Featuring commentary from Philip Kitcher and Charlotte Gordon
In Bella Cohen's brothel, late in the Circe episode of James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), a doctor named Dixon reads out a bill of health. Philip Kitcher, in his Rebind commentary on Ulysses, reads it with him: "Professor Bloom is a finished example of the new womanly man. His moral nature is simple and lovable," and then, "He is about to have a baby." Bloom's answer is "O, I so want to be a mother," and with the help of Mrs. Thornton, a midwife, he bears eight sons who speak five languages and run Dublin's banks. Kitcher calls it "a gigantesque over-response" to a thought Bloom had that morning in a funeral carriage, about a son who died at eleven days old.
In Ingolstadt, "on a dreary night of November," Victor Frankenstein watches the dull yellow eye open, finds that "the beauty of the dream vanished," and runs to his bedroom, where he dreams he is kissing Elizabeth and holding his mother's corpse. Charlotte Gordon, in her Rebind commentary on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), reads the scene as a birth and nothing else: "the reverse of what a mother is supposed to do with the child," and, she reminds us, "the first pages she wrote."
Neither commentator mentions the other's book, so the pairing is mine. But set them side by side and two of the strangest births in English fiction are given to men, and the two readers value the transgression in opposite ways. For Kitcher, Bloom's pregnancy is the one place in the novel where the traits Dublin jeers at are allowed to count as virtues. For Gordon, Victor's is the sin the rest of the book punishes. The difference comes down to what each man wants from the child, and the Oxen of the Sun episode supplies the scorecard: the value of procreation and the importance of empathy. Bloom fails one and passes the other. Victor fails both.