Sweny the Alchemist
Leopold Bloom’s observation that chemists rarely move has turned out to be oddly prescient. As Dublin has evolved as a city since 1904, much of Bloom’s hometown would be unrecognizable to him. Many familiar locations, including his home at 7 Eccles St., have fallen victim to both urban development and decay. Sweny’s Pharmacy, however, has stubbornly clung to its perch on an unassuming corner in Dublin’s city center. When it closed its doors as a pharmacy in 2009, it was one of Dublin’s longest operating businesses. Since that time, and despite onerous rent hikes on what has become prime real estate, a cadre of dedicated and dogged volunteers maintains Sweny’s as a shrine to Joyce’s writing and Dublin’s history.
Blooms & Barnacles has had the privilege to get to know the Sweny’s crew through our podcast. We’ve done two audio episodes about them and the history and future of Sweny’s. If you’d like to hear more about their history and their struggle to maintain a space containing the very floorboards and counters touched by Joyce, please check out our episodes here and here. Please also visit their website. Finally, please consider making a donation or subscribing to their Patreon that helps them pay their rent and continue proving Bloom’s observation true: chemists rarely move.
While the Sweny’s of today is a fascinating time capsule of a bygone era, the Sweny’s that Bloom steps into in “Lotus Eaters” has the air of a fantastical alchemist’s lair, its shelves lined with phials and beakers filled with mysterious elixirs and tinctures (surely ingredients for bizarre, arcane concoctions). The episode “Lotus Eaters” is ruled by the arts of botany and chemistry, and nowhere is their twinned power felt more than the salubrious confines of Sweny’s. There’s a sense that while medicine offers up solutions to life’s various aches and pains, it’s the chemist who is really in control - able to dispense what he likes, possibly leaving the patient (or victim?) in a lotus-y haze. The touch of the lotus is everywhere in Sweny’s:
“The chemist turned back page after page. Sandy shrivelled smell he seems to have. Shrunken skull. And old. Quest for the philosopher's stone. The alchemists. Drugs age you after mental excitement. Lethargy then. Why? Reaction. A lifetime in a night. Gradually changes your character. Living all the day among herbs, ointments, disinfectants. All his alabaster lilypots. Mortar and pestle.”
Bloom may as well be in Diagon Alley. He attempts to identify some bewildering elements:
“Aq. Dist. Fol. Laur. Te Virid.”
Sweny has labeled his bottles in abbreviated Latin. These particular labels identify aqua distillata (distilled water), folia lauri (laurel leaves), and thea viridis (green tea). The Latin labels add intrigue to the mundane contents for a muggle like Bloom. The Latin is once again stupefying, just like the Latin he heard earlier in All Hallows’ Church. Bloom allows his imagination to pull him away from his humdrum little errand:
“Smell almost cure you like the dentist's doorbell. Doctor Whack. He ought to physic himself a bit. Electuary or emulsion. The first fellow that picked an herb to cure himself had a bit of pluck. Simples. Want to be careful. Enough stuff here to chloroform you. Test: turns blue litmus paper red. Chloroform. Overdose of laudanum. Sleeping draughts. Lovephiltres. Paragoric poppysyrup bad for cough. Clogs the pores or the phlegm. Poisons the only cures. Remedy where you least expect it. Clever of nature.”
Many of the substances that crawl through Bloom’s internal monologue are pacifying lotuses of some kind. An electuary is a preparation mixed with honey or another sweetener - tickling the tastebuds to make bitter medicine go down more easily. Chloroform is a crude form of anaesthetic. Laudanum is an opiate. Love philtres (or love potions), more a product of a fantasy alchemist than a dispensing chemist, dull reason and cause a person’s judgment to be clouded by an artificial love. Paregoric, a remedy for diarrhea, commonly contained opium. Bloom's observation that “poisons [are] the only cure” comes from homeopathy, which purports that “like cures like.” In Bloom’s interpretation, only a poison can be the antidote for ingesting poison. Perhaps, then, a narcotic might cure one’s lethargy? Keep nibbling those lotuses, buddy.
Bloom is in good health, perhaps under the protection of his potato against some alchemist’s numbing potion, and places an order for Molly’s lotion and purchases a humble bar of lemon-scented soap. The soap, like his potato, will accompany and protect him on his heroic, Homeric voyage across Dublin for the rest of the day.
There’s more to Bloom’s lemon soap than meets the eye (or nose), though. Soap was advertised in the Victorian era as not only a daily hygiene necessity, but also as a means of achieving purity and virtue. Cleanliness was proof positive of civilization and progress, and thus strengthened the health of the individual as well as the health of the British Empire. Using images of imperial power in advertising was common during the Victorian era. Not only did it play on patriotic feelings of citizens of the United Kingdom (which included Ireland at that time), but it also communicated to the middle class that they could sustain their comfortable lifestyle through the mere purchase of consumer goods. Plumtree’s Potted Meat could transform your domestic sphere into an abode of bliss, and buying the right toiletries assured your position in the imperial social hierarchy. Victorian soap advertising was not subtle, either. Many ads featured tidy white people beside dark-skinned colonial subjects.
The subtext of such ads was political as much as it was commercial, meant to reassure the average English person that their status was god-given and immutable. Purchasing and using mass-produced soap was emblematic of a well-bred, civilized Anglo-Saxon, while scruffy, uncouth colonials needed their social and racial superiors to teach them the virtue of cleanliness. Even if colonization is frequently violent and degrading, those people are happier under colonialism! It’s a lot of heavy lifting for a soap ad, sure, but it’s worth considering that even the poorest neighborhoods in Dublin were plastered with these ad campaigns touting the superiority of the British Empire. People who never purchased the products were still being sold the message in the ad.
Establishing a distinct separation between colonized and colonizer is a common theme of Victorian soap ads. We’ve discussed in the past how Orientalism pervaded Victorian culture, creating a hard line between rational, civilized Englishmen, and the mysterious, sexy Other living in the East. Though the Irish were colonial subjects of the English, they were not immune from this mindset. Racial purity was part and parcel of this worldview, and soap was sold as a commodity that offered purity.
The implication, then, was that living the clean, virtuous life of an Englishman could purge foreign contaminants from society and ward off impure degenerates. This brand of paranoia pops up in Stephen’s conversations in Ulysses’ early episodes, such as in “Telemachus” when the Englishman Haines lamented, “I don't want to see my country fall into the hands of German jews either. That's our national problem, I'm afraid, just now,” and in ''Nestor” when Mr. Deasy the Unionist insisted, “England is in the hands of the jews. In all the highest places: her finance, her press. And they are the signs of a nation's decay.... Old England is dying.” It’s unambiguously clear who these two see as degenerates.
Charles Kingsley: a real barrel of monkeys
Bloom, a Jewish man, doesn’t share these men’s antisemitism, but he has swum (bathed?) in the same waters. Though the Irish are white-skinned people, they were colonial subjects rather than colonizers, a sign to many English people of the inferiority of the Irish and that they deserved their lowly social stature. The Irish, like African people, were portrayed as simian caricatures in cartoons, such as those that ran in Punch magazine, and were famously referred to as “white chimpanzees” by racist dude Charles Kingsley. And since the Irish were seen as inferior to the English, they were also seen as dirty. After leaving Sweny’s with his soap in hand, Bloom bumps into Bantam Lyons and gives him a judgey once-over:
“Bantam Lyons's yellow blacknailed fingers unrolled the baton. Wants a wash too. Take off the rough dirt. Good morning, have you used Pears' soap? Dandruff on his shoulders. Scalp wants oiling.”
While it’s possible ol’ Bantam may just be a gross dude, it’s telling that Bloom’s appraisal includes a slogan for Pears’ Soap, (a company that also ran the slogan “powerful enough to clean a black child.”) Lyons is a dirty Irishman, and Bloom clocks it immediately. Bloom is generally kind and genteel, but he is not free of the prejudices of his society. People of many marginalized groups internalize negative stereotyping, after all, and Bloom is Irish as well as Jewish.
The Irish are not a monolith, however. Class hierarchy was sold in those soap ads alongside racial hierarchy. Soap was a commodity that allowed the middle class to distinguish themselves from the working class. It’s possible then that Bloom’s prejudice is not ethnic or racial, but rather class-based. Bloom is not dirty like Lyons. He’s better. He’s civilized. He’s middle class. His nails and scalp are immaculate. He’s like the nice, clean people in the Pear’s ad.
Soap in this instance provides Bloom some psychic armor against his own insecurity and internalised prejudice. The lemon soap may actually have magical protective properties, though, becoming a protective amulet alongside his desiccated potato (a decidedly Irish symbol). The soap, like the potato, is effective. Think of the scene at the end of “Lestrygonians” where Bloom invokes the power of the soap to elude Blazes Boylan:
“Straw hat in sunlight. Tan shoes. Turnedup trousers. It is. It is….
His hand looking for the where did I put found in his hip pocket soap lotion have to call tepid paper stuck. Ah soap there I yes. Gate.
Safe!”
In “Circe,” the soap takes on a life of its own in order to ward off the aggressive apparition MARION:
“(He points to the south, then to the east. A cake of new clean lemon soap arises, diffusing light and perfume.)
THE SOAP
We're a capital couple are Bloom and I;
He brightens the earth, I polish the sky.
(The freckled face of Sweny, the druggist, appears in the disc of the soapsun.)
SWENY
Three and a penny, please.”
This sentient SOAP quotes ad copy to protect Bloom and declare their alliance. This bit of verse, as discussed by Hye Ryoung Kil, is lifted from an 1891 ad for Brooke’s Monkey Brand soap, a competitor of Pears’. Monkey Brand ads featured an ape wearing human clothes. In this particular ad he’s dressed as a minstrel, but typically he’s dressed to the nines in a tuxedo. The Brooke’s monkey, though he is cheerful and positive, is quite a sinister image in the context of Victorian soap advertising. He appears as a not-quite-human creature that’s trying to pass as a dapper man. He's learned to live in a civilized manner through the miracle of soap and its attendant virtues of cleanliness and order. However, as humans, we can see he’s not quite one of us. No matter how effectively he dons the trappings of civilization, anyone with eyes can see he’s still a wild creature. To take it a step further, it communicates to viewers that those further down the social hierarchy (people of color, immigrants, Jews, the Irish, etc.) can try all they like to imitate the forms of status, whiteness and Englishness, but they can never quite achieve true Englishness. As someone much smarter than me said, maybe you didn’t notice it, but your brain did.
Back in “Circe,” Bloom merges with the moon in the Brooke’s ad while his soap, which rose like the sun in the East, merges with the monkey. When their powers combine, they brighten the earth and polish the sky. As such a “capital couple,” Bloom and his soap are able to banish the frightening ghouls of Nighttown, acting as a version of Odysseus’ moly, protecting him from the evil of Circe’s abode.
It’s not a coincidence that “Molly” and “moly” sound alike. In the above sequence, Bloom mistakenly claims that the soap was a present for Molly, possibly to appease the false, phantasmagorical MARION. Joyce wrote to his friend Frank Budgen that this connection was key. Bloom’s ultimate goal is to return to Molly’s side in “Ithaca,” and it’s his moly that leads him through peril back to her side. Odysseus’ moly, which Joyce described as a “milky yellow flower,” was a gift from Hermes, the god of commerce. A yellow-colored commercial product allows Bloom to traverse the darkness. Mark Osteen points out that yellow is Molly’s color and frequently corresponds with her presence in Bloom’s life. In “Sirens,” Bloom remembers her yellow knees and yellow dress when they first met at Mat Dillon’s, in “Calypso,” she is bathed in “yellow twilight” as she eats her breakfast, and at the end of Bloom’s long night, he kisses her “mellow yellow smellow melons.” In addition to acting as a protective Molly/moly for Bloom, we learn in “Ithaca” that his soap is neither Pears’ nor Brooke’s Monkey brand, but Barrington’s, which was manufactured in Dublin. Using the magic incantations of the soap ad and a bar of sweet, lemony, Irish moly, Bloom was able to ward off Lyons, Blazes and angry ghosts. Perhaps it wasn’t the soap, but Molly who protected him the whole time?
Back to ”Lotus Eaters.”
After purchasing his lemon soap, Bloom heads around the corner to the Turkish bath at 11 Lincoln Place. Also known as a hammam, a traditional Turkish bath is a steam bath and may or may not include submerged bathing. Turkish baths became popular in the United Kingdom as a health treatment. This imported variety, known as a Victorian Turkish bath or improved Turkish bath, aimed for a dryer heat with reduced steam to soothe various maladies. The Victorian Turkish bath experience often ended with a plunge in a cold pool. If you are in the UK in the 21st century, you can visit a restored Turkish bath in Yorkshire.
Turkish baths were a place to improve both one’s physical and social health in the Victorian era. In their heyday, the Lincoln Place baths offered coffee and tobacco to their patrons. The even swankier confines of the Stephen’s Green baths offered these amenities as well as soup, wine, biscuits, a hairdresser and a small library. This style of public bath was already going out of style by the end of the 19th century, though. The Lincoln Place baths themselves closed their doors for good in 1901.
The Lincoln Place baths
The popularity of “improved” Turkish baths was due in part to the popular Orientalism of the period. Anything from the East seemed mysterious, intriguing, and possibly magical. Bloom, a robust Orientalist himself, has been dreaming of dolce far niente since the first page of “Lotus Eaters.” Perhaps he hopes to find a taste of that sweet life inside this imitation hammam, the façade of which was designed to resemble a mosque:
“He walked cheerfully towards the mosque of the baths. Remind you of a mosque, redbaked bricks, the minarets.”
It’s not surprising that our pseudo-Haroun al-Raschid would take refuge there.
For men of Bloom’s era, public baths weren’t simply a place to live out one’s Orientalist fantasies or socialize; they were a symbol of middle class respectability. The Victorian era saw growth in the middle class, but the middle class is a precarious place to be. If a middle class person is particularly lucky, they may be able to rise in the social hierarchy. However, there is plenty of room for failure and a slide into poverty. At the turn of the 20th century, reminders of the horrors of poverty would never have been far from sight. Bloom is well aware of his place in the social hierarchy. In the opening paragraph of “Lotus Eaters,” he thinks:
“By Brady's cottages a boy for the skins lolled, his bucket of offal linked, smoking a chewed fagbutt. A smaller girl with scars of eczema on her forehead eyed him, listlessly holding her battered caskhoop. Tell him if he smokes he won't grow. O let him! His life isn't such a bed of roses. Waiting outside pubs to bring da home. Come home to ma, da.”
Epidemics of diseases like cholera and typhoid were caused by dismal sanitation in the poorest quarters of cities like Dublin. Additionally, the horrors of the Great Hunger of the 1840’s had occurred in living memory (just ask Mr. Deasy). Rather than evoke empathy for the poor or social reforms, these calamities were blamed on their most vulnerable victims. People experiencing grinding, inescapable poverty were seen as reckless, intemperate, and lazy. Since the lower classes were assumed to be unable to control their impulses for immoral vices, the middle and upper classes saw them as simply lacking discipline. As such, the middle classes favored so-called “moral” pastimes. Bathing was seen as a virtuous, moral and rational way to occupy one’s free time as it improved society. After all, cleanliness is next to godliness. It also created a hard dividing line between what was considered lower class and middle class. It’s no coincidence that the term “the great unwashed,” used to describe the common rabble, was coined in the 19th century United Kingdom.
Though Bloom has some empathy for those less fortunate than himself (“Tell him if he smokes he won't grow. O let him! His life isn't such a bed of roses.”), Bloom more or less buys into this class-based morality. The Blooms are lower middle class and have been in financially precarious situations in the past, but that is all the more reason to outwardly project their class status. Think of the scene in “Lestrygonians” where Bloom rejects the raucous Burton restaurant in favor of a more subdued Davy Byrne’s, which he describes as a “moral pub.” Clearly, cleanliness and morality are merged in Bloom’s mind.
Contrary to all this cleanliness and morality, Bloom imagines doing something fairly dirty in the Lincoln Place bath:
“Massage. Dirt gets rolled up in your navel. Nicer if a nice girl did it. Also I think I. Yes I. Do it in the bath. Curious longing I. Water to water. Combine business with pleasure. Pity no time for massage.”
Given that Turkish baths were mainly hot air baths, Bloom’s plan to masturbate there only raises questions. It would be fairly hard to be discrete masturbating in a steam bath, but I don’t know if it’s better or worse to jizz into a filled bathtub. Both seem worthy of a medal at the Terrible Conduct Olympics, and he certainly doesn’t think of the unfortunate worker who will have to clean up after him. I guess that unnamed figure is lucky that Bloom ultimately saves himself for Gerty.
As Bloom imagines himself sliding into the warm bath a few pages later, he compares himself to the Eucharist he witnessed back in All Hallows’ Church:
“Enjoy a bath now: clean trough of water, cool enamel, the gentle tepid stream. This is my body.”
Bloom will use his newly-purchased lemon soap in this near-at-hand bath (“He saw his trunk and limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly upward, lemonyellow…”), and through the power of this ritual ablution, transubstantiate his soap into a protective amulet for his travels through Dublin. Bloom, a man of commerce, sees the possibility of restorative healing in that which can be bought and sold. His Communion is between himself and the cleansing power of mass-produced soap. The Mass-produced salvation of the Eucharist offers him no protection. Bloom is totally disinterested in Scripture, but he sees the power in the promises of redemption offered in the saving grace of potted meat and the cleansing virtue of Pears’ soap. As Bloom’s mind is so firmly rooted in the material world, he needs to go through a more powerful cleansing in order to connect with spiritual Truth. The Turkish bath can only cleanse him physically.
And as Bloom prepares to “cleanse himself physically” (wink, wink, nudge, nudge), he connects with the sensuality of the physical space of the baths:
“He foresaw his pale body reclined in it at full, naked, in a womb of warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved.”
The baths acts as a site of emotional regression, allowing him to metaphorically crawl into a womb, his soap, combined with the inert, steamy bath, acting as a lemony narcotic. The bath casts a sexual spell over Bloom rather than maternal one, however. Public baths are a rare space where public nudity is socially acceptable and therefore take on an erotic quality in a repressed society. The sensuality of this atmosphere takes on a feminine quality for Bloom. This may be due in part to the Orientalist stereotype of Eastern cultures as feminine (there was a fear in the Victorian era that Turkish baths might feminize the men who frequented them). Bloom, harboring residual sexual energy from Martha’s letter, is seeking a symbolic vagina in which to relieve his pain and insecurity. Though he doesn’t quite achieve this, he is able to restore himself enough to wriggle free from the grip of the Lotuses and reach the next leg of his journey.
Further Reading:
Breathnach, T. (2004). For Health and Pleasure: The Turkish Bath in Victorian Ireland. Victorian Literature and Culture, 32(1), 159-175. Retrieved February 1, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/25058658
Burgess, A. (1968). ReJoyce. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Ellmann, R. (1972). Ulysses on the Liffey. Oxford University Press. Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.65767/page/n39
Herring, P. (1974). Lotuseaters. In C. Hart & D. Hayman (eds.), James Joyce’s Ulysses: Critical essays (71-90). Berkeley: University of California Press. Retrieved from https://tinyurl.com/yy2gpfhs
Gifford, D., & Seidman, R. J. (1988). Ulysses annotated: Notes for James Joyce's Ulysses. Berkeley: University of California Press. Retrieved from https://tinyurl.com/vy6j4tk
Gilbert, S. (1955). James Joyce’s Ulysses: a study. New York: Vintage Books.
Kil, H. (2010). Soap Advertisements and "Ulysses": The Brooke's Monkey Brand Ad and the Capital Couple. James Joyce Quarterly, 47(3), 417-426. Retrieved February 1, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/23048746
Osteen, M. (1995). The economy of Ulysses: making both ends meet. New York: Syracuse University Press. Retrieved from https://tinyurl.com/yycf2ar5