“Of course he has a knife, he always has a knife, we all have knives! It's 1183 and we're barbarians! How clear we make it. Oh, my piglets, we are the origins of war: not history's forces, nor the times, nor justice, nor the lack of it, nor causes, nor religions, nor ideas, nor kinds of government, nor any other thing. We are the killers. We breed wars. We carry it like syphilis inside. Dead bodies rot in field and stream because the living ones are rotten. For the love of God, can't we love one another just a little - that's how peace begins. We have so much to love each other for. We have such possibilities, my children. We could change the world.” - Katherine Hepburn as Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter

To listen to a discussion of this topic, check out the podcast episode here.

After Bloom escapes M’Coy in “Lotus Eaters,” he sneaks around a corner and finally indulges in his in his secret letter from Martha Clifford. The technic of “Lotus Eaters,” as outlined in Stuart Gilbert’s James Joyce’s Ulysses, is narcissism - not a clinical narcissism characterized by a lack of empathy, but a classical narcissism exemplified by deep self-indulgence. Bloom’s (or Henry Flower’s) affair with Martha is perhaps the best representation of this technic in “Lotus Eaters” as he is titillated by stringing this woman along, first with a phony job offer and then with a phony love affair.

One aspect of Martha’s attention that adds to the thrill for Bloom is the mystery that surrounds Martha. Who is she? Just an average secretary residing in Dolphin’s Barn, a southwestern area of Dublin’s Inner City? A kinky temptress in her own right? Is she also writing under an assumed name? To unravel this maze of riddles, we must analyze the clues we’ve been given.

Bloom receives his correspondence from Martha at Westland Row Post Office (rather than close to his home on Eccles St.) under the pseudonym Henry Flower, Esq. This nom de dirty letter is the first riddle we’re presented. According to Gifford and Seidman’s annotation, “Henry” means “ruler of the house.” Knowing that he is on the verge of becoming a cuckold, Bloom feels emasculated. He’s certainly not the man of the house at home, but in his letters he can become more forceful, taking the reins sexually. In any case, Martha finds his name beautiful, so he’s chosen wisely.

The surname “Flower” is clearly a play on “Bloom,” which in turn is an anglicization of his father’s Hungarian surname, Virag, meaning “flower.” A flower is more soft and feminine in tone, but it also reminds that the lotus’ influence hangs over this episode. In this moment, Bloom is intoxicated by Martha’s tepid sexual innuendo and scentless flower. Furthermore, Bloom is high on the knowledge that he holds the power to get even with Molly, if he should so choose. Additionally, Bloom has appended “esquire” onto Henry Flower, implying that his alter-ego holds a more prestigious position in society than Bloom and is, as Andrew Williamson put it, is “the arbiter of the law.”

John Gordon, writing in James Joyce Quarterly, put forth a more historical interpretation of Henry Flower, believing Bloom’s affair to have been inspired by King Henry II’s affair with Rosamund Clifford. Gordon points out that Henry’s family name, Plantagenet, came from a term for a “sprig of broom” worn in the brim of a hat. Note that Bloom hides the card bearing Henry Flower’s name in the band of his own high-quality ha. King Henry’s wife Eleanor of Aquitaine had no time for his infidelities, so he hid Rosamund in a labyrinth. Eleanor eventually found Rosamund, and though the details vary, it did not end well for Rosamund. Martha better watch her back for Molly of Gibraltar, as her wrath would be no less dreadful, though probably less murderous. Gordon adds that in “Circe”, Henry Flower appears in the guise of a serenading troubadour. Eleanor, prior to her marriage to Henry, was a patroness of troubadours.

It’s not until “Lestrygonians” that we learn how our Henry gained the acquaintance of his Ms. Clifford:

“He passed the Irish Times. There might be other answers lying there. Like to answer them all. Good system for criminals. Code. At their lunch now. Clerk with the glasses there doesn't know me. O, leave them there to simmer. Enough bother wading through fortyfour of them. Wanted, smart lady typist to aid gentleman in literary work.”

So, Martha is one of forty-four would-be lady typists, and though it’s a bit of “bother wading through” them, Bloom intends to read them all eventually. He’s quite pleased with the little labyrinth he’s built around himself to protect his identity, directly referencing a code. A new mystery arises here: why did Bloom choose Martha out of the forty-four? In the same episode, Bloom recalls another candidate, Lizzie Twigg, who would have been in a shoe-in for a real job:

“And the other one Lizzie Twigg. My literary efforts have had the good fortune to meet with the approval of the eminent poet A. E. (Mr Geo. Russell).”

She’s talented and well-connected, but unfortunately doesn’t meet Bloom’s narcissistic, erotic standards:

“No time to do her hair drinking sloppy tea with a book of poetry.”

Personally, I think Lizzie and I would have been friends.

Martha’s skills as a typist leave something to be desired, as her letter is riddled with grammatical and spelling errors, such as “my patience are exhausted” and “if you do not wrote.” Many commentators chalk this up to a lack of education or a sign of low class status on Martha’s part. Andrew Christensen, writing in James Joyce Quarterly, makes a strong case that Martha is not uneducated or incompetent, but instead that English is her second language. Her letter shifts tone and formality somewhat awkwardly, and the grammatical and spelling errors don’t seem consistent with the errors of a native English speaker. Constructions like “I feel so bad about.” and “Tell what kind of perfume does your wife use.” are consistent with an English language learner rather than a native speaker with low written competency.

In any case, she seems to lack the skills required of a typist. So, why Martha?
Gordon speculates that it’s her address at Dolphin’s Barn that entices Bloom. Both he and Molly recall the night they shared their first kiss after a night at a friend’s house in Dolphin’s Barn, as Molly recounts in “Penelope”:

“ ...the night he kissed my heart at Dolphins barn I couldnt describe it simply it makes you feel like nothing on earth…”

Even as Bloom carries out this half-hearted affair, he thinks mainly of Molly. Perhaps it’s this tenuous connection to his queen that draws his eye in the end.

My personal guess is that Martha may have been the only one to respond in kind when Henry Flower replied to her resume with an erotic letter. Imagine thinking that you are reaching out for legitimate employment and getting a dirty letter in return. Maybe today’s equivalent would be sending off an inquiry on LinkedIn and getting a dick pic in return. Serious candidates like Lizzie Twigg are not going to waste their time on Henry Flower. Also, many women would find this insulting, embarrassing and dehumanizing. In any case, Martha does seem to be up for Henry’s game. And if she were foreign born, her exotic origin would fit into Bloom’s orientalist fascination. The fun explanation is that, like Henry, she’s a bit of kinky weirdo and is enjoying the saucy repartee. The darker version is that four letters in, she’s still holding out for that typing job. She may really need the money and believe that indulging the sexual narcissism of powerful men is the only way for a working class woman to gain a foothold.

Since Bloom never says directly and we know very little about who Martha actually is, we’re left guessing. We don’t even know if Martha is her real name or if she lives in Dolphin’s Barn at all. In “Nausicaa”, Bloom reflects:

“Might be false name however like my name and the address Dolphin's barn a blind.”

If Bloom is correct that Martha is also playing games and speaking in code, who might she really be?

One popular suspect is Miss Dunne, Blazes Boylan’s secretary who makes a brief appearance in “Wandering Rocks.” She’s a smart lady typist, after all, and the connection to Boylan is narratively satisfying. Though we learn very little about Miss Dunne in this brief vignette, we do learn that she is thoroughly skilled at her work, so it seems unlikely that she would make Martha’s non-volitional errors. More to the point, Stuart Gilbert says straight out that Miss Dunne is an intentional red herring used to obscure Martha’s identity.

Another leading candidate is Gerty MacDowell. There’s an almost Shakespearean element to these two carrying on a sexy epistolary affair with hidden identities culminating in Bloom masturbating to her exposed legs on Sandymount Strand, neither aware of their previous connection. Like the affair with Martha, Gerty and Bloom’s encounter takes place entirely at a distance without touch. Even Bloom himself wonders about this possible coincidence. He remembers a fragment of Martha’s letter as he speculates about Gerty:

“Then I will tell you all. Still it was a kind of language between us. It couldn't be? No, Gerty they called her. Might be false name however like my name and the address Dolphin's barn a blind.”

Strengthening the case for Gerty being Martha, she is called out by The Bawd in “Circe”:

THE BAWD Leave the gentleman alone, you cheat. Writing the gentleman false letters. Streetwalking and soliciting. Better for your mother take the strap to you at the bedpost, hussy like you.
GERTY (To Bloom.) When you saw all the secrets of my bottom drawer. (She paws his sleeve, slobbering.) Dirty married man! I love you for doing that to me.

The events of “Circe” occur in Bloom’s subconscious, so there’s danger in ascribing too much objectivity to them. This is definitely a window into Bloom's version of events. We see his guilt intermingled with arousal at the memory of his own lascivious behavior. I think it’s also a sign he is scrambling, at least subconsciously, for an answer to the puzzle of Martha.

There is far more evidence against Gerty being Martha, however. Though she shares some superficial similarities with Martha, we also learn that Gerty prefers to handwrite her love letters in violet ink. The flower motif in this preference ties her to Martha’s letter thematically, but given her world view, it seems unlikely that Gerty would be looking for a position as a typist. Gerty prefers “a man among men” rather than a “naughty boy” like Martha. Gerty is clearly a sexual being, but I think she would be turned off by the erotic content of Henry’s letters. It’s clear that Henry wrote something that crossed a boundary in the last letter, as he concludes Martha’s not annoyed with him since she responded. She does seem mildly irritated with him, stating that she does “not like that other world.” We can assume “world” is a typo, meant to be “word,” and that she is responding to something a little too crude in Bloom’s previous letter. Martha, however, is still game and continues to correspond with Henry. I think given Gerty’s sensibility she would be turned off by the crassness and power dynamic in Henry’s letters. Punishing a naughty boy who’s disobeyed her isn’t exactly fodder for one of her romantic fancies.

If we’re looking to “Circe” for evidence of Martha’s identity, she directly states her true identity at one point:

MARTHA (Sobbing behind her veil.) Breach of promise. My real name is Peggy Griffin. He wrote to me that he was miserable. I'll tell my brother, the Bective rugger fullback, on you, heartless flirt.

There is no character in Ulysses called Peggy Griffin, so we must turn to folklore to fully understand this reference. It’s likely alluding to a folk tale about a jilted woman named Peggy Griffin who performs a Black Mass to curse her former lover. However, she is cursed in turn and is forced to walk to the Earth, in some versions of the story, stealing potatoes to fill her belly. Peggy is an inhabitant of the “other world”, which Martha dislikes. Since it’s likely Bloom doesn’t plan to meet her or fully reciprocate her feelings, she is on her way to being spurned by a “lover.” Bloom has his potato stolen in “Circe”, as well, though by Zoe (who is very unlikely to be Martha Clifford). Peggy Griffin and her rugby-playing brother are both figments of Bloom’s subconscious, so while he has the potential to do psychic damage, he’s unlikely to cross Bloom’s path in waking life.

Pretty much every female character in the novel is suspected of being Martha by someone, including Nurse Callan from the maternity hospital, Miss Douce and Miss Kennedy from the Ormond Hotel, and Molly. While there’s something delightful about Ulysses ending a la the “Piña Colada Song”, I think it’s unlikely Molly would have failed to mention it in her soliloquy, given that we do learn she is aware that her husband is exchanging letters with someone other than herself. She has also received smutty letters from Bloom, which she recalls in “Penelope”, so she would recognize his writing style. The other suspects are even bigger stretches of the imagination.

Marthe Fleischmann and her “guardian” Rudolf Hiltpold

Perhaps, like so many riddles in Ulysses, we need to look to Joyce’s biography to find Martha’s hidden identity. In 1918, Joyce carried on an affair, mainly through letters, with a woman named Marthe Fleischmann in Zurich. Though they did eventually meet, there doesn’t seem to have been any physical relationship. This real-world encounter is enticing, but Joyce had already written and published the sections of Ulysses introducing Martha Clifford in The Little Review before he met Marthe, so it’s unlikely she was the initial inspiration for Martha.

Since Joyce so frequently based his characters and scenarios on his own lived experience, some commentators speculate that he had a penchant for engineering situations in his personal life so that he could write about them. His wife Nora recounted in later years that he had asked her to cheat on him so he could have the direct experience of being cuckolded. It’s possible that he also sought out direct experience of a love letter affair with a Martha/Marthe. In Joyce’s case, their affair ended abruptly when Marthe complained to her partner that Joyce was propositioning her. He threatened Joyce with violence if he didn’t stop, and Joyce, ever one to back down from physical confrontation, cut off the affair. Perhaps this will be the off-screen outcome of Bloom’s affair with Martha as well.

I, for one, think that Martha Clifford is likely her real name or, at the very least, a name she uses professionally since she initially thought she was replying to a job ad. Christensen argues that if Martha Clifford is an alias, it may be an anglicized name used to cover a foreign origin. Like Gerty on the beach, the whole messy business can only be justified if the woman is into it. Like with Gerty, Bloom’s affair with Martha doesn’t begin consensually. I think Bloom is wondering if Martha is as slippery as himself, performing mental gymnastics to validate immorality. Recall once more Gerty in “Circe” simultaneously chastisting and lusting over Bloom: “Dirty married man! I love you for doing that to me.” The same twist of justification could be applied to Martha. I think Bloom might find it titillating to think that she is drawing him through a labyrinthine code of her own. It means that she’s enjoying his perversion and is in on the secret.

In “Lestrygonians,” Bloom thinks of criminals and codes in conjunction with Martha’s letter. We learn in “Ithaca'' that he has squirreled her letters away in a drawer in his home and enciphered the name and address of their sender “in reserved alphabetic boustrophedontic punctated quadrilinear cryptogram (vowels suppressed).” His code reads:

N. IGS./WI.UU. OX/W. OKS. MH/Y. IM

Like King Henry before him, Bloom has hidden his Rosamund in a labyrinth of sorts. Let’s see if we can make our way to the center of the labyrinth without being waylaid by goblins.

“Reserved” here means “reversed.” The code follows the alphabet, taking the usual ABC order and lining it up with a reversed alphabet. The letters that lie next to each other are code for their counterpart:

For example, A stands for Z, B for Y, etc.

The punctuation marks (periods) show where the vowels have been repressed (removed). It’s quadrilinear because it’s broken into four lines. “Boustrophedontic” refers to pattern followed by an ox plowing a field. The ox and plow might proceed east and then turn west and plow the next furrow. Each of the four lines, separated in Bloom’s code by backslashes, is one row of crops. The first line is read left to right, the second right to left, the left to right again, etc.

Deciphered, the code reads like this:

You can see it reads “Martha Clifford Dolphin’s Barn” with the vowels added in. Notice “Clifford” is written backwards, as that line would be a backwards path.

Deciphering the code adds a new dimension to revealing clues to Martha’s identity. The most fanciful I encountered is that this lady typist is really a gentleman typist. This theory was put forth by Michael Begnal in James Joyce Quarterly, who noted in his endnotes that he was intrigued by a student’s theory that Martha Clifford was really Buck Mulligan. Begnal doesn’t elaborate on the possibility of Mulligan, but rather puts forth another candidate: Ignatius Gallaher, one of the main characters of the short story “A Little Cloud” in Dubliners. Begnal’s theory is based on the fact that, if you fiddle with the boustrophedontic code, the initials MC are revealed to be equidistant from IG. Gallaher certainly has a puckish personality and a connection to Bloom’s social circle, but it seems a bit far-fetched overall. Joyce liked to weave secret codes into his work, but this seems to be too much of a stretch with too little evidence. We’ll have to file it away under “fun things to think about” for now.

The boustrophedontic code may have one more secret to reveal, though. The last “quadrilinear cryptogram” reads “Y. IM” and is deciphered as “B. RN.” It initially seems to represent the “Barn” in “Dolphin’s Barn”, but a keen-eyed reader will note that this doesn’t follow the code properly. The last line should be reversed and correctly deciphered as “NR. B”. Read together, the code and its solution could be read as:

“Y. IM NR B.”

Or, in English, “Why, I’m Nora B.” Perhaps, then, Martha is really a stand-in for Nora Barnacle, real-life recipient of James Joyce’s naughty letters, in which he promised to do all kinds of kinky things to her. Joyce liked to play games with his writing and hide clues in plain sight. Perhaps he hoped Nora would one day read Ulysses and uncover this secret message, though he likely hoped in vain. Leopold, for his part, leaves enough evidence that Molly could uncover his secret affair with Martha. He saves Martha’s letters in an unlocked drawer in their home, which he leaves unsupervised for most of the day. Though he shreds her envelope, he keeps an enciphered record of her address. The code, though it sounds complex when translated into Ithaca-speak, could potentially be cracked by a child. Perhaps Leopold wants to get caught. It’s possible that he has little beyond a passing interest in Martha and wants Molly to catch him as revenge for Boylan. Maybe Leopold wants to see Molly fight for his affection. Given that Leopold and Molly do still have feelings for one another, this seems extremely possible to me. They are both terrible communicators, though, and behaving childishly. Eleanor of Aquitaine eventually found Rosamund because Henry left a trail of thread to her hiding place in his labyrinth. Bloom has left his own thread for Molly to follow, if she so chooses.

The Secret Life of Martha Clifford

N. IGS./WI.UU. OX/W. OKS. MH/Y. IM

“Y. IM NR B.”

Further Reading:

The Secret Life of Martha Clifford

N. IGS./WI.UU. OX/W. OKS. MH/Y. IM

“Y. IM NR B.”

Further Reading:

The Language of Flowers

Ground Control to Major Tweedy