Dublin in Drag: Costuming and Performing Culture in "Circe"

Abstract

Abstract: Costume and performance have continued to inform our reading of the "Circe" episode of Ulysses , often blurring (and at times obliterating) our previously held interpretations of characters both familiar and strange. But to what extent should the reader invest in clothing as a cultural marker? In other words, how does clothing perform in the episode? This essay argues that drag offers a means of reading the self-conscious performative fantasy world of "Circe," while maintaining a critically parodic element that disrupts the reader's comfortable assumption that we might ever come truly to know these familiar characters. The essay proposes that the theatrical conventions of "Circe" highlight the adaptability of identity through a performance of culture that might be termed "drag," offering a counter-narrative to readings of Circean cross-dressing and gender-bending work by investigating drag as performative fantasy. The uncomfortable reality of drag and its critical potential lies in its ability to reveal that our perception of reality might, too, be artifice. In its recycling of characters, "Circe" disrupts our reading of Ulysses , implicating itself in a performance of culture that re-alerts audiences to the very nature of culture as performative. Characters re-appear in Nighttown in alternative guises, drawing on turn-of-the-century drag culture and allowing those characters to transgress the rigid cultural norms of the period. This is a queer Dublin, bringing to light the everyday ways in which gender and culture in Ulysses are not only performative but also changeable and adaptable.