Ulysses Essay 12 (21:19)
Chapter 1 (Telemachus) No. 12
“Redheaded women buck like goats”

Stephen, Mulligan and Haines arrive at a creek, and as Mulligan gets undressed preparatory to a swim, he exchanges gossip with an (unnamed) young man – apparently also a medical student – who has just come out of the water. The young man tells Mulligan that one of their colleagues, Seymour, has “chucked” medical school and joined the army as an officer. Seymour has also been seen “spooning” with a red-haired Carlisle girl named Lily (known to Mulligan) whose father is “rotto” rich. Taking off his trousers, Mulligan announces reflectively (and apparently jealously) that “redheaded women buck like goats.”

It is not clear whether Mulligan is using the verb “to buck” to imply sexual licentiousness generically (it is after all his nickname), or whether he is referring to its more specific (and more vulgar) usage to describe the coital position in which the woman, lying on her back, extends her legs upwards so that her ankles are locked around her partner’s neck. Be that as it may, the idea linking red-haired women with sexual abandon is a long standing Christian tradition. It seems, to have its origin in medieval and Renaissance artistic and literary portrayals of Judas Iscariot (and Jews generally) as red-haired. Since Judas epitomized treachery and untrustworthiness, by analogy red-haired women (why not men?) were assumed to be sexually unfaithful.

The Tanach describes two important personalities who were “reddish” (Hebrew “admoni”). The first is Esau, Jacob’s older twin brother, who is described at birth (Genesis 25:25) as “coming out reddish.” Esau, the outdoor huntsman, does not have a good press in Jewish tradition, but the Tanach seems to take a more multilayered view of his essentially tragic life story. Redness recurs in Esau’s life when he encounters Jacob on his return from a hunting expedition: utterly famished, he agrees to swap his seniority birthright for a bowl of red soup that Jacob has on the fire. Also Edom, the trans-Jordanian tribe of which he was the progenitor (and from which King Herod sprang) means “red” in Hebrew, and to this day you can stand on your hotel balcony in Eilat at Israel’s  southern tip and take in the red mountains of Edom skirting the Great Rift Valley to the east.

The other redhead in the Tanach is King David. God tells the prophet Samuel, an unwilling kingmaker, that his (God’s) first nominee for the throne, King Saul, has been a disappointment (mainly because he showed political weakness by sparing the life of the captured Agag, king of the Amalekites, whose destruction to the last man God had enjoined as punishment for their persecution of the Israelites during their trek in the desert some five centuries previously). God therefore instructs Samuel to anoint as a future king one of the sons of Jesse, a Bethlehem sheep farmer. Samuel checks out the seven sons whom Jesse presents, but none fit the bill. So he asks Jesse whether these seven are indeed all his children. Jesse replies that in fact he has another much younger son who is tending the sheep. Samuel orders Jesse to send for the boy, and when he arrives we are told that “he was reddish, with beautiful eyes, and handsome in appearance” (I Samuel 16:12). God tells Samuel that this young shepherd – David – is indeed the favored appointee and Samuel accordingly anoints him with oil.

Both in Jewish and Christian tradition the red-haired David is the progenitor of the Messiah (Hebrew “Mashiach” – “the anointed one”), which is probably why the New Testament placed Jesus’ birthplace in Bethlehem, David’s Judean home town, situated a good seventy miles south-east of the family’s Galilean residence in Nazareth. But red hair is heritable, and although it can skip several generations (its gene is recessive), it is just possible that it was Jesus who was red-haired, rather than Judas Iscariot.




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