Amor
matris: subjective and objective genitive.
This quotation, part of Stephen’s inner
monologue, appears in Episode Two. Amor matris translates
to “mother love,” a concept that Stephen ponders while giving extra
help to his student Sargent. Sargent reminds Stephen of himself
at the same age—Stephen was similarly dirty and disheveled, a child
only a mother could love. Stephen thinks of “mother love” frequently
in Ulysses—he contrasts the concrete, bodily reality
of a mother’s love to the disconnected, tension-ridden relation
between a father and a child. In Episode Nine, Stephen calls amor
matris “the only true thing in life,” and skeptically identifies
paternity as “a legal fiction.” The phrase “subjective and objective
genitive” refers to the confusion about the translation of amor
matris—it can be either a child’s love for a mother or
a mother’s love for a child. This touches on Stephen’s difficulties
in deciding whether to be an active or a passive being. In Episode
Nine, he frames the choice this way: “Act. Be acted on.” In the
quotation from Episode Two above, we see Stephen trying to understand
the ethics and power relations involved in his teacher-stu-dent
relationship with Sargent in terms of the compassion entailed by
“mother love.”
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