248 jodie medd Finally, Stephen’s love affair with Angela Crossby ends in a scene that returns again to Collins, a memory now entrenched in Stephen’s mind as symbolic of base heterosexuality After restlessly spending a “long night of vigil” away from Angela, Stephen returns in the early morning “to stand and keep watch in [Angela’s] garden” (197, 196), only to encounter another heterosexual shock when she spies Angela and Roger Antrim, her childhood rival, clasped in a coarse embrace, “drunk with loving.” Stephen’s hysterical reaction is as much to the memory that the scene arouses as it is to the scene itself: Then, as sometimes happens in moments of great anguish, Stephen could only remember the grotesque She could only remember a plump-bosomed housemaid in the arms of a coarsely amorous footman, and she laughed and she laughed like a creature demented—laughed and laughed until she must gasp for breath and spit blood from her tongue, which had somehow got bitten in her efforts to stop her hysterical laughing; and some of the blood remained on her chin, jerked there by that agonized laughter (197) Here the force of “grotesque” memories drives Stephen to an hysterical and gruesome spectacle; however, its staging within a structure of shell shock trauma (amplified by Stephen’s bloodied face) invites the reader to engage sympathetically with Stephen’s invert woundedness This moment also catalyzes a series of “bombardments” by God’s good people that culminates in Stephen claiming an identity as a sexological invert Stephen’s hysteria so frightens Angela that she betrays Stephen to her husband, who in turn informs Stephen’s mother, which finally results in Stephen’s banishment from Morton This chain of betrayals compels Stephen into her father’s library, where she discovers the “answer to the riddle of her unwanted being” (206), realizes the extent of his paternal failure to convey this knowledge, and assumes the mark of Cain Once finally discovered, the sexological diagnosis locked within Philip Gordon’s bookcase then offers a difficult but welcome answer to the neurotic questions posed by the garden scenes In this way the traumatic scenes and their memories provide the conditions of possibility for Stephen’s, and the reader’s, acceptance of her sexological-theological sentence That is, the master narratives of sexology and the Bible require the supplementary dis-