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In April 1868, Regina v. Hicklin refined the 1857 Obscene Publications Act by establishing the legal test for obscenity. The case concerned The Confessional Unmasked, until now read as sincere religious controversy. It was in fact flaunting pornography, paradigmatic of the material the 1857 Act prohibited. The story of The Confessional Unmasked and its ineffectual suppression significantly shifts understanding of mid-Victorian practices of censorship. It reveals surprising state tolerance, a decade after the statute passed into law, of a cheap pornographic pamphlet in widespread circulation throughout the United Kingdom for three long and turbulent years.

This article investigates James Joyce's fascination with a wide variety of medical texts, sexual folklores, religious beliefs, and persistent superstitions about menstruation. That fascination finds its way into Ulysses , which draws upon a number of intertexts to inform a curiosity about the female body most strikingly articulated by Bloom, Molly, and Gerty MacDowell. These intertexts are not simply imported into the novel but are dismantled and interrogated, as Joyce exposes, rather than endorses, cliches of essential femininity.