It is easy to see a number of similarities between Joyce`s "Clay" of Dubliners and the "Nausicaa" chapter of Ulysses. Both narrators identify with the female protagonist and both texts allow their desires to be expressed. Further, Maria of "Clay" and Gerty of "Nausicaa" want to be seen as "feminine." Based on the question of what made them have similar desires, this study explores the interrelationship of gender, language, and society. Maria wishes to be seen both as a Virgin Mary figure and a valuable Victorian woman, just as Gerty dreams of herself as an "Angel in the house," a social construct that, according to Virginia Woolf, entrapped Victorian women. As the former tries to reveal herself as "proper mother" to Joe and as a still marriageable woman, so the latter plays the role of Virgin Mary comforting the suffering sinner, Bloom. She also tries to prove she can still attract the attention of men. Although both women smooth over the deficiencies and troubles in their lives, they turn out to be the opposite of what they wish to be. More importantly, their desire is not their own, but society`s. They are selfless victims of a male-dominated capitalist society, whose ideological forces formed their desire. Disempowered by a patriarchal culture, Maria imagines that she has been recognized by a powerful gentleman. Gerty is a "defective product" on the sexual market in the patriarchal society of 1904 Dublin. Dominated by advertising images, she is reduced to the passive object of male desire.