Synaptic

The major assignment for this senior seminar on James Joyce was to illuminate something significant in Ulysses drawing on intensive knowledge of Joyce’s works and extensive knowledge of the large critical conversation about Ulysses. Lindsey Greer’s essay on Penelope in James Joyce’s Ulysses is both lucid and authoritative, a delight to read. Lindsey presents us with a seemingly easy grasp of difficult materials ranging Homer’s Odyssey through Joyce’s own works that precede Ulysses and with the linguistic pyrotechnics of Ulysses itself to contemporary criticism in order to perform a kind of feminist rehabilitation of Molly Bloom.

-Walter Cannon

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Introduction: The Problems

From the dawn of Ulysses in 1922, the character of Molly Bloom has been under scrutiny, judged for her actions, implied or explicit, on one particular day. Early readers called her “‘earth mother’ and ‘satanic mistress’” while 21st century readers called her “‘bitch,’ ‘slut,’ and ‘thirty shilling whore’” (Norris 217). Certainly she is often perceived to be the latter for much of the book, as Bloom seems perpetually obsessed by her body, her actions, her suitors, and her affair. But such interpretations seem to contradict her chaste religious and mythological parallels, the Virgin Mother Mary and ever-virtuous and faithful Penelope, to whom she can be reconciled with a little reader insight. Fifty years after the world was introduced to Molly Bloom, Fr. Robert Boyle summed up the situation: “Critical opinion is hopelessly fragmented among those who would condemn [Molly] and those who would praise her, even among those wiser souls who admit her mysterious inaccessibility to limited human vision” (407).

In-depth revelations of Molly’s character become increasingly difficult as time progresses, and the gap between present world culture and the extremely contextually based Dublin constructed by James Joyce becomes more and more obscure. One hundred years after Joyce’s mind-boggling publication hit the shelves, modern (or rather, postmodern) readers are left with mountains of questions regarding the plot, the characters, and the historical and cultural references — surface details which hinder a reader’s grasp of the symbolic. Once these questions are dealt with on the reader’s own time (“[Ulysses’] margins black with cross-references… So much homework, is done; so many, many facts have been checked out” [Kenner 63]), issues of symbolism and interpretation abound. And these are much more difficult questions to answer, considering that Joyce’s writing style and means of conveying Molly’s character to readers leave quite wide ranges of possibilities, and layers of them. Who is Molly Bloom, or can we even grasp the nature of her character? Is she the embodiment of Joyce’s own modernist brand of feminism, or the opposite? What was Joyce trying to achieve by writing “Penelope” as he did? In this essay I will explore a few lines of thought, from first impressions to careful considerations, on Molly’s person and purpose, and ultimately I hope to pass an arguably fair judgement on a woman who I believe is neither wholly guilty nor wholly innocent. She is vulgar, but forgivable; she is, extraordinarily, normal.

Molly’s Assumed Identity

Molly’s nature is particularly hard to grasp compared to Ulysses’ other main characters, mostly because, while Stephen and Bloom can reveal their natures through inner thought processes, dialogue, and interaction with other characters and each other, Molly is not given such a narrative opportunity until the very end of her husband’s Odyssean day. The majority of what the readers infer about Molly is based on hearsay and assumptions up until “Penelope,” and even then, everything one thinks one knows about Molly is still only inferred. She is like a ghost haunting Bloom in his travels, barely thought of or viewed as human; she is one who “has functioned chiefly as an ‘other’ in the text up to ‘Penelope,’ a situation that obliges us to think with particular care about the justice of the responses that are being provoked to her throughout the progress of the text” (Norris 229). In terms of symbolic connotations, Molly can be seen in several illuminating and somewhat conflicting views. In order to make sense of Molly’s personality, as well as her purpose, the reader ought not to pass judgment too soon.

For example, if Bloom is generally understood to be the black panther of Haines’ nightmares, then Molly’s animal parallel must be the cow. She is assumed to be in bed for the first half of the day, and admits herself that she had not even gotten fully dressed by 3:15PM (“because it was ¼ after 3 when I saw the 2 Dedalus girls coming from school I never know the time… when I threw the penny to that lame sailor for England home and beauty when I was whistling there is a charming girl I love and I hadnt even put on my clean shift or powered myself or a thing” [Joyce 615, line 344]). She is in the background, not doing much, just grazing from the light breakfast Bloom brought her that morning and the fruit basket delivered in advance of Boylan’s arrival; not speaking much (her first word of the day is “Mn,” actually not a word at all [46, line 57]): and not knowing much either, as during the course of her only conversation with Bloom until “Ithaca,” she asks him the meaning of a word she does not know. The word, “metempsychosis,” is from a cheap erotica novel of highly questionable scholarly merit, and she does not understand the first explanation he gives (52, lines 321-343). The initial impression of Molly’s slow, sluggish cowness becomes noticeably more of a morally questionable, promiscuous, and physically objectified cowness as stories bandied about by Bloom’s social circle become more derogatory (Norris 230). They imply that Boylan may not be Molly’s first affair, or at least that more than one man has lusted after Molly. Her figure being large but pretty, men find her desirable and often make passes at her (conveniently leaving her reactions to these passes out of their stories [O’Brien 2]). The animalistic and carnivorous Bloom introduced to readers in “Calypso” (“Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine” [Joyce 45, lines 1-5]) likewise lusts after his domesticated prey. But Molly “de-lionizes” him by taking the “Leo” out of his name and calling him “Poldy” (Blamires 26-27). He then essentially becomes a domesticated housecat, not to be taken seriously by his peers or, at times, the readers. What then, does Molly become? Perhaps an elusive bird, flying out of the cat’s reach, preferring to mate with flashy peacocks like Boylan?

On another note, recall that in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the recurring cow symbol has maternal connotations, and so it is suitable that Stephen, when adopted by Bloom, acquires a cow as a foster mother to replace his own deceased mother.

Following the adoption theme leads us to the religious parallels, in which Bloom = God the Father, Stephen = Christ the Son, and Molly = Marion = Virgin Mother Mary. Some bizarre things happen when one delves 34 beyond superficial facts (such as Molly “[sharing] a name and a birthday with the Blessed Virgin” [Boyle 423]) of the religious parallels of Ulysses, especially considering Joyce’s fascination with the theme of transubstantiation; it becomes quite confusing trying to keep straight who is supposed to be who. As Christ is an extension of God the Father, so Bloom is seen as a Christfigure nearly as much as he is seen as representing God. This is especially so in respect to his issues with Mary and Martha: one his wife and the other his secret penpal. Biblically, the two are sisters who accommodate Jesus for a short while: Mary is praised for listening in reverence to Jesus while Martha is chastised for being a busybody and not knowing what is truly important (Luke 10:38-42). In this case, Molly becomes simultaneously the Virgin Mother of Jesus and one out of the multitudes of his followers, but one who is commended in particular for her priorities. Molly’s eagerness to listen to whatever Stephen-Christ might have to say is in line with this image: “Id love to have a long talk with an intelligent welleducated person” (Joyce 641, lines 1493-1494).

Having not met Stephen since he was a child, Molly idealizes the adult version (637-638). But then she contemplates seducing Stephen, thinking that the three of them, Molly, Stephen, and Bloom, ought to be able to live together in harmony (“why cant we all remain friends over it” (639, lines 1392-1393); this could also be in reference to Boylan, Bloom, and Molly, but is a bit vague due to Molly’s moving from “he” to “he” without saying who either “he is). At this, present-day readers might be tempted to draw another connection between Molly and Mary Magdalene, the sometimes-theorized wife of Jesus; but of course, as Joyce passed away in 1941 and no conspiratorial evidence for this theory surfaced until 1945, readers ought to throw out this connotation (and, even if Joyce had thought of such a thing, it would have been certain heresy to suggest it in any obvious way). Thus, this third Molly- Mary parallel is technically void; however, all an author (especially one like Joyce) can do is guide the reader’s interpretation, not dictate it, and so meaning evolves with time, and with every new reader (so the parallel is not historically feasible, but is legitimate nonetheless). In any case, marital and gender issues do still arise here with Bloom still being cuckolded if Molly seduces Stephen, as in Molly’s fantasy he is pictured bringing Stephen and Molly breakfast in bed (Joyce 641, lines 1491-1492) — he is the “new womanly man” and genderless God presiding over his son and wife/daughterin- law (Blamires 248). Such morally and socially wouldbe- frowned-upon thoughts, coming from Molly herself, do not help her fight the derogatory cow issue.

Of course, given the nature of the comments made about Molly by Bloom’s friends throughout the book, readers are not particularly surprised when they find her pondering sexual encounters with nearly every man she thinks of in “Penelope,” whether the encounters are wanted or unwanted, actual or merely hypothetical. This at first makes Molly seem slutty and scandalous; after all, she is in reality no Blessed Virgin. But as we’ve seen from “Nausicaa,” men find virgins just as attractive and seductive as experienced women, if not more so. Molly could therefore be seen as the victim of double standards; knowing gender ideologies and stereotyped expectations to be unrealistic, Molly committed herself to none, but let on that she had, in this way keeping her identity safely her own.

Here we come to the Homeric symbolism. A clever revelation by Kimberly Delvin in her article, “Pretending in ‘Penelope’: Masquerade, Mimicry, and Molly Bloom,” points out one of Joyce’s more subtle tricks in making Molly Penelope’s parallel: “‘Penelope’ actualizes her name, which translates to ‘countenance of webs’ or mask” (72). This rings true not just for the Ulyssean chapter of the same title, but for the entire problem of knowing and interpreting Molly Bloom, as “Molly’s contradictions are internalized cultural contradictions: she weaves and unweaves ideological cliches” (Delvin 74). Even as a young girl, Molly was a victim of– or was she manipulating? –double standards. She recalls her first kiss, with a sailor named Mulvey: “It never entered my head what kissing meant till he put his tongue in my mouth his mouth was sweetlike young I put my knee up to him a few times to learn the way what did I tell him I was engaged for for fun to the son of a Spanish nobleman named Don Miguel de la Flora and he believed me that I was to be married to him in 3 years time theres many a true word spoken in jest there is a flower that bloometh” (Joyce 625, lines 770-775). Before Mulvey, Molly was actually inexperienced, except for whatever sexual knowledge she had gained from reading or listening to stories. She used Mulvey, leaning on said indirectly gained experience, in order to gain actual personal experience. All of this was for the purpose of later being able to act inexperienced, despite being more experienced than she let on, or vice versa to continue the trend. Also, based on the lies she told Mulvey, we can deduce that Molly never took him seriously as a suitor. It is therefore likely that Molly is not serious in any of the similar recalled or imagined sexual musings; for example, those involving Stephen have “little to do with the fearful, brilliant, introspective, ineffectual” young artist, and more to do with Molly working her way mentally back towards her husband (Boyle 421).

As has been stated, Molly is of course the Penelope to Bloom-Odysseus and Stephen-Telemachus in Joyce’s Homerian parallel, staying at home while her husband, constantly distracted by the question of her fidelity to him, embarks on a perilous journey through a land in which he is an ethnic stranger. The main issue with this parallel is that Joyce seems to have inverted certain characteristics of the characters (namely, sexual fidelity) so that Molly is also the unfaithful Odysseus, and Bloom is Penelope.

Joyce apparently inverted more than just this parallel. At the end of “Ithaca” and for six out of eight “Penelope” paragraphs, we see one of the two scenes which prompted some critics to call Molly an “Earth Mother”: Bloom partly curled into the fetal position with his head towards Molly’s feet, mentally zooming out on the world, kissing “the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each plump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation” (Joyce 604, lines 2241-2243). Bloom is at this time experiencing the convergence of “antagonistic sentiments and reflections” into a “final satisfaction…at the ubiquity in the eastern and western terrestrial hemispheres…of adipose anterior and posterior female hemispheres…expressive of mute immutable mature animality” (lines 2228-2236). Once again, Bloom appears to prefer not to see Molly as particularly human, but he has mentally bridged the emotional waters that kept him physically apart from his wife; thus, the physical inversion which awakens the slumbering Molly. The two briefly parallel the mythical couple, choosing only to converse at their reunion (or perhaps not “only,” a question for later). Then another inversion commences when Bloom-Penelope falls asleep, leaving Molly-Odysseus wide awake in the wee hours of the morn to embark on her own mental journey of Homeric proportions, wandering through perilous obstacles of thought and feeling, relying on nothing but memory to bring her home to Bloom and their marital bed.

This seems a bit contradictory considering the fact that Molly has just had an affair. She also dedicates much of her thoughts to comparing her husband to her lover, or lovers, past and present. Molly is almost cruel in her critique of Bloom; in her brief “Calypso” appearance, Molly does act blunt and short with him, giving him an “imperious set of questions and orders” (Norris 218). She seems to wear the pants in their relationship, being “a woman of few and pointed words, who wastes little time on courtesies” (Norris 218). Perhaps, then, Molly is selfish and greedy, wanting Boylan’s money and absolutely everyone’s attention, treating even her own daughter as a rival. Or perhaps this is only Molly being pragmatic, seeing both the pros and cons of each lover, all their faults and good points. But perhaps it is still more than that, as Molly is in truth a good and a fair judge of character, giving great attention to detail, catching others in the vaguest and most subtle of lies while also giving them due respect to genuine behavior (Sternlieb 765). Thus, one of Molly’s most contradictory points, her apparently constant changing of opinions, is actually proof that she is intelligent, “worldly and capable of wit” despite being “poorly educated” and superstitious (Norris 218, Boyle 422).

One last Molly- Penelope parallel: the duo “[weaves] in order to unweave…[does] in order to undo” (Sternlieb 758). In order to hold off suitors, Penelope weaves the same burial robe for four years, unweaving it every single night and starting over again every morning, keeping the pattern in her mind. Molly does the same: in order to defend others, she must insult them; in order to love Bloom, she must see him for who he is; in order to go forwards, she must go backwards.

Perceptions of “Penelope”

“Penelope” is yet another of Joyce’s linguistic experiments, yet another chapter of Ulysses written with an “aesthetic of mobility” (O’Brien 2). Many twentiethcentury critics and feminists claimed that “Penelope” was a prime example of ecriture feminine due to Molly’s perceived “language of flow.” In quite a contrast to Stephen and Bloom’s narrations, Molly’s lack of punctuation of any kind creates the illusion of disorienting timelessness, giving the impression of simultaneously rushing and rambling; as the monologue of the Other, Molly’s narrative “exposes the leisureliness of Bloom’s introspective and often maudlin journey” (Sternleib 767). Though perhaps not always “maudlin” per se, Bloom’s version of stream of consciousness is extremely fragmented compared to Molly’s neverending runons. It is as if Joyce were puddle-jumping, and the scattered droplets equate to every period, every disjointed statement conveyed from Bloom to the reader. Given time, those droplets will converge into a new puddle of meaning, but it is largely up to the reader to connect the dots, and this is extremely difficult without knowing from which puddles certain droplets originated.

Take, for example, Martha’s letter to Bloom. It is presented to the reader as a whole exactly once, in “The Lotus Eaters,” and this is the main puddle (Joyce 63-64, lines 240-259). Before this, the reader only gets scattered bits of information about Martha and the affair, and about Bloom’s intention to collect the letter (by hiding the card of his alias Henry Flower in his hat, etc.). After this, several events throughout the day bring to Bloom’s mind phrases, often incomplete or registered only as a connotation segwaying other fragments, that originated in Martha’s letter. Thinking of death, Bloom is reminded of Martha’s typo: “I do not like that other world she wrote” (94, line 1002); “To aid gentleman in literary work” is a reference in “Lestrygonians” to how the relationship began (136, lines 532-533); “Are you not happy in your home you poor little naughty boy? Wants to sew on buttons for me. I must answer. Write it in the library” (137, lines 612-613) and “Lovely name you have. Can’t write…. She’s a. I called you naughty boy. Still the name: Martha. How strange! Today” are Bloom’s reminders to himself to answer Martha (226, lines 713-716); “Full voice of perfume of what perfume does your lilactrees” is the specific answer to one of Martha’s questions in a “Sirens” reference to Molly (lines 730-731); “How many women in Dublin have it today? Martha, she. Something in the air. That’s the moon” is a reflection on women and their periods brought on by Gerty McDowell and connecting to Molly (301, lines 781-782). All of this the reader can catch and connect, slowly but surely. Molly’s thoughts are the opposite, with details constantly gushing forth, overflowing to the point that they are connected in too many ways, and the reader’s new concern is not gathering raindrops but trying to stay afloat in her female mind’s flood of information.

But is this escriture feminine supposed to be a 38 positive portrayal of the Other? At first glance, there is no denying that “Penelope” looks like a complete mess: seemingly “rogue capitalization” abounds (Brown 4); “Pronouns have unclear antecedents and words that start with one grammatical connection can end by shifting to another one in the flow of her language” (Stanier 3); and “the quotidian and the epic overlap as do the present, past and future” (Sternlieb 770). The syntax of “Penelope” gives readers the impression that they are listening in on an uneducated and extremely fickle mind. However, we have already seen that Molly is not so fickle as she seems at first. Likewise, all of Joyce’s confusing formal techniques are “ambiguities only to the reader and not to Molly” (Stanier 3). Perhaps in Molly’s mind, she hears or pictures her thoughts, sees them ending and beginning and flowing into one another much more clearly; and Joyce could have better conveyed this by doubling up linking words or phrases. But was it ever Joyce’s intention to be clear when it came to Molly? Or any of Ulysses, for that matter?

Just as “Oxen of the Sun” is written in a style that shows the evolution of English prose, or as “Cyclops” moves through commentary voices of “the legal, the epic, the scientific, the journalistic, and so on” (Blamires 118), “Penelope” is Joyce’s experiment in the writing styles of popular culture, and specifically feminine ones. The language of Molly’s thoughts moves through such genres as gothic, romantic poetry, drama, girlish memoir, and erotica (O’Brien 3-6). However, the episodes which contain such language are not necessarily written in those styles, per se; rather, Molly herself remains uniform in her running commentary of her own memory and imagination, and simply pulls certain images and vocabulary from conveniently corresponding literature. According to Delvin, these styles are supposed to correspond to whatever form of media Molly had been reading at the time of the formation of the memories she conveys to readers, and all of the “Mollys” seen in “Penelope” are therefore “byproducts of identifications with specific texts of femininity” (74); for example, when thinking of her potential relations with the presumably prestigious Stephen, she imagines herself as the female protagonist of a romantic poem and a song she once heard (“they all write about some woman in their poetry well I suppose he wont find many like me… two glancing eyes a lattice hid Ill sing that for him theyre my eyes if hes anything of a poet two eyes as darkly bright as loves own star” (Joyce 637, lines 1333-1340)). While we may safely assume Molly has done her fair share of reading of all the various genres pointed out by O’Brien, there is no way of knowing exactly how recently Molly may have read any of them. They simply manifest cultural ideologies of gender, which Molly fantasizes being inside, occasionally also acting them out. In any case, a multitude of different aspects or expectations of femininity are present in “Penelope,” and we cannot after all take gender and language as separate topics, especially regarding a character and a chapter as controversial and syntactically dense as Molly Bloom in “Penelope.”

Whether or not Joyce has been successful in the endeavor of accurately portraying the Other (or whether this was his endeavor at all) therefore remains a controversial topic. Molly is often written off as the queen of female stereotypes, the “illogical” archetype of feminine thought processes, but these are unfair judgements. Delvin debunks the theory that Molly herself is constructed of either stereotypes or archetypes; archetypes are the “original copies,” simultaneously “‘a perfectly typical example’… and ‘the most extreme example’… which revealingly claim, moreover, the norm and the exaggeration of it are one and the same” (73). Molly, though unaware of being written, is aware of “being watched” and of the need to “act natural”(without necessarily “[being] natural” [Sternlieb 771-772]). She stores up all those cultural ideologies and stereotypes inside herself and dispenses them as she sees fit, casting herself as whichever role seems most suitable for the situation and accompanying actor (whose pretending she despises because they do not know it for pretending). Meanwhile, despite outwardly acting as an experienced seductress, wicked adultress, tragic victim, or innocent flirt, Molly keeps her self-definition separate, safely behind a figurative mask, knowing herself to be much more than she lets on. In this way, Molly “undermines the notion of womanliness as [she] displays it” ( Delvin 73).

On the other hand, Michael Stanier’s article, though recognizing that portraying the Other was perhaps Joyce’s goal, challenges feminists’ conclusions that Molly’s inner thoughts in ‘Penelope’ are the epitome of feminine writing meant to “destabilize the phallocentric nature of the world that has been depicted” (4). His article “’The Void Awaits Surely All Them That Weave the Wind’: ‘Penelope’ and ‘Sirens’ in Ulysses” is explicitly about the relationship between femininity and language, or Joyce’s portrayal and use of them. In it he argues that “Joyce’s attempt to portray the essential feminine as destabilizing, undermining, and ‘unweaving’ the world of phallocentric language and presence is ultimately doomed to failure,” because Joyce is ultimately just a man trying to define the “Otherness” of the feminine, and his writing cannot escape his own presumptuous masculinity (2-3). From Stanier’s perspective, Molly’s monologue “merely shores up this world by being contained and assimilated into it” (4). Indeed, Molly has her fun knowingly mixing and matching stereotypes, but such social commentaries get her nowhere; she gratifies the men she encounters and is in turn gratified by knowing her behavior to be an act — but the joke is lost on the men (Delvin 89).

All of this debunking and undermining can be gained only from taking a closer look, from giving Molly a chance to defend herself — or rather, giving Joyce the chance to defend her. There are a few passages in which Joyce’s feminism/ egalitarianism is indisputable. For example, when Molly goes off on this tangent rant: “Men again all over they can pick and choose what they please a married woman (which Molly is) or a fast widow (which Bloom has earlier imagined her to be) or a girl (which Molly has been) for their different tastes like those houses round behind Irish street no but were to be chained always chained up theyre not going to be chaining me up no damn fear” (Joyce 639, lines 1388-1391, parentheses mine).

Molly’s Significance to the Internal Plot of Ulysses

Central to the plot of Ulysses is Bloom’s constant awareness of Molly’s infidelity, though he assumes it more than knows it; his suspicions cause him pain, it is a stressful subject for him to dwell upon, yet he cannot avoid thinking about it, reminded so often as he is by the slightest question, statement, or association of thought. But what, if anything, is Bloom going to do about it? And why is Molly unfaithful in the first place? What has led the couple to this day?

In the “Sirens” episode, Bloom contemplates a passive kind of revenge against Molly for her adultery: “Gone. They sing. Forgotten. I too. And one day she with. Leave her: get tired. Suffer then. Snivel. Big spanishy eyes goggling at nothing. Her wavyavyeavyheavyeavyevyevy hair un comb’d” (lines 806-809). According to Norris, this passage “could be seen as a punishment Bloom threatens, namely that he could as readily leave her as she might leave him” (226). Norris correctly infers that this line of thought is brought about by Bloom’s speculating on a wife losing a husband, as it is preceded by thoughts of Dignam’s death: “Gone. They sing. Forgotten. I too” refers to Bloom’s observations of Dignam’s funeral and his own future death. However, along with “And one day she with,” the line has the dual meaning of Bloom’s realization that Molly might leave him for another man, specifically Boylan, potentially as soon as during the coming concert tour, a thought that does indeed briefly cross Molly’s mind in “Penelope” (“suppose I never came back what would they say eloped with him [Boylan]” [lines 373-374]). Norris is again correct in interpreting that Bloom thinks he could “as readily leave her” — but she misses the mark in stating that this hypothetical leaving would be because “he got tired of her,” as this would imply that Bloom tired of Molly in her entirety, including her personality and living habits, that he no longer loved her (226). Not so: Bloom imagines instead that he might go home and catch her in the act of adultery. This would give him the legal and social ability to leave her, with the excuse given to her that he is tired of her abstinence from him despite blatant indulgence with other men. Such an event would surely cause Molly to regret her actions; if she loves Bloom, she would cry, she would miss him, but it would be too late, he would be gone.

Norris likely missed this conclusion because of her belief that it is Bloom who is abstaining from sexual intercourse with Molly. This confusion on whether it is Bloom or Molly who has been abstaining from/withholding sexual intercourse from the other for the last ten years of their marriage is of course thanks to the insurmountable vagueness of Joyce-brand stream of consciousness writing. The controversy lies in the key line “Could never like it again after Rudy” from “Lestrygonians” (line 610). Norris seems to think Bloom is the abstainer/withholder: “Bloom blames Molly’s lusty libido for the death of Rudy and arguably punishes her for what is finally a fictitious construction of the dynamic of the tragedy by withholding interior sex from her from then on” (221). Norris’s support for this claim makes sense. Bloom, as a Jew, naturally breaks from his usual scientific line of thought to seek some divine reason for the emotional event of his newborn son’s death. And he finds one, absurd as it may seem: Bloom attributes Rudy’s conception to a specific morning when Molly was apparently aroused by the sight of two dogs mating, and he decides it must have been sinful to copulate at such a time, for such a reason (Joyce 73-74, lines 77-81; 640, lines 1444-1447).

However, Harry Blamires attributes “Could never like it again after Rudy” to Molly: “Molly ended their full marital relationship with the plea that she ‘could never like it again’ after their son Rudy’s death” (69). The phrase would then become an explanation for the sexual death of the marriage passed on to the reader through Bloom, who, though frustrated, respects her decision both because he loves her and because the loss of their son is equally sad to him. Taking this death-based logic one step further (they “avoid intercourse for fear of the pain of another death”) Boyle takes up the third stance: “It is not possible, it seems to me now, to determine which of the two, Molly or Poldy, is responsible for their unsatisfactory sexual relationship” (416). Both are mutually responsible; not only for ceasing to copulate but for not knowing when or how to start again, each retreating inside themselves to deal with the problem independently rather than together as a couple, which eventually leads to both seeking solace from suitors. And, ironically, as Sternlieb claims, Molly’s affair is what eventually brings them together again. Norris’s stance does make more sense in light of her other arguments. It is the basis for what she believes is the reason Bloom is so forgiving of Molly’s assumed affairs, the next controversial round of the blame game: “Bloom…seems to take some responsibility for Molly’s adultery, perhaps recognizing that just as he scuttles about for compensatory sex, Molly has her own need to find compensation for Bloom’s rusty gun and the decade-long sleep it has induced in their bedroom” (228). And Molly does indeed defend herself with similar-sounding logic on this point: “Still of course a woman wants to be embraced 20 times a day almost to make her look young no matter by who so long as to be in love or loved by somebody if the fellow you want isnt there (Joyce 639, lines 1407-1410). Bloom is experiencing selfblame for Molly’s sexual freeness because it is only natural that she would act so, and Molly also seems to be blaming nature for her actions.

However, she also says “its all his own fault anyway if I am an adultress” (641, line 1516), blaming Bloom for orchestrating her illicit relationship with Boylan; Boyle points out several instances where Molly suspects that Bloom has been “plotting and planning” everything from sending Milly away to allowing Boylan’s flirting and further advances, to getting himself out of the way for the day (419). In fact, Molly almost seems to have a passive aggressive attitude about the whole affair. She occasionally lashes out at Bloom in her imagination; she more than once thinks of overdoing something sexual in order to draw out Bloom’s animalistic urges, such as using his jealousy to arouse him, wanting to seduce him by “[letting] him know if thats what he wanted that his wife is fucked yes and damn well fucked too up to my neck nearly not by him” (641, lines 1510-1511). Molly’s language takes a vulgar turn whenever she has these violent impulses, showing her irritation with Bloom’s apparent wishywashyness in their longdormant sexual relationship.

Perhaps this aggression is also pointed at Bloom’s hypocrisy. Though Molly is generally perceived as the unfaithful one, throughout Ulysses readers witness Bloom lusting guiltlessly after a number of women and girls. It is revealed that on a previous day, Bloom did commit physical adultery with prostitutes (Norris 227). This is what Molly suspects when Bloom returns from his Odyssean day (“yes he came somewhere Im sure by his appetite…so either it was one of those night women if it was down there he was really and the hotel story he made up a pack of lies to hide it planning it…or else if its not that its some little bitch or other he got in with somewhere or picked up on the sly” [Joyce 609, lines 34-45]). Molly is only slightly wrong in her assumptions: Bloom has not committed physical adultery with another woman. No, on this day, he merely sticks to ogling every passing female and masturbating at the sight of his “Cyclops” attacker’s granddaughter (the “little bitch” is Gerty McDowell, whose grandfather is Giltrap, “the citizen” who owns Garryowen [289, line 232]).

In any case, both Molly and Bloom at least have a general idea of the other’s affairs, and each makes a decision not to interfere based on the logic that though they may be jealous, the other’s actions are acceptable because their own marital bed is dead. In her article “The Oxymoron of Fidelity in Homer’s Odyssey and Joyce’s Ulysses,” Keri Ames discusses in depth the parallels between Molly and her mythical Greek counterparts, Penelope and Helen of Troy. Ames gives special attention to Penelope’s excuse for her fidelity to Odysseus during his absence – that Helen’s infidelity to Menelaus was due to a sort of divine possession or influence, an act of the gods rather than of her own free will – an excuse one would expect Penelope to give only if she had been disloyal (2-3). However, her using this kind of excuse is both a show of humility and of forgiveness, since it exonerates Odysseus from his infidelity while also stating that she was also tempted and could have been sexually disloyal to him too, had the gods willed it (4). This is monumental in reestablishing the couple’s long estranged marriage relations; Penelope only cares that Odysseus returned to her, and nothing he did (or she could have done) during his absence matters in the light of his return. The two then have an unspoken agreement that sexual infidelity is not as important as others make it out to be, because what matters in marriage is loyalty of the heart. Ames argues that the same can be said of the Blooms’ marriage, because they are both aware of each other’s sexual infidelity and allow it, forgiving it, and that this is real love. In light of this, the Bloom marriage appears to be based more on mutual respect and emotional affection rather than on sexual gratification, a point several critics agree on.

Furthermore, both Bloom and Molly appear to intend to re-establish sexual relations. Clearly, the issue of infidelity has been on Molly’s mind quite a bit. Both Boyle and Kenner are of the opinion that Boylan is in fact Molly’s very first affair, that she put it off for as long as possible after Rudy’s death (Boyle 415, Kenner 67). Both point out that Bloom’s list of Molly’s suitors includes any and all men who “showed any interest in Molly as a sex object” and support the theory with the fact that Molly’s wandering but blatant thoughts only reference actual past sex with Boylan and Bloom (Boyle 415). Kenner even argues that Molly procrastinated sexual intercourse with Boylan while he was in her house by having him rearrange the furniture in the living room, an act that was as behindthe- scenes as Penelope’s weaving and unweaving her father-in-law’s (Bloom’s father Rudolph = Rudy for short, the name of their son) burial robe (66, 70). To Kenner this was Molly’s “masterstroke,” a genius plan that belies her reluctance to actually act out the affair with Boylan despite all her lust and all her husband’s maneuvering – but it fails, Penelope is caught in the middle of unweaving, and Molly allows full, not just partial (“She makes Boylan withdraw” [Boyle 417]) intercourse with her lover.

Conclusion: The Future of the Blooms

So finally, in a desperate act to shock her marital status quo into oblivion, in order to pick up the pieces and glue them together again — or rather, in order to weave once more the soon-to-be-unraveled threads — Molly sleeps with Boylan. She has “left” Bloom, and now must return to him as he has just returned to her in “Ithaca;” this is “Penelope,” the aftermath of the affairs, the summation of all of Ulysses crammed into eight paragraph-sentences that take up 35 pages. Bloom and Molly are opposites, inverted, one shocked into a daze and the other into a frenzy. One has come forward from a slow and languorous journey to the marital bed, the other, having already been there, must recap it all in her own mind, working backwards and forwards again until she has reached the same place (literally: Bertolini points out that in Joyce’s original manuscripts, “Ithaca” begins at one end of a notebook, “Penelope” at the other, so that the reader would have to turn it upside-down in order metaphorically begin again [5]).

And what place is that? It is the dawn of a new day, the conception of a new “sun,” as Joyce might write to pun on “son,” that other goal of Bloom’s throughout Ulysses (as Molly cheats to remain faithful, Bloom adopts Stephen in order to beget). Ames, Sternlieb, and Kenner are all staunch believers in love shared rather than lost in this relationship. Boyle goes one step further in speculating on the Bloom couple’s immediate and long-term future by, once again, going backwards to find yet another subtle, cleverly concealed cause of Molly’s Bloom-orchestrated affair with Boylan: perhaps Bloom subconsciously wanted Boylan to father Molly’s next child. Of course it will not work, because Molly is not pregnant (her period comes at the end of the sixth sentence-paragraph [Joyce 632, lines 1104-1105]) and will not be having Boylan over again, if Sternlieb is correct in believing that Molly’s final “orgasmic” Yeses are to be taken as overlapping with physical events (as Gerty McDowell’s “Ohs” overlapped with Bloom’s masturbation [300, lines 733-740]). Of course, as Molly is very tired at this point, having been trying to fall asleep for most of “Penelope,” she also could have merely been slipping off into a dream, albeit an erotic one, which would make perfect sense given the events of the day and the course of her latenight thoughts.

In any case, I agree with Boyle’s other, safer, more basic interpretation of things: “The breakfast which Bloom demands and which she finally determines to provide is the most obvious evidence of a new and healthier relationship” (420). This simpler breaking of routine (“I love to hear him falling up the stairs of a morning with the cups rattling on the tray and then play with the cat” [Joyce 628, lines 933- 934]) is the first step towards re-establishing anything. The couple has mentally worked hard to find each other, to rediscover their love for one another, at the end of this one single, extraordinary, normal, Odyssean day.

Works Cited

Ames, Keri Elizabeth. “The oxymoron of fidelity in Homer’s Odyssey and Joyce’s Ulysses.” Joyce Studies Annual, 2003, pp. 132+. Literature Resource Center. Accessed 22 Mar. 2016.

Bertolini, C. David. “Bloom’s death in ‘Ithaca,’ or the END of Ulysses.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 31, vol. 2, 2008, pp. 39+. Literature Resource Center. Accessed 22 Mar. 2016.

Blamires, Harry. “Penelope.” The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses. 3rd ed. Routledge, 2002, pp. 233-49.

Boyle, Ft. Robert, S.J. “Penelope.” James Joyce’s Ulysses: Critical Essays. Ed. Clive Hart and David Hayman. UC Berkeley Press, 1977, pp. 407-33.

Brown, Richard. “When in doubt do gender’: constructing masculinities in ‘Penelope,’ ‘theyre all buttons men.” Joyce Studies Annual, 2002, pp. 147+. Literature Resource Center. Accessed 22 Mar. 2016.

Delvin, Kimberly J. “Pretending in ‘Penelope’: Masquerade, Mimicry, and Molly Bloom.” A Forum on Fiction, vol. 25, no. 1, Fall 1991, pp. 71-89.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler, Wolfhard Steppe, and Claus Melchior. 1st ed. Random House/Vintage Books 1986.

Kenner, Hugh. “Molly’s Masterstroke.” James Joyce Quarterly, vol. 50, nos.1-2, pp. 63-71. MLA International Bibliography.

Luke. Holy Bible. New International Version. BibleGateway. Biblica, Inc., 2011. Accessed 17 Apr. 2016.

Norris, Margot. “Molly Bloom before ‘Penelope.’” Virgin and Veteran Readings of Ulysses. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp. 217-35.

O’Brien, Alyssa J. “The Molly Blooms of ‘Penelope’: Reading Joyce Archivally.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 24, no. 1, 2000, p. 7+. Literature Resource Center. Accessed 22 Mar. 2016.

Stanier, Michael. “’The Void Awaits Surely All Them That Weave the Wind’: ‘Penelope’ and ‘Sirens’ in Ulysses.” Twentieth Century Literature vol. 41, no. 3, 1995, pp. 319+. Literature Resource Center. Accessed 22 Mar. 2016.

Sternleib, Lisa. “Molly Bloom: Acting natural” ELH, vol. 65, no. 3, Fall 1998. pp. 757+.