of course hed never find another woman like me to put up with him the way I do
(Molly Bloom thinking her husband, Leopold, should count his blessings)

he can stick his tongue 7 miles up my hole as hes there my brown part
(Molly angry at Bloom’s weird habit of kissing her bottom)

Im always like that in the spring Id like a new fellow every year
(Molly’s friskiness)

what else were we given all those desires for Id like to know I cant help it if Im young still can I
(Molly defends her natural urges)

compared with what a man looks like with his two bags full and his other thing hanging down out of him or sticking up at you like a hatrack no wonder they hide it with a cabbageleaf
(Molly compares a woman’s lovely boobs with a man’s ugly bits)

wherever you be let your wind go free
(Molly celebrates the joys of farting)

I bet he never saw a better pair of thighs than that look how white they are
(Molly’s body positivity)

God send him sense and me more money
(dismissing a boring old bishop she once heard deliver a moralising sermon, and sounding very like her irreverent namesake, Moll Flanders)

Lord the cracked things come into my head sometimes

‘Penelope’ is the 18th and final chapter of James Joyce’s novel, ‘Ulysses’. Here’s a reminder of the complete chapter numbers and names. (Note that the names given here are not printed in the published book, they were assigned in guidance and schemas which Joyce sent to supporters and have been used by commentators ever since; but you won’t find them in any published or online edition):

Part 1. Telemachiad

1. Telemachus
2. Nestor
3. Proteus

Part 2. Odyssey

4. Calypso
5. Lotus Eaters
6. Hades
7. Aeolus
8. Lestrygonians
9. Scylla and Charybdis
10. Wandering Rocks
11. Sirens
12. Cyclops
13. Nausicaa
14. Oxen of the Sun
15. Circe

Part 3. Nostos

16. Eumaeus
17. Ithaca
18. Penelope

Place in the sequence

As you can see, ‘Penelope’ is not only the final chapter but the third chapter of the third part of the novel, which is generally called ‘Nostos’, Greek for ‘The Return’, Joyce’s own name for it.

The preceding two chapters tell how (in ‘Circe’) middle-aged advertising salesman Leopold Bloom helped over-educated, drunk and depressed young Stephen Dedalus get away from Dublin’s red light district where he’d been involved in a fight with a soldier. In ‘Eumaeus’ Bloom helps Stephen to an all-night café down by the docks where he tries to restore him with a cup of (disgusting) coffee and a hot roll. In ‘Ithaca’ the pair leave the café and walk to Bloom’s home at 7 Eccles Street.

Here Bloom lets them in, makes Stephen a nice cup of cocoa and they talk about many things. Bloom offers to make up a bed on the sofa for Stephen and suggests all kinds of plans – that he could move in as a lodger and give his wife, Molly, Italian lessons, and maybe even join her as a professional singer in the music troupe Bloom fantasises about setting up and managing. But Stephen turns these offers down and, after the pair have gone for a pee in Bloom’s back garden, Bloom opens the garden gate and Bloom stumbles off into the night never to be heard of again.

Bloom re-enters his house, locks up, gets undressed interspersed with rummaging about in his drawers, looking at mementoes of his absent daughter and dead father, thinking about all kinds of subjects, not least extended fantasies about moving to a delightful cottage in the country. Then he finally gets into bed and thinks about the Central Event in the book which is that while he’s been out walking the streets of Dublin, his bosomy wife, Molly, stayed at home and was visited by the flash man-about-town and concert promoter Hugh ‘Blazes’ Boylan, who had sex with her.

All day long Bloom has been aware of their tryst, set for 4pm, so that he’s spent the book in a kind of PTSD hyper-self-aware state (which partly explains the super stream-of-consciousness style of the novel). But during the course of his ponderings, Bloom gets over it. He registers his own mixed emotions of jealousy and anger but circles, in the end, round to equanimity and, finally, tenderness. And in this sleep forgiving mood, he kisses Molly on her bare bottom.

Unfortunately, this has the effect of waking her up from her sleep. Now half awake, Molly quizzes her husband about where he’s been and he proceeds to tell her a pack of lies, saying he spent the evening at the theatre then went on to a restaurant for supper where a fellow diner, Stephen, injured himself performing a gymnastic feat and so he brought him home, here, to Eccles Street, to patch him up, and that’s why he’s come to bed late. And having recited this pack of lies which omits everything important which happened during the day and replaces it with a set of fabrications, Bloom falls asleep and hands the novel’s narrative over to his wife. And it’s here that the final chapter, ‘Penelope’, consisting of Molly Bloom’s long monologue, begins.

First a few more facts, then we’ll look in detail at Molly’s chapter.

Time

Each of the chapters of ‘Ulysses’ covers about an hour in the course of one long day, starting at 8am on Thursday 16 June 1904 and going through to the early hours of the following morning, Friday 17 June. (As Stephen remarks, ‘Every Friday buries a Thursday’.)

‘Ithaca’ takes place from about 2 to 3 am on the morning of Friday 17 June 1904. As Bloom lets Stephen out the back door of his garden, the bells of St George’s ring and the commentators tell me this marks 2.30 am. So assuming it takes Bloom about half an hour to lock up, get undressed, potter about and finally get into bed, ‘Penelope’ kicks off maybe around 3am in the morning.

Homeric parallel

Each of the chapters in ‘Ulysses’ is based on an episode from The Odyssey, the famous epic poem composed some 750 years BC by the ancient Greek poet Homer, which describes the ten-year-long voyage back from the Trojan War of the Greek hero Odysseus and his crew, and which features encounters with mythical creatures and legendary figures such as the giant Cyclops or the witch Circe.

In The Odyssey, Penelope is the wife of Odysseus who has waited 20 long years for her husband’s return, which we, the readers, know has been comprised of the ten years of the war itself, and then the ten years of Odysseus’s wanderings round the Mediterranean. During the last few years she has been fending off the horde of ‘suitors’ who have descended like locusts on her palace and are eating her out of house and home while they vie for her hand in remarriage, and so ownership of Odysseus’s kingdom of Ithaca.

Now the key point is that Penelope is every bit as cunning as her husband Odysseus, who is himself described as being the most cunning and many-minded of the Greek heroes. And so in her husband’s absence, Penelope has devised a series of strategies to put off the suitors. The most famous of these is that she tells them she must weave a burial shroud for Odysseus’s elderly father, Laertes, and cannot listen to their suits until she’s finished. For three long years she dutifully weaves the shroud during the day but then carefully unpicks it during the night, so that the task is never finished. Clever, eh?

Molly, her modern reincarnation in the novel, shares many of Penelope’s traits. 1) For a start she represents the final aspect of Bloom’s coming home, his nostos or return. Sure he arrived at his actual house in the previous chapter, but in a sense it’s only climbing into bed and kissing her that marks the completion of his odyssey and his final arrival Home.

2) As to the suitors, Odysseus arrives back at his palace but still has to dispel the suitors and take possession, but there no hordes of suitors in the ‘Ulysses’ version. There was one (Blazes Boylan) but he’s long gone. Instead Bloom arrives home at his house but needs, in some subtle psychological sense, to retake ownership by a) touching all his precious possessions and b) working through in his mind his responses to Molly’s infidelity to him – both processes which are itemised in ‘Ithaca’.

3) Where Molly most resembles Penelope is in her own cleverness, in being every bit as smart as her husband. Because the real point of this chapter is that at long last we get to hear her side of the story and it is significantly, and at all points, different from her husband’s.

Because the ‘Penelope’ chapter consists of a long, long interior monologue by Molly in which she passes in a chaotic review over all the key moments in her life, before and after her marriage to Bloom, mentioning and describing her parents, her girlhood in Gibraltar, incidents from her career, the umpteen times she’s been propositioned or molested or flirted with – but above all, hundreds of comments about Bloom’s character and habits which show him in a completely different light from the entire preceding narrative.

It does a number of things, this final chapter. It rounds off the whole novel by bringing Bloom’s odyssey to a conclusion. But it also gives the woman’s version of a world up to now dominated by men and men’s opinions. More specifically, it gives a completely different portrait of Bloom than we’ve hitherto had, portrayed in detail by someone who knows him intimately (really intimately) and whose version is often at drastic odds with what we’ve learned so far.

First a brief reminder of the key facts of Molly’s biography, then I’ll go through the monologue in detail.

Molly key facts

• current name Marion ‘Molly’ Bloom
• born Marion Tweedy, daughter of Major Brian Tweedy, of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers
• Molly was born and raised in Gibraltar because that’s where Major Tweedy’s regiment was stationed
• age 33
• earns money as a soprano singer and is fairly well known around Dublin
• been married for 15 years to Leopold Bloom
• two children: a daughter, Milly, who just turned 15 yesterday, and a son, Rudy, who died in infancy, aged 11 days, a decade ago, since when the couple haven’t had sex

Stream-of-consciousness

The latter 5 or 6 chapters of ‘Ulysses’ differ from the first ten or so in each being dominated by one big formatting idea. Thus ‘Nausicaa’ is written in the style of a lady’s romantic novel and ‘Circe is in the form of a play. Molly’s chapter is another case in point: it is the book’s purest example of the invention (often attributed to Joyce) of the stream-of-consciousness. It’s 24,000 words long, filling 40 to 50 pages of the book versions and yet it contains of just 8 unpunctuated sections i.e the words flow seamlessly together with no punctuation at all for thousands and thousands of words. The final section alone contains 3,680 words and no punctuation.

Why the initial style is hard

Surprisingly, though, it isn’t as hard to make sense of as the densest of the ‘initial style’. Brainy young Stephen Dedalus’s thoughts in ‘Proteus’ 1) contain loads of learned references, including 2) quotes from theology and literature, 3) often in foreign languages and 4) the references are often cut off halfway through, clipped and abbreviated, sometimes down to just one word, and all chopped up by continuous full stops into tight little fragments.

Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. A catalectic tetrameter of iambs marching. No, agallop: deline the mare.

It’s the combination of these four elements which makes the ‘initial style’, and Stephen’s stream-of-consciousness in particular, often so impenetrable.

Why Molly’s style is much easier

By contrast, all these challenging elements are missing in Molly’s thoughts. There are no fancy-ancy quotes or foreign languages or tight truncations; instead, a soothing flow of words:

theyre all so different Boylan talking about the shape of my foot he noticed at once even before he was introduced when I was in the D B C with Poldy laughing and trying to listen I was waggling my foot we both ordered 2 teas and plain bread and butter I saw him looking with his two old maids of sisters when I stood up

In one of the book’s many commentaries I came across the highly revealing fact that Joyce originally wrote the chapter out as traditional prose and then went back and took all the punctuation out. Once you know that, you can kind of feel your way towards the missing stops. Maybe ‘full stop’ is being slightly too dogmatic, but you can feel the ghost of the missing punctuation. In other words, the prose isn’t really endlessly flowing, it’s actually made up – once you get a feel for it – from relatively traditional units. So the excerpt above could be loosely punctuated thus:

they’re all so different – Boylan talking about the shape of my foot – he noticed at once, even before he was introduced – when I was in the D B C with Poldy laughing and trying to listen, I was waggling my foot – we both ordered 2 teas and plain bread and butter – I saw him looking with his two old maids of sisters when I stood up

Not that difficult after all, is it? In fact, surprisingly easy. Obviously there are plenty of passages which aren’t quite as easy to silently punctuate into traditional prose as this one, but a lot are, and once you get used to reading it while looking for these sentence-like units, you develop the knack for recognising them and so extracting the sense, relatively quickly.

While reading ‘Ulysses’ I came across the RTE radio dramatisation of the novel which was made for the centenary of Joyce’s birth in 1982. You can listen to each individual chapter as a separate track on Spotify.

• RTE radio production of ‘Penelope’ on Spotify

Listening to this radio production of ‘Penelope’, what you almost immediately realise is the obvious fact that, if you’re going to read this text (or indeed anything) out loud, you regularly have to stop for breath. And any sensible reader will tend to stop for breath at the natural breaks of sense, at the end of cadences or phrases. So listening to someone read out Molly Bloom’s soliloquy really brings out the ghostly punctuation which, as I’ve suggested, in practice still exists in the text. Reading it out loud tends to naturally reintroduce the invisible punctuation.

In addition, this (marvellous) reading also brings out the changes of tone and expression which are continually occurring throughout the text, as appropriate for different phrases, and this, too, helps to chop up what at first seemed like page after page of solid text, into what are in reality much more manageable, understandable phrases.

The ‘Eternal Feminine’

As to the reason for this endless flow – in the schematic charts and diagrams which Joyce made about the book, he said ‘Penelope’ took the sign ∞ representing infinity, supposedly because she represents the Eternal Feminine.

Personally, I shy away from this kind of talk because discussing the ‘nature of woman’, ‘female psychology’ and so on was problematic and controversial at the time, and has only become more mired in four generations of feminist theory, not to mention the worldwide swamp of social media.

If you do a quick Google search and read any articles or commentary about Molly and her monologue you will quickly discover how the entire subject is infested by experts who cite the received ideas of our age, that Molly is a ‘strong independent women’ who ‘expresses her own sexuality’ in ‘defiance of the patriarchy’ and countless other clichés. You can find thousands of feminist interpretations at the click of a button.

• Feminist interpretations of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy

What I noticed in the two commentaries I’ve tended to have open beside me, is that because they both go on at length about feminism, sexism, the patriarchy and so on, they completely ignore many other aspects and details which are just as important.

Therefore in my summary I will try to stick closely to what the words actually say and not wander off into sweeping generalisations about The Female Mind, Female Sexuality, the Patriarchy and all the other high-level issues which so many commentators instantly jump to. Their approach takes us away from the words on the page, which are not only funny and surprising but are deliberately designed to 1) recap information about quite a few characters we’ve met previously in the book and 2) prompt us to rethink everything we thought we knew about her husband, Leopold.

Yes yes

In that spirit, looking at the actual words on the page, there’s an obvious aspect of the concept of the infinite, which is that this big chapter starts with the word ‘yes’ and ends with the word ‘yes’. This is an obvious manoeuvre by Joyce to bring out the Eternity theme.

Pondering this I conceived a Kafkaesque nightmare of a hypothetical reader who finds themselves somehow condemned to read the chapter forever, because as soon as they read the final ‘yes’ they are transported back to the first ‘yes’ and so spend the rest of their lives stuck inside an endless loop of Molliness.

Section lengths

Precise definitions of the section lengths vary slightly on whether you’re referring to the 1922, 1961 or Gabler (1984) edition. I used an online word counter to count the words in each section of the Planet Gutenberg online edition.

Section 1: 3,746 words (opens with ‘Yes because he never did…’)

Section 2: 4,404 words (opens with ‘theyre all so different Boylan talking about the shape of my foot…’ and makes up what is supposedly the longest sentence in literature)

Section 3: 921 words (opens with ‘yes I think he made them a bit firmer sucking them like that so long he made me thirsty…’)

Section 4: 2,208 words (opens with ‘frseeeeeeeefronnnng train somewhere whistling…’)

Section 5: 2,378 words (opens with ‘Mulveys was the first when I was in bed that morning…’)

Section 6: 3,619 words (opens with ‘that was a relief wherever you be let your wind go free…’)

Section 7: 3,230 words (opens with ‘who knows is there anything the matter with my insides…’)

Section 8: 3,680 words (opens with ‘no thats no way for him has he no manners nor no refinement nor no nothing in his nature…’)

Summary

As explained, I am going to avoid wading into the many high-level feminist debates raised by the soliloquy (there’s no shortage of people doing that) and instead try to focus on the exact words and what they tell us.

Section 1 (3,746 words)

Molly is surprised that Bloom has asked her to make him breakfast in bed tomorrow morning. This request doesn’t occur in ‘Ithaca’ so is a puzzle.

Quickly she moves on to a sharp assessment of one of the many other people who appear in the monologue, Mrs Riordan who we met as Dante, nanny to young Stephen Dedalus in ‘Portrait’. In a surprising coincidence we discover she lived as an old lady in the same hotel as Molly and Bloom and the latter used to take her for excursions in her bathchair. I find this one of the most striking things in the entire monologue.

But Molly is cross because Dante never left them any money in her will when she died. Also, she was very moralistic, down on bathsuits etc so Molly is glad she’s not like that.

She likes Bloom for his kindness that way, mind you he’s useless when he’s ill, and so are men generally, ‘weak and puling’, compared to women who have to hide it all. Remembering Bloom being in hospital after he sprained his ankle at a party, she does the first of many shrewish comments about other women using their wiles to get close to Poldy, in this case Miss Stack buying him flowers to get into his bedroom, the implication she had a fancy for him or they even had sex (?).

She suspects he must have had an orgasm during the day because he asked for breakfast i.e. it gives him an appetite. But she’s equally sure it’s not an affair, it’s not ‘love’, so speculates it might be with one of the prostitutes from nighttown, which leads her on to think about all the little bitches Bloom’s picked up on the sly, ‘if they only knew him as well as I do’. She knows that’s why she kissed his bottom, it’s a tell-tale sign and remembers the smell of other women on his clothes.

Just recently she came into a room where he was writing which he hurriedly covered up with blotting paper, poor fool (we know it was probably a letter to his penpal lover Martha Clifford though Molly doesn’t know her name).

She hated it when he had a pash for their scullerymaid, Mary Driscoll, the pair of them flirting under her nose (we know about Mary because she appeared among the many accusers in Bloom’s dream trial in ‘Circe’) and was outraged when Bloom suggested Mary eat Christmas dinner with them, and driven to distraction by her queening round the place (singing in the WC) until she confronted Bloom with an ultimatum, her or me, he chose her and so she gave Mary her week’s notice.

She remembers the last time Bloom came on her bottom, on an evening when they’d gone for a walk with Blazes Boylan and the latter had squeezed her hand. She imagines seducing some young boy, then remembers Bloom’s insistent questioning of who is she thinking about.

She seems to go on and think that now she’s had sex with Boylan, the first time is over, now it will become more routine. She wonders why you can’t just get people to kiss and hug you, she loves kissing.

I wish some man or other would take me sometime when hes there and kiss me in his arms theres nothing like a kiss long and hot down to your soul almost paralyses you

Then thinks about having to go to confession, the silly euphemisms the priest uses, then that she was a bit attracted to the priest with his bullneck.

Id like to be embraced by one in his vestments and the smell of incense off him like the pope

Thinking back to her afternoon sex with Boylan, she wonders if he was satisfied with her, she didn’t like him slapping her on the bottom:

I laughed Im not a horse or an ass

A flower he was wearing reminds her of a funny tasting drink she associates with an American she knew, can’t figure out if he slept with her. She associates it with a thunderstorm which put the fear of God into her, thinks about the end of the world, what could you do except go to church and pray, which reminds her that Poldy isn’t religious, refuses to go to church, says there is no soul, just grey matter inside us. Which circles back to memories of sex with Boylan that afternoon:

he must have come 3 or 4 times with that tremendous big red brute of a thing he has I thought the vein or whatever the dickens they call it was going to burst… no I never in all my life felt anyone had one the size of that to make you feel full up…

With a little recrimination to God:

whats the idea making us like that with a big hole in the middle of us or like a Stallion driving it up into you because thats all they want out of you with that determined vicious look in his eye

But then a surprising debunkment of Boylan:

still he hasnt such a tremendous amount of spunk in him when I made him pull out and do it on me considering how big it is so much the better in case any of it wasnt washed out properly the last time I let him finish it in me

Surely the second he refers to Bloom (‘the last time’) since we thought Boylan had only done it once. Interesting to note she’s describing coitus interruptus in the first part. Then a complaint about condoms (?):

nice invention they made for women for him to get all the pleasure

Thoughts of contraception lead to the opposite, of large families like Mina Purefoy‘s whose husband keeps getting her pregnant so she lives in a swarm of children. She wonders about having a child by Boylan but then considers that Poldy has more spunk in him.

Then she remembers coming across him flirting with Josie Powell, the unmarried name of Josie Breen, who Bloom had a thing with, at a dance, which Bloom tried to justify then led to a stand-up row about politics, something about Jesus being a carpenter and the first socialist. But generally how she managed the rivalry with Josie, how she knew Bloom liked her better. But still she ponders how she would win Bloom back is he resumed his passion for Josie, in ‘his plabbery kind of a manner’. How she’d revive him by little touches, getting him to fold down her collar, whereas she’d go and confront Josie directly.

Remembers the night Bloom almost proposed when she was in the kitchen making a potato cake, and how Josie was always embracing her, Molly, in front of Bloom, as if it was Bloom, one among many women who flirted with him. Molly used to tease Josie with how close she was to Bloom, then after they got married she stopped coming round.

She wonders what life is like for her now, with her mad husband, Breen. Last time they met, Josie told her he sometimes gets into bed with his muddy boots on. At least Poldy always wipes his feet on the mat, always blacks his own boots, always takes off his hat when he comes up in the street. Whereas Breen is mad about this postcard he got with U.P. on it.

No she’d rather die than marry another man, mind you Bloom is lucky to have her: ‘hed never find another woman like me to put up with him the way I do’, and thinking of women driven to distraction by their husbands she thinks of Mrs Maybrick who poisoned her husband with white arsenic for love of another man. She was hanged.

Commentary: although there’s a fair amount about Bloom and Boyland, and their penises and spunk, in fact the section can be seen as Molly comparing herself with seven other women, with their different beliefs, moral values, and experiences of love and marriage. Knowing Joyce I imagine with a bit of effort you could work each of them up into symbolising different types or categories.

Section 2 (4,404 words)

its all very well a husband but you cant fool a lover

She blames Bloom for having some new fad every week. She left her suede gloves behind in the toilet at the DBC Dame Street, Poldy suggested offering a reward. Boyle likes her feet, likes her crossing them, he liked watching her take off her stockings. But this segues into Bloom one time asked her to walk in the horses’ dung in the street, ‘of course hes not natural like the rest of the world’.

She remembers him saying she’d beat Katty Lanner (a real-life dancer). The tenor Bartell DArcy who kissed her in church, he liked her low notes. She thinks she’ll tell Bloom about it one day and show him the place where they ‘did it’ – surely she means had sex.

In particular Bloom ‘hes mad on the subject of drawers’, and stares at young girls on bicycles with their skirts blowing up to show their knickers as they ride. The time at a fair when a woman was standing against the sun and he stared even though he was with her and Milly. The hypocrisy of men who can go and get anything they like from anything in a skirt but insist on interrogating them (women) about where they’ve been and with who etc. ‘drawers drawers the whole blessed time till I promised to give him the pair off my doll to carry about in his waistcoat pocket’ (which of course links up with the subject of the ‘Nausicaa’ chapter where Bloom gets his rocks off watching Gerty show him her drawers).

The time they were in the rain and he begged her to lift her skirt a little and she touched his trousers ‘the way I used to Gardner’.

Bloom was always canny not like ‘that other fool Henny Doyle he was always breaking or tearing something in the charades’. Bloom sent her 8 poppies. But he could never embrace well ‘like Gardner‘. She hopes Boylan will come round again, on Monday, same time, 4pm.

She hates people calling at random times like the time Professor Goodwin found her flushed from cooking stew. We learn that Boylan sent ahead a gift of port and peaches (which we saw him buying in Thornton’s fruit and flower shop in ‘Wandering Rocks’.

She’s scheduled to go to Belfast with Boylan the following week; lucky Bloom is to go to Ennis to commemorate his father’s death, would be tricky being in rooms next to each other; if Bloom had sex with her, Boylan would know.

She remembers the time Bloom carried bowls of soup from the dining car along a moving train spilling them everywhere, and the steward locked them in their compartment in revenge. She hopes Boylan books first class tickets. Trains remind her of the nice workman who got her and Bloom their own compartment in the train for their outing to Howth.

She remembers patriotic concerts she did in support of the Boer War where she sang the Rudyard Kipling poem The Absent-Minded Beggar. This song is mentioned numerous times in Bloom’s thoughts earlier in the book. Funnily enough I devoted a blog post to it when I had my Kipling phase. She wore a brooch for Lord Roberts and had a map of the war. Which leads her to reminisce about ‘Gardner lieut Stanley G 8th Bn 2nd East Lancs Rgt’ who fought in the war and apparently died there of enteric fever.

he was a lovely fellow in khaki and just the right height over me Im sure he was brave too he said I was lovely the evening we kissed goodbye at the canal lock my Irish beauty

She likes the army, after all she’s an army brat, her father was a major, so:

I love to see a regiment pass in review the first time I saw the Spanish cavalry at La Roque it was lovely… the Black Watch with their kilts in time at the march past the 10th hussars the prince of Wales own or the lancers O the lancers theyre grand or the Dublins that won Tugela

Interchangeable men I’ll note here where I’ve noticed it, that Joyce deliberately blends all the men in her life together under the one pronoun ‘he’. In consecutive phrases ‘he’ can refer to Bloom or Boylan or his or her father or various others. The implication (apart from Molly being dreamily half-awake) is that all men are the same. At a deeper level, maybe the implication is that all people are the same, that our identities are only skin deep, like name labels stuck on our chests at a conference which soon peel off.

She notes how Boylan’s father made money selling horses to the army and hopes he’ll buy her a nice present when they go to Belfast ‘well he could buy me a nice present up in Belfast after what I gave him’ i.e. sex. She’d love to go shopping with him. She’ll have to take her wedding ring off or risk being reported to the police (married woman with unmarried man) although:

O let them all go and smother themselves for the fat lot I care

She remembers that Boylan is heavy, hairy too, would be more convenient to have sex doggy position:

always having to lie down for them better for him put it into me from behind the way Mrs Mastiansky told me her husband made her like the dogs do

She remembers Boylan was beautifully dressed but for the first ten minutes in a foul temper because he’d just lost £20 on the Gold Cup horse race which reverberates through the novel. He got the tip from Lenehan and that reminds Molly of sitting in a coach next to Lenehan coming back from the Glencree dinner (in ‘Wandering Rocks’ Lenehan remembers this journey, pressed up against Molly so he could feel the outline of her fine breasts: ‘His hands moulded ample curves of air’, which gave him an erection). Unsurprisingly she thinks Lenehan is a creep. At that social do she was aware of the Lord Mayor staring at her with his dirty eyes. Molly’s fate is to be eyed up and chatted up wherever she goes.

She wishes she had cutlery as fine as the ones at that dinner and reflects she could have stolen a few by slipping them into her muff. Shopping: she wants two new chemises and a kidfitting corselet as advertised in The Gentlewoman. Which makes her reflect she’s getting a bit tubby, needs to lay off the stout at lunchtime. Mind you, the poor quality of the booze they get from Larry O’Rourke.

She’s got one pair of garters Bloom bought her, and he got her some lovely face cream which made skin ‘like new’, she asked him to buy a new bottle (which we saw him do right at the start of his part of the narrative). She only has 3 sets of clothes and one at the cleaners.

She feels sorry for herself wearing such shabby outfits and remembers she’ll be 33 this September i.e. 32 now. Mind you take Mrs Galbraith, older than her and a fine looking woman though on the turn. She remembers watching Kitty O’Shea brush her hair in the house opposite in Grantham Street. (This peripheral contact with Kitty parallels Bloom’s brief encounter with Charles Stewart Parnell, recovering his hat after it was knocked off in a riot.)

In another parallel her thoughts drift to Lily Langtry, the Jersey Lily, widely known to be having an affair with the Prince of Wales. So these two women mirror Molly in having extra-marital affairs: one with the leader of the nationalist Irish, one with the future King of England.

In a real digression she remembers Bloom buying a volume of Rabelais for her, and her not getting on with its absurdity and obscenity. (We know from ‘Ithaca’ that Bloom thinks he can educate Molly by leaving good books around.)

Back to the Prince of Wales, she knows he visited Gibraltar the year she was born, planted some tree. Back to Bloom and she wishes he’d change job ‘and go into an office or something where hed get regular pay or a bank where they could put him up on a throne to count the money all the day’, instead he mooches round the house under her feet all the time.

Molly remembers going to Mr Cuffe to plead for Bloom’s job back after he was fired; Cuffe stared at her breasts (as more or less all the men seem to) and politely refused. What she remembers more is the shabby dress she had to make the visit in.

Bloom thinks he knows about women’s clothes but hasn’t got a clue and she remembers some terrible hats he thought she looked great in. Just like he’s rubbish at cooking, ‘mathering everything he can scour off the shelves into it’.

Section 3 (921 words)

Molly ponders her breasts, thinking maybe Boylan made them firmer by sucking them, which leads onto the breasts on the grand statues of naked women you see everywhere, the woman often hiding one breast behind her hand. Mind you not as silly as men’s bits:

compared with what a man looks like with his two bags full and his other thing hanging down out of him or sticking up at you like a hatrack no wonder they hide it with a cabbageleaf

And she remembers various men who have exposed themselves to her:

• that disgusting Cameron highlander behind the meat market
• that other wretch with the red head behind the tree where the statue of the fish used to be when I was passing pretending he was pissing standing out for me to see it with his babyclothes up to one side
• theyre always trying to show it to you every time nearly I passed outside the mens greenhouse near the Harcourt street station

She remembers popping into a men’s toilet in the freezing winter of 1893 coming back from a party and teasingly thinks ‘pity a couple of the Camerons werent there to see me squatting in the mens place’.

Of men’s penises she thinks: ‘I tried to draw a picture of it before I tore it up like a sausage or something I wonder theyre not afraid going about of getting a kick or a bang’.

She remembers Bloom encouraging her to let herself be photographed nude when he lost his job to earn some money, which reminds her of the painting of a naked nymph they have above their bed, or the erotic photos he keeps hidden in his drawer (catalogued in ‘Eumaeus’).

She remembers him trying to explain the word metempsychosis which had cropped up in a book right at the start of Bloom’s narrative: ‘he never can explain a thing simply the way a body can understand’ and then he went and burned the bloody pan frying his kidney this morning. Sounds like any wife complaining about any husband.

Then she switches men and complains about Boylan biting her nipple till she screamed: ‘arent they fearful trying to hurt you’. She remembers having swollen breasts full of milk when Milly was born and Bloom (typically) saying she could rent herself out as a wetnurse. She remembers ‘ that delicate looking student that stopped in no 28 with the Citrons Penrose’ nearly catching her washing naked through the window.

As to her full breasts she a) got Dr Brady to write her a prescription and b) got Bloom to suck the milk out of them, they were so hard and painful: ‘he said it was sweeter and thicker than cows then he wanted to milk me into the tea well hes beyond everything.’

Just one more of his outrageous suggestions, she thinks she should write them all in a book titled ‘the works of Master Poldy’. He used to suckle her for an hour at a time, the big baby: ‘hey want everything in their mouth all the pleasure those men get out of a woman’.

Then a very explicit memory of the multiple orgasms Boylan gave her:

O Lord I must stretch myself I wished he was here or somebody to let myself go with and come again like that I feel all fire inside me or if I could dream it when he made me spend the 2nd time tickling me behind with his finger I was coming for about 5 minutes with my legs round him I had to hug him after O Lord I wanted to shout out all sorts of things fuck or shit or anything at all

Though she had to restrain herself because you never know with some men, some men want you to remain coy and well behaved even while having sex. And she looks forward to more of the same with Boylan come Monday: ‘O Lord I cant wait till Monday’.

Section 4 (2,208 words)

Molly’s fourth sentence begins with her hearing a train whistle ‘frseeeeeeeefronnnng train somewhere whistling’, the latest of Joyce’s hundred or so attempts to transcribe non-human sounds (the cat, the door, bells, gongs, clocks, the sea and many more).

Molly thinks of the men who work in trains, away from their wives at night. ‘Im glad I burned the half of those old Freemans and Photo Bits leaving things like that lying about hes getting very careless’ – are these saucy magazines?

It was hot earlier, the rain shower was refreshing, she thought it was going to get as hot as Gibraltar. She remembers her father’s friend Mrs Hester Stanhope (a real-life historical figure) who sent her a nice frock from the B Marche Paris and her husband: they called each other Doggerina and Wogger, and she remembers a letter she wrote him.

She would give anything to be back in Gibraltar where life was free and easy. Take Edwardian clothes: ‘these clothes we have to wear whoever invented them expecting you to walk up Killiney hill then for example at that picnic all staysed up you cant do a blessed thing in them in a crowd run or jump out of the way’.

She hated bullfights, the horses all getting ripped open. She was good friends with Hester, who showed her how to put her hair up, she slept in her bed the night of the storm and they had a pillow fight in the morning.

She remembers blushing the first time ‘he’ looked at her, when she was with her father and Captain Grove: ‘he was attractive to a girl in spite of his being a little bald intelligent looking disappointed and gay at the same time’. ‘She’ gave Molly The Moonstone to read. Reminds her she doesn’t like books with Molly in the title like that Molly Flanders.

She’s hot and uncomfortable, the blanket is too heavy and her nightdress has ridden up so she moves around to get comfortable. She remembers the mosquito nets in Gibraltar, how long ago it seems. She remembers in detail the day the Stanhopes left, the dress Mrs S was wearing, then how terribly dull life was after they both left.

Ships remind her of guns booming whenever a dignitary arrived at Gibraltar like General Ulysses Grant (Ulysses – a small connection). She remembers old Sprague the consul dressed in mourning for his son (echoing Bloom) and then Captain Groves and her dad having endless yarns over whiskey in the evenings about imperial battles.

Boredom and trying to get a reaction reminds her of how she’d dress up and put her gloves on in the window for the benefit of the young doctor in the house opposite, in Holles Street, but he never got the idea. Men are stupid.

there was a nice fellow even in the opposite house that medical in Holles street the nurse was after when I put on my gloves and hat at the window to show I was going out not a notion what I meant arent they thick never understand what you say even youd want to print it up on a big poster for them… where does their great intelligence come in Id like to know grey matter they have it all in their tail if you ask me

She thinks of recent letters and cards, including one from Milly, and a letter from a Mrs Dwenn in Canada who wrote out of the blue wanting to know the recipe for pisto madrileno (apparently the Spanish version of ratatouille). And one from Floey Dillon who wrote to say she was married to a very rich architect. And: ‘poor Nancy Blake died a month ago of acute neumonia well I didnt know her so well as all that she was Floeys friend more than mine poor Nancy.’

She thanks God Boylan has fucked her:

O thanks be to the great God I got somebody to give me what I badly wanted to put some heart up into me

But she hopes he’ll write her a letter, she’d love a real love letter, ‘I told him he could write what he liked yours ever Hugh Boylan.’ It just makes you so happy: ‘true or no it fills up your whole day and life always something to think about every moment and see it all round you like a new world.’

Then she’ll write an answer from bed where he can imagine her. Need only be a few words, in fact the less the better, lets the imagination work. Not like here friend Atty Dillon who wrote long elaborate letters copied from The Ladies Letterwriter to the fellow that was something in the Four Courts. He ended up jilting her. ‘A few simple words’ is best.

This section ends with a sudden spurt of bitterness at the fate of women to be pursued and worshipped when young, and then dumped and ignored once they get old.

as for being a woman as soon as youre old they might as well throw you out in the bottom of the ashpit.

Note that it ends with a full stop, one of only two in the entire chapter.

Section 5 (2,378 words)

Section 5 opens with a similar passage to section 1 (intentionally?) in that it is a harsh character assassination of an older woman. In section 1 it’s Mrs Riordan (the Dante of ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’). Here it is the elderly Spanish housekeeper of the Tweedy family in Gibraltar, Mrs Rubio. Molly condemns her as a:

disobliging old thing… with her switch of false hair on her and vain about her appearance ugly as she was near 80 or a 100 her face a mass of wrinkles

and also, as with Mrs Riordan, feels threatened by / despises the old woman’s religious zeal:

with all her religion domineering because she never could get over the Atlantic fleet coming in half the ships of the world and the Union Jack flying with all her carabineros because 4 drunken English sailors took all the rock from them and because I didnt run into mass often enough in Santa Maria to please her with her shawl up on her except when there was a marriage on with all her miracles of the saints and her black blessed virgin with the silver dress

So Molly dislikes her on account of 1) her age (she seems ancient to Molly, who is only 15); 2) her religious zeal (which clearly Molly has no time for); and 3) also a Spanish nationalist reason. Apparently the Spanish Mrs Rubio is still angry that the British seized a part of Spain with just ‘4 drunken sailors’. (Incidentally the number 4 seems to have no historical provenance: the actual capture of Gibraltar was, as you might expect, a bigger bloodier affair.)

So one morning this ‘disobliging old thing’ brings her a letter from Lieutenant Mulvey who is clearly a ‘beau’ of the 15-year-old Marion. This Mulvey followed her in the street one day, but instead of scaring Molly this just excited her and made her want to ‘pick him up’. Then he wrote her a letter making an appointment to see her, which thrilled her to bits, she kept it on her and was so excited that she wanted to move the hands on the clock forward to make the appointment come quicker.

Now who does this remind you of? Of Blazes Boylan of course, whose letter Molly received at the start of this long day, setting his arrival for 4pm. Direct parallel. History repeats.

Cut to Molly being out with this Mulvey who kissed her ‘under the Moorish wall’ and ‘he crushed all the flowers on my bosom’. She considered him her sweetheart. Given the graphic sexual details everywhere else, I was intrigued by the phrase:

I put my knee up to him a few times to learn the way

What way? Well, For the flirtatious lolz she told him she was engaged ‘to the son of a Spanish nobleman named Don Miguel de la Flora and he believed me’.

Eventually he was posted away, in May (she remembers because she always feels like a new man in the spring: ‘Im always like that in the spring Id like a new fellow every year’). She knew precisely how far to flirt:

I had that white blouse on open in the front to encourage him as much as I could without too openly they were just beginning to be plump

They were at some place up on some mountain among entrances to ancient galleries of St Michael’s caves, a beautiful sunny day and far from anywhere, and:

he caressed them outside they love doing that its the roundness there I was leaning over him with my white ricestraw hat… my blouse open for his last day

Obviously he wanted to go further:

he wanted to touch mine with his for a moment but I wouldnt let him he was awfully put out first for fear you never know consumption or leave me with a child embarazada that old servant Ines told me that one drop even if it got into you at all

And remembers how she’s experimented with how it would feel to have a penis inside her by using a banana.

after I tried with the Banana but I was afraid it might break and get lost up in me somewhere because they once took something down out of a woman that was up there for years

You can see why sex-averse Virginia Woolf loathed this book, can’t you? I’d forgotten it was stuffed (so to speak) with so much sexual crudeness or candour (depending on taste). As to men, well:

theyre all mad to get in there where they come out of youd think they could never go far enough up

Back to Mulvey, she would have full sex but instead masturbated him to climax:

how did we finish it off yes O yes I pulled him off into my handkerchief pretending not to be excited but I opened my legs I wouldnt let him touch me inside my petticoat because I had a skirt opening up the side I tormented the life out of him first tickling him I loved rousing that dog in the hotel rrrsssstt awokwokawok his eyes shut and a bird flying below us he was shy all the same I liked him like that moaning I made him blush a little when I got over him that way when I unbuttoned him and took his out and drew back the skin it had a kind of eye in it

Yep, sounds like a penis alright. Amusingly, she can’t clearly remember Mulvey’s name, though this is consistent with her using the pronoun ‘he’ to refer interchangeably to many men (mainly Bloom and Boylan).

Molly darling he called me what was his name Jack Joe Harry Mulvey was it yes I think a lieutenant he was rather fair he had a laughing kind of a voice

Lucky Jack Mulvey promised he’d come back for her and she promised she’d let him **** her, even if she was married. Twenty years ago it must be and he’s probably promoted and married and little does his wife know about his little sexual adventure with Molly Tweedy.

Far from anywhere she blew up the paper bag they’d brought biscuits in, then burst it with a bang which made all the pigeons take off. She wanted to fire his gun but he didn’t have one. HMS Calypso she thinks he was assigned to, because it was printed on his cap (note another sly Odysseus reference slipped in).

Cut to memories of some pompous old Bishop who delivered a sermon about the New Woman riding bicycle and wearing bloomers, which triggers her to think how funny she’s ended up with the surname Bloom. Her rival for Leopold, Josie Breen, used to joke that she was looking ‘blooming’ whenever they met, still better than names with bottom in them like Ramsbottom.

She doesn’t really remember her mother (who is a very shadowy figure in the whole book). Her name was Lunita Laredo and she was a Gibraltarian of Spanish/Jewish descent. A vivid memory of running down Williss Road and her boobs jiggling:

they were shaking and dancing about in my blouse like Millys little ones now when she runs up the stairs I loved looking down at them

She remembers the wonderful view from the Rock over the Straits to Africa. She was so infatuated with Mulvey, she kept the hankie the masturbated him into under her pillow for weeks, for the smell of it.

Mulvey appears to have given her a ring as a keepsake, ‘that clumsy Claddagh ring for luck’ that she then gave to another lover, Gardner, the soldier who went off to the Boer War where he died of enteric fever.

She has the impression of a moustache and for a moment thinks it was Mulvey’s but then realises she’s getting him mixed up with Gardner.

Another train whistles, reminding Molly of Love’s Old Sweet Song and her upcoming performance, which triggers a repeat of her scorn for the other singers:

Kathleen Kearney and her lot of squealers Miss This Miss That Miss Theother lot of sparrowfarts skitting around talking about politics they know as much about as my backside

As the daughter of a soldier who’s lived abroad, Molly views herself as much more worldly than the daughters of bootmakers and publicans, ‘I knew more about men and life when I was 15 than theyll all know at 50’.

She reflects on her looks. Her father left her her English accent (raised among soldiers in garrison) but she has her mother’s eyes and figure. Let them get a husband and a lovely daughter and get a fine man like Boylan falling over her and swiving her 4 or 5 times. She thinks about the correct posture, neck and facial position to project her singing voice best, and considers which songs to sing: Love’s Sweet Song and Wind from the South but not My Lady’s Bower, ‘too long for an encore’.

She thinks she could have been a prima donna if she hadn’t married Bloom. She’ll dress to impress.

Ill change that lace on my black dress to show off my bubs and Ill yes by God Ill get that big fan mended make them burst with envy

And then she realises she needs to pass wind and shifts position in the bed, carefully so as not to wake Bloom. (Remember the reference a few lines earlier to the song Wind from the South? A Joyce joke). So she softly passes wind, in another joke doing so in synch with the whistle from another passing train.

Section 6 (3,619 words)

Molly starts by being happy at having passed wind and wondering if it was the pork chop she ate earlier which gave her wind, she doesn’t trust that butcher.

She remembers being a girl in Gibraltar, the freezing cold nights, which leaps to being much older and stripping and creaming herself for the pleasure of the medical student living opposite (mentioned above).

Which links into her hoping Poldy isn’t going to fall in with the medical students, squandering money and getting drunk, what do they find to talk about?

We get more specifics on Bloom’s request for breakfast, which wasn’t reported in ‘Ithaca’. According to Molly, he ordered: ‘eggs and tea and Findon haddy and hot buttered toast’ which leads onto how she enjoys hearing him clunking up the stairs with the rattling cutlery. Then onto the cat, licking itself but she doesn’t like its claws. (It strikes me as odd that the cat doesn’t have a name. Surely Joyce missed a trick, he could have given it an ironically Odyssey-connected name.)

Hunger: she thinks she’ll buy a nice piece of plaice, no cod, and some jam which flows into the thought of buying more and organising a picnic, which flows into memories of various outings, better at the seaside but not in a boat after he swore blind he could row and then got into so much trouble they nearly drowned, and the water flooding into the rowing boat ruined her shoes and the wind ruined her hat.

But the sea brings memories of Gibraltar, the smell of the sardines and the bream in Catalan bay all silver in the fishermen’s baskets.

She remembers all the grandiose plans Bloom made, saying he’d change their place into a musical academy, or a hotel, full of plans and schemes which all come to nothing.

he ought to get a leather medal with a putty rim for all the plans he invents then leaving us here all day

She gets scared being alone in the house at night and remembers a vagrant who got 20 years for murdering an old woman, she’d castrate men like that. She remembers the night she swore she heard burglars and she made Poldy go downstairs with a candle frightened out of his wits, making as much racket as he could to scare them off, of course there was no-one.

Then she’s unhappy the way Bloom sent their daughter, Milly, away to Mullingar to get a job at a photographer’s, she thinks because he sensed Molly and Boylan’s impending affair. She should have been sent to Skerry’s Academy to study for the civil service.

She remembers Milly becoming a handful ‘with her roughness and carelessness’, breaking a statuette, refusing to peel the potatos, and Bloom taken to explaining things out of the paper to her and Milly pretending to play along. Cunning, like her dad. She’s started flirting with the boys and reminds Molly of herself at that age. She’d started to go beyond bounds for example to the skating rink and she smelled tobacco on her clothes.

all the people passing they all look at her like me when I was her age

And being prissy at the theatre, insisting Molly not touch her, which makes her remember men who’ve ogled and rubbed up against her at theatres. Milly didn’t even want Molly to kiss her at the station when she was leaving well – in the same tone as she said Bloom will never find anyone else like her, Molly thinks good luck to her daughter to find someone else who’ll dance attendance on her when she’s ill, like her old Ma.

I think Molly says she didn’t have a climax till she was 22:

of course she cant feel anything deep yet I never came properly till I was what 22 or so it went into the wrong place (?)

Milly’s boyfriends including Conny Connolly and Martin Harvey. She thinks such devotion means a man’s a bit cracked in the head which reminds her of Poldy’s father, must have been cracked to commit suicide.

She thinks it’s Bloom’s fault for not getting a servant and instead having the two women in the family slaving away for him, apart from the useless cleaner they had, Mrs Fleming, sneezing and farting everywhere and you had to follow her round fixing her work, and the time she left a smelly old dishcloth behind the dresser.

All the friends Bloom brings back at all hours including Simon Dedalus, and his son who won all the prizes, what was he doing bringing him home, and why did he have to drop down into the area to get into the house, amazing he didn’t rip his grand funeral trousers, shame her old drawers weren’t hanging up for them both to see!

And we learn that Mrs Fleming, useless as she was, is now leaving them to look after her husband who’s got to have an operation.

Thoughts of the body circle round to Molly realising her period’s about to start, not surprising considering ‘all the poking and rooting and ploughing he [Boylan] had up in me’. Damn! That means she’ll be bleeding when Boylan next visits in just three days time (it’s Friday and he’s scheduled to come around on Monday). Menstruation she sees as a curse, out of action five days every three weeks, ‘simply sickening’.

She remembers the most embarrassing occasion when it came on when they were at the theatre, had been given a box by one Michael Gunn to see Mrs Kendal and her husband at the Gaiety, when it came on her and her struggle to concentrate with her husband yakking on next to her.

O patience above its pouring out of me like the sea

She’s very self-conscious about having sex in the bed with all the springs jingling so seems to say that when Boylan came round she put the quilt on the floor and a pillow under her bottom.

She thinks she’ll shave her pubic hair to look like a young girl again, that’ll surprise Boylan next time!

And during these thoughts she’s eased out of bed and is squatting over the chamberpot bleeding into it, hoping she won’t break it, thinking about rinsing it out and perfuming it in the morning, very self conscious about it making such a noise, and so the section ends.

Section 7 (3,230 words)

Molly continues menstruating on her chamber pot. She remembers encounters with a gynaecologist, Dr Collins, who she’d gone to see, worried about some discharges, during which she gets long medical words wrong like ‘omissions’ and is amused by the posh word he used for her bits, ‘vagina’: comedy at the expense of her illiteracy.

Which segues into the letters Bloom wrote her, quoting Keats and other poetry. She was so excited by him and the letters she masturbated 4 or 5 times a day. She was impressed by his high political talk about home rule and the Land League. She’s thinking all this while she’s still on the pot:

I better not make an alnight sitting on this affair they ought to make chambers a natural size so that a woman could sit on it properly

I think she says the Leopold kneels to masturbate, ‘I suppose there isnt in all creation another man with the habits he has’; and then bemoans his habit for years of sleeping upside down in the bed, with his head at her feet and his feet by her head. The posture reminds her of him taking her to see an Indian god all yellow in a pinafore on his side, presumably a Buddha.

She reaches for a napkin which she ties round her parts, then slips back into bed, noting how deeply Bloom is sleeping, and repeating her hunch it’s because he had an orgasm today, and wondering who with, and waspishly pointing out he can only get it if he pays for it these days.

She laments the many moves of house they’ve had to make due to Bloom’s inability to keep a job or progress, including Raymond Terrace, Ontario Terrace, Lombard Street, Holles Street and then the City Arms hotel with the toilet out in the hall and you could always tell who’d used it before you by the stink. Things are always just starting to shape up when he puts his big foot in it, getting dismissed again and again, from Thoms and Helys and Mr Cuffes and Drimmies.

St George’s bells chime, saying its 2am (?) can that be right?

She describes Bloom’s poor attempts at cunnilingus:

when I wouldnt let him lick me in Holles street one night… he does it all wrong too thinking only of his own pleasure his tongue is too flat or I dont know what he forgets that wethen I dont Ill make him do it again

She wonders if the woman Bloom was with today was Josie, then decides he doesn’t have the guts to risk it with a married woman, despite her Josie Breen’s) mad husband. She thinks Poldy having sex was ‘the fruits of Mr Paddy Dignam yes they were all in great style at the grand funeral’ i.e. all those men all got hammered and went on somewhere and Bloom paid for a prostitute (she thinks; we know that’s not at all correct).

They think they’re so grand, those silly men in their little funeral parade and she rattles off a list of the male mourners at Dignam’s funeral who we met in chapter 6, but Molly says they’ve never seen a military parade like she knew back in Gibraltar, now that was impressive.

She feels sorry for poor Paddy’s wife and orphans which leads into memories of a dinner and formal singing, thoughts of Ben Dollard the base baritone, 5 shillings admittance to the concert, and then praises Simon Dedalus’s voice, untrained but effective (and we remember Simon singing at the Ormond Hotel in ‘Sirens’), she remembers he was married to May Goulding but a widower now.

She remembers seeing Stephen as a boy of 11, 11 years ago, when she was in mourning for poor Rudy, ‘he was an innocent boy then and a darling little fellow in his lord Fauntleroy suit and curly hair like a prince on the stage’ (‘prince’ of course reminds us of Stephen’s recent obsession with Shakespeare, Hamlet and the lecture at the National Library).

Suddenly she realises Stephen was predicted in the tarot cards she played with this morning and goes back through the cards in detail. She guesses at Stephen’s age and hopes he’s not a lank-haired poet, briefly imagining seducing him. Bloom claimed he’s a professor, Molly knows he’s surely too young, and hopes he’s not a professor like old Professor Goodwin whose specialist subject is whiskey.

Which segues into poetry, she likes poetry, and random quotes from favourite poems. It would be a nice change to have an intelligent person to talk to (Stephen) and not have to listen to Bloom’s endless talk about Billy Prescott’s ad and Keyes’s ad and Tom the Devil’s ad.

Instead she remembers seeing lithe young men at Margate bathingplace lazing on the rocks or diving into the sea, if only all men were that fit and handsome. Then some more rudeness:

I often felt I wanted to kiss him all over also his lovely young cock there so simple I wouldnt mind taking him in my mouth if nobody was looking as if it was asking you to suck it so clean and white he looks with his boyish face I would too in 1/2 a minute even if some of it went down what its only like gruel or the dew theres no danger

If she’s never met the adult Stephen this must be a sort of sleepy fantasy Stephen of her imagination she’s imagining sucking off and swallowing. Quite staggeringly pornographic, isn’t it?

She resolves to throw the tarot cards again in the morning to see if they’re fated to be together and anyway she’ll read and study some poetry so as not to appear ignorant if they meet, while she’ll teach him about sex until he half faints, and then:

then hell write about me lover and mistress publicly too with our 2 photographs in all the papers when he becomes famous

I’d forgotten that Molly has this quite graphic fantasy about Stephen. Remembering it sheds a whole new light on his character extending right back through ‘Portrait of the Artist’. What would happen if in the next few weeks Molly does meet Stephen, is taken by his strange intelligence and youth, while he sees sex sex sex in the older, voluptuous woman, and they ended up falling in love and eloping? Has anyone ever written a sequel to ‘Ulysses’ in which that happened?

Section 8 (3,680 words)

But then, what’s she going to do about Boylan? Thinking about Boylan makes her cross again at him slapping her on the bottom, such a peasant ‘he doesnt know poetry from a cabbage’. She criticises the way he just stripped off his shoes and trousers, might as well be an animal, he might as well have been an old lion. Well, maybe he was so excited because her boobs were so round and tempting. To be honest, they excite her sometimes, in fact she’d like to be a man:

I wished I was one myself for a change just to try with that thing they have swelling up on you so hard and at the same time so soft when you touch it

Men are lucky:

they can pick and choose what they please a married woman or a fast widow or a girl for their different tastes

Whereas women are restricted and limited. Jealousy. Why can’t people remain friends while sleeping around? She’s glad she’s still young and excitable but frustrated that Bloom never touches her, never embraces her any more. Only kisses her on the bottom, where she has least expression, like kissing an inanimate object, one time he kissed the front door, she thinks Bloom is mad, ‘what a madman nobody understands his cracked ideas but me’.

A woman needs loving and cherishing:

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

Sometimes she gets so sexually frustrated she fantasises about going down to the docks and picking up a sailor or maybe one of the dangerous looking gypsies from their camp in Rathfarnham, some stranger to ‘ride me up against the wall without a word or a murderer anybody’.

Men, eh? She remembers some fine KC giving her and Bloom a fish supper after winning a bet on a boxing match but later that night catching him coming out of a dingy alley (Hardwicke lane) followed by a common prostitute, then going back to his wife.

She is irritated with Bloom being such a big lump and tries to budge him over in the bed, and irritated at him expected to be waited on with breakfast in bed. A little feminist polemic:

itd be much better for the world to be governed by the women in it you wouldnt see women going and killing one another and slaughtering when do you ever see women rolling around drunk like they do or gambling every penny they have and losing it on horses yes because a woman whatever she does she knows where to stop sure they wouldnt be in the world at all only for us they dont know what it is to be a woman and a mother how could they where would they all of them be if they hadnt all a mother to look after them

Speaking of needing mothers she wonders what Stephen’s doing away from his books and home and study, keeping bad company now his mother’s died.

Which morphs into thinking about her son Rudy, going over the decision to bury him in ‘that little woolly jacket I knitted crying as I was but give it to some poor child but I knew well Id never have another’. She and Bloom have never been the same since.

Back to Stephen, she wonders why he wouldn’t stay the night (how does she know this, it feels like Joyce’s awareness bleeding into hers). Remember Hugh Kenner’s point that Molly never says something but she soon contradicts it? Well, barely a few phrases after her little feminist praise of women, the exact opposite:

I hate that in women no wonder they treat us the way they do we are a dreadful lot of bitches I suppose its all the troubles we have makes us so snappy

She thinks Stephen could have slept on the sofa in the other room, mind you she’d have heard her filling the chamber pot, ‘arrah what harm’.

Dedalus, odd name. Makes her think of names of people on Gibraltar, she’s particularly tickled by a woman named Opisso, she’d die rather than have such a name.

small blame to me if I am a harumscarum I know I am a bit I declare to God I dont feel a day older than then

For the third time she laments that Stephen didn’t stay, she’d like to give him Spanish lessons then he’d see she’s not so ignorant after all: quite the persistent thinking about clean-cocked young Stevie.

And it goes on: she thinks Stephen was tired, and needed a rest, and she’d have happily brought him breakfast in on the sofa. She’s really taken with having Stephen as a lodger:

supposing he stayed with us why not theres the room upstairs empty and Millys bed in the back room he could do his writing and studies at the table in there for all the scribbling he does at it and if he wants to read in bed in the morning like me as hes making the breakfast for 1 he can make it for 2… Id love to have a long talk with an intelligent welleducated person

Which segues into needing to buy a new bed, and shopping triggers thoughts of going to the market early to get fresh fruit and vegetables, she’d love a fresh juicy young pear. And then another pornographic passage I can’t make out whether it starts about Stephen but it definitely becomes about Bloom, arousing him then making him feel guilty about Boylan:

Ill start dressing myself to go out presto non son piu forte Ill put on my best shift and drawers let him have a good eyeful out of that to make his micky stand for him Ill let 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 5 or 6 times handrunning theres the mark of his spunk on the clean sheet I wouldnt bother to even iron it out that ought to satisfy him if you dont believe me feel my belly unless I made him stand there and put him into me Ive a mind to tell him every scrap and make him do it out in front of me serve him right its all his own fault if I am an adulteress

So she’ll let Bloom know that his wife has been well fucked and the mark must be of Boylan’s spunk, but what does ‘make him do it out in front of me’? Force Bloom to masturbate in front of her to shame him, to make it clear that if he masturbates and refuses to fuck her then she will be unfaithful, ‘its all his own fault if I am an adulteress’?

Supercrudely she says if he wants to kiss her bottom, he can kiss her hole, and she’ll get a £1 or 30 shillings out of him to go shopping with. She’ll buy some fine new drawers and let him masturbate onto her from behind:

Ill let him do it off on me behind provided he doesnt smear all my good drawers… Ill tighten my bottom well and let out a few smutty words smellrump or lick my shit or the first mad thing comes into my head… Ill tighten my bottom well and let out a few smutty words smellrump or lick my shit or the first mad thing comes into my head then Ill suggest about yes… then Ill wipe him off me just like a business his omission’

She realise it’s getting late, they’ll be up in China, the nuns will be getting up soon, she should try and get some sleep. She’ll get up early go and buy some flowers to brighten the place up in case Bloom brings Stephen home again, I’m surprised how much longing for Stephen features in this last section.

She’ll clean the piano and they’ll have music, she’ll buy some cakes and has a passage thinking about her favourite types. Flowers,

I love flowers Id love to have the whole place swimming in roses God of heaven theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with the fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers all sorts of shapes and smells and colours springing up even out of the ditches primroses and violet

She dismisses Bloom’s highfalutin atheism, nature disproves it, and they all end up calling for the priest as they lie dying. Thoughts of God and nature line us up for the final passage in which she reminisces about the day she and Bloom spent outdoors on Howth hill.

the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life

What she remembers is genuinely liking him, but also her canny manipulation of him.

that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky

And Joyce gives her a magnificent passage recapping all her memories of her girlhood in Gibraltar, all the sights and sounds and words of the hot place, the castle and the multicultural society of Greeks and Turks and Jews and Arabs, and it ends with the famous magnificent climax:

and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Molly’s feminism?

If you summarise Molly’s soliloquy, it’s easy to speak in clichés about her being a strong independent woman or expressing her sexuality, as if that’s a fine and impressive thing like a speech or a declaration. But if you read it closely (and if you’ve read my summary) you’ll realise she’s far from being a role model for feminists, she’s far too bitchy and critical of other women for that, critical of old women and scornful of her rival female singers.

And ‘expressing her sexuality’ sounds fine in the abstract but when you read the detail of her thoughts (I’m tempted but won’t repeat the fruitier passages), again, it’s not necessarily such a fine and noble thing; it feels much muckier, messier, real and compromised than that, as actual sex tends to be.

Is Molly a male projection?

All the commentaries go on about Molly being a modern woman freely expressing her own sexuality and, having gone through it in this much detail, you can see how Molly is, indeed, staggeringly rude but totally honest and accepting of sex, the sex act, her own desires and fantasies, yes.

However, I could never forget that this whole thing is written by a man. I.e. is it just a man’s fantasy of how sexually frank and candid he’d like a woman to be? Is it purely a male fantasy to imagine a woman who goes to sleep fantasising about sucking a young man’s cock or having it done to her doggy fashion? Is Molly’s much vaunted sexuality in fact male projection?

In a sense, the most relevant criticism of Molly is what the woman Joyce based her on, his own partner, Nora Barnacle, thought of her, and Nora was famously unimpressed by Molly. (As, when I summarised some of the passages to her, was my wife.)

This is vanishingly tiny anecdotal evidence but it crystallises my feeling that Molly is a construct made of words, not always convincing, and the relentless dominance of sex fantasies… well, rather than capturing a woman’s thoughts, it just felt too relentlessly male to me.

Men, eh?

That said, I was struck by the number of thoughts Joyce gives his creation which diss or rubbish male sexuality:

• theyre so savage for it
• they want to do everything too quick take all the pleasure out of it
• can you ever be up to men the way it takes them
• only for the name of a king theyre all made the one way
• arent they fearful trying to hurt you
• arent they thick never understand what you say even youd want to print it up on a big poster for them
• they always want to see a stain on the bed to know youre a virgin for them all thats troubling them theyre such fools
• I suppose he thinks I dont know deceitful men all their 20 pockets arent enough for their lies

All these sentences mocking men’s obsession with sex were written by a man. The steady stream of criticisms of the male sex, maybe that’s plausible in a woman’s passing thoughts? Or does it reveal a kind of self-obsession with masculinity on Joyce’s part? Is there something masochistic in Joyce the man writing quite so many passages slagging off men as sex-obsessed? Was it a form of self-critical therapy? Or was he simply bringing together lots of the criticisms you hear women say or women write about men, bundling them, along with much else besides, into Molly’s big boisterous character?

I’m not sure there’s any way of arriving at a conclusive answer, which is why I’ll note the questions but leave it at that.

Weaving contradictions

Hugh Kenner makes the point that Molly is a creature of contradictions, she doesn’t make a statement without somewhere else stating the opposite. Boylan is superb, Boylan is coarse. Bloom is inadequate, Bloom has more spunk in him than Boylan. The prospect of Stephen excites, then again he probably has long lank student hair. She’s proud to be a woman, she hates being a woman. She’ll bring Poldy breakfast in bed, she’ll throw it at him.

Kenner smartly compares this pattern of Molly stating then denying, with Homer’s Penelope weaving her shroud by day and unweaving it by night. Typically Kenner in being cute, insightful and amusing. I’ve written a blog post summarising Kenner’s book on ‘Ulysses’, coming soon.

Credit

‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce was published by Shakespeare and Company in 1922.

Related links

• Ulysses on Planet Gutenberg
• Ulysses guide: section 18
• Sparks notes: section 18
• Annotate version
• RTE radio production

Joyce reviews

• Dubliners (1914)
• Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
• Ulysses by James Joyce: introduction
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Cyclops
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Nausicaa
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Oxen of the Sun
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Circe
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Eumaeus
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Ithaca
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Penelope