Giorgia Vita                                                                                                                                                                    

19^th April 2017

English Written Test III

Second Period

TASK: Marjorie, Gretta and Molly: Postmodernist and Modernist female characters.

Discuss the idea of wievs conveyed by three female figures with reference to characterization, narrative technique and the use of language.

PARAGRAPH 1: Introduction to the three female figures

Molly Bloom's monologue belongs to the 18^th and the last episode of the novel “Ulysses” by James Joyce, written in 1922 and set betweeb the 16^th and the 17^th June 1904. Molly's episode takes place in the middle of the night, at 3 a.m. Molly is the only conscious character, while her husband Leopold and the other figures appear only in her memories. Therefore Molly is central in the story as an active character. Instead, Marjorie, the wife of the co-protagonist of the novel “Nice Work” by David Lodge and Gretta, the wife of one of the main characters of Joyce's “Dubliners”, are both explained with the function to explore their husbands' characterization, in fact they are asleep during the narration.

PARAGRAPH 2: Relationship with their husbands

The importance of Molly's figure is underlined by the parallelism with Penelope, Ulysses' loyal wife, as she waits for Leopold, her husband, to return home from his travels but, differently from Penelope, Molly betrays Leopold with several lovers while he is around Dublin. In addition, all around the monologue, she remembers with plesure her past love stories , when she was young and free. On the contrary, the memory of her young love (who died) creates in Gretta a sort of sadness. The comes Marjorie who, not only is not able to cheat on Vic, but she even has no longer sex with her husband.

PARAGRAPH 3: Semantic livel differences

So the express three steps of female sensuality: Molly, whose name reminds fertility and whose surname recalls the blooming of flowers, represents the spring of life with all its sex appeal, Gretta is the middle-age woman losing her beauty and, last but not least, comes Marjorie, whose name reminds a flower too, the daisy, which withers quickly.

PARAGRAPH 4: Their daily settings

The three stories are set in the bedroom, the place of a couple's intimacy, where characters are stripped of their daily shame. Altough Marjorie belongs to a more advanced generation than the other two women, she has interests similar to Molly's, such as houseworks since they are all housewives, but Molly, and Gretta of course, seem to have a more complex personality.

PARAGRAPH 5: Two kind of narrators

Joyce and Lodge both use third-person omniscent narrators, but they make the readers' mind work differently: while Lodge's reader is smart but limited to being a spectator who can see Marjorie's description made using the technique of showing (during her short dialogues with Vic or with her daughter) and the technique of telling (when Lodgedescribes her physical aspects), Joyce's reader is involved in narration, he/she is invited to share Molly's or Gabriel's stream of consciousness and is not allowed to be lazy in order to face the total absence of puntuation and to capture every leitmotifes (such as “yes” in Molly's monologue). Reading Joyce's novels is more complicated since, while Marjorie's story follows chronological time, Joyce's stream of consciousness is a semnatica vortex where free associations, memories, reflections, past images and present doubts fuel the energy of the volcano perfectly managed by the author. The novelist appeals to the language of sense impression in order to add realism to the text. While Molly's and Gretta's descriptions draw from every source, like the noise of an allarm clock, to give birth to the “mental journeys”, Marjorie does not even hear the sound of the allarm because of her deep sleep.

PARAGRAPH 6: Conclusion

Paradoxically, Molly and Gretta, who came from an “earlier” historical period, can be considered more modern than Marjorie: indeed they are independent and able to make the reader's mind travel in space and time. On the contrary, Marjorie (the result of a close Victorian mentality) is only “the wife of”, she could not even behave without the advice of a book, “Enjoy your Menopause”, which perfectly summarizes Lodge's satirical point of wiev.