In the following text I’m going to compare two different characters: Molly Bloom and Marjorie Wilcox.

Molly Bloom, a character from Joyce’s modern novel “Ulysses”, is a Dubliner semiprofessional singer and Leopold’s wife but her heart belongs to several lovers. Instead, Marjorie is taken from David Lodge’s “Nice work”, a post-modernist novel, and she is an housewife married with Vic Wilcox, a Managing director in Rummidge.

First of all, the reader has to take into consideration the meaning of the names: he or she might understand that “Molly” suggests the idea of something full and the concept is also underlined by her surname, ”Bloom”, that reminds the blooming of the flowers. On the contrary the name “Marjorie” means “Perl”, something precious but also rare. After reading about the two woman the reader realizes that “Molly Bloom” perfectly reflects what Joyce’s character is, since the woman’s thought goes back to sixteen years later, when she was young and accepted to marry Leopold Bloom. Differently, the name “Marjorie” seems to be inappropriate to Lodge’s characters, who has nothing of rare, but she is simply a common housewife who takes care of house and family: in this way Lodge seems to parody his character, which becomes ridiculous to the reader’s eyes .

Another meaningfull aspect is the age of the two: they are both middle-aged women going through the menopause. Molly seems to has lost her youthful beauty and to has acquired a greater physical and mental maturity, instead Marjorie’s menopause is underlined by the same Lodge, who presented his character by the reading of a book entitled “enjoy your menopause”. Lodge and Joyce's decision to choose two middle-aged women for their novels has a logic nature: even if the character had not live long enough, it has  nothing to tell to the reader (non ha senso questa cosa)

Then comes the relationship with their husbands. On one side Marjorie embodies “the angel of the house”, totally devoted to Vic at the point of serve him in everything, on the other Molly is the symbol of infidelity, her heart belongs to several lovers, in fact during her monologue she also thinks about Blazes Boylan, who is coming to visit her in the following day.

During Molly and Marjorie’s characterization of the category of space and time, both women are presented when they are in bed beside their husbands, but if on one side the character of Marjorie comes to life through the facts, using always the present time, on the other the character of Molly is bring to surface by her steam of consciousness, that has a simultaneous time and where memories, doubts, feelings, conjectures and free associations of ideas collide in her mind. So, while Marjorie's present conveys to the reader the idea of something stable, the mix of times suggest the idea of an erupting volcano.

It follows another category: the narrative technique used by the writers. They has different purposes so, while Lodge adopted a 3^rdomniscient narrator and the technique of showing to present Marjorie through the facts, Joyce uses the interior monologue to carry out Molly’s stream of consciousness. The coherence is given by the chosen of the time, the present is the time of the facts while the simultaneity of the time is typical of the human’s mind. The idea of stability in Lodge is also given by the Marjorie’s routine, she does always the same actions, while the idea of being in molly’s mind is given by the absence of punctuation.