Penelope

Molly Bloom’s stream of consciousness is an extract from Penelope, the last episode of J. Joyce’s Ulysses, which lets the reader penetrate into Molly’s mind to unveil her thoughts. The way her thoughts are arranged may appear chaotic at a first glance: there is no punctuation, and no paragraphs that may build up an understandable structure. This is, however, the main point of force of the entire extract, as the way Molly’s thoughts are set on paper is probably the closest to the effective working of our mind, which does not always follow clear paths, but, on the contrary, bases itself rather on spontaneous associations, which emerge from the similarities drawn between objects. This is the result of a subjective point of view, that reinterprets reality through his/her own experience. Indeed, modernism sought for a more personal and subjective way of representation of the real world, since the old Victorian objective depiction of the world had clearly failed in reporting reality “as it is” (as V. Woolf recognizes in The Common Reader).

Entering someone’s stream of consciousness, however, may not be so simple. Associations between objects are made on the basis of our experience and our sensibility, and what appears natural for one person, might be absurd for another. Digging inside the text, it becomes clear that Molly Bloom uses two main ways to link thoughts: through association of sensations, and through her net of memories.

Her first thoughts are about her attempts to fall asleep: her mind goes from China to the neighbours’ house in the time span of a moment. The fusion between different times (past, present and future) and different locations on Earth is, paradoxically, made possible only by the fact that Molly Bloom is still in her bed: if she were wandering around, her mind would not be so free to roam through space and time, and this demonstrates that the real voyage people can take (and the voyage modernists were looking for) is not the physical one we do by sea, air or land, but the one we experience in our mind.

The attempts to sleep are suddenly broken when Molly sees some flowers on the wallpaper, reminding her of others similar seen in a shop; again these thoughts are interrupted by her need to sleep (“better lower this lamp”), but again her preoccupations about the following day overwhelm her, thus making up a chain of thoughts which recall each other throughout the text. Nevertheless, the simple idea of roses makes her think of nature, and an entire new section of reflections begins. Here an important aspect of Molly’s personality emerges from the lines: she needs to think that Nature was created by an intelligent Being, and she challenges atheists on this subject; yet, when he questions them about who was the first person in the universe before anybody, she says “they don’t know neither do I”. Here it is possible to see the great contradiction at the basis of Molly’s (and modernists’) mentality: modernists searched for a justification of the world, but they rejected any simple, naïve explanation (as the one given by religion) because, effectively, the people who believed in God had no more real answers than atheists, and the mystery of creation, even for religious people, remained a mystery.

Going on, the expression “the shine shines for you” reminds her her first meeting with Leopold, which however emerges as a blurred memory among the description of the landscape and the people of Gibraltar. This description is manly constructed through the juxtaposition of sensitive impressions, often aroused by the different cultures: the Spanish girls, the Greeks, the Arabs, …, and these people are melted with memories about donkeys and wheels of carts: there is no distinction drawn between animals, people or objects, since they are fused in a general memory, which makes no distinction between relevant or irrelevant elements, and they all become part of a sort of painting, thus showing that our memory does not always remember what’s important.

The casual thought about plants and flowers recalls her back to the memory of her first kiss with Leopold, and here the narration gradually vanishes as the word “yes”, which occupies a lot of space in the text, is repeated eight times in just 3 lines. The great repetition of “yes” may have different possible interpretations, but it can simply be considered a linking word which marks the passages from a memory to another, and the glue between every paragraph.