Class test correction - 21.03.13

The extract belongs to the last part of Molly's monologue. It adopts the technique in a way different from V. Woolf in that it is a total female monologue to record the most impressive moments of the female character's stream of consciousness. There are still cloose of the narrator's presence as one can see in the first line: the narrator is here Molly herself. She remembers the moment when her present husband and she were both lying in Howth (Dublin) spending their leisure time together.

The woman seems to have kept a precise memory of the situation: she perfectly tells about the way her husband was dressed so that the reader can make up an idea of the scene very near to the one of a camera.                                                                    

Even the setting is suggestive "among a rhododendrons". Reality is evolved in the way of a film. There seems to be a cinematic technique, since it is possible to visualize it. Attention to detail, a typical feature of Joyce's symbolic realism, adds to the perception of what is going on in Molly's mind and what really took place in Howth. This is due to the exploitation of a language that appeals to senses: colours like "the grey tweed suit" or others that hint at rhododendrons make the scene visible and concrete. 

The suit made of tweed also suggest touch and together with his "straw hat" return a lively scene, one that seems to conjure up in front of the reader's eyes.                             

The personality of the female character is immediately conveyed by the extract: Molly is a sensual woman who apparently knows exactly how to relate to men. 

Differently from the classical faithful Penelope, she "got him" to propose to her, an attitude  and a behaviour which is exactly the opposite of what should generally happen according to the ordinary behaviours of traditional women.

Playing with "the bit of seedcake out of my mouth" she appeals to her husband's sexual instinct: it is a language that suddenly appeals to taste. It also leaves room to time. Molly thinks about the passing of time when she realizes 16 years have passed. Interesting is to consider how memory finds its way in Molly's mind and even more interesting is the technique Joyce adopts to have the reader's access to the mind. To tell the truth, it is the word "leap year" that allows the creation of a parallel between the past and the present thus making what T. S. Eliot called "a contiguity" possible. It is leap year now as it was when Molly worked all her sex-appeal to her present husband.

T.S. Eliot's definition of mythical method provides the naive reader elements to understand what has happened of the traditional Penelope of Homer's Odyssey in the contemporary time. Molly's sensuality is totally perceptible in the exclamation "my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath". Disrupting syntax, giving up the use of punctuation in order to convey Molly's flux of thoughts and emotions, the reader is totally involved in a scene which marks the triumph of the senses where it is through bodily's perception that communication comes to life. A communication Molly towards Bloom that becomes vivid through the lines and in the lines.

Joyce (better than anybody else before) experiments with the way of writing that was doomed to be rejected by the main stream of his times.

Body and flash were both to be banned, to be left outside the room of literature and the novel. 

It was  revolutionary way to hint at a man-woman relationship which involved mind, body, emotions and instinct all together.

James Joyce's interest in the female nature is continually suggested in the exploitation of metaphor of the flower to refer to Molly. The intelligent reader, unfortunately not all readers, perfectly understands the flower is the symbol of femininity in all of its dimensions. It is not a case that immediately after resorting to the metaphor of the flower, Joyce starts relying on the affirmation Yes which will work as the most interesting leitmotiv in the text one that will add coherence to a disgorged syntax.

Yes represents the acceptance of humanity, devoid of the previous attitude of heroism of the traditional classical characters of the Odyssey the one that provided Joyce with the scaffolding for his Summa Anthropologica.

The men kind of the contemporary world, is weak and can not show the stoic behaviour you can see in the classical figure of Ulysses. Joyce's adds to the dimensions of a contemporary anti-hero an idea of women that it probably enjoy sharing with the snubbed-knows people of the main stream to make fun of them. You can see it in Molly's words "so we are flowers all a woman body". The injure like figure of the classical and traditional Victorian novel is totally rejected here: in terms of plot and in terms of language. As postmodernism has thought us we create ourselves in language. And characters are linguistic products. Molly completely adheres to such an image of woman: of the female nature when she recognises "yes that was why I liked him". Immediately afterwards follows the image of the sun that seems to be born to heat the female nature. Indeed, in literature, the sun is generally used as a symbol of the male nature and that is why Joyce says "the sun shines for you today". Molly perfectly knows if and why she liked Leopold. Molly Bloom declares  that the reason why she liked Leopold because he understood "what a woman is". In addition, she perfectly understood how to get from him what she really wanted ."To have from him all the pleasure I could" was Molly's intent on that moment.

She gives herself away clearly when she confesses "leading him on". The expression "he asked me to say yes" clearly shows what makes women interesting for men. That is why "yes" marks and works as a cohesive leitmotiv.

Last but not least the ultimate word of an interaction since Molly also confesses how she played with Leopold's hunger for reality: when Joyce writes "and I would not answer first". It is really interesting to consider Molly's thoughts just before she is going to say yes "I was thinking of so many things he didn't know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house". The passage under scrutiny does not leave any room for the naive reader to hope that Molly might ever be the faithful wife of Homer's Odyssey.

The exotic atmosphere in Gibraltar in Molly's memories, is recreated through Joyce's adoption of the language of sense impressions: smell (perfume, flowers); touch (long kiss, my arms, drew down, feel my breasts, hard being like mind); sight (see and style, glorious sunsets, trees, pink and blue and yellow houses); hearing (Spanish girls laughing, yes); taste (bit). The most frequent connector between sentences is and.

The rhythm of the last lines sound like a climax: there is a list of images of Gibraltar, followed by vivid recollections of the moment when she and Leopold made love for the first time. The repetition of yes in the last four lines culminates in the final yes which seems to sum up Molly's sensuality.