MOLLY BLOOM'S MONOLOGUE

The extract belongs to the last part of Molly's monologue. It adopts the technique in a way different from Virginia Woolf's, 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 clues 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 where both lying in Howth (Dublin), spending their 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 suggested "among the rhododendrons". Reality is evoked in the way of a film. There seems to be a cinematic technique, since it is possible to visualize it.

Attention to details, 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: colors like "the gray tweed suit" or others that hint at rhododendrons make the scene visible and concrete.

The suit made of tweed almost suggest touch and together with his "straw hat" returns a lively scene, one that seems to conjure it 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 appearently knows exactly how to relate to men.

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

Molly thinks about the passing of time when she realizes sixteen 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 accessed that mind. To tell the truth, it is the word "leapyear" that allows the creation of a parallel between the past and the present, thus making what T. S. Eliot called "a continuity" possible. It is "leapyear" how as it was when Molly worked all her sex appeal to her present husband.

T. S. Eliot's definition of mythical method provides the naïve 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".

The syntax is disrupted, giving up the use of punctuation in order to convey Molly's flux of thoughts and emotions, and the reader is totally involved in a scene which marks the triumph of the senses, where it is through bodily perception that communication comes to life. A communication Molly - towards -Bloom that becomes vivid through the lives and in the lives.

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

Body and flesh were both to be bound, to be left outside the room of literature and the novel. It was a 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 the 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 its dimensions. It is not a case that, immediately after resorting to the metaphor of the flower, Mr. 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, the void of the previous attitudes of heroism of the traditional classical characters of the Odyssey, the ones that provided Mr. Joyce with the scaffolding for his "Summa Anthropologica".

Mankind, the mankind of the contemporary world, is weak and cannot show that stoic behavior you can see in the classical figure of Ulysses. James Joyce adds to the dimensions of a contemporary anti-hero an idea of women that he probably enjoyed 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 womans body". The angel - 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 taught 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 recognizes "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 Mr. Joyce says "the sun shines for you today".

Molly perfectly knows if and why she liked Leopold and she declares the reason why she liked him ("because he understood or felt 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 intention on that moment.

She gives herself away clearly when she confesses "leading him on" and the expression "he asked to me to say yes" clearly shows what makes women interesting for men.

That is why "yes" marks and works as a cohesive leitmotif. Last but not least the ultimate word of an interaction since Molly also confesses how she played with Leopold's hunger for reality.

When Mr. Joyce writes "and I would not answer first" it is really interestinh to consider Molly's thoughts just before she is going to say yes to Leopold's propose (" 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").

The passage under scrutiny does not leave any room for the naïve reader to hope that Molly might ever be the faithful wife of Homer's Odyssey.