JAMES JOYCE'S ULYSSES

ANALYSIS OF MOLLY BLOOM'S MONOLOGUE 

The extract belongs to the last part of Molly Bloom's monologue. It adopts the technique in a way different from Virginia Woolf, because it is a total female monologue to recall 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 Molly herself here. 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 speaks about the way her husband was dressed so that the reader can make himself 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 a way of a film. There seems to be a cinematic technique. Scenes can be visualized . Attention to detail, a typical feature of Joyce's symbolic realism, adds to the perception on 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. Indeed colours like the grey of the tweed suit or others that hint at rhododendrons make the scene visible and concrete. The "suit made of tweed" suggests touch and together with his "straw hat" returns 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 knows exactly how to relate to men, differently from the classical faithful Homer's Penelope. Indeed  she "got him" to propose to her is an attitude and a behaviour which is exactly the opposite of what should generally happen according to the ordinary behaviour of traditional women.

Playing with the "bid of seedcakes put of my mouth" she appeals to senses. It also leaves the room two times: Molly thinks about the passing of time when she realizes that sixteen years have passed. Interesting is to notice how memory finds its way in Molly's mind and even more interesting is the technique Joyce adopts to let readers access in her 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 waked 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 to 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 to convey Molly's flacks of thoughts and emotions, 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 between Molly and Bloom that becomes vivid through the lines and in the lines.

Joyce, better that anybody else before, experiments with a way of writing that was doomed to be rejected by the mainstream of his time. Body and flesh were both to be banned to the last, 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. Joyce's interest in the female nature is continually suggest in the exploration of the metaphor of the flower to refer to Molly. The intelligent reader, unfortunately not all readers, perfectly understands that the flower is the symbol of femininity in all its dimension. It is not a case that, immediately after resorting to the metaphor of the flower,  Joyce starts relying on the affirmation "Yes" which works as the most interesting leitmotiv in the text which adds coherence to a disgorged syntax. "Yes" represents the acceptance of reality devoid of the previous attitude of heroism of the traditional classical character of the Odyssey that once that provides Joyce with the scaffolding for his "Summa Anthropologica". Mankind, the mankind of the contemporary word is weak, and cannot show that stoic behavior you can see in the classical figure of Ulysses. Joyce adds to the dimension of a contemporary anti-hero an idea of women that he probably enjoyed sharing with the snubbed - knows people of the mainstream to make fun of them.  You can see it in Molly's words "so we are flowers all a woman's 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", so 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: 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 why she liked Leopold and she declares the reason of that: "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 leitmotiv. Last but not least, it is 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 interesting to consider Molly's thoughts just before she' s going to say yes to Leopold's propose (" I was thinking of so many things ... the sentry in front of the governors"). The passage under scrutiny does not leave any room for the naive reader to hope that Molly might ever been the faithful wife of Homer's Odyssey.