By Joseph Hallstein
The richest of treasures awaits the reader who can successfully navigate the nearly limitless narrative swells and shoals of James Joyce’s Ulysses, but to read the novel is to submit without question to the command of the book’s true hero, Joyce himself. In the novel’s most daring gambit, Joyce risks losing even the most intrepid of his crewmen by allowing Molly Bloom to confront the reader, who has empathized almost from the novel’s outset with the public humiliation and private horror of her husband. Weak with fatigue, that reader arrives at No. 7 Eccles Street to meet his hope and Bloom’s saving grace. Surely she will prove that the journey has been worth it.
What one finds there is a fat, vulgar, stupid woman who nourishes her vanity on old sexual conquests. How could this slovenly adulteress have been the thorn in the heart of Bloom? For the reader who cannot reconcile this Molly with the object of Bloom’s abject longing, the novel threatens to collapse altogether.
But throughout this long day Joyce has entreated his readers to acknowledge the power of parallax, of disparate perspectives, in understanding the position and direction of observed phenomena. It is the reader’s final task to apply that instrument to the person and motivation of Molly Bloom. For Molly insists that she has been the long-term victim of emotional neglect and that her husband, Leopold, is therefore responsible for her adultery. Bravely, she has refused to succumb to this fate and is resolved to resuscitate her marriage and save their home for herself as well as for him. Molly, then, is not a parody of Penelope but a genuine reincarnation of her, a case of metempsychosis.
It is misleading to construe Homer’s Odyssey as an unambiguous template for Joyce’s Ulysses. While the symbolism of the epic’s supernatural aspects (Cyclops, Circe, Scylla) is easily recognized, the profuse significance of the Odyssey’s human actors can easily escape notice, particularly when a simplistic rendering has become a cultural reference. Penelope is the model for faithfulness, more specifically for sexual fidelity, and her rejection of the suitors is an expression of her sexual allegiance; she wants to preserve herself for her wandering husband. Actually, her sexual fidelity is a metonymy for far more. What she wants to ensure is that her husband may return to the home he remembers. Her sexual loyalty is a part of this home but so also is his son, Telemachus, his land, people and kingship. Penelope struggles to defend her husband’s memory of their home; she knows that it is only that memory which gives Odysseus the strength to endure. If she were to fail, he would return an alien, a wanderer without cattle, wine, land, people, or wife.
Like her Greek counterpart, Molly longs to preserve her home by burnishing its memory -- the memory of reciprocal love consecrated on Howth Head, where she shared a seedcake with Bloom. And herein lies a paradox: Molly’s enemy is not a band of carousing suitors but Bloom himself. In his refusal to have complete, conventional sexual intercourse with her, he has denied her the love pledged in the mutual mouthing of that seed cake. Molly recalls how Bloom made her feel desired, needed, loved. He crowned her “a flower of the mountain” and “…God in heaven theres nothing like nature…” (l8.1576). In other words, Molly’s continuing desires and sexual attractions are not illicit corruptions but natural and ordained gifts of the Creator.
It is Bloom who has dishonored the dignity of her sovereignty and left her feeling unfulfilled and deficient. Molly can no longer ignore or deny these desires, but she senses that while she may find sexual satisfaction elsewhere, she will share love with Bloom alone. Her final “Yes” will be reserved for the man who understands how a woman feels and restores her to her birthright. With a shrewdness borne of desperation, she makes a final effort to save their love, for only then will Bloom have a home to come home to. Like Penelope’s weaving of Laertes’ death shroud, Molly’s stratagem is a deception: “To make him want me thats the only way…” (18.1539) Thus she takes a lover, Blazes Boylan, and lets Bloom know that she has done so to re-ignite his sexual interest and embolden him to overcome his fear of the birth of another doomed male child.
One may take pity on Bloom for what is happening at 4:00 on June 4, 1904 at 7 Eccles Street, Dublin, and for the stinging reminders of the affair that he must undergo in the course of the day. Would Bloom, however, have been thinking of Molly otherwise? Yes -- but strictly in his role as the considerate husband who serves her breakfast in bed.
When love begins to sicken and decay,
It useth an enforced ceremony.
There are no tricks in plain and simple faith. (Julius Caesar, IV, ii)
As a result of her infidelity, Bloom is not only forced to think of Molly but to think of his place in Molly’s bed usurped by that bandy bounder, Blazes Boylan. While such thoughts might impel a man never to return home or to do so only to wreak his revenge on the adulterers, Bloom’s imaginings of Eccles Street are the antagonists to the powerful memory of his proposing to Molly on Howth Head. It is this complex vision of his home, of his palace under siege, that sustains him on his journey throughout the day and inspires him not to confront Molly with accusations that night -- but instead, to order her to prepare for him a breakfast of eggs, tea, Findon haddy and buttered toast for the next morning. Without Molly’s adulterous prodding, Bloom would have had a day much like any other. That is, he would still have been far from home.
Note: All references are to Hans Walter Gabler, ed. Ulysses. New York: Random House, 1986.
