Molly Bloom's Soliloquy

Molly Bloom is a fictional character in the 1922 novel ''Ulysses'' by James Joyce. The wife of main character Leopold Bloom, she roughly corresponds to Penelope in the ''Odyssey''. The major difference between Molly and Penelope is that while Penelope is eternally faithful, Molly is not. Molly is having an affair with Hugh 'Blazes' Boylan. Molly, whose given name is Marion, was born in Gibraltar on 8 September 1870, the daughter of Major Tweedy, an Irish military officer, and Lunita Laredo, a Gibraltarian of Spanish descent. Molly and Leopold were married on 8 October 1888. She is the mother of Milly Bloom, who, at the age of 15, has left home to study photography. She is also the mother of Rudy Bloom, who died at the age of 11 days. In Dublin, Molly is an opera singer of some renown.

The final chapter of ''Ulysses'', often called " Molly Bloom's Soliloquy", is a long and almost entirely unpunctuated passage comprising her thoughts as she lies in bed next to Leopold.

Soliloquy

Ms Molly Bloom's soliloquy is the eighteenth and final "episode" of ''Ulysses'', in which the thoughts of Molly Bloom are presented in contrast to those of the previous narrators, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. Molly's physicality is often contrasted with the intellectualism of the male characters, Stephen Dedalus in particular.

Joyce's novel presented the action with numbered "episodes" rather than named chapters. Most critics since Stuart Gilbert, in his ''James Joyce's Ulysses'', have named the episodes and they are often called chapters. The final chapter is referred to as "Penelope", after Molly's mythical counterpart.

In the course of the monologue, Molly accepts Leopold into her bed, frets about his health, and then reminisces about their first meeting and about when she knew she was in love with him. The final words of Molly's reverie, and the final words of the book, are:

Joyce noted in a 1921 letter to Frank Budgen that "The last word (human, all too human) is left to Penelope." The episode both begins and ends with "yes", a word that Joyce described as "the female word" and that he said indicated "acquiescence, self-abandon, relaxation, the end of all resistance." This last, clear "yes" stands in sharp contrast to her unintelligible first spoken line in the fourth chapter of the novel.

Molly's soliloquy consists of eight enormous "sentences", The concluding period following the final words of her reverie is one of only two punctuation marks in the chapter, the periods at the end of the fourth and eighth "sentences". When written this episode contained the longest "sentence" in English literature, 4,391 words expressed by Molly Bloom (it was surpassed in 2001 by Jonathan Coe's '' The Rotters' Club'').

Sources

Joyce modelled the character upon his wife, Nora Barnacle; indeed, the day upon which the novel is set—16 June 1904, now called Bloomsday—is that of their first date. Nora Barnacle's letters also almost entirely lacked capitalization or punctuation; Anthony Burgess said that "sometimes it is hard to distinguish between a chunk of one of Nora's letters and a chunk of Molly's final monologue". Some research also points to another possible model for Molly in Amalia Popper, one of Joyce's students to whom he taught English while living in Trieste. Amalia Popper was the daughter of a Jewish businessman named Leopoldo Popper, who had worked for a European freight forwarding company (Adolf Blum & Popper) founded in 1875 in its headquarters in Hamburg by Adolf Blum, after whom Leopold Bloom was named. In the (now published) manuscript ''Giacomo Joyce'' are images and themes Joyce used in ''Ulysses'' and ''A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man''.

Cultural references

Literature

* J. M. Coetzee's novel ''Elizabeth Costello'' portrays the fictional writer Costello as the author of a fictional novel, ''The House on Eccles Street'', which is written from Molly Bloom's point of view.
* Susan Turlish's play ''Lafferty's Wake'' features the character Molly Greaney quoting from Molly's monologue.
* Nobel laureate Mo Yan concludes ''The Republic of Wine'' with what could be seen as an homage to Molly's soliloquy.

Music

*Ron McFarland has written a 2-character comic " micro-opera", ''The Audition of Molly Bloom'' (1985), which culminates with the soliloquy.
* Kate Bush's song "The Sensual World" echoes Molly Bloom's soliloquy. Bush's 2011 album '' Director's Cut'' includes a newer version of the track ("Flower of the Mountain") with new vocals that use the original Joyce text.
* Amber produced a dance song entitled "Yes!".
* "Yes I Said Yes I Will Yes" is the title of a track by Bristol-based jazz quartet Get the Blessing, appearing on their album ''Bugs in Amber''.
* Tom Paxton's album ''6'' contains a song titled "Molly Bloom".
* The video of "Endless Art" by A House spells out part of the soliloquy letter by letter.

Film and television

* The soliloquy is featured in a Rodney Dangerfield movie, ''Back to School'', wherein it is read aloud to a college English class by Dr. Diane Turner (played by Sally Kellerman).
* Stephen Colbert's parody of Donald Trump's announcement for his presidential candidacy, entitled "Announcing: an Announcement", recites part of the soliloquy in an otherwise random series of statements.
* The 2017 film ''Molly's Game'' contains a character who believes Molly Bloom, the film's poker hostess, is Irish. Molly says, "Okay, Douglas. Focus up. Yes, there's a book by James Joyce called ''Ulysses'' and there's a character named Molly Bloom and that is why you think I'm Irish but now it's time to move past that."

Art

* A bronze sculpture of Molly Bloom stands at the Alameda Gardens in Gibraltar. This running figure was commissioned from Jon Searle to celebrate the bicentenary of the ''Gibraltar Chronicle'' in 2001.

Other

The character Ralph Spoilsport recites the end of the soliloquy, with erratic variations in gender pronouns, as the last lines of the Firesign Theatre's album '' How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at All''.

References

Further reading

''The Chronicle of Leopold and Molly Bloom: Ulysses as Narrative''
full preview on Google Books
* Blamires, Harry (1988). ''The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses (Revised Edition Keyed to the Corrected Text)''. London: Routledge. .
* Joyce, James (1992). ''Ulysses: The 1934 Text, as Corrected and Reset in 1961''. New York: The Modern Library. .

External links

Entire text of Molly Bloom's Soliloquy
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Bloom, Molly
Characters in novels of the 20th century
Female characters in literature
Fictional Irish people
Literary characters introduced in 1918
Monologues
Ulysses (novel) characters