REPORT ON JAMES JOYCE'S ULYSSES

EPISODE 18--PENELOPE (738-783)

The final episode of Ulysses takes place in the early hours of Friday, June 17, and takes the form of a monologue uttered by Molly Bloom. The structure of the episode is intensely stream-of-consciousness, lacking punctuation and traditional sentence structure. We're taken inside the consciousness of Molly, and to do so is "to plunge into a flowing river. If we have hitherto been exploring the waste land, here are the refreshing, life-giving waters that alone can renew it" (Blamires 608).

The episode begins with the word "Yes," which resonates throughout Molly's soliloquy and ends the episode as well in a stream of affirmation of life and human love. The entire episode takes place in bed, except for a succession of moments upon the chamber-pot as Molly attends to her menstrual needs and urinates (thereby continuing the theme of herself as symbolic of the female "stream" working for renewal and regeneration of life). Leopold has asked Molly to bring him his breakfast in bed the following morning, and this leads to a series of reflections and reminiscences concerning him. She surmises that he must have ejaculated somewhere: "Im sure by his appetite anyway love its not or hed be off his feed thinking of her" (Joyce 738).

Molly's thoughts turn to a servant-girl, Mary Driscoll, with whom Leopold apparently once had a flirtation, and then to her own connection with Blazes Boylan. She recalls walking between the two men, singing the duet she and Boylan had performed earlier in the evening. Her thoughts turn to matters of sex from there, and then to a confession she once made to a priest. She scoffs at the priest's verbal prudishness and then fantasizes a bit about an imagined sexual liaison with him. Her thoughts segue into a recollection of her afternoon tryst with Boylan. Though she admires the size of his penis-- "no I never in all my life felt anyone had one the size of that to make you feel full up" (Joyce 742)-- she concludes that "Poldy has more spunk in him yes" (Joyce 742).

Molly recalls an old argument over politics and religion she and Poldy once had, and this leads to another succession of reminiscences about her early married days with him. She thinks to herself that while women may be bad enough, men are actually much worse: "Id rather die 20 times over than marry another of their sex of course hed never find another woman like me to put up with him the way I do" (Joyce 744). This leads Molly to recall her first meeting with Boylan, which inevitably sets in motion another series of memories of her days of courtship with Leopold. She then becomes a bit self-conscious about her physicality, thinking "my belly is a bit too big Ill have to knock off the stout at dinner" (Joyce 75).

These reflections about her own body lead Molly to an aesthetic appreciation of her own sex, thinking "the woman is beauty of course" (Joyce 753). She recalls her days of nursing her daughter Milly, and then again her orgasmic afternoon with Boylan. A train whistle sounds, and Molly begins to remember her old days in Gibraltar, before moving to Dublin. She thinks of an old flame, Lieutenant Mulvey, and of their courtship and of a sexual encounter with him. She also remembers her beauty as a young girl and uses the cover of the passing train-whistle to break wind.

Molly's thoughts move from Bloom's late hour of arrival home to her loneliness for Milly, away learning the trade of photography. She notices that her monthly period has arrived, and with it substantial physical discomfort. She hopes that it won't keep her from intimacy with Boylan the following Monday (Joyce 769). She moves to the chamber pot, where she urinates as the menstrual blood flows from her (Joyce 769). Molly considers Leopold's sleeping posture (with his feet at her head), and as George's Church clock strikes the hour, she feels annoyed again with Leopold's late arrival home (Joyce 772).

Molly's ensuing thoughts of the Glencree Dinner put her in mind of Stephen Dedalus; she thinks "he was on the cards this morning" (Joyce 774) and begins to fantasize about an affair with the young poet. She resolves to throw the cards again the following morning, and soon her thoughts turn again to Boylan, and then as ever back to Bloom. She thinks of the contrast between men and women and their habits, and then sadly of her infant son Rudy's death a decade earlier (Joyce 778). She resolves to give Leopold one more chance at establishing marital relations with her, and thinks that if he doesn't respond, she'll let him know just to what extent he is a cuckold. Molly then recalls her period in annoyance and tries to fall asleep. As her mind continues to drift, she thinks of her love for flowers-- "Id love to have this whole place swimming in roses God of heaven theres nothing like nature" (Joyce 781)-- and this begins the final rush of thoughts which involve her vivid recollection of her first sexual encounter with Leopold, of the passion and affirmation of it. She recalls, "I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes" (Joyce 783).

In the "Penelope" episode of The Odyssey, Odysseus returns home to Ithaca and his wife Penelope in the guise of "a huddled mass of rags" (Fagles 458). Though her nursemaid tells Penelope of Odysseus' identity, she at first refuses to believe it and sets up a test for the stranger in which she instructs her maid to move Odysseus' bed out of their bedchamber for him. Odysseus responds, "Woman, your words--they cut me to the core! Who could move my bed?" (Fagles 461) and relates how he built their bed around an olive trunk which rendered it immobile: "That's our secret sign, I tell you, our life story!" (Fagles 462). Penelope realizes that the stranger is indeed her husband, and the two retire united to their chamber, Odysseus declaring, "come, let's go to bed, dear woman--at long last delight in sleep, delight in each other, come!" (Fagles 463).

At the end of Joyce's "Penelope" episode, we see Molly Bloom preparing a test for Leopold as she prepares to give him one more chance for marital reparation: "Ill just give him one more chance Ill get up early in the morning . . . Ill put on my best shift and drawers let him have a good eyeful out of that to make his micky stand for him" (Joyce 780). In the same sense that Penelope makes Odysseus pass a test of recognition in homecoming, so Molly, in her own bed, which parallels the olive-trunk marriage bed of The Odyssey, prepares to offer Leopold an opportunity for homecoming through a test involving his knowledge of her, of them, of their "life story."

Though there is not the same sense of closure as in The Odyssey, Molly's final uttered affirmation--"yes I said yes I will Yes" (Joyce 783)--reasserts her essential love for Leopold, as well as her own engagement with the natural world, of the essence of creation. Her stream of conscious reverie is analogous to the waters which wash Odysseus home to his own wife and bed.

The household symbol for Molly's monologue is the bed, which represents a Homeric parallel of homecoming as well as the theatre for human procreation, for restoration of life's creative forces through sexual intercourse. Molly's voice is the essence of female creative energy, with its constant recurrent "Yeses" and its streamlike structure as her inner discourse flows from one subject to another, with an emphasis on her love for Leopold and all its implications the point to which it consistently returns. The soliloquy is full of images of nature, of mountains and flowers and rivers and seas. Stuart Gilbert asserts that Molly "is not a degenerate modern playing at a 'return to nature', phallus-worship, the simple life and what not; she is the voice of Nature herself, and judges as the Great Mother, whose function is fertility . . . whose pleasure is creation and the rite precedent" (Gilbert 400).

The episode is full of references to the Virgin Mary, ranging from Mary Driscoll, the Bloom's old houseservant, to Molly's singing of Ave Maria (Joyce 729), to a momentary use of "O Maria Santissima " as expletive. Molly is the conjunction of the two mythic Marys, of the temptress and the maternal, compassionate Mother of God. While her sexuality is undeniable and lush, she is not strictly representative of a Magdalene archetype. She speaks in the tones of a Gaia figure, her voice encompassing rich natural metaphor, and her own wit and quick mind flesh her out as a woman who sees beyond the scope of what men see. Her train of thought is honest, rich, and associative, informing us with unsparing honesty in each of her smallest personal rituals and bodily functions. Her menstruation and urination reinforce the metaphor of her voice as streamlike, of the cyclical river of consciousness which celebrates the physical, the earthly, and the real.

Blamires, Harry. The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses. London:

Routledge, 1996

Fagles, Robert, trans. The Odyssey. Homer. New York: Penguin, 1996.

Gifford, Don and, Robert J. Seidman. Notes for Joyce: An Annotation of James Joyce's

Ulysses. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974.

Gilbert, Stuart. James Joyce's Ulysses. New York: Vintage, 1955.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York: Vintage International, 1990.