Molly Bloom, the cuckolding wife of Leopold Bloom (the star of the book) appears only at the very beginning of the book, cooking breakfast, and then her stupendous inner monologue which ends the book. And yet – Leopold is so obsessed with her, so worried about her infidelities, as he journeys throughout Dublin – that you can feel her presence throughout the book. And you, as a reader, make judgments about her. At least I did. You spend the entire book with worried Mr. Bloom, who feels impotent, scared, intimidated by her sexuality … and she starts to grow, in your mind, into this monster woman.
But then when she actually appears … and you actually get to get into HER brain … you must give up those judgments.
There is never only one side to things.
Joyce blatantly stole a lot of Nora’s expressions, her salty no-nonsense humor, her passionate sexuality, her earthiness (Molly gets her period, during the 60 page monologue, etc. And the final 2 pages, with its interspersed “yes yes yes” – as she reminisces about a romantic and erotic moment with Leopold – in the rhododendrons – lets you know, in no uncertain terms, that she’s masturbating.) There’s a lot of that going on in her monologue – after all of the intellectualizing, after all of the talk talk talk … suddenly there we are, with the feared female, in the dark … and all Joyce does is show us her humanity. He probably would scorn that tepid way of describing it … He doesn’t show us her humanity. That’s not right.
I’m not sure how to describe it. Let’s just say – from MY experience reading the book – when Molly Bloom finally shows up, she was NOTHING like I had imagined.
It would be like everyone warning you that “so and so is a bitch” – and when you meet her, and she’s sweet and kind, and funny – you have to re-adjust yourself. You have to give up the expectations everyone has placed on you …
Apparently, when Nora wrote James letters in the very few times they were ever separated, she didn’t use punctuation. Everything was a run-on sentence.
And so, for 60 pages, while you are inside Molly’s head, there are no commas, no periods, no nothing.
After Joyce died, Nora continued to be pestered about him, and a reporter once asked her if she was actually Molly Bloom from Ulysses.
Nora replied, “I’m not — she was much fatter.”
A lot of readers (myself included) have actually been quite surprised at Nora’s letters to Jim. They make the “Penelope” episode seem much less original and radical than it did before the publication of the letters, insofar as Nora wrote very much like the style of that episode, even without punctuation.