Joyce's ‘Saucebox’

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Notes

 1. Eggers, ‘Darling Milly Bloom’, 386.

 2. Scott, Joyce and Feminism , 165–68.

 3. Groce, ‘“Shes Restless Knowing Shes Pretty”’, 26.

 4. Shloss, ‘Milly, Molly, and the Mullingar Photo Shop’, 49.

 5. Shloss, Lucia Joyce, 75.

 6. Ben-Merre, ‘Bloom and Milly’, 442.

 7. Ford, ‘Why is Milly in Mullingar?’, 447.

 8. See Deming, James Joyce , 191–93.

 9. Joyce, Ulysses , 6.87. All subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text.

10. Boyle, ‘Penelope’, 418.

11. Scott, Joyce and Feminism, 166.

12. Steinberg, ‘A Book with Molly in It’, 58.

13. Scott, Joyce and Feminism, 167.

14. Ford, ‘Why is Milly in Mullingar?’, 447.

15. Eggers, ‘Darling Milly Bloom’, 392.

16. Eggers, ‘Darling Milly Bloom’, 391.

17. Ford, ‘Why is Milly in Mullingar?’, 438.

18. Eggers, ‘Darling Milly Bloom’, 391.

19. Groce, ‘“Shes Restless Knowing Shes Pretty”’, 24.

20. Critics often note that readings of Molly as she appears in ‘Penelope’ are numerous and varied. Father Robert Boyle, SJ, explains, for example, after a sustained character analysis of Molly in ‘Penelope’ that ‘I am not settling down in these opinions. Molly is a mystery, as is reality, and I anticipate that in ten years, if I should still be around and compos, she may look quite different to me. From my first view of her, she has been fascinating, and she still is, and, I anticipate, will always be—a woman of infinite variety’ (Boyle, ‘Penelope’, 432). Similarly, Michael Patrick Gillespie asserts that ‘“Penelope” recapitulates for us the central experience of Ulysses. Like all paraphrases, however, it extends rather than recreates initial impressions.’ Gillespie proceeds to explain that ‘the ambiguity of Molly's final affirmation rejects closure and invites us to begin reading again, aware that the provisionality of subsequent texts will enhance rather than undercut the force of the aesthetic experience’ (Gillespie, Reading the Book of Himself , 198–99). Scott also addresses the multiplicity of Molly's identity. Scott states in her chapter on Molly that ‘in this chapter, Molly will be allowed the full scope of the ambiguity and contradictory nature that has been detected in her. She will be considered, not just as the extremes of realistic individual and archetypal goddess, but also as conglomerate spokeswoman, a middle ground between the two’ (Scott, Joyce and Feminism, 161–62). David Hayman also asserts the importance of these numerous and varied interpretations of Molly when he explains that ‘deprived of ready answers and confused by his choices, [the reader] is apt to accept only one or two of the many readings of Molly's character and role and overlook or misread the others … Unfortunately, this will not do if we are to understand the book to which Molly provides the final yes’ (Hayman, ‘The Empirical Molly’, 103).

21. Molly, for example, begins her narrative by complaining that she is a burdened wife: ‘Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs’ (U 18.608). Yet she also states later in her narrative that Stephen ‘could do his writing and studies at the table in there for all the scribbling he does at it and if he wants to read in the morning like me as [Bloom is] making the breakfast for 1 he can make it for 2’ (U 18.641). Molly is annoyed with Bloom ‘doing his highness to make himself interesting for that old faggot Mrs. Riordan’ and at the same time pleased: ‘still I like that in him polite to old women like that’ (U 18.608). Molly alternately admires and despises other women, Bloom, the male body, and Boylan's crudity. She contemplates having an affair with Stephen just as she expresses her revulsion of Boylan; she views women as weak but attractive and better qualified than are men to govern public affairs, and she disdains men precisely as she longs for them. Molly's thoughts thus embrace the truth of Virginia Woolf's comment that ‘the mind, exposed to the ordinary course of life, receives upon its surface a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumberable atoms’ (Woolf, ‘Modern Novels’, 1919, 23).

22. It is worth briefly summarising the differing conceptions that critics have of Molly, first in order to demonstrate the contrast between the wealth of insight we can acquire about Molly's character versus the little we are able to say about Milly's character, and second, because just as part of Molly's identity resides in the perspectives of other characters, so too does her identity reside in the differing perspectives of multiple critics. Most reviewers in the 1920s viewed Molly in ‘Penelope’ as obscene, vulgar, and repulsive. To-day called ‘Penelope’ ‘most disgusting’, for example, and the Sporting Times referred to Molly's representation as ‘a glorification of mere filth’ that was ‘supremely nauseous’ (Deming, James Joyce, 191–93). Since then, opinions of Molly have ranged from perceiving her as an earth-goddess to condemning her as a whore. Hugh Kenner, in Dublin's Joyce, published in 1956, describes Molly as a ‘satanic Mistress’ (Kenner, Dublin's Joyce, 262). Similarly, Darcy O'Brien, in 1968, in The Conscience of James Joyce stated his belief that Molly is ‘a thirty-shilling whore’ (O'Brien, The Conscience of James Joyce , 211.). Erwin R. Steinberg offered perhaps the most biting diatribe against Molly when he stated that ‘[s]he [Molly] is completely egocentric, and, concomitantly, snobbish and self-confident. She is also sensual. And she is ignorant, inconsistent, and superficial … Thus Molly would seem to have many of what are considered the female vices and few of the female virtues’ (Steinberg, ‘A Book with Molly in It’, 61). Phillip F. Herring responds directly to such diatribes in ‘The Bedsteadfastness of Molly Bloom’. Herring asserts that ‘if we are disgusted with the portraits, we have failed to see the verisimilitude and are thus at a loss to interpret the affirmative note on which the novel ends’ (Herring, ‘The Besteadfastness of Molly Bloom’, 61). Christine Van Boheemen also acknowledges the affirmative tone of ‘Penelope’ in her focus on Joyce's ‘cultural-historic psychodynamic of his transformation of Molly Bloom into a “star,” an image of transcendent and invulnerable physicality’ (Van Boheemen, ‘Molly's Heavenly Body and the Economy of the Sign’, 268). Joseph Heininger, like Van Boheemen, concentrates on Molly's more elusive, positive qualities, asserting that ‘Molly claims a symbolic relation to the natural world. She chooses a symbol which exists prior to and in opposition to the commodity culture of advertising when she identifies herself with a poetic image, “the flower of the mountain”’ (Heininger, ‘Molly Bloom's Ad Language and Goods Behavior’, 169). In addition, while some critics aim to identify Molly as whore, star, flower, or earth goddess, other viewpoints strive to understand Molly from a purely historical perspective. Heininger notes the way in which Molly visualises herself acclimating to an imperialist environment by imagining herself forcing her body into English clothing, and critics like Carol Shloss, Brian W. Shaffer, Susan Bazargan, and Herring in ‘Toward an Historical Molly Bloom’, similarly, focus on Molly from a historical perspective in an effort to understand what it would have been like to actually be Molly Bloom living in Dublin in 1904. (See Shloss, ‘Molly's Resistance to the Union, 1904’, Bazargan, ‘Mapping Gibraltar’, and Shaffer, ‘Negotiating Self and Culture’, in Molly Blooms, 105–18, 119–38, 139–51, respectively. Also note Herring, ‘Toward an Historical Molly Bloom’, 501–21). Other critics such as Elaine Unkeless and Kimberly J. Devlin analyse Molly in terms of her adherence to or derivation from the early twentieth-century's prevailing ideas of acceptable behaviour for women. Unkeless believes that ‘the traits with which Joyce endows Molly stem from conventional notions of the way a woman acts’ (Unkeless, ‘The Conventional Molly Bloom’, 150). Devlin also agrees that ‘Molly often attempts to conform herself to cultural images of femininity’, but also notes that ‘she often consciously dons various masks’ (Devlin, ‘Pretending in “Penelope”’, 83–99). Some critics focus on the limitations that Molly experiences. Diana E. Henderson, for example, notes that ‘only belatedly does she [Molly] remember her one nonsexual, independent strength: it is, with delicious irony, her singing voice—the voice we, as readers, cannot hear (Henderson, ‘Joyce's Modernist Woman’, 521). Vicki Mahaffey, in contrast, believes that Molly ‘speaks for herself—powerfully, lyrically, sometimes crudely, and without inhibition’ (Mahaffey, ‘Ulysses and the End of Gender’, 165). Like Mahaffey, other critics celebrate Molly's clever nature, wit, or representation of what Herring refers to as the ‘Emancipated Woman’. Hugh Kenner suggests that Molly, in her reluctance to actualise her relationship with Boylan, adroitly decides that she will ‘drain him, therefore, with exercise’ (Kenner, ‘Molly's Masterstroke’, 26), and Richard Pearce believes that ‘most importantly, the male gaze is broken by Molly's monologue’ (Pearce, ‘How Does Molly Bloom Look Through the Male Gaze’, 46). The numerous, varying, complicated, detailed readings of Molly's identity acquired through analysis of ‘Penelope’ exist as a striking contrast to the collection of criticism written about Milly.

23. Butler, ‘Imitation and Gender Subordination’, 1514–15.

24. Butler, ‘Imitation and Gender Subordination’, 1522.

25. Butler, ‘Imitation and Gender Subordination’, 1522.

26. See Boyle, 418; Scott, 166, 167; Steinberg, 58; Ford, 447; and Eggers, 392.

27. Kimberly J. Devlin has been particularly effective at noting the numerous identities that Molly performs. She states: A weaver and unweaver of identity itself, Molly dons multiple recognizable masks of womanliness, appropriating femininity in many familiar figurations. She stages herself as Venus in Furs, the indignant and protective spouse, the jealous domestic detective, the professional singer, the professional seductress or femme fatale, the teenage flirt, the teenage naif, the unrepentant adulteress, the guilt-ridden adulteress, the narcissistic child, the exasperated mother, the pining romantic, the cynical scold, the female seer/fortuneteller, the frustrated housewife, the female confidante and adviser, the female misogynist, et cetera, et cetera. (p. 81)

28. Butler, 1514–17.

29. Devlin, 81–82.

30. As a result of Molly's multitudinous, fluctuating thoughts, critics vary in their discussions of Molly's effectiveness as any number of the identities that Devlin lists. Critics both celebrate and deplore Molly, and they label her as every identity ranging from ‘satanic mistress’ to ‘whore’, ‘star’ to ‘flower of the mountain’ to ‘earth goddess’, ‘conventional’ to ‘emancipated woman’. It is my belief that Molly enacts all of these identities. I believe that at times in ‘Penelope’ Molly appears to be vulgar while at other times Molly exhibits great depth and warmth. At certain points in the chapter Molly appears to be a loving wife, and at other points she seems to be a full-fledged adulterer.

31. Shloss, Lucia Joyce , 424–25.

32. See Shloss, Lucia Joyce; Eide, Ethical Joyce ; and Catherine Driscoll's dissertation ‘New Free Women’. Also note pages 73–77 of Shloss's biography, referred to in the introduction of this article, where Shloss discusses the character of Milly in Ulysses.

33. Eide, 143.

34. Shloss writes: ‘… amid all the turmoil about what happened to her in later life, an important part of Lucia's story got lost. People tended to forget that she, too, had been an artist, a dancer, who worked with fervor and vision comparable to Joyce's own. From a young age, she had shown a marked aptitude for sport, for physical culture, for dance …’ (Shloss, Lucia Joyce, 5).

35. Shloss, Lucia Joyce, 73.

36. Shloss, Lucia Joyce, 84.

37. Shloss, Lucia Joyce, 42.

38. Driscoll, Girls , 7.

39. Driscoll, Girls, 56.

40. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 252–53.

41. Shloss, Lucia Joyce, 62.