Molly Bloom is a fictional character in the 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, having an affair with Hugh 'Blazes' Boylan after ten years of her celibacy within the marriage. Joyce modelled the character upon his wife Nora Barnacle; indeed, the day upon which the novel is set — June 16 1904, now called Bloomsday — is that of their first date. Critics also point 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. Joyce wrote about his affair with Amalia Popper in the (now published) manuscript Giacomo Joyce, whose images and themes he used in Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Molly, whose given name is Marion, was born in Gibraltar in 1870, the daughter of Major Tweedy and Lunita Laredo. Molly and Leopold were married in 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, unpunctuated chapter of Ulysses, often called "Molly Bloom's Soliloquy", is a long stream of consciousness passage comprising her thoughts as she lies in bed next to Bloom. The writer 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 the fictional Molly Bloom's point of view. Molly Blooms is the name of an Irish pub on the otherside of the border to Gibraltar, in the Spanish town of La Linea.
References
- Blamires, Harry (1988). The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses (Revised Edition Keyed to the Corrected Text). London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-00704-6.
- Joyce, James (1992). Ulysses: The 1934 Text, as Corrected and Reset in 1961. New York: The Modern Library.
