Marion (Molly) Bloom | |
---|---|
Ulysses character | |
![]() Molly Bloom's statue in her fictional home in Gibraltar | |
Created by | James Joyce |
In-universe information | |
Alias | Marion Tweedy |
Nickname | Molly |
Occupation | Singer |
Family | Major Tweedy (father) Lunita Laredo (mother) |
Spouse | Leopold Bloom (m. 1888) |
Children | Millicent (Milly) Bloom (b. 1889) Rudolph (Rudy) Bloom (b. 1893 – d. 1894) |
Religion | Roman Catholic |
Nationality | British |
Birthplace | Gibraltar |
Birth date | 8 September 1870 |
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 Bloom.
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:
I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish Wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first 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 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" [1] and that he said indicated "acquiescence, self-abandon, relaxation, the end of all resistance." [2] 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 ). [3]
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". [4] 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 .
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 .
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century. Joyce's novel Ulysses (1922) is a landmark in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, particularly stream of consciousness. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, letters, and occasional journalism.
Ulysses is a modernist novel by the Irish writer James Joyce. Parts of it were first serialized in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and the entire work was published in Paris by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, Joyce's fortieth birthday. It is considered one of the most important works of modernist literature and has been called "a demonstration and summation of the entire movement." According to the writer Declan Kiberd, "before Joyce, no writer of fiction had so foregrounded the process of thinking."
In literary criticism, stream of consciousness is a narrative mode or method that attempts "to depict the multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind" of a narrator.
Leopold Bloom is the fictional protagonist and hero of James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses. His peregrinations and encounters in Dublin on 16 June 1904 mirror, on a more mundane and intimate scale, those of Ulysses/Odysseus in Homer's epic poem: The Odyssey.
Bloomsday is a commemoration and celebration of the life of Irish writer James Joyce, observed annually in Dublin and elsewhere on 16 June, the day his 1922 novel Ulysses takes place on a Thursday in 1904, the date of his first sexual encounter with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle, and named after its protagonist Leopold Bloom.
The British Museum is Falling Down (1965) is a comic novel by British author David Lodge about a 25-year-old poverty-stricken student of English literature who, rather than work on his thesis in the reading room of the British Museum, is distracted time and again from his work and who gets into trouble instead.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the first novel of Irish writer James Joyce, published in 1916. A Künstlerroman written in a modernist style, it traces the religious and intellectual awakening of young Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's fictional alter ego, whose surname alludes to Daedalus, Greek mythology's consummate craftsman. Stephen questions and rebels against the Catholic and Irish conventions under which he has grown, culminating in his self-exile from Ireland to Europe. The work uses techniques that Joyce developed more fully in Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939).
Stephen Dedalus is James Joyce's literary alter ego, appearing as the protagonist and antihero of his first, semi-autobiographic novel of artistic existence, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and as a major character in his 1922 novel Ulysses. Stephen mirrors many facets of Joyce's own life and personality. Joyce was a talented singer, for example, and in Ulysses Leopold Bloom notes the excellence of Stephen's tenor voice after hearing him sing Johannes Jeep's song "Von der Sirenen Listigkeit".
Nora Barnacle was the muse and wife of Irish author James Joyce. Barnacle and Joyce had their first romantic outing in 1904 on a date celebrated worldwide as "Bloomsday" after his modernist novel Ulysses. Barnacle did not, however, enjoy the novel. Their sexually explicit letters have aroused much curiosity, especially as Joyce normally disapproved of coarse language, and they fetch high prices at auction. In 2004, an erotic letter from Joyce to Barnacle sold at Sotheby's for £240,800.
Penelope is the faithful wife of Odysseus in Homer's epic poem Odyssey.
Davy Byrne's pub is a public house located at 21 Duke Street, Dublin. It was made famous by its appearance in Chapter 8 ('Lestrygonians') of James Joyce's 1922 modernist novel Ulysses, set on Thursday 16 June 1904. The main character, advertising canvasser Leopold Bloom, stops at just before 2 pm for a gorgonzola cheese sandwich with mustard and a glass of burgundy while wandering through Dublin.
The James Joyce Centre is a museum and cultural centre in Dublin, Ireland, dedicated to promoting an understanding of the life and works of James Joyce. It opened to the public in June 1996.
Malachi Roland St. John "Buck" Mulligan is a fictional character in James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses. He appears most prominently in episode 1 (Telemachus), and is the subject of the novel's famous first sentence: "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed."
Gerald Davis was one of Ireland's leading semi-abstract artists. He was also an art gallery owner, critic, and Joycean scholar. He was a prominent member of the Jewish community in Ireland. He wrote for Irish national newspapers and broadcast on radio and television, where he reported on the arts and Irish Jewish life.
Ulysses is a 1967 drama film based on James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses. It concerns the meeting of two Irishmen, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, in 1904 Dublin.
Bloom is a 2003 Irish film written and directed by Sean Walsh, based on the 1922 novel Ulysses by James Joyce. The film premiered at the 2003 Taormina Film Festival. Angeline Ball won the award for "Best Actress in a Film" at the Irish Film and Television Awards. The soundtrack was written and produced by David Kahne.
The Ulysses broadcast occurred on Bloomsday 1982 when the Irish state broadcaster, RTÉ Radio, transmitted an uninterrupted 30-hour dramatised radio performance, by 33 actors of the RTÉ Players, of the entire text of James Joyce's epic 1922 novel, Ulysses, to commemorate the centenary of the author's birth. The broadcast was carried by live relay internationally and won a Jacob's Broadcasting Award in recognition of its achievement.
7 Eccles Street was a row house in Dublin, Ireland. It was the home of Leopold Bloom, protagonist of the novel Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce. The house was demolished in 1967, and the site is now occupied by the Mater Private Hospital.
Amalia Popper was the first Italian translator of James Joyce's works and author of his first biography, published as an introduction to his translation of Dubliners, published in 1935 in Trieste under the title "Araby".
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