Modern Wife

Richard Ellmann’s 1959 biography claimed readers were “still learning how to be Joyce’s contemporaries.” Today, Molly Bloom is proof of that.

She was married to Modernism’s cucked Odysseus. On Howth Head, before infidelity and a dead infant son and the very fact of marriage came between them, she said yes:

yes he said I was a flower of the mountains yes so we are flowers all a woman’s body yes that was one true thing he said in his life

and yes I said I will Yes.

Molly Bloom repeats the three-letter refrain breathlessly, unpunctuated, ninety-one times, leaving eminent literary scholars to debate in earnest whether she was approaching orgasm or mentally renewing her vows. Kate Bush wrote a great album in her voice. “Last word of Ulysses” is a popular New York Times crossword clue. Among the mountain’s rhododendrons, where she accepted his proposal and gave him head, a sign encouraging hikers to move gently makes its simple plea: Do not disturb the Blooms.

Flaubert’s women abused their husbands’ money, Lawrence’s their fidelity—but Joyce’s elusive Molly wields a peculiar psychosexual androgyny, the girlish whims of her smut novels and the virile authority of a man cheating in plain sight. There is no pub crawl, no geocaches leading Joycean nerds across Dublin a century after the fact, without Molly. She is the main event, the inciting incident and the narrative question: how does a man spend the day he suspects his wife is getting “fucked yes and damn well fucked too”?

Get drunk, certainly. Buy a bar of lemon soap. Write a letter. Masturbate to a young girl sunbathing in the Irish June. Pull out of a bar fight, “limp as a wet rag,” and never confront his wife’s lover.

“He is a beautiful writer, but does he have to break all the windows?” Virginia Woolf remarked. Carl Jung called Ulysses “an unalterably boring book…chaotic nonsense…a positively brilliant and hellish monster-birth,” and one of “those endless writings of the insane.” Best of all: “If worms were gifted with literary powers they would write with the sympathetic nervous system for lack of a brain.” It is a psychoanalyst’s take, prognostic and absolute, but it gets one thing right: Molly indeed soliloquizes with the sympathetic nervous system, but not necessarily for lack of a brain. There is no literary wife as enduring, as poked and prodded, as impossible as Molly. The sybil and the idiot girl, inconsolable adulteress and doting wife. Her climactic monologue invokes the rituals of serving and satiating, a memory of the before-time, when she belonged to him as much as he did to her; when she was the taken and he the taker. “Yes,” she begins, “because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed.” Yes, because—at last—he has demanded a conventional woman, a real man’s wife out of her.

In the hallucinatory psychodrama of “Circe,” Bloom is diagnosed as “a finished example of the new womanly man.” The epithet sets him apart from the men of Dublin’s Nighttown, a blundering outlier from the world of gigantism and bravado, a failure among philandering conquerors—like the one in his home, in his bed, sleeping with his wife. His traits of intuition, empathy, and passivity suggest a secondary embedded odyssey in a city of rigid sexual polarity. He contemplates the psychosomatic symptoms of womanhood with remarkable acuity and care. With his analog menstrual pains, receptive sensitivity to the material world, slight build, and prolonged concern with Mina Purefoy’s excruciating three-day labor, Bloom is no man among men. In “Sirens,” noticing the gap in a woman’s singing voice, that empty space between alto and soprano notes, Bloom thinks, “Fill me. I’m warm, dark, open.”

When men gather in flocks, he reflects, there is always “The wren, the wren, / King of all birds.” Boylan is the “conquering hero” of his romantic and social pursuits; Bloom, walking alone outside the bar, is the “unconquered hero,” estranged object of the passive adjectival form. In Kiernan’s pub, the Citizen is a picture of muscular Christianity, the “broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed…deepvoiced barekneed brawnyhanded hairylegged…sinewyarmed hero.” Even the pureblooded patriotism of his name signifies something hard and innate in his character. But Bloom is a joke among men. He is hit with a pain he deems “Monthly or effect of the other. Brainfogfag.” His periodic ailment is the nonspecific pain of a woman’s hysteria diagnosis, a mystery sickness that makes him “Bit light in the head,” or just: “That tired feeling.” Manly men call it hermaphroditism. “One of those mixed middlings he is,” one remarks, “lying up once a month.” “Greeker than the Greeks,” Buck Mulligan calls him.

The men compete, lock horns, grope in the dark, exile the unmanly. Women exist at a distance, or not at all. Remote, ornamental, consumed by hungry eyes in fraternal pubs, in bustling newsrooms and on endless streets. The epic’s most potent encounters with women happen when Bloom is, like them, pushed out of the insular arena of men. He is alone by the sea at Sandymount Strand when he encounters Gerty in “Nausicaa,” who is, rather than a sitting duck, an eager object who returns his gaze and copies his behavior. The encounter mirrors Stephen Dedalus’ epiphanic brush with an anonymous seductress in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the synchrony of privacy and scopophilic exhibitionism, sexual-religious prudery and depravity, virginity and lust. The scenes are stylistically overwrought and sentimental, taking on the tones of pulp-fiction erotica: “Heavenly God!” Stephen cries “in an outburst of profane joy,” singing blasphemy’s praises. Bloom transposes onto the slow nightfall the persona of the Blessed Virgin, “who is in her pure radiance a beacon ever to the storm-tossed heart of man, Mary, star of the sea.” These lovestruck vignettes parody themselves, exuding the reverie of the “unliterary”: Bloom’s pocket romance novel, Victorian penny magazines, allusions to the Virgin Mary, or Christ dying on the cross for these very sins, fireworks shooting across the sky mid-climax. In “Nausicaa,” Gerty dreams of becoming someone’s “dear little wifey,” possessed and kept. The poor romantic idiot doesn’t realize she shares an orgasm with a man who is not, by any measure, the princely “man among men” of her fantasy.

He is an unlikely hero for any odyssey, especially one whose Homeric analog is a lionized war hero. But there are subtle echoes. In Book 8 of Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus hears a song of his achievements, and is reduced to tears by the poeticism of the lyrics, perhaps, or by the compulsory reliving of his own life:

But the heart of Odysseus melted, and the tear wet his cheeks beneath the eyelids. And as a woman throws herself wailing about her dear lord…even so pitifully fell the tears beneath the brows of Odysseus.

The epic hero can’t make sense of his weeping without the language of the wailing woman, hysterical with grief. So Bloom can’t make sense of his failures as a man—his dead son, a failure to produce a male heir; his wife’s blatant adultery, a failure to act as a husband—without imagining himself as a woman.

Molly likewise departs from her Homeric counterpart. She is the anti-Penelope: unfaithful, insufficiently adoring, immodest, unwomanly in the way of a “self-authored” woman. She toys with the idea of wreckage, with man-hating and rage:

as for them saying theres no God I wouldn’t give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning why don't they go and create something I often asked him atheists or whatever they call themselves…theyre afraid to go to hell on account of their bad conscience ah yes I know them well

they can go on and get whatever they like from anything at all with a skirt on it and were not to ask any questions but they want to know where are you going I could feel him coming along skulking after me…anything for an excuse to put his hand near me

its all his own fault if I am an adulteress

he was very handsome at that time…though he was too beautiful for a man

All this after a day spent bolted to the marital bed with another man, a state Christine Van Boheemen deemed “hypostatic femininity.” The Joycean mise en abyme, Molly might be a triumphant show of female self-authorship or a reductive lampoon of the bad wife. For some, she is artless, mindless, out of control; another misogynistic idea of a woman, another attempt at lécriture féminine by a man. For others, Molly is embodied, dispossessed, a revelation of contradictions, all ecstasy and remorse.

What is the word known to all men? If it is love, as the Gabler edition of Ulysses plainly states, then perhaps the word known to all women is that simple, potent syllable: yes. The word that receives and acquiesces. When Bloom re-enters his bedroom in the final episode, he is entering a new marriage, one we are poised to assume is changed beyond repair. But Molly knows she never lost him. There is a couplet by the Irish poet Eavan Boland that gets stuck in my head from time to time: I am your wife. / We love each other still.

Jennifer Steyner as Molly Bloom in 2010

Read this way, Molly is not so unlike the Odyssean wife: as Penelope weaves, Molly sees her life done and undone. The Joycean woman and her Homeric analog: doing their day’s work, bedded and domestic, while far away their husbands complete the epic arc.

Though Molly’s time is compressed, her own odyssey occurs as she lies awake in the early morning hours with her husband’s feet on the pillow beside her head, his request for breakfast in bed looming over the coming day. When she complies, she will assume the domestic role. If indeed we are, as Richard Ellmann posits in his 1959 biography, “still learning how to be Joyce’s contemporaries,” then there are lessons yet to be learned from Ulysses in more than style. The dominant gender pyschology to emerge from postmodern theory is that of social constructionism: by approaching the idea of gender as a socialized phenomenon rather than a consequence of biology, we are not so much products of an innate disposition to being man or woman, but rather products of social coaxing into the costume of one thing or the other. We cannot merely be, so we inhabit. Joycean masculinity, then, is not the automatic instinct for material achievement, shows of strength, or sexual conquest; it is a portrait of men who adapted to suit their type, and Bloom is the anythingarian who failed to adapt. But what does it mean to be the anythingarian’s wife?

She “hates sewing” and desires phallic conquests like firing a pistol and “being a man and [getting] up on a lovely woman.” Freud would tell us it’s penis envy, this petulant reaction to leaving the “phallus stage” of childhood and entering the “latency stage” of female adulthood. “I wished I was [a man] myself for a change just to try with that thing they have swelling up on you so hard and at the same time so soft,” she says. In the next breath, however, she is right back in the gender paradox, exalting the lush, romantic seduction of her features—a flower in her hair, Moorish eyes, plump breasts, small body. It is an intricate sequence of a woman gendering and de-gendering herself: in one moment she revels in the sexual glory of the feminine, to the extent that she feels a vain and masturbatory attraction to it; in the next, she envisions herself in a male body, equally tempted by the virility of her sexual opposite. Molly detests and reveres womankind, loving and debasing herself. Considering one of her husband's erotic postcards, she remarks, “Im a little like that dirty bitch in that Spanish photo he has,” a figure described in “Ithaca” as “buccal coition between nude senorita (rere presentation, superior position) and nude torero (fore presentation, inferior position).” The narrator of “Ithaca” describes another of Bloom’s postcards as depicting “anal violation by male religious (fully clothed, eyes abject) of female religious (partly clothed, eyes direct).” The feminine is pornographic, even in its moments of self-authorship and self-reverence, when Molly puts herself inside these postcards. The woman is split down the middle: virgin or whore, mother-wife or spinster-hag, smut or romance.

“Penelope” resists grammar and punctuation in favor of the stream-of-consciousness monologue, hinting at a kind of female illiteracy that puts feeling over fact. Van Boheemen labels this style “the language of the flow,” flow here suggesting a womanly syntax reminiscent of menstruation, orgasm, changing moods, the phases of the moon. The scarcity of punctuation partitions the episode into eight expansive run-on sentences, which employ the allegorical figure 8 as “the symbol of Mary, Mother of God, as well as the lemniscate denoting infinity.” The syntactical flow contributes to the sexual reading of her episode as ending, with the final “yes,” in climax; it also renders the woman uneducated and structureless, Jung’s sympathetic nervous system. Of course, much of the book could be—and has been—called formally nonsensical, absurd, incoherent. The case must be made that Molly and Bloom yearn equally for purer forms of expression. Molly attributes her initial attraction to Bloom to that androgynous virtue: “that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is.” The revelation comes only moments after Molly derides all mankind and the ascribed roles of the sexes, declaring that “they dont know what it is to be a woman and a mother how could they.” She makes a distinction between her husband and the general character of men—he doesn’t share their naivety, their carelessness, the selfish way their bodies were made for pleasure and hers for pain. To be a woman, Molly says, is to be caught between the rigid poles of feminine and masculine expression; and who knows that contradiction better than Bloom. Neither will quite fall into place. The woman gets the last word, a word of obedience and pleasure. Yes.