MOLLY BLOOM LOOKING BACK ON THE GARDEN
Critics rarely come to a consensus on the function of Molly Bloom’s narrative meanderings at the end of Ulysses. To some, her character is broadly representative of woman, or of the feminine, as Joyce himself affirmed. This feminine may serve to flesh out and complement, by way of contrast, the masculine psychological scaffolding that secures the initial 17 chapters of the epic. Indeed, Joyce effectually leaves his work in a circuit of infinite self-circling by capping the narrative with Molly’s open-ended, half-somnolent musings, which carry the reader into the morning of June 17th, a morning on which, we might assume, Buck Mulligan will appear at the head of the stairs equipped with lather and a razor. Joyce concludes, by way of Molly’s dreamy meta-narrative, in a manner that shirks the imperatives of time that have directed and aligned his characters on that Dublin summer’s day. His Molly achieves a self-sufficient remoteness, by virtue at least of her gender and state of consciousness, from the earlier masculine quotidian of the novel. Whatever particulars we find to make Molly unique, we can be assured that her role is one of cognitive contrast rendered particularly vibrant by her own self-contradictions. Joyce wrote that the Penelope chapter, in “conception and technique…tried to depict the earth which is prehuman and presumably posthuman” (L I, 180); her physical volubility makes a Gaia of her, an archetype outside of time, outside even of humanity, simultaneously atavistic and proleptic.
In the deepening history of Molly Bloom criticism, we find heterogeneous readings of Molly’s nature, including whether we should conceive of her on the real or the symbolic realm, and whether she represents an admirable femininity or the subversion thereof. Many critics approach Molly’s character and purpose in the text by comparing her to similar women in literature, a less value-laden tack that has resulted in colorful developments in our concept of Ulysses’ place in gender criticism. Bonnie Kime Scott promotes the quality of Molly’s multifarious place among literature’s females, claiming that her “ability to play so many roles, and to range in attitude from conventional matron to liberal feminist makes her a useful representative of the spectrum of female types” (162). Annette Shandler Levitt finds affinities between Molly and the écriture feminine of Luce Irigaray’s essays, wherein Irigaray writes against a fixed concept of woman, both in body and mind: “woman has sex organs more or less everywhere…the geography of her pleasure is far more diversified…than is commonly imagined” (507). Lisa Sternlieb suggests that Molly provides a “textual performance of Penelope’s backstage activity of weaving in order to unweave…that Penelope’s four year ruse is reflected in the artifice of both the language and structure of Molly’s narrative” (758). John Lammers locates a common feminine archetype in Molly and Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, both of whom are “powerfully and obsessively sexual” (489), see “sexual experience and nature as their philosophical bases of power” (490), “realize that as women they are doomed to defeat” (493), and “do what they have to do with their sexuality in order to survive in male-governed societies that define morality to benefit men” (496).
Of course, among these critiques, Penelope and the Wife of Bath stand for quite different female virtues: the former for her patient faithfulness and crafty prevarication and the latter for her salacious discourse and savvy life experience. But they both share features with Molly, who might be described as a patchwork woman laced together by the rambling but ultimately symmetrical style of her narrative, the disjointed descriptions of her body, and the generally intrinsic contradictions of femaleness that she imagines in her liminal state of consciousness: “such a mixture of plum and apple” (U.18.1535).
I suggest that another female archetype, Milton’s Eve, the willful transgressor of Paradise Lost, contributes to a collective embodiment in Molly Bloom. Eve is of particular interest as a feminine archetype because she has so often been vilified as the idiot of Christian foundation mythology, a figure stamped upon the behavioral valuation of subsequent women in Christian societies. So she has. But I subscribe to a rich counter-tradition of Paradise Lost readers, originating with the English Romantic poets, by contending that Eve is not weak, or foolish, or simply the pawn of a serpent’s guileful ambitions. Quite to the contrary, Eve opposes Adam’s obsequies to God, she is aware of her nascent desires and how she might manipulate the garden sphere to attain them, and she uses a fair amount of deception, and feminine charm, to approach those ends. Patrick Colm Hogan, in Joyce, Milton, and the Theory of Influence identifies an affinity between the two figures, but places most emphasis on the Molly/Eve dynamic in relation to the further parallels of Leopold/Adam and Blazes/Satan. My interest for this essay resides with the dispositional similarity of these women as feminist insurgents against their particular ancillary social positions.
As Shelley and other Romantics sympathized with Satan as the real hero of Paradise Lost, the clever agonist who used whatever means of disobedience that were left him by an omnipotent, omniscient, and to him tyrannical God, one can sympathize similarly with Eve. She is the secondary creation in a pair that is created simply for God’s experiment in right reason: she is given rules and is placed as a “help meet” to a man who follows them unquestioningly. She senses her subordination, and, far from weak in mind, she uses her right reason and internal discursiveness to conclude that knowledge is her right, and her chance at equality. True, she expects knowledge to make her closer to a God, the same “weakness” of “improper” ambition that Satan suffers. Hers is a reactive disobedience: she spurns the unfair rules of God’s Eden game, and moves within Adam’s jurisdiction to manipulate her God-determined ontology, and broaden her epistemological borders. But it is her legacy of weakness and gullibility that undergirds patriarchal Christian societies in the theme of Adam’s lamentation, a plea for the abjection of women:
O why did God,
Creator wise, that peopl’d highest Heav’n
With Spirits Masculine, create at last
This novelty on Earth, this fair defect
Of Nature, and not fill the world at once
With Men as Angels without Feminine
Or find some other way to generate
Mankind? this mischief had not then befall’n,
And more that shall befall, innumerable
Disturbances on Earth through Female snares,
And straight conjunction with this Sex (PL, X.888-898)
Eve’s conventional reception in Christian culture results in many of the daily disadvantages that Molly is both a product of (in perceptions of herself and other women) and that she works against (when she feels empowered sexually and intellectually).
Carol Shloss argues that Dublin of 1904 was a hostile, limiting environment for women. She claims that Molly possesses “strategies of resistance” (106) to her cultural and political surroundings, strategies that have “reduced [her] to insurgency: she can withhold consent, she can complain, and she can engage in acts of subterfuge that undermine the structures of authority that bind her life. She does all three” (115). Since Molly lives within a social scaffolding that enforces an Eve-based archetype for woman, I would like to explore the ways in which Eve’s strengths, not her notorious weaknesses, seep into Molly’s self-conception and affect her actions.
One of the more unexpected and revolutionary moments in Paradise Lost is Eve’s description of her own creation, her memories from the first morning of life. It reveals some facets of Eve’s personality that come to the fore later when she makes her big decision to taste of the fruit of Knowledge. She describes the vernal Edenic scene, and in her first questionings wonders “where / And what I was, whence thither brought, and how” (PL, IV. 451-452). As a supposed answer to these questions, a brook spreads out “Into a liquid Plain, then stood unmov’d / Pure as th’expanse of Heav’n” (IV.455-456) giving Eve a first glimpse at herself. Of course, with “unexperienc’d thought” (IV.457) Eve is unaware that the image is her own, and immediately she falls in love with the “Shape within the wat’ry gleam” (IV.461), as it gives “answering looks / Of sympathy and love” (IV.464-465). Whether one should call this Narcissism or naïve lesbianism is a moot point: Eve has defined her self-conception of beauty in the feminine, and accordingly goes on to describe the quickly intervening Adam as “less fair, / Less winning soft, less amiably mild, / Than that smooth wat’ry image; back I turn’d” (IV.478-481). Eve is prevented from hanging out with her image both by God and Adam, the two-handed masculine engine, who convince her (she claims under duress) that “beauty is excell’d by manly grace / And wisdom, which alone is truly fair” (IV.490-491). (Molly has an uncannily Eve-like moment, though sexually charged of course, when she describes “all kinds of splendid fruits all coming in lovely and fresh who knows whod be the Ist man Id meet theyre out looking for it in the morning” (U, 18.1500-1502).) Of course, though male grace and wisdom may be more “fair” than beauty, they prove to be the less compelling temptations for Adam, who, erstwhile full of reason and conformity, dives kamikaze-like after the fallen Eve, the “fairest of Creation, Last and best / Of all God’s Works” (IX.896-897).
Molly, too, recognizes feminine beauty, finds herself caught up in it, and uses it as power. She says “the woman is beauty of course thats admitted” (U, 18.559-560) and women are “so beautiful of course compared with what a man looks like with his two bags full and his other thing hanging down out of him or sticking up at you like a hatrack no wonder they hide it with a cabbageleaf” (U, 18.541-544). She is proudly, sexually narcissistic: “the smoothest place is right there between this bit here and how soft like a peach easy God I wouldnt mind being a man and get up on a lovely woman” (U, 18.1145-1147). She has homoerotic memories: “she kissed me six or seven times didnt I cry yes I believe I did or near it my lips were taittering when I said goodbye…it got as dull as the devil after they went” (U, 18.672-674, 676). She projects herself on a theme of mythological innocence in Eve’s tradition (though the original story belongs to the pagan Diana) with the picture hanging over her bed, The Bath of the Nymph: “I was selling the clothes and strumming in the coffee palace would I be like that bath of the nymph with my hair down yes only shes younger” (U, 18.562-563). Pre-lapsarian Eve leans on Adam, “half her swelling Breast / Naked met his under the flowing Gold / Of her loose tresses hid” (IV.494-496). Leopold admires the likeness: “splendid masterpiece in art colours…Not unlike her with her hair down: slimmer. Three and six I gave for the frame. She said it would look nice over the bed” (U, 4.370-372). Leopold’s suggestively fiduciary memory centers on the picture’s frame, the literal container of his Molly-like nymph.
Molly appreciates the power of her sexual desirability, but is utterly aware that heterosexual dynamics operate on inequality including, among other female (Eve-based) lamentations, childbirth, the woman’s burden: “nice invention they made for women for him to get all the pleasure but if they gave them a touch of it themselves theyd know what I went through with Milly” (U, 18.157-159); senescence and mortality: “its all very fine for them but as for being a woman as soon as youre old they might as well throw you out in the bottom of the ashpit” (U, 18.744-747); and menstruation: “O Jamesy let me up out of this pooh sweets of sin whoever suggested that business for women what between clothes and cooking and children…this nuisance of a thing I hope theyll have something better for us in the other world tying ourselves up God help us” (U, 18.1128-1131, 1210-1211).
In recognizing these socio-biological disadvantages of femaleness, the misogynistic baggage of the Christian tradition, Molly cultivates a sense of deserving pleasure, of desiring equality with men in some measure. She spurns the masculine theory that women have no souls: “your soul you have no soul inside only grey matter because he doesn’t know what it is to have one” (U, 18.141-143) and continues, much later in the monologue, with “where does their intelligence come in Id like to know grey matter they have it all in their tail if you ask me” (U, 18.709-710).
Her assertion of female intelligence finds some basis in Eve’s rather carefully deliberated decision to eat of the fruit. Far from falling wholesale for the serpent’s rhetoric, Eve considers the advantages and dangers of her action, and decides that there is no rational justification for God’s prohibition, that it is just His envy of what He does not possess, “For had the gift been theirs, it had not here / Thus grown” (IX.806-807). Furthermore, she sees the possibility of equality between the sexes once she obtains the tree’s knowledge, and she listens to Satan herald the tree as “Wisdom-giving Plant, / Mother of Science” (IX.679-680), as though the mystery of knowledge is specifically feminine. She speculates that she does not need a companion, but can
keep the odds of Knowledge in my power
Without Copartner? so to add what wants
In Female Sex, the more to draw his Love,
And render me more equal, and perhaps,
A thing not undesirable, sometime
Superior; for inferior who is free? (IX.820-825)
Eve explores the possibilities of womanhood for herself and her successors. Unfortunately, God (and through Him, Adam) have already defined the female as necessarily domestic, weak, fair, pleasing. Eve holds down this role for a while, but is always working within the guise of subordinance to gain some latitude. Milton writes, as Eve is about to succeed in her argument with Adam to divide labors,
So spake the Patriarch of Mankind, but Eve
Persisted, yet submiss, though last, repli’d.
With thy permission, then, and thus forewarn’d
Chiefly by what thy own last reasoning words
Touch’d only, that our trial, when least sought,
May find us both perhaps far less prepar’d,
The willinger I go, nor much expect
A Foe so proud will first the weaker seek.(IX.376-383)
Transgression is only her final method of rebellion. Along the way, she always works at her bonds using flattery and coy submissiveness. To Adam, she calls her captor Satan: “If this be our condition, thus to dwell / In narrow circuit strait’n’d by a Foe…/ How are we happy, still in fear of harm?” (IX.322-323, 326). But to herself, after eating of the fruit, she feels disabused of her former innocence, concludes that God is “our great Forbidder” (IX.815) and considers deceiving Adam about her actions.
Molly, the inheritor of Eve’s actions and legacy, pictures the world of man’s creation and sees a dystopia based on male vices. She operates on deception, as her only hope for leading the life she desires. She speculates on a world run by women, citing the strengths of reason and wisdom:
in it you wouldnt see women going and killing one another and slaughtering when do you ever see women rolling around drunk like they do or gambling every penny the have and losing it on horses yes because a woman whatever she does she knows where to stop sure they wouldnt be in the world at all only for us they dont know what it is to be a woman and a mother how could they where would they all have them be if they hadnt all a mother to look after them what I never had
(U,18.1435-1443)
Molly sometimes has to remind herself that she, as a woman, is not necessarily intellectually inferior, a maxim we may assume she has been hearing through her lifetime. We read her vicissitudes on the subject: “hell see Im not so ignorant” (U, 18.1477); “quite changed they all do they havent half the character a woman has” (U, 18.826-827); “a woman is so sensitive about everything I was fuming with myself after for giving in” (U, 18.176-177). Molly, like Eve, is a motherless child, but also a mother who sees her adolescent daughter crossing the same bridges as she did. Molly is not always outwardly empathetic to her daughter (“I gave her 2 damn fine cracks across the ear for herself take that now for answering me like that” (U, 18.1070-1071)), but her attentive method of mothering is colored by her own unguided childhood, and fierce notions of the respect due to mothers rarely finds equivalence with the Patriarchal imperative of unquestioning obedience to the father. Milly receives the cracks because of a class-based prejudice: “she pretended not to see us…we werent grand enough” (U, 18.1069-1070). But Molly, whose class and Jewish ancestry have always been liabilities in Ireland, feels quite comfortable assuming the traditionally masculine role of physical discipline, particularly when her honor has been impugned by her own issue.
Molly’s descriptions of her daughter usually dwell on physical, and specifically sexual, features. Clearly, Molly sees sex as the locus of female power within her social circles, and nurtures some envy of her daughter’s physical freshness, her virginity, which Leopold Bloom speculates would soon fall asunder. She remembers that “they were shaking and dancing about in my blouse like Millys little ones now when she runs up the stairs I loved looking down at them” (U, 18.850-852) and understands “of course shes restless knowing shes pretty with her lips so red a pity they wont stay that way (U, 18.1065-1066). A “fallen woman” is one who takes on unchaste knowledge; Molly’s perceptions of Milly betray a kind of pre-lapsarian nostalgia, her nagging reminder that beauty is youth, youth beauty.
Chastity is the first casualty after Adam and Eve’s transgression. In their fair bower they had enjoyed only the most blessed of sexual unions, Milton is quite careful: “Here in close recess / With flowers, Garlands, and sweet-smelling Herbs/ Espoused Eve deckt her Nuptial Bed, / And heav’nly Choirs the Hymenaean sung” (IV.708-711). But after transgression their object is no longer procreation (Hail wedded Love, mysterious Law, true source / Of human offspring (IV.750-751)), it is physical pleasure: “Carnal desire inflaming, hee on Eve / Began to cast lascivious Eyes, she him / As wantonly repaid; in Lust they burn (IX.1013-1015). Molly would approve of this development in experience. She thinks of Milly as an innocent, for now: “of course she cant feel anything deep yet I never came properly till I was what 22 or so” (U, 18.1050-1051). Molly recognizes her own powers as seductress are at least as real as the hegemony of feminine chastity in her society, and that sexual transgression is the only end for a woman who seeks knowledge equal to the culturally imprinted sexual initiation of males.
Eve and Molly share an affinity for the garden. Women are usually portrayed as the more attuned to nature, the daughters of earth, receivers of a masculine sun’s gaze. Tropes of femininity as floral abound in literature. Eve is closer than Adam to the garden in very practical ways: she names of the flora, gathers the food, and knows what earthly ambrosia to bring to the table of the angel Gabriel. She serves them in unabashed nakedness. Her work in the garden is to train the flowers to their trellises, working a natural medium into a practiced art, a purely human aim. She is set amid resembling flowers as the serpent approaches her with his guiles:
Eve separate he spies,
Veil’d in a Cloud of Fragrance, where she stood,
Half spi’d, so thick the Roses bushing round
About her glow’d, oft stooping to support
Each flow’r of slender stalk, whose head though gay
Carnation, Purple, Azure, or speckt with Gold,
Hung drooping unsustain’d, them she upstays
Gently with Myrtle band, mindless the while,
Herself, though fairest unsupported Flow’r
From her best prop so far, and storm so nigh. (IX.424-433)
Milton states that Eve herself needs support, now separated from Adam, and she has not yet been woven into a structure of society that would keep her fresh and unravished by the impending winds. On her exit from Paradise, Eve voices her lamentation of the loss of her part in nature:
O flow’rs,
That will never in other climate grow,
My early visitation, and my last,
At Ev’n, which I bred up with tender hand
From the first op’ning bud, and gave ye Names,
Who now shall ye to the Sun, or rank
Your Tribes, and water from th’ambrosial Fount?
Thee lastly nuptial Bower, by mee adorn’d
With what to sight or smell was sweet; from thee
How shall I part, and whither wander down
Into a lower World, to this obscure
And wild, how shall we breathe in other Air
Less pure, accustom’d to immortal Fruits? (XI.273-285)
Molly operates from the other side of Eve’s Edenic situation, that is, she inhabits the world that Eve approaches with her “wand’ring steps and slow” (XII.648) as she leaves her garden. Molly’s bower is no longer strictly “nuptial” after the events of June 16th, but the salubriously, wildly jingling bed (that is an advertisement for her lapse in nuptial faithfulness), is certainly the locus of her expertise and power. Molly’s bower is a mortal one: it suffers her physical bulk and bodily smells, and it is now the literal reverse of a traditional marital union, with Poldy’s feet at the head in a physical chiasmus that parodies their marital confusion. But Molly’s cherished memories of a purer time involve both Edenic perfection in the natural world and the breathless joy of a younger love. She remembers,
I love flowers Id love to have the whole place swimming in roses God of heaven theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with the fields of oats and wheat…I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was the one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is (U, 18.1557-1560, 1576-1579)
The highest moment in her estimation of her husband comes when she believes in his understanding of womanhood, that woman is nature amid its mixture of chaos and control, brightness and shadow, the geometrical perfection of a flower’s form and its fate to break back down into the soil. These memories still stir Molly and keep Poldy a loved figure, for all their individual and mutual imperfections. Adam never had empathy enough to stir Eve’s passion; his gaze was ever upwards, or, when trained on her, possessive and patronizingly controlling. Their final moment, far from Molly’s exaltant “yes I said yes I will Yes” (U, 18.1608-1609), is confused, cold, and disparate: “They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow/ Through Eden took their solitary way” (XII.648-649).
John Ulreich argues that Eve is the hero of Paradise Lost because “the defining paradox of Milton’s ‘great argument’ is that one becomes a self only by an act of self-annihilation” (75). Both Molly and Eve become themselves by subverting the feminine roles prescribed by the male architects of their social worlds. Eve defines feminine non-compliance for Molly’s Christian world and, though she may be vilified (by both sexes) in additional efforts to reel in and control the female principle, Eve is the archetype who realizes freedom, with its reciprocal seductions, labor pains, and inexorable senescence, as the grateful vicissitudes inherent in an experience of depth and diversity.
Works Cited & Consulted
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Scott, Bonnie Kime. Joyce and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.
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Ulreich, John C. “’Argument Not Less But More Heroic’: Eve as the Hero of Paradise Lost.” All in All: Unity, Diversity, and the Miltonic Perspective. Charles W. Durham and Kristin A. Pruitt, eds. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1999.