Penelope
“Yes because he never did a thing like that before…”
Molly Bloom's unpunctuated nocturne. Eight long sentences carrying memory, lovers, irritation, tenderness, and a final, famous, affirming Yes.
- Beat 01Eight sentences
The chapter is Molly Bloom's thoughts in bed, written as eight enormous sentences without punctuation. Time is collapsed: the afternoon with Boylan, her girlhood in Gibraltar, and tonight's odd husband are all one weather.
- Beat 02Boylan and Bloom
She thinks about the afternoon with Boylan — admiringly, irritatedly, physically — and then about Bloom, his strangeness, his kindness, his asking for breakfast in bed in the morning.
- Beat 03Memory of lovers
She runs through the men of her life: army officers in Gibraltar, an early Mulvey, a long-ago Lieutenant Gardner, the men who liked her singing.
- Beat 04Gibraltar
Her childhood under the Rock returns vividly — sun, Spanish girls, the garrison band, the Moorish wall, the day she said yes to Bloom on Howth among the rhododendrons.
- Beat 05The final yes
The monologue arrives, eventually, at her memory of Howth Head and Bloom and the seedcake passed mouth to mouth, and ends with the most famous closing word in twentieth-century fiction.
Some time after two in the morning, in the bed at 7 Eccles Street. Bloom is asleep beside her. Molly Bloom is wide awake, and the entire chapter is her unpunctuated stream of thought — roughly eight enormous sentences with no full stops, no commas, no quotation marks, just the inside of her mind running on. She thinks about Boylan and the sex they had that afternoon, sharp and physical and not entirely admiring. She thinks about other men she has known and almost known, about her girlhood in Gibraltar where the sun was hotter and she felt more alive, about her singing career, her body, her clothes, her daughter Milly growing up, the baby son Rudy who died, her husband's odd kindnesses and odder requests. She is funny, earthy, vain, generous, jealous, contradictory, completely alive — a real human consciousness, not an idea of one. Her period starts mid-chapter, which folds in another layer: she's been worrying she might be pregnant, and isn't. And then, as dawn approaches, she drifts back to the afternoon on the Hill of Howth years ago when Bloom proposed to her, and she remembers thinking yes, and saying yes, and the whole enormous book closes on that word, repeated, affirming — a woman, in bed, in the dark, choosing her ordinary, complicated, faithful-and-unfaithful husband all over again, of her own free will. After 700 pages of male voices, the book gives the last word to her.
- Scene
- The Bed
- Hour
- After 2 AM
- Organ
- Flesh
- Art
- —
- Color
- —
- Symbol
- Earth
- Technic
- Monologue (female)
- Correspondence
- Penelope