Abstract
Molly is engaged quite directly in this episode in resisting and rejecting her position as a potential “adulteress.” She does this by offering a series of contextual justifications for her behaviour that range from accusations about Bloom’s own misdemeanours to assertions about the irrelevance of the monogamous element of the marital bond. Molly effectively inverts the literature of adultery: acting as investigative agent in a “domestic detective story,” Molly (nominally the “wrongdoer” throughout the novel) temporarily occupies the position usually reserved for the wronged “cuckold.” The episode as a whole represents a series of quietly revolutionary criticisms of cultural responses to female adultery.
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Notes
- 1.
Leckie, Culture and Adultery, 14. (Leckie 1999)
- 2.
“[T]heres the mark of his [Boylan’s] spunk on the clean sheet” (U, 18.1512).
- 3.
Tanner, Adultery, 15. (Tanner 1976)
- 4.
As Joyce suggested, “the last word (human, all too human) is left to Penelope. This is the indispensable countersign to Bloom’s passport to eternity.” Letter to Frank Budgen, 28 February 1921 in Joyce, SL, 278.
- 5.
I don’t want to overstate this. I’m not suggesting that we reach “Penelope” baying for blood. I would imagine that very few readers feel this way. But our sympathy for Bloom has had plenty of time to percolate, not least because he has given us a good deal of insight into the problems in his marriage that would lead Molly to “stray.”
- 6.
The term “novel of adultery” always refers to adultery on the part of the wife.
- 7.
Perhaps this is too strong a word; Molly is willing to accept that her behaviour is not perfect. What she is not willing to do is accept a subject position that is forced upon her: sinner—spiritual or social—or loose woman. Molly denies that a crime has been committed but mounts a defence just to make sure.
- 8.
Tanner, Adultery, 12. This is not really in conflict with Tanner, since his point is that “adulteress” is not a meaningful social role in the way that “mother” and “wife” are. Moreover, one can be both wife and mother at the same time, though the degree to which one is one or the other is dependent on context. One cannot, in Tanner’s terms, be both “adulteress” and “wife” at the same time, since the one negates or undermines the other.
- 9.
Tanner, Adultery, 367.
- 10.
I use the word “adulteress” as if constantly surrounded by quotation marks. Some distinction needs to be made between male and female adultery, since this is key to understanding the uneven social taboos in place. Similarly, Molly’s awareness of the power of this particular word gives it a specific charge in this discussion. Using quotation marks at every instance is, however, tiresome and awkward, while I would like to have some distinction between my use of the word as a quotation from “Penelope” and my use of it more generally. Outside the context of this discussion and without attention to the particular history it conveys, the word, like cuckold, is unpleasant and unnecessary.
- 11.
Tanner, Adultery, 41.
- 12.
Molly later decides that she will check Bloom’s shirt for lipstick in the morning: “first Ill look at his shirt to see” (U, 18.1234–5).
- 13.
Molly dulls this point slightly by referring over and again to the incorrigible sexual appetite of men in general. If all men, by their nature, seek, even require, sex outside of marriage, then Molly’s inability to “satisfy” Bloom is not a failure.
- 14.
In a sense, he is doing precisely this, since a husband is “naturally” free to have sex with whomever he likes, but socially bound by contract. The distinction is between natural freedoms and social bonds. One trades some of the former for the security of the latter. The binding intrusiveness of that contract on personal freedoms is built more or less consciously into all social contract theory, but for Joyce it provides an ongoing provocation.
- 15.
By “fantasy of a fantasy” I mean that Molly has produced a fantasy in which Bloom fantasizes about Josie Breen. Though slightly cumbersome, I think this distinction is valuable, since it stresses the double layering of what she imagines. She is invested both in the image of Josie Breen and, in a different sense, in the image of Bloom as one who is interested in that image. In a sense, she produces both the desired object (Josie) and the desiring subject (Bloom) and in doing so she disguises the fact that both emerge from the same fantasy projection.
- 16.
Bloom is clear on the causes for his father’s suicide: depression caused by the death of Bloom’s mother. By this logic, could Molly’s adultery not represent a similar loss with similar consequences? There is no sense in Ulysses that Bloom is thinking seriously about taking his own life, but the spectre is certainly raised.
- 17.
Mahaffey uses the example of the “Athy” riddle in Portrait. Stephen is unable to see “the other way you could ask it” because for all his (creative) intelligence, he is simply unable to move beyond the binary options he is offered. Vicki Mahaffey, Reauthorizing Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 58–9. (Mahaffey 1988)
- 18.
In a paper delivered at the 2012 James Joyce Symposium, Dublin.
References
Leckie, Barbara. 1999. Culture and Adultery: The Novel, the Newspaper, and the Law, 1857–1914. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Mahaffey, Vicki. 1988. Reauthorizing Joyce. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tanner, Tony. 1976. Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
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Fraser, J.A. (2016). Sexual Betrayal in “Penelope”. In: Joyce & Betrayal. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59588-1_8
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