Molly Bloom's Soliloquy
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Molly Bloom's soliloquy is presented in the eighteenth, and final, chapter of James Joyce's novel Ulysses. It is a compilation of the thoughts of Molly Bloom, the concert-singing wife of advertising agent Leopold Bloom, whose wanderings around Dublin are followed in much of the book. Molly's physicality is often contrasted with the intellectualism of the male characters, and of 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. One major difference between Molly and Penelope is that while Penelope is eternally faithful, Molly is not, having an affair with Hugh 'Blazes' Boylan after ten years of her celibacy within the marriage.
Molly's soliloquy (or interior monologue) consists of eight enormous "sentences," with only two marks of punctuation in the entire episode (periods after the fourth and eighth "sentences"). Molly accepts Leopold into her bed, frets about his health, 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 very last 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 "[t]he 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" and that he said indicated "acquiescence and the end of all resistance." This last, clear "yes" stands in sharp contrast to her unintelligible first spoken line in the fourth chapter of the novel.
[edit] Contemporary cultural references
- Molly Bloom's soliloquy was also used as the basis for a dance song by Amber, entitled "Yes".
- It is quoted by the Firesign Theatre on their album How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at All.
- The soliloquy is also featured in a Rodney Dangerfield movie, "Back to School", wherein it is read aloud to a college English class by Dr. Diane Turner (played by Sally Kellerman). Her passionate reading causes the over-excited Thornton Melon (played by Mr. Dangerfield) to blurt out "YES! YES!" during the class.
- Part of the soliloquy is quoted by the character Charlene toward's the end of the Paula Vogel play Hot 'N Throbbing.
- It was also the inspiration for the Kate Bush song "The Sensual World." Originally Bush had written the song to directly quote Ulysses, but Joyce's estate refused permission. Thus she rewrote the lyrics, but it still is very much about Molly Bloom's soliloquy.
- In the 1999 four-part BBC miniseries Wives and Daughters, based on the novel of the same name (1865) by Elizabeth Gaskell, the character Roger Hamley (played by Anthony Howell) haltingly proposes marriage to heroine Molly Gibson (Justine Waddell) in the antepenultimate scene in the last segment of the series. Molly Gibson's final words are an anachronistic borrowing by the script writer (Andrew Davies), minus "I said," of the final words of Molly Bloom's soliloquy, rendered by Davies as "Yes. Yes, I will. Yes!"
