Climbing Mt. Ulysses, Part III: Woman on Top

In her masterful film Jame's Joyce's Women, Fionnula Flanagan 
plays Molly Bloom in one of the most sensual performances 
in cinematic historyAnd then there’s Molly Bloom. I’m not qualified as a feminist, or a woman for that matter, to declare her a feminist icon. But as a writer and humanist I feel free to call her one of the greatest fictional characters regardless of gender…punctuation and capitalization be damned. She is woman, hear her roar:

“show them attention and they treat you like dirt I dont care what anybody says itd be much better for the world to be governed by the women 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 they 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 of them be if they hadnt all a mother to look after them what I never had thats why I suppose hes running wild now out at night away from his books and studies and not living at home on account of the usual rowy house I suppose ”

She’s also got a bit of misogyny going:

“still its a lovely hour so silent I used to love coming home after dances the air of the night they have friends they can talk to weve none either he wants what he wont get or its some woman ready to stick her knife in you I hate that in women no wonder they treat us the way they do we are a dreadful lot of bitches I suppose its all the troubles we have makes us so snappy ”

In a much earlier post about my father, I mentioned how dad used to embarrass me by pronouncing the letter H as haitch rather than aitch. Later I learned that such pronunciation was a way the Irish stuck a finger in the eye of their punctilious British overlords. I was heartened to hear dad’s lingo rebelliousness echoed throughout Ulysses. And I thought of dad’s linguistic idiosyncrasies again when I heard Molly Bloom say:

“I unbuttoned him and took his out and drew back the skin it had a kind of eye in it theyre all Buttons men down the middle on the wrong side of them Molly darling he called me what was his name Jack Joe Harry Mulvey was it yes I think a lieutenant he was rather fair he had a laughing kind of a voice so I went round to the whatyoucallit everything was whatyoucallit”

Much to his son’s dismay, dad, too, used “whatyoucallit” for everything all the time. How was I to know that my father’s illiteracy had such strong literate roots?In Ulysses Joyce plays by turns a: LinguistDramatist Historian (world and local)DiaristTheologianAccountantPoetPhilosopherPornographerIt is the last, of course, that brought Joyce his greatest notoriety…at least in Puritan-borne America…where it was famously banned as obscene for 13 years after publication and where black market copies were confiscated and burned by the (currently sanctified) US Post Office. Much of the grist for those obscenity charges stems from Molly Bloom’s languorous, largely lascivious, unpunctuated stream of consciousness soliloquy:

“if I am an adulteress as the thing in the gallery said O much about it if thats all the harm ever we did in this vale of tears God knows its not much doesnt everybody only they hide it I suppose thats what a woman is supposed to be there for or He wouldnt have made us the way He did so attractive to men then if he wants to kiss my bottom Ill drag open my drawers and bulge it right out in his face as large as life he can stick his tongue 7 miles up my hole as hes there my brown part then ”

If Ulysses had arrived on American shores in the early 21st century rather than the early 20th, it’s unlikely that it would have run into the troubled waters of obscenity charges. That doesn’t necessarily mean it would’ve had smooth sailing. There’s a good chance Joyce’s book would’ve run afoul of the Political Correctness Regime and faced a fierce informal quarantining.  Now as then, Ulysses probably would triumph as a monument to free expression and humanism. Over her 22,000-word soliloquy Molly Bloom reflects rapturously on her life’s resentments, jealousies, triumphs, tragedies, deceits, longings…all the things that make her a whole, mature woman in full. It builds to an orgiastic climax where Joyce, who has doted on his male characters Stephen Daedalus and Leopold Bloom for more than 1400 pages, gives the last, life-affirming word to his vibrant female creation:

“where 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.”

And now this. No soliloquies, but a nice tribute to Chadwick Boseman: Now Playing Black Panther