Mythological Complexities in Ulysses

There is a great temptation to see Molly Bloom as an archetypal image of the Great Mother, ¹ for at the end of "Ithaca," Joyce has her "reclined semilaterally, left, left hand under head, right leg extended in a straight line and resting on left leg, flexed, in the attitude of Gea-Tellus, "fulfilled, recumbent big with seed" (U 17.2313). ² Gea, or Gaea, or Ge emerged from Chaos, "At the beginning of all things," Graves says. He calls her Mother Earth. ³ Tellus is Gea's Roman counterpart.

I find Molly to be Gea-Tellus, however, only in the same sense that she can be seen as a faithful Penelope. The epithets applied to Gea and Tellus are "all-producing and all-nourishing mother, nourisher of children, receiver and nourisher of seeds, sanctuary of the dead, prophetess." I see none of these qualities in Molly. For example, she has given birth to only two children, one of whom died at age eleven days (U 14.267, 17.2281). There is no indication that she wants more children; and she offers no objection to Bloom's sending their daughter away so as to facilitate her affair with Boylan (U 18.1008). Although it may not be her fault that she has not received any of Bloom's seed since Rudy's death, she takes care not to receive any of Boylan's either (U 18.155); and she sneers at the Purefoys, who have "a child or twins once a year as regular as a clock" (U 18.161). ⁴

The most interesting aspect of Joyce's description of Molly as "reclined. . . in the attitude of Gea-Tellus" is the phrase "big with seed" (U 17.2314). Normally, one would take the word seed to mean a fertilized rather than an unfertilized egg: the first meaning of seed is usually something like "fertilized and mature ovule." For those who believe that Joyce was careless, ⁵ that phrase should suggest that Molly was impregnated by Boylan. During her soliloquoy, Molly menstruates and notes, "anyhow he didn't make me pregnant" (U 18.1123). One might also, I supposed, read irony in the phrase, seeing Molly "big with seed" in the same sense that she is Gea-Tellus or Penelope.

Whether or not Molly is a contemporary version of Gea-Tellus, she is certainly intended to be an echo of Pasiphaë, wife of King Minos:

Poseidon . . . made Pasiphaë fall in love with the white bull which [Minos had] withheld from sacrific[ing to him]. She confided her unnatural passion to Daedalus [, who] promised to help her, and built a hollow wooden cow. . . . Then, having shown Pasiphaë how to open the folding doors in the cow's back, and slip inside with her legs thrust down into its hindquarters, he discreetly retired. Soon the white bull ambled up and mounted the cow, so that Pasiphaë had all her desire, and later gave birth to the Minotaur, a monster with a bull's head and a human body. ⁶

One of the medical students introduces the subject at the hospital:

An outlandish delegate sustained against both views . . . the theory of copulation between women and the males of brutes, his authority being his avouchment in support of fables such as that of the Minotaur which the genius of the elegant Latin poet has handed down to us in the pages of his Metamorphoses. (U 14.994)

Stephen picks up the theme in Circe, changing "the males of brutes" to "prize bulls": "Queens lay with prize bulls. Remember Pasiphae for whose lust my grandoldgrossfather made the first confessionbox" (U 15.3867). Molly applies the term brute twice to Boylan (U 18.144, 18.594) ⁷ and then to men at a bullfight she has seen, noting, too, that "the women were as bad" (U 18.632). The connection between "males of brutes," bulls, excited men and women, and Boylan is clear. So, then, is the connection...