Molly Blooms

BOOK REVIEWS Molly Blooms Richard Pearce, ed. Molly Blooms: A Polylogue on "Penelope" and CuIturalStudies . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994. ix+291pp. Cloth$45.00 Paper $24.75 IN DESIGNATING Molly Blooms a "polylogue," Richard Pearce sets up in his introduction some dramatic expectations about how the essays in the volume wUl relate, not only to the text of Ulysses, but to each other. The focus of the volume is, of course, MoUy Bloom, but as the absent apostrophe in Finnegans Wake indicates an expanding spiral of textual meaning, so the s added onto the end of Marion Tweedy Bloom's name indicates an expansive and inclusive sense of the character . And not just one character, either. Pearce's stated goal, given in the first-person plural to suggest that he is merely the representative for all the contributors to the volume, is to "[look] at Penelope' through the lenses of cultural studies—which include feminism, new historicism, popular culture, postcolonialism, and postmodernism, and which therefore produce a multiplicity of MoUy Blooms.* This is accomplished by means of "polylogue, where many voices argue and interweave, maintaining their own integrity, learning from but not convincing one another , and opening the way for new voices.* Pearce has assembled some of the most interesting scholars currently working on Joyce to contribute to the debate. It is a bold project. It is almost entirely successful. The volume is separated into five categories: "MoUy and the Male Gaze,* "Molly in Performance," "Negotiating Colonialism," "MoUy as Consumer," and "MoUy as Body and Embodied." Section One, "Molly and the Male Gaze," opens with a bibliographicaVhistorical essay by Kathleen McCormick, "Reproducing Molly Bloom: A Revisionist History of the Reception of Tenelope,' 1922-1970," which analyzes the way critics have envisioned, excused, and excoriated MoUy Bloom for roughly the first fifty years of the reception of Ulysses. McCormick tracks the novel and particularly how MoUy Bloom is figured in relation to it according to two broad categories: the earth mother and the whore, showing how both positions relate to specific cultural stresses regarding the canonical nature of the novel and women's place in society. In historicizing the various critical/cultural positions of these early (and mostly male) critics, McCormick provides an interesting entrée into Molly Blooms, by suggesting that we need to historicize what foUows as weU. The second essay in this section is Pearce's own "How Does MoUy Look Through the Male Gaze?" which uses feminist film theory to unlock the by now 413 ELT 38:3 1995 weU-tread ground of scotophilia and power. Pearce argues that even though Molly has "to some extent internalized" the male gaze, "her chapter is structured to undermine the male gaze, to establish an independent gaze, and to represent or enact or embody the space of holding, of "being with' of mutuality, intersubjectivity, creativity, where a variety of female desires can play themselves out" (original emphasis), a position he then reexamines by remembering his own (male) subject position, also that of the "addressed" reader of Ulysses, and how that position might lead to the desire for a "happy ending." In an interesting epilogue to his article, Pearce adds a review of sorts of a 1993 performance of "Penelope" by Fionnulla Flanagan, suggesting that what she adds to our perception of Molly Bloom is a sense of sadness, disappointment with her life, grief for her lost son and lost friends. The epilogue concerning Molly in performance introduces the idea of Molly as performance, a subject Cheryl Herr and Kimberly Devlin broach in the next section. In "Penelope' as a Period Piece," Herr refuses "to grant the Molly of Penelope' any reality-value whatsoever." Instead, she suggests that we envision Penelope" and ite star as the clou or headlining act of a music hall performance, as "a role to be enacted by this or that major artiste of the era." Unlocking the term "period," which she explicitly connects to menstruation and theatricality, Herr examines how these two issues become deeply interwoven in Penelope." Kimberly Devlin's Pretending in Penelope'" utilizes the concepts of female masquerade and female mimicry, a distinction she identifies as "the slight but critical difference between...