Molly Bloom: A Re-Immersion in the Concrete

Do we still read the "Penelope" episode of Ulysses for all the wrong reasons? Does Joyce offer its readers a cathartic experience of marriage counseling, a candid expression of female sexuality, or a textualist staging of subversive femininity that undermines the law of the father? This essay reevaluates critical orthodoxies about the significance of Molly's character. Challenging what is too often perceived as her adultery, irrationality, and gender fluidity, it revises established accounts of Molly's symbolic femininity to argue that she asserts her identity through an oblique social critique of culture. Molly's reflections on cultural codes, social conventions, and gender roles reconnect Irish historical consciousness to the social field and reconfigure the parameters of discourses on justice, equality, and universal emancipation.