![]() Whatever Molly’s provenance may be, Joyce’s creation is certainly one of the most intriguing characters in all of literature Joyce’s characters are almost invariably composed of elements from real life seasoned by his literary imagination. It is difficult to believe that Joyce could have created a character like Molly without reference to the woman he had lived with for all of 17 years by the time he wrote ‘Penelope’, but Molly is not Nora. Though she had but little education, she had natural aptitudes, among them a love and understanding of music.” 3 ![]() Budgen, of a book with a big, fat, horrible married woman as the heroine?”įor Mary Colum, Nora “was not only beautiful but vivacious and humorous. Her judgements of men and things were swift and forthright and proceeded from a scale of values entirely personal, unimitated, unmodified. “Mrs Joyce was a stately presence, but what was most impressive on acquaintance was her absolute independence. Frank Budgen, a close friend of Joyce during his time in Zurich and Trieste, wrote approvingly of Nora. One influence on this part of the novel may well be Nora Barnacle Joyce, the woman James Joyce first dated on June 16th 1904, an otherwise ordinary Dublin day on which he decided to situate Ulysses. Everything in these pages happens within her fertile, fractious mind. This closing episode of Ulysses, known as ‘Penelope’ (wife of Odysseus in Homer) belongs from start to finish to Gibraltar-born Molly Bloom, whose birth name was Marion Tweedy. “But the force of this long, unpunctuated meditation, in which a drowsy woman’s vagrant thoughts are transferred in all their naked candour of self-revelation on to the written record, lies precisely in its universality.” 2 She is neither mysterious vamp nor sentimental angel.” 1 “There can be but few women in literature that do not look sickly in their virtues and vices alongside Molly Bloom.
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