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Summary:
"Penelope" is Ulysses' eighteenth and final chapter. Molly Bloom thinks on her life before marriage and she defends and regrets her affair with Boylan, while bemoaning the social restrictions on women. Mrs. Bloom catalogues the detriments of her married life, describing her nagging loneliness, the deceptive allures of adultery and the betrayals she has suffered on account of her emotionally absent "Poldy." Mollyıs narrative quickly slides between the distant and recent past and we learn of her years as an unmarried and attractive young lady in Gibraltar, a British colony on the southernmost tip of Spain. Her years with her mother Lunita and her father, a military man named Tweedy, seem to offer her the most pleasure as she is largely displeased with Boylanıs rough manners and her husbandıs effeminate deficiencies.
For all of the negative assessments of hearth and home, "Penelope" is emphatically braced with the word "Yes" at the beginning and conclusion, and we have every reason to believe that-at least for June 17- the Bloom's intend to preserve their marriage. Perhaps in irritation and gratitude for Bloom's "kiss on the rump," Molly intends to turn his servility on its head by waking up early to serve Bloom "his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs." After analyzing Bloomıs faults, Molly suggests that she knows Bloom better than anyone else and that their shared memories represent an emotional wealth that she would be unable to duplicate in a relationship with Boylan.
Analysis:
The final chapter is named for "Penelope," the faithful wife of the Greek hero, Ulysses. When suitors overran her husband's palace and forced her to concede Ulysses' death and remarry, Penelope remained faithful, claiming that she had to knit a funereal shroud in memory of her husband before she could choose a suitor. After spending each day earnestly knitting, Penelope would spend the night unraveling the work that she had done. Eventually, her suitors tired of the ruse and Ulysses' triumphal return could not have come a moment later as it had been twenty years (and two Homeric epics) since Ulysses first left Ithaca to assist King Menelaus and the Greeks at Troy. As Ulysses and Telemachus reclaim the palace, Penelope has locked herself in her bedroom chamber and when Ulysses enters the chamber to greet his wife, she does not recognize him. Ulysses must prove himself by recounting the story of their wedding bed's construction, a secret that Penelope knows that only Ulysses would know. The end of epic is a portrait of marital bliss, even as the king and queen are physically altered, haggard and aged. Furthermore, Ulysses has more difficulties to endure.
"Penelope" lacks the few narrative pretenses that are found in other chapters, expressing the simple and unstructured "interior monologue" of Molly Bloom. Unlike the other interior monologues, Molly's is uncorrupted by dialogue or outside distraction because it occurs when she is half-asleep. Even though Molly presents a fairly complete chronology of June 16 (as well as a few other historical moments), "Penelope" is very clearly a catalogue of Molly's thoughts beginning at the precise moment when she is stirred by Bloom's arrival into their bed. This is after 3 am and is probably closer to four or five in the morning as the light of the summer dawn is fast approaching. "Penelope" is the novel's final, most daring attempt to capture the essence of the human mind at work. Joyce complicates this mission and the "Penelope" that we see is Molly whose subconscious is at work while she is drifting into sleep. The non-narrative prose skips coherently from fragment to fragment and the lack of punctuation suggests a hallucination that is distinct from the regimented hallucinations of "Circe." That the chapter's mere eight sentences span over 1600 lines of text is evidence enough that "Penelope" is Ulysses' closest approximation to the "stream of consciousness," functioning almost exclusively as a series of linked ideas rather than words.
Just as "Penelope" carries the tropes of Modernism, it also represents a twentieth-century alternative to Homer's scheme of marital bliss. Joyce's revision is "modernized" and made "real" by Molly's infidelity and unabashed sexuality. The obsolescence of epic, battlefield heroism is chronicled in the story of Bloom-as-Ulysses just as the decline of sexual purity and marital devotion is captured in Molly's role as Penelope. The Blooms deviate from the classical ideal but they are able to attain a degree of marital bliss and perhaps it is more meaningful because they have both strained and struggled. Joyce argues in "Penelope" that even though his Ulysses and Penelope are imperfect, they are able to unite because their love for each other is uncorrupted and solid.
Molly appears as the sum total of all of the novel's female characters. [...]
"Penelope" is perhaps, most notorious for Molly's coarse language and sexual frankness.[...] She reveals Bloom's (unsurprising) sexual proclivities, his penchant for voyeurism and pornography ("the smutty photo"), his anal fetishes, and his coprophilia. We finally understand that Bloom's emotional distance corrupted their sexual union and forced Molly to seek companionship elsewhere.
As "Penelope" concludes, Molly's acceptance of Bloom, stems from their shared memories and Mrs. Bloom assumes a defiant tone in her defense of Leopold. To the women of Dublin, she remarks, "let them get a husband first thats fit to be looked at and a daughter like mine." And she chides the men of Dublin for their treatment of Bloom, "making fun of him then behind his back I know well when he goes on with his idiotics because he has sense enough not to squander every penny piece he earns down their gullets and looks after his wife and family goodfornothings poor Paddy Dignam..." Molly admits to the reader that she "loves to hear him [Bloom] falling up the stairs of a morning," suggesting that his awkward foibles ("falling up") have an endearing quality to them, and like Nausicaa, Molly prides herself on her unique ability to perceive Bloom's brooding thoughts and melancholy. Bloom is "a madman nobody understands his cracked ideas but me."
Molly's most revealing confession comes in her discussion of love songs. [...]Her final conclusion is that the love song that she sings is the song of her marriage, with all of its troubles and joys. Her thoughts on Rudy's death are reflected when she notes that her husband got her on stage "to sing in the Stabat Mater." The Stabat Mater, concerns the sadness of the Virgin Mary, the mother of Christ, standing at the cross of her dead son.[...] In this regard, the Stabat Mater of "Penelope" is a fitting conclusion to Love's bitter mystery, sung by Stephen Dedalus at his mother's deathbed. In typical Joycean style, a living son's song to his dead mother has been answered by a living mother's song to her dead son.