Promesas formuladas por los Estados americanos durante la XXXII

Ulyssesprimarily focuses on the lives of three major characters: Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, and Molly Bloom. Other chapters within this study concentrate on Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom. Consequently, the current chapter explores them only in brief detail, devoting most of the discussion to Molly Bloom.

As Ulysses opens, Stephen Dedalus, now twenty-two years old, has ful- filled little of the personal and artistic ambitions that surrounded his char- acter in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He returned from Paris, receiving notice of his mother’s imminent death, without producing the major work of art he thought would come of his journey abroad. Moreover, he manifests, at the beginning of Ulysses and throughout the text, symp- toms consistent with depression. He does not wash. He eats and sleeps lit- tle. He cannot focus on his work. He indulges in drinking, temporarily satisfying his desire for forgetfulness but ultimately revealing bitterness and disgust with his life and family. Indeed, he remains emotionally isolated from his father, physically separated from his siblings, and distant from peo- ple he meets in the novel. He makes himself vulnerable to the attacks of his roommates and rejects the well-intentioned affections of Leopold Bloom by modeling the worst prejudices of his former employer, Mr. Deasy, and the worst behavior of his roommates.

In terms of Stephen’s relationship to art and to his self-image as art- ist/creator, his aesthetic has grown from the objective relationship between artist and the product of artistic labor articulated in A Portrait to a highly subjective model. Stephen offers a reading of Hamlet that relies heavily on biographic details and psychological complexities. However, Stephen also reveals that he does not fully believe his own theories, and, indeed, he wal- lows in intellectual complexities and aesthetic theories at the expense of his own artistic production and at the expense of his relationship to real people. He so imagines the world around him that, in the third episode, he misreads the activities and professions of individuals on the beach and imagines rather than interacts with his mother’s family.

Stephen’s aesthetic theories and his sense of loss, isolation, and depres- sion relate directly to his sense of rootlessness. His views his father with

scorn, seeing in his laziness the cause of his wife’s early death and his fam- ily’s poverty. Critics observe that the inept father figure is consistent with Irish writing throughout the twentieth century,10_{ranging from Synge’s cre-}

ation of a brutish father in The Playboy of the Western World to Frank McCourt’s representation of the drunken and lazy father in Angela’s Ashes. Critics relate the inept father to Ireland’s situation under colonial rule, ar- guing that the impotent colonized father relates directly to the powerless predicament of a colonized people. In addition, Stephen’s mother’s long-suffering relationship with her husband and her early death can also be related to Ireland’s colonial circumstances. In the tradition of the aisling,11_{Stephen watches as a woman wastes away because of deprived and}

desperate circumstances. Stephen, like many Irish patriots and literary fig- ures, fled Ireland to discover freedom and the opportunity for self-expression. However, the desperateness of his familial circumstances forces Stephen’s return, and he becomes trapped by those same forces he sought to escape. As Ulysses comes to an end, Stephen remains trapped within the limited circumstances of his environment, rejecting the oppor- tunities offered by Bloom for escape and independent development.

Leopold Bloom, on the other hand, escapes from similarly limiting cir- cumstances, using his imagination and a natural optimism to free himself from depression and isolation. Bloom too is beset by images of a failed fa- ther who committed suicide and died owing money as a consequence of failed business ventures. Moreover, the tragic death of his son shakes Bloom’s own sense of paternity and masculinity. Further, most of the char- acters in the novel either openly and cruelly mock Bloom, such as Stephen and the citizen, or treat him only with polite deference. Bloom has few inti- mates. In addition, the female figure in his life torments him with an infi- delity with his business and social rival. In business, Bloom also cannot find complete success. He, despite devoting hours to researching an advertise- ment and canvassing for its sale, does not fully consummate the business deal. Nor does Bloom fully consummate his sexual relationships. He spends time watching the bottoms of statues and following the figures of passing women on the street. He does actively indulge in a masturbatory sexual re- lationship with a woman on the beach, in which she participates. However, he does not directly communicate with her nor does he achieve any lasting contact. In addition, Bloom’s status as the descendent of immigrants and his Jewish heritage make him vulnerable to the ridicule and disdain of many throughout the novel. His lack of knowledge of basic Catholic tradi- tions and practices also marks him as an outsider. Nevertheless, Bloom, by the end of the novel, manages to avoid despair.

However, Ulysses offers clues that Bloom’s optimism only occurs at the novel’s conclusion. He, after all, has failed to engage in fully integrated sex- ual activity since the death of his son. Moreover, the image of a suicidal fa- ther also haunts him years after his father’s death. Therefore, Ulysses details Bloom’s recovery from depression and despair. Bloom finds comfort in small acts of kindness and in human interaction. He imaginatively trans- forms his somewhat limiting experiences by accentuating their positive content. He creates a meaningful relationship with the girl on the beach. He assumes that his acquaintances do not fully intend to harm him. More- over, he assumes the best about them. In addition, he asserts his own theo- ries of love and deference in the face of violent opposition. He also fashions his own aesthetic, indulging in fantasies of the East and of sensual pleasure. His fantasies value his “Oriental” heritage in the face of prejudice and ha- tred. However, he recognizes the limits of his created impressions of the East, consequently achieving the benefit of imaginative escape along with the realistic knowledge of the limits of intellectual and imaginative fancy. Further, in the psychologically complex fifteenth episode, he comes to terms with his father’s death, his son’s death, and his wife’s infidelity. He ac- cepts his daughter as his heir, makes himself emotionally vulnerable to Ste- phen, confidently asserts his (Bloom’s) presence in his relationship with his wife, and processes many of his own personal and psychological de- mons. Bloom, as he approaches middle age (he is thirty-eight at the novel’s outset), finds himself coming to terms with the difficult circumstances of his youth and early adulthood.

Molly Bloom’s character occupies relatively little of the narrative.12_She

appears in the fourth episode, makes a cameo appearance in another epi- sode, and finally emerges as a clearly defined figure only in the final epi- sode. However, her behavior and faithfulness to her husband become a preoccupation of his thoughts throughout the day. Essentially, even though she seems to occupy only the margins of the text, she is really central to the narrative. Indeed, in more than this way, Molly is a marginalized figure made central. She is the daughter of a British soldier, raised in a colonial outpost, who lives in the heart of the Irish capital. She is also a woman with relatively few career options and limited educational possibilities who manages to help support herself, at least partially, through her singing and also actively pursues imaginative escapes through literature, albeit popular and sexually charged romance novels. Moreover, many characters in the text notice only her physical and sexual attributes and potential. However, she manages to not limit her own self-perceptions; she sees herself as more than a sensual, pleasure-giving machine.

On a symbolic level, she values the former periphery culture without los- ing her essential identity. However, she, because her monologue operates as private revelation, does not “transform” the dominant society. Specifically, the “Penelope” episode takes a reader through both an emotional and an intellectual series of revelations in which Molly in turn comes to terms with a larger community of women, her personal history, and a sense of communion with the sublime that leads her to a greater understanding not only of the oppressions that limit the intellectual and emotional develop- ment of herself but of all women. Molly, as critics have suggested, is a con- tradictory figure. However, she is contradictory not because she is feminine or marginal and not because Joyce attempts to “moralize” about loose women.13_{Molly is contradictory because she represents a transition from}

oppressive and limiting discourse to a more liberated discourse. She articu- lates the principles of liberation but does not yet act on them.

In the course of her monologue, Molly Bloom details the story of a woman who “poisoned her husband” because she was “in love with some other man” (613).14 _{Initially, Molly responds with revulsion seeing the}

murderess, a Mrs. Maybrick, as “the downright villain” (613). Certainly, this is the way Molly is supposed to respond if she is to fulfill the expecta- tions of Dublin’s middle-class community. Specifically, that stratum of soci- ety would have seen that a woman, by killing her husband, destroys not only an individual’s life but also strikes out against the institution of mar- riage and, consequently, challenges one of the most fundamental organiza- tional structures of society and consequently, threatens the very stability of the society itself. Marital traditions, cultivated in turn-of-the-century Ire- land by the values of not only the Catholic church but also of Victorian morality, posit the ideal union of a man and a woman, suggest a power dy- namic within a marriage that restricts women to roles of subservience and submission to the male will. Certainly, Joyce’s choice of the name “Mrs Maybrick” suggests both the romanticized image of the pure May bride and a debilitating solidity that hangs “like a brick” around the neck. However, Molly, defying the traditional societal convention, soon develops a sense of empathy for Mrs. Maybrick, refusing to dissolve the bonds of identification between herself and another woman and refusing to link her repulsion for murder with a repulsion for the woman who committed the murder. Conse- quently, Molly implicitly rejects both the traditions of Victorian morality and the teachings of the church. Further, the manner of identification ex- plicitly seeks to justify Mrs. Maybrick’s actions while simultaneously derid- ing men and, by connection, the chain of revulsion that seeks to encourage Molly to reject any sense of community with women who, like Mrs.