Episode 18 — Penelope

The small hours of the morning. Bloom is asleep at the foot of the bed, his head at Molly's feet. Molly is awake. The chapter is given entirely to her interior monologue, and the technique is Joyce's purest version of stream of consciousness. Forty-five pages, eight long sentences, almost no punctuation, almost no paragraph breaks, almost no concession to the conventional reader. The mind not pretending to be anything but itself. The mythical correspondence is to Penelope; the organ is the flesh.

Molly drifts. The afternoon with Boylan — sharp, sensory, faintly disappointed in him already. Her childhood in Gibraltar — Major Tweedy her father, the Spanish boys, Mulvey her first kiss. Her dead son Rudy, who would now be eleven; the grief that lives below the bed. Her teenage daughter Milly, whom she misses and resents. Her old lovers and almost-lovers, real and imagined. Her singing. Her body. Her sense of God. The next morning's shopping. Whether to fry Bloom an egg.

Underneath the drift she is working through her marriage. She is angry with Bloom for many things and tender toward him for many others; the two are not separate. She thinks of him reading to her in bed years ago, of the seedcake passed mouth to mouth, of his strangeness, of his gentleness, of his kissing her bottom that night and asking for breakfast. She remembers, near the end, the day on Howth Head years before — the rhododendrons in flower, Bloom proposing, her answering. The closing words run her memory of that yes through the rest of her life: "and yes I said yes I will Yes." It does not say the marriage is fine. It says that on this Thursday, in spite of everything, Molly is still capable of remembering the moment she said yes. That is what Joyce thinks a marriage is.