Molly Bloom's soliloquy

Marion (Molly) Bloom
Ulysses character
Molly Bloom's statue in her fictional home in Gibraltar
Created by	James Joyce
Information
Nickname(s)	Molly
Aliases	Marion Tweedy
Occupation	Singer
Family	Major Tweedy (father) Lunita Laredo (mother)
Spouse(s)	Leopold Bloom (m. 1888)
Children	Millicent (Milly) Bloom (b. 1889) Rudolph (Rudy) Bloom (b. 1893 – d. 1893)
Religion	Roman Catholic
Nationality	United Kingdom
Birthplace	Gibraltar
Birth date	8 September 1870

Molly Bloom is a fictional character in the novel Ulysses by James Joyce. The wife of main character Leopold Bloom, she roughly corresponds to Penelope in the Odyssey. The major difference between Molly and Penelope is that while Penelope is eternally faithful, Molly is not. Molly is having an affair with Hugh 'Blazes' Boylan. Molly, whose given name is Marion, was born in Gibraltar on 8 September 1870, the daughter of Major Tweedy, an Irish military officer, and Lunita Laredo, a Gibraltarian of Spanish descent. Molly and Leopold were married on 8 October 1888. She is the mother of Milly Bloom, who, at the age of 15, has left home to study photography. She is also the mother of Rudy Bloom, who died at the age of 11 days. In Dublin, Molly is an opera singer of some renown.

The final chapter of Ulysses, often called "Molly Bloom's Soliloquy", is a long and unpunctuated stream of consciousness passage comprising her thoughts as she lies in bed next to Bloom.

Molly Bloom's soliloquy is the eighteenth and final "episode" of Ulysses, in which the thoughts of Molly Bloom are presented in contrast to those of the previous narrators, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. Molly's physicality is often contrasted with the intellectualism of the male characters, Stephen Dedalus in particular.

Joyce's novel presented the action with numbered "episodes" rather than named chapters. Most critics since Stuart Gilbert, in his James Joyce's Ulysses, have named the episodes and they are often called chapters. The final chapter is referred to as "Penelope", after Molly's mythical counterpart.

In the course of the monologue, Molly accepts Leopold into her bed, frets about his health, and then reminisces about their first meeting and about when she knew she was in love with him. The final words of Molly's reverie, and the very last words of the book, are: