With the shift in “Penelope” away from Bloom’s familiar perspective and into Molly’s voice, one of the things I noticed most clearly was the different portrayal of sexuality. Bloom, even in his sexual fantasies, doesn’t actually have sex – when he thinks about sex at all, it’s to reminisce on how long it’s been since he last had “complete” intercourse with Molly, or to gain erotic pleasure from the act of looking at women’s bodies without even the prospect of actually touching them. Molly, by contrast, spends considerable time frankly considering the bodily realities of sexuality, whether it be Boylan’s “big red brute of a thing”(18.144), Bloom’s “tremendous amount of spunk”(18.154) compared to Boylan, or how she suspects Boylan’s “poking and rooting and ploughing he had up in me”(18.1106) has brought on her period.<\/p>\n
In a way, Molly’s sexuality brings attention by contrast to the perverseness of Bloom’s own mode of sexuality, in which the desire to touch women sexually\u00a0has been supplanted by the desire to observe and assess\u00a0their bodies and garments. Early in the episode, Molly comments derisively on Bloom’s underwear fetishism: “of course hes mad on the subject of drawers thats plain to be seen”(18.289). She relates a story in which he begs her to cut off a piece of her undergarments for him to carry with him, and another anecdote in which he begs for a peek under her petticoat. Notably, this seems to take the place of any other sexual initiative – it is in this episode that we realize that the lack of sexual intercourse between Bloom and Molly may in fact be Bloom’s fault, as Molly comes up with a scheme to confront Bloom once and for all about her adultery and see if it will get him to finally make a sexual advance.<\/p>\n
The way that photography is talked about in this episode particularly exemplifies the way in which the sexual image or object supersedes sex itself for Bloom. We learn, for example, that after losing a job he suggested to Molly that she pose for nude photos for money (18.560-561) and that there are certain “Photo Bits” that Bloom keeps by the outhouse and which Molly must prevent him from selling (18.601-604). Perhaps most curiously, Molly wonders whether Milly’s sending away – to study photography, her status as “photo girl” thus carrying the dual meaning of photographer and photographed – was related to her impending infidelity with Boylan: “on account of me and Boylan thats why he did it”(18.1108-1110). Sending her away not only prevents Milly from incidentally witnessing the affair, of course, but also facilitates its happening by removing the only other person in the house during the day who might get in the way of such meetings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
With the shift in “Penelope” away from Bloom’s familiar perspective and into Molly’s voice, one of the things I noticed most clearly was the different portrayal of sexuality. Bloom, even in his sexual fantasies, doesn’t actually have sex – when he thinks about sex at all, it’s to reminisce on how long it’s been since […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=470"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":476,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470\/revisions\/476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}