Eccles Street and Canterbury: An Approach to Molly Bloom

Abstract

It is generally agreed that the two most important sources of Molly Bloom in are Penelope and Nora Joyce. Stuart Gilbert, one of the first critics to explore the Homeric parallels in Joyce's novel, makes it abundantly clear in James Joyce's Ulysses (1930) that Molly is an ironic twentieth century counterpart of the heroine of the Odyssey. Similarly, in his edition of Joyce's letters' and in his life of Joyce,2 Richard Ellmann discusses specific resemblances between Molly and Joyce's wife. Nevertheless, beyond these literary and biographical resemblances, there is still another important source for Mrs. Bloom to which Harry Levin3 has briefly alluded: it is Chaucer's Wife of Bath. She deserves to be considered at greater length. The textual comparison that follows does not suggest that Joyce consciously patterned Molly Bloom after the Wife of Bath. Rather, it attempts to indicate how the literary tradition initiated by the Wife of Bath influenced the spirit of Joyce's creation, how, in fact, Joyce's image of femaleness was embodied in the Wife of Bath almost six hundred years before.