Molly Bloom facts for kids

Quick facts for kids 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. 1894)
Religion	Roman Catholic
Nationality	British
Birthplace	Gibraltar
Birth date	8 September 1870

Molly Bloom is a fictional character in the 1922 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 in a relationship 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 almost entirely unpunctuated passage comprising her thoughts as she lies in bed next to Bloom.

Sources

Joyce modelled the character upon his wife, Nora Barnacle; indeed, the day upon which the novel is set—16 June 1904, now called Bloomsday—is that of their first date. Nora Barnacle's letters also almost entirely lacked capitalization or punctuation; Anthony Burgess said that "sometimes it is hard to distinguish between a chunk of one of Nora's letters and a chunk of Molly's final monologue". Some research also points to another possible model for Molly in Amalia Popper, one of Joyce's students to whom he taught English while living in Trieste. Amalia Popper was the daughter of a Jewish businessman named Leopoldo Popper, who had worked for a European freight forwarding company (Adolf Blum & Popper) founded in 1875 in its headquarters in Hamburg by Adolf Blum, after whom Leopold Bloom was named. In the (now published) manuscript Giacomo Joyce, are images and themes Joyce used in Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

See also

In Spanish: Molly Bloom para niños