Lunar Weaving

James Joyce's Ulysses doesn't have very much in the way of plot, but it's certainly full of allusions.  When I read it, I think I placed more importance on figuring out the allusions than figuring out what was happening.  While writing my final paper for the class I had on it, I discovered something else interesting.

In the penultimate chapter, Molly is compared to the moon.  Among other things, the narrator mentions "her satellitic dependence:  her luminary reflection:  her constancy under all her phrases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning."  Molly is set up to be a figure who - in some respects - controls time.

Molly's parallel in The Odyssey - Penelope - also controls time in a way.  She delays her suitors by weaving a burial shroud for Odysseus' father Laertes.  They agree to wait until she's finished, but she unweaves her work at the end of the day, which extends the completion for a few years.

So both Molly and Penelope are presented as figures who aren't under the strict progression of time.  Penelope is able to delay the inevitable by unweaving her shroud, and Molly is described as constant "under all her phases."  Furthermore, in the section from her perspective, specific times are not seen.  Things are relative or vaguely described.  Where both Bloom and Stephen would probably be very specific about times, Molly just says "it was 1/4 after 3."

But the connexions between Molly and Penelope do not end there.  Also significant is that they are women, which means that they can weave.  The weaving is seen literally in the case of Penelope's weaving the shroud, but the weaving is also a metaphor for creating and sustaining life.  "As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image.  ...  the mole on my right breast is where it was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff time after time."

Molly resembles Penelope through her distance from time and her ability as a woman to metaphorically weave and create life.