The Gibraltar childhood and adolescence that Joyce created for Molly Bloom are rooted in his conception of Galway as a Spanish city
Twice in Molly Bloom’s celebrated cadenza at the end of James Joyce’s Ulysses she recalls being kissed “under the Moorish wall” in Gibraltar by a young sweetheart named Harry Mulvey.Molly says that Harry Mulvey gave her a Claddagh ring that “must have been pure 16 carat gold because it was very heavy”. This suggests a link to Galway where the prototype Claddagh ring was created by local goldsmith Richard Joyce around the year 1700.
His observation was published in an Italian newspaper, but his article contains the word Spain, Spanish or Spaniard 11 times. “Do you notice how women when they write disregard stops and capital letters?”, Joyce asked his brother Stanislaus in a 1906 letter accompanied by a note from Nora that illustrated his point. “And no stops ... a few simple words”, as Molly says.
A lifelong city dweller, Joyce must have taken from Nora and from Galway the pastoral flow of words that he gave to her alter ego Gretta Conroy in the throes of her grieving for her lost Galway love in The Dead. “We used to go out together, walking, you know, Gabriel”, she cries to her husband, “like the way they do in the country”.
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