ABSTRACT
To enter the mind of Molly Bloom after so much time spent in the minds of Stephen and Leopold is to plunge into a flowing river. If we have hitherto been exploring the waste land, here are the refreshing, life-giving waters that alone can renew it. The flow is the flow of Nature that runs thought Eliot’s Dry Salvages, the river within us whose ‘rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom’, the untamed, intractable god, ‘reminder of what men choose to forget’. But the waters are also the waters of Baptism, for Molly is the Mystical Body, born on the Rock, and before the end of the episode blood as well as water flows from her, reminding us of our double inheritance, as natural men born into the order of nature and as Christians saved by the redeeming Blood.
