Ulysses in 80 2026: In Conversation with Clare Hutton

A question that comes up then is, what does it mean to have the last word? I mean, it's a phrase we use quite a lot in ordinary speech.

Some people have argued that Molly is consigned to the margin of Ulysses.

Another view is that Molly has the last word and the last word is the most important.

And the last word is yes.

And it remembers the moment when Molly said yes to Bloom's

Marriage proposal.

He could feel my breasts all perfume, yes, and his heart was going like mad.

And yes, I said.

I will.

Yes.

So Joyce criticism, like all things, works in trends.

And I think it's true to say that there's currently a lot of new work and energy in feminist approaches to Joyce.

In December last year, the James Joyce Quarterly described as the flagship journal in the field, published a special issue on quote unquote women's issues.

And it points to the significance of feminism as an approach.

When I was an undergraduate, people used to say, well, if you want to do feminist criticism, Joyce is the writer too.

But actually, I think more than 30 years on, I think it would be true to say that Joyce has a complicated reception in relation to feminism.

There's a real kind of back and forthness here.

He clearly noticed women in great detail and documented their intrinsic differences.

To quote the text, he saw or felt what a woman is.

But the general culture of Ulysses is very male.

I love the work that Anne Enright has done on Ulysses.

She talks about how Ulysses is full of men bantering with each other in that very masculine, mock heroic way.

All in all, she says, it's a very male culture.

One of the things I think that's really distinctive about Joyce in relation to gender is that he is an absolute genius at multi-speaker male dialogue.

So, for example, if you think about Hades, we listen in detail to the kind of conversation Cunningham, Simon Dedalus, Bloom and McCoy have four men in a taxi cab sitting opposite each other on the way to their colleague's funeral.