Come to think of it, you're more right than not. Molly is a proto-Anna Livia Plurabelle, a nature spirit/symbol of capriciousness/primordial passion/irrationality/ the feminine as conceived by Joyce. She doesn't care about this "masculine" constancy stuff.
[A propos of nothing, Moscow is in the grip of a mini Sex Pistols mania, due to the soon-to-be performance of the middle-aged Pistols (God bless them). It's surreal -- there are TWO giant "SEX PISTOLS" signs within a block radius of my apartment, and I have seen more "Sid Lives" tee-shirts in the past week than since I was a teenager in the 80s. It's really weird. :) ]
--- On Tue, 6/17/08, Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> wrote:
>
>
> A wonderful passage, but it's remarkably how often
> it's interpreted
> exactly backwards. Many commentators say this is Molly
> affirming her love
> for Leopold in the end after spending most of her
> hypnogogic meanderings
> thinking about her past and prospective adulteries --
> that's its an
> affirmation of ultimate loyalty. But it's exactly the
> opposite: this is
> Molly explaining why she'll be able to twist Leopold
> around her little
> finger so that she'll be able to have an affair with
> Stephen Daedalus when
> he's living in their house even as outrageous as that
> seems in so many
> ways because of the difference in age, the proximity,
> Bloom's feelings for
> the boy, the scandal since the boy can be expected to write
> about it later
> when he's a famous poet (which is one of the many
> things that turn her on
> about the idea, being immortalized). It's simple, she
> says: I've always
> been able to get Leopold to do anything just by tossing him
> a little sex.
> It intoxicates him. Especially if I indulge his weird
> fantasies a bit.
> It's been true from the very beginning -- and then
> follows this passage,
> which is about "the day I got him to propose to
> me" when she realized "I
> knew I could always get round him" and so "I gave
> him all the pleasure I
> could leading him on until he said yes..." -- and
> it's that sentiment that
> this final passage is the culmination of.
>
> All of which I realized for the first time when I reread
> the book a couple
> of years ago. I don't know what I was thinking the
> first time, but it
> wasn't that. But now it seems inescapably obvious if
> you read the last
> dozen pages at all slowly and remember the chapter before.
>
> Michael
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