65 (U618.478) what O well look at that Mrs Galbraith

The 65th Cast. Page 618, line 478.

what O well look at that Mrs Galbraith shes much older than me I saw her when I was out last week her beautys on the wane she was a lovely woman magnificent head of hair on her down to her waist tossing it back like that like Kitty OShea in Grantham street 1st thing I did every morning to look across see her combing it as if she loved it and was full of it

Episode 18. The final episode consists of Molly Bloom’s interior monologue. It runs to thirty-six pages, made up of eight enormous unpunctuated sentences, with neither periods nor commas.

Here Molly is thinking about her own age and fading looks.

As for Mrs Galbraith, she appears only fleetingly in Episode 15, in the phantasmagoric sequence where a great many figures from the novel crowd briefly into view as Bloom flees the brothel. But who exactly she is remains unclear. (U479.4358)

Kitty O’Shea, however, immediately calls to mind Katharine O’Shea (1846–1921), the mistress of the famous Irish politician Charles Stewart Parnell.

Parnell, leader of the Irish Home Rule movement, was carrying on an affair with Katharine O’Shea, the wife of his fellow MP Willy O’Shea. When the scandal became public, it ruined Parnell politically and dealt a severe blow to the Irish nationalist cause as well.

Katharine O’Shea, Parnell’s mistress

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KittyOShea.jpg

Katharine was still alive in 1904, the “present” of the novel, but she was in England by then, and could not literally have been living in Grantham Street in Dublin.

So this Kitty O’Shea in Molly’s memory must be someone else with the same name.

After their marriage, Molly and Bloom lived on Pleasants Street. Grantham Street runs one street to the south.

So presumably Molly is remembering a woman named O’Shea who lived there in those earlier days.

Parnell’s affair is one of the novel’s important recurring motifs.

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