7 - Bloom and Molly: the bourgeois utopians

Summary

Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcumbs, fried hencod's roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.

Kidneys were in his mind as he moved about the kitchen softly, righting her breakfast things on the humpy tray. Gelid light and air were in the kitchen but out of doors gentle summer morning everywhere. Made him feel a bit peckish.

(U 57)

Why ‘Mr’ Leopold Bloom? It is a title he shares with some other characters in Ulysses – Mr Best, Mr Dedalus, Mr Power – and it has both social and literary resonances. Socially, it conveys seniority, respectability (however attenuated in Mr Dedalus's case) and a certain distance. In literature, too, there is a distinction to be drawn between people described as ‘Mr’, people identified by surname only and people known familiarly by a Christian name or nickname. From the Pilgrim's Progress onwards the ‘Mr’ had denoted middle-class status, but it had taken a distinctly downward turn in the course of the nineteenth century. By the time Joyce was writing the usual ‘Mr’ in fiction was a comic petty bourgeois: Mr Pickwick, Mr Pooter, Mr Polly.

Mr Polly, in Wells's novel, begins with indigestion. Mr Bloom's dignity is undermined by his taste for the ‘inner organs of beasts and fowls’.