Polly Mooney
The landlady's nineteen-year-old daughter in "The Boarding House", given the run of the lodgers and left to work out what her mother wants.
To be settled somewhere better than her mother's house. Of what she is thinking about on the bed at the end, the story says only this: "She waited on patiently, almost cheerfully, without alarm, her memories gradually giving place to hopes and visions of the future."
The book
At a glance
- A character in "The Boarding House", the seventh story
- Nineteen
- Daughter of Mrs Mooney; her brother Jack is a clerk with a reputation as a hard case
- Housework in her mother's boarding house, after a short spell as a typist
- The boarding house in Hardwicke Street, over one Sunday morning
- "As Polly was very lively the intention was to give her the run of the young men."
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freePolly Mooney is a character in "The Boarding House", the seventh of the fifteen stories in Dubliners, the 1914 collection by the Irish writer James Joyce. She is nineteen and lives in her mother's boarding house in Dublin, where the lodgers are mostly young clerks. She was sent out to be a typist, but her disreputable father kept turning up at the office asking to speak to her, so her mother brought her home and set her to housework instead.
The intention, the story says plainly, was to give her the run of the young men. She flirts with all of them and her mother watches, judging that none of them mean business, until something real starts with a lodger in his mid-thirties named Bob Doran. Joyce keeps Polly at a slight distance throughout: she is nineteen, she is being used by her mother, and she is not innocent either.
How the book draws them
- How she looksA slim girl of nineteen with light soft hair and a small full mouth. Her eyes are grey with a shade of green and have a habit of glancing upwards when she speaks to anyone, which the story says makes her look like a little perverse madonna.
- What she singsAt the Sunday-night gatherings in the front drawing-room, with the music-hall lodgers obliging and someone vamping accompaniments, Polly sings a comic song. Its first line is: "I'm a ... naughty girl."
- The typing jobShe lasted only a short while in a corn factor's office because her father, working as a sheriff's man, came round every other day asking to be allowed to say a word to his daughter.
- How it startedDoran remembers it as a series of small things: her dress and breath and fingers, and the night she tapped at his door to relight her candle, in a printed flannel jacket with her instep showing in furry slippers. On cold nights she warmed his dinner and had a tumbler of punch waiting.
- The morning it breaksShe comes into his room while he is sitting on the bed in his shirt and trousers, tells him she has made a clean breast of it to her mother, throws her arms round his neck and cries: "O Bob! Bob! What am I to do? What am I to do at all?" She says she will put an end to herself.
- What she does nextLeft alone, she cries for a little, then dries her eyes with a towel dipped in the water jug, looks at herself in profile in the glass and puts a hairpin straight. Then she sits at the foot of the bed, and the perturbation goes out of her face entirely.
The last page of the story belongs to Polly, alone on the bed while her mother settles the marriage downstairs. She stops crying quickly, tidies herself, and falls into a reverie — "her memories gradually giving place to hopes and visions of the future" — so absorbed that she forgets what she is waiting for. Then her mother calls up that Mr Doran wants to speak to her, and the last line is: "Then she remembered what she had been waiting for." Joyce leaves it deliberately unclear how much of this she planned and how much was done to her.
The marriage does happen, and Joyce reports on it a decade later. In Ulysses, Bob Doran is a hopeless annual drunk married to Polly Mooney, and the Dubliners who discuss the match treat it as a trap that closed on him years ago.