Jingling Symbol Analysis

Jingling represents sex—specifically Blazes Boylan’s affair with Molly Bloom. It also illustrates how Joyce connects music and sound to thought and memory. The jingling sound appears in two main forms. First, the quoits (brass rings) on Leopold and Molly Bloom’s bed are loose, so they jingle whenever anyone moves on the bed. Secondly, the horses who pull Boylan’s car wear bells, so his car is always jingling.

Joyce introduces the jingling bed early in the novel, during “Calypso.” Later, the novel repeatedly describes Boylan’s jingling car in “Sirens,” while he’s making his way across Dublin to visit Molly. The implication is clear: when Molly and Boylan have sex, the bed is going to jingle like crazy. Surely enough, in “Penelope,” Molly says that the bed jingled so loud that she and Boylan decided to have sex on the floor instead. Whenever the jingling sound appears, then, it’s a reference to Molly’s affair with Boylan.

Joyce’s “jogjaunty” jingle sounds also show how Bloom’s awareness of Molly’s affair is constantly haunting him. It lingers in the back of his mind, just like the jingling sound lingers throughout the “Sirens” episode. Every so often, the main storyline pauses and a line about Boylan jingles into the story. For instance, when Bloom thinks of Molly, the novel cuts to the “jingling, hoofthuds” of Boylan’s horses across town. When Father Cowley plays the piano, Bloom notices his “conductors legs too, bagstrousers, jiggedy jiggedy,” and then he thinks of Boylan: “jiggedy jingle jaunty jaunty.” In addition to showing how Joyce uses repeated sounds and unusual syntax to give this episode’s prose a musical quality, these examples show how the sounds of the Ormond Hotel bar keep reminding Bloom of Boylan’s jingling carriage (and by extension his affair with Molly).