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Joyce's depiction of women is characterized by a high degree of literary self-consciousness, perhaps even more so than in the rest of his work. The self-consciousness emerges as an awareness of both genre and linguistic expectations. contrasting highly self-conscious, isolated literary men (or men with literary aspirations) with women who follow more romantic models, even stereotypes. In Dubliners, Joyce utilizes a clichéd story of doomed love ending in death-physical or spiritual-in "A Painful Case" …

…things and write a book out of it the works of Master Poldy" (18.579-580). Again, the "1 half" orthography heightens our awareness of the text and, of course, someone has written about Bloom (even if she wrote it, Molly would designate authorship to "Master Poldy," not to herself). We are reading about him as Molly thinks about him in the present and, most importantly, well after Joyce wrote about him, in the eternal lines of "Penelope."