Dolphin's Barn
Dolphin's Barn
In Brief
"Dolphin's Barn" is an area on the southwest edge of inner
city Dublin, named for the Dolphyn family who apparently had a
barn there when it had not yet been swallowed by the
metropolis. Molly was living in this suburb with her father
when she and Bloom first met, and he remembers being with her
at a party "In Luke Doyle's long ago. Dolphin's Barn, the
charades." The encounter at the Doyle family house was one of
their earliest meetings, and after the charades Bloom kissed
her. Dolphin's Barn also figures in the Martha Clifford
intrigue, because that is where she receives mail, and
possibly lives. And it has a Jewish connection: Dublin's
Orthodox Jewish cemetery has been located there on
Aughavannagh Road since 1898.
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Ithaca gives Brian Tweedy's address in Dublin as "Rehoboth, Dolphin's Barn." This might refer to several different streets in the area (Rehoboth Avenue, Rehoboth Terrace, and Rehoboth Place are all present-day addresses, and Gifford mentions a Rehoboth Road), but Molly pins it down in Penelope: "the first night ever we met when I was living in Rehoboth terrace we stood staring at one another for about 10 minutes as if we met somewhere."
That first meeting was almost certainly at Mat Dillon's
house, but Bloom also thinks of Molly staring at him as he
enacted Rip Van Winkle in the charades at Luke Doyle's place:
"Rip van Winkle we played. Rip: tear in Henny Doyle's
overcoat. Van: breadvan delivering. Winkle: cockles and
periwinkles. Then I did Rip van Winkle coming back. She leaned
on the sideboard watching. Moorish eyes." In Penelope
Molly remembers "the night he kissed my heart at
Dolphins barn I couldn't describe it simply makes
you feel like nothing on earth." Ithaca observes
that this consequential encounter kept Bloom up all night:
"Once, in 1887, after a protracted performance of
charades in the house of Luke Doyle, Kimmage, he
had awaited with patience the apparition of the diurnal
phenomenon, seated on a wall, his gaze turned in the direction
of Mizrach, the east."
It is certainly interesting that "Martha Clifford" lives (or
purports to do so) in the same
part of town where Molly took an early interest in Bloom's
intellectual qualities and where he gave her an early, memorable kiss. After
"wading through fortyfour" replies to his want ad for a "smart
lady typist to aid gentleman in literary work," as he recalls
in Lestrygonians, did Bloom initiate a correspondence
with this woman because her address suggested an opportunity
to go back to the happy early days of his relationship with
Molly? Or is it a mere coincidence, owing perhaps to the fact
that this one woman was willing to undertake increasingly
risqué correspondence with an unknown purported employer who
does not act very much like a "gentleman"?
Kimmage is a separate suburb nearly a mile south of Dolphin's Barn. It is not clear why Joyce should have located Doyle in both places, though perhaps he had in mind an address located somewhere in between. In The Chronicle of Leopold and Molly Bloom, John Henry Raleigh observes that Clive Hart and Leo Knuth "say there was a real Luke Doyle, a building surveyor, who lived at Camac Place, more properly described as being in Dolphin's Barn, rather than in Kimmage" (85). The fictional couple at that address were "Luke and Caroline Doyle," whom Ithaca mentions as having given the Blooms a wedding present. "Henny Doyle," whose torn overcoat Bloom used as a charades clue, may have been one of their grown children, or perhaps Luke's brother. Molly thinks of him in Penelope as "an unlucky man" who was always "breaking or tearing something in the charades."
