‘Eveline’ is one of the shortest stories that
make up James Joyce’s
collection Dubliners (1914), a volume that was not an initial
commercial success (it sold just 379 copies in its first year of publication,
and 120 of those were bought by Joyce himself). Yet, Dubliners redefined the short story and is now viewed
as a classic work of modernist fiction, with each of its fifteen short stories
repaying close analysis. ‘Eveline’ focuses on a young Irish woman of nineteen
years of age, who plans to leave her abusive father and poverty-stricken
existence in Ireland, and seek out a new, better life for herself and her lover
Frank in Buenos Aires.
Eveline
is a young woman living in Dublin with her father. Her mother is dead. Dreaming
of a better life beyond the shores of Ireland, Eveline plans to elope with
Frank, a sailor who is her secret lover (Eveline’s father having forbade
Eveline to see Frank after the two men fell out), and start a new life in
Argentina. With her mother gone, Eveline is responsible for the day-to-day
running of the household: her father is drunk and only reluctantly tips up his
share of the weekly housekeeping money, and her brother Harry is busy working
and is away a lot on business (another brother, Ernest, has died). Eveline
herself keeps down a job working in a shop. On Saturday nights, when she asks
her father for some money, he tends to unleash a tirade of verbal abuse, and is
often drunk. When he eventually hands over his housekeeping money, Eveline has
to go to the shops and buy the food for the Sunday dinner at the last minute.
Eveline is tired of this life, and so she and Frank book onto a ship leaving
for Argentina. But, as she is just about to board the ship, Eveline suffers a
failure of resolve, and cannot go through with it. She wordlessly turns round
and goes home, leaving Frank to board the ship alone.
Like
many stories in Dubliners, ‘Eveline’ explores the
relationship between the past and the future by examining a single person’s
attitude to their life in Dublin. Joyce was interested in this relationship,
and believed that Ireland – which often had a habit of nostalgically looking
backwards and holding onto the past – needed to progress and strive to bring
itself up to date. In many ways, Eveline typifies the difficulties faced by
many Dubliners at the time. Joyce depicts her current existence as dull,
uninspiring, even oppressive, with her abusive father highlighting the idea
that the older generation needs to be cast off if young Ireland is to forge
itself into a new nation. Even the good aspects of the old Ireland, such as
Eveline’s mother and her older brother Ernest, are dead and gone.
And yet when it comes to crunch time,
to the moment when she must board the boat, Eveline is unable to do so, and
instead clings to the barrier as though literally clinging to old Ireland and
the past which is dead and gone but which she cannot leave behind. She cannot
let go of the past, as the early sections of the story reveal:
The
man out of the last house passed on his way home; she heard his footsteps
clacking along the concrete pavement and afterwards crunching on the cinder
path before the new red houses. One time there used to be a field there in
which they used to play every evening with other people’s children. Then a man
from Belfast bought the field and built houses in it – not like their little
brown houses but bright brick houses with shining roofs. The children of the
avenue used to play together in that field – the Devines, the Waters, the
Dunns, little Keogh the cripple, she and her brothers and sisters. Ernest,
however, never played: he was too grown up. Her father used often to hunt them
in out of the field with his blackthorn stick; but usually little Keogh used to
keep nix and call out when he saw her father coming. Still they seemed to have
been rather happy then. Her father was not so bad then; and besides, her mother
was alive. That was a long time ago; she and her brothers and sisters were all
grown up her mother was dead. Tizzie Dunn was dead, too, and the Waters had
gone back to England. Everything changes. Now she was going to go away like the
others, to leave her home.
‘That
was a long time ago’, and everything has changed, yet Eveline sits and
reminisces about this happy time from her childhood. And this brings us to one
of the most difficult aspects of Joyce’s story to analyze and pin down. Is it
this nostalgia for old Ireland – embodied by her childhood memories – that
prevents her from emigrating with Frank? Perhaps. The masterstroke on Joyce’s
part is refraining from telling us precisely what makes Eveline
stay in Dublin at the end of the story. Is it filial duty to her father and
brother? Or is it a nostalgic attachment to Ireland, and the happy memories
that it carries for her, even though most of the people who shared those
memories with her have either emigrated (back to England, revealingly) or have died?
One
of the key words in Joyce’s Dubliners is
‘paralysis’: people feel immobilized, unable to move or progress, trapped in
their own lives. This, Joyce believed, is what Dublin – and, indeed, much of
Ireland – was like as a whole: paralyzed. ‘Eveline’ offers in a little snapshot
an example of how deeply such paralysis could run, even leading a young woman
to forgo the chance of a new start in favour of remaining in an abusive,
dead-end life.
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