James Joyce’s Eveline

The short story “Eveline” is taken from the Adolescence’s section of Joyce’s Dubliners is setting in Dublin at the turn of the twentieth century. It is about the everyday failures and disappointments of normal people, it is both a vivid and unflinching portrait of Dublin. In Dublin not much moves: stasis and paralysis are states of live, Dublin is a kind of prison.

Eveline is a young woman of about nineteen years of age. She watches the evening, she was tired and in a way or another she is stuck in the close setting and she stair, she look from the outside from the protective shield of the window. There is anyway a very important verb: “She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue”, that conveys the idea she is threatened from the outside. Her body is still at the window, but her mind moves in the past, she get away from the small room. Right from the start Joyce uses the language of sense impression to make the reader perceive the surrender reality, which is describe from Evelin point of view. In contrast to her stasis people outside are walking. Dust is a Modernist metaphor for something that has no energy that is crumbled and dead.

The narrator uses literary choices to make the scene realistic by having the reader perceive, not by description. The character thought bring her back to the past. The character is still in a closed space, she is afraid because of the outside. There is a claustrophobia effect. She is not projected outside, she is going back to the past. “One time there used to be”: there is an habit in the past, the narrator, who is following the trend of her thoughts make the reader feel the sense of nostalgia.

Eveline’s story illustrates the gin of holding onto the past when facing the future. Eveline reflects the typical woman’s life of the early twentieth-century, between a domestic life rooted in the past and the possibility of a new married life abroad. Indeed she is faithful to her sales job. Her mother has died as has her older brother Ernest.

She broods on the aspects of her life that are driving her away, while "in her nostrils was the smell of dusty cretonne”. She fears that her father will beat her as he used to beat her brothers. In the set of their memories there is the reference to her father, a violent man who drinks a lot. The idea of this aggressive father is anticipated by the verb hunt, generally connected to animals. This memory bring fourth more details about the relationship with her father. Joyce, following Evelin trend of though create Evelin’s family environment. He creates the scene with a very little plot, and the worlds are in the mind of the characters.

However, she has fallen in love for a sailor named Frank who promises to take her with him to Buenos Aires. Before leaving to meet Frank, she hears an organ grinde outside, which reminds her of a melody that played on the day her mother died. She remember the promise she made to her to look after home. At the dock where she and Frank are ready to embark on a ship together, Eveline is deeply conflicted and makes the painful decision not to leave with him. In such situation she is paralyzed, her face registers no emotion at all.

Eveline suspends herself between the call of home and the past and the call of new experiences and the future, unable to make a decision. Her life is either memory or imagination. She would be, she is a future in the past, she never be in the present. Her life becomes a picture of her imagination, dissolving in imagines.

Escape and paralysis are the central themes: Eveline feels trapped by the stifling conditions, poverty and family situations, that entrap her at home. Eveline’s dream is escape from Dublin, but she is unable to because she finds herself frightened to leave her family and Ireland. Her action is the sign that she in fact hasn’t made a decision and she remains fixed in a circle of indecision. Eveline’s paralysis within an orbit of repetition leaves her a “helpless animal,” stripped of human will and emotion. The idea of death is present everywhere. Nothing is happening there, but everything change. There is a shift from the past to the present. The idea of leaving the place is in her mind, but it is just an intention, not a plan. Everything is potentially possible, but she never acts. In order to do something you have to decide, to think what is better to you.

To make decisions is a very strong act, a revolutionary one because it means to bring forth the consequences. There is a common problem in the Dubliners, where all the characters imagine doing something, but they are paralyzed. Dead people seems to be more realistic.

Eveline, despite her young age, is already dead, because she lives in memory. Death is much real that active life, as you can notice in Hamlet’s monologue: people are afraid to take action, are crystalized. Eveline is symbolical, basically because she feel a sense of guilt. She just consider things that have already happen.

The showing technique in the last part is less filter by the narrator. She is pave. Passive is no acting, she is subject. The reader have a mental photogram of Evelin: an afraid face of a young girl paralyzed even in her eyes. Her intention are always a mental ones.

She has not a point of view, even if the narrator tell the story from her perspective. Her mother and her father have decided for her and also Frank.

In conclusion the message is that people are what they do, not what they think. Decision make you responsible. She is always thinking. Evelin is not living, she is surviving. She has not an identity, she never investigate what she is really want. What is the sense of your life? She does not answer because her life is in death. She hasn’t got a point of view, she is afraid from other people judgment. She does not know herself; she is like a ghost because she knows only what other people think of her. Dubliner are living dead.