Critical Analysis of James' Joyce's Eveline

James Joyce's book of short stories "The Dubliners" is one of his most famous works. Himself an Irish man, Joyce penned stories that centered around characters in Dublin who were dealing with the issues of the time period.

"My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis," Joyce writes in Selected Letters. "I tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life."

Joyce's short story "Eveline" was the advent between adolescence and maturity. Written in 1914, which preceded the women's suffrage in Ireland by four years, te story's protagonist and title character, Eveline, is largely affected by the feminist issues of the time period. These feminist ideas are illustrated through Eveline's relationships with her family and boyfriend, as well the societal expectations, and her duties and obligations.

Eveline is much like many young women in early twentieth century Ireland. With her mother having passed, she is expected to take care of her childhood home. Joyce writes that Eveline struggled to keep "her promise to keep the home together as long as she could," a promise she made to her mother while on her deathbed.

Taking care of her home is one example of Eveline's oppression by the lack of women's liberation in 1914.

"She had hard work to keep the house together and to see that the two young children who had been left to her charge went to school regularly and got their meals regularly," Joyce writes. "It was hard work-a hard life." It is never clear whom Eveline is taking care of, but it is clearly illustrated that she is unhappy in her assumed position of a housewife without a husband.

Eveline's relationship with her father is one of the most telling examples when looking at the text from a feminist viewpoint. Joyce outright acknowledges that Eveline's father treats her differently and with disprespect because she's female.

"Even now, though she was over nineteen, she sometimes felt herself in danger of her father's violence," Joyce writes. "When they were growing up he had never gone for her, like he used to go for Harry and Ernest, because she was a girl."

In that time period, females were still viewed as less than the worth of men, unable to vote or hold positions of power, thus Eveline's father wasn't proud of her as he was of his sons. Eveline's father also made her give up her work wages. Consequentially, she was always broke and was aided by her brother, as her father wouldn't ever help out, saying Eveline "squandered" his hard-earned money.

Eveline's plan is to leave her monotonous life and go to Buenos Aires with her lover, Frank. She puts so much of her proposed future happiness on Frank's shoulders, and assumes that leaving her life as a homemaker is only possible by marrying him.

"She was about to explore another life with Frank," Joyce writes. "She was to go away with him by the night-boat to be his wife and to live with him in Bunos Aires where he had a home waiting for her."

Frank also offered Eveline the chance to travel. He regails her with his past adventures sailing and she is excited at the idea.
In the book Studies of Short Fiction, Earl G. Ingersoll finds Buenos Aires to be a metaphor.

"The narrative makes clear that the possible trip with him to Buenos Aires, where he claims to have a house, is a metaphor for a new realm of experience that his love promises to open for Eveline," he writes. "In a statement suggesting how she herself might phrase it if this story were first-person narrative, we learn: 'She was about to explore another life with Frank.'"

But Eveline wanted to use Frank as an escape, and was romanced by the idea of marriage and how others would think highly of her now that she was with a man.

"Then she would be married-she, Eveline," Joyce writes. "People would treat her with respect then. She would not be treated as her mother had been."

Eveline was affected largely by what society deemed normal and acceptable for young women. At her job in the Stores, the women she worked with looked down at her for being single.

"What would they say of her in the Stores when they found out that she had run away with a fellow?" Joyce writes. "Say she was a fool, perhaps; and her place would be filled up by advertisement. Miss Gavan would be glad. She had always had an edge on her, especially whenever there were people listening."

At the end, Eveline's subconscious was not completely ready to leave her family, home, and promises. Joyce makes sure to write one last line to ensure readers are aware of Eveline's position as a female, declaring she was "passive, like a helpless animal," a position in which Eveline's father and other men of the period assumed women were constantly in.
Ingersoll notes that this last scene is one of the most significant. "What is important is the closing image of Eveline as one immobilized, one whose hands are frozen to the railing, one who loses humanness itself," he writes.

In this image, Eveline is being viewed as a lowly female who must stay to take care of her "home," which includes the family she has left and the undesirable positions she must be in constantly to fulfill her role as a young single woman in 1914 Ireland.

"Eveline is the ultimate 'feminized' subject," Ingersoll writes. "Perhaps because she has been lent for a time a prospect of enfranchisement - Eveline comes to embody the essence of the 'feminine' in patriarchy. She has seen the possibility of 'travel,' but she evades the opportunity of 'travel' because she can associate it with only the very vulnerability and loss to which, in the end, she ironically commits herself. Even if she never leaves her room at the end of the story - indeed especially if she does not - she has passed a life sentence on herself as a 'housekeeper,' a servant of details."

Looking at James Joyce's "Eveline" from a feminist viewpoint, the oppression of women during the twentieth century Dublin setting is illustrated in the text through Eveline's relationship with her family, her lover, society, and the obligations she has as a young single woman.