The Books: “Dubliners” – ‘Eveline’ (James Joyce)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

DublinersJoyce.jpgDubliners – by James Joyce – excerpt from the fourth story in the collection: “Eveline”.

Another story in the collection that has exile as its theme. The only way to be happy, apparently, and free – is to leave Ireland. But as is apparent in “Eveline” – leaving is not an easy choice. As Eveline is a young woman – who is planning to run off to Buenos Aires with a young man, a sailor – whose name is Frank. There is nothing really keeping her in Ireland – except the ties of family and culture – her mother is dead (and on her deathbed she said to Eveline: “Keep the family together …”) – her two brothers are grown-up and gone – and her father … well. She’s kind of afraid of her father. She’s too old now to be beaten by him, and he never did hit her that much – he saved THAT brand of love for his sons … but she is still afraid of him. He dominates her choices, tells her to never see that Frank sailor person again, etc. She sits at her window – for the majority of the story (which is only 4 pages long) …. and the boat is sailing that afternoon … and she goes over her choices, her mind going this way, that way … On the brink of leaving Ireland, she suddenly sees her life in a different light, a more forgiving light … her life isn’t THAT bad here, etc. It’s not that she’s waffling. It is that this is truly a difficult choice. At that time, if you move to Argentina from Ireland – you’ll probably never go home again. You can’t leap on a flight and go home once a year, visit the old soil, etc. It’s over. Say goodbye. You will never see this place again. Eveline grapples. It also doesn’t sound like her love for Frank is of the sweeping soulmate variety. He represents escape and adult womanhood … it’s not like she’s so in love with him it hurts, or that she loves him so much she MUST be with him … It’s that her life in Ireland is made up of doing for others, and drudgery, and dull colors, and “odour of ashpits” – and for her whole life she’s been dying for a way out. Frank represents that. Joyce makes Ireland seem pretty bleak … that’s one of the reasons why Irish publishers and Irish people in general balked at the book. They got their backs up. Joyce’s reply to all that was: “It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilization in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass.”

Until the last moment of the story, you think she will get on that boat with Frank. But she can’t. She just can’t. Ties of home and Ireland are too strong.

And – as with all of these stories – the last sentence packs a huge punch. Frank stands calling to her from the ship, devastated that she won’t come. She stares up at him and her face “gave no sign of love or farewell or recognition.”

Shivers. That’s some cold shite right there. It’s almost like once she decides to stay (even though it feels like the decision is made FOR her, it comes from a primal place – not in the intellect) – it’s apparent that she never meant to leave anyway. The whole Frank thing, the whole grappling thing … it’s as though it never happened. Snap. Done.

Here’s an excerpt – the opening of the story. You can feel the sense of impending change from the very beginning: new houses going up at the end of the street, where she used to play … brick houses … different …


Excerpt from Dubliners – by James Joyce – “Eveline”.

She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue. Her head was leaned against the window curtains and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne. She was tired.

Few people passed. The man out of the last home 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 grownup. 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.

Home! She looked round the room, reviewing all its familiar objects which she had dusted once a week for so many years, wondering where on earth all the dust came from. Perhaps she would never see again those familiar objects from which she had never dreamed of being divided. And yet during all those years she had never found out the name of the priest whose yellowing photograph hung on the wall above the broken harmonium beside the coloured print of the promises made to Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque. He had been a school friend of her father. Whenever he showed the photograph to a visitor her father used to pass it with a casual word:

— He is in Melbourne now.

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3 Responses to The Books: “Dubliners” – ‘Eveline’ (James Joyce)

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