“Escape! She must escape!” but why she did not (Meyer 515). James Joyce title character in “Eveline” had all the reason in the world to escape her odd life and explore a new life. She fears making the change in her life by moving to Buenos Aires with her boyfriend Frank. Eveline becomes the main provider for her dysfunctional family after her mother’s death and has to make the biggest decision of her life, to stay or runaway. The guilt that Eveline will feel forced her to stay in her trap awful life. James illustrates in the short story “Eveline”, that his character didn’t leave her gloomy life because of two reasons, Eveline promised her mother to care for the family and she doesn’t know or love Frank enough to leave.
James Joyce was born February 2, 1882, in Dublin, Ireland. He attended private Jesuit schools and graduated from University College, Dublin in 1902 with a degree in modern languages. After college he travels to Paris to study medicine but decides to write instead. He return back home to take care of his ill mother and starts a relationship with Nora Barnacle in the early 1900’s; they marry in 1931. After marriage they move back to Europe where he completes Dubliners. Joyce submits his work to the English Publisher Grant Richards. Richard states the stories are too contends and publish them nine years later. Joyce also publish Chamber Music, Ulysses (1907), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and Finnegan’s Wake (1939) (Meyer 512). Joyce influences the way fiction is written in the twentieth century. He dies January 13, 1941 after moving to France during the World War II.
Eveline is apart of James Joyce's book of short stories Dubliners. Dubliners is Joyce most famous and first major work (Litfinder...
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...omise to her mother. Eveline promised her dying mother she will take the duty of the caretaker of the household. Also Eveline discovers she does not really love Frank until she gets to the load dock. This is another reason why Eveline decides to stay home. Eveline choose the love for her family instead the unreal love for Frank.
Works Cited
Dettmar, Kevin J. H. "James (Augustine Aloysius) Joyce." British Short-Fiction Writers, 1915-
1945. Ed. John Headley Rogers. Detroit: Gale Research, 1996. Dictionary of Literary
Biography Vol. 162. Literature Resource Center. Web. 17 Nov. 2013.
"Explanation of: Eveline by James Joyce." LitFinder Contemporary Collection. Detroit: Gale,
2007. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 28 Oct. 2013.
Meyer, Michael. The Bedford Introdution to Literature. 10th Edition. Boston, New York:
Bedford/St.Martin's, 2010. 512-15. Print.
"Eveline" is the story of a young teenager facing a dilemma where she has to choose between living with her father or escaping with Frank, a sailor which she has been courting for some time. The story is one of fifteen stories written by James Joyce in a collection called "Dubliners". These stories follow a certain pattern that Joyce uses to express his ideas: "Joyce's focus in Dubliners is almost exclusively on the middle-class Catholics known to himself and his family"(the Gale Group). Joyce's early life, family background, and his catholic background appear in the way he writes these stories. "Where Joyce usually relates his stories to events in his life, there are some stories which are actually events that took place in his life" (Joyce, Stanislaus). James Joyce in his letter to Grant Richard writes:
Twentieth Century Interpretations of Dubliners. Prentice-Hall, Inc. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: 1968. Torchiana, Donald T. Backgrounds for Joyce’s Dubliners. Allen & Unwin, Inc. Winchester, Massachusetts: 1986.
Eveline is compelled by her responsibility of taking care of her father. In this story, the main antagonist is her father who is a shameful parent. He creates an unplea...
The major theme explored in “Eveline” is the idea of order and hazard. In society, the idea of order has a lot more positive connotation than hazard. People often quote popular sayings such as “life is not always greener on the other side of the pastor” to indicate this belief. Contrary, the idea of taking chances is seen as dangerous. However Joyce in “Eveline” seems to be pushing the reader to give up their everyday routine, which is order, and instead take chances, hazard, to attempt to create a better life for themself.
...e, and "perhaps love, too" and "she had a right to happiness" (50). Yet Eveline is not certain she will find love with Frank, just as she doesn't know what kind of life they will have together. The adult world of desire, longing, fulfillment, and heartbreak roil about in "the seas of the world that tumbled about her heart" (51) and this unknown world of emotional vitality and power is as frightening to Eveline as the physical reality of sailing halfway round the world. In this realm she might drown, yes, but she might just as likely learn to swim. Yet by declining "to test the waters" Eveline condemns herself to a life without emotional fulfillment at all. In the rite of passage from adolescence into adulthood, Eveline feels only that the transformative experience will "drown" her old self and she is unable to adequately imagine a new self emerging from the waves.
Will she stay with her abusive father in a hard working life, or sail away to Buenos Ayres with her short-time lover, Frank? Although in the end, she chooses to stay with her family and abusive father, she is considered a hero due to the fact that she stays for the greater good, not for herself, but for the sake of others. Due to her mother’s death, Eveline’s psychological state is already quite fragile. She seems to love her mother more than her father, and after her mother’s death, her father became more abusive. Eveline’s mother spoke seemingly crazed words before her death: “Derevaun Seraun!
Thomas, Steve. "Dubliners by James Joyce." ebooks@Adelaide. The University of Adelaide, 23 Aug 2010. Web. 20 Jan 2011
James Joyce uses his novel Dubliners to reveal how fathers are in Dublin during 1904. Joyce utilizes his stories within Dubliners, such as “Eveline” and “Counterparts,” to describe the cruelty fathers were during the early 1900s. Within “Eveline” Eveline Hill is trapped within her home dealing with her abusive father and trying to escape the reality with her lover. However, she remembers her mother’s promise of maintaining the household. Her father is a prime example of Joyce’s representation of fathers within the 1900s. He is an abusive man usually when he is only drunk. During his rarity of soberness, he shows characteristics of a normal father. “Counterparts” exhibits the same aspects of fathers. Farrington eludes from his work at the law firm to have drinks with his friend. This makes him into an incompetent nuisance within his work that makes him angry, even though it is his own
Another one of these stories was “Eveline”. Many women of this time period were faced with the reality of choosing the future instead of holding on to the past in order to make a life. Eveline was mistreated by the men in her family but is not able to fully let go of the family relationship that she still found with them. This goes to show that women were underestimated for their compassion role in society. She wants to run away with the man she has been seeing for a long time. His name is Frank. She sees him as a way to escape and maybe have chance at a happier life but backs out of this decision when she hears an organ play in the streets that brought back memories of her mother’s death. Eveline shows the side of humans that desire routine and a need to feel safe in repeated routine. Paralysis is seen through the way she is frozen in her life because of routine and cannot let it go. Joyce blames the Catholic Church for the way women lived and people in general, lived their lives in fear of anything
Friedrich, Gerhard. "The Perspective of Joyce’s ‘Dubliners.’" College English (March 1965) Vol. 26 No. 6. Rpt. in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism Vol. 35. Detroit: Gale, 1990. 166-169.
The Feminist’s Eveline In the first wave of the feminist movement, women were greatly disadvantaged in terms of power and opportunity. Likewise, in the story Eveline, the protagonist exhibits the powerlessness and lack of opportunity commonly seen during the same period. The protagonist is unable to make her own decisions and relies on male influence to determine her fate despite her individual goals. Her lover, Frank, was the only form of freedom she knew; however false it might have been. Meanwhile, her father held her back and her mother’s last wishes only reinforced her enslavement.
James Joyce's Eveline is a short story that takes place in Dublin, Ireland, in 1914. The short story was published alongside Joyce's other short stories in a book called Dubliners. The story's main character is the title character, Eveline. Eveline is approximately a nineteen year old girl who still lives at home in the house she grew up in, with a physically abusive father. Eveline's mother dies due to illness while Eveline is still young.
In the majority of the story Eveline "sat at the window," (512) which parallels with her paralysis because she does not move. Eveline "was going to go away like the others" (512) because she was one of the only people left in Dublin from her childhood. However, Eveline doesn't go since she is trapped in her setting. Almost nothing in Eveline's setting ever changes throughout her life. The significance of Eveline looking around the room "reviewing all its familiar objects" (512) is that she "never dreamed of being divided" from them. All around her Eveline "had those she had know all her life about her" (512). Eveline is a product of her environment. The reader can see how the setting never changes, Eveline's life molds to it. This explains the reason for her not going away and starting a much happier life.
In the short story “Eveline “ by James Joyce, Eveline, the protagonist is given the opportunity to escape from her hard unendurable life at home and live a life of true happiness at Buenos Ayres with Frank, her lover. Throughout the story, Eveline is faced with a few good memories of her past from her childhood and her mother, but she also faces the horrible flashbacks of her mother’s illness and her father’s violence. In the end, she does not leave with Frank, Eveline’s indecisiveness and the burden of her family’s duties makes her stay.
Trapped in a world where mental anguish imprisons her, Eveline is another of James Joyce's paralyzed souls. Her life is full of ups and downs. Every day she struggles with burdens that she should not have to bear and when the opportunity comes for her to get away from this retched life, she denies herself the chance. The reasons why I feel Eveline did not leave for Buenos Aires with Frank is because she was obligated to her family, she was afraid of the unknown and she did not know how to receive love.