The Gender Roles In James Joyce's Eveline

James Joyce’s Eveline touches on themes of helplessness, expectation and the gender roles present in an impoverished Irish family during its narrative. The narrative focuses on the perspective of Eveline the dutiful daughter of a violent widower. She is the eldest daughter and has tried to follow the promise that she gave her mother when she was on her death bed. She sees it as her duty to keep her family together since her mother’s death. She feels that she has to fill in her mother’s roles while still continuing to be a daughter. She is melancholic about how her town seems to be changing even though her life seems to be at a standstill. She knows that everything changes. She and her siblings are becoming older, as is her father, and she
She feels that her family would fall apart if she was not there to keep it functional. She doesn’t view her family as something strong enough to weather the hard time, instead she feels like it is growing old and slowly decaying around her. Initially her family was large, happy and robust, but with the death of her mother and Earnest, and Harry moving away, it has become a sickly aging shadow of itself. Weak and estranged and almost helpless. No matter how much effort Eveline puts into keeping it alive her father tells her that she doesn’t have the right mindset for it. He tells her that her efforts help the streets more than they help the family and that all she does is ‘squander’ the family’s resources. Eveline’s family is a practical definition of the antonyms of ‘large’ and ‘strong’, tragically trying to stay traditional and being dysfunctional for trying.
Joyce knows that families need more than a traditional rule of law to be successful. He understands families can still malfunction when their members still support each other. He shows that the efforts one person in a family cannot keep a family standing. Eveline’s Family was clearly plagued with instability -in the traditional Irish sense- and the power dynamics, malignant responsibilities and lack of true communication stymies the titular character’s every effort to stop her family from dying out. It shows that she is helpless to stop it without support, and trying to will eventually kill