Stories of adolescence

Eveline

In the overall structure of Dubliners, this is the first story of the sequence devoted to adolescence where Joyce balances two feminine polarities: virgin and temptress in what is, by the large, a man’s world. Eveline representing the woman victim, her treatment is probably more sympathetic, although it is difficult to decide whether pity or irony dominates (some critics have read ‘Eveline’ like the pastiche of a romance). Perhaps, in any case, Joyce is too ‘clinical’ to intimate anything more than the notion of failure. Escape and elopement fail except for the very strong (and Eveline lacks fortitude). Nor can the ‘good’ life (if such a thing exists) be sought in ‘high’ society (‘After the Race’), venality (‘Two Gallants’) or lust (‘The Boarding House’).

This first story of adolescence, and one in which the main character, a girl, is no longer Joyce himself, shows a definite shifting of the point of view. The third person is used (instead of the first) and two voices at least can be heard: the narrator’s (now detached and observant, now the omniscient creator, although he intervenes as unobtrusively as possible); and Eveline’s, whose inner monologue we are given.

After the Race

Social and economic criticism of the poor(in ‘Eveline’) is extended to the provincial and cosmopolitan rich in the present story. The former set is denounced for their heaviness, lack of real during (‘reasonable recklessness’-a fine example of oxymoron), vanity, snobbery, longing ‘to see life’ (about which their view is nonsensical) and ultimate silliness, since they become the easy preys of strangers to whose enterprises they deliver Ireland, that ‘channel of poverty and inaction’, no match for the foreigners’ ‘wealth and industry’. The latter set is denounced not only for their lack of scruples but for their artificiality (note such words as ‘hilarious’, ‘light’, ‘volubly and with little reserve’, ‘flashing’, ‘excited’).

Political criticism is added: of the nation’s general attitude (e.g. ‘the gratefully oppressed’), of Irishman’s cliché-vision of themselves and the relationship with the sister-island (obtuse and pitiless though she is: for instance Routh is completely at sea when he is told about English madrigals, but wins the money in the end).

Two Gallants

This is probably one of the most difficult stories to interpret in Dubliners. One of the ‘adolescence’ group, Joyce tells us, although here (with the characters in their early thirties) and even more so in the next piece, the team has to be strained extensively(or is prolonged adolescence, the refusal to grow old, another form of paralysis?). An illustration of the sin of covetousness-but not very convincing from that point of view.

It is obviously an instance of literary pastiche; notice in the very first paragraph, the insistence on warm grey evening’, the number of heavy words of romance origin (‘descended’, ‘circulated’, ‘shuttered for repose’, ‘illumined’), continued later with ‘rotundity’.

The Boarding House

The interest of ‘The Boarding House’, it lies in the variety of the points of view, in the fact that it is one of Joyce’s most naturalistic stories, the accumulation of details tending to show how the main character is literally trapped by the combined forces of social conventions and moral taboos. Other highlights of this essentially satirical piece are the denunciations of hypocrisy (see the interview between mother and daughter) and the role played by priests(see, for instance, ’she went to the priest and got a separation from him, with care of the children’; and see also Doran’s confession:’the priest had drawn out every ridiculous detail of the affair, and in the end had so magnified his sin that he was almost thankful at being afforded a loophole of reparation’). ‘The Boarding House’ is, with ‘Grace’, the most anticlerical story of someone who vanquished paralysis by refusing the common Irish pattern illustrated by Doran: free-thinking in youth and a ‘regular’ life in maturity.

© Librairie du LIban.

York Notes, James Joyce Dubliners, notes by Patrick Rafroidi. Longman York Press, Beirut 1985.