james joyce+ eveline

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people, especially in Dublin, had an instinctive stillness he could no longer tolerate. Religiously speaking, Ireland always represented Catholicism. Families were huge and lived terrible living conditions. Ireland has always been a very poor country because it didn't have the same dignity as Britain and was considered as a secondary country. Joyce wrote a pamphlet titled "A modest proposal", where he proposes a practical way to solve the problem of famine in Ireland. The solution was eating children and he gave tips. This was a violent ironic pamphlet against the indifference of British politicians (indirectly), to eventually change their mind and show some compassion. DUBLINERS First literary work Joyce published around 1914. It's a collection. The stories are chronologically ordered. The first story takes into consideration children, then adolescence, that adult and old age. The purpose was to portray through his short stories the stillness and impossibility to move. Paralysis present in all characters. Epiphany under a biblical meaning it has the meaning of revelation, which is what happens in the life of each character in Joyce's stories. Stream of consciousness or "flow of thoughts", is a characterising technical feature of modernism in general. This expression was introduced by psychologists. Henry James was one of the psychological novelists. His brother William was a psychologist and created this expression, which refers to a free flow of thoughts coming to people's mind. Joyce's stream of consciousness is complicated by the fact that the thoughts in the mind of his characters don't follow a chronological order, but they have a flashback and from it go back to the present and jump to the future directly. This continue passage makes Joyce's prose sometimes difficult to understand. As he proceeds, his prose becomes more and more difficult to understand, sometimes almost impossible. Joyce realises all the rules had followed so far will no longer be respected. Removes punctuation and syntactical structure. We will get to a point where words will become unrecognisable. What is left is the rhythm of narration and the possibility to feel something as readers. EVELINE (FROM "DUBLINERS") - PLOT Eveline is a young woman living in Dublin with her father. Her mother is dead. Dreaming of a better life beyond the shores of Ireland, Eveline plans to elope with Frank, a sailor who is her secret lover (Eveline's father having forbade Eveline to see Frank after the two men fell out), and start a new life in Argentina. With her mother gone, Eveline is responsible for the day-to-day running of the household: her father is drunk and only reluctantly tips up his share of the weekly housekeeping money, and her brother Harry is busy working and is away a lot on business (another brother, Ernest, has died). Eveline herself keeps down a job working in a shop. On Saturday nights, when she asks her father for some money, he tends to unleash a tirade of verbal abuse, and is often drunk. When he eventually hands over his housekeeping money, Eveline has to go to the shops and buy the food for the Sunday dinner at the last minute. Eveline is tired of this life, and so she and Frank book onto a ship leaving for Argentina. But as she is just about to board the ship, Eveline suffers a failure of resolve, and cannot go through with it. She wordlessly turns round and goes home, leaving Frank to board the ship alone. EVELINE (FROM "DUBLINERS") - ANALYSIS The main element is dust, which we usually find on old things (=the past). Another meaning of dust in Eveline's routine → she is tired of her routine, but she can't do anything to change it or she should manage to change something. She's unhappy. She doesn't get along with the shop keeper. She is reproached of no acting adequately considering her job as a shop assistant. Dust, routine, abusive father, melancholy. Eveline often remembers about her happy life. Her routine elements are tiering for Eveline, so much so that she wants to escape to Buenos Aires. Ideal of paralysis → At the opening of the passage, she is represented leaning on the curtain and inhaling the smell of dust. She can't react to a bad smell she's inhaling, she can't or doesn't want to move away. Another peculiarity was the idea of "what would people say if". People were used to see Eveline meeting people her family knew. What would they say if suddenly she would run away with Frank? The passage started with a 19 y/o Eveline. She presents the treatment her father gave her on a weekly basis. It's more a torture than a bad treatment. She starts having doubts about her life. Eveline is more afraid of losing her respectability if she married Frank. Marriage might be one of her goals, become a married woman deserves more respect. She felt guilty for running away. They were a happy family, when her mother and brother were alive, and her father wasn't that abusive. Eveline is in love with the idea of being married. No one had ever appreciated her the way Frank appreciates her. Second, she had never had such a nice time with every other man of her family, neither be in one of her family's attention. Frank took her out to see an opera at the theatre and he would sing to her. Frank represented all that she had never been and she never will. Frank was a young man who decided to have a career into the unknown, while Eveline is still leaning on the curtain. She is in love with the idea of being in love. She wants to share the same enthusiastic attitude to life Frank still has. He might not be a millionaire, but he could provide for her. We see her paralysis and she's thinking more and more often about the awful episodes of her life. Plus, she hears the music of a street organ and the worst memory of her life comes to her mind: the day when her mother died. The sign of this organ rings her bad memories back but adds to her paralysis. Eveline tends to sit still rather than grabbing life in her hands and change it, as Frank did. She met her mother. That memory constitutes her epiphany. She comes to realise and put in practice that she's desperately living. She can't no longer think clearly and rationally. She wants to escape from herself. It's not a physical escape she needs only. She can't physically leave. She's not strong enough to cut off with her past and start a new life. She's paralysed. At the end of each paragraph there are always two elements that keep her stuck in Dublin: The music of the distant organ which reminds her the death of her mother Eveline asking God to help her deciding (as a Catholic) Ultimately, she never ever becomes the real protagonist of her own life. She left herself be lived by the outside world. It is as if she would never and could never get off, stand and move the first steps.