Feminism in the Short Story “Eveline” by James Joyce (original) (raw)

The Oppression and Paralysis of Women in Joyce’s “Eveline” and “The Boarding House”

James Joyce's collection of short stories; Dubliners is one of the most famous modernist works in the history of literature. Stories in the collection have common qualities such as the similarity of themes and techniques and have an order according to these qualities. This paper will examine two of these stories: "Eveline" and "The Boarding House" and the themes of paralysis, oppression and emancipation. The difference between these stories which is the existence of the paralysis of both genders is going to be the other aspect. The stories of "The Boarding House" and "Eveline" in Dubliners states the oppressed and paralyzed state of women and Ireland by the employment of modernist techniques such as epiphany and open-ending.

James Joyce’un ‘Eveline’ ve ‘The Boarding House’ adlı Hikayelerindeki Ruhsal Çöküntü ve Epifani

DergiPark (Istanbul University), 2012

This article intends to highlight James Joyce's ironical outlook for the existence of epiphanies in women's lives to be released from their spiritual paralysis and stagnation as indicated in "Eveline" (1904) and "The Boarding House" (1906) in Dubliners. In "Eveline" and "The Boarding House," Joyce portrays women who are in a struggle for setting aside the inequalities and miseries of their social environment through their representative wish for emancipation in their lonely and alienated state of minds. Trapped in a web of social expectations and constraints, women intend to escape from the strict patriarchal society of Dublin in these short stories. Structured and controlled by the issue of femininity, James Joyce writes about the effects of the Irish society on female adolescents. "Eveline" and "The Boarding House" offer two portrayals of women who are enclosed by the dominance of the rigid patriarchal society which ends up the need for emancipation from social rigid rules. In these stories, however, the women characters portray a continuation of the choice of their domestic female roles, i.e., their struggle for emancipation turns out to be useless. "Eveline" is the story of a young teenager who faces a dilemma where she has to choose either she has to live with her father or escape with his boyfriend. In "The Boarding House," Mrs. Mooney, a working woman who has rooms to be rented by the young male lodgers, is also in a struggle for supporting herself and her two children. She is in search for emancipation from her drunken abusive husband having social prejudices. Hence, both of these stories highlight women's tendency for exploring their selfhood and free will because of the inequalities and struggles of patriarchal society of the time in which they are spiritually paralyzed. Thus, James Joyce hints at women's wish for emancipation

The 'feminine fictions' of James Joyce

1994

Typescript in Bold has been used throughout, in place o f It a lic in the texts quoted. I t has also been incorporated into the t i t l e s of books and a rtic le s which include the t it le s of others' works. This is to avoid confusion, as the works of dames doyce, c r itic a l works, and the t it le s of journals are underlined. 8 NOTES 1. Helene Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa" translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen in Signs:Women and Gender, edited by Elizabeth and Emily Abel, 1977; p .279. 2. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1959 and 1982; p .149. 3. Ellmann, c f.o p .c it.; p .629. 4. Ellmann, c f.o p .c it; p.629. 5. Lynne Pearce, Woman/Image/Text London harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991; p .2. 6. "...a s he pointedly told Mary Col urn la te r, 'I hate in te lle c tu a l women1", quoted in Ellmann, c f.o p .c it.; p .529. 7. Ellmann, c f.o p .c it.; p .634. Also quoted in Ellmann is a conversation Joyce had with Frank Budgen, where he apparently argued: "Women w rite books and paint pictures and compose and perform music. And there are some who have attained eminence in the fie ld of s c ie n tific research.. .But you have never heard of a woman who was the author of a complete philosophic system, and I don't think you ever w ill" c f.o p .c it.; p .634. 8. Both Richard Ellmann and Brenda Maddox chart the financial and lite ra ry support given to Joyce by these women. In her role as his patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver was to give Joyce not only regular amounts o f money to pay fo r se ria liza tio n of his work (Ellmann, p.404; Maddox, p .223), but also helped to supplement his small income and help support his young fam ily. Her g ifts by 1923 had reached the to ta l of £2100 (Ellmann, p .556). She became a supportive friend to Nora too (Maddox, pp.198-199), and la te r she was to continue to support Joyce over Finnegans Wake, when many doubted the project (Ellmann, p .669). On his death, she paid fo r his funeral (Ellmann, p.481). Sylvia Beach, a friend of H arriet Shaw Weaver's, published the f i r s t edition of Ulysses through her Paris bookshop, "Shakespeare and Company", and although she and Joyce became estranged in la te r years, her support fo r his work remained appreciated by him (Ellmann, pp.504-505). 9. Suzette Henke and Elaine Unkeles, editors, Women in Joyce Urbana:University of I llin o is Press, 1982. 10. Modern Fiction Studies, edited by Ellen Carol Jones, v o l.35, no.3 Autumn 1989. 11. Brenda Maddox, c f.o p .c it.

In Search of Cultural and Personal Experience behind woman in James Joyce’s Dubliners

Artes Humanae

Artes Humanae ■ 1/2016 ■ artykuły an individual's choice and use of words reflects his/her subjective experience and idiosyncratic assessment of reality. Our lexical material comprises the lexical item woman in James Joyce's Dubliners, the attempt being to show how the senses of woman in the collection are related to the writer's private life-story and his own vision of the Irish culture and society as regards gender issues at the turn of 19 th and 20 th centuries 2. On the methodological plane, our position is that the senses of a word are not just extensions of one another, but, rather, they all constitute clusters based on "family resemblance" 3. As there is no generally established, or agreed, rule on the basis of which we can predict conventionalized meanings of a lexical item, it seems that the senses are culturally defined and have to be learned, rather than can be predicted. Even within one culture, the meaning of a word is by no means the same in all minds. Still, it is possible to find experiential and dictionary-based way of tracing semantic histories of words. On methodological and practical inadequacies of the latter, see additionally Łozowski (2015). 2 We attempt this specifically in our contextual analysis below. Yet, a few words of generalization might prove useful here. Gleed (2011: 51-52) points out that having spent in Ireland his first 22 years of life, James Joyce left not only his own country but also abandoned his Roman Catholic religion, choosing "self-imposed exile" in Continental Europe. In the words of Bulson (2006: 21), "Joyce was born and raised in the nineteenth-century Ireland, but he matured in twentieth-century Europe." Although in many European countries this was the period of great changes as regards gender roles, Ireland's development concerning this issue was considerably postponed to the result that old Victorian values were preserved there much longer. Irish women at the turn of the 20th century were severely abused with no rights to defend themselves. To conform to societal norms, they had to be obedient, devoted to family life and religion, passionless, and submissive towards men (

What is the role of women in James Joyce’s Dubliners and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio?

2017

This extended essay is an investigation of the protagonist female characters in both James Joyce’s Dubliners and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. The research question revolves around unwed young women and married women in their motherhood in terms of man-woman relationships, sociocultural views and religious concepts. In addition to the context, the purpose and explanation of the literary devices is included in the relevant sections of the essay. The arguments are fully supported by quotations from the two literary works and refuted with proper historical knowledge in appropriate places. Mainly only the characters in the chosen short stories are analyzed and explored, however for some of the stories, additional characters are taken into consideration. The purpose of this work is to investigate how women are portrayed in two diverse cultures with the aforementioned circumstances. The extended essay is composed of an introduction, main body and conclusion. In the main body, James...

'Passive, Like a Helpless Animal': A Psychoanalytic Study of Eveline in James Joyce's "Eveline"

VEDA'S JOURNAL OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE [JOELL], 2017

In James Joyce's intriguing short story "Eveline", the protagonist Eveline Hill and her life were vastly affected by her traumas of personal history, thus, making her passive, like a helpless animal. This particular paper tries to evaluate the character Eveline from the psychoanalytical point of view and find out why this character behaved in a certain way. She was driven by her Superego and failed to rationalize with her Id and Ego for which she felt guilty, passive and helpless. All her important actions and decisions were majorly influenced by the treatment that she obtained from her family especially from her father in the childhood which contributed to her inner conflicts and eventually made her psychologically paralyzed. This work might be helpful for those researchers who would like to grasp more knowledge on psychoanalytic study or analyzing any character from a psychoanalytic point of view.