"Because She was a Girl": Gender identity and the Postcolonial in James Joyce's 'Eveline' I (original) (raw)
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 (
Feminism in the Short Story “Eveline” by James Joyce
Journal on Education
The message is conveyed by the author (writer) which is conveyed either explicitly or implicitly “Eveline” is a short story written by James Joyce. This short story was published in 1904 with a story setting around the same year and decade. The short story “Eveline” is then considered to have feminist values. Feminism is an awareness of gender injustice that befalls women, both in the family and society. The research uses a descriptive form of research. The data source in this research is the short story “Eveline” by James Joyce. Published in 1904 in Dublin, Ireland. The data used in this study are all short story quotations in the form of words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs in the short story “Eveline” by James Joyce that illustrate feminism. Eveline is portrayed as a girl who generally does housework (stereotypical of women’s duties as house caretakers). Eveline’s consideration of her choice to stay with the grueling routine with her family and abusive father, or to run away ...
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.
Cultural Identity Crisis: A Colonialist Reading of Joyce's "The Sisters"
East-West Cultural Passage, 2013
James Joyce's collection of short stories, Dubliners, includes fifteen stories written from 1904 to 1907. The stories, that deal with the life of middle-class and lower middle-class Dubliners, raise the questions of Irish identity and cultural identity crisis. In Dubliners, the characters are represented in such a way as if they are unable to find out their Irish identity since they are affected both by the British empire and the Catholic Church of Ireland. By focusing on the first story of the collection, "The Sisters," this article uses Homi Bhabha's concepts of "hybridity" and "liminality" to depict the boy narrator's newly formed identity. It is argued that the unnamed boy narrator, seized between the two conflicting cultures of the colonizer and the colonized, is neither Irish nor British, and instead a "hybridized" subjugated subject standing in the so-called "third space" that is somewhere between these two clashing cultures. A detailed exploration of the boy narrator's psyche and his relationship with Father Flynn-the Catholic priest-reveals the boy's identity crisis as well as the paralysis that is part of all the stories in Dubliners.
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.
The question of gendered voice in some contemporary Irish novels by Brian Moore and John McGahern
1997
This thesis questions the use of the 'voice' metaphor in contemporary Irish cultural studies in order to examine the ways in which gendered identities are constructed in some Irish Catholic communities in twentieth-century Ireland. With reference to novels by Brian Moore and John McGahern as well as to Judith Butler's theories of performativity and citational practices, it argues that gendered identities are constructed through the repetitive citation of hegemonic cultural discourses. Ibis thesis focuses on the ways in which gendered identities are produced and maintained through the citation of the official discourses of the Catholic Church and the State as well as the more mundane discourses related to popular nationalism and the family. The first two chapters concentrate on novels whose protagonists are trying to construct powerful identities in urban Irish society through the manipulation of gendered discourses. The discussion of Moore's 7he Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne identifies some of the strategies through which conventional Irish women's voices are constructed and questions the validity of the category of 'authentic' women's voices. In the chapter relating to McGahem's Yhe Pornographer, the powerful, abstract male voice is exposed as a performative construct which is sustained only through the abjection of those elements which disrupt the narrator's performance of masculinity. The remaining chapters concentrate on the use of idealised images such as those of the 9 woman-as-nation' and the iconised mother in novels by Moore and McGahem. Moore's The Mangan Inheritance provides the basis for a discussion of whether or not voices attributed to women in texts by Irish men can be read in ways that disrupt the apparent authority of Irish men's voices. This thesis discusses the issues raised when men participate in the deconstruction of idealised images of Irish women. The final chapter examines the processes through which conventional identities are discursively constructed and maintained in two novels by John McGahem: The Dark and Amongst Women. This thesis contends that through the strategic redeployment of those voices attributed to idealised images of Irish women, voices which are conventionally regarded as silent, patriarchal gendered identities can be destabilised or displaced.
Joyce's Vagina Dentata Irish Nationalism and the Colonial Dilemma of Manhood
In Edgar Degas's Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando (1879) we see a darkskinned woman suspended in midair on a rope secured by her teeth. Placed in a position of a commercial display, she is an eroticized and exoticized object of public consumption, in a way also resembling a lynched figure, since the rope extends upward, and her head seems to be thrust backward. Marilyn Brown's essay "Miss La La's Teeth" discusses the painting "within a broader visual practice of social masquerade, ranging from depictions of minstrelsy to those of interracial performance, in which racial difference was simultaneously represented and obfuscated by the white gaze."' However, as Brown notices in her groundbreaking study of the picture, the assumed strength of Miss La La's teeth also points to something else: the threat she may pose to a vulnerable man who could be entrapped by her redoubtable jaw. If the popular assumption that Degas was impotent and celibate is true, then the powerful toothed mouth of Miss La La possibly reveals not only "a stereotypical colonial object for male modernist self-projection" but also Degas's fear of female organs and castration.^ The trope of exoticized and demonic women equipped with menacing powers, especially the power of castration, has been alive not only in European painting but also in North and South American folklore, Indian mythology, Irish legends, and Modernist literature. Recall Joseph Conrad's dark voracious female representing Africa and numerous other Modernist (and pre-Modernist) tropes of the devouring mother to observe a certain pattern, a connection between the myth of a menacing female and endangered masculinity and-I'd like to add-collective national identity as well. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to make any universalist claims about anxieties relating to female sexuality, I will look at a localized example of a phallogocentric imagining of one nation-Ireland-in James Joyce's fiction. Although
2012
DESTABILIZING TRADITION: GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND POSTNATIONAL IDENTITY IN FOUR NOVELS BY IRISH WOMEN, 1960-2000 Sarah M. Nestor, B.A., M.A. Marquette University, 2012 This dissertation examines four novels that represent Irish women and girls confronting the typical narrative of Irish national identity in the twentieth century. The post-independence construction of Irish national identity depended upon prescriptive roles that aligned with its founders’ beliefs about the nation’s ethnic homogeneity and moral superiority. Irish women’s identity and roles as wives and mothers were imperative to upholding this idea of the nation, particularly its morality. Irish women were therefore charged with maintaining well-defined gender roles and the nuclear family in an effort to define a distinctive Irish identity. Thus, when women’s roles are challenged or changed the idea of the nation and national identity are also challenged or changed. This study finds that novels by Edna O’Brien, Maeve Kel...
On both sides of the Atlantic: Migration, gender and society in contemporary Irish literature
Contemporary Irish literature has shown a noticeable interest in women´s diasporic experiences in the 20 th century. This article analyses the construction process of a new society in America in four selected novels, focusing on the physical and emotional (dis)locations undergone by their female characters. The underlying tensions between their actual experiences and the Irish national discourse are studied from a gender perspective. The depressed Irish context and the existing networks overseas are detected as determinant factors that shape the construction of a gendered society overseas.
Joyce's feminine outlook: between heaven and earth
Estudos Germânicos, 1986
This article endeavours to show how Joyce's outlook on women hovers between heaven and earth; that is, he either portrays woman as a refleetion of the Virgin Mary and, as such, near to heaven; or as Eve/seductress, sensual and down to earth. The last part of this study, still dwelling on the feminine outlook, shows how Leopold Bloom, as Ulysses, gets reinstated into his rightfui place-in his home and by his wife's side. RESUMO Este artigo tenta mostrar que a visão feminina em Joyce oscila entre o céu e a terra, isto é: ele ora retrata a mulher como reflexo da Virgem Maria, e como tal esta fica perto do céu, ora como Eva/sedutora, sensual e terra-a-terra. A última parte deste estudo, ainda focalizando a visão feminina no autor, mostra como Leopold Bloom, como Ulisses, se reintegra em seu lugar de direito-em sua casa, ao lado de sua mulher.
A Feminism of Their Own? : Irish Women's History and Contemporary Irish Women's Writing
For a long time, Irish women’s lives were strictly confined to the private domain, and women’s issues were largely silenced and hidden from public knowledge. Additionally, both Church and state maintained that women should hold a certain morality, particularly relating to areas of sexuality and reproduction. As a result, until relatively recently, Irish women’s issues remained largely ignored and therefore unremarked upon. This paper will examine two major areas in which Irish women’s lives have traditionally been repressed: women’s sexuality and domestic violence, both issues which were once considered taboo for open discussion. This paper will also discuss how these same issues are being represented in Irish chick lit novels, thus providing a frank and positive voice for these largely female issues and for the everyday experiences of women in Ireland.
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
Reading Between the Lines: Notes on Female Characterization in Dubliners
2016
In this article, I propose to analyze female characterization in Dubliners (1914), by James Joyce, by “reading between the lines” of this literary work and considering not only character description and the direct discourse, but especially some characters’ silences and more interior way of expressing themselves, perceived through the narration. One of the traits of James Joyce’s style is the description of these characters using only a few lines. While this trait can limit the formation of a clear picture of them, on the other hand – and maybe for this reason – it may make a more open interpretation possible. This might happen either because of the consequent ambivalence of the literary language or because of the tension that is formed when comparing our present reading of the text and the pre-conceived meanings we attribute to some of the expressions used, such as what characterizes a “lady” or a “spinster”. It is not by chance, then, that what is not said, or the blank spaces left...
2021
The present paper focuses on Irish drama written and staged before and after independence from the perspective of the binary opposition of traditional gendered representations of colony and colonizer. From A. Gregory and W.B. Yeats's Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), Synge's Playboy of the Western World (1907) and O'Casey's Dublin Trilogy (1923-26) to Teresa Deevy's The King of Spain's Daughter (1935) and Katie Roche (1936), and SeánO'Faolain's She Had to Do Something (1937), the paper underscores how these plays present women who only apparently contradict traditional and externally imposed strictures. In the light of Maria Lugones' theories on the coloniality of gender – as regards the intersection between gender, race and sexuality – the paper investigates the extent to which Irish playwrights challenged the traditional image of women and the role religion, politics and the examples of other European countries had in helping, or hindering, the const...
Gender and Identity in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney and Eavan Boland
Reflecting on Derek Mahon’s essay Poetry in Northern Ireland, Matthew Campbell asserts that poets, while not directly involved in politics, have political responsibilities. (Campbell, 12). For Eavan Boland these responsibilities are lived out at the intersection between life, poetic inheritance, political discourse and personal identity. (Boland, 32) She is critical of the culture of a modern Ireland that emerged from the idealism of the Gaelic revival that sought to repossess the nation just as she has attempted to do so. In this sense the ideals of nationhood that she is critical of, are a by-product of a nation’s attempt to discover itself while struggling with a colonization process that sought to subjugate it. Boland utilizes these challenges as opportunities to re-possess the Irish national story and reinterpret it through the prism of a lived rather than an idealized feminine experience. It lets go of the sanitized version of Irish nationhood for one rooted in the struggle of daily life. According to Stevens et al, Seamus Heaney’s writing expresses well the tensions between the masculine and feminine in Irish literature and national identity. (Stevens) Questions of national and personal identity are present in Heaney’s choice to remain outside the conventions of nationalist identity. Boland’s eventual decision to repossess the Irish poetic tradition lead her to challenge “tribal ambivalences and doubts” that supported conventional literary tradition. (Boland, 32) This challenging of conventional thinking leads to a displacement that Stan Smith describes as “the necessary ground upon which to find or found one’s place.” For Smith part of this necessary ground is the ability to move beyond the confines of heritage or environment. (Smith 119-120) This essay will examine how both Heaney and Boland have a similarity of purpose – the challenging of received stereotypes and conventional understandings of gender and identity as expressed in the national and familial consciousness.
Joycean Rebirth in the "Abject" Womb
Pamukkale Sosyal Bilimler Üniversitesi Dergisi, 2018
The land/woman metaphor has always been an effective tool to define Ireland and Irish nationalists aligned their feminized land with patriarchal discourse and created the iconic Mother Ireland in the image of the Virgin Mary. Known for his anti-Revivalist arguments, James Joyce reveals that the cult of Mother Ireland must be demolished to reach the essence of Irish identity hidden in the "abject" maternal body. Therefore, in his struggle against colonialism, Joyce turns his attention to women, believing that Irishness starts with the exploration of a woman's body. Using Kristeva's abjection theory to re-interpret Joyce's position as the "abject" child of Irish literature, this paper aims to analyze the writer's prominent women characters in Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and in Ulysses in parallel to his search for an identity as an Irish writer and his anti-colonial struggle against patriarchy.