Eveline by james joyce questions and answers

Short Story Analysis

This assignment is a 4-5 page analysis of one of the short stories discussed in class. You will have the opportunity to focus on an approach to a short story that most interests you and should consider writng on the same story that you chose for your explication.

You could examine character development, theme, symbolism and plot development, or you might want to use one of the critical approaches mentioned in Chapter 45 of your text. While you are not required to do research for this assignment, you are strongly encouraged to do so. I would also like to encourage you to incorporate comments from your fellow students into your analysis. You should feel free to quote the conversations on the discussion boards. Including these comments is an excellent way to support your thesis. If you do use researched information or quotes from the boards, be sure to use the MLA format (covered in your textbook) to cite your sources. You should also use the MLA format for all direct quotes from the story.

Remember, your essay should not be a long paraphrase of the plot. Rather, in this essay you are giving your analytical reading of this story and so you should provide only a brief plot summary and then use direct quotes to emphasize particular aspects of the story that are important to the development of your thesis.

Review the following pages in the anthology for further information on writing about fiction: 46-62 and 1557-1590 in the 8th edition. (This is referencing the chapter titles "Reading and Writing" or "Reading and the Writing Process" in other editions of the textbook. Also be sure to review the Sample Papers link on in the Study Tools section of the website. Please note: You must create you’re an original thesis. Slight revision of the sample essays will not be an acceptable approach to your own paper.

Choose one story from the following:

“The Story of an Hour”

“A Sorrowful Woman”

“A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner

“Barn Burning” by William Faulkner

“A Father” by Bharati Mukherjee

“Eveline” by James Joyce

Steps for Writing the Paper

Choosing and reading the story

The first step in your writing process should be to re-read the story you choose. Also consider rereading the discussion posts for this story. As you read, jot down questions that you have about the story. For example, with "A Father"—“What is the significance of the title? What really happens in the end?” You should also review the "Questions for Responsive Reading and Writing" in your textbook as a way to further your analysis. Make a note of the questions that most interest you and that seem to apply to the story you have chosen. You should also feel free to use any of the questions that follow the short stories as a way to guide your reading and writing process.

Finally you should reread the story, but this time you should begin taking notes.You may want to make a photocopy of the story so that you can mark the actual text. Highlight or underline dialogue or language that stands out for you; mark moments in the plot that are crucial to the progression or completion of the story. Mark points in the story that simply baffle you. Repeating this process should lead you to an area to focus on. Pay special attention to the questions you had while reading; it is likely that the instincts you had that brought you to ask these questions will also guide you to an effective focus or thesis for your essay.

Developing a working thesis

Remember that a working thesis is not permanent. It can change. Its main purpose is to guide your drafting process, so that your writing is more focused.

For example, while you may want to focus on character development in "Barn Burning," this is not a thesis. It doesn't give a direction or make a statement about your interpretation. Your thesis needs to make a statement about WHAT character development does in the story, and perhaps how character development affects your reading of the story. Then the rest of your paper should examine several devices in the story (dialogue, description, point of view, plot structure and so on) that work to support your understanding of character development. So an early draft of a working thesis about "Barn Burning" might be something like:

In "Barn Burning," Sarty is a dynamic character who makes a successful transition into adulthood, though at a terrible price.

OR

In "Barn Burning," though Sarty does go through a transformation, by the end of the story, he remains trapped between the two worlds, that of his father, Abner Snopes and that of Major de Spain.

To make these sample theses even stronger, we could add further reflection that ponders WHY Faulkner might have emphasized this point in the story. In other words, we can speculate about Faulkner’s intentions as a writer. Often the difference between a “B” and an “A” paper is the inclusion of this speculative aspect of the thesis.

With this line of thinking, our thesis might end up looking like this:

“In "Barn Burning," though Sarty does go through a transformation, by the end of the story, he remains trapped between two worlds, that of his father, Abner Snopes and that of Major de Spain. Because he remains trapped, it seems that Faulkner is emphasizing the class paralysis that existed for poor whites in the post-Civil War south.”

With this thesis, our essay would then focus on discussion class structure in the post-Civil War south and would emphasis elements from the story that illustrate and support this reading.

Outline

Once you have crafted a strong, complex and original working thesis, review your notes on the story and create a rough outline that will give a possible structure to your paper. Use this outline as a guide as you write your rough draft. Be sure to give yourself enough time to review and revise your rough draft. Remember to send your draft to the Online Writing Lab if you would like to get assistance from the tutors, but do this early so that you can get their comments back in time for the due date.

Grading based on:

Engaging opening paragraph

Captivating conclusion

Varied, logical transaction

Effective paragraph focus/development

Original, insightful thesis

Textual evidence (quote) support thesis

Effective quote integration

Effective support of thesis/analysis of evidence

Clear complex sentence style/vocabulary

Careful proofreading

Correct essay format/MLA format/works cited

Eveline
“Her head was leaned against the window curtains and in her nostrils was the odor of dusty cretonne” (Joyce 427). This first glimpse of the protagonist in James Joyce’s “Eveline” speaks volumes about how Joyce viewed the typical citizen of Dublin at the turn of the century. Eveline, a young woman of 19, who feels trapped by tradition and life circumstances is longing to be free, to find happiness, and pursue her dreams. However, as with most of Joyce’s characters in Dubliners, Eveline is the result of a “social fabric” (Meyer 427) that inhibits her ability to break free of her self-imposed prison; she is doomed to live a stagnant life with her nose pressed longingly to that window.

Although Joyce uses symbols, setting and mood to emphasize the theme of paralysis that permeates Dubliners (Meyer 427), it is his signature stream of consciousness style of narration (Meyer 426) that allows the reader to eavesdrop on Eveline’s thoughts during this pivotal night in her life and gives us the most information about Eveline’s dilemma. We “hear” Eveline’s dissatisfaction with her drab and confining life, the abusiveness of her father, and her daring plan to run away to Buenos Aires with her dashing and exciting lover, interwoven with the fear and denial created by oppressive cultural and religious influences, which, in the end, overpower her, culminating in an epiphany that crushes her spirit.

In the opening paragraphs of “Eveline,” the protagonist is “watching the evening invade the avenue” (Joyce 427). The dim light and the dust from the curtains are our first clues to the dreariness of life. She is “tired” as she ponders the new houses across the way: [they are] made of “bright [red] brick” [and] “shining roofs,” [unlike their] “little brown house” (Joyce 427). Eveline gazes about the room and sees a “yellowing photograph” [and a] “broken harmonium” (Joyce 428). In happier times she had played with the other children in a field where the new houses stand (Joyce 427). The reader imagines that her family may have sang and danced to music from this harmonium. But now, her mother, most of her brothers and sisters, and the neighbors are dead or gone (Joyce 427). She seems to be sitting in a world of gradual decline and decay, in which her youthful spirit has been confined to a life of drudgery and duty.

Eveline works at “the Stores” and gives “her entire wages” to her father (Joyce 428). Her supervisor, Miss Gaven, is cold and criticizes her in public: “Miss Hill, don’t you see these ladies waiting?” (Joyce 428). Her Saturday nights are spent in “the invariable squabble for money [with her father, followed by elbowing] her way through the crowds and returning home late under her load of provisions” (Joyce 428). When her mother was dying, she had promised her “to keep the home together as long as she could” (Joyce 429). Thus, the duties of keeping the house, preparing the meals, and caring for “the two young children who had been left to her charge” (Joyce 428) had fallen on her. The only bright spot in her life is her boyfriend Frank, but she can only see him secretly because “her father had found out about the affair and had forbidden her to have anything to say to him” (Joyce 429).

Her father drinks heavily and is both verbally and physically abusive toward his family. Although she gives him all her wages, he accuses her of “squander[ing] the money” (Joyce 428). Joyce implies that Eveline’s mother had been physically abused; Eveline imagines how her life will be with Frank: “She would not be treated as her mother had been” (Joyce 428). Also, when they were children her father “used to go for Harry and Ernest” (Joyce 428), but she had escaped physical punishment because she was a girl. However, now that her mother and older brothers are gone, she has “nobody to protect her [and] latterly [her father] had begun to threaten her and say what he would do to her only for her dead mother’s sake” (Joyce 428). She dreams, however, that her life will be different in Buenos Aires with Frank: “People would treat her with respect then” (Joyce 428).

Her affair with Frank seems to be the only bright point in Eveline’s dreary life. Unlike her father, Frank is “very kind, manly, open-hearted” [and] awfully fond of music” (Joyce 429). She recalls that Frank “took her to see The Bohemian Girl” (Joyce 428). Joyce no doubt chose this play because it was about a young woman whose life is filled with travel, adventure, and excitement, and who eventually finds true love and is allowed to marry with her father’s blessings even though her amore is a gypsy (Meyer 436 – 437). The reader can’t help but imagine the longing this play must have created in Eveline’s heart, and it would have been easy to compare Frank with the protagonist’s gypsy lover. “[Frank] was awfully fond of music…he sang about the lass that loves a sailor…[and told] tales of distant countries” (Joyce 429). But her fears bring her back to the present moment and to the dilemma before her.

She ponders the wisdom of leaving her home: “she had shelter and food; she had those whom she had known all her life about her” …. Perhaps people will “say she was a fool” (Joyce 428). She also considers her father’s comment to guests who ask about the photograph of the priest who went to school with her father: “Whenever he showed the photograph to a visitor her father used to pass it with a casual word: – He is in Melbourne now” (Joyce 428). Eveline realizes “during all those years she had never found out [the priest’s name]” (Joyce 428). Perhaps she fears that, like the priest, she will be dismissed and no longer embraced by the family if she leaves. And perhaps when she recalls her father’s response to the organ-player’s music “—Damned Italians! coming over here!” (Joyce 429) she wonders if the people in Buenos Aires will think of her as an unwanted foreigner.

Eveline’s fears are the result of oppressive cultural and religious influences. As an Irish woman coming of age in the early 1900’s, she is mired in tradition, and it is not surprising that “she had never before dreamed of being divided [from the familiarity of her home]” (Joyce 428). The preface to the story tells us that “Eveline” and the other stories in Dubliners are “about characters who struggle with oppressive morality, plodding routines, somber shadows, self-conscious decency, restless desires, and frail gestures toward freedom” (Meyer 426). Consequently, Eveline’s yearnings are inhibited not only by her fears, but by the expectations of her society as well: “The major causes of [Joyce’s] characters’ paralysis are transmitted by their family life, Catholicism, economic situations, and vulnerability to political forces” (Meyer 427).

From her seat by the window, Eveline’s gaze falls on “the colored print of the promises made to Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque” (Joyce 428). Ironically, these promises include “peace in their families … [and blessing the] homes in which the image of My Sacred Heart shall be exposed (Apostleship of Prayer). This contradiction was probably Joyce’s way of pointing out how the Irish blindly followed the dictates of Catholicism rather than making their own judgments and decisions. “In a letter to his wife, Joyce once explained that he…was trying to ‘create a conscience’ for his race….[It was his opinion] that they had turned over the moral responsibility for their lives to their confessors and religious leaders. [Dubliners was meant to] encourage us to exercise our spirits, develop our consciences; to accept the view that morality is a matter of individual responses to particular situations rather than an automatic invocation of religious or ethical rules of thumb” (Sholes 342).

Despite Eveline’s valiant attempt to escape the influence of her rigid cultural and religious upbringing, she slips into denial and begins to see her life through rose-colored glasses. “It was…a hard life – but now that she was about to leave it she did not find it a wholly undesirable life” (Joyce 428). She even manages to momentarily minimize her father’s cruel and abusive behavior: “[Her father] sometimes could be very nice. Not long before, when she had been laid up for a day, he had read her out a ghost story and made toast for her at the fire” (Joyce 429).

However, her mood changes as her thoughts return to her mother’s final days. Eveline has a moment of clarity and sees “the pitiful vision of her mother’s life…a life of commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness” (Joyce 429). She once again hears “her mother’s voice saying constantly with foolish insistence, ‘—Derevaun Seraun!’ (Joyce 429). The end of pleasure is pain (Gaelic)” (Meyer 429). Trembling, she is seized with terror: “Escape! She must escape! Frank would save her. He would give her life…she wanted to live….She had a right to happiness” (Joyce 429).

Sadly, this motivation, though fierce, cannot be sustained. Just as Eveline is about to board the ship with Frank, she is once again gripped by fear and indecision. She is vaguely aware that Frank is speaking to her, but she is almost catatonic, unable to respond or move. “Her hands clutched the iron [rail] in frenzy” (Joyce 430). She no longer has the courage to exercise her will and follow her heart. “She turns to God, in prayer” (Joyce 430) Eveline momentarily feels guilt at backing out after all Frank has done for her, “but…then a bell clanged upon her heart….All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. [Frank] was drawing her into them: he would drown her” (Joyce 430). In the epiphany of this moment, Eveline’s spirit is broken. “She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal” (Joyce 430).

Unlike Eveline, Joyce did escape Ireland. While attending University College in Dublin, “he rejected both his religion and his national heritage [believing they invoked] mediocrity, sentimentality, and self-deception” (Meyer 424). After graduation, he moved to Paris and joined the modernism movement, “which challenged traditional attitudes about God, humanity, and society” (Joyce 424). It’s tempting to compare Eveline to Joyce and presume that if she had been more courageous, she could have created a happier, more fulfilling life for herself. However, very few Irish women at that time had the means to seek a higher education. Without access to such intellectual stimulation, a woman like Eveline would not be able to see beyond the tiny slice of life that made up her reality.

Works Cited

Apostleship of Prayer. 20 October 2002.

Ellmann, Richard, ed. James Joyce. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982

Joyce, James. “Eveline.” The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. Michael Meyer. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2002

Meyer, Michael, ed. The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2002

Sholes, Robert, “ ‘Counterparts’ and the Method of Dubliners.” Dubliners: Text, Criticism, and Notes. Eds. Robert Sholes and A. Walton Litz. New York: Penguin Books, 1996