James Joyce at the Wikipedia: click here
Dubliners at the Wikipedia: click here
Eveline (with audiobook): click here
Eveline: study guide
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Eveline: analysis
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Presentation, by Glòria Torner
JAMES JOYCE
James Joyce is one of the most influential and
important writers of the 20th century. He is known for his experimental use of
language and exploration of new literary methods, including interior monologue,
use of complex network of symbolic parallels and invented words and allusions
in his novels, especially in his main novel Ulysses.
BIOGRAPHY
James Joyce, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, was born
in 1882, in Dublin (Ireland) into a middle-class family.
He was the eldest of ten children. At the age of six
he went to a Jesuit boarding school called Clongowes Wood College. But, as his
father was not the man to be affluent for long; he drank, neglected his affairs
and borrowed money from his office, and his family sank deeper and deeper into
poverty, Joyce didn't return to Clongowes College in 1891; instead, he stayed
at home for the next two years and tried to educate himself. In 1893 he and his
brother Stanislaus were admitted to Belvedere College, a Jesuit grammar school
in Dublin. Joyce was a brilliant student and there did well academically.
He entered the Trinity College Dublin in 1898. There
he studied modern languages, English, French and Italian, and read widely,
particularly in books not recommended by the Jesuits. He began to write verses and
experimented with short prose passages that he called Epiphanies. To support himself while writing, after graduation in
1902, he went to Paris to become a doctor, but he soon abandoned this idea.
He went back home in April 1903 because his mother was
dying. He tried several occupations including teaching; he also began to write
his first novel, Stephen Hero, based
on the events of his own life, and he also began to write the short stories
published as Dubliners in 1914.
Joyce had met Nora Barnacle in June 1904, and they
began a relationship until his death; they probably had their first date, and their
first sexual encounter, the day that is now known as “Bloomsday”, the day of
his novel Ulysses. The couple left
Dublin and emigrated together to continental Europe where he taught languages
in Pola (Croatia) and Trieste (Italy), where their son Giorgio was born. He
also lived for a year in Rome, where he worked in a bank and where their daughter
Lucia was born.
Joyce visited Ireland in 1909 and again in 1912, this
time with his family. In 1914 he rewrote and completed the novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
published in 1916, and he began to write Ulysses.
In 1915 the Joyce’s couple moved to Zürich and in 1916
he published his play Exiles. It was
also the year that chapters from Ulysses,
his novel in progress, began to appear in the American journal, “The Little
Review”. The completed book would not appear until 1922. Ernest Hemingway and
Winston Churchill were two of the first to buy the ready famous new book.
Ulysses, the most notable novel of the twentieth century, his
main novel, is a gigantic work. All the action takes place in and around Dublin
in a single day. The novel is the chronicle of the Dublin journey of the main character,
Leopold Bloom, on an ordinary day. The three central characters: Stephen
Dedalus, (Telemacus) the same hero of Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man, Leopold Bloom (Ulysses) a Jewish advertising
canvasser, and his wife Molly (Penelope), the unfaithful woman. The events of
the novel loosely parallel the events in Odysseus’s journey home after the Trojan
War. Joyce employs interior monologue, stream of consciousness, parody and
almost every other literary technique to present his characters.
Finding out that he was gradually gaining fame as an
avant-garde writer, Joyce set himself in Paris to finish his Ulysses. His last book was Finnegan's Wake, published in 1939. Joyce's eyes began to give him more and
more problems, and he travelled to Switzerland for eyes surgery.
Joyce died at the age of 59 in January 1941, in Zurich
for a perforated duodenal ulcer.
EVELINE
Eveline is one of the fifteen short stories published
in 1904 by the journal “Irish Homestead” and later in a collection in 1914,
called Dubliners. Joyce himself
offers a general plan for the book, revelling that he wants to present Dublin under
four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. Eveline opens the section dealing with adolescence.
The story begins “in medias res”, at the middle of the
plot.
Eveline, a young Irish woman about nineteen years old,
sits by her window. The short first paragraph reveals Eveline’s state of mind:
the verb “invade” suggests the dullness
and tiredness of her life, her lack of energy. She is thinking about the
aspects of her life. Her mother is dead and her older brother Ernest too. Her
remaining brother, Harry, is busy working, and he is away on business. She works
very hard at home and at work. She muses on Miss Gavan, from the Stores: she
always takes advantage of any occasion to humiliate her in front of other
people.
She plans to leave home, to leave her abusive and violent
father and her existence of poverty in Ireland and to seek out a new and better
life. She has already consented to it, but then she says “Was that wise?” and she
begins to question the decision she has made, she sees both sides of the
question “Was it worth it?”
She thinks she has had shelter and food at home and also
the security of the known things. But her thoughts are driving her away because
she has decided to elope with Frank, a sailor who is her secret lover, and start
with him a new better life in Argentina. But before leaving home to meet Frank,
she hears an organ grinder outside (it's the same melancholy air from Italy
played by the street musician the day her mother died), and, remembering the promise
she made to her mother to look after her home, she begins to change her decision.
Another important word at the end of the story is the
noun “gate”. At the dock where she
and Frank are ready to embark on a ship together, she will not take this way out; at the very last moment, she takes
the painful decision of not leaving with him. She will remain at home.
Themes
The description is a portrait of an unhappy woman of
the lower social class in provincial Dublin.
The conflict between staying at home or leaving with
her love with the promise of a new start in a new country.
The triumph of the sense of duty and responsibility.
Eveline’s anguish, frustration and pessimism.
Style
I want to emphasize some literary style traits used in
this short story:
Joyce choice his favourite narrative technique: the
free indirect style. The verbs are mainly in past tense, 3rd person. He changes
from time to time to present tense.
Most of the long descriptions in nearly every paragraph
begin with the same syntactic structures: She
sat at the window, she looked round, she had consented to
go away…
He uses many abstracts words (substantives and
adjectives) meaning thoughts: to be free;
feelings: being tired, and senses, hearing: she
could hear a street organ playing, her mother voice saying constantly “Derevaun
Seraun”…”, smell: the odour of dusty
cretonne, and also the same sounds in one sentence: She looked round the room, reviewing all its...
CONCLUSION
In my opinion, I have read a wonderful pessimist and
realistic story. The sensibility of the person, Eveline, is described by the
language.
QUESTIONS
Eveline HillErnest HillHarry HillThe fatherThe motherMiss GavanFrankKeoghTizzi DunnThe man who’s in Melbourne now
Describe the place where Eveline lives.
Eveline has two letters. Who were they for, and what do you think they say?
What good things did her father do for her?
What gave her palpitations?
What used to happen on Saturday at Hill’s?
Describe Eveline everyday’s work.
How did Eveline love Frank?
What was her father’s opinion about the affair?
What was the effect of the melancholy air from Italy played by the street musician?
Why do you think she didn’t go at the end?
SOME
NOTES ABOUT EVELINE
A man from Belfast: he had to be Protestant (Irish people are Catholics)
and Unionist.
Brown houses: for Joyce brown was the colour of the paralysis of Ireland
Blackthorn stick: according to Celtic folklore, blackthorn carries bad
luck. Jesus thorns crown was made of blackthorn.
“To keep nix” means “to keep watch”.
Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647-90) was a French nun, enthusiastic of self-mortification;
she was some years paralysed, and she had visions of Christ. She was canonized in
1920.
Melbourne: lots of Irish people went there because of the famines.
“They had come to know each other”: it’s a very ambiguous sentence, because it can be in
the Biblical sense.
The Bohemian Girl: it was a light opera (1843). The count’s daughter is
abducted by some gypsies. She grows up with the gypsies until a Polish count
disguised as a gypsy marries her. She discovers who she is and goes to his
father, who, at the end, forgives her for getting married.
Italian organ player: at the time a lot of Italians who lived in Ireland
were musicians, actors, artisans, pedlars…
Patagonians: in the 19th century they believe
Patagonians were giants.
Deveraun Seraun!: perhaps a Gaelic expression that means “death is
very near”.
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