Analysis of Eveline

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Analysis of Eveline James Joyce's "Eveline", one of the short stories in "The Dubliners" , is a tale based upon the friction which can exist between familial and romantic love , the conflicts between the opposite choices of perpetuating the status quo versus initiating irreversible change , and the agonies that are experienced when pivotal decisions have to be made and powerful but divergent emotions inevitably collide. The plot is not complex. The story opens - we see a young woman who is agonising over a vital life choice. She is bored and overworked , victimised and threatened by her aggressive and occasionally drunken father yet she has been offered the chance of salvation from these circumstances by a potential lover who would transport her far away perhaps never to return. Her decision as to whether to take this chance causes her much distress as she wrestles with the arguments for both staying and going. In the end she decides to stay , perhaps no less anguished , perhaps in the future to regret what might have been ; we are not told - the story closes. Such has been the basic theme , with of course some variations , for countless stories , anecdotes , legends , dramas , novels (ancient and modern) , and even fairy tales. Twist the ending and we have the story of "Cinderella" ; modify the father to a crippled husband and we have the basis for "Lady Chatterley's Lover" ; keep the ending , alter the setting and exaggerate the motivation of the main characters and we see "Brief Encounter". If we delve at random into a shelf of Mills and Boon novellas or riffle through the pages of any one of a number of womens' periodical magazines we risk discovering this recurrent image :- girl stressed and unhappy , girl falls in love , girl offered chance of a lifetime , girl torments herself with decision - (should she ? , shouldn't she ?) , girl decides , girl lives with the consequences of the decision happily or ruefully as the case may be. So it is not for the originality of its plot that we should commend Joyce's work - nor indeed for the colour of the setting for what little action there is. We know the location is Dublin because of the story's inclusion in the collection of tales about characters in that city and also by the incidental mentioning of places in the Dublin area - 'when their mother was alive , they had all gone for a picnic to the Hill of Howth.'. Whilst we have a hint of Eveline's Catholicism - 'beside the colour print of the Blessed Margaret Mary' and her mother's erstwhile raving in Gaelic - 'Derevaun Seraun' , we get little sense of Dublin or even Ireland from the piece. Even though there are a few little extra hints within Joyce's language - Frank had - 'come over to the old country for a holiday' and we learn Miss Gavan - 'always had an edge on her', these are surely not intended to persuade us of any special Irish dimension to the story and are merely written in that fashion for no other reason than Joyce himself was Dublin Irish. Thus the circumstances of this tale could quite easily have surrounded any Catholic family resident in any large industrial seaport in the British Isles - Dublin of course , but quite easily Liverpool , Glasgow , London , Cork , Belfast , Swansea , Bristol , Newcastle. Knowing Joyce for the brilliant writer that he developed into with his publication of "Ulysses" , a work commonly regarded as a great leap forward for fiction , only eight years after "The Dubliners " , we must assume that he was trying to communicate to the reader images and ideas over and above the banality of the basic plot and the independence of location and environment. To establish these images , we have to probe the characters , the nature of the conflict and the complex emotions which Eveline is experiencing together with
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their reasons. As with many of Joyce's works , when we probe we find concepts that are only hinted at or are virtually unsaid ; these can help provide us with the keys to unlock our understanding of Eveline's pain - in short our answer as to why - 'her hands clutched the iron in frenzy. Amid the seas she sent a cry of anguish!' , at the closing summit of the story. There are three principal individuals within the story - Eveline , the eponymous character from whose viewpoint the story is written , her (unnamed) father who manifests ...

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