Depiction of childhood in 'Dubliners'

Faye Parkin English Literature Coursework

The depiction of childhood in ‘Dubliners’ is a bleak one; the child narrators and characters are usually depicted as victims in some sense. How far do you agree with this view?

James Joyce described ‘Dubliners’ as a ‘nicely polished looking glass’, through which he offers the society of Dublin in the early 20th century a chance to ‘have a good look at themselves’. At the time, Joyce employed a modernist style of writing in ‘Dubliners’, Wallace Gray identifies that:

‘the modernist is hostile to city life, finding that it degrades and demeans its citizens...the modernist finds culture itself to be drab and shallow, and this attitude prevails in Joyce’s stories’

This can be seen to be true in the stories depicting childhood as Dublin society is clearly identifiable as having a negative impact on the individual citizens as they struggle to deal with the events which greet them as children and adolescents, although this theme does continue throughout the novel. In order to fully portray the broad spectrum of people who were impacted by both social and religious aspects in Dublin at this time, Joyce implements the structure of a bildungsroman – the first four clearly identifiable as dealing with aspects of childhood and adolescence. By examining these four stories the reader not only gets an overall perspective of what childhood was like, but more fundamentally how adults can be seen contributing to the moulding of impressionable children and inevitably condemning them to the status of a victim of adult behaviour. The stark reality of childhood is inconceivable, not only horrifying, to the modern readers, thus the view that ‘the depiction of childhood’ in this novel is a bleak one, can be agreed with wholly.

The underlying sense of innocence which is woven throughout the stories depicting childhood is deliberately employed by Joyce in order to illuminate the stark contrast which the road of adulthood, which is laced with realisation and a distinct loss of hope, holds for the characters we meet in the stories. For example, in ‘The Sisters’ we are introduced to a young, nameless narrator who at first is deeply involved with the death of Father Flynn. His natural if morbid curiosity, concerning the death is apparent when whispers ‘the word paralysis’ describing it as a ‘sinful being’. The narrator seems innocently unaware that death is not unusual, although it was fairly common due to the poverty and poor conditions many inhabitants of Dublin at the time were subject to. The boy also seems unaware of the corruption of the religious figure, a theme which is present throughout Dubliners; however the readers are made aware of this through both the priest’s description as well as from the comments made by Old Cotter. For example, it is said by Old Cotter that ‘it’s bad for children’ for them to be so closely involved with ‘a man like that’, although Old Cotter’s meaning here is not explicitly clear it can be argued that this is a reference to the sexual misdemeanours which are often linked to Catholic priests – something which readers can also relate to in contemporary context. It is ironic that at the time Joyce was writing ‘Dubliners’ it was encouraged by Catholic society for young boys to take the ‘vocation’, even where in this case there is obvious corruption suspected. Obviously, adults such as Old Cotter were aware of the dishonourable conduct of the church, from this it can be wondered why parents would want their innocent children to become implicated in such a situation. Joyce himself had a turbulent relationship in his adolescence which eventually culminated in his choice to leave the Catholic Church; here it can be argued that Joyce is communicating his own views of religion through the narrator. Despite the initial in-depth narrative which is presented to the reader through the communication of the inner-most thoughts and feelings of the narrator, by the end of it the boy is seemingly detached from the situation. This can be seen from how the boy ‘could not gather my thoughts’ in order to pray for the loss of the priest, instead he begins to notice rather trivial things such as; ‘I noticed how clumsily her skirt was hooked...her cloth boots were trodden down at the back’ . The language used here shows the narrator’s stream of consciousness – although he is shaken by the priest’s death he cannot help but to let his mind wander to other thoughts and observations, perhaps this is the only way that he can deal with the situation.

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The reader hears the revelation of the priest’s situation through other characters, rather from the actual narrator, which can be seen to imply that the boy has realised death is not some mysterious figure or being and is instead something which gives rise to idle gossip amongst neighbours and relatives. This would suggest that the boy has experienced an epiphany of sorts, yet another theme constant throughout ‘Dubliners’. By using this method of the narrator being detached at the end of the story, Joyce is inviting the reader to interpret and make sense of the events, as the boy does, alone. The portrayal of childhood in this story is subtle and rather haunting – the boy experiences a degree of ambiguity in his feelings for the priest’s death, he admits to feeling ‘freed from something by his death’ even though he is saddened by it. Overall the portrayal of childhood in ‘The Sisters’ is that it is somewhat confusing – not only has the boy experienced the loss of someone he is fairly close to, but not one adult is willing to explain why and support the boy in these strange new emotions. This can only lead to uncertainty in his understanding of life which will undoubtedly impact upon his ability to keep a firm grip on hope, unquestionably a bleak basis from which a child may progress.

A youthful longing for adventure and escape are depicted in ‘An Encounter’. Joyce may have based the idea of the desire for escape from Dublin from his own youthful sentiments. He left Ireland as a young man, and for most of his adult life he lived abroad. For the boys in this story, dissatisfaction with the provinciality and dinginess of Dublin life, leads to the outlet of American stories about the Wild West. The American frontier is a symbolic of absolute freedom and adventure, not only in America but around the whole world; the boys use the games of cowboys and Indians to sate their only partially articulated desire to leave the trapping world of Dublin. When the boys have their day out, they spend a good part of their time watching the ships come in. The ships are symbolic of escape and freedom; unlike the boys, they get to leave Dublin and go around the world. The boy ‘examined the foreign sailors to see had any of them green eyes’; green here is symbolic of corruption. The boy finds no sailors with this colour eyes, whereas the man they encounter later does. Joyce here is conveying the idea that corruption is distinctly present in Dublin, whereas escape to other countries may also offer and escape from deep-seated corruption, although to what extent this is true is debatable the boys’ innocence makes them unaware of what foreign countries may hold. The boys are initially optimistic about their ‘break out’, however, even though they have escaped ‘the weariness of school-life’, they still walk ‘streets flanked by high stone walls’. Even though the boys are free of their day-to-day routine, the city of Dublin itself becomes almost prison like, with high walls preventing Dubliners the opportunity of escape. What ‘freedom’ and ‘adventure’ the boys do find in Dublin is sinister and dangerous, with little in the way of fun or glamour.

The old man they encounter clearly has sexually charged fantasies about children. His sadistic fantasies about ‘how he would whip such a boy’ and ‘what he wanted was to get a nice warm whipping’ are well outside the narrator's child-minded understanding. However, the boy clearly feels uncomfortable in the old man’s presence and he says ‘my heart was beating quickly with fear’. The disturbing presence of the ‘queer old josser’ echoes the indefinite relationship between Father Flynn and the narrator of ‘The Sisters’, yet the ‘encounter’ here clearly shows the man exploiting and abusing the innocence of youth. Such matters in contemporary times are viewed as truly horrifying yet this is a theme present in Joyce’s other stories – something which truly haunts readers through the presentation of the situation and the language used to describe it, ‘his voice...seemed to plead with me that I should understand him’. Joyce here is indicating how the filthy corruption of Dublin spills over onto children. Although a sense of hope can be indentified in the boy’s finding of a bond of friendship with Mahony, the underpinning semblance is that although the boys may be able to escape their day to day normalities, it is impossible for them to escape their bleak life – and inevitably future – whilst they are captives of the city of Dublin.

The story of ‘Araby’, as with ‘An Encounter’, deals with the longing for adventure and escape, although here this longing finds a focus in the object of the narrator's desire. Joyce may have drawn inspiration for this story from his own adolescent experience. At the age of fourteen Joyce had his first sexual experience with a prostitute, it was at this stage that he had to choose between sex and religion and it is perhaps his own longing for change and escape. The title, "Araby," also suggests this longing for change and escape. To the nineteenth-century Dublin inhabitant the Islamic land of Arabia symbolised decadence, exotic delights, escapism, and a luxurious sensuality which is exemplified with the boy’s feeling that ‘the word Araby...cast an Eastern enchantment over me’. The boy's erotic desires for the girl become joined to his fantasies about the extravagances that will be offered in the bazaar. He dreams of buying the object of his infatuation a suitably romantic gift. The third story of the collection, it is the last story with a first-person narrator. This may be because after this point any symbolism of a hopeful future – in this case the boy’s passion – simply washes over the characters, and they instead distance themselves from their lives which effectively distances them from the bleak realism. As the boy strives to fulfil his fantasy, he proves unable to navigate the adult world and the bazaar becomes emblematic for the difficulties which children had to forego in order to realise their hopes. This can be identified with ‘I looked humbly at the great jars’, the boy feels somewhat foolish for believing that he could purchase such gifts for his object of affection and his loss of hope is symbolised by ‘The upper part of the hall was now completely dark’, the bright lights of optimism and hope have been extinguished and the boy is left alone in the dark, ‘eyes burned with anguish and anger’.

Boyish fantasies are dashed by the realities of life in Dublin, illuminating the theme of paralysis Joyce creates which outlines how the society of the city prevents people from realising their wishes. The key theme in ‘Araby’ is frustration, as the boy deals with the limits imposed on him by his situation. The protagonist has a series of romantic ideas, about the girl and the wondrous event that he is desperate to attend on her behalf ‘I had hardly any patience with the serious work of life...now that it stood between me and my desire’. But on the night when he awaits his uncle's return so that he can go to the bazaar, we feel the boy's frustration mounting. For example, when the boy describes himself; ‘I went from room to room’ and ‘I began to walk up and down the room, clenching my fists’, the reader can imagine the boy pacing to and fro and almost become frustrated themselvesat the unfortunate situation. For a time, the boy fears he may not be able to go at all. When he finally does arrive, the bazaar is more or less over. His fantasies about the bazaar and buying a wondrous gift for the girl are revealed as ridiculous. For one thing, the bazaar is a rather tawdry shadow of the boy's dreams. He overhears the conversation of some of the vendors, who are ordinary English women, ‘I remarked their English accents’. The mundane instills the reality that there is in fact no escape: bazaar or not, the boy is still in Dublin, and the accents of the vendors remind the reader that Dublin is a colonised city. Thus, in this story, Joyce is portraying how although anticipation of an event for an adolescent may provide pleasant daydreams, reality is much harsher. He remains a prisoner of his modest means and of his city, and even describes himself as a ‘creature’, conjuring images of an animal trapped within a cage. Overall, what is created here is rather a bleak outlook for what should be an exciting first love.

Yet again ‘Eveline’, the final story depicting childhood, focuses on the longing to escape the dreary city of Dublin. However, in this situation the young woman we encounter has been given a chance at escape, unlike the other young male narrators we have met in the previous stories. Certainly, she has every reason to leave. The portrait we have of her family life is less than heart-warming. We see that she has taken on an incredible part of the burden in keeping the family together, as her mother did before her. Her father is a domineering and unfair man, who makes his daughter work and then keeps her wages. Sympathy is evoked from the reader with lines such as ‘she sometimes felt herself in danger of her father’s violence’ and ‘the trouble was to get any money from her father’. However, despite these hardships being an obvious reason for Eveline to take the opportunity to escape her situation, she feels shackled by her overbearing family life – her feeling of commitment to her family becomes a metaphor for the trap that is Ireland.

This inevitably creates frustration for the reader, why would this young girl choose not to take her chance to flee the paralytic city of Dublin? This frustration is cemented as her mother provides the chilling example of what it means to be committed to the traditional Irish family life: we learn that she lived a life "of commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness". The meaninglessness of her mother’s final words: ‘Derevaun Seraun! Derevaun Seraun!’ suggests, metaphorically, that the sacrifices have also been meaningless. Paralysis is a common theme in Dubliners, and Eveline finds herself unable to move forward. She lacks the courage and strength to make that leap that will free her of her oppressive situation, ‘now she was about to leave it she did not find it a wholly undesirable life’. She's too scared to leave Ireland, and sees her lover as a possible source of danger: "All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. He was drawing her into them: he would drown her". She is a victim of her own mentality and from this it is obvious that her life and future are bleak. Eveline’s lack of courage is the end of the short stories focussing on young characters, this indicates that the hardships the previous child narrators have had contribute to their feeling of hopelessness which inevitably leads to their inability to progress, either physically or emotionally.

The first three tales of childhood which Joyce presents us with are riddled with uncertainty and the realisation of a bleak and unpromising future – these emotions are eventually epitomised in ‘Eveline’ as contributing to the mental paralysis which later stories in Dubliners identify in other characters. Terrence Brown states that:

‘This text...contains autobiographical matter and is rooted in an intensely accurate apprehension of the detail of the Dublin life Joyce had observed...as he grew to adulthood’

Thus it is obvious that the stories portraying childhood are not simply the creation of Joyce, but rather the reality which children were subject to, strengthening the reader’s ability to identify the true bleakness of the situations. Childhood has been depicted as a hardship rather than a joy, which is difficult for contemporary readers to understand without looking at the context in which these stories are written. With poverty rife and religion having a strong hold on how a child’s impression of the world was shaped, a child’s life in early 20th century Dublin was never going to be wholly enjoyable. Although the children search for ways of escapism these prove ineffectual as the corruption of Dublin refuses to allow them such opportunity – often as a result of the action of adults. Fundamentally, Joyce here argues that children are victims of the city they are a part of and their bleak existence cannot be overcome. By having examined the evidence which Joyce presents us with regarding childhood and its depiction then it can be confirmed that the view can be agreed with wholly.

Word Count: 2,564 (excluding quotations)

Wallace Gray, An Introduction to ‘Dubliners’

Terrence Brown, Introduction and Notes on ‘Dubliners’