Eveline's Conflict
James Joyce, in Dubliners, explores the internal conflict that paralyzes his female protagonist, Eveline, as she stands upon the event horizon of a new life, and a new set of possibilities. At this particular moment in her life, Eveline finds herself at a crossroads, considering whether or not she should leave her home and her abusive, alcoholic father in order to travel to a far away and exotic land to begin a new life, full of promise and hope. As the story progresses, Eveline appears ready to say 'yes!' To life when the story's narrator suggests that Eveline "wanted to live" (Joyce 38). A trip to Buenos Aires with her lover, Frank, would offer Eveline the opportunity to grow beyond the restrictive confines of her old life, that which she had been required to endure while living in Dublin. But as the boat for Buenos Aries is about to pull away, and with Frank desperately calling for Eveline to come to him, Joyce writes, "[h]er eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition" (39). In the end, Eveline decides not to go. But the key issue in this final line of the story revolves around the word "recognition," and Eveline's inability to recognize Frank. Eveline, I would argue, is unable to recognize Frank because in reality she is unable to recognize herself, with Frank. At the heart of this story, Joyce asks a question: what does it take for an individual to become someone other than who they are? Or, more to the point, can we ever escape ourselves? Eveline's conflict was not whether she would go or stay,...
She remembers her past, her time in the house, her neighborhood, her life growing up; all the while, she smells "the odour of dusty cretonne" (Joyce 34). Both the dusty smell and the flood of memories give evidence of a woman deeply connected to her life in Dublin. She remains attached to her past in much the same way that the dust, itself, the lingering residue of a life, symbolically attaches itself to the cretonne drapes. Eveline recalls a time when things had been better, when "[h]er father was not so bad...[and] her mother was alive" (34), and she begins to struggle with the possibility of leaving her life behind for good. Everything in the room reminds her of life in Dublin, and at this point the lure of those memories, and that past, begin to weigh heavily on her mind. She wonders if it is "wise" (35) to leave, even as she attempts to imagine herself departing Dublin. She seems, at this point, to be wondering if she is even the type who could leave. She tries that foreign image of herself on for size and begins to wage a battle against the memories that continue to flood her mind, images that she simply cannot shake on the eve of her ultimately doomed flight to freedom in the arms of her lover, Frank.
Eveline further loses her resolve to leave Dublin when she recalls her personal responsibility to her home, as a woman, a surrogate mother, and a caregiver to her alcoholic father.…
