The Victims of Patriarchal Society—The Analysis of James Joyce’s Eveline from the Perspective of Feminism

邱莉瑩/廣州醫科大學外語教研室

The Victims of Patriarchal Society—The Analysis of James Joyce’s Eveline from the Perspective of Feminism

邱莉瑩/廣州醫科大學外語教研室

Eveline is of one of the stories of Dubliners by James Joyce. This paper attempts to analyze the cause of the miserable life of the heroine and her mother, and concludes that they are the victims of patriarchal society whom are depicted by Joyce to raise women’s feminism consciousness.

Joyce; Eveline; oppression; feminism

I. Introduction to Dubliners and James Joyce

Eveline is the fourth story of Dubliners, a collection of fifteen short stories by James Joyce. All the stories in Dubliners centered around the life of the Irish middle class in and around Dublin, the capital city of Ireland, in the early years of the 20th century.

James Joyce was one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. Joyce was born to a middle class family in Dublin. His father, like most men in that patriarchal society, was an ill-tempered drunkard. His gentle, self-sacrificing mother died at an early age as the result of his father's ill-treatment. As for Dubliners, Joyce once told his friend in a letter, “My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis”. His depiction of the sufferings and hardships women in Ireland went through was actually his way of treating and curing this social and moral disease that paralyzed the female society.

II. Analysis of the story of Eveline

In the story Eveline, Joyce depicted two victims of the maledominant society—the heroine Eveline and her late mother Mrs. Hill.

Eveline lived in a poor family in Dublin. At the early age, Eveline was deprived of the happy childhood. When she used to play in the field as a little girl, “her father used often to hunt them in out of the field with his blackthorn stick”. The phallic image of “blackthorn stick” is used to indicate the dominant male’s oppression on women. In the story, Eveline was 19 years old. Her mother died from deteriorated health, leaving the daughter with the responsibility of caring for the whole family.“She had hard work to keep the house together and to see that the two young children who had been left to her charge went to school regularly and got their meals regularly. It was hard work—a hard life.” As a result, Eveline was deprived of the freedom to enjoy life, which was a basic right of a young girl. Although she has been a grown-up, her father treated her differently and with disrespect because she’s female. This is a telling example of women’s inferiority at home at that time.

In order to support the family, Eveline had to work as a saleswoman in a store to do tedious and monotonous work. Her boss Miss Gavan“had always had an edge on her, especially whenever there were people listening.” She was deprived of her dignity by the society, in which women were subject to personal and institutional discrimination.

Later, Eveline met Frank, a kind, manly, knowledgeable sailor, who was totally the opposite of her father. They fell in love. Frank promised to take her to Buenos Ayres “where he had a home waiting for her.”It seems that Frank came along to rescue her from the hard life. She was not satisfied with her miserable life, and she was afraid of repeating her mother’s tragic life. She decided to escape. But when it was the time to leave, she hesitated. She looked at the yellowing photograph of a priest hung on the wall. She believed that if she left, her reputation would be ruined. From here we can see women living in the patriarchal society were not only oppressed by men, by society, but also by religion. This is also reflected when Eveline met Frank at the station, being in a dilemma of whether to go or not to go, “she prayed to God to direct her, to show her what was her duty.” At last, she submitted to the moral norms of the society. “All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. He was drawing her into them: he would drown her.” The “seas” here symbolizes the moral condemns of the society. Women of her time should be obedient to their father and sacrifice for the family. Even though Eveline showed the awakening of the feminist consciousness to look for her own happiness, she was in the end deprived of a true loving husband and a better life by the society.

Compared with Eveline, her mother was a bigger victim of the patriarchal family. The story does not tell us clearly about the life of Mrs. Hill, but from Eveline’s psychological activities, we can get an inference about her life. At her time, women might not have free choice of their spouses. She most probably was forced to marry a man of lazy, alcoholic and bad-tempted nature. She lived completely for her husband and her children, like a loyal servant of the family. She lost her vigor and vitality little by little without any expectation and hope for life. Later the pressure of life and the exhaustion of mentality drove her crazy. She repeated the meaningless phrase “Deveraun Seraun! Deveraun Seraun!”, which suggested, metaphorically, that the sacrifices had also been meaningless. Unfortunately, even when she died, the poor woman did not have the consciousness of rebelling against the patriarchal oppression. She made her daughter to promise to keep the home together as long as she could, which she herself had done in her whole life. She was a good example of the spiritual numbness and paralysis of the Dubliners, which was quite prevalent at that time.

III. Conclusion

Looking from a feminist perspective, Eveline and her mother were the typical examples of the subordinate living status of women in the patriarchal society. By depicting the cruel reality that female endured, the story Eveline tries to raise the readers’ awareness of feminism, in order to stimulate the people, especially the female to fight for gender equality.

[1]James Joyce, Dubliners (《都柏林人》) [M]. 譯林出版社. 2012.

[2]Richard Ellmann, James Joyce [M]. Oxford University Press.1982.

[3]YANG Shuang-ju, GAO Yi-xian, Eveline’s awakening of woman consciousness—The analysis of Eveline by James Joyce from the perspective of feminism. Sino-US English Teaching [J]. 2009.5.

[4]李曉紅, James Joyce’s “Eveline” in Feminist Perspective,安徽文學[J]. 2007年第2期.

邱莉瑩, 女, 漢族, 碩士, 廣州醫科大學講師。主要研究方向:二語習得和大學英語教學。