But on the evening of the bazaar, everything goes awry. His uncle is out drinking and returns home so late that the boy arrives at the site when it is effectively preparing to close. All that appears to remain is “the magical name” (25) of Araby on the building, and when he hears the trite flirtation of the shop girl with two fellows, he cannot even bring himself to buy a promised gift for Mangan’s sister. The failure of romance to materialize in the reality of his daily life leaves him completely crushed. “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity: and my eyes burned with anguish and anger” (26).
“Eveline”
The three stories of childhood all give us boy narrators with something to look up to or forward to: an erudite priest, the prospect of gratifying adventure, the delight of romance and a romantic setting. But in each case, the realities of the flawed adult world intrude to dim the brightness of childhood vision.
“Eveline” now presents the first story of adolescence. At its center there is ambiguity: does its heroine, Eveline Hill, try to preserve childhood hopes and dreams, or has the dreariness of adult life already defeated her before she has even settled in it. The story offers only two scenes. The first shows Eveline sitting at her window with two letters on her lap, one to her brother and the other to her father. Unlike the childhood stories, her thoughts are narrated in the third person as she reflects on a childhood and present life made difficult by a taxing father, a situation that has caused her to decide to leave home. She plans to travel to Argentina with Frank, a young man she has begun to like. The second scene shows her at the dock where the two are about to board the ship bound for Buenos Ayres. Tormented by indecision that paralyzes her, Eveline holds back and sees Frank go forward without her. Did she make a wise decision or a foolish one?
The venerable critic Hugh Kenner argued that Eveline was lucky to abort the voyage because Frank in all likelihood was a seducer who would probably have abandoned her (“Molly’s Masterstroke”). His reading places the story in the genre of young women deluded by the fantasies generated by romance novels, the kind of situation presented in Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, for example. But other critics such as Sidney Feshbach place the story into the larger category of immigration narratives, reminding us that the difficult life in Ireland following the Great Famine of the 1840s prompted thousands of Irish people to leave their country in hopes of a better life elsewhere. Eveline’s painful decision may reflect the anxiety of many people in her day, wondering if a tolerable but dreary existence at home was safer than a risky adventure with a totally uncertain outcome abroad. The narration makes this decision unpredictable, incapable of being adjudicated for its wisdom—not only for Eveline—but for the reader as well. As a result, we are left with the sad prospect that the downturns in the boys’ lives in the first three stories may not find redemption in adulthood, and instead, encounter further challenges that may or may not be met successfully.
Eveline will hopefully not end her life as pitifully as her demented mother, but the signs of promise are sparse. Her childhood—like that of the boys—had its pleasant moments of outdoor play, and she concedes that her father “was not so bad then” (27), and recently even looked after her when she was not feeling well. In earlier days the family even went on a picnic, with her father “putting on her mother’s bonnet to make the children laugh” (30). Yet there is no question that, at age 19, life is difficult for Eveline, with her father’s control and threats, and the responsibilities of maintaining an entire household, in addition to a dreary job. The story’s realism lies precisely in these ambiguities and complexities with their lack of a clear answer to a best course of action.
“After the Race”
To assure that adolescence and young adulthood are difficult not only for the relatively poor, like Eveline, Joyce endows the protagonist of “After the Race” with all the advantages and promise of a prosperous life. We encounter the 26-year-old Jimmy Doyle in a racing car with an international group of friends, happy with their success at a solid finish—although Jimmy “was too excited to be genuinely happy” (33).
His is clearly a different world from Eveline’s. Jimmy has a father wealthy and devoted enough to send him to excellent schools in England, Dublin, and Cambridge, and he has a substantial sum of money under his control even at a relatively early age. This money is a factor in the background of the story, and yet it lies at its heart in a crucial respect. Although the story will describe chiefly a delightful evening spent with a group of scintillating French, Hungarian, English, and American friends—including an “exquisite” dinner and a merry trip to the Kingstown harbor followed by a jovial card game on an American’s yacht—we eventually infer that Jimmy’s friendships are all about his money. “[H]e was about to stake the greater part of his substance” by investing in his friend Ségouin’s “motor business” (34), a project approved by his father and presumably a source of the fellows’ interest in honoring Jimmy with inclusion in their professional and social events on this day. With its focus on Jimmy’s pleasures and social timidities in relation to his worldly friends, the narration makes a card game by happily inebriated students a source of enjoyment rather than a deliberate gambit to defraud the naïve Irish youth of his investment.
We are never told that this is what the card game was all about and are simply given the wherewithal to infer this, without any clear evidence. But, of course, it makes perfect sense: why should Ségouin take Jimmy’s money as an investment when, by making sure that Jimmy loses a fortune in the card game, he can have it free and clear, with perhaps only a share paid to conniving friends. “How much had he written away?” (38) Jimmy wonders, as he watches the last round of the game, before he will lean on the table, his head between his hands, “counting the beats of his temples” (38). We can only imagine the reaction of his father, and the effect of a loss of his entire fortune on his future.
Placed next to Eveline Hill’s story, Jimmy Doyle’s enlarges the diversity of Dubliners by widening the broader scope of social and economic class, without losing sight of the challenges and difficulties that can afflict the city’s young people at critical moments in their lives, whatever their situations. The story also complicates a portrayal of Irish oppression by giving it a tangential political component with its focus on the disadvantages produced by inexperience and lack of sophistication in its upwardly mobile classes.
“Two Gallants”
Joyce’s thematic pairing of Dubliners stories comes into intriguing view in “Two Gallants.” Once again, money will be in the background and yet at the center of a story at the same time, and again, this will not be revealed to the reader except through clues that invite us to guess what is going on. “Two Gallants” also focuses on friendship, although the characters of Corley and Lenehan belong to the opposite end of the social and economic spectrum from the world of Jimmy Doyle.
The third person narration begins with a conversation between the two men about women, with Lenehan paying tribute to Corley as a “gay Lothario” (41) or attractive ladies’ man in spite of his large, globular, and oily head that sweats in all weathers. But Corley’s treatment of women is anything but gallant, judging from his own account of how he quickly stopped spending money on them, and how one of his early lovers ended up on the “turf” as a prostitute. On this particular night, Corley has a date with a young “slavey”—a domestic servant—who apparently likes him enough to bring him cigarettes and cigars, possibly stolen from her master, and pays for the tram on their trips to Donnybrook, where they carry out their assignation. Corley has no intention of rewarding her interest in him with any sort of commitment, and has even kept his real name from her (“She doesn’t know my name” [40]) to avoid future complications.
The mystery at the heart of “Two Gallants” is the question of Lenehan’s interest in this relationship. Is it simply a casual and perhaps voyeuristic curiosity about how a fellow manages this sort of affair? That’s the impress
ion we are given at the beginning of the story. But after the men spot the young woman, some curious tensions emerge. Lenehan wants a look at her, and arranges to meet Corley at 10 o’clock when he returns from his date. Why? As Corley and the young woman go off, Lenehan’s narrated thoughts reveal that he appears to be virtually broke, hungry after having eaten only two biscuits all day, and able to order only a plate of peas and some ginger beer for supper rather than the much tastier-looking ham and plum-pudding in the eatery window. Thinking about Corley on his date brings out a sense of despair in him, making him feel “his own poverty of purse and spirit,” along with weariness at still “knocking about” at the age of 31, rather than settling down to a decent life (46).
As he waits to meet Corley, he begins to be both excited and anxious about whether “Corley would pull it off all right” (47). Pull what off? What is going on here? When Corley does return with the young woman, Lenehan follows them to what is presumably the house where she works, watches her enter the house, come back out toward Corley, and disappear inside again. Lenehan follows Corley, and badgers him to tell him “Did it come off?” (48). Corley finally responds by opening his hand and revealing a small gold coin.
The reader is left to speculate what this evening was all about, and our best guess is that Corley owes the broke Lenehan some money and has no means to repay it except to prod the young slavey to steal it from her employer. Destitution dogs these young Dubliners, and the consequences for the young woman will be disastrous if her employers dismiss her for stealing: it would be impossible for her to find another job, and she could end up as a prostitute like one of Corley’s earlier women. If the impressionable Jimmy Doyle was the victim in the previous story, the young slavey’s victimization in this one is infinitely more cruel.
“The Boarding House”
The next story still features an adolescent—19-year-old Polly Mooney—and also focuses on an exploitation of sorts, although the victim here is not Polly but Bob Doran, a man in his 30s, living in the boarding house run by Polly’s mother.
The plot is relatively straightforward: the older Doran has begun a relationship with the young Polly Mooney, an occurrence that her mother observes and uses to force Doran into what we would now call a “shotgun wedding.” We can readily infer this from the rather dry and bland narration, even though two scenes are missing: Mrs. Mooney’s confrontation with and possible threats to Bob Doran, and the unhappy man’s ensuing marriage proposal to Polly. Neither scene is represented, and the story is thereby robbed of its most exciting narrative possibilities. Why would Joyce write it like this when he could have made it so much more dramatic and entertaining? Whenever Joyce builds elisions like this into his stories, he appears to do so in order to present a challenge to the reader, and this challenge is often ethical, forcing the reader to figure out how to arrive at a fair judgment of the rights and wrongs of a complicated social situation.
Many questions spring to mind. Is Polly’s father, “a shabby stooped little drunkard” who eventually attacks his wife with a cleaver, also a victim of a shotgun wedding? Is Mrs. Mooney—The Madam, as her residents call her—a madam in more ways than one, intent on prostituting her daughter to the first respectable and solvent young man who will then be forced into marrying her? Is Bob Doran wholly the victim of Mrs. Mooney’s plot or should he have seen the danger of his little dalliance with Polly, avoiding it rather than risking his reputation and livelihood in the event of, say, a possible pregnancy? He is better educated than the Mooneys, and while he may not have guessed that “he was being had” (54), he clearly had no intention of marrying Polly until confronted with the mother’s righteousness and the possible threat of her burly brother’s violence. Also, he is not a total innocent, having “sown his wild oats” (54) in his youth, and living a regular life “nine tenths of the year,” suggesting some carousing during the remaining weeks. And what about Polly herself? Is she the innocent victim of both parties, a dim and possibly impaired young woman unaware of her mother’s manipulation or does she have an inkling of the background (“she did not wish it to be thought that in her wise innocence she had divined the intention behind her mother’s tolerance” [52]). Does her little song, “I am a …. naughty girl” (51) contain a tiny bit of truth, as Ulysses suggests, where rumors are circulated about the now married Polly exposing herself to some men “without a stitch on her“ at two in the morning (Ulysses 249)? What if Polly’s sweetness toward Doran and her ostensible despair with the present situation (“She would put an end to herself, she said” [54]) collude consciously or unconsciously with her mother’s plan? The lives of Dubliners are complicated, and so are the moral judgments confronting their readers.
“A Little Cloud”
Although by now we should have moved from adolescence to adulthood, we still get a subtle reversal of roles in this story of a seemingly childish man named Chandler, who is actually more grown-up than his supposedly worldly friend, Gallaher, who still has the impulses and values of a wild teenager. What keeps this perspective from being clear is the narrative point of view, which tells the story of the evening meeting of the two men in the spirit of Chandler’s self-deprecating sense of things.
The story begins with Chandler’s admiring thoughts about Gallaher, the friend from his youth who had gone to London eight years before and had become “a brilliant figure on the London press” (57). Gallaher has returned to Dublin for the first time since his departure and will meet with his friend for drinks at an elegant place called “Corless.” The narrative voice introduces the protagonist as “Little Chandler,” as people refer to him, explaining that although he is not particularly short, “he gave one the idea of being a little man” (57) due to a neat appearance and quiet manners. Chandler’s own thoughts seem to corroborate this judgment as he laments his dull job as a law clerk and his quiet life, and reveals his love of poetry and a suppressed wish to be a published poet, perhaps of the “Celtic school.” He clearly envies the now successful Gallaher, who displays his newfound cosmopolitanism by injecting French phrases into his orders to the waiters at Corless. Gallaher chides his friend for provincialism and lack of travel “Go to London, or Paris: Paris, for choice” (62), while boasting of his own unsavory Continental experiences.
The narration telling us of this encounter consistently refers to the men as Little Chandler and Ignatius Gallaher, keeping our focus on Chandler’s diminution in contrast to Gallaher’s professional persona. But Chandler’s sober judgment begins to see through his friend’s patronizing pomposity and, in a surprising challenge, he tries to present marriage and family as a positive metric for adulthood, a position Gallaher rejects by making it clear he plans to use marriage to get rich: “There are hundreds—what am I saying?—thousands of rich Germans and Jews, rotten with money, that’d only be too glad” (67).
Sadly, Chandler goes home to his wife and child without the satisfaction of acknowledging that he is both a better man than Gallaher and has a potentially better life. Instead, his perspective is now clouded with dissatisfaction and disappointment that he tries to remedy with poetry while his wife goes out to buy tea. But as Chandler is reading Byron (not Celtic poetry), his baby begins to cry, and in his frustration, he shouts at him to “Stop!”—causing the child to produce a hysterical fit of screaming that infuriates his wife on her return. The way the story is told produces an ethical dilemma for the reader who is encouraged both by the narration and by Chandler’s thoughts to see him as an effeminate weakling rather than as the responsible family man he is in spite of his timidity. The reader thereby risks falling victim to Chandler’s own bent for self-deprecation rather than being spurred to stand up for him.
“Counterparts”
We learn little of Thomas Chandler’s life as a clerk in his law firm at the King’s Inns, but “Counterparts” takes us into the work-day life of Farrington, a copyist in a law firm. Such 19th century short stories as Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” or Nikolai Gogol�
�s “The Overcoat” present the working life of scriveners as dull and uneventful, and while Chandler’s may resemble theirs, Farrington’s does not. In the first sentence Farrington’s boss is described as “furious,” and Farrington is subjected to Mr. Alleyne’s critical harangues and cruel reprimands all day. Unlike the sober “little” Chandler, Farrington is a large, hulking figure with a face red from drinking, who towers over his boss, “a little man wearing goldrimmed glasses on a clean-shaven face” (70), who repeatedly upbraids him, mimics and humiliates him in front of others, and threatens him with dismissal. The situation comes to a crisis of sorts when Alleyne calls Farrington a “know-nothing” in front of a client and co-workers and asks him “Do you think me an utter fool?” Farrington retorts by blurting out that he doesn’t think “that’s a fair question to put to me” (75). Alleyne is furious at this response and Farrington knows “his life would be a hell to him” at work from now on. We see him try to survive this horrendous day by first sneaking out for a drink, then pawning his watch at the end of a day so he can drown his misery with a night of drinking with friends. He ends up going home to an empty house. His wife is at chapel, the kitchen fire out, and it is left to his little boy to try to cook him some supper. At this moment his frustrations erupt in violence, and he turns into a version of Alleyne, mimicking and terrifying his little boy and beating him with a stick, his behavior making this the most violent story in Dubliners.
The reader is once again presented with an ethical dilemma: should Farrington, a victim of his boss’s relentless taunting, incite sympathy and pity? Or should Farrington’s aggressiveness in beating an innocent child impede such a response? In some respects, this question makes “Counterparts” much more complicated than Melville’s or Gogol’s stories, and more modern with its implications of the transfers in cycles of abuse that transform victims into becoming abusers themselves. As readers we are obliged to both judge and question our judgment, to feel sympathy and disgust simultaneously for the same individual, while conceding that unless we have endured similar experiences, we should perhaps not feel entitled to judge—all the while knowing that we must.
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