In his short story “Eveline,” James Joyce presents a character who apparently wants to escape the confines of her current life but who ultimately chooses to stay confined. The story does not explicitly state the reasons for her decision, leaving it up to the reader to provide a rationale for what seems to be a foolish choice. In some ways, though, her decision may be interpreted less as a failure of courage on her part and more as a failure of imagination on Joyce’s part. Simply put, Joyce succumbs in the story to the traditional gender stereotype of women as lacking courage and putting more emphasis on their duty to the men in their lives. He cannot envision a woman who ultimately rejects her duty and so he instead portrays her as deciding suddenly, as if on a whim, to continue on as caregiver to her existing family.
For the first part of the story, Joyce establishes the character of Eveline as someone who has passively accepted what life has given her. She reminisces of happier times when her mother was still alive and her father was not as violent, but even her childhood seems to have been spent in some fear of her father. She has a job she does not like, and endures critical comments from her manager. She gives all her salary to her father, and then must ask him for money to buy groceries for the household or to pay for her own activities. She has been the primary caregiver for her two younger siblings; she was responsible for getting them to school and preparing meals for the entire family. Based on the passivity with which she accepted these responsibilities that should not be hers alone, she seems incapable of escaping her situation. Given the characteristics that Joyce ascribes to her, Eveline fits the traditional gender stereotype of women: passive, deferring to men, basing her identity and sense of self on her relationship to others, living a life of servitude, and staying primarily at home.
Yet her thoughts reveal that she does in fact dream of escape and has the means to do so by eloping with a man she has met. She envisions how different her life could be; she would travel (normally regarded as a male activity involving action) and be respected. She acknowledges that her life would also be different from her mother’s; the implication is that her father did not treat her mother with respect or kindness. However, even in her fantasy of escape she still fits somewhat into the gender stereotype. She is not escaping on her own; she is relying on a man to rescue her. Thus, her anticipated liberation from servitude lacks autonomy. Eveline is not creating her own version of freedom; she simply considers accepting escape and freedom as offered and defined by another man. Given this situation, if she chooses to elope, is it really freedom from the life of servitude she has already experienced, or is she simply contemplating trading one type of servitude for another?
It is interesting that while Eveline entertains these notions of escape, at the end of the story she finds herself incapable of thought or speech. She is in effect paralyzed by her fear of the unknown. Her home and existence, although frequently unpleasant to her, are familiar to her while the life she would live as Frank’s wife is unfamiliar. She rationalizes that her father is not as violent as he once was and is getting older, so presumably his threats of violence will no longer be as serious as in the past. She lacks the conviction to break away from what she regards as her duty to her father. In making that choice, she reverts back to a state even more passive than previously. She cannot speak; she cannot even show recognition of Frank. As Joyce describes her, “She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition” (23). She retreats to the very essence of the traditional female gender stereotype; she becomes so passive she cannot act at all. One scholar has noted of this ending that “Eveline is the ultimate ‘feminized’ subject. Eveline comes to embody the essence of the ‘feminine’ in patriarchy. She has seen the possibility of travel, but she evades the opportunity of travel because she can only associate it with the very vulnerability and loss to which, in the end, she ironically commits herself [S]he has passed a life sentence on herself as a ‘housekeeper,’ a servant of details” (Ingersoll 506).
In regarding the story with 21st century sensibilities, it is difficult to argue that Eveline made the right choice. She does not find happiness or fulfillment in her current situation. Neither was it really her responsibility to take care of her father’s needs. Her father should be responsible for taking care of his own household. The physical abuse he has threatened also makes it difficult to regard her final choice as wise. By staying with her father and tolerating his threats of violence, she is perpetuating the model of male violence and female subservience. She does not take control of her own future; she presumably will stay in her father’s house until he dies, at which point her own options may be quite limited. By the time her father dies, she may be past the age at which women would normally marry and so she might well be unable to find a romantic relationship that would bring her happiness. As long as she stays at home and has the responsibility of taking care of her father’s household, her job prospects also appear to be very limited. It seems at the end of the story that she cannot bear the loss of those things that are familiar to her, but one could argue quite easily that she is like an animal that has become so used to its cage she is afraid to leave it.
At the same time, it is also difficult to argue that Eveline should have gone ahead with her plan to elope with Frank. The story implies that she has not known him very long. Although he seems to have treated her well, by taking her entertainment venues, all she knows about him is what he has told her of his travels. He could quite easily be just as violent as her father once the newness of their relationship wears off. If she leaves with him and travels to another country, she could quite easily find herself in a horrible situation surrounded by complete strangers, and with no one available to assist her. In addition, if she becomes his wife, she will then have simply gone from one man’s household to another man’s household, without ever exploring her own identity.
Neither of the options that Joyce gives Eveline has much appeal, and both seem to fit all too neatly into overused and stereotypical gender roles. As one critic notes about Eveline, “She does not achieve a moment of ‘spiritual manifestation,’ but instead becomes enfolded within the structures of an all-too-familiar marriage plot from which neither she nor Joyce can imagine an escape. The apparent choice at the end of the story between flight and stasis is, in fact, a false one, for both of these options appear to Eveline, to Joyce, and even to the reader as equally exhausted roles” (Latham 122). Joyce could have taken with Eveline the same kind of bold step that Henrik Ibsen did with Nora in A Doll’s House, but instead Joyce elected to limit Eveline’s choices to an either/or dichotomy. She either stays subservient to the needs of her father as a daughter, or she marries someone and thus becomes subservient to his wishes, as a wife. Joyce fails to imagine a life for Eveline where she exists on her own terms, in which she could still maintain contact with her family but not be chained to them, in which she could love a man but not be married to him, and in which she could work at a job but not be criticized for shortcomings. Ultimately, the decision that Eveline made was the wrong choice, but Joyce did not provide her with a right choice, either.
Works Cited
Ingersoll, Earl G. "The Stigma of Femininity in James Joyce's `Eveline' and `The Boarding House'." Studies in Short Fiction 30.4 (1993): 501. MasterFILE Premier. Web. 2 Feb. 2013.
Joyce, James. “Eveline.” Dubliners. New York: Dover Publications, 1991. 20-23. Print.
Latham, Sean. "Hating Joyce Properly." Journal of Modern Literature 26.1 (2002): 119-31. Web. 2 Feb. 2013.
