Dubliners 629individual hopes and dreams are unfulfilled due to
the pressures of marriage and family. As a result
of the tensions mentioned above, Joyce’s characters
often find themselves alienated and isolated from
others around them. Joyce neither resolves these
conflicts, nor provides a solution to the solitude felt
by his characters, but leaves readers to contemplate
the universality of these conditions.
Wern Mei Yong
Family in Dubliners
Family in Dubliners is more often than not por-
trayed as a source of oppression. In “Araby,” a young
boy, in love with a young lady, wants to go to the
night bazaar to buy her a gift. He is unable to do so
because he has to wait for his uncle to return home,
and give him some money. By the time the boy goes
to the bazaar, it is almost closing and most of the
stalls have closed. The night bazaar, with its exotic
connotations, presents an escape for the boy, just as
his infatuation for the lady is a means of escaping
the drudgeries of everyday life. His uncle does not
seem to take the boy’s desire to go to the bazaar seri-
ously, and Joyce reveals at one point, very curtly and
simply, that “He had forgotten.” The brief sentence
adds a sense of finality and poignancy to the lack of
control the boy seems to have over his own desires,
as their fulfillment is tied to the whims of others.
Family, in this sense, stands in the way of the fulfill-
ment of the boy’s desires, and at the end of the story,
the boy finds himself alone in darkness, a “creature
driven and derided by vanity,” and his “eyes burned
with anguish and anger.”
In “Eveline,” Joyce continues to explore the idea of
family. The story begins with a description of Eveline:
She sat at the window watching the evening
invade the avenue. Her head was leaned
against the window curtains and in her nos-
trils was the odour of dusty cretonne. She
was tired.Here, Joyce portrays an image of a young girl trapped;
just as the evening is seen to invade the avenue, we
get a sense of the young girl being overwhelmed by
her surroundings. The pervasive odor of the curtains
that fills her nostrils suggests the immense pressure
domestic life seems to have on her. This pressure is
reinforced by the brevity and finality of the closing
sentence of the paragraph. We learn that Eveline,
on the last night of her mother’s illness, had made
a “promise to her mother, her promise to keep the
home together as long as she could.” Having had
enough, she decides “to go away, to leave her home”
and to “explore another life with Frank” in Buenos
Aires. Life in Dublin consists of constant “squabble
for money,” “hard work to keep the house together,”
and domestic violence. Buenos Aires, at the time a
thriving and wealthy city, offers a means of escape
for Eveline; but, apart from being Frank’s wife, we
are not told what she will do in Buenos Aires. At the
very moment the ship is about to leave the pier, she
finds herself unable to leave with Frank: “She set her
white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her
eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recogni-
tion.” Comparing her to a “helpless animal” suggests
her powerlessness and paralysis. Eveline is indeed
trapped, since whether in Ireland or Buenos Aires,
she will continue to live a life of subjection to the
will of others, with little autonomy or freedom of her
own. Eveline does not leave Ireland because of the
guilt she would bear were she to break her promise
to her mother to look after the family.
A similar force of oppression symbolized by
the family is seen in the story “A Little Cloud.”
The story begins with Chandler’s meeting with
his friend in a public space, and ends with tension
and conflict within himself in the private, domestic
space of the home. At the beginning of the story,
we see Chandler getting ready to meet his friend,
Gallaher, after an eight-year absence. As the story
progresses, Chandler finds himself and his life to be
inadequate, small and impoverished in comparison
to the life of Gallaher, who has left Dublin. That he
is referred to as “Little Chandler” further enhances
how limited and small his life and personality are in
comparison to Gallaher, who is described as a man
of presence who has achieved a certain degree of
success in life. As with other stories in the collec-
tion, the main protagonist understands that “if you
wanted to succeed you had to go away. You could do
nothing in Dublin.” He expresses envy at his friend’s
newfound life in London, and is resentful of the
factors that hold him back from what might have