Materie: | Appunti |
Categoria: | Lingue |
Voto: | 1 (2) |
Download: | 218 |
Data: | 10.12.2001 |
Numero di pagine: | 2 |
Formato di file: | .doc (Microsoft Word) |
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Testo
EVELINE: from Dubliners
Summary
A young woman named Eveline sits at the window one evening watching dusk fall over the empty street outside. She thinks over her past on this street, in this house, and in this room, where she has tried to hold her family together following her mother's death and her father's descent into alcoholism. She has agreed to leave her home and elope with a young sailor named Frank, who plans to take her to Buenos Aires, and she feels enticed, frightened, and saddened by the thought all at once. She remembers when she and Frank were courting; her father had quarreled with her suitor, and they had had to meet in secret, as they were leaving in secret now. She has written two letters, one to her father and one to her brother Harry, explaining her decision to leave. She remembers when she missed work recently due to an illness; her father was kind to her, reading aloud from a book of ghost stories and making her toast over the fire. She remembers her mother's death and her promise to hold the family together as long as she could, and she feels overwhelmed by the urge to escape.
At the appointed time, Eveline goes to meet Frank at the station where they can board the boat to Buenos Aires. As the crowd surges into the boat, Eveline draws away from Frank, miserable and unable to bring herself to leave with him.
Commentary
"Eveline" is a short, agonized look at a single crucial moment in the life of a young woman, contextualized within her whole life up to this point. Like many of the characters in Dubliners (and Dublin in general, in Joyce's view), she is trapped by familial, social, and economic pressures into an extremely imperfect situation. On her mother's deathbed, Eveline promised to hold the family together, but now her father has slipped into excessive drinking and abusive behavior, one of her brothers has died, and she is forced to work a miserable job in addition to keeping the house. Social class is another important theme in Dubliners, the young boys in the preceding three stories have seemed comfortably middle class, or at least comfortable. But Eveline is different: Not only is she the first nearly adult main character for a story, the first female main character, and the first character not portrayed in the first person, she is also facing much harder financial circumstances. Eveline and her family are not poor, but getting by is not easy for them.
The moment of possible escape, which appears in so many of Joyce's stories, is, for Eveline, a literal, physical escape: She can leave her drunken father and go away to Argentina to marry Frank. The background story, which precedes the final lines of the story is essentially designed to convey the weight of the pressure working on Eveline: her family, her history, and her home all compel her to stay, but she feels an overwhelming desire to leave. The story's final outcome is characteristic of all of the stories; no one in Dubliners ever achieves escape.