After her moment of what Joyce calls "spiritual paralysis," Eveline's life will most likely be one of what Thoreau termed "quiet desperation."
As Eveline experiences terror at the last moment before boarding the ship, imagining that Frank will drown her, she grabs the iron railing with both hands. "Her distress awoke a nausea in her body and she kept moving her lips in silent fervent prayer." Joyce describes her as like a "passive,...helpless animal." Eveline experiences a spiritual paralysis foreshadowed in the first paragraph of the story and she does not depart.
In the first paragraph, Eveline lays her head against the window as evening "invade[s] the avenue." The smell of cretonne in the drapes fills her nostrils. "She was tired." The simple brevity of this sentence fills the idea of it with almost infinite weariness. Then, there is dust, suggesting inaction:
She had dusted once a week for so many years, wondering where on earth all the dust came from. Perhaps she would never again see those familiar objects from which she had never dreamed of being divided.
Further, she deliberates over the wisdom of having decided to leave home, where her little brother might then become the victim of her father's abuse. She reviews her life, a hard life, but she has not found it completely undesirable. This vacillation of Eveline demonstrates her inability to act with conviction, a failing demonstrated in her subservience to her father, to Miss Gavan, her employer, and in her lack of surety about a life with Frank as she remembers her mother's cries about life--"Derevaun Seraun!" [Gaelic for "the end of pleasure is pain"]
At the North Wall Eveline stands in the crowd, a victim of her spiritual inertia, and she cannot respond to Frank as he calls to her. She will return home and suffer a life of "quiet desperation" because she is a victim of her character, not of circumstances.
No comments:
Post a Comment