write a two to three page (five to seven paragraph) essay, typed, double-spaced, on any topic regarding one of the short stories we’ve read.
1. Derevaun Seraun. In James Joyce’s “Eveline,” the title character’s mother on her deathbed mutters words that may be translated “the end of pleasure is pain.” Or they may just be the singsong nonsense of dementia. How can Eveline’s experience in this story be understood as in part a paralyzed response to her mother’s ambiguous words? Do the words at times urge her toward a better life, at others urge her to remain within a life like her mother’s?
Point of View: James Joyce, “Eveline”; “Sample Student Analysis”
PROLOGUE
Point of View
One of the things we noted about Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” is how strange the voice of it seems. We wonder, Who is speaking? Where? When? I suggested the voice might be a long record of the mother’s teaching in the mind of her grownup daughter. What interests me today are again such questions about the voice of fiction: “Who is speaking? Where? When?
These are, technically speaking, “point of view” questions.
In the simplest definition, literary “point of view” means the perspective, the angle of perception or knowledge, from which a story is told.
“Point of view” is signaled grammatically by the predominant pronoun in a piece of storytelling: Take a look at presiding pronouns in a text: Does “I” or “you” or “he” or “they” or even “we” predominate in the sentences? Point of view can be human (a specific individual), inhuman (say, cold and objective), or superhuman. The “I” can be very specific, a barber talking while he cuts a guy’s hair. But it can also be inhumanly objective, “mechanical,” like the voice of Raymond Carver’s story. Novelists and story writers in the 18th and early 19th century sometimes preferred a kind of “Godlike” point of view, telling stories in which every character’s thoughts and feelings were available to the storyteller whenever they pleased. Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is a good example of this “omniscient” narrator. Modern writers often limit themselves to a single character’s point of view, either letting them tell their story in the first person (“I’m a thief, a word thief and a story thief…”) or sharing a character’s interior life by a kind of intimate, or “close,” third person (“It seemed to him that it was all right, that he would feel no more pain for a while now…”).
In general, point of view can be broken into “1ST Person” stories, told by a specific “I,” and “3RD Person stories,” using “he,” “she,” or “they.”
But this 3rd person point of view comes in three very different flavors:
Objective, “fly-on-the-wall” perspective (“Popular Mechanics”)
Limited 3rd person point of view (limited to recording the inner life of one or sometimes two characters)(“Eveline”)
Omniscient, “Godlike,” point of view, with access to the inner life of many characters
(The Scarlet Letter)
PASSAGES
James Joyce, “Eveline”
Joyce’s “Eveline” is a fine example of “limited third person.” The opening paragraph gives us a very still, frankly inert portrait of the title character, looking out from behind a pane of glass, at a largely lifeless scene. She smells the dust and feels “tired” (309). With that third sentence, “She was tired,” we are brought into the inner life of Eveline, how she feels in this scene (which might be used as a tv ad for antidepressants!). The “footsteps” of the second paragraph, “clacking” on concrete, then “crunching” on the cinder path, are a nice example of the kind of concrete imagery, or sensory details, that can bring a story to life. But after all, there’s not much life in this opening, certainly not in Eveline.
There was more, for Eveline, in the past. With the line, “One time there used to be a field,” we go with Eveline into memories of her childhood here, playing with her siblings and other children in the field. But it’s not all play. A slightly sinister figure appears in that remembered field, her father, who came “to hunt” the children, carrying a “blackthorn stick,” which looks like a potential weapon, or sign of overlordship, here. It is, as they say, “phallic,” in the scariest sense. In fact, Keough keeps watch for the others, to warn them when this man is coming. Look at the word “still” in “Still they seemed to have been rather happy then.” Look even at the word “rather.” It’s as if Eveline is arguing with herself: Well, it wasn’t that bad. Father “was not so bad then [my italics].” This is colloquial speech; you can hear Eveline’s voice in her head (even though this is 3rd person!): Her father gets “fairly bad of a Saturday night” (310). That is, her father is a drinker; her father also, we will soon learn, gets violent with the children and with his wife. (This is all folded into the paragraph that begins “But in her new home,” on page 310.)
But already, on page 309, we find this story’s central conflict: It is between two different warring impulses or motives in Eveline: Should I stay or should I go? Is this a good place for my life or an evil place? Eveline is conflicted, perhaps even paralyzed, between contrary impulses, on the one hand to leave her father and depart with Frank and, on the other, to stay and fulfill the promise she made to her dying mother. Look at the details of this home surveyed on page 309 (¶3), all the dust; the “yellowing photograph” of another man who, like Eveline’s male siblings, left this place behind; the “broken harmonium” (there’s no music here!). The “colored print of Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque.” This is a cheap, gawdy religious poster, one about promises made to a female saint for all her sacrifices. Each of these elements is suggestive about Eveline’s life here, dusty and dreary, self-sacrificing, but also comfortably familiar and filled with some pleasant past associations.
In ¶s 9 and 10, we begin to learn of the opportunity that has emerged for Eveline. “[I]n her new home, in a distant country… she would be married—she, Eveline.” In those last two words, we hear her near-disbelief that such a life is possible for her. Paragraph 10 introduces us to “Frank,” who seems not only to respect and care for Eveline, but to bring music into her life—and to offer the prospect of a kind of romantic adventure together to tropically “exotic” Buenos Aires. Frank takes Eveline (“Evy!” he calls her) to music hall shows; he loves music and likes to sing, embarrassing and delighting her by singing “about the lass that loves a sailor.” There may even be a musical pun in the city’s name, “Buenos Aires,” since, as we see in paragraph 14, “airs” can also mean a tune or song (in Spanish, Good Songs). So that we might ask, Which is it going to be, Eveline—lively music or a broken harmonium?
Frank may, of course, be a liar and user. There’s risk in adventure. But he seems pretty decent; thinking of him seems to make Eveline happy.
How many jobs does Eveline have?
1. She is a maid-of-all-work in her father’s home;
2. she has a wage-earning post at “the Stores”; and
3. she cares for the neighbors’ children.
Who gets all the money from these labors? Dear old dad. That’s called “exploitation,” here with emotional abuse and threats of physical violence attached. It’s all in ¶9. In ¶s 14 through 17, we learn that Eveline’s mother ended her life sick and “raving.” Music from an Italian organ-grinder on the street reminds Eveline of her mother’s raving death, and presents to Eveline a “pitiful vision of her mother’s life… that life of commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness” (311). A lot is being communicated all at once here, but notice particularly 1) the words the dying mother chants might summarize the mother’s own terrible fate: her initially promising marriage ends in this pain; 2) this memory is enough to make Eveline stand up and think, “Escape! She must escape!” (This is her first physical movement in the story, three pages in!) (Who was it? Hemingway—said fictional “action is not motion”: it can happen in people’s heads); 3) Eveline’s father hates immigrants (Italians, in this case); perhaps for him they seem, like Eveline, bent on cheating him out of his “rights” and making his life miserable. He seems to hate music too.
What a charming fellow.
The mother’s “The end of pleasure is pain” can, however, also be interpreted in a directly opposite way: Why even try to have a good life, Eveline? Love always leads to pain anyway! Forget Frank and Buenos Aires, sweety. (Besides, you promised your mother you would stay!)
Is Eveline’s duty to her father and mother or to herself? What should Eveline do?
The story of course does not answer this question. It puts you in the painful grip of it; it lets you consider and feel how it feels for Eveline. It gives you one more human being in your life that you didn’t know before you read this story, unless it is very much like you or someone you know, in which case it brought you closer to them. It expanded the range of your human empathy.
PUZZLES
I was tempted to say that the story’s finale, its “final struggle” is between Eveline and Frank. But that’s not quite right. It is Eveline’s final struggle with herself, between two different impulses, two possible futures. How is her conflict finally “resolved”? (Notice how “resolved” isn’t always a good thing, just the end result of a conflict.)
Is the conflict (or paralysis?) between two “dut[ies],” with which the story begins, the same with which it ends? Or does one side win, sort of by default? More importantly, how would you describe the final emotional state we see Eveline in? And now, is this one of the saddest stories you have ever read?! One of the most affecting? I’ll do you one better, another story in Joyce’s Dubliners, called “Clay.” You can find it online.
POSTSCRIPT
“Sample Student Analysis”
John Updike’s “A & P” is a good example of another way modern writers capture the experience of individual characters, the first person “I.” Here we have a kind of bored-by-his-job, sexually excitable teenage boy, awakened suddenly to sexual appetite and an impulse to “buck the system.” Or something like that. Updike’s is a kind of fiction many writers produced in the American 1950s and 60s: middleclass male suburbanites express their sense of the absurdity or “meaninglessness” of postwar, consumerist, and “conformist” American life. This is not fiction anyone much talks about these days, for good reason, I think: whiny, privileged white guys whose relevance on this planet has properly waned. I ask you to read it mainly as context for the fine “Sample Student Analysis” we are reading.
This is, to me, an ideal model for the short student essays I will ask you to write this term. Why ideal? Because it breaks the student’s insights, after her reading (and no doubt rereading) of the story, into three clear blocks: Look at the three central paragraphs. This student expresses her insights about 1) the story’s institutional “setting,” 2) its suggestive regional location in New England, and 30 the store’s boring and predictable manager, Lengel. And it links these three “blocks” in a persuasive argument, a viable “thesis,” about the story’s meaning: Sammy rejects, for better or worse, not only a job but a whole consumerist-conformist “state of mind” represented by the A & P (east coast equivalent to Ralph’s or Vons).
