“Through the wide doors of the sheds she caught a glimpse of the black mass of the boat, lying in beside the quay wall, with illumined portholes. She answered nothing. She felt her cheek pale and cold and, out of a maze of distress, she prayed to God to direct her, to show her what was her duty.”
In the early 1900s, James Joyce set out to capture Irish life as he saw it, which wasn’t a particularly encouraging view. The resulting collection of short stories, Dubliners, was published in 1904, overcoming initial protests over its publication due to the indecency of its controversial tone. Comprising fifteen stories grouped into four stages—childhood (I published a reading of “Araby” from this grouping September of 2025), adolescence, maturity, and finally public life—Dubliners delivers powerful glimpses into the frictions of everyday life,. The final story, and his most famous of the set, “The Dead,” is a culmination of all these themes.
Joyce began writing these stories as he was attending medical school in Dublin, and his studies greatly affected the tone and purpose of Dubliners. At the time, he spoke often of the tepid lifeforce of his countrymen in specifically medical terms. As scholar Florence L. Walzl observed, Joyce “concluded that Ireland was sick, and diagnosed its psychological malady as hemiplegia, a partial, unilateral paralysis. He told his brother, ‘What’s the matter with you is that you’re afraid to live. You and people like you. This city is suffering from hemiplegia of the will.’”
Today’s story, “Eveline,” is from the adolescence phase. In it, a young woman is on the precipice of a life-altering move away from her dour life of servitude under an abusive father and towards open possibility in another country with a man who loves her. One gets the sense that, while Joyce conjures up the reader’s deep sympathy with Eveline’s ultimate impotence, he doesn’t care to join us in it but would rather rebel against the suspension of will that inspired it—a masterful achievement in so few words.
Please enjoy…
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