James Joyce's darkly colored portraits of "mother" in Dubliners

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1995 by Linda Rohrer Paige

For Eveline, doing her duty to her mother requires mothering her mother's children. Her siblings, essentially, become her children. Encumbered by her potentially violent father, from whom she must slip away even to buy food staples, Eveline seems imprisoned in domestic, "motherly" duties: she must see to it that the two young children go to school and eat regularly: "It was hard work -- a hard life . . ." (38). Ultimately, paralyzed by fear, Eveline rationalizes about her present life of drudgery, assessing it as not "wholly undesirable" (38). Selectively, she recounts scenes that demonstrate her father's sometime ability to be "nice" (39), underscoring his "feminine" potential as nurturer. She recalls how he fetched her toast and tea, reading her a ghost story from the fireside (39), and how, in previous years, he imitated her mother at a family outing:

Another day, when their mother was alive, they had all gone for a

picnic to the Hill of Howth. She remembered her father putting on

her mother's bonnet to make the children laugh. (39)

Clearly, Eveline's memory of the picnic trip imbues the father with a kind of "motherly" generative power. This scene, ironically, hints at a kind of complicity between mother and father, a solidarity of purpose. Both "mothers" -- the biological one and the father as an abstraction of "mother" -- share a common purpose, to keep Eveline homebound. Eveline's selective recall -- she never plays out scenes of her father's beating her mother, for instance, though Joyce strongly hints that he did -- seems another indication of her inability to face her previous and present pain. Trevor L. Williams, in "Resistance to Paralysis in Dubliners,' offers a theory as to why Eveline selectively forgets to remember her father's violence:

The roots of violence arc complex, but on a symbolic level

Eveline's relationship to her father appears to represent the

internalization and reproduction of a patriarchal and militarized

culture. Patriarchal thinking dominates the story; it freezes Eveline

in the present and has driven her mother crazy. in the past. (443)

Promises to the dead take precedence over those with the living in "Eveline." The protagonist's eventual decision to reject Frank and to remain consigned to her present home involves two forms of symbolic "contracts": one, the promise to her mother, and two, the promise of marriage to Frank. Though some critics have called into question Frank's intentions,(6) Williams counters their arguments aptly by noting that nothing could be worse than Eveline's present fate:

It is immaterial whether (as some critics have debated) Frank's

intentions are honorable or not: even if he were to dump her in

Liverpool, Eveline could scarcely suffer a worse fate than

cooperating in her own enslavement in Dublin as her mother had.

(443)

Frank does, after all, have the distinct advantage of being alive. His potential marriage contract offers romance and hope, a chance for life -- and it affords Eveline an opportunity to obtain the "respect" for which she has longed, the kind that her mother never enjoyed (37). Joyce, perhaps, intimates Frank's connection to a kind of life force by establishing his "fond[ness] of music" and singing (39). Contrarily, he disconnects Eveline's father from musical associations: as her mother lay in her sickroom dying, Eveline's father notably "order[s]" away the organ grinder (40). Sadly, Eveline's rejection of life with Frank ensures not just her helpless, voiceless condition,(7) but also her deafness to the music of life.