Hopeless Eveline

Romantic Ireland is dead and gone,

It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

                                                            W.B. Yeats (September 1913)

            Eveline, representative, if not symbolic of Ireland in the early years of the 20^th century, struggles within herself to find the will (and strength) to escape her dull life in a decaying and paralyzed country.  The fear of the “danger of her father’s violence” (26) had long controlled her life, just as Moran, the domineering father, in John McGahern’s Amongst Women, tries to control his children’s lives.  For McGahern, the controlling father does violence towards the family, just as England’s violence towards the Irish had long ruled over Ireland and terrorized the Irish people.  Joyce’s Eveline may be less the political personification of the Ireland at the time, but she is certainly the social personification of many in Irish society.  Eveline desires to escape the shackles of her situation, and wants to “leave her home” (25) to “go away like the others” (25).  She reminisces about her younger years and we discover that many of her childhood friends are either dead or have “gone … to England” (25).  Even the priest in the “yellowing” (26) picture, hanging on her wall, and representative of a decaying society, a “new Ireland” not even inhabited by priests anymore, has moved to “Melbourne” (26).  Because her mother and her brother Ernest are also dead, and her other brother, Harry is absent, she is isolated in a country from which she wants to escape.  All of the death, and a changed Ireland, mean that Romantic Ireland is dead and gone, as Yeats described in his poem, September 1913, and a paralyzed society remains in its place.  Frank, her lover, “would save her” (28) from the decaying society, by bringing her to “Buenos Ayres” (27).  She believes Frank will bring her back to “life” (28), and “save her” (28) from physical, emotional, and spiritual death and decay.  She wants to “live” (28), meaning she wants to escape her situation.  In the end, Eveline finds a way to rebirth or revival, and takes a step.  She goes as far as the dock, but then retreats and watches Frank leave without showing any “sign of love or farewell or recognition” (29).  Eveline ends up in hopeless decrepitude, symbolic of the decrepitude of her nation, the same state in which she began.   While Yeats looked back to a truly better Ireland, does Joyce’s Eveline reminisce or feel nostalgia for that Ireland, or is her memory a memory of a time just as stagnant as the one she lives in and cannot escape?