-
Critic:
Harry Stone
Source:
The
Antioch Review,
Vol. XXV, no. 3,
Fall, 1965, pp. 375-445.
Criticism about:
Author Covered:
James Joyce
Table of
Contents:
Essay
|
Source Citation
[Stone is an educator, editor, and
Cha
rles Dickens scholar. In the
following excerpt
ed essay, he discusses
some of the autobiographical elements of
Joyce's childhood in Dublin,
Ireland, and how the e
xoticism of the
real
-life Araby festival, with its
Fa
r Eastern o
vertones,
impacted the
young Jo
yce.
Stone also discuss
e
s
the poet James Man
gan's
influence on the story. ]
For
recapitulate. The boy in
the nets and trammels of society. That
beginning involves painful farewells and
disturbing
dislocations. The boy must
dream
shimmering mirage of childhood,
begin to see things as they really are. But to see
things as
they really are is only a
prelude. Far in the distance lies his appointed
(but as yet unimagined)
task: to
encounter the reality of experience and forge the
uncreated conscience of his race.
The
whole of that struggle, of course, is set forth in
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man.
boy.
The autobiographical nexus
of
though that conflict--an epitome of
Joyce's first painful effort to see--is central
and controls all
else. Many of the
details of the story are also rooted in Joyce's
life. The narrator of
Araby
narrator is the boy of
the story now grown up--lived, like Joyce, on
North Richmond Street.
North Richmond
Street is blind, with a detached
two
-story house at the blind end, and
down
the street, as the opening
paragraph informs us, the Christian Brothers'
school. Like Joyce, the
boy attended
this school, and again like Joyce he found it dull
and stultifying. Furthermore, the
boy's
surrogate parents, his aunt and uncle, are a
version of Joyce's parents: the aunt, with her
forbearance and her unexamined piety,
is like his mother; the uncle, with his irregular
hours,
his irresponsibility, his love
of recitation, and his drunkenness, is like his
father.
Source
Citation:
Stone, Harry,
The
Antioch
Review,
Vol. XXV,
no. 3, Fall, 1965, pp. 375-445.
EXPLORING Short Stories
.
Online Edition.
Gale, 2003. Student
Resource Center. Thomson Gale. 04 June 2007
Historical Context:
Table of
Contents:
Source
Citation
While
Dublin, Ireland, has seen much change since the
turn of the twentieth century, when
Joyce wrote many of the conditions
present then remain today. In 1904, all of Ireland
was
under British control, which the
Irish resented bitterly. The nationalist group
Sinn Fein (part of
which later became
the Irish Republican Army--the IRA) had not yet
formed, but Irish politics
were
nonetheless vibrant and controversial. The
question of Irish independence from Britain
was one of primary importance to every
citizen.
There were no
televisions or radios for entertainment at the
turn of the century. Children in
working-class families were expected to
help with running the household, as the boy in
does
when he carries packages for his
aunt at the market, and to entertain themselves by
reading or
playing alone or with
others. It was rare for children to have money of
their own to spend. An
event like the
bazaar in would cause great excitement.
Ireland's major religion,
Roman Catholicism, dominated Irish
culture,
as it continues to do
today although to a lesser extent. Many
families sent their children to schools run by
Jesuit
priests (like the one the
narrator in attends) and convent schools run by
nuns (like the one
Mangan's sister
attends).
Catholicism is often seen as
a source of the frequent conflict in Irish
culture between sensuality and
asceticism,
a conflict that figures
prominently in Joyce's
autobiographical
novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man
. In many ways, Catholicism,
particularly as practiced at the turn
of the century, was an extremely sensuous
religion,
emphasizing intense personal
spiritual experience and surrounding itself with
suc
h rich
trappings as
beautiful churches, elegant paintings and statues,
otherworldly music, and
sumptuous
vestments and altar decorations. On the other
hand, the Church's official attitude
toward enjoyment of the senses and
particularly toward sexuality was
severe and restrictive.
The ideal woman
was the Virgin Mary, who miraculously combined
virginal purity with
maternity.
Motherhood was exalted, but any enjoyment of
sexuality, even in marriage, was
considered a sin, as were the practice
of birth control and abortion. The inability to
reconcile
the spiritual and sensual
aspects of human nature can be seen in the boy's
feelings toward
Mangan's sister in He
imagines his feelings for her as a
object--and so worshipful is his
attitude that he hesitates even to speak to her.
Yet his
memories of her focus almost
exclusively on her body--her figure silhouetted by
the light, the
image of the
chalice is ambivalent, since its cup-like shape
and function suggests a sexual
connotation. The boy never resolves
this conflict between spirituality and sensuality.
Instead,
when confronted with the
tawdriness of a shopgirl's flirtation at the
bazaar, he abruptly
dismisses all his
feelings as mere
The Structure of
Critic:
Jerome
Mandel
Source:
Modern Language Studies,
Vol. X
V, no. 4, Fall, 1985, pp.
48-54.
Criticism
about:
Author
Covered:
James Joyce
Table of
Contents:
Essay
|
Source Citation
[In the following excerpt, Mandel
compares the imagery of Joyce's
romance, particular with regard to the
protagonist's love for Mangan's sister. ]
[In
most hostile
to romance
O love! O love!
many times
long been examined for images
from medieval romance and need not be
recapitulated in detail
here. My
concern is not that [the boy's] world is hostile
to romance (both literary tradition and
personal feeling) and that her image
accompanies him, but that the paradigm of courtly
romance is strictly maintained and the
attitudes of courtly love constantly suggested. As
the
boy continues to perform his public
duties in the world (to win worship:
of
the parcels
possessed by love, he moves
out of time, and all worldly, public, and temporal
considerations
pass from him:
often full of tears (I could not tell
why)
desire to veil
themselves
committed to love. The
conflicting demands of world, duty, and love
developed in these two
paragraphs
exhibit in action what, in the medieval romance,
is the love debate--the soliloquy
that
usually begins when the lover first sees the
knight or lady and ends when the lover places
himself (or herself) totally in the
service of love....
In the
next passage, the passage that establishes and
defines the quest (and which ends with
the lover's commitment:
role
as the object of the lover's adoration and she for
whose sake the adventure is to be
undertaken.
knight who has
adored her from a distance without hope of success
but with unrelenting
devotion. He
responds as do all courtly lovers when they first
come to the attention of the
beloved:
he is
to Araby,
command: he
must take upon himself the fulfillment of an
adventure to which he has been
called
by love--one she herself is prevented from
accomplishing. The multiple religious
symbolism of the two
enriched by the further suggestion from
medieval romance that he dedicates his lance to
her
(
head toward
me
promise of reward for knightly
service in the
her
wrist.
admission of love, for in the
context of medieval love revelations the line
means,
you--that is, you are better off
than I am--since you are not smitten by love for
me as I am
smitten by painful love for
you.
boy nor that he thinks she does,
but only that her response in this context has
particular
connotations in medieval
romance.
[Plot
Summary]
Author:
James (Augustine Aloysius) Joyce,
also
known as:
James Augustine Aloysius
Joyce,
James Augustus Aloysius Joyce,
and James (Augustine Aloysius) Joyce
Genre:
short stories
Date:
1914
Table of
Contents:
Essay
|
Source Citation
Introduction
Dubliners.
Although Joyce wrote the stories between 1904 and
1906, they were not published
until
1914.
Dubliners
paints a
portrait of life in Dublin, Ireland, at the turn
of the 20th century. Its
stories are
arranged in an order reflecting the development of
a child into a grown man. The
first
three stories are told from the point of view of a
young boy, the next three from the point of
view of an adolescent, and so on.
perspective of a boy just on the verge
of adolescence. The story takes it
s
title from a real
festival which came
to Dublin in 1894 when Joyce was twelve years old.
Joyce is one of the most
famous writers of the Modernist period of
literature, which runs
roughly from
1900 to the end of World War II. Modernist works
often include characters who
are
spiritually lost and themes that reflect a
cynicism toward institutions the writer had been
taught to respect, such as government
and religion. Much of the literature of this
period is
experimental; Joyce's writing
reflects this in the use of dashes instead of
quotation marks to
indicate that a
character is speaking.
Joyce had a very difficult time getting
Dubliners
published. It took
him over ten years to find a
publisher
who was willing to risk publishing the stories
because of their unconventional style
and themes. Once he found a publisher,
he fought very hard with the editors to keep the
stories the way he had written them.
Years later, these stories are heralded not only
for their
portrayal of life in Dublin
at the turn of the century, but also as the
beginning of the career of
one of the
most brilliant English-language writers of the
twentieth century.