James Joyce's "Eveline" is a story written as an internal
monologue of the main character who finds herself in a quandary: she does not know
whether to flee her home, trusting her life with a sailor ironically named Frank, or to
stay at home and care for her father and brother. Her conflicts involve the ambiguous
nature of Frank's proposal to run off with him: While his name indicates honesty, his
profession is rather dubious regarding honor. And, his proposal to Eveline to run away
with him, a sailor, to Buenos Ayres suggests both the adventurous and the carnal. That
Eveline is rather ambivalent about her safety and security if she goes with him is
evident in her internal conflicts.
Then, too, her father
has learned of her love and now Eveline must meet Frank secretly, so she is unsure of
whether she wishes to gamble her life on the words of this sailor. Added to what
Eveline feels is her obligation to her little brother for whom she promised her mother
before the colored print of the Bessed Margaret Mary Alacoque. And, as she muses upon
this promise, the image of her mother appears in Eveline's mind, the image of the plight
of the Irish woman who makes "all those commonplace
sacrificies."
Perhaps it is Eveline's fear of love,
perhaps it is Eveline's sense of obligation to family, but Eveline is unable to leap
upon the boat as Frank urgently calls to her. Representing the tragic Irish woman for
whom psychological freedom is impossible because of the tremendous pull of the
religious, social, and historical patterning of her culture that keeps her subjugated,
Eveline cannot love and go with Frank because she is the victim of her internal
conflicts with her way of life.
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