Literary critics have relied on comparing a work to a current intellectual theory for over a century now. Most major works in the English canon have fallen under the influence of Marxist criticism, a criticism that emphasizes the economic relationships and class between major characters, at one time or another. After, the 1960s, many works were reinterpreted from a feminist perspective which stresses the subservience of female characters and their reliance on males. James Joyce’s “Eveline” has been analyzed in these fashions; both theories have a great deal of validity and grant the reader new insights into Eveline’s plight. However, while, in academia, it has become acceptable to disregard authorial intent (what did Joyce intend to “say” when writing “Eveline”?), there should be common sense limits to criticism, so that it remains pertinent to the culture and era in which the literature was created.

Freudian interpretations are a prime example of literary criticism that often is more about Freud’s theories than the literature that psychoanalytic theories are attempting to clarify. Ever since Freud first published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, intellectuals have been applying his theories on developmental sexuality and the unconscious to different literary works. Joyce himself was well aware of Freud and was known to comment on the similarity of their names: The German Freude means joy in English. Additionally Joyce was well aware of Freudian, psychoanalytic theories. When Joyce’s daughter, Lucia, began exhibiting signs of mental illness (she was eventually institutionalized), Joyce conferred with Carl Jung, an early disciple of Freud. Many of the stream-of-consciousness techniques that Joyce employs, particularly in later works, would not have been as accepted had it not been for Freud’s groundbreaking work on the subconscious. However, in spite of all this, Freudian interpretations that rely on the Oedipal or Electra complex (the theories of human sexual development), seem to have less to do with “Eveline” than the theories of the subconscious because the sexual theories disregard specific aspects of the Irish-Catholic upbringing which may override any influence of the different complexes discussed. Freudian criticism of “Eveline” presents a good example of the intellectual bias towards an aspect of Freudian theory that emphasizes the Electra Complex at the expense of the more mundane subconscious impulses which both spur and prevent Eveline from acting.

A detailed Freudian analysis occurs in a 1993 book, Reading Dubliners Again, in which author Gary Leonard applies elements of Freudian interpretation to Eveline’s psychological development. According to Freud’s Oedipal or Electra complex, a child develops a sexual attraction for the opposite-sex parent (the Electra complex refers to a girl’s attraction for her father). Failure to resolve the conflict can result in difficulties in adult sexuality that manifest themselves in all sorts of ways which stifle healthy development. Freud concludes that the Oedipal and Electra complex provide the fundamental obstacle that a child must overcome to develop healthily; a failure of the developing child to resolve the Oedipal or Electra complex results in profound difficulties. Taken at a very basic level, a Freudian might say that Eveline has never been able to free herself from her attraction to her father; it is for this reason that she cannot pursue other lovers, or can only find lovers who exhibit traits much like her father. Eveline, indeed, finds herself in difficulty; is this difficulty truly the result of an unresolved attraction for her father, or are other cultural factors, for example a victim’s response to chronic abuse, more important? According to Leonard and other Freudian interpretations, Eveline’s paralysis or inability to act is caused by her failure to overcome her childhood attraction to her father. Consequently, the father still exhibits too much control over her. In fact, he treats her as a substitute for his wife; Eveline does all the housework and is in danger of becoming abused by her father, much the way her mother was. Leonard’s analysis culminates with the idea that the final description in the tale is an allegorical depiction of orgasm. One critic, Scott Trudell, has reinterpreted this moment as an orgasm for Frank, but not Eveline. Eveline remains frigid, attached to her father, and unable to develop in a healthy sexual manner. In this case, the paralysis that is a theme throughout Dubliners, is both physical and sexual.

While the above analysis is enticing, and sexuality, of course, influences many human acts, one can view this particular interpretation with a bit of skepticism. According to Leonard’s analysis, the Oedipal motives override all the other factors in Eveline’s life. However, in addition to Eveline fighting off Frank’s sexuality and forthright command (-Come!), Eveline, along with her frigidity, experiences a religious moment or epiphany. “Her distress awoke a nausea in her body and she kept moving her lips in silent fervent prayer.” Although one can point to sexual allegory in these final passages, Leonard’s analysis seems to discount religion and the concurrent duty that Irish-Catholicism demands as the overriding factor in Eveline’s “decision.”

How appropriate is it to apply theories across different cultures? Sigmund Freud was an Austrian Jew whose clients were primarily upper-middle class Austrians from a culture where religion was, often, not of primary importance. Although Freud was well aware of religion as a cultural phenomenon, he was not devout. Joyce, in Dubliners, describes a dominating Irish-Catholic environment where religion, even if it is absent, is the primary influence in the lives of the inhabitants. The Dubliners in Joyce’s tales do not view religion as a cultural phenomenon, but as a truth and way of life. With this in mind it is entirely possible that the bell which “clanged upon her heart” in the final moments of the tale has more to do with the duty evoked by Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque than any culminating Oedipal struggle. The promises which she sees hanging on the wall earlier in the tale are imbued in the consciousness of virtually all Irish-Catholics. Instead of the battle inside of Eveline’s mind between her father and Frank, her father-substitute, there is a struggle more specific to Catholicism: the struggle between carnal desires and their negation for higher spirituality and divine duty. In this interpretation, Eveline passes up sexuality for the promises made to her dying mother and Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque, who blesses the house in which the promises are hung.

The validity of Freud’s theories have been debated for a century now. Assuming a universality across the cultural spectrum for Freud’s theories is, possibly, a mistake. Why should sexual development and complexes be absolutely the same in Ireland and Austria, or New Guinea for that matter? Although there are kernels of truth in a Freudian analysis, utilizing Freud’s theories on sexual development remains a highly subjective, culture-specific venture that is open to much disagreement. (A Freudian might proclaim that those espousing a theory where religion plays the primary role are, in effect, denying the truth, that sexuality is of primary importance and that religion makes a meager attempt to conceal this). However, there is no denying that Freud’s acknowledgment of the subconscious was partly responsible for the whole Modernist movement and the stream-of-consciousness technique which, with Joyce, began in “Eveline”.

The Modernist movement is widely regarded as the first to portray the interior thoughts of characters and to embed them in the text. The Modernists made it difficult for the reader to discern what is occurring in a character’s head and what is taking place outside. Objective and subjective reality are blurred. Additionally, in Modernist texts, it is often difficult to discern whether a particular character is aware of his or her thoughts. Are the thoughts of Eveline conscious or subconscious?

Freud was the first to acknowledge a subconscious, a realm of the mind where thoughts could not be verbalized and grasped; in fact it is difficult to even label them “thoughts” since the person under their influence is unaware of them. According to Freud, the subconscious manifests itself in conscious thoughts and behaviors, but remains hidden. Joyce, in his later works, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, was often able to delve into the unconscious and portray it in an experimental prose that was not written in any particular language. Consequently the writing is very difficult to understand, or, rather, there is no understanding at a conscious level. One critic, Fritz Senn, has pointed out, “If you think you are right, you’re wrong. If you are right, you know you are right.” In other words, the only way to truly comprehend Joyce’s later works is to merely read and react to different passages. The unconscious cannot be understood by means of rational thought.

While Joyce’s later works are far-removed from the more traditional tales reminiscent of naturalism in Dubliners, there are instances where the subconscious, first acknowledged by Freud, come into play. These moments, akin to the Catholic epiphany, transcend conscious thought and cannot be described with mere words. There is a specific instance in “Eveline” when the stream-of-consciousness becomes, for a moment, an unconscious moment, or epiphany. Concurrent with Freud’s theories, the moment when Eveline recalls her mother repeating “Derevaun Seraun” leads to an instance where the subconscious overriding consciousness is illustrated in prose. Eveline, slave to an unconscious memory and impulse, is propelled to action, if only temporarily.

Up until then, Joyce is writing with the reader in mind; enough details are given to allow the reader to follow the tale. For example, in a pure train of conscious thought, Eveline would not think “Her father. . .” The pronoun “her” is purely for the reader. In later Joyce works, this “consideration” for the reader disappears. It is up to the reader to bridge the gap between the subjective reality of a character and what he or she perceives. In “Eveline,” Joyce gives enough of a description to keep the reader involved in the thoughts of the heroine, enough to allow the plot to unfold with very little ambiguity as far as Eveline’s emotions. Although the tale is not linear or chronological, in that much of the tale is thoughts, there is still a logical progression in Eveline’s musings that a reader can follow. This is because the thoughts are conscious and Eveline herself is aware of them. However, her thoughts take a sudden detour or divergence with the memory of her mother. And, at this moment the words transcend meaning, in fact, there are multiple meanings and interpretations, largely because it is not the words themselves that are important, but how they affect Eveline.

Scholars have been debating the meaning of “Derevaun Seraun” for decades. Initially, it was believed that the phrase was nonsensical. Later, the phase was attributed to a West Gaelic dialect meaning, “Worms are the only end.” Regardless of the meaning, it is highly probable that Eveline did not recognize the phrase at a literal level (otherwise she would have been thinking in a West Gaelic dialect throughout the tale). Furthermore, Joyce deliberately failed to provide the reader with a literal translation because the unconscious cannot be fully grasped and transformed into commonplace language. He uses obscure dialect to illustrate the moment where the subconscious broaches conscious thought. The literal meaning, though very appropriate to the tale, is not important in comprehending the tone and theme. The mere sound of the strange words, or rather, the sound of her dead mother’s voice reciting these words with “foolish insistence” is ultimately a manifestation of the unconscious. Moreover, manifestations of the unconscious are best left in ambiguous form, otherwise they are weakened.

Joyce’s strategy in stressing epiphanies in his tales leads, in the case of “Eveline” to an early illustration of the differences between conscious thoughts and the subconscious, which Freud had brought to attention only four years before the initial publication of Joyce’s story. Although one can read “Eveline” with an Oedipal interpretation, the early illustration of a subconscious memory propelling a character to action avoids the cultural-specific pitfalls of Freud’s theories on sexual development.

Many critics dwell on James Joyce’s use of “epiphany,” that is a “sudden spiritual manifestation whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself” (from Stephen Hero, an early version of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). In other words, the theme of epiphany in Joyce’s works functions much like what we now commonly refer to as a “Freudian slip,” a moment in which the motives or insights of the subconscious mind are revealed by word or gesture. Although this device is common in Dubliners, the idea of “paralysis,” not epiphany, drives the story of “Eveline”. At the end of “The Sisters,” the first story in the collection of Dubliners, Joyce provides an excellent description of “paralysis” through the words of the story’s protagonist:

“Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.”

Eveline, a psychologically battered woman, at the end of the story cannot remove her frozen clasp on the gangplank’s railing, but stares without “recognition” at Frank, her would-be lover and rescuer, “passive, like a helpless animal.” Eveline remains a prisoner of that “maleficent” being at the end of her story with absolutely no insight into her condition in the form of an epiphany. The source of Eveline’s paralysis is her dysfunctional Irish family and her Roman Catholic faith. Like family therapists, we can read “Eveline” and “diagnose” her paralysis with insights that she as a character lacked despite the manifest signs of paralysis throughout the story.

First we note Eveline’s set and setting at the beginning of the tale. She is looking out a window, watching the gathering darkness of the coming night with her head leaned against the cretonne, heavy cotton draperies, and inhaling thick dust from the curtains: “She was tired.” Here the epiphany is the reader’s alone. The darkness and dust and her immobile exhaustion indicate acute depression. The fact that her head “is leaned” against the curtains (grammatically a passive construction) denotes her own passive state. Yet, there is more in this description because each of its elements is emblematic. In fact, the dust of the cretonne is mentioned twice in the story, as well as the dust that fills the house, underlining its significance in the story. In Catholicism, dust signifies mortality, the frailty of the flesh. On Ash Wednesday, every Catholic receives the sign of the cross on the forehead from the priest’s ash-covered thumb. While signing the faithful, the priest intones to each individual, “Remember, man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return.” The purpose of this ceremony is to stir up repentance in the heart of the believer and engender the proper psychological disposition for the season of Lent. However, Eveline shows no awareness of her inward disposition at all. She merely breathes in the dust with her head pressed against the cretonne, utterly empty before the on-coming night.

Eveline sits passively and looks on the scenery below her, listening to the sounds of passers-by, and reminiscing on her childhood. Where a “man from Belfast” (the Protestant North of Ireland) has erected clean modern housing, she and fellows had once played together in a vacant lot. Like patches of light in a black void, Eveline’s few “happy” memories starkly contrast with the death that surrounds her. The lot is covered with foreign houses, the children have grown and moved away or died, and she is left a prisoner to an unrecoverable past. In Prisoners of Childhood, Swiss psychotherapist Alice Miller points out that adult survivors of child abuse are unable to escape their victimization because they are unable to recognize the pervasive pain of their childhood for its brief moments of joy. Without a clear recognition of the damage done them, adult children are bound to the patterns they unconsciously bear within themselves. Eveline is acutely aware that her outward circumstances have changed, but she cannot escape memories of better days, even though she is abandoned and stuck in her home.

Eveline then considers her “home” itself and muses on the mysteries that surround her, like the great accumulation of dust that incessantly fills it despite years of weekly dusting and the identity of the priest in the yellowed photograph posted on the wall next to the Promises of the Sacred Heart made to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque. The only thing she knows about the priest is her father’s casual comment to visitors that he “is in Melbourne now.” Significantly, the unknown priest has escaped Ireland to foreign shores, but the Promises of the Sacred Heart continue to rule the home. St. Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647—1690) was a French mystic who from the age of nine, when she first received Holy Communion, secretly practiced severe corporal mortifications upon herself until paralysis (note well) confined her to bed for four years. After making a vow to the Blessed Virgin Mary that she would devote herself to ascetic practice in the religious life, she was restored to perfect health. Joyce, a lapsed Catholic, of course knew all these biographical details about the Saint and intended great irony in making mention of her and the twelve Promises of the Sacred Heart. Like St. Margaret Mary, Eveline is paralyzed into accepting her seemingly inevitable destiny. Even more ironically, the second Promise the Sacred Heart made to all His devotees was “I will give peace in their homes.” As we can see from Eveline’s circumstances, this Promise is not kept.

Nevertheless, Eveline, passively staring out the window, questions the wisdom of her secret plans to escape from this house full of dust with a man she hardly knows. She muses on the effect her running away with a sailor would have at the dismal “Stores” where she is continually humiliated by “Miss Gavan.” The scandal would be counterpoised socially by the fact that her status would be changed to that of a married, and therefore respected, woman. Still, the greatest benefit of her leaving would be to escape from the increasing violence of her father. The stress from his alcoholic fits has given her “palpitations.” From her musings, we see that her father had always been violent, but had taken out his rage on his sons. Her favorite brother, Ernest, was now deceased, and Harry kept himself busy selling church decorations to clients out of town. She alone had to withstand the worst of his abuse, especially since her mother’s demise. Yet, for all the bleakness of her existence, Eveline, like many abused people, cannot really imagine any other way of living and thinks to herself that “she did not find it a wholly undesirable life.”

The exciting life the Frank offers her is contrary to her confined life at home. He takes her to the theater to see an opera, tells her about his adventures as a sailor, presenting her imagination with all the blandishments the “life of the flesh” has to offer. Opposed to the dust of the cretonne, he offers escape to “Buenos Ayres” (literally, “Good Breezes”). However, this life may actually be a temptation to disobey God and her parents. After all, the first Promise made by the Sacred Heart to St. Margaret Mary was that He would provide His devotes with “all the graces necessary for their state of life.” Wasn’t Eveline’s state in life dictated by the promise she had made to her demented mother before her death, that she would “keep the home together as long as she could”? Wasn’t it a violation of the “Fourth Commandment” to disobey one’s parents? Certainly, the Catechism had told her so. Thus Eveline’s mind balances in doubt until “the pitiful vision of her mother’s life laid its spell on the very quick of her being — that life of commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness,” and Eveline remembers her mother’s “voice saying constantly with foolish insistence: ‘Derevaun Seraun! Derevaun Seraun!’” These words, variously interpreted since they are in garbled Gaelic, may mean, “The end of pleasure is pain.” Eveline flees towards her rendezvous with Frank to escape the “pain” her mother’s “life of pleasure” as a devoted wife and mother has brought her.

To the contrary, the “life of pleasure” that Frank offers causes Eveline to balk in the end. Despite all that Frank had done for her, booking her passage to the Argentine and offering her life in marriage, “perhaps love, too,” Eveline falls into an anxiety attack, a distress that “awoke a nausea in her body” and causes her to move “her lips in silent fervent prayer.” The Sacred Heart had promised St. Margaret Mary that He would “console [His devotees] in all their afflictions” and would “be their secure refuge in life, and especially in death.” Thus, Eveline clutches on to the iron railing of the gangplank with both hands clutching fiercely and chooses death in the mortal dust of her life rather than to breathe the fresh air of Buenos Ayres. The ingrained patterns learned in her Irish Catholic family win out in the end and are held captive to the promise made to her dying mother and the Promises of the Sacred Heart.

James Joyce was a severe critic of the effect Roman Catholicism had had on Irish life. Along with Eveline’s father, he might say, “Damned Italians! coming over here!” A deep admirer of the work of Henrik Ibsen, Joyce joined Ibsen in ridiculing the pious pretensions of the “churched” middle classes of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries. For all the effusive praise of married life and the “life of virtue,” repressed sexuality burst forth in socially unacceptable ways, and women were captives to an inexorable social order. Like defenders of “family values” today, the established order of the time did all it could to suppress both Joyce’s and Ibsen’s work because the revelations in them were too close to home. One hundred years after “Eveline” was first written (1904), we may find Joyce’s insights into Eveline’s psychopathology somewhat commonplace. But we need to remember that without Joyce’s fierce honesty and literary craft, we might find ourselves today much like Eveline, prisoners to familial and religious tradition, frozen with paralysis.