Though short and easy to read, this story is devastating, possibly the most powerful in the book. (The other candidate for that honor would be “The Dead.”) It is yet another Dubliners tale about paralysis, as Eveline stands on the pier at story’s end, frozen in place by fear and guilt. She wants to leave Ireland, but she quite literally cannot move, speak, or even express emotion on her face. A crippled childhood friend called Little Keogh, whom Eveline recalls early in the story, perhaps foreshadows her own eventual paralysis.
Death pervades “Eveline” too: the deaths of her mother and her brother Ernest, and of a girlhood friend named Tizzie Dunn. And of course, Eveline fears her own death: “he would drown her,” she thinks of Frank, defying logic. Perhaps she unconsciously associates her fiancé with the other man in her life, her brutal father.
As usual, Joyce holds the Catholic Church and England accountable, albeit subtly. Though Eveline’s father’s cry of “Damned Italians! coming over here!” is of course irrational, it reminds the reader of the seat of the church’s power in Rome, and the way that power affects even distant Ireland. Note that Eveline’s dockside paralysis is preceded by a prayer “to God to direct her, to show her what was her duty”—and that a bell (like a church bell) clangs “upon her heart” as Frank grasps her hand in vain at story’s end. Also, be aware that like contemporary airline passengers flying first to a hub airport before boarding planes for their final destinations, Irish travelers for South America at the turn of the twentieth century had to travel first by ferry to Liverpool, England. Neighbors named the Waters have “gone back to England,” but Eveline is incapable of straying even that far from home, much less across the Atlantic.
Thus, this is the third Dubliners story in a row about a failed quest. The Holy Grail of the boy in “An Encounter” was the Pigeon House, which he never reached; the main character in “Araby” sought the bazaar, closing down by the time he got there. Eveline seeks Argentina, a place where she hopes to avoid the very real threat of her father’s violence as well as her dead mother’s “life of commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness.” “People would treat her with respect,” Eveline thinks of married life in Argentina.
She believes she has a right to happiness, too—that is, until she stands on the shore and confronts the reality of the journey on which she is about to embark. Then fear and guilt (about abandoning her father and her younger siblings) overwhelm her, and she stays rather than goes. Though it is as old and dusty as her father’s house (“She looked round the room, reviewing all its familiar objects which she had dusted once a week for so many years, wondering where on earth all the dust came from”), Dublin is at least familiar, and Eveline is a fearful young woman, obsessed with thoughts of wild Patagonians and remembered ghost stories. “He rushed beyond the barrier and called to her to follow,” the tale concludes. “He was shouted at to go on but he still called to her. She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.” Though this is not certain, it seems unlikely that Eveline will ever leave home now. Frank seems to have been her last, best chance.
