"Araby" and the Writings of James Joyce
Critic: Harry Stone
Source: "`Araby' and the Writings of James Joyce," in The Antioch Review,十大空难 Vol. XXV, no. 3, Fall, 1965, pp. 375-445.
Criticism about: "Araby"
Author Covered: James Joyce
Table of Contents: Essay | Source Citation
[Stone is an educator, editor, and Charles Dickens scholar. In the following excerpted essay, he discuss some of the autobiographical elements of "Araby," which include Joyce's childhood in Dublin, Ireland, and how the exoticism of the real-life Araby festival, wit
h its Far Eastern overtones, impacted the young Joyce. Stone also discuss the poet James Mangan's influence on the story. ]
For "Araby" prerves a central episode in Joyce's life, an episode he will endlessly recapitulate. The boy in "Araby" like the youthful Joyce himlf, must begin to free himlf from the nets and trammels of society. That beginning involves painful farewells and disturbing dislocations. The boy must dream "no more of enchanted days." He must forego the shimmering mirage of childhood, begin to e things as they really are. But to e 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 cour, is t forth in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. "Araby" is the identical struggle at an earlier stage; "Araby" is a portrait of the artist as a young boy.
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The autobiographical nexus of "Araby" is not confined to the struggle raging in the boy's mind, though that conflict--an epitome of Joyce's first painful effort to e--is central and c
ontrols all el. Many of the details of the story are also rooted in Joyce's life. The narrator of "Araby"--the 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 hou 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, "`Araby' and the Writings of James Joyce," in The Antioch Review,干煸蚕蛹 Vol. XXV, no. 3, Fall, 1965, pp. 375-445. EXPLORING Short Stories. Online Edition. Gale, 2003. Student Resource Center. Thomson Gale. 04 June 2007 </rvlet/SRC>
Historical Context: "Araby"
Table of Contents: Source Citation
While Dublin, Ireland, has en much change since the turn of the twentieth century, when Joyce wrote many of the conditions prent then remain today. In 1904, all of Ireland was under British control, which the Irish rented 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 houhold, as the boy in does when he carries packages for his aunt at the market, and to entertain themlves 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 cau great excitement.
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Ireland's major religion, Roman Catholicism, dominated Irish culture, as it continues to do today although to a lesr extent. Many families nt 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 en as a source of the frequent conflict in Irish culture between nsuality and asceticism, a conflict that figures prominently in Joyce's autobiographical novel 孜然羊肉粒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 nsuous religion, emphasizing inten personal spiritual experience and surrounding itlf with such 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 ns and particularly toward xuality was vere and restrictive. The ideal woman was the Virgin Mary, who miraculously combined virginal purity with maternity. Motherhood was exalted, but any enjoyment of xuality, even in marriage, was considered a sin, as were the practice of birth control and abortion. The inability to reconcile the spiritual and nsual aspects of h
uman nature can be en in the boy's feelings toward Mangan's sister in He imagines his feelings for her as a "chalice"--a sacred religious 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 "soft rope of her hair," "the white curve of her neck," the border of her petticoat. Even the image of the chalice is ambivalent, since its cup-like shape and function suggests a xual connotation. The boy never resolves this conflict between spirituality and nsuality. Instead, when confronted with the tawdriness of a shopgirl's flirtation at the bazaar, he abruptly dismiss all his feelings as mere "vanity."
The Structure of "Araby"
Critic: Jerome Mandel
Source: "The Structure of `Araby'," in 摩羯女和巨蟹男Modern Language Studies, Vol. XV, no. 4, Fall, 1985, pp. 48-54.
Criticism about: "Araby"
Author Covered: James Joyce
Table of Contents: Essay | Source Citation
[In the following excerpt, Mandel compares the imagery of Joyce's "Araby" to that of medieval romance, particular with regard to the protagonist's love for Mangan's sister. ]草体书法
[In "Araby" the two paragraphs] beginning "Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance" and ending with his "murmuring: O love! O love!自度曲 many times"--have 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 wi
n worship: " to carry some of the parcels"), he retains the attitude and respon of the courtly lover. As a lover totally possd by love, he moves out of time, and all worldly, public, and temporal considerations pass from him: "I thought little of the future." He is swept by strange emotions: "My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why)" and rendered inarticulate. When all his "ns em to desire to veil themlves" and he trembles in adoration, he exhibits the proper respon of one committed to love. The conflicting demands of world, duty, and love developed in the two paragraphs exhibit in action what, in the medieval romance, is the love debate--the soliloquy that usually begins when the lover first es the knight or lady and ends when the lover places himlf (or herlf) totally in the rvice
