Question

What is life like in Ireland for “Eveline” and the boy in “Araby”? Think about their class/social position. Think about how the people around them treat them. Think about their frustrations and their dreams and possible futures.

Answer 1

Both stories are set in the same small, claustrophobic Dublin of Joyce’s Dubliners. That setting — economically depressed, socially conservative, and saturated with religious and familial obligation — shapes everything the characters imagine and become. Below is a focused comparison of Eveline (from “Eveline”) and the boy-narrator (from “Araby”) in terms of class/social position, how others treat them, their frustrations and dreams, and the likely futures Joyce implies.

Class and social position
- Eveline: She belongs to the lower–middle/working class. Her family are householders but economically strained; she has worked and earned money (she “had been obliged to work hard” to keep the home), and she keeps the house and cares for an ailing father. She is socially and economically dependent on family ties and domestic labor rather than independent work or wealth.
- The boy in “Araby”: Also from a modest, working-class or lower–middle family. He goes to Catholic school, has limited pocket money, lives in a small, dark household on a drab street. His life is regimented by family routines and limited means; he is not yet an adult but is already constrained by social and economic reality.

How people around them treat them
- Eveline: She is surrounded by duty and expectation. Her dead mother’s “command” to keep the home, her father’s controlling and sometimes violent behavior, and the watchful, gossiping community all press upon her. She is treated as the family’s binder — emotional laborer and carer — not as an individual with autonomous desires.
- The boy: Adults treat him patronizingly or indifferently. His uncle’s late arrival and thoughtlessness about money, the banal conversations of grown-ups, and the merchants at the bazaar (who are uninterested or closing) all remind him of how inconsequential his feelings and efforts appear to the adult world. The object of his affection — Mangan’s sister — is more an ideal than a social actor in his life, and she is inaccessible within the rigid patterns of adult-supervised social life.

Frustrations and dreams
- Eveline’s frustrations and dreams: She is torn between the duty of home and the desire to escape. Her dream (embodied by Frank’s offer to take her to Buenos Aires) is of a new life: love, travel, freedom from her father and from drudgery. But she is also haunted by promises (especially her promise to her mother) and by fear — fear of the unknown, fear of deserting her duty, fear compounded by the social stigma of abandoning family obligations. The result is chronic indecision and paralysis.
- The boy’s frustrations and dreams: He is driven by romantic and aesthetic longing. He dreams the exotic dream of Araby and of winning a girl’s love through a gift — a quest that gives his otherwise restricted life meaning. Frustrations are practical (lack of money, the late start, the closing bazaar) and existential: his idealization clashes with banal reality. The story ends with the boy’s anger and shame at his vanity and self-deception — an epiphany and humiliation rather than triumphant freedom.

Possible futures Joyce implies
- Eveline: Joyce strongly suggests paralysis rather than escape. Her final choice — inability to step onto the ship — points to lifelong entrapment: a future of continued servitude, stifled desire, and emotional numbness. The social forces around her (family obligation, religion, poverty, social expectations of women) make mobility difficult; her surrender to duty aligns her with many of Dublin’s static, trapped adults.
- The boy: He experiences an epiphany that likely pushes him toward disillusionment. His romantic illusions are punctured; he sees himself as “driven and derided” by vanity. While he is not yet an adult, the implication is bleak: his youthful idealism will likely harden into the resigned cynicism or paralysis typical of the adults in Joyce’s Dublin. He may continue living under the same social constraints, now tempered by chastening self-knowledge.

Summary comparison
- Both characters are socially constrained, coming from modest backgrounds in repressive, routine-bound Dublin. Their inner lives are rich with yearning — Eveline for escape and the boy for romantic adventure — but exterior forces (family duty, economic limitation, religious and social norms) curtail them.
- Their responses differ: the boy’s story ends in a painful, clarifying epiphany that strips away illusion; Eveline’s ends in immobilized fear and submission. Joyce uses both to show two faces of the same problem: the city’s capacity to smother desire, either by breaking it into bitter knowledge or by freezing it into lifelong paralysis.