Eveline (Historical Context)

Historical Context

Turn-Of-The-Century Dublin

The world of Dubliners is based on the political and social climate of Dublin around the closing years of the nineteenth century, when Joyce was growing up. The author used Dublin as the artistic canvas for all his major writings, and each street name, political reference, or mention of different regions of Ireland holds a particular significance to what he is communicating.

Dublin was the capital of Ireland, although Belfast was to temporarily outgrow it in size by 1900, and the entire island was under strict English rule (a regime that would lead to nearly a century of violent conflict). At the heart of the economic and political hardships of the era, Dublin had a majority Catholic population, most of whom desired home rule for Ireland. These "Nationalists" were deeply disillusioned after the disgrace and death of the formerly championed Irish political leader Charles Stewart Parnell, who skillfully fought for home rule in the British Parliament until he was voted down as leader because of an affair with a married woman. Parnellite loyalists like Joyce's parents, living on the unfashionable north side of the river Liffey, were shamed and humbled after Parnell's death in 1891. Coupled with the longstanding economic decline of the city in general, Catholic families like the Joyces were often left in miserable social conditions.

At the top of this strict social order was Dublin's 17 percent Protestant population, closely tied to the English ruling class. Holding most positions of political power and business influence, this minority kept the class system rigid. One of the most overt signs of the religious discrimination that stemmed from their power was the worsening north side of the city, which was vastly overcrowded, poor, and almost entirely Catholic. The docks on the Liffey were another example, overflowing with the displaced and unemployed masses of the Catholic lower class and a symbol of the exploitative British colonial system; this is why it is not insignificant that the boat at the end of "Eveline" is leaving from the docks of the "North wall," and why it would be very resonant with Irish readers that she makes a meager seven shillings per week.

Modernism

The beginnings of the literary movement of modernism are generally considered to have coincided with World War I, an upheaval that caused a variety of assumptions and ways of thinking to drastically change. Many modernist writers, feeling they could no longer express themselves in old forms, responded with experimental techniques based most notably on post-impressionism (which dealt with a simplification of form in the visual arts) and naturalism (which dealt with a deterministic universe that often involved a brutal struggle for individual survival). Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot were among the chief writers of the modernist movement, Pound's criticism often becoming more influential than his other writings and Eliot's poetry examining the spiritual decadence of the modern world by reconciling the idea of "tradition" with new artistic forms in works like The Waste Land. Later, American novelists such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway moved to Paris and produced their own innovations in style, while in London, Virginia Woolf, who was associated with the "Bloomsbury Group," wrote novels dealing with feminism and new expressions of consciousness.

Joyce himself was probably the most influential author on the whole of the modernist movement. One of the first writers considered a modernist, he actually invented many of its new aesthetic methods, including the tendency to develop a multiplicity of viewpoints that lead to an "epiphany," or sudden moment of truth and understanding. Dubliners was written ten years before the main onset of modernism, and for a long time it was thought to be straightforward realism out of the naturalist movement. The Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen, whose naturalist and proto-modernist tendencies depicted a somewhat dismal provincial world and its complex relationship to truth and light, was particularly influential over Dubliners. As with many of Ibsen's plays, most critics now acknowledge the vast amount of symbolism in Dubliners and consider it one of the key modernist texts.

Compare & Contrast

• 1900: Dublin is second to Belfast and is firmly under English rule with Catholics in an oppressed majority.
  Today: Dublin is the capital of independent Ireland, non-inclusive of Belfast and the northern counties that remain part of the United Kingdom.
• 1900: Having endured a century of economic decline, Dublin's unemployment is massive and prospects are bleak. Although many Protestants enjoy relative prosperity, the Catholic majority in the city are poor and live in overcrowded districts, and the city has an extremely high infant mortality rate.
  Today: Ireland has the fastest growing economy in Western Europe and is held as a worldwide model for dramatically improved social conditions. Dublin is at the center of it all, with a high level of education and job prospects that have attracted a large immigrant population.
• 1900: Ireland has a very religious culture. Christian values are pervasive in legal and social norms, although the population is divided between Catholic and Protestant interpretations of correct belief and practice.
  Today: Christian influence has somewhat declined. Abortion is still illegal in Ireland, but the government finally legalized divorce in 1996. Church attendance and membership has dropped dramatically in the last decade, and Ireland's large foreign community has brought an influx of new religions.
• 1900: English publishers were liable to legal penalty if they allowed works considered offensive or immoral to be published. Joyce's Ulysses is banned in the United States until 1933 when the court declared it not obscene.
  Today: Although the Irish and British governments infrequently ban books outright, each government has provisions similar to the telecommunications bill passed by the United States Congress in 1996 that renders it illegal to make "indecent" material generally available.