Eveline (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

Craig Hansen Werner writes in his book "Dubliners": A Pluralistic World that "the earliest critics of Dubliners were the editors and printers who seem to have shared a feeling that the book was in some sense obscene or dangerous." The collection did not, however, receive the antagonistic reception its publisher Grant Richards had feared. Although it tended to be eclipsed by what were considered Joyce's more radical works, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, Dubliners had a warm reception in the literary climate of the time. Werner notes that its most influential critic, Ezra Pound, praised the collection's "clear hard prose" and, like other critics, concentrated on its effective realism. In his book Axel's Castle, Edmund Wilson calles the work "a straight work of Naturalistic fiction," which was the general view of Dubliners for twenty years.

One of the first critics to begin to explore the symbolic themes of Dubliners was Brewster Ghiselin. In his 1956 essay "The Unity of Joyce's Dubliners," published in Accent, Ghiselin argues that the collection of stories should be understood as a unified whole and that its symbolism reveals "a sequence of events in a moral drama, an action of the human spirit struggling for survival under peculiar conditions of deprivation." Since Ghiselin's reading, critics have tended to deny that Dubliners is exclusively a work of realism. As with Joyce's major novels, critics have thoroughly examined it under almost every conceivable critical lens and raised it to the level of a modern classic.

Because of the trend to review the collection as a whole, "Eveline" has largely been considered within essays or books alongside theories about all the stories in Dubliners. While early critics focused on the psychological forces in Eveline's decision, Ghiselin, for example, discusses the story as an instance of the symbolism recurring through the collection, such as the sea as a symbol for freedom. Similarly, Garry Leonard's 1993 book Reading "Dubliners" Again analyzes the story as an example of how the text as a whole relates to the theories of the French psychologist Jacques Lacan.