'because she was a girl'
Gender identity and the Postcolonial in James Joyce's 'Eveline'

Yet the term still has analogous uses : for instance, the women in Joyce’s Dubliners are repressed by their men (whom Empire maintains in hegemonic position) - and the men are in turn repressed by a colonial and class system which condemns them to menial jobs.

Eveline’s struggles for a mature sense of Self come to nothing because she finds herself at the bottom of this pile. Marriage would be a significant step-up for her - but that would entail a relationship with a man which had something of reciprocity or symmetry about it. However, Frank (her `fellow’ or marriage-prospect, whom, unexpectedly, she has begun to like) swims into her ken and out again only as a distant star : the emotional life of her family has been too ground down by her tyrannical father, for her to have any experience of what it might be like to connect with a man as with an equal. So Eveline has to remain regressed-by-default in the only `meaningful relationship’ of her life, that with her mother : for her, there can never come about that psychological progression (sketched by Lacan) away from the imaginary experience of infantile all-satisfying maternal love, and towards an adult love received from some real Other.

The violent father had driven the mother to her death. But Eveline remains in denial about his abusive tyranny : he is able to force her to beg back from him the weekly household shopping-money which actually comes from the shopgirl wages which she had handed over to him; and she takes it as a favour that she is spared the physical abuse which he visited on her brothers...Her denial may be rooted in the fact that to females like her, choice was not open; one brother, however, had exercised the option of escape, and was now working away from home. But then, of course, every male had an identity in society : her brother was a church-furnisher, Frank was a sailor. She, however, must wait for social identity through marriage (and then only as an appendage).

When Frank cuts loose, Eveline is left turned in on herself - perhaps to face, like her mother, a gradually diminishing world.

Eugene O'Brien is Head of English at MaryImmaculate College, University of Limerick