Eveline

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Eveline

Eviline is unlike any other love story. Yes it is about young love and the hardships the couple were faced with, but the out come is very different. Eveline, who has already been courted by Frank, is planning on marrying him and "to live with him in Buenos Ares"(5). Or has she really made up her mind? When she meets him at the station and they are getting ready to board the ship, all of the sudden Eveline changes her mind and decides that she cannot go with Frank. "He would drown her" in "all the seas of the world"(7) if she was to leave everything that she has known. But Eveline's rejection of not just a rejection of love, but also a rejection of a new life and a way to escape the hard life she has already come to accept. Water is used as a practical means of escape; it also symbolized rejuvenation and emotional vitality. It is used to show everything that Eveline looses through her fear and lack of courage. By not plunging into the "seas of the world that tumbled about her heart"(7), Eveline abandons the thoughts of escape, life and love for the past, duty, and death.

Moving eastward in "Eveline" is in relation with new life. But for Eveline, sailing eastward with Frank is as much of an escape as a promise of something better. From the beginning of the story, she is submissive and tired and tends to remember old neighbors, like "the Waters" who have moved east "to England"(4). She looks forward to "going away like the others"(4). She openly admits that she will not be missed at her job; and at nineteen, without the protection of her older brothers, she is beginning to feel "herself in danger of her father's violence"(4). Her father confiscates what little money she earns and expects the world in ret...

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...e had the right to happiness"(6). Yet she is uncertain that she will ever fall in love with him.

The world of desire, longing, fulfillment, and heartbreak are tossed about in "the seas that tumbled about her heart"(7) and this unfamiliar world of vitality and power is as terrifying to Eveline as the reality of traveling halfway around the world. She might drown, true, but she might even learn how to swim. But, deciding against "testing the waters" Eveline subjects herself to a life without any fulfillment at all. On the way from childhood to adulthood, Eveline feels that the altering experience will "drown" her old self and she is unable to imagine a new self emerging out of the waves.

Joyce, James. "Eveline" Literature and the Writing Process. Ed. Elizebeth McMahan, Susan X Day, and Robert Funk. 7th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice, 2004. 3-6

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