Analysis Of James Joyce's Araby: Love Is A Facade

Cole Yang

Stafford Pd.1

AP English Lit- Research Paper

8 September 2015

Love is a Facade

In “Araby”, James Joyce details the transition of a young Irish boy into his adolescence. Looking for love and excitement, the narrator becomes obsessed with pleasing his best friend’s sister, eventually ending up at a special festival to buy her a present. Disappointed by the bad- natured shopkeepers and its closing down, he reaches a frustrating epiphany about the fine line between reality and his wistful dreams. Through the use of fanciful imagery and detached characterization, Joyce demonstrates how romance belongs to the realm of the young, not the old, and that it is doomed to fail in a word flawed by materialism and a lack of beauty.

Through

Joyce’s characterization, the narrator transforms over the course of the story from an idealistic child into a teenager who has just grasped the harsh realities of the adult world. After reaching a point of despair in his failed love affair, he finally sees himself in all his childish fantasy. As he “gazed up into the darkness, [he] saw [himself] as a creature driven and derided by vanity, and [his] eyes burned with anguish and anger.” (Joyce 5).

It is this last line of the short story that symbolizes the narrator coming to terms with his prior disillusionment. On the way to bazaar, he had envisioned himself as a knight in shining armor, embarking on a noble quest to secure a beautiful present for his beloved. However, his experiences after that destroy his dreams. As he takes his first baby steps towards adulthood, he finally takes the world at face value. Ironically, he pays a heavy price for this realization: his vibrant imagination. He can no longer tease magic from the mundane actions of others, or his boring neighborhood houses. All the magic that he had created as a little boy disappeared in an instant. In a sense, being one step closer to adulthood actually prevents him from growing in many other ways. In “Blind streets and seeing houses: Araby’s dim glass revisited” by Margot Norris, she mentions how, “North Richmond Street is introduced as blind, mute, with emptiness inside – a proleptic figure of the boy at the end of the story” (Norris 1). She ties the story back full-circle by comparing all the

striking similarities such as how all the houses on “North Richmond Street engage in both sober introspection and discreet censoriousness.” In the mind of the narrator when he was a child, his imaginative thoughts immersed him in a portrait of love that he became addicted to. However, in the realm of the older generation, the narrator struggles to see things past their physical form. At the conclusion of “Araby”, he is just like the houses on his street, his uncle and aunt, and the shopkeepers at the bazaar: drained of life and hypocritical. It only reinforces how romance truly does belong to the young and youthful, because they are the only ones with the ability to see past the barriers of materialism and create beauty out of ugliness.
In addition to his internal emotional growth, Joyce’s characterization also showcases the narrator’s evolving attitude towards women as he progresses through the stages of his unhealthy obsession with Mangan’s sister.

The narrator cannot stop himself from fantasizing about her perfections, such as when “the light from the lamp opposite our door caught the white curve of her neck, lit up her hair that rested there and, falling, lit up the hand upon the railing” (Joyce 2). Through his constant thoughts about Mangan’s sister and her physical beauty, the narrator reveals an intricate piece of his innate desires. It isn’t exactly Mangan’s sister that continually captivates his heart, but his idea of her and her greater embodiment of love. Ironically, despite the fact that she is the source of all the action that takes place in “Araby”, the narrator reveals very little about her. In “Exhibition and Inhibition: The Body Scene in Dubliners”, Sheila Conboy wrote, “While the boy narrates the process of his sexual awakening, the girl remains anonymous, merely the petticoated object of his desire, never given a voice to express a desire of her own” (Conboy 4). Because the narrator treats Mangan’s sister as only an object of desire -- as opposed to a person capable of desires -- reality is destined to disappoint him. Through Mangan’s sister, we come to understand that the narrator at the end of the story is not only distraught because his idea of love has been dashed, but ashamed that

he could have been so foolish and childish to believe them in the first place. His view of the world from then on may be less romantic, but it would also be much fairer to women. Taken that way, his quest is not entirely fruitless, because it helps the narrator learn more about himself. As Jerome Mandel stated in, "The Structure of 'Araby',” “the quest is successful because it leads to vision and epiphany: coming to some understanding of oneself."
Told from the point of view of the extremely shy and introverted narrator, “Araby” is only brought to life through his restless imagination. With a plethora of descriptors, Joyce creates scenes full of fanciful imagery that ironically symbolize the lack of real beauty in the short story. Religious imagery plays an especially influential role in the young boy’s actions and thoughts. Throughout the short story, most of it is focused upon Mangan’s sister. Despite the fact that she is never given a human name, the narrator identifies her figure “by the light from the half-opened door.'' (Joyce 1). The way she is lit from behind causes her to exhibit an unearthly glow, which he associates immediately with some heavenly body, possibly even an angel. He also views her as a “symbol of purity and feminine perfection” (Joyce 2), his imagination molding her into the ideal woman. Mangan's sister is quite literally the boy's image of the Virgin Mary, pure and chaste and worthy of devotion. The boy himself is a devout follower, comparable to a wise man, who must spend his time in the priest's room, devoting himself to thoughts of her. Also, like a wise man, he hopes to get a gift for her, a token of his devotion - although his experience at the bazaar so disillusions him that he leaves without making a purchase. As Sean Latham posited in “Hating Joyce Properly”, “the use of the priest's antechamber and the description the narrator gives of his object and his "love" are reinforcements of religious imagery. Symbolically, the Catholic priest, the only former tenant of the narrator's house, may be considered to represent the entire Catholic Church” (Latham 3). By extension, the ancient books left by the priest may represent the boy’s own feelings of ambiguity/confusion towards religion, especially Catholicism. The narrator has severely misinterpreted his religious teachings at school and has turned his lust into a spiritual devotion. In the same way, the bazaar, a church sponsored event, is not the religious affair it claims to be. Like the boy's lust, it simply panders to a base human and animalistic instinct, greed in both the sellers and buyers of trinkets. When the boy sees this, particularly in overhearing the conversation between the adult men and women, he understands how he has foolishly misunderstood himself as well as the world. Joyce, through the young narrator’s naïvely romantic dreams, forces the reader to witness the ironic lack of beauty in Dublin due to hypocrisy and materialistic disillusionment.