Mangan's Use Of Masculinity In Araby

“Araby” is the story of a boy’s awakening. The narrator of the story is caught between childhood and being a teenager. He has innocent crushes that involve the objectification of women. These crushes show his growing awareness of the gender order, in which men are at the top and women are there to serve men. For example, in his neighborhood, “…if Mangan's sister came out on the doorstep to call her brother in to his tea, we watched her from our shadow peer up and down the street” (Joyce, “Araby”). Mangan’s sister seems to be defined only through two things: her relationships to boys (specifically, to Mangan as well as to the narrator). Indeed, she is more of a symbol than a real woman: “I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words,
The narrator of this story senses that he is a bit sensitive and different from his peers, and yet despite these differences – or perhaps because of them – they have a strong and solid clique of friends who get along and form a group anyway: “A spirit of unruliness diffused itself among us and, under its influence, differences of culture and constitution were waived. We banded ourselves together, some boldly, some in jest and some almost in fear: and of the number of these latter, the reluctant Indians who were afraid to seem studious or lacking in robustness, I was one” (Joyce, “An Encounter”). This passage shows how in the world of boys, differences are subsumed into a larger whole and “types” of people tend to take over. Individualism is important, but it is subordinate to the needs of the group. The encounter the boys have is with a mysterious older man they meet while they are playing hooky. The man brags at great length about his experience with women and girls, and then abruptly changes his view to discuss how boys should be treated. “He began to speak on the subject of chastising boys. His mind, as if magnetised again by his speech, seemed to circle slowly round and round its new centre. He said that when boys were that kind they ought to be whipped and well whipped. When a boy was rough and unruly there was nothing would do him any good but a good sound whipping. A slap on the hand or a box on the
Dealing with life at different stages, instead of childhood, the story focuses on the regrets and understanding of older people. The story begins with the dance put on by the spinster sisters who are music teachers. The idea of “fussy” (Joyce, “The Dead”) spinster sisters opening a music school reveals one of the few ways that economic opportunity is afforded to unmarried women in this society. Yet the central tension in the story is between Gabriel and Gretta, and Gabriel’s irrational jealousy of the long-dead Michael Furey. “A dull anger began to gather again at the back of his mind and the dull fires of his lust began to glow angrily in his veins” (Joyce, “The Dead”). Gabriel is a petty and self-righteous middle-aged man who begins to justify his wife’s innocent story about Michael Furey by reducing her to a woman who no longer has value: “His curious eyes rested long upon her face and on her hair……he thought of what she must have been then, in that time of her first girlish beauty, a strange, friendly pity for her entered his soul. He did not like to say even to himself that her face was no longer beautiful, but he knew that it was no longer the face for which Michael Furey had braved death” (Joyce, “The Dead”). This cruel focus on her declining desirability reinforces the gender dynamics between them, while also establishing the dead Michael Furey as a potential foil, one who was less shallow than Gabriel. In