Evaline
I'm having trouble with my essay, it explores setting in relation to the story "Eveline", and I feel my essay may be confusing, just because there is so much in that story I would be talking about. What do you think?
James Joyce is the author of “Eveline”, a story about a young woman who both desires and fears leaving her family and the life she’s ever known, to leave with a sailor boy to become his wife. Setting as described by Webster is “the time, place, and circumstances in which something occurs or develop”. Eveline takes place in Dublin, Ireland in the early 1900’s, when Catholicism, English control, and poverty creates a stifling environment unable to change, just as the dead room in which Eveline sits at the window stifles her. The room reflects upon her, how she is just as dead and unable to change. The setting is the accumulation of her family and the place where she lives and how this leaves its mark on her. It takes incredible strength to leave the known, no matter whether it is good or not.
Eveline has spent her entire life in this house, “[…] all its familiar objects which she has dusted once a week for so many years, wondering where on earth
all the dust came from”(114), the stagnancy of this room, of her life, is palpable. The same routines, the same chores, the same objects to dust every week shows just how much of a rut her life is truly in. “[…] she continued to sit by the window, leaning her head against the window curtain, inhaling the odour of dusty cretonne” (116). Eveline is paralyzed in her own home, sitting by the window, despite the fact that “her time was running out” (116). She dreams about a better life where she is happy, and maybe she will even find love, but still she cannot seem to force herself to move from where she sits in the window, watching evening fall. She does not know how she will handle giving up all she has ever known, all the people who have ever known her, for a new life.
Eveline desires a better life
James Joyce is the author of “Eveline”, a story about a young woman who both desires and fears leaving her family and the life she’s ever known, to leave with a sailor boy to become his wife. Setting as described by Webster is “the time, place, and circumstances in which something occurs or develop”. Eveline takes place in Dublin, Ireland in the early 1900’s, when Catholicism, English control, and poverty creates a stifling environment unable to change, just as the dead room in which Eveline sits at the window stifles her. The room reflects upon her, how she is just as dead and unable to change. The setting is the accumulation of her family and the place where she lives and how this leaves its mark on her. It takes incredible strength to leave the known, no matter whether it is good or not.
Eveline has spent her entire life in this house, “[…] all its familiar objects which she has dusted once a week for so many years, wondering where on earth
all the dust came from”(114), the stagnancy of this room, of her life, is palpable. The same routines, the same chores, the same objects to dust every week shows just how much of a rut her life is truly in. “[…] she continued to sit by the window, leaning her head against the window curtain, inhaling the odour of dusty cretonne” (116). Eveline is paralyzed in her own home, sitting by the window, despite the fact that “her time was running out” (116). She dreams about a better life where she is happy, and maybe she will even find love, but still she cannot seem to force herself to move from where she sits in the window, watching evening fall. She does not know how she will handle giving up all she has ever known, all the people who have ever known her, for a new life.
Eveline desires a better life