3. Araby {Childhood} Flashcards
Genre
“Araby” is a short story that belongs in the genre of Modernism. Modernist literature emerged in the early 1900s as writers became disillusioned with the industrialized world around them—plagued, as it was, by inequality and war—and decided to publish books that captured this sense of alienation.
Modernist authors communicated this discontentment in both their characters (who tended to be struggling members of the working class) and in the style of their writing (which often included fragmented and disaffected narration).
The ways in which Joyce depicts the reality of growing up poor in Dublin also makes this a realist, or naturalist, piece of literature. Realism as a genre focuses on capturing the reality of life, including banal and (on the surface) meaningless moments. This literary movement began as a critique of romanticism in literature, which writers felt ignored the realities of life.
Naturalism as a movement, while overlapping with realism, focused even more intensely on oppressed people’s despair, with authors seeking to depict how poor and working-class people specifically are trapped by their harsh circumstances. While realism, at times, centered middle-class characters leading relatively comfortable lifestyles.
Mood
The mood of “Araby” is bleak, somber, and unsettling. Joyce’s decision to set the story in the dark days of winter communicates a lack of vibrancy and life.
Though one might expect the mood to shift as the young narrator develops a crush on his friend’s sister—coming of age as he discovers his sexuality—it mostly stays in its bleak register.
The narrator’s first experience of romantic longing is not pleasurable or freeing, but one full of “bad humor” and foreboding—sentiments that leave readers unsettled and pessimistic.
Tone
At the beginning of “Araby,” the narrator’s tone is one of an open-hearted child reckoning with the harsh conditions around him. Here, the narrator is with his friends and also in motion—implying both a connection to his community and a sense of possibility—yet he also notices the dark imagery around him. Though he seems to be playing, there is a palpable sense of foreboding and stagnancy over the scene.
In the middle of the story, the tone becomes obsessive and desperate as the narrator develops a crush on his friend Mangan’s sister and starts to become isolated from his group of neighbor friends. Here, again, the narrator notices the darkness around him (this time, his crush’s house), but the darkness is inside him now, too.
Finally, at the end of the story, the narrator’s desperate tone is gone and replaced with true hopelessness and despair as he reckons with no longer having friends or the escapism of a crush, after he fails to purchase a gift for Mangan’s sister at the Araby market.
The arc of these three tones adds to the story’s theme of loss of innocence while coming of age, as well as the loss of optimism in the face of the narrator’s harsh living conditions in working-class Dublin.
Style
In trying to capture the bleak reality of the young narrator’s working-class life in Dublin, Joyce opts for telling the story in the first-person point of view, using evocative—and often depressing—imagery. These stylistic choices underline the narrator’s disillusionment with the world, a common characteristic of Modernist literature.
Modernism is also known for experimental storytelling. Rather than featuring romantic stories of empowered narrators facing conflict head-on and coming out victorious, Modernist writers often chose to tell fragmented, sometimes stream-of-consciousness tales of loss and defeat.
This style is present in “Araby” as the narrator abruptly jumps between scenes, creating a sense of instability.
Setting
“Araby” takes place in a working-class neighborhood in Dublin, Ireland in the early 1900s, when Ireland was still under Britain’s colonial rule. Through the process of industrialization, Dublin’s population was growing but its economy was still struggling, leading to widespread poverty, alcoholism, and interpersonal problems.
As the Dublin’s population grew, it became the center for the Irish nationalist movement, as some Dubliners came to believe that Ireland’s economy would be stronger if they could gain independence from the British Empire.
The narrator of the story—sometimes considered to be modeled after Joyce himself—is from a poor Catholic community experiencing the effects of the struggling economy; poverty, alcoholism.
The harshness of the story’s setting is what inspires the narrator to seek escape in the exotic Araby market, an alluring counter to his everyday life.
Themes: Coming of Age
The narrator, who is a grown man who uses mature language to describe his youthful experience, reflects back on his experience with the Araby market, providing small insights from an adult perspective. The fact that the story is told from an adult perspective indicates that the story is about growing up.
The narrator’s coming of age also becomes apparent through changes in his interactions with authority figures, in this case his aunt, uncle, and teacher.
The protagonist becomes slightly more rebellious as the story progresses, which shows that he is learning to think independently of the adults around him, a key factor in his coming of age.
He also notices that his uncle is drunk when he comes home that night, suggesting that he is no longer entirely innocent, and can understand aspects of the adult world.
In a typical coming of age story, the protagonist experiences pivotal events that lead him or her toward adulthood. These events are usually trying (such as experiencing war, loss, love, rape, or economic hardship) but lead to a satisfying realization or epiphany.
In Araby, Joyce shows that the protagonist is growing up through his discovery of his sexuality, his sudden distance from his friends, and his increasingly rebellious attitude, however the protagonist’s new knowledge and maturity bring him discontent instead of fulfillment.
Themes: Religion and Catholicism
He attends a Roman Catholic school and all of the people around him, just like he himself, are steeped in the Catholic religion that held sway in Ireland at the time when the story was set. Joyce does not clearly indicate how strongly the narrator believes in his faith, but Catholicism plays a large role in his upbringing and he often explains things through Catholic ideas and imagery.
Most obviously, the narrator over and over again thinks about and describes his crush, Mangan’s sister, in religious terms.
the narrator doesn’t even understand his prayers to Mangan’s sister seems to imply that he is not idolizing Mangan’s sister on purpose. Instead, it seems as if his Catholic upbringing has defined the form of how he understands anything for which he feels strong emotion.
At the same time, the sort of idolizing of Mangan’s sister that the narrator engages in would have been seen as deeply irreligious by serious Catholics. The idolization of anything or anyone above God was considered a kind of blasphemy. When looked at in this light, it might be argued that the story exposes or at least questions the narrator’s relationship with religion. The protagonist’s infatuation with and distraction by Mangan’s sister might suggest that he is not strongly devoted to his faith. After all, while thinking of her he begins to see his studies as childish, suggesting that he is not fully invested in his religious education. However the protagonist’s regret at the end of the story could suggest a return to his religious roots. The narrator’s realization that he is a “creature driven … by vanity” is stated in religious terms, and indicates that out of individualist desire (love or infatuation) he has strayed from his true duty. The choice of the word “creature” could have religious connotations as well, in the sense of the creations of God being described as his “creatures.”
tldr: blasphemous language (worshipping someone lesser than god) hints narrator is not actually religious. but the end suggests hes returning to religion.
At the same time, it is also possible to interpret the text as criticizing Catholicism and religion, as implying that the narrator’s religious background may have set him up to be unsatisfied, because nothing can meet divine standards. Or, conversely, that, just as the narrator’s “worship” of Mangan’s sister is shown to be impossible because nothing can match his imaginative ideals, the story is implying that the same applies to religion in general – that worshipping anything is unreasonable and bound to end in disappointment.
More broadly, the story seems to indicate that whatever the particular nature of the narrator’s epiphany, he has come to recognize that what he thought was simple – including his Catholic religion – is in fact complicated and difficult to live with, promising not just salvation but also guilt and anguish.
tldr: worshipping anything wont bring u satisfaction because ur putting that idol to an impossible pedestal.
Themes: Escapism and the Exotic
In the text both Mangan’s sister and the Araby market offer an escape from the ordinary, from the dull, brown picture of Dublin that the narrator otherwise describes as the world he lives in.
In the narrator’s sheltered world, the word “Araby” alone indicates something foreign to him, as it refers to an Eastern “Arabian” world that is so distant from the narrow, cloistered world of Ireland that he is used to (the story is set well before globalization). The narrator constantly refers to Araby as “eastern” and clearly relishes in the exotic connotation of the “magical name.”
Homi Bhabha- Orientalism is the site of dreams, images, fantasies, myths.
He realizes that the Araby market is not truly exotic, not truly an escape, but rather little more than a thin veneer of exoticism lamely pasted over his own regular world. And in this realization about the Araby market, he also seems to see that his own sense of his “exotic” love for Mangan’s sister was similarly just a mask, a fake “escape” rather than a real journey to a new and distant place.
The fact that the Araby market exists at all, and that young men and women flirt within it to pass the time, suggests that even his desire for an escape from the everyday is itself common and everyday.
Themes: Love and Sexuality
One of the central issues of “Araby” is the narrator’s developing crush on Mangan’s sister and the discovery of his sexuality.
The protagonist lives on a “blind” street, a dead end that is secluded and not frequented by outsiders. Additionally, he attends an all-boys school, which suggests that he does not know many girls. That he immediately falls for his friend’s somewhat older sister and thinks of his infatuation as a kind of worldliness only solidifies the sense of his lack of experience with girls.
Joyce manages to capture the way that the narrator is both seeing Mangan’s sister in a physical way, and yet also how this way of seeing her is so new to him as to be almost innocent. He is not thinking of sex; he may not even know what sex is. But he is aware of and appreciative of her physicality in a way that is essentially idealistic.
Riquelme stated “joyce can include the psychological within a physical description”
Vincent J Cheng describes his infatuation as the adolescent male obsession with the male other.
Sheila C Conboy- The female body is objectified and mystified under the male gaze.
However, although clearly the protagonist is infatuated with Mangan’s sister, Joyce gives little evidence that it is “love.” The narrator thinks of Mangan’s sister only in a physical way, includes no details about her personality, and basically shares no dialogue with her.
In the narrator’s epiphany about his love, one can also argue that Joyce is making a broader point: that what most people see as “love” in fact usually springs from vanity or the innate desire for the approval of others. Grandiose acts of love in life and literature, such as the narrator’s attempted gift-buying at the Araby bazaar, are often portrayed as selfless but, like the narrator’s actions, may in fact be motivated by selfish motives.
tldr: gift giving is selfish because u do it for validation
Garry Leonard- ‘The Joycean epiphany does not so much confirm a truth as disrupt what one had grown comfortable with accepting as true”
Symbol: Blindness
The story uses the word “blind” to draw attention to the narrator’s naiveté and isolation. He begins by describing the dead-end street where the narrator lives as “blind,” with the narrator’s house being a lone abandoned house at the blind end, set off from the other houses. This isolated house foreshadows the narrator’s later isolation from his friends.
The narrator also recounts watching for Mangan’s sister from the front parlor, with the blind pulled down so she cannot see him. The narrator is figuratively blinded by his infatuation with Mangan’s sister. He loses sight of everything else in his life.
The word “blind” also emphasizes the anonymous nature of the characters in the text, as only two of them are given names (Mangan and Mrs. Mercer). The lack of identity and physical description of most of the characters leaves them anonymous and forces the reader to focus on the other details given in the text, most of them related to the setting.
It also allows the reader to alter the narrator’s identity – perhaps in him they see themselves, or James Joyce, as many critics have called this is a semi-autobiographical work.
Symbol: Light and Darkness
The story uses a great deal of light and darkness in its descriptions.
Darkness also comes into play in understanding the narrator’s epiphany. Normally light represents enlightenment or knowledge, but at the end of the story the narrator’s newfound knowledge instead coincides with darkness.
In this case, his new knowledge is of a dark and depressing nature, as his epiphany has revealed to him the darkness in himself (his vanity) and in the larger world, which does not offer the sort of romantic escapes he had believed.
Declan Kiberd stated that “sight has been replace with inner vision or insight” since the light was out when he had his realisation (reversal of traditional light symbolism.
Symbol: Brown
The color brown is used repeatedly to symbolize the dullness of everyday Dublin. The houses are brown, and even Mangan’s sister is described as a “brown-clad figure,” perhaps indicating that it was common to dress in brown clothes. Brown is used to emphasize how unexciting and oppressive Dublin is for the narrator in every way, both visually as well as in the everyday occurrences.
Allusion: Holy Grail
Comparing Mangan’s sister to a chalice, the narrator alludes to the Holy Grail, a reference that makes sense given his position in an Irish Catholic community. In Catholicism, the Holy Grail is the cup that Jesus drank out of at the Last Supper and its symbolic power led to the Catholic Church’s use of similar-shaped chalices in their church services.
This allusion implies that the narrator’s religious devotion has shifted, through the force of his infatuation, toward Mangan’s sister and away from God. Further, in viewing the Dubliners around him on the streets as “foes,” he separates himself even more from his community, implying that he seeks to escape from the everyday drudgery of his working-class Irish Catholic life.
strange considering the chalice like object is used often when the church and the parish unite for certain religious events but he uses it to seperate himself from it. further reinforcing the motif of isolation.
Symbol: Irish Nationalism
The crowd on the street includes a group singing songs about O’Donovan Rossa, an allusion to the Irish nationalist movement.
The members of the Irish nationalist movement used songs (or “come-all-yous”) as a way to spread their message in the streets, pubs, and other public places.
This particular song is about Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, a real historical figure who was a leader of the Irish movement for independence from Britain’s colonial rule in the mid-1800s. By the time that James Joyce wrote this story (1904–1906), O’Donovan Rossa had become a symbol for the movement as a whole.
It is important to note that, while lauded for his efforts, O’Donovan Rossa was not successful at overthrowing the British government from Ireland. In fact, he lived out his final years in the United States after being exiled from Ireland, becoming a martyr in the process.
The narrator does not sing along with the “ballad about the troubles in our native land” and refers to the singing as “nasal,” suggesting his lack of alignment with (or belief in) these efforts for change. The narrator’s lack of interest in these protest songs—combined with his obsession with the exotic Araby marketplace—suggests he is more interested in finding ways to escape Ireland than in fighting for its freedom.
tldr: doesnt care for nationalism wants to escape ireland.
Context
The character of Mangan is thought to be a reference to the nineteenth century Irish Romantic poet, James Clarence Mangan, who often wrote about unrequited love. Though no specific work by Mangan is mentioned in the text, Joyce presented a paper at the Literary and Historical Society at University College and his choice to include “Mangan” as one of the only names in the text is likely an intentional choice meant to draw a parallel between Mangan’s work and Joyce’s own.
In the story Joyce also mentions three texts left behind by the former tenant of the narrator’s house, the priest: The Abbott by Walter Scott is a novel that idealizes Mary, Queen of Scotts, and this is most likely included to parallel the narrator’s idealization of Mangan’s sister, The Devout Communicant could refer to any of several works but most likely serves the purpose of highlighting the strong influence of religion on the narrator. And, finally, The Memoirs of Vidocq is the memoir of a former criminal turned detective, notable for its sensationalist style.
Some critics speculate that the reason Joyce never gives the narrator in “Araby” a name is because it is actually a semi-autobiographical work. Although Joyce did not live with his aunt and uncle, his father had a drinking problem that drove their family into debt and Joyce himself actually attended the Christian Brothers’ School on North Richmond Street in 1883.
