A Study on the Short Story 'Eveline' by James Joyce and 'Hands' by Sherwood Anderson - Pro, Apuntes de Literatura

¡Descarga A Study on the Short Story 'Eveline' by James Joyce and 'Hands' by Sherwood Anderson - Pro y más Apuntes en PDF de Literatura solo en Docsity! Unit II – From Realism to Modernism. James Joyce. James Joyce was born in Ireland, in a big family as he was the oldest of ten siblings. His father was an alcoholic and despite the situation of his family, he could go to university in Dublin. He was extremely intelligent and he spoke seventeen language. He had a huge gift for mastering different languages as it is shown in one of the chapters of Ulysses, which is written through the history of English language. He got married but he moved to continental Europe, living in several countries such as France or Italy. He published Dubliners in 1914, but he had been writing these stories for a long time. He had a lot of trouble getting these stories published. He started writing in 1905 and, in 1916, he published “The portrait of the artist as a young man.” The next thing he published was Ulysses in 1922, although it had been circulating before. He wrote the chapters before and in its publication, people were already familiar with the novel. The novel was banned because of obscenity. This is why it became a huge success once it got published in countries such as United States. He developed an illness in his eyes and wrote in large papers with red crayons so he could see it. In 1939, he published his last book full of linguistic experiments. At the time, he was living in Switzerland where he died in 1941. Dubliners. Dubliners was quite difficult for him to publish as he wanted to reflect Irish society and the life in Dublin. Despite being quite close to reality, the stories are written to transpire clear modernist characteristics. It is not one single narrative but one unified piece of literature. This is one of the interesting things about Dubliners. There is no sense of closure which allows the argument to start something else that would lead to another meaning about writing Modernism from now on. One of the characteristics of this novel is what is known as narratorial invisibility, this is, the invisibility of the narrator. In these stories, the narrator is nowhere to be found, which makes impossible to find coherent meaning. The narrator disappear inside the characters’ mind and creates a sense of obscurity and indeterminacy. The impossibility of accessing one solid and reliable meaning is what allows readers and scholars to consider this novel as a piece of literature that, even written with no intent, introduces a new style of fiction. Eveline. This text narrates Eveline’s childhood and how now everything has changed and some people or things are not there anymore. The story is set in the present but the text goes to the past and to the memories of the character and later to the present. Eveline’s thoughts is what brings the story to the past, this is, thanks to Eveline’s consciousness as she remembers her childhood. It is because of this that her experience and vision of the story is unreliable and subjective. Readers do not know anything about how life was in that neighbourhood but they do know how Eveline felt about living in that neighbourhood. This device is called “subjective time.” Readers do not know either how much time passes in the story, it could be a couple of hours or a month, but it looks so much longer because readers are inside the mind of the character; in the mind of the character, time does not pass as quickly as in real life. Ficción Modernista At the beginning of the story, in the first paragraph, the narrator is still there, focusing on Eveline’s perception of reality (“She was tired,” “she heard…”). Nonetheless, as the narrator mentions the red houses, it triggers something in Eveline that makes the story change from the perspective of the narrator to Eveline’s memories (“One time there used to be a field there in which they used to play every evening with other people’s children”). It is in this moment when the narrator disappears and enters in the mind of the character, something that is called free-indirect speech. Readers are left only with the consciousness of the character. In this fragment of her consciousness, she is thinking about her childhood. “Still they seemed to have been rather happy then.” She is aware of her unreliability, that her memory does not provide clear and true-to-reality information about her feelings and state of happiness. In her neighbourhood, rural Dublin, a man from industrial Belfast comes and buys the field where they used to play in order to build houses. Through this, readers can see how industrialisation and, somehow, colonisation of the cities are happening. For Eveline, her home is not only her neighbourhood, her house, and her family, but also Ireland. • “She was about to explore another life with Frank. Frank was very kind, manly, open-hearted. She was to go away with him by the night-boat to be his wife and to live with him in Buenos Ayres where he had a home waiting for her.” (pg. 4) In this fragment, Eveline is about to make a decision: either she leaves with her lover, a sailor called Frank, or she stays in her hometown with her family. The theatre is quite important in this fragment as it has relation with Maggie by Stephen Crane. Maggie projects her desires and aspirations into the play she is watching with Pete. Eveline, however, feels confused as Frank sings about “a lass that loves a sailor.” Readers are seeing how Eveline presents them a love story that is quite of parallel with her own love story. The way she is projecting her feelings and making sense her new experience with life is through songs; she imagines a future with Frank by taking information out of songs and the theatre, the same way it happened with Maggie. Apart from singing, Frank has different stories and tales from different countries. This contributes to the fact that everything is a fantasy, a lie out of imaginary tales and stories, and this is what Frank is offering Eveline as a future. Eveline is using this as a framework to know Frank and to make her decision. This is the plot of a romantic story, not of a realistic or naturalistic story. It is also important to mention how Eveline decided to get to know Frank and then fleet with him to Buenos Ayres (“Then they had to come to know each other. He used to meet her outside the Stores every evening and see her home. He took her to see The Bohemian Girl and she felt elated as she sat in an unaccustomed part of the theatre with him.”). As opposed to that painful and realistic life Eveline has, her imagination of life is what creates an unrealistic future with her lover. However, her father disapproves their relationship, although he does not know Frank or his intentions. His only excuse is the fact that he knows sailors and their lives, using his own assumptions and prejudices to judge Frank. We are never offered an answer to know whether Frank is honest or not, so we are left with uncertainty. Readers do not know as well if Eveline is making a good choice by staying instead of fleeting with Frank. • “Four men in their shirt-sleeves stood grouped together on the garden path. They carried staves covered with rolls of canvas, and they had big tool-bags slung on their backs. They looked impressive. Laura wished now that she had not got the bread-and-butter, but there was nowhere to put it, and she couldn’t possibly throw it away. She blushed and tried to look severe and even a little bit short-sighted as she came up to them.” (pg. 1–2) Laura is interacting directly with the workmen in the garden as she is deciding where the marquee should be placed. She is “copying her mother,” as her mother is her only example of a high-class mother. Her mother is relying on her the task of preparing the garden party because it is a rite of passage from being a teenager to being a high-class woman, building herself as a woman following her mother’s model. However, she stammers like a little girl, which means that she is still in her teenagerhood. She starts feeling better and comfortable with the workmen as she sees them smiling. Her perception of the work of the workmen depends exclusively on how they treat her and their personalities; she does not appreciate their work as labour force. She projects onto them her own fears and comes to the conclusion that they are all quite nice because they have only smiled at them. • “When Laura saw that gesture she forgot all about the karakas in her wonder at him caring for things like that—caring for the smell of lavender. How many men that she knew would have done such a thing? Oh, how extraordinarily nice workmen were, she thought. […] Just to prove how happy she was, just to show the tall fellow how at home she felt, and how she despised stupid conventions, Laura took a big bite of her bread-and-butter as she stared at the little drawing. She felt just like a work-girl.” (pg. 2) For her, being a work-girl is simply eating bread and butter; thus, being a workman for her is doing something she likes, like smelling and touching the flowers. With this action, she feels a connection with the workman because they both like flowers and smelling them. She is very conscious of her class because she wants these men to entertain her in her parties and her dinners, despite her wanting these men to be her friends. Hence, the relationship of labour exploitation is not broken by Laura’s desires. She does not feel class-distinctions at all, although she does know she and the workmen belong to a different social class than her. By changing her behaviour, she thinks she can become a work-girl. She never abandons her privilege position, she never abandons her aesthetic vision of reality. • “Oh, impossible. Fancy cream puffs so soon after breakfast. The very idea made one shudder. All the same, two minutes later Jose and Laura were licking their fingers with that absorbed inward look that only comes from whipped cream.” (pg. 6) This sentence shows the readers a glimpse of innocence in Laura despite her wishes to mature and to be a rich, high class woman as her mother. 1. Consider the moment when Laura looks at herself in the mirror. Why does she change her mind about cancelling the party? • “‘People like that don’t expect sacrifices from us. And it’s not very sympathetic to spoil everybody’s enjoyment as you’re doing now.’ […] ‘I don’t understand,’ said Laura, and she walked quickly out of the room into her own bedroom. There, quite by chance, the first thing she saw was this charming girl in the mirror, in her black hat trimmed with gold daisies, and a long black velvet ribbon. Never had she imagined she could look like that. Is mother right? she thought. And now she hoped her mother was right. Am I being extravagant? Perhaps it was extravagant. Just for a moment she had another glimpse of that poor woman and those little children, and the body being carried into the house. But it all seemed blurred, unreal, like a picture in the newspaper. I’ll remember it again after the party’s over, she decided. And somehow that seemed quite the best plan....” (pg. 8) Laura’s mother tries to, and gets to, change Laura’s mind by giving her the hat because it is her mother’s hat. By wearing the hat, she is not a girl anymore but a woman now as the circle of imitating her mother is now closed and fulfilled. When she sees herself in the mirror, her identity is shifted because the image she sees reflected is an image she does not recognise. She sees a high-class woman, not the girl she used to be. This is the second main theme of the story: self-aestheticasion of female identity. This is the process through which high-class girls are trained into adulthood. By saying “People like that don’t expect sacrifices from us. And it’s not very sympathetic to spoil everybody’s enjoyment as you’re doing now,” Laura’s mother is telling Laura that working class people do not expect them, high-class people, to stop enjoying just because someone has dead. 2. What do you think Laura wants to say about “life” at the ending of the story? Laura goes to the house of the dead man to give his family the leftovers and to pay respect to them. There, Laura sees the corpse and thinks it is beautiful, that he is not dead but in an endless dream from which he should not be woken up ever. As she goes out of the house, she meets her brother and talk about what life is about, even though they do not say anything at all. There is an obvious element in common between The Garden Party and Eveline, the blank space. Readers might try to hypothesis what life is to Laura considering her background and realising it is quite different from what life is to Eveline as she belongs to a lower class. Laura, after this idealisation and romantisation of the gardeners and the workers, comes face to face with the harsh reality of what life to working classes is: putting yourself at risk every time you work, dying from a labour accident, and having your wife and children living in poor conditions due to your death. • “There lay a young man, fast asleep—sleeping so soundly, so deeply, that he was far, far away from them both. Oh, so remote, so peaceful. He was dreaming. Never wake him up again. His head was sunk in the pillow, his eyes were closed; they were blind under the closed eyelids. He was given up to his dream. What did garden-parties and baskets and lace frocks matter to him? He was far from all those things. He was wonderful, beautiful. While they were laughing and while the band was playing, this marvel had come to the lane. Happy... happy... All is well, said that sleeping face. This is just as it should be. I am content.”(pg. 12) In Laura’s consciousness, the way the man has died is how things should be. She has not grown up being conscious about the working classes as this death is marvellous, beautiful. She gets aesthetic pleasure from the dead man, seeing him as something beautiful to look at. The social system that has people in power is sustained by working class people. Laura is witnessing the violence this statement is implying, but she does not anything to stop it. Laurie, her brother, understands her perspective of life because he shares it, having grown up under the same circumstances. This is presented not as an epiphany but an apophany, as she understands what life is but she is trapped in her high-class mind. Sherwood Anderson. It is a moment of economic growth as the country has just exited its Civil War. The United States is becoming the greatest economy and industry in the world with advancements in industry like the gasoline engine, the automobile companies, and larger ships like the Titanic. The big cities started to grow and the rural areas started to be less important than they were before. With the turn of the century, buildings were built higher than before to accommodate all the people from rural towns that came to capital cities such as New York. Sherwood Anderson was an American novelist and short story writer, known for subjective and self- revealing works. Self-educated, he rose to become a successful copywriter and business owner in Cleveland and Elyria, Ohio. In 1912, Anderson had a nervous breakdown that led him to abandon his business and family to become a writer. At the time, he moved to Chicago and was eventually married three additional times. His most enduring work is the short-story sequence Winesburg, Ohio, which launched his career. Throughout the 1920s, Anderson published several short story collections, novels, memoirs, books of essays, and a book of poetry. Though his books sold reasonably well, Dark Laughter (1925), a novel inspired by Anderson’s time in New Orleans during the 1920s, was his only bestseller. Regarding his literary work, Anderson is considered one of the fathers of the “new short story”. There already was, of course, a long tradition of short stories in America, which he transformed by adapting them to modernist characteristics and conventions. Moreover, he also wrote a few novels. Hands. This text belongs to a collection called “Winesburg, Ohio” published in 1919. This collection is one of the examples of the ‘story circle,’ which are stories that are meant to read individually but, if read together, they all revolve around the same character or context. In this case, all the stories of Winesburg, Ohio are written around The Grotesque. Hands narrates the story of Wing Biddlebaum, an ex-teacher from Pennsylvania who had to move to Winesburg after being accused of a transgression involving his hands that he did not commit, having to change his name from Adolph Myers to Wing Biddlebaum. 1. What is the meaning/symbolism of “hands” in the text? What does it have to do with what the text explores? How can they relate to the notion of the ‘grotesque’? • “Wing Biddlebaum talked much with his hands. The slender expressive fingers, forever active, forever striving to conceal themselves in his pockets or behind his back, came forth and became the piston rods of his machinery of expression. The story of Wing Biddlebaum is a story of hands. Their restless activity, like unto the beating of the wings of an imprisoned bird, had given him his name. Some obscure poet of the town had thought of it. The hands alarmed their owner. He wanted to keep them hidden away and looked with amazement at the quiet inexpressive hands of other men who worked beside him in the fields, or passed, driving sleepy teams on country roads. […] They became his distinguishing feature, the source of his fame. Also they made more grotesque an already grotesque and elusive individuality.” (pg. 10–11) The protagonist’s story is described as “a story of hands.” Hence, the text indicates to readers that Biddlebaum’s hands are significant, a crucial aspect and the source of his identity. They are used as mustard weeds, he could see the public highway along which went a wagon filled with berry pickers returning from the fields.” The clover, as it is commonly known, is a symbol of good luck. It could mean that Biddlebaum, after his incident in the town in Pennsylvania, wanted to start a new life in Winesburg, Ohio, a life that is supposed to bring him new beginnings and a certain solitude, along with a kind of “closure” to overcome with the trauma that experience in Pennsylvania created in him; Biddlebaum seeded clover to find that happiness and good luck in his life. However, the clover had not grown, and instead, there are yellow mustard weeds, which means that the attempt to search that good luck has failed, as well as Biddlebaum’s life. It is true that he uses his hands, not only to gesticulate with them as he talks, but also to pick the berries in his new job, but he still is afraid of touching everybody, even George Willard, in case someone blames him for the same crime he was blamed of in Pennsylvania. • “Adolph Myers was meant by nature to be a teacher of youth. He was one of those rare, little- understood men who rule by a power so gentle that it passes as a lovable weakness. In their feeling for the boys under their charge such men are not unlike the finer sort of women in their love of men.” (pg. 12) Adolph Myers is educating his students like a mother teaches his sons, nurturing them and teaching them to see the world as he actually sees it. There was a new system of seeing the world, either physical or both physical and spiritual. Things are like they see them, but also as they do not see them, this is, having several perspectives and considering the uncertainty of life. It is impossible to say that something that we are looking at is true or a fact because we are missing the things that are beyond the physical and material. This notion of how there are different ways of interpreting a word or a situation reflects this modernist ambiguity. • “A half-witted boy of the school became enamored of the young master. In his bed at night he imagined unspeakable things and in the morning went forth to tell his dreams as facts. Strange, hideous accusations fell from his loose-hung lips. Through the Pennsylvania town went a shiver. Hidden, shadowy doubts that had been in men’s minds concerning Adolph Myers were galvanized into beliefs.” (pg. 13) By spreading his dreams as facts, it makes them part of the community even though those dreams, those actions did not happen at all. Myers, as a teacher, wanted to show the students how the reality cannot be trusted because we do not know all the perspectives it has. However, his student misunderstands his dreams for real events, living in the side of the spiritual and due to the influence of his father, transforms his dreams into something physical, belonging to the literalism, and accuses falsely the teacher of such unreal events. • “In the darkness he could not see the hands and they became quiet. Although he still hungered for the presence of the boy, who was the medium through which he expressed his love of man, the hunger became again a part of his loneliness and his waiting.” (pg. 14) This fragment shows how he wants to be with George, not in a romantic way but in the way of missing his old life and wanting to be that person again. This story is about the dehumanisation of a person. By staying in a state of in-betweenness, we are losing ourselves as humans. The main character is portrayed as a mere machine made to work for the community instead of being a free human. Biddlebaum is in darkness, he does not see his hands, he is focused on not moving his hands and not touching anything with his hands apart from eating or picking the berries. In this scene, readers do not know whether he is moving his hands or not because he is in complete darkness. He can be himself in the darkness, he is not restricted anymore. “A few stray white bread crumbs lay on the cleanly washed floor by the table.” The bread, in Catholicism, means salvation in the moment of Communion. However, in this story, Biddlebaum is not asking for salvation to God as he des not know what he did wrong in the past; he is in communion with himself.