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Joyce's Dublin
For most scholars, James Joyce’s very name is synonymous with Irish literature as all of his fiction is set in the city where he grew up. He was born into a middle-class, Catholic family in Rathgar, a suburb of Dublin, on February 2, 1882. The family’s prosperity dwindled soon after Joyce’s birth, forcing them to move from their comfortable home to the unfashionable and impoverished area of North Dublin. Nonetheless, Joyce attended a prestigious Jesuit school and went on to study philosophy and languages at University College, Dublin. He moved to Paris after graduation in 1902 to pursue medical school, but instead he turned his attention to writing. In 1903 he returned to Dublin, where he met his future wife, Nora Barnacle, the following year. Joyce and his wife would go on to live in a number of countries across Europe until his death in 1941. However, no matter where they traveled, Joyce continued to set all of his literature in Ireland, especially Dublin.
Ireland permeates all of Joyce’s writing, especially Ireland during the tumultuous early twentieth century. The political scene at that time was uncertain but hopeful, as Ireland sought independence from Great Britain. The nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell, who became active in the 1870s, had reinvigorated Irish politics with his proposed Home Rule Bill, which aimed to give Ireland a greater voice in British government. Parnell, dubbed the “Uncrowned King of Ireland,” was hugely popular in Ireland, both for his anti-English views and his support of land ownership for farmers. In 1889, however, his political career collapsed when his adulterous affair with the married Kitty O’Shea was made public.
Although Parnell and his supporters were ultimately unsuccessful, Ireland underwent a dramatic cultural revival after Parnell’s death in the late 19th century. Irish citizens struggled over the years to define what it meant to be Irish, and a movement began to reinvigorate Irish language and culture. The movement celebrated Irish literature and encouraged people to learn the Irish language, which many people were forgoing in favor of the more modern English language. Ultimately, the cultural revival of the late nineteenth century gave the Irish a greater sense of pride in their identity.
Joyce’s “Araby” is a beloved contribution to that cultural revival. “Araby” is part of a collection of short stories called Dubliners which Joyce published in 1914. Dubliners contains fifteen portraits of life in the Irish capital. Joyce focuses on children and adults who skirt the middle class, such as housemaids, office clerks, music teachers, students, shop girls, swindlers, and out-of-luck businessmen. Joyce envisioned his collection as a looking glass with which the Irish could observe and study themselves. In most of the stories, Joyce uses a detached but highly perceptive narrative voice that displays these lives to the reader in precise detail. Rather than present intricate dramas with complex plots, these stories sketch daily situations in which not much seems to happen—a boy visits a bazaar, a woman buys sweets for holiday festivities, a man reunites with an old friend over a few drinks. Though these events may not appear profound, the characters’ intensely personal and often tragic revelations certainly are. The stories in Dubliners peer into the homes, hearts, and minds of people whose lives connect and intermingle through the shared space and spirit of Dublin.
