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Childhood Memories and Nostalgia
“Eveline” is filled with references to childhood memories. For instance, the story opens with Eveline recalling how she, her siblings, and the neighborhood kids used to play in a field by their houses. Eveline reflects on her childhood again a few paragraphs later when she remembers a picnic that her family took to the Hill of Howth when her mother was still alive in which her father put on her mother’s bonnet to make the kids laugh. She also remembers how she used to ask her father about the framed photo of the priest that hangs in the hall of her family’s home. Even the recollection of her mother’s death could be considered a childhood memory because it appears to have occurred a few years before the events of the story take place and Eveline is only nineteen.
Over the course of the story, Eveline outlines the many reasons why she wants to go with Frank to Buenos Aires including but not limited to her dream of living a fuller life than her mother and her desire to escape her abusive father. However, standing on the brink of such a permanent life change, Eveline starts to panic. The repeated references to Eveline’s childhood memories are a manifestation of that panic because they demonstrate Eveline’s reluctance to leave behind the only home that she has ever known. It is important to note that Eveline primarily references pleasant childhood memories despite her unhappiness. Perhaps the threat of leaving Dublin has caused her to view her home through rose-colored glasses, conveniently glossing over all of the reasons why she wanted to leave in the first place.
Dust
The majority of “Eveline” takes place in Eveline’s childhood home as she grapples with whether to leave Dublin or not. The story is bookended with dust. It both begins and ends with Eveline breathing in the scent of the dusty curtains as she stands at the window and attempts to make up her mind. There are also additional references to dust towards the middle of the story when an exhausted Eveline mentions that she has dusted her family’s house once a week for the past several years. She marvels at how the house can accumulate so much dust so quickly.
The references to dust bring to mind the housework that women in the early 20th century were expected to do. Furthermore, given Dubliners’ emphasis on Catholicism, it also is possible that Joyce is referencing Genesis 3:19 which reads, “for dust you are and to dust you will return,” a quote about the cyclical nature of life. Eveline feels physically trapped in her family’s home but she also feels figuratively trapped by the life that has been allotted to her. Eveline is terrified of becoming her mother and wants to break the generational cycle and live for herself instead of simply existing to take care of her family. Unfortunately, Eveline is unable to break from said cycle and resigns herself to a life that eerily mimics the life of her dead mother; both women spent their lives at home taking care of the same violent man. Joyce’s repeated emphasis on dust in “Eveline” is meant to show that Eveline is doomed to be trapped in the same monotonous, dead cycle that she once desperately wished to avoid.
