Semicolonial Masculinity and Synchronic Narration in “Araby”

초록

The ending of “Araby” has come to epitomize the notion of the Joycean epiphany, a sudden revelation about a deeper social reality sparked by a seemingly trivial everyday experience. This article challenges such pervasive assumptions about the story’s epiphanic narrative structure in order to explore a far more troubling representation of Irish masculinity. Rather than marking a diachronic progression in perspectives from a young boy to a mature narrator, the story’s plot structure depicts a synchronic viewpoint which imagines the two halves of the boy-narrator as inseparable: the adult narrator never progresses beyond boyhood and the young boy exhibits an unnerving precocity. Embodying a subordinated form of masculinity, the boy-narrator finds himself futilely struggling to assert his manliness in the face of an English masculine ideology associated with the late-nineteenth-century social purity movement. This results in the frustration of Irish masculine desires and the depiction of a hysterical Irish masculine body incapable of asserting autonomy and self-control. The story’s ending does not imagine an epiphanic transition from a naïve boy to a mature narrator so much as it depicts the hysterical frustrations of a boy-narrator unable to establish authority over his own body and narrative.

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