Sexual Expression: Defining Joyce’s Characters Essays

Joyce Carol Oates plays upon the stereotypic female gender role through her adolescent character, Connie, in “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” The story was written at a significant time in America’s history. It was a season when social and moral conventions were challenged. This period experienced the rise of women struggling for sexual freedom and gender equality in a patriarchal society. Oates portrays the protagonist, Connie, as naive, unaware and inexperienced; she has yet to find her identity and fully understand her place as a women in the world. She believes she has learned to play the game of the sexes and that she has the upper hand. This belief, though, is quickly subverted when she is confronted by Arnold Friend, a man who works to reinforce patriarchal standards by punishing Connie for acting outside stereotypic female role boundaries, she then realizes as a women, she has very little power.

What can be said of the menacing literary masterpiece that is A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is that the gender issues Joyce so surreptitiously weaves into Stephan Dedalus’s character create sizable obstacles for the reader to overcome. Joyce expertly composes a feminine backdrop in which he can mold Stephan to inexplicably become innately homosexual. As Laurie Teal points out “… Joyce plays with gender inversion as a uniquely powerful tool of characterization.”(63) Stephan’s constant conflict with himself and what he wants generate a need for validation that he tries to simulate through day dreams and fantasies but is ultimately unable to resolve. Through exploring the tones of characterization and the character development of

James Joyce wrote Dubliners to portray Dublin at the turn of the early 20th century. In Dubliners, faith and reason are represented using dark images and symbols. James Joyce uses these symbols to show the negative side of Dublin. In “The Sisters,” “The Boarding House,” and “The Dead” dark is expressed in many ways. James Joyce uses the light and dark form of symbolism in his imagination to make his stories come to life.

Another important aspect of the novel is that of sexuality and of same-sex desire. Froehlich states that, in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries,

Firstly, Joyce incorporates multiple figures of speech and elements of design to express a purpose through the events that occur in the story. As mentioned before, this story is written in first person perspective of a boy who lives with his aunt and uncle. The perspective best allows readers to understand what this boy encounters every day and his opinion on certain topics. Furthermore, it also allows readers to perceive the feelings this boy has for a girl. For example, the author mentions the boy playing and says, “The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed. Our shouts echoed in the silent street. The career of our play brought us through the dark muddy lanes behind the houses…” (Joyce, 1). This quote highlights the lively and childish fun the boy has with his friends.

There is an underlying pattern of sexism in Joyce Carol Oats’ Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?. When Arnold Friend first is introduced in the short story, he pulled up into Connie’s driveway in his bright gold car with a lot of writing covering various parts of the car. He had his name painted largely on his car and where the “left rear fender had been smashed, [it said] DONE BY A CRAZY WOMAN DRIVER”(Oats 5). It is some people’s misconception that women are lesser driver than men simply because of their gender, and here it is said the woman is not only a poor driver, but a crazy person. The writing on the car implies an inferiority to men because Arnold wrote that a woman did it on his car as an explanation for the dent. If a man had

In Hemingway’s short story, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, we begin with the married couple, Franics and Margaret Macomber, on a safari in Africa with a man named Robert Wilson. Francis is shown to be a coward when he shoots his first lion twice, but is too afraid to finish it off even though it may be suffering. Margaret is very displeased with her husband’s cowardice and shows her contempt by berating him profusely. Francis is awoken from his sleep late at night after a bad dream to find his wife, Margaret, is gone. When she returns to the tent she claims she was out getting “a breath of air” but Francis knew she had just slept with Robert Wilson. Francis

Throughout ages, men have dominated, and women have surrendered. In the 1800s, women were not as liberal as today. They were not allowed to express their sexuality. It was a patriarchal society, and women were considered a man's property. Women were idealized as being pure and virtuous. British doctor William Acton went so far to state that, “The majority of women (happily for society) are not very much troubled with sexual feelings of any kind. Love of home, of children, and of domestic duties are the only passions they feel." In William Faulkner's, " A Rose for Emily" the character Emily is faced with same old tradition. Miss Emily has been stripped of her sexuality and reality due to her society and her father.

Authors often use literary techniques to convey a central theme in their writing. In his collection of short stories, Dubliners, James Joyce uses a multitude of literary techniques to communicate the ideas of escape and freedom. Joyce’s use of narrative perspective, selection of detail, and conventional diction in his short story “Eveline” allow him to express Eveline’s oppressive environment as well as her ultimate submissive nature to it.

In Dubliners, women are victims indeed. They are victims of home, of the recognized virtues by society, of classes of life, of religious doctrines, and of women themselves. In this essay, we are going to analyze the portrayal of women in Dubliners in terms of the aforementioned aspects, namely home, the recognized virtues by society, classes of life, religious doctrines and women themselves.

James Joyce’s book of short stories entitled Dubliners examines feminism and the role of women in Irish society. The author is ahead of his time by bringing women to the forefront of his stories and using them to show major roles and flaws in Irish society, specifically in “Eveline” and “The Boarding House”. James Joyce portrays women as victims who are forced to assume a leading and somewhat patriarchal role in their families. He uses them to show the paralysis of his native land Ireland, and the disruption in social order that is caused by the constant cycle of abuse that he finds commonplace in Ireland. Joyce is trying to end the Victorian and archaic view of

inability to escape their lives. In another of Joyce’s writings, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young

Gender equality is achieved when both men and women receive the same rights and opportunities throughout all areas of society. Often, it is men who are given dominance while the women are deprived of owning such superiority; this is called a patriarchal society. In James Joyce’s Eveline, it is quite clear that women were not allowed the equality of men in the social, political, and economic fields, primarily in the postcolonial times at which this book was written in. As Eveline’s life was greatly influenced by people of the male gender, her decision at the end of the short story suggests that she was significantly influenced by her religion, economic status, as well as her identity as a woman during this time period in Dublin, Ireland.

James Joyce and H.G. Welles had different styles of writing and relied on different forms of narration. H.G. Wells was direct and focused on the external environment or situation. He did not give much insight on the thoughts or internal struggle of his characters, while James Joyce did. Joyce supplied his characters with a greater level of internal comprehension than Wells did and was able to provide more human like characters. This difference is especially seen in H.G Well’s Tono-Bungay and James Joyce’s A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. They do share their views on the lifestyle of religious people, but there is a difference in their style of writing their respective novels. They contrast in how they convey emotional moments, they portray violence in different lights, and their view toward youth is contradictory.

In James Joyce’s “Eveline”, Eveline remains in Dublin to care for her father, to take care of the house and the kids, and she realized she was already comfortable in her current home. Eveline has lived in Dublin her whole life in Dublin and has seen her siblings either leave home or pass away through time. Yet she remains in the house that she grew up in, experienced the changes in environment, changes in time, and the change in the people around her. She has seen her mother pass away, her father grow older and crueler. She has witnessed the field “in which they used to play every evening with other people’s children” be destroyed by a man from Belfast who “bought the field and built houses in it – not like their little brown houses but