Notes and Questions on James Joyce's Short Story "Araby"
Notes: General
While R&J's teaser-synopsis of the story (helpfully supplied in the table of contents of R&J) -- "an introspective boy develops insights after keeping his promise to attend a street bazaar and trying to buy a gift" -- is accurate, the insights arise from within the framework of something that should be familiar and piquant to college students: the adolescent's first glimmers of romantic love and sex. As you read the short story, keep in mind how this subject pervades it, and ask yourself how your first adolescent glimmers of romantic love and sex (whenever these were) compare or contrast (or both) with the narrator's.
Joyce objected to the use of quotation marks to indicate conversation, asserting that these marks were both unrealistic and unsightly; he preferred, as customary in some other European literature, the use of the dash to indicate the beginning of a person's oral communication. (The practice is to be found in the English translation of Voltaire's Candide, reflecting the use of the dash in the original French, in the textbook used for Humanities 2001-2002, The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces.)
Setting may convey symbolism or significance or thematic relevance or aspects of characterization through any component of time or place. Significance may be conveyed by whether something happens during the day or night; or at certain times of day (morning, noon, afternoon) or night (dusk, evening, night); or a certain day of the week (e.g., on Sunday rather than Thursday); or a certain month (April rather than July); or a certain season, or portion of the year (summer, fall, winter, spring); or a certain year (e.g., 1929, or 1917); or a certain decade (e.g., the 1920's vs. the 1930's); a certain century (e.g., the twelfth century vs. the eighteenth century); or a certain era (e.g., the Middle Ages vs. the Renaissance). For example, the contrast of decades and centuries (nineteenth vs. twentieth) is meaningful in Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" (Ch. 3 of R&J); the first sentence of Eudora Welty's "A Worn Path" (Ch. 3 of R&J) stresses the month, December, while later references emphasize the notion of Christmas -- both of these symbolically relevant to the story (concepts of death vs. birth, as well as gift-giving); the first sentence of Susan Glaspell's "A Jury of Her Peers" (Ch. 4 of R&J) emphasizes the season (late fall or early winter), which is interrelated to several other such references that help convey the story's themes and ideas (concepts of death vs. birth).
Setting is symbolic or revealing in real life, as well. For example, the furnishings of someone's house or apartment or special room in a house (e.g., a young person's own bedroom in the parents' house) often may suggest things about the person or persons who chose the furnishings.
Notes: Specific
Joyce's short story is highly allusive (look up "allusion" in R&J, as well as your collegiate dictionary), not only with implicit references to literature, religion, and myth, but also with oblique references to Anglo-Irish culture of about 1880 to 1910. For example, the narrator's reference to the "Christian Brothers' School" that "set the boys free" (par. 1) and the reference of Mangan's sister to "a retreat that week in her convent" (par. 9) implicitly assume the reader's familiarity with a system of education comprised of religious parochial schools segregated by gender (no mixture of male and female students). The narrator's reference to taking a train (par. 23) would be much more familiar to a European, particularly in the British Isles, given Britain's excellent train system; in this system, ticket prices and accommodations in the train cars ("carriages") varied from affluent ("first class") to spare ("third class"), comparable to the difference between first class and coach ticket prices and accommodations for today's commercial jetliners. Further, the narrator's noticing "the streets . . . glaring with gas" (par. 24) assumes the reader's understanding that most illumination inside and outside the urban home in this period would be from natural gas (flames burning from continually supplied natural gas in lamps in the home, or in street lamps, ignited by a lamp-lighter, on the streets) rather than electricity.
Good notes or annotation can be gleaned from Don Gifford's Joyce Annotated: Notes for Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 2nd ed. (U of California P, 1982) as well as the editions of Joyce's Dubliners by Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz (Viking, 1969), Terence Brown (Penguin, 1992-1993), and Jeri Johnson (Oxford World's Classics, 2000).
"Araby [title of the short story]": A bazaar, advertised
as a "grand Oriental Fete" and given in aid of the Jervis Street Hospital
(under the care of the Roman Catholic Sisters of Mercy), Monday through
Saturday, 14-19 May 1894. "Araby" was a poetic name for Arabia and was
suggestive of the heady and sensuous romanticism of popular tales and poems
about the Middle East. The bazaar had a theme song, composed by W.G. Wills
(words) and Frederick Clay (music):
| I'll sing thee songs of Araby,
And tales of fair Cashmere, Wild tales to cheat thee of a sigh, Or charm thee to a tear. And dreams of delight shall on thee break, And rainbow visions rise, And all my soul shall strive to wake Sweet wonder in thine eyes . . . |
Through those twin lakes, when wonder wages,
My raptured song shall sink, And as the diver dives for pearls, Bring tears, bright tears to their brink, And rainbow visions rise, And all my soul shall strive to wake, Sweet wonder in thine eyes . . . To cheat thee of a sigh, Or charm thee to a tear |
The first four stanzas of "Araby's Daughter," a ballad
by the important Irish man of letters Thomas Moore (1779-1852), suggest
the tone of the nineteenth-century fascination with Araby:
| Farewell -- farewell to thee, Araby's
daughter!
(Thus warbled a peri* beneath the dark sea) No pearl ever lay, under Oman's* green water More pure in its shell than thy spirit in thee. Oh! Fair as the sea-flower close to thee growing,
|
But long, upon Araby's green sunny highlands,
Shall maids and their lovers remember the doom Of her, who lies sleeping among the Pearl Islands, With nought but the sea-star to light up her tomb. And still, when the merry date-season* is burning,
* * * Notes * * * peri = nymph of Persian myth; Oman = Sultante of the SEA
Arabian Peninsula on the Golf of Oman; date-season = high point of the
season for growing date fruit
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North Richmond Street (par. 1 ): off North Circular Road in the northeast quadrant of Dublin; the Joyces lived at number 17 from 1894-1896, while James Joyce was a student at Belvedere College; the street was lined with modest but not poor dwellings in the 1890s
blind (par. 1): annotated in R&J
Christian Brothers' School (par. 1): A Roman Catholic all-male school of the Christian Brothers stood on the northwest corner of North Richmond Street and North Circular Road; it was a day school maintained by a teaching brotherhood of Irish Catholic laymen, bound under temporary vows, with a history going back to 1802; the Christian Brothers were supported by public contributions, charged very low fees for their services, and were more interested in practical than in academic education
"stood . . . in a square ground" (par. 1): ? offset somehow in its own small lot?
"the waste room behind the kitchen" (par. 2): ? ? ? [= what today would be called "spare room"?]
The Abbot, by Walter Scott (par. 2 ): published in 1820, combining history and romance in a not-too-accurate version of the story of Mary Queen of Scots (1542-87), who is not the ambiguous devout Catholic and/or "harlot queen" of history but an unambiguously pure and romantic ideal; the novel's young hero is transformed overnight from an unimportant youth into the imprisoned Mary's page and the all-important guardian of her state secrets
The Devout Communicant (par. 2): published in 1813, the book, authored by the English Franciscan Friar Pacificus Baker (1695-1774) has the subtitle Pious Meditations and Aspirations for the Three Days Before and the Three Days After Receiving the Holy Eucharist
The Memoirs of Vidocq (par. 2): Vidocq began a career as a criminal, turned informer, and then became a detective, this last career somewhat marred by the suspicion that he was as brilliant at playing the agent provocateur and creating crimes to detect as he was at detecting them. His memoirs present him as a master of disguises and duplicities, who has, with sang froid, experienced every possible escapade on both side of the law
"its leaves were yellow" (par. 2): a hinted pun on "leaves" as not only the pages of a book (primary meaning), but with the reference to "yellow," the decaying leaves of a tree; the pages are yellowed for one or both of the following reasons: (a) older, cheaper paper in books turns yellow, or (b) the especially British usage of the word "yellow," to be found in a fine British collegiate-level dictionary, Chambers 20th Century Dictionary: under the word "yellow," the term "yellowback: a cheap, sensational novel, specifically one with yellow board or paper covers, common in the 19th century"
"very charitable priest" (par. 2): "charitable" both in the secular sense of philanthropic generosity and in the religious sense of love for God and for humanity
"rough tribes of the cottages" (par. 3): children from the poorer houses -- Richmond Cottages, a lane off North Richmond Street, which was lined with small dwellings for the poor
"light from the kitchen windows had filled the areas" (par. 3): "the areas" = sunken spaces affording access, air, and light to the basements of houses -- the below-ground-level spaces between the railings and the fronts of houses
"Mangan's sister" (par. 3): no Mangan family lived in North Richmond Street in the 1890s, and the name is probably meant to symbolically evoke James Clarence Mangan (1803-49), a minor but famous Irish romantic poet; Mangan was fascinated by the romantic aura that had been cast over things Middle Eastern by the writers Byron, Moore, and others, and liked to pretend that many of his poems were translations from Arabic, a language he did not know; the boy's preoccupation with Mangan's sister can be contrasted with the self-dedication of the speaker in one of Mangan's most popular poems, "Dark Rosaleen" (the title referring to a personification of Ireland)
"hostile to romance" (par. 5): "romance" carries its primary modern meaning, but also an overtone of the word's meaning as the literary genre that dealt with knights and their quests -- this sense is activated by other references in the short story, such as to the "chalice"
"A come-all-you about O'Donovan Rossa" (par. 5): a "come-all-you" is a topical song sung on the streets and in public houses (= taverns or "pubs"), announced by the conventional introductory line "Come all you gallant Irishmen and listen to my song"; Jeremiah O'Donovan (1831-1915) was a Fenian leader whose advocacy of violent measures in Ireland's struggle for independence from England, together with his birthplace, Ross Carberry in County Cork, earned him the nickname Dynamite Rossa
"a ballad about the troubles in our native land" (par. 5): revolutionary nationalism in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Ireland depended in part for popular support on a vast repository of songs and ballads that recounted the wrongs suffered by the nation and the daring deeds of her patriots
"I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes" (par. 5): "chalice" probably refers to the cup used to hold the wine in the celebration of the Eucharist and implies "that which I idealize or worship"; the whole context echoes nineteenth-century versions of legendary quests for the Holy Grail, made popular in the nineteenth century by Alfred Lord Tennyson's lengthy poem about King Arthur and the Round Table, Idyllls of the King (a brief excerpt from the poem may be found on pp. 834-35 of R&J7 -- incorrectly listed as on p.845 in the R&J7 index); cf. also the Steven Speilberg film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
"harp" (par. 5): the harp was an ancient symbol and emblem of Ireland
"a retreat that week in her convent" (par. 9): the convent school which she attends is to devote several days to a withdrawal from worldly concerns during which students and teachers will spend their time in meditation, prayer, and attendance at special sermons
"boys were fighting for their caps" (par. 9): playing a game of trying to snatch each the cap off each other's head (?)
"It's well for you" (par. 10): i.e., "you're lucky," with an overtone of envy or bitterness
"Some Freemason affair" (par. 12): the Masons were regarded as vigilant, powerful, and subversive enemies of Roman Catholicism; the aunt is apparently not aware that the bazaar is for the benefit of a Roman Catholic hospital, though she may have simply confused this bazaar with one of two years before, the Masonic Centenary Exhibition and Bazaar in Aid of the Masonic Female Orphan's School, 17 May 1892; cf. the negative portrayal of the Masons in Arthur Conan Doyle's tales of Sherlock Holmes "The Norwood Builder," "The Red-Headed League," "The Retired Colourman," and "A Study in Scarlet," as well as films about Jack the Ripper such as the recent From Hell, starring Johnny Depp.
"collected used stamps for some pious purpose" (par. 17) she would give them to the local foreign missions officer of the Catholic Church, who would sell the stamps through a stamp-collecting outlet and send the money to Catholic missions overseas (to baptize the heathen)
"This night of Our Lord" (par. 18 ): probably Saturday night (possibly the last night of the bazaar which, in historical time, did close on Saturday, 19 May 1894); a popular pious conventional reference to Saturday night, or a conventional pious phrase to refer to any night of the week, comparable to the expression "year of Our Lord"
"The Arab's Farewell to his Steed" (par. 23 ):
a poem by Caroline Norton (1808-77); the first two and last stanzas (of
eleven) are as follows:
| My beautiful! My beautiful! That standeth meekly by,
With thy proudly-arched and glossy neck, and dark and fiery eye! Fret not to roam the desert now with all thy winged speed; I may not mount on thee again! Thou'rt sold, my Arab steed! Fret not with that impatient hoof - snuff not the breezy
wind;
|
Who said that I had given thee up? Who said that thou
wert sold?
'Tis false! 'Tis false! My Arab steed! I fling them back their gold! Thus - thus, I leap upon thy back, and scour the distant plains! Away! Who overtakes us now shall claim thee for his pains.
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"a florin" (par. 24): a two-shilling coin, the equivalent of from $5 to $8 in 1982, a sizeable and generous sum for a boy who would be used to handouts of threepence or sixpence
"Buckingham Street" (par. 24 ): lies on the direct route from North Richmond Street south-southeast to the Amiens Street Railway Station (now Sean Connolly Station), just north of the Liffey river in the northeast quadrant of Dublin
"Westland Row Station" (par. 24 ): now Pearse Station, south of the Liffey in eastern Dublin, was linked by the Loop Line to the Amiens Street Station north of the river; trains from Westland Row served southeastern Ireland as trains from Amiens Street served the north and west
"a shilling" (par. 25): in context, a rash and expensive gesture on the boy's part, particularly if he is to have anything left over for the gift he intends to buy - he has now spent over half the money he was given (the "florin"), plus trainfare
"Café Chantant" (par. 25 ): French: literally, a coffeehouse with singing -- that is, entertainment; a tourbook of 1907 about France remarks that thes eplaces of entertainment were a cut below the music halls (another form of entertainment popular not only in France, but also in England), with entertainments consisting of vaudevilles, operettas, and farces, that, along with the mixed nature of the audience, might prove embarrassing for a proper lady
"two men were counting money on a salver" (par. 25 ): cf. the Gospel of Matthew, 21:12-13
"English accents" (par. 26): either as stated, or perhaps the accents of the Protestant middle classes unfamiliar to the boy
"eastern guards" (par. 33): as with the guards, carrying large scimitars, and dressed in pantaloons and vests over otherwise naked torsos, an image in the popular imagination of the guards around the Sultan or harem (to be seen in several popular feature films of the 1940's and 1950's) --- in keeping with the title of the short story, "Araby"; perhaps also a faint allusion to Genesis 3:24 in the Bible
"two pennies . . . sixpence" (par. 36): somewhat puzzling, since it is not clear whether the eight pence the boy has left (worth roughly $3 to $3.50 in 1980) would be enough for the gift he has intended to purchase; possibly he would have enough if he saved the four-penny return train fare by walking the two-plus miles back to North Richmond Street
"gazing up into the darkness . . . anguish and anger"
(par. 37): possibly faint allusions to (a) the description of "Vanity Fair"
in John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, First Part; (b) Ecclesiastes
1:2 in the Bible; (c) Romans 8:20 in the Bible
1. Vocabulary (asterisk indicates a word used for an unusual sense)
introspective (R&J's synopsis of the story, R&J/p. xiii), imperturbable (par. 1), musty (par. 2), waste room (par. 2), leaves* (par. 2), dusk (par. 3), sombre or somber (par. 3), gauntlet (par. 3), career* (par. 3), tribes* (par. 3), ashpits (par. 3), parlor (par. 4, par. 15), sash* (par. 4), diverged (par. 4), parcels (par. 5), jostled (par. 5), litanies (par. 5), nasal (par. 5), converged (par. 5), chalice (par. 5), throng (par. 5, par. 24), adoration (par. 5), drawing-room (par. 6), impinge (par. 6), incessant (par. 6), sodden (par. 6), beds* (par. 6), murmuring (par. 6, par. 33), splendid (par. 7), convent (par. 8), petticoat (par. 9), innumerable (par. 12), follies (par. 12), annihilate (par. 12), tedious (par. 12), strove (par. 12), luxuriated (par. 12), bazaar (par. 12), amiability (par. 12), master* (par. 12), sternness (par. 12), monotonous (par. 12), hall-stand (par. 13, par. 19), hatbrush (par. 13), curtly (par. 13), misgave (par. 15), gained* (par. 16), indistinct (par. 16), discreetly (par. 16), brown-clad (par. 16), garrulous (par. 17), strode (par. 24), porters* (par. 24), improvised (par. 24), sixpenny (par. 25), turnstile (par. 25), shilling (par. 25), girdled* (par. 25), gallery* (par. 25, par. 36), pervades (par. 25), salver (par. 25), porcelain (par. 26), vases (par. 26), remarked* (par. 26), fib (par. 32), lingered (par. 36), wares (par. 36), derided (par. 37), vanity (par. 37), anguish (par. 37)
2. (A) With reference to the meaningfulness or significance or symbolism of setting, how do the real circumstances of the young narrator's setting compare or contrast with the associations of Arabia in the late 1800s and early 1900s, which are evoked by the name of the bazaar (itself a word derived from the region), "Araby," named to connote this region? (B) What might be the significance of the emphasis of North Richmond Street being "blind"? Why might the word be repeated in par. 1? (Don't overlook the demonstrative essay in R&J.) (C1) What ideas or feelings are evoked about the setting by the stylistic element of personification used to characterize the setting in par. 1? (C2) What might be implied or conveyed or symbolically relevant to the story by the following details of setting in par. 1: (C2a) one house being separated from the others, (C2b) the "square ground," (C2c) houses gazing at each other imperturbably, (C2d) the emphasis on the color brown (compare the references to brown in pars. 4 and 16). (D) What might be conveyed by the objects in the "waste room" emphasized: the particular books named? (E) Potential symbolism or relevance of the "wild garden," "central apple tree," and rusty bicycle pump behind the narrator's house (par. 2)? (F1) Thematic relevance of the primary season of the year in which the story is set (pars. 3 and 15)? (F2) Thematic relevance of the contrast between the "ever-changing violet" of the sky over the houses where the narrator plays (par. 3) and the brown houses (par. 1)? (F3) Thematic relevance or symbolism of the personification of the street lamps lifting their "feeble lanterns" (par. 3) toward the violet sky? (G) Thematic relevance or symbolism in the metaphor of the "tribes" from the cottages in the narrator's neighborhood (par. 3)? (G) How are the door and sash of the Mangans' house symbolic, as described in par. 4? (H) How do setting and the narrator's mood or wishes interact in par. 6? Why is the setting appropriate to what the narrator feels and says? (I-1) How does the aspect of setting of the three boys fighting for their caps relate thematically in any way to the narrator's conversation with Mangan's sister (par. 9)? (I-2) What might be the symbolism of setting of the railing leading up the steps to the Mangan's house, which is repeatedly mentioned (pars. 3, 9, 16)? (J) What do the details of setting of the hallstand and hat-brush (pars. 13 and 19) help to convey or express symbolically about the narrator, his uncle, the narrator's family, or the narrator's milieu? (K1) The narrator says that since his uncle "was in the hall I could not go into the front parlour and lie at the window" (par. 15); why? What ideas or aspects of characterization are conveyed here? (K2) What does the window help to symbolize about the narrator, not only in this passage but as a motif in the story? In what paragraphs is a window referred to? (L1) How do timepieces help convey symbolism through setting in pars. 16, 20, and 24? (L2) How are various details of setting in par. 16 (other than the timepiece) potentially thematic or symbolic, including upper storey vs. lower storey? (M1) How do the respective settings of par. 17 and the opening of par. 24 ("streets thronged . . . journey") help convey the contrasts of constriction vs. expansiveness, inactivity vs. liveliness? (M2) Why is the river "twinkling" when the narrator's train passes over it (par. 24)? What suggestions or connotations, relevant to the narrator, are conveyed by the twinkling of the river, and passing over the river to get from his usual world to "Araby"? (Maps showing the narrator's actual route in the Dublin of 1907 can be found at the end of these Notes and Questions.) (M3) What thematically relevant ideas or concepts are conveyed by the excluding of passengers from the narrator's train (par. 24)? (N) What might be the thematically-relevant symbolism of the actions of the bazaar workers described in pars. 25-32? (O) How might the apparent "English accents" of the bazaar workers (par. 26) thematically relate to what Arabia and "Araby" represented to the narrator and his fellow Dubliners in the late 1800's or early 1900's? (P) How do the vases (par. 26) and "great jars" (par. 33) relate thematically to the narrator's "chalice" (par. 5)? (Q) What are all the paragraphs in which references to light and dark occur? The meanings of this motif? (Don't overlook the demonstrative essay in R&J).
3. Like William Faulkner, James Joyce is famous
as a prose stylist. (A1) Where and how does Joyce repeatedly use the vocabulary,
imagery, and figurative language of religion in the short story? (A2) Where
and how does Joyce repeatedly use the vocabulary, imagery, and figurative
language referring to the literary genre of Romance (e.g., as with Malory's
Morte
Darthur, the tales of King Arthur and the Round Table) in the short
story? (B) How do the recurrent imagery and figurative language referring
to water or liquid (e.g., pars. 5, 6, 24) accumulate any symbolic meanings
relevant to the short story? (C1) How does the figurative language the
narrator uses to describe the hair of Mangan's sister --- "the soft rope
of her hair" (par. 3) not only accurately describe the appearance of the
object but also suggest ideas or themes relevant to the short story? (D)
Joyce's fondness for the pun, the use of a word for two or more different
meanings at the same time, reached an acme in his last novel, Finnegans
Wake, which has not only puns on the different meanings of words in
English, but also multilingual puns on some words. (D1) How do the multiple
meanings of the repeated word blind (e.g., pars. 1, 4) relate to
or help express any of the short story's themes or ideas? (D2) How does
the secondary sense of the word career (par. 3) relate to or help
express any of the short story's themes or ideas? (D3) How might more than
one meaning of the word impinge (par. 6) be applicable in context
and in the short story overall? (E) How are sentence length and parallelism
used expressively -- to convey character or theme -- in the sentence "We
walked through . . . native land" (par. 5)? How is sentence length used
expressively in the sentence "I thought . . . future" (par. 5)? (F1) Where
does Joyce use the formal level of usage (see Ch. 7 of R&J, as well
as material about the levels of usage in the composition handbook -- Ch.
16/SFHW6 or Ch. 18/SFHW7, "What Kinds of Language Can You Use?") expressively
or thematically? (F2) Where does Joyce use the colloquial or informal level
of usage expressively or thematically? (F3) How does Joyce use the contrast
of formal and informal (or colloquial) levels of usage expressively or
thematically?
Below is a visual diagram of the narrator's route from where he is living to the bazaar:
Clicking on the link below will provide an overall map of Dublin in 1907 --- in a large file of about 1.8M --- that puts the narrator's setting and trip in an expanded context. Basically the territory covered by "Araby" is represented by map squares F2 through F6, G2 through G5, and H3 through H6.
