James Joyce’s “Araby,” as the Norton Anthology notes, is equal parts realistic and symbolic and, as such, entails a highly suggestive reading. In particular, Joyce’s language does a lot for the story’s overall realistic effect, as it incites visual imagery in its depictions of scenes and characters’ actions. As well, it glorifies the object of the protagonist’s affection, Mangan’s sister. Its content, on the other hand, informs its inherent symbolism: it makes a motif out of the term “blind” and its implications, and, most notably, draws on several sacred images to produce a religious undertone for the story. Both of these symbolic maneuvers will essentialize the story’s end; the narrator’s shame in his vanity and his burning eyes demonstrate the story’s parabolic nature, and therefore seemingly rid “Araby” of its affectionate storyline. By emphasizing the story’s content, namely its motifs and religious imagery, and thus through religiously-charged epiphany, this paper will argue that Joyce shows that love is indeed what motivates the protagonist’s action, where readers may feel compelled to view vanity as the driving factor.
Joyce makes literal use of love’s blindness to establish that what drives the protagonist to take on a grand gesture is not vanity but love. The beginning of the story makes sure to highlight darkness as a hindrance, creating the illusion that there is something to overcome in it: “North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free” (Joyce 407). Joyce aims to show that the street on which the protagonist lives already presents the challenge that “any quest in Dublin will lead to a dead-end” (Collins 85). However, that the schoolboys are successful in livening the street with their play each night incites joy, and presents the ever-looming darkness as no hindrance at all. The second time in as many pages the narrator uses the term “blind” to describe the means through which he gazes at Mangan’s sister each morning: “Every morning I lay on the floor in the front parlor watching her door. The blind was pulled down within an inch of the sash so that I could not be seen” (Joyce 408). Just as the blindness of his street produces an illusion of silence that the protagonist each night breaks, so does this blindness between him and Mangan’s sister create a sense of envelopment, as it is the means through which the two are kept separate; yet it is also how the narrator sees her and continuously develops feelings for her. In this sense, the protagonist is still in the dark, just as his play at night is still in the dark, and we may argue that love’s blindness is still loved.
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What perhaps best demonstrates that the protagonist is motivated by love for Mangan’s sister is the final line of the story in which he assumes he has not been persuaded by such a force: “Gazing up at into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity, and my eyes burned with anguish and anger” (Joyce 411). While the narrator knows that there is shame in what has motivated him to come to the Araby in search of a gift for Mangan’s sister, what propels him to such a realization is the conversation he overhears with the women and two men operating a kiosk at the bazaar: “At the door of the stall a young lady was talking and laughing with two young gentlemen” (Joyce 410). Up until this moment, the boy had been consistently enthralled with the thought of bringing his beloved a gift; afterward, he wishes no longer to do so. This lingering moment in which he overhears the woman flirting with the two men is the one in which he recognizes his love for Mangan’s sister cannot possibly be any different, and as such he has been vain to assume it is. Despite this, however, Joyce again describes a darkness into which the boy comes out, his eyes burning at the sight of it. Author Margot Norris writes “The story’s closing moral turns on itself by concluding with a parabolic maneuver, by having the narrative consciousness turn itself into a symbol of’ something, as Gabriel Conroy might put it” (Norris 46). Arguably, the narrative consciousness turns itself into a symbol of blindness, and is informed by this repetitive darkness, and the numbing of the narrator’s senses: “All my senses seemed to desire to veil themselves and, feeling that I was about to slip from them, I pressed the palms of my hands together until they trembled, murmuring: ‘O love! O love!’ many times” (Joyce 408). That the protagonist finds himself in recurrent blindness shows that he is indeed motivated by love, as to find himself again in the dark means that, while it may blanket him and his senses, his feelings for Mangan’s sister remain real, just as the blind is the means through which he watches her, and the silence of North Richmond Street does not hinder play.
The closing lines of the story also entail a religiously-charged epiphany, arguably resulting from Joyce’s recurring use of sacred symbols and blindness throughout the narrative. In keeping with Norris’s argument, Joyce’s “Araby” does indeed close with a parabolic maneuver, that of the epiphany and its religious implications. However, the way in which Joyce utilizes this literary device is counter to the effects of the story’s religious undertones. Time and again throughout the narrative, religious symbols, metaphors, and rituals are alluded to, most notably the “central apple tree” in the garden, and, of course, the previous tenant of the house being a priest. These two examples are given within the story’s opening two paragraphs, informing readers of the possibility of the priest’s life in the narrator’s home being of influence to the narrator’s practices, and, with the allusion to the Tree of Knowledge in the apple tree, that he will experience a fall of some kind. Looking at the motif of blindness, we have already discussed its illusionary tendency in the story, making it useful in proving love to be the motivating factor for the protagonist. As well, this motif may play to the illusion of the protagonist’s religious practices. Author Harry Stone writes of the scene in the back drawing room: “The boy is about to lose himself in an ecstasy of devotion, and Joyce wants us to see that the boy is tenanting the same rooms and worshipping at the same shrines as the dead priest […] the boy, like the priest, has begun to mix devotion with profanation, spirituality with materialism” (Stone 361). If we are to look at the darkness as a symbol for the boy’s faith, we may read this scene, in which he notes that “it [is] a dark and rainy evening” (Joyce 408), as the boy worshipping at the thought of Mangan’s sister, and thus declaring his spirituality. The boy, however, notes a distant light, which can be interpreted as what Stone suggests is his devotion mixing with profanation and materialism, which may otherwise suggest that his devotion to Mangan’s sister is not one to be read in religious terms but in affectionate terms. Profanation being one’s deliberate rejection of religion, the boy can be seen to reject any devoutly-driven devotion to Mangan’s sister.
The narrator’s epiphany in the final lines, while he may feel he has been driven by vanity, is therefore argued to not at all be driven by such a force. As Norris argues, the story does indeed conclude with a parabolic maneuver, one in which we may view the boy as allegorizing the Christian teachings of the sin of idolatry, which results in his immediate penance at the realization of his acts, and thus the foreshadowed allusion to the story of Genesis takes shape. However, the story ends in the same darkness that has many times deluded our protagonist, here, it gives him the feeling that he has been motivated by negative forces. That darkness can also be said to symbolize the boy’s religious beliefs, it remains that he is indeed motivated by his affection for Mangan’s sister, as the darkness is an illusion of his faith.
James Joyce’s “Araby,” in its conclusion, portrays vanity as the protagonist’s motivation for completing a grand gesture for his love, Mangan’s sister. While the many religious symbols in the narrative do well to prove this, showing that the boy worships only an idol and crushes on Mangan’s sister for the wrong reasons, these images, along with the motif of blindness, can instead be seen to prove that inherent in his affections for this girl is a true feeling of love which show that the boy is not at all driven by sinful motives. Ironically, this duality in the role of religion is a perfect example of its preaching that two wrongs do not make a right.
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