Eveline

The Dubliners collection, including “Eveline,” is known for Joyce’s use of epiphany. Normally, epiphanies are moments of sudden revelation or insight, and characters often change their perspective as a result. In Joyce’s use, epiphanies take on a slightly different connotation and are used for more quotidian concerns; an epiphany is a moment of sudden “‘revelation of the whatness of a thing,’ the moment in which ‘the soul of the commonest object […] seems to us radiant’” (Ellman, Richard. James Joyce. Oxford University Press, 1983, p. 83). Richard Ellman, Joyce’s biographer, clarifies that Joyce felt the artist “must look for [such revelations] not among gods but among men, in casual, unostentatious, even unpleasant moments […] in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself” (83). Epiphanies occur in moments of emotional fullness and convey something specific about these experiences.

Eveline experiences when she remembers her mother’s death: “As she mused the pitiful vision of her mother’s life laid its spell on the very quick of her being […] She stood up in a sudden impulse of terror. Escape! She must escape!” (22-23).