Entrapment as Portrayed in Joyce and Trevor

In the early part of the twentieth century, Irish authors have dealt with the more oppressive themes in everyday Irish life. Two of these authors, James Joyce and William Trevor, have written short stories inundated with the unfairness of it all. Entrapment is one of the most prevalent themes and dealt with utilizing the people’s fear, lack of funds and lack of rights, devotion to the church, devotion to the past, and devotion to a beloved parent.

Joyce and Trevor dealt with the theme of entrapment in a similar way in “Eveline” and “The Ballroom of Romance.” Joyce’s “The Boarding House” and Trevor’s “The Distant Past” show the different ways entrapment can happen. All these stories, however, illustrate both Joyce’s and Trevor’s feelings that the Irish trap themselves in their despondent lives by their own hands.

The theme of entrapment is exemplified in “Eveline” by the fact that she cannot stand to leave her father. She is trapped in her untenable situation because of a promise made to her mother on her deathbed. Thus, she is trapped by her own choice, as Florence Walzl agrees when she states, “These characters are already trapped by life, having made the constraining choices earlier (520).” The time this takes place in is a time where familial duties are taken quite seriously and most times at the sacrifice of the individual’s own happiness. However, her promise to her mother is not the only reason she is trapped.

Fear was also a major factor in Eveline trapping herself in her old life and cutting herself off from a new, possibly better one. Her father, being abusive and controlling as he was, showed her that one could not be certain of another human being. He was kind and somewhat gentle to her when her mother was alive, but the moment her mother died, he turned to Eveline and started beating her, treating her like a slave, and expected her to stay unmarried. All this coalesced in her heart and made her afraid to runaway with her fiancé, Frank. According to Professor Florence Walzl in response to Friedrich, Eveline chose ‘to accept the trap at a time in [her] life when [she] could have made a revitalizing choice (520).’ I find that this is very true. Eveline had a chance at freedom, she just had to take a few steps up a gangplank and she would have been able to begin again – to revitalize her existence.

However, in making the choice to stay behind and remain in her old life and according to critic John Gordon who states that Eveline ‘may have become addicted to her deprivations of poverty and inaction, that she is gratefully oppressed (344).’ Joyce demonstrates this in the story when Eveline grips the railing tightly and refuses to go along with Frank as he is ushered up the gangplank. She is ‘gratefully oppressed’ because she is staying trapped in a life that she already knows, is aware of what is expected of her and is inexplicably grateful because she is not faced with the unknown, which she fears. I agree with Gordon’s assessment of Eveline’s mind set; one can be grateful that they are oppressed because then big, uncertain, life-changing decisions don’t have to be made. Two sentences from Joyce’s ‘Eveline’ can explain her fear of these decisions quite well: “All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. He was drawing her into them: he would drown her (23).”

Similarly, in William Trevor’s “The Ballroom of Romance,” Bridie is trapped in her lifestyle by fear as well as being ‘gratefully oppressed’. Her fear to speak up to her first love, Patrick Grady, trapped her in the wilds of Ireland where she toiled day in and day out for her father. That is where the grateful oppression comes in. Her father is crippled and unable to work or take care of himself. Instead of choosing to leave Ireland, to see if she could make a life for herself elsewhere, she chose to stay with the father she loved dearly and take care of him, trapping herself in that way of life by her own choice.

Like Eveline, Bridie stays with her father and helps him out in part because of her mother. Bridie’s mother did not ask her for a deathbed promise but the weight of her mother’s passing traps her in her father’s house just as much as a promise to the dying would have. In contrast to “Eveline”, however, “The Ballroom of Romance” shows that Bridie is also a victim of circumstance. She is living in a time when poverty and unemployment are prevalent, so to get work, many of the men have emigrated to the United Kingdom or America. This leaves a disproportionate amount of men and women in the country. Bridie, being saddled with a crippled father, no money, no beauty, and being thirty-six is taken out of the running for wife of all the desirable bachelors… of which there are very few, if any. And without a husband, there is nothing she can do to free herself from her entrapment.

However, if she were not stuck in the past, she might have been able to find someone with a stable job, who was kind, and who she might be able to fall in love with and vice versa. So, another contribution – and again in contrast to “Eveline” – to Bridie’s entrapment is her nostalgia, her desperate grip to hold onto a teenage infatuation. Were she not constantly comparing every man she met to that sixteen year old boy whom she hardly spoke to – if at all – twenty years ago, she might have been able to move on and find someone else she could be happy with and possibly realize that she could love this other man. With this liberation, she would then be able to free herself from the entrapment at her father’s farm by sharing the burden.

Bridie still holds onto her ‘lost love’ which makes her unable to get a husband that she could care for; which leads to another cog in her self-entrapment machine. Because she cannot move on from Patrick Grady, she has forced herself into the position where, sometime in the slightly distant future, she will marry a lazy drunkard. So, the source of her self-entrapment is her nostalgia and refusal to forget Patrick.

“The Distant Past” is a story about a brother and sister who are trapped in their lives by the past. They were once a prominent Protestant family, rich and affluent, with a big, well-kept manor and servants; and their entrapment was also of their own making. They refused to see the changes happening around them and their manor and continued to act according to their upbringing: “In the shops and elsewhere they made, quite gently, no secret of their continuing loyalty to the past. They attended on Sundays St. Patrick’s Protestant Church… for prayers were still said there for the King whose sovereignty their country had denied (23).”

When the Middletons drove into town on the Queen’s coronation day, they had a Union Jack in their car window. They still stood when ‘God Save the King’ was played on the BBC, and they protested when prayers were no longer said for the king in their church. All this dedication to the past is attributed to the fact that their father squandered away everything they had on a Catholic Dublin woman. When he died and they found out that everything except twelve acres had been sold off, they grasped on to their last link of what was known to them and held on tightly. This choice ensured that the Middletons were trapped in their way of life, by the past, for good.

The Middletons were not only trapped of their own making, however. They were also trapped in their lives by the people of the town. They were always known as the Middletons of Carraveagh, until the revolution, then just the Middletons. But the townsfolk refused to see them as part of the contemporary community. This is exemplified when Fat Cranley says ‘Will you ever forget it, Mr. Middleton? I’d ha’ run like a rabbit if you’d lifted a finger at me (23).’ This is just one of the incidents of the villagers constantly seeing the Middleton’s still in the past; comments that are made every time the Middletons go to town and thus, firmly entrenching the siblings – in every one’s minds – as the last living relics of a bygone era.

When the Troubles started in the North, the friendliness and the tolerance disappeared. Ones who used to drink and converse with the Middletons suddenly stopped and suddenly their words and actions over the years didn’t seem so ridiculous to the townspeople anymore. So, with this digression back to the former hostilities, the townspeople, along with the Middletons’ politics, helped trap the Middletons in the downward spiral that their lives had steadily been taking. This story is an example of a quote by William Trevor himself, “In Ireland you can escape neither politics nor history, for when you travel through the country today the long conflict its landscape has known does not readily belong in the far-away past as Hastings or Stamford Bridge does for the English,” quoted in Haughey’s article, page 356. An excellent point that I can agree with wholeheartedly. Even if the Republic’s freedom was assured by that time, the upheaval in the North as well as the many that were killed and suppressed in the Republic was still fresh in everybody’s minds, even though it had to have been thirty years or more since their independence.

“The Boarding House” is a different example of entrapment from “The Distant Past”. It deals with the contraction of a marriage of a girl, Polly, to a man who has taken her virginity. Again, by their own hands, they sealed their fate by engaging in pre-marital sex and by Polly becoming pregnant. This, and Mr. Doran’s duty to honor, trapped the young couple into a marriage that was not necessarily wanted.

This example of entrapment, however, seems to allude to the fact that Polly was deliberately entrapping Mr. Doran, as it says in the story: “She sang ‘I’m a naughty girl, you needn’t sham, you know I am (39).’” Other examples of her deliberate trapping of the man are when she would brush her dress up against him, gently breath on him, or caress him with her fingers. Another time, she knocked on his door and asked for a light from his candle, wearing only a loose, open jacket and slippers. And yet, the conniving seems to have come from the mother. The daughter, in doing her mother’s bidding, traps herself into a marriage. The claim that the mother encouraged the daughter’s wantonness can be seen in this line from the story: “Polly had been made awkward… because… she had divined the intention behind her mother’s tolerance (40).”

This claim can also be supported quite heavily with the description of the mother going about getting the man to marry her daughter. Mrs. Mooney keeps repeating that she is an outraged mother whose daughter has just been robbed of her virtue. She then makes continuous reference to the fact that she would no doubt win, what with having all the righteous cards. Another point that supports the fact the mother trapped her daughter and a fool Mr. Doran into marriage is the fact that she quite frivolously says that she would no doubt win and still have time to go down to Marlborough Street. More evidence that this claim is true is when the book says: “… her mother’s persistent silence could not be misunderstood… there had been no open complicity between mother and daughter… though people began to talk of the affair, still Mrs. Mooney did not intervene (39).”

Polly, following her mother’s orders or not, does not feel trapped for long, though. She cries when it is vaguely implied that she tells Mr. Doran that she is pregnant and continues to cry – even harder – when Doran goes down to discuss the problem with Mrs. Mooney. A little later, though, she stops crying and starts thinking of the wonderful life she’d have with the decent amount of money Doran made, she seemed to cheer up.

Mr. Doran at the end, then, was the only one who was officially trapped. He acknowledged that it was only lust that had drawn him to her and that he could not love someone who was of such a lower social class than he was. So, even though Polly and Mrs. Mooney set out to entrap Doran, it was also Doran’s lust and his sense of honor that helped in the entrapment. The church is also a factor in the man’s entrapment. Since it is a well-respected and feared institution in Ireland, most folks would follow the ‘marry the girl you impregnated’ unspoken rule that existed. Indeed, the priest seemed to heavily encourage Doran to do the right thing as seen when Joyce wrote, ‘the priest had drawn out every ridiculous detail of the affair and in the end had so magnified his sin that he was almost thankful at being afforded a loophole of reparation (41).’

In all four of these stories, the main characters are all trapped by their own choices and personal fears. “The Ballroom of Romance” is the only story here that has entrapment by external forces, almost making Bridie’s entrapment by choice a very distant second in her imprisonment. Each story shows a different way that a person in the early to mid-1900s in Ireland can be entrapped into a life of misery and pain. Most of the entrapment could have actually been avoided if fear had been let go or if the past had been let go. But these are the lives that most Irish are used to and it is probably hard to break the habit of being miserable. According to John Gordon, they are indeed ‘addicted to their deprivations of poverty and inaction.’

Works Cited

Friedrich, Gerhard, and Florence Walzl. "Joyce's Pattern of Paralysis in Dubliners."

      College English 22 (1961): 519-520.

Gordon, John. "Dubliners and the Art of Losing." Studies in Short Fiction 32 (1995):

      343-353.

Haughey, Jim. "Joyce and Trevor's Dubliners: the Legacy of Colonialism." Studies in

      Short Fiction 32 (1995): 355-365.

Joyce, James. The Dubliners. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1991.

Trevor, William. Ireland. "The Ballroom of Romance." 1-29.