Darkness in James Joyce’s “Araby”
James Joyce’s short story Araby expresses the message of first love, then the sense of anger and disappointment in the journey of a young boy. It is also a sense of breakdown of one’s illusion. The main character of the story, a young boy, seeks to please his friend, Mangan’s sister, an unnamed older girl, whom he idolizes but fails in his attempt, plunging him into despair and disappointment at the end of the story. Joyce uses a common thread of darkness throughout the story, which draws the reader to see the boy’s discovery of real reality. This theme of darkness is extended into Joyce’s descriptions of Dublin, as this Irish town appeared to him in his own youth. Joyce used the darkness as a theme of this story to express the concepts of emptiness, despair, and sorrow in his details of the setting in Dublin, in his description of the boy’s first sharp taste of reality when he encounters disappointing experiences at Araby bazaar, and shows the imagery of light as a hope for the boy.
Through the eyes of young boy, Joyce uses the darkness in the setting of Araby to symbolize the concepts of emptiness and sorrow when describing the street, the houses, and the bazaar. In the opening of Araby, the young boy describes North Richmond Street as being "blind," a dead-end, and the sound of silence in the street shows the surrounding of the area to be empty (p. 639-40). The emptiness is a hollow sense of darkness or a "void" feeling, in which the boy feels he is alone when talking about his street and the few people who inhabit it. In Joyce’s Araby, A.R. Coulthard states that the young boy and his friend, by being playful, "tried to frolic among somber houses, whose ‘brown imperturbable’ seemed ‘conscious of decent lives within them,’ an image that expresses…a bond between decency and constructed life in the mind of the Dubliners" (Coulthard).
A second example to which the word "dark" is used several times to describe a specific place, and that is an area surrounding the boy’s street. The young boy describes his play with his friend which had "brought [them] through the dark muddy lanes behind the houses where [they] ran the gantlet of the rough tribes from the cottages, to the back doors of the dark dripping gardens where odors arose from the ashpits, to the dark odorous stables…" (p. 640). The imagery of darkness of this passage expresses that the town itself is filled with shadowy and dark colors in the streets and houses.
A third instance of the imagery of darkness is manifested in the section that describes the young boy’s entrance to the bazaar. As the boy enters the bazaar, he sees "nearly all the stalls were closed and the greater part of the hall was in darkness. [He] recognized a silence like that which pervades a church after a service" (p. 643). The darkness that appears at the bazaar in this section gives Araby a feeling of emptiness and despair; the bazaar seems to be closing at the same time as the boy’s first entrance. The detailed setting of the houses, street, and the bazaar in this story utters the emotion of emptiness and despair through the observation of the boy.
As the overwhelming image of darkness appears throughout the story, an image of light gives the boy a sense of hope. In Araby, the image of light that appears out of the darkness is the older girl, Mangan’s sister, who fascinates the young boy. Because of her, the boy has the feeling of hope in which he would find a meaning for his life and more images of light of cover the troubled and darkened world that surrounds him. Mangan’s sister has become a hope, an image of light that he takes with him to "places the most hostile to romance" (p. 640). One example from the story that reveals the girl as a light for the boy: the "light from the lamp opposite [their] door caught the white curve of her neck, lit up her hair that rested there and…the hand upon the railing. It fell over one side of her dress and caught the white border of a petticoat…visible as stood at ease" (p. 641). The image of the girl wearing the white dress symbolizes goodness and purity, which the young boy is wishing for in his life. In a sense, the boy has become confused because he does not know for sure what he is feeling toward the girl, but he believes to be a pure love.
Because of his adoration for the girl, the boy will do anything for her to gain the purity of the girl’s light. One author, Margot Norris, has stated in her article, Blind Streets and Seeing Houses: Araby’s Dim Glass Revisited, that "when Mangan’s sister speaks, her speech is like a startling irruption in the boy’s fantasy" (Norris). When the girl finally speaks to the boy, he became shocked to the point where he barely knows what to say to her. Since the girl mentions the Araby bazaar, he makes it a heroic mission to go to the bazaar because he felt it was a place of hope. He feels that "the syllables of the word Araby were called to [him] through the silence in which [his] soul luxuriated and cast an Eastern enchantment over [him]" (p. 641). While the bazaar is an enchanting place in his mind, but not in reality, the boy still keeps the image of the girl to himself as to keep hope alive during his trip to Araby.
Assuming Joyce as a young boy in this story, he expresses his own first severe taste of reality as he encounters unexpected and disappointing experiences at the Araby bazaar. The first disappointing experience appears when the young boy first enters Araby at the same time as it is closing. He sees that "the greater part of the hall was in darkness. [He] recognized a silence like that which pervades a church after a service. [He] walked into the center of the bazaar timidly" (p. 643). At this point, the boy starts to feel that his ideal would has abandoned him since the Araby bazaar appears to be empty. Because the bazaar has become a quest for the boy, he experts it to be a temple of love and hope with kind, caring people and bright lights engulfing the place, but it is not what he expects. The bazaar, as it turns out, is simply a market of stalls selling goods and products.
Another experience at the bazaar to which the boy see the "two men…counting money on a salver. [He] listened to the fall of the coins" (p. 643). The imagery of "counting money on a salver" represents the same motive of a greed profit as the market shop in the eyes of the boy. The fact that the men count money at the bazaar is not the sign of light and hope to which the boy expected to find.
The third experience revealed an interaction between the girl and the two men engaging in flirtatious conversation by the door of the stall (p. 643). The boy finds that love is portrayed as an empty, passing flirtation at the bazaar, not alluring or enchanting as he would expect it to be. When the salesgirl walks up to the boy and asks him if he wants to buy something, he discovers that "the tone of her voice was not encouraging; she seemed to have spoken to [him] out of a sense of duty" (p. 643). In this section with the salesgirl, the boy seems to be nervous talking to her because she appears to be uncaring of him, and he does not expect distasteful attitude from the people there. According to John Updike’s "A & P": A Return Visit to Araby, Walter Wells expresses that the young boy gets to the bazaar "too late, and recognizes in the flirtatious banter there between the salesgirl and her two English admirers, and in the two men counting money, something uncomfortably close to the nature of his own longing: his dream…was actually sexual, and money would not buy it" (Wells). The young boy then learns that sexual flirtation becomes pointless if he has no money to show at the bazaar, and he wishes that money would not buy his fantasy of love.
The final experience of disappointment appears when the lights of the bazaar have gone out, and he finds an unexpected image in the dark. When the upstairs hall of the bazaar has gone completely dark, the boy gazes "up into the darkness [he] saw [himself] as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and [his] eyes burned with anguish and anger" (p. 643). This last section of Araby is the turning point of the young boy’s life in which he is finally faces the real reality. According to Norris, "the darkened gallery of [the bazaar appears] to ’see’ the boy in a way that lets him see himself, as though it were a dark mirror catching him in its eye…" (Norris). The last experience at the bazaar causes the boy to be angry at life, but he seems to come to accept that darkness have been and always will be a part of him. As the story’s main character who encounters the unexpected and disappointing experiences at the Araby bazaar, Joyce recounts his first sharp taste of reality.
James Joyce uses darkness in his short story to bring forth a shattering of illusion. The young boy’s first love was in fact an illusion, and his experiences of disappointment and shocks were the sounds of his illusion cracking. While the darkness expresses emptiness or perhaps a glimpse of harsh reality, Joyce uses the imagery of light that balance the story’s plot as the young boy’s motivation in his travel to Araby bazaar.
Notes:
Coulthard, A.R. "Joyce’s Araby." Explicator. 52.2 (1994): 97+.
Joyce, James. "Araby." Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. 8th ed. Ed. X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. New York: Longman, 2002. 639-643.
Norris, Margot. "Blind Streets and Seeing Houses: Araby’s Dim Glass Revisited." Studies in Short Fiction. 32.3. (1995): 309+.
Wells, Walter. "John Updike’s ‘A & P’: A Return Visit to Araby." Studies in Short Fiction. 30.2 (1993): 127+.
