In James Joyce's short story, "Araby," Mangan's sister is
the neighbor of the narrator who becomes infatuated with her. Joyce describes the
street as a quiet one with a dead-end. The houses, other than the vacant one, "gazed at
one another with brown imperturbable faces." This reference to the brown of the houses
is referred to in another of his works, Stephen Hero, in which Joyce
writes,
one of
those brown brick houses which seem the very incarnation of Irish
paralysis.
The street of this
brown neighborhood have "dark muddy lanes" behind them that lead to dark gardens and
dark "odorous" stables. But, when the boys who play in the streets return from the
muddy lanes to the street, the light from the kitchen windows fills the area. If
Mangan's sister came out, the boys watch her from their shadowed spot, "her figure
defined by the light from the half-opened door." They watch as her dress swings and the
"soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side."
While she
is part of the brown neighborhood, Mangan's sister comes out of the shadow of their
existence for the narrator who perceives her "defined by the light." His perception, of
course, becomes unrealistic as he idealizes her. This idealization and voyeuristic
nature of the narrator is suggested in the second paragraph by the narrator's discovery
of the books The Abbot, Sir Walter Scott's novel that idealized
Mary Queen of Scots, The Devout Communicant, which suggest
the boy's almost spiritual worship of the girl, and The Memoirs of Vidocq,
a popular adventure story of a criminal turned detective that contains a
blend of invention, sensationalism, and prurience.
That she
is not given a name in Joyce's narrative also indicates that the narrator's confused
perception of her in both a religious and romantic way are unrealistic, for, in reality,
she is simply part of the neighborhood of brown houses of "Irish
paralysis."
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