The Sacred Heart: Examining the Boundaries
of Jungian Shadow, Animus, and Space
in "Eveline"

 

by Kate Nesin
©Kate D. Nesin, Phillips Academy, Andover, 1999

 

Footnotes are in square brackets [ ].  Page numbers are in parenthesis ( ).
 Pages in "Eveline" refer to the Dover Press edition of Dubliners.

In James Joyce's "Eveline," Jung's concepts of shadow and animus chase each other, circling, claiming, and releasing. By some strange alchemy, the Jungian shadow becomes corporeal, the Jungian animus becomes personified. Eveline's shadow presents her with both duty at home and life abroad, Janus-faced. Similarly Janus-faced, Eveline's animus finds physical manifestation both in her father and in Frank. This tension between two poles, this tangled unconscious knot, seeks further physical embodiment in Joyce's recurring imagery: of the circle, the wave, the ritual, the cycle, the tide, the minutes ticking away. Most of all, Eveline's shadow and animus emphasize her struggle to conceptualize--and alternately to live within or to break--her boundaries, personal and physical, abstract and concrete, always shifting. At her center lies her nucleus, her heart and core, bound ultimately by the space of her very body. Jung proposes: "In the unconscious, one is unfortunately in the same situation as in a moonlit landscape. All the contents are blurred and merge into one another, and one never knows exactly what or where anything is, or where one thing begins or ends."[1]

The Jungian shadow is often described as "criticism from the unconscious," that which one does not or cannot see in oneself stepping forward as a "guide," for good or  evil. One's shadow "often appears in dreams in a personified form."[2]   Joyce's opening image is of Eveline at physical rest, leaning in toward the fading light of the window, her mind working at first indolently, then picking up speed. She does not dream, but she sees: that which passes intermittently in front of her eyes and that which passes more frequently behind them. In this dusky, dreamlike state, her shadow is indeed personified, entering the scene first as light and dark, coloring the street outside her window. "She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue" (20). Once again, Joyce employs chiaroscuro, modeling Eveline's face and thinking in light and shadow, in soft and alliterative sound. The evening in the street, as it approaches, draws an organic line, an encroaching boundary, between day and night, interior and exterior.

The Jungian animus, too, is a piece of the unconscious sphere, the masculine spirit found in every woman. A woman's animus is most commonly influenced by her father: "The father endows his daughter's animus with the special coloring of unarguable, incontestably 'true' convictions--convictions that never include the personal reality of the woman herself as she actually is."[3]  In such a way, Eveline's father has created for her a physical reality, disengaged and undifferentiated from her personal reality. Her abstract, psychological space is defined by her memories of him: by the "shining roofs" (20) of the old houses among which she used to play; by her father brandishing his "blackthorn stick" (20); by the softly remembered, wearisome weekly ritual, cooking and cleaning "regularly" (21), and then every Saturday, as if on cue, battling her father for money (21). Her concrete, physical space appears in this very ritual of routine: beyond the silver-edged memories lie the edges of their house, the cornerstones between which she dusts tirelessly, and the objects, pictures and furniture, so familiar, so redolent of "home." "Home! She looked around the room, reviewing all its familiar objects which she had dusted once a week for so many years, wondering where on earth all the dust came from" (20). Psychologically she strains against the boundaries of memory and ritual; physically she strains against the boundaries of house, dust, all that is familiar to her eye.

Jung observes that, when viewed mythologically, another embodiment of the animus is Hades, abductor of Persephone, god of the dead. Hades, stretching his limbs and surveying his lands one morning, spies Persephone gathering flowers in a wide field. Struck to the core, he hesitates only a moment before swooping down alongside her, grasping her by the waist, and pulling her into his chariot. The god then guides his chariot and his capture down into his earthy home. In a similar vein, Jung notes that "a vast number of myths and fairy tales tell of a prince, turned by witchcraft into a wild animal or monster, who is redeemed by the love of a girl--a process symbolizing the manner in which the animus becomes conscious. . . . Very often the heroine is not allowed to ask questions about her mysterious unknown lover and husband; or she meets him only in the dark and may never look at him."[4] Eveline recalls first getting to know Frank, her sailor lover. Their courtship is swift, so swift that it seems only weeks ago that they had met (22). Perhaps too swift--Frank is clearly not a familiar part of her life. It is the novelty that draws her, rather than any sense of comfort or familiarity. She has not found her other half in Frank, but a half which she would like to have. When thinking of him, she moves into that other half, "exploring" that other sphere.

 

[She had] a hard life--but now that she was about to leave it she did not find it a wholly undesirable life.

She was about to explore another life with Frank. . . . She was to go away with him by the night-boat to be his wife and to live with him in Buenos Aryes where he had a home waiting for her. How well she remembered the first time she had seen him . . . Then they had come to know each other. . . . He took her to see The Bohemian Girl and she felt elated as she sat in an unaccustomed part of the theatre with him. . . . First of all it had been an excitement for her to have a fellow and then she had begun to like him. He had tales of distant countries. . . . He told her the names of the ships he had been on and the names of the different services. (21-22)

The key words here are "explore," "another," "come to know," "unaccustomed," "tales," "names." In this passage Frank straddles the realms both of memory and of the unknown. Eveline remembers with detail, with intimacy, but much of what she remembers is the sensation of looking to the future, the sensation of the unfamiliar. Frank is still very much in the dark, as is the "home waiting for her" in that strange land. She only has his words, tales, and names, and the music of the operetta, with which to visualize a life wholly removed from the one which she inhabits. "When he sang about the lass that loves a sailor, she always felt pleasantly confused" (22).

If we are to imagine Frank as the mythical dark prince, shrouded in shadow, or even as Hades himself, perhaps fanning the pomegranate branch beneath Eveline's nose, we must imagine the psychological and physical space which he offers. As Eveline luxuriates in the weavings of her shadow, the pretty pictures of a better life, "another life," she does not imagine the boundaries, the limitations, of this other existence. Frank wants to take her away, to show her a home in new lands, across broad seas. Frank asks her to break life-long ties, to break free from the boundaries of attachment to home and family. Frank seems to be offering physical freedom, the expansion of physical and personal space. But the sea, too, is a boundary. Water washes and refreshes, drowns and floods. By crossing the Atlantic she would break from home, from the waters which bind her island, only to be bound by the same ocean from the other side, only to find another home to keep and tend. Ovid tells us that we came from mud and water, so it is right to ask whether or not we can ever escape it.

Hades spirits Persephone down into the underworld, a maze of loam and dark heavy air, a constricted and winding space. Jung often personifies the unconscious as an underworld, a shadowy maze. Thus while Eveline sits against the cool glass of the window, her shadow and her animus cross. She feels the strictions of soil and dark, longs for the water and the open, but she mispairs her associations: the evening lengthens, casting deeper and deeper shadow; she seems to have made up her mind; she hears a tune outside, an "air." That word is significant for its dual meaning. "She knew the air" (22), she knew the song and it brings memories; she knew the air of that home, of that street, dusty and dim as it may be. She gasps for air through the thick of her memories, seizing on the thought of escape. What she does not see is that the new air and life which Frank offers her is damp and earthy, too, the air of Hades's labyrinthine home; the air which her shadow offers her is the same, just as coiled and mazelike; the air at home, as familiar as it is, is dense with memory. Where she was "pleasantly confused" before, Eveline is already spiraling into the "maze of distress" (23) which overtakes her along the crowded docks. "The evening deepened in the avenue. The white of the two letters in her lap grew indistinct" (22). She had written of her departure, she had said the words aloud to Frank, but now the shadows of the street, Joyce's exterior embodiment of Eveline's interior space, fade the brightness, the whiteness, of her plan. Even before she cries out for escape, we know that she will not leave.

The story is revealed, layer by layer, by what is at the surface and by what is just below. Joyce's immediate imagery--the sound of the waves introduced in the first line, the cycling tide of Eveline's memories pulling at her heart, the shadow lengthening in the street, the dusty lace curtains, recognizable and comforting because of their very dust--defines the surface, colors it, glosses it. But just below, we see the play of Eveline's interior world, the shadows and dust, waves and tides, of her personal space. This is where she grapples with her shadow and the physical manifestations of her animus, both her father and Frank. This is where she loses herself because this is where the boundaries themselves are lost. She can see with her own two eyes the house and dust and remembrances and darkling ocean which physically bind her, but she cannot see the personal boundaries. She cannot see that just as her father binds her so Frank does. Both men offer to define Eveline's physical space without knowing her personal reality. Physical and personal reality, though intertwined, knotted, and certainly mutually effective, must be separated in Eveline's own mind before she can make the right decision. She fails in this, losing herself in a "maze of distress," trying to compare old memories with new ones, the "familiar" with the unrecognizable and "unaccustomed."

As we read of Eveline in the first lines of Joyce's page, she is steeping in quiet thought. I can see her indolent in the methodical process of her brain, glued to window and chair, images from the street peeking into her consciousness only here and there. The mental process escalates, the memories becoming fresher, more and more pleasant--of Frank, of her father's good days--until they break with the memory of her mother's final illness and final words. We are then shifted to a scene along the docks: "swaying" (23), noisy, the crowds and voices swelling like the waves which break against the boats and pilings. Eveline's mental distress continues, although they are no longer her mother's insistent, frenzied words which she hears, but her own dizzy, "fervent" prayers. She clutches the iron railing to steady her body and her brain. I do not hear the crowds or even feel the human crush. Rather I feel the open space where Eveline leans against the railing, isolated in the straining of her brain and lips. As Frank rushes toward the boat, as the crowds follow him, boil about him, Eveline stands straight and taut. Her face is no longer seen through the twilight from the window, but pale and "white" and "set." Surrounded by pressing bodies and water, the eyes which she turns to Frank are calm again--not heavy or full of dreaming as in the beginning, but cold, without "recognition."

Joyce creates the sense of a nucleus, a center, a magnetic core in each of his stories (perhaps, in many instances, the city of Dublin itself, for better or worse), even while his characters search outside of themselves, search for their own center, their own extension and adventure. Conscious meaning floats at the surface, and it is the unconscious meaning which circles around the core, the heart.

A bell clanged upon her heart. She felt him seize her hand:

"Come!"

All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. He was drawing her into them: he would drown her. (23)

What is at Eveline's core? From where does her unconscious speak, and what part of her is she denying when she refuses Frank's face, glance, calls? Joyce has brought us full cycle, from Eveline's shadowy reverie to her white, set, face; from the waves' sounds in the first line to the water tumbling about her heart, to her final refusal of water and escape; and from her heart in the beginning back to her heart in the end; from a print of divine promises to the promise she remembers making her mother: when she looks up from the window, scanning the room and its familiar, dusty objects, she passes her eyes along the wall.

 

Perhaps she would never see again those familiar objects from which she had never dreamed of being divided. And yet during all those years she had never found out the name of the priest whose yellowing photograph hung on the wall above the broken harmonium beside the coloured print of the promises made to Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque. (20)

Alongside the familiar photograph--the familiar photograph which she never really knew--, Gifford emphasizes the significance of the "print of the promises" in Joyce Annotated.

St. Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647-90) was a member of the Visitation Order in France. Her career was marked by a baroque counterpoint of physical and spiritual suffering. In the years of 1673-77 she experience a sustained sequence of visions which led her to crusade for "public devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus." She was beatified in 1864 and hence is called "Blessed" in this story; she was canonized in 1920. The "coloured print" would illustrate the Sacred Heart and would list the promises made through St. Margaret-Mary to those faithful who display in their homes a representation of the Sacred Heart. . . . (Gifford, 49)

The sixth promise of the twelve is then given as follows:

"Sinners shall find in My Heart the source and the infinite ocean of mercy" (50).

So Joyce carries us along the circling tides which Eveline herself traverses, from the familiar to the new and back to the familiar, the author himself defining her physical and personal space as a circle. Is the familiar good or right? Is circling good or right? The images of circle and cycle are inextricably related to many rituals, to divine and earthly routines, to the passage and understanding of time past, time present, and time future. But in this way the circle binds and the familiar too becomes a map with boundary lines. Eveline's heart and mind--oscillating in space, shifting between spaces defined by light and shadow, defined by her own shadow and animus--lie at the center of a larger, spacial circle, and at the center of a circling story. The waves are parentheticals, notching either end and both sides.

Joyce personifies the shadow, gives body to the animus. Eveline's shadow, variously embodied, colors her vision; it entertains the notion of leaving while holding her back in the end. Her animus, also variously embodied, invites her to leave and requires her to stay, swaying--like the dockside crowds--between life and duty. Eveline's boundaries are so clear, those that are geometric and physical, and those that are organic and personal, but the boundaries of her unconscious are not. Shadow and animus flicker, shamelessly ambiguous and labyrinthine, so that for all her vision, for all her intimately reviewed memories, Eveline is caught without sight. Her eyes are pale, empty. "Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition" (23). Sitting in the window and later standing at the railing, Eveline looks through glass, over iron, ever on the other side. She sits or stands in her exterior space, straining to look into her interior space, straining to grasp at what she recognizes--or doesn't recognize--in both. Recognition seems an instantaneous effort on the surface, but we know how long Eveline sat by the light and shadow of the window. We know how long she mulled over Frank's face before not recognizing it. There being no recognition does not mean there is no memory--Eveline is full of memories--but it does mean refusing the uncharted boundaries of the new for the comfortable boundaries of the familiar. It does mean refusing "to know again."

Plato wrote a "myth of the cave," his articulation of life before civilization as he knew it. "Plato imagines primitive man imprisoned in a cave (The Republic, 517-19); he can do no more than stare at the back of his prison--on the wall of which are projected the shadows of an external reality, the existence of which he does not even suspect. Only by turning around and facing the world of the sun can he gain access to real knowledge." These cave shadows are "the dark spots which, by their presence confirm an absence."[5]

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1. Carl G. Jung, Man and His Symbols, (New York: Anchor Books, 1964) 173.
2. ibid., 168.
3. ibid., 189.
4. ibid., 193-194.
5. Victor I. Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow, (London: Reaktion Books, 1997) 1-7

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