Axis of Reality on the Short Story Araby

Illusion and Reality in "Araby"

In James Joyce's short story "Araby," written in 1905, but first published in 1914 in Dubliners (Merriam Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature, p. 611) a young boy experiences his first sexual awakening, and finds himself endlessly fantasizing about "Mangan's sister," who lives in a house near his own. As Joyce describes Mangan's sister, from the boy's perspective "Her dress swung as she moved her body and the soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side." He cannot pull his image of Mangan's sister from his mind, even long enough to say his prayers. Thoughts of Mangan's sister interfere impede his concentration at school. Without understanding why, the picture inside his head of Mangan's sister, distorted or real, takes on iconic significance, substituting for reality in a way far more, in fact deliciously, exciting. However, by the end of the story, the young boy's axis of reality, which has to do, in his case, with the lives and priorities of those older than himself, pulls him back, and much-cherished hope of buying and presenting Mangan's sister with a special gift from Araby is destroyed.

The word "axis" means "a straight line around which a body rotates" (Webster's New American Dictionary, p. 36). When the boy becomes fascinated with Mangan's sister, his mind wanders far from that axis, which consists of school, church, home, and the authority of others, religious, parental, and otherwise, to a place that seems to open up an entirely new world, in which imagination and fantasy are allowed free play, and hopes, wishes, and fantasies may be entertained with abandoned. It is a child's kind of straying from such an axis: the first delicious stirrings of pending adulthood, and along with it, freedom from the axis of reality that (as a child's does) grounds a child's privileges, responsibilities, and activities in the rules, expectations, demands, and wishes of others older than himself or herself. For example, the heavy dominance and seriousness of Irish Catholicism is nearly palpable throughout the story. As Joyce states: "The former tenant of our house, a priest, had died in the back drawing-room. As one critic points out, however:

In some ways "Araby" has nothing to say to us. Ours is not a culture of convent schools and sexual repression, and we no longer rely upon the occasional Saturday night bazaar for titillating entertainment. But in other ways, nothing much has changed. This story has universal appeal because it speaks to the intense passion and awesome insecurity of adolescence.

Within this story, prayer and sexuality also become crazily fused and intertwined: the young man prays to God that he may be able to give Managan's sister something beautiful and precious from the Araby Bazaar, and thereby encourage her affection for him. "I pressed the palms of my hands together until they trembled, murmuring: 'O love! O. love!' many times." To further juxtapose the opposing forces of repressive religion and sexuality, Mangan's sister herself "would love to go" to Araby, yet cannot do so since she is scheduled to attend a convent retreat that night.

Next, however, he is pulled back again, this time by his own personal axis of reality, but by his uncle's. When Saturday night finally arrives, he waits impatiently for his uncle to come home and bring him some money for the bazaar. However, his uncle comes in late, at 9:00, and the first way reality encroaches on his expectations for this night is that there is nothing he can do to hasten his uncle's return. Yet without it, he is powerless to take his next, much dreamed-of step.