Lily Galbraith

I read Phillip Larkin’s Church Going this summer through the lens of its representation and even use of “curiosity.” As the narrator walks through he church, he uses all of his senses — different from a supposed cavalier indifference just to make fun of the church. I’m reminded of the bird in Hardy’s Darkling Thrush, weak and fragile and old but singing its song out to the world.

I love the idea of love for love’s sake in EBB’s Sonnet 14 .

“Do not say I love her for her smile – her look – her way of speaking gently, for a trick of thought That falls in well with mine”

Interesting in light of standards typically applied to women — be beautiful! Be an object for men to admire! She says, implicitly, I will age, I will change, and I want to be loved for who I am. Not her “smile,” “look,” or “speaking,” but something of soul’s senses. Anyways, this reminds me of marriange in Pride and Prejudice:

“Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance. If the dispositions of the parties are ever so well known to each other, or ever so similar beforehand, it does not advance their felicity in the least. They always continue to grow sufficiently unlike afterwards to have their share of vexation, and it is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life.” 

Of course, those lines are spoken by Charlotte Lucas, who is so much more pragmatic, or so it seems, than EBB. I wonder if Charlotte Lucas thinks love is not even part of the equation? She is motivated by a desire not to be an economic burden to her parents and, not unreasonably, thinks that the situation with Mr Collins offers her a respectable future. I love the episode in P&P when Elizabeth visits them and takes the measure of the marriage, noting for example that Charlotte has positioned her reading room so that she minimizes exposure to her husband.

David Thoreau contends that “when our companion fails us we transfer our love instantaneously to a worthy object.” That absence is a compelling and moving force is a truth in James Joyce’s short story Araby, where the narrator attempts to fill the silences of his home with other forms of presence.

Absence marks the boy’s home. He lives at the “blind end” of a “detached” and “uninhabited” street, whose silence breaks only briefly when school children are set free (Joyce 1). Shouts of play loom against the “ever-changing sky” and “feeble” lanterns in the street (1). Scholar Luke R. Farquhar carefully explores these images in Our Shouts Echoed in the Silent Street. The street lamps are “feeble,” unable to produce any lasting illumination, and instead, “the most vibrant light in the boy’s description comes from the glowing bodies of the children” (Farquhar 17). These images suggest that the boy notices a conflict between his own vitality and the comparative lifelessness in his home. Through contrasting images of North Richmond Street, Joyce demonstrates the boy’s sense of absence.

The boy breaks from these descriptions when he meets Mangan’s sister. He writes that her “dress swung as she moved her body” and the “soft rope of her hair tossed from side of side,” awarding her a sense of life and vitality against an otherwise stagnant landscape (1). Similar to the glowing light of the school children, this description casts her as a rare living presence. He idealizes her, delighting in her presence and fixating on her absence when she is gone. When he cannot watch her, he returns to his “tedious” days, irritated by the “ticking clock,” and unable to call his “wandering thoughts together” (3).

Notably, he treats her more like an empty “chalice” than a person. She is referenced only by her relation to a man, relegated to the object of a boy’s desire or the relative of a boy’s best friend. Writer Kaitlyn Cummings contends that, in the realm of literature, the absence of names has the “power to silence the voice, suppress the identity, and impose passivity upon the character” (Cummings 1). As Blanche Gelfant writes, “the reader can see Mangan’s sister only as she has been appropriated by the male” (Gelfant 263). The boy’s authority to either hide or disclose her name conveys his inherent control of her narration and yet, he repeatedly reduces her to a simple “brown figure” and fills her with his own presumptions and fascinations (2). In this sense, the boy manufactures the presence he feels from the girl, proving its hollowness.

The boy’s enchantment with Araby marks another feeble attempt to escape silence. Scholar Jerome Mandel writes that, in quest narratives, a lady gives the literary knight his sense of purpose. In line with Mandel’s work, the boy’s quest to Araby emanates from their interaction. Her brief mention of the Bazaar awakens awe and intrigue in his otherwise dull world, calling to him through the “silence” of his “soul” (3). Afterward, the “serious work of life” seems to him like “ugly monotonous child’s play” (3). Entranced and infatuated, he imagines not just a new world but a new self, “singing” in its silent rooms (3). When he arrives at the bazaar and finds “the greater part of the hall was in darkness,” his imagined enchantment disappears and once again met with silence, one so stark it resembles “a church after a service” (4).

Throughout Araby, hollow idealization metaphorically joins his infatuation with the girl and his fantastical quest to the bazaar. For the narrator, both promise a different kind of presence to replace the dark ones at home. When the narrator sees the futility and vainness of his efforts, he describes himself as part of the darkness he initially wished to escape from. As the boy finds himself “remembering with difficulty why I had come,” he embodies the paralysis inherent in the story’s symbols (5). The narrator transfers his “love” to another object, only to find that the objects around him bring the same end.