Gao Huan

The short story Eveline opens in a seemingly tranquil nostalgia, and when it ends, the heroine is stricken with a sudden frenzy of distress, and loses power to act.

The first part of the story is unfolded through Eveline��s flow of thoughts, which wanders freely from present back to the memories of the past, or forth to the dreams of future. Though readers are only able to see the action and plot from Eveline��s relatively subjective angle of vision, we get a general picture of what is happening and what is on the heroine's mind.

Eveline��s happiness is largely in her carefree childhood. Now its fragrance has turned into the odor of dusty cretonne, mixed with the stale smell of her present: She works hard, both in the house and at business, where she is constantly found fault with. She feels in danger of her father��s violence, with no one to protect her. ��The invariable squabble for money" wearies her unspeakably. She is insecure and mentally oppressed by the menial burdens necessitated by survival.

Since she meets sailor Frank, a lot of variety has been injected into her bored life. It is excitement at first and gradually grows into fondness or love. Frank at least gives her a chance to breathe freely and heartily out of the suffocating life. But her father forbids her to see him, probably because of the stereotyped image of sailors. Finally she decides to elope with Frank, which seems to be the only solution to all her miseries.

Eveline lives a hard life, arduous, boring and hopeless. But still, she thinks she has a right to happiness. Maybe that is what the modern human existence is like in the author��s eyes. The outside world is a cage, with visible, or more frequently, invisible bars, whereas the inner self longs for freedom. The conflict between the two is intense and central to the human survival. Often the self is turned back painfully against the almost invincible bars. When there is an opportunity to get away, whether wise or not, it looks particularly alluring. Frank's exoticism is enough to fascinate Eveline and win her heart. That is true of human behavior to some extent. People like things sometimes just because they are different, not because they are good. When all that life offers is monotony, a change will be most desirable. Eveline looks forward to exploring a foreign life with Frank, free from all the weariness that she has undergone for so long.

But once ready to go, Eveline begins to think a lot. Inhaling the odor of dusty cretonne, she makes something like a mental summary of her life in this city. ��Now that she was about to leave it she did not find it a wholly undesirable life. ��(And maybe the life waiting for her ahead is not a wholly DESIRABLE life?) She savors the occasional but sweet moments in the family. Her father is getting older and will miss her. She remembers the promises she has made to keep the home together. But the image of her mother��s life of "commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness�� terrifies her and prompts her to escape the fate of her mother, who has not been treated with respect.

Eveline believes that a future with Frank as a part outweighs the regret about abandoning her home. Thoughts of stay might have flashed through her but are immediately suppressed into her subconscious. Her conscious is, for the time being, preoccupied with the prospect of an exhilarating life elsewhere. However, the underlying unwillingness to go has been seeded and started to take root in her mind.

The second part of the story takes place at the dock. Their passage booked, they are about to leave. Among the swaying crowd around her, which is weird to her, Eveline suddenly feels disorientated. The hustle and bustle casts a spell on her, makes her distressed, nauseated and stupefied. Even the prayers to God don��t work. The love for her rescuer Frank evaporates. No! No! She can��t go! He draws her to follow, but she acts like a helpless yet stubborn animal.

Why does Eveline draw beck at the crucial moment, after all that Frank has done for her? Some say Frank might be a deceiver and it is wise of her to stay. This can be true but beside the point. What stops Eveline mainly lies in her unspoken apprehension for the future, an instinctive caution out of self-preservation, and her unrealized intense attachment to her familiar home. ��All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. He was drawing her into them: he would drown her.�� The swimming noisy surroundings suggest to her a threatening uncertainty. The present is agonizing enough. The future might be better or even worse, in an alien country with a lover who is formerly a total stranger. The challenge of an unforeseen future projects both a light and a shadow on Eveline's heart. Obviously, at the dock, the light in her conscious is devoured by the dark shadow in her subconscious. According to Freud, the subconscious is more revealing of and true to the self and therefore more powerful than the conscious. It is possible that her superego, where the sense of responsibility and conscience inculcated by the social convention dwell, interferes to make her stay, besides her ��future-phobia". What the future will be like can never be known if she does not have a try, she simply chooses not to know it. Her expression is blank when Frank rushes away, still calling her name. This suggests that Eveline is undergoing a mixed feeling of frustration and release. After all, the accustomed boredom or suffocation is easier to stand than the fear and anxiety. Wrestling between the definite unhappy destiny and a turn toward a possible happy life, she chooses the former like a masochist.

Eveline recoils from an actual turn of life because it means a lot to her. ��In her home anyway she had shelter and food; she had those whom she had known all her life about her.�� If the future turns out just so-so or even worse, why does she bother to act? But the status quo really tires her out. A fancy for variety just turns her on. ��She tried to weigh each side of the question�� and decides to leave. Nevertheless, she changes her mind again at last. Eveline wavers in mind, inept to grasp her destiny in her own hands. To go a little bit further, we can see that not only Eveline, but we also have this problem: putting off or abandoning an important decision, in the remote hope that there will be a smoother way. As a result, the delay or inaction often intensifies the existential anguish. In time, we have to face the reality point and blank and regret and deplore. Indecisiveness is quite a characteristic of the modern human existence, or perhaps even of the past existence, as seen in Hamlet. People don��t want to lose what they have got, no matter how insignificant it is. They don��t want to take risks. But actually they are losing things every minute, including the important spirit of exploration or rebellion.

Though Eveline has yearned to fulfil herself in a completely different way, when she actually comes to it, to her dismay, she finds herself unable to take it. The shackles of daily routines and ethic conventions have disabled her to deviate, discouraged her to go for an ideal. Some people are numbed by the stuffy atmosphere to such a degree that they don��t have an ideal at all. Even if they have one, like Eveline, they have to treat it as an illusion. They dare not reach out for it because the grail seems too strangely good for them. So, without courage, without action, what could have been a realizable ideal really degrades into an illusion.

At the dock, Eveline probably gets the epiphany that she is not up to making dreams come true. Formerly she at least has some confidence in her own capacity for dreams. Now it dawns on her that the confidence is but a shell: the guts have already been eaten by the stale life. If we say her confidence once has a hallucinating effect on her to move, now even the hallucination is removed. Now that she chooses to stay, she will inevitably fall pray to the very way of life that captures her mother: giving up claims on love and happiness, sacrificing herself to the worldly trivialities, getting swallowed by the jaws of dullness and becoming soulless. Yes, she is awakened, but what is the use of this enlightenment? It afflicts her even more in the predicament. Now even HOPE she has lost. A chance wasted is indeed worse than no chance at all.

The story Eveline is simple in plot and unpretentiously artful in language. It reveals for us a modern human state of mind, which has profoundly much to do with the dilemmatic existence in this world. The root of the tragedy of Eveline, as of many others, is confinement and indecisiveness. People come to see with disappointment that individual is not the master of himself. Again this favorite theme of modern literature is successfully fleshed out in this short story Eveline.

Paper for British Literature Course, got an A from Professor Sun Jian.