Tag: araby

As soon as the narrator of “Araby” finally gets some money from his late-arriving uncle, he takes off down Buckingham Street on his way to the bazaar: “I held a florin tightly in my hand as I strode down Buckingham Street towards the station” (34). Buckingham Street is situated just southwest of the narrator’s residence. From his house in North Richmond Street, he must first go southwest into North Circular Road, travel southeast briefly to Summerhill, turn right, and then turn left into Buckingham Street. Once there, he must travel a quarter mile (.4 km) down the entire street until he reaches Amiens Street where the train station is located.

Buckingham Street, Dr. Ruth McManus and Ms. Sinead O’Shea suggest, “represents a microcosm of the city’s development from its initial layout by speculative landowners in the late 18th century ‘golden age’, through its largely middle-class residential status in the 19th century, its demotion to tenement use, then attempted rehabilitation in the late 20th century.” The narrator would have been traveling down this residential street a little after 9pm, and if his uncle is correct, the residents of the houses would have been “in bed and after their first sleep” already (34).

Things might have become a bit more lively as he approached the intersection of Buckingham, Amiens, and Montgomery Streets, though. Montgomery Street was part of “Monto,” the city’s red-light district. Though the boy would not have been in its midst, he would be right on the edge, an appropriate position as he teeters on adolescence. His entire trip, in fact, parallels the movement from childhood to maturity through its increasingly public and complex locations and it evolving modes of transportation (e.g. walking to train riding). Buckingham Street, with its transition from sleeping residents to soliciting women, becomes, to use McManus and O’Shea’s language, a “microcosm” of the revelations the boy experiences in his final epiphany.

It might be one of the most recognizable first lines in English literature, and it happens to contain not just one but two specific geographical references to very real locations: “North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free” (29). The sentence is from “Araby,” certainly Joyce’s most anthologized story, and it is the setting for much of the story’s action. (The story’s title location is the locale for only the final few paragraphs.) The narrator’s home street is described as “blind” or having a dead end. At the blind end stands an empty house while “[t]he other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces.” The almost haunting personification of the blind street and the gazing houses echoes the general hybridization of place and person that characterizes Dubliners and emphasizes the importance of place and geography in the collection as a whole.

Joyce himself lived at 17 North Richmond Street for a time when he was a child, and number 12 North Richmond Street is identified in Ulysses as a place where Stephen Dedalus’s mother had once kindled a fire for him (U 10.76). In “Araby,” it’s where the boy lives with his aunt and uncle, where he plays with his friends in the shadows, and where he falls in love with Mangan’s sister in the evening lamplight. The railings are mentioned several times and can be seen in the image above: “…I was alone at the railings. She held one of the spikes, bowing her head towards me. The light from the lamp opposite our door caught the white curve of her neck, lit up her hair that rested there and, falling, lit up the hand upon the railing” (32). Later the boy recalls this image: “I may have stood there for an hour, seeing nothing but the brown-clad figure cast by my imagination, touched discreetly by the lamplight at the curved neck, at the hand upon the railings and at the border below the dress.” The description almost anticipates Gabriel’s image, a couple miles southwest at Usher’s Island, of his wife on the stairs listening to distant music.

Once again, this week’s featured place is a route rather than one fixed location. The video below shows the path the narrator of “Araby” takes all alone one night in hopes of finding something special to buy for Mangan’s sister.

He starts in the street where he lives, North Richmond Street, walks down Buckingham Street, gets on a train which passes through Westland Row Station, and disembarks at the bazaar. The location of Araby, according to Don Gifford, is just across the River Dodder. As with the “An Encounter” route, the narrator does not return home but is left at the end of the story on the south side of the Liffey and east side of the Dodder. As all the childhood stories begin north of the Liffey, the crossing of it becomes almost a rite of passage, a journey into adulthood whether the move be temporary or permanent. The epiphany the narrator experiences at the end, coupled with the lack of a return home, emphasizes the permanence of the step toward maturity he has made even if we assume that he does return home after the end of the story.

To view the route on the map is to observe the visual cues of the journey. Though the trip is only represented in one paragraph in the text, it becomes quite a trek when seen played out on the screen and when considered as a solo night journey by a young boy. It begins with a walk along the streets before evolving into a more fast-paced train ride. The route as projected in Google Earth offers a modern-day view of the landscape, complete with tunnels and stadiums, but it also raises questions about that landscape as it would have appeared to a young boy in the 1890s. Was there indeed a tunnel on the path of the train? If so, what does the tunnel add symbolically to the narrator’s journey from home to Araby, from childhood to adolescence? What other elements of the landscape help contribute to the story’s themes?