A synthesis of Joyce's "Eveline" and Elliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

. . . And so become yourself
Because the past is just a good bye --- Graham Nash

Past Hates Future
In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” by T.S. Eliot, Prufrock’s desires for self assertion are stymied by his culturally-induced feelings of inadequacy and inappropriateness. Similarly, in “Eveline,” by James Joyce, Eveline’s decision to act on a proposal which provides the hope of a more desirable fate than that of her deceased mother is reversed when she succumbs to the pressures of social doctrine. In both the poem and the short story, a portrait is painted (figuratively speaking) of a somewhat tiresome, cold, and shady existence for Prufrock and Eveline. Their autonomous visions seem within reach. But, grim as their lives may be, the next step toward fulfillment in their personal lives becomes a leap of faith which they are unwilling to take.
One notable difference between the two character’s respective dilemmas is that for Prufrock, the opportunity for self assertion will certainly present itself many times over, a fact which he uses to justify his inaction. Thus, he is held in a state of limbo, neither being nor becoming. Whereas, in the case of Eveline, the paralyzing factor is in the finality of her decision---the choice of one way of life will forever end the possibility of the other. Thus, the comfort of familiarity takes precedent over the large, dark ship of change. It could be said that if Prufrock were to one day find himself in a situation like Eveline’s, when he knows that the opportunity will not present itself again, he would be liberated from his indecision. Likewise, if Eveline, having had the time to experience the sorrow of missed opportunity, could borrow just one of Prufrock’s multitudes of opportunities, then she, in turn, would be able to make the right choice. Similarly, if Prufrock and Eveline, after having become familiar with the outcomes of their own decisions, were placed in each others shoes at that crucial moment in time when their decisions are made, while, at the same time, lacking a sense of obligation to the other’s history, they might each be more capable of taking the leap of faith which the other was too fearful to take. This would imply that it is the way in which the two characters relate to their own past which ultimately inhibits their ability to take on their appropriate futures, and that, in order to achieve the transformation which they seek, it is the very definition of themselves which is imposed on them by their respective histories that they would do well to disobey.
From the outside looking in, this seems quite obvious, as it is their history which has set the course for the future with which they struggle. Both Prufrock and Eveline foreshadow, with fear and anxiety, the fate that awaits them in the lifestyle with which they have become so familiar, as when Prufrock compares the “evening” to “. . . a patient etherized upon a table” (2-3), or in his reference to “Streets that follow like a tedious argument/ Of insidious intent” (8-9), implying to the reader a setting, or perhaps a feeling that when he says “Let us go then, you and I” (1), the “evening,” or atmosphere into which he is leading “you” is not one of freedom, but rather, one of being held fast in a state of anesthetization and malaise.
Lyndal Gordon shows the potentially autobiographical nature of this setting in his paraphrasing of Eliot: “. . . a narrow, unique, and horrible vision of life might come, as the result of a few slender experiences, to a highly sensitive youth” (44). This points to the mindset of Eliot in reference to his own past, as Gordon continues to point out, in Eliot’s youth, his “cynicism . . . loathing and disgust of humanity . . . project[ed] from his own inner world of nightmare, ‘some horror beyond words’” (44). Thus, the character of Prufrock is obliged to spend his evenings in acquiescence of Eliot’s “overwhelming need to question an abhorrent world based on attrition, poverty, and drabness” (44, Gordon). This is a picture painted vividly throughout the poem in such instances as the drabness of the “yellow fog/ . . . [with soot] upon its back [which]/Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains” (15-19), or in the attrition of Prufrock’s having “. . . . Seen [his] head . . . brought in upon a platter” (82).
But it’s not just the evenings that he passes ill at ease. For “[he has] known the . . . mornings, [and] afternoons” in which “[he has] measured out [his] life . . . [and] known the voices dying with a dying fall” (49-52). Whose voices? In what way does he relate to them?
It may be that these dying voices are beacons, penetrating “. . . the music from a farther room” (53) (his past, no doubt), and they provide jeering glimpses into his destiny, by design of his history. For he has “. . . known them all already” (49), the dying voices, and “[t]he eyes that fix [him] in a formulated phrase” (56), and as he assures himself that “[i]ndeed there will be time/ [t]o wonder, “Do I dare?”/ [d]isturb the universe?” (37-46), his attention turns to the way in which he is dressed. It is not the way he would have chosen for himself. It is, instead, the eyes which have him “pinned and wriggling on the wall” (58) that have insisted that his collar be “mount[ed] firmly to the chin.” (42). He wears his past like a tailored suit that his mother has dressed him up in for Easter Sunday, but spends the whole day wondering when he will be able to slip into something less stuffy. But, to his dismay, he finds that the stuffy suit has consumed him, and assumed the role of his identity. Yet he is fully aware that his necktie, “rich and modest,” is merely “asserted by a simple pin” (43), a fact which lies at the pivot point of his conflict, for it illustrates that he is mindful of the ease with which this symbol of his compliance may be discarded.
In the case of Eveline, once the “. . . pitiful vision of her mother’s life [had] laid its spell on the very quick of her being¬¬-¬--that life of commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness . . . [s]he stood up in a sudden impulse of terror” (27). This is the point in the story where Eveline comes to her senses. Like a ghost from the past, she revisit’s herself, infecting herself with the deep exhilaration of the recognition that she is alive. For the length of a single, short paragraph in the story, the dulling effects of culture give way the sparkling brilliance of a young girl. Eveline’s true identity burst through the surface of her conditioning, gasping for air with the intensity of one who was being drowned: “Escape!”, “Frank would save her,” “. . . she wanted to live,” “[w]hy should she be unhappy?” In her sudden rapture she momentarily transcends her past and decides that the opportunity for escape that Frank would provide was the right choice (27). Frank, the sailor to whom she was to be married, and “live with . . . in Buenos Ayres,” “would take her in his arms, fold her in his arms” (27), releasing her from the wicked fate of her mother, and the fear of her father, whose violence “. . . she sometimes felt herself in danger of,” which “[s]he knew . . . [had] given her the palpitations” (25).
Yet, these palpitations were more familiar to her than Buenos Ayres. And so was the “odour of dusty cretonne” (24), and “her promise to her mother . . . to keep the home together as long as she could” (27), and all the dusting, and the hard work, and “those whom she had known all her life” (25), the picnic with her father, and even the ladies in the store, for whom she was instructed to “look lively” (25) and not to keep waiting. Or consider, for example, Peter De Voogd’s assertion that Eveline’s final expression to Frank (‘She set her white face to him’) was not representative of “a pitiful case of stasis,” but a “melodramatic . . . [act of heroism] . . . giving up a pleasant if uncertain future, and asserting instead her Irish girlhood as latterday embodiment of her blessed role model, Margret Mary Alacoque” (48, my emphasis). It was from the mold of her Irish girlhood that she projected a future of no escape.
This was her past, her history. This was the history that she obeyed when, while looking out the window and waiting to board the ship, it informed her as to who she was, and what her place in the world was. It was the life that she had lived, and had so frightfully resolved to escape, that she referred to in the determination of whether her “consent . . . to go away, to leave her home . . . [w]as . . . wise” (25). If only she had known that her history was not interested in her future, but in her enslavement, she would have known better than to base her future on such irrelevancies as “What [they would] say of her in the Stores when they found out that she had run away with a fellow” (25). This is as ridiculous as the mouse taking time to ask the snake if she might be granted the opportunity to run off and become herself.
In the case of both the poem and the short story, the protagonists face crises of identity in societies where the penalties for disobeying the rule of social doctrine, and thus allowing one’s self (the individual will) room to breathe, are ingrained within the psyche. This coincides closely with the insights of Craig Hansen Werner on Joyce’s Dubliners. Werner states that “Joyce . . . identified paralysis as the central theme of Dubliners” (39). In such an atmosphere of repression, there is a perpetual distancing from balance on the side of the collective at the expense of individual will and sensibility. Or, to put it another way, as Werner states that, “In effect, Joyce suggests that the external environment crushes the individual sensibility, encouraging the more sensitive Irish children to accept and internalize paralysis” (41). Finally, allowing Eliot to weigh in on the situation, we find that that such cultural environments create a taboo on “. . . the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves, and an evasion of the visible and sensible world” (T.S. Eliot: The Design of His Poetry).
Upon reflection of their past, the protagonists eventually succumb to the residual elements of this taboo within which their respective identities have been formulated. And so the opportunity is lost---lost to one J. Alfred Prufrock, lost to a young woman named Eveline, lost to the multitudes of others who allow history to determine their fate for them, lost to the world, lost, that is, until the one who is, indeed, “. . . no prophet” (83) nor “Prince Hamlet” (111) will “. . . [Bite] off the matter with a smile” (91) “. . . squeeze . . . the universe into a ball” (92) and “Come from the dead . . . to tell you all, I shall tell you all” (94-95).

Works Cited
Drew, Elizabeth. T.S. Eliot: The Design of His Poetry. 1949. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Eliot, T.S. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces (One Volume Edition). Ed. Maynard Mack. New York, London: Norton, 1997. 2787-2790.
Gordon, Lyndal. Eliot’s Early Years. 1977. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
Joyce, James. “Eveline.” Dubliners. 1914. New York: Bantam, 1990. 24-28.
Vooged, Peter de. “Imagining Eveline, Visualized Focalizations in James Joyce’s Dubliners.” European Journal of English Studies. 2000, Vol. 4, No. 1, 39-48.
Werner, Craig Hansen. Dubliners: A Pluralistic World. 1988. Boston: Twayne Publishers

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