Analysing gender in “Araby”

Throughout Joyce’s story “Araby” the way the narrator, a schoolboy, views
Mangan’s sister introduces the theme of love and sexuality. Both the narrator
and the sister are not given proper names, providing an appropriate ground for
the archetypal functions of a desiring lover and a desired “princess”. Of course,
in “Araby” the romance quest is mocked and subverted. In the end, the narrator
realizes that he was motivated not by love but by vanity. Nonetheless, both boy
and girl are cast in conventional gender roles. The fact remains that “she” is
represented as an object of male desire more than as an independent being. In
short, the function of Mangan’s sister is reduced to enhancing the boy’s budding
sexuality, as he emerges from childhood innocence and is initiated into young
adulthood.
Gender roles
By representing a nameless, distant woman and a hopeless, typical young boy
who is infatuated with her, Joyce falls back on typical gender roles to convey the
theme of romance. The gender roles in “Araby” are clear from the way social
space is divided. The female characters in “Araby” are not allowed to move
about as freely as the male characters. For example, the narrator and his male
companions used to play in the streets till daylight had long faded away, and the
light from the windows fell on the road:

Our shouts echoed in the silent street. The career of our play brought us through
the dark muddy lanes behind the houses where we ran the gauntlet of the rough
tribes from the cottages, to the back doors of the dark dripping gardens where
odours arose from the ashpits, to the dark odorous stables where a coachman
smoothed and combed the horse or shook music from the buckled harness.
When we returned to the street light from the kitchen windows had filled the
areas. (Joyce, “Araby”)

It is remarkable that the playful teenagers are all boys – there are no girls among
them. Perhaps most, if not all, of them are students of the Catholic Brothers’
School. The boys roamed around the neighborhood, including its unsavory parts
and those places inhabited by people belonging to ‘low culture’, such as the
“rough tribes from the cottages” or the coachman lurking inside the dark stables.
These parts are way from the reassuring, domestic “light from the kitchen
windows”, to which they returned only when it was time to go home.
At tea-time it is Mangan’s sister who stands at the door and calls her brother to
go inside for tea. The figure of the sister standing at the doorstep not only
significantly points out the dividing line between private female space and
public male space but also triggers on the narrator’s romantic fantasies about her
silhouette.

She was waiting for us, her figure defined by the light from the half-opened
door. Her brother always teased her before he obeyed and I stood by the railings
looking at her. Her dress swung as she moved her body and the soft rope of her
hair tossed from side to side. (Joyce, “Araby”)

The male gaze

The narrator goes on to say, “Every morning I lay on the floor in the front
parlour watching her door. The blind was pulled down to within an inch of the
sash so that I could not be seen. When she came out on the doorstep my heart
leaped”. (Joyce, “Araby”) His fascination with Magnan’s sister is clearly
represented in the quote. Without words, Joyce creates a scene that puts woman
in a position of what Laura Mulvey calls “look-at-ness” instead of positions of
worth. She becomes the object of the male gaze: “Woman as image, man as
bearer of the look.” (Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, 1989). Gender
roles in Araby, although indirect, drive the story’s theme of the boy’s sexual
awakening. “Every morning,” the narrator explains, “I lay on the floor in the
front parlour watching her door. The blind was pulled down to within an inch of
the sash so that I could not be seen.”
He would follow her part of the way, so he “kept her brown figure always in
[his] eye”. This is the typical attitude of the voyeur, who sees yet remains
unseen. The power contrast is perhaps best expressed through the situation of
Mangan’s sister standing in the doorway, virtually blinded by the light that
framed her from behind, peering out into the darkness, while the boys lurked in
the dark nooks and crannies, looking at her and enjoying the curves of her
romanticized figure.