SOURCE: “Romantic Ireland, Dead and Gone: Joyce's ‘Araby’ as National Myth,” in Colby Library Quarterly, Vol. 15, 1979, pp. 188–93.

In the following essay, Egan examines Joyce's utilization of Irish culture and history in “Araby.”

Although A. Walton Litz points out that a “careful analysis of the last pages of ‘Araby’ shows how the boy's personal despair is extended symbolically until it encompasses religious and political failure,”¹ perhaps insufficient attention has been given to the story's national imagery drawn from Irish culture and history and set in motion by the narrator's love for Mangan's sister, “the brown-clad figure cast by my imagination.”² The allusion here is to James Clarence Mangan, the nineteenth-century Irish poet, and primarily to his best-known work, the love song “Dark Rosaleen” (Roisin Dubh in Irish, or “Dark Little Rose”)—in part a translation from the Gaelic of a lyrical address to a personified Ireland written by a...