he shriveled psyche born of virginal lovelessness. According to Sutcliffe, "Eveline" was a "gallant tribute by Joyce to his beloved, Nora Barnacle, who did defy family anger and social constraint when she courageously sailed off with him into an unknown future in October 1904" (10).
But perhaps only a stern Jesuit education could have positioned Joyce so ideally as a critic of the society that such an education was surely intended to endorse. Further, evidence of the preoccupation with faith in general and Catholicism in particular in Joyce's texts speaks as much to a need to sort out the problem of God as to a simple rejection of faith. This does not mean, of course, that Joyce's critical stance toward the Church can be dismissed as a cry for faith. In that regard, Hodgekins points to "Joyce the man standing at an equal distance from Catholic belief and from modern liberal Protestantism, since like Stephen Dedalus he rejected the one for its claims to power over him and despised the other for its denial of any power at all" (426). Yet Hodgekins also notes that, although Joyce "firmly denied belief all his life . . . he criticized those who lightly dismissed the Church and Catholic doctrine" (427). In other words, even at his most hostile toward the Church Joyce never quite relinquishes the label Catholic; Joyce in that sense belongs to the culture of Jesuit training, even if its rigors, against all Jesuitical expectations, turned him into an all-time-great freethinker. The overarching point is this: Irish Catholic culture figures prominently in several of the stories of Dubliners and in the very structure of Ulysses.
If "Araby" is a coming-of-age story about the perils of entering manhood and the vicissitudes of the battle of the sexes, it is equally a meditation on the special difficulties of maturity for a boy whose entire experience is suffused with the symbols and dogma of Catholicism. The boy lives near a Catholic school for...