boys. Around his home are books with Catholic themes or referents. His parents' lodger had been a priest. The sense of a particular kind of atmosphere--"musty from having been long enclosed" (Joyce 18)--pervades not only the house but all that is associated with the morally and emotionally sheltered life of a quietly devout, but almost aggressively narrow, family in Dublin. Ostensibly, "Araby" is built around the efforts of a young boy to impress a young girl by buying a gift for her at a bazaar from which the story derives its title. Arriving too late, after most of the bazaar booths have shut down, he is disappointed and frustrated, unable to achieve his purpose. He imagines himself a knight in shining armor, her a maiden for whom he does great deeds. "I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes" (19). She--his best pal's kid sister--is unattainable Woman, as unattainable and therefore as much an object of obsession as the Virgin was the medieval knights who embraced the cult of Mary. His devotion to her is characterized in re
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