Eveline and her father’s relationship

Eveline and her father’s relationship is shaped by a sharp contradiction: she fears his threats and resents the struggle to support the household, yet remembers tenderness and shared family moments. As she weighs leaving with Frank, her father is neither simply a source of danger nor an uncomplicated object of affection; the relationship helps bind her to the home she is preparing to leave.

Dependence and fear at home

Eveline is over nineteen, but still sometimes feels in danger of her father’s violence. She understands that this fear has caused her palpitations. When the children were growing up, he had not treated her as he treated her brothers, Harry and Ernest, but latterly he had begun threatening her and invoking her dead mother as the only reason he did not act. With Ernest dead and Harry often away in the country for his church-decorating work, she feels she has nobody to protect her.

The threat sits alongside a recurring dispute over money. Eveline gives her entire weekly wage of seven shillings to the household, while Harry sends what he can. Her father accuses her of squandering money and refuses to give her his earnings freely; after the argument, he asks whether she intends to buy Sunday’s dinner. She must then hurry out with her black leather purse, do the shopping, and return with provisions. The quarrel is not merely a matter of cash: it exposes how responsibility for maintaining the household falls on her while she remains subject to her father’s control.

Care and contradictory memories

Eveline’s view of her father is not confined to fear and resentment. She notices that he is growing old and thinks he will miss her if she goes. Sometimes, she remembers, he could be very nice. When she was laid up for a day, he read her a ghost story and made toast for her at the fire. That care gives the relationship a tenderness that sits uneasily beside his threats and their Saturday-night arguments.

Her recollections also reach back to a family picnic on the Hill of Howth when her mother was alive. She remembers her father putting on her mother’s bonnet to make the children laugh. In the immediate context of her contemplated departure, this comic family memory recalls a version of home in which her father is a source of amusement and shared affection, not fear alone.

The relationship at the point of departure

The prospect of marriage to Frank and a new home in Buenos Ayres sharpens Eveline’s mixed feelings about her father. She imagines that, as a married woman abroad, she will be treated with respect and will not be treated as her mother was. At the same time, she acknowledges that her father can be kind and that he would miss her. Her attachment to home therefore includes both a wish to escape his threats and the pull of remembered family intimacy.

As her time to leave runs out, a street organ brings her back to her promise to her mother to keep the home together as long as she could. She recalls the last night of her mother’s illness: her father had ordered the organ-player away and given him sixpence, then returned to the sickroom and complained about Italians coming over. The episode links her father to both practical action in a family crisis and a remark that remains part of her memory of that night. Together with her recollections of his kindness and her knowledge of his threats, it helps explain why leaving is emotionally difficult; the relationship remains unresolved as she faces departure.