“It Wouldn’t Be Her Own”: Norah Hoult’s “Miss Jocelyn” as a Response to James Joyce’s “Eveline”

Abstract

This article examines Norah Hoult’s 1929 short story “Miss Jocelyn,” from her short story collection Poor Women!, as an intertextual response to James Joyce’s representation of single women in the short story “Eveline” included in his landmark 1914 collection Dubliners. Drawing on Katherine Fama and Jorie Lagerwey’s work on singlehood, I suggest that Hoult challenges the dichotomy of “married” versus “premarried” that Joyce critiques in “Eveline”. At the same time, Hoult’s portrait of Miss Jocelyn powerfully engages the material and social factors that so often condition single women’s lives. She considers not only Miss Joceyln’s awareness and loss of her former independence, but also the ways that ageism compromises her options and agency. While both stories examine the disempowerment of women, “Miss Joceyln” highlights the loss of agency, the financial dependency, and the societal dismissal to which celibate older women were often subject in early twentieth-century Ireland and Britain, thus treating celibacy as a “third space”—an option not proffered in Joyce’s work.

1. Introduction

Norah Hoult’s 1929 short story collection, Poor Women!, is riddled with single females.1 Yet the appellation “single” here is potentially misleading: despite their common marital status, these characters represent a wide variety of marital, social and sexual histories, which are themselves inflected by factors such as age, religion, and class. Thus, the eponymous character in “Ethel” is a middle-aged, unfaithful wife living in limbo after her lover’s abandonment; “Violet Ryder” is a self-important, naïve young working girl who lives at home; “Alice” is a self-righteous, single older churchgoer; “The Other Woman” is a mistress anxiously awaiting her lover, and “Mrs. Johnson” is a widow forced into prostitution. Whatever their circumstances, the female characters in Hoult’s collection consistently expose the societal challenges they navigate by virtue of being single women—but they also reflect how varied the category of “singlehood” can truly be.

What all these characters do share, however, is narrative exposure to the strictures imposed by women’s socially-expected dependence on men. As Hoult observes in the short passage titled “Mary, Pity Women!,” appended to some issues of the 1929 edition of Poor Women!:

Any sensitive young woman starting out in life comes sooner or later up against the hard, and sometimes unpalatable, fact that it is one of her most important jobs as a woman to conciliate the man [sic]. He may be her father; he may be her employer; he may be her lover; he may be her husband—the point is that the great majority of women are dependent on some man.

(Hoult [1929] 2016a, p. 191)2

Poor Women! mercilessly exposes how its female characters are circumscribed by their gendered positionality in society—as well as by their own occasional complicity with such constraints and by confounding variables such as class and age.

The present article considers only one of Hoult’s short stories, “Miss Jocelyn,” the fifth story included in the 1929 run of Poor Women!. I suggest “Miss Jocelyn” proffers an intertextual response to James Joyce’s representation of single women in the short story “Eveline,” from his landmark 1914 collection Dubliners, by highlighting the limitations of the married/pre-married binary. Hoult’s portrait of Miss Jocelyn’s situation powerfully engages the material and social factors that so often condition single women’s lives, such as financial strictures, class differences, and ageism. If young Eveline seems paralyzed by her societal position, by familial obligations, and by her own naïveté, older Miss Jocelyn is irrevocably trapped by—and painfully aware of—her own societal position; Eveline’s failure to escape contrasts with Miss Jocelyn’s ultimate inability to do so. In this respect, Hoult’s short story can also be situated within wider discussions about the intersectional influence of factors such as aging on literary representations of women.3

However, the story also positions Miss Jocelyn as a woman who managed to create a single life for herself on her own terms, until age and poverty intervened; unlike Eveline, she is not straddling the binary options of daughterly dependence or marriage that Joyce’s short story tacitly critiques.4 While both stories examine the disempowerment of women, then, “Miss Jocelyn” grants its eponymous character a life of independence, at least for a time, and thereby carves out a third option that was not proffered to Eveline. Hoult’s story highlights the loss of agency, financial dependency, and societal dismissal to which celibate older women were often subject in early twentieth-century Ireland and Britain.

I will address parallels between the two stories below, but I should note that there are both practical and circumstantial reasons to speculate that Poor Women! may have been intended as a response to Joyce’s earlier text. First, we know that Hoult was a reader of Joyce; aside from his literary ubiquity at the time, Hoult directly references Joyce’s monumental 1922 novel Ulysses in a review of Samuel Beckett’s More Pricks Than Kicks that she published in 1934 (Hoult 1934, pp. 84–87; see Harrington 1991, pp. 65–66). Like Ulysses, which carefully traces Leopold Bloom’s perambulations around Dublin, Hoult maps London throughout Poor Women!—a method Hoult would later employ, too, in her 1935 novel Holy Ireland (Madden-Simpson 1985, p. iv). This kind of geographical mapping is quite possibly indebted to Joyce’s near precedent.

Finally, and perhaps most compellingly, the entirety of Poor Women! is concerned with women who are trapped within and by their social milieu—by society generally, by their families, and by the religious strictures that hold them in place.5 As I have written elsewhere, Hoult “share[d] with Joyce’s canon the tendency to represent characters whose lives are marked by paralysis and self-deception […]. As in many of the stories in Dubliners, […] Hoult’s women [in Poor Women!] suffer from erroneous or inflated self-perception undergirded by insecurity” (Costello-Sullivan 2016b, p. 11). If, as Joyce famously wrote to Grant Richards, he “chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed […] the centre of paralysis” (Joyce 1975b, p. 83), Hoult’s “Mary, Pity Women!” suggests that Poor Women! carries a similar anthropological intention:

I wrote about the individual women, young and old, whom I have written about, because, very briefly, each of them happened to come my way; and it seemed to me that I was able to understand, at least in part, something about them: what they wanted, what they were unable to obtain, and the nature of the handicap against them. They are real to me, and I have tried to make them, and their problems real.

(Hoult [1929] 2016a, p. 191)

Dubliners considers the paralyzing impact of Dublin society on Joyce’s characters; Hoult’s Poor Women! takes a similar focus but concentrates on the delusions and societal restrictions imposed specifically on women.

2. “Eveline” and “Miss Jocelyn”

Joyce’s “Eveline” follows the decision-making of a nineteen-year-old woman, Eveline Hill, who has been forced, by the death of her long-suffering mother, to care for her younger siblings and to tend house for her alcoholic and violence-prone father.6 When she meets a sailor, Frank, who offers to whisk her away with him to Argentina, Eveline sees the opportunity finally to find freedom: “She must escape! Frank would save her. He would give her life, perhaps love, too. But she wanted to live. […] Frank […] would save her” (Joyce [1914] 1996b, p. 40). As a potential foil to her father, the “kind, manly, [and] open-hearted” Frank seems to pose an alternative (albeit still patriarchal) path for Eveline to follow, as the repetition that he “would save her” suggests (Joyce [1914] 1996b, p. 38)—a point to which I return below.

Eveline is conflicted, however. She notes that her home, “anyway,” affords her “shelter and food,” as well as the solace of having “those whom she had known all her life about her”; hers is what she describes as a “not […] wholly undesirable life” (Joyce [1914] 1996b, pp. 37–38). Indeed, Margot Norris observes that Eveline’s concerns “all point to safety, security, and freedom from abuse and abasement, rather than toward romantic or sexual fulfilment” (Norris 2003 p. 63).7 Tellingly, Eveline cites familiarity and basic necessities, not emotional sustenance of any kind, as her bonds to home. This familiarity reinforces her imbrication in the domestic space, even as it stresses the smallness of the world which she is tempted to leave and the narrowness of her ambitions.8

At the same time, Eveline makes excuses for her abusive parent, signaling the kind of rationalizations one makes when in a position of dependence. Reflecting on her childhood, she recalls that “they seemed to have been rather happy then” and that her father was “not so bad then”—hardly a raving endorsement, and one that implicitly suggests that she is not happy, nor is her father “not so bad” now (Joyce [1914] 1996b, pp. 36–37, emphasis added).9 Although she notes that her father has “begun to threaten her” recently, Eveline demurs that he “was becoming old lately” and “would miss her” and excuses him by thinking that “[s]ometimes he could be very nice” (Joyce [1914] 1996b, p. 39).10 Like many people caught in abusive or violent contexts, Eveline tries to excuse those on whom she is dependent.11

When the time finally comes to board the ship to Buenos Aires, Eveline freezes and “pray[s] to God to direct her, to show her what was her duty” (Joyce [1914] 1996b, p. 40). Ultimately, Eveline proves unable to leave, famously “clutch[ing] the iron [railing] in frenzy” and “set[ting] her white face to [Frank], passive, like a helpless animal” (Joyce [1914] 1996b, p. 41). She implicitly chooses the abusive but familiar contexts of home and “duty” over the uncertain future overseas which Frank represents. Throughout much of the short story’s reception history, critics have thus generally agreed that “Eveline” reflects the kinds of Blakean “mind-forg’d manacles” to which Joyce gestures throughout Dubliners.12

Recent scholarship on “Eveline” stresses the ways in which Joyce uses the short story to critique the dichotomous choice that Eveline perceives. Her option of remaining home and unmarried is clearly a desperate one; as Luke Gibbons has noted, in “Eveline,” “home is not where you escape to, but where you escape from” (Gibbons 2000, p. 165). At the same time, what she perceives as her escape route, marriage, is shadowed by risk. Following Hugh Kenner’s ground-breaking essay, “Molly’s Masterstroke,” in which he identifies Frank not as a potential savior but rather as “a bounder with a glib line,” Norris has suggested that Eveline experienced “a close shave with disgrace and ruin” through her flirtation with Frank (Norris 2003, pp. 55–56). Katherine Mullin has also noted the dangers Frank potentially represents to Eveline as an unmarried young woman, given both Argentina’s notorious reputation in Ireland by 1914 and “[t]he extent to which Frank’s courtship uncannily suggests that of the white slave trader” (Mullin 2000, pp. 177–84). Considering the text’s “narrative complicity with seduction and betrayal” and Eveline’s naïveté—not to mention Joyce’s own historical opposition to marriage as an institution— it is thus possible to read “Eveline” as critiquing the limited options available to women: staying home, marrying, or ruin (Norris 2003, p. 56).13

At nineteen years old, Eveline would be explicitly configured as being of marriageable age in 1914. This sense that her future lies before her is reinforced by the fact that Joyce placed “Eveline” in the section of stories he described as exploring “adolescence” (Ingersoll 1993, p. 501; Joyce 1975b, p. 77). Dušan Ivanović recently observed that Eveline is “divested of agency, autonomy, and voice,” and that she “cannot liberate herself from the patriarchal confines of Dublin” (Ivanović 2021, p. 133).14 Even as the text tacitly critiques the options available to its eponymous heroine, “Eveline” thus fits what Katherine Fama and Jorie Lagerwey have described as a tendency of literary “investigations of single representation [to] focus on the never married as premarried” (Fama and Lagerwey 2022, p. 4). Although her sense of duty, fear of change, and internalized oppression help keep Eveline in place, there is no telling ultimately what her life could have in store. Eveline may “spend her life regretting the great refusal” of Frank, as Kenner claims, but it is unclear that she herself sees any alternate possibilities to the dichotomy the text presents (cited in Norris 2003, p. 55).

The insinuation of Joyce’s story that Eveline perceives marriage as her only way out stands in stark contrast to Hoult’s representation of the older celibate woman Miss Jocelyn in her eponymous short story.15 “Miss Jocelyn” follows the travels (and travails) of an older woman who is being forced by poverty, age, and possibly illness to move in with her nephew and his wife in Hull; it is implied that she will be treated as a maid and live-in nanny to the couple’s two children.16 She had, however, lived independently in Nottingham for an unspecified number of years until now—working, saving, and renting two rooms from a married landlady. In this respect, unlike “Eveline,” “Miss Jocelyn” challenges what Bella DePaolo terms “singlism”—defined by Fama and Lagerwey as “the construction of legal, health, and dominant social structures around heterosexual marriage, to the exclusion and often active detriment of single people,” who “are not necessarily […] defined by their relationship to family” (Fama and Lagerwey 2022, p. 3). Whereas Joyce’s short story posits Eveline’s third option—“ruin”—as the most likely consequence in Ireland of violating the married/premarried binary Joyce critiques, “Miss Jocelyn” shows the alternative to what life could be if one were not to marry—both the positive and the negative—as well as the confounding obstacles caused by age. In this respect, I suggest the text illustrates celibacy as a potentially positive third space, illustrating what Benjamin Kahan describes as its ability to work “between sexuality and asexuality, […] between gender ideal and gender failure” (Kahan 2013, p. 2.)

3. Comparative Reading, or Singlisms

There are multiple, telling parallels between “Eveline” and “Miss Jocelyn.” Both are, of course, eponymously named for the main character, which centers the narratives around the women. However, while “Eveline” bears its character’s first name alone, Miss Jocelyn, whose full name is Elizabeth Mary Jocelyn, is referred to as “Miss Jocelyn” throughout, and the story bears her patronymic.17 The use of the character’s title and last name here reinforces both the awareness that she is older and single, and her consequently subordinate place in patriarchal society.

Like “Eveline,” “Miss Jocelyn” starts with the character sitting in her rented rooms meditating on a potential departure because of a man tellingly also named “Frank”—in this case, her nephew. At the outset of Joyce’s text, Eveline’s desire to escape her stultifying life is counterbalanced by the comfort that familiarity of place affords:

Home! She looked round the room, reviewing all its familiar objects which she had dusted once a week for so many years […]. Perhaps she would never see again those familiar objects from which she had never dreamed of being divided.

(Joyce [1914] 1996b, p. 37)

Miss Jocelyn, too, ruminates on the objects which define “home” for her:

She rose and looked in the bedroom. […] Gone was her green handkerchief sachet with its hand-painted pink tulips. Gone was the brown holland case with her brush and comb. […] Gone was the white china pintray with its pattern of pink rose-buds. Of course in a few hours she would be taking them out, and putting them on a different dressing table […]. But still it wouldn’t be the same; it wouldn’t be her own as this had been.

(Hoult [1929] 2016b, p. 145)

Whereas both women consider their respective domestic spaces, however, there are significant differences here. Eveline envisions the potential recourse to marry, to move out of her father’s home, and thus to escape her confinement; the objects she examines, like the photograph on the wall, however, are not her own (Joyce [1914] 1996b, p. 37).18 Miss Jocelyn, in contrast, has remained single, although the reasons why she has never married are not made clear in Hoult’s text. She notes that the apartment she rents “was the first real home of her own she had had since father had died when she was thirty” (Hoult [1929] 2016b, p. 145), and the objects that she contemplates are thus hers. Whereas Eveline has been forced to give her father “her entire wages” (Joyce [1914] 1996b, p. 38), Miss Jocelyn has her own “savings in the Post Office” (Hoult [1929] 2016b, p. 140).19 While Eveline contemplates the move from one form of patriarchal support to another—her father to Frank—without pondering other possibilities, Miss Jocelyn has been living independently for years after having remained with her father into middle age. Miss Jocelyn could represent Eveline’s possible future—a different alternative to the ruinous possibility Frank might represent. Miss Jocelyn’s situation up to now thus contrasts directly with Eveline’s scenario of going immediately from one form of financially dependent paternalistic care to the next. Whereas Eveline believes she has something to gain—a conviction that, as we have seen, Joyce’s short story subtly works to undermine—Miss Jocelyn unequivocally has something to lose.

Hoult’s short story reinforces this difference as a palatable alternative through the contrast between the celibate Miss Jocelyn and her married landlady, Mrs. Dixon. Miss Jocelyn’s independence leads her to put on airs: she views Mrs. Dixon as “not a bad-hearted woman, even though […] she was showing far more of her chest than was really respectable […] but she was not a lady” (Hoult [1929] 2016b, p. 142). Miss Jocelyn congratulates herself that she made sure “not to lose […] small opportunities of doing things that people like Mrs. Dixon would not think of doing,”—yet she sees work as the price of her prized independence:

It was not, of course, the fact that Mrs. Dixon was poor that did not make her a lady. She, Miss Jocelyn, was poor, and had done work that she was well aware was not the right sort of work for a lady, but it was for the sake of her independence, and her two tiny rooms.

(Hoult [1929] 2016b, p. 142, emphasis added)

The narrative also contrasts Miss Jocelyn’s cherished independence with Mrs. Dixon’s misery in motherhood: realizing her baby needs to be changed, she thinks, “Sopping wet! Who would be a mother?” (Hoult [1929] 2016b, p. 145).20 Particularly if we read “Eveline” as shadowed by the risks of “potential peril for unchaperoned young women,” Miss Jocelyn’s sense of independence and ladylike propriety establishes a strikingly empowering alternative (Mullin 2000, p. 185). Miss Jocelyn represents an option not captured in “Eveline”—that of being a single, contentedly independent woman.

If Eveline desperately wishes to “escape” and for someone to “save” her, then, Miss Jocelyn just as desperately wishes to stay in her own rooms, to save herself and to maintain her independence. The financial strictures she experiences are a reminder of the challenges for single women to remain independent in early twentieth-century Britain, a time when “British culture […] fretted over single women” and “witnessed a pronounced spike in anxiety about ‘surplus women’” (Fama and Lagerwey 2022, p. 6). When Miss Jocelyn is unable to find additional work—noting that her savings “had dwindled to seven pounds ten shillings, and then seven pounds, and then six pounds ten, and then six pounds, and then five pounds fifteen, and then five pounds ten, and then, after two weeks, nothing could prevent it from reaching the five pound mark” (Hoult [1929] 2016b, p. 140)—she is forced to reach out to her nephew, Frank. The relentless description of her inexorably shrinking finances creates a sense of claustrophobia that mimics the desperation Miss Jocelyn must feel. Similarly, her repeated insistence that she “grappled miserably with the fact that [to] stay [with Frank] meant [to] live, and not live with but live on,” and that she “didn’t want to go to Hull” (Hoult [1929] 2016b, pp. 139, 156), reminds us that “[t]here was no one else who could or would help her” other than “the workhouse of course” (Hoult [1929] 2016b, p. 141). Hoult captures the economic constraints to which Miss Jocelyn, as a single woman, is subject, as well as the inherent precarity of her independence. Unlike Eveline, Miss Jocelyn is clear eyed and all too aware of her position.

Miss Jocelyn’s age is a complicating factor in her situation, as she is perceived as less employable as she ages. Reduced to having only one paying client, she recognizes that now “other ladies who interviewed her seemed so positive that she was too old to be worth paying” (Hoult [1929] 2016b, p. 140).21 After ten days of unsuccessful job hunting, she admits, “Nobody thought she would suit them. It was evident she was too old” (Hoult [1929] 2016b, p. 141).22 Mrs. Dixon provides an external view of the older, single Miss Jocelyn and of how she is perceived by society. She reflects, “Poor old lady! It wasn’t all honey going to live with relations who were probably as mad as hatters at having to take her. Of course you couldn’t blame them. Having a prim old dame […] dumped on you for the rest of her days” (Hoult [1929] 2016b, p. 144). Frank’s wife Joan later corroborates this impression: she avoids a taxi so as not to give the “impression we are made of money,” and “insert[s] little remarks” that “contained cues to the part she wanted [Miss Jocelyn] to play in the household,” demarcating the latter’s positioning as both a financial burden and as anticipated uncompensated labor (Hoult [1929] 2016b, p. 157). On her trip to Hull, Miss Jocelyn feels “unwanted, […] old and tired,” and she is treated as invisible by a porter who avoids her, being “out for higher game than shabby little elderly ladies with their inevitable tuppences” (Hoult [1929] 2016b, p. 151). Unlike Eveline, whose suitor Frank attends to her and wants to take her away with him (for better or worse), Miss Jocelyn is configured as a familial burden and as an obligation because of her age. That she can be “dumped” signals the kind of objectifying treatment that ageism can provoke.23

Like Eveline, Miss Jocelyn tries to rationalize her situation now that she, too, is in a position of dependence. Yet, while Eveline’s defense of her father is lukewarm, hers also signals the element of choice: that she refers to life in her father’s home as “not […] wholly undesirable” does suggest, I think, the reality that she has a decision to make, albeit a profoundly problematic one (Joyce [1914] 1996b, p. 38).24 In contrast, Miss Jocelyn finds herself totally out of options, and so she must reconcile herself to the inescapability of her plight. Unlike Frank in Joyce’s short story, who “called to [Eveline] to follow” and “still called to her” when urged to leave her behind, Miss Jocelyn’s nephew Frank barely pretends to be a welcoming alternative (Joyce [1914] 1996b, p. 41). Instead, he speaks to her in a “rather annoyed voice” and “impatiently,” and he suggests that his wife, having “only one maid now,” will find Miss Jocelyn to “be no end useful to her” (Hoult [1929] 2016b, pp. 140–41), making clear that she will be treated as a servant in what is ostensibly her new home.

In response, Miss Jocelyn can only try to be grateful, repeatedly claiming that “Frank had been so very good” and was “very kind and good,” even though he addresses her in a “quick abrupt way”; it is evident that he is dismissive of her work history and accomplishments and “just reduced the whole position to the one circumstance that she could only earn ten shillings a week” (Hoult [1929] 2016b, pp. 140–41). His distaste for the entire situation is reflected in the detail that, while his “voice was hearty […] he did not meet her eyes” (Hoult [1929] 2016b, p. 141). Whereas Eveline tries to downplay the difficulties of her domestic situation, Miss Jocelyn tries to convince herself of the impending generosity of hers, despite admitting that “[s]he couldn’t help not wanting to give up her rooms” (Hoult [1929] 2016b, p. 145). Eveline focuses on the possibility of love and affection with Frank, seeing no alternative, but Miss Jocelyn’s repeated invocation of her Frank’s (supposed) generosity highlights the differing needs the two characters negotiate. Eveline, configured as “premarried,” seeks to be “saved” via the only path she perceives; Miss Jocelyn seeks only financial rescue, out of desperation, and is all too aware of lost independence. In this respect, whereas Joyce’s story tacitly condemns the limited options available to young Eveline, Hoult’s story painfully draws the tenuous nature of a desirable third option of celibate independence.

A last parallel between the two short stories is in the characters’ respective resort to God to free them from their dilemmas. As we have seen, Eveline “prayed to God to direct her, to show her what was her duty,” and, as she confronts the possibility of departure, “she kept moving her lips in silent fervent prayer” (Joyce [1914] 1996b, pp. 40–41). I would reiterate here that while the mention of “duty” invokes Eveline’s gendered familial obligations and perhaps her inability psychologically to extricate herself from them, her plea for direction reinforces the reality that a choice, however problematic, remains. Duty to her father or future husband are what she perceives as her alternatives; however, she still has youth on her side.

In contrast, while Miss Jocelyn is deeply religious, her prayers smack of desperation and even magical thinking at times.25 Her quotation of Matthew 7:7—“‘Ask and it shall be given you. Knock and it shall be opened to you’”—is counter indicated by the very real financial strictures she confronts (Hoult [1929] 2016b, p. 146). As a result, her belief feels less like faith, and more like denial:

There had been a hope at the bottom of her heart, though she had never voiced it—that would have been too presumptuous—that even though it might be at the very last moment, God would have sent some sign, done something which would have allowed her to keep her own little home, her own independence. So many times other members had borne testimony […] of how God had interfered on their behalf. But in her case it was evidently not to be.

(Hoult [1929] 2016b, p. 146)

This utter inability to change her circumstances and her resort to magical thinking extends to her journey. Whereas Eveline cannot board the ship, Miss Jocelyn cannot escape her travel; her financial dependency is reinforced by the pound note which Frank sends “to cover anything [she] may wish to buy for [her] journey” (Hoult [1929] 2016b, p. 142).26 The short story repeatedly highlights the inexorable progress of her trip—first with her “shock to hear the cab drive up and then stop […] to take her away,” and then with the “station [which] seemed to sneer” at her (Hoult [1929] 2016b, pp. 146–47).27 As she journeys “inescapably” toward Hull, then, she is confronted both by the “train’s determination” and “the invincible passage of time” (Hoult [1929] 2016b, p. 148). It is, perhaps, not coincidental that Miss Jocelyn imagines the train deriding her by observing, “Other people were going to really important places like London, perhaps abroad? People did!” (Hoult [1929] 2016b, p. 147). Miss Jocelyn’s circumscribed world does not allow for possibilities like international travel; she is on a uni-directional trip from Nottingham to Hull, from independence to practical indebted servitude, and the possibility of international escape, such as Eveline innocently imagines, is firmly off the table.

Perhaps the most telling instance of this sense of denial and dread can be found in Miss Jocelyn’s ruminations about a leather case she finds abandoned under her seat on the train. When she realizes that the bag is monogrammed with the letters “A.J.,” Miss Jocelyn elaborates a fanciful story in which the bag represents divine intervention to prevent her move:

The ‘J’ seemed an extraordinary coincidence to Miss Jocelyn […]. She recollected after a minute that her own mother’s initials would be A.J., if you left out the Mary. […] In her occupation she arrived at the thought that J stood for Jesus. […] [S]upposing God, supposing Jesus had sent this bag to help her in her trouble!

(Hoult [1929] 2016b, p. 150)

While this speculation is clearly fanciful, Miss Jocelyn spends the next six pages clinging to the hope that this bag comes to represent for her. When she ultimately realizes that the bag was not, in fact, placed there by divine intervention, we see her from an external perspective once more:

The few people passing who troubled to glance at her saw a neat little elderly lady with pale, rather hollow cheeks […]. A little, elderly spinster: a lady probably, but not at all well off. And there are so many of her kind about that they wouldn’t have been struck by the fixed expression in her eyes.

(Hoult [1929] 2016b, pp. 154–55)

Miss Jocelyn’s “pale” face and “fixed expression” are evocative of Eveline’s “white face” and “eyes… [with] no sign […] of recognition” (Joyce [1914] 1996b, p. 41). Both women are stricken by the inability to act: Eveline’s paralysis reflects a kind of primal terror, as well as her entrapment in the marriage/pre-marriage dichotomy the story critiques. In contrast, Miss Jocelyn is reduced to her the reality of her aged, financially-positioned, and gendered body. The two stories thus parallel one another in the characters’ final sense of paralysis and entrapment, but these emotions are for wholly different reasons.

Despite her continuing effort to find gratitude, Miss Jocelyn recognizes the loss of the freedom she has hitherto enjoyed by observing to herself bleakly that “her own life was over” (Hoult [1929] 2016b, p. 160). By allowing the reader to catch a glimpse of Miss Jocelyn’s future in the final narrative turn, the short story highlights not only the new life she now faces, but also all that she has lost, reminding us just how true her prognosis is. Thus, Joan’s condescending self-talk in deciding not to explain to Miss Jocelyn why they dine at mid-day—because you need only do so to “anyone that mattered at all”—reminds us of Miss Jocelyn’s new, subordinate position; it also creates an ironic echo of the self-satisfied superiority Miss Jocelyn had previously enjoyed, at Mrs. Dixon’s expense, when she was herself the lady of her own household (Hoult [1929] 2016b, pp. 158–59). This exchange binds her loss of autonomy and independence to her new-found dependent position as causally related.

Similarly, Joan flippantly dismisses orphans whom they pass on the initial walk to her home by claiming “they [the orphans] have a pretty good time, really,” as they are “[w]ell fed” with “[g]ood, plain food.” In contrast, Miss Jocelyn thinks, “How sad it was!” This brief aside correlates Joan’s home to the workhouse thatMiss Jocelyn had hoped to avoid. Joan’s callous insensitivity to the children’s confinement, as well as her apportioning to Miss Jocelyn an “attic room” with a “camp bed,” reifies the loss of agency and autonomy that Miss Jocelyn has rightly dreaded (Hoult [1929] 2016b, pp. 158–59). By associating Miss Jocelyn’s nephew’s home with an institution like an orphanage, Hoult evokes the spectre of being both unwanted and societally marginalized.28 She thus powerfully reinforces the precarity of Miss Joceyln’s hitherto independence and the dismissal to which she is subject as a financially-straitened, older, celibate woman.

4. Conclusions

“Miss Jocelyn” is, at its core, a story that challenges the binary of pre-marriage and marriage critiqued by James Joyce’s “Eveline”. By proffering a character who has enjoyed financial and domestic independence in Poor Women!, Hoult offers an alternative option to “singlism,” wherein single women can live on their own, and on their own terms. Nonetheless, as she warned with the observation that “the great majority of women are dependent on some man”—a dichotomy “Eveline” rehearses—such independence is fragile (Hoult [1929] 2016a, p. 191). Miss Jocelyn’s loss of employment as she ages and her resultant economic precarity illustrate the tenuousness of such freedom, particularly for older single women in early twentieth-century Britain—a precarity that would be applicable to contemporary Ireland, as well.29 Lacking other options, Miss Jocelyn, like Eveline, must revert to dependence on the wider patriarchal structures that render her, in society’s view, her nephew Frank’s “problem,” even as her age adds the complexities of dismissal and indifference to which Eveline was not yet subject. By building on the critique in “Eveline,” “Miss Jocelyn” extends Joyce’s engagement to consider the opportunities—and hazards—of a third space not engaged in the earlier short story, that of celibate independence. Hoult’s short story is a powerful reminder of the many ways that single women were constrained by the expectations and norms of their societies—most particularly if they had the temerity to be celibate and to aspire to independence into old age.