The Enigmatic Figure of Women in James Joyce's: Araby

In literature, the anonymous character occupies a negative space, functioning as an" abstract `Other' whose concrete and tangible distinctions are unintelligible." The absence of the character's voice has the power to silence the voice, repress identity, and impose passivity. Anonymity has been employed as a tool of oppression in the gender politics of the unnamed character. The motif of the nameless female character threatens the female identity as it upholds a legacy that has smothered the female voice. The female character can be filled with tropes of sexual objectification and patriarchal dominance. The Araby Bazaar was, in reality, one of the most enormous public spectacles held in Dublin in the late nineteenth century. In this supposed romance, an adolescent boy's infatuation with the unnamed sister of his best friend prompts him to attend a pseudo-Middle Eastern marketplace. The young boy's journey to Araby is a pilgrimage in quest of the feminine and the Oriental Other as the anticipated destination of male desire. Mangan's sister functions as a female blank page awaiting his male inscription. The inscription imposed by the speaker asks her to satisfy his longing for the other, a longing for the exotic that ultimately cannot be provided. Mangan's sister lacks the agency provided by a name. The speaker knows her name yet he withholds it from the reader. Her appointed title is nominally linked to her relation to a man, Magnan. In the most literal sense, she cannot exist without a man.
 Themes of voyeurism as an expression of his desire emerge here. He is "watching" but not "seen" behind the "blind" as she is "always in [his] eye". In his furtive gaze, the boy can achieve arousal by visualizing her as a "brown figure”. Mangan’s sister is an objectified Other upon which the boy can affix his exotic fantasies. The speaker's descriptions of her "dark house" and "brown-clad figure" confirm her function as his icon of exotica. Her house and figure are the mysterious Oriental structures enshrouding and framing her identity as imposed by the young boy.
 The poem recites the last words of an equestrian rider to his treasured, yet sold, horse. In both texts, the commodified Arab horse and nameless woman became invaluable acquisitions. Similarities like the courtly refrains declared by the young boy in Joyce's poem and the romantic verbiage of Norton's poem accentuate their resemblance.
 In The Arab's Farewell, the narrator applauds his noble horse for its graceful posture: My Beautiful! That standest meekly by, / With thy proudly arched and glossy neck (Norton 1, 2). Similarly, in "Araby," the speaker's description of Magnan's sister's pose employs a similar language and tone.
 The Arab's horse and Magnan's sister are the rhapsodized representatives of Otherness, whose identities are shaped in the eyes of their male suitors. Their harmonized glow represents the gleam of an idealized projection, as they only exist as they have been illuminated by the speaker's eye.
 Mangan's sister is presented as a faceless silhouette, with no explicit description of her face or body. The young boy begins inscribing Magnan's sister's character with his own romanticized and impossible ideals of woman. We can see this in his simultaneous idealization of Araby. For the boy, Araby is an obtainable oasis of Otherness, and even "the syllables of the word Araby… cast an Eastern enchantment over [him]". His arrival at Araby marks the collision of fantasy and reality. John Brugaletta and Mary Haden present the young boy's disillusionment as an indication of Mangan's sister's nonexistence.
 The theoretically impossible woman, grossly apotheosized by the young boy, is also literally impossible. The boy's awakening, a consequence of his realization that the Araby is no more than a cheap marketplace of English vendors, unveils the impossibility of Mangan's sister as an ideal woman.
 The young boy's affection for Magnan's sister is finally reciprocated in Araby. Her playful gesture intensifies his craving for the Orient. His illusory memory of her withers against the unwelcoming physical presence of the bazaar. The shop girl seems to have spoken to him out of a sense of duty. In "Araby," a young Irish boy's desire for the unknown is quenched by Magnan's sister's light.
 His frustration at the story's end, epitomized in his fiery eyes, is the fruit of his dissatisfaction. The collision of his imagined reality and the actual reality of a woman leaves him wallowing in hateful disappointment.