Childhood in Araby and We Are Seven Essay

Our whole life is but a greater and longer childhood Benjamin Franklin

Even in the best circumstances, childhood puts us on a long, transitory path that leads to adulthood. The road does not provide the smoothest ride for us travelers, but is littered with experiences and sacrifices that shape who we are and who we become. This topic is addressed in both James Joyces Araby and William Wordsworths We Are Seven in a very different, yet similar way.

In We Are Seven, the youth of the girl accompanied by the apparent puerile argument with Wordsworth, creates a childish, trivial, and repetitive poem; however, Wordsworth disagrees with these criticisms and suggests that he wrote the poem because "the childs matter-of-factness and her prosaic health" impressed him.

In any case, as a reader takes Wordsworth's portrayal of the girl to be one of the foolish innocence that we take for granted in children. In talking further with the child, Wordsworth finds himself arguing with her regarding her deceased siblings. She is adamant in counting the siblings in their graves along with those who still live. Our first impression, as a reader, is that the child is in a state of denial, shadowed by her ignorance of earthly pains. She does not acknowledge death to exist because she does not understand it.

As the poem progresses, the childs certitude stands out even more. To this child, to be plagued by disease and exposure is merely a footnote to the eternal bliss of heaven; existence not only fails to end upon death, but the differences between either states are subtle. Wordsworth's embodies this child's blissful view of unity even after death has ravaged her family. Upon describing her relationship to her two deceased siblings, the young girl states,

"My stockings there I often knit

My kerchief there I hem

And there upon the ground I sit

And sing a song to them" (Wordsworth 1332).

Wordsworth, through a real conversation, presents the obscurity with which childhood attends to our notion of death, or rather our inability to admit the notion.

However, in James Joyces Araby, we are presented with a very interior sort of story; the action occurs almost exclusively inside the protagonists head. Joyce uses space and place within to highlight and mark transitions. The houses of North Richmond Street are associated with adulthood while the street is the symbol of childhood. The houses, in contrast to a vacant one at the end, are described as such in the opening paragraph: The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces. But the street itself can be a more raucous place:

When we met in the street the houses had grown sombre. The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed. Our shouts echoed in the silent street.

The story is masterful in taking the narrator and the reader from the space of childhood (the bracing chill of the dark street ringing with boys shouts) to the awkward in-between (confining oneself to private corners of the house then railing against that confinement) to young adulthood (and the sharp moments of disillusionment it inevitably brings).

The journey in "Araby" is one we all embark on at one time in our lives. Though, we have our own unique ways of attaining adulthood, eventually all of us taste from that tree, and the awareness that accompanies the loss of the idyllic view of childhood is often traumatic to the extreme.

Joyce writes with a pessimistic undertone that the Modernists saw as the inevitable end for everyone. He uses a young child still caught in the state of childhood innocence. This "coming of age" idea is the point in everyone's life where we realize that substantial pain lies ahead. This pain translates to an avoidance of others in order to escape such suffering. The Modernist solution is finding pleasure, intelligence, and sanity in art. Joyce has created a flawless actualization of society in the eyes of many, but his genre of literature creates a paradox for the solution that leaves the reader searching for resolution as his protagonist had.

In conclusion, the approach in which Wordsworth and Joyce employ to use in showing the loss of innocence is quite different by the usage of conversation, tone, and symbolism are indeed different as night and day. However, the idea is the same. Childhood represents innocence, but as we grow; that innocence is inevitably lost.