James Joyce’s “Eveline” and the Emergence of Global Sex Trafficking1 |
—First I used to go with girls, you know, said Corley unbosoming, girls off the South Circular. I used to take them out, man, on the tram somewhere and pay the tram or take them to a band or a play at the theatre or buy them chocolate and sweets or something that way.
I used to spend money on them right enough,
he added in a convincing tone,
as if he were conscious of being disbelieved.
But Lenehan could well believe it; he nodded gravely.
—I know that game, he said, and it’s a mug’s game.
James Joyce, “Two Gallants”
—Oh then, said Gabriel gaily, I suppose
we’ll be going to your wedding one of these fine days
with your young man—eh?
The girl glanced back at him over her shoulder
and said with great bitterness:
—The men that is now is only all palaver
and what they can get out of you.
James Joyce, “The Dead”
Always historicize!
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious
This journey into the abject world of female sex trafficking begins with retelling the experience of the Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who, as mentioned in the introduction, in the twenty-first century bought himself two underage Cambodian sex slaves and wrote a book about it. Through his book and editorials, this journalist strives to raise awareness of the evils of contemporary sexual slavery and inspire the first world to support his campaign to prosecute traffickers more harshly, while rescuing third-world girls “one brothel raid at a time.”2 In the twenty-first century, Kristof has become a media favorite in championing the abolitionist cause in the United States.3
But Kristof’s approach is not new. During Victorian times in England, the journalist and editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, William T. Stead, came up with the same idea. Prompted by the British feminist Josephine Butler’s campaign to repeal several Contagious Diseases Acts (which targeted women suspected of prostitution and subjected them to humiliating compulsory physical examinations while keeping male consumers free and anonymous), Stead devised the same plan as Kristof did to prove that sexual slavery existed in England and that it was easy for a man to buy an underage sex slave.4 With only five pounds, Stead purchased a young girl and then wrote a sensationalist article he called “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” in the Pall Mall Gazette.5
As Stead had calculated, this piece of news spawned a literal scandal that quickly spread beyond England, as “[t]elegraphic services rapidly transformed the ‘Maiden Tribute’ into an international event. Stead proudly boasted that his ‘revelations’ were printed in every capital of the Continent as well as by the ‘purest journals in the great American republic.’ Unauthorized reprints were said to have surpassed the one and half million mark” (Walkowitz 82). The momentum generated before the article’s release is worth recounting: three days ahead of publication, on July 4, 1885, the newspaper issued a “frank warning” urging the most sensitive individuals not to read the paper because the content they would see would shock them to the extreme—a brilliant marketing technique as the copies ran out in no time and consequently ended up being sold at much higher prices (qtd. in Walkowitz 81). George Bernard Shaw himself, who also worked for the PMG and whose interest in the relation between prostitution and poverty would become evident in his Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1893), actively helped with the papers’ distribution to the pleading public.6 Anne McClintock contends, without exaggeration, that in 1885, “W. T. Stead set London aflame with his lurid revelations about child prostitution” (Imperial Leather 288). But, unlike the case of the girls Kristof bought in the twenty-first century, the horror surrounding the events at the turn of the twentieth century was that the slave Stead purchased was white.
In this chapter I will analyze James Joyce’s “Eveline” (1904), looking at the moral panic about “white slavery” in Europe and the new continent, especially focusing on Argentina, the foremost recipient of trafficked women between 1880 and 1930 (and, of course, Joyce’s destination choice for Eveline). In British Modernism and Censorship (2008), Celia Marshik explains that by now “scholars have demonstrated [that] Joyce’s texts contain extensive allusions to white slave panics,” so this analysis will connect the ideological perception of sexual danger with the actual trafficking situation in Buenos Aires that Joyce surreptitiously hints at in “Eveline” (127). It was precisely at the turn of the twentieth century that, along with the popularity of transatlantic migration, sex trafficking went fully global and news about international “dangers” for single white women reached the general public, provoking all kinds of repressive reactions through what became known as the “social purity” movement, a topic compellingly investigated by Katherine Mullin in James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity (2003).
In England, a pioneer in the transnational abolitionist cause, the “Maiden Tribute” scandal gave birth in 1885 to two influential organizations devoted to fighting sex trafficking: the National Vigilance Association, founded by Stead himself, and the Jewish Ladies’ Society for Preventive and Rescue Work. The social purity movement quickly reached the United States, where anxieties about white slavery in the hands of corrupt foreign elements had already begun to alarm audiences and were expressed in unsettling stories such as Frank Norris’s “Bandy Callaghan’s Girl” (1896) and “The Third Circle” (1897).7 To tackle moral corruption, several vice-policing associations surfaced nationally and locally, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice being perhaps the best known, with the banning of Joyce’s Ulysses listed among its notorious accomplishments. As Mullin notes, “social purity was an international and, particularly, transatlantic phenomenon, as British organizations like the National Vigilance Association, and United States groups like the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice communicated with each other and borrowed one another’s strategies” (5). In Argentina, another favored destination of emigrants, similar movements emerged, so delegates from European anti-vice societies visited Buenos Aires and established associations to monitor and prevent white slavery, which, relevant to this analysis, was widely believed to be dominated by Jewish traffickers.
However, Jewish outlaws did not actually monopolize this crime. As documented by the South American historians Ivette Trochón, Gerardo Bra, and Andrés Carretero, Argentina was, indeed, the headquarters of the biggest global Jewish criminal organization fully dedicated to sex trafficking: the “Varsovia” [Warsaw], better known later as the Zwi Migdal.8 This association’s modus operandi consisted in sending procurers to Europe to lure potential victims (mainly impoverished Jewish girls) through promises of marriage and a better future in Argentina in order to traffic them and, once in Buenos Aires, sell them as prostitutes. Even though Zwi Migdal members constituted a clear minority of the Jewish community in Argentina—and Jewish society considered these traffickers and their prostitutes virtual pariahs—the organization became extremely successful, particularly because it was legally registered in Buenos Aires as a society of mutual help, the Varsovia Jewish Mutual Help Society, which allowed the traffickers to operate with relative ease. Historians point out that there were other sex trafficking groups active in Argentina, such as the French Le Milieu, which was almost as lucrative as the Zwi Migdal, yet far more tolerated because of Argentina’s infatuation with French culture at the time. Another significant difference is that, unlike the Zwi Migdal, the French criminal organization was not legally registered.9 Overall, the Argentinean sex trafficking business was roughly split between these two criminal groups: the Zwi Migdal mainly imported Jewish women (especially from Warsaw, with “the largest Jewish population in Europe in 1900”), and Le Milieu trafficked women from Marseilles to Buenos Aires (there was also a smaller French association trafficking women from Paris) (Bristow 53). The crime was thus handled primarily by Jewish and French traffickers who shared a very lucrative market in relative “harmony”—Jewish prostitutes [‘las polacas,’ as they were referred to in Argentinean slang] serviced lower-class customers, while French prostitutes [‘las franchutas’] catered to a wealthier public (79; 90–91).
Predictably, even though Jewish traffickers and their recruited prostitutes constituted minority of the total Jewish population living in fin de siècle Buenos Aries, the sex trafficking issue took on other dimensions when anti-Semitism was added to the mix. Ben Zion Hoffman “lamented in 1906 that ‘all the papers and organizations that deal with the slave traffic remark that Jewish girls from Russia and Galicia comprise a large part of the living merchandise’” (Bristow 8). As a consequence, many Jewish feminists became actively involved in the global fight against sex trafficking: the anarchist Emma Goldman played a primordial role in the American press, while the Austrian Bertha Pappenheim (known to history by the pseudonym of “Anna O.” in Sigmund Freud’s texts) became well-known internationally for her persistent crusades in Germany.10 Indeed, lurid stories of Jewish trafficking circulated profusely in the media as cautionary tales and chilling examples of what could happen if a woman dared to cross imagined or actual frontiers, enticed by someone perceived, in the years leading up to World War I, as embodying the quintessential white Other.
Like “a helpless animal”? Like a Cautious Woman
Hugh Kenner’s ground-breaking reading of “Eveline”—one of seduction and betrayal by a sailor who probably intended to “pick himself up a piece of skirt” and later abandon the girl at the port in Liverpool (“Molly’s Masterstroke” 21)—inspired critics to revisit traditional interpretations of Joyce’s story. Several clues in the text suggest that Joyce knew more about white slavery than earlier scholars initially thought and that he, as Katherine Mullin contends, slyly incorporated such discourse in his tale. In “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina: ‘Eveline’ and the Seductions of Emigration Propaganda” (2000), Mullin compellingly analyzes the ideological perception of sexual danger in foreign lands disseminated by the European media, which was adopted in Ireland to discourage emigration. Continuing with this observation, in James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity (2003), Mullin persuasively examines the nuanced ways in which Joyce weaves a white slavery subtext (among other “offensive” discourses) into his narrative in order to provoke censors. Indeed, Joyce’s choice of Buenos Aires as Eveline’s destination is semantically charged.
By the time Joyce was writing this story, literature dealing with sex trafficking from Europe to Argentina had already become popular among continental readers thirsty for titillating tragedies. Carne Importada [Imported Meat] (1891), the Spanish Eduardo Lopez Bago’s erotic white slavery novel, for example, details the downfall of an innocent (Christian) Spanish orphan tricked into prostitution by a Jewish procurer. After losing her father, the girl travels to Buenos Aires hoping to find a decent job. In the ship to South America, she meets a mysterious man (Don Rodolfo) who, readers later learn, turns out to be a Jewish trafficker. Don Rodolfo ends up orchestrating a scheme where the girl is raped once in Buenos Aires and is then brought to his brothel to work for him.11 In highly melodramatic final moment, the girl, unable to bear her disgrace, dies of a heart attack after having been dishonored and deceived by the procurer. The author closes the narrative admonishing readers directly, reminding them that “To tell the truth is not to write amusing stories [emphasis in the original text]” (283).12 As it turns out, Lopez Bago told his audience some truth; while this novel was obviously intended as a sensual cautionary tale, South American historians like Trochón, Bra, and Carretero confirm that early in the twentieth century Buenos Aires was the center of the Jewish “white slave trade” between Europe and South America.13
In this chapter, then, I will describe the historical situation of white slavery in Argentina at the time “Eveline” takes place in order to provide further evidence supporting the existence of Eveline’s “hidden story” (Kenner, “Molly’s” 21), concentrating on the representation of a potential trafficking victim and her trafficker together with the ideological implications of such portrayals. While this analysis will rely partly on Mullin’s investigation, it will not focus on her argument about Joyce and censorship but will concentrate on the possible links between “Eveline” and the sex trafficking industry thriving in Buenos Aires through the Jewish criminal association Zwi Migdal. Frank’s representation allows us to draw this connection because his behavior with Eveline coincides with the seduction and recruiting tactics employed by Zwi Migdal procurers: courtship and promises of marriage to later prostitute the women in South American brothels. This analysis adds to Kenner’s skeptical reading of the sailor and Mullin’s Joyce/white slavery connection by suggesting that, in light of the historical context in Argentina and Joyce’s hyper-analyzed ambiguities, the author could have modeled the enigmatic sailor after the stereotypical (Zwi Migdal?) recruiters so prevalent in social purity propaganda. In fact, if we follow Fredric Jameson’s dictum and historicize the tale, it is possible to imagine that Eveline’s likely outcome if she leaves Dublin with Frank may be that of becoming a trafficked prostitute in Buenos Aires.
In her 2009 book Las Rutas de Eros, the Uruguayan historian Ivette Trochón documents sex trafficking patterns during the early twentieth century, concluding that between 1860 and 1930 sex trafficking of women occurred predominantly from Europe to the new continent (and, to a lesser extent, to imperial ‘outposts of progress’ in Africa and Asia such as Johannesburg and Bombay) (21). With painstaking detail, Trochón explains that, in this period, the trafficking of white women originated in countries such as Poland, Russia, France, and Italy and disembarked primarily in Argentina, Brazil, and, on a smaller scale, the United States. The main ports of departure were Marseille, Geneva, Boudreaux, Le Havre, Liverpool, Vigo, and Lisboa (Trochón 23). The reasons for this emergent wave of international sex trafficking were various: new technologies such as the steamship and the telegraph facilitated transatlantic movements; the high indices of male immigrants in the new continent created a demand for “imported” women; the disruption of family dynamics generated by the movement to urban centers because of industrialization; the pervasive poverty especially in eastern Europe, persuading members of the more exploited populations to search for fortunes abroad—all valid motives that, in turn, opened a space for women to attempt some independence in foreign lands (21).14 In this respect, the Argentinean government certainly encouraged European female immigration in the hopes of “improving” the local gene pool. Yet one should note that only educated white European women (read ‘middle class’) were openly welcomed; “the female immigrant from the lower-classes of southern Europe,” on the other hand, was invoked to symbolize “a failure in the Argentine program of enhancing the race,” especially if she was (willingly or unwillingly) involved in prostitution (Masiello 6).
Inevitably, the promising economic prospects enticed both legitimate and criminal immigration. The hopes for material advancement of impoverished Europeans (especially Jews, who were experiencing extreme discrimination and consequent pauperization) combined with the constant demand for female prostitutes, so many women saw the opportunity to emigrate. Historians like Donna J. Guy document that only a small percentage of such emigrant women were deceived and later enslaved in brothels; the majority of trafficked women knew that they would be working as prostitutes and expected to perform such work in the new continent. Yet what one should bear in mind when analyzing “Eveline” is the overwhelming ideological perception between 1885 and the late 1930s that Argentina was a literal trap for innocent, unsuspecting virgins whose naiveté would lead them to a life of perdition.15 As Mullin observes in “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina: ‘Eveline’ and the Seductions of Emigration Propaganda,” early in the twentieth century, the expression “going to Buenos Ayres” was a well-known slang phrase implying “taking up a life of prostitution, especially by way of a procurer’s offices” (qtd. in Mullin 189).
Probably because of the widespread anti-Semitism reigning in Europe and the Americas, the activities of the criminal Jewish organization always stood out over the same crimes committed by the French ones. And even though Jewish traffickers mainly targeted Jewish women (often through seduction and promises of marriage), fears of Jewish procurers on the prowl for Christian girls like Eveline in Joyce’s story were common, which only fed the ubiquitous anti-Semitism of the time.16 In any case, what is undeniable is the fact that, because of the great demand for white prostitutes from Europe, Argentina was a favored destination for trafficked women who ended up working under highly structured sex trafficking organizations (Trochón 22).
Frankly speaking, “The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you”
As Joyce scholars know, the stories in Dubliners thematically center around paralysis—a key term for most critics, with the word generally functioning “as a metaphor for the plight of the characters caught up in situations that they can neither completely comprehend nor control, and from which they cannot escape” (Doherty 35). Beginning with the crippled priest in “The Sisters” who leaves readers utterly uneasy, to the alienated Mr. Duffy in “A Painful Case,” and ending with Gabriel Conroy’s thoughts on the dead, Joyce gives readers a glimpse of the stagnation he feels Ireland suffers. Analyzing “Eveline” from the depiction of her burdened existence, critics have extrapolated Joyce’s criticism of the extent of Irish people’s inability to act for their own benefit. Through the perils of Eveline, they argue that Joyce describes the failure of a girl to move forward and become herself, thus implying that Ireland will remain static, drowning in its own corruption unless the country takes action. The most common readings of this story have contrasted the freedom that awaits Eveline, represented by the open sea, with the subjugation she feels at home. Joyce places this story after “The Sisters,” “An Encounter,” and “Araby,” as a way of preparing the reader to understand why Eveline remains “paralyzed” in the end.17 Eveline’s everyday life is haunted by a promise to her dying mother, an abusive alcoholic father who takes her money, a monotonous job, and the children who have been left to her charge. In such a bleak context, Frank, an enigmatic but charming sailor, appears with promises of marriage and a new life in Buenos Aires. Despite her dismal situation in Dublin, Eveline refuses to board a ship with the sailor and stays in Ireland. Just like Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque, Eveline mortifies herself, and many have agreed that the oppression in which she lives perversely grants her the only security she has ever known. As a collection, Dubliners attempts to create a consciousness of the state of Ireland and the Irish through its characters, showing how they experience, in their own personal way, the entrapment of a country that has turned into a waste land and to which Joyce himself famously declared non serviam.18
“Eveline” was first published in The Irish Homestead on September 10, 1904. Almost exactly one month later, on October 8, Joyce moved to Pola, Austria, and later Trieste, Italy, where he began his permanent exile.19 As documented by Richard Ellmann and other biographers, Joyce’s emigration initiated his arduous struggle for publication of his short story collection that lasted ten years. During this time, Joyce revised the story making considerable alterations, but Eveline’s closing rejection of Frank, nonetheless, always stayed the same.20 Many have argued that her panic attack at the docks offers the ultimate proof of Eveline’s (ergo Dubliners’) paralysis. Several critics concur that Eveline cannot help but remain numb in her familiar routine, thus failing to evolve.21
Yet such received wisdom changed when Hugh Kenner began to suspect Frank’s intentions in his book The Pound Era (1971), to openly suggest that Frank was a liar by analyzing a couple of commas in his “Molly’s Masterstroke” (1972), and later by highlighting Joyce’s use of “pastiche and parody” in his Joyce’s Voices (1978) (81). Kenner challenged traditional readings of “Eveline” that present this (anti)heroine as paralyzed in the end, unable to embrace a promising future with Frank in Buenos Aires (The Pound Era 38). Instead, Kenner questions the sailor’s frankness (now a seducer?). Since then, other scholars have offered provocative responses to Kenner’s reading—the most extreme positions best exemplified by Sidney Freshbach, who, comparing Kenner’s interpretation of Frank to house of cards, confesses his desire to “collapse [Kenner’s] argument [suggesting that] Frank changes from being a character in a short story by Joyce to an invention of [Kenner’s] own,” and Katherine Mullin, who persuasively suggests that Frank could actually be a procurer by analyzing the ideological atmosphere of Victorian England (Freshbach 223; Mullin 69). Other critics, such as Garry Leonard and Suzette Henke, “see the menacing and abusive father as a potentially greater threat to Eveline’s safety and welfare than the risk of a possible seduction and abandonment by a lying sailor” (Norris 59). Margot Norris, for her part, focuses on Joyce’s narrative omissions, while she opens the possibility of yet another interpretation of Eveline’s “decision by indecision” at the end of the story (57). Norris argues that “the point of the story may be less the adjudication of the correct choice than to have the reader experience the [ … ] desperate uncertainty of such a life-altering choice,” but she shares Kenner’s apprehensive view of Frank (59). As for the most recent scholarly versions of Dubliners, Sean Latham’s 2011 Longman edition specifically addresses the possibility of Frank being “a ‘white slaver’ who intends to lure Eveline into a life of prostitution—a threat made explicit in advertising campaigns like Clifford G. Roe’s 1911 The Horrors of the White Slave Trade: The Mighty Crusade to Protect the Purity of Our Homes” (264).
I would like to pause for a moment on Katherine Mullin’s analysis because she develops the existing scholarship by proving through carefully documented archival evidence that, during the time Joyce was writing and revising “Eveline” for publication, the social purity movement in England and Ireland had ignited a moral pandemonium around stories of unscrupulous pimps suspiciously akin to Frank and sexual enslavement of innocent white girls uncannily similar to Eveline—Stead’s article in the Pall Mall Gazette epitomizes such discourses. Joyce actually mentions Stead in passing in Part V of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)—“MacCann began to speak with fluent energy of the Czar’s rescript of Stead, of general disarmament [ … ]”—so we know that Joyce was aware of the journalist’s existence (176). Looking beyond Dubliners, Mullin finds suggestive connections in what she identifies as Eveline Hill and Frank’s “intertextual identity” in the Victorian pornographic novels Eveline, or the Adventures of a Lady of Fortune Who was Never Found Out, John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, and the novella Frank and I (196). Such titles, like López Bago’s Carne Importada mentioned above, circulated in Joyce’s time as popular readings, and therefore one can speculate that the author could have played on their presence in the fantasies of his audience. John McCourt comments in The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste 1904–1920 (2000) that Joyce had “an uncommon interest in matters of sexuality [and that he] would send home [to Ireland] books that would so scandalize the Irish reading (and non-reading) public that would accuse him of being the Antichrist” (24). Arguably, sex trafficking of white virgins was the titillating turn-of-the-century topic par excellence.
To begin with, we know that Joyce was conscious of the flourishing white-slave traffic from Europe to Buenos Aires, not only from Stead’s article and the international scandal it generated but from a copy he possessed and annotated of The White Slave Market (1912).22 Mullin notes that “the extent to which Frank’s courtship uncannily suggests that of a villain in white slave tracts is probably most strikingly demonstrated” in the following excerpt from that book:
Some pimps take months and months to gain proper control over their victims.… For a long time, one fiend incarnate contented himself with merely “walking out” with the girl, taking her to cheap picture shows, buying her little presents, meeting her as she came home from work and doing everything that would take her mind off his villainy. Once he had taught her to trust him, to love him, he ruined her and ruthlessly “dumped” her into the inferno at Buenos Ayres. (qtd. in Mullin 70)
Lopez Bago’s Carne Importada offers an eerily similar account of the way in which white women were deceived by recruiters23—and Frank does fit the pattern: we know little about when the affair started, but Eveline remembers
well [ … ] the first time she had seen him; he was lodging in a house on the main road where she used to visit. It seemed a few weeks ago. [ … ] Then they had come to know each other. He used to meet her at the stores every evening and see her home. He took her to see the Bohemian Girl and she felt elated as she sat in an unaccustomed part of the theatre with him. [ … ] People knew that they were courting and when he sang about the lass that loves a sailor she always felt pleasantly confused. First of all it had been an excitement for her to have a fellow and then she had begun to like him. (Joyce, Dubliners 29)
When describing Frank’s courtship, Joyce emphasizes the uncertainty of Eveline’s predicament pairing words such as “pleasantly confused” to refer to her state of mind (29). But when thinking about her possible emigration with the sailor, Eveline at times is less ambivalent as she anticipates being judged “a fool”—a puzzling reaction that could imply her awareness about the potentially negative consequences of her decision and explain her subsequent panic attack at the docks (28). To mention another intriguing example, the original version of the story published in 1904 reads: “She had consented to go away—to leave her home. Was it wise—was it honourable?” (216). For the final edition published in 1914, Joyce changed the punctuation and deleted the second part of the question: “She had consented to go away, to leave her home. Was that wise?” suggestively omitting Eveline’s wondering whether her decision would be “honourable” (28). One should also consider that early in the 1900s, Dublin was notorious for “the sheer number of ‘fallen women’” that a girl like Eveline would have been accustomed to see and, interestingly, whose demographics closely match her own (Marshik 130). As analyzed by Marshik, the typical prostitute in Ireland “was in her twenties, uneducated, and poor[.] Most of these women were partially or completely orphaned, resulting in decreased financial and emotional support as well as in a lessening of surveillance”; like the unfortunate protagonist of Lopez Bago’s white slavery novel, the penniless and motherless Eveline easily falls into the group procurers would entice (130–31).24 The opera Frank takes Eveline to see also invites speculations, as the author also mentions The Bohemian Girl in “Clay,” another story with connections to prostitution. Here, Maria, the main character, works in the kitchen of the Lamplight Laundry, a Protestant charity where “fallen women” were reformed by offering them “decent” jobs (although Maria, like Eveline, is not a “fallen woman” herself). A “letter to his younger [ … ] brother indicates [that] Joyce was aware that ‘wicked’ or sexually experienced women worked at the laundries,” especially after being rescued from prostitution (Eide 62).
As for Eveline’s suitor, while Joyce gives us more ellipsis than concrete data, “the sailor who calls himself Frank” makes at least three suspicious claims (Kenner, “Molly’s” 20): he tells the girl stories about the “terrible Patagonians”; he says that he has a “home” waiting for her; and, of all places in the world, he wants to take her to “Buenos Ayres” (Joyce, Dubliners 29–30). As Kenner contends, “[c]aught up as we are in the pathos of [Eveline’s] final refusal, we may not reflect on the extreme improbability of these postulates, that a Dublin sailor-boy has grown affluent in South America, and bought a house and sailed back to Ireland to find him a bride to fill it” (“Molly’s” 20–21). Let us analyze the plausibility of such claims in light of what was happening in Argentina.
By the time of the story’s first publication, “heavy immigration from Europe” to Argentina had already started. From 1830 to 1930, sporadic waves of Irish immigrants reached Argentinean coasts in search of a better future, tempted by the “spectacularly rapid economic and cultural development” happening during those years (although Mullin provides evidence showing that between 1902 and 1904 no Irish emigration to Argentina was recorded) (Whitaker 2; Mullin, Joyce, Sexuality 62). This halt does not look coincidental, as in 1902 the Argentinean government passed the “Ley de Residencia” to restrict immigration, in part to prevent the entrance of traffickers, while the Asociación Nacional Argentina Contra la Trata de Blancas [National Argentinean Association against White Slave Trafficking] was founded among local anti white slavery campaigns organized by the newspaper El Tiempo (Trochón 281). Irish immigrants arriving before then generally settled in Buenos Aires, the capital city, or in Patagonia. Noticeably, these groups constituted a clear minority when compared to the influx from other nations such as Spain and Italy (the overwhelming majority, with cultural and linguistic affinities), and France and Germany (to a lesser extent). Jewish immigration was also encouraged, as the Argentinean government desperately needed to enlarge the agricultural workforce in order to compete in the international market (those rural laborers became known as the “Jewish gauchos”).25 By 1914, “around one-third of the country’s population was foreign born, and around eighty percent of the population were immigrants and those descended from immigrants since 1850,” with Spaniards and Italians comprising the largest slice of the foreign community (Rock 166). Thomas F. McGann explains that, in fact, “one-half of the total of economically active people in the country in 1914 were foreigners” (31). It thus sounds credible that Frank in Joyce’s story could have attempted a new life in Buenos Aires. What raises many eyebrows is the successful picture he paints of himself to Eveline.
The most obvious of Frank’s fabrications lies in the seductive “stories of the terrible Patagonians” he tells the young girl (Joyce, Dubliners 30). A quick look at any Argentinean history book can confirm: (a) that the Patagonians had been long wiped out by the time Frank is traveling around the world, and (b) that they were not nearly as “terrible” as Frank portrays them. Don Gifford corroborates in Joyce Annotated (1982) that “in Victorian times little was known of [the Patagonians] except that they were said to be the tallest of human races,” while he further notes that “[l]egend took over from there and created a race of near monsters” (51). In reality, Jonathan C. Brown explains in his chapter “Ancient Argentina and the European Encounter,” that the native Patagonians were “quite small [ … ] families or clans” of hunters that “moved mainly on foot and set camps based on the seasons and hunting opportunities” (17, 16). Their “tools were simple, usually bone and stone weapons and scrapers, products of their Stone Age existence” (17). When Spaniards arrived in the sixteenth century, the conquistadores set in motion a systematic crusade of annihilation of the native aborigines in Argentina, which was relatively easy to accomplish given that the tribes were scattered around the territory, and never managed to constitute strong empires like those of the Incas, the Aztecs, or the Mayans. This decimating trend continued for centuries until General Roca accomplished in 1879 his infamous “Conquest of the Desert,” where he completed “the end of indigenous resistance [in a Kurtz-like fashion, by extermination],” and, therefore, “southern Pampas and Patagonia became open for settlement” (287). Unlike most of the rest of South America, Argentina had very few of its native inhabitants left by 1879, especially in Patagonia.
From a historical standpoint, then, the “terrible Patagonians” Frank describes to Eveline were clearly a myth, yet such a fable gives the sailor a convenient alibi to “inflate” his deeds and (hopefully) seduce the girl. By mentioning this extinct tribe and its fierce attributes, Joyce could have tried to paint Frank as an opportunist charlatan who only tries to entice the girl out of Ireland for a short sexual escapade to Liverpool (as Kenner suggests), or as a procurer attracting his prey to sell her in Buenos Aires (as Mullin argues). Joyce was finally able to publish Dubliners while living in Italy, in 1914, having spent his time since 1904 for the most part between Trieste and Rome, with only brief visits to Ireland. Considering the context where Joyce lived for almost ten years, it is reasonable to assume that the author knew that the monstrous Patagonians existed only in the collective unconscious of conquistadorial minds. After all, by the time Joyce was revising Dubliners for publication, Argentina and Italy had already consolidated cultural ties through the vast number of Italians in contact with relatives in the new continent, all of whom could testify that the dreadful Patagonians were nowhere to be seen.
The second of Frank’s problematic assertions comes from the supposed “home” he claims to have in Buenos Aires (Joyce, Dubliners 29). Sidney Freshbach has supported Frank’s credibility in terms of the money he could have made in Argentina, arguing that “it is possible that Frank ‘fell on his feet’ there and bought a house” (223–24). This might have been the case, but it would have presented an unusual scenario. By the beginning of the 1900s, the Argentinean oligarchy prided itself on the possession of land, which makes it unlikely that Frank, or any other poor, uneducated immigrant, could have purchased (very expensive) property. Let us remember that Frank claims to have “started as a deck boy at a pound a month on a ship of the Allen line”—a footnote in Margot Norris’s 2006 Norton edition of Dubliners defines this position as that of an “inexperienced worker hired to help the crew on a ship with menial tasks and errands” (29–30). Most likely, he would have shared the fate of other sailors, who managed to make a decent but far from prosperous living (unless, of course, his business differs from the one he describes to Eveline).
Non-educated immigrants could obtain jobs, but their status generally remained marginal. As Arthur P. Whitaker comments, it was “the oligarchy’s unwillingness to admit [uneducated immigrants] on terms of equality that kept them from becoming full-fledged members of the Argentine nation” (58). Whitaker further explains that it was easy for immigrants “to acquire citizenship by naturalization after only two years’ residence, but they could still neither vote nor hold office, and naturalization would only subject them to compulsory military service” (58–59). As a result, by 1914, “the vast majority of foreign-born residents remained alien,” which only makes it more improbable that a supposed sailor like Frank could have owned anything in Buenos Aires (59). David Rock, for his part, observes that “in 1914 it was estimated that four-fifths of [immigrant] working class families lived in one-room households,” in what used to be called conventillos: crowded, unsanitary urban dwellings with shared bathrooms and limited access to drinking water (175). If Frank is really a sailor, this sounds like the most plausible of his alternatives. If not, the “seduction and swindle” hypothesis makes a compelling case (Norris 56).26
Sex traffickers, in contrast with most working-class immigrants, enjoyed an enviable economic position in Argentina that would have allowed them to purchase real estate and property with ease, since they earned considerable amounts of money from the prostituted women and were therefore constantly searching for new recruits to import. French prostitution, for example, was directly linked to Argentina’s oligarchy, as wealthier men preferred (and paid substantially more for) a French prostitute or “cocotte,” which accounts for the clear favor that Le Milieu members enjoyed. As for Jewish traffickers, even though they were stigmatized, the affluence they acquired was certainly conspicuous: the headquarters of the Zwi Migdal society of mutual help in Buenos Aires was a luxurious mansion in Calle Córdoba 3280. It contained a synagogue, an ample party hall, a bar, a room to perform wakes, another room for business meetings, and a garden with tall palm trees. Trochón describes marble and bronze plaques in some of its rooms commemorating the memory of presidents, vice-presidents, and secretaries of the association (92). These facilities, among others the Zwi Migdal possessed, allowed Jewish traffickers and prostitutes to continue practicing their faith and their rituals, as the respectable Jewish community treated them like outcasts. In Bodies and Souls: The Tragic Plight of Three Jewish Women Forced into Prostitution in the Americas (2005), Isabel Vincent notes that, during its heyday, Zwi Migdal members and their recruited prostitutes were “completely banned by the respectable Jewish community” and “ostracized [as] the unclean ones,” but that did not prevent their ultra-lucrative business from prospering until its dismantling in 1930 (Vincent 12; Bristow 5). Unlike sailors, sex traffickers in Argentina were undoubtedly wealthy.27
According to Mullin, “Frank closely matches the stereotype of the itinerant international procurer, ‘bully’ or ‘cadet’, charming the gullible with tales and rash promises” (69). Mullin notes that procurers “in social purity propaganda were almost always ‘of foreign parentage, probably a Jew, a Frenchman, an Italian, or perhaps a Greek’” (69). In her analysis, Mullin highlights Frank’s foreignness without specifying any particular nationality, but a look at the most common methods of recruitment can shed more light on the sailor. French recruiters, for example, offered the women jobs as prostitutes and did not resort to courtship or marriage (Carretero 114). Jewish procurers, on the other hand, often seduced the women and promised them marriage in order to traffic them from Europe into Argentina (114).28 Such a strategy would lead one to connect Frank with Jewish pimps: of those Jewish girls who were deceived, a majority reported that it was through tactics of courtship similar to the ones Frank seems to be employing with Eveline.29 While, arguably, the story paints Frank with an air of foreignness (we know he has a darker complexion, for example), nowhere do we get hints of a foreign accent (French, Italian, or Greek, if we go along with the stereotypical procurer of social purity propaganda). That he is visiting the “old country just for a holiday” implies that he is from Ireland (Joyce, Dubliners 30). Can we assume that Frank may have been, like Leopold Bloom, and Irish Jew? Joyce’s destination choice (the infamous turn-of-the-century Buenos Aires) and his own interest in Jewish themes (as evidenced in Ulysses) invite speculation.
Several critics, Kenner among them, have pointed out that Dubliners offers an embryonic version of Joyce’s oeuvre. In it, the author began the experiments both with form and content that would recur in his later masterpieces. In fact, Joyce initially conceived the germ of the story that flourished into Ulysses as one for the Dubliners compilation. It does seem pertinent, then, to read his collection of short stories in light of Ulysses, where the author explicitly connects white slavery with Jewish characters. In “Circe,” for example, the discourses of white slavery, prostitution, and Jewishness become intertwined. During Leopold Bloom’s nightmarish trial, the City Recorder vows “to put an end to this white slave traffic and rid Dublin of this odious pest. Scandalous!” (Ulysses 384). As for the ideological links between “vice” and Jewishness, Marshik observes that, “Zoe [the prostitute Leopold Bloom encounters outside Bella Cohen’s brothel,] [l]ike Bloom, [ … ] has a complicated ethnic and national identity: when Bloom asks her if she is Irish, Zoe responds that she is English but then murmurs Hebrew under her breath” (154). Marshik further notes that Bella Cohen “again links the (racially) Jewish Bloom with fallen women” (154). The critic points out that “Cohen’s name implies that she is, or has married someone of Jewish descent, and Bloom refers to ‘our mutual faith’ in an attempt to placate her” (154). But, to complicate Joyce’s ambivalent treatment of the subject, later in the trial Bloom himself becomes the target of anti-Semitic racist accusations, as Alexander J Dowie summons his “Fellowchristians and antiBloomites” to proclaim the Jewish ad salesman “a disgrace to christian men,” a Caliban “bronzed with infamy” (401). In such a context, the adjective “bronzed” denotes Jewishness. Noticeably, in Dubliners Joyce describes Frank’s complexion with the same word: Eveline remembers how he “was standing at the gate, his peaked cap pushed back on his head and his hair tumbled forward over a face of bronze” (Joyce, Dubliners 29). While we don’t know much about Frank or Bloom’s physical appearance (in Bloom’s case, it differs according to the speaker, while we only know Frank through Eveline’s eyes), the chosen term and its associations with Jewishness in Ulysses are suggestive.
While I certainly do not imply that Joyce was suspicious of Jews in Dublin—and Joyce’s representation of Leopold Bloom becomes a prime example of his sympathetic treatment of Jewish people—in “Eveline,” the author could have incorporated the orientalized discourse of the time in order to play with the pervasive fears about Jewish men preying on Christian virgins.30 If Joyce had in mind such stereotyped individual, on the surface, Frank’s portrayal would appear to contradict the author’s sympathetic image of Leopold Bloom (a character who, despite his ambiguities, resists stereotypes and shows signs of generosity and compassion throughout Ulysses: contributing to the Dignam fund to help the fatherless children, visiting Mrs. Purefoy at the hospital and empathizing with her pain, trying to keep Stephen out of trouble in the red-light district, etc.). Joyce’s more well-rounded depiction of a Jewish character in Ulysses could then show the author’s own evolution and maturity as a writer, similarly observed when comparing the conventional images of the East young Joyce deploys in “Araby” (the story immediately preceding “Eveline”) and the “more intelligent awareness of the Orient as a Western construct” Joyce advances later in Ulysses (Almond, “Tales” 18).31 As argued above, Joyce’s incorporation of the white slavery subtext in a clichéd, superficial manner in his earlier short story may have little to do with perpetuating existing stereotypes and more with highlighting Frank’s unreliability by playing with the ubiquitous fear of Jewish procurers seducing Christian virgins, thus keeping the girl seemingly paralyzed within the narrative. Indeed, readers get the impression that, by staying in Ireland, Eveline will probably become as stagnant as the other characters in the collection, as the girl’s life seems to follow her mother’s (like Joyce’s own mother’s) overworked future.
At the height of colonial expansion, “[b]iological racism” had become pervasive (Walkowitz 35). Africans’ and Asians’ pigmentation presented no problem for white colonizers, but Irish and Jewish populations demanded more creative signifiers of racial inferiority. In her analysis of Charles Booth’s investigations of London poverty and violence at the turn of the century, Judith Walkowitz explains that “Jews bore the physical stigmata of racial Otherness” (35). Boasting pseudo-scientific expertise, Booth claims: “‘It is not difficult to recognize the Jews,’ facial features, skin pigmentation, even posture and bearing denoted their racial type. [ … ] ‘the observant wanderer may note the [ … ] darker complexion and unmistakable nose’” (qtd. in Walkowitz 35). This racialized discourse was widely reproduced in popular magazines such as Punch, whose cartoons, as analyzed by Vincent Cheng in Joyce, Race, and Empire (1995), had become staple images in Britain. Joyce subverts this hegemonic perception by painting highly unsympathetic portraits of nationalistic Irish Catholic men who scorn Leopold Bloom by projecting onto him insidious racial stereotypes. In “Cyclops,” for instance, the citizen makes remarks about the Jewish “queer odour” and Joe Hynes calls the salesman “a bloody dark horse,” while in “Nestor” Mr Deasy worries that “England is in the hands of the jews [ … ] And they are the signs of a nation’s decay. Wherever they gather they eat up the nation’s vital strength” (Joyce Ulysses 250, 275, 28). Mr Deasy’s anti-Semitism may relate to “complaints about the traffickers’ colony in Buenos Aires [that] began reaching Europe in the 1880s. In 1888 an alarmed correspondent in Buenos Aires wrote to London’s Anglo-Jewish Association about the ‘immoral practices committed in this city by Jewish immigrants’” (Bristow 115).32
In any case, if Frank has “immoral” intentions, what awaits Eveline in a city full of immigrants speaking languages she does not know, with the ghost of prostitution lurking in the shadows, does not look enticing. Without any exaggeration, in the early 1900s the options of a young Irish girl who did not speak Spanish, alone in an unfamiliar city where the main source of income for lower-class aliens came from the port—traditionally, men’s territory—were minimal. Several sources confirm the omnipresent perception that prostitution was a bleak feature of Buenos Aires at that time, which, according to David Rock, “reflected the marked lack of women immigrants” (176). “Early in the twentieth century,” Rock explains, “Buenos Aires had ill-fame as the center of white-slave traffic from Europe” (176). In Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires (1991), Guy reports that “[y]oung girls, even those with no intention of migrating abroad, were advised not to walk unescorted at night” for fear of being enticed into a trap in a distant country (5). The hysteria about white slavery and the city’s “terrible international reputation as the port of missing women” was such that “the very name of Buenos Aires caused many a European to shudder” (5). Guy explains that ‘[by] the 1860s the Continental press reported frightening stories of women lured away by strangers with false promises of marriage or work, only to be trapped in some sordid house of ill repute,” yet the author suggests that such reports “were cautionary tales for independent European females,” and she observes that white trafficking stories achieved a mythological proportion, when, in fact, “verifiable cases of white slavery were infrequent [and] highly exaggerated” (6). When they did occur, however, they involved “a system of forced recruitment by lovers, fiancées, husbands and professional procurers,” while, predictably, “one or two particularly nasty incidents were sufficient to persuade the European public that their women were endangered in foreign lands” (6).
Leaving myths aside, Trochón, Bra, and Carretero confirm that there were powerful global sex trafficking associations operating in Argentina in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which commanded a vastly profitable business. The most well-known and best-organized association, the Zwi Migdal, had international ramifications (with connections in places as diverse as Rio de Janeiro, New York, Bombay, Johannesburg), but found a central outpost in Buenos Aires, where the government condoned the presence of their 2,000 brothels and their prostitutes (Trochón 96; Bra 70, 114). Zwi Migdal members’ treatment of their recruited women illustrates cases of literal slavery, as the prostitutes were sold from one owner to another and often endured brutal threats, punishments, and ongoing exploitation (Bra 37; Carretero 120). Zwi Migdal today is considered a disgrace by the Jewish society in Argentina—a name no one wants to remember because it brings about a collective feeling of anxiety since the activities of a minority group of Jewish criminals were used as an ideological weapon to disseminate anti-Semitic propaganda. “In Buenos Aires,” Bristow notes, “every Russian or Polish Jew was believed to be a trafficker, no matter how respectable he might be” (215). As it has been suggested throughout, the condemnable activities of a select group of Jewish traffickers reinforced the ideological association between Jewishness and white slavery, thus obscuring other criminals’ presence and participation in the same illicit business. Unfortunately, much of the evidence of the Zwi Migdal’s operations has been destroyed by the society’s members. Historians remark that, while there is absolute certainty of the Zwi Midgal’s existence and proof of their crimes, the society carefully manipulated the evidence of their illicit activities in order not to leave incriminatory traces and evade the authorities (Bra 35). The 1994 terrorist attack on the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) in Buenos Aires erased most of the remaining archives, yet some documentation still exists (Vincent 10–11).
I want to stress once again that Jewish pimps generally recruited Jewish girls. But—it bears repeating—the paranoia over Christian girls’ dishonor related more to ideological perception than empirical fact, a subtext that Joyce could have subversively incorporated in his tale. From the “Nestor,” “Cyclops,” and “Circe” examples quoted above, readers understand the pervasive anxieties about Jewish individuals corrupting European Christianity. Indeed, in “the age of pandemic anti-Semitism,” Bristow explains, “anti-semites failed to acknowledge that Jewish traffickers normally recruited Jewish women. The young Hitler in Vienna was particularly influenced by the accusation that Jews trafficked in Christians” (4). Bristow recounts Hitler’s memories of his visit to Vienna in 1907 and his impressions of the Jewish white slave traffic as described in Mein Kampf:
In no other city of Western Europe could the relationship between Jewry and prostitution and even now the white slave traffic, be studied better than in Vienna.… An icy shudder ran down my spine when seeing for the first time the Jew as an evil, shameless and calculating manager of this shocking vice, the outcome of the scum of the big city. (qtd. in Bristow 84)
This becomes no small detail as both Bristow and Trochón document that the white slavery discourse contributed to reinforce existing Jewish stereotypes, while we know that Hitler was aware of their involvement in sex trafficking and how “the nightmare of history” unfolded. “By the early 1890s,” Bristow remarks, “the image of the alien Jewish trafficker in Christian female flesh was a staple of the German anti-semites” (250). Thus, white slavery propaganda had far broader ramifications than the obvious policing of newly independent women and the voicing of feminist concerns, particularly because the trade was mainly attributed to Jewish traffickers.33
Akin to the situation of pauperized Jewish populations in Eastern Europe, Ireland’s colonial status contributed to the pervasive poverty and lack of opportunities experienced by its citizens, which in turn propelled continuous migration into the Americas after the 1845 potato famine. Eveline’s social class, like that of all the trafficked female characters analyzed in this work, plays a crucial part in her contemplating the prospect of emigration with Frank. Readers never perceive Eveline having feelings of love towards Frank; at the most, she hints at some anticipation about abandoning a life of poverty and oppression in Dublin.
Let us finally consider that Joyce wrote this story at the height of social purity campaigns in Dublin, where its port visibly displayed anti-white slavery propaganda that Eveline could have seen at the North Wall while giving Frank “no sign of love or farewell or recognition” (Joyce, Dubliners 32). Joyce later revised this story while living in Trieste, a cosmopolitan city with a thriving port, where tales of enforced prostitution in Buenos Aires would have not been unheard of. After all, the “vast majority of [European women involved in white slave trafficking] came from Eastern Europe, France, and Italy” (Guy 7). Ira Nadel illustrates the spectrum of Joyce’s many long and lasting friendships with Jewish people, with whom the author would attend concerts and plays, share walks, etc.—the writer Italo Svevo (Ettore Schmitz) to name just one. “Throughout his life,” Nadel explains, “Joyce constantly sought the companionship, support, and knowledge of Jews through friendships that continued despite geographic relocations”; as a proof of “the misunderstandings which sometimes resulted from these associations,” Nadel mentions “the refusal of Switzerland in September 1940 to grant Joyce and his family an entry visa on the grounds that he was Jewish” (13). Knowing that in Trieste Joyce had several Jewish acquaintances with whom he exchanged frequent and candid conversations could suggest that he might have been familiar with the clandestine activities taking place in Buenos Aires, as Bristow confirms that “white slavery became widely known in Jewish communities” through the massive media dissemination (and discrimination) of the time (218).
Looking at “Eveline” in a broader historical context necessarily changes conventional readings of Joyce’s story. Contrary to the way most critics have traditionally interpreted it, as the one demonstrating the most conspicuous case of paralysis in Dubliners, “Eveline” may have a less depressing ending if the girl could be saving herself from a future of sexual exploitation in a foreign land. Historicizing “Eveline” both in Europe and across the Atlantic opens up a more optimistic panorama for the young girl, who may have wisely chosen to stay, instead of facing an ominous future with one of the many betrayers Joyce depicts in Dubliners. I do not wish to imply, however, that “Eveline” defies the notion of a paralyzed Ireland (a conspicuous trope throughout this short story), but that this particular character should not be assumed to embody that “paralysis” all by herself: her situation remains, no doubt about it, hopeless. Eveline lacks opportunities and her position is clearly deplorable. But after considering the very real risks involved in this adventure with a mysterious sailor (who, regardless of the supposed love he has professed, boards the ship and leaves her), staying in Ireland may not have turned out to be “a wholly undesirable life” after all (Joyce 29). Once we add the ideological atmosphere and the historical context in which the story was conceived, the journey begins to look suspicious.
Fredric Jameson reminds us in “Magical Narratives” that the text provides “clues [ … ] which lead us back to the concrete historical situation of the individual text itself, and allow us to read its structure as ideology, as a socially symbolic act, as a prototypical response to a historical dilemma” (157). Admittedly, Joyce’s story leaves ample room for ambiguity, and thus one can understand why Sidney Freshbach has deemed Kenner’s “interpretation of Frank” as “clearly one of the weakest moments in Joyce criticism” because “there are simply not enough clues in the text to justify [Kenner’s] judgments about Frank” (226). And Freshbach is right, for Joyce’s short story does not offer enough clues in the text itself. Instead, it relies on a net of intertextual and cultural associations existing beyond the narrative: to fully convey Eveline’s predicament, Joyce may have pointed readers outside the text. Knowing that white slavery, “one of the leading social issues of the age,” was mainly attributed to orientalized Jewish individuals—information that Joyce withholds from the narrative, but that we can assume Eveline (and Joyce’s original readers) must have been aware of—, her choice becomes far more nuanced (Bristow 5). The narration never suggests that Eveline has any romantic longing for the sailor, which could have provided enough motivation to plunge into the adventure. If anything, readers perceive that her despondent situation in Ireland is guiding her tentative choice. Leaving love out of the equation, Eveline’s “complicated mental state” gradually reveals itself to the readers as she cautiously debates the pros and cons of a life with a not-so-credible Frank and his promises of a not-so-secure future (Attridge 6). With his acknowledged scrupulous meanness, Joyce forces readers to debate with her, to decide with her. In the end, choosing between misery in her native country and potential enslavement in a foreign land, Eveline opts for the first (and sure) option. Yet let us not judge her too hastily because, although the story closes with Eveline visibly “passive” at the port, we know that the mere name of Buenos Aires would have conjured up enough ideological demons to make her feel that emigrating with the sailor, perhaps after all, is not such a good idea.
In the revisionist work conducted over the past years, historians concur that, for the most part, the white slavery hysteria of the turn of the twentieth century pursued political objectives: above all, the need to reinforce patriarchal ideas of womanhood and nationhood at a time when women were beginning to search for a place outside the home. The atmosphere of pervasive danger and latent sexual threat emphasized by the media aimed at preventing female independence and encouraging subordination to an economic order that benefitted from maintaining women’s unpaid labor within the domestic sphere. Anne McClintock observes that “[c]ontrolling women’s sexuality, exalting maternity and breeding a virile race of empire-builders were widely perceived as the paramount means for controlling the health and wealth of the male imperial body politic, so that, by the turn of the century, sexual purity emerged as a controlling metaphor for racial, economic and political power” (Imperial 47). Like the Irish Homestead editors, then, social purity advocates believed that the “angel in the house” should stay in the house.
But instead of remaining in fear, many women nevertheless saw the opportunity to carve a space out through migration (some for prostitution, some for sweatshop work, some for adventure), while others become politically active, invoking precisely the same discourse intended to keep them under the protection of the patriarchal wing.34 White slavery thus turned into a powerful ideological master narrative. As Bristow explains,
[the] supremacy of an obnoxious system of state-regulated prostitution nearly everywhere, the popular if false belief that most prostitutes had been recruited through deceit, the partly symbolic use of the prostitution question by feminists, and the development of widespread concern with public health issues like venereal disease, all combined to make white slavery into one of the most popular questions across the western world. (5)
Bristow further emphasizes that prostitute migration (some, admittedly, through deception) was so prevalent that around “this issue [white slavery] there spread from England in 1899 an international crusade of considerable influence, and one whose work was later inherited by the League of Nations” (5).
In England, feminists such as Josephine Butler mobilized significant social change by spearheading campaigns against prostitution and sex trafficking that transcended the British Isles. In Germany, the Jewish feminist “Bertha Pappenheim judged correctly that white slavery was the most effective issue around which to mobilize her generation of Jewish women” (6). The same occurred in the United States, where critics have pointed out that some early American feminists utilized white slavery rhetoric to further their own political agendas, including the passing of the first White Slave Traffic Act in 1910 which prohibited single women from crossing state borders to perform immoral acts and criminalized interracial marriages. Sex slavery thus formed part of a discourse that utilized trafficked women for diverse political purposes, often independent of what could have benefitted the trafficked women per se.35
As analyzed throughout, white slavery propaganda also had other insidious effects beyond the policing of women, as it carried xenophobic and racist overtones, with the crime mainly attributed to undesirable foreign elements. Without a doubt, Jewish involvement in sex trafficking was prominent and real (Bra 114), but Jews’ participation in the crime conveniently elided the presence of other groups engaged in the same illegal business. Journalistic campaigns in the graphic media showing haunting images of orientalized traffickers and innocent white maidens generated a widespread anti-Semitic atmosphere that, not coincidentally, peaked before World War I.
The Great War that followed diverted sex trafficking patterns: on the one hand, it propelled more emigration to the Americas, especially to Argentina (Carretero 131); on the other hand, women became necessary in military camps. As will be analyzed in more detail in the following chapter, Edward Bristow observes that the military made use of impoverished prostitutes. Interestingly, Bristow remarks that, despite the pervasive anti-Semitism of the time, between “the German conquest of Warsaw in August 1915 and May 1917, 24 percent of the 2689 women who registered for prostitution were Jewish[.] Of the grand total, 1054 were war victims and 584 war widows” (285). Clearly, poverty played a major role in the women’s involvement in these activities, while Bristow further notes that in “eastern Europe, where life for the Jewish masses became increasingly miserable between the wars, white slavery survived until 1939” (7). It thus becomes difficult to attribute these women full “agency” in the strict sense of the word—they obviously prostituted themselves as a matter of basic survival—but it would be possible to argue that they still retained some choice. In stark contrast, the following chapter will explore the horrors of an army that, through calculated official policies, forced young women to serve as sexual slaves for the military during World War II. For many of those unfortunate girls, there would be no romantic courtships or promises of marriage, but blatant abduction, rape, and often murder.
In his story, Joyce incorporates a subtext of sexual slavery and plays with the prevalent fears disseminated by social purity propaganda in an (arguably) obvious way. The author sprinkles such stereotypical discourse throughout the pseudo-romance between the “innocent” girl and the “charming” sailor. But these characters’ representations must have resonated with audiences who soon demanded an end to such uncomfortable depictions of Irish virtue. When reading the story through the lens of Frank’s unreliability, this character becomes one more of the many betrayers that abound in Dubliners, “all palaver” with no substance (Joyce, Dubliners 154). From this perspective, it may be he who best embodies Ireland’s maladies, rather than the “ever-passive” Eveline herself. After all, despite her miserable life in Dublin, she seems smart enough not to fall for a potential inferno of sexual enslavement. In fact, as we shall see, the narratives that follow show that Eveline might have been, indeed, very lucky.
NOTES
1. Part of the research presented in this chapter has been published in the journals the James Joyce Quarterly and Irish Migration Studies in Latin America. See Laura Barberan Reinares’s “Like a “Helpless Animal”? Like a Cautious Woman: Joyce’s ‘Eveline,’ Immigration, and the Zwi Migdal in Argentina in the Early 1900s” (2011) and “Frankly Speaking, ‘The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you’: Migration and White Slavery in Argentina in Joyce’s ‘Eveline’” (2013) in this bibliography.
2. See Kristof’s New York Times column “Fighting Back, One Brothel Raid at a Time” in this bibliography.
3. I mean abolition of sexual slavery. See Kristof’s New York Times column “If This Isn’t Slavery, What Is It?,” where the journalist exposes one of the many horrific cases of sex trafficking he has brought to public attention.
4. In Imperial Leather, McClintock explains that “The [Contagious Disease] Acts were designed less to abolish prostitution than to place control of sex work in the hands of the male state; as will be developed in more detail in the following chapter, “the argument ran that the real threat to the prowess and potency of the national army lay in the syphilitic threat that prostitutes supposedly posed to the genital hygiene of the army” (287–88). Controlling women and ensuring their purity was, above all, a means of preserving the health of military men.
5. I do not wish to imply that Kristof exploits women’s stories in order to sell books. The journalist seems deeply committed to eradicating sex trafficking (see Kristof’s columns “The Face of Modern Day Slavery” and “Fighting Back, One Brothel Raid at a Time” in the New York Times). His approach, on the other hand, is debatable (see Noy Thrupkaew’s “The Crusade against Sex Trafficking: Do Brothel Raids Help or Hurt the ‘Rescued’?” in The Nation).
6. Shaw was actually critical of the social purity movement and later parodied Stead’s “Maiden Tribute” in some of his work (Marshik 204).
7. These stories deal with Asian mafias and “white slavery” on the American west coast. For the historical context, see Ruth Rosen’s The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900–1918 (1994), Chapter 7.
8. According to Ivette Trochón, Jewish sex trafficking into Argentina started around the 1870s and was loosely organized until 1906, when the first Jewish society of mutual help was legally registered and officially recognized under the name of Varsovia (Trochón 334). As documented by Gerardo Bra in his book La Organización Negra: La Increíble Historia de la Zwi Migdal, this was only a façade, as the association was fully dedicated to sex trafficking and all its members were criminals (29). From now on, I will refer to this organization by its most familiar name, Zwi Migdal, even though it was effectively called this for only one year before it was dismantled in 1930. In 1929, the Polish consul in Argentina, Ladislao Mazurkiewicz, complained to the Argentinean government that this criminal organization shared the name of Poland’s capital, therefore prompting the name change (Trochón 341). Since most historians call it Zwi Migdal, I will use the same name to avoid confusion.
9. At the turn of the century, French architects were brought to Buenos Aires to design several buildings for the government and the oligarchy, so some of the city’s neighborhoods have a strong Parisian resemblance—in fact, at the turn of the century Buenos Aires was known then as the “Paris of Latin America.”
10. Bertha Pappenheim was the first patient of psychoanalysis, renamed “Anna O” by the Austrian physician Josef Breuer and later immortalized in Sigmund Freud’s Studies in Hysteria (1985)—Breuer was the one who wrote about her in such work.
11. In this story, the brothel is managed by Sarah, a Jewish madam; coincidentally, Celia Marshik suggests that Bella Cohen, the brothel’s owner in Joyce’s Ulysses, could be Jewish.
12. The Spanish version reads: “Contar la verdad no es escribir cuentos divertidos” (283).
13. I refer to the “white slave trade” in quotation marks because it was an ideologically charged term, implying the deception and downfall of an innocent victim. While deception did happen in some cases (Zwi Migdal procurers often promised marriage to the women in order to traffic them), most women migrated for prostitution on their own volition. See Doezema, Walkowitz, and Guy in this bibliography.
14. I have paraphrased Ivette Trochón. The original account reads: “En las últimas décadas del Ochocientos el tráfico de mujeres, la ‘trata de blancas’ como se llamo entonces, alcanzó un desarrollo sin precedentes, y en América estuvo estrechamente vinculado a las grandes corrientes migratorias decimonicas, convirtiéndose en una de sus consecuencias no deseadas” (21). The author further adds: “los barcos de vapor, los ferrocarriles, el telégrafo [ … ] facilitaron la expansión del ‘comercio infame’, y las nuevas rutas oceánicas, abiertas por el canal de Suez y mas tarde por el de Panamá, hicieron los desplazamientos mas accesibles, catapultando el fenómeno a una escala planetaria” (21). Trochón concludes: “es posible sostener que entre 1860 y 1930 el tráfico de mujeres se realizó fundamentalmente desde el viejo continente hacia América y, en menor escala, hacia África o Asia” (Trochón 21).
15. In the original Spanish version, Trochón explains: “Una ola de pánico—alimentada por una prensa sensacionalista que hizo de la trata un folletín terrorífico—recorrió el mundo occidental convirtiendo el robo de “jóvenes vírgenes” en una de las preocupaciones públicas del momento” (Trochón 25).
16. See Edward Bristow’s Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight against White Slavery 1870–1930 (1983) in this bibliography.
17. None of the previous stories allows an outlet for the main characters. The young boys depicted in them come to an awareness of the corrupt environment where they live, but there is no indication of a possible escape for them.
18. Emigrating was a popular decision at the time, but one that the author deeply scorned as another betrayal of his nation. Of course, Joyce’s own emigration to the Continent with Nora Barnacle barely a month after the publication of “Eveline” adds a layer of irony to this story, yet, unlike many of the characters in Dubliners, Joyce always remained involved with Ireland and frequently expressed his desire to help his compatriots progress. As Joyce wrote to his publisher Grant Richards after the latter kept requiring deletions and modifications to the manuscript of Dubliners: “I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilization in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass” (qtd. in Leonard 92).
19. Trieste, a cosmopolitan port city on the North East coast of Italy, formed part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire between 1867 and 1918, but it maintained a predominantly Italian identity. After World War I, the city was occupied by the Italian army, and it was officially annexed to Italy in 1920. Joyce lived there between 1904 and 1920, hired by the Berlitz School to teach English to immigrants. At the time, there was a considerable underclass of port laborers from all over the world, while the city was notorious for its red-light district located near the docks. John McCourt observes that Trieste was the “world’s seventh busiest port, the second in the Mediterranean after Marseilles” (29). In such a context, one can speculate that stories of white slave traffic in Buenos Aires would have been heard by Joyce, especially since much of the policing against sex trafficking occurred at the ports.
20. The story’s final version, Hans Walter Gabler notes, is “significantly different from the text published in The Irish Homestead” (xxxi).
21. Critics frequently point to “Eveline” as the story that most evidently shows paralysis. As Trevor L. Williams asserts, in “story after story one petite-bourgeois character after another is brought to the mirror to apprehend his or her situation, but (and Eveline is the prime example) they see no way to act, no way to transcend the limits of their present consciousness or class position” [my emphasis] (54). Peter De Voogd summarizes the traditional critical reception of “Eveline” in his essay “Imaging Eveline, Visualized Focalizations in James Joyce’s Dubliners,” explaining that this story has generally been interpreted as “the most obvious story in Dubliners to express the sterile paralysis that Joyce thought of as typical of Dublin life” (48). However, De Voogd does not read Eveline as a “helpless animal” (Joyce, Dubliners 32). He claims instead that “Eveline’s final refusal to go with Frank has little to do with sudden paralysis or real helplessness”; the fact that Eveline “set her white face to him” implies “activity and deliberation, [ … ] an almost perverse act of the will” (48).
22. Celia Marshik explains that, despite its apparently prudish/cautionary intention, this book “is replete with erotically charged episodes” (196). The critic further adds that some “contemporary readers judged The White Slave Market to be undiluted naughtiness” (196).
23. The original text in Spanish reads:
[ … ] Gastadas y pervertidas por todo estremo, ganando ya muy poco, las encuentran los tratantes que hacen todos los años estos viajes de esploracion de América á Europa. No se presentan á ellas en muchos casos, descubriendo sus propósitos, y diciendo su verdadero oficio, sinó que aparecen uno de tantos, entre los parroquianos del lupanar, se fingen enamorados, pagan la deuda que ellas tengan contraída con el alma, y se las llevan. Luego, en el cuarto del hotel, el nuevo querido, habla de América, come el país del oro, menciona los pingues beneficios que allá se pueden obtener y las deciden á la aventura. Una vez a bordo del transatlántico, despójáse el individuo ante ellas de todo disfraz y disimulo, y confiesa su verdadera condición de caften, de rufian ó amo de casa. (170–71)
24. Along with Lopez Bago’s Carne Importada (1891), other novels address the perilous circumstances of poor/orphaned women and their vulnerability to prostitution. See Marshik’s analysis of the female protagonists in Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Good Morning, Midnight (1939).
25. The Jewish communities in the fertile Pampas region greatly contributed to increase the productivity and wealth of the Argentinean nation, which enjoyed unparalleled prosperity in the years before World War I through the end of World War II. The Jewish “gauchos” were allowed to purchase land and settle in La Pampa, Santa Fe, and the countryside of Buenos Aires; incidentally, the name “polacas” also referred to legitimate female Jewish immigrants (not only Jewish prostitutes).
26. If we analyze the collection as a whole, the seduction theory becomes even more prominent. Dubliners presents many speculators who would quickly sell their souls to make easy money for themselves, without ever considering what would benefit their fellow Irish, man or woman. In “Two Gallants,” for example, Lenehan and Corley devise a shameful strategy to extract a gold coin from a servant girl. Similarly, Ignatius Gallaher in “A Little Cloud” has long traded Ireland for England and shows no scruples in admitting that he would marry a woman for her money, as he confesses about a potential wife: “She’ll have a good fat account at the bank or she won’t do for me” (66). Even women seduce and deceive in Dubliners, and here Polly, Mrs. Mooney’s daughter in “The Boarding House,” comes to mind, as she finds herself a husband through a dubious behind-closed-doors arrangement between her mother and the chosen male victim (56). In “The Dead,” Lily, the caretaker’s daughter who opens the story, puts it in plain words: “The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you” (154). The suggestion that Frank could be following similar steps with Eveline, then, should not surprise readers.
27. Incidentally, Lopez Bago’s Carne Importada describes a Jewish pimp (Don Rodolfo) who amasses a fortune by prostituting immigrant girls. The narrator recounts that Don Rodolfo “was a procurer, that Jewish man, the richest of all and the one who had real estate in Corrientes street. Three houses in the same block, three houses joined in the interior, and to one of them, the best one, he had just brought the young girl through his artful deceit” [my translation; the original Spanish version reads: “era un caften, aquel judio, el más rico de todos ellos, y el que tenía más hacienda en la calle de Corrientes. Tres casas en una misma cuadra, tres casas unidas, que se comunicaban interiormente, y á una de ellas, a la mejor, era adonde acababa de llevar á la jóven por las artes de su astucia”] (157). The narrator further recounts that “of all the businesses that could be done in Buenos Aires, [Don Rodolfo] had chosen the most lucrative” [my translation; the original Spanish version reads: “De todos los negocios que en Buenos Aires pueden hacerse, había elegido el más lucrativo”] (158).
28. I have paraphrased Andrés Carretero: “Cuando existió la compra [ … ] de prostitutas europeas, no fue necesario aparentar ningún matrimonio[.] Estaban acostumbradas a ello y trabajar en Marsella, Hamburgo o Buenos Aires, sólo era cuestión de ganancias[.] Zwi Migdal se inició con la instalación de prostíbulos en cadena. Para ello los rufianes ‘se casaban’ con mujeres que mandaban a traer o traían ellos de Europa” (114). Also, see Gerardo Bra (116–17).
29. Raquel Liberman, the woman who denounced the Zwi Migdal in 1929 and eventually caused its downfall, was seduced through methods strikingly similar to those employed by Frank with Eveline (Bra 116–17).
30. See Edward Bristow’s Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight against White Slavery 1870–1930 (1983) in this bibliography.
31. See Ian Almond’s “Tales of Buddah, Dreams of Arabia: Joyce and Images of the East” (2002) in this bibliography.
32. Of course, not every Jewish immigrant in Argentina was a trafficker, although that was the prevailing ideological assumption, which tended to stigmatize the Jewish community (traditionally discriminated against) even more. Interestingly, Jorge Luis Borges’s ancestors have Jewish connections. His grandmother’s sister, the British Caroline Haslam, married in England a Jewish man from Livorno, Girogio Suares (Hadis 298). Because of Suares’s Jewish connections in Argentina, the couple traveled and settled there in order to start a legitimate business. That was actually the reason why Borges’s future grandmother, Frances Haslam (featured in Borges’s story “Historia del Guerrero y de la Cautiva”), came to Argentina around 1870, at the height of Jewish immigration into the country. Once in the new country, Frances Haslam met the Argentinean Colonel Francisco Borges Lafinur and married him (298). Clearly, there were separate Jewish communities in Argentina, and the Zwi Migdal does not represent the totality.
33. Historians concur that those prostitutes recruited by Jewish traffickers endured harsher exploitation than the French ones, as the women worked under more precarious situations and were allowed fewer concessions by their traffickers. But, as Edward Bristow explains, “nowhere did [Jewish traffickers] achieve anything like a monopoly in any aspect of commercial vice” (2). Bristow further observes that “Jews were only one of many groups to share in this form of enterprise,” yet they “maintain[ed] an important position in brothelkeeping and procuring in parts of eastern Europe, Argentina, Constantinople, New York, and elsewhere; and they dominated the international traffic out of eastern Europe, especially in Jewish women” (2). “Between 1880 and 1939,” Bristow explains, “Jews played a conspicuous role in ‘white slavery’, as the commercial prostitution of that era was dramatically called. Not only was this Jewish participation conspicuous, it was also historically unprecedented, geographically widespread, and fraught with collective political dangers” (2). Yet Bristow also notes that, in terms of procurement, “the Chinese and Japanese played the biggest role of all in ‘white slavery’, thus demonstrating the term was itself a Eurocentric misnomer. The Jewish involvement was far from unique and can only be understood as part of the general phenomenon of nineteenth-century world migratory prostitution” (2). As Jo Doezema observes, despite the Victorian zeal to showcase women as ‘helpless animals’ susceptible to being deceived and trafficked, for the most part, “the turn of the century obsession with the ‘white slave trade’ turned out to be based on actual prostitute migration” (qtd. in Kempadoo 44).
34. It is worth mentioning that Nora Barnacle, Joyce’s future wife, took a considerable risk in leaving Ireland with Joyce in 1904 without having married him. For further details, see Brenda Maddox’s Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce (1989) in this bibliography.
35. In the words of Anne McClintock:
Stead’s tales of hapless virgins entrapped by lascivious aristocratic roués gave middle-class women a language in which to express for the first time the sexual distress, frustration and secret terror of Victorian marriage. As a result, the prostitute became the projection of middle-class anxieties and hypocrisy. Prostitutes’ own voices, lives, motives and powers were swept away in the electrifying storm of middle-class outrage and voyeurism. (Imperial 288)