Joyce's kinesthetic imagery enables the reader to easily experience sympathy and feel Eveline's fear and anger. "Even now, though she was over nineteen, she sometimes felt herself in danger of her father's violence. She knew it was that, that had given her the palpitations. When they were growing up he had never gone for her like he used to go for Harry and Ernest, because she was a girl" (Joyce 115). .
In fact "Eveline" is an ironic tragedy reflecting the old adage, "better the devil you know than the devil you don't." Eveline's life with her father and brother is "the devil she knows." The life she could have with Frank is "the devil she doesn't know." In an ironic twist her father warns her about Frank when he says he "knows those sailor chaps" (Joyce 116). Who should Eveline believe? In the end, Eveline chooses to be with the devils she knows (her father and brother) rather than with Frank, the devil she doesn't know. Her sense of duty is to her own kin. Eveline is a victim from a position two perspective. (Atwood 1). Eveline is aware that she is a victim. She is a repressed woman who is powerless to make her own decisions and asks god to give her direction. ""She felt her cheek pale and cold and, out of a maze of distress, she prayed to God to direct her, to show her what was her duty." Eveline is the "other hero," unable to break away from the overbearing men in her family.
In contrast, Kate Chopin's short story, "The Story Of An Hour," is probably set around the early 1890's in the United States, around New Orleans. Chopin lets the reader know that Louise is a "young woman with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression" (Chopin 71). Chopin takes us into Louise's house, upstairs and into the comfort of her bedroom where she sits in an armchair, in front of her window to grieve over the recent news about her husbands death. The significance of Louise going up stairs is analogous to moving into a higher state of consciousness of the upper world.
