Abstract: Joyce writes fifteen short stories in Dubliners to show us a moral history of his motherland. He chose Dublin because he thought that city was the paralyzed center. Through his descriptions, we could have a clear view about the social lives in Ireland at that time. And we get a direct and penetrating idea about people’s living conditions and spiritual states of Irishmen in late 19th century. What is specific about women is that their social statuses are very low in that patriarchal society. They can’t choose their own lifestyles and happiness. Here I would take two young female figures Eveline and Polly as the representatives for my paper, probing into the truth of their living, outer and inner world, to see how circumstances change their lives and the consequences behind that. With the detailed text reading, the depressed life reality of women in Ireland illustrated itself in our very eyes, partly of the frustration under patriarchal system, and partly of the under-developed women movements of the time. By analyzing the characters of two female figures, the paper aims to know more about Irish young females at that time.

Key words: paralysis; feminism; patriarchy; social status; modernism