“A right to happiness”: The Appropriation of Joyce’s “Eveline” in Mary O’Donnell’s “Mrs Ward’s Diary” and Sara Benvenuto’s Válvula

Abstract

This article aims to explore how two contemporary artistic works – Mary O’Donnell’s short story “Mrs Ward’s Diary” and Sara Benvenuto’s short film Válvula – appropriate and subvert one of the most renowned stories in James Joyce’s Dubliners: “Eveline”. O’Donnell and Benvenuto present fictional narratives that echo and at the same time disrupt themes and characters from Joyce’s emblematic short story, delving into analogous marks of peripheral realities and simultaneously proposing new solutions for shared forms of oppression.