In "Eveline" domesticity is clearly associated with details, with metonymy and synecdoche. The detail that will become Eveline's signature is the "odour of dusty cretonne," expressive of the eternal Hausfrau's world: Eveline cleans and cleans, but still there is the inevitable dust that settles in those curtains of cretonne, representing her marginal effort at gentility. This is the "home" she has decided to leave, a home that she associates with its objects: "She looked round the room, reviewing all its familiar objects which she had dusted once a week for so many years, wondering where on earth all the dust came from". Of the many "familiar objects" on which her gaze is fixed, two are foregrounded: the "yellowing photograph" of an absent priest whose name she was never able to identify and a "broken harmonium." In a home now merely a museum of memories for Eveline, it is details that have made her "tired." She has not only all those "familiar objects" to be dusted each week but also the Saturday night quarrels with her father over money, which "weary her unspeakably." She has been "feminized" by a concern for details, since she has become the keeper of the pitifully meagre household funds.

Eveline's "black leather purse"  is a metonymy of her role as housekeeper for her family, the "purse" with its naturalistic function is the incriminating stigma of her role as imprisoned housekeeper.

Frank, on the other hand, offers her the prospect of "travel." The narrative makes clear that the possible trip with him to Buenos Aires, where he claims to have a house, is a metaphor for a new realm of experience that his love promises to open for Eveline. In a statement suggesting how she herself might phrase it if this story were first-person narrative, we learn: "She was about to explore another life with Frank". In contrast to the stasis of her life at home, or at "the Stores" where she is also confined, Frank offers Eveline the possibilities of travel in a variety of modes. He "took her to see The Bohemian Girl," just as he has taken her into the realms of desire, for she is "pleasantly confused" - a Joycean euphemism for "sexually aroused" - by the knowledge that others know they are courting, especially when he sings the song of the "lass that loves a sailor."

Most importantly, Frank takes Eveline with him imaginatively by telling her stories of his voyages. As though he fears that he will be the prisoner of the stereotyped sailor yarning a girl into his bed in every port, he offers her a profusion of details that neither her memory nor the narrator now particularizes - "the names of the ships he had been on and the names of the different services". However, she recalls his telling her of his first voyage on "a ship of the Allan line going out to Canada" and his earning a "pound a month" as a "deck boy." Furthermore, he tells her of having sailed through the "Straits of Magellan" and relates "stories of the terrible Patagonians." These details, which he may offer as a legitimation of his authenticity as a wooer - like some latter-day Othello courting Desdemona with his tales(1) - are metonymies of her desire for his Frank-ness, for his being something more than the sailor of countless jokes with what Lily in "The Dead" will call "palaver."

Juxtaposed to Frank, whose company she has been forbidden after their courtship was discovered, is Eveline's father. Mr. Hill, in contrast to Frank's associations of menace, offers the comfort and security of the familiar. Indeed, now that he is growing old and perhaps less likely to have the strength to abuse her, as he did her mother, he seems to be moving in her consciousness toward another of those familiar objects" on which the dust will soon be settling in her domestic prison. As the time approaches when she must leave to keep her appointment with Frank, she continues to sit with two letters in her lap - one to her brother Harry, who tends the houses of his Lord, and the other to her father. Eveline recalls details from her life with her father, just as she has recalled similar ones from her new relationship with Frank: the time her father made her toast when she was ill and read her a "ghost story," and the family picnic to Howth when he put on "her mother's bonnet to make the children laugh". Through the letters she has written and the "ghost story" that her father appropriately has read to her, Eveline is also implicated in textuality. However, she is a prisoner of "prose," the servant of metonymy, and thus unable finally to travel, to move from the house of her father.

Even the detail of the returning Italian organ-grinder, whom Eveline associates with her mother's martyrdom and who seems to prophesy similar prospects for her own future, is insufficient to save her. The last paragraph of the major section of the story begins: "She stood up in a sudden impulse of terror," and the first paragraph of the last section following a narrative strategy that seems like an extended ellipsis begins: "She stood among the swaying crowd in the station. . . ." However, the reader has no way of ascertaining that Eveline has actually moved to the "North Wall," except in projecting herself forward to that scene of departure.(2) Whether she stands on the quay being "shouted at" to come aboard or stands instead in her room fantasizing her inability to move forward in answer to his cry of desire is not important finally. What is important is the closing image of Eveline as one immobilized, one whose hands are frozen to the railing, one who loses humanness itself: "She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition".

Central to this last scene is the iron railing "gripped" and "clutched" by Eveline's terrified hands. If the Joycean epiphany allows the subject an encounter with the metaphoric, or the power of movement across the bar, Eveline is a subject as incapable of the epiphanic experience as is conceivable. Offered the possibility of crossing that bar into the metaphoric, she cannot move or indeed even speak. All she can know in the end is the nothing" to which "all the seas of the world" seem to be opening her up. More graphically than any of the Dubliners to follow, Eveline is the ultimate "feminized" subject. Perhaps because she has been lent for a time a prospect of enfranchisement - whether or not Frank was "frank" is a moot point(3) - Eveline comes to embody the essence of the "feminine" in patriarchy. She has seen the possibility of "travel," but she evades the opportunity of "travel" because she can associate it with only the very vulnerability and loss to which, in the end, she ironically commits herself. Even if she never leaves her room at the end of the story - indeed especially if she does not - she has passed a life sentence on herself as a "housekeeper," a servant of details.