This paper offers a useful context for a discussion of the Eveline story as it situates itself within the dynamic of the metaphoric and the metonymic. It is possible to read "Eveline" as an expression of the binary oppositions of symbolist poetry and realist prose, since the story focuses on both a scrupulous effort in representing the details of everyday Dublin life and the transformative power of metaphor with which Joyce associated epiphany. It is also possible to focus on the clear gender associations of these binary oppositions in "Eveline", where the feminine is consistently associated with the constrained, restrained, and repressed position in the bourgeois room, while the masculine is associated with the impulse to travel, to organize desire as a quest for a variously defined possession or goal.