The stigma of femininity in James Joyce's "Eveline" and "The Boarding House."

Since her husband "ruined his business," Mrs. Mooney has fallen back on the last resort of many women with talent as managers at the time - hiring out her domestic skills. Thus, she receives pay for providing the services to her boarders, women as well as men, which she would otherwise be forced to render gratis to her family. Since Mr. Mooney has proved himself incapable of functioning either as a butcher or as a husband/father, Mrs. Mooney must not only provide for herself and her children but also fulfill a father's responsibility - finding an eligible husband for a daughter. Thus, she has allowed Polly to have "the run of the young men," the clerks who comprise the "resident population" of the house.

To match her "masculine" decisiveness and initiative, Mrs. Mooney has mastered the "feminine" concern for detail. She watches Polly flirt with the young men in the house but also sees that "none of them meant business" (63). On the "bright Sunday morning of early summer" when she puts into action the final solution to the problem of disposing of a penniless daughter, Mrs. Mooney clearly enjoys demonstrating her power in engineering this resolution of her parental concerns. The narrator lavishes detail on the scene's description, from the "lace curtains" that "balloon" out from the "raised sashes" to the "gloved hands" of the churchgoers holding their prayer books as they are called to worship by the bells of "George's Church." As Mrs. Mooney watches her servant Mary removing the remains of breakfast, the "plates on which yellow streaks of eggs with morsels of bacon-fat and bacon-rind" serve as metonymic signifiers of her concern with detail, once again as though she herself were describing them. That concern with detail is also evident in her frugality: "She made Mary collect the crusts and pieces of broken bread to help to make Tuesday's bread-pudding" (64). As she is reminiscing about her successful interrogation of her daughter the night before, she becomes aware that George's bells have stopped, and she consults the "little gilt clock on the mantelpiece" to reassure herself that she has plenty of time: "It was seventeen minutes past eleven" (64).

Mrs. Mooney's management of details makes her an able "plotter," a surrogate for the narrator of this tale. In preparation for her "interview" with the man who has traduced the family's honor, she surveys the evidence for her confidence that he is in her power. Bob Doran cannot excuse his sin as youthful indiscretion, since he is "thirty-four or thirty-five." In addition, he is "a serious young man, not rakish or loud-voiced like the others . . . Mr Sheridan or Mr Meade or Bantam Lyons." Also the affair is common knowledge among the lodgers, and "details had been invented by some." Probably the trump card, however, is the detail of Doran's "thirteen years" of employment in a "great Catholic wine-merchant's office" (65). If Doran's job as a clerk necessitates attention to the minutest of details, Mrs. Mooney is about to prove to him that she is his master as a "clerk," since she has been more astute at paying attention to those details that have advanced her plot.