ABSTRACT
That she stays put tells in her favour I would have thought, especially if Frank was out to deceive her or turn her into a prostitute. The view Bulson espouses, however, has been afforded quite an airing in recent years. Jeri Johnson, for example, in her edition of Dubliners (2000), cites Jonathon Green’s claim in The Cassell Dictionary of Slang (1998) that ‘to go to Buenos Aires’ in the nineteenth century meant ‘to start working as a prostitute’. This, to my mind, is to reduce the story to a private joke on Joyce’s part. If it was a well-known saying in Dublin at the time, then the joke would have been at the expense of whom? The Irish farming community where the story first appeared? If the saying wasn’t well-known, then the joke must
be on later readers unfamiliar with its hidden meaning, unfamiliar that is until The Cassell Dictionary of Slang was published nearly a century later. Even if it were a well-known saying at the time, I would still resist making too much of it. After all, in one sense there’s nothing metaphoric about going to Buenos Aires, and the story turns on Eveline not boarding the ship.
