Almeda's house, as a symbol of the past, presents a conventional twentieth-century view of the nineteenth century. The Freudian intersection ("Joynt"?) where Father Roth (Wrath?) has built his house is the conjunction between the respectable and the rejected, the conscious and the unconscious, the superego and the id. The front "faces" on the respectable and patriarchally-named Dufferin Street, but the back windows "overlook" the ironically and female-named Pearl Street, the world of "the unrespectable and undeserving poor." Almeda lives at this intersection carefully locking and unlocking her doors and gates only to be, like Joyce's Mary, "surprised . . . in the rere of the premises" (Joyce). The symbolic significance of the house's location is in its both/neither relation to the opposed worlds. Its position marks the inevitability of its inmate's need to choose, and when, at the end of section II, the narrator imagines that Almeda has refused...