The first time that Joe visits Louisa at her home in the story, the narrator uses a hyperbole to capture Joe’s large presence, as seen in the following passage:
In about half an hour Joe Dagget came. She heard his heavy step on the walk, and rose and took off her pink-and-white apron […] She had barely folded the [apron] with methodical haste and laid it in a table-drawer when the door opened and Joe Dagget entered.
He seemed to fill up the whole room.
The hyperbole here—that Joe “fill[ed] up the whole room”—is, of course, not literal. It would be impossible for a man to fill up the entirety of a living room. The exaggerated language captures something important about how Louisa views Joe, however—rather than feeling bolstered by his presence, she feels overwhelmed by it. With his “heavy walk” and large size, Joe is, in some ways, the opposite of Louisa, who is small and dainty (as seen in the way she gently removes and folds her apron).
It’s notable that, while the societal story is that women desire this sort of large masculine presence, Louisa does not. She enjoys her feminine lifestyle and wants to have full control over her home. This is one of the reasons she feels glad to have a reason to end her engagement with Joe after seeing him with Lily.
When Joe is reflecting on his visits to Louisa’s home, the narrator uses hyperbole and a metaphor to capture his view of Louisa’s decorations:
He came twice a week to see Louisa Ellis, and every time, sitting there in her delicately sweet room, he felt as if surrounded by a hedge of lace. He was afraid to stir lest he should put a clumsy foot or hand through the fairy web, and he had always the consciousness that Louisa was watching fearfully lest he should.
The hyperbole here—“he felt as if surrounded by a hedge of lace”—compares Louisa’s living room decorations to an imposing bush made of lace. While Louisa’s decorations are certainly lacy, this is clearly an exaggeration meant to capture how out-of-place Joe feels as a large, masculine man in a soft, feminine home.
The metaphor in the passage—in which Joe refers to Louisa’s lacy decorations as “the fairy web”—communicates how Joe feels he does not belong in this kind of “delicately sweet” space. Referring to it as a “web” also implies that Joe feels trapped in this room, as well as in his relationship with Louisa. The fact that he chooses to come and visit her despite how awkward and out-of-place he feels demonstrates how important it is to him to honor the promise he made to Louisa 14 years ago to marry her one day.
