Mapping Feminine Identity through Joycean Epiphany in A Portrait

Tu Elka-Georgeta, University of Craiova

Key words: epiphany, feminine presence, male logic, artistic conscience. Summary The key element that binds and holds together all of the narrators experiences evolves around women or other feminine instances. It is the sensible and beautiful that touches the artists vibrant soul enabling the occurence of epiphanies. Most of the experienced epiphanies are possible due to the more or less near presence of the feminine causing the narrator to emprunt such a feminine aspect lest he resists it with his authoritative male logic. The tension of his ressistence will be later crystallized into the becoming aware of his artistic consciences mission. Rezumat Elementul cheie care leag i ncheag toate experienele naratorului evolueaz n preajma femeilor sau a altor prezene feminine. Ceea ce atinge spiritul vibrant al artistului este sensibilul i frumosul nlesnind astfel naterea epifaniilor. Majoritatea epifaniilor experimentate sunt posibile datorit prezenei mai mult sau mai puin apropiate a femininului determinndu-l pe narator s mprumute un astfel de aspect feminin doar dac nu i va rezista cu logica lui masculino-autoritar. Tensiunea impus de rezistena sa se va cristaliza mai trziu n contientizarea menirii sale ca artist.

When speaking of James Joyces writings one reveals an entire universe of themes illuminating even more identities as they radiate from his use of trivial things, religion, mythology, history, public life, political aspects, gender and love, all intertwined and undestructibly kneated to forge the uncreated conscience(op.cit.last page) of his people. His epiphanic mode proves an indispensable tool in rendering the conscience of the Irish culture as a universal one. However, the key element that binds and holds together all of the narrators experiences evolves around women or other feminine instances. It is the sensible and beautiful that touches the artists vibrant soul enabling the occurence of epiphanies. Most of the experinced epiphanies are possible due to the more or less near presence of the feminine causing the narrator to emprunt such a feminine aspect lest he resists it with his rational logic. The speaker-narrator strives to conceptualize his spiritual elevations, to inventory and map them, just like a trusworthy librarian does with his books, but it is not only a process of rigurous organization for he learns something new from each and every epiphany following closely the spiral of his evolution thus reaching in the end the awareness of his purpose in artistic existence. Similarly, the reader will attempt to reach the cultural identity of the feminine through a restructuring of textual epiphany. It is well-known that Joyce borrowed the termepiphany from religion and applied it to his literary technique. By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation,whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. (Epiphany in the Modern Novel, Morris Beja) Starting from this definition one may characterize the epiphany as ordinarily trivial or intellectually memorable in source, instantaneous and sensible in nature and spiritual when experienced; a feeling of completness that fulfills the artists conscience. Although epiphany would rise from the perception of something external,Joyces emphasisis generally on the perceiving

consciousness,the subject who actively adjusts his spiritual vision to focus on the object,which in turn is epiphanized. His stress on the perceiver is in line with the general development in epistemology from an emphasis on the object that reveals itself, fundamentally through Gods grace, to an emphasis on the role on the role of mans mind and imagination:from revelation by the object to insight on the part of the subject. (Epiphany in the Modern Novel, Morris Beja) Therefore epiphany appears as a subjective means of appropriating the other unveiling also a Romantic dimension of the process:a kind of rationally limited empathy on behalf of the viewer. The role of epiphany becomes quite crucial for in the first place it determins the narrators evolution towards artistic existence, secondly it becomes involved in structuring the novels text and thirdly it also enables the reader to experience his own epiphanies. As we have already said earlier most of the spiritual elevations are centered around women leaving but a couple of epiphanies dealing with objects. Let us now focus on the feminine oriented epiphanies which may be grouped in mother, lover and ideal woman epiphanies. In kristevian terms both female and male characters reach a point where each of them stands as a barrier in the evolution of the other just like at a certain moment the mother may cause the childs regression by means of her correcting ways . This intermingling of shades prolongs also in A Portrait as the reader is presented with the ambiguous gesture of Stephens mother (the kiss). The ambiguity rises not from the gesture itself but from the way the hero perceives it; the word kiss contains within it the expression of maternal affection and also the idea of sexual connotation. His mother had told him not to speak with the rough boys in the college. Nice mother. The first day in the hall of the castle when she had said goodbye she had put up her veil double to her nose to kiss him: and her nose and eyes were red. But he had pretended not to see that she was going to cry. She was a nice mother but she was not so nice when she cried.(p.9) It will later explain Stephens attitude of revolt towards his mother as a way of showing her he is not going to let her engulf his individuality. Notice that at this level of the novel the epiphany coincides with the childs apprehension of his mother, both of them being united through a cosmic-like umbilical chord. She cannot be described but through the eyes and conscience of the child. However, Mrs. Dedalus subscribes to the good mothers as she is the one that offers him comfort, warmth, harmony. Her company means music, dance, intimacy which makes the hero want to relive these serene moments, to bask in a total self forgetfulness. In such a sense the mother becomes synonymous to the eternal return, to use Eliades terms, similar to a regress in the consolating warmth of the home. Regressing home means to escape from the external world and reality into the tranquil atmosphere created by his mother. Taking the bits that contribute to the creation of this atmosphere one may have the impression that in his home time has stopped; thus every gesture coming from Mrs Dedalus is interpreted as a sign of frozen eternity: neither involution, nor evolution more like stagnation. The music, the dance, the warmth offered by the fire, the warmth of the tea are all elements that help the child preserve in his memory the beneficial and pleasant atmosphere of his home. From this perspective Mrs. Dedalus becomes a protector of Stephen from the meanness of exterior people, embodying a somewhat form of dependency which at the beginning the child does not fell it as a constraint; on the contrary he acts as an empty vessel for his mothers never-ending affection.

That is perhaps why the return home, even if it is only in the heros mind, appears like a sweet self forgetfulness and as need of fully identifying himself with his mother. Later as the hero will grow up the sexual desire will abolish the dream of mother-son identity. The neutral state that lies between the good mother Dedalus and the abolished mother is prefigured in the repetition of the word nice when Stephen leaves home. Notice the cold distant tone with which the child hero remarks that even though his mother was nice she was not so nice when she cried.(p.9) He slowly tends to take distance from his mother not because she was a bad mother but because he wishes to break the umbilical cord and spread his wings of creation. In this respect his mother is neither ideal like Virgin Mary, nor bad or severe like Dante; she represents a more human version of mother, an oscilant one between extremes. She too bears the stigma of matter/body suggested by the kiss but shes also attentive at his education (thus the spiritual side) providing Stephen a harmonious universe at least inside the home. At the psychological level of a child Stephen first sees his mother as a powerful and beneficent source of physical pleasure. She ministers to her son's corporal needs, changes the oil sheet, and encourages his artistic expression by playing the piano.(op.cit. p.40) The first of the many imperatives that erode his ego, the "apologize" episode is associated in his mind and vivid imagination with matriarchal threats. Dante and Mrs. Dedalus both represent the inhibitions of a reality principle that begins, at this point, to take precedence over the perverse gratifications of infantile narcissism. As Dorothy Dinnerstein explains in The Mermaid and the Minotaur, it is usually a woman who serves as the infant's first love, first witness and first boss. The initial experience of dependence on a largely uncontrollable outside source of good is focused on a woman, and so is the earliest experience of vulnerability to disappointment and pain. The uncleanness of birth is also reflected in the mother and if the little boy remains in early childhood sensually attached to the maternal flesh, when he grows older, becomes socialized, and takes note of his individual existence, this same flesh frightens him, calls him back to those realms of immanence from where he would fly. Reproduction is the beginning of death, argued Hegel, and so argues Stephen's friend Temple. The Manichean dichotomy between flesh and spirit, body and mind, has long been mentioned in the writings of male philosophers who fantasized polarity between the sexes and the linguistic construction of sexual difference. Stephen extends the tradition of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer when, in Stephen Hero, he proposes a misogynist "theory of dualism which would symbolize the twin eternities of spirit and nature in the twin eternities of male and female" (Stephen Hero, 210). According to Simone de Beauvoir, man's symbolic association of woman with the flesh reflects an infantile disdain for corporality and bodily drives. The male identifies himself as spirit by virtue of his own subjective consciousness; he then perceives the female as "the Other, who limits and denies him" (129). The sexual antagonism that pervades Irish society is seen in Stephen at an early age. He loathes his mother's feminine vulnerability and thinks that she is "not nice" when she bursts into tears. In a world where only the ruthless survive, Stephen finds himself as marginal, small, frail; he mentally takes refuge in artistic evocations of the family protected by beneficent female spirits. Alienated from a brutal male environment, Stephen longs to return to this female figure of security and comfort, "to be at home and lay his head on his mother's lap" (p. 24).

His childhood educator Dante, "a clever woman and a well read woman" who teaches him geography, is replaced by male instructors. The Jesuit masters at Clongowes
invite Stephen to ponder the mysteries of religion, death, canker, and cancer. They introduce him to a system of male authority and discipline that will ensure his correct training and proper socialization and eventually will lead to his depersonalization. At a somewhat opposite pole of

Mrs. Dedalus stands Dante as the severe mother who is very strict concerning religious faith. She becomes a symbol of punishment and violence possibly emerging as a step mother. In the presence of these two mother statuses Stephen feels the need of escaping in another home, of his own, together with Eileen, who is a protestant. Here his mother no longer supports him and the child remains unprotected but all the more free. According to Mrs Anghel his feelings towards his mother are blurred as on one hand he is attracted to her due to the pleasant moments spent together and her nice odour and on the other hand he is disillusioned by her reaction, feeling himself betrayed. Consequently Mrs. Dedalus acquires a paradoxical status oscillant between Eileen as a representative of the carnal and Dante as an emblem of the punitive authority. No matter how much he wishes to unlock himself from the maternal care all of his future intimacies with the opposite sex will find himself comparing his lovers features with his mothers warmth, nice odour, dance and even kiss; and conversely the hero will grasp bits of his mothers image in each status of his lovers. That is perhaps explainable as every mother is the first woman that every boy perceives; as she once was the center of his universe (in childhood) he is presumably entitled to compare every woman he would later meet in his life with his mother. After his childhood experience with the kiss, Stephen refuses any dialogue referring to his mother and takes shelter in the objective requirement of defining ones terms. When asked by Cranly if he loves his mother, Stephen replies: I dont know what your words mean (p.287) According to Mrs. Anghel for Cranly the love of mother is something you cannot argue about and at the same time overpasses mens ability of understanding. Moreover, Cranly involuntarily points to the primordial function of mother which is strongly related to her matter/earth-bound nature. For Stephen on the other hand a mothers love can easily acquire sexual nuances: Pascal if I remember rightly, would not suffer his mother to kiss him as he feared the contact of her sex.(p.289) Not only does he refuse to talk about his mother-son relationship with Mrs. Dedalus but he also exhibits a certain detachment/ distance fed with the experience of illustrious authors.(Pascal, Christ) His detachment is not caused but self-imposed as a means of educating himself in the process of creation. There is nothing in Mrs. Dedalus that made him take distance but his conscience is the one that feels constrained; this lack of freedom is even more strongly felt in the presence of Dante, the symbol of the punitive mother. The mother and lover dimensions of the joycean woman are again dissipated or overlapped as they find their representative in a single form. What stands out beyond all mother types discussed so far is the ideal mother represented in A Portrait by Virgin Mary. As prefect of the sodality of the Blessed Virgin, Stephen chants Mary's praises in an act of proud dissimulation. The Catholic Virgin becomes a
figure of courtly devotion, whose holiness radiates a hypnotic, translucent glow. Wishing to serve as her knight, Stephen prostrates himself before his vision of the adored female. He worships the flesh of an icon that seems an object of both veneration and desire. An oasis of heavenly peace after the fervor of sexual course, the Virgin becomes a postcoital Madonna offering refuge from the turmoil of his flesh. The self-conscious sinner takes satisfaction in reciting the Holy Office with "lips whereon there still lingered foul and shameful words, the savoir itself of a lewd kiss" (p. 99). Later in the episode, Stephen will offer his prayer to Mars,

whom he invokes as beneficent mother. Regretting and feeling sorry for his fall he no longer imagines her as a frail-fleshed virgin but appeals to the powerful magna mater, whose beauty is "not like earthly beauty, dangerous to look upon, but like the morning star" (p. 125)

Virgin Mary proves to be the ideal mother also because of its concrete absence, being thus an intangible feminine presence. According to Mrs. Anghel the road to Virgin Mary
is a long and painful return in the heros soul, which hosts his most intimate mysteries, while the Blessed Virgin becomes his protector. Although he takes refuge in her while she offers him warmth and understanding, although she keeps her verticality she cannot escape mans materializing tendency which transforms her into an Eve for the archangel Gabriel and the seraphims who feel attracted to her and therefore reach their downfall.

James Joyce demonstrates that people/human representation and places change according to the one who perceives them, their psychical state, their intellectual level and their disposition. In this sense the reader remarks a continuous metamorphosis of the
characters dependent on Stephens view and evolution in A Portrait If the image of mother is altered by the heros sexual impulses or by the word games by which he elopes in the imaginary, we notice that the motherly figure of woman is slowly replaced by the figure of the lover as the protagonist discovers her and indirectly himself. The evolution of the female figure starts from the enclosed protective space designated by the home (but which prevents the hero from spreading the wings of his artistic conscience, hindering thus the evolution of his individuality) towards the open space in which the hero is vulnerable but also free to dream and create. Just like the image of the mother is slowly contoured and then further highlighted in its nuances in A Portrait so is figure of the lover contoured with each stage of the narrators growing mature until he reaches the artistic conscious in Stephen which vivisects and endows the lover with a multitude of qualities. Unlike the figure of the mother which is altered, the

lovers image, like an Eve urging him to bodily sin but also to self knowledge/awareness, she remains the temptress whom he refuses to discover totally in favour of exploring his own personality. The words used to complete her portrait betray in fact his own way of seeing things, thus his own self. For Stephen art becomes an expression of resisting the mundane pleasures transforming all of his refusals into creative energy. The woman remains the temptress whom he refuses, a kind of source of inspiration which the hero can rely from the moment he discovers her. The love for the woman is slowly translated into love for words; in the womans multilayered nature are prefigured the multiple meanings of the word. With the Count of Monte Cristo as his model, Stephen conjures up adolescent fantasies of a beautiful Mercedes whom he stalks in the suburbs of Blackrock. He imagines a scene of beatific transformation in a moonlit garden when the romantic heroine, meeting her erstwhile lover, blesses him with nothing less than the power of refusal. In spiritualizing his life, she paradoxically endows him with sufficient grace to conquer libidinal temptation. When Stephen dreams of himself as Edmond Dantes, he identifies with a man betrayed by his friends and his mistress, unjustly exiled and imprisoned, but eventually able to wreak vengeance on those who failed him. Monte Cristo's adventures culminate in a "sadly proud gesture of refusal". As a becoming artist, Stephen admires the selfsufficiency of Dante, an isolated hero who eventually conquers the woman he loves through a complex process of amorous sublimation.
"The beautiful Mabel Hunter" of pantomime fame stares from a newspaper photograph with "demurely taunting eyes" (pp. 68-69). This "exquisite creature" intrudes on the squalor of Irish life to provide a popular though elusive model of seductive femininity. Stephen's ringleted cousin admires the music-hall artiste with a kind of religious devotion. The popular press has constructed an icon of girlish charm, a figure of the female body as a desirable and coyly inaccessible market commodity. Like a voracious animal, he mauls the edges of the paper and roughly pushes his sister aside to get a glimpse of Mabel's photograph. Greedy and whining, he appropriates this pretty pinup for his own

lascivious enjoyment. Unmoved by such popular representations of feminine charm, Stephen seeks refuge from reality in the priesthood of art: he longs to confront the beauty and mystery of creation while tasting the joy of loneliness. Before the tantalizing face of Emma cowled in nun's veiling, he forces himself to remain calm and controlled, repressing "the feverish agitation of his blood" (p. 70). The fact that when experiencing epiphany the emphasis is on

the perceiver, is most evident in his girls epiphanies. He characteristically projects his own erotic vulnerability onto the girl he believes to be "flattering, taunting, searching, exciting his heart" (p. 70). Emma appears in the guise of Kathleen Ni Houlihan, a Celtic figure, inviting Stephen to romantic initiation in the peaceful stillness of a moonlit evening. Depersonalized and seen through the eyes of mythic reverie she emerges as a shadowy emblem out of the unconscious Mercedes in Dublin robe. He saw her urge her vanities, her fine dress and sash and long black stockings, and knew that he had yielded to them a thousand times. Yet a voice within him spoke above the noise of his dancing heart, asking him would he take her gift to which he had only to stretch out his hand.(p. 70) In this self-indulgent exercise, Stephen gains symbolic master over Emma's erratic movements by assuming that he can, at will, catch hold of her figure. Focusing on attractive garments such as stockings and dress, he exhibits her in the role of temptress and refuses her gift of an adolescent kiss. On the verge of exteriorizing his emotional turmoil, Stephen refuses to yield to this temptation. Like the Count of Monte Cristo, he turns away from Emma in proud abnegation, determined to possess his mistress wholly through art. Blurring the figures of himself and his beloved in the womb of his artistic imagination, Stephen is able to give cathartic expression to the pain of loss associated with unacted desire. As a true Romantic, Stephen imagines that "the kiss, which had been withheld by one, was given by both" (p. 71). Poetry compensates the frustrated physical desire, and the fever of adolescent sexuality is intimately exorcised through lyrical fulfillment. The artists cold detached mind trades the romantic epiphany on the chaste nature of his being, thus resembling the virgin muse. The scene has been stripped of naturalistic detail and emotional materializations have been restricted to art: Stephen feels fulfilled, but Emma is left sad in her nunlike cowl.
Refusing to communicate his passion, Stephen realizes libidinal desire through the literary language of courtly love and nineteenth-century romantic convention. Taking Byron as master, he succeeds in mastering the young woman who would otherwise be mistress of his heart. The writing of his poem provides an emotional circuit by substituting carnal desire and thus Eros with the symbolic order of his self-contained male authority. However, he continues to feel tormented by the emotions that hurt him in poetry, as he imagines a tender reunion and an opportunity to rewrite the scene with a different ending. Masking his frustration under lyrical writing, Stephen operates what one calls erotic displacement by suppressing and compressing (in the sense that he encloses/ refrains bodily drives) the physical into the psychological. We witness a chastising trajectory that his love for Emma follows from first love buds to carnal desire then lyrical outburst and finally fantasized religious union. Later on in the novel he experiences a pseudo-epiphany when he day-dreams that Virgin Mary having transformed into the morning star offices his communion to Emma: Take hands, Emma and Stephen. It is a beautiful evening now in heaven. You have erred, but you are always my children. It is one heart that loves another heart. Take hands together, my dear children, and you will be happy together and your hearts will love each other. (p. 98) The fact that he appeals to religion in order to sanctify his bond with Emma does not necessarily imply that Joyce admitted the authority of the Church, he merely preferred this religious sealing of their relationship instead of leaving it at a level of mundane, sentimental or romantic dimension. Therefore, Emma Clery, in Stephens conscience, is submitted to a complex evolution process from being a mere shadowy presence at the beginning of the novel when the narrator retains only her initials, to an evil temptress conscious and proud to an etherealized condition, an essence before man.

Apparently a totally different condition of woman is represented by the prostitute: Walking on an alley behind the Dublin morgue, he takes comfort in the "good odour" of "horse piss and rotted straw.(p. 84) Urine and ordure symbolically send to the archaic memory of an inaccessible maternal body, the desire for the eternal return. His infantile like nostalgia places him in medieval times. On the other hand Stephen's apprehension sends also to evil carnal communion : He wanted to sin with another of his kind, to force another being to in with him and to exult with her in sin" (p. 95). The sexual imagery at the end of chapter two is ironically inverted. As Stephen feels the shadow of a streetwalker "moving irresistibly upon him", he figuratively suffers the "agony of its penetration" node surrenders to a murmurous flood of physical excitation (p. 95). The erotic and romantic imagery degenerates into an unusual rite of sexual initiation that reverses man and womans role in the sexual act. Stephen perceives himself as a deflowered virgin, raped by a phallic representation. The theory of male authority oriented towards the suppression and sublimation of woman is reversed. The woman in the black straw hat holds the key cards as she occupies a power position, she is an experienced lover, a love initiator who fills / penetrates Stephen, who is in a weaker position, that of novice. Although Joyce is not the first to deal with the theme of prostitution as Balzac has long before him said that marriage was a form of legalized prostitution, the Irish writer uses this social condition to further stress the contrast between whore and virgin. At least this is the first impression that we get, but as we reconsider Emmas condition from this level of the novel we find out that there is a very thin line between these two opposing feminine conditions. According to Richard Brown Stephen, like Christ, looks to prostitutes as
his allies in exposing the exploitations of the old order and heralding the universal generous love of the new. He clearly expresses his thoughts in Stephen Hero in a conversation with Lynch, paradoxically stating that it is the virgin Emma who is greedy and materialistic in her sexual principles and the prostitute who is generous and loving.

However, the all encompassing image of woman is prefigured in the bird girl epiphany. The bird imagery first enabled as a threat in the apologize epiphany during Stephens childhood, prepares the protagonist for his vision of the wading girl where the imagery encourages a promise of freedom. This epiphany of his calling in art is nevertheless
dealt with in very ecclesiastical terms. The girls herself is reminiscent of Beatrice, and the description of her flesh as soft hued as ivory makes her, like Eileen and Emma, an image of the Virgin Mary, the Tower of Ivory. Despite the religious phrases he uses, Heavenly God! Holy silence of his ecstasy, a wild angel , his emotion resembles more with a profane joy. Beyond this concrete interpretation the bird girl beautifully seals off the narrators quest for his artistic nature. The wading girl may also stand as a symbol of universal beauty and her resemblance with a bird may also allude to the artists future flight away from the nets of tradition; last but not the least the no name girl on the beach may be equated with the ideal, unreachable woman who appears and reappears in mans memory as a sanctified beauty whose downfall he perversely desires: a carnal beauty, a spiritual elevation and a holy etherealized woman. Deconstructing her image as he does, Stephen will eventually depersonalize her and submit her to his aesthetic principles transforming her into a tool or concrete muse for developing his aesthetic thought.

In his return to ritualistic devotion, Stephen becomes involved in an aesthetic love affair with his own soul. The anima, the feminine aspect of the psyche, has won his passion.
Like Narcissus, Stephen has fallen in love with his self-projected image under female guise. By allowing the feminine to enter with her multilayered identities and modes of speech and

refusing to plead for a final irrevocable position of woman which will only lead to the completeness/ totality of both gender representatives. It is a mirror labyrinth of identities, shadows, nuances, lightly or darkly coloured portraits to which Joyce exposes his readers in a poetically polished looking glass. Bibliography:

James Joyce. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Penguin Books, U.S.A., 1996 James Joyce. Stephen Hero, Southern Illinois University Press, U.S.A., 1959 Florentina Anghel. James Joyce: Portret al artistului n tineree- o lectur poietic, Scrisul Romanesc, Craiova 2006 Morris Beja. Epiphany in the Modern Novel, London, 1971 Dorothy Dinnerstein. The Mermaid and the Minotaur: sexual arrangements and human malaise, HarperCollins Publishers, 1977 Richard Brown. James Joyce and Sexuality, Cambridge University Press, 1985 Derek Attridge. The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, 2nd edition, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2004 Julia Kristeva. The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi, Oxford: Blackwell, 1986 Tracey Teets Schwarze. Joyce and Victorians, University Press of Florida, United States of America, 2002 Simone de Beauvoir. The Second Sex, Vintage Books, New York, 1980