Life of the Author

James Joyce was born in Dublin. His father, John Stanislaus Joyce, was an impoverished
gentleman, who had failed in a distillery business and tried all kinds of professions, including
politics and tax collecting. Joyce's mother, Mary Jane May Murray, was ten years younger than
her husband. She was an accomplished pianist, whose life was dominated by the Roman Catholic
Church and her husband. In spite of the poverty, the family struggled to maintain solid middle-
class facade. From the age of six, Joyce was educated by Jesuits at Clongowes Wood College, at
Clane, and then at Belvedere College in Dublin (1893-97). Later the author thanked Jesuit for
teaching him to think straight, although he rejected their religious instructions. At school, he
once broke his glasses and was unable to do his lesson. This episode was recounted in A Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). In 1898 he entered the University College, Dublin, where
he found his early inspirations from the works of Henrik Ibsen, St. Thomas Aquinas and W.B.
Joyce's first publication was an essay on Ibsen's play When We Dead Awaken. It appeared in
Fortnightly Review in 1900. At this time he began writing lyric poems.
After graduation in 1902 the twenty-year-Old Joyce went to Paris, where he worked as a
journalist, teacher and in Other Occupations in difficult financial conditions. He spent in France
a year, returning when a telegram arrived saying his mother was dying. Not long after her death,
Joyce was traveling again. He left Dublin in 1904 with Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid (they
married in 1931), staying in Pola now in Croatia, Austria-Hungary, and in Trieste, which was the
world's seventh busiest port. Joyce gave English lessons in Berlitz School and talked about
setting up an agency to sell Irish tweed. He continued to live abroad refusing a post teaching
Italian literature in Dublin. The Trieste years were nomadic, poverty-stricken, and productive
Joyce and Nora loved this cosmopolitan port city at the head of the Adriatic Sea; where they
lived in a number of different addresses. During this period, Joyce wrote most of Dubliners
(1914), all of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the play, Exiles (1918), and large sections
of Ulysses. Several of Joyce's siblings joined them, and two children, Giorgio and Lucia, were
born. The children grew up speaking the Trieste dialect of Italian. Joyce and Nora stayed
together although Joyce fell in love with Anny schleimer, the daughter of an Austrian banker,
and Roberto Prezioso, the editor of the newspaper II Piccolo della Sera, fried to seduce Nora.
After a short stint in Rome in 1906-07 as a bank clerk ended in illness, Joyce returned to Trieste,
In 1907, Joyce published a collection of poems, Chamber Music. The title was suggested, as the
author later stated, by the sound of urine tinkling into a prostitute's chamber pot, The have with
vowels and repetitions such musical quality that many of them have been made into songs. "I
have left my book, / I have left my room, / for I heard you singing (through the gloom." Joyce
himself had a fine tenor voice; he greatly liked opera performances. In 1909, Joyce opened a
cinema in Dublin, but this affair failed and he was soon back in Trieste still broke and working
as a teacher, tweed salesman journalist and
Lecturer. In 1912, he was in Ireland, trying to persuade Maunsel & Co. to fulfill their contract to
publish Dubliners. The work contained a series of short stories, dealing with the lives of ordinary
people, youth, adolescence, young adulthood, and maturity. The last story, ' 'The Dead", was
adapted into screen by John Huston in 1987. It was Joyce's last journey to his native country.
However, he had become friend with Ezra Pound, who began to market his works. In 1916,
appeared A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, an autobiographical novel. It apparently began

1
as a quasi-biographical memoir entitled Stephen Hero between 1904 and 1906. Only a fragment
of the original manuscript has survived. The book follows the life of the protagonist, Stephen
Dedalus, from childhood towards maturity, his education at University College, Dublin, and
rebellion to free himself from the claims of family and Irish nationalism. Stephen takes religion
seriously, and considers entering a seminary, but then also rejects Roman Catholicism. "—look
here, Cranly, he said.
You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and
what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my
home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art
as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using my defense the only arms I allow myself to use —
silence, exile, and cunning." At the end, Stephen resolves to 'leave Ireland for Paris to encounter
"the reality of experience". He wants to establish himself as a writer. At the outset of the First
World War, Joyce moved with his family to Zürich, where Lenin and the poet essayist Tristan
Tzara had found their refuge. Joyce's WW I years with legendary Russian revolutionary and
Tzara, who founded the Dadaist movement at the Cabaret Voltaire provide the basis for Tom
Stoppard's play Travesties (1974). In Zürich. Joyce started to develop the early chapters of
Ulysses, which was first published in France, because of censorship troubles in the Great Britain
and the United States, where the book became legally available in 1933. The theme of jealousy
was based partly on a story. A former friend of Joyce claimed that he had been sexually intimate
-with the author's wife, Nora, even while Joyce was courting her. Ulysses takes place on one day
in Dublin (June 16, 1904) and reflected the classic work of Homer. The main characters are
Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising canvasser, his wife Molly, and Stephen the hero from A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. are intended to be modem of Telemachus, Ulysses, and
Penelope. Barmaids are the famous Sirens. One of the Model for Bloom was Ettore Schmitz
(Italo Svevo), a novelist and businessman who was Joyce's student at the Berlitz school) in
Trieste. Story; using stream-of- consciousness technique, parallels the major events in (Odysseus'
journey towards home. However, Bloom's adventures are less heroic and his homecoming is less
violent. Bloom makes his trip to the underworld by attending a funeral at Glasnevin Cometary.
'We are now for the repose of his soul. Hoping you're well and not in hell. Nice changed air; out
of the .frying pan of life into the fire of purgatory." the paths of Stephen and Bloom cross and
recross through the day. Joyce's technical innovations in the art of the novel include an extensive
use of interior monologue; he used a complex network of symbolic parallels drawn from the
mythology, history, and literature from 1917 to 1930, Joyce endured several eye operations,
being totally blind for short intervals. (According to tradition, Homer was also blind.) In March
1923, Joyce began in Paris his second major work, Finnegan's Wake, suffering at the same time
chronic eye troubles caused by glaucoma. The first segment of the novel appeared in Ford
Madox Ford's transatlantic review in April 1924, as part of what Joyce called Work in Progress.
Wake occupied Joyce's time for the next sixteen years — final version was completed late in
1938. A copy of the novel was present at Joyce's birthday celebration in February 1939. Joyce's
daughter Luda, born in Trieste in 1907, became Carl Jung's patient in 1934. In her teens, she
studied dance, and later The Paris Times praised her skills as choreographer, linguist, and
performer. With her father, she collaborated in Pomes Penyeach (1927), for which she did some
illustrations. Lucia's great love was Samuel Beckett, who was not interested in her. In the 1930s,
she started to behave erratically. At the Burghölz psychiatric clinic in Zürich, where Jung
worked, she was diagnosed schizophrenic. Joyce was left bitter at Jung's analysis of his daughter

2
— Jung thought that she was too close with her father's psychic system. In revenge, Joyce played
in Finnegan's Wake with Jung's of Animus and Anima. Lucia died in a mental hospital in
Northampton, England, in 1932. After the fall of France in WW II, Joyce returned to Zurich,
where he was taken ill. He was diagnosed of having a perforated duodenal ulcer. Joyce died after
an operation, on January 13, 1941, still disappointed with the reception of Finnegan's Wake,
published on 4 May, 1939, by Faber and Faber. His last words were: "Does nobody understand?"
Joyce was buried in Zurich at Fluntern Cemetery.

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 Key Facts about the Text

Full title: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Author: James Joyce
Type of work: Novel
Genre: Bildungsroman, autobiographical novel
Language: English
Time and place written: 1907—1915; Trieste, Dublin, Zurich
Date of first publication: 1916
Publisher: B. W. Huebsch, New York
Narrator: The narrator is anonymous, and speaks with the same voice and tone that Stephen
might.
Point of view: Although most of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is in the third person,
the point of view is Stephen's: as Stephen develops as a person, the language and perspective of
the narration develop with him. We see everything in the manner in which he thinks and feels it.
At the very end of the novel, there is a brief section in which the story is told through Stephen's
diary entries. This section is in the first person.
Tone: The tone is generally serious and introspective, especially during Stephen's several
heartfelt epiphanies,
Tense: Past
Setting (time): 1882—1903
Setting (place): Primarily Dublin and the surrounding area
Protagonist: Stephen Dedalus
Major conflict: Stephen struggles to decide whether he should be loyal to his family, his church,
his nation or his vocation as an artist.
Rising action: Stephen's encounters with prostitutes; his emotional reaction to Father Arnall's
hellfire sermons; his temporary devotion to religious life; his realization that he must confront
the decision of whether to center his life around religion or art
Climax: Stephen's decision in Chapter 4 to reject the religious life in favors of the life of an artist
Falling action: Stephen's enrollment in University College, where he gradually forms his
aesthetic theory; Stephen's distancing of himself from his family, church, and nation
Themes: The development of individual consciousness; the pitfalls of religious extremism; the
role of the artist; the need for Irish autonomy
Motifs: Music; flight; prayers, secular songs, and Latin phrases
Symbols: Green and maroon; Emma; the girl on the beach
Foreshadowing: Stephen's heartfelt emotional and aesthetic experiences foreshadow his
ultimate acceptance of the life of an artist. Additionally, Joyce often refers to Stephen's vague
sense, even very early in his life, that a great destiny awaits him.

4
 Critical Context

Published in 1916 and set in Ireland in the late. Nineteenth A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man established James Joyce as a leading figure in e international movement known as literary
modernism. The title describes the book's subject quite accurately. On one level, A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man can be read as what the Germans call a Bildungsroman, or coming-of-age
novel.
Chronicling the life of Stephen Dedalus from early childhood to young adulthood and his life-
changing decision to leave Ireland, the novel is profoundly autobiographical. Like Stephen,
Joyce had early experiences with prostitutes during his teenage years and struggled with
questions of faith. Like Stephen, Joyce was the son of a religious mother and a financially inept
father, Like Stephen, Joyce was the eldest of ten children and received his education at Jesuit
schools, Like Stephen, and Joyce left Ireland to pursue the life of a poet and writer. Stephen's
education includes not only his formal schooling but also his moral, emotional, and intellectual
development as he observes and reacts to the world around him. At the center of the story is
Stephen's rejection of his Roman Catholic upbringing and his growing confidence as a writer.
But the book's significance does not lie only in its portrayal of a sensitive and complex young
man or in its use of autobiographical details. More than this, A Portrait is
Joyce's deliberate attempt to create a new kind of novel that does not rely on conventional
narrative techniques. Rather than telling a story with a coherent plot and a traditional beginning,
middle, and end, Joyce presents selected decisive moments in the life of his hero without the
kind of transitional material that marked most novels written up to that time. The "portrait" of the
title is actually a series of portraits, each showing Stephen at a different stage of development.
And, although this story told in a third-person narrative, it is filtered through Stephen's
consciousness. Finally, the book can be read as Joyce's artistic manifesto and a declaration of
independence—independence from what Joyce considered the restrictive social background of
Catholic Ireland and from the conventions that had previously governed the novel as a literary
genre. More than eighty years after its publication, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
continues to be regarded as a central text of early twentieth-century modernism.

Mythical Context: Daedalus Myth

The name Stephen Dedalus was chosen by James Joyce to link his hero with the mythical Greek
hero, Daedalus. The Latin epigraph is from the Roman poet Ovid's version of the story.
In Greek myth, Daedalus was an architect, inventor, and craftsman whose name is often
translated as "cunning (skillful artificer." By the request of king Minos, Daedalus built a
labyrinth—a maze— on Crete to contain a monster called the Minotaur, half bull and half man.
Later, for displeasing the king, Daedalus and his son Icarus were both confined in this labyrinth,
which was so complex that even its creator couldn't find his way out.
Instead, Daedalus fashioned wings of wax and feathers so that he and his son could escape. But
when Icarus flew too high—too near the sun—in spite of his father's warnings, his wings melted,
and he fell into the sea and drowned. His more cautious father flew to safety. Joyce had always
been drawn to myths—ancient legends and tales that, despite their cultural origins, relate
universal themes like the conflict between father and son or the role of the creative artist. The
legend of

5
Daedalus and his headstrong son particularly interested him. He found in it parallels to his own
predicament as an artist caught in the maze of his own constricted life, with his own father-son
conflict. Like Daedalus, he needed skills and courage to fly away and escape. Joyce signed the
name Stephen Daedalus to some of his early stories. Later, when he decided to use the name for
the hero of Portrait of the Artist, he changed the spelling to Dedalus to make it seem a more Irish
last name. The Daedalus myth gives a basic structure to Portrait of the Artist. At first, Stephen
doesn't understand the significance of his unusual name. He comes to realize, by the fourth
chapter, that like Daedalus he is caught in a maze. If he wants to be free, he must fly high above
his hazardous existence. At the end of Chapter Five, he is poised to fry his wings. Novel echoes
the myth on several levels. Stephen seeks a way out of the restraints of family, country, and
religion. Like Daedalus, he will fashion his own wings—of poetry, not of wax—as a creative
("cunning") artist. But there are also times when Stephen feels like Icarus, the son who will not
heed his father's advice and who died for his stubborn pride. At the end of Portrait of the Artist,
he seems to be calling on a substitute, spiritual parent for support, when he refers to Daedalus as
"old father, old artificer."
The myth's pattern of flight and fall also gives shape to the novel. Some readers see each chapter
ending as an attempted flight followed by partial failure — a fall — at the beginning of the next
chapter. The last chapter ends with the most ambitious attempt, to fly away from home, religion,
and a nation to a self-imposed artistic exile. If we identify Joyce with Stephen Dedalus, the last
flight will appear to have been a success. As a purely fictional matter, however, it is not certain
whether Stephen will soar like Daedalus or drown like Icarus

Political Context: Ireland

The most troubling issue in the history of Ireland was its difficult relations with England.
England, which from the twelfth century had controlled portions of Ireland, gained near-
complete dominance of the island in the sixteenth century. Irish resentment towards the
conquerors was strong, especially when under King Henry VIII the English monarchy became
Protestant, while Ireland clung to Roman Catholicism. Irish Catholics became victims of
religious persecution in their own country. Unjust agricultural policies also contributed to the
difficulties. Most Irish land was owned by absentee landlords and leased to tenant farmers. It was
an inefficient system that was in part responsible for a series of Irish famines, the most terrible of
which occurred after the failure of the potato crop in 1848. Over a million people died during this
famine. From time to time, revolutionary heroes—like the eighteenth-century patriots
Wolfe Tone and Hamilton Rowan admired by young Stephen—aroused Irish hopes for
independence, only to be crushed. In Joyce's youth, confrontation was once again in the air. The
Land League, led by Michael Davitt and Charles Stewart Parnell, had campaigned ' successfully
for agricultural reforms. Other groups campaigned for Irish cultural independence by promoting
the use of Gaelic, Ireland's native tongue, rather than the English brought by Ireland's
conquerors. Perhaps most important was the campaign for Irish Home Rule, self-government
through an independent Irish parliament. The Home Rule campaign was led by Charles Stewart
Parnell. Parnell's leadership in the British Parliament had succeeded in winning over his
colleagues to Home Rule.
Before the bill was passed, however, Parnell's enemies exposed his personal relationship with the
married Katherine (Kitty) O'Shea, with whom he had been living secretly for many years.
The Parnell affair divided Ireland. Parnell's own party deposed him, the Catholic Church
denounced him, and his British backers withdrew their support. Parnell died of pneumonia

6
shortly afterwards, in 1891, when Joyce was nine. (In the scene in Chapter One, the feverish
Stephen dreams of his hero's funeral procession.) Irish politics remained hopelessly tangled after
Parnell's downfall. Some groups still wanted to work for independence by peaceful means.
Others believed that violence was necessary. Irish nationalists, like Stephen's friend Davin,
joined a group called Sinn Fein, whose military arm was called
The Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). Remnants of the IRB later became The Irish
Republican Army, known as the IRA. The Sinn Fein's armed Easter Sunday Rebellion of 1916
against the British was unsuccessful in its attempt to seize Dublin and proclaim a republic. The
British outlawed the group in 1918 and sent in troops ("Black and Tans") to round up remaining
guerrilla fighters.
Nevertheless, the Irish Free State (now the Republic Of Ireland) was established four years later;
it included most, but not all, of Ireland. The six counties of the northern region of Ulster
remained, as they are now, a part of Britain—but violently divided over religious issues. Thus,
the long tradition of Anglo-Irish conflict continues to this day. The influences of Ireland on
Stephen appear to him as a part of the labyrinth in which he is entangled; he feels that he must
escape it. The country is the very opposite of Stephen's ideal, because the Irish have allowed
themselves to be shaped by alien forces and cultures. They are, in this view, victims of two
empires, the British, which controls them politically, and the Roman Catholic, which rules them
spiritually from Rome. That this is foreign to Ireland's true nature is made very clear when
Stephen, now a Student at University College, enters a house owned by the Jesuits. He senses the
history of the place and asks himself, "(Was the Jesuit house extraterritorial and was he walking
among aliens? The Ireland of Tone and of Parnell seemed to have receded in space". Tone and
Parnell were Irish nationalists; Stephen will also soon find out that the Dean of Studies is an
Englishman. So the Jesuit house is "extraterritorial"; not really part of Ireland at all.
Part of Stephen's quest is to break through this Irish net of foreign-dominated cultural history and
create an art that is free. He has been aware, from a very young age, of the conflict in Ireland
because the fierce quarrel that erupts at the family Christmas dinner makes a deep impact on
him. It shows the divisions between the Irish regarding their own history and destiny. Dante
Riordan supports the Church, which opposed Charles Parnell, the Irish nationalist who nearly
brought Home Rule to Ireland. The Church in general opposed Irish nationalism. Opposing
Dante are Stephen's father and Mr. Casey, who argue that Ireland is a "priest-ridden" country; the
Church is a harmful influence. As Stephen matures, he does not take sides; he transcends the
debate. He will not side with the nationalists because he sees no hope in that path, based on the
way the Irish people have treated their own leaders. He tells his friend Davin that "No honorable
and sincere man.
has given up to you his life and his youth and his affections from the days of Tone to those of
Parnell but you sold him to the enemy or failed him in need or reviled him and left him for
another". Nor does Stephen have any interest in following the Roman Catholic Church, which
would merely be to follow a system and a doctrine laid out by an authority external to himself.
Stephen does want to do something for his country, but he wants to free it through art, not
politics. Or religion. This is clear from his penultimate diary entry, when he goes to "encounter
for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the
uncreated conscience of my race"

7
 Settings of James Joyce's Novels

Joyce fled from Dublin to the mainland of Europe, but Dublin never left him. He wrote about the
city for the rest of his life— in Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist, Ulysses, and Finnegan's Wake.
Dublin is more than the backdrop of Portrait of the Artist. It is also the symbol of Stephen's
discontent. The drab, stagnant city is seen as the heart of a paralyzed Ireland that stifles the
aspiring young artist. The city's streets, through which Stephen constantly wanders as he works
out his future, are like the labyrinth (maze) constructed by his eponym, the mythical Daedalus.
For both of them the only escape is flight.
Stephen's family starts out living in Bray, an affluent sea side village to the south of Dublin.
However' financial problems force the family into the city, first to the suburb of Blackrock, and
then to a series of progressively bleaker dwellings in the city's shabbier sections. As you might
expect, these downhill moves color Stephen's view of the city and of his life. The Dublin streets
reflect his dissatisfaction. There even comes a time when, disgusted with himself, he finds
comfort in their foul-smelling filth—they match his own darker moods and self-disgust. The real
Dublin of Joyce's time had its gracious sections adorned by eighteenth-century Georgian brick
houses and by many handsome monuments. It also had the natural beauty of Dublin Bay, the
outlet of the River Lifer. Stephen is not completely blind to this beauty. In his frequent walks, he
goes to the water. It is on the harbor's seawall, called the Bull that he clearly hears the call of his
artistic destiny, and on the Bay Shore that he sees the girl who becomes a symbol of the freedom
and beauty he seeks. (Some see the Lifer and the sea as symbols of the "stream" of Stephen's
thoughts and as the sites of his rebirth and baptism as an artist.) But it's the seamy side of Dublin
that haunts Stephen in all its sordid detail: water-logged lanes, putrid puddles, dung heaps, odors
of fish, "horse piss and rotted straw." Despite any momentary feelings of communion, Stephen
must reject the "dull phenomenon or Dublin"—and Ireland—as an environment suitable for
artistic growth, even though both city and country will remain a rich source of the art itself.

8
 Point of View
Just as the literary style of Portrait of the Artist is more subtle and in some ways more difficult
than that of traditional novels, so is the novel's point of view. Portrait of the Artist is, in general,
an example of a third-person, limited omniscient narrative. Stephen Dedalus doesn't tell his story
himself. But in general we perceive only what he perceives. We don't enter other characters'
minds. Only occasionally—as at the Christmas dinner scene, or during the trip to Cork with
Simon Dedalus— do we even hear or see other characters who haven't been completely filtered
through Stephen's perceptions.
Indeed, the book focuses so closely on Stephen, and takes us so. Deeply into his mind, that at
times it resembles a first-person narrative. In fact, however, the book is a little trickier than that.
If Portrait of the Artist were a first-person narrative, or a traditional third-person, limited
omniscient narrative, it would be difficult for us to get outside of Stephen. We would see him
only as he sees himself. We could judge him only as he judges himself. But that isn't what
happens.
First, Joyce very occasionally lets us step outside of Stephen's consciousness. For example, at the
end of the Christmas dinner scene, we are told that Stephen raises "his terror-stricken face."
Stephen, of course, can't see his own face while sitting at the dinner table—but by taking us
outside Stephen for this instant, Joyce emphasizes the impact the vicious argument has had upon
the young boy.
More subtly, and more frequently, Joyce lets us stand just slightly outside Stephen—in this way
giving us the distance we need to judge him—a through the language he uses to describe
Stephen's thoughts. For example, in Chapter Two, Stephen dreams of finding 'in the real world
the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld. .... They would meet quietly as if
they had known each other and had made their tryst ... and at that moment of supreme tenderness
he would be transfigured." Some readers feel such sentences are merely accurate descriptions of
Stephen's thoughts; they feel that since Stephen approves of his own thoughts, Joyce does too.
But many other readers feel that Joyce has purposely laid it on a little too thick here, and in many
other parts of the book. They feel the language, he uses to express Stephen's thoughts is
purposely a little too "poetic," because Stephen himself is a little too poetic. He takes himself, his
art, and his rebellion too seriously. Even the famous lines — "Welcome, O life! I go to encounter
for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the
uncreated conscience of my race"
— can be taken as a brave vow or as an eloquent-sounding but hollow promise that Stephen
won't be able to fulfill. In these ways, language in Portrait of the Artists becomes closely
connected to point of view. We are inside Stephen's mind, yet Joyce's language may put us
slightly outside it as well.

9
 Form and Structure
Portrait of the Artist is divided into five chapters, each composed of episodes. Most episodes are
separated, by asterisks. The scenes go back and forth in time without alerting the reader to the
transition. They represent clusters of meaningful periods in Stephen Dedalus' life. How does this
collection of episodes add up to a unified whole? Some see the basic framework of Portrait of the
Artist as a five-chapter, chronological progression from small boy to university student.
According to this view, each of the five chapters represents a stage in the growth of Stephen's
character: his childhood, the shift from childhood to adolescence, the discovery of his true
vocation as a writer, and his final decision to be an artist-in-exile. The discovery of his literary
vocation pro- vides the book's climax, and his decision to go abroad its resolution—a pattern like
that of a musical symphony or a classical Greek drama.
Other readers see Portrait of the Artist as having a three-part structure that reflects the three
crucial periods of Stephen's self-awareness. The first two chapters concern Stephen's awakening
to his own body. The next two show his developing awareness that he must be a writer (and not a
priest). The fifth chapter focuses on his realization that he must leave Ireland. Yet another view
concentrates on the rhythmic movement of each chapter from a low point of self- doubt to a
moment of triumph. The action rises slowly, only to fall at the beginning of the next chapter. It's
a pattern that has been compared to a series of waves. It has also been linked to the myth that
underlies the novel—the myth of Daedalus. Each chapter can be seen as an attempted flight, at
the chapter's end, Stephen soars. But at the opening of the following chapter, he is brought down
to earth once again. At the book's end, Stephen is ready to make his most daring test of his
wings. Whether he will succeed like Daedalus, or fall and drown like his too-proud son, Icarus, is
left for the future still others read the book's basic pattern as .an analogy to the birth embryo is
barely formed. Later, the embryo develops a heart, its sex is defined, and it finds it must leave
the mother's womb to breathe the outside air. The final chapter leads up to the actual moment of
birth and departure from the womb of family, religion, and country. To further unify this novel,
Joyce uses special literary devices that take the place of transitions and plot developments. One
is the myth of Daedalus that underlies the novel. Linked to it is another myth that of Lucifer
(Satan), the fallen angel who, out of pride, refuses to serve God. Figures of speech—images and
symbols—also help to flesh out the bare bones of the story, and to suggest tone and mood. They
become a vital part of the structure, extended motifs that wind in and out of the story to lead the
readers through the maze of Stephen's experience. The use of recurrent words and references to
create a structure was part of Joyce's pioneer effort to express a deeper reality than that expressed
by conventional narratives. Understanding of the structure depends much on readers' ability to
pick out and interpret the connecting materials.

10
 Plot Overview

The novel begins with Stephen Dedalus' first memories, when he was about three years old. The
fragmented lines are from a childhood story and a nursery song, and are linked with family
associations, sensory perceptions, and pieces of conversation. In this opening scene, Joyce is
presenting to us the genesis of a future artist’s perception and interpretation of the world. Moving
from Stephen's infancy to his early days at Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit boarding school
for boys, Joyce focuses on three key incidents which significantly affect Stephen's personality.
First„ Stephen is pushed into an open cesspool by a bullying classmate and, subsequently, he
develops a fever which confines him to the school infirmary; here, he begins to discern that he is
"different," that he is an outsider. Later, when he is probably six years old, Stephen returns home
to celebrate Christmas dinner with his family and is invited, for the first time, to sit with the
adults at the dinner table. This extraordinarily happy occasion is marred by. A heated political
argument between Stephen's old nurse, Dante Riordan, and a dinner guest, Mr. Casey, leaving
Stephen confused about the issues of religion and politics in the adult world.
On returning to school, Stephen accidentally breaks his glasses and is unable to complete his
class work. He is unjustly humiliated and punished by the cruel prefect of studies, but after
receiving encouragement from a friend, Stephen bravely (if fearfully) goes to the rector of the
school and obtains justice. The success of this meeting instills in him a healthy self-confidence
and ennobles him, for a moment, in the eyes of his classmates. After a brief summer vacation at
his home in Blackrock, Stephen learns that his father's financial reversals make it impossible to
return to Clongowes Wood; instead, he is enrolled in a less prestigious Jesuit day school,
Belvedere College. Here, he develops 'a distinguished reputation as an award-winning essay
writer and a fine actor in his school play. Despite these accomplishments, however, Stephen feels
increasingly alienated from his schoolmates because of his growing religious skepticism and his
deep interest in literature and writing. This feeling of isolation is intensified during a trip with his
father to Cork, where he learns more about his father's weaknesses.
Stephen becomes increasingly repelled by the dead-ü end realities of Dublin life. Frustrated by
his loss of faith in the Catholic Church, in his family situation, and in his cultural bonds, Stephen
seeks to "appease the fierce longings of his heart." After wandering through the city's brothel
district, he finds momentary solace with a Dublin prostitute. He is fourteen years old, and this is
his first sexual experience. After a period of "sinful living," Stephen attends an intense three-day
spiritual retreat. During that time, he is overwhelmed by guilt and remorse; he believes that
Father Arnall is speaking directly to him. Panicking, he seeks out a kindly old Capuchin priest,
pledges moral reform, and rededicates himself to a life of purity and devotion. He fills his days
with fervent prayers and takes part in as many religious services as he can. Noticing Stephen's
exceedingly pious behavior, the director of the school arranges a meeting to encourage Stephen
to consider entering the priesthood. At first, Stephen is flattered, fascinated by the possibilities of
the clerical life, but increasingly he is tormented by carnal desires, He finally realizes that his
"inherent sinful nature" makes it necessary for him to reject a religious vocation. Having made
this discovery about himself, Stephen decides to enroll in the university, where he hopes to shape
his destiny as an artist. This decision is immediately followed by a climactic "epiphany": he sees
a girl wading in the sea; to Stephen, she embodies the attraction, the promise, and the abandon
which he wishes to experience in life. It is at this moment that Stephen understands that he can
only hope to gain this experience through a life of artistic expression. Shortly thereafter, Stephen

11
begins a new life as a young man in search of his own values and his own credo. In comparison
with the other college students, Stephen often seems anti-social and more concerned with
pursuing his own interests than supporting the causes of others. Even Stephen himself realizes
that unlike most of his friends, he is unusually introspective. He is not the typical devil-may-care
university student; he rejects the typical blind patriotic blather, and although he continues to
respect the Catholic faith, he no longer believes that its tenets should govern his life. Through
conversations with friends and a dean of studies, Stephen eventually develops his own aesthetic
theory of art, based on the philosophies of Aristotle and
Aquinas. Simultaneously, he concludes that if he is ever going to find his artistic soul, he must
sever all bonds of faith, family, and country. He must leave Dublin and go abroad to "forge" his
soul's "uncreated conscience."

12
 Brief Summary

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man takes place in Ireland at the turn of the century. Young
Stephen Dedalus comes from an Irish Catholic family; he is the oldest of ten children, and his
father is financially inept. Throughout the novel, the Dedalus f family makes a series of moves
into increasingly dilapidated homes as their fortunes dwindle. His mother is a devout Catholic.

When Stephen is young, he and the other Dedalus children are tutored by the governess Dante, a
fanatically Catholic woman. Their Uncle Charles also lives with the family. Book opens with
stream of consciousness narrative filtered through a child's perspective; there is sensual imagery,
and words approximating baby talk, we leap forward in time to see young Stephen beginning
boarding school at Clongowes. He is very young, terribly homesick, un-athletic and socially
awkward. He is an easy target for bullies, and one day he is pushed into a cesspool. He becomes
ill from the filthy water, but he remembers what his father told him and doesn't tell on the boy.

That Christmas, he eats at the adult table for the first time. A terrible argument erupts over
politics, with John Casey and Stephen's father on one side and Dante on the other. Later that
year, Stephen is unjustly hit by a prefect. He complains to the rector, winning the praises of his
peers.
Stephen is forced to withdraw from Clongowes because of his family's poverty. The family
moves to
Blackrock, where Stephen takes long walks with Uncle Charles and goes on imaginary
adventures with boys from around the neighborhood. When Stephen is a bit Older, the family
moves to Dublin, once again because of financial difficulties. He meets a girl named Emma
Clere, who is to be the object of his adoration right up to the end of the book. His father, with a
bit of charm, manages to get Stephen back into private school. He is to go to Belvedere College,
another institution run by the Jesuits. Stephen comes into his own at Belvedere—a reluctant
leader and a success at acting and essay writing. Despite his position of leadership, he often feels
quite isolated.
He continues to be a sensitive and imaginative young man, acting in school plays and winning
essay contests. He is also increasingly obsessed with sex; his fantasies grow more and more
lurid. Finally, one night he goes with a prostitute. It is his first sexual experience. Going with
prostitutes becomes a habit. Stephen enters a period of spiritual confession. He considers his
behavior sinful, but he feels oddly indifferent towards it. He cannot seem to stop going to
prostitutes, nor does he want to stop. But during the annual spiritual retreat at Belvedere, he
hears three fire sermons on the torments of hell. Stephen is terrified, and he repents of his old
behavior.
He becomes almost fanatically religious. After a time, this feeling passes. He becomes
increasingly frustrated by Catholic doctrine. When a rector offers him priesthood, Stephen
realizes that it is not the life for him. One day, while walking on the beach, he sees a beautiful
girl. Her beauty hits him with the force of spiritual revelation, and he no longer feels ashamed of
admiring the body. He will live life to the fullest. Next time we see Stephen, he is a university
student, University has provided him with valuable structure and new ideas; in particular, and he

13
has had time to think about the works of Aquinas and Aristotle on the subject of beauty. Stephen
has developed his own theory of aesthetics. He is increasingly preoccupied with beauty and art.
Although he has no shortage of friends, he feels isolated. He finds Ireland as a trap, and he
realizes that he must escape the constraints of nation, family, and religion. He can only do that
abroad. Stephen imagines his escape as something parallel to the flight of Daedalus who escaped
from his prison with wings crafted by his own genius. The book ends with Stephen leaving
Ireland to pursue the life of an artist.

14
 Motifs

Music
Music, especially singing, appears repeatedly throughout A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man.
Stephen's appreciation of music is closely tied to his love for the sounds of language. As a very
young child, he' turns Dante's threats into a song, "apologies, pull out his eyes, pull out his eyes,
apologies." Singing is more than just language, however—it is language transformed by vibrant
humanity. Indeed, music appeals to the part of Stephen that wants to live life to the fullest.
We see this aspect of music near the end of the novel, when Stephen suddenly feels at peace
upon hearing a woman singing. Her voice prompts him to recall his resolution to leave Ireland
and become a writer, reinforcing his determination to celebrate life through writing. Flight
Stephen Dedalus's very name embodies the idea of flight. Stephen's namesake, Daedalus, is a
figure from Greek mythology, a renowned craftsman who designs the famed Labyrinth of Crete
for King Minos. Minos keeps Daedalus and his son Icarus imprisoned on Crete, but Daedalus
makes plans to escape by using feathers, twine, and wax to fashion a set of wings for himself and
his son. Daedalus escapes successfully, but Icarus flies too high. The sun's heat melts the wax
holding Icarus's wings together, and he plummets to his death in the sea.
In the context of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, We can see Stephen as representative
of both Daedalus and Icarus, as Stephen's father also has the last name of Dedalu"s. With this
mythological reference, Joyce 'implies that Stephen must always balance his desire to flee
Ireland with the danger of overestimating his own abilities—the intellectual equivalent of
Icarus's flight too close to the sun. To diminish the dangers of attempting too much too soon,
Stephen bides his time at the university, developing his aesthetic theory fully before attempting
to leave Ireland and write seriously. The birds that appear to Stephen in the third section of
Chapter 5 signal that it is finally time for Stephen, now fully formed as an artist, to take flight
himself.

Prayers, Secular Songs, and Latin Phrases

We can often tell Stephen's state of mind by looking at the fragments of prayers, songs, and Latin
phrases that Joyce. Inserts into the text. When Stephen is a schoolboy, Joyce includes childish,
sincere prayers that mirror the manner in which a child might devoutly believe in the church,
even without understanding the meaning of its religious doctrine. When Stephen prays in church
despite the fact that he has committed a mortal sin, Joyce transcribes a long passage of the Latin
prayer, but it is clear that Stephen merely speaks the words without believing them. Then, when
Stephen is at the university, Latin is used as a joke—his friends translate colloquial phrases like
"peace over the whole bloody globe" into Latin because they find the academic sound of the
translation amusing. This jocular use of Latin mocks both the young men's education and the
stern, serious manner in which Latin is used in the church, these linguistic jokes demonstrate that
Stephen is no longer serious about religion. Finally, Joyce includes a few lines from the Irish folk
song "Rosie O'Grady" near the end of the novel. These simple lines reflect the peaceful feeling
that the song brings to Stephen and Cranly, as well as the traditional Irish culture that Stephen
plans to leave behind. Throughout the novel, such prayers, songs, and phrases form the
background of Stephen's life.

15
 Symbols

Green and Maroon

Stephen associates the colors green and maroon with his governess, Dante, and with two leaders
of the Irish resistance, Charles Parnell and Michael Davitt. In a dream after Parnell's death,
Stephen sees Dante dressed in green and maroon as the Irish people mourn their fallen leader.
This vision indicates that Stephen associates the two colors with the way Irish politics are played
out among the members of his own family.

Emma
Emma appears only in glimpses throughout most of Stephen's young life, and he never gets to
know her as a person. Instead, she becomes a symbol of pure love, untainted by sexuality or
reality. Stephen. Worships Emma as the ideal of feminine purity. When he goes through his
devoutly religious phase, he imagines his reward for his piety as a union with Emma in heaven.
It is only later, when he is at the university, that we finally see a real conversation between
Stephen and Emma. Stephen's diary entry regarding this conversation Portrays Emma as a real,
friendly, and somewhat ordinary girl, but certainly not the goddess Stephen earlier makes her out
to be. This more balanced view of Emma mirrors Stephen's abandonment of the extremes Of
Complete sin and complete devotion in favor of a middle path, the devotion to the appreciation
of beauty.

16
 Critical Essays about“A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”

The Question of Autobiography

The question of how much autobiographical material Joyce inserted into the fictional character
of
Stephen Dedalus has long been a matter of debate. Scholars and critics still produce evidence on
both sides of the issue, but for the most part, the question has been largely resolved through the
contributions of Richard Ellman, Joyce's definitive biographer, and Joyce's brother Stanislaus,
who wrote his own book about Joyce, My Brother's Keeper.
Despite the countless similarities between Joyce's own childhood and that of Stephen Dedalus,
Stanislaus Joyce makes it clear that "Stephen Dedalus is an imaginary, not a real, self-portrait."
Significant details exist to verify this view, including Joyce's school records at Clongowes and
Belvedere, as well as recorded interviews with several of Joyce's friends. Stanislaus points out
that although Joyce "followed his own development closely, has been his own model and (has)
chosen to use many incidents from his own experience. He has (also) transformed and invented
many others."
One example of such invention is Joyce's portrait Of Stephen as a physically weak, cowering and
innocent "victim" at Clongowes. In contrast to this view of Stephen, Stanislaus remembers Joyce
as a relatively well-adjusted student and "a good athlete," who won "a variety of cups for his
prowess in hurdling and walking." He also recalls that Joyce was less isolated, less relatively
bookish, and at times, less manageable than Stephen. In the Clongowes ' Punishment Book we
find that Joyce, unlike Stephen, was never punished mistakenly for an incident involving broken
glasses, but the book does record that Joyce received at least two punishments for forgetting to
bring a book to class, and on another occasion, he was punished for using "vulgar language."
Other variances between Stephen and Joyce are found in Joyce's treatment of Stephen's friends,
most of whom are clearly intellectually inferior to him. Stanislaus remembers, to the contrary,
that Joyce's friends provided him with significant mental stimulation throughout his adolescent
development. Yet another difference between the creator and the creation exists in Joyce's
relationship with his father. Ellman states, "In A Portrait, Stephen denies that Simon is in any
real sense his father, but James himself had no doubt that he was in every way his father's son."
In addition, Stanislaus recalls the Cork incident in the novel (where Stephen travels with Simon
to Cork) and states that Joyce's feelings during that trip were quite different; unlike Stephen, who
was disgusted by his father's visits to various pubs, Stanislaus emphasizes that "my brother's
James' I letters ... at the time were written in a tone of amusement even when he described going
from one bar to another." Joyce's fictional representations of his friends at the university are just
that—fictional. He changed many of their personalities, invented non-existent dialogues, and
deliberately excluded significant individuals in the novel. Clearly, Stephen Dedalus is Joyce's
fictional Persona, whom he used to express his ideas about. The lyrical, epical, and dramatic
forms of literature. In conclusion, in spite of-the obvious autobiographical similarities, Stephen is
a fictional representation of Joyce's art. Stephen exists, as does the novel, as an example of the
author's "handiwork," behind which Joyce is "invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent ..."
and, probably if he had his way in the matter, is still standing concealed somewhere, "paring his
nails."

17
Artistic Development of the Hero
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man had various themes which covered many areas. The
primary theme of the novel is the artistic development 'Of the artist, Stephen, and this relates
specifically to the artist's development in the life of a national language. Stephen experiences
many voices of Ireland as well as those of the writers of his education. Out of all these voices
emerges Stephen's aesthetic theory and his desire to find his own manner of expression. Stephen
develops his own voice as a way of escaping these constraints. One of the main constraints on
the artist as Joyce depicts his life is the Roman Catholic Church. However, it is both a constraint
and an enabling condition for the artist's development. First, the Jesuit education Stephen
receives, gives him a thorough grounding in the classical and medieval thinkers. It also structures
Stephen's life in such a way that it provides him with a basis for his own development as a moral
and intellectual person. In relation to his eventual development of a theory of art or an aesthetic
theory, Stephen fully draws on' this tradition. He uses two central doctrines of the church in this
theory. First, he revises the doctrine into a way of imagining the relationship between art and the
world it describes. When Stephen develops his theory, he thinks of himself as taking on the role
of a "priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant
body of ever-loving life," The second use of Catholic doctrine or tradition relates to its creation
of a priesthood, a class of men separate from the world who act as intermediaries between the
deity and the people, In Stephen's idea of the artist, he is priest like, performing the miracle of
turning life into art. Joyce is in good company when he uses techniques to drive a wedge in the
totalizing authority of the church and in other forms of seriousness, even the artist's own, When
Stephen is discoursing learnedly on his aesthetic theory, his friend Lynch criticizes him. He
brings lust into' the picture of how and why art is created. He laughs at Stephen's deadly serious
use of the scholastics to develop a theory of art. Earlier in the novel, when Mrs., Dante Riordan
is condemning Parnell and supporting his excommunication from the Catholic church, Mr.
Dedalus and Mr. Casey discourages her, describing fat priests, the way the priests eat, and
generally joking about the priest's grasping for. Power. They win that argument. Mrs. Riordan
leaves. It serves a good lesson for the young Stephen, who never employs it himself, but which
Joyce certainly makes good use of. Even in describing Stephen's process of writing a poem to his
beloved, he begins in poetic inspiration and ends in lust, both are used to produce the poem. It is
this philosophy that characterizes the final version of Stephen's ideas of the function of art and
the free life. Instead of the church's idea of mortifying the flesh in favor' of the spirit, Stephen
finally decides that the flesh should also be given voice. The novel itself insists on the local as a
site for theories of the universal, of the body as the place in which the spirit resides. The final
description of Stephen's theory of art is not in the novel's narrative it is the novel's narrative, as it
incorporates all the voices of Stephen's development, orchestrates them, makes them speak to
each other, and disables any one of them from an authoritative hold over the free artist.

Modernism
Though Joyce's A Portrait is not a fully Modernist text (in the sense that Ulysses is), the novel
appeared as a significant influence in the early days of the embryonic movement. Its subject and
techniques anticipate many of the features of the later, more mature achievements of both
Modernism and of Joyce himself, who became its prime mover. To fully appreciate these
features in A Portrait it is vital to see it in the wider context of European artistic currents, and

18
especially in the light of the crisis of values and uncertainties which took place during the period
from 1890 to1920, a crisis which occurred in the face of a widespread collapse of confidence in
science, philosophy, religion and art. To try to pinpoint the start of any movement with a specific
date or work of art is inevitably a ticklish endeavor-—Modernism more so since it was never a
school, just a more or less simultaneous stirring * among intellectuals and artists as a common
but independent reaction to the failure of science and religion to offer a convincing definition of
the changing world. There was never any consensus or manifesto among the artists and writers
who have since been grouped together under its umbrella by succeeding critics. Thus Modernism
has no easily identifiable starting date and indeed no real starting date—it grew instead as a late
nineteenth-century reaction to Romanticism and a response to the world's social and intellectual
changes. And while its achievements reveal it’s radically distinct approaches based on new
perspectives, its initial rise was quite gradual. While the break itself is difficult to pinpoint in
time there is no question about the great divide in the terms on which art, 'literature,
philosophical attitudes, social values, politics and science separated the Modernists from the age
of Jane Austen, Wordsworth, George Eliot and Dickens. But what differentiates the approach
and style of Modernism from what went before? How can we identify the style of Modernism—
its soul? To start with, Modernism is not one style but many. Unlike Romanticism which was
effectively a change of emphasis growing out of the unconscious reaction to Neo- classicism,
Modernism is a concerted attempt to create a new artistic attitude through a new way of looking
at the world and at the art which expresses it. This is typified for instance in the new styles of
painting, such as Picasso's Cubism, with rejection of representationalism in favor Of significant
form and expressive style based on experience—a sort of introversion turning on skepticism and
mannerism, in which technique and form are un- mistakably foregrounded. But unlike
representational art, which finds its pretext in a close physical correspondence between the image
and the real world, Modernist art finds its justification within itself; it is ultimately self-
sufficient. For Modernist art, there is not merely a crisis in reality but also a crisis in perception.
On a wider scale, Modernism springs from and closely corresponds with the crises and anxieties
of the age as a whole—industrialization and urbanization on a vast scale, rapid and
uncontrollable change and chaos, together with the inevitable alienation of the individual. And
all this is mirrored in the splintering of art into diverse schisms and "-isms" Two central
challenges have preoccupied the Modernist novel: exploration and expression of the subtle
potentialities of consciousness, and a coming to terms with the perceived state of chaos and
fragmentation of the real world. Although A Portrait is not a fully Modernist text, both of these
concerns can already be seen in embryo in it: firstly, in the abandonment of the restraints of
conventional chronological plot (in favor of expressive form with modulating styles and shifting
author-character-reader relationships arranged through Stephen Dedalus's consciousness; and,
secondly, in the sense of awe and fear which Stephen feels in the face of the chaos behind
received forms of order (that is, the imposed moral order of the adult world and the Church) and
the void awaiting him in the uncertain future beyond the novel:
A sense of fear of the unknown moved in the heart of his weariness, a fear of symbols and
portents, Of the hawk like man whose name he bore soaring out of his captivity on osier woven
wings ... At the start of this century it seemed that the novel might have exhausted its potential in
terms both of form and of content (having fully explored different forms and narrative styles,
inner and outer states, politics, religion, philosophy, sex as well as violence). The novel could
confidently embrace any aspect of human affairs which public taste and the circulating libraries
would permit, or so it was confidently imagined.

19
However, in England the three-volume novel's interest in scientific realism had declined into a
sterile preoccupation with plot, materialism and the naturalistic fallacy of surface effects—
typified in the writings of Wells, Galsworthy and Bennett who, according to Virginia Woolf,
could examine every physical aspect about a character and yet overlook its essential soul. To
illustrate her criticism she used the analogy of a railway in which a Mrs. Brown might be
travelling with them, while they observed everything in the background:
... At factories, at Utopias, even at the decoration of the carriage; but never at her, never at life,
never at human nature for us those conventions are ruin, those tools are death."
One of the immediate consequences of this apparent dead-end was a crisis of confidence,
especially in the capacity of language to communicate, but there also followed a collapse of faith
in the realist illusion (a skepticism which had been growing even as the novel itself had evolved,
at least since the eighteenth century). The crisis emerged most characteristically in a new form of
self-awareness, even in self-consciousness, doubt and a failure of confidence. But this was not
new. Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1760-67) brilliantly epitomizes the novelist's doubts
about narrative conventions and exploits them through parody for comic effect. It is of course a
witty display of authorial virtuosity, though it accepts the traditional authorial role and material
content in order to parody them. However, Modernism goes further than authorial virtuosity,
especially in first undermining and then positing new author-reader relationships, directly co-
opting the reader's active involvement but also, through its subtlety of form-play, examining and
qualifying the very nature of the art form itself as the artist creates it, so that ultimately the reader
himself is complicit in the form of the novel. A Portrait focuses precisely on this and further
anticipates later Modernist developments by focusing also on the theme of the artist—the growth
of the artist becomes the theme of his own creation, and by extension if we grant the special
relationship between Stephen Dedalus and James Joyce the novel eventually comes to discuss
itself. For example, in Chapter 5 the villanelle and the art theory are the culmination of growing
speculation about the nature of the artist's relationship to his art, to his reader and to society in
general:
"The image, it is clear, must be set between the mind or senses of the artist himself and the mind
or senses of others."

Because of this skepticism there also emerged in the early days of Modernism a distinct feeling
of angst, a fear that the author of a novel creates nothing in fact but clearly fakes or forges the so-
called reality in a work and that his search for form is partly to justify this (a clear symptom of
this is the popularity of the detective story in the late nineteenth century especially among
prominent writers such as Wilkie Collins, Dickens, Conan Doyle, Henry James and T. S. Eliot),
forging a coherent pattern on to the apparent chaos. Stephen Dedalus too talks of forging in this
way—imposing meaning on life through art, forging an order .different from that in reality but
creating a new aesthetic order. But he also uses "forges" to highlight the sense that the Modernist
artist is a confidence trickster, deceiver, con man like Thomas Mann's Felix Krull. But who is
fooling whom? Is Stephen deceiving, only himself or, through Joyce, the reader too? Further
aspects of the Modernist novel can also be seen beginning to emerge in A Portrait. For example,
the form of the novel, rather than being a more or less detached vessel into which the subject
matter is poured and contained, actually partakes of the subject matter as later, in the mature
Modernist work (such as Ulysses), the form actually became the content, united and radiant in
appropriate wholeness and harmony: these words in this order. As Joyce told his friend, the artist
Frank Budgen:

20
"I have the words already. What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentence. There
is an order in every way appropriate."

It was a concern very much shared by other Modernist writers at this time, anxious to liberate the
novel from its close dependence on external material realism (itself based on assumptions of a
direct correspondence between words and reality) and to concentrate on probing the unutterable
territory of the human consciousness and the soul, instead of finding their creative energy from
within the artist's uniquely private vision. Subsequently, the Modernist novel also became very
much concerned with disrupting the traditional forward flow of narrative time by sudden leaps
forward and backward along "timeless" moments (or epiphanies), and setting up conflicts with,
while also exploiting, the reader's "real time" progress through the But one of Joyce's profound
innovations here is the use of multiple points of view. A Portrait has no single perspective:
Stephen's consciousness changes as he matures and, through the shifting modulating style, the
perspective of the narrator also changes, setting up an implicit dialectic between the two. The
idea itself of an implied narrator—a voice not wholly Joyce's, but a surrogate author and Joyce's
representative in the work— is a new development evolving through Flaubert, James and
Conrad, and arising directly from the avowed aim of keeping the author's moral presence out of
the novel. As we have seen, A Portrait excludes any direct authorial moral comment but
continues to exert control over the reader's response through the technique of the form—
juggling the order, emphasis, theme and point of view. Time is also of crucial importance. In the
Modernist novel, time dominates both as one of the key themes as well as one of the key
organizing principles of the design. Marcel Proust's A la recherché du temps perdu (1913-27) is a
paradigm of this preoccupation with time. An enormous undertaking, its scope is equally epic, its
central ideal being that in moments of intense illumination it is possible to penetrate and
recapture the long-lost past and to relive its emotions. Because of his special skills and sensitivity
the artist, unlike the ordinary person, is able to record and prolong such isolated moments into
eternity itself through the magic of symbolism and myth vision (stressing the elevated status of
the artist).
But to be able to exploit such moments for the central experience of reality, it was necessary for
the novelist to concentrate on pattern rather than plot in organizing his work. Both A la recherché
du temps perdu and A Portrait display this emphasis, and Virginia Woolf made her plea for such
novels in which, like A Portrait, the interplay of the consciousness of the writer and of his people
work to create the form:

"If a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if
he could base his work upon his own feelings and not upon convention, there would be no plot,
no comedy, no tragedy, no clove interest Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically
arranged; but a luminous halo, a' semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning.
Of the consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, unknown
and circumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexion it may display, with as little
mixture of the alien and external as possible?" (Virginia Woolf)

At the same time the capacity of the language and the novel form are pressed to new limits in
attempting to make language approximate to the inner realities of such phenomena as
simultaneity (Ulysses), sudden illumination or epiphany (Dubliners and A Portrait), and relative

21
time and the unconsciousness (the techniques of stream-of-consciousness and "interior
monologue"). We have seen above already that this idea of the "moment" was one which
energized -the work of so many G Modernist -writers—Woolf, Eliot, Proust, and Others—but
especially of Joyce, in his idea of the 'epiphany", the basic unit of the form in both Dubliners and
A Portrait. Its use underlines vividly the fragmentariness of modern existence 4 and .its
disintegration, at the same time deriving the form of the work from a principle of significant
aesthetic pattern rather than from a conventional chronographic history, the concept of the
epiphany dynamically assimilates the Modernist idea of time as the moment to the special notion
of truth as discovery. And the writer's use of his own biography works in the same way, fusing
the writer's conception of real life with the need for pattern and coherence, as Proust reflected:
"The true life, life at last discovered and illuminated, the only true life really lived, is that of the
writer."
The theme of the artist's own biography (sometimes attacked as a form of introversion) is
encountered again and again in the Modernist novel. Like Proust's masterpiece, A Portrait is both
the portrait of the novel's creator and the revelation of the life principle on which the novel is
written. It represents that reality which the novelist is most familiar with: his own life and his art.
Combined with the epiphany as the most logical means of arranging and signifying experience,
his own themes of personal exile and alienation parallel the exile and alienation of the age. In the
best work of the theme confronts and resolves one of the central crises in the Modernist novel—
the struggle to express the new impalpable realities in the wake of the acute failure of confidence
in the language. In A Portrait Stephen Dedalus is at the same time both the experience of the
novel and its author; Joyce adapts his own experience, and his words are both the means of
expressing them as well as being the subject of the expression themselves. The text ultimately
forges its justification' within itself, again perfectly fusing form and content, technique and In
Joyce's contemporary writing, the "portrait of the artist" theme occurs again and again: in
Thomas Mann's
Tonio Kroger, Andre Gide's The Counterfeiters, D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers and in
Proust's monumental work, as well as in submerged form in countless works, frequently
involving exile or flight into the unknown—a correlative of the Modernist crises themselves—
through which the artist confronts the problematic of artistic creation and his own relationship to
it.

The following points can broadly be considered to understand A Portrait as a Modernist text:

1. The first two pages of A Portrait, so distinctive in style and technique, are an example of the
experimentalism that made Joyce's writing so different from that of his 19th century
predecessors. Stephen’s way of perceiving the world affects the sound of the prose, making the
boundary between the narrator and the character hard to determine.
2. Stephen's thoughts about his own name bring up the issue of myth and modernism. Modernist
writers like Joyce (T.S. Eliot is another example) had a respect for writers and ideas of the past
and often referred myths and mythical characters in their work.
3. Stephen's decision to devote himself to art after he sees the bird girl is an example of an
"epiphany." Epiphanies, often portrayed in modernist writing, happen when a character is
transformed in one moment of penetrating insight.
4. When Stephen thinks as he's walking to school about "common lives," he's expressing a
modernist's concern for the lives of people who are not rich or well-known. Modernist writing

22
often portrays the very real problems of characters that may not have been considered "literary"
enough in times past.
5. When Stephen looks at Maple's Hotel, full of boring middle-class people too comfortable to be
affected by art, his reaction of contempt expresses the modernist attitude that true art must be
created for art's sake only, not in the hopes of changing people (who are often too silly or
stubborn to be changed).
6. Stephen's decision to take on art and the world alone shows a notion of individuality that was
relatively novel in this time period. In the modern era, the idea of one person taking on the world
(Vs. a person acting as part of a community) became a more popular way of thinking about the
self.
7. For Joyce, time is a dynamic sequence of fluid consecutive present moments, forever cross-
referencing through memory and fate to the past and the future, represented in Stephen's stream-
of-consciousness, and fluctuating between different times in the forms of memory and ambition.
Fluidity of time lies central to modernism as an experimental movement.

Stream-of-Consciousness Technique
The advances of modern psychology have been a great shaping force in the literature of the
twentieth century, the drama of the mind of the individual becomes the writer's focus of interest,
The term "stream-of-consciousness" is borrowed from modern psychoanalysis and describes the
"free association" of ideas in the human mind. Just as floating objects are carried along
somewhat haphazardly by the current of a stream or river, so do thoughts and images travel
through our minds in an apparently unorganized, illogical succession. James Joyce and Virginia
Woolf were the first writers to transfer this mental phenomenon to English literature and exploit
it as a literary technique. Instead of simply stating what the character is thinking, the author
writes as though he were inside the mind of the, character. The result is an "interior monologue"
or "direct quotation of the mind." The "action" takes place and the plot develops through the
mind of the characters. The adventures of Stephen Dedalus are of an emotional and intellectual
nature. The real struggles take place in his mind, and so, th6ught becomes "action." what he does
and sees is not so significant as what he thinks as he is doing and seeing. The actual conflict &
are not usually dramatized. An external event or situation along with all the associations and
recollections which it arouses in Stephen's mind are presented more or less simultaneously. In
this connection, it should be noted that there is an uncommon amount of walking done in Portrait
of the Artist. It is the principal "action" of the story. Stephen says at the end of Portrait of the
Artist: "The Past is consumed in the present and the present is living only because it brings forth
the future." Joyce was ever concerned with the past's impingement on the present. One cannot
escape the past; it determines the present. Other twentieth-century writers have developed this
theme, notably William Faulkner. Stephen Dedalus has a sense of history and though he says, "I
am not responsible for the past," he sees the consequences of the past all around him in the
present. This merging of past and present in Joyce's writing is expressed by means of the stream-
of-consciousness technique.

Epiphany
Fundamental to an appreciation of Joyce's approach in A Portrait is an understanding of his
concept of "epiphany ' and its use. As defined by Stephen and used by Joyce, it is crucially
important not only to this novel but to all of Joyce's work, since in implications it widely
embraces the themes of time, truth, morality and art. By epiphany, Joyce meant a sudden

23
revelation, a moment when an ordinary object is perceived in a way that reveals its deeper
significance. An epiphany can produce in the perceiver a moment of ecstasy. The word epiphany
does not actually appear in A Portrait, but Joyce does use it in Stephen Hero, the draft on which
A Portrait was based: "By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation. . . . He
believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing
that they themselves are the most delicate -and evanescent of moments." An epiphany occurs as
part of the perception of beauty, Stephen says as he explains his aesthetic theory to Cranly (in A
Portrait, it is Lynch to whom he explains the theory). Joyce bases this theory on the work of St.
Thomas Aquinas, the medieval Catholic theologian. According to Aquinas, the three things
needed for beauty are integrity, symmetry, and radiance. It is when the last quality, radiance, is
perceived, that an epiphany occurs.
This is how Stephen explains it in Stephen Hero: "1ts soul, it's what ness, leaps to us from the
vestment of its appearance, the soul of the commonest object seems to us radiant. The object
achieves its epiphany." When this episode appears in A Portrait (in Chapter 5), the three qualities
from Aquinas are altered slightly, to become wholeness, harmony and radiance. Stephen
explains, "The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic
image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and
fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state" In A
Portrait, Joyce makes use of epiphanies not only as a fundamentally significant literary technique
but also as an important philosophical concept which was to become the cornerstone Of his own
mature works—and a cornerstone of Modernism in general. The most famous epiphany in A
Portrait is the moment Stephen perceives the girl wading in the strand: "A girl stood before him
in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed
into the likeness of a strange and beautiful sea creature" Another epiphany occurs later, when
Stephen watches the swallows from the steps of the library. The Penultimate entry in his journal
("Welcome, O life) is also an epiphany, since an epiphany, Joyce has Stephen say in Stephen
Hero, can also be "a memorable Phase of the mind itself." In this case, the epiphany is a sudden
realization about life that uplifts the soul. In Stephen's definition and in Joyce's practice, the term
has two meanings: one is that an epiphany reveals the truth, the intrinsic essence of a person or
of something which is observed, revealed perhaps through a "vulgarity of speech or of gesture";
and the second meaning is a state of mind, a heightened spiritual elation of the observer's mind,
what Joyce calls the "memorable phase of the mind itself'. The first puts emphasis on the object
and the fact that its reality can be revealed by an epiphany, while the second puts emphasis on
the observer„ for whom an epiphany can be a state of spiritual ecstasy. Consequently, although
we would normally think of the acquisition of knowledge in terms of a rational process, both of
these meanings involve non-rational states, and in so far as they involve knowledge (either about
an object or about oneself), the process implies a subjective source of truth, knowledge as a sort
of intuition.
Taking the first meaning of "epiphany", the example which Stephen gives to Cranly in Stephen
Hero places the emphasis on the object rather than the observer: "the clock of the Ballast Office
was capable of an epiphany"— not that the clock has the ability, but that it is a potential source
of epiphany for the person looking at it. A good example of this comes in Chapter 2 of Portrait
when Stephen's romantic idea of farm life is given a violent shock by the reality when he visits
Stradbroke, and the vivid details of the cow yard bring home to him the between the beauty of
his idea and the foulness of the reality: the first sight of the filthy cow yard at Stradbroke with its
foul green puddles and clots of liquid dung and steaming bran-troughs sickened Similarly, in

24
Chapter 4, Stephen recalls the rough feel of a woman's stocking as a shock to his preconception
of the yielding softness of women. And, as we have seen in A Portrait as a whole, Joyce likes to
parallel the shock of reality for Stephen with a similar shock for the reader through a change of
style, both to reinforce the impact of the sudden enlightenment and to rouse Stephen into an
awareness of the sordid reality of Dublin. The epiphany; in fact, is fundamental to Joyce's
writings and Modernism in general, for no longer is the novel tied to the plot of strict
chronological sequence. The psychological insights of the epiphany all at once open up a
completely new, wholly natural method of organizing the subject matter-—through the
consciousness of the central character, around the ever-present and eternal moment, flashing
back and forth spontaneously between the "was" and "shal" of now. For Joyce, time is a dynamic
sequence of fluid consecutive present moments, forever cross-referencing through memory and
fate to the past and the future, represented in Stephen's stream-of- consciousness, and fluctuating
between different times in the forms of memory and ambition. This idea, that in the evanescent
moment all eternity can be glimpsed, is further developed by Joyce in Ulysses and in Finnegans
Wake where it finds ultimate expression. In both works Joyce takes Rill advantage of the
epiphany technique by his additional of myth and fable, vastly expanding the connotations of the
immediate material to embrace cosmic potentialities However, as we have already seen, the
approach already started with A Portrait both in the role played by the epiphany br "timeless
moment in time' 7 (as T.S Eliot called it) and also in his more limited use of archetype myth and
symbol: Daedalus, Icarus, Christ, St. Stephen,
Lucifer, Parnell.

Stephen's Aesthetic Theory

The main aspects of Joyce's aesthetic theory are as follows:
1. Those things are beautiful the perception of which pleases.
2. The good is that towards which the appetite tends.
a. The creative artist is concerned only with the creation of the beautiful.
b. The productive artist is concerned with the production of the good.
3. Art must produce a stasis in the observer; that is, it seeks no end but the satisfaction of an
aesthetic sense.
4. Art should not be kinetic; that is, it should not produce an emotion such as desire or loathing.
If it does it assumes the function of a useful art, such as rhetoric,
5. Three things are necessary for the perception of the beautiful:
A. wholeness or integrity
B. harmony or proportion
C. clarity or radiance.
Using the example of a basket, Stephen elaborates on the three things necessary for the
perception of the beautiful. First, one sees the basket as one thing (wholeness); then one
perceives it as a thing with parts (harmony): finally one sees it as that thing and no other thing
(clarity). Stephen explains to Lynch that beauty and truth produce a stasis in the mind of the
observer He quotes Plato: "Beauty is the splendor of the truth." As they proceed on their walk,
Stephen divides art into a progression of three forms:
1. The lyrical: the image is presented in immediate relation to the artist himself.
2. The epic: the image is presented in immediate relation to the artist and to others (not purely
personal).

25
3. The dramatic: the image is presented in immediate relation to others. The artist's personality is
refined out of existence (impersonal).

Joyce's Use of Imagery

Although Joyce is frequently praised for his mastery of the "stream-of-consciousness" narrative
technique, his distinctive use of imagery has contributed much to the artistic development of the
twentieth-century novel. Specifically in A Portrait, he uses imagery to establish motifs, identify
symbols, and provide thematic unity throughout the work. Perhaps the most obvious use of
imagery in the novel occurs during the novel's first few pages, with the introduction of the
sensory details which shape Stephen's early life: wet versus dry; hot versus cold; and light versus
dark—all images of dichotomy which reveal the forces which will affect Stephen's life as he
matures. If we can understand this imagery, then we can better Understand Stephen's reasons for
deciding to leave Ireland. The wet/dry imagery, for example, is symbolic of Stephen's natural
response to the world versus a learned response. As a small child, Stephen learns that any
expression of a natural inclination (such as wetting the bed) is labeled "wrong"; the wet sheets
will be replaced by a dry, reinforcing "oil sheet"— and a swift, unpleasant correction for
inappropriate behavior. Thus, wet things relate to natural responses and dry things relate to
learned behavior. Other examples of this wet/dry imagery include the wetness of the cesspool
(the square ditch) that Stephen is shoved into and the illness which follows; likewise, the "flood"
of adolescent sexual feelings which engulf
Stephen in "wavelet(s)," causing him guilt and shame, seemingly, "wet" is bad; "dry" is good.
A turning point in this pattern occurs when Stephen crosses the "trembling bridge" over the river
Tolka. He leaves behind his dry, "withered" heart, as well as most of the remnants of his
Catholicism. As he waves through "a long rivulet in the strand," he encounters a young girl,
described as a "strange and beautiful seabird." She gazes at Stephen from the sea, and her
invitation to the "wet" (natural) life enables Stephen to make a climactic choice concerning his
destiny as an artist. Later, after Stephen has explained his aesthetic philosophy to Lynch, rain
begins to fall; seemingly, the heavens approve of Stephen's theories about art, as well as his
choice of art as a career. The hot/cold imagery similarly affects Stephen. At the beginning of the
novel, Stephen clearly prefers his mother's warm smell to that of his father. For Stephen, "hot" is
symbolic of the intensity of physical affection (and, in some cases, sin); "cold," on the other
hand, is
Symbolic of propriety, order, and chastity. Specific examples of this symbolism can be found in
Stephen's memories: resting in his mother's warm lap, being cared for by the kindly Brother
Michael (when Stephen is recovering from a fever), and receiving a heated embrace from the
Dublin prostitutes during his first sexual encounter. In contrast, the cold, slimy water of the
square ditch is evidence of the cruel reality of his changing life at school; in addition, Stephen
initially experiences a "cold indifference" when he thinks about the Belvedere retreat, and his
vision-like worship of Eileen (the young Protestant girl) has coldly symbolic, touch-me-not
overtones; her hands, pure and white, enable him to understand the references to the Tower of
Ivory in an oft-repeated Church litany. The last of this set of opposites is concerned with the
light/dark dichotomy: light symbolizes knowledge (confidence)' and dark symbolizes ignorance
(terror). Numerous examples of this conflict pervade the novel. In an early scene, when Stephen
says that he will marry a Protestant, he is threatened with blindness: "Put out his eyes /
Apologies." Stephen is terrorized without knowing why; seemingly, a good Catholic boy should
remain ignorant about other faiths—and perhaps even of women Stephen's natural fondness for

26
Eileen is condemned. Stephen is only a boy, but his sensitive artist's nature realizes that he is
going to grow up in a world where he will be forced to suppress his true felling and conform to
society's rules and threats. Stephen's broken glasses are also part of this light/dark imagery.
Without his glasses, Stephen see the world as if it were a dark blur; figuratively blinded, he
cannot learn. And yet he is unjustly punished for telling the truth about the reason for his
'blindness." He quickly' realizes the potential, dark (irrational) cruelty of the clergy Further on in
the novel, there are recurrent images of darkness in the streets of Dublin—for example, when
Stephen makes his way to the brothel district. Here, we also see the darkness within Stephen's
heart as he wanders willfully towards sin. Later on, the philosophical discussion about the lamp
with the Dean of Studies (Chapter V) reveals the 'blindness" of this cleric, compared with the
illumination of Stephen's aesthetic thoughts.
A close reading of the novel will produce many more images within these patterns. Joyce's use
of them is essential as he constructs his intricate thematic structure. Another kind of imagery in
the novel is made up of references to colors and names. Colors, as Joyce uses them, often
indicate the political and religious forces which affect Stephen's life. Similarly, Joyce uses names
to evoke various images—specifically those which imply animal qualities, providing clues to
Stephen's relationships with people. For an example of color imagery, note that Dante owns two
velvet-backed brushes—-one maroon, one green. The maroon brush symbolizes Michael Davitt,
the pro-Catholic activist of the Irish Land League; the green- backed brush symbolizes Charles
Stewart Parnell. Once Parnell was Dante's political hero par excellence, but after the Church
denounced him, she ripped the green cloth from the back of her brush. Other references to color
include Stephen's desire to have a "green rose" (an expression of his creative nature) instead of a
white one or a red one, symbols of his class' scholastic teams. Another reference to color
imagery can be seen in Lynch's use of the term "yellow insolence" (Chapter V); instead of using
the word 'bloody," Lynch uses the word 'Yellow," indicating a sickly, cowardly attitude towards
life. Idea of a 'bloody" natural lust for living would be appalling to Lynch. Lynch's name,
literally, means "to hang"; he has a "long slender flattened skull . . . like a hooded reptile ... with
a reptile like ... gaze and a self- embittered ... soul." Like Lynch, Temple is also representative of
his name. Temple considers himself "a believer in the power of the mind." He admires Stephen
greatly for his "independent thinking," and he himself tries to "think" about the problems of the
world. Cranly, like his name (cranium, meaning "skull"), is Stephen's companion, to whom he
confesses his deepest feelings. Note that several of Joyce's references also focus on Stephen's
image of Cranly's "severed head"; Cranly's symbolic significance to Stephen is similar to that of
John the Baptist (the "martyred Christ"). The name 'Cranly" also reminds us of the skull on the
rector's desk and Joyce's emphasis on the shadowy skull of the Jesuit director who queries
Stephen about a religious vocation. Concerning the other imagery in the novel, perhaps the most
pervasive is the imagery that pertains to Stephen's exile, or, specifically, his "flight" from
Ireland. The flight imagery begins as early as his first days at Clongowes, when Stephen's
oppressed feelings are symbolized by "a heavy bird flying low through the grey light." Later, a
greasy football soars "like a heavy bird" through the sky. At that time, flight from unhappiness
seemed impossible for Stephen, but as the novel progresses and Stephen begins to formulate his
artistic ideals, the notion of flight seems possible. For example, in Chapter IV, after Stephen
renounces the possibility of a religious vocation, he feels a "proud sovereignty" as he crosses
over the Tolka and his name is called out by his classmates; this incident is followed by another
allusion to flight. Later, the girl wading in the sea is described as "delicate as a crane," with the
fringes of her "drawers ... like the featherings of soft white down"; her bosom is described as "the

27
breast of some dark plumaged dove." Her presence in this moment of epiphany enables Stephen
to choose art as his vocation. Finally, note that when Stephen's friends call him, his name seems
to carry a "prophecy"; he sees a "winged form flying above the waves and ... climbing in the air."
The image of this "hawk like man flying sunward" is at the heart of the flight motif. As Stephen
realizes his life's purpose, he sees his "soul soaring in the air." He yearns to cry out like an "eagle
on high." He experiences "an instant of wild flight" and is "delivered" free from the bondage of
his past. At the end of the novel, Stephen cries out to Daedalus, his "old father, old artificer," and
prepares for his own flight to artistic freedom.

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 Themes
The Development of Individual Consciousness
The development of Stephen's consciousness in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is
particularly interesting because, in so far as Stephen is a portrait of Joyce himself, Stephen's
development gives us insight into the development of a literary genius. Stephen's experiences
hint at the influences transformed Joyce himself into the great writer he is considered today:
Stephen's obsession with language; his strained relations with religion, family, and culture; and
his dedication to forging an aesthetic of his own mirror the ways in which Joyce related to the
various tensions in his life during his formative years. In the last chapter of the novel, we also
learn that genius, though in many ways a calling, also requires great work and considerable
sacrifice. Watching Stephen's daily struggle to puzzle out his aesthetic philosophy, we get a
sense of the great task that awaits him. Joyce's innovation in showing the development of his
hero's consciousness is known as stream of consciousness, a style in which the author directly
transcribes the thoughts and sensations that go through a character's mind, rather than simply
describing those sensations from the external standpoint of an observer. Joyce's use of stream of
consciousness makes A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man a story of the development of
Stephen's mind. In the first chapter, the very young Stephen is only capable of describing his
world in simple words and phrases. The sensations that he experiences are all jumbled together
with a child's lack of attention to cause and effect. Later, when Stephen is a teenager obsessed
with religion, he is able to think in a clearer, more adult manner, Paragraphs are more logically
ordered than in the opening sections of the novel, and thoughts progress logically, Stephen's
mind is more mature and he is now more coherently aware of his surroundings. Nonetheless, he
still trusts blindly in the Church, and his passionate emotions of guilt and religious ecstasy are so
strong that they get in the way of rational thought. It is only in the final chapter, when Stephen is
in the university, that he seems truly rational by the end of the novel, Joyce renders a portrait of a
mind that has achieved emotional, intellectual, and artistic adulthood.

The Pitfalls of Religious Extremism

Brought up in a devout Catholic family, Stephen initially ascribes to an absolute belief in the
morals of the church. As a teenager, this belief leads him to two opposite extremes, both of
which are harmful. At, first, he falls into the extreme of sin, repeatedly sleeping with prostitutes
and deliberately turning his back on religion. Though Stephen sins willfully, he is always aware
that he acts in violation of, the church's rules. Then, when Father Argall's Speech prompts him to
return to Catholicism, he bounces to the other extreme, becoming a perfect, near fanatical model
of religious devotion and obedience. Eventually, however, Stephen realizes that both of these life
styles—the completely sinful and the completely devout—are extremes that have been false and
harmful. He does not want to' lead a completely debauched life, but also rejects austere
Catholicism because he feels that it does not permit him the full experience of being human.
Stephen ultimately reaches a decision to embrace life and celebrate humanity after seeing a
young girl wading at a beach. To him, the girl is a symbol of pure goodness and of life lived to
the fullest.

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The Role of the Artist
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man explores what it means to become an artist. Stephen's
decision at the end of the novel—to leave his family and friends behind and go into. Exile in
order to become an artist—suggests that Joyce sees the artist as a necessarily isolated figure.
In his decision, Stephen turns his back on his community, refusing to accept the constraints of
political involvement, religious devotion, and family commitment that the community places on
its members. However, though the artist is an isolated figure, Stephen's ultimate goal is to give a
voice to the very community that he is leaving. In the last few lines of the novel, Stephen
expresses his desire to "forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." He
recognizes that his community will always be a part of him, as it has created and shaped his
identity, when he creatively expresses his own ideas, he will also convey the voice of his entire
community. Even as Stephen turns his back on the traditional forms of participation and
membership in a community, he envisions his writing as a service to the community.

The Need for Irish Autonomy

Despite his desire to steer clear of politics, Stephen constantly ponders Ireland's place in the
world. He concludes that the Irish have always been a subservient People, allowing outsiders to
control them. In his Conversation with the dean of studies at the university, he realizes that even
the language of the Irish people really belongs to the English. Stephen's perception of Ireland's
subservience has two effects on his development as an artist. First, it makes him determined to
escape the bonds that his Irish ancestors have accepted. As we see in his conversation with
Davin, Stephen feels an anxious need to emerge from his Irish heritage as his own person, free
from the shackles that have traditionally confined his country: "Do you fancy I am going to pay
in my own life and person debts they made?" Second, Stephen's perception makes him
determined to use his art to reclaim autonomy for Ireland. Using the borrowed language of
English, he plans to write in a style that will be both autonomous from England and true to the
Irish people.

Entrapment and Constraint

Stephen eventually comes to see Ireland as a kind of trap, a restraint that will make it impossible
for him to live and create. Three major bonds threaten: family, nation, and the Church. Stephen's
family, increasingly destitute, is a source of frustration and guilt. He can do nothing to help them,
and the continued ineptitude of his father exasperates Stephen. Though his father is an ardent
nationalist, Stephen has great anxieties about Irish politics. He finds that the Irish people are
fickle- minded and ultimately disloyal; at one point, he says to a friend that the Irish have never
had a great leader whom they did not betray or abandon. He also rebels against the nature of
activities like petition-signing and protest; in his mind, these activities amount to an abdication
of independence. At the same time, he leaves Ireland hoping to forge the new conscience of his
race.

Catholicism
The Church is perhaps the greatest constraint on Stephen, and merits its own entry. The
teachings of the Church run contrary to Stephen's independent spirit and intellect. His sensitivity
to beauty and the human body are not at all suitable to the rigid Catholicism in which he was

30
raised. But the Church continues to exert some small hold on him. Although he eventually
becomes an unbeliever, he continues to have some fear that the Catholic Church might be
correct. Despite his fears, he eventually chooses to live independently and without constraint,
even if that decision sends him to hell.

Escape/Alienation
Escape is the natural complement to the theme of Entrapment and Constraint. Joyce depicts
escape metaphorically by the book's most important symbol and allusion: the mythical artificer
Daedalus. Dedalus is not at all an Irish name; Joyce took the name from the mythical inventor
who escaped from his island prison by constructing wings and flying to his freedom. Stephen,
too, will eventually escape from the island prison of Ireland for the alienation need for an artist.

Independence
Closely related to the above theme, Stephen's move towards independence is one of the central
movements of the novel. When we first encounter- Stephen as a Young boy, his athletic
ineptitude and sensitive nature make him an easy target for bullies. He is a rather shy and
awkward boy. The contrast with the university student Stephen could not be greater. The older
Stephen is fiercely independent, willing to risk eternal damnation to pursue his destiny. He is not
cowed by anyone, and he will pursue life as an artist no matter what the cost.

Beauty, Sensitivity, and Imagination

What begins as sensitivity and imagination in the child Stephen eventually evolves into a near-
obsessive contemplation of beauty and the mechanics of art. Even as a child, young Stephen is an
extraordinarily imaginative and sensitive boy. Eventually, these strong but unarticulated feelings
take shape as a passion for the arts. In Chapter 5, Stephen has developed a theory of aesthetics
that is quite sophisticated for a university student; he thinks carefully and thoroughly about
beauty and the power of art, and knows that he can do nothing else but pursue the life of a poet
and writer.

Rejection of Authority
Stephen's ultimate rebellion is a classic example of a young person's struggle against the
conformity demanded of him, by society. The young Stephen possesses a childish faith in his
family, his religion, and his country. As he matures, he comes to feel these institutions are
attempting to destroy his independent spirit. He must escape them to find himself. Stephen's
rebellion is directed against numerous opponents. One is his father, Simon Dedalus. As Stephen
discovers that his father is a drunken, in- effectual failure, he rejects his authority. Stephen also
rejects the bonds of a religion that restricts his natural impulses. Catholicism imposes a burden of
guilt that weighs him down. He must "'admit" and "confess" and' "apologies" even when he feels
innocent. By rejecting Catholicism, Stephen is 'also rejecting his devoutly religious mother.
Stephen's rebellion is also directed against his native land. Dirty,' backward Ireland destroys any
of its children who show creativity; it is, he says,' a sow that eats her farrow. His classmates
attempt to reform Ireland through political action and promotion of native literature. Stephen
rejects these attempts as futile and backward-looking. Instead he abandons Ireland and looks
towards the continent.

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Portrait of a Young Egotist
Some readers feel that the central theme is the character study of an arrogant, unhappy egotist, an
intensely self-absorbed young man. An egotist is interested only in the self, and is intensely
critical of other people and the world. This can be said of Stephen, who feels superior and finds it
hard to care for others, even for his own family. It is equally hard for him to accept affection or
love from others. From his early school days on, he is at the edge of group life, observing
himself. As he grows older, he becomes even more totally absorbed in his own ideas until he
finally withdraws from his familiar surroundings. Stephen's Opinions on art and his own
attempts at writing, as evidenced by the villanelle he writes in Chapter Five, suggest to some that
he is not talented enough to justify his self-appointed role as a priest of art.

Sin as a Liberating Force

In some views, it is Stephen's acceptance of his own sinfulness that sets him free. Guilt and fear
of punishment keep him in a sterile, pale world of virtue where he is always hounded by the
pressure to confess, admit, or apologize. By committing a mortal (serious) sin of impurity (of the
flesh) and falling from grace like Adam from Paradise, or like Lucifer expelled from Heaven, he
is thrust back into the earthly world of the senses, a world that releases his creative powers.
Stephen will sin again and again, but instead of confessing he will write.

Life as a Maze
From the beginning, Stephen, like most young people, is caught in a maze, just as his namesake
Daedalus was. The schools are a maze of corridors; Dublin is a maze of streets. The mind itself is
a convoluted maze filled with dead ends and circular reasoning. Life poses riddles at every turn.
Stephen roams the labyrinth searching his mind for answers. The only way out seems to be to
soar above the narrow confines of the prison, as did Daedalus and his son.

Pride
Many readers point to Stephen's pride as a cause of his isolation. From the beginning, pride—a
mortal sin— keeps him away from others. He yearns for "order and elegance" in his life. He feels
superior to his family and to his peers. He feels superior to his country, and to attempts to
improve it. In the end, pride drives him to lonely exile. What readers must decide is whether
Stephen's pride is justified by his talent, or whether it is merely selfish; whether pride has driven
him to a fall, as it did Icarus and Lucifer, or whether it will save him.

32
 Characters
Stephen Dedalus
The main character of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. While growing up, Stephen goes
through long phases of hedonism and deep religiosity. He eventually adopts a philosophy of
aestheticism, greatly valuing beauty and art. Stephen is essentially Joyce's alter ego, and many of
the events of Stephen's life mirror events from Joyce's own youth.
Simon Dedalus
Stephen's father, an impoverished former medical student with a- strong sense of Irish patriotism.
Sentimental about his past, Simon Dedalus frequently reminisces about his youth.
Mary Dedalus
Stephen's mother and Simon Dedalus's wife Mary is very religious, and argues with her son
about attending religious services.
The Dedalus Children
Though Simon's siblings do not play a major role in the novel, Stephen has several brothers and
sisters, including Maurice, Katey, Maggie, and Boody.
Emma Clery
Stephen's beloved, the young girl to whom he fiercely attracted over the course of many years.
Stephen constructs Emma as an ideal of femininity, even though he does not know her well.
Mr. John Casey
Simon Dedalus's friend, who attends the Christmas dinner at which young Stephen is allowed to
sit with the adults for the first time. Like Simon, Mr. Casey is a staunch believer in Irish
nationalism, and at the dinner he argues with Dante over the fate of Parnell.
Charles Stewart Parnell
An Irish political leader who is not an actual character in the novel, but whose death influences
many of its characters. Parnell had powerfully led the Irish National Party until he was
condemned for having an affair with a married woman.
Dante (Mrs. Riordan)
The extremely fervent and piously Catholic governess of the Dedalus children, Dante, whose real
name is Mrs. Riordan, becomes involved in a long and unpleasant argument with Mr. Casey over
the fate of Parnell during Christmas dinner.
Uncle Charles
Stephen's lively great uncle. Charles lives With Stephen's family. During the summer, the young
Stephen enjoys taking long walks with his uncle and listening to Charles and Simon discuss the
history of both Ireland and the Dedalus family.
Eileen Vance
A young girl who lives near Stephen when he is a young boy, When Stephen tells Dante that he
wants to marry Eileen, Dante is enraged because Eileen is a Protestant.
Father Conmee
The rector at Clongowes Wood College, where Stephen attends school as a young boy.
Father Dolan
The cruel prefect of studies at Clongowes Wood College,

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Wells
The bully at Clongowes. Wells taunts Stephen for kissing his mother before he goes to bed, and
one day he pushes Stephen into a filthy cesspool, causing Stephen to catch a bad fever.
Athy
A friendly boy whom Stephen meets in the infirmary at Clongowes. Athy likes Stephen Dedalus
because they both have unusual names.
Brother Michael
The kindly brother who tends to Stephen and Athy in the Clongowes infirmary after Wells
pushes Stephen into the cesspool.
Fleming
One of Stephen's friends at Clongowes.
Father Arnall
Stephen's stern Latin teacher at Clongowes. Later, when Stephen is I at Belvedere College,
Father Arnall delivers a series of lectures on death and hell that have a profound influence on
Stephen.
Mike Flynn
A friend of Simon Dedalus who tries, with little success, to train Stephen to be a runner during
their summer at Blackrock.
Aubrey Mills
A young boy with whom Stephen plays imaginary adventure games at Blackrock.
Vincent Heron
A rival of Stephen at Belvedere.
Boland and Nash
Two schoolmates of Stephen at Belvedere, who taunt and bully him.
Cranly
Stephen's best friend at the university, in whom he confides his thoughts and feelings. In this
sense, Cranly represents a secular confessor for Stephen. Eventually, Cranly begins to encourage
Stephen to conform to the wishes of his family and to try harder to fit in with his peers—advice
that Stephen fiercely resents.
Davin
Another of Stephen's friends at the university. Davin comes from the Irish provinces and has a
simple, solid nature. Stephen admires his talent for athletics, but disagrees with his unquestioning
Irish patriotism, which Davin encourages Stephen to adopt.
Lynch
Another of Stephen's friends at the university, a coarse and often unpleasantly dry young man.
Lynch is poorer than Stephen. Stephen explains his theory Of aesthetics to Lynch in Chapter 5,
MacCann
A fiercely political student at the university who tries to convince Stephen to be more concerned
with politics.

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Temple
A young man at the university who openly admires Stephen's keen independence and tries to
copy his ideas and sentiments.
Dean of Studies
A Jesuit priest at University College.
Johnny Cashman
A friend of Simon Dedalus.

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 Analysis of Major Characters

Stephen Dedalus
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is above all a portrait of Stephen Dedalus. It is through
Stephen that we see his world, and it is his development from sensitive child to rebellious young
man that forms the plot of the novel. There are many Stephens, often contradictory. He is fearful
yet bold, insecure yet proud, lonely and at the same time afraid of love. One Stephen is a
romantic who daydreams of swashbuckling heroes and virginal heroines: The other is a realist at
home on Dublin's most sordid streets. One Stephen is too shy to kiss the young lady he yearns
for. The other readily tums to prostitutes to satisfy his sexual urges. One is a timid outsider
bullied -by this classmates. The other is courageous enough to confront -and question authority.
One devoutly hopes to become a priest. Other cynically rejects religion. Stephen loves his
mother, yet eventually hurts her by rejecting her Catholic faith. Taught to revere his father, he
can't help but see that Simon Dedalus, his father, is a drunken failure. Unhappy as a perpetual
outsider, he lacks the warmth to engage in true friendship. "Have you never loved anyone?" his
fellow student, Cranly, asks him. "I tried to love God," Stephen replies. "It seems now I failed."
The force that eventually unites these contradictory issues is Stephen's overwhelming desire to
become an artist, to create. At the novel's opening he is seen as an infant artist who sings "his
song." Eventually he expands that song into poetry and theories of art. At the book's end, he
makes art his religion, and he abandons family, Catholicism, and his country to worship art.
The very name of the hero underscores this aspect of his character. His first name comes from St.
Stephen, the first Christian martyr; many readers have seen Stephen as a martyr to his art. His
last name comes from the great inventor of Greek myth, Daedalus, whose mazes and waxen
wings are the kind of splendid artistic creations Stephen hopes to equal in his writing. Just as
Stephen is a contradictory figure, we may have contradictory feelings about him. On the one
hand, he seems to be a brilliant artist who must flee dull, uncultured Dublin at any cost. We can
admire intelligence and courage. We can consider his art well worthy of martyrdom, and
consider that it merits comparison with Daedalus' achievements. His theories and poems are, if
not masterpieces, at least the works man who may someday create a masterpiece. Indeed we can
believe that
Stephen may grow up to be very much like the James Joyce who wrote Portrait of the Artist, On
the other hand, Stephen can be called a supreme "a posturing, unproven esthete (lover of egotist,
Beauty]," a self-centered snob who has succumbed to the sin of pride. "You are wrapped up in
yourself," says his friend MacCann, We can believe, as some readers do, that Stephen's artistic
theories and his works of poetry are at most the products of a clever but shallow mind. Stephen
may martyr himself for art, but his martyrdom will be worth nothing because he is too self-
absorbed to be a great artist. He is not Daedalus; instead he resembles Daedalus' son, Icarus,
Who, wearing his father's wings, soared too near the sun and died as a result of foolishness and
pride. Or we can take other views. Perhaps Joyce makes fun of Stephen's pretensions while still
admiring the bravery that accompanies them. Perhaps Joyce feels sympathy for Stephen's
struggles but also feels obliged to mock the less admirable aspects of his hero's character because
he shared those character traits himself. In short, Stephen Dedaluso is a man with many
contradictions found in a creative artist, a person whose egoism and creative frenzy ultimately
lead to his alienation.

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Simon Dedalus
He was Stephen's father, "A medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting
politician... a drinker, a good fellow, a story teller, somebody's secretary, something in a tax
gatherer, a bankrupt and at present a praise of his own That's how Stephen describes his father,
Simon Dedalus, towards the end of the novel. Portrait of the Artist is a book, of discoveries, and
one of the most important discoveries Stephen must make is this: what kind of man is his father?
Like most sons, he must measure his father in order to measure himself. Simon Daedalus’,
Character is revealed gradually from the first chapter of the novel to the last. To the infant
Stephen he 'is just a hairy face. A slightly older Stephen knows he is a "gentleman."' During the
Christmas dinner in Chapter One, you see that Simon can be a genial but argumentative host. In
Chapter Two you see that while he may fall from respectability himself, he still believes in it for
others. Stephen must attend an upper-class school run by the Jesuits, not the Christian Brothers'
school that caters to the lower-class Irish—though ' Simon is rapidly becoming part of that class,
As the novel progresses, Simon seems. To represent both what is admirable about, Ireland and
what is destructive. Simon is a good fellow fine talker, a lover of politics and But he is an
irresponsible head of a family, incapable of keeping a job, saving money, or refusing a drink.
Stephen feels alienated both from his father's strengths and from his weaknesses. He feels
superior to Simon's irresponsibility. But he envies his father's robustness, gregariousness, and
warmth. When in a bar Simon declares that in his youth he was a better man than Stephen is
now, part of Stephen fears his father's judgment is correct. As time goes on, Simon drinks more
heavily and leads his family deeper into poverty. He lives in the past because has failed in the
present.
Stephen realizes that to grow he must reject his biological father and adopt a spiritual father who
will guide him in his art. He chooses Daedalus, the father and creator of wings to fly. And it's
Daedalus, not Simon, whom Stephen calls "old father," in the final lines of the book.

Emma Clery
Emma is Stephen's "beloved," the young girl to whom he is intensely attracted over the course of
many years. Stephen does not know Emma particularly well, and is generally too embarrassed or
afraid to talk to her, but feels a powerful response stirring within him whenever he sees her.
Stephen's first poem, "To E—C," is written to Emma. She is a shadowy figure throughout the
novel, and we know almost nothing about her even at the novel's end. For Stephen, Emma
symbolizes one end of a spectrum of femininity. Stephen seems able to perceive only the
extremes of this spectrum: for him, women are either pure, distant, and unapproachable, like
Emma, or impure, sexual, and common, like the prostitutes he visits during his time at
Belvedere.

Charles Stewart Parnell

Parnell is not fictional, and does not actually appear as a character in the novel. However, as an
Irish political leader, he is a polarizing figure whose death influences many characters in A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. During the late nineteenth century, Parnell had been the
powerful leader of the Irish National Party, and his influence seemed to promise Irish
independence from England. When Parnell's affair with a married woman was exposed,

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however, he was condemned by the Catholic Church and fell from grace. His fevered attempts to
regain his former position of influence contributed to his death from exhaustion. Many people in
Ireland, such as the character of John Casey in Joyce's novel, considered Parnell a hero and
blamed the Church for his death. Many others, such as the character Dante, thought the Church
had done the right thing to condemn Parnell. These disputes over Parnell's character are at the
root of the bitter and abusive argument that erupts during the Dedalus family's Christmas dinner
when Stephen is still a young boy. In this sense, Parnell represents the burden of Irish nationality
that Stephen comes to believe is preventing him from realizing himself as an artist.

Cranly
Stephen's best friend at the university, Cranly also acts as a kind of non-religious confessor for
Stephen. Long, late-night talks, Stephen tells Cranly everything, just as he used to tell the priests
everything during his days of religious fervor. 'While Cranly is a good friend to Stephen, he does
not understand Stephen's need for absolute freedom. Indeed, to Cranly, leaving behind al the
trappings of society would be terribly lonely. It is this difference that separates the true artist,
Stephen from the artist's friend, Cranly. In that sense, Cranlyrepresents the non-genius, a young
man who is called to greatness as Stephen is, and who therefore doc not have to make the same
sacrifices.

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