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Intro and Thesis
The dialectics James Joyce creates in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man synthesize a literary
criticism of the 'nets' of Ireland. Through the character Stephen Dedalus, Joyce struggles to break
free of Irish stereotypes through the complicated psychology of a boy flourishing into an artist. The
novel challenges the stereotypical relationships between church and state, male and female, family
and son, religion and parishioner. However, Joyce's curious use of women and gender inversions in
the novel offer an interesting theory, which, in its conclusion, defines Stephen as a repressed
homosexual. Richard Ellmann comments on the state of Ireland:
A curious aspect of Irish life is that relationships between men seem more vital there than
relationships between men and women. It is not easy to know whether this trait is due to a long
misogynistic bias in Irish Catholicism ... .the trait carries over into the work of Joyce. In his writings,
there is a succession of important friendships between men, which receive more of his attention
than love affairs. (33)
From harlot to graceful female, Joyce uses women as the end of an aesthetic ideal, not an object of
sexual desire. Joyce frames the story through a misogynistic mindset creating, from the start, the
conditions for a perverted view of sexuality. Moreover, the uses of gender inversion throughout the
novel implicate perverse and homosexual tendencies. Laurie Teal explains:
The recent outings of homosexual referencing in the text often advance through a decoding of the
novel's many gender inversions, an interpretive strategy authorized, as Joseph Valente points out, by
the fact that inversion was 'the dominant model of homosexuality' at the turn of the century 'in both
the popular imagination and in the work of prominent sexologists like Ellis, Krafft-Ebing, Carpenter,
and Freud (All whom Joyce read). (63)
The subtle gender inversions present in Portrait coupled with Stephen's Oedipal and misogynistic
views allow him to subvert women by making them means to an aesthetic ideal, exposing his
repressed homosexuality.
Chapter One
Chapter one of Portrait presents Simon Dedalus as an aloof and unreliable patriarch-causing the
preconditions for a fleeting respect for masculinity and masculine authority. Stephen demonstrates
a subconscious tendency to break away from the authority of his father by usurping his role as
narrator. Mulroony suggests:
Stephen's will to lyricism, that is, his compulsion to continue narrating his own subjective position to
the exclusion of others, originates in the way he situates himself psychically in response to his
earliest sensations by constructing a personal narrative... The boy fashions a story |the moocow| in
the image of his father's reordering the elements in relation to the central social position he
imagines for himself. In his own story, Stephen, the narrator, is the most important character. (160)
By constructing his own narrative and rearranging the elements of his father's story, Stephen
demonstrates a subconscious will to separate himself from an alienated patriarchal view of the
world. Stephen reconstructs the narrative, keeping to himself, while externally accepting the
narrative of his father. Mulroony suggests Stephen's internal personal narrative excludes others
from his actual thoughts. Stephen's exclusive mindsets justify his tendency to repress thoughts and
feelings instead of externalizing them, which, in the future, will be a repression of his sexuality from
all authorities. Mulroony continues:
The almost binary cognitive operation of countering his father's story with his own develops
accordingly into a complex practice of self-orientation attentive to the social and political
implications of encountered narrative methods. Like Bakhtin's developing individuals, Stephen is
continually choosing his orientation amongst those methods by appropriating various aspects of
their figurations of reality as his own. The task of self-narration remains quite the same throughout
his growth. (160)
Mulroony's analysis shows the 'binary' narrative response becomes the natural and subconscious
response Stephen utilizes to deconstruct the external reality he dislikes and internally construct his
own reality. Thus, Stephen's will to internalize his own perception of reality while conforming to
external expectations demonstrate a tendency to repress counter cultural feelings in the face of
authority.
Also, Stephen's alienation from his father creates a need within Stephen to construct a unique
individual identity separate from his father.
From a psychological perspective... The father, in contrast |to his mother|, offers a model of
logocentric control. Stephen sees his father as masculine and aloof, visually separated by a glass
monocle and hairy face. The male parent is the bearer of the word; he tells a story which appeals to
the father's imagination and awakens him to a sense of individuality. (Henke 55-56)
Thus, Stephen constructs a perverse sense of masculinity-understanding the masculine to be 'aloof'
and alienated utilizing meaningless and 'logocentric control. In chapter one, Stephen deduces his
father to be aloof and, as a child, already understand his father as a failure. Stephen, armed with the
tool of repression, prepares to fight against his view of masculinity and 'logocentric' control.
More curious than his understanding of his father, Stephen Dedalus views his mother as matriarch,
patriarch, and friend-creating Oedipal confusion. Stephen Dedalus identifies his mother as 'nice
mother' because he understands her to be the source of all physical pleasure. Stephen coins the
term 'nice mother' after identifying her pleasant smell and disposition but, when she exerts
matriarchal authority over him, confuses her role in his life. Henke explains:
At the outset of Portrait, Stephen perceives his mother as a powerful and beneficent source of
physical pleasure. She ministers to each of the five senses. It's the 'nice mother,' however, who is
one of the women principally responsible for introducing Stephen to a hostile external world and to
the laws of social conformity. The first of many imperatives that thwart the boys ego, apologize, is
associated with matriarchal threats (56).
Thus, Stephen grapples with understanding his mother and women's, by extension, roles in society
and life. Because his mother exists as the first experience of physical pleasure, Stephen reverts back
to memories of his mother in times of physical discomfort, creating an Oedipal complex. After being
pushed into a ditch by wells, Stephen thinks back to a pleasant time with his mother. Henke
elaborates:
The boy mentally takes refuge in artistic evocations of the family hearth, protected by a beneficent
female spirit - Mother, Dante and the servant Brigid. As he relives the horror of being shouldered
into a urinal ditch by Wells, Stephen projects himself beyond the rats and the scum to an apparently
dissociated reverie. He recalls his mother sitting by the fire in hot 'jewelry slippers' that exude a
'lovely warm smell.' Alienated from a brutal male environment, Stephen longs to return to his
mother. In true Oedipal fashion, he focuses on the fetishistic symbols of her warm feet, sexual
totems that offer both kinesthetic and olfactory satisfaction in compensation for the stench and
slimy touch of the chilling water." (58)
Stephen, at an early age, already confuses his mother as the outlet of sexual pleasure and protector
against a brutal male environment. As consequence, he will view all women as he views his mother
and healthy sexual relationships will never form. In short, Stephen alienates himself from a male
dominant world and finds pleasure defined as childish comfort in women. Joyce subtly creates
gender inversions by swapping in Stephen's head the stereotypical roles of men and women-
ultimately altering Stephen's view of sexuality to something far less traditional. Stephen takes these
feelings even further when Wells asks him if he kisses his mother. Stephen cannot fathom the
correct answer to the question and the situation leaves a permanent mark on Stephen's
subconscious. Henke explains:
Stephen tries to fathom the mysteries of Oedipal attraction. He is unable to differentiate between
filial an erotic love and feels perplexed when Wells unites the two in a sexual conundrum. Stephen
desires the soft wetness of his mother's lips, but is baffled by the moral implications. (58)
Thus, in a world dominated by men, Stephen doesn't seek to dominate women or use them or seek
them for sexual desire. Stephen sees women as friends and mothers. He detaches himself from the
sexual qualities with women and uses his mother as the criterion for how women ought to act.
At school, Stephen's lack of appropriate male role models skews his perception of men and sexuality.
In a fit of masochistic pleasure, Father Dolan, abuses his powers to reprimand Stephen-tainting
Stephen's perception of masculinity and the male role model. Before the episode with Father Dolan,
Stephen viewed priests as the most intelligent and most deserving of respect. Stephen thinks,
"Father Arnall knew more than Dante because he was a priest" (Portrait 8). Henke elaborates on a
skewed masculine perspective:
As the curious child stumbles toward manhood, he feels compelled to cast of allegiance to maternal
figures. His childhood educator Dante, 'a clever woman and a well read woman' who teaches him
geography and lunar lore, is supplanted by male instructors. They introduce him to a system of male
authority and discipline, to a pedagogical regimen that will insure his correct training and proper
socialization. (58)
Stephen identifies the word priest with the source of good and the source of knowledge. With
Dolan's reprimand, Stephen's view of the priest, the ultimate masculine role model, shatters-causing
Stephen to actively push against the experience and develop into a more feminine figure by rejecting
the paradigm of men as authoritative role models. Stephen subconsciously decides to reject men as
role models, and, as consequence, turn towards imitation of the female. In doing so, Stephen starts
to look at himself as the perfected female, which comes up more forcefully in later chapters, and
develop a sexual affinity towards men because they do not possess the vulnerability of women.
Henke continues, "He disdains his mother's feminine vulnerability and thinks she is 'not nice' when
she cries. Like most young boys, Stephen begins to interpret his relationship with his mother as an
obstacle to more grown up ties with his own sex" (57). Thus, the Dolan episode paints men as bad
role models, forcing Stephen to view women as role models, not sexual objects.
Stephen's repressed homosexual feelings first expose themselves through his assessment of Mr.
Gleeson. Stephen thinks:
Mr. Gleeson had round shiny cuffs and clean white wrists and fattish white hands and the nails of
them were long and pointed... But they were terribly long and pointed nails. So long and cruel they
were though the white fattish hands were not cruel, but gentle. And though he trembled with cold
fright to think of the cruel long nails and of the high whistling sound of the cane and of the chill you
felt at the end of your shirt when you undressed yourself yet he felt a feeling of queer quiet pleasure
inside him to think of the white fattish hands, clean and strong and gentle. (Portrait 58)
Though Stephen looks towards women for an idea of how to act, Stephen develops a sexual affinity
towards men because they are strong, unlike the vulnerable women in Stephen's life. When Stephen
thinks of Gleeson, he consciously equates the experience with the nervousness and feelings
associated with undressing-the same sexual excitement and feelings a heterosexual person feels
around others they find sexually appealing. Stephen also comments on the 'queer quiet' pleasure he
experiences when thinking of the 'strong and gentle' hands. Stephen views masculine qualities as
sexually exciting but with 'quiet pleasure' indicating his desire to keep the feelings repressed.
Stephen represses his feelings towards Gleeson with 'quiet' pleasure, not wanting even himself to
hear the thoughts he thinks. Also, Stephen's use of the word fright suggests the same uneasiness a
young boy would experience around the person they have some sort of affinity towards. Thus, the
episode with Gleeson exposes Stephen's repressed homosexuality by showing the reasons Stephen
finds men more sexually appealing and the thought processes he goes through around the men he
finds attractive.
Stephen's socialization in an all male environment forces him to repress any sexual feelings towards
men. Susan Henke again elaborates:
The young boy is being socialized into what Philip Slater identifies as a culture of male narcissism.
According to Slater, single sex education and the separation of male children from the emotional
refuge the family promotes misogyny, narcissism, and terror of the female. Boy children suffer from
an 'unconscious fear of being feminine, which leads to protest masculinity, exaggeration of the
differences between men and women.'(59).
At Clongowes, Stephen feels threatened by the masculinity of other boys. Joyce characterizes him as
feeble, weak, and on the sidelines of the games the boys play. At the school, Stephen struggles to
maintain his individual identity amongst his hyper-masculine environment. Afraid of forever walking
the sidelines, Stephen forces himself into 'protest masculinity'-trying to cover up his feminine side to
fit into the brutal male environment. Stephen fear of his feminine side forces him to repress his
individuality and his sexual orientation. The boys at Clongowes harass a known homosexual at their
school, Lady Boyle. Stephen, afraid of the same harassment, represses his feelings and even joins in
to make fun of Boyle-counter intuitive to Stephen's character. The environment in which Stephen
must socialize forces him to fear his orientation and, as consequence, repress all affinity towards
men and his feminine nature. Stephen actively sees the punishment associated with his feelings and
orientation. When teachers and students at Clongowes caught a group of boys in homosexual
flirtations (smugging), the administration expelled some while the boys gossiped and ridiculed the
others. Stephen's environment does not embrace or encourage his orientation. Stephen must
repress and hide his orientation in fear of being ridiculed and forces him into fake, 'protest
masculinity.'
Chapter one, then, offers the foundations for a repressed homosexual outlook. Through chapter
one, Stephens understanding of women develops into feelings of respect as role models, which will
later morph into his desire to raise them to an aesthetic ideal. Also, from chapter one, Stephen
learns to desire men for their strong invulnerable disposition, while denying his own masculinity.
Stephen's socialization forces him to repress and mask his dominate femininity while repressing his
affinity towards men. The dialectics between his feelings for men and the attitude of his peers
towards homosexuality synthesize into Stephen's repressed feelings.
Chapter Two
Chapter two reveals Stephen's desire to raise women to a non-sexual aesthetic ideal and the desire
within Stephen to find the fleeting motherly comfort he once experienced through Mercedes,
Emma, and the prostitute. The three women form a dialectic, which solidifies Stephen's confusion in
respects to women's roles in his life. First he takes Mercedes for the prototype of how to raise
women to the status of art. Then he uses Emma to create his first praise of the female form.
Towards the end, the prostitute penetrates Stephen-taking advantage of Stephen's needy and
confused state of mind.
The Mercedes episode foreshadows a desire to look at women as esthetic ends, not objects of
sexual desire. Joyce writes on Stephen's infatuation with romantic pursuit:
Outside Blackrock, on the road that led to the mountains, stood a small whitewashed house in the
garden of which grew many rosebushes, and in this house, he told himself, another Mercedes lived...
in his imagination he lived through a long train of adventures, marvelous as those in the book itself,
towards the close of which there appeared an image of himself, grown older and sadder, standing in
a moonlit garden with Mercedes, who had so many years before slighted his love and with a sadly
proud gesture of refusal saying: Madam, I never eat muscatel grapes. (Portrait 82)
Stephen finds Mercedes desirable because she offers an esthetic story, a romantic pursuit, which he
finds beautiful and worthy of imitation. He does not desire Mercedes sexually, and even looks
towards her to fulfill his motherly longing. Mercedes functions as an abstraction of the situations to
come between Emma and the prostitute. Joyce continues:
He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his should so constantly
beheld... this image would without any overt act of his, encounter him... They would be alone,
surrounded by darkness and silence, and in that moment of supreme tenderness he would be
transfigured... Weakness and timidity and inexperience would fall form him in the magic moment.
(85)
Mercedes acts as a comfort for Stephen. Stephen fantasizes Mercedes will show him how to act and
how to aesthetically define and interact with women. Joyce carefully hides Stephen's intentions
through sexually oriented language. However, decoding Joyce's language reveals a child longing for
his mother and longing for motherly direction on how to live life in a static Ireland. Stephen seeks
refuge in women and comfort from confused sexual identity-not an outlet for juvenile sexual
frustration. Stephen identifies himself as above childish games, "The noise of children at play
annoyed him and their silly voices made him feel, even more keenly than he had felt at Clongowes,
that he was different from others. He did not want to play" (Portrait 85). Stephen's maturity makes
him unable to justify a quest for sexual fulfillment. Instead, his quest calls him to discover a method
he can utilize to fulfill his already advanced and developing esthetic theory. Thus, any contact with
women, sexual or colloquial, acts as an extension to the fulfillment of his esthetic quest, not his
sexual desire.
Stephen uses Emma as an experiment in making women the crux of his esthetic theory-a pursuit
never complicated by sexual desire or lust. From the very beginning, Stephen never intended to form
a relationship with Emma beyond obtaining the material he needed to raise her to the status of art.
Emma presents Stephen with an opportunity for a kiss, an opportunity Stephen does not desire.
Joyce fills the Emma kiss episode with rhetoric of confused Oedipal attraction and a desire for
comfort via a caring female. Peter Kang elaborates:
In this way, kiss attached to EC in the vicinity of the indirect reference to the mother reinforces the
initial maternal association and merges it with the girl image... one of which has itself already
resumed the initial maternal connotation of the item. He behaves, with EC, like an outsider, a
seemingly tranquil watcher, as he describes it to be. If only in one-word references, the mother is
textually present in the kiss. (179-180)
Kang's analysis articulates Stephen's will to find the ideal maternal influence amongst the brutal Irish
nets cause him to use women as esthetic devices, and objectify them with experimental motives-
never really intending or desiring sexual contact or relationship. From the experience, Stephen forms
the first poem, the first attempt to use women aesthetically. The poem avoids mention of Emma and
only describes the surrounding romantic elements. Joyce writes, "There remained no trace of the
tram itself nor of the trammen nor of the horses: nor did he vividly appear. The verses told only of
the night and the balmy breeze and the maiden luster of the moon" (Portrait 93). Stephen uses the
romantic settings of sexual pursuit as the ideal experience in his first esthetic trial, but he never
mentions the woman and only comments on the surroundings. Later findings in the text suggest and
confirm the theory so early established in chapter two. Eugene A. Waith explains:
He thinks of EC, like Davin's temptress, as 'a bat like soul waking to the consciousness of itself' and
surmises that her soul had 'begun to live as his soul had when he had first sinned.' The composition
of the final stanza is described as an imaginary act of sexual intercourse, in which EC is
metamorphosed into the words of the poem while both are symbolized by flowing water. No
passage in the book links temptation more unequivocally with artistic creativity, and none makes
more clear that the emphasis is not finally upon sin. (122-123)
Waith's analysis makes clear Stephen's desire to use women as esthetic devices, not sexual ones.
Even though Waith draws his evidence from later in the novel, applying Waith's analysis to Stephen's
current psychological conditions yields the same results and conclusions.
Stephen gives into the prostitute's advancement out of a desire to sin and a desire to relive maternal
comfort, while hoping to get insight into the life of women and experience a woman sexually for an
esthetic end. Joyce writes on Stephen's state of mind prior to the prostitute's advancement, "He
wanted to sin with another of his kind, to force another being to sin with him and to exult with her in
sin" (Portrait 133). Stephen used and objectified the prostitute to experience sin with another
person, not necessarily a woman, as rebellion against the brutal environment and demanding
expectations. From the premise of wanting to sin, Stephen falls into the prostitute's arms as a child
would fall into the arms of a mother. Joyce continues:
Give me a kiss she said. His lips would not bend to kiss her. He wanted to be held firmly in her arms,
to be caressed slowly, slowly, slowly. In her arms he felt that he had suddenly become strong and
fearless and sure of himself. But his lips would not bend to kiss her. (135).
Stephen falls into the prostitute's arms as a child to a mother. He wants and desires to be caressed
and held, comforted and made stronger. He refuses to kiss her as hints of Oedipal confusion again
penetrate his mind. Forces controlling Stephen's world have amounted to nothing but
disappointments and failed role models. Stephen longs to create and make an ideal esthetic
experience based on women-stemming from the satisfaction he experienced when next to his 'nice
mother.' Because of his confusion with women and his confused Oedipal conditions, Stephen refuses
to initiate sexual contact and does not desire sexual contact. Instead, the prostitute forces sexual
contact upon Stephen, which Joyce describes in rhetoric alluding to a female orgasm. Joyce writes:
With a sudden movement she bowed his head and joined her lips to his and he read the meaning of
her movements in her frank uplifted eyes. It was too much for him. He closed his eyes, surrendering
himself to her body and mind, conscious of nothing in the world but the dark pleasure of her softly
parting lips. They pressed upon his brain as upon his lips as though they were the vehicles of a vague
speech; and between them he felt an unknown and timid pressure, darker than the swoon of sin,
softer than sound or odour. (Portrait 135).
Joyce's own rhetoric suggests the swoon towards sin, not sexual desire. Examining the language,
hints of Stephen's mother become apparent and the uncertainties of Stephen's life become
actualized through his first sexual experience. Stephen's femininity causes him to be timid and
reluctant and penetrated, while his true sexual desires belong to men. Henke writes on the gender
inversions of the prostitute scene:
The sexual imagery at the end of chapter two is ironically inverted. As Stephen feels the shadow of a
streetwalker moving irresistibly upon him, he figuratively suffers the agony of penetration and
surrenders to a murmurous flood of physical desire. The fusion of erotic and romantic imagery
degenerates into a vague ritual of sexual initiation, celebrated before a phantasmal altar illumined
by yellow gas flames. Traditional symbols are versed, and Stephen envisions himself in the role of
sacrificial virgin, raped by a phallic figure and flooded with seminal streams. His cry for an iniquitous
abandonment evokes an excremental vision of sex. The sound is but the echo of an obscene scrawl,
which he had read on the oozing wall of a urinal. (63).
Henke's analysis takes the idea of Stephen's sexual escapade for sin, not desire, and extends it a step
further. Henke suggests, then, sex with a woman for Stephen becomes excremental in nature, a dirty
endeavor that brings nothing but death. He imagines himself as a sacrificed virgin, suggesting the
experience as a necessary prerequisite to something greater-esthetic beauty and understanding.
Joshua Jacobs suggests Stephen's anima, female portion of his psyche, taking control in the
prostitute scene:
By distributing agency from a central self, Joyce effects a kind of organic liberation and allows a
release of sexual power through what Derek Attridge has called a 'traffic between vocal and sexual
organs'... Much has been made of Stephen's surrender to phallic penetration in this sequence, but I
would argue that any surrender in the context of the epiphanic mode is not within a binary... but is a
relinquishing of unifying authority in favor of multiplicity. By his deployment of swooning in these
final pages, Joyce leads Stephen to join in a hitherto female act of falling from a unitary conception
of the body into a liberating field of autonomous organs and senses. (20).
Jacob's analysis shows Stephen's act with the prostitute deconstructs any binary sense of male and
female. While being male in body, Stephen becomes female in mind as he eagerly learns sin with
another person in hopes of understanding the opposite sex better for the fulfillment of his esthetic
conquest. Laurie teal also comments:
The repeated association of the masculine sexual role with that of the prostitute accounts in great
part for all the oddly penile temptresses in Portrait who acquire the anatomical ability to penetrate
inexperienced men. Stephen's union with the prostitute is such a moment of fusion, an encounter
with a perfectly specular other that dissolves all boundaries between self and other, subject and
object, male and female, and masculinity and femininity. (63)
In retrospect, Teal shows Stephen's concepts of masculine and feminine start to cross over each
other and produce in Stephen a heavily feminine psyche, desiring nothing but the art of female.
In short, Chapter two firmly establishes Stephen's will to raise women to an esthetic level. He uses
sex and sexual situations to understand women and their esthetic beauty. Stephen's Oedipal
complex extends even further in the chapter, suggesting women's roles and functions are anything
but sexual. Stephen's pursuits have been to fit into the brutal world around him and to establish a
theory of aesthetics to covey his thoughts and ideals about art and life. His anima becomes firmly
established and takes over his masculinity in the act of penetration with the prostitute.
Chapter Three
Chapter three of Portrait establishes and firmly roots the ideas of the previous chapters into a
concrete theory through Stephen's contemplation on how to act and live. He repents for his sexual
escapades, realizing they are not for him and desires to be a priest of the eternal imagination,
confirming his sexual orientation and mission of a feminine esthetic which penetrates substance, not
just accidents. He furthers his esthetic theory through contemplation of the Virgin Mary, and
deduces that his current path does not help him in creation of an esthetic theory.
Chapter three opens with Stephen contemplating his sins in a mesmerizing way-indicating Stephen
begins to realize his current path does not reconcile with his esthetic pursuit well before any priest
informs him, which helps him come to terms with his repressed sexuality and ultimate goals. Joyce
writes:
The vast cycle of starry life bore his weary mind outward to its verge and inward to its center, a
distant music accompanying him outward and inward... The stars began to crumble and a cloud of
fine stardust fell through space... It was his own soul going forth to experience, unfolding itself sin by
sin, spreading abroad the balefire of its burning stars and folding back upon itself. (137).
Stephen reluctantly realizes he chose the wrong way to go about understanding women and their
esthetic ideal. Long before the retreat, Stephen internally repented for his soul, which consequently
made the retreat much more powerful. Stephen realizes his sexual acts were a call to sin and
experience sin, not sexual relationships with women for sexual gratification. Slowly, through
contemplation in chapter three, Stephen realizes his call to sexual action perverts his own sexuality
and perverts his conquest for an esthetic ideal. Eugene Waith comments:
The flow of this rebellion of the senses has coarsened and thickened to the point where it has
stopped itself. What was at first a release has become a horrible restraint. Yet before the process is
complete there is a hint that the excursion into sensuality is not entirely worthless. As Stephen sits
thinking about his sin and working a math problem, Stephen sees his own soul, going forth to
experience, unfolding itself sin by sin, and folding back and fading. The meaning of the passage
seems to be double: the failure of Stephen's present way of life is foreshadowed, while at the same
time sin is presented an unfolding development. (119)
Waith expresses the insight Stephen possesses over his previous way of life. Stephen realizes sin
taught him many things, but also realizes sin no longer contributes to the fulfillment of his of his
esthetic ideal. Interestingly, from the moment sin unfolds itself to Stephen, he no longer engages in
sexual misconduct with women. Because Stephen stops relishing in sexual misconduct when he
realizes sin contributes nothing, the theory Stephen used women and sex to understand sin and
women for an esthetic ideal gains validity.
Throughout the chapter, Stephen's feelings about esthetics solidify through the judgment, hell, and
heaven sermons-acting as the impetus to thoughts of the Virgin Mary, which yield a finalized
aesthetic theory. Through the sermons Stephen becomes frightened and sorry for objectifying Emma
for an esthetic objective. Stephen utilizes his understanding of the Virgin Mary to gain repentance
for his sins. Joyce writes:
She |Mary| placed their hands together, hand in hand, and said, seaking to their hearts. Take hands,
Stephen and Emma. It is a beautiful evening now in heaven. You have erred but you are always my
children. It is one heart that loves another heart. Take hands together my dear children, you will be
happy. (156-157)
Stephen uses Mary as his savior. He understands the awesomeness and respect, which accompanies
the Virgin birth. Stephen uses the above image to justify the understanding women are not binary
creatures, only the Virgin acts as a pure female worthy of imitation-ultimately leading to his chastity.
Garry Leonard explains:
A girl innocent and demure whom the Virgin Mary herself joins with him in sinless satisfaction...
Stephen's fantasy of this encounter is neatly split between the kinetics of the pornographic city and
the stasis achieved by aesthetic distance from it. On the one hand, the wanton woman is the femme
fatale of commodity culture, never weary of her ardent ways, merciless, and forcing him to spend
again and again. (79).
Leonard argues the retreat and the Virgin give Stephen the justification necessary to divorce himself
from all sexual experience with women and idolize the Virgin as the perfect female figure worthy of
imitation. He sets himself apart and realizes his esthetic theory rests in the esthetics of a stasis
detached from the 'pornographic' town. Leonard continues:
Stephen's aesthetic theory, set in deliberate opposition to the pornographic, also creates a category
of normativeness, not by declaring what is normal, however, but by categorizing and regulating
affect. He strives for a perceptual grid that will allow the subject to watch him or herself watching
and stand ready to condemn or discipline with increasing severity whatever such self surveillance
experiences as an 'abnormal' response... a state Stephen calls esthetic stasis. (79)
Leonard succinctly identifies the final formation of Stephen's ascetic theory as one, which raises
women to the status of art by forming them into the ideal Virgin. Stephen no longer possesses the
need, or the desire, to sexually pursue women-giving credence to the theory his sexual escapades
were for the sake of understanding women for art. David Seed confirms the feeling, "The creation
analogy implies Stephen identifies closely with the Virgin after he has lost his faith and also sets up
an extraordinary oscillation between literal and analogical gender throughout the passage... Stephen
dramatizes himself not only as a phallic force, but also a female matrix" (95). Certainly, as Seed
shows, by identifying with the Virgin Mary, Stephen's new aesthetic theory ends sin and begins with
idealizing the Virgin Mary.
Chapter three functions esoterically, to solidify Stephen's esthetic theory into permanence. Stephen
comes to terms with the way he uses women for his esthetic theory, and he concludes the pursuit is
no longer a worthwhile endeavor. He idealizes the Virgin and wants to usurp her powers as supreme
spotless creator. Chapter three gives way into the thoughts of Stephen as the priest of the eternal
imagination. Subsequent chapters focus on the fulfillment of Stephen's theory through interaction
with male characters and feminine ideals.
Chapter Four
Chapter four permits Stephen to practice his new method of obtaining and fulfilling his aesthetic
through rigorous discipline-accentuating the idea of Stephen finally giving up objectifying women in
an aesthetic pursuit while maintaining a repressed homosexuality. However, chapter four reveals
the Church's inadequacy in fulfillment of the theory. Leonard writes:
In the opening of Book IV of A Portrait, Stephen uses the readily available taxonomic system of the
Catholic Church to carry this state |esthetic stasis| over into the everyday... But this is still too
general to provide minute to minute protection, and so he must watch himself even more closely...
Stephen generates pleasure through intense self - surveillance, just as he formally generated
pleasure for himself in a completely contrary manner, by refusing to see himself as anything but a
sensual animal randomly wandering for sensation... Though he sees himself as completely open to
the call of the city, we should not forget pleasures of the city are something which Stephan has to
pay. (79)
Leonard perceives Stephen's actions, as the manifestation of his new found esthetic developed in
chapter three.
The culmination of Stephen's aesthetic ideal occurs during his reaction to the bird woman-showing
Stephen's non-sexual interest in women. Joyce's description of Stephen's perception of the bird girl
exists as confirmation of his mature aesthetic theory, a theory, which he is too young to actualize in
the end. Joyce writes:
A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, aging out to sea. She seemed like one whom
magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful sea bird. Her long bare slender legs
were delicate as a crane's and pure... where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a
sign upon the flesh... her bosom was as a bird's ... but her long fair hair was girlish... and touched
with the wonder of mortal beauty. (233)
Sexual lust or desire does not exit in Joyce's rhetoric. The woman mid stream becomes successfully
idealized and placed on a pedestal. Stephen finally actualizes his aesthetic theory, even though he
cannot successfully administer it throughout the rest of the novel. The girl mid stream exists as the
apex of Stephen's artistic theory. The Midwest Quarterly explains, "Witnessing the bird girl is the
culmination of his journey, the end of his quest for manhood and artistry. Reflected in the bird girl is
Stephen's inner self, his artistic soul" (274). The rest of the novel is putting the theory into larger
practice. But, by the end of chapter four, the theory is complete. From the theory, Stephen's
reaction to the bird girl and his newly developed aesthetic reveals his true nature and feelings on
sexuality, life, and art. Waith comments:
Stephen's ecstatic contemplation of the girl on the shore is emblematic of the life, which he feels
himself destined to lead-in the world, but not of it. Twice in chapter four, once plainly and once
symbolically, this destiny is described. The first passage comes shortly after his association of the
priest's life with the sluggish water of the Clongowes bath. The wisdom of the priest's appeal did not
touch him to the quick. He was destined to learn his own wisdom apart from others or to learn the
wisdom of others himself wandering among the snares of the world. (121)
Certainly, Stephen existed as an outsider throughout the novel. Now, he learned his lessons on his
own and lives comfortably in his own skin. His aesthetic theory pleases him. Now that he
understands his theory and what it entails, he tries to live a life conducive to its fulfillment.
Chapter Five
For this theory, chapter five offers no further evidence. However, Stephen must force himself to
break away from his friend Cranly and Emma Clery, his former infatuation of aesthetics, to fulfill the
theory in his mind. Forcing the exile however puts into context the young man part of the title.
While he was mature enough to experience life in a way to help him construct his aesthetic theory,
his decision to go into exile makes him a young man. Stephen ultimately fails in exile, and returns to
Dublin as a 'jejune' Jesuit', facing many of the same problems he experienced in Portrait. However,
Stephen's relationship with Cranly and the villanelle deserve a brief analysis.
Crany offers Stephen an intellectual equal and competitor-which leads Stephen to see his aesthetic
theory unfulfilled. Ellmann elaborates:
The self-centered character of Portrait precludes Joyce's enlarging upon Stephen's further relations
with Cranly. Stephen dispenses with both love and friendship; reluctantly but with what he considers
justification. The contest of love and hate between him and Cranly is irrelevant except in so far as it
compels his departure to search for freedom. (36)
As Ellmann suggests, Cranly is significant only in so far as his action as an impetus to Stephen's exile
to further his aesthetic ideal. The competition with Cranly does not exist as a competition to win
Emma Clery, but to further and deepen Stephen's convictions towards an aesthetic ideal.
Finally, the journal and villanelle at the end suggest the pinnacle of art and a breakaway from
traditional Irish nets-especially the nets of sexuality. Mulroony writes:
Constructing the villanelle, creating the journal, Stephen begins to claim A Portrait as his own book.
As Stephen's language breaks through to form an independent voice, 'we discover that the
fulfillment of the process of becoming an author occurs in the act of writing.' In its denial of any
social and political reality beyond the personal the same lyric voice that frees Stephen from cultural
bondage finally leads him into a static, and literally pronounced, artistic solipsism. Concerned with
individual identity more than anything else Stephen denies himself the interactions with others that
would enable him to create an authentic aesthetic representation of Ireland's culture. (160)
Thus, chapter five acts as a synopsis of Stephen's breakaway and exile. Stephen leaves Ireland
because his views of life, art, and sexuality cannot truly be expressed without censorship. Stephen
thus feels he cannot accurately represent Ireland through aesthetics. Chapter five identifies with
Stephen's individuality and gives him the courage to leave Ireland.
Conclusion
In retrospect, Stephens 'attraction' towards women throughout the novel exist only as an
experiment to creating an esthetic theory, an ideal. The gender inversions present in the novel
suggest Stephen's repressed homosexuality, and raising women up on a pedestal creates a
misogynistic outlook because the theory deconstructs the matrix of femininity into an unfair binary
composition of body and soul.

¢

¢
 ¢


EARLY REVIEWS
Joyce is arguably the most influential modern writer. His influence on the fictional technique of
twentieth-century writers, from traditional realists to the most wildly experimental postmodernists,
has been decisive. Although Joyce's †
 has evoked a far greater amount of critical discussion,
there is no doubt that  
    as a Young Man is Joyce's most widely-read work.
While  
 is among the most frequently taught novels in modern university curricula, it is also a
novel undergraduates often discover on their own. Despite its surface difficulties, young people still
respond to the book's eerily convincing portrayal of a sensitive youth who is harrowed by religious
and sexual guilt and transfigured by an idea of beauty. Stephen's remarkable self-involvement and
his frustration under the authority of church, state, and parents rings especially true for
undergraduate readers today, however different the specifics of circumstance.
So well established is  
 as a modern classic that it is difficult to imagine the situation of the
book's early reviewers, faced with writing of a sort they had not encountered before. Spotting
literary greatness is an almost impossible task on its first appearance; Ezra Pound did it with Joyce,
and so did T.S. Eliot, but even as perceptive a reader as Edward Garnett, who had encouraged
Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, and D.H. Lawrence, balked at Joyce. In a reader's report for the
publisher Duckworth & Company, collected with many other early reviews in Robert Deming's two-
volume James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, Garnett admits the book is "ably written" but needs
revision because it is too "discursive, formless, unrestrained, and ugly things, ugly words, are too
prominent." The novel is too "unconventional," Garnett asserts, and "unless the author will use
restraint and proportion he will not gain readers" (81). Given this sort of misjudgment by a usually
sensitive reader, it is all the more surprising that so many of the initial reviews of  
 hailed it as
a major achievement, even a work of "genius." Ezra Pound's review in   , where the book
had appeared in installments, stressed that it was well written--and tried to suggest just how rare
that was among novels in English. Indeed, "Joyce produces the nearest thing to Flaubertian prose
that we now have in English." Aside from that, "I doubt if a comparison of Mr. Joyce to other English
writers or Irish writers would help much to define him." Pound stresses Joyce's realism and the
book's value as "diagnosis," but otherwise says virtually nothing about the novel's content (83).
Others were more struck by what they saw as the book's unpleasantness. A review
in 

 entitled "A Study in Garbage" called it "an astonishingly powerful and extraordinary
dirty study of the upbringing of a young man by Jesuits" and suggested that at the end of the book
Stephen goes mad (85). Similarly, H. G. Wells in a rather awe-struck essay comparing Joyce to Swift,
Sterne, and Conrad, nevertheless complained about Joyce's "cloacal obsession" (86-88).
The  protested the "occasional improprieties"; the  

  complained of "the brutal
probing of the depths of uncleanness" and the 
  

 of the novel's "astounding bad
manners" (89,92, 93).
Like other reviewers, the 

's essayist found in Stephen "a passion for foul-smelling things"
(93), confusing Joyce's unusual technique of documenting odors and textures with his protagonist's
tastes. Irish reviewers were, if anything, more offended than British ones. The 


claims that "Mr. Joyce plunges and drags his readers after him into the slime of foul sewers"
(98). These critics' stress on  
 's unpleasantness is likely to be somewhat baffling to a modern
reader until we realize that the "impropriety" found on the book's "very first page" (89) can only be
the reference to bed-wetting; at this point we understand what a large part of human existence in
1916 was held to be inappropriate for mention in literature. One theme not picked up in later
criticism is the concern over whether Stephen and his companions are representative of Irish youth
in their ideas. Wells noted that "every human being" in the book "accepts as a matter of course. . .
that the English are to be hated," and adds that he thinks that picture is "only too true" (88).
The 

on the other hand protested that "English critics, with a complacency that
makes one despair of their intelligence, are already hailing the author as a typical Irishman, and his
book as a faithful picture of Irish life." It would be just as accurate to see De Quincey's Opium-Eater
as a typical picture of British youth, the reviewer asserts (99).
Still, Joyce's technique was so convincing that the reviewers had to admit that something beyond
conventional realism was at work. A. Clutton-Brock said that "[Joyce] can make anything happen
that he chooses" in his writing, and that "No living writer is better at conversations" (89). J.C. Squire
agreed that the dialogue "is as close to the dialogue of life as anything I have ever come across"
(101). Virtually all reviewers praised the writing, and some were swept away despite themselves,
protesting all the while. The 
  

's writer begins, "When one recognizes genius in a
book one can perhaps best leave criticism alone," and then goes on to give his reservations.
Interestingly, he continues, "Not for its apparent formlessness should the book be condemned. A
subtle sense of art has worked amidst the chaos, making this hither-and-thither record of a young
mind and soul. . . a complete and ordered thing" (92). In noting this he is unusual, for nearly all the
early reviewers complained of the book's formlessness, its abrupt transitions, its lack of plot, and its
unusual demands upon the reader. Just as the term "naturalism" was used to evoke the "gutter-
realism" of the notorious Emile Zola, the term "impressionism" occurred frequently to suggest an
aesthetic combination of shapelessness and sensitivity in both protagonist and book.

ULYSSES AND AFTER

But reaction to the novel did not develop in a vacuum, because within two years installments of
Joyce's even more challenging †
 began to appear in The Little Review. In a now-famous essay
entitled "Modern Novels" that appeared in 1919, Virginia Woolf hails Joyce as an example of a
revolutionary sort of fiction that does away with outmoded conventions. "Let us record the atoms as
they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however
disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the
consciousness," she urges. In doing this--in shifting the focus inward, toward momentary
perceptions and a "spiritual" dimension of consciousness--Woolf feels the artist will produce
something closer to "life itself" (125-26). Gradually it began to be realized that a group of writers
including Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and (somewhat later) Woolf herself were engaged in similar challenges
to literary conventions, and that the art of such writers demanded evaluation on its own terms
rather than censure for departing from the norms of Victorian prose and verse. This had two effects:
first, published commentary on writers like Joyce tended to become either exclusively laudatory or
exclusively derogatory, depending on which position the reviewer took in the politics of art. And
further, as comments by Joyce's increasing circle of admirers appeared, those critics who took him
seriously began devoting their energies to explicating his work rather than evaluating it.
The advent of †
 in 1922 helped draw the battle lines more clearly than Portrait had done.
Stuart Gilbert's 1930 book 

†
, written with the help of Joyce, revealed to an
uninformed public the complexity of Joyce's mythic structure in that book, as well as the richness
and variety of his stylistic and narrative effects. One implication was that Portrait or even the earlier
story collection Dubliners might well have formal complexities of their own that--as with †
--
had gone unnoticed. Gilbert also put some stress on Joyce's use of symbolism, a characteristic of his
prose that his early reviewers, obsessed by his use of naturalistic detail, had slighted. This cut little
ice with reviewers on the political left who, especially during the reign of "socialist realism" in the
1930's, dismissed Joyce as obscure, bourgeois, and apolitical. A Russian essay translated in  

 (1933) sees the stream-of-consciousness method of †
 as "too closely connected with
the ultra-subjectivism of the parasitic, rentier bourgeoisie, and entirely unadaptable to the art of one
who is building socialist society." The naturalism of  
 might at first seem more promising,
since it exposes the material evils of capitalism, but it has its roots in "a morbid, defeatist delight in
the ugly and repulsive" and in "an aesthetico-proprietary desire for the possession of 'things'" (591-
92). As for the portions of ! that had so far appeared in journals, the Marxist
reviewer (like mainstream reviewers throughout Europe and America) dismissed them as nonsense.
Meanwhile, another artistic trend was on Joyce's side. Increasingly during the twentieth century
Anglophone writers became aware of the Continental literary tradition; indeed, in the 1920's both
British and American writers migrated to Paris, often to sit at the feet of Joyce or Gertrude Stein, the
great expatriates. Since Joyce's literary models were generally European rather than British or Irish,
his work was more intelligible and less frighteningly original when seen in this context.
Indeed, †
 was probably the first important work of English literature to be explicated and
celebrated first by French critics. During the 1930's and 1940's a generation of American critics who
were conversant with European literature naturally named Joyce among the great contemporary
writers. Most notably, Edmund Wilson in his 1931 book" #
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STRUCTURALISM AND AFTER
The 1970's saw the impact in American and British criticism of a variety of Continental critical
approaches, most of which had been strenuously resisted during the previous decades. The so-called
"phenomenological" criticism of the Geneva School, whose best American practitioner was the early
J. Hillis Miller, was reflected in Suzette Henke's 

 %.! (1978), which deals
with Ulysses, and by R. B. Kershner's "Time and Language in Joyce's  
 " (1976), a study of the
interiority of Stephen's time-sense and the ways in which subjectivity and objectivity are unified in
his experience.  " 

 (1972) by Helene Cixous--who later would be best known as
a major "French feminist"--combines a psychological approach to Joyce's whole work with themes
such as absence and silence or art as transgression that were of particular interest to structuralists
and post-structuralists.
A renewed interest in Marxist criticism, especially as adapted by the "Frankfurt School" (and in
socially- and politically-based criticism in general) led to a new critical distance from the society of
which both Stephen and Joyce were a part; issues like Joyce's sexual tastes now seemed less
important in themselves and more significant as markers of social development at a given historical
moment. James Naremore's "Consciousness and Society in  
 " (1976) discusses "some of the
ways that Stephen Dedalus's ideas, language, and art have been affected by his economic status and
his Catholic upbringing," and also reveals Joyce's fictional technique as a variety of realism that
betrays the author's defensive reaction against his own "excremental vision." The Godlike
impersonality that Stephen claimed for the artist, and that New Critics claimed for Joyce, was
wearing thin. While Naremore had asserted that Joyce was a more politically-aware writer than
most earlier critics had thought, Richard Ellmann's #
 (1977) provided
evidence for the writer's interest in politics from Joyce's own library. Joyce had early termed himself
a socialist and had referred to the change in the relationship between men and women as the most
important social change of his time; Ellmann demonstrated that Joyce's political awareness was not
simply a fashion of his youth. Dominic Manganiello's full-scale study
   (1980) broadened
the argument, presenting Joyce as--unlike other major modernists such as Yeats, Eliot or Pound--a
social progressive.
During the 1970's and 1980's a host of varieties of historically-responsive criticism evolved, and with
them a broad spectrum of interests that might once have seemed peripheral to Joyce's art. Richard
Brown's 


%"

(1985) showed how the sexual rebelliousness, oddity, or
experimentation of Joyce's characters occurred within a political context in which, for instance,
assenting to a conventional marriage could be seen as ceding control of one's sexuality to the state.
Cheryl Herr's groundbreaking study 


#  (1986) set Joyce's work within the
context of the popular press, the popular theater, and the tradition of popular religious oratory,
arguing that Joyce's use of these materials produced a powerful social critique. Three years later, R.
B Kershner's 
/0
! /
1
 
, which treated Joyce's early writing, made a
similar argument from an analysis of Joyce's sources in popular writing of the late nineteenth
century, and included an extended discussion of  
 .
Meanwhile, structuralism, deconstruction, and post-structuralism began to have a major impact on
Joyce studies. Relatively few of the Continental critics and their followers addressed  
 directly
though, preferring to use †
 and especially the Wake to exemplify the ways in which language
itself formed complex structures independent of signification or (alternately) undermined itself.
Starting in the 1970's essays on Joyce by Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida began appearing in
Joyce conference volumes, and books and articles devoted to Joyce took on a new theoretical rigor.
Following Barthes's announcement of the "death of the author" in modern literature, the new work
paid increased attention to style and structure in Joyce's work--and especially to the linguistic and
philosophical implications of these--and once again shunned the biographical. Derrida's critique of
structuralism in many ways exaggerated these tendencies.
The book that best exemplifies these trends, and applies them to  
 as well, is Colin MacCabe's
post-structuralist 


 2    (1979). Summary is difficult for a book
such as this, especially as MacCabe refuses to "interpret" Joyce in any conventional sense: "Instead
of constructing a meaning, Joyce's texts concern themselves with the position of the subject in
language" (4). While MacCabe also refuses to "psychologize" Joyce in any ordinary way, he does rely
heavily on the work of Jacques Lacan, a revisionist Freudian who redirected attention to language as
the primary material of the psychoanalytic method. Further, MacCabe insists that his reading of
Joyce is radically political, because Joyce's revolutionary politics are inherent in his language and its
new relationship to representation, rather than residing in any particular statements in his texts.
MacCabe sees in the movement from % 1 3 to  
 a change from the ordered world of
the "classic realist text", in which meaning is guaranteed by a "Father" and resolution is implied by
the very narrative, to a new world in which all meanings are provisory, in which third and first
person blend, and in which sound carries more weight than sense. Although the language of the
artist threatens to establish a "meta-language" that will enable us to evaluate the other languages
represented in the book, even this possibility is frustrated by the book's discontinuities. The
technical problems that for critics like Booth had marked flaws in  
 are precisely those
MacCabe celebrates as liberating us from the epistemology of bourgeois humanism.
The general trend of criticism in the past two decades has been away from the New Critical
presumption of organic unity in Joyce's works, away from symbolic interpretation, and in some ways
away from biography. The stress has been upon close analysis of style, a reexamination of the social
and political context of Joyce's work, an intense theoretical examination of the implications of
Joyce's writing project, and a questioning of previous interpretations of the entire modernist
movement. An excellent recent article that exemplifies at least some of these points is Michael
Levenson's "Stephen's Diary in Joyce's Portrait--the Shape of Life" (1985). Important works
on †
 and, especially, 

! have appeared under the stimulus of Continental
approaches, and the fact that both Derrida and Lacan championed Joyce has encouraged a great
deal of work in deconstructive and other poststructuralist modes. The collection of politically-
oriented contemporary critical approaches loosely grouped together as "cultural critique" and the
allied approach known as "New Historicism" have both had an impact. The most important
intellectual event of the past twenty years, the rise of feminist criticism, has been reflected in a wide
variety of feminist approaches to Joyce as well.

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