A Story of Liberation: James Joyce´s ‘A Portrait of the Artist’
The story of Daedalus, the mythical figure, is well-known. He is said to have been an inventor, architect, and artisan who pushed his nephew Perdix from the Acropolis. Consequently, he was forced to flee to Crete, where he was imprisoned by King Minos. Daedalus decides to build wings in order to escape from his imprisonment on the island.
Stephen Dedalus, the hero of James Joyce´s novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), resembles the mythic figure of Daedalus not only in his surname. Like the ancient story of Daedalus, Joyce´s novel is a story of liberation. Stephen´s first name, alluding to Saint Stephen, indicates that the protagonist’s gradual liberation from his Catholic faith is the central theme, though Stephen´s emancipation from his family background and questions of national identity are also significant issues in the novel. In a way, Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes (And he turned his mind to unknown arts), Joyce´s epigraph to the novel taken from Ovid´s Metamorphoses, already conveys the entire story in a single line.
The beginning of Joyce´s largely autobiographical novel is set in a Jesuit college where Stephen is ridiculed by his classmates. He inadvertently loses his glasses and is consequently corporally punished by Father Dolan. Stephen´s decision to complain about Father Dolan´s behavior to the rector marks the first step in his process of self-emancipation.
The second chapter recounts of Stephen´s sexual awakening. He reads The Count of Monte Cristo and begins to fantasize about Mercédès, a female figure from Dumas´s novel. Stephen´s difficulties to align his idealization of Mercédès with his reality first become apparent in the encounter with Emma, a young woman he becomes acquainted with after a party. Later, they are uncovered more explicitly when he begins to have recurrent intercourse with prostitutes. Stephen develops strong feelings of guilt due to his behavior and repents during a religious retreat. Some critics have noted that Stephen´s sense of remorse signifies both a figurative and a literal retreat toward conformity. However, other critics argue that through his emotional struggles, Stephen also gains a much deeper understanding of the interplay between his mind, body and soul. Undoubtedly, Stephen´s involvement with his feelings of guilt is essential for his later evolution into an artist.
The Jesuits urge Stephen to become a clergyman due to his devoutness and thereby provoke an intense inner conflict between faith and artistic ambitions in him. Ultimately, this results, metaphorically speaking, in Stephen’s shifting away from his surname towards Daedelian mythology: “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” (Joyce).
Consequently, Stephen leaves behind both his family, including his father, who had arranged a place for him at the university, as well as the church. Eloping to the seashore, he comes upon a group of friends from his school but follows his own path and decisively frees himself from the restraints which formerly held him back. The emotional effect is intense: “His soul was soaring in an air beyond the world and the body he knew was purified in a breath … and commingled with the element of the spirit” (Joyce). Later on, Stephen encounters a girl who is, in his view, “the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him an instant ecstasy the gates of all ways of error and glory” (Joyce). The Joyce scholar John Blades once argued that “she is the word made flesh”, the ideal and the real uniting.
The last chapter of the novel recounts Stephen´s final steps in his rebellion against the oppressive father figures of the preceding chapters and towards artistry. The fact that Joyce shifts from a third person to a first-person narrator at the end of the novel also points to the sprouting of Stephen´s new identity as an artist.
Source: The Egoist Ltd., London, Public Domain
