Joyce, James
A portrait of the artist as a young man

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Summary

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man tells the story of Stephen Dedalus, a boy growing up in Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century, who gradually decides to cast off all his social, familial, and religious constraints and live a life devoted to artistic pursuits. As a young boy, Stephen is influenced heavily by his Catholic faith and his Irish nationality. He attends a strict religious boarding school called Clongowes Wood College. The death of Irish political leader Charles Stewart Parnell becomes the subject of a furious argument over Christmas dinner.

Stephen's father Simon is inept with money, and his family sinks deeper and deeper into debt. After a summer spent in the company of his spry old Uncle Charles, Stephen learns that the family cannot send him back to Clongowes. He moves to a prestigious day-school called Belvedere, where he grows to excel as a writer and as an actor in the student theater. His first sexual experience--with a young Dublin prostitute--unleashes a storm of guilt and shame as Stephen tries to reconcile his physical yearnings with the stern Catholic moralism of his surroundings. On a three-day religious retreat Stephen hears a trio of fiery sermons about sin, judgment, and hell. Deeply shaken, the young man resolves to rededicate himself to a life of Christian piety.

Stephen begins attending Mass every day, but his belief quickly wavers, and--despite a talk about entering the priesthood with the director of his school--his old religious doubts creep back in. Stephen hopes attending the university will enable him to make some sense out of his life. One day, Stephen learns from his sister that the family will be moving, once again for financial reasons. Stephen goes for a walk on the beach, where he observes a young girl wading in the tide. He is struck by her beauty, and realizes in an epiphanic moment that to love and desire beauty should not be a source of shame. He resolves to live his life to the fullest, and not to be constrained by the boundaries of his family, his nation, and his religion.

At the university, Stephen works to formulate his theories about art while cultivating an independent existence liberated from the expectations of his family and friends. He becomes more and more determined to remain free from all limiting pressures, and eventually decides to leave Ireland to escape them. Like his mythical namesake Daedalus, Stephen hopes to build himself wings on which he can fly above all obstacles and achieve a life as an artist.

Characters

Stephen Dedalus - The protagonist and main character of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. A sensitive, thoughtful boy, Stephen is the son of Simon and Mary Dedalus. His large family runs into deepening financial difficulties over the course of the book, resulting in several moves to different parts of Ireland. They manage to send Stephen to prestigious schools, however, and eventually to university. As he grows up, Stephen grapples with questions of nationality, religion, family, and sin, and finally decides to reject all socially imposed bonds and live freely as an artist.

Simon Dedalus - Stephen's father, an impoverished former medical student with a strong sense of Irish patriotism. Simon spends a great deal of his time reliving past experiences, lost in his own sentimental nostalgia. Joyce often uses Simon to symbolize the bonds imposed on Stephen by his family and the burden of his country.

Mary Dedalus - Stephen's mother, Simon Dedalus's wife. Mary is not a devoted Irish nationalist like her husband, but she is deeply religious and strongly committed to the Roman Catholic faith. She is often melancholy, and seems to have been defeated by the circumstances of her life and her marriage.

Uncle Charles - Stephen's lively great uncle. Charles lives with Stephen's family. During the summer, the young Stephen enjoys taking long walks with him and listening to Charles and his father discuss the history of both Ireland and the Dedalus family.

Dante - The extremely fervent and piously Catholic governess of the Dedalus children. Dante (whose real name is Mrs. Riordan) becomes involved with Mr. Casey in a long and unpleasant argument over the fate of Parnell during Christmas dinner when Stephen is about six.

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. At the dinner, Mr. Casey, like Simon a believer in Irish nationalism, argues with Dante over the fate of Parnell.

The Dedalus Children - Though his siblings do not play a major role in the novel, Stephen has several brothers and sisters, including Maurice, Katey, Maggie, and Boody.

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. Later, Stephen remembers Eileen's long, white hands.

Father Conmee - The rector at Clongowes Wood College, where Stephen attends school as a young boy. Father Conmee is kind to Stephen after Father Dolan beats the young boy with the pandybat, and promises to resolve the matter with Father Dolan. Later, however, Stephen learns to his humiliation that Conmee and Dolan had later laughed about the incident with Stephen's father.

Father Dolan - The cruel prefect of studies at Clongowes Wood College, where Stephen attends school as a young boy. Father Dolan punishes Stephen severely in Latin class one day for not doing his lessons. Stephen says he has been excused from lessons because of his broken glasses--which is the truth--but Father Dolan accuses him of lying and beats his palm with a pandybat.

Father Arnall - Stephen's stern Latin teacher at Clongowes Wood College. He later delivers three fiery sermons at a religious retreat Stephen attends; his fierce depiction of the torments of hell is enough to frighten Stephen into temporarily embracing his Catholicism.

Brother Michael - The kindly monk who tends to Stephen and Athy in the infirmary after Wells pushes Stephen into the cesspool. Brother Michael reads the newspaper aloud to cheer up his patients, and it is from this source that Stephen first hears about Parnell's death.

Athy - A friendly boy whom Stephen meets in the infirmary. Athy likes Stephen because they both have unusual names ("Dedalus" being a highly unusual last name for a young boy in Ireland). Athy's father owns and cares for racehorses.

Wells - The bully at Clongowes Wood College. Wells taunts Stephen for kissing his mother before he goes to bed, and one day he pushes Stephen into the infected cesspool, causing Stephen to catch a bad fever. Wells later apologizes, seeming to feel guilty--but he is also worried that Stephen will report him to the priests.

Mike Flynn - A friend of Simon Dedalus's 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.

Cranly - Stephen's friend at the university, to whom Stephen confides his thoughts and feelings. Eventually, though, Cranly begins to encourage Stephen to conform to the wishes of his family and to try harder to fit in with his peers, advice Stephen fiercely resents.

Lynch - Stephen's friend at the university, a coarse and often unpleasantly dry young man. Stephen explains his theory of aesthetics to Lynch in Chapter 5.

Davin - Stephen's friend at the university. Davin comes from the Irish provinces, and has a simple, solid nature. Stephen admires his talent for athletics, but is repelled by his unquestioning Irish patriotism, which Davin encourages Stephen to adopt.

McCann - A fiercely political student at the university who tries to convince Stephen to be more concerned with politics. He is offended when Stephen refuses to sign his petition.

Temple - A young man at the university who openly admires Stephen's keen independence, and who tries to copy his friend's ideas and sentiments.

Emma Clere - Stephen's "beloved," the young girl to whom he is fiercely 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 whenever he sees her, she unleashes a powerful response within him. His first poem ("To E----- C----- -") is to her.

Charles Stewart Parnell - Not a fictional character in the novel, but a real Irish political leader whose death influences many characters in Portrait. During the late nineteenth century, Parnell was the powerful leader of the Irish National Party, and his influence seemed to promise Irish independence from England. But when Parnell's affair with a married woman was exposed, he was condemned by the Irish Catholic Church and fell from grace. His fevered attempts to regain his former position of influence led to his death from exhaustion. Many in Ireland (such as John Casey) considered him a hero and blamed the Church for his death; many other (such as Dante) thought the church had done the right thing to condemn him.

Context

James Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, in the town of Rathgar, near Dublin, Ireland. He was the oldest of ten children, the son of a well-meaning but financially inept father and a solemn, pious mother. His parents managed to scrape together enough money to send their talented son to the Clongowes Wood College, a prestigious boarding school, and then to the less-expensive Belvedere College, where Joyce excelled as an actor and a writer. Later, he attended University College in Dublin, where he became increasingly committed to language and literature as a champion of modernism. In 1902, Joyce left the university, and moved to Paris, but he returned to Ireland briefly for the death of his mother in 1903. Shortly after his mother's death, Joyce began work on the story that would later become A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Published in serial form in 1914-15, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man draws very, very heavily on details from Joyce's early life. Its protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, is in many ways Joyce's fictional double--Joyce had even published stories under the pseudonym "Stephen Daedalus" before writing the novel. Like Joyce himself, Stephen is the son of an impoverished father and a highly Catholic mother; like Joyce, he attends Clongowes Wood, Belvedere, and University College, and like him, he struggles with questions of faith and nationality before leaving Ireland to make his own way as an artist. Many of the scenes from the book are fictional, of course, but some of the most powerful are virtually autobiographical: both the Christmas-dinner scene shortly after the death of Charles Parnell and Stephen's first sexual experience with the Dublin prostitute accord closely to actual experiences in Joyce's life.

After completing Portrait of the Artist in Zurich in 1915, Joyce returned to Paris, where he wrote, over the course of the next several years, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. These three works, along with the story collection Dubliners, form the core of his remarkable literary career. He died in 1941.

Joyce was one of the great literary pioneers of the twentieth century--he was one of the first writers to make extensive and convincing use of a stylistic form called stream-of-consciousness, a type of writing in which the written prose seeks to mirror the thoughts and perceptions of particular characters, rather than rendering them in an objective, external portrait. This technique (used in Portrait mostly during the opening sections and in the fifth chapter) can make a prose passage confusing to read. But with effort, the jumbled perceptions can crystallize into a coherent and sophisticated portrayal of experience.