Joyce Paper

How Stephen Changes

In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce develops the character of Stephen Dedalus by exploring the attraction to art as well as women to greater show the effects of the two in comparison to the roles in actual existence. Through the novel Stephen is a victim of his own unconscious mind and leads him to a journey of guilt and ultimately a loss of innocence. Joyce as well suggests that Stephen, no matter the circumstance, is still a teenager coming of age in, modern society, that one infant boy finds the predominant male figure a threat and needs to find comfort in the mother or alternative female figure.

In the passage in Chapter 1 (pg. 26-27), Stephen is confronted with a rather childish joke played on by the bullies at the school, furthermore this explains Stephen’s progress in the Oedipal stages of personality as well as behavior. The conflict at hand is the criticism of the mother figure in Stephen’s life, phrased by the question, “Do you kiss your mother every night before you go to bed?” At first Stephen says “I do” (26) and the mere shame is enough to spur the imagination of young Dedalus. In this case Stephen’s subconscious is affecting his behavior around his peers. It is in this passage that the diction commonly used to indicate such phallic imagery is further explored by Joyce. Stephen tries to laugh again to relieve himself of the guilt of having been tricked. “He felt his whole body hot and confused in a moment.” (27) Stephen is often times bogged down by these figures that are dominating him.

The passage was further analyzed by Sheldon Brivic in his critical essay on A Portrait, in which he proclaims that the exchange between Wells and Stephen shows, “This refers not to Stephen being at home with his mother but to an imaginary mother Stephen kisses in the present.”(282) Also, on a grander scale Wells’ comment is an emotional scar for Stephen and more importantly his identity which splinters his actions and emotional control.

The choice is a respectful one because he faces the possibility of losing a maternal figure, but on the other hand he may disobey this premature belief that he may lose the attention or competition for the maternal feel and touch. In a state of imagination and self-doubt Stephen talks of his decision to answer the question. After this answer he ponders, “Was it right to kiss his mother or wrong to kiss his mother?…Why did people do that with their two faces?”(27) The use of contradictory thoughts and feelings guides the views that Stephen finds in the intolerable acts of others. For instance when the boys steal the wine from the sacristy (57) “must have been a terrible sin to steal the flashing gold thing into which God was put on the altar.” (57) Joyce makes the contrast that sin is so important than the childhood desires much like the one Stephen is drawn to by the Oedipus Complex involving his mother.

From this point, Joyce makes connections to the sin one must feel indulging in the passions that are associated with the development of children. After the communion Stephen is imaginarily burdened by God as he is his newfound father in the growth process.

In a new passage in chapter 2, Joyce emphasizes the breakdown of the former male figure of his father and the burden of the church coming down on his father more than it should Stephen himself. After his family is in shambles, his father is a scapegoat to Stephen who can now feel more artistic freedoms. “There’s a crack of the whip left in me yet, Stephen, old chap, said Mr. Dedalus, poking the dull fire with fierce energy. We’re not dead yet.” (70) As described by Brivic, there is a “paternal defeat” (285) which brings about the anxiety that Stephen had succumbed to in his passionate encounter of his sin:

“….he was different from others. He did not want to play. He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld. He did not know where to seek it or how: but a premonition told him that this image would, without any overt act of his encounter him. They would meet quietly as if they had known each other and had made their tryst, perhaps at one of the gates or in some more secret place.” (pg. 69)

It would be easy to conclude that Mercedes, is a desired mother figure, but Joyce does not intend this to be the preeminent cause of concern for young Stephen. Rather, Joyce uses the imagined incident to guide his character to very well succeed in the locating of the real figure he desires. Arguably in the home of the church and in the heart of the oldest text to date Joyce gives Stephen the Virgin Mary. Here Joyce makes an interesting choice of comparison. He takes a popular Freudian belief and a holy spirit to test the limits of the Oedipus Complex as it applies to Stephen. Joyce takes a virgin figure (Mary) and demonstrates just how far Stephen can control the urge to violate himself in the sin of lust. This is contrasted by the view that Freud thinks that children find sex “icky” and “gross,” but feel that it is awful that their mother was involved with another man. Joyce intentionally uses the Virgin to confirm the changing of the guard as it applies to Stephen. It is assumed that from now on Mary is to be the mother of Stephen and that Stephen in turn is the reincarnation of Jesus who had been killed for his sins against humanity.

The vacancy left by his family’s seemingly abandonment of Stephen allows him the artistic freedom he so truly desires. With a change of setting, Stephen feels “freer” (70) than ever before and his memory of the old town brings back heart “warming” feelings about life. He “missed the bright sky and the sun-warmed trellises of the wine shops,” (70). Once again warmth and heat are being associated with a longing memory and context. Alas, this is also used later in regards to his second dream sequence in which he is receiving communion, “He sat by the fire in the kitchen, not daring to speak for happiness. Till that moment he had not known how beautiful and peaceful life could be” (pg. 134) Stephen’s desire for his former land in retrospect visualizes the desire to get back the mother he had grown to accept and love to the greatest of artistic ability and will. The uses of the flashbacks and dream sequences each demonstrate Stephen’s inner conflicts over religion, morality, and sin. In the growth process he is shielding himself from the horrors of reality, but embracing the artistic freedom and the knowledge of the road ahead.

Furthermore, this story can be broken down into different stages and how the growth of Stephen is important to better understanding the ultimate goal of Joyce’s writing. In the stages there is always a hope that Stephen gets to “her” and that he can be self-fulfilled. In the natural progression there is also the possibility that his saved up emotions can lead to fulfillment. Joyce’s abusing of these “epiphanies” all begin with the repetition of the phrase “he was sitting” (71-72) all these lead to the next stages of Freud’s belief pattern. In humanity, most bottled up emotions result in anger, however, Stephen absorbs this infuriation with society. Joyce creates the artistic freedom because for a rare instant, Stephen is paralleling Joyce in his own novel. At this point they seem to know each other by heart and the severe misunderstanding of behaviors and events both seem to inspire. Joyce writes to explore his own path and what Stephen can do to change Joyce and vice-versa.

In Chapter IV, he goes to the beach which is a significant setting change, which resembles of the first stage in the psychoanalytic diagram presented by Sheldon Brivic in his essay (291). “His soul had risen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her grave clothes.”(154) The reference to the imagined “bird-girl” (153) exposes Stephen’s newfound freedom stating that “beauty is without shame” (154), however, the warmth that “she” provides is only a memory conjured up by the unconscious part of his brain. Ironically, the harsh realities return in chapter V, as stated by Brivic:

“His fantasies of transcendence are contained in a framework that shows them to be illusions, but without them Stephen could not build his vision…the opposing vectors… allow the structure to embody the vitality (pulse) of Stephen’s mind.” (293)
This becomes a turning point in the reasoning for his art, the “why” and “how,” he creates this “art.” He (Stephen) can now use art to document his history and use it as a way to forget the memories that held him back so long. The retrieving of the art as a fulfillment of history and its forgetfulness, initiates a balance of power between life and art and how these two no longer so associated. Stephen’s idea of this balance is contradicted by the literal interpretation of stasis (balance). On pg. 183, Stephen argues that, “the mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing,” however the idea of a stasis is that two planes are at one, paralleled in every way, shape, and form. Stephen’s argument can be broken down even further into a simple effort of emotions not being able to coexist in the same world as art; therefore one can not be mixed with the other. Stephen accuses kinetic (active) emotions are purely physical emotions:

“Our flesh shrinks from what it dreads and responds to…what it desires by a purely reflex action of the nervous system… [But] Beauty expressed by the artist cannot awaken in us an emotion which is kinetic or a sensation which is purely physical. It awakens…an esthetic stasis, an ideal pity or an ideal terror, a stasis called forth, prolonged and at last dissolved by what I call the rhythm of beauty.” (184)

Joyce seems to write this segment of the story to have an argument with his own conscious represented here by Stephen as a means of aggression. In this crossfire, desires are matched with ideas and Stephen acknowledges the difference between an emotion that is kinetic and one that lacks the heart and soul of the others. According to Simon Lesser, “The peace of stasis is arrived at by balancing opposed psychic forces in a pleasing way.” Also, Lesser demonstrates that a failure to communicate these emotions in Stephen’s art embodies the work as disgraceful and lewd as well as cheap and prohibitive.

This greater struggle Stephen has forming an alliance with his art concurrently relates to his feelings about Ireland and his later conversion to a stance in which he is a non-conformists to the state in taking socialism. His “motherland,” Ireland, to Stephen is like a “strumpet” that now “works” solely for the state of England. With the scary images of such treachery and anarchy seem like the depleted state of his voyaged trip for his mother. By the time Chapter V arises, Stephen no longer feels the need to be nurtured by a “mother.” Instead, Stephen has found his calling, his freedom, by fittingly: Abandoning All Hope Ye Who Enter Here (in this case, a creative freedom). Stephen, being isolated by the end of the novel, finds that one must be alone to attack their nation. He would not be able to find the strength needed to do this if he does not learn from the psychoanalytic approach to his life.
Stephen is given the power to relinquish all the disturbing thoughts and events that he had pondered about for so long and all those things could not change Stephen and what he really was. The transition Stephen makes is not one in which is immature to wise in the ways of art of development. Stephen is trapped in this situation because he is caught in between the transition from a boy to a teenager, between what he has been taught and what is logical, and between the real world and his imagination.