A Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Grad Student

I needed a break from the library. The fluorescent lights, the silence, the unending construction. When my friend asked to meet at a coffee shop, I agreed for the change of scenery. Little did I know that this coffee shop had fluorescent lights, too!

Anyways, so I wrote about Dubliners so now it's time to write about Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). As I mentioned in that post, mothers don't figure in as predominantly in Dubliners, but they linger in the background. Mothers, mentors, (mis)guides with the rising generation that is inevitably stalled by their predecessors. Here, though, it's a little different. It's not just the nurturing figures who cause the protagonists to stagnate; rather, the focus has shifted to the protagonist's own responsibility in creating his journey.

To follow up on Virginia Woolf (making so many connections in this blog!), I think the relationship between the metaphysical and the physical is interesting. Just as in "An Encounter," we get this circular movement throughout the text. We go from memory to boarding school back home and back to school just in the first section. The circle slowly widens as Stephen is sent to a different school, closer to home, and begins to explore Dublin. He travels around as he gets older, but any exploration beyond the city limits resolves with a return home. Furthermore, each section ends with an epiphany that is immediately undermined by the beginning of the subsequent section, and so consequently, any psychological move forward is quickly followed by a return to the start. It is not until Stephen decides to end his physical circling by going to Paris that we seem to make any headway in the formation of identity and a development of personal principles (this, however, can be debated by the publication of Ulysses).

Okay, so obviously women are used by this text as "mile markers," but before I dive deep into that, I want to talk about the male mentors of the text: Stephen's father, the school priests, Father Arnall, Cranly, and maybe even Davin. Each man represents a different facet or option of Irish masculinity. Simon Dedalus as the (failed) political agent, the school priests represent external authorities

The men seem to represent external principles that Stephen attempts to accept and embody while the women represent Stephen's projection of his forming internal principles. Because the text is an examination of the formation of an artist--the tracking of his internal journey--the text incorporates feminine principles, symbols, and techniques throughout.

From the outset of the novel, the language is circular. Joyce relies on repetition to establish a child-like perspective and a reliance on the maternal. When Stephen Dedalus gets sick at school, he lies in bed with his thoughts piling on one another. The ideas begin to circle through their repetition, and almost in a Steinian fashion, the repetition allows the difference to emerge. Stephen's thoughts slowly progress as he considers, "God was God's name just as his name was Stephen. Dieu was the French for God and that was God's name too; and when anyone prayed to God and said Dieu then God knew at once that it was a French person that was praying. But though there were different names for God in all the different languages in the world and God understood what all the people who prayed said in their different languages still God remained always the same God and God's real name was God." Not only the logic but the language itself is circular.

Stephen often comforts himself through rhythmic motions: playing with the sound of his ears, rocking himself back and forth, or wandering in circles. This often occurs as a response to more overt masculinity around him: violent bullies, angry school teachers, or a disappointing father. The circular imagery becomes more overtly tied to the feminine principle in chapter three as Stephen explores the Catholic faith as a part of his identity. He imagines 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, fading slowly, quenching its own lights and fires." This is shortly followed by a reflection upon Mary in which he believes that "the glories of Mary held his soul captive."Mary--the ultimate mother--is but one consideration of the maternal in Portrait. For while scholars have looked at the role of the father in both Portrait and Ulysses, it is important to remember that fathers require mothers.

So while fathers and mothers must both be present, they seem to emerge in through fathers as obstacles--assertive, protruding, demanding--and mothers as enablers--nurturing, comforting, and supportive. This also seems to reflect Joyce's own experiences as a writer. It was working with Dora Marsden and Harriet Shaw Weaver that he was finally able to publish his works. But through this support also comes an obligation or responsibility to those supporting. While nurturing allows a child to leave the home, it also demands that the child returns. It is harder to resist the maternal embrace; the father's phallic authority is more clearly subverted. Joyce considers how maternal morals caused Ireland to circle in on itself and exclude Parnell after his affair is exposed. When Stephen considers attending university, he notices that:

Yes, his mother was hostile to the idea, as he had read from her listless silence. Yet her mistrust pricked him more keenly than his father's pride and he thought coldly how he had watched the faith which was fading down in his soul ageing and strengthening in her eyes. A dim antagonism gathered force within him and darkened his mind as a cloud against her disloyalty and when it passed, cloud-like, leaving his mind serene and dutiful towards her again, he was made aware dimly and without regret of a first noiseless sundering of their lives.

Her influence is quieter than his father's, but it is stronger and longer lasting. Even as a university student Stephen still has his mother wash him as a baby. He openly resists his father--the two engage in hostile interactions by the novel's end--but he cannot fight his mother to the same extent.

Stephen seems to be associated with his maternal, or at least feminine, principle more than he is with the paternal or the masculine. It is almost that by not conforming to the traditional masculine identity, he becomes "not-man" and so somehow closer to a woman. During one of the pinnacle moments of the text--the sex scene--he is described with a passive and submissive sexuality. He performs the traditional role of a woman in a romance novel, receiving her lover's embrace. But as giving Stephen this role, does Joyce not play with the understanding of power and gender?

Mothers shape the communities that fathers head, in Joyce's text. Cranly observes the importance of mothers when beseeching Stephen to not isolate himself from all community:

—Your mother must have gone through a good deal of suffering, he said then. Would you not try to save her from suffering more even if... or would you?

—If I could, Stephen said, that would cost me very little.

—Then do so, Cranly said. Do as she wishes you to do. What is it for you? You disbelieve in it. It is a form: nothing else. And you will set her mind at rest.

He ceased and, as Stephen did not reply, remained silent. Then, as if giving utterance to the process of his own thought, he said:

—Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not. Your mother brings you into the world, carries you first in her body. What do we know about what she feels? But whatever she feels, it, at least, must be real. It must be. What are our ideas or ambitions? Play. Ideas! Why, that bloody bleating goat Temple has ideas. MacCann has ideas too. Every jackass going the roads thinks he has ideas.

Stephen, who had been listening to the unspoken speech behind the words, said with assumed carelessness:

—Pascal, if I remember rightly, would not suffer his mother to kiss him as he feared the contact of her sex.

—Pascal was a pig, said Cranly. . .

His hat had come down on his forehead. He shoved it back and in the shadow of the trees Stephen saw his pale face, framed by the dark, and his large dark eyes. Yes. His face was handsome and his body was strong and hard. He had spoken of a mother's love. He felt then the sufferings of women, the weaknesses of their bodies and souls: and would shield them with a strong and resolute arm and bow his mind to them.

Away then: it is time to go. A voice spoke softly to Stephen's lonely heart, bidding him go and telling him that his friendship was coming to an end. Yes; he would go. He could not strive against another. He knew his part.

If Stephen wants to be free from his community and its limitations, he must physically leave. The mother's influence is inescapable in physical proximity and her lure will perpetuate the circling within a community, like a planet orbiting the sun. Stephen's own mother tells him that he may leave the church but he will return to it eventual, circle back once more. To an extent, she is right. He cannot strive against another, but he mostly cannot strive against a mother. And as we know from Ulysses, his mother does draw him back once more.

But we are still in Portrait, and at the end of Portrait, Stephen pens, "Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead." But he says this as he ventures to birth and nurture his own creation.

Oh God, I thought I needed a break from the fluorescent lights, but now I need a break from myself.

#jamesjoyce #portraitoftheartistasayoungman #maternal #motheraspathos #artistmother #ireland #father