Portrait Of The Artist As Young Man Essays -

Portrait Of The Artist As Young Man Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man By: Valerie Gomez Stephen Dedalus, the main character in most of James Joyce's writings, is said to be a reflection of Joyce himself. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the reader follows Stephen as he develops from a young child into a young artist, overcoming many conflicts both internally and externally, and narrowly escaping a life long commitment to the clergy. Through Joyce's use of free indirect style, all of Stephen's speech, actions, and thoughts are filtered through the narrator of the story. However, since Joyce so strongly identifies with Stephen, his character's style and personality greatly influence the narrator. This use of free indirect style and stylistic contagion makes Joyce's use of descriptive language one of his most valuable tools in accurately depicting Stephen Dedalus's developing ideals of feminine beauty. As a very young child Stephen is taught to idealize the Virgin Mary for her purity and holiness. She is described to Stephen as "a tower of Ivory" and a "House of Gold" (p.35). Stephen takes this literally and becomes confused as to how these beautiful elements of ivory and gold could make up a human being. This confusion is important in that it shows Stephen's inability to grasp abstraction. He is a young child who does not yet understand how someone can say one thing and mean something else. This also explains his trouble in the future with solving the riddles and puzzles presented to him by his classmates at Clongowes. Stephen is very thoughtful and observant and looks for his own way to explain or rationalize the things that he does not understand. In this manner he can find those traits that he associates with the Blessed Mary in his protestant playmate Eileen. Her hands are "long and white and thin and cold and soft. That was ivory: a cold white thing. That was the meaning of Tower of Ivory" (p.36). "Her fair hair had streamed out behind her like gold in the sun" (p.43). To Stephen that is the meaning of House of Gold. He then attributes Eileen's ivory hands to the fact that she is a girl and generalized these traits to all females. This produces a major conflict for Stephen when his tutor, Dante, tells him not to play with Eileen because she is a Protestant and Protestants don't understand the Catholic faith and therefore will make a mockery of it. His ideas about women being unattainable are confirmed. The Virgin Mary is divine and therefore out of reach for mortals. Now Eileen, the human representation of the Blessed Mary, is out of reach as well because Stephen is not allowed to play with her. In chapter two an amazing transformation takes place in Stephen from a young innocent child who believes women are unattainable and who idealizes the Virgin Mary, into a young teen with awakening sexual desires. As Stephen matures into adolescence, he becomes increasingly aware of his sexuality, which at times is confusing to him. At the beginning of the second chapter in A Portrait, we find Stephen associating feminine beauty with the heroine Mercedes in Alexander Dumont Pere's The Count of Monte Cristo. "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....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..."(p. 62-3). These fantasies about Mercedes are the first real step for Stephen in challenging the church's view of women, but again he feels as though this image of women is out of his reach. She is a fictional character in a Romantic Adventure novel and he can only imagine himself with her. Although Mercedes may not be real, the feelings that Stephen has and the emotions she provokes in him are very real. "...As he brooded upon her image, a strange unrest crept into his blood." (p.64). "...but a premonition which led him on told him that this image would, without any overt act of his, encounter him... and in that moment of supreme tenderness he would be transfigured. He would fade into something impalpable under her eyes and then in a moment, he would be transfigured. Weakness and timidity and inexperience would fall from him that magic moment." (p.65). Stephen realizes that some transformation is going to take place,