SOUTH PASADENA HIGH SCHOOL  D  THE ENGLISH SEMINARAP  [NICHOLSON]

James Joyce
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Some things to pay attention to
Dr. Vincent Cheng
University of Southern California




Chapter I:  memories of childhood, elementary 
school
Stephen's growing fascination with words and sounds, and 
with the correspondence between words, sounds, and 
objects; his interest in books; the light and dark; his 
initiation into the adult world of politics; Stephen's sense 
of injustice--why does Chapter I end with the story of his 
triumphant talk with the rector?
Chapter II:  adolescence--family moves to escape 
creditors
Stephen's growing sense of a) alienation, loneliness, and 
detachment, and b) the power of silence; his attitudes 
toward his father; also toward his mother; the search of 
his romantic imagination for the ideal, transfiguring 
woman (Eileen, Mercedes from The Count of Monte 
Cristo, B.V.M. = Blessed Virgin Mary, Emma Cleary, 
etc.).  How does this chapter end?
Chapter III:  wallowing in lust
Stephen's attitudes toward women and sex: sex vs. the 
idealized woman, lust vs. beauty, shame and guilt vs. 
repentance; his interest in technical religious questions; 
the nature of hell in the sermons; Lucifer's Fall as an act 
of self-exile and defiance: non serviam, I will not serve. 
 The chapter ends with repentance and spiritual renewal.
Chapter IV:  tries to choose a vocation--chooses 
art rather than priesthood
The power and secret knowledge of priesthood; Stephen's 
sundering from both father (and the misrule of his 
father's houseIreland?) and mother; his discovery of 
his priestly vocation as an artist (via the myth of 
Daedalus, Icarus, and the fall); the inspirational 
revelation of the bird-like girl on the beach. Chapter IV 
ends with a discovery of vocation and purpose.
Chapter V: at University--conversations about 
aesthetics-- decides to eave Ireland
a)  Stephen's aesthetic theory and definitions (from 
Aristotle and his applied Aquinas): art and beauty; pity 
and terror; rhythm; wholeness, harmony and radiance, and 
the moment of apprehension of beauty, of 
inspiration--light, claritas, epiphany; lyric, epic and 
dramatic forms; the artist's indifferent and invisible 
personality, refined out of existence from the work.
b)  Stephen's combat against the three nets of language, 
nationality, and religion through silence, exile and 
cunning; his sense of isolation, his self-imposed silence; 
his growing sense of women (mother, Emma, etc.) as 
treacherous, as symbols of Ireland, the Church, and Irish 
treachery: the old sow that eats her farrow.
c)  Stephen's exile: his rejection of home, parents, Ireland 
and Church for art and the priesthood of eternal 
imagination: he is the winged exile (in both senses of 
flight), the hawklike man: and symbol of the artist 
(Daedalus), the apprentice artificer (Icarus), both Icarus 
and Lucifer (Brightness falls from the air in both 
meanings of fall), the winged and defiant angel in 
Lucifer's non serviam.


Pay special attention, as you read, to the rich and intricate 
development of the themes and motifs of (1) light and 
vision, (2) birds, winged creatures, and flight (3) the 
myth of Daedalus and Icarus (mythic motif of escape 
from the Labyrinth [the maze of Dublin] by the father 
teaching the son how to fly) and  (4) Stephen's attitude 
toward women.
 



 

 


