Historical background
British rule in Ireland was brought to a head by the potato famine of the 1840s. There followed mass migration and a potent nationalism. Charles Stewart Parnell — a Protestant and the charismatic leader of the Home Rule cause in Westminster — briefly united Protestants and Catholics behind Irish independence. His public fall, however, after revelations of an affair with a married woman and the denunciation by the Catholic hierarchy, broke that alliance. The scandal and the Church’s withdrawal of support are commented on in the novel’s Christmas‑dinner argument. Contemporaries often blamed clerical condemnation for Parnell’s political ruination and premature death.
Literary context
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man charts Stephen Dedalus’s flight from the strictures of family, nation and faith into the solitary vocation of the artist. Written as a Bildungsroman, the narrative follows Stephen’s moral and aesthetic formation as he rejects the Roman Catholic world that shaped him and chooses exile in pursuit of art. Joyce mixes Victorian omniscient narration with Stephen’s voice using a free indirect narrative style. This inward turn shifts emphasis from the Victorian focus on society to personal consciousness and signals a transition towards Modernism in the novel.
Stephen’s name links him to the mythical Daedalus who escaped from a labyrinth by making wings. His son Icarus fell when he flew too near the sun. This summarises the novel’s dilemma: the artist’s desire to escape the maze of Irish Catholic culture by fleeing Ireland. The closing pages show his escape, but leave the open question of whether his flight will triumph or end in a tragic fall.
