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‑lunch 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 narrative's traditional focus on society to personal consciousness. It signals a transition towards Modernism in the evolution of the novel.
Stephen’s name links him to the mythical Daedalus who escaped from a labyrinth by fabricating wings. His son Icarus fell when he flew too near the sun. This allusion summarises the novel’s dilemma: the artist’s desire to escape the maze of Irish Catholic culture by fleeing the country. The closing pages show his escape, but leave the open question of whether his flight will triumph or end in a tragic fall.
Summary
DiscussionA central theme in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist is Stephen Dedalus’s growing decision to throw off his upbringing and flee Ireland. The protagonist’s growing-up experience is compared to that of a bird caught in the triple cultural nets of nationality, religion and language, which impede him from flying, as his mythical namesake did.
The topic of Irish nationality is one which divides his family and it comes to a head at a Christmas dinner in an argument about Parnell, the deposed Home Rule leader. Though Stephen is too young to understand the political discussion, he is later faced with it at university. He refuses to side with the activists promoting Ireland’s independence from British rule, but yet the issue affects him as a budding artist: he chooses to write in English, not Irish Gaelic and thus partly abandons his Irish past.
The weight of his traditional Catholic childhood, dominated by fear and guilt, affects his view of sex. Confession and a hellfire retreat sermon increase his conscience of sinfulness. In order to free himself from this angst he adopts a born-again attitude of saintliness, but discovers that this is not sustainable. He also finds that these Catholic beliefs have affected his perception of women, who appear in a triple division: his female family members, the Virgin Mary and the local prostitutes. As his Jesuit educators know, beliefs run deep and are not to be easily thrown off.
In the final pages of the novel Stephen himself narrates through a diary. He declares that his flight from Ireland is not actually an escape from his background, but rather an establishing of a distance in order to become "the consciousness" of his race. The Portrait is the inauguration of this distancing.
The author chose to write his novel in a free indirect style in which Stephen’s first-person thoughts are voiced by a third-person narrator. This shift of emphasis from the conventional Victorian omniscient narrator and focus on society to a tale of personal consciousness signals a transition towards Modernism in the evolution of the novel. Joyce not only distances himself from his own cultural background, but does it through creative use of narrative technique.
