A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Over the course of his young life, Stephen becomes obsessed with language. He speaks English as his primary language, though also learns Latin and other languages at school and college. Despite being Irish, he possesses only a passing knowledge of the Irish language. As Stephen matures, he explores the meaning of identity through art and language, and eventually realizes that his passions are his liberation.

Stephen uses language in an artistic capacity. Even as a young child, Stephen uses poetry and prose to organize and codify complex emotions. When his family yells at him for asking to marry a Protestant girl, Stephen—who is too young to understand the clash between Catholics and Protestants—retreats into himself and writes a nursery rhyme-like poem to make sense of the situation. Later, Stephen writes love poems to express his feelings for Emma. By this point, he has matured enough to understand romantic feelings, but rather than using his art as a bridge for human connection, he keeps himself separated from his peers. He never declares his love to Emma herself, as he is never quite satisfied with the poems.

Despite his passion for poetry, language is always limited in Stephen’s view. To him, mere words cannot truly express the depth and nuance of his strongly-felt emotions. This ties language to liberation, and to the theme of Independence and Identity. At times, Stephen worries that because English is a language of a colonial power, imposed on the people of Ireland, it denies Irish people like himself the capability to truly express ideas about nationalism and patriotism. Stephen struggles with his nationalist impulses because he fears that he does not truly understand Ireland. For Ireland to be liberated, the country must be also liberated from the English language. English is Stephen’s native tongue, however, and is the language through which he discovers and explores his passion for art and poetry. Thus, despite being born and raised in Ireland, Stephen must consider the consequences of potential political liberation. To Stephen, artistic expression becomes a complicated and confusing interplay between language and liberation.

Language is also used in the novel to explore Stephen’s fading devotion. Stephen is raised Catholic, and, from a young age, he is made keenly aware of the sectarian interplay between his Catholic identity and the external Protestantism of the English. Prior to the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s, Catholic Mass was held in Latin. Mass, which represents knowledge of and connection to God, was conducted entirely in an ancient language, only spoken by priests and certain educated individuals in the community. As such, the language spoken during a church service in Stephen’s lifetime possesses a sectarian, colonial aspect. While an Irish Catholic like Stephen would have to purposely study Latin in order to deepen their religious comprehension, Protestants held their services in English, allowing them to claim a vernacular connection to God.

As Stephen’s family is initially wealthy, Stephen has access to education, and he learns Latin during his studies. Stephen‘s increased skill in the Latin language occurs simultaneously with his fading belief in God, however. This ability to understand the Latin Mass represents a growing understanding and scrutiny of the nature of God. Stephen speaks the language of the church, but eventually, he frees himself from the shackles of belief. By not believing in judgment after death, he frees himself from the shame of his past sins. For Stephen, a knowledge of the Latin language is a tool of liberation.

Once he loses his religion, Stephen searches for a new purpose in his life. He briefly explores academia, but quickly gives it up when he finds it does not meet his expectations. His fellow students are not only far more social than he is, but they are passionately invested in the topic of Irish liberation, which contrasts with Stephen’s growing need to fully detach. All his life, Stephen has viewed the world through the lens of a narrator; eventually, Stephen realizes that art is the only thing that seems to add substance to his existence. Once he embraces this, Stephen finds his own liberation, as he is free to turn his focus to his true passion.

Stephen wants to be a writer. More specifically, he wants to be a poet. Throughout his life, he has dallied with the prospect of writing poems, but these only arrived in snatches of verses that were scattered throughout the text. As Stephen matures, however, his poems take on a new form. His full villanelle is included in the novel, with Joyce pausing the narrative so that readers can appreciate Stephen’s development as a writer. His poetry is a combination of art and language that proves he has been liberated from his past burdens. The novel’s format shifts to diary entries as Stephen seizes control of the written word, and with it, control of his own story.

However, the modernist tendencies of the novel hint at the limitations that await Stephen in the future. Joyce shared his contemporaries’ concern that language struggles to communicate entire, complex emotions and ideas. T. S. Eliot and other modernists sought to create a new mode of artistic expression that shrugged off the shackles of the past—such as form and meter—and revolutionized the way in which poetry and prose communicated with the reader. Free verse and stream of consciousness, for example, are attempts to leave behind literary forms and conventions that limit the expression of language. Stephen, like Joyce, seeks to free himself by finding a new way to speak to the world. Joyce went on to experiment with the English language in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, the former of which continues Stephen’s story. In this respect, the novel’s final chapter most closely draws the parallel between Joyce and Stephen, in which the author’s own artistic concerns are embedded into his protagonist’s future.

Of all Stephen’s struggles, his spiritual struggles most prominently dominate his thoughts. Stephen is raised Catholic in a Catholic country. With a devout mother, he is raised to believe in the Catholic God and the teachings of the Catholic Church. When he hears the adults argue over a dinner table, he instinctively sides with Dante and her assertion that the priests of the Catholic Church must always be followed, only changing his mind when he remembers that Dante dislikes the girl he has a crush on. The level of conviction his mother and his governess possess leaves a lasting impression on Stephen, one that causes him great inner turmoil as he grows older and must reckon with the clash between his maturing thoughts and his religious upbringing.

Throughout his youth, Stephen veers wildly between devotion and sin. At first, he simply accepts his mother’s beliefs and follows the teachings of the Catholic Church. He trusts his mother, though he instinctively ponders the vastness of the universe even early on. Though Stephen witnesses intense disagreements—Protestant faith versus Catholic faith, religious devotion versus patriotism—he is too young to comprehend the nuances of these conversations, and uninterested in topics that don’t seem to have much on impact his life.

As he grows older, however, Stephen finds himself developing romantic, then sexual urges. At first, he keeps these thoughts private; he quietly fantasizes about a fictional character, and he does not attempt to touch or kiss his second crush, Emma, even when they share a ride home. However, when he moves to Dublin, he descends into a routine of visiting sex workers. This coincides with an overall turn toward rebellion and a desire for anonymity as Stephen grows increasingly dissatisfied with the state of his life.

Over time, Stephen struggles to keep his daytime life—as Stephen Dedalus—and his nighttime life—as the anonymous wanderer—apart. Fears of eternal damnation begin to invade his thoughts. For a while, he refuses to pray for mercy because he feels he is too far gone for fake pleas to hold any sway over God. Eventually, though, the thought of sinning becomes overwhelming, and Stephen abandons his lifestyle to become very religious. Competing influences—his mother, his sexual desires, his priest—tempt Stephen back and forth across the religious divide between belief and unbelief. Whichever side he is on at any given moment, Stephen goes to the extreme: He is either the most pious boy in his school or a debauched young man with a sex addiction.

Although Stephen abandons his debauchery, he struggles to convince himself that his beliefs are sincere. So much of his devotion is a performance, whether he is rubbing rosary beads in his trouser pocket or loudly joining in with the recital of prayers. These rituals of devotion are gestures, made to the outside world to ratify Stephen’s reputation as a religious man. Behind the religious mask, however, Stephen struggles to comprehend his personal connection to religion. Not only has Stephen himself swung wildly back and forth, but he has also seen the hypocrisy in other believers. His father, for example, urged Stephen to be a devout Catholic and a gentleman, all while harassing women and squandering their family fortunes. Stephen even witnesses Dante, one of the most spiritual people he knows, contradict herself in public versus private. As such, Stephen has come to understand the role of performance in his religion. Rather than feeling some true connection to God, Stephen’s piety is based in terrifying fantasies of damnation, which makes it difficult for him to become genuinely devout.

When he is given the chance to embark on a career as a priest, Stephen thinks about his future. In this vision, Stephen sees himself in the third person. He examines the power and authority he would have as a priest, but this vision makes him realize that he is invested in the appearance of devotion rather than religion itself. Stephen’s religious struggles turn his belief into a fiction, a theatrical, exaggerated version of religion that is as hollow as it is public. Behind closed doors, in his private thoughts, Stephen can no longer ignore the doubts he has about religion. This leads him to reject the Jesuit path and end his attempts at a religious life.

After a life spent obsessing over the state of his immortal soul, Stephen ends the book with a liberating sense of rejection. Stephen simply stops caring about God, having realized that the entire institution of the church is as much a performance as his own period of piety. He reasons himself into a position where he can no longer believe in God. He is no longer bound by visions of hell or burdens of shame. To the end, however, Stephen struggles to separate religion from performance. When he confesses his newfound atheism to Cranly, he shares a story about an “unpleasant quarrel” (271) with his mother. She wants him to attend church with her at Easter, but Stephen believes that he cannot do so. Cranly chides him, questioning whether he is really an atheist. If Stephen truly does not believe, he suggests, then he should have no trouble performing religion for the sake of his mother’s happiness; he should believe that there will be no repercussions for taking communion without the attendant faith. Stephen, however, has decided he will no longer serve anyone, including his family. What seems like a simple gesture to placate his mother is, to Stephen, an unacceptable compromise. Stephen claims he has put religion entirely behind him, but it is clear that he has not fully overcome the struggle between complete non-belief and the public performance of spirituality.

At the end of the book, Stephen proves that he has found a happy medium for himself. His last entry is a prayer to Daedalus, the Greek mythological figure who is his namesake. In this way, Stephen is able to combine his lingering sense of spirituality with a safe form of religion: worship of someone to whom he has a personal connection, but who is completely out of reach. This frees Stephen from the fears of damnation under the eyes of an all-seeing God, and frees him from the necessity of performance, as no one would expect Stephen to attend church for Daedalus. Lastly, this ties Stephen’s spirituality to his art, as Daedalus is, in essence, a fictional character; in this way, spirituality can serve as inspiration for his art and his pursuit of happiness, rather than block him from it.