On this day at Clongowes, Stephen shivers as he gets ready for bed, and by the time he climbs under the cold white sheets, he is “shaking and trembling” (19). It is his classmate Fleming who had noticed that Stephen was not well, and who tells him the next morning to stay in bed, fetching the prefect who will arrange for Stephen to go to the infirmary. Wells, alarmed that he will get in trouble for having pushed Stephen into the cold ditch water apologizes to him: “It was only for cod. I’m sorry” (21). In the infirmary, Stephen confronts his mortality. “He might die before his mother came” (24) he thinks, and imagines that “they would carry the coffin out of the chapel slowly and he would be buried in the little graveyard,” making Wells sorry for what he had done. These morbid thoughts are eased a bit by the talk and riddles of a fellow named Athy, who shares his infirmary room. But as Stephen drifts off to sleep, he has a vision of a multitude of people awaiting a ship at a harbor, emitting a wail of sorrow at the news that “Parnell! Parnell! He is dead!” (27)
This section offers a vivid view of young Stephen’s juvenile personality, his physical and social vulnerabilities, the pain of his emotional separation from his warm home and family, and his lively mind and vivid imagination processing words, stories, and information, even as he has to deal with the consequences of a very difficult day in his young life. The episode also details the consequences of conflict—a childish response to an unwillingness to make a trade, which becomes the prelude to the much larger sense of conflict that is rocking the Ireland of his day, and one that comes to a climax in the devastating argument between Dante and Mr. Casey in the next section of this chapter.
The Christmas dinner scene begins promisingly enough with a great fire warming the room, the chandelier trimmed with ivy, and the family waiting for the servants to bring in “big dishes covered with their heavy metal covers” (27). It is as though Stephen’s dreamy wish of a happy home while at Clongowes is being fulfilled. But the lovely dinner will be overlaid by the escalating conflict among Dante, Simon Dedalus, and his friend Mr. Casey, over the Church’s role in bringing down the Irish patriot Charles Stewart Parnell. The narration presents this scene in the third person from an adult perspective, but we are reminded that little Stephen is watching and listening to it all, but unable to sort out what the conflict is about. He knows Mr. Casey spent time in prison for “making speeches from a wagonette” (37), and he remembers a Sergeant O’Neill once coming to his house to speak nervously to his father about Mr. Casey. Yet he wonders why there would be a conflict if Mr. Casey “was for Ireland and Parnell and so was his father: and so was Dante too.”
But there definitely is a conflict. Mr. Dedalus calls priests “Sons of bitches!” and accuses them of having betrayed Parnell and destroyed him “like rats in a sewer” (34). And Mr. Casey aims an ultimate blasphemy at Dante by insisting that if God and religion come before everything, then “no God for Ireland!” and “Away with God!” (39). The dinner ends with Stephen raising “his terrorstricken face” to see his father’s eyes full of tears (39). Yet, the lesson Stephen takes away from this quarrel stands him in good stead when he returns to Clongowes, and is unjustly beaten with a pandybat by the prefect for having broken his glasses, presumably to get out of school work (“Broke my glasses! An old schoolboy trick!”) (50).
The Church and its priests are capable of oppression on both large and small scales, it appears. When his classmate Fleming, who was also beaten for being a lazy, idle loafer, defends Stephen and encourages him to “go up and tell the rector on him” (52), timid little Stephen somehow musters the courage to do just that. He may not be consciously imitating Parnell, or even his father and Mr. Casey, and he knows that his protest may backfire and result in more pandy-batting. But, all the same, his small burst of courage appears to have been obliquely underwritten by the witnessed Christmas dinner fight. In Stephen’s childhood experience, the topic of politics has been transformed from narrative and story into action, conflict, oppression, and revolt, or, at least, a response to oppression.
Chapter II
In the second chapter, Stephen’s transition from childhood into adolescence is accompanied by a problematic change in the social state of his family. The narration presents this with some subtlety, first by opening the limited horizon of home and school into a broader scene of Dublin and its environs, with Stephen accompanying his Uncle Charles to markets and parks, playing at adventure battles with his friend Aubrey Mills, and riding with a milkman on his route into the pastoral surroundings of the suburbs where “the cows were at grass” (63). He listens to his father and grand-uncle discuss politics, focused more on the language than on the social issues. “Words which he did not understand he said over and over to himself till he had learned them by heart: and through them he had glimpses of the real world about him” (62).
The artistic ambition at the heart of the Künstlerroman is in Stephen’s heart, preparing him for “the great part which he felt awaited him” in his life. And it is art that gives him the first stirring of romance through the language of a “ragged translation” of The Count of Monte Cristo that he reads in the evenings. The tension at the core of this time in his life is that as his soul reaches upward, as he longs to achieve a transformation into some greater version of himself, the material life around him disintegrates. This threatens to deprive him of the advantages of class and affluence that might have held great promise for him in the first chapter.
Scholar Morris Beja reports that Joyce’s family also suffered a “declining financial state in 1891” (6), requiring a series of moves to poorer and poorer housing. The Portrait narration conveys the effects of this change by embedding Stephen’s still-unclear and struggling thoughts and feelings into highly precise renderings of the material conditions of the world around him. In his fantasies, he pictures an encounter with an undefined female “image” that he envisions he would “meet quietly as if they had known each other and had made their tryst” (65). But his reality is peopled by figures like his father’s friend, Mike Flynn, with his “stubblecovered face” lit by “mild lustreless blue eyes,” and hands with long swollen and stained fingers that roll tobacco into cigarettes with grains and fibers falling back into the pouch (61). The narration offers an explanation of the deterioration of the material surroundings only through Stephen’s struggling and unclear sense of what is going on. “In a vague way he understood that his father was in trouble and that this was the reason why he himself had not been sent back to Clongowes” (64).
Later, on the first night in a new “half furnished uncarpeted” house whose parlor fire does not draw and whose bare floors are muddy from the shoes of the moving men, Stephen hears his father deliver a “long and incoherent monologue. He understood little or nothing of it at first but he became slowly aware that his father had enemies and that some fight was going to take place” (65).
Visits to his extended family in the city offer little comfort in the weeks that follow, for his relatives too have their problems. They can only dream of the beauty of the pantomime by looking at pictures in the newspaper. The family includes an infirm member described as a “feeble creature like a monkey (68), whose whining voice mistakes Stephen for a female ‘Josephine.’ No wonder Stephen is bitter: angry at himself not only for his “restless foolish impulses,” but also at “the change of fortune which was reshaping the world about him into a vision of squalor and insincerity” (67).
But curiously, Clongowes re-emerges in this chapter to give Stephen some critical help at this desperate time. He overhears his father tell his mother that he has bumped into someone who will arrange to get Stephen into Belvedere, a Dublin Jesuit school of much higher caliber than the Christian brothers’ schools the underprivileged are obliged to attend. The narration only describes what Stephen hears, so it is not until the end that we, and presumably Stephen, can infer that it was Father Conmee, the rector to whom Stephen had complained about being unfairly pandy-batted, who tells the father that the incident
gave him and Father Dolan, who beat the boys, a “famous laugh” over little Stephen’s protest—“Ha! Ha! Ha!” (72). We are not given Stephen’s response to hearing this story, yet can imagine that it all but destroyed his childhood moment of heroism.
But Stephen does well at Belvedere, where his reputation for essay writing gets him elected chairman of the gymnasium, and earns him a role in the annual Whitsuntide play. However, the oppressive nature of Catholicism that broke into conflict at the Christmas dinner some years before has not entirely gone away. It surfaces in a memory evoked in Stephen when his classmate Heron strikes him playfully on the leg with a cane. Near the end of his first term, Stephen had apparently been reproved by one of his teachers for inadvertently making a “heretical” statement in the phrase of an essay he wrote. At a later encounter with a group of classmates that includes Heron, the fellows decide to test Stephen’s orthodoxy with a set of charged questions, asking him to name the “greatest writer,” and then also “the best poet” (80). He passes the first question by naming Cardinal Newman, but his answer of “Byron” to the second earns him a beating on his legs with Heron’s cane, and a demand that he admit that Byron, whom the boys consider an immoral “heretic,” “was no good” (82).
Stephen does not concede and even allows the “cowardice and cruelty” of his classmates to pass into oblivion without resentment in the aftermath. But the incident resurfaces his conflict with the oppressive character of the Church, this time related specifically to his personal passion for and avocation of art. Joyce here focuses the challenges to be overcome by the emerging artist in the Künstlerroman on ongoing conflict with the effects of Irish Catholicism—not only on politics but also on art. The greatest challenge remains, however, and it will concern the issue of the adolescent’s emerging sexual feelings and inclinations, which will dramatically evoke the shamed response produced by Stephen’s religious retreat in the upcoming Chapter III.
However,Stephen’s attention to females begins in Chapter II—very sweetly—on the way home from a children’s party at Harold’s Cross. A girl playfully dances up and down the tram’s steps as “her glance travelled to his corner, flattering, taunting, searching, exciting his heart” (69). They appear not to speak, conversing only with looks and movements, but she clearly stirs some latent romantic impulses in Stephen and he thinks “I could hold her and kiss her” (70), although he does not. What he does do is transform the experience and his feelings into art on the next day, with a poem dedicated “To E___ C____”, whose initials, we learn in Stephen Hero, refer to a young woman named Emma Clery. A somewhat tense conversation Stephen has with Emma in that work is followed by the appearance of a woman with a glazed face, wearing a black straw hat who appears to be a prostitute.
Later, in Portrait, Stephen undergoes a transition from innocent romantic sensations provoked by Emma to “wasting fires of lust” that have him moan like some “baffled prowling beast” (99) as he wanders the “maze of narrow and dirty streets” (100) of Dublin’s red light district. This transition is separated by a series of family experiences including the night of the Whitsuntide play.
Before the play begins, Heron tells Stephen “We saw her” (77), referring to a young woman accompanying Stephen’s family who have come to see his performance. “And what part does Stephen take, Mr Dedalus?” Heron reports her as saying to Stephen’s father, and Stephen’s thoughts confirm that the young woman is indeed Emma, the girl with whom he had shared the tram ride at Harold’s Cross, the one who inspired his poem, and whom he has not seen again in the last two years.
The play, including Stephen’s performance, goes off splendidly, and when it is over, his “nerves cried for some further adventure” (85), presumably with the young woman who had come to see him perform. But he is devastated to find that she is gone after the play, and he leaves his family to run off in a swirl “of wounded pride and fallen hope and baffled desire” (86). His first romantic experience has ended in abandonment.
Further degradations of his family life will follow with a trip to Cork to sell his father’s property at auction, a downturn reprieved with a brief financial family renaissance when Stephen’s exhibition and essay prize money allows him to restore a brief affluence and elegance to his family. But this reprieve deteriorates as quickly as it began, “How foolish his aim had been!” (98). And now the “savage desire” and “secret riots” (97-98) that had caused him to commit mortal sins of lechery in his heart and his imagination are translated into actual wanderings into the brothel area. There he will follow a young woman dressed in a long pink gown into her room and, unwilling or unable to kiss her, she imposes a kiss whose pressure is to him “darker than the swoon of sin” (101).
Chapter III
Throughout Chapter II the style of the narration struggles with the intense emotional conflict that adolescence and the changing conditions of his family life impose on Stephen by alternating objective surroundings with his internal ruminations. His feelings can only be described in simple terms, and represented with simple details. “His very brain was sick and powerless,” we are told as he listens to his father try to recapture old friendships and pleasures on the depressing trip to Cork. “He could scarcely interpret the letters of the signboards of the shops. By his monstrous way of life he seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of reality” (92). This is followed by a poignant moment when Stephen tries to recapture reality with the simplest and most purely factual statements he can muster: “I am Stephen Dedalus. I am walking beside my father whose name is Simon Dedalus. We are in Cork, in Ireland. Cork is a city” (92). Joyce turns Stephen’s dilemma inside out here, by having wholly unemotional language convey emotional anguish precisely in its reversal.
Chapter III moves in a different direction. In its opening we encounter Stephen in a schoolroom, working equations on the page of a notebook. But the narration enters his thoughts which roam almost aimlessly around his moral life, the contrast between his acute sense of sin and his hypocritically pious outer life. Even as he views with contempt the Sunday church-goers who repel him with “the sickly smell of the cheap hairoil with which they had anointed their heads” (104), he is strangely enchanted by an image of the Blessed Virgin Mary, whose “eyes seemed to regard him with mild pity” and whose holiness shines like “a strange light glowing faintly upon her frail flesh” that makes him wish to be her knight (105).
This conflicted inner life of adolescence is soon subjected to an intervention clearly designed by the Church to address it in a most powerful way with the sermons of an annual religious retreat. The sermons are cleverly designed to encourage the teenage boys to “examine the state of our conscience, to reflect on the mysteries of holy religion and to understand better why we are here in this world” (109). By appealing to the four last things—“death, judgment, hell, and heaven”—the boys will be encouraged and frightened into considering how to “save our immortal souls” because “[a]ll else is worthless” (110). Instead of reporting or describing Father Arnall’s first sermon, the narration offers it verbatim at length, as Stephen hears it. A “faint glimmer of fear began to pierce the fog of his mind” (111) and by the second sermon this “became a terror of spirit as the hoarse voice of the preacher blew death into his soul” (112). This second sermon appears to flow from Stephen’s thoughts and feelings into the words he hears, “And this day will come, shall come, must come; the day of death and the day of judgment” (114), and its effect is powerful. “Every word of it was for him. Against his sin, foul and secret, the whole wrath of God was aimed,” he thinks. As he walks home, a young girl’s voice evokes, if only in his mind, how Emma would judge the “brutelike lust” that had “torn and trampled upon her innocence” (115). His shame prompts him to imagine that he could reverse his degraded state by fantasizing that “he stood near Emma in a wide land and, humbly and in tears, bent and kissed the elbow of her sleeve” (116).
But even though Stephen imagines salvation—“Take hands, Step
hen and Emma. It is a beautiful evening now in heaven. You have erred but you are always my children” (116)—the retreat is not over. The sermons go on and on, reviewing biblical sins and their punishments: Noah’s flood, Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit, and Jesus, enduring the torture of crucifixion in order to save those who would obey “the word of His church” while those who “persisted in their wickedness” (119) would be consigned to hell. The relentless cruelty of hell afflicts all the human senses as its suffocating closure makes sinners “not even able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws it,” enveloping them in a stench like that produced by “some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jellylike mass of liquid corruption” (120). Sinners in hell are made to feel a fire raging inside and outside the body. “The blood seethes and boils in the veins, the brains are boiling in the skull,” the students are told, “the bowels a redhot mass of burning pulp, the tender eyes flaming like molten balls” (121). No wonder Stephen leaves this last sermon with “his legs shaking and the scalp of his head trembling as though it had been touched by ghostly fingers” (124).
Pages and pages of depressing sermons represent a strange narrative maneuver in this chapter because they intrude with a voice that is neither a narrator’s nor a description of Stephen’s thoughts, becoming sufficiently tedious that readers may long to be simply done with them. But their function is to justify Stephen’s extreme emotional reaction in contrast to that of his classmates who are more easily able to shake off the sermons’ oppressive effects. His friend Heron, for example, appears to be little affected by the horrendous prose, complaining more about the rain: “I wish it would clear up. I had arranged to go for a spin on the bike with some fellows out by Malahide,” he says, while Stephen, sitting at his desk, has been gratefully thinking, “He had not died. God had spared him still” (125). The retreat continues, going on and on, but now guiding the way to repentance and its promise of forgiveness.
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