The opening scene of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man begins with Stephen's father telling him a story about a moocow. Since this novel depicts the evolution of an artist - a storyteller - it's significant that the first story Stephen remembers comes from his father. Throughout his early childhood, Stephen looks up to his father and trusts everything he says. When he arrives at Clongowes, feeling lonely and scared, Stephen is guided by his father's advice to "never peach on a fellow". Stephen follows that advice, even when it means that Wells gets away with cruelly shoving him into a poop ditch.
As he grows older, Stephen's perfect image of his father starts to fade. Stephen begins to notice his family's economic struggles and feels embarrassed that his family is constantly moving to smaller houses in rougher neighborhoods. He disapproves of Simon's long reminiscent rambles about his youth in Cork and looks down upon his old friends, saying that "his mind seemed older than theirs: it shone coldly on their strifes and happiness and regrets like a moon upon a younger earth". By the time he joins the university, Stephen sees his father as a bumbling old fool who couldn't possibly understand the mind of a true artist such as himself.
Stephen's gradual disillusionment with his father mirrors his estrangement from Irish nationalism and the Catholic Church. He was raised to accept the authority of all forms of national, cultural, religious, and familial institutions, but as Stephen grows older he realizes a need to break free from the "nets" that restrict his artistic development.
Rather than forming an identity that synthesizes the beliefs he's grown up with, Stephen's fierce sense of independence drives him to completely cut ties from everything he's ever known. This need for freedom is why Stephen abandons his family, forsakes the Church, and sets out for Europe to become a modern artist.
This is very fascinating. At the beginning of the novel, Stephen's family was a constant presence. All of them had very significant importance to him. However, as the novel progresses and he leaves to go to a boarding school away from them, his connection with them fizzles out quickly. Some of them disappear from his memory. He begins to look down on his father, eventually even thinking about him as an idiot. He chooses to break his mother's heart for his own goals at the end of the novel. It seems like a necessary step for Stephen to become the artist he wishes to be, but I also think because of how disconnected he had already become with them, it was a much easier decision for him than it might seem to many of us. He even said he didn't love his mother, because he didn't know what love was. Ireland and the Church tore him away from his family from a young age, leaving him lonely in a school where he was often mocked and bullied, and no parents or friends to cling to. No wonder it may have seemed necessary to Stephen for him to distance himself from everybody to become an artist.
ReplyDeleteI think our discussion today makes this observation even more complex and interesting. Yes, Stephen makes a big deal about exiling himself from his previous life. But, as we learned, he only writes about Dublin. While his physical being is far from the life he knew, his "spirit" remains heavily influenced by his childhood.
ReplyDeleteI think this point has a lot to say about coming of age as a subject, since many of us find in our coming-of-age journeys that we start questioning those in authority and who we were raised to look up to. We come to wrestle with who we are as people, and wonder how much of it comes from the people we were brought up alongside, and how much if it is actually purely "us". As we see in Stephen's case (mirrored by Joyce's), he ends up leaving his family and Dublin yet focuses a lot of his writing and art on Dublin, meaning his upbringing is still rooted inside him, despite him being independent from his now-rejected society. This really connects with the talks we've had about coming of age in the very beginning of the semester, in which we could all really agree that coming of age is a loss as much as it is a gain, and every journey is vastly different.
ReplyDeleteI really like your point about how coming of age involves both the loss of institutional values and the gain of new and independent ways of thinking. These losses and gains make us individuals with different ways of existing in the world. The end of Chapter 5 shows Stephen cutting himself off from older beliefs, and I think it would be interesting to see how Stephen learns and synthesizes new values once he leaves for Europe.
DeleteIt's fascinating that many of the values such as religion, and nationalism defined what stephen rejects. I wonder how stephen dedalus would turn out in an atheist, liberal family. He seems so sure of his artistic and anti religious beliefs at the end of the novel, but they are very much defined as the opposite of earlier values. This is not necessarily wrong but i criticize the way stephen looks down on others for their beliefs.
ReplyDeleteIt would be an interesting case study to see Stephen's reaction to his family had they had different beliefs, maybe it is the repression of Catholicism as well as it's deep roots in Ireland making it so prevalent that makes Stephen so disdainful of those who believe in it.
DeleteI think Stephen thinks the only way to find his identity and figure out who he is a person is to cut off and remove everything from his past. That includes his beliefs, family, friends, and any other things that potentially influence him. So that's I think he believes that in order for him to truly be an "artist", he has to isolate himself from his past.
ReplyDeleteI'm always struck by Simon Dedalus's final appearance in the novel, in the "journal entry" section at the very end: Stephen is with his nationalist pal Davin, and they run into his father, who suggests Stephen join a rowing team (!), and Stephen politely but dismissively "pretends to think it over." He sort of humors his father here, who is so fully out of touch with the guy Stephen has become. But Stephen is no longer angry or impatient; he just humors him until he goes away. This little vignette speaks volume as to how far his father has fallen in his estimation.
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