Development of an Artist in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
“finite to infinite, creature to creator, earthly to
heavenly (or hellish) domains”.
Stephen’s maturity comes through his bitter
experiences of life; his rebellion is directed against all constituted
authority in different forms: family, school, custom, race etc.
In his early age, he fears the authority in the
domestic atmosphere.
“He
hid under the table.”
The
only way to escape punishment is to submit or to “apologize”. He finds
the “conscience of [his] race” as corrupt and brutal. He also finds the social
customs rigid and ready-made which he must conform. In his school he is “caught
in the whirl of a scrimmage”, and is unduly punished by one of the
teachers, Father Dolan. However, he repots the cruelty to the rector and is
applauded by others for his courage. Therefore he now feels “happy and free”
for his status.
But his feelings of happiness and
freedom ends soon and he has to struggle to keep his identity in a hostile
environment which demands him to be athletic and patriotic, a good son, a
decent fellow, and a good Catholic above all things. But because of the demands
of his growing body, he feels obsessed by erotic feelings. Even, he gets his
first sexual experience, with a young Dublin
prostitute.
In her arms he felt that he had suddenly become strong
and fearless and sure of himself.
Thus
the natural man achieves a temporary fulfillment here.
In the next stage, Stephen turns into a
spiritual man after he has attended a three-day religious retreat. Under the
direct emotional assault of this fiery sermon, Stephen feels
“a terror of spirit as the hoarse voice of the
preacher blew death into his soul”.
To
him,
“The past was past… The ciborium
had come to him.”
His
religious devotion is so pronounced that the director of his school asks him to
consider entering the priesthood.
In the meantime, Stephen has grown to
excel as a writer and as an actor in the student theater of Belvedere.
Therefore, to consider the rector’s offer, now he feels that his vocation is
not the priesthood which is to him “a grave and ordered and passionless life”.
On the contrary, he needs to lead a free life in order to grow the artist in
him. His mental conflict leads him to conclude that he can not accept the
rector’s offer. And so the artist in Stephen is born.
That day when Stephen was walking on
the beach with anxiety for his family university affairs, he observes a young
girl wading in the tide. Struck by her beauty, he feels the artist’s joy:
“Heavenly God! cried Stephen's
soul, in an outburst of profane joy.”
He
visualizes significance of his name, “Stephen the Dedalus”, a hawk-like man
flying upwards from the waves of the sea. He responds to the girl’s call to
dedicate his life to art:
Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the
call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!
This
is the climax of his career. Now he knows what he is to serve and what not to
serve: his vocation is to become a priest, not of the Church but of the
imagination.
Once Shtephen has realized his destiny
to become an artist, Stephen resolves to live his life to the fullest, and vows
not to be constrained by the boundaries of his family, his nation, and his
religion. He wants to express himself freely even taking the defence of the
weapon of “silence,
exile,
and cunning”. When opportunity comes,
he readily accepts it and expresses the feelings of the artist:
Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth
time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the
uncreated conscience of my race.
To sum up, throughout the book, Stephen’s struggle
with his external environment is fused with the development of his own inner life.
First he revolts unconsciously but next fully consciously. In the course of his
becoming an artist, Stephen undergoes several crucial transformations. The
first is from a sheltered little boy to a bright student through social
interactions. The second is from innocence to debauchery. The third is from an
unrepentant sinner to a devout Catholic. Finally, Stephen's greatest
transformation is from near fanatical religiousness to a new devotion to art
and aesthetic beauty which continues through his college years. By the end of
his time in college, Stephen has become a fully formed artist, and his diary
entries reflect the independent individual he has become.
Work Cited
Doherty, Gerald. Pathologies of desire: the vicissitudes of the
self in James Joyce's A portrait of the artist as a young man. Peter Lang,
2008
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