A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Becoming an Artist Means Making a Self

100 Works of World Literature · Article 69

# A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Becoming an Artist Means Making a Self

The novel begins not with an adult remembering childhood but with a song, a cow, a father’s story, and the warmth and cold of a wet bed. Before words form a stable world, Stephen Dedalus experiences himself in sound, smell, and shame. At the end he prepares to leave Ireland, announcing in a diary that he will forge his people’s uncreated conscience. Between these points lies no straight ascent, but repeated cycles of belonging, terror, revolt, and self-mythology.

James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a Bildungsroman that transforms the form. Its prose matures with its protagonist: child syntax becomes school language, religious fear, political argument, scholastic aesthetics, and lyric declaration. Readers experience how family, Church, nation, and desire are reinterpreted into an artistic destiny.

From Stephen Hero to a modernist novel

• Author: James Joyce (1882–1941), the Irish novelist, short-story writer, and poet.
• Precursor: around 1904 Joyce began the long realist manuscript Stephen Hero, then abandoned its structure and radically compressed and rewritten it.
• Serialisation: with Ezra Pound’s support, A Portrait ran in the London modernist magazine The Egoist in 1914–15.
• Book publication: B. W. Huebsch issued the American edition in 1916; the Egoist Press subsequently published it in Britain.
• Form: semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman, artist novel, and modernist narrative; Stephen returns in Ulysses.

Semi-autobiographical does not mean documentary. Joyce and Stephen share Dublin upbringing, Jesuit education, family decline, and a desire to leave Ireland, but Stephen is formally constructed. Treating every statement as Joyce’s position ignores the irony and distance through which the novel tests his self-image.

A portrait, not a complete autobiography

A portrait selects, frames, and transforms. It does not promise the entirety of a life. The novel skips years and preserves scenes that shape consciousness. Other people blur outside Stephen’s attention because the subject is his developing mode of perception.

The indefinite article makes him both singular and representative. He belongs specifically to a Catholic family in colonised Ireland, while his conflict between inheritance and independence, body and faith, community and self belongs to a broader tradition of artistic formation.

The artist does not already exist in the opening. Identity is made by language, institutions, and self-narration. By the end Stephen casts himself as a mythic flyer, but the novel never guarantees that his self-portrait is final truth.

Prose that grows with consciousness

The opening cow tale follows a small child’s hearing. Pronouns, names, and sensations remain unstable; face, smell, wetness, and warmth make a universe. Free indirect style keeps third-person narration while adapting vocabulary, rhythm, and judgement to Stephen’s age.

The prose grows up. A child cannot understand politics and remembers raised voices and dangerous names at Christmas dinner. An adolescent produces elaborate theological fear. A student constructs an aesthetic system. Development in language is itself plot.

Closeness does not guarantee reliability. It makes shame and delight intelligible while confining readers within self-absorption. Other motives must often be inferred from what Stephen fails to notice.

Clongowes: the body learns power first

At the Jesuit boarding school Clongowes, games, mockery, cold water, sickness, and homesickness form Stephen’s first institutional knowledge. Physically weak and poor at sport, he wants inclusion while protecting himself through observation.

After classmates push him into a filthy ditch, he falls ill. Later a broken pair of glasses prevents work, but Father Dolan treats incapacity as idleness and pandies him. Authority misreads inability to see as refusal to obey.

Stephen complains to the rector, Father Conmee, and receives a fair hearing. Classmates celebrate him. Language can challenge power, yet justice still depends on a superior correcting a subordinate, not on stable student rights.

Christmas dinner and Irish politics

A family meal erupts over Charles Stewart Parnell. The Irish nationalist leader lost power after an adultery scandal and abandonment by Church and allies. Simon Dedalus and Mr Casey defend him, while devout Dante supports ecclesiastical judgement.

Stephen cannot understand the history but sees loyalties tearing one another apart. Nationalism, Catholic authority, friendship, family, and sexual morality refuse alignment. Tears and insults enter political memory before explanation.

The scene establishes the book’s pattern. Family, nation, and Church all demand love and may punish dissent. Stephen’s later description of them as nets grows partly from seeing collective language seize a private table.

Family decline and class

Simon’s financial failure forces repeated moves and the auction of possessions. He is charming, nostalgic, and irresponsible. Stories about old friends, schools, and politics preserve history while helping him avoid the present.

Stephen loves his humour and feels shame at debt, drinking, and self-pity. In Cork, Simon turns the city into a memory theatre while his son feels estranged from family history.

The artistic vocation is therefore material as well as spiritual. A collapsing household offers no secure future. Departure is aesthetic ambition, economic desire, and an escape from care. The novel keeps art connected to who pays for daily life.

Desire before intellectual rebellion

Adolescent Stephen wanders Dublin, driven by sexuality, romantic fantasy, and shame, and visits a sex worker. Tenderness, fear, passivity, and release mingle. His body breaches doctrine before he has formed an anti-Church philosophy.

Desire does not provide stable freedom. It creates a divided life between school and worship by day and acts named sinful by night.

Women appear as Madonna, temptress, beloved, or inspiration, rarely as full voices. This reflects Stephen’s limitation and invites criticism of the novel’s gendered structure. He seeks liberation while making women signs in his own development.

The hell sermon enters the body

During a retreat, a priest describes death, judgement, and hell through space, smell, sound, and endless duration. Stephen maps every detail onto his sexual conduct. Doctrine becomes nausea, heat, darkness, and surveillance.

The sermon’s oppressive length demonstrates rhetoric organising the body. Repetition and sensory catalogue bring institutional language into the nervous system.

Stephen confesses in a distant chapel and experiences genuine cleansing. He adopts strict prayer and bodily discipline. Religion is not simply false; it gives order and intense beauty, which makes its claim difficult to discard.

Piety as another form of control

Stephen suppresses sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch, turning discomfort into spiritual exercise. The former pursuit of sensation becomes pursuit of sensation’s denial. Both centre on absolute self-creation.

His devotion contains pride. He measures holiness and imagines a special destiny. Sinner and saint are not wholly separate personalities; one absolutising tendency changes its content.

When the director suggests the Jesuit priesthood, institutional recognition reveals a future of grey order and fixed identity. Stephen refuses not because religion never moved him, but because a permanent role would close the self still becoming.

The girl by the sea

After rejecting priesthood, Stephen sees a girl wading at the shore, poised like a bird. Her returned gaze becomes a secular epiphany: body, beauty, and life can call him to art rather than sin.

He decides to live, err, and create. Yet the girl has neither name nor speech; his gaze makes her the image of his birth as an artist. Liberation and objectification coexist. He escapes fear of the body without necessarily escaping the habit of using a female body for male revelation.

Dedalus: maker of wings and labyrinths

Stephen’s surname invokes Daedalus, maker of the labyrinth and wings used to escape with Icarus. Stephen understands it as destiny and imagines flying beyond nets of nationality, language, and religion.

Flight contains freedom and warning. Icarus falls, while Daedalus’s craft also serves power. An artist may escape a labyrinth and build another. Myth helps Stephen act while magnifying heroic self-conception.

The word “young” matters. Ulysses will show an older Stephen facing poverty, isolation, and his mother’s death. Flight is a real beginning, not proof of arrival.

Whose language is English?

At university, Stephen debates politics, faith, aesthetics, and literature. Under British rule, English is both his medium and an inherited colonial language. Discussing the word “tundish” with an English dean, he recognises that the same vocabulary is native to one speaker and estranging to another.

He does not therefore adopt simple linguistic nationalism. He intends to make art in inherited English, unable to recover an untouched origin and unwilling to concede the language solely to England.

Davín urges political and linguistic commitment; Lynch hears the aesthetic theory; Cranly becomes the closest interlocutor. Stephen needs others to form ideas while incorporating dialogue into his story of independence.

Wholeness, harmony, and radiance

Drawing on Aquinas, Stephen distinguishes kinetic feelings that provoke desire or loathing from aesthetic arrest. He describes apprehending beauty through wholeness, harmony, and radiance.

Lyric, epic, and dramatic forms supposedly move towards the artist’s impersonality, until the maker withdraws like a god behind creation. The theory shows his desire for formal control and anticipates Joycean technique.

Yet it appears during a comic, interrupted walk with Lynch, not as unquestionable doctrine. Stephen says the artist should disappear while his own personality fills the theory. It is a young thinker’s tool, not necessarily the novel’s final constitution.

Nationalism as net and resistance

Davín supports Irish nationalism and hopes Stephen will learn Irish and join the movement. Stephen fears that collective duty will subordinate art, remembering Parnell’s abandonment.

His suspicion has force. Cultural revival can prescribe what a “real” Irish person should speak and create. Yet calling nationality only a net may underestimate collective organisation under colonial rule.

The novel does not demand a simple choice. National identity can resist empire and police internal difference; individual freedom can create new art and leave common burdens to others.

His mother and Easter duty

Stephen’s mother asks him to perform Easter communion so the family will not be shamed. He refuses to violate conscience despite knowing her pain. Cranly asks whether he could complete a disbelieved ritual for her sake.

Participation would submit to institution and perform faith; refusal transfers part of spiritual honesty’s cost to somebody he loves. The novel does not resolve the conflict.

Stephen names silence, exile, and cunning as weapons. They protect artistic autonomy but may avoid care and public responsibility. Leaving can be necessary without erasing the suffering of those who remain.

Cranly and the fiction of solitude

Cranly listens closely and challenges Stephen’s self-dramatisation. Intimacy, rivalry, and difficult-to-name feeling coexist. Stephen’s jealousy when Cranly approaches the woman he admires complicates friendship with possession.

Preparing to leave, Stephen tells Cranly that he will not serve family, nation, or Church. Yet the declaration of solitude requires a friend’s presence. Autonomy is never absence of relations. Father’s stories, mother’s music, schoolmates, sermons, and beloved figures all provide material for the wings.

Why the ending becomes a diary

The last pages shift into first-person journal entries. Dates skip, sentences loosen, and Stephen records dreams, arguments, and plans. He appears to seize narration and write himself directly.

The diary also removes some ironic distance. He invokes the mythic father Daedalus and vows to forge his race’s uncreated conscience—a thrilling aspiration that nearly assigns national history to one artist.

This is a departure pose, not an authorial certificate of success. The unfinished journal leaves creation and failure, voice and isolation, equally possible.

Five cycles rather than one ascent

Chapter One moves from infancy to the school complaint; Two from family decline to sexual experience; Three from sin to confession; Four from piety to vocation and the shore; Five from debate to exile.

Each cycle produces crisis, discipline, breakthrough, and a new identity that soon becomes another constraint. Sensual freedom produces guilt, religious purity produces suffocation, and artistic awakening may produce pride.

Growth is spiral rather than linear. Stephen recombines the past instead of discarding it. Even the logical precision of Jesuit training enters his anti-clerical aesthetics.

Women outside the frame

Mother, Dante, Eileen, the sex worker, the shore girl, and E—C— are crucial but rarely narratively independent. Stephen sees them through Madonna and Eve, purity and temptation, inspiration and restraint.

Catholic gender ideology, national allegory, and youthful egocentrism intersect. The close narrative perspective often reproduces his limitation rather than announcing a correction; readers must infer labour and emotional cost from gaps.

His mother remains especially important. Her faith is linked to love, fear, and family stability, not merely abstract oppression. Stephen leaves a declining household in order to become an artist. The portrait’s frame includes carers it does not paint fully.

The three entangled nets

Nation, language, and religion are not independent. British rule shapes education and English; Catholicism is both majority identity and disciplinary power; nationalism resists colonisation while sometimes requiring cultural conformity.

No side offers simple freedom. Rejecting English culture risks losing his main medium, Church obedience denies doubt and desire, and nationalism may conscript art. Exile creates distance within contradiction.

Distance cannot remove history. In Europe Stephen will write with Dublin voices, Jesuit logic, and Irish political memory. Leaving makes home an enduring material.

Sympathy without worship

Stephen is intelligent and sensitive to institutional language. He refuses compelled belief and inherited roles and accepts an uncertain artistic path. Those are real forms of courage.

He is also proud, status-conscious, and self-centred, turning friends and women into symbols. His refusal to serve depends on education, listeners, and family resources. Insight and blindness coexist.

Joyce lets Stephen’s lyricism ignite the prose, then introduces bodily detail, laughter, and repetition that puncture grandeur. Readers may celebrate flight and still notice wax on the wings.

Why it changed the modern novel

Traditional Bildungsroman often looks back from a stable adulthood towards social integration. A Portrait makes stability the problem. Consciousness changes, society has no single centre, and the ending offers departure rather than marriage, career, or mature consensus.

Free indirect discourse changes with age, while recurring birds, flight, water, temperature, smell, colour, and sound connect distant scenes. Plot advances through the changing echo of a word as well as external event.

This form opens towards the stylistic plurality of Ulysses. Modernism is not mere difficulty; it is a search for techniques adequate to divided subjects, historical pressure, and moving sensation.

What the artist’s wings are made from

The novel carries readers from nursery song to young man’s journal as Stephen learns to name himself. His refusal to let family, country, and Church decide an entire life secures space for thought and art.

Departure is not unconditional triumph. Every liberation takes material from the past and leaves costs with others. Flight may escape nets and become a narcissistic myth; silence may resist censorship and avoid response; exile may create art and loneliness.

The portrait is therefore unfinished, subject to revision by later life and later books. Stephen will leave Ireland while carrying it into every English sentence. An artist makes a self but never from nothing: the wings consist of inheritance, injury, relationship, and choice.

Further reading

• James Joyce Centre: the novel and its modernist form
• James Joyce Centre: Stephen Hero, serialisation, and 1916 publication
• James Joyce Centre: biography, education, and major works
• British Library archives: manuscripts and drafts from about 1912–13
• British Library archives: Harriet Shaw Weaver and Egoist publishing papers
• Series directory: 100 Works of World Literature