Women: A simple word that has the potential to trigger numerous and endless conversations among historians, artists, writers, religious figures, most of whom are male. Women are multi-faceted and complex in nature.
According to Christianity, Eve was the woman who listened to the snake and committed the original sin; and from that same woman, human kind was born and flourished. Taking advantage of this complexity of the other gender, James Joyce repeatedly implements the image of women in his autobiographical novel: “The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.”
The life, morality and artistry of the protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, are heavily influenced by the various female figures that he encounters at each stage of his physical and mental development. By incorporating motif of several female figures that permeates throughout the kuntslerroman, Joyce illustrates the growth of Stephen as a person and as an artist. His mother’s care and affection result in Stephen’s craving for a motherly figure when he was in bed with a prostitute. Eileen, Mercedes and Emma serve as moral compasses, guiding his sense of morality and artistry as he makes decisions that shape his identity. Finally, Stephen sees parts of himself in the girl who os sunbathing on the beach when he has an epiphany about his choice of identity and his mission as an artist.
Stephen's relationship with the opposite sex begins to develop early in his life. Within the first few pages of the novel lie hints of the different roles women will play in his story. Senses are sources of inspiration for an artist, since art intensifies the sense of immediate living and accentuates what is valuable in enjoyment.
Therefore, sensory ability is directly proportional to artistry. Stephen expresses and develops innate artistic talent as he, influenced by female figures around him, characterizes his world with senses. Betty Byrne is associated with the sour taste of lemon platt. His mother introduces him to the auditory sense when she sings him a song and plays on the piano for him to dance. As a five or six year-old boy, Stephen starts to differentiate between warm and cold, between the smell of the oil sheet and that of his mother, who “had a nicer smell than his father” (Portrait,7).
Dante broadens his sense of color with her marron and green brushes for two different politicians in her press. She also becomes the first to give Stephen some experience of the world outside himself when she teaches him about geographical features in other countries and on the moon. This physical understanding of the exterior world may be “the impetus for Stephen’s subsequent construction of a hierarchical list that defines his place within the universe” (Coyle, 52). From the moment Stephen’s infantile conscience unfolds, female’s influence on his growth and artistry is undeniably abundant.
The various female figures that Stephen encounters throughout his life serve as his artistic inspiration. Upon listening to a song sang by his mother, Stephen creates his own version of the song, changing the lyrics into “O, the green wothe botheth” (Portrait, 7). By using incorrect, incomprehensible words, James Joyce underscores Stephen’s ability to take a common, cliqué phrase and turn it into his own.
This is simultaneously the creative power and mission of the artist, which Stephen identifies in his epiphany later in the novel as “to recreate life out of life” (Portrait, 434). From his childhood leading up to this epiphany, many female figures, real or fictional, inspire him to generate and discover his own art. Both Dante and Stephen's own mother assert that he "will apologise" or "the eagles will come and pull out his eyes" (Portrait, 8).
This incident results in Stephen's composition of a poem based on "apologise" and "eyes," one of his first artistic endeavors. Dante and Mrs. Dedalus, by planting these words in Stephen’s mind, are the first females to inspire him to create. Another female figure, Eileen, indirectly leads Stephen to the conclusion that "by thinking of things you could understand them" (Portrait, 287) when he sees in her hands and hair possible meanings for the terms Tower of Ivory and House of Gold.
In the kunstlerroman, Stephen writes two poems using Emma Clery as inspiration, a super-romanticized one in his early childhood and a villanelle ten years later. Because both poem vaguely evoke Stephen’s feelings of love, desire and confusion rather than focusing on Emma’s specific characteristics, some critics argue that Stephen “devotes these poems to his poetic, idolized and ideal model of a “beloved” rather than Emma herself” (Coyle, 127). Either way, Emma is an indispensable driving force that stimulates Stephen to write poems, which are yet another indication of Stephen’s gradual but inevitable transformation into an artist.
The key to understanding the relationship between women and creation lies in Stephen's association of himself with his mythological name, Daedalus. In Greek mythology, Daedalus (meaning “clever worker”) was a skillful craftsman and artisan. Pasiphae, wife of King Minos, provides Daedalus with the impetus to create when she asks him to construct a cow-shaped shell in which she can hide in order to have sex with a bull (Wikipedia). If the readers take this myth into consideration, there is enough evidence that this connection between female figures and invention of art goes beyond the novel and is integrated into Stephen’s identity.
Women also serve as moral compasses for Stephen to make choices that shapes his identity as a person and as an artist. Throughout his life, each of the various female figures marks a stage of mental development and artistic ideology. Young Stephen's first romantic interest in the opposite sex comes in the form of his playmate, Eileen, whom he plans to marry when they are older. Stephen adore Eileen for her physical characteristics, such as long thin cool white hands.
This “recognition of women as sexual beings” (Coyle,132) manifests itself again when Stephen begins to have sexually-driven fantasies about Monte Cristo’s Mercedes. He expects that he will be transfigured when he encounters his Mercedes, that “weakness and timidity and inexperience would fall from him in that magic moment” (Portrait, 60) Stephen, on the metaphorical moral bridge, decides to immerse in sin, and believes that sin is needed for the creation of art. His desire draws him toward the prostitute, who calls Stephen “Willie dear” and “a little rascal” (Portrait, 101).
These terms of motherly endearment, along with the repetition of “his lips would not bend to kiss her” capture the protagonist’s disillusionment when his poetic ideal shatters against harsh reality. Stephen feels awkward and is conscious that the sexual experience is “too much for him” (Portrait, 101). The emotion is similar to when he has to play football or endure math classes in highschool. At this point, the woman beauty perceived by Stephen is purely sexual. It induces in him what he would later call “kinectic emotions”.
From then, Stephen temporarily loses his moral and artistry direction. Being overwhelmed with guilt from his sins that clouds his mind from creating art, the young artist seeks refuge in piety and in mortifying his senses. However, his art – reflected in the narrative in the beginning of chapter IV – becomes extremely dry, lacking the usual rich details that overflow in earlier section:
Sunday was dedicated to the mystery of the Holy Trinity, Monday to the Holy Ghost, Tuesday to the Guardian Angels, Wednesday to saint Joseph, Thursday to the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Altar, Friday to the Suffering Jesus, Saturday to the Blessed Virgin Mary. (Portrait, 140)
It is not until Stephen encounters the girl sunbathing that he stops wandering hither and thither between absolute piety and sin, between whores and priests. Upon the sight of this female figure, Stephen epiphanised his mission as an artist and the path he must walk to establish his identity. He sees and admires the girl’s beauty with the “esthetic motion,” which is static and “raised above desire and loathing” (Portrait, 203).
Dedalus becomes aware that he can neither be hither or thither, but must invent a new religion and become “the priest of eternal imagination” (Portrait, 204). The girl sunbathing on the beach, an angel of youth and beauty, is a secular version of the Virgin Mary. She reveals to Stephen the possibility of achieving heaven and producing great art without the church by not conforming to the norm and choosing his own ideal of artistry.
Once again, a female figure exerts a driving force and provides inspiration for Stephen’s biggest epiphany, a catalyst for his decision of "encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and forge in [his] soul" (Portrait, 253).
There is enough evidence to claim that Stephen owns his inspiration for artistry, art creation and identity to the various female figures that he encounters throughout the kuntslerroman. Stephen, or Joyce himself, attempts to deny this reliance on and attachment to women by incorporating reoccuring images such as birth in the scene of Stephen and the prostitute, and the image of birds flying away from the net and soar high in the scene of the sunbathing girl.
The author even includes the details of Stephen’s mom “putting [his] new secondhand clothes in order”(Portrait, 252) and praying before Dedalus leaves Ireland to live his own life, with the possible intention of showing the protagonist’s independence from the care of his mother.
However, when one examines the passage where Stephen encounters the sunbathing girl, one can find small but essential details, such as the parallel phrases “He was alone” – “She was alone” and “a faint flame on her cheek” (Portrait, 166), a flame that is similar to that on Stephen’s cheek when the Director of Studies mentioned “le jupes.” These details may imply not only the great extent to which Stephen depends on women, but also the idea that Stephen sees himself in the girl, and that the process of creation has a feminine characteristic.
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