A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the second novel of Irish writer James Joyce, published in 1916. A Künstlerroman written in a modernist style, it traces the religious and intellectual awakening of young Stephen Dedalus, Joyce’s fictional alter ego, whose surname alludes to Daedalus, Greek mythology’s consummate craftsman. Stephen questions and rebels against the Catholic and Irish conventions under which he has grown, culminating in his self-exile from Ireland to Europe. The work uses techniques that Joyce developed more fully in Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939).
A Portrait began life in 1904 as Stephen Hero—a projected 63-chapter autobiographical novel in a realistic style. After 25 chapters, Joyce abandoned Stephen Hero in 1907 and set to reworking its themes and protagonist into a condensed five-chapter novel, dispensing with strict realism and making extensive use of free indirect speech that allows the reader to peer into Stephen’s developing consciousness. American modernist poet Ezra Pound had the novel serialised in the English literary magazine The Egoist in 1914 and 1915, and published as a book in 1916 by B. W. Huebsch of New York. The publication of A Portrait and the short story collection Dubliners (1914) earned Joyce a place at the forefront of literary modernism.
Background
Born into a middle-class family in Dublin, Ireland, James Joyce (1882–1941) excelled as a student, graduating from University College, Dublin, in 1902. He moved to Paris to study medicine, but soon gave it up. He returned to Ireland at his family’s request as his mother was dying of cancer.
Despite her pleas, the impious Joyce and his brother Stanislaus refused to make confession or take communion, and when she passed into a coma they refused to kneel and pray for her. After a stretch of failed attempts to get published and launch his own newspaper, Joyce then took jobs teaching, singing and reviewing books.
Joyce made his first attempt at a novel, Stephen Hero, in early 1904. That June he saw Nora Barnacle for the first time walking along Nassau Street. Their first date was on June 16, the same date that his novel Ulysses takes place.
Almost immediately, Joyce and Nora were infatuated with each other and they bonded over their shared disapproval of Ireland and the Church. Nora and Joyce eloped to continental Europe, first staying in Zürich before settling for ten years in Trieste (then in Austria-Hungary), where he taught English.
There Nora gave birth to their children, Giorgio in 1905 and Lucia in 1907, and Joyce wrote fiction, signing some of his early essays and stories “Stephen Daedalus”. The short stories he wrote made up the collection Dubliners (1914), which took about eight years to be published due to its controversial nature.
While waiting for Dubliners to be published, Joyce reworked the core themes of the novel Stephen Hero he had begun in Ireland in 1904 and abandoned in 1907 into A Portrait, published in 1916, a year after he had moved back to Zürich in the midst of the First World War.
Composition
Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes.
(“And he turned his mind to unknown arts.”)
— Ovid, Epigraph to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
At the request of its editors, Joyce submitted a work of philosophical fiction entitled “A Portrait of the Artist” to the Irish literary magazine Dana on 7 January 1904. Dana’s editor, W. K. Magee, rejected it, telling Joyce, “I can’t print what I can’t understand.” On his 22nd birthday, 2 February 1904, Joyce began a realist autobiographical novel, Stephen Hero, which incorporated aspects of the aesthetic philosophy expounded in A Portrait.
He worked on the book until mid-1905 and brought the manuscript with him when he moved to Trieste that year. Though his main attention turned to the stories that made up Dubliners, Joyce continued to work on Stephen Hero. At 914 manuscript pages, Joyce considered the book about half-finished, having completed 25 of its 63 intended chapters.
In September 1907, however, he abandoned it, and began a complete revision of the text and its structure, producing what became A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. By 1909 the work had taken shape and Joyce showed some of the draft chapters to Ettore Schmitz, one of his language students, as an exercise. Schmitz, himself a respected writer, was impressed and with his encouragement Joyce continued to work on the book.
In 1911, Joyce flew into a fit of rage over the continued refusals by publishers to print Dubliners and threw the manuscript of Portrait into the fire. It was saved by a “family fire brigade” including his sister Eileen. Chamber Music, a book of Joyce’s poems, was published in 1907.
Joyce recycled the two earlier attempts at explaining his aesthetics and youth, “A Portrait of the Artist” and Stephen Hero, as well as his notebooks from Trieste concerning the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas; they all came together in five carefully paced chapters.
Stephen Hero is written from the point of view of an omniscient third-person narrator, but in A Portrait Joyce adopts the free indirect style, a change that reflects the moving of the narrative centre of consciousness firmly and uniquely onto Stephen. Persons and events take their significance from Stephen, and are perceived from his point of view.
Characters and places are no longer mentioned simply because the young Joyce had known them. Salient details are carefully chosen and fitted into the aesthetic pattern of the novel.
The transition from Stephen Hero to A Portrait has been characterized as a radical, uncompromising act of refinement: “The original elements of Joyce’s first novel, particularly the characters, are subjected to a process of compression and distillation that rejects all irrelevancies, all particularities and ambiguities, and leaves only their pure essence.”
Publication history
In 1913, W. B. Yeats sent the poem I Hear an Army by James Joyce to Ezra Pound, who was assembling an anthology of Imagist verse entitled Des Imagistes. Pound wrote to Joyce, and in 1914 Joyce submitted the first chapter of the unfinished Portrait to Pound, who was so taken with it that he pressed to have the work serialised in the London literary magazine The Egoist. Joyce hurried to complete the novel, and it appeared in The Egoist in twenty-five installments from 2 February 1914 to 1 September 1915.
There was difficulty finding a British publisher for the finished novel, so Pound arranged for its publication by an American publishing house, B. W. Huebsch, which issued it on 29 December 1916. The Egoist Press republished it in the United Kingdom on 12 February 1917 and Jonathan Cape took over its publication in 1924.
In 1964 Viking Press issued a corrected version overseen by Chester Anderson that drew upon Joyce’s manuscript, list of corrections, and marginal corrections to proof sheets. This edition is “Widely regarded as reputable and the ‘standard’ edition.” As of 2004, the fourth printing of the Everyman’s Library edition, the Bedford edition, and the Oxford World’s Classics edition used this text. Garland released a “copy text” edition by Hans Walter Gabler in 1993.
Major characters
Source:
Stephen Dedalus – The main character of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Growing up, Stephen goes through long phases of hedonism and deep religiosity. He eventually adopts a philosophy of aestheticism, greatly valuing beauty and art. Stephen is essentially Joyce’s alter ego, and many of the events of Stephen’s life mirror events from Joyce’s own youth. His surname is taken from the ancient Greek mythical figure Daedalus, who also engaged in a struggle for autonomy.
Simon Dedalus – Stephen’s father, an impoverished former medical student with a strong sense of Irish nationalism. Sentimental about his past, Simon Dedalus frequently reminisces about his youth.
Loosely based on Joyce’s own father and their relationship.
Mary Dedalus – Stephen’s mother who is very religious and often argues with Stephen about attending services.
Emma Clery – Stephen’s beloved, the young girl to whom he is fiercely attracted over the course of many years. Stephen constructs Emma as an ideal of femininity, even though (or because) he does not know her well.
Charles Stewart Parnell – An Irish political leader who is not an actual character in the novel, but whose death influences many of its characters. Parnell had powerfully led the Irish Parliamentary Party until he was driven out of public life after his affair with a married woman was exposed.
Cranly – Stephen’s best friend at university, in whom he confides some of his thoughts and feelings. In this sense Cranly represents a secular confessor for Stephen. Eventually Cranly begins to encourage Stephen to conform to the wishes of his family and to try harder to fit in with his peers, advice that Stephen fiercely resents. Towards the conclusion of the novel he bears witness to Stephen’s exposition of his aesthetic philosophy. It is partly due to Cranly that Stephen decides to leave, after witnessing Cranly’s budding (and reciprocated) romantic interest in Emma.
Dante (Mrs. Riordan) – The governess of the Dedalus children. She is very intense and a dedicated Catholic.
Lynch – Stephen’s friend from university who has a rather dry personality.
Synopsis
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo …
His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.
He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt.
— James Joyce, Opening to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
The childhood of Stephen Dedalus is recounted using vocabulary that changes as he grows, in a voice not his own but
