Stephen attends the Jesuit-run Clongowes Wood College, where the apprehensive, intellectually gifted boy suffers the ridicule of his classmates while he learns the schoolboy codes of behaviour. While he cannot grasp their significance, at a Christmas dinner he is witness to the social, political and religious tensions in Ireland involving Charles Stewart Parnell, which drive wedges between members of his family, leaving Stephen with doubts over which social institutions he can place his faith.
Back at Clongowes, word spreads that a number of older boys have been caught “smugging” (the term refers to the secret homosexual horseplay that five students were caught at); discipline is tightened, and the Jesuits increase use of corporal punishment. Stephen is strapped when one of his instructors believes he has broken his glasses to avoid studying, but, prodded by his classmates, Stephen works up the courage to complain to the rector, Father Conmee, who assures him there will be no such recurrence, leaving Stephen with a sense of triumph.
Stephen’s father gets into debt and the family leaves its pleasant suburban home to live in Dublin. Stephen realises that he will not return to Clongowes. However, thanks to a scholarship obtained for him by Father Conmee, Stephen is able to attend Belvedere College, where he excels academically and becomes a class leader. Stephen squanders a large cash prize from school, and begins to see prostitutes, as distance grows between him and his drunken father.
As Stephen abandons himself to sensual pleasures, his class is taken on a religious retreat, where the boys sit through sermons. Stephen pays special attention to those on pride, guilt, punishment and the Four Last Things (death, judgement, Hell, and Heaven). He feels that the words of the sermon, describing horrific eternal punishment in hell, are directed at himself and, overwhelmed, comes to desire forgiveness.
Overjoyed at his return to the Church, he devotes himself to acts of ascetic repentance, though they soon devolve to mere acts of routine, as his thoughts turn elsewhere. His devotion comes to the attention of the Jesuits, and they encourage him to consider entering the priesthood. Stephen takes time to consider, but has a crisis of faith because of the conflict between his spiritual beliefs and his aesthetic ambitions. Along Dollymount Strand he spots a girl wading, and has an epiphany in which he is overcome with the desire to find a way to express her beauty in his writing.
As a student at University College, Dublin, Stephen grows increasingly wary of the institutions around him: Church, school, politics and family. In the midst of the disintegration of his family’s fortunes his father berates him and his mother urges him to return to the Church.
An increasingly dry, humourless Stephen explains his alienation from the Church and the aesthetic theory he has developed to his friends, who find that they cannot accept either of them. Stephen concludes that Ireland is too restrictive to allow him to express himself fully as an artist, so he decides that he will have to leave. He sets his mind on self-imposed exile, but not without declaring in his diary his ties to his homeland:
… 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.
Style
The novel is a Bildungsroman and captures the essence of character growth and understanding of the world around him. The novel mixes third-person narrative with free indirect speech, which allows both identification with and distance from Stephen. The narrator refrains from judgement. The omniscient narrator of the earlier Stephen Hero informs the reader as Stephen sets out to write “some pages of sorry verse”, while A Portrait gives only Stephen’s attempts, leaving the evaluation to the reader.
The novel is written primarily as a third-person narrative with minimal dialogue until the final chapter. This chapter includes dialogue-intensive scenes alternately involving Stephen, Davinb and Cranly. An example of such a scene is the one in which Stephen posits his complex Thomist aesthetic theory in an extended dialogue.
According to Sanders, “… it is the eucharistic theology of Thomas Aquinas that most determines the complex aesthetics that Stephen expounds. Although his faith is replaced by scrupulous doubt, Stephen retains an insistent Jesuit authoritarianism in his arguments about definitions of beauty.
As the latter stages of the story affirm, Stephen assumes a new priesthood, that of the artist”. Joyce employs first-person narration for Stephen’s diary entries in the concluding pages of the novel, perhaps to suggest that Stephen has finally found his own voice and no longer needs to absorb the stories of others. Joyce fully employs the free indirect style to demonstrate Stephen’s intellectual development from his childhood, through his education, to his increasing independence and ultimate exile from Ireland as a young man.
The style of the work progresses through each of its five chapters, as the complexity of language and Stephen’s ability to comprehend the world around him both gradually increase. The book’s opening pages communicate Stephen’s first stirrings of consciousness when he is a child. Throughout the work language is used to describe indirectly the state of mind of the protagonist and the subjective effect of the events of his life.
The writing style is notable also for Joyce’s omission of quotation marks: he indicates dialogue by beginning a paragraph with a dash, as is commonly used in French, Spanish or Russian publications.
The first two pages of A Portrait introduce many of the novel’s key motifs, and have been shown to “enact the entire action in microcosm”.
Joyce introduced the concept of “epiphany” in Stephen Hero to preface a discussion of Thomas Aquinas’s three criteria of beauty, wholeness, harmony, and radiance: when the object “seems to us radiant, it achieves its epiphany”.
The term is not used when Stephen Dedalus explains his aesthetic theory in A Portrait. Joyce critics, however, have used it freely when discussing the novel as well as Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. One critic has identified four distinct epiphany techniques in Joyce’s fiction, saying of A Portrait that “in at least three instances an epiphany helps Stephen decide on the future courses of this life”.
Stephen Dedalus’s aesthetic theory identifies three forms of literary art: lyric, epic, and dramatic. The Canadian scholar Hugh Kenner saw the three forms of literary art as a progression that applies to his novels, with A Portrait being lyric, Ulysses epic, and Finnegans Wake dramatic.
William York Tindall has noted that other critics have applied the three forms differently, some finding all Joyce’s works dramatic, one finding all three forms in A Portrait, another finding them in Ulysses “with more justification from the text perhaps”. Tindall has speculated on how they might apply to A Portrait, Stephen being “lyric in his attitude toward himself”, Joyce being dramatic in his attitude toward Stephen, so that at times “he is the author of a dramatic book about a lyric hero”, while at other times he is an ironist and so “seems epic… standing between audience and victim”.
Themes
Identity
As a narrative which depicts a character throughout his formative years, M. Angeles Conde-Parrilla posits that identity is possibly the most prevalent theme in the novel. Towards the beginning of the novel, Joyce depicts the young Stephen’s growing consciousness, which is said to be a condensed version of the arc of Dedalus’ entire life, as he continues to grow and form his identity. Stephen’s growth as an individual character is important because through him Joyce laments Irish society’s tendency to force individuals to conform to types, which some say marks Stephen as a modernist character. Themes that run through Joyce’s later novels find expression there.
Religion
As Stephen transitions into adulthood, he leaves behind his Catholic religious identity, which is closely tied to the national identity of Ireland. His rejection of this dual identity is also a rejection of constraint and an embrace of freedom in identity.
Furthermore, the references to Dr Faustus throughout the novel conjure up something demonic in Stephen renouncing his Catholic faith. When Stephen stoutly refuses to serve his Easter duty later in the novel, his tone mirrors characters like Faust and Lucifer in its rebelliousness.
In Catholicism, “Eucharist” refers both to the act of Consecration, or transubstantiation, and its product, the body and blood of Christ under the appearances of bread and wine. It is the Church’s central sacrament. Stephen uses it to dramatize his apostasy. He refuses to take communion during Easter time, every Catholic’s duty, to show he is a Catholic no longer.
He notes that the Eucharist is “a symbol behind which are massed twenty centuries of authority and veneration”. Stephen parallels the literary artist with the Catholic priest and literary art with the Eucharist, both the act and the product. He sees himself as “The priest of eternal imagination transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.”
Myth of Daedalus
The myth of Daedalus and Icarus has parallels in the structure of the novel, and gives Stephen his surname, as well as the epigraph containing a quote from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. According to Ivan Canadas, the epigraph may parallel the heights and depths that end and begin each chapter, and can be seen to proclaim the interpretive freedom of the text. Stephen’s surname being connected to Daedalus may also call to mind the theme of going against the status quo, as Daedalus defies the King of Crete.
Irish identity
Stephen’s struggle to find identity in the novel parallels the Irish struggle for independence during the early twentieth century. He rejects any outright nationalism,
