Stephen's Emergence as an Artist

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man deals with the evolution of Stephen Dedalus from
infancy to a potential artist. Thus, the book does not provide the full life story of an artist. It
presents the young man emerging from the environmental prison of religion, family and
country to become a worshiper of art.

The emergence of the youth is conveyed in the first four chapters of the novel through
several incidents that follow the pattern of struggle, defeat, and victorious emergence. After
the Kinetic turmoil of the earlier chapters, chapter five deals with the static calm of a
journey as the would-be artist rationalizes his position and as he plans the framework of his
new role.

From the thematic point of view, the evolution of the soul of the artist is represented as a

three- way conflict toward the appeasement of sexual, religious and aesthetic longings. The
sexual and religious desires at first form a nexus and later alienate from each other. The
aesthetic longings prove victorious only after the other desires have been satisfied and found
incapable of nourishing the soul. The clash among these forces is a practical or an actual
application to his personal life, of his derived theory of good and beautiful, of kinetic and
static effects. "The good is that toward which an appetite tends." "Those things are beautiful
the perception of which pleases". Ultimately, Stephen regards both the sexual and the
religious desires are kinetic, those things toward which the appetite inclines to find
fulfillment outside itself. The beautiful is what pleases the sight. The appeasement of the
aesthetic appetite is static; it is something that pleases or satisfied in itself, and it does not
appetite the individual to the possession of something or someone outside the self. Stephen
proceeds to the aesthetic stage only after he has gone through the other two stages.

Symbols of Stephen's Aspirations

The symbols devised to express Stephen's aspiration are rose, woman, bird, and water.
Woman associated with rose embodies Stephen's aspiration and his creative power. Apart
from his mother and Dante, the first female figure who figures in Stephen's life is Eileen. It is
her white hands and golden hair that first stir his boyish notion about girls. She is soon
identified with sex, and the tower of ivory, symbol of the Blessed Virgin. Then there are the
romantic dreams about Mercedes (a character from the novel The Count ofMonte Cristo by
Alexandre Dumas. She is the beloved of the novel's hero Edrnond Dantes). Stephen pictures
himself grandly rejecting her because she had earlier slighted his love. The other source of
aspiration to figure in Stephen's life is Emma, whom he meets at the party at Harold's Cross.
Withdrawing from the other children, he relishes his isolation. She gives rise to a feverish
excitement in him, and later on she becomes his poetic muse for writing poems to her. The
sexuality that might have found an outlet through this relationship is diverted elsewhere
culminating in his experience with the prostitute. In this experience he is able to find not
only relief from the goading of his lust but a new self-assurance. After a cycle of sin and
guilt, the wading girl becomes for him a way out of his dilemma. She becomes the catalytic
agent for creativity. The wading girl who embodies moral beauty unites all previous
symbols. Associating her with Emma, the Virgin, the rose, and the womb of imagination
whose priest he becomes, he finds her an image of his own capacity. "Heavenly God" ! His
soul exclaimed...

Moreover, water is a very frequent and appropriate image in the novel. It is either cold or
warm; agreeable or frightening. The image of water at the beginning of the novel seems to
be a symbol of creation. On his way to the beach, Stephen still finds the sea cold and infra-
human. The bathing boys repel him, but the sight of the wading girl gives water another
aspect. It is an epiphanic moment which symbolizes baptism, rebirth, inaudible music and
the sound and rise of the water nourishes his creative ecstasies.

The bird imagery in the text has a great importance for the notions of freedom and artistic
soul in Stephen's character. In many instances, Stephen identifies himself with birds flying
upward to relate his artistic soul to the myth of the great artificer Daedalus in Greek
mythology. " hawk -like man flying sunward above the sea… a symbol of the artist forging
anew in his workshop . in another paragraph, his condition is more accurately described "
his heart trembled; his breath came faster and a wild spirit passed over his limbs in an
ecstasy of fear and his SOUL was in flight".