59 pages • 1 hour read
James JoyceA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1916A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Stephen Dedalus
Stephen Dedalus is the titular character. He possesses an artistic sentiment from an early age, viewing the world with a curiosity and a fascination that he spends his life trying to put into words. Stephen dedicates his life to this pursuit of artistic expression, eventually deciding that he must leave his home country of Ireland to find what he has searched for throughout his entire life. Throughout the story, Stephen is continuously caught up in daydreams, which he uses to explore his own identity.
Stephen’s life is a tangled mess of competing influences. While Stephen eventually comes to regard his father as an overly nostalgic failure of a man, he struggles to match his mother’s fervent piety with his own lack of religion. He moves away from their influences, as they do not suit his artistic vision of the world. At the Jesuit school Clongowes, Stephen is bullied and isolated; his social alienation becomes pronounced to the point where other boys comment on his remote demeanor. The school environment matures Stephen, however, exposing him to a world with different expectations from his home and family.
While still a young teenager, Stephen wrestles with guilt. He visits sex workers frequently, but the weight of sin hangs heavily over him, to the point where he obsesses over the concept of hell and the fate of his immortal soul. Stephen struggles with the divide between his adolescent sexual desires and his belief in God. When the threat of hell becomes too much, Stephen dramatically veers toward religion. However, religion cannot satisfy his artistic and intellectual yearnings, and he eventually discards it for atheism.
Over time, Stephen begins to engage in debates about religion, art, politics, and more. He pursues academia, which fills him with a sense of self-importance that, eventually, is also discarded. Stephen rejects a life as a Jesuit priest, but also life as an Irishman in Ireland. He eventually feels a need to disassociate himself from the society of competing influences and institutions. He wants to step back from the world and observe it from a third-person, detached position. Stephen’s intellectual struggles mimic a desire to be the voice of his own story. He seeks to detach himself from the world in pursuit of the ultimate artistic authority and agency. By the end of the book, Stephen has established his identity as an artist. He overcomes his crisis of spirituality by redirecting his prayers to Daedalus, the Greek figure from whom his surname is derived.
Simon Dedalus
Simon Dedalus is Stephen’s father. His words open the novel as he narrates a bedtime story to his son. This nostalgic, fond memory of Simon creates a starting point for Stephen’s understanding of the world, setting Stephen up for a lifetime in pursuit of Art, Language, and Liberation.
To the young Stephen, Simon seems to be a wise and warm man. He talks authoritatively about politics and other subjects well beyond the comprehension of his son. He is fiercely loyal to Ireland, even above religion, concepts that become more important to Stephen as he grows older. As he does grow, however, Stephen begins to realize that his father is neither as intelligent nor as warm as Stephen believed him to be. Simon constantly mishandles the family finances. The Dedalus family is forced to move on several occasions, their homes shrinking in size in relation to the dwindling resources that Simon has frittered away. When Stephen accompanies his father to Cork on a business venture, he sees his father flirting with female bar staff, drinking too much alcohol, and being overly sentimental about his past as a way to avoid his present predicament.
Stephen’s revelation about his father’s true character is as much a moment of awakening as his religious or political rebirths. The fond memories that opened the novel have a new meaning; the simplicity of the bedtime story is a form of escapism, of Simon leading Stephen into an idealized and blissfully ignorant world as a way to avoid reality.
Stephen becomes determined not to repeat his father’s mistakes, so Simon fades from the novel. In one of his final appearances, Simon has no dialogue. He watches Stephen perform in a school theater production, but Stephen slips away with a casual excuse instead of lingering to speak with his father, even though Stephen’s love interest is close by. In this moment, Stephen puts his father to the side in favor of focusing on his continuing existential dilemmas. Stephen rejects the false world of his father, but it takes time to find something with which to replace it.
Stephen’s rejection demonstrates the way in which the world of Simon Dedalus—filled with nostalgia, alcohol, and financial mismanagement—is as much a false reality as religion or academia.
Emma Clery
Emma Clery is a young girl on the periphery of Stephen’s social circle. They share a tram ride home from a party, a memory that lingers long in Stephen’s mind. He refers to her as his “beloved” (245) and he writes reams of poetry dedicated to Emma. However, their actual interactions are limited. Stephen rarely approaches her, and her appearances in the novel are typically limited to distant glimpses, rumors, and recollections. Stephen never shows any of his love poetry to Emma, believing this to be “folly” (253). In this respect, Emma is an elusive and nebulous character. She is distant and unknowable, a demonstration of Stephen’s social alienation coupled with his boundless capacity for romantic idealism, which is heightened further by the novel referring to her as E___ C____ (her last name is not revealed in Portrait of the Artist but is assumed from drafts of Stephen Hero, the unpublished autobiographical novel on which Portrait is based).
Before Emma, Stephen’s love interests are completely unrealistic: He wants to marry his neighbor, Eileen, when he is a child too young to actually understand romantic love; then, he fantasizes about Mercedes, a fictional character in The Count of Monte Cristo. Emma is the first real person Stephen is genuinely attracted to, and this kicks off a complicated exploration of sexuality and romance.
To the young poet Stephen, Emma comes to represent all the feelings of love and passion that he cannot express. She functions as his muse. To Stephen, Emma is femininity itself. But at this point, due to his social isolation, Stephen’s concepts of femininity and romance are derived purely from literary fantasy. Stephen conceives of Emma as a literary device rather than a genuine romantic partner, and Joyce uses this to explore Stephen’s struggles to relate to his world. Stephen turns Emma into an ideal, driving himself further away from her through his efforts to understand her. At the same time, Stephen explores his feelings of lust through visits to sex workers, but he views himself as a different Stephen during this time, creating a marked distinction between those encounters and his feelings for Emma.
Like everything in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Emma’s function is not to be a character in her own right, but to be a reflection of Stephen. Emma the character and Emma the metaphor may be markedly different, but they both demonstrate Stephen’s social and artistic separation. By the end of the book, Stephen grows more comfortable with himself and his chosen path; he cuts himself free of his devotion to Emma. The last mention of her comes from a diary entry, in which he mentions telling her about his poetry; this establishes that Stephen is free to interact with her, as she no longer represents lofty, artistic ideals.
Cranly
Among Stephen’s associates and schoolmates, Cranly is one of the most significant. He acts in dialogue with Stephen, providing Stephen with a platform to discuss his maturing ideas about art, aesthetics, and religion. Though Cranly rarely talks in Stephen’s academic style, he is an intelligent man in his own right. He possesses a level of emotional intelligence Stephen lacks, such as the conversation in which he recommends that Stephen attend the church with his mother simply to make his mother happy. Cranly is not religious—as evidenced by his willingness to insult Jesus Christ in an effort to test Stephen’s atheism—but he knows the emotional importance of Stephen visiting church with his mother. Cranly provides Stephen with guidance, advice, and the opportunity to confess his sins and fears. In this respect, Cranly performs a role approximating that of a secular priest. He hears Stephen’s confession and then tells him how to atone. Through this function, he helps his friend to navigate the world, something Stephen has struggled with since childhood.
As with most of the characters in the novel, Cranly is a reflection of Stephen. Through Cranly, the audience is able to better understand Stephen’s relationship with greater society. Cranly criticizes his friend for being antisocial and withdrawn; the comments are good-natured but rooted in genuine concern. This adds dimension to Stephen’s isolation, which was previously showcased through the bullying of his peers and teachers. Cranly proves that people are trying to reach out to Stephen, but that he rejects every institution, authority, and connection. He desires total freedom and refuses to serve anybody, unlike characters like Cranly, who is content to integrate himself into the foundations and institutions of the society.
Cranly may lack Stephen’s genius and artistry, but he is able to achieve a level of happiness that perpetually eludes Stephen. Cranly’s social skills vastly outmatch Stephen’s, which is shown when Emma is more interested in interacting with Cranly, even though Stephen loves her. Stephen envies Cranly, not just because of Emma, but because of the confidence of his friend and the ease with which Cranly can simply exist. To Stephen, Cranly is an example of the sacrifices he must make in the name of art. Stephen is cursed to be on the periphery, to think about everything, constantly, with the aim of achieving some kind of artistic transcendence. As such, he will never be happy simply existing in society and interacting with his peers. For him, Cranly’s limited ambitions and contented mind are an enviable but impossible alternative.
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By James Joyce
