My Coming-of-Age-Novel class has finished reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and the discussion after reading the final chapters mostly revolved around Stephen Dedalus' decision to leave Ireland forever. In class, we naturally talked a lot about the idea of the maturing process, and questioned the nature of Portrait as a bildungsroman.
I drew a comparison between Stephen Dedalus' feeling of being the odd-man-out at the childrens' party portrayed early in the book to his "exile" at the end of the novel. He seems to revel in the former, in a slow, somber way, and looks at the whole tableau as though it must have been pre-ordained. He, the "artistic soul," the "tortured intellect," must have always been set apart in such frivolous situations. He was shown in the earliest chapters to be a scrawny kid, a bit socially awkward, and definitely more thoughtful than his rough-and-tumble classmates. They would've treated him as a bit of an outcast or a loner anyway, and he would've preferred that to taking part in games that could have gotten yet another pair of glasses broken. With kids like that, it's difficult to say whether their propensity toward solitude resulted from or resulted in their peers leaving them alone. Whatever the case, it suits Young Stephen's twisted romanticism quite nicely. He crouches in the corner, eying the girl he can not attract, and thinking very smugly about how mysterious he must look.
The Stephen Dedalus leaving Ireland in the final pages of Portrait is not altogether a different man, but his romanticism has matured along with his ability to express himself. He does not smugly revel, he exalts. He is leaving the nest, taking flight, and embarking upon the road to artistry. I think it is this change which makes Joyce's self-portrait a true bildungsroman. In the beginning of the book, Young Stephen was constantly taking stock of himself as he imagined others must see him. The party scene is a perfect example of this. Stephen is not thinking "Artistic" thoughts, but imagining Emma thinking that he must be thinking "Artistic" thoughts. Terry Pratchett would have considered this phenomenon to be some self-indulgent derivative of second thoughts. Dedalus as a young man is certainly still considering the way he comes across to others, but it is no longer his primary objective to appear worldly and sophisticated. If anything, he feels the need to get away from people who know him as the weirdo in the corner. It is this, more than anything else, that indicates that he has come of age.
You mentioned that Stephen exalts in leaving his home and his family and I think that, in addition to not caring as much about how people view him, he has also changed in that he doesn't care about other people, too. When Stephen first goes to Clongowes, he thinks the world of his parents and the other adults in his life. After the Christmas dinner, he changes his perspective and starts thinking more about the fellows than about his family. Eventually, Stephen cares only about himself and his artistic passions.
ReplyDeleteThe distinction between "smugly reveling" and "exalting" is a subtle one, and it nicely captures the sense of both familiarity and progression that characterizes the end of the novel. There is an important kind of humility in Stephen near the end, even as his heart races to think about the life he's now rushing to encounter--he's a strange blend of arrogant/confident and humble/afraid, which maybe isn't that strange, when we think about it. (I might describe myself as I went off to college in similar terms.) But I do agree that it's wrong to view this version of his "apartness" at the end as simply an extension of the dynamic we see earlier in the novel. There's a real humility to Stephen at this stage: he's crazy-ambitious, trying to put together an original artistic theory at age 19 or whatever, using Aristotle as his "light," but this ambition is tempered by his self-effacing references to the "essay" he's ostensibly working on, and his own doubts about the originality and worth of his ideas.
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