[Please note that unlike the other material at this site, this essay was not written by me, but by Brian Hogue.]
The dialectics James Joyce creates in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man synthesize a literary criticism of the 'nets' of Ireland. Through the character Stephen Dedalus, Joyce struggles to break free of Irish stereotypes through the complicated psychology of a boy flourishing into an artist. The novel challenges the stereotypical relationships between church and state, male and female, family and son, religion and parishioner. However, Joyce's curious use of women and gender inversions in the novel offer an interesting theory, which, in its conclusion, defines Stephen as a repressed homosexual. Richard Ellmann comments on the state of Ireland:
A curious aspect of Irish life is that relationships between men seem more vital there than relationships between men and women. It is not easy to know whether this trait is due to a long misogynistic bias in Irish Catholicism ... .the trait carries over into the work of Joyce. In his writings, there is a succession of important friendships between men, which receive more of his attention than love affairs. (33)
From harlot to graceful female, Joyce uses women as the end of an aesthetic ideal, not an object of sexual desire. Joyce frames the story through a misogynistic mindset creating, from the start, the conditions for a perverted view of sexuality. Moreover, the uses of gender inversion throughout the novel implicate perverse and homosexual tendencies. Laurie Teal explains:
The recent outings of homosexual referencing in the text often advance through a decoding of the novel's many gender inversions, an interpretive strategy authorized, as Joseph Valente points out, by the fact that inversion was 'the dominant model of homosexuality' at the turn of the century 'in both the popular imagination and in the work of prominent sexologists like Ellis, Krafft-Ebing, Carpenter, and Freud (All whom Joyce read). (63)
The subtle gender inversions present in Portrait coupled with Stephen's Oedipal and misogynistic views allow him to subvert women by making them means to an aesthetic ideal, exposing his repressed homosexuality.
Chapter one of Portrait presents Simon Dedalus as an aloof and unreliable patriarch-causing the preconditions for a fleeting respect for masculinity and masculine authority. Stephen demonstrates a subconscious tendency to break away from the authority of his father by usurping his role as narrator. Mulroony suggests:
Stephen's will to lyricism, that is, his compulsion to continue narrating his own subjective position to the exclusion of others, originates in the way he situates himself psychically in response to his earliest sensations by constructing a personal narrative... The boy fashions a story |the moocow| in the image of his father's reordering the elements in relation to the central social position he imagines for himself. In his own story, Stephen, the narrator, is the most important character. (160)
By constructing his own narrative and rearranging the elements of his father's story, Stephen demonstrates a subconscious will to separate himself from an alienated patriarchal view of the world. Stephen reconstructs the narrative, keeping to himself, while externally accepting the narrative of his father. Mulroony suggests Stephen's internal personal narrative excludes others from his actual thoughts. Stephen's exclusive mindsets justify his tendency to repress thoughts and feelings instead of externalizing them, which, in the future, will be a repression of his sexuality from all authorities. Mulroony continues:
The almost binary cognitive operation of countering his father's story with his own develops accordingly into a complex practice of self-orientation attentive to the social and political implications of encountered narrative methods. Like Bakhtin's developing individuals, Stephen is continually choosing his orientation amongst those methods by appropriating various aspects of their figurations of reality as his own. The task of self-narration remains quite the same throughout his growth. (160)
Mulroony's analysis shows the 'binary' narrative response becomes the natural and subconscious response Stephen utilizes to deconstruct the external reality he dislikes and internally construct his own reality. Thus, Stephen's will to internalize his own perception of reality while conforming to external expectations demonstrate a tendency to repress counter cultural feelings in the face of authority.
Also, Stephen's alienation from his father creates a need within Stephen to construct a unique individual identity separate from his father.
From a psychological perspective... The father, in contrast |to his mother|, offers a model of logocentric control. Stephen sees his father as masculine and aloof, visually separated by a glass monocle and hairy face. The male parent is the bearer of the word; he tells a story which appeals to the father's imagination and awakens him to a sense of individuality. (Henke 55-56)
Thus, Stephen constructs a perverse sense of masculinity-understanding the masculine to be 'aloof' and alienated utilizing meaningless and 'logocentric control. In chapter one, Stephen deduces his father to be aloof and, as a child, already understand his father as a failure. Stephen, armed with the tool of repression, prepares to fight against his view of masculinity and 'logocentric' control.
More curious than his understanding of his father, Stephen Dedalus views his mother as matriarch, patriarch, and friend-creating Oedipal confusion. Stephen Dedalus identifies his mother as 'nice mother' because he understands her to be the source of all physical pleasure. Stephen coins the term 'nice mother' after identifying her pleasant smell and disposition but, when she exerts matriarchal authority over him, confuses her role in his life. Henke explains:
At the outset of Portrait, Stephen perceives his mother as a powerful and beneficent source of physical pleasure. She ministers to each of the five senses. It's the 'nice mother,' however, who is one of the women principally responsible for introducing Stephen to a hostile external world and to the laws of social conformity. The first of many imperatives that thwart the boys ego, apologize, is associated with matriarchal threats (56).
Thus, Stephen grapples with understanding his mother and women's, by extension, roles in society and life. Because his mother exists as the first experience of physical pleasure, Stephen reverts back to memories of his mother in times of physical discomfort, creating an Oedipal complex. After being pushed into a ditch by wells, Stephen thinks back to a pleasant time with his mother. Henke elaborates:
The boy mentally takes refuge in artistic evocations of the family hearth, protected by a beneficent female spirit - Mother, Dante and the servant Brigid. As he relives the horror of being shouldered into a urinal ditch by Wells, Stephen projects himself beyond the rats and the scum to an apparently dissociated reverie. He recalls his mother sitting by the fire in hot 'jewelry slippers' that exude a 'lovely warm smell.' Alienated from a brutal male environment, Stephen longs to return to his mother. In true Oedipal fashion, he focuses on the fetishistic symbols of her warm feet, sexual totems that offer both kinesthetic and olfactory satisfaction in compensation for the stench and slimy touch of the chilling water." (58)
Stephen, at an early age, already confuses his mother as the outlet of sexual pleasure and protector against a brutal male environment. As consequence, he will view all women as he views his mother and healthy sexual relationships will never form. In short, Stephen alienates himself from a male dominant world and finds pleasure defined as childish comfort in women. Joyce subtly creates gender inversions by swapping in Stephen's head the stereotypical roles of men and women-ultimately altering Stephen's view of sexuality to something far less traditional. Stephen takes these feelings even further when Wells asks him if he kisses his mother. Stephen cannot fathom the correct answer to the question and the situation leaves a permanent mark on Stephen's subconscious. Henke explains:
Stephen tries to fathom the mysteries of Oedipal attraction. He is unable to differentiate between filial an erotic love and feels perplexed when Wells unites the two in a sexual conundrum. Stephen desires the soft wetness of his mother's lips, but is baffled by the moral implications. (58)
Thus, in a world dominated by men, Stephen doesn't seek to dominate women or use them or seek them for sexual desire. Stephen sees women as friends and mothers. He detaches himself from the sexual qualities with women and uses his mother as the criterion for how women ought to act.
At school, Stephen's lack of appropriate male role models skews his perception of men and sexuality. In a fit of masochistic pleasure, Father Dolan, abuses his powers to reprimand Stephen-tainting Stephen's perception of masculinity and the male role model. Before the episode with Father Dolan, Stephen viewed priests as the most intelligent and most deserving of respect. Stephen thinks, "Father Arnall knew more than Dante because he was a priest" (Portrait 8). Henke elaborates on a skewed masculine perspective:
As the curious child stumbles toward manhood, he feels compelled to cast of allegiance to maternal figures. His childhood educator Dante, 'a clever woman and a well read woman' who teaches him geography and lunar lore, is supplanted by male instructors. They introduce him to a system of male authority and discipline, to a pedagogical regimen that will insure his correct training and proper socialization. (58)
Stephen identifies the word priest with the source of good and the source of knowledge. With Dolan's reprimand, Stephen's view of the priest, the ultimate masculine role model, shatters-causing Stephen to actively push against the experience and develop into a more feminine figure by rejecting the paradigm of men as authoritative role models. Stephen subconsciously decides to reject men as role models, and, as consequence, turn towards imitation of the female. In doing so, Stephen starts to look at himself as the perfected female, which comes up more forcefully in later chapters, and develop a sexual affinity towards men because they do not possess the vulnerability of women. Henke continues, "He disdains his mother's feminine vulnerability and thinks she is 'not nice' when she cries. Like most young boys, Stephen begins to interpret his relationship with his mother as an obstacle to more grown up ties with his own sex" (57). Thus, the Dolan episode paints men as bad role models, forcing Stephen to view women as role models, not sexual objects.
Stephen's repressed homosexual feelings first expose themselves through his assessment of Mr. Gleeson. Stephen thinks:
Mr. Gleeson had round shiny cuffs and clean white wrists and fattish white hands and the nails of them were long and pointed... But they were terribly long and pointed nails. So long and cruel they were though the white fattish hands were not cruel, but gentle. And though he trembled with cold fright to think of the cruel long nails and of the high whistling sound of the cane and of the chill you felt at the end of your shirt when you undressed yourself yet he felt a feeling of queer quiet pleasure inside him to think of the white fattish hands, clean and strong and gentle. (Portrait 58)
Though Stephen looks towards women for an idea of how to act, Stephen develops a sexual affinity towards men because they are strong, unlike the vulnerable women in Stephen's life. When Stephen thinks of Gleeson, he consciously equates the experience with the nervousness and feelings associated with undressing-the same sexual excitement and feelings a heterosexual person feels around others they find sexually appealing. Stephen also comments on the 'queer quiet' pleasure he experiences when thinking of the 'strong and gentle' hands. Stephen views masculine qualities as sexually exciting but with 'quiet pleasure' indicating his desire to keep the feelings repressed. Stephen represses his feelings towards Gleeson with 'quiet' pleasure, not wanting even himself to hear the thoughts he thinks. Also, Stephen's use of the word fright suggests the same uneasiness a young boy would experience around the person they have some sort of affinity towards. Thus, the episode with Gleeson exposes Stephen's repressed homosexuality by showing the reasons Stephen finds men more sexually appealing and the thought processes he goes through around the men he finds attractive.
Stephen's socialization in an all male environment forces him to repress any sexual feelings towards men. Susan Henke again elaborates:
The young boy is being socialized into what Philip Slater identifies as a culture of male narcissism. According to Slater, single sex education and the separation of male children from the emotional refuge the family promotes misogyny, narcissism, and terror of the female. Boy children suffer from an 'unconscious fear of being feminine, which leads to protest masculinity, exaggeration of the differences between men and women.'(59).
At Clongowes, Stephen feels threatened by the masculinity of other boys. Joyce characterizes him as feeble, weak, and on the sidelines of the games the boys play. At the school, Stephen struggles to maintain his individual identity amongst his hyper-masculine environment. Afraid of forever walking the sidelines, Stephen forces himself into 'protest masculinity'-trying to cover up his feminine side to fit into the brutal male environment. Stephen fear of his feminine side forces him to repress his individuality and his sexual orientation. The boys at Clongowes harass a known homosexual at their school, Lady Boyle. Stephen, afraid of the same harassment, represses his feelings and even joins in to make fun of Boyle-counter intuitive to Stephen's character. The environment in which Stephen must socialize forces him to fear his orientation and, as consequence, repress all affinity towards men and his feminine nature. Stephen actively sees the punishment associated with his feelings and orientation. When teachers and students at Clongowes caught a group of boys in homosexual flirtations (smugging), the administration expelled some while the boys gossiped and ridiculed the others. Stephen's environment does not embrace or encourage his orientation. Stephen must repress and hide his orientation in fear of being ridiculed and forces him into fake, 'protest masculinity.'
Chapter one, then, offers the foundations for a repressed homosexual outlook. Through chapter one, Stephens understanding of women develops into feelings of respect as role models, which will later morph into his desire to raise them to an aesthetic ideal. Also, from chapter one, Stephen learns to desire men for their strong invulnerable disposition, while denying his own masculinity. Stephen's socialization forces him to repress and mask his dominate femininity while repressing his affinity towards men. The dialectics between his feelings for men and the attitude of his peers towards homosexuality synthesize into Stephen's repressed feelings.
Chapter two reveals Stephen's desire to raise women to a non-sexual aesthetic ideal and the desire within Stephen to find the fleeting motherly comfort he once experienced through Mercedes, Emma, and the prostitute. The three women form a dialectic, which solidifies Stephen's confusion in respects to women's roles in his life. First he takes Mercedes for the prototype of how to raise women to the status of art. Then he uses Emma to create his first praise of the female form. Towards the end, the prostitute penetrates Stephen-taking advantage of Stephen's needy and confused state of mind.
The Mercedes episode foreshadows a desire to look at women as esthetic ends, not objects of sexual desire. Joyce writes on Stephen's infatuation with romantic pursuit:
Outside Blackrock, on the road that led to the mountains, stood a small whitewashed house in the garden of which grew many rosebushes, and in this house, he told himself, another Mercedes lived... in his imagination he lived through a long train of adventures, marvelous as those in the book itself, towards the close of which there appeared an image of himself, grown older and sadder, standing in a moonlit garden with Mercedes, who had so many years before slighted his love and with a sadly proud gesture of refusal saying: Madam, I never eat muscatel grapes. (Portrait 82)
Stephen finds Mercedes desirable because she offers an esthetic story, a romantic pursuit, which he finds beautiful and worthy of imitation. He does not desire Mercedes sexually, and even looks towards her to fulfill his motherly longing. Mercedes functions as an abstraction of the situations to come between Emma and the prostitute. Joyce continues:
He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his should so constantly beheld... this image would without any overt act of his, encounter him... They would be alone, surrounded by darkness and silence, and in that moment of supreme tenderness he would be transfigured... Weakness and timidity and inexperience would fall form him in the magic moment. (85)
Mercedes acts as a comfort for Stephen. Stephen fantasizes Mercedes will show him how to act and how to aesthetically define and interact with women. Joyce carefully hides Stephen's intentions through sexually oriented language. However, decoding Joyce's language reveals a child longing for his mother and longing for motherly direction on how to live life in a static Ireland. Stephen seeks refuge in women and comfort from confused sexual identity-not an outlet for juvenile sexual frustration. Stephen identifies himself as above childish games, "The noise of children at play annoyed him and their silly voices made him feel, even more keenly than he had felt at Clongowes, that he was different from others. He did not want to play" (Portrait 85). Stephen's maturity makes him unable to justify a quest for sexual fulfillment. Instead, his quest calls him to discover a method he can utilize to fulfill his already advanced and developing esthetic theory. Thus, any contact with women, sexual or colloquial, acts as an extension to the fulfillment of his esthetic quest, not his sexual desire.
Stephen uses Emma as an experiment in making women the crux of his esthetic theory-a pursuit never complicated by sexual desire or lust. From the very beginning, Stephen never intended to form a relationship with Emma beyond obtaining the material he needed to raise her to the status of art. Emma presents Stephen with an opportunity for a kiss, an opportunity Stephen does not desire. Joyce fills the Emma kiss episode with rhetoric of confused Oedipal attraction and a desire for comfort via a caring female. Peter Kang elaborates:
In this way, kiss attached to EC in the vicinity of the indirect reference to the mother reinforces the initial maternal association and merges it with the girl image... one of which has itself already resumed the initial maternal connotation of the item. He behaves, with EC, like an outsider, a seemingly tranquil watcher, as he describes it to be. If only in one-word references, the mother is textually present in the kiss. (179-180)
Kang's analysis articulates Stephen's will to find the ideal maternal influence amongst the brutal Irish nets cause him to use women as esthetic devices, and objectify them with experimental motives-never really intending or desiring sexual contact or relationship. From the experience, Stephen forms the first poem, the first attempt to use women aesthetically. The poem avoids mention of Emma and only describes the surrounding romantic elements. Joyce writes, "There remained no trace of the tram itself nor of the trammen nor of the horses: nor did he vividly appear. The verses told only of the night and the balmy breeze and the maiden luster of the moon" (Portrait 93). Stephen uses the romantic settings of sexual pursuit as the ideal experience in his first esthetic trial, but he never mentions the woman and only comments on the surroundings. Later findings in the text suggest and confirm the theory so early established in chapter two. Eugene A. Waith explains:
He thinks of EC, like Davin's temptress, as 'a bat like soul waking to the consciousness of itself' and surmises that her soul had 'begun to live as his soul had when he had first sinned.' The composition of the final stanza is described as an imaginary act of sexual intercourse, in which EC is metamorphosed into the words of the poem while both are symbolized by flowing water. No passage in the book links temptation more unequivocally with artistic creativity, and none makes more clear that the emphasis is not finally upon sin. (122-123)
Waith's analysis makes clear Stephen's desire to use women as esthetic devices, not sexual ones. Even though Waith draws his evidence from later in the novel, applying Waith's analysis to Stephen's current psychological conditions yields the same results and conclusions.
Stephen gives into the prostitute's advancement out of a desire to sin and a desire to relive maternal comfort, while hoping to get insight into the life of women and experience a woman sexually for an esthetic end. Joyce writes on Stephen's state of mind prior to the prostitute's advancement, "He wanted to sin with another of his kind, to force another being to sin with him and to exult with her in sin" (Portrait 133). Stephen used and objectified the prostitute to experience sin with another person, not necessarily a woman, as rebellion against the brutal environment and demanding expectations. From the premise of wanting to sin, Stephen falls into the prostitute's arms as a child would fall into the arms of a mother. Joyce continues:
Give me a kiss she said. His lips would not bend to kiss her. He wanted to be held firmly in her arms, to be caressed slowly, slowly, slowly. In her arms he felt that he had suddenly become strong and fearless and sure of himself. But his lips would not bend to kiss her. (135).
Stephen falls into the prostitute's arms as a child to a mother. He wants and desires to be caressed and held, comforted and made stronger. He refuses to kiss her as hints of Oedipal confusion again penetrate his mind. Forces controlling Stephen's world have amounted to nothing but disappointments and failed role models. Stephen longs to create and make an ideal esthetic experience based on women-stemming from the satisfaction he experienced when next to his 'nice mother.' Because of his confusion with women and his confused Oedipal conditions, Stephen refuses to initiate sexual contact and does not desire sexual contact. Instead, the prostitute forces sexual contact upon Stephen, which Joyce describes in rhetoric alluding to a female orgasm. Joyce writes:
With a sudden movement she bowed his head and joined her lips to his and he read the meaning of her movements in her frank uplifted eyes. It was too much for him. He closed his eyes, surrendering himself to her body and mind, conscious of nothing in the world but the dark pleasure of her softly parting lips. They pressed upon his brain as upon his lips as though they were the vehicles of a vague speech; and between them he felt an unknown and timid pressure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odour. (Portrait 135).
Joyce's own rhetoric suggests the swoon towards sin, not sexual desire. Examining the language, hints of Stephen's mother become apparent and the uncertainties of Stephen's life become actualized through his first sexual experience. Stephen's femininity causes him to be timid and reluctant and penetrated, while his true sexual desires belong to men. Henke writes on the gender inversions of the prostitute scene:
The sexual imagery at the end of chapter two is ironically inverted. As Stephen feels the shadow of a streetwalker moving irresistibly upon him, he figuratively suffers the agony of penetration and surrenders to a murmurous flood of physical desire. The fusion of erotic and romantic imagery degenerates into a vague ritual of sexual initiation, celebrated before a phantasmal altar illumined by yellow gas flames. Traditional symbols are versed, and Stephen envisions himself in the role of sacrificial virgin, raped by a phallic figure and flooded with seminal streams. His cry for an iniquitous abandonment evokes an excremental vision of sex. The sound is but the echo of an obscene scrawl, which he had read on the oozing wall of a urinal. (63).
Henke's analysis takes the idea of Stephen's sexual escapade for sin, not desire, and extends it a step further. Henke suggests, then, sex with a woman for Stephen becomes excremental in nature, a dirty endeavor that brings nothing but death. He imagines himself as a sacrificed virgin, suggesting the experience as a necessary prerequisite to something greater-esthetic beauty and understanding. Joshua Jacobs suggests Stephen's anima, female portion of his psyche, taking control in the prostitute scene:
By distributing agency from a central self, Joyce effects a kind of organic liberation and allows a release of sexual power through what Derek Attridge has called a 'traffic between vocal and sexual organs'... Much has been made of Stephen's surrender to phallic penetration in this sequence, but I would argue that any surrender in the context of the epiphanic mode is not within a binary... but is a relinquishing of unifying authority in favor of multiplicity. By his deployment of swooning in these final pages, Joyce leads Stephen to join in a hitherto female act of falling from a unitary conception of the body into a liberating field of autonomous organs and senses. (20).
Jacob's analysis shows Stephen's act with the prostitute deconstructs any binary sense of male and female. While being male in body, Stephen becomes female in mind as he eagerly learns sin with another person in hopes of understanding the opposite sex better for the fulfillment of his esthetic conquest. Laurie teal also comments:
The repeated association of the masculine sexual role with that of the prostitute accounts in great part for all the oddly penile temptresses in Portrait who acquire the anatomical ability to penetrate inexperienced men. Stephen's union with the prostitute is such a moment of fusion, an encounter with a perfectly specular other that dissolves all boundaries between self and other, subject and object, male and female, and masculinity and femininity. (63)
In retrospect, Teal shows Stephen's concepts of masculine and feminine start to cross over each other and produce in Stephen a heavily feminine psyche, desiring nothing but the art of female.
In short, Chapter two firmly establishes Stephen's will to raise women to an esthetic level. He uses sex and sexual situations to understand women and their esthetic beauty. Stephen's Oedipal complex extends even further in the chapter, suggesting women's roles and functions are anything but sexual. Stephen's pursuits have been to fit into the brutal world around him and to establish a theory of aesthetics to covey his thoughts and ideals about art and life. His anima becomes firmly established and takes over his masculinity in the act of penetration with the prostitute.
Chapter three of Portrait establishes and firmly roots the ideas of the previous chapters into a concrete theory through Stephen's contemplation on how to act and live. He repents for his sexual escapades, realizing they are not for him and desires to be a priest of the eternal imagination, confirming his sexual orientation and mission of a feminine esthetic which penetrates substance, not just accidents. He furthers his esthetic theory through contemplation of the Virgin Mary, and deduces that his current path does not help him in creation of an esthetic theory.
Chapter three opens with Stephen contemplating his sins in a mesmerizing way-indicating Stephen begins to realize his current path does not reconcile with his esthetic pursuit well before any priest informs him, which helps him come to terms with his repressed sexuality and ultimate goals. Joyce writes:
The vast cycle of starry life bore his weary mind outward to its verge and inward to its center, a distant music accompanying him outward and inward... The stars began to crumble and a cloud of fine stardust fell through space... It was his own soul going forth to experience, unfolding itself sin by sin, spreading abroad the balefire of its burning stars and folding back upon itself. (137).
Stephen reluctantly realizes he chose the wrong way to go about understanding women and their esthetic ideal. Long before the retreat, Stephen internally repented for his soul, which consequently made the retreat much more powerful. Stephen realizes his sexual acts were a call to sin and experience sin, not sexual relationships with women for sexual gratification. Slowly, through contemplation in chapter three, Stephen realizes his call to sexual action perverts his own sexuality and perverts his conquest for an esthetic ideal. Eugene Waith comments:
The flow of this rebellion of the senses has coarsened and thickened to the point where it has stopped itself. What was at first a release has become a horrible restraint. Yet before the process is complete there is a hint that the excursion into sensuality is not entirely worthless. As Stephen sits thinking about his sin and working a math problem, Stephen sees his own soul, going forth to experience, unfolding itself sin by sin, and folding back and fading. The meaning of the passage seems to be double: the failure of Stephen's present way of life is foreshadowed, while at the same time sin is presented an unfolding development. (119)
Waith expresses the insight Stephen possesses over his previous way of life. Stephen realizes sin taught him many things, but also realizes sin no longer contributes to the fulfillment of his of his esthetic ideal. Interestingly, from the moment sin unfolds itself to Stephen, he no longer engages in sexual misconduct with women. Because Stephen stops relishing in sexual misconduct when he realizes sin contributes nothing, the theory Stephen used women and sex to understand sin and women for an esthetic ideal gains validity.
Throughout the chapter, Stephen's feelings about esthetics solidify through the judgment, hell, and heaven sermons-acting as the impetus to thoughts of the Virgin Mary, which yield a finalized aesthetic theory. Through the sermons Stephen becomes frightened and sorry for objectifying Emma for an esthetic objective. Stephen utilizes his understanding of the Virgin Mary to gain repentance for his sins. Joyce writes:
She |Mary| placed their hands together, hand in hand, and said, seaking to their hearts. Take hands, Stephen and Emma. It is a beautiful evening now in heaven. You have erred but you are always my children. It is one heart that loves another heart. Take hands together my dear children, you will be happy. (156-157)
Stephen uses Mary as his savior. He understands the awesomeness and respect, which accompanies the Virgin birth. Stephen uses the above image to justify the understanding women are not binary creatures, only the Virgin acts as a pure female worthy of imitation-ultimately leading to his chastity. Garry Leonard explains:
A girl innocent and demure whom the Virgin Mary herself joins with him in sinless satisfaction... Stephen's fantasy of this encounter is neatly split between the kinetics of the pornographic city and the stasis achieved by aesthetic distance from it. On the one hand, the wanton woman is the femme fatale of commodity culture, never weary of her ardent ways, merciless, and forcing him to spend again and again. (79).
Leonard argues the retreat and the Virgin give Stephen the justification necessary to divorce himself from all sexual experience with women and idolize the Virgin as the perfect female figure worthy of imitation. He sets himself apart and realizes his esthetic theory rests in the esthetics of a stasis detached from the 'pornographic' town. Leonard continues:
Stephen's aesthetic theory, set in deliberate opposition to the pornographic, also creates a category of normativeness, not by declaring what is normal, however, but by categorizing and regulating affect. He strives for a perceptual grid that will allow the subject to watch him or herself watching and stand ready to condemn or discipline with increasing severity whatever such self surveillance experiences as an 'abnormal' response... a state Stephen calls esthetic stasis. (79)
Leonard succinctly identifies the final formation of Stephen's ascetic theory as one, which raises women to the status of art by forming them into the ideal Virgin. Stephen no longer possesses the need, or the desire, to sexually pursue women-giving credence to the theory his sexual escapades were for the sake of understanding women for art. David Seed confirms the feeling, "The creation analogy implies Stephen identifies closely with the Virgin after he has lost his faith and also sets up an extraordinary oscillation between literal and analogical gender throughout the passage... Stephen dramatizes himself not only as a phallic force, but also a female matrix" (95). Certainly, as Seed shows, by identifying with the Virgin Mary, Stephen's new aesthetic theory ends sin and begins with idealizing the Virgin Mary.
Chapter three functions esoterically, to solidify Stephen's esthetic theory into permanence. Stephen comes to terms with the way he uses women for his esthetic theory, and he concludes the pursuit is no longer a worthwhile endeavor. He idealizes the Virgin and wants to usurp her powers as supreme spotless creator. Chapter three gives way into the thoughts of Stephen as the priest of the eternal imagination. Subsequent chapters focus on the fulfillment of Stephen's theory through interaction with male characters and feminine ideals.
Chapter four permits Stephen to practice his new method of obtaining and fulfilling his aesthetic through rigorous discipline-accentuating the idea of Stephen finally giving up objectifying women in an aesthetic pursuit while maintaining a repressed homosexuality. However, chapter four reveals the Church's inadequacy in fulfillment of the theory. Leonard writes:
In the opening of Book IV of A Portrait, Stephen uses the readily available taxonomic system of the Catholic Church to carry this state |esthetic stasis| over into the everyday... But this is still too general to provide minute to minute protection, and so he must watch himself even more closely... Stephen generates pleasure through intense self - surveillance, just as he formally generated pleasure for himself in a completely contrary manner, by refusing to see himself as anything but a sensual animal randomly wandering for sensation... Though he sees himself as completely open to the call of the city, we should not forget pleasures of the city are something which Stephan has to pay. (79)
Leonard perceives Stephen's actions, as the manifestation of his new found esthetic developed in chapter three.
The culmination of Stephen's aesthetic ideal occurs during his reaction to the bird woman-showing Stephen's non-sexual interest in women. Joyce's description of Stephen's perception of the bird girl exists as confirmation of his mature aesthetic theory, a theory, which he is too young to actualize in the end. Joyce writes:
A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, aging out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful sea bird. Her long bare slender legs were delicate as a crane's and pure... where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh... her bosom was as a bird's ... but her long fair hair was girlish... and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty. (233)
Sexual lust or desire does not exit in Joyce's rhetoric. The woman mid stream becomes successfully idealized and placed on a pedestal. Stephen finally actualizes his aesthetic theory, even though he cannot successfully administer it throughout the rest of the novel. The girl mid stream exists as the apex of Stephen's artistic theory. The Midwest Quarterly explains, "Witnessing the bird girl is the culmination of his journey, the end of his quest for manhood and artistry. Reflected in the bird girl is Stephen's inner self, his artistic soul" (274). The rest of the novel is putting the theory into larger practice. But, by the end of chapter four, the theory is complete. From the theory, Stephen's reaction to the bird girl and his newly developed aesthetic reveals his true nature and feelings on sexuality, life, and art. Waith comments:
Stephen's ecstatic contemplation of the girl on the shore is emblematic of the life, which he feels himself destined to lead-in the world, but not of it. Twice in chapter four, once plainly and once symbolically, this destiny is described. The first passage comes shortly after his association of the priest's life with the sluggish water of the Clongowes bath. The wisdom of the priest's appeal did not touch him to the quick. He was destined to learn his own wisdom apart from others or to learn the wisdom of others himself wandering among the snares of the world. (121)
Certainly, Stephen existed as an outsider throughout the novel. Now, he learned his lessons on his own and lives comfortably in his own skin. His aesthetic theory pleases him. Now that he understands his theory and what it entails, he tries to live a life conducive to its fulfillment.
For this theory, chapter five offers no further evidence. However, Stephen must force himself to break away from his friend Cranly and Emma Clery, his former infatuation of aesthetics, to fulfill the theory in his mind. Forcing the exile however puts into context the young man part of the title. While he was mature enough to experience life in a way to help him construct his aesthetic theory, his decision to go into exile makes him a young man. Stephen ultimately fails in exile, and returns to Dublin as a 'jejune' Jesuit', facing many of the same problems he experienced in Portrait. However, Stephen's relationship with Cranly and the villanelle deserve a brief analysis.
Crany offers Stephen an intellectual equal and competitor-which leads Stephen to see his aesthetic theory unfulfilled. Ellmann elaborates:
The self-centered character of Portrait precludes Joyce's enlarging upon Stephen's further relations with Cranly. Stephen dispenses with both love and friendship; reluctantly but with what he considers justification. The contest of love and hate between him and Cranly is irrelevant except in so far as it compels his departure to search for freedom. (36)
As Ellmann suggests, Cranly is significant only in so far as his action as an impetus to Stephen's exile to further his aesthetic ideal. The competition with Cranly does not exist as a competition to win Emma Clery, but to further and deepen Stephen's convictions towards an aesthetic ideal.
Finally, the journal and villanelle at the end suggest the pinnacle of art and a breakaway from traditional Irish nets-especially the nets of sexuality. Mulroony writes:
Constructing the villanelle, creating the journal, Stephen begins to claim A Portrait as his own book. As Stephen's language breaks through to form an independent voice, 'we discover that the fulfillment of the process of becoming an author occurs in the act of writing.' In its denial of any social and political reality beyond the personal the same lyric voice that frees Stephen from cultural bondage finally leads him into a static, and literally pronounced, artistic solipsism. Concerned with individual identity more than anything else Stephen denies himself the interactions with others that would enable him to create an authentic aesthetic representation of Ireland's culture. (160)
Thus, chapter five acts as a synopsis of Stephen's breakaway and exile. Stephen leaves Ireland because his views of life, art, and sexuality cannot truly be expressed without censorship. Stephen thus feels he cannot accurately represent Ireland through aesthetics. Chapter five identifies with Stephen's individuality and gives him the courage to leave Ireland.
In retrospect, Stephens 'attraction' towards women throughout the novel exist only as an experiment to creating an esthetic theory, an ideal. The gender inversions present in the novel suggest Stephen's repressed homosexuality, and raising women up on a pedestal creates a misogynistic outlook because the theory deconstructs the matrix of femininity into an unfair binary composition of body and soul.