Myth and identity in Joyce's fiction: disentangling the image - James Joyce

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1994 by William O'Neill

This view of societal influence as an obstacle to the development of the central character was one of Dickens's great contributions to the Bildungsroman. Indeed, Joyce seems to have learned a good deal about the Bildungsroman from Dickens.

Like David Copperfield and Great Expectations, A Portrait tells the story of the emergence of a young protagonist from a youth filled with snares into promising adulthood. David Copperfield develops his survival skills, first by learning, in good nineteenth-century-optimist fashion, to avoid Mr. Micawber's fecklessness and do something. Biting Mr. Murdstone's hand is his first foray into the world of action. It gets him sent away to Salem House, not the best of all possible outcomes, but better than staying at home. Later he runs away from Murdstone and Grinby's warehouse, learns shorthand to become a court reporter, discovers (with Micawber's help) Heep's skullduggery, and so forth. He learns to control his destiny by this kind of effort, and by learning to understand and assess the people around him. In this way he learns to avoid the kind of surprises out of the blue that had so plagued his youth, such as his mother's marriage to Murdstone, and Steerforth's abduction of Emily. And he develops values. He learns that Steerforth, in spite of his glamour, is a rotter; he learns that Mr. Peggotty, in spite of his homely exterior, is a gem.

The whole course of David's development is straightforward perhaps too much so. Great Expectations is in part a correction of the too simple depiction of ethical development as portrayed in David Copperfield. The world of David Copperfield has much evil in it, but there are enough pockets of sanity that it requires only determination and intelligence to solve any problem. The ground that the little seed of a person, Pip, must grow in is marshy and overgrown with nettles. In spite of his developing into quite an intelligent young man, he can get no clear picture of his world and of the forces that govern his life. He thinks that Miss Havisham is the source of his expectations and learns only very slowly of the twisted underneath of things, that his benefactor is the criminal, Magwitch.

Like David, Stephen learns to do something: he goes to the rector to complain about unjust pandying, he writes, he leaves the church, and finally leaves Ireland too. Like Pip, he finds the moral ground marshy, or boggy perhaps, and overgrown with an Irish variety of nettles. His difficulty in perceiving his world and understanding its intentions toward him is more complicated than Pip's because there are none of the Joe Gargery-John Wemmick role models that help Pip find his way. The English, having been their own masters for centuries, have created many models of the successful life; the Irish, being colonials, have been unable to do so. As with American blacks and Indians, subjection to a foreign culture has destroyed all authority figures in the society.

This latter point is, I think, the theme of the first episode of A Portrait. The novel begins with the beginning of a children's story, a moocow coming down along the road and meeting a nicens little boy, Stephen. The little boy, who will grow up to become the "bullock befriending bard," learns as he grows older to associate cows with mothers and with mother Ireland.(4) And what comes down along the road and meets Stephen in the early part of the novel is his nationality. He goes off to Clongowes to find that his father is not as important as the other fathers.