Silencing Stephen: colonial pathologies in Victorian Dublin - protagonist in author James Joyce's book 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1997 by Tracey Teets Schwarze

Can we not build up a national tradition, a national literature, which shall be none the less Irish in spirit from being English in language? Can we not keep the continuity of the nation's life ... by translating or retelling in English, which shall have an indefinable Irish quality of rythm [sic] and style, all that is best of the ancient literature? (Rpt. in Frayne 255)

As Stephen Dedalus wanders through the din of competing discourses that make up the modern Irish nation, he helps Joyce to reveal that those who would promote hegemony and insularity - whether the forms be British or Irish - would destroy the very nation they would create.

The signifiers of political self-betrayal intrude upon the consciousness of Portrait's Stephen from the novel's first page, which records his earliest memories - hearing the Baby Tuckoo story, wetting the bed, and dancing the sailor's hornpipe. Stephen here also observes that "Dante had two brushes in her press. The brush with the maroon velvet back was for Michael Davitt and the brush with the green velvet back was for Parnell" (Portrait 7). It is the earliest text of colonial impact that Stephen tries to read; it records the temporary unity of nationalist factions - including Davitt's Fenian Irish National Land League and the Catholic Church - under Parnell's leadership. With Parnell's political demise in 1890 and his death in 1891, however, came the renewal of virulent factionalism. A few pages later, Dante has "ripped the green velvet back off the brush that was for Parnell ... and ... told him that Parnell was a bad man," and Stephen wonders "which was right, to be for the green or for the maroon" (Portrait 16). Before his terror-stricken eyes, Christmas dinner is transformed into a metaphoric civil war, each side accusing the other of deception, treachery, and betrayal: John Casey and Simon Dedalus violently deride the Catholic priests and the "priests' pawns" who denounced Parnell because of his liaison with Kitty O'Shea; just as vehemently, Dante Riordan defends the priests' action as a vindication of "God and morality and religion" (Portrait 38). Stephen momentarily recalls happier days when both sides united against British imperialism:

he was for Ireland and Parnell and so was father; and so was Dante too for one night at the band on the esplanade she had hit a gentleman on the head with her umbrella because he had taken off his hat when the band played "God Save the Queen" at the end.

(Portrait 37)

But with Parnell's fall, the union he had forged fractured; in the Dedalus dining room, faces darken in anger, voices quiver with rage, and fists crash onto the table. That this is Christmas dinner, that time of year when "goodwill among men" mythically pervades, intensifies the violence and causes the scene to reverberate with irony. Stephen's confusion over the argument - "Who was right then?" (Portrait 35) - underscores the prismatic nature of nationalist discourse as it scatters altered pieces of ideology, among various political factions.