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

Stephen's need for an exalted place in the schoolyard hierarchy is a direct result of the oppression he experiences there. In a native appropriation of the colonial scene in which colonizers subdue indigenous populations by imposing behavioral patterns for the natives to emulate, the Irish Catholic Wells establishes himself as Stephen's superior. This enactment of Said's theory of nativistic self-oppression becomes unmistakable as the episode progresses. Already outranking Stephen as a magistrate's son, Wells is also positioned in the elevated "third of grammar" and owns a "seasoned hacking chestnut," significantly described by Stephen (and presumably by Wells) as "the conqueror of forty" (Portrait 14). The question Wells poses to Stephen - "Tell us Dedalus, do you kiss your mother before you go to bed?" unmasks Stephen's failure to assimilate into the new hierarchy. Stephen's blushing confusion as he attempts to discover the "right" answer to the question marks the imminent failure of colonial mimesis that Homi Bhabha has argued for in "Of Mimicry and Man." Stephen tries in this scene to imitate the response he believes his tormentors require to prove he is one of them, but instead produces what Bhabha calls "a difference that is almost the same, but not quite" (126); Stephen's response reveals nothing so much as his own estrangement from his countrymen's discourse and solidifies their positions over him.

As it did in the Christmas dinner episode, the gendering of this scene further contributes to its political implications. If, as Doyle and other theorists have noted,(5) the female figure in Irish literature is often an encoded representation of the struggles against colonial oppressions, then the power of Wells's question may derive from its appropriation of the female figure. Janet Grayson has argued that Wells's question is a politicized one - do you submit to Ireland and her claims on you? Grayson suggests that Stephen's change of affirmation to negation foreshadows his later "non-serviam"; her analysis overlooks the fact that Stephen's "I do not" is more likely to be not a statement of convictions, but rather an attempt by an unhappy child to silence his tormentors by guessing the "right" answer to their trick question. But Wells's question and the reading of the female figure is a legitimate one; Stephen will later in Portrait refuse his mother's request that he make his Easter duty, and she becomes a progressively clearer representation of Ireland and its staunch Catholicism.(6) For now, however, Stephen faces for the first time a question for which there is no "fight" answer; the ambiguity of fight and wrong among political texts is, of course, repeated at Christmas dinner.

These schoolyard scenes, then, become miniaturized, nativistic appropriations of the conquest narrative, where British dominion is replaced by an Irish Catholic rule that employs the forms of colonial subjugation as it subdues fellow Irishmen. As he grows older, Stephen becomes an increasingly more sophisticated reader of the self-oppression inherent in Victorian Dublin's colonial discourses. In a heated exchange with Davin, Stephen explodes against one nationalist faction, the Gaelic Leaguers: