Smugging in the Square: Homosexuality as a Literary Device in James Joyce's "A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man."

What can be said of the menacing literary masterpiece that is A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is that the gender issues Joyce so surreptitiously weaves into Stephan Dedalus’s character create sizable obstacles for the reader to overcome. Joyce expertly composes a feminine backdrop in which he can mold Stephan to inexplicably become innately homosexual. As Laurie Teal points out “… Joyce plays with gender inversion as a uniquely powerful tool of characterization.”(63) Stephan’s constant conflict with himself and what he wants generate a need for validation that he tries to simulate through day dreams and fantasies but is ultimately unable to resolve. Through exploring the tones of characterization and the character development of Stephan himself, I will argue that Stephan Dedalus rejects his heterosexuality in favor of homosexuality so that he may eventually find himself. Dedalus’s character must inherently be homosexual in able for his story to progress believably. Joyce conceives his character, a hero in fact, in a moment of genius. A hero must have a fatal flaw. I wish to clarify Joyce’s work and explain how homosexuality IS present in Portrait and does work in creating a hero. Stephan rejects possible companion after companion yet ceaselessly alludes to his constant social isolation. On Stephan’s definition of normal, Garry Leonard has this to say, “Although Stephan strives for such a system, he also seeks relief from it, declaring all responses illegitimate except for a state he calls ‘esthetic stasis.’”(Leonard, 81) Joyce’s decision to create “such a system” within Stephan demonstrates Joyce’s choice to make Stephan unable to delineate from what is normal and was is not. Stephan is confused with himself and with his surroundings. Here, we are able to see that if there was even a chance for Stephan to understand himself at some point, it is now gone. In his creation of a system, Stephan actually makes it harder for himself. He cannot now arbitrarily