What is the role of women in ''Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'' by James Joyce?

Answer 1

In "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," women primarily serve as symbols of temptation and inspiration for the protagonist, Stephen Dedalus. They play a significant role in shaping Stephen's views on religion, morality, and artistic expression. The women characters in the novel represent a mix of influences that challenge and shape Stephen's identity as he navigates his place in the world.

Answer 2

Stephen Daedalus, the central character of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is considered to be a semi-autobiographical account of the author's own life, James Joyce. Both Joyce and Daedalus were Roman Catholics who shared a rocky relationship with the church but being an artist neither could escape their Catholic upbringing any more than being an expatriate could cleanse themselves of being Irish. The Roman Catholic church is famous, or some would say infamous, for their somewhat oppressive policies towards women. Indeed, the King James Version of the New Testament presents a Jesus who is known to have a close personal relationship with only two women, His Mother, the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene. While in the New Testament there is no direct reference of Mary Magdalene ever being a whore, the Catholic church has gone out of their way to portray her in this fashion.

In A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, Stephen is conflicted about his own views of women and suffers great guilt--he is of course Catholic---about his regular visits to brothels. His virginity is lost to a prostitute while his own romantic infatuations with women he knows are never realized. Early on it is Emma who is the girl of his dreams and he writes poems to her and idealizes her to the point of placing her on a pedestal and bestowing upon her a goddess-like status. He also almost always refers to her as "she" and she remains a mysterious figure both for the reader and Stephen. In some ways, and even though idealized the very real Emma seems to parallel the very fictional Mercedes of Count of Monte Cristo. For Stephen, Edmond Dantes love, Mercedes represents the ideal woman. He searches in vain for a woman who can live up to his own idealized conception of Mercedes. He expects that upon finding such a woman he will transform into someone better, or being Catholic, a transfiguration.

He of course, never meets this woman in real life, our fictional character Stephen Daedalus, who in an earlier draft Joyce had named Stephen Hero, and has a penchant for pushing the women he longs for away. It is this distinctly Catholic upbringing coupled with his own views of art, and being an artist, that has so strongly affected Stephen's view of women. They are either idealized goddesses pure and radiant as the Virgin Mary or Whores who can only offer a sexual gratification such as his own understanding of Mary Magdalene, only to have that pleasure followed by extreme guilt. His very first sexual event was with a prostitute and as Joyce wrote it he; "He closed his eyes, surrendering himself to her, body and mind, conscious of nothing in the world but the dark pressure of her softly parted lips." Stephen has come close to the transfiguration he believes will happen but then is consumed with unbearable guilt.

Stephen never seems to achieve his fantasy of transfiguration in the arms of his goddess-like woman, and has somehow exchanged that for the life of an artist. A solitary artist who perceives a girl wading in the strand, or as Joyce puts it: "A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to the sea. She seemed like one who magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful sea creature." It is this vision that has a profound effect on Stephen as an artist. It is from this moment, this spiritual and artistic epiphany that he forms his theory on what an artist should be. It is Wholeness, Harmony and Radiance that he looks for in the love of a woman and realizes that those very same qualities are what he should strive for as an artist. While in his endeavor to find that woman of which he can transform himself, it is through sex and love that he imagines this will happen. Yet the woman he contemplates wading midstream is done so with detachment with no romantic or sexual desire. The irony of this is the girl is now reduced to a means to an end, that end being his own artistic revelation. Joyce wrote this artistic epiphany as such:

"The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the aesthetic apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of aesthetic pleasure, a spiritual state."

The role of women in this novel becomes one of facilitation to himself. What Stephen never obtains is that shedding of self in exchange for the creation of a new being intertwined with the self of a woman who has also shed herself to become this transfiguration of self into a couple. In his imagination women are either Madonna's or whores, yet in reality women are far more complex than these extreme polarized ideals. Stephen in this novel and in this context represents not only Catholic males but pretty much all men in this polarized view. A common expression amongst barroom brothers is; "Treat a princess like a whore and a whore like a princess." A very common ideal of women amongst most men and like Stephen most men must come to the realization that this idealization neither serves any man who seeks a relationship with women nor does it serve those women.