The protagonist of James Joyce's A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus, has much in common with one of the protagonists of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, Marianne Dashwood, as well as with the main character of Kate Chopin's The Awakening, Edna Pontellier. Like Marianne, his sensibility hates commonplace expressions passing for witticisms(Austen 38, Joyce 200-06), they each scorn cultural expectations(Austen 124, Joyce 268-69), and they both launch into detailed explanations of their life philosophies at the slightest notice(Austen 31-33, Joyce 211-33). Like Edna, who lives "her own small life within herself" as a child into adulthood, Stephen also externally follows his society's rules, secretly questioning why they exist and what they could mean(Chopin 26, Joyce 88).
Similarly, all three lose the love of their lives, whether that's based on reality's appearance or mere fantasy; as Willoughby callously deserts Marianne, Edna leaves Mr. Pontellier and is in turn left by Robert, and Stephen loses Emma. Here, however, a difference emerges. Marianne, after her near-death experience, realizes what a fool she has been and is remorseful about it. She forgives him as much as possible and then moves on with the next chapter of her life, accepting the role she is to play in the world (Austen 300-05). Stephen explicitly states that in his rejected state he will not serve what he does not believe in (Joyce 260, 268). He then exiles himself, leaving his old world full of disappointments behind, letting down all those who have placed their expectations on him (Joyce 267). Edna takes Stephen's position even farther; once her world crumbles, she gives up, stating that she will give up the unessential in her life as a mother, even her life, but not sacrifice herself, later on becoming even clearer in her sentiments: "I don't want anything other than my own way. That is wanting a great deal, of course, when you have to trample upon the hearts, the lives, the prejudices of others - but no matter" (Chopin 88, 184). Edna shortly thereafter commits suicide, just to prove her point (Chopin 188-90).
In Portrait, Joyce creates a character that is an outsider among everyone, standing on the fringes of everything. As a child, "he thought he was sick in his heart, if you could be sick in that place" and as a teen, his heart is again sick as he thinks about his place in the world: "A leader afraid of his own authority, proud and sensitive and suspicious, battling against the squalor of his life and the riot of his mind" (Joyce 10, 96). Even his name is confounding; "Stephen" was the name of the first Christian martyr, who gave up his earthly life for a more eternal reward, juxtaposed with "Dedalus", as Daedalus was the brilliant Greek engineer who created the Labyrinth and escaped Minos' tower; keeping himself alive while indirectly responsible for the deaths of his son, Icarus, and numerous Athenian youths.
When Stephen is unjustly beaten by the unfair, cruel world in the form of Father Dolan's pandybat, he then courageously goes to the rector and complains(Joyce 56-60). Like most of his time at Clongowes, this was an early formative experience, but this time he found out for the first time that priests were not infallible; neither was he helpless. By writing his father quickly for a new pair of glasses, and then speaking to the rector shortly after the humiliating punishment, he could to some small extent control what life throws in his way in order to improve his journey.
At Belvedere during the play, another important realization occurs: Priests are just men. As men, they can be just as coarse and stupid as his father(Joyce 89). Almost more memorable; in losing himself to the character he plays, Stephen finds himself "clothed for a moment in the real apparel of boyhood", proving that he can truly live in the same world as his fellow creatures(Joyce 90). While he seems to have forgotten this by his time at the university(Joyce 204), it is important for us as readers for the purposes of dramatic irony.
Perhaps, though, Stephen does remember the lost exquisite joy of the play, as by the novel's end he is seeking to recapture that feeling through hesitant stumbling attempts at journaling(Joyce 270-76). This act of creation has the status quo of his thought process's dreamlike non-reality; in writing his poem he seeks to adapt the trappings of the priesthood he rejected(Joyce 174-79) to fit into a shape more becoming to the first steps of artistic adventurings(Joyce 235-43). We don't ever fully (or even mostly) understand ourselves and why we do the things we do, but that doesn't stop us from searching. By switching to first-person at the end, Joyce provides a hint that Stephen is beginning a new epiphany; that he might use his imagination and peculiar outlook on life to provide a public good through his writings, whether that be in the form of stories or the form of essays.
Joyce used a radical form of stream-of-consciousness style in writing this novel, which while a nightmare to read, opened the doors to an entirely new class of possible nonlinear narrative styles and demolished the walls currently holding novels in place. It works amazingly well at capturing the thinking of a child or of someone extremely ill. We could argue that Stephen is often both childish(Joyce 8-14, 62-74, 188-89, 200-10) and sick(Joyce 8-11, 18-24, 96-98, 146-52) throughout his lifetime.
While there could certainly be more written expounding on these and other themes in much more depth, as Lucy Steele wrote in one of her letters, 'my paper now reminds me to conclude" (Austen 242).
WORKS CITED
Austen, Jane. Sense and Sensibility. 1811. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Print
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. 1899. New York: Avon Books, 1972. Print.
Joyce, James. A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. 1914. New York: Penguin Books, 1993. Print.
