A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Study Guide

Portrait of the Artist is largely autobiographical: Stephen’s life corresponds in most details to Joyce’s. Like Stephen, he was born in Dublin to a merry, profligate father and devout Catholic mother, the eldest of ten surviving children; like his fictional counterpart, he attended Clongowes Wood College, Belvedere College, and University College Dublin. During college, Joyce began to publish literary reviews, poems, and plays. After graduating in 1902 he briefly studied medicine in Paris; he returned to Dublin some months later to attend his mother’s funeral. At this time, he tried unsuccessfully to publish shorter, earlier versions of Portrait under the names of Portrait of the Artist and Stephen Hero. In 1904 he met Nora Barnacle, who he married and who served as an inspiration and a model for many aspects of Joyce’s fiction. The couple spent many years wandering around Europe in near-poverty, settling eventually in Zurich and Paris.

Portrait takes place during one of the most turbulent and eventful periods of Irish history. A significant issue during this period was Irish nationalism and separatism. Since the Norman invasion in the 12th century, large parts of Ireland had been held under British rule, and in 1801 Ireland became part of the United Kingdom. Throughout the 19th century, and especially after the great potato famines of the 1840s, many Irish people felt growing dissatisfaction with British rule and dreamed of becoming a sovereign nation. Irish separatists splintered into two major groups: Fenians, who favored the use of brute force, and constitutional reformists, who chose to follow a more moderate path within the confines of international law. Michael Davitt and Charles Parnell were famous separatist leaders of the 1870s and 80s. Under Parnell’s leadership, and with the support of the British prime minister, the Irish people hoped to finally establish home rule; but when it came out in 1891 that Parnell had been engaging in an extramarital affair with Kitty O’Shea, the wife of a member of the Irish Parliament, the Catholic Church denounced Parnell and he fell from power. He died only a year later, and the Irish separatist movement lost direction – until erupting in the 1919 War of Independence.

Joyce’s novel arrived at the pinnacle of the profoundly significant literary movement known as modernism. Portrait pioneered many modernist literary techniques, including stream of consciousness, nonlinear narrative structure, and wildly imaginative wordplay. He brought these techniques to an even greater degree of polish in the longer, more enigmatic novel Ulysses, which brought him universal renown (as well as scathing criticism). Portrait is also famous for its use of the epiphany, an ecstatic moment of understanding. Joyce’s modernist cohort included such writers as Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Andrey Bely, Marcel Proust, and his student Italo Svevo. He also had strong ties to such Irish writers as W. B. Yeats.