James Joyce's Portrait

Abstract

This essay seeks to explore Joyce's appropriation of the Greek myth surrounding Daedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in consideration of the intricate relation between language, identity-sexuality, and between home and homelessness in the Irish context. I will suggest that the Daedalian labyrinth functions as the model for Stephen Dedalus's negotiation between what Julia Kristeva calls the symbolic and the semiotic signifying dispositions, which are manifested as the patriarchal law of disembodiment and the desire of the transgressive body. While his Greek avatar flew home away from the labyrinth confining bestial sexuality which he constructed, Stephen, through imaginary gender inversions, emerges toward the end of the novel as the self-engendered Daedalian author of Portrait who leaves Ireland only to return to the aesthetic residence of the novel, and as the mother of a new Ireland which validates hissexuality as well as her own.