Stephen’s Inner Conflicts

Stephen’s Inner Conflicts【Abstract】Inner conflicts play a vital important role in James Joyce’s semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This thesis displays and analyzes Stephen’s inner conflicts with examples, along his growth and transformation: the two major inner conflicts as obedience and rebellion, sense and emotion, as well as the minor inner conflicts as mind and body, sin and confession.【Key words】A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man；James Joyce；Stephen Dedalus；Ｉnner conflict0IntroductionStephen, the protagonist of the a semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man written by James Joyce, is a young man who brought up in a Catholic family and studied in Catholic schools successively. However, finally he becomes an artist. He pursues beauty, vitality, and wildness in life and art, which is exactly on the opposite side of sense, repression of emotions and lifelessness of sermons in Catholicism of that time in Ireland. Through the development, Stephen, a good boy who lived in the Catholic atmosphere eventually turns to a rebellious artist. It is a development of his several pairs of inner conflicts, including main conflicts such as obedience and rebellion, sense and emotion, and other minor conflicts as mind and body, sin and confession, religion and art, etc. This paper aims at analyzing Stephen’s several pairs of inner conflicts to better understand why Stephen can finally become a rebellious artist. In some pairs of conflicts, one defeated another at last, and in others, along with Stephen’s growth, the two sides were not conflicted with each other anymore.1Conflict between Obedience and RebellionThe first pair of inner conflict is obedience and rebellion. This appears in all the whole 5 chapters. At first, Stephen was more an obedient child and student for he was always educated to obey others who were superior to him. In Chapter 1, when asked whether he will kiss his mother before he goes to bed by Wells, Stephen answered two times with different answers, but all the boys were laughing at him no matter what answer he replied. It was obviously that Wells who superior to him was just teasing him, yet Stephen didn’t even think about that way. He was only confused “what was the right answer to the question?” (Chap.1) His schoolmate Vincent Heron once described Stephen as “a model youth” (Chap.2). Stephen “doesn’t smoke and he doesn’t go to bazaars and he doesn’t flirt and he doesn’t damn anything or damn all.” (Chap.2) Studying in either Clongowes or Belvedere, “he had never once disobeyed or allowed turbulent companions to seduce him from his habit of quiet obedience; and, even when he doubted some statement of a master, he had never presumed to doubt openly.” (Chap.4) Moreover, the priest once talked to Stephen that “in a college like this, there is one boy or perhaps two or three boys whom God calls to the religious life. Such a boy is marked off from his companions by his piety, by the good example he shows to others. He is looked up to by them; he is chosen perhaps as prefect by his fellow sodalists.” (Chap.4) And the priest treated Stephen as “such a boy in thiscollege, prefect of Our Blessed Lady’s sodality. Perhaps you are the boy in this college whom God designs to call to Himself.” (Chap.4) All these show that Stephen is, at least, appearing to be an obedient young man.While Stephen’s obedience was existed all along in his young life, his rebellions were slowly gathered, strengthened and finally defeated his obedience. His first rebellion was tiny, hesitated and indirect. That happened in Chapter 1, when Father Dolan, the prefect of studies, wrongly pandied Stephen because Father Dolan thought him as a lazy idle little schemer who made up a trick to avoid studying. The punishment is a huge humiliation and is unfair and cruel, for Stephen was always one of the best students in the class. Actually, obeying Father Arnall’s words, Stephen didn’t do anything wrong. Driven by his feelings and classmates’words, he wanted to “go up and tell the rector on him” (Chap.1). But his obedience to the superior prevented himself from doing it. After a long-term hesitation, he finally told the rector on Father Dolan. Fortunately, his first rebellion was succeeded. Although he still warned himself that “he would not be anyway proud with Father Dolan. He would be very quiet and obedient: and he wished that he could do somethin g kind for him to show him that he was not proud” (Chap.1), his first rebellion unobviously helped to rid himself of obedience. His next rebellion happened because of his repression of the love towards Eileen. At that time, Stephen, on the one side, imagin ed that “I could easily catch hold of her when she comes up to my step: nobody is looking. I could hold her and kiss her.” (Chap.2) While on the other side, he repressed himself, “he did neither” (Chap.2). However, love and lust, at his age, was inevitable and indispensable. Therefore, his repression was broke out later and he had to go to prostitutes. This time his rebellion was significant and profound. When his repression broke out, “he cared little that he was in mortal sin, that his life had grown to be a tissue of subterfuge and falsehood. Beside the savage desire within him to realize the enormities which he brooded on nothing was sacred.” (Chap.2) Despite of he still remind himself of “its dim memory of dark orgiastic riot, its keen and humiliating s ense of transgression” (Chap.2) on the next morning, he began to challenge the authority of rituals and the rationality of canons. “Is baptism with a mineral water valid?” “If the wine change into vinegar and the host crumble into corruption after they have been consecrated, is Jesus Christ still present under their species as God and as man?” (Chap.3) However, this rebellion was soon surrendered to religious ethics in fear of terrible death and hell. His last rebellion was happened when he could not repress his nature anymore. After talking with the priest who wanted Stephen to become a priest as well, he realized that “his throat ached with a desire to cry aloud, the cry of a hawk or eagle on high, to cry piercingly of his deliverance to the winds. This was the call of life to his soul not the dull gross voice of the world of duties and despair, not the inhuman voice that had called him to the pale service of the altar.” (Chap.4) Thus he decided to refuse the office and to go to the university. As to family, “he was made aware dimly and without regret of a first noiseless sundering of their lives.” (Chap.4) In addition, Stephen described Ireland as “the old sow that eats her farrow” (Chap.5). He was on the opposite of Irish renaissance and Irish War of Indep endence, as he thought “when the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to meof nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.” (Chap.5) From that moment on, Stephen had finished his transformation from an obedient good boy to a rebellious artist.3Other inner conflictsExcept these two main inner conflicts, there’re several smaller conflicts like mind and body, sin and confession, religion and art, etc. In Chapter 3 and the former part of Chapter 4, Stephen got deeply caught in whether to go to confession or to keep his sin which he had already made. From the beginning, he was a little proud of “his own sin, his loveless awe of God” and “a false homage to the All-seeing and All-knowing.” (Chap.3) Later his “faint glimmer of fear became a terror of spirit” (Chap.3). At last, he felt that “his soul was festering in sin” (Chap.4). However, “when the agony of shame had passed from him he tried to raise his soul from its abject powerlessness” (Chap.4) And he would prefer to keep his sin at that time. But, unfortunately, the mellifluent preacher’s speech utterly changed Stephen’s attitude towards confession. That made him thought, “No escape. He had to confess, to speak out in wor ds what he had done and thought sin after sin.” (Chap.4)As to the inner conflict between mind and body, which appears in Chapter 3-4, the two were first abnormally harmonious with each other. “At his first violent sin he had felt a wave of vitality pass out of him and had feared to find his body or his soul maimed by the excess. Instead the vital wave had carried him on its bosom out of himself and back again when it receded: and no part of body or soul had been maimed but a dark peace had been established between them.” (Chap.3) Then his mind gradually defeated his body, for Stephen was still restricted to the rigescent or rigid Catholicism. “His soul was fattening and congealing into a gross grease, plunging ever deeper in its dull fear into a somber threatening dusk while the body that was his stood, listless and dishonored, gazing out of darkened eyes, helpless, perturbed, and human for a bovine god to stare upon.” (Chap.3) But as soon as Stephen chose art instead of religion, which formed the other inner conflict, the inner conflict between body and mind were no longer exist anymore for his mind were no more tied tightly with rigid religion.４ConclusionTo sum up, Stephen, who is a young man that produced by “this race and this country and this life” (Chap.5), finally chooses to express himself as he is. From a good boy to a rebellious artist, it is the complicated and devious development of his inner conflicts that fashion a life-like and vivid figure. Stephen’s several pairs of inner conflicts, which influence Stephen together significantly, are interacted with each other and largely motivate the development of the plot.【Referenceｓ】［１］[爱尔兰]詹姆斯·乔伊斯. 一个青年艺术家的画像[M].北京：外国文学出版社.［２］朱宾忠，张正平.论《一个青年艺术家的画像》中主人公的成长[J].外国文学研究，2004（6）.［３］“A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” .14 June 2012.Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.14 June 2012./wiki/A_Portrait_of_the_Artist_as_a_Young_Man.［４］James Joyce Portrait of the Artist[OL]./users/kershner/port.htm．。