Silencing Stephen: Colonial Pathologies in Victorian Dublin

Abstract

James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus is an insatiable reader of the cultural texts that comprise turn-of-the-century Dublin. Critics such as R. B. Kershner rightly have noted the ways in which the Stephen of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man romantically reenacts Dumas's Count of Monte Cristo and Bulwer-Lytton's Lady of Lyons in order to escape the ever-downward spiral of life in the Dedalus household,(1) but I believe the themes of these works have even broader implications in the political development of the young artist. They also reflect and solidify the sense of betrayal that Stephen comes to recognize as a pivotal motif in Irish colonial politics. Both works depict estranged lovers separated by treachery, but this important theme is also encoded with the signifiers of self betrayal. The protagonists of these stories are deceived not from without, but from within: Edmond Dantes and Claude Melnotte are betrayed by ill-chosen friends, and to a lesser degree, by the women they love. The implications of this self-deception for both Stephen Dedalus and colonial Ireland become clear as we follow Stephen's reading of the Irish political scene and note his inescapable conclusion: It is not England that is Ireland's chief betrayer; it is Ireland itself. Vincent J. Cheng and Enda Duffy recently have argued forcefully for Joyce's position as a subaltern writer concerned with representing the divisive and devastating effects of colonial oppression in Ireland. Both Cheng and Duffy suggest Joyce depicts an Ireland that, in its attempts to throw off the mantle of British imperialism, devises a nationalism that mimics the very structures of racism, ethnocentrism, and violence that Britannia perpetuated in order to subdue indigenous populations across the empire. I, too, view Joyce as a highly politicized, colonial figure writing against canonical and political hegemony. While I agree that Joyce certainly sees British imperialism as a fundamental cause of Irish political chaos in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods (Can the back of a slave forget the rod? Joyce asks [Critical Writings 168]), I would also assert that Joyce's primary, purpose in depicting this discord is not so much to condemn British mistreatment of Ireland as it is to expose and deride Ireland's oppression of its own sons and daughters as it attempts the impossible task of purifying or de-anglicizing Irish culture. Robert Spoo has claimed that Ulysses itself and its protagonists repudiate the totalizing impulse of conventional historiography as simplistic and unsatisfactory; that is, Joyce's novel rejects the depiction of as a teleological, inexorable progression towards one great goal (Ulysses 2.381, my emphasis). Spoo also contends that Joyce attacked Irish nationalism and its doctrine of racial purity for the same reasons (47).(2) I agree with this assessment of Joyce's position, but central to my argument is the contention that late nineteenth-century Irish nationalism - like the problematic notion of Irish - cannot be discussed as a monolithic entity; nationalisms seems to me a more accurate term than the singular form to describe the multiplicity of revolutionary movements in turn-of-the-century Ireland. These nationalisms divided colonial Ireland and presented a threat to Irish nation-ness as dangerously monolithic and oppressive as any imperialistic hegemony.(3) As Stephen Dedalus moves through the politically charged narratives of Portrait and Ulysses, his encounters with the evolving Irish nation - as well as his exclusion from its forms at every turn - reveal Joyce's implicit condemnation of these Irishmen (and women) who have recreated the very political and cultural constructs that they would overthrow. It is a repetitiously bloody and complex colonial heritage that Stephen Dedalus must decode, a national experience characterized by six centuries of British occupation and Irish revolt. Beginning in 1171 with Henry II's arrival on Irish soil and continuing until the 1922 partition of the island into Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State, Irish history records the gamut of colonial oppression aimed at expediting the absorption of the foreign culture and reaping the economic harvests of colonization. …