‘Uncertainty and Doubt’: Heterotopic Bisexuality in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Abstract

This essay explores the depiction of bisexuality in James Joyce’s 1916 novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In contrast with a lack of sustained and serious consideration toward bisexuality as an adult identity at the turn of the twentieth-century, as well as in subsequent criticism, this piece reflects on how Joyce’s interest in bisexuality as a representational device in A Portrait facilitated his critique of the disproportionate attention given to monosexual identities in sexual science. The essay argues that Joyce’s aestheticization of bisexuality served two ideological aims. Firstly, I suggest that Joyce resisted the sexologist Henry Havelock Ellis’s dismissal of bisexuality as a legitimate sexual identity within the ideological landscape of sexual modernism. Secondly, I consider how the representation of bisexuality in Joyce’s fiction facilitated a rupturing of the socially constructed binary demarcating normative heterosexuality against a deviant mode of homosexuality. In doing these two things, the essay argues that the exploration of a bisexual psyche equipped Joyce with an aesthetic apparatus that could represent the less reductive and more complex experiences of polymorphous sexual desires, which fell outside of sexology’s two-sex model of hetero- and homosexuality. My reading of Joyce’s protagonist Stephen Dedalus as bisexual in A Portrait here deliberately dismantles the dialectic interplay between the licit and illicit or between the permitted and the forbidden, as Michel Foucault would describe this figurative boundary. The article does this to show how Joyce was significantly progressive in his move away from dualistic eroticism because he dared (perhaps more so than other canonical European male modernist writers) to activate two libidinal currents in one moment, rather than alternating between heterosexuality and sexual deviancy.