Stephen is thinking about girls, and I think we all could
agree that he seems to be growing up. Concededly, this time in any boy’s life
can be filled with awkwardness, passive uncertainty, and regrettable inaction. Stephen,
however, seems to have a much more distressing situation than that.
Stephen does not look to his father as an example of
manliness or for advice on how to treat girls. Instead, his family endures financial
ruin, and Stephen flees from this harsh reality into The Count of Monte Cristo. Here, in literature, he finds a role
model: the hero who acts with masculine decisiveness around girls and who
enjoys adventure in his life. While admittedly it is hard to act like your role
models in certain circumstances, Stephen becomes acutely aware, when with Eileen
C. after the party, that she would respond to his advances. But, unlike his
manly hero from The Count of Monte Cristo,
he stands “listlessly in his place,..a tranquil watcher of the scene before him”
(64). He knows Eileen wants him to “hold her and kiss her,” but “he [does]
neither” (65).
 | |
| How Stephen Wishes He Could Act (scene from The Count of Monte Cristo) |
Now why is this incident worth discussing? Isn’t this just a
nervous kid acting like a nervous kid? Well, yes, but Joyce is offering a
comment here on Stephen’s use of literature. I can’t be sure what that comment
is exactly, but it is telling that Stephen looks to literature for masculine
ideals and then cannot execute them. Stephen’s new emerging sexuality does not
seem as definitive as he wants it to be. That he goes into a book at all, an
action that then would have been considered feminine, alerts readers to the fact
that Stephen’s sexuality does not fall neatly into the strict homosexual or
heterosexual categories of his day. I think Stephen senses this as well and, as
a result, finds it hard to make a move on Eileen. Joyce will likely examine how
masculinity relates to art/being an artist in more pressing ways later on.
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