Religion and Desire

After reading Joyce’s Dubliners, I could not help but notice similar themes pervading A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. Dubliners concentrated mostly on paralysis on an individual level in order to convey the metaphorical paralysis of society as a whole. An interesting motif that Joyce consistently utilized was the church’s influence on society. There is a definite schism between Catholics and Protestants, and clearly the rhetoric of the church conflates sexual/physical feelings with religious themes. A great parallel can be found in Araby and the initial chapters.

In Araby, the boy idealizes Mangan’s sister. He is too young to have ever had any sexual or even physical experience with a girl, so he does not know how to express his strong feelings. The only things he knows come from the religious rhetoric that pervades the society. He “imagined that [he] bore [his] chalice safely through a throng of foes,” alluding to the fact that he feels as though he is on some kind of crusade to gain her love (Dubliners, 31). The boy cannot seem to dissociate his feeling of love (or lust) from the religious chains – an example of paralysis. At the end of the chapter, he says, "All my senses seemed to desire to veil themselves and feeling that I was about to slip from them, I pressed the palms of my hands together until they trembled, murmuring: O love! O love! Many times" (31). This is an overt example on Joyce’s part. Not only does he convey that the boy feels some guilt for his desires, but the last part of the quote can be interpreted as a sexual innuendo.

In Portrait, we see much of the same thing. When a young Stephen Dedalus tells his auntie that he wishes to marry Eileen in the future, she is irate because Eileen is a Protestant. He compares her beauty (fairness of skin and blonde hair) to that of the Virgin Mary when he uses the term “Tower of Ivory.” Clearly there is an issue with this. The boy has a physical attraction to Eileen, but Joyce paints a strange picture by conflating his feelings of love and desire with his religious upbringing. In paintings and statuettes, the Virgin Mary is depicted as beautiful; however, there is a problem with Stephen associating her beauty with the desire he feels for a girl. It is too early to pick out all of the main themes and motifs in Portrait, but one carryover is the idea that religion acts as an inhibitive force in love and desire. In fact, in the case of the boy in Araby and Stephen in Portrait, the combination of religious knowledge and primal desire prompts both boys to misconstrue their desires as spiritual experiences.  

What is meant by “House of Gold?”