‘Bodily Weakness’ and the ‘Free Boy’: Physicality as Subversive Agent in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Abstract

Although the young Stephen Dedalus’s status as artist and (to a lesser extent) as aesthetician has been extensively interrogated (especially following Kenner), few critics have questioned his identification of himself as a loner, ‘a free boy … proud and sensitive and suspicious’ (P 91). Stephen’s desire to reject the communities of family, school, nation, religion, that surround him, is accepted by critics as by Cranly. But that desire is articulated only belatedly in the novel, and is frequently complicated by contradictory though less conscious impulses to connection. If Stephen Dedalus is indeed the detached, even chilly, isolate readers generally find him, he takes that posture only with reluctance.¹ For much of the narrative, indeed, Stephen is not so much rejecting as rejected, and his isolation depends less on his fineness of intellect or emotional sensitivity than on his recalcitrant and always uneasy body. In this chapter I examine how Stephen’s body forces him past the various systems in which he seeks to be contained, compelling him finally to choose to fly past their nets into a voluntary exile.