Primitive Emancipation: Religion, Sexuality, and Freedom in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses

Abstract

As many of the essays in this collection show, the identification of the “primitive” in Irish cultural discourse remains a mutable and conditional construct rather than a consistent or static ideal. Sinéad Garrigan Mattar explains simply, “Primitivism is the idealization of the primitive” (3). Yet, within this straightforward definition, there is an intriguing irony. For Mattar, the vision of the primitive is somehow related to Ireland’s “proper darkness” (19), a phrase she borrows from Yeats. She notes that this idea “becomes tantalizingly paradoxical. How can darkness be ‘proper,’ in the sense of the morally and socially correct, any more than it can be the ‘property’ of any one social grouping?” (19). This paradoxical intersection of ownership, identity, and darkness suggests the mutable perspectives that create Irish primitivisms. The identification of “primitives,” then, becomes highly subjective and relative to cultural positioning and norms. Mattar distinguishes between romantic primitivism evident in well-known ideas such as the authentic and pure noble savage and modern primitivism evident in the idealization of the “brutal, sexual, and contrary” (4).