Silencing Stephen: colonial pathologies in Victorian Dublin - protagonist in author James Joyce's book 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'

The fragmented discourse that Stephen endeavors to decode is often underwritten by a gendered subtext that further confuses him. In Stephen Hero, Madden articulates one of the spiritual qualities that his nationalist movement has claimed as integral to its Irishness, telling Stephen: "The Irish are noted for at least one virtue all the world over .... they are chaste" (Stephen Hero 55).(4) Thus hard-line, conservative Catholic outrage over Parnell's and O'Shea's adultery has its basis not only in the Ten Commandments, but also in the perceived betrayal of Irish national character. Tellingly, the Christmas dinner scene also seems to be as much about O'Shea and her subversion of the feminine responsibility in preserving culture as it is about Parnell; the story Casey relates about the old woman who taunted him with Parnellite slurs turns on her final vilification of O'Shea in sexualized terms: "I let her bawl away, to her heart's content, Kitty O'Shea and all the rest of it till at last she called that lady a name that I won't sully this Christmas board nor your ears ... nor my own lips by repeating" (Portrait 36).

Only vaguely perceiving the gendered subtext of the political argument, Stephen unwittingly makes the connection that remains unspoken at this table between sexual scandal and Parnell's Protestantism. Casey defends himself against Mrs. Riordan's accusations that he is a "renegade catholic," for, although he rejects chastity as a signifier of "Irishness," he does not (initially) seem to abjure the movement of religion into the same domain. When Dante intimates that Casey is among "the blackest protestant[s] in the land," he retaliates, his face flushing: "I am no protestant, I tell you again" (Portrait 35). Stephen's immediate evocation of his Protestant friend, Eileen, is clearly connected to Dante's accusation and Casey's denial, but Stephen's reflection is curiously sexualized:

She [Dante] did not like him to play with Eileen because Eileen was a protestant and when she was young she knew children that used to play with protestants and the protestants used to make fun of the litany of the Blessed Virgin. Tower of Ivory, they used to say, House of Gold! How could a woman be a tower of ivory or a house of gold? (Portrait 35)

The intimations here are two-fold: first and most obviously, Irish Protestants, in Mrs. Riordan's opinion, are skeptical of any claim for a miraculous virgin birth, and thus are bereft of any reverence for the Catholic icon's sanctity. The second suggestion is more complex and is tied to the Protestant demotion of the Virgin to the status of "a woman." Their refusal to accept these metaphorical descriptions of purity and value, "ivory" and "gold," as signifiers for womanhood implies that Protestants are sexually "loose" - a proposition demonstrated for many Irish Catholics by the Parnell-O'Shea scandal. Protestants by extension of this argument would not be "truly" Irish because they do not possess the chastity that is integral to the definition of Irish national character propounded by Madden in Stephen Hero and by Dante here.