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Silencing Stephen: colonial pathologies in Victorian Dublin - protagonist in author James Joyce's book 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'
Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1997 by Tracey Teets Schwarze
The young Stephen first treads the halls of academia at the prestigious Clongowes Wood College, a school in which academic teams are dubbed "Lancaster" and "York" and in which Catholic Ireland's mimicry of British forms seems already well established. While the class consciousness evident among the Irish Catholic elite may not have been representative of attitudes at the less fashionable Belvedere College (which Stephen attends after his withdrawal from Clongowes, a move precipitated by his father's financial trouble [Portrait 64]), the influence of his first alma mater on his evolving sense of Ireland's oppressive political structures is undeniable. Class hierarchies are in play among even the schoolyard boys at Clongowes; as soon as he arrives, Stephen's schoolmates try to discern his proper place in their order. His last name, neither Saxon nor Gaelic, defies classification, but Nasty Roche presses undaunted for some indication of Stephen's social status: "What is your father?" Roche wants to know. When Stephen replies, evasively, "A gentleman," Roche pushes further: "Is he a magistrate?" (Portrait 9). This discussion of profession is encoded with the signifiers of Ireland's colonial status; magistrates, of course, were Irish civil servants who administered British law in the colony. Drawing their power from this association with the British Crown, these young practitioners of playground politics evince Said's point that native populations frequently model exploitative class structures on those they have observed in their conquerors. Stephen feels acutely his lack of position in this order; his father has already apologized that "he was not a magistrate like the other boys' fathers" (Portrait 26), but Stephen fantasizes that he might yet outrank the magistrates' sons. A promotion for Simon figures prominently in his son's dreams of the perfect Christmas vacation: "Welcome home, Stephen! Noises of welcome .... His father was a marshal now; higher than a magistrate" (Portrait 20).
Stephen's need for an exalted place in the schoolyard hierarchy is a direct result of the oppression he experiences there. In a native appropriation of the colonial scene in which colonizers subdue indigenous populations by imposing behavioral patterns for the natives to emulate, the Irish Catholic Wells establishes himself as Stephen's superior. This enactment of Said's theory of nativistic self-oppression becomes unmistakable as the episode progresses. Already outranking Stephen as a magistrate's son, Wells is also positioned in the elevated "third of grammar" and owns a "seasoned hacking chestnut," significantly described by Stephen (and presumably by Wells) as "the conqueror of forty" (Portrait 14). The question Wells poses to Stephen - "Tell us Dedalus, do you kiss your mother before you go to bed?" unmasks Stephen's failure to assimilate into the new hierarchy. Stephen's blushing confusion as he attempts to discover the "right" answer to the question marks the imminent failure of colonial mimesis that Homi Bhabha has argued for in "Of Mimicry and Man." Stephen tries in this scene to imitate the response he believes his tormentors require to prove he is one of them, but instead produces what Bhabha calls "a difference that is almost the same, but not quite" (126); Stephen's response reveals nothing so much as his own estrangement from his countrymen's discourse and solidifies their positions over him.
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