I don’t mean to write this as a dig at Catholicism or
religion in any way. I don’t think ill be saying anything offensive about it,
but if for some reason I say something that disturbs you please let me know. What
I will be discussing are the effects of social depravation and scare tactics on
naïve individuals (in this case a child/teenager) without an alternative
authoritative influence such as a parent’s guidance or a group of relatable
friends.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
establishes perfectly in the first chapter the stirring pot for Stephen’s decent
into self loathing and anxiety. Stephen is sent to a boarding school which
isolates him from his family in some of the most important years of his
development. Though the school he attended gave him few grievances, his peers bullied
him, and in these years of vital development, transformed Stephen into a
socially inept character. Because he was deprived of family influence, and
friendship with his peers, his religion is the only thing he can pull his
understanding of the world from. Since this occurred so early in his life, the
effects of this isolation remain and fester with him well into his teenage
years. Furthermore, because there is no alternate source that could explain the
complex and confusing lessons he is taught, he develops a bizarre understanding
of his faith and develops an obsession with sin and punishment.
(I think this interest may have
stemmed from his relationship with justice at Clongowes. In what we have read
so far, Stephen has a conscience preoccupied with the concept of sin and sinful
thoughts, however until chapter three he has not considered the punishment, or
justice for being sinful. The cyclic nature of the novel leads me to believe
that Stephen will soon enough have to face the justice associated with the crimes
he has committed against his faith.)
The
obsession starts to wear on Stephen’s conscience especially heavily during
chapter three when father Arnall describes the punishment he must endure for
the what he has done. In this moment the culmination of his social issues, his
feelings of guilt, and his pride in his knowledge clash to create some kind of totally
devastating vortex for Stephen. He has no friends to confide in, he has no
father to confide in, and he cannot possibly confess at his school!! He has all
of these feelings that he has internalized after years of being isolated from
the group that he can’t let them out when he really needs to. I believe that
with the involvement of his guardians or his peers (or even the men working at
his school who he has deemed inaccessible because of his status as the head of
the Virgin Mary committee) he would have had a much more secular approach to
life which could have prevented him from either committing his ultimate sins or
feeling such an overwhelming guilt. Would that make Stephen less special? Yeah.
Would that make the book less interesting? Yeah. But I think its important to
try to think about why Stephen sometimes seems so weird to us.
Also unrelated but related, I watched a 45-minute documentary
on Magdalene Asylums, which are orphanages for girls or “safe homes” for women
who have given birth before marriage. The sorts of terrible things discussed in
this documentary bring to light how central and controlling to society the
Catholic faith was in Ireland in the 1900s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWKuGqtWDow
