A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Chapters II & III

Chapter II

In Chapter I of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, we saw Stephen Dedalus morph from a “small and weak” and, in some ways, sheltered boy into a bright student whose awakening to the world around him leads to the formation of his worldview. In Chapters II and III, on the other hand, Stephen’s freshly shaped worldview is altered by events beyond his control leaving him restless in his heart and in his soul. These chapters chronicle Stephen’s loss of innocence and his decline into sin.

Chapter II opens with Stephen and his family spending what will be their final days of “comfort and revelry” at the family home in Blackrock, a suburb of Dublin. His innocence still intact, Stephen views the world through the eyes of a romantic. Each night, Stephen reads from Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, while forming a strong association with the novel. Edmond Dantes, Dumas’ protagonist, “stood forth in his mind for whatever he had heard or divined in childhood of the strange and terrible.” Taken with the notion of romantic love, Stephen envisions “another Mercedes” (Mercedes being Edmond Dantes’ fiancé) living in a white house just outside of Blackrock. Furthermore, Stephen believes his first sexual experience will occur with this real-life equivalent of Mercedes: “They would meet quietly as if they had known each other and had made their tryst...and in that moment of supreme tenderness...he would be transfigured. Weakness and timidity and inexperience would fall from him in that magic moment.”

However, Stephen’s worldview, the source of his innocence, begins to crack under the strain of his family’s financial misfortune. “For some time he had felt the slight change in his house; and those changes in what he had deemed unchangeable were so many slight shocks to his boyish conception of the world.” Forced to give up the estate in Blackrock, the Dedalus family takes up residence in Dublin proper and Stephen is enrolled in Belvedere College, another Jesuit-run school.

For Stephen, Dublin is a “new and complex sensation.” With his Uncle Charles now too “witless that he could no longer be sent out on errands” and the rest of his family busy settling into the new house, Stephen finds himself free to wander the city. Walking near the docks “wakened again in him the unrest which had sent him wandering in the evening from garden to garden in search of Mercedes.” Disillusioned and angry with “the change of fortune which was reshaping the world about him into a vision of squalor and insincerity,” Stephen begins walking the city at night in an attempt to “appease the fierce longings of his heart.” After wandering into “a maze of narrow and dirty streets” in Dublin’s brothel district, Stephen’s romantic vision of love turns into pure lust as he lays eyes on the “leisurely and perfumed” women. Relinquishing the chastity he was saving for his Mercedes, he succumbs to sin and loses his virginity to a prostitute.

Chapter III

The end of Chapter II marks Stephen’s passage from innocence to a life of sin. Now 16 years old and a student of Belvedere College, Stephen possesses a “sin-loving” soul in which a “cold lucid indifference” reigns. He is now visiting the brothels regularly, despite knowing that “while he stood in danger of eternal damnation for the first sin alone, by every succeeding sin he multiplied his guilt and his punishment.” Initially, Stephen feared his dalliances with Dublin’s women of the night would leave his body or his soul “maimed by the excess.” Instead, he finds “a dark peace” has been established between the two planes.

Stephen is finally forced to re-evaluate the state of his soul by an unexpected visit from Father Arnell, his “old master” at Clongowes. The sight of Father Arnell brings back childhood memories of the old school. As Stephen recounts these memories, his soul becomes “ a child’s soul.” For the first time since his sins began, Stephen realizes he has “sunk to the state of a beast” and that his soul was “fattening and congealing into a gross grease.” At last, fear begins to creep into Stephen’s mind as he contemplates the consequences of his actions.

While listening to a fire and brimstone sermon delivered by Father Arnall, Stephen’s piety is suddenly renewed. He flees the chapel with “his legs shaking and the scalp of his head trembling as though is had been touched by ghostly fingers.” Later that night, Stephen is gripped by the sudden urge to confess each and every sin. Not wishing to admit his trespasses among his schoolmates, Stephen finds a chapel away from the campus and makes his first confession in eight months. With his soul finally purged, Stephen takes the sacrament and commits himself to a life of “grace and virtue and happiness.”