It was a troubling time for Joyce when he first tried to write his life story. “Joyce first attempted to draw his self portrait on January 7, 1904, four months after the death of his mother. On that day, commissioned by the editors of a new Dublin magazine called Dana, he wrote... ‘A Portrait of the Artist’” (Anderson, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Text Criticism, and Notes 257). Joyce wanted to let all of the emotions of his life out at this point in his life by telling his story. The death of his mother was very hard for Joyce, and this is how he tried to overcome her death.
Joyce is trying to tell the reader of all the successes he has had in his life without bragging. Instead of trying to make himself look better, Joyce tells his story through Stephen. “… Joyce sees Stephen as an autobiographical hero who triumphs over his tawdry environment of squalor, stupidity, and treachery, by rejecting it, flying past the ‘nets’ of family, nation, and church to find his own identity” (Anderson, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Text, Criticism, and Notes 447). Joyce makes the novel a mere study of his life. “As indicated by the title, Stephen Dedalus, in all essentials, is James Joyce, and the Portrait is an autobiographical study… (Anderson, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Text, Criticism, and Notes 447). Joyce just uses the events in his life as the basis for what he writes. Everything in his life that he remembers is his selection for his material (Anderson, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Text, Criticism, and Notes 447).
There are many occurrences in Joyce’s novel which are very similar to happenings in Joyce’s life. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, some boys tease Stephen about whether or not he kisses his mother before he goes to bed. All of the boys laugh and make fun of Stephen. In Joyce’s life, the same instance occurred: “The snobbish older boys tried to embarrass him about his father’s social position and teased him about whether or not he kissed his mother before going to bed at night”(Anderson, James Joyce 16).
James Joyce’s novel is sometimes thought of as only partly autobiographical. Chester G. Anderson, however, disagrees when he says “As autobiography, the work has an almost terrifying honesty” (Anderson, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Text, Criticism, and Notes 447).
There are many similar stories in Joyce’s life and A Portrait of the Artist of the Young Man. There is an instance in Joyce’s novel when Stephen is exempt from his work because his glasses are broken. The prefect thinks Stephen is trying to trick him by telling him his glasses were broken so that he does not have to do school work. The prefect then says “Out here, Dedalus. Lazy little schemer. I see schemer in your face. Where did you break your glasses?”(Joyce 41). Chester G. Anderson is referring to Joyce’s actual life when he says “During his first months at the school the Prefect of Studies, Father James Daly, beat his hands with a pandybat for breaking his glasses to avoid studying, though another boy had in fact broken them” (Anderson, James Joyce 16). Joyce may have used this in his novel to show what happens next. After he had been beaten, Stephen went to the Rector of the College and complained. This is to brag to the reader the amount of courage Joyce had. After this happened, all the boys at the college treated him like a hero for standing up to the head of the school.
Another instance occurs when Stephen and some fellow classmates are arguing over the best poet. Some students answer that Lord Tennyson is the greatest of the poets and Stephen disagrees and says that Lord Byron was the best of the poets. In Joyce’s childhood, “he was beaten by two classmates on his way home from school because he would not admit that Tennyson was a better poet than the immoral Byron” ( Anderson, James Joyce 22).
There are several other occurrences in both the novel and Joyce’s life that are similar. One is when Joyce’s father tells him to never tell on someone else at his school. Joyce obviously was picked on quite frequently and his father knew not to tattle on someone because it would only make the situation worse. Stephen’s father tells him the same thing, not to tell on a classmate. In Joyce’s life “his father gave him ten shillings, reminded him that his great-grandfather John O’Connell had given him an address at Clongowes to the liberator fifty years before, and told him to never peach on a fellow”(Anderson, James Joyce 15). In the novel, one of the most drastic changes of Stephen’s life took place when he met a prostitute. This was the beginning of the artist’s emergence in the novel. Anderson writes about Joyce’s life saying “That spring, at the age of fourteen, walking home from the theatre along the tree-lined path beside the Royal Canal, he met a prostitute and began his adult sexual life” (Anderson, James Joyce 24).
There are many similarities in the lives of Stephen Dedalus and James Joyce. These occurrences are related so closely that it proves Joyce must have written this novel as an autobiography, and titled it A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Perhaps this was his way of showing his flaws and his heroic acts without bragging or being embarrassed. His objective autobiography truly is one of the great works in English literature.
