Joyce’s “Surrender” to the Interior Realm: the Subjective Consciousness of Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Authors

  • Rachel Couchman University of Edinburgh Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.2218/n1m83v09

Abstract

This essay argues that in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), James Joyce presents Stephen Dedalus’s artistic development through his continual aestheticisation of reality. Joyce’s free indirect discourse immerses the reader in Stephen’s subjective consciousness, revealing his use of language and literary metaphor to negotiate the pressures of religion, family, and nation as he grows up. Attempting to reconcile a grim external reality with his inner artistic vision, Stephen turns to Romantic imagery and literary allusion. Ultimately, the essay contends that Joyce ironises this artistic idealism, exposing the limitations of his attempt to achieve creative freedom through detachment from reality. 

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Author Biography

  • Rachel Couchman, University of Edinburgh
    Rachel Couchman is a recent graduate of French and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Her primary research interests lie in twentieth-century literature, particularly Irish literature, spanning modernism, poetry, and drama. She is especially interested in how a nation’s literary works can illuminate and reinterpret the social, political and cultural complexities of the modern era.   

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Published

10-09-2026

Issue

2026: S/S 2026

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2026 Rachel Couchman

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.