Katie Donovan said in 1988 that “James Joyce and Kate O’Brien are an incongruous pair –the former the giant of male Irish writers, the latter one of the least recognised of Irish women writers. Elizabeth Foley O’Connor has recently argued that Joyce is not just a writer O’Brien admired, but in fact her “most sustained and pervasive literary mentor”. The influence of Joyce in her work is one of the areas that requires more investigation. It is only in the last few years that O’Brien has been discussed for her modernist interests and innovative style, including her rather original development of subtext and fictional autobiography, and her engagement with feminism, post-colonial Irishness, socialism, or q ueer representation.

Despite this, her work las long been associated by critics with Balzac’s social vistas, George Elliot’s realism, and populist romance. To Kate O’Brien, James Joyce was “the greatest Artist –there will never be another”. By using social class and realism theories from, amongst others, Georg Lukács, researching the historic and social setting in Ireland of that time, Franco Moretti’s theory of the Bildungsroman and Bourdieu’s theories on the rules of art and its limits, I want to put Joyce’s classless artist ideal to the test and see whether or not it is a truthful possibility in the case of Stephen Dedalus. Stephen Dedalus subscribes to an aesthetic ideal that includes being cut off from about everything that could possibly limit an artist, including social and local boundaries the paradox being, of course, that the artist nonetheless needs these contexts as ‘material’ for his art. Therefore, in my paper I would like to explore how social class dynamics are represented and depicted by James Joyce in Portrait more specifically I want to see if Joyce’s idea of the artist as a global classless being is actually possible within the boundaries of a class-based society. Although a number of studies (Brenann, Ledden, Canny) examine the local contexts of Portrait, the extant research has overlooked the complex social class dynamics of the novel, an interesting yet understudied phenomenon in literature studies. As the title already gives away – perhaps in a subtle hint to Oscar Wilde-, this Kunstlerroman recounts how Stephen casts off all his familial, social and religious constraints in order to become an artist, a writer. Set in the Dublin area in the late nineteenth century, James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man tells the story of Stephen Dedalus’ growing up.

A portrait of the artist as a young man