3. A Portrait

‘A Portrait’ examines James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). In January of 1904, Joyce wrote an autobiographical essay entitled ‘A Portrait of the Artist’. The essay sketches a life, complete with religious disillusion, romantic love, and visits to brothels, which is recognizably the life of Stephen Dedalus. After the essay was rejected for publication, Joyce sat down and began a long autobiographical novel with the provisional title Stephen Hero. This draft would become A Portrait, which is constructed on a dialectic of masculine identity and female disidentification.