Coming of Age in the Age of Empire: Joyce’s Modernist Bildungsroman

James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which depicts the development and exile of a quintessentially modernist artist-hero, has not often been read in terms of the challenge that it issues to the classical Bildungsroman and the space it affords for a radical reconfiguration of Bildung, the “inner culture” theorized by German Enlightenment thinkers like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and Wilhelm von Humboldt. This essay looks closely at Joyce’s depiction of his protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, and argues that a colonial society like Ireland in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries was inhospitable to the culture of Bildung. Family life and education fail to offer Stephen the means for harmonious self-formation and thus the vocational opportunities (particularly the priesthood) for integration into the larger social world. The colonial subject, internally split and alienated from that social world, must pursue self-development along different pathways. Joyce’s articulation of this critical and subversive “colonial Bildung” paradoxically takes place within the bounds of a narrative that adheres mainly to the formal limits of the classical Bildungsroman. In this way, Joyce’s Bildungsroman is able to critique immanently the very imperialist assumptions and attitudes about the individual and his relation to society that legitimates the classical form. By examining Stephen’s experiences with significant father figures and the women and girls he meets, by looking closely at the alternative vocation of “priest of eternal imagination” that he evolves out of an elaborate profane aesthetics and confessional performativity, I demonstrate that Stephen’s struggle with the processes of socialization, together with Joyce’s struggle to represent those processes, indicates some of the problems the modernist Bildungsroman faces—and not just in the colonial territories but in the entire field of late modernity.