ORIGINAL ARTICLES

Homosociality and identity crisis in A portrait of the artist as a young man

Hamid Farahandian & Zhang Bei

This paper aims at the study of the lack of homosocial desire in Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, and investigates the relationship between such absence and his ambiguous identity.
Stephen Dedalus experiences fresh ideas, which are beyond his age in different levels of his life and in wide-ranging situations and conditions. This study takes advantage of some approaches of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who first popularized homosociality in literature in her book, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985). According to Kosofsky, homosociality is the same-sex bonds and associations albeit not of any romantic or sexual nature.
This article will be discussed in three different periods and situations of the novel: when Stephen is at boarding school, with family, and finally at the university, after which he leaves the country in search of independence and personal identity but with an absence of desire to homosocialize with his same-sex peers and friends to the very end.

Keywords:

homosociality, James Joyce, masculinity, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Dial Phil Ment Neuro Sci 2022; 15(2): 45-50