Thrilled by His Touch: Homosexual Panic and the Will to Artistry in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Joyce’s views on homosexuality belong to the realm of “the proximate,” that area of the self that can most effectively be disavowed—recognized and yet denied. Because patriarchal educational institutions—like the ones Joyce attended—reinforced what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls “male homosocial desire,” this proximate-ness led to a sense of homosexual panic on Joyce’s part, which he transferred, in amplified form, to his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. From the square-ditch episode to the smugging scandal and the pandying incident that ensued, from Stephen’s bird-girl encounter to his final interview with Cranly, a disavowed homo-erotic energy contours the narrative structure of the novel and fuels its defining thematic impetus, Stephen’s aspiration to aesthetic mastery.