"Was that poetry?"

"The image of Emma appeared before him and under her eyes the flood of shame rushed forth anew from his heart. If she knew to what his mind had subjected her or how his brute-like lust had torn and trampled upon her innocence! Was that boyish love? Was that chivalry? Was that poetry?"

I don't think we are ever going to get away from the issue of language and Stephen in Portrait. Stephen's unrequited love for Emma Clery is complicated by her involvement with Fr. Moran in the Irish language revival movement. And language gives way to cultural formation and expression; it is the gateway to ideas, feelings and philosophies, to a people's way of life. Language is necessarily political; it interpellates its subjects and speakers into a particular modality of thought, over and against alternative philosophies and ideologies. And for Stephen, the threat of the resurgence of Gaelic is intertwined with his untenable desire for Emma. In a very real sense, he loses Emma to language.

Language and words are, however, Stephen's arsenal. His quiver full of arrows, if you will. The aforementioned penultimate apprehension of her transmutes Emma into poetry by his lustful thoughts. His ironic decorporealization and retextualization of Emma is a "brute-like" violence of the mind enabled by language. Here, Emma is at once an idealized vision of Irish femininity that remains untenable to Stephen. Having experienced the carnal encounter with a woman's flesh, followed by the orgasmic epiphany of his vision of the female muse, Stephen is finally able to repudiate his affinity for this vision of Irish femininity based on Clery's apparent affinity for the wrong language, the wrong religion, the wrong man. Stephen above all must unshackle himself from all those issues before taking flight. Constantly trumping his own indigenous language would result in self-disenfranchisement, and Stephen's intense devotion to his own individual soul underlies this desire to come into his own, above all things else.