Modernism and Empire and, Identity

This is the first time I’m reading anything by Joyce and well, it was an experience. Anyway, I felt that it was a novel about influences and I really saw modernism and empire come together in this novel because Stephen is trying to find/shape his personal identity as a person (I always thought modernism has much to do issues of identity because of its style of using stream of consciousness, multiple viewpoints). I thought it was adorable but also meaningful and astute when Joyce wrote from a child’s perspective and Stephen sees himself as belonging to “Ireland…Europe…The world…The universe”. The discipline of geography itself appears redundant because countries only stay put on the map. In reality, people move, migrate, cross boundaries, invade territories. In this process of moving then, identities lose their clear-cut definition. A white man in England would be just that; in India however, he would have a different identity, perhaps as a pukka sahib. So what escapes the colonized child’s attention is that Ireland does not just belong to Europe; it belongs to the Empire. His own identity is as such, because of the Empire, is fragmented even before he starts to shape it.

When reading the Christmas dinner bit in Portrait, the part about how “the British imperial rule in nineteenth-century Ireland generated a political culture where families might be divided through their Irish or imperial allegiance” from Jackson’s article was brought to mind for me. In this scene, it is not about ‘Us. v. Them’ or even Protestant v. Catholic. Joyce shows another type of division in which “Irish allegiance” gets problematized. It appears at one level to be a debate about whether religion should enter politics or whether the latter should remain secular. But I felt (since Stephen is sitting at the adult table for Christmas for the first time and watching this scene unfold) that this debate would only further complicate the construction of self-identity for the protagonist. Mr. Casey, Mr. Dedalus and Dante are all Catholics and they are all for the liberation of Ireland (since Dante whacked a man who had “taken his hat off when the band played God save the Queen” with her umbrella) but yet, what a heated argument! Who is the ideal patriot? Who is the ideal Catholic? Empire thus enters to prevent someone from ever resolving such issues of identity and like Jackson says, an individual or family ends up housing within itself contradictions or ambiguities.