Paradox: the empire as both an agent of liberation and oppression

Jackson argues that Ireland under the British Empire epitomized its contradictions, where for the Irish the empire was both an agent of liberation and of oppression, and it paradoxically provided both the path to social advancement and the shackles of incarceration. The Irish’s attitude towards the British Empire was often an ambivalent one: Although they were major participants in Empire, they also formed a significant source of subversion.

This ambivalence is evident the characterization of Stephen. On the one hand, Stephen resents colonial rule, and diagnoses Ireland as suffering multiple levels of imperial subjection under British colonial rule and the Catholic Church. Stephen sees the empire as alien and menacing, lamenting that “when the soul of a man is born into this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight”, where he shall attempt “to fly by the nets” of “nationality, language and religion” that entrap him. He asserts that he is the “servant of two masters, an English (British colonizers), an Italian (the Roman Catholic Church), and a third who wants me there for odd jobs.(the contemporary Irish Nationalist movements that he perceive as being ineffective because they do not break free from this condition of subjection.)” When Stephen states in Ulysses that “history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake”, he is referring to Ireland’s long history of colonization by England, the ineffectiveness of the Irish resistance and the fact that the Irish had grown to love their enslavement, and cooperated with their oppressors to reinforce their subjection. Thus, although Stephen sees the true Irish self as one that has not yet been awakened, and is confident that his art will be the means of liberation, the text ironises this belief as being naïve because his mind is too supersaturated with the English language (such that he knows the word “tundish” and the English dean of studies does not) and the Catholic religion. This ironising is apparent in the scene where Stephen experiences an epiphany of his artistic vocation. Although he identifies with his namesake Daedalus, the text uses irony and distance to suggest that Stephen can be the over-striving Icarus who falls because his ideals are over ambitious and unrealistic, causing him to fly too near to the sun and drown as a result.

However, Joyce's modernist text is then again highly ambiguous because it does not completely undermine Stephen's bid to be an artist, and resists a definitive meaning and closure because it suggests that although the Catholic religion entraps Stephen, it could also paradoxically provides him with the creative ability as an artist to be a "priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everlasting life."