A Portrait

The tension between identity and language is interesting. Davin asks Stephen “Are you Irish at all” (219) because he spoke against the Irish reformers. What does it mean to be Irish, or British (or Singaporean for that matter since we do not even have a language of our own). There is a lot of emphasis on language in Portrait, Davin believed that speaking Irish would make Stephen more ‘Irish’ but I get the sense that language does not and cannot define our identity. The same thing that is called a “funnel” or “tundish” doesn’t change what it is; it merely changes the perspective in which we recognize it. If it is not language, what defines our nationality? This is quite a stretch but Stephen needed to find new perspective/find his identity or redefine ‘Irishness’ by leaving Ireland and in Passage, Ronny became more ‘British’ in India (British imperialist cliquishness) which was accentuated by his initial admiration for Adele’s individuality (Passage 44) until it led to her being ostracized by the colonists’ community.

“Irish families simultaneously upheld and subverted the Empire” (Jackson 137) – this split in loyalty exists not only in Ireland but within the empire itself. We’ve seen it in Flory and Veraswamy in Burmese Days, Fielding and Aziz in Passage, and Stephen and Davin in Portrait, there is no absolute consensus within their own community on colonialism. So far, we’ve been associating the two camps colonizer/colonized in terms of racial binaries - white/non-white but in Portrait, we’re reminded that Europeans (Irish) too were colonized by the British. In previous texts, colonialism is intrinsically linked to race, at the same time, it isn’t really just race. Nationality is defined by the language we speak, the views we share yet we don’t share the same views. The inability to categorize and define empire seems to be complicate by modernism’s multi-perspective, polyphonic voices that are allotted to individuals?