Stephen’s Inability to Fly Away from the “Nilemud” of Colonial Ireland: the Young - Hero - Artist against English and Roman Crocodiles

Stephen’s Inability to Fly Away from the “Nilemud” of Colonial Ireland: the Young - Hero - Artist against English and Roman Crocodiles

Stephen the artist is born with the mission to discover the soul of Ireland, whose national identity has been lost from the lengthy domination of British imperialism and Roman Catholicism. The artist in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is, however, still an adolescent hero, as seen in Stephen Hero, who has just begun his rebellion against the Catholic-mother-Ireland and who has not yet overcome her repetitive self-betrayal in favor of English authority as well as Roman Church. Moreover, in colonial Ireland, exists a third source of oppressive power--the Protestant-Anglo-Irish nationalists, whose claim to Ireland is as fierce as England’s and Rome’s. Although he desires to fly away from colonial Ireland to create her true identity as an Anglo-Roman-Irish hybrid, Stephen the artist is too young and too heroic to grapple with the old treacherous English and Roman crocodiles of the colonial mud. He needs a Bloom.