Blame

Okay, so Stephen is growing up pretty fast. He's doing a lot of things that I think most of us can say are objectively not great. He's also got some pretty unsavory thoughts about other people. What I started thinking about was how much is Stephen to blame for all of these things that he thinks and does? How much is he to blame for his own mental state?
For example, in class today Emma brought up how ironic it is that because of the Catholic church, Stephen is pushed to have sex with prostitutes, which I agree with, at least partly. I agree that the Catholic church and the way they taught Stephen about sex  (hint: not at all) is one of the pushing factors that sent Stephen spiraling into sin. However, I also wonder what other factors there are to his straying. Specifically, I'm curious as to how much Stephen himself is to blame for wandering into the brothels all the time. If we're to take Stephen's word completely seriously, we could be tempted to say he's not responsible at all, and it was simply human sin that drew him into the neighborhood - fate led him there, lust kept him there. But I think most of us don't take Stephen's word for how everything went down, and that complicates things, because we don't have a purely objective point of view of what happened. So how do we split the blame for Stephen's actions? 75-25, 75 for Stephen? 50-50? 32-68?
On a very related note, we briefly talked about Stephen's objectification of women. We talked about how he has the whore-virgin binary in his mind whenever he's encountered a woman so far. He also seems to only think of women in terms of what they can do for him. Hopefully we can all agree that this is not a good mentality to have. So I ask the same question about his objectification of women: how much is he to blame for his thoughts? Here are the other contenders for blame: the time period, his upbringing away from women, the church, and probably more. The first's reasons are probably obvious - in the time when Joyce is writing and when Stephen is living, it was the norm to objectify women and all that good stuff. His upbringing away from women probably only accentuate that. If he never had the chance to interact with girls until he grew up quite a bit, he wouldn't know how to treat them like normal human beings. So when he gets to interact with girls in his early teen years, it's like an exotic meeting with another species. The church has taught him the whore-virgin dynamic, at least as far as my limited knowledge of the Bible (please correct me if I'm wrong, I don't mean to offend) portrays women either as pious beings of God who can do no wrong or beings of sin. Again, I don't know all that much about Christianity, so if this isn't believable to you, feel free to scratch that off the list and slap me with a rosary or something. Anyways, Stephen has all of these factors in his life that need to be taken into account when thinking about his outlook on women. So where does Stephen himself fit into this mix of factors to blame? I honestly don't have an answer. Again, I don't think Stephen deserves 0% or 100% of the blame, but I have no idea where in between that he does deserve the blame.
In general, this has brought me back to The Stranger from last semester, which brought up the question of judgement and how much we can truly judge each other. And now I'm questioning how much we can truly judge others again and my head is spinning so yeah if you'd like to help a confused little girl comment your thoughts.

Sympathetic Stephen?

As we near the midpoint (I think) of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I realize that I've been thinking of Stephen in kind of a harsh way. I've thought of him as kind of this pretentious kid, someone who would fit right in on tumblr with lots of other teenagers who reckon themselves too mature for their age, born in the wrong era, all that good stuff. But I also want to take a step back and really look Stephen in the eye. He is human and only sixteen or so. I think a lot of us have a little arrogance or pride or something of that nature that we tuck into a little corner of our minds and do our best not to show. I think he is at least a little overdramatic, a bit of a drama queen, but we know people who are drama queens who we still enjoy the company of. He seems to be struggling with the financial situation of his family, which he is aware of and affecting his boyhood greatly. One of my friends moved to another state while their brother was in high school, and he was extremely upset by it and, according to my friend, was like a completely different person from the time their parents told them to the time that they moved. I think big events that cause a disruption in people's lives, especially teenagers, are really upsetting and I don't think I personally give Stephen enough credit for the things he's going through.
I was also thinking that Stephen gradually is getting harder and harder for me to sympathize with. When he was at Clongowes, I felt really bad for him for the bullying and just how clueless he seemed of the social dynamics around him. I laughed a little at the dramaticism of the funeral he imagined for himself. I felt bad again as we as readers saw how he was being brushed off by the rector without him realizing. But as he got older, I found it harder to sympathize with him. I thought his biting little sarcastic remarks about Uncle Charles and Simon weren't super cool of him. I thought that his whole "brooding" thing was kind of obnoxious to say the least. But again, I think I have to step back and really take in Stephen's situation, and I have a feeling that as the story progresses, I will have to continue to remind myself to at least try to understand Stephen's viewpoint more, because even though he is growing older and ideally would be getting better, that's not really how life works, and Joyce does an amazing job of portraying this through Stephen. I have realized I not only need to understand and open my eyes to Stephen more, but probably to a lot of people in my life who I don't resonate with or understand very well.

Coming Of Age

From here on, posts are about Coming of Age