Early on in the novel when he is a child, Stephen fantasizes to marry his childhood friend Eileen Vance and he often thinks about her. Throughout the novel, the role of women plays a significant role in Stephen’s life. When he is in school, he dreams of being kissed by his mother when he becomes sick and is feeling homesick. As a child, Stephen is aware that his mother smells nicer than his father does. James Joyce’s novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man follows Stephen’s sexual development with great care. The readers observe that his sexual desires are almost always accompanied by feelings of remorse and guilt. In his novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the main protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, is a teenager who continually struggles over the course of the novel between his Catholic conscience and his sexual desires. Joyce’s efforts to publish his work within the constraints forced on him “became an integral element in modernist avant-garde” (Jones, Pg.162) battle against censorship and his publications were a cultural rebellion. 162), this was one of the reasons as to why Joyce’s book was very difficult to published. Joyce wrote in a time where believers of social purity wanted to “suppress the explicit expression of sexuality in art, particularly in fiction” (Jones, Pg. Differing from the general themes that were written by other writers of his time, James Joyce experimented with the theme of “sexuality” in his works.

Artist as a young man