The fates of Irish Artists: Wilde, Joyce, aestheticism, and nationalism

Early readers of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) aware of the recent history of Irish writing would probably have heard an echo of Oscar Wilde (1856-1900) in Joyce's title. Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) concerns an artist, the painter Basil Hallward, who produces a portrait of the young Dorian Gray that, like Joyce's work, portrays and reveals the artist himself. Hallward's painting of a young man is 'a portrait of the artist', as Hallward declares in the first chapter of Wilde's book. The Greek names given to the central characters in both works invite the association, which yields a difference: Stephen Dedalus's story of intended escape from Ireland's limitations contrasts with Dorian Gray's self-destruction in England. Dorian murders the artist and kills himself, while Stephen tries to bring himself into being as an artist. Wilde is never mentioned in A Portrait, as he is in Ulysses (1922), perhaps because Joyce was more at ease later in his career about acknowledging his precursor's place in his work. He may also have felt that the similarity of the titles was sufficiently evident to conjure Wilde's book and his life as important contexts for reading A Portrait.