Faubourg Saint Patrice - ScholarsArchive at Oregon State University

Much research has been conducted on the influence of the Catholic Church on
James Joyce and his works. Both biographer Richard Ellmann and critic Kevin Sullivan
delve deeply into Joyce's religious education, providing detailed insight into the life of an
author who described all writing as essentially autobiographical (Ellmann,
Consciousness 48). In his landmark biography, James Joyce (1982), Ellmann reveals
those cultural forces, most significantly the Catholic Church, which formed the writer
into the artist he was. Ellmann also explores Joyce's literary works more thoroughly in
his two studies, The Consciousness of Joyce (1977) and Ulysses on the Liffey (1972).
Kevin Sullivan's biographical study, Joyce Among the Jesuits (1957), analyzes Joyce's
parochial education and the important influence that the Jesuits had on his consciousness.
Moreover, Sullivan demonstrates that, although Stephen Dedalus is not a strict
autobiographical representation of his creator, Joyce transformed many of his youthful
experiences into his fiction. In Joyce and Aquinas (1957), William Noon explores the
Thomistic influence reflected in Joyce's work, most significantly Joyce's restructuring of
Aquinas's aesthetics in his attempt to develop his own secular aesthetic theory.
The above cited works all contribute to an understanding of Joyce and his
culture, and reflect the Church's dominant influence on his life, his aesthetic theory, and
his artistic work. This understanding becomes invaluable in decoding the cultural
markers placed throughout Ulysses. Indeed, as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
concludes, Stephen Dedalus reveals his artistic goal: "to forge in the smithy ofmy soul
the uncreated conscience of my race" (218). As a loose autobiographical representation
of the author, Stephen departs for Paris to escape the repressive bonds of Irish society as
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