Abstract

This essay explores the depiction of bisexuality in James Joyce’s 1916 novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In contrast with a lack of sustained and serious consideration toward bisexuality as an adult identity at the turn of the twentieth-century, as well as in subsequent criticism, this piece reflects on how Joyce’s interest in bisexuality as a representational device in A Portrait facilitated his critique of the disproportionate attention given to monosexual identities in sexual science. The essay argues that Joyce’s aestheticization of bisexuality served two ideological aims. Firstly, I suggest that Joyce resisted the sexologist Henry Havelock Ellis’s dismissal of bisexuality as a legitimate sexual identity within the ideological landscape of sexual modernism. Secondly, I consider how the representation of bisexuality in Joyce’s fiction facilitated a rupturing of the socially constructed binary demarcating normative heterosexuality against a deviant mode of homosexuality. In doing these two things, the essay argues that the exploration of a bisexual psyche equipped Joyce with an aesthetic apparatus that could represent the less reductive and more complex experiences of polymorphous sexual desires, which fell outside of sexology’s two-sex model of hetero- and homosexuality. My reading of Joyce’s protagonist Stephen Dedalus as bisexual in A Portrait here deliberately dismantles the dialectic interplay between the licit and illicit or between the permitted and the forbidden, as Michel Foucault would describe this figurative boundary. The article does this to show how Joyce was significantly progressive in his move away from dualistic eroticism because he dared (perhaps more so than other canonical European male modernist writers) to activate two libidinal currents in one moment, rather than alternating between heterosexuality and sexual deviancy.

摘要

本文探讨了詹姆斯·乔伊斯（James Joyce）1916年的小说《青年画家肖像》中对双性恋的描绘。与二十世纪初对双性恋作为成年人的身份缺乏持续和认真的考虑相比，以及随后的批评，这篇文章反映了乔伊斯对双性恋作为《肖像》中的代表性装置的兴趣是如何促进了他的。批评性科学中对单性身份的过分关注。本文认为，乔伊斯对双性恋的审美化达到了两个意识形态目标。首先，我建议乔伊斯抵制性学家亨利·哈夫洛克·埃利斯（Henry Havelock Ellis）在性现代主义意识形态范围内将双性恋视为合法的性身份的说法。第二，我认为乔伊斯小说中的双性恋表现如何促使社会建构的二元划定规范异性恋与一种异常的同性恋模式破裂。在做这两件事时，文章认为，对双性恋心理的探索为乔伊斯提供了一种美学工具，该美学工具可以代表多性性欲的还原性和复杂性较低的体验，这超出了性学的异性和异性两性模型的范围。同性恋。我在这里的《肖像》中读到乔伊斯的主角斯蒂芬·达达勒斯是双性恋，故意打破了合法与非法之间或允许与禁止之间的辩证互动，正如米歇尔·福柯（Michel Foucault）所描述的那样。