To its contemporary reviewers, James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was a “squalid,” reeking, and unseemly text (Colum 166). Preoccupied with “uncleanness,” redolent with “foul-smell[s],” and contaminated by “improprieties,” the novel was accused of having “astounding[ly] bad manners” (“Unsigned Review, Literary” 92; A. M. 93; Clutton-Brock 89; A. M. 93). Like Father Arnall, whose pestilential sermons in part 3 of the novel exemplify Stephen’s Jesuit education, these early reviewers not only disdained but also presupposed connections among dirt, stench, and desire. Portrait, however, challenges the devaluation and conflation that it depicts.

Demonstrating that the links among dirt, stench, and desire are not natural, the novel traces Stephen’s growth from boy to man through an Irish Catholic education that inculcates the “abjection” of dirt, stench, and desire—their classification as things that disgust. Under the influence of his Jesuit educators, Stephen is taught to feel ashamed of his body and its desires, functions, and effluvia—to associate smells with the body, the body with desire, desire with filth, and filth with disgust. This instruction, though not wholly successful, is vigorous. It hinges on the policing of boundaries between right and wrong, outside and inside, wholesome and foul that underlie turn-of-the-century Catholic Ireland—and, as some of the earliest reviews reveal, Britain more broadly. Feeling defiled by their proximity to the abject, reviewers sought to preserve these boundaries, to cleanse themselves by condemning Joyce’s use—worse, his seeming enjoyment—of these topics. Examining Stephen’s indoctrination into the dangers of filth, stench, and desire, I seek to show that Joyce’s bildungsroman is not a “dirty study of the upbringing of a young man by Jesuits,” as one anonymous critic wrote in a review titled “A Study in Garbage” (“Unsigned Review, Everyman,” 85), but rather a study of one young man’s education by Jesuits about the nature of filth. Ultimately Portrait not only reveals but also critiques the depreciation of desire through its association with dirt and stench, an association learned by Stephen in this novel of dubious development.

My reading distinguishes Stephen’s perspective, conveyed by the narrator, from that of Father Arnall, whose lengthy sermons occupy much of the novel’s third section. The personification of Stephen’s Jesuit education, Arnall paints a landscape designed to compel the confessions of adolescent boys. In his hell, dirt and stench abound, engulfing the perpetrators of sexual and other sins. In Stephen’s physical environment, dirt appears in such forms as tobacco juice, cow dung, slimy water, mouth scum, and wet rubbish. Smell, frequently excluded from fiction, is an important part of Stephen’s experience, but the smells that he encounters are as often “lovely” as they are “stinking,” as often “fragrant” as they are “stale” (Joyce 7, 25, 158, 65). The illicit manifestations of desire that make up Stephen’s world include masturbation, prostitution, fetishism, and homosexuality. Nonetheless, the “cloacal obsession” that H. G. Wells (86) famously accused Joyce of demonstrating in Portrait belongs neither to Joyce nor to Stephen, but rather to Father Arnall, who collapses waste, desire, and biological and (what he sees as) moral filth. Defined as a single cavity for waste and reproduction as well as “a receptacle of moral filth” (“Cloaca”) and a sewer, the cloaca is the perfect symbol for the conflation of dirt, stench, and desire articulated by Arnall.¹ Seeking to stigmatize desire by associating it with filth and stench, the priest describes hell as a place where “all the filth of the world, all [its] offal and scum . . . run[s] . . . as to a vast reeking sewer,” and its denizens as those who once “delighted” in “impure and adulterous unspeakable and filthy pleasures” (129, 139). Mistaking Arnall’s obsession for Joyce’s, the novel’s earliest critics evinced the very logic contested by Portrait, an associative logic that conflates and abjects dirt, stench, and desire.

Stephen’s education in the unwholesome resembles the process of evolution described by Sigmund Freud, for whom civilization had as much to do with biology as with behavior. As human beings stood erect, lifting their noses above the lower regions of the body, men began to use sight rather than smell to choose their female sexual partners, Freud suggested. Cyclical mating gave way to more or less continual mating, leading ultimately to “the founding of the family,” which Freud considered the hallmark of civilization (qtd. in Miller 71). “Standing up does more than reverse the value of menstrual odor,” writes William Miller, assessing Freud’s argument; “it paves the way for the devaluation of everything in the genital region,” including menstruation, human waste, and the smells of the erotic (72). “Olfaction, formerly the engine of desire, now founds the very capacity to be disgusted by those things once desired. So it comes to be that disgust keeps us on our feet and out of bed” (72-73).

This process is enacted not only within the species but also within the individual, so that infants learn to revile bodily waste, to stigmatize “body odors, sexual or otherwise,” and to feel shame for the various protrusions, tubes, and openings that constitute the genital area (Drobnick 258-59). Only neurotics and hysterics, according to Freud, maintain a strong “pleasure” in waste or scent (Mavor 282). For them, waste and “particularly odorous” smells “recall the body of the mother and the coprophilic [having an interest in excrement] pleasure of a long lost childhood,” when they possessed “an unselfconscious attitude toward human waste” (Mavor 282; Cohen xviii). It is this cloacal past that Father Arnall invokes in his “noisome” hell, where the souls of those who have “defile[d] and pollute[d]” God and themselves are eternally subjected to feces, rotting flesh, “intolerable stench[es],” and “unbreathable . . . air” (Joyce 133, 131, 129). Foul matter, noxious smells, and “the evil seed of lust” are entangled in Arnall’s threatening exposition as, similarly, effluvia, scent, and sex are entangled in Freud’s theory of human evolution. The difference is that what Arnall sees as sin, Freud sees as psychological regression (113).

The nineteenth-century “bourgeoisie ‘obsession’ with filthiness and stink,” reflected in Portrait and manifest in its critics, has been widely documented (Cohen xxiv). As Miller notes, the “massive construction of underground sewers” that marked this century throughout Europe meant that city streets were no longer permeated by “the ubiquitous stench of feces and decaying animal matter” (78). Seeking to distinguish themselves from their own noxious waste, among which they had so recently lived, Europeans identified public sewers as contaminative spaces. “The new Hell, the lower gastrointestinal base for the civilization resting upon it,” the sewer was seen as a site of pollution, both literally and symbolically (78). By the end of the century, not only had “stink” become an “improper” word to use in “polite conversation,” but prominent sexologists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis were asserting that “a pronounced interest in odors” was a characteristic of “moral degenerat[es],” “’primitives,’” and the mentally ill (Miller 78; Drobnick 257). According to these sexologists and other nineteenth-century “scientists,” these same groups displayed a heightened interest in sex. Further, these interests sometimes coincided—in the form of olfactophilia (sexual arousal caused by bodily smells) and osphresiophilia (sexual arousal caused by smells generally thought to be foul). The early accusations that Portrait’s author displayed a “preoccupation with the olfactory,” could “never resist a dunghill,” probed subjects “which modern drainage [has] . . . taken out of ordinary intercourse,” and “would be really at his best in a treatise on drains” were undergirded by the belief that an interest in dirt, smell, and sex was a sign of moral filth (Squire 100; Wells 86; “Unsigned Review, Everyman” 85). Joyce’s moral character, in short, was in question.

Sex, like dirt and stench, was considered inappropriate for “ordinary . . . conversation” (Wells 86), but like them it pervaded the nineteenth-century consciousness. Overturning the long-standing belief that Victorians spoke little about and indulged less in sex, French philosopher Michel Foucault famously offers his repressive hypothesis in The History of Sexuality. Branding sex a taboo subject, he argues, actually served as a “polymorphous incitement to discourse” (34). In other words, the social interdiction against sexual chatter generated more. Inciting the taboo in an attempt to manage attitudes toward sex, social institutions compelled individuals to internalize their interdicts, thereby, in essence, policing themselves. As a representative of the Church, Father Arnall, expounding at length on the forbidden, inculcates such self-policing in his listeners. As belated Victorians, Joyce’s earliest critics, accusing the modernist author of “plung[ing] and drag[ging] his readers . . . into the slime of foul sewers,” enacted such self-policing (“Unsigned Review, Freeman’s” 98).

In exposing the conflation of dirt, smell, and desire, I follow the practice of Janice Carlisle, author of Common Scents: Comparative Encounters in High-Victorian Fiction, for assessing smell in fiction. Like her, I read something as a smell, whether person, object, memory, or concept, only if it is “explicitly described as giving off a smell” in the text; “even obvious odorants like [farm animals] and sewers do not count if no one, character or narrator . . . , is depicted as noticing their exhalations” (5). I do not, in other words, assume stench simply because there is filth. So while I would classify a sewer as an example of filth, I would not classify it as a smell unless the text expressly attributes it with emitting one. Examples of desire in Portrait include masturbation and prostitution, whose representations are unambiguous; homosexuality, allusions to which, though once overlooked or glossed over briefly, have in more recent years been expatiated by prominent Joyceans; and fetishism (a component of Stephen’s attraction to both his mother and E. C.), remarked upon by Freudians old and new.²

As critics have long noted, “The opening section of the novel renders a child’s sensuous and emotional response to stimuli,” including his own waste (Carens 271). But other than Stephen’s urine, dirt (or waste) figures only minimally in part 1. The most notable instantiations are the “cold slimy water” of the “square ditch” (an open cesspool) into which Wells shoulders Stephen, “the dirty water” in the hotel sink, and the “warm turfcoloured bogwater” of the boys’ bath, all of which recall Stephen’s urine-soaked bedclothes (Joyce 7, 8, 20). In each case, Stephen processes liquid filth through the sensation of touch, assessing it as warm, cold, or both in sequence. Smell is quickly established as a strong, if not “the strongest,” sensory “cue . . . for Stephen” (Valente, “Thrilled” 61), but it is not the primary means by which he interprets filth. Though he does ascribe a “queer smell” to the square’s “stale water,” as he did the clean oil sheet, Stephen finds only one smell unpleasant in part 1: altar wine, which makes him “feel a little sickish” because it reminds him of the “faint winy smell [of] the rector’s breath” at his first communion (43, 47). Father Conmee’s study has “a strange solemn smell . . . like the old leather of chairs”; the charcoal burned by the acolyte has a “weak sour”—but not necessarily offensive—“smell”; and the medicine Stephen takes at the infirmary is “stinking stuff to drink,” though it is not attributed with any smell (58, 41, 20).

The many expressly or connotatively good smells in part 1 include Stephen’s “sweet-smelling guardian,” as Suzette Henke (318) describes Stephen’s mother, who “had a nicer smell than his father” (Joyce 3); the “lovely warm smell” of her slippers (7); “the warm heavy smell of turkey and ham and celery” at his “first Christmas dinner” (28); the “cold night smell,” “a holy smell,” of the chapel at Clongowes (15); “the lovely smell . . . of Clane: rain and wintry air and turf smouldering and corduroy,” a smell shared by “its old peasants who knelt at the back of the chapel at Sunday mass” (17, 15); and “the smell of evening in the air, the smell of the fields in the country” (61). We can thus conclude that while young Stephen’s perception is particularly olfactory, it is by no means occupied with the putrid; and while his memories of Clongowes are somewhat sodden, they are by no means foul.

Stephen’s innocent desire to marry Eileen and his Oedipal attraction to his mother are the principal examples of Stephen’s desire in part 1. Of these, smell figures affirmatively in his assessment of his mother and dirt not at all. The “smugging”—unspecified homosexual activity—of a few of Clongowes’s older boys is vaguely associated with the dirty square where they were rumored to have been caught, but this association is made by Stephen’s peers, who, unlike Stephen, have a clearer sense of the sexual nature of the purported crime (42). That the location of the smugging is as indeterminate as the smugging itself suggests not only the boys’ assumption that the wrongdoing involved sex but also that sex, at least when homosexual, is dirty.

Filth figures moderately in part 2 of the novel, but it is not connected to stench. In Stephen’s estimation, the pubs he visits with his father and Uncle Charles on their Sunday constitutionals are “grimy,” but their odor goes unremarked (64). Stephen’s heart is “sickened” by the “sight of the filthy cowyard at Stradbrook with its foul green puddles and clots of dung and steaming brantroughs,” but it is the sight of the cows and not their smell that “revolted him” (66). Though the smells that scent the pages of part 2 may offend the average nose, they do not seem to trouble Stephen. From his point of olfaction, cigarette smoke gives off a “faint aromatic odour” while the “rank heavy air” of “horse piss and rotted straw” is to him a “good odour,” one that “calm[s] his heart” (79, 91). It may thus be that the “stale odours of the foreshore,” which Stephen and his gang frequent, do the same (91, 65). “Odour,” as we learn in the final evocative sentence of part 2, is for Stephen as “soft” and soothing as the “parting lips” of the prostitute to whom he “surrender[s]” (108).

By part 2, Stephen has, however, begun to accept the association between desire and moral filth, and between squalor and moral filth, that Father Arnall later articulates so forcefully. Stephen’s “mind and home,” the former increasingly lustful, the latter increasingly degraded, feel to him “squalid” and “sordid” (83, 106). The word “fœtus,” which Stephen finds carved into a desk in a Cork “anatomy theatre,” reflects to him his own “monstrous reveries” (as he thinks of his sexual fantasies) and “mad and filthy orgies” (as he thinks of his masturbatory activities), reminding him of the “squalor of his life and . . . the riot of his mind” (95, 96-97, 96). As Joseph Valente and Margot Backus have suggested, this is a somewhat incongruous response to “medical graffiti” (538). But for Stephen, who is learning to read the body as dirty, this mark of vandalism, a mark connected in its own way to sex, easily recalls his own “defile[ment],” both of his body and of those that figure in his onanistic fantasies (Joyce 105). In contrast to “the vigour of rude male health” possessed by implicitly normal young men, Stephen sees his own physical state as abject: “his blood . . . in revolt,” “his hands clenched convulsively and his teeth set together as he suffered the agony of . . . penetration” by “some dark presence moving irresistibly upon him” (102, 106). No longer “capable of simple joys,” he is consumed by “the wasting fires of lust,” choked by “the cry . . . in his throat,” “a cry which was but the echo of an obscene scrawl which he had read on the oozing wall of a urinal” (102, 106). Where once Stephen associated the body and its senses with pleasure, he has come to see them as a source of shame. Where once he accepted his desire for the “nice”-smelling maternal body, he has come to see himself as a “prowling beast,” “wandering up and down the dark slimy street[s] and peering into the gloom of lanes and doorways,” in search of the “maternal arms” of a “perfumed” “doll” (Joyce 3, 106; Brivic 287; Joyce 107). The infant lying contentedly in his own urine has become the adolescent reading his own desires in the “obscene” signposting of fecal smear (106). The familiar has become the foul, as desire, like waste, has been polluted by shame.

The sermons that constitute the majority of part 3 “reproduce mimetically in the reader what Stephen himself is undergoing”: the pressure of indoctrination against “sensual impulses” (Wollaeger 17; Mahaffey 208). As fetid as they are fiery, as abject as they are artful, Father Arnall’s sermons depict a putrid, pungent eternity that awaits the unrepentant sinner. This malignant hell is filled with rotting corpses, “human fungus,” “fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition,” “suffocating filth,” “offal,” and “scum” (Joyce 130, 129, 131, 129). Its smells are “sickening,” “horrible” (130), “awful,” “pestilential,” “reeking,” “intolerable,” and “unbreathable (129). In this dirty and “foulsmelling prison,” the “defile[d] and pollute[d]” soul, “tortured” by the “noisome odours” of filth, “loathe[s]” itself for “the impure and adulterous and unspeakable and filthy pleasures in which [it] delighted” (128, 133, 131, 139). As Arnall sees it, it is an apt punishment for the soul that has “consent[ed] to the promptings of . . . the lower instincts, to that which is gross” (131, 137).

Even before the retreat, the “doctrines of the church” have convinced Stephen that his unconfessed “lust” ensures his “condemnation,” though he is unwilling to do anything about it (113). Stephen’s sense of his own degradation steadily intensifies as he listens to Arnall, until at last he confesses, “his sins trickl[ing] from his lips, one by one, trickl[ing] in shameful drops from his soul, festering and oozing like a sore, a squalid stream of vice[,] . . . sluggish [and] filthy” (156). Listening to the preacher, he imagines “his soul fattening and congealing into a gross grease,” his “sweat oozing upon his skin,” his body dying, then, becoming a corpse, “thrust . . . out of sight into a long hole in the ground into the grave, to rot, to feed the mass of its creeping worms and to be devoured by scuttling plumpbellied rats” (120). While the thrust, the hole, the worms, and the swollen bellies suggest the sexual nature of his sin, the grease, the sweat, the corpse, the rot, and the rats reflect its filth. Convinced that “every word” of the sermon “was for him,” “he felt now that his soul was festering in sin”; “like a beast in its lair,” it was lying “down in its own filth” (123). “Foul memories condensed within his brain,” “shame covered him wholly like fine glowing ashes,” and “his soul sickened at the thought of a torpid snaky life feeding itself out of the tender marrow of his life and fattening upon the slime of lust” (124, 154, 151). Throughout part 3, the guilt Stephen feels over his sexual sins is conveyed through the language of filth. During the course of the retreat Stephen comes to associate his sexual impulses with stench, so that “the sordid details of his orgies stank under his very nostrils” (124). By the end of the retreat, he sees and smells himself as “utterly abject[]” (136).

The evening before his confession, Stephen, employing Arnall’s conflationary logic, reflects on the particulars of sexual sins that he enacted “secretly, filthily, time after time” (148). Hiding his face beneath his hands, he envisions a field of fiendish “creatures,” surrounded by “clots and coils of solid excrement” from which “an evil smell, faint and foul as the light, curled upwards” (148). The creatures

“Lecherous” creatures with “thrusting” faces and “shite”-besmirched tails engulf the conscience-ridden Stephen (148). “The reeking odour” of his guilty nightmare enters his nose, descends his throat and blocks his entrails. In revolt, his body expels the stench, with all its sinful associations, back up through his throat and out the mouth “whereon [once] lingered foul and shameful words, the savor . . . of a lewd kiss” (112). Arnall’s sermons, exemplary instantiations of the indoctrination to which Stephen has long been subjected, have produced in the sixteen-year-old not just a “frenzy to confess” but also, more extensively, a submission to the values of his Jesuit education—repugnance, in other words, for the filthy and the fetid, and the belief that most forms of sex are both (Castle 165). In the “fragrant shadow of the church,” Stephen confesses until he has nothing left to say, after which he imagines “his prayers ascend[ing] to heaven from his purified heart like perfume streaming upwards from the heart of a white rose” (Joyce 157). “His soul,” which such a short time before was “foul with sin,” has become as “fragrant” as the “masses of white flowers” “heaped” on the altar at which he now kneels (153, 158).

Filth all but disappears in the novel’s penultimate chapter, in which Stephen atones for his sins. Submitting himself to milder versions of the sensory punishments of Father Arnall’s hell, Stephen undertakes a series of “mortifications,” bringing “each of his senses . . . under a rigorous discipline” (162). “His sense of smell,” however, is “revolted” by “only one odor”: “a certain stale fishy stink like that of long-standing urine,” to which “he subjected himself” whenever he could (163). Though Stephen has come to associate sex with sin and sin with stench, he has not gone so far as to associate olfaction itself with the sexual, the excremental, or the fetid. In fact, “he found in himself no instinctive repugnance to bad odours whether they were the odours of the outdoor world, such as those of dung or tar, or the odours of his own person among which he had made many curious comparisons and experiments” (163). Despite this relative immunity to stench, Stephen has learned to assign positive value to a lack of scent, as evinced by his sense that “the rosaries which he said constantly . . . transformed themselves into” “odourless” “coronals of flowers” (160). By way of contrast, “the names of articles of dress worn by women or of certain soft and delicate stuffs used in their making brought always to his mind a delicate and sinful perfume” (168). The connection between stench and desire that Stephen made on the retreat may not linger, but the belief that desire is sinful persists.

Following the retreat, Stephen abstains from sex, with himself and others, though he ultimately rejects the “passionless life” of the priesthood (174). As he attempts to imagine what his experience as a novitiate would be like, he recalls “the troubling odour of the long corridors of Clongowes” and “smelt again the warm moist air which hung in [its] bath above the sluggish turfcoloured water” (174). These smells, the latter ambivalent, the former indeterminate, are for Stephen associated with “the chill and order” of institutional Jesuit life (174). Returning home after declining the director’s invitation to join the priesthood, Stephen smells “the faint sour stink of rotted cabbages . . . from the kitchen gardens on the rising ground above the river. He smiled to think that it was this disorder, the misrule and confusion of his father’s house and the stagnation of vegetable life, which was to win the day in his soul” (176). Rejecting a logic that carves the world into halves, rank and odorless, dirty and clean, sinner and saved, Stephen has begun to accept the fact that rot, stench, and imperfection are natural parts of life.

By the end of the novel, Stephen has discarded the belief that dirt is foul. Walking through Dublin’s streets at the start of part 5, “he was glad to find himself still in the midst of common lives, passing on his way amid the squalor . . . of the city fearlessly and with a light heart” (191). He even allows for the possibility that something as quintessentially filthy and abject as excrement could be art. “If not why not?” he provocatively asks his friend Lynch (232). As altar wine was the only smell that offended Stephen in part 1, so in part 5 only one smell “assailed him”: the “cheerless cellardamp and decay” permeating University College, both in the classroom and in the gardens outside (192). Refusing to “serve that in which [he] no longer believe[s],” Stephen has rejected the church he sees as “the scullerymaid of christendom” (228, 239), associating it, not his desires, with dank smells and “dirty work” (“Scullery”).

He has also begun to relearn sensuous pleasure. “He allowed his mother to scrub his neck and root into the folds of his ears and into the interstices at the wings of his nose,” to reach into his cavities and tease out their dirt (Joyce 189). Walking through Dublin, he thinks of “girls and women,” characters in plays, without shame, their “memories . . . and the fragrance falling from the wet branches mingl[ing] in a mood of quiet joy” (190). Though he declines to pursue the elusive E. C., Stephen accepts his desire for her.

Stephen reads E. C.—even locates her—through her scent. Wild and warm, wet and fleshy, it is a scent composed of sexual notes that do not constitute the “sinful” bouquet he once associated with a woman’s body (168). While the object of Stephen’s desire remains scented, it has lost its aroma of shame. Stephen feels the “glow of [his] desire kindl[ing] . . . his soul and . . . fulfill[ing] all his body” as, preparing to write his villanelle, he thinks of E. C., “waking from odorous sleep,” “yield[ing]” “her nakedness . . . to him, radiant, warm, odorous and lavishlimbed, . . . enfold[ing] him like water with a liquid life” (242). An ambiguous word, sometimes denoting the fair scented, sometimes the foul scented, “odorous” is the perfect word, at once recalling Stephen’s earlier ascription of stench to desire and conveying the present aromatic associations desire holds for him.

According to the directors of Stephen’s religious education, dirt, odor, and desire are pollutants that threaten both body and soul. As Joyce suggests in the sensuous opening of the novel, however, the child delights in all three. Taught to revile these consistently conflated elements, Stephen undergoes a journey into shame and back out again. Learning, adopting, then unlearning the attitudes toward dirt, stench, and desire so passionately detailed by Father Arnall at the pungent heart of the novel, Stephen traverses the psychological minefield of his Jesuit education. He does not, however, escape unscathed, for his unwillingness to pursue the girl for whom he so clearly longs, like his unwillingness to bathe shortly after the death of his mother (noted in Ulysses), reflects, while not the shame of desire, its unwholesome residue.

This essay has benefited from suggestions made by Albert Wachtel, Scott Henkel, Keguro Macharia, and especially Nicholas D. Nace.

Works Cited