Paper Summary:

This paper analyzes Virgina Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway" and James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man". The paper relates that both works are modernist works that depict the struggle between the world and the individual, between knowledge and consciousness. The paper further relates that the conflicts that the novels' protagonists, Clarissa and Stephen, experience represent this struggle and that these struggles are marked by the opposition between "freedom" and "imprisonment". Freedom is associated with the expression of individuality and imprisonment is connected to the demands of society. The paper substantiates the points made by describing the life experiences of the protagonists and the conclusions they come to about the lives they lead.

From the Paper:

"In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus goes through the same conflict as Clarissa but his conclusion is different in the end. From childhood, Stephen is conscious of the restrictions that the world places on his individual form of expression. Later in life, he likens those restrictions to chains that hold him from flying. The standards of society, derived from patriotism, culture and religion, constitute hindrances to free individual manifestations. Since Stephen is an artist, this reality affects him deeply, placing him in an equivocal position and creating a conflict between the values and beliefs of society and the values and beliefs of art. Social codes are challenged by the freedom that art inspires and by its vast scope and multiple possibilities. Thus, social values are seen as imprisoning and art as liberating. Stephen's conflict is marked by the sudden change from one extreme to the other. "

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