The “girl-bird” epiphany as the starting point of the flight of Stephen´s creative freedom.
There are a lot of moments of epiphany in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; some of them are caused by a phrase that Stephen “draw forth from his treasure” or by words and the association of ideas suggested while his schoolmates ridicule his name or by any gesture or event in principle totally irrelevant.
But, among all those many moments of epiphany that Stephen experiences throughout the novel, there is one that stands out above all others: the induced by the vision of a young girl wading in the water at the beach (the “girl-bird”), the starting point of the flight of Stephen´s creative freedom and where the reader is able to approach, clearly, to the claritas moment in which the object achieves its epiphany.
This scene shows how Stephen will relate with other persons (specifically with the female gender) from this moment in which he discovers his real vocation. Stephen gives a detailed and beautiful description of the girl’s body, comparing her to a bird many times. The decisive detail of the scene, the one that triggers the miracle where the discovery occurs, takes place when she perceives his presence behind her she turns around and returns his gaze “without shame or wantonness”. And so it remains a time before turning to new and childish chores. Nothing else. Nothing else needs to be done or said to provoke the prodigy that causes Stephen to exclaim in an outburst of “Heavenly God!… in an outburst of profane joy” (186).
This is not the first time in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in which an element appears linking a character of this novel with birds or with their abilities to fly. Really, the whole of the novel is about Stephen’s flight of his shackles (nets) by birth: nationality, language, religion (174). On the contrary, this relation is evident from the beginning, derived from the similarity of the surname of the protagonist with Daedalus (the maker of wings), the artist of the Greek mythology who escaped the incarcerating island of Crete by fashioning wax wings for himself and his soon Icarus. A reference that is an obvious sign of the Joyce desire of be recognized as Daedalus: the artist capable of flying.
In this moment of epiphany, this girl-bird performs an initiatory function, as the nymphs who inspired the classics, invites to Stephen, once then he knows his vocation and his aspires to beauty, freedom, love and the poetry, to leave his current life and leave Ireland.
The dedication that Stephen devotes in describing the drawers and the bosom of the girl is may be linked to the way of living the sexuality of a teenager, turning her in a symbol of universal beauty. In the girl of the beach reappears many of the women who have passed through his life, in there are Eileen and Emma, with their soft ivory tone (as Virgin Mary: Tower of Ivory).
But in addition, the epiphany of the girl-bird in the beach, being the first that he has after his rejection to embrace a religious life, also represents the return of Stephen to the sensuality and sex life, and the relations between them and his artistic vocation.
