ABSTRACT
Stephen, all too aware in A Portrait that he is ‘sundered’ from his father and his world, is less self-conscious, more accommodating, in Stephen Hero. There we are told that Stephen persuades his mother and his father to read Ibsen. His mother rises to this challenge; Simon Dedalus, however, does not do so well, or so it appears at first glance. He has a down to earth approach to literature, and seeks to relate the Norwegian’s themes to his own experience:
Following the custom of certain old-fashioned people who can never understand why their patronage or judgements should put men of letters into a rage he chose his play from the title. A metaphor is a vice that attracts the dull mind by reason of its aptness and repels the too serious mind by reason of its falsity and danger so that, after all, there is something to be said, nothing voluminous perhaps, but at least a word of concession for that class of society which in literature as in everything else goes always with its four feet on the ground. Mr. Dedalus, anyhow, suspected that A Doll’s House would be a triviality in the manner of Little Lord Fauntleroy and, as he had never been even unofficially a member of that international society which collects and examines psychical phenomena, he decided that Ghosts would probably be some uninteresting story about a haunted house. He chose the League of Youth in which he hoped to find the reminiscences of like-minded roysterers.3
