Religion in Modernism Epiphany and Heresy in Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses.

Abstract

In the early part of the last century, there were signs of new attitudes toward institutional religion in the Western world. These attitudes placed value on the subjective, individual experience over orthodoxy in the Judeo-Christian tradition. This historical shift concerning the truth gives rise to a question: How does the individual access their spiritual knowingness without the former religious institutions as validations? In this thesis, I examine two protagonists and their journeys toward spiritual sovereignty, setting them free from institutional religion, and giving them a sense of inner spiritual knowingness. When read together, Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1934) and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and the “Talamachia” triad in Ulysses (1922) give a diverse account of how this journey toward spiritual sovereignty may unfold. I apply the concepts of epiphany and heresy to illustrate the complexity of this deeply personal journey. In encountering modernist techniques such as stream-of-consciousness, interior monologue, and free indirect discourse, the reader gets intimate access to the protagonists’ religious sentiments through their epiphanies. Moreover, as the epiphanies are interpreted and internalized, the protagonists dare to liberate themselves from institutional religion and cultural heritage. In contrast to the early years of the Judeo-Christian religion, the protagonists are not punished as heretics. Instead, heresy is internalized and they must free themselves from thoughts of guilt or punishments.