A doctor-ridden Godforsaken race

[摘要] In the first chapter of James Joyce's loosely autobiographical novel The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, he famously describes a family Christmas dinner in Dublin in the early 1890s that was spoiled by a bitter row over what was known in Ireland as ‘the national question’. The story is told from the perspective of the young Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's alter ego. The argument rages over the recently-deceased nationalist leader Charles Stuart Parnell, whose career had ended in disgrace after a divorce scandal. ‘For pity's sake and for pity sake’, implores Stephen's mother, ‘let us have no political discussion on this day of all days’. But her pleas fall on deaf ears as his father denounces the Irish people, who generally supported the clerical condemnation of Parnell, as a ‘priest-ridden Godforsaken race’, to the outrage of Stephen's pious and respectable aunt.

[学科分类] 卫生学