Virginia Woolf: A Feminist Slant, and: Virginia Woolf: Centennial Essays, and: Virginia Woolf: New Critical Essays, and: The Short Season between Two Silences: The Mystical and the Political in the Novels of Virginia Woolf (review)
When Stephen speaks of the artist "transmuting" experience he uses the same verb as had Pater in Marius the Epicurean and Wilde in "The Decay of Lying," and, most interestingly, he echoes Lamarck's denial of blind chance in evolution. Harkness discovers parallels between Wilde's poem "The Harlot's House" and the "Circe" chapter. Pater had also speculated that "the name Daedalus, the name of a craft rather than a proper name, probably means to work curiously." Thus Stephen, in the Portrait, "belongs to, sums up, and exaggerates the tradition of the 'last romantics,' " as Harkness notes. Bloom, also, is something of an artist, albeit of a more lowly kind. He also sees a girl on the beach, has created jingles and acrostics, thinks of writing "a sketch" or a "prize tidbit story," contemplates and evaluates advertisements. A clue that might have been explored further is the similarity between his socialistic views and those of one Benjamin Tucker in a collection edited by Paul Eltzbacher, Anarchism: Exponents of the Anarchist Philosophy, a book that Joyce owned.