Identity and Dissent in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Youngman and D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow

Abstract

The last decades of the nineteenth century were a culmination of years of social, political, and economic change in Europe and in the United Kingdom. These changes occasioned a cultural revolution that will see the rapid dissolution of the organic fabric of the British society and elicit questions about the very morality that was the foundation of English society. D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce chronicled these social and moral tensions in The Rainbow and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This paper interrogates the nexus between identity and dissent in the protagonists’ attempts to navigate their moral world. It equally seeks to understand the moral compass of religion, country, and family in the assertion of individual identity and how these define the cultural collective consciousness of the era in which they were produced and the birth of alternative truths.