Looking at Stephen peering into his cracked mirror, Mulligan
exclaims, "The rage of Caliban at not seeing his face in a
mirror... If Wilde were only alive to see you!" He is alluding
to the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891),
where Oscar Wilde
defines two great movements in 19th century literature in
terms of the reactions of the reading public: “The nineteenth
century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his
own face in a glass. / The nineteenth century dislike of
Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in
a glass.”
Wilde’s meaning seems clear enough: the benighted bourgeois
are like Caliban, the anti-hero of Shakespeare’s The
Tempest who resists Prospero's civilizing influences.
When realistic art accurately imitates humanity
in all its imperfection—the extreme form was "naturalism" as
practiced by Émile Zola
and other late 19th century writers—middle-class readers are
outraged by an ugliness that they understand all too well. But
when romantic art presents avant-garde visions of what
humanity might be, they howl in protest at having no ability
to relate to it.
Stephen is himself a romantic artist, but here Mulligan casts
him as the baffled object of representation rather than the
knowing creator. He seems to imply that Stephen, in his unwashed,
lice-infested,
and poorly
clothed state, looks like the savage Caliban but does
not see himself as he is. His romantic self-image blinds him
to the reality of his condition. If this reading is correct,
then Mulligan is only stating in his own way what Stephen has
already thought about himself, using Robert Burns
rather than Wilde as a touchstone: “As he and others
see me. Who chose this face for me?” The mockery
offers no helpful insight.
