In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, our protagonist Stephan Daedalus briefly becomes infatuated with a girl he meets at a party, initially only referring to her as E____ C_____ in a poem he writes the day after. We eventually learn that her name is Emma, but that's just about all we learn about her. Instead of engaging in any meaningful conversation with Emma, Daedalus merely gawks at her throughout the night, sure that she is equally enamored with him.
Stephan quickly develops an attachment to Emma, within the time from seeing her at the party, and staring at her on the tram. He begins to think that they had met in a previous life, thinking he had "yielded to [her] a thousand times". Stephan has fantasies of grabbing her and kissing her, so certain she wanted him too. We see Stephan's fantasies of a moonlit romantic encounter in the section before, where he would yield to his 'Mercedes' and transform into the fearless and suave gentleman all teenage boys have wished to be at one point or another. As we see in the end of section two, Stephan keeps trying to make his Mercedes fantasy into a reality-- describing both his encounter with a prostitute, with Emma, and his imagined encounter with Mercedes with the same velvety and idealized tone. We see Stephan projecting his idealized vision of Mercedes onto Emma, filling in her personality character with an idealized 'dream girl'.
What really struck me about this passage was just how much of myself I saw in Stephan during it. While reading, I remembered all of the times I had pined for whomever I had 'fallen in love with' at that time. I remembered what it was like to become enamored with a person so quickly that you feel like it was destiny. Too scared to talk to them, I'd wait, sure they'd 'come to me when the time was right'. I think that since I've experienced a lot of what Stephan felt during the first two sections of part two, it helped humanize the character to me; and while not making him likable, made me more invested in him.
The fact that Joyce makes sure to show just how arrogantly Daedalus sees the world also made me enjoy the section more. I said that I've experienced what Daedalus felt, not that I was particularly proud of it. I think Joyce knew that this was a particularly 'cringey' time for people, so the fact he wrote it in such a tongue-in-cheek manner helps the reader to laugh at their younger selves.
