Sexuality in Portrait of the Artist

The sexuality in section 3 of James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" was obviously shocking when novel published a century ago - even kind of shocking when I first read it some 40 years ago - and today of course not shocking in the least, unless you're shocked by how demure and indirect these scenes are. And by their indirection, they're actually quite beautiful: Dedalus, now probably a late-teenager, still in school (not entirely clear where - still at the Conglawes boarding school? some of the schoolmates are the same) ha apparently won some money from his racing and spent quite a bit of it on his family, but then gets drawn into the Dublin red-light district, we have a scene - kind of a prelude to many similar scenes of night wandering that Joyce will develop much more fully in Ulysses - in which Dedalus walks among the prostitutes, is approached by one, goes up with her to a room, they touch lips, his world swirls around and changes forever; then we have the impression that he is a dissolute for a while - does seem kind of precocious in this, having the time and the money and the wherewithal to pursue this obsession - and we also see him back a school, some kind of proctor or supervisor for the younger students, and totally wracked with guilt and wondering how he can confess or if he even should confess - school goes off on a religious retreat and Dedalus is torn by guilt. As with the rest of Portrait, these are sketches and snapshots rather than developed narrative lines, which over the course of the novel gradually cohere and form an image, a portrait, of the emerging personality of a writer. At this point in the novel, however, Dedalus shows no literary or artistic inclinations.