James Joyce traces Stephen’s sexual development with great care in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  As an infant Stephen is aware that his mother smells nicer than his father does. As a small schoolboy,  he dreams of being kissed by her when sickness makes him long for home.  As a young boy, he imagines that he will marry his playmate Eileen when they grow up.  It is Eileen’s soft white hands and golden hair that first stirs his romantic boyish notions of idealised womanhood, but the way she puts her hand in his pocket and runs away is the first instance of what his relations with attractive girls are to be.  He lacks the maturity to take the initiative in practice or to respond when a girl takes the initiative.  Instead, he glamorises the experience in words.  For Stephen this mental romanticisation of love is one thing; the experience of living girls is another thing altogether!  The two experiences are never brought into harmony.  Thus Stephen indulges in these romantic dreams about Dumas’ Mercedes, but it is significant that he pictures himself grandly rejecting her approaches because she had earlier slighted his love.  This pose of grand, offended isolation is all too attractive to him.

The first fully recognisable sexual encounter occurs when Stephen goes to the party at Harrold’s Cross.  He withdraws from the other children, relishing his isolation, while Emma glances repeatedly and invitingly in his direction.  She rouses him to feverish excitement, and after the party, she goes with him to the tram-stop.  They stand on the tram steps, he a step above hers, and as they talk she keeps coming up to join him on his step.  He knows that she is making an offer; he also knows that the experience is like the occasion when Eileen ran laughing away from him.  But for all his sense of her beauty and his knowledge that she is ready to be held and kissed, he does nothing.  The failure depresses him.  Then, next day, he begins to turn the whole experience  – which should have had a living climax – into a literary matter.  He tries to write a poem to Emma and consciously brushes the realities of the scene out of his mind.  He turns the memory into an exercise in vague, conventionalised poetic verbalism.  And after that, he goes and stares at himself in the mirror.  His own pose as a romantic poet is more fascinating to him than the living girl who has inspired it.

Two years later, on the occasion of the school play, Stephen works himself up into an excited romantic mood in the belief that he will meet Emma after she has seen the play.  Once more the devotion is an uncommunicated obsession based symbolically on a dramatic performance.  After the play, in which he excels in the world of imaginary self-projection, Emma is nowhere to be found and he is plunged into despair.  Stephen’s awakening sexuality, then, is blocked off from real human relationships and diverted into romantic dreams fed by his reading.  The Count of Monte Cristo and Bulwer Lytton’s The Lady of Lyons supply him with imaginary situations of romantic love.  As a result, his suppressed physical urges produce a perverted urge to sin and to force someone else into sin.  The consequence is that when he meets a prostitute in the street one night, he is readily lured to her room and as she takes the initiative and embraces him he finds not only relief from the urges of lust but a new self-assurance.

For a time sexual experience with prostitutes runs alongside his romantic adoration of the Virgin Mary until the retreat sermons convince him of his wickedness and he repents.  We are not told whether, after his loss of faith, he returned to the habit of visiting prostitutes.  But clearly, he fails to make a connection between the romantic sexuality in his mind, which is stirred so deeply by the sight of the wading girl, and the life of real contact with women.  The wading girl becomes the ideal to move the artist to creative dedication.  Real human relationship is not involved.

The fitful references to Emma in the last chapter of the book suggest a very slight interest in living beauty compared to the passionate intellectual interest in the theory of beauty.  Though Stephen chooses to imagine that Emma flirts with Father Moran, the sight of her by the library door stirs the thought that she may be innocent and there is another uprush of emotion – but it all goes into dreams and words, not into real contact with her.  He writes an extravagantly rhetorical poem to her and pictures himself, the priest of the imagination, listening to her confession.  Stephen’s mental life and his concept of himself as the heroic lonely artist are plainly incompatible with a sympathetic understanding of others.  He indulges the notion that Emma is consciously rebuffing him and that Cranly is pursuing her when she ignores him outside the library.  In consequence, he mentally washes his hands of her: ‘Let her go and be damned.’  But the reader lacks evidence to know how far Stephen is deceiving himself.  Indeed the last references to Emma in his diary giver the impression of a girl who is trying hard to make contact with him.  She wants to know why she sees so little of him and whether he is writing poems, and his reply is a churlish rebuff calculated to embarrass her.  Stephen’s final observation, ‘I liked her and it seems a new feeling to me’, is one of the most revealing sentences in the book.  Stephen has expressed a liking for another human being and has conceded that the feeling is a new one to him.

Therefore, it can be said that Stephen’s relationships with girls suffer because of his egotism.  He cultivates an image of himself as an isolated artist.  His sexual instincts are satisfied with prostitutes.  His romantic yearnings are channelled into poems and day-dreams.