James Joyce’s attitude toward Irish politics as developed in the character of Stephen Dedalus involves “postcolonial” ambivalence and third space, and is crucially represented in Stephen’s aesthetic theory and in the bird girl epiphany in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Stephen Hero. Stephen’s theory is not an apolitical aestheticism but a realistic manifesto that engages Irish coloniality, culture, and politics, which indicates a postcolonial strategy that is not subsumed into colonizing mission but which works toward the creation of a new Irish art. Particularly, the three phases of perception, integritas, consonantia, and claritas (or quidditas), in Stephen’s aesthetic theory serve to ground Stephen’s ambivalent position as such an Irish colonial subject searching for a third space in between Catholic tradition and colonial modernity. The epiphanic scene of the “bird girl” is where many important aspects of the theory appear-mimicry and ambivalence, subversion of gaze, and alternative perception-as a process of undermining colonial power and authority.