Joyce is sometimes regarded as one of male chauvinists including Mailer, Lawrence, and Hemingway. I think the criticism results from his male-centered narrative in which he places females as "others" , inferior beings in the dichotomy of mind/flesh, intellect/feeling, and knowledge/ignorance. Females are almost no human beings with neither activities nor personality in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. They are radical "others" . Stephen Dedalus struggles to reject Fathers` discourses in order to be an artist. He needs females for his aesthetic contemplation and he wants to project his feelings and thoughts into females in order to attain his real vocation. Women are steps he uses to get a higher stage of maturity. Women as mirrors projecting Stephen`s love, horror, and disgust emerge as angels or temptress. Mrs. Dedalus, Stephen`s mother seems to be the "phallic" mother imposing symbolic system on her son. The artist is able to approach the underside of "the symbolic order" by writing mothers who defy the spaces the patriarchal cultural tradition constructs for them. In Stephen Hero, Emma is Stephen`s girl friend going to the same college. She is depicted as an intelligent, active individual, in short, live character. But after casting the manuscript of Stephen Hero into fire, Joyce tries to reduce the character, Emma, to nothing with the intention of portraying the growth of a male artist. Emma as a substitute of the "phallic" mother is appealing to Stephen only when she is equipped with sensual warm body of a temptress in A Portrait. Females become Stephen`s supporting goddesses. The girl he meets on the seashore is transformed into an emblematic bird. The idealized female offers a Lacanian mirror image of fictive coherence, according to S. Henke she evolves into a permutative symbol of radical otherness. With the vision of the girl, he realized a mission "to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race." But in this scene, readers realize it is the artist`s imagination that weaves unrelated things and situations into a meaning. Stephen deploys the Catholic concept, "epiphany" which reveals the true presence of Jesus Christ, Messiah. The artist`s random analogy of unrelated situations, I think, imposes its meaning on the scene in the free play of signifiers signifying nothing. That is a secret of creation. Stephen recreates the reality in his image to transmute the daily bread of life into the radiant body of everliving life.