Stephen Dedalus Stephen Dedalus Stephen Dedalus is James Joyce's literary alter ego, appearing as the protagonist and antihero of his first, semi-autobiographical novel of artistic existence "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" and an important character in Joyce's "Ulysses". In "Stephen Hero", an early version of what became "Portrait", Stephen's surname is spelled "Daedalus" in more precise allusion to Daedalus, the architect in Greek myth who was contracted by King Minos to build the Labyrinth in which he would imprison his wife's son the Minotaur. Buck Mulligan makes reference to the mythological namesake in "Ulysses", telling Stephen, "Your absurd
Daedalus Minos kept it for himself; and in revenge, Poseidon, with the help of Aphrodite, made Pasiphaë, King Minos's wife, lust for the bull. For Pasiphaë, as Greek mythologers interpreted it, Daedalus also built a wooden cow so she could mate with the bull, for the Greeks imagined the Minoan bull of the sun to be an actual, earthly bull, the slaying of which later required a heroic effort by Theseus. This story thus encourages others to consider the long-term consequences of their own inventions with great care, lest those inventions do more harm than good. As in the tale of