A Companion to Henry James

A Companion to Henry James

A Companion to Henry James. Edited by Greg W. Zacharias © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-14042-3

Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture This series offers comprehensive, newly written surveys of key periods and movements and certain major authors, in English literary culture and history. Extensive volumes provide new perspectives and positions on contexts and on canonical and post-canonical texts, orientating the beginning student in new fields of study and providing the experienced undergraduate and new graduate with current and new directions, as pioneered and developed by leading scholars in the field. Recently published: 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

A Companion to Mark Twain Edited by Peter Messent and Louis J. Budd A Companion to European Romanticism Edited by Michael K. Ferber A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture Edited by David Bradshaw and Kevin J. H. Dettmar A Companion to Walt Whitman Edited by Donald D. Kummings A Companion to Herman Melville Edited by Wyn Kelley A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture c.1350–c.1500 Edited by Peter Brown Edited by Mary Luckhurst A Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama: 1880–2005 A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry Edited by Christine Gerrard A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets Edited by Michael Schoenfeldt A Companion to Satire Edited by Ruben Quintero A Companion to William Faulkner Edited by Richard C. Moreland A Companion to the History of the Book Edited by Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose A Companion to Emily Dickinson Edited by Martha Nell Smith and Mary Loeffelholz A Companion to Digital Literary Studies Edited by Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman A Companion to Charles Dickens Edited by David Paroissien Edited by Richard Brown A Companion to James Joyce A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture Edited by Sara Castro-Klaren A Companion to the History of the English Language Edited by Haruko Momma and Michael Matto A Companion to Henry James Edited by Greg Zacharias A Companion to the British and Irish Short Story Edited by Cheryl Alexander Malcolm and David Malcolm

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A

CO M PA NION

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H ENRY J AMES EDITED BY G R E G W. Z A C H A R I A S

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

This edition first published 2008 © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd except chapter 10 © 2008 Sigi Jöttkandt Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell. Registered Office John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom Editorial Offices 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell. The right of Greg W. Zacharias to be identified as the author of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A companion to Henry James / edited by Greg W. Zacharias. p. cm.—(Blackwell companions to literature and culture ; 55) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4051-4042-3 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. James, Henry, 1843–1916—Criticism and interpretation—Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Zacharias, Greg W., 1958– PS2124.C235 2008 813′.4—dc22 2008008193 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Set in 11 on 13pt Garamond 3 by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong Printed in Singapore by Markono Print Media Pte Ltd 1

2008

For Bob Gale and Edward Chalfant

Contents

Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments

x xiv

Introduction Greg W. Zacharias

1

Chronology of Henry James’s Life and Work Jennifer Eimers

4

Part I Fiction and Non-Fiction 1

Bad Years in the Matrimonial Market: James’s Shorter Fiction, 1865–1878 Clair Hughes

2

What Daisy Knew: Reading Against Type in Daisy Miller: A Study Sarah Wadsworth

3

Growing Up Absurd: The Search for Self in Henry James’s The American Wendy Graham

15 17 32

51

4

Vital Illusions in The Portrait of a Lady Peter Rawlings

70

5

The Bostonians and the Crisis of Vocation Sarah Daugherty

88

6

“The Abysses of Silence” in The Turn of the Screw Kimberly C. Reed

100

viii

Contents

7

On Maisie’s Knowing Her Own Mind Robert B. Pippin

8

“What woman was ever safe?” Dangerous Constructions of Womanhood in The Ambassadors Anna Despotopoulou

139

Unwrapping the Ghost: The Design Behind Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove Evelyne Ender

156

9

121

10

Truth, Knowledge, and Magic in The Golden Bowl Sigi Jöttkandt

176

11

Henry James and the (Un)Canny American Scene Gert Buelens

193

12

Revisitings and Revisions in the New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James Philip Horne

208

What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Love: Henry James’s Last Words Michael Anesko

231

13

14

Henry James, Cultural Critic Pierre A. Walker

249

15

Timeliness and Henry James’s Letters Greg W. Zacharias

261

Part II Contexts for Reading Henry James

275

16

A Brief Biography of Henry James Jennifer Eimers

277

17

Jamesian Matter Bill Brown

292

18

Henry James and the Sexuality of Literature: Before and Beyond Queer Theory Natasha Hurley

309

Exuberance and the Spaces of Inept Instruction: Robert Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys and Henry James’s The Art of the Novel Denis Flannery

324

19

20 Nothing Personal: Women Characters, Gender Ideology, and Literary Representation Donatella Izzo

343

Contents

ix

21

The Others: Henry James’s Family Linda Simon

360

22

Beyond the Rim: Camp Henry James Jonathan Warren

374

23

Henry James and the United States John Carlos Rowe

390

24

Henry James and Britain Nicola Bradbury

400

25

Henry James in France Julie Wolkenstein

416

26

Henry James and Italy Rosella Mamoli Zorzi

434

27

Henry James in the Public Sphere Richard Salmon

456

28

James and Film Susan M. Griffin

472

Index

490

Notes on Contributors

Michael Anesko is the author of “Friction with the Market”: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship (1986) and Letters, Fictions, Lives: Henry James and William Dean Howells (1997). He is currently finishing a new book, Monsieur de l’Aubépine: The French Face of Nathaniel Hawthorne, a critical study and translation of francophone responses to one of the key figures of the American Renaissance. Nicola Bradbury is Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Reading. She is the author of Henry James the Later Novels (1979) and several books and articles on James, Dickens, and the novel form. Bill Brown is the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, in the Department of English Language and Literature. He is the author of A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (2003), and the editor of Things (2001), a special issue of Critical Inquiry that subsequently appeared in book form. Gert Buelens has published several books on Henry James, multi-ethnic American literature, and cultural theory, and is the author of some sixty essays in collections and journals, the latter including the Henry James Review, Modern Philology, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, and PMLA. He serves on several editorial boards, including the Canadian Review of American Studies, Comparative American Studies, the Henry James E-Journal, the Henry James Review, MELUS, and Open Humanities Press. He is a past president (2005) of the Henry James Society. Sarah Daugherty, Professor of English (retired) at Wichita State University, is the author of The Literary Criticism of Henry James (1981) and writes the Henry James chapter for American Literary Scholarship: An Annual. Anna Despotopoulou is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Athens, Greece. Her published work includes articles on Henry James and publicity, Jane

Notes on Contributors

xi

Austen, George Eliot, film adaptation of Victorian novels, and the contemporary playwright Peter Shaffer. Jennifer Eimers is finishing her dissertation, “It is Art That Makes Life: Experiencing Visual Art in Henry James’s Novels,” at the University of Georgia. She has published articles in the Henry James Review and Searching for America: Essays on American Art and Architecture. Her research interests include nineteenth-century American literature, British Aestheticism, Southern literature, and scholarly editing. Evelyne Ender holds a doctorate in Comparative Literature from the Université de Genève. She is currently professor of French at Hunter and at the Graduate Center at CUNY. Her specialties are nineteenth- and twentieth-century French and English literatures, feminist criticism and gender, and memory studies. She is the author of Sexing the Mind: Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Hysteria (1995) and Architexts of Memory: Literature, Science, and Autobiography (2005), which won the 2006 Scaglione Prize in Comparative Literary Studies. Denis Flannery is Senior Lecturer in American and English Literature at the School of English, University of Leeds. His first book, Henry James: A Certain Illusion was published in 2000 and his second, On Sibling Love, Queer Attachment and American Writing was published in 2007. As well as several articles on James, Flannery has written extensively on visual culture, most notably on the work of David Fincher and Robert Mapplethorpe. Wendy Graham is an Associate Professor of English at Vassar College, where she teaches British and American Literature, Literary Theory, and American Studies. She is the author of Henry James’s Thwarted Love (1999). Susan M. Griffin is Professor and Chair of English and Justus Bier Chair of Humanities at the University of Louisville. She is the editor of the Henry James Review and Henry James Goes to the Movies (2002) and author, most recently, of Anti-Catholicism and 19th-Century Fiction (2004). Philip Horne is a Professor in the English Department at University College London. He is the author of Henry James and Revision: The New York Edition (1990); and editor of Henry James: A Life in Letters (1999). He has also edited Henry James, A London Life & The Reverberator; Henry James, The Tragic Muse; Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist; and written articles on a wide range of subjects, including telephones and literature, zombies and consumer culture, the films of Powell and Pressburger and Martin Scorsese, the texts of Emily Dickinson, and the criticism of F. R. Leavis. He co-edited Thorold Dickinson: A World of Film (2008). He is working on a study of Henry James and Theodore Roosevelt. Clair Hughes, educated in Scotland and at the universities of Bristol and London, taught English and American Literature and the History of Art in the UK and latterly in Japan. She retired as Professor of English and American Literature at the

xii

Notes on Contributors

International Christian University of Tokyo in 2004, and now lives in France. Publications include articles on Henry James, Anglo-Irish Literature, and the novels of Anita Brookner. She has published books on British portraiture, Henry James and the Art of Dress (2001), and Dressed in Fiction (2005). Natasha Hurley is a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Alberta in Edmonton where she works in the fields of American Literature, Children’s Literature, and Sexuality Studies. She earned her PhD in 2007 from Rutgers University and is co-editor (with Steven Bruhm) of Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children (2004). Donatella Izzo is Professor of American Literature at Università di Napoli “L’Orientale,” Italy. Her latest studies of James are Portraying the Lady: Technologies of Gender in the Short Stories of Henry James (2001) and “Killing Mothers: Decadent Women in James’s Literary Tales” (in Henry James Against the Aesthetic Movement, ed. David Barrett Izzo and Daniel T. O’Hara, 2006), part of a wider project investigating the gendered construction of the literary field in James’s tales of writers and artists. Sigi Jöttkandt is a researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academy, the Netherlands where she co-edits the open access journal S. She is author of Acting Beautifully: Henry James and the Ethical Aesthetic (2005) and is currently completing a manuscript titled First Love: A Phenomenology of the One. Robert B. Pippin is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books on theories of modernity, on German idealism, and on later German philosophy, and in 2001 published Henry James and Modern Moral Life. Peter Rawlings is Professor of English and American Literature and Head of the Department of English at the University of the West of England, Bristol. He has published widely on Henry James, American theories of fiction in the nineteenth century, and the American reception of Shakespeare. His books include Americans on Shakespeare, Americans on Fiction, 1776–1914 (3 vols.), Henry James and the Abuse of the Past, Three American Theorists of the Novel: Henry James, Lionel Trilling, and Wayne C. Booth, and Henry James Studies. His current research project is Transatlantic Sensations: Henry James and the Empirical Tradition; the pendant project is Towards Pragmatism: Americans on Religion and Philosophy, 1620–1910 (6 vols.). Kimberly C. Reed is Professor of English and French at Lipscomb University. She is the editor of Approaches to Teaching Henry James’s “Daisy Miller” and “The Turn of the Screw” (2005) and of two forthcoming books, one on James’s ghost stories, the other a collection of those stories. She is currently working on a book about Edith Wharton and the ghostly. John Carlos Rowe is USC Associates’ Professor of the Humanities at the University of Southern California. In addition to other scholarly works, he is the author of Henry

Notes on Contributors

xiii

Adams and Henry James: The Emergence of a Modern Consciousness (1976), The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James (1984), and The Other Henry James (1998). Richard Salmon is a Senior Lecturer in the School of English, University of Leeds, where he specializes in teaching Victorian literature. He is the author of Henry James and the Culture of Publicity (1997) and has more recently written a monograph on W. M. Thackeray (2005). He is currently working on a study of literary professionalism and the iconography of authorship in the early Victorian period, provisionally entitled The Disenchantment of the Author. Linda Simon is Professor of English at Skidmore College. She is the author of The Critical Reception of Henry James: Creating a Master (2007) and Genuine Reality: A Life of William James (1998). She has edited William James Remembered (1996), and has written an introduction to The Diary of Alice James (1999). Sarah Wadsworth is an Assistant Professor of English at Marquette University. She is the author of In the Company of Books: Literature and Its “Classes” in Nineteenth-Century America (2006). Currently, she is working with Wayne A. Wiegand on a history and analysis of the women’s library of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair (World’s Columbian Exposition). Pierre A. Walker is a Professor of English at Salem State College. He is the author of Reading Henry James in French Cultural Contexts (1995), editor of Henry James on Culture, and co-general editor, with Greg W. Zacharias, of The Complete Letters of Henry James (2006–). Jonathan Warren is co-editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1999) and author of numerous journal articles and conference papers on James. His current research inquires into the motley after-echoes of the Jamesian fin de siècle in twentieth-century American and British camp. He is Associate Professor of English at York University in Toronto, Ontario. Julie Wolkenstein teaches comparative literature in Caen Basse-Normandie University in France. Both scholar and writer, she has worked on the representation of Europe in Henry James’s novels and has published four novels. Greg W. Zacharias is Professor of English and Director of the Center for Henry James Studies at Creighton University. He is author of Henry James and the Morality of Fiction (1993) and articles on Henry James, Mark Twain, and John Milton. He is project director and co-general editor (with Pierre A. Walker) of The Complete Letters of Henry James (2006–). Rosella Mamoli Zorzi is Professor of American Literature and Director of the Graduate School at the University of Venice, Italy. She has edited several collections of letters by James, among them Beloved Boy: Letters to Hendrik C. Andersen, 1899–1915 (2004) and Letters from the Palazzo Barbaro (2001, second edn.).

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the Johns Hopkins University Press for permission to reprint “Henry James and the United States” by John Carlos Rowe in chapter 23, which first appeared in substantially the same form in the Henry James Review (27.3 [2006] 228–36.) Thanks too to Aya Zacharias for her help with a range of difficult editing problems. Most of all, thanks to all of my companions around the world in Henry James studies.

Introduction Greg W. Zacharias

When I was offered the opportunity to edit this volume, I couldn’t accept quickly enough. The idea of a “companion” to Henry James was suited to the way I think about and try to practice James studies, a discipline in which companions are valued. Henry James himself referred to the significance of those readers who would be companions when he wrote in “The Art of Fiction” that “[a]rt lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints” ( James 1984: 44–5). For James, it is in the engagement of individuals with the text, with art, and with each other that art “lives.” Kenneth Burke’s “parlor” of criticism – a metaphor that depends obviously and fundamentally on the relation of “parlor” to parler and thus to the notion of companions – for neither the parlor nor parler make sense without companions – serves to dramatize James’s understanding of the process through which “art lives” through the company of companions: Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion has already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress. (Burke 1973: 110–11)

The conversation among companions that sustains the critical dialogue for Burke is the same one that sustains art for James. It’s the one that makes James studies important for me because that conversation fosters and sustains the community of those

A Companion to Henry James. Edited by Greg W. Zacharias © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-14042-3

2

Greg W. Zacharias

interested in Henry James studies. This Companion to Henry James, then, may serve its readers as an invitation, a “way in,” to the unending conversation that is Henry James studies. It is meant to stand as an invitation to join the conversation that’s been in progress for more than one hundred years and was initiated by James himself, through his writing, from his own companions actual and textual. When I wrote for a couple of years the section on “Henry James” for American Literary Scholarship, I was repeatedly surprised by the depth and breadth of scholarly writing on Henry James. A review then of the MLA International Bibliography showed that for the rather recent past (1970s through the 1990s), there was more published work on Henry James than on any other American writer. In the mid-1990s, most of what was being published in English on James came from those traditional companions writing in North America and the United Kingdom. At the same time, mostly missed, a significant amount of work was also being done by Jamesians from Europe, Japan, and South Korea. Annick Duperray’s The Reception of Henry James in Europe (2006) testifies to this point in terms of Europe. When I became Executive Director of the Henry James Society in 1999, I was encouraged to work to “internationalize” the Society, which then was comprised mainly of individuals who resided in the US, Canada, and Britain. Today, the Henry James Society has members in twenty countries around the world and the circle of companions continues to grow wider and more vigorous. Recent international conferences on James organized by the Henry James Society in New York (1993), Paris (2002), Venice (2005), and Newport (2008) brought together parlor and parler-style companions in James studies. Smaller meetings continue to reinforce that collegiality. Part of the editorial mission of the Henry James Review is that of a companion as well: to foster new scholarship in Henry James studies. James’s place in the world extends past a parlor of scholarly companions. As Adeline Tintner pointed out, for example, “Henry James” has made his way into the everyday of current US culture, at least. There is no sign, wrote Tintner, that James is releasing his grip on the popular imagination. The frequency in advertising of both James’s likeness and familiar quotations from his work attests to that. When Barnes and Noble, the gigantic bookseller, wants a striking image for its plastic bags, it chooses James’s familiar face and his familiar formal clothes. When Banana Republic, a chain of stores selling informal clothing, seats his figure among the modern expatriates in a café and Rolls Royce quotes from The Ambassadors, “Live all you can,” to market the most costly of production motor cars, it is plain that James has penetrated communication addressed to the general consciousness. (Tintner 1998: 2, 4)

Given such scholarly and popular interest in James, it seemed unwise to me and, I imagined, uninteresting to readers to shape this Companion as a kind of review of conventional positions. In my view, that would not make the kind of companion I would choose to sit with. First, other publications strive to do that already. Second, the production of writing during James’s career: some twenty novels published during his lifetime, short fiction (more than one hundred pieces), more than a dozen plays

Introduction

3

and dramatic pieces, thousands of pages of criticism and reviews, travel writing, autobiography and biography, cultural commentary, and more than 10,400 extant letters mock every attempt to summarize. Third, even if an accurate summary were possible, such a summary volume would have difficulty representing the richness and diversity of Henry James scholarship today. If this Companion should be the kind of companion that James knew provided art with its vitality and Burke knew provided a motive for companionship, I reasoned that it would have to be emblematic of what a Henry James “companion” could be. It would have to discuss things Jamesian in Henry James’s or Kenneth Burke’s sense. It would have to provide points of contact for James’s texts and works. It would have to represent things Jamesian as they are occurring now around the world. Thus I offer this group of essays, this Companion, from authors both established and newer who are themselves companions and who together I believe represent the diversity and richness of Henry James studies today. My aim for this volume-as-companion is that its organization would promote engagement between its authors and readers, who together comprise the conversation, as it were, that nourishes, sustains, and helps to promote the discipline. Each of the authors is not only a first-rate Jamesian. Each is an excellent reader. Each is an excellent teacher. The purpose of this volume is to provide students and teachers of Henry James with individual chapters that mark the state of the art in significant areas of James scholarship. Taken together, the chapters map the direction of James studies overall. The first part of the volume offers chapters on James’s most frequently read fiction and non-fiction. The second part offers chapters that outline current approaches to reading and teaching James’s fiction. Special attention is given to reading James in national contexts – American, British, French, Italian – and to understanding his work in terms of the cultures which informed his life and writing. Fashionable approaches and readings were not the goal of this volume. Instead, recently relevant approaches that are now shaping and seem certain to continue to shape the discussion of James’s fiction and non-fiction for the foreseeable future were chosen. While each chapter works within the restrictions of space to develop its subject in some depth, the range of chapters attempts to represent the wide sweep of possibilities in James scholarship. I hope that in the representation and suggestion of those possibilities, each reader of this Companion will, each in his or her own way, be encouraged to join the ongoing Jamesian conversation.

References and Further Reading Burke, Kenneth (1973). “The Philosophy of Literary Form.” The Philosophy of Literary Form. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1–37. Duperray, Annick (ed.) (2006). The Reception of Henry James in Europe. London: Continuum.

James, Henry (1984). Henry James, Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers. New York: Library of America. Tintner, Adeline (1998). Henry James’s Legacy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Chronology of Henry James’s Life and Work1 Jennifer Eimers

1843

1844

1845

1846 1847 1848 1850

1852

Born April 15 at 21 Washington Place, New York City, second child of Henry James, Sr. and Mary Robertson Walsh, and younger brother of William. In October the family sails for England with Mary’s sister Catherine (Aunt Kate). In England they meet Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Alfred Tennyson, and George Henry Lewes. In January the family leaves London for Paris. They return to England in late April and settle at Frogmore Cottage in Windsor Park. In May Henry Sr. has a nervous collapse and shortly after becomes interested in Swedenborg’s works. Family returns to Paris in January.2 One of Henry Jr.’s earliest memories (of Place Vendôme) probably occurred on this visit. Early summer: family returns to New York. Brother Garth Wilkinson (Wilky) born July 21. Family moves to 50 North Pearl St., Albany, near Henry Sr.’s mother, Catharine James. August 29: brother Robertson (Bob) born in Albany. Henry Sr. buys an apartment at 11 Fifth Avenue, New York. In April Henry Sr. buys a house at 58 West 14th Street. August 7: only sister, Alice, born. In August, Washington Irving tells Henry Sr. of Margaret Fuller’s drowning, which the young Henry overhears. Henry Sr. receives visits from Charles Dana, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Thackeray, Bronson Alcott, and Henry David Thoreau. Visits Barnum’s Great American Museum. Goes to theater often. December: Louis Napoleon proclaimed Emperor and Second Empire begins.

A Companion to Henry James. Edited by Greg W. Zacharias © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-14042-3

Chronology of Henry James’s Life and Work 1853–4

1855

1856

1857

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Attends P. T. Barnum’s production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Enrolled in the Vergnès’s Institute for Young Gentlemen. September 1853 transferred to school run by Richard Pulling Jenks at 689 Broadway. Taught by Forrest and Quackenbos the following autumn. Family sails for Liverpool, arriving July 10 in London, where Henry Jr. comes down with malarial fever. Family pushes on to Paris, then in August to Geneva, where William, Wilky, and Bob are enrolled in Pensionnat Roediger while Henry convalesces. Family leaves Switzerland in early October, arriving in London after short stay in Paris. Henry Sr. hires Scotsman Robert Thomson to tutor the boys. Sees Charles Kean’s production of Henry VIII. Early summer: family moves to Paris. M. Lerambert hired as tutor before father enrolls boys in the Institution Fezandié. Mlle. Augustine Danse, their governess, takes them on walks through Paris. Henry Jr. learns French and frequently visits the Louvre. Family summers in Boulogne-sur-mer, where Henry Jr. contracts typhus in September and is bedridden for two months. Reads Irving, Dickens, Thackeray, Shakespeare, Poe. Henry Sr. describes his son as “a devourer of libraries, and an immense writer of novels and dramas.” Boys attend the College Imperial in Boulogne-sur-mer during the early summer. Coquelin, later the famous French actor, is Henry’s classmate. Family returns to Paris in October, but financial difficulties caused by American economic crash force family back to Boulogne, where cost of living is lower. In early summer the family returns to the United States and settles in Newport, Rhode Island. Fifteen-year-old Henry Jr. begins a lifelong friendship with Thomas Sergeant Perry. Attends Berkeley Institute under the direction of Reverend W. C. Leverett. In October William begins lessons with William Morris Hunt. John La Farge comes to Newport in the summer to study with Hunt. Becomes friends with William and Henry. Dissatisfied with American education, Henry Sr. returns the family to Geneva in October. Henry attends the Institution Rochette and continues to write. October 16: John Brown raids Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. In April Henry is allowed to drop most of his classes and to sample classes at the Geneva Academy, which William attends. Studies German in Bonn that summer.

5

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Jennifer Eimers

1861

1862

1863

1864

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1867

In September family returns to Newport. William resumes study at Hunt’s studio and Henry accompanies him. Continues friendships with Perry and La Farge. Wilky and Bob are enrolled in Frank Sanborn’s co-educational school in Concord; Julian Hawthorne, Edward Emerson, and John Brown’s daughters are their classmates. Orphaned Temple cousins come to live in Newport; Henry develops friendship with Minny Temple. Civil War begins in April as Henry turns eighteen. He remains at home while William attends Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard and Wilky and Bob return to Concord. As a volunteer fireman, Henry claims to have suffered an “obscure hurt” while helping to put out a stable fire. Enters Harvard Law School. Wilky enlists in the 44th Massachusetts, and later in Robert Gould Shaw’s 54th Massachusetts, the Union Army’s first AfricanAmerican regiment. Withdraws from law school. Sends unsigned stories to magazines. In June Bob joins the 55th Massachusetts. Wilky wounded at Fort Wagner, South Carolina, on July 18 and brought home in August. Battle of Gettysburg and New York draft riots take place in July. First tale, “A Tragedy of Error,” published, unsigned, in Continental Monthly (February). In May family moves to 13 Ashburton Place, Boston. Begins writing book reviews for North American Review (NAR). Becomes friends with its editor Charles Eliot Norton and his sister Grace. “The Story of a Year,” his first signed story, published in the Atlantic Monthly (March). Publishes a review in first number of The Nation (July). Civil War ends with Lee’s surrender to Grant April 9. April 15, Henry’s twenty-second birthday, President Lincoln dies. August vacation in White Mountains with Minny Temple and others. They are joined by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and John Chipman Gray. Wilky and Bob work on plantation in Florida. “A Landscape Painter” (Atlantic, February). “A Day of Days” (Galaxy, June). Begins friendship with William Dean Howells. In November family moves to 20 Quincy Street, Cambridge. “Poor Richard” (Atlantic, June–August). Writes reviews for The Nation and NAR.

Chronology of Henry James’s Life and Work 1868

1869

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1874

1875

“The Story of a Masterpiece” (Galaxy, January–February). “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” (Atlantic, February). Continues to write reviews for The Nation and NAR. “Gabrielle de Bergerac” (Atlantic, July–September). Sails in February for Europe to travel and improve his health. Spends first three weeks of April in Malvern for Dr. Raynor’s water cure, then late April-May tours England. Through Nortons meets William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, George Eliot, John Ruskin, and Charles Darwin. In May leaves London for Boulogne and Paris, then walks extensively in Switzerland, arriving in Italy in late August. “Travelling Companions” (Atlantic, November–December). Leaves Italy in January to return to Malvern. In March Minny Temple dies of tuberculosis. Henry returns to Cambridge in May. Writes travel sketches for The Nation. Italian army occupies Rome following the withdrawal of French forces and establishes a secular authority. The Pope withdraws into the Vatican, and Rome made capital of Italy. Franco-Prussian War (1870–1). Watch and Ward serialized in Atlantic (August–December; novel published 1878).3 “A Passionate Pilgrim” (Atlantic, March–April; NYE). “Master Eustace” (Galaxy, November). Serves as occasional art reviewer for the Atlantic. Accompanies Aunt Kate and Alice on tour of Europe May-October. Writes travel sketches for The Nation. Spends late autumn in Paris. Visits Francis and Elizabeth Boott in Florence in December. Meets Fanny Kemble and her daughter Sarah Butler Wister in Rome. “The Madonna of the Future” (Atlantic, March; NYE). “The Sweetheart of M. Briseux” (Galaxy, June). Leaves Rome in May, summers in Bad Homburg, and visits Florence in October. “The Last of the Valerii” (Atlantic, January). “Mme. de Mauves” (Galaxy, February–March; NYE). “Eugene Pickering” (Atlantic, October–November). Returns to the US in September. Roderick Hudson serialized in the Atlantic ( January–December; novel published 1875 and NYE). A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales. Transatlantic Sketches. Lives in New York City January to July. Spends three months in Cambridge before sailing October 20 for Europe. November arrives

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1876

1877

1878

1879

1880

1881

1882

in Paris, settles at 29 rue de Luxembourg. Writes articles on Parisian life and culture for New York Tribune. Meets Turgenev, Flaubert, Zola, Goncourt, Maupassant, and Daudet. The American runs in the Atlantic (June–May 1877; novel published 1877 and NYE). Unfavorably reviews early Impressionists at the Durand-Ruel gallery. Resigns from the Tribune. In December moves to London, taking rooms at 3 Bolton Street, Piccadilly. “Four Meetings” (Scribner’s Monthly, November; NYE). Meets Browning, Du Maurier, Boughton. September to December in Paris, Florence, and Rome. French Poets and Novelists. “Daisy Miller” (Cornhill Magazine, June–July; NYE). “An International Episode” (Cornhill Magazine, December 1878– January 1879; NYE). The Europeans (Atlantic, July–October; novel published 1878). “Longstaff’s Marriage” (Scribner’s, August). Meets Tennyson and Whistler. William James marries Alice Howe Gibbons. Whistler-Ruskin trial in November. “The Pension Beaurepas” (Atlantic, April; NYE). Confidence (Scribner’s, August–January 1880; novel published 1879). “A Bundle of Letters” (The Parisian, December; NYE). Hawthorne published by Macmillan. Dined out “107 times” during the winter of 1878–9. Meets Edmund Gosse and Robert Louis Stevenson. Sees Henry Adams and his wife Clover often. Washington Square (Cornhill Magazine, June–November; novel published 1880). The Portrait of a Lady begins serialization in Macmillan’s Magazine (October 1880–November 1881) and in the Atlantic (November 1880–December 1881; novel published 1881 and NYE). Late March to May stays in Florence working on The Portrait of a Lady. Meets Constance Fenimore Woolson. Spends February to July in Venice finishing Portrait. Alice James arrives in London with Katharine Loring. October 20: leaves England for the United States. Visits Cambridge and New York. President James Garfield assassinated; Chester Alan Arthur succeeds him. “The Point of View” (Century, December; NYE). Visits Henry Adams in Washington. Meets President Arthur and Oscar Wilde.

Chronology of Henry James’s Life and Work

1883

1884

1885

1886 1887

1888

Mary Walsh James (mother) dies January 29. Writes dramatization of “Daisy Miller.” Returns to England in May. From September to November travels in France and sees Turgenev for the last time. Briefly in London before receiving message of his father’s poor health. Sails to Boston; arriving on December 21, discovers that Henry James, Sr. died December 18. “The Siege of London” (Cornhill, January–February; NYE). Daisy Miller: A Comedy (dramatized version) (Atlantic, April–June). Portraits of Places. As the executor of his father’s will, spends time settling the estate. In January travels to Milwaukee to see younger brothers. Returns to London in September. Garth Wilkinson (Wilky) James dies in November. A Little Tour in France. “Lady Barbarina” (Century, May–July; NYE). “Pandora” (New York Sun, June; NYE). “The Author of ‘Beltraffio’ ” (English Illustrated Magazine, June–July; NYE). “Georgina’s Reasons” (New York Sun, July–August). “A New England Winter” (Century, August–September). “The Art of Fiction” (Longman’s Magazine, September). Spends February in Paris, where he meets John Singer Sargent and visits Goncourt, Zola, Daudet. Sargent visits him in London. The Bostonians serialized in Century (February 1885–February 1886; novel published 1886). Princess Casamassima serialized in the Atlantic (September 1885–October 1886; novel published 1886 and NYE). March: moves to 34 De Vere Gardens. December: travels to Florence. Spends late February to mid-April in Venice with Katherine Bronson, and visits Daniel and Ariana Curtis. In April travels to Florence to see Woolson, then goes back to Venice to stay with the Curtises at Palazzo Barbaro until July 1, when he returns to London. Writes The Aspern Papers and begins The Tragic Muse. “Louisa Pallant” (Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, February; NYE). The Reverberator (Macmillan’s, February–July; novel published 1888 and NYE). “The Aspern Papers” (Atlantic, March–May; NYE). “The Liar” (Century, May–June; NYE).

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1889

1890

1891

1892

1893

1894

“The Modern Warning” (appeared as “Two Countries” in Harper’s, June). “A London Life” (Scribner’s, June–September; NYE). “The Lesson of the Master” (Universal Review, July–August; NYE). “The Patagonia” (English Illustrated Magazine, August–September; NYE). Partial Portraits. Elizabeth (Lizzie) Boott Duveneck dies in March. Spends October to December in Geneva, where Woolson is also vacationing, and in Paris. The Tragic Muse (Atlantic, January 1889–May 1890; novel published in 1890 and NYE). Aunt Kate dies in March. Engages to write dramatization of The American. Visits Paris from late October to December 1; sees the Paris Exhibition (Exposition Universelle) of 1889. Translation of Daudet’s Port Tarascon (Harper’s, June–November; novel published 1890). Travels through Italy in the summer. Spends three weeks with the Curtises at the Palazzo Barbaro in Venice and travels with them. Meets Rudyard Kipling and Morton Fullerton. “The Pupil” (Longman’s Magazine, March–April; NYE). “Brooksmith” (Harper’s and Black and White, May; NYE). “The Marriages” (Atlantic, August; NYE). “The Chaperon” (Atlantic, November–December; NYE). “Sir Edmund Orme” (Black and White, November; NYE). The American: A Comedy in Four Acts produced on stage and is moderately successful. Spends July in Ireland. First International Copyright law. “The Real Thing” (Black and White, April; NYE). “The Private Life” (Atlantic, April; NYE). “Lord Beaupré” (Macmillan’s, April–June). “Greville Fane” (Illustrated London News, September; NYE). “Owen Wingrave” (Graphic, November; NYE). Alice dies of breast cancer in March. “The Middle Years” (Scribner’s, May; NYE). Picture and Text. Essays in London and Elsewhere. Fanny Kemble dies in January. James spends most of March through May in Paris. “The Death of the Lion” (April) and “The Coxon Fund” (July) appear in Yellow Book; NYE.

Chronology of Henry James’s Life and Work

1895

1896

1897

1898

Theatricals: Two Comedies and Theatricals: Second Series. Constance Fenimore Woolson dies in Venice in January. James spends April–July in Italy. Katharine Loring sends him one of four copies of Alice’s journal, which he later burns. Robert Louis Stevenson and Walter Pater die. “The Next Time” (Yellow Book, July; NYE). “The Altar of the Dead” published in Terminations (NYE). Guy Domville opens in January for five week run. After it closes, James visits Lord Houghton and the Wolseleys in Dublin in mid-March. Oscar Wilde libel suit begins in spring. In early May Daudet visits London; James arranges his trip and hosts a dinner at the Reform Club. Spends most of July to October in Torquay while his flat is renovated and electric lighting installed. October: William Wetmore Story dies (James later wrote his biography). “The Figure in the Carpet” (Cosmopolis, January–February; NYE). “Glasses” (Atlantic, February). The Old Things serialized in the Atlantic (April–October; published as The Spoils of Poynton in 1897 and NYE). “The Way It Came” (Chap Book, May; NYE as “The Friends of the Friends”). The Other House (Illustrated London News, July–September; novel published 1896). Spends May to September in Sussex. In early October George Du Maurier dies. President Cleveland interferes in a boundary dispute between Britain and Venezuela by reasserting the Monroe Doctrine. What Maisie Knew (Chap Book, January–August; novel published 1897 and NYE). Purchases a typewriter in February and begins to dictate. Spends most of July in Bournemouth working with typist William MacAlpine. Spends August with Ellen Temple and her daughters on Suffolk coast. Leases Lamb House in Rye. Howells visits James in London. The Turn of the Screw serialized in Collier’s (January–April; nouvelle published 1898 and NYE). The Awkward Age (Harper’s Weekly, October–January 1899; novel published in 1899 and NYE). “In the Cage” (NYE).

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1899

1900

1901

1902

1903

“The Covering End” appears in The Two Magics. Signs James B. Pinker as his literary agent. Moves into Lamb House in June. Annie Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett visit in September. Meets H. G. Wells and Stephen Crane, both of whom live nearby. Cuba sinks the USS Maine in Havana Harbor, leading to the Spanish American war (ends in December). In February France tries Zola for libel in Alfred Dreyfus case. “Europe” (Scribner’s, June; NYE). “The Real Right Thing” (Collier’s Weekly, December; NYE). “Paste” (Frank Leslie’s Popular Magazine, December; NYE). Fire in Lamb House delays trip to Italy, but he leaves for Paris in March, then on to Italy, where he stays at Palazzo Barbaro in Venice for three weeks. Meets Hendrik Andersen in Rome and examines Story papers for forthcoming biography. Visits Florence, then travels back to Venice. Returns to England in early July. James buys Lamb House, and William, who has heart trouble, visits in October with family members. “The Great Good Place” (Scribner’s, January; NYE). “Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie” (Cornhill, May; NYE). “The Tree of Knowledge” (The Soft Side; NYE). “The Abasement of the Northmores” (The Soft Side; NYE). “Maud-Evelyn” (Atlantic, April). “The Faces” (Harper’s, December; NYE). “Broken Wings” (Century, December; NYE). Shaves beard, which was turning white. Alternates between Rye and London. Begins The Wings of the Dove, then drops it for The Ambassadors. William’s daughter Peggy visits at Christmas. “The Beldonald Holbein” (Harper’s, October; NYE). “Mrs. Medwin” (Punch, August–September; NYE). The Sacred Fount. Completes The Ambassadors and takes up The Wings of the Dove. Queen Victoria dies. President William McKinley is assassinated, and Theodore Roosevelt succeeds him. The Wings of the Dove (NYE). “Flickerbridge” (Scribner’s, February; NYE). “The Story in It” (Anglo-American Magazine, January; NYE). The Ambassadors published (first appeared in North American Review, January–December, 1903; NYE). “The Beast in the Jungle” and “The Birthplace” published in The Better Sort (NYE).

Chronology of Henry James’s Life and Work

1904

1905

1906

1907

1908 1909

1910

William Wetmore Story and His Friends. In December meets Edith Wharton, who had been seeking an introduction for many years. The Golden Bowl published (NYE). “Fordham Castle” (Harper’s Magazine, December; NYE). Arrives in the United States in late August. Travels and lectures (“The Question of Our Speech” and “The Lesson of Balzac”) from Boston south to Florida and west to St. Louis and Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle. “The Question of Our Speech” (Appleton’s Booklovers Magazine, August), “The Lesson of Balzac” (Atlantic, August). English Hours. In January dines in Washington, DC, with Augustus SaintGaudens at President Roosevelt’s table. Elected to American Academy of Arts and Letters. In July returns to England. Works on The American Scene and begins revisions for NYE. “The Speech of American Women” (Harper’s Bazar, November– February 1907). Continues to work on NYE. The American Scene. The Novels and Tales of Henry James, New York Edition (24 volumes) published 1907–9. March to May visits Paris and motors through south of France with Edith Wharton. May to late June visits Italy for last time. Hires Theodora Bosanquet as his secretary-typist. “Julia Bride” (Harper’s Magazine, March–April; NYE). “The Jolly Corner” (English Review, December; NYE). Italian Hours. “The Velvet Glove” (English Review, March). “Mora Montravers” (English Review, August–September). “Crapy Cornelia” (Harper’s Magazine, October). “The Bench of Desolation” (Putnam’s Magazine, October–January). Becomes friends with Hugh Walpole. Burns letters sent to him. Suffers depression and attacks of gout. “Is There a Life after Death” (Harper’s Bazar, January–February). “A Round of Visits” (English Review, April–May). Suffers ill health; William, himself gravely ill, and Alice come to England to be with him. They travel to Switzerland in June. Robertson (Bob) James dies in Concord of heart failure. MidAugust returns to the United States with William and Alice. William dies August 26.

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Jennifer Eimers 1911

1912

1913

1914

1915

1916

1917 1919

The Outcry. Honorary degree from Harvard. Returns to England early August. Resides at Reform Club in London and works in rooms adjoining Theodora Bosanquet’s flat in Chelsea. Delivers “The Novel in ‘The Ring and the Book’ ” at Browning Centenary. Receives honorary doctorate of letters at Oxford. Contracts shingles. Moves to 21 Carlyle Mansions in Chelsea. Sees Edith Wharton frequently. Balkan War (1912–13). A Small Boy and Others. In celebration of his seventieth birthday, James is asked to sit for a portrait (by Sargent) and is presented with a gilded bowl. Notes of a Son and Brother. Notes on Novelists. Horrified by the war, James visits hospitals and participates in Belgian relief. Honorary president of the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps. “The Mind of England at War” (New York Sun, August). Becomes a British national and stays involved in war relief. Suffers two strokes in early December. George V awards him the Order of Merit on January 1. February 28 dies in London. Body is cremated and ashes buried in Cambridge Cemetery family plot. Ivory Tower and The Sense of the Past (two unfinished novels). Within the Rim and Other Essays.

Notes 1

For further publication information, see A Bibliography of Henry James (Edel and Laurence 1982) and A Henry James Chronology (Harden 2005). For further details of James’s life, see Leon Edel’s five-volume biography (Edel 1953–72), R. W. B. Lewis’s The Jameses (Lewis 1991), and Fred Kaplan’s Henry James: The Imagination of Genius (Kaplan 1992).

2

3

Habegger writes that the James family left Liverpool for New York on October 12, 1844. First book publication information is noted for the novels. Also noted are works included in the 24-volume New York Edition (NYE) of 1907–9.

Part I

Fiction and Non-Fiction

A Companion to Henry James. Edited by Greg W. Zacharias © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-14042-3

1

Bad Years in the Matrimonial Market: James’s Shorter Fiction, 1865–1878 Clair Hughes

When Henry James was asked to list an introductory selection of his work for a new reader he advised that his tales, the “little tarts,” should be read “when you have eaten your beef and potatoes” (Krook 1967: 325). After serious effort with the novels, that is, the ideal reader might indulge in something lighter by way of a dessert. To extend the culinary metaphor, we might consider James’s early tales as amuse bouches – introductory savouries, evidence of style and content, challenge and innovation, perhaps, but, most importantly, a promise that staying the course will be rewarding. Not all readers have been enthusiastic about these early tales. Rebecca West dismisses “those first stories” as “pale dreams as might visit a New England spinster looking out from her snuff-coloured parlour on a grey drizzling day” (West 1916: 24). West, in the year of James’s death, might have been more charitable, given her real admiration for James, but the literary personality she ascribes here to James – female, morose, and sexually thwarted – was already current, and is one that still lingers, particularly amongst those who have not seriously read the novels. Philip Sicker’s description of the heroes of the early stories as “a collection of demented artists, chronic invalids, drunkards, suicides, ineffectual dilettantes and hypochondriacs” (Sicker 1980: 26) adds an edge of excitement to the spinster parlor imagined by West, but not much cheer. West’s comment is less a considered judgment than a young writer’s urge to be amusingly iconoclastic; but, for all its superficiality, it does at least point us to one important aspect of the early stories: in relation to fiction’s traditional courtship/marriage paradigm, things do not turn out well for the protagonists. James’s “little tarts” were not reassuring confections of the kind familiar to the readership of the magazines in which they first appeared. In “The Art of Fiction” of 1884, James observed that novelistic convention required “a distribution at the last of prizes, pensions, husbands, wives, babies, millions, appended paragraphs and cheerful remarks”; such an ending was like that of “a good dinner, a course of dessert and ices” ( James 1984a: 48).

A Companion to Henry James. Edited by Greg W. Zacharias © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-14042-3

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Clair Hughes

From the first, however, James felt himself bound to frustrate readers of their usual fare. The editor of the Atlantic Monthly, according to James’s biographer, Fred Kaplan, grumbled about his “penchant for ending stories unhappily” (Kaplan 1992: 50). The early work looks forward to the central importance of narrative experiment in the great novels: these “pale dreams” constantly affront and deny narrative expectations, particularly in relation to the possibility of a happy marriage as acceptable closure. In what follows I look at a selection of James’s early tales and his neglected first novel, Watch and Ward, to focus on how the traditional narrative of courtship is deployed and the ways in which its problems are resolved. These stories fall roughly into four thematic groups: those with a Civil War setting; tales of the ghostly; tales of the early 1870s, exploring James’s “International Theme,” often involving concerns with tradition and the past; and tales which reflect his increasing focus on the problematic situation of women. There are no hard and fast boundaries between the groups: “The Last of the Valerii,” for example, involves the past, the supernatural, and one of James’s first American girls in Europe. Modern readers of the stories cannot avoid, of course, the urge to read back from later work, to find situations similar to those encountered in the novels. There is a certain artificiality in reading in this way, as it places the early fiction constantly at a disadvantage in relation to later achievements, but there are also positive aspects to this inevitable process. As Dorothea Krook says, James’s treatment in the early work, while tentative, is also remarkable for “a degree of explicitness,” providing “valuable corroborative evidence of [his] main preoccupations in the novels” (Krook 1967: 326). Certain Jamesian obsessions stand out from the start, in particular the ambivalent fascination of strong, independent (often American) women, and the threatening prospect for a man of being closely involved with one of them. If magazine fiction seems to move ineluctably towards satisfying resolutions, the elements within the stories struggle not to accept such a desired pattern. From the start of James’s career, things work out only at great cost. James’s choice of the marriage-plot for the early stories was arrived at through a complex of causes. His early education, for example, had exposed him to the culture and literature of Europe, where the novel had evolved alongside the fortunes of the bourgeoisie, for whom the inheritance of property was of central concern and property problems made the fate of the jeune fille à marier crucial. There is no one, as Leslie Fiedler says, “to whom the phrase ‘they lived happily ever after’ is meaningless” (Fiedler 1982: 46), and in Europe that usually means they finally had enough property and money to start a new household. This format, however, was by no means the stuff of the American literary scene. The great works of American fiction, Fiedler points out, “tend to avoid treating the passionate encounter of a man and woman.” If in Europe Flaubert “was dreaming of Madame Bovary,” in America “Melville was finding Moby Dick”(Fiedler 1982: 24, 28), Fenimore Cooper had headed for the wilderness, and Twain’s Huck Finn was fleeing domesticity on the Mississippi.

James’s Shorter Fiction, 1865–1878

19

James had no intention to attempt anything in this robustly American style, but his return to America from Europe with his family in 1860 coincided with the start of the Civil War, a topic that a hopeful writer for the magazine market might well have been expected to address.1 Furthermore, the younger Jameses, Wilky and Bob, went on to enlist in the Union army in 1862, Wilky returning wounded in 1863. The question of James’s “obscure hurt” of 1860, his non-participation in the war, and the relation of these events (or non-events) to his work has been the subject of discussion; most recently in Peter Rawlings’s Henry James and the Abuse of the Past. Rawlings suggests that “[w]hether James was either unable or unwilling to take up arms is less significant than the use to which he put his negative experience of the Civil War in terms of the discourse of fiction-compelling obscurity” (Rawlings 2005: xi, xii) – which sensibly frees us from worrying at unanswerable biographical questions and directs our attention to the work. James himself in his autobiographical writings saw in the “hurrying troops, the transfigured scene . . . a cover for every sort of intensity” (Dupee 1956: 415–16). The war, then, is less a background to stories such as “The Story of a Year” (1865), “Poor Richard” (1867), and “A Most Extraordinary Case” (1868) than an off-stage element, a testing, threatening obscurity, “a cover for every sort of intensity.” As Rawlings says, war became for James “subservient to a campaign in which popular fiction, common assumptions about the unproblematic nature of representation, and the torrid zones of gender come under a reviling scrutiny” (Rawlings 2005: 46). The start of “The Story of a Year” at once questions the assumptions of popular fiction: “when the hero is despatched does not the romance come to a stop?” John Ford and Lizzie Crowe – the “romance” – are introduced within an idyllic if damp landscape setting, and so besotted with one another that the young lieutenant disregards damage to his uniform and Lizzie is “reckless of her stockings.” Ford marches off to war on clouds of imagined glory – “columns charging . . . standards floating” – clasping a vision of Lizzie as “Catholics keep little pictures of their adored Lady in their prayer-books” ( James 1999a: 26, 27). His romantic illusions are early instances of the trap that unexamined imagery lays for the unwary, a theme that will occupy James to the end of his life. James’s narrator declines to follow his hero into battle, but the language of war is transferred to the domestic front: waiting for her soldier’s return, “Lizzie became a veteran at home.” The year’s seasonal changes suggest “another silent transition” ( James 1999a: 39) as she grows bored with Ford’s battlefield letters and a life of suspended activity. Christmas brings invitations and Lizzie arms herself for a party in “voluminous white, puffed and trimmed in wondrous sort,” puts on “her bracelet, her gloves, her handkerchief and her fan, and then – her smile” and conquers Mr. Bruce, who is not young, but, as her friend says, “beautifully educated” ( James 1999a: 41, 42). Romance stops no more than do the seasons. Ford is gravely wounded in battle and in Lizzie’s muddled mind the two men now stand “like opposing knights” ( James 1999a: 49). Her emotional confusion makes

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her ill, and on accepting Bruce’s proposal of marriage, she collapses. News arrives that Ford has improved and is on his way home, although on arrival he worsens. Lizzie fulfils her role of loving sweetheart and falls weeping at his bedside. But Ford, having been told of Mr. Bruce, gives up, like “an old wounded Greek who . . . has crawled into a temple to die,” adoring his “sculptured Artemis” ( James 1999a: 65). So much for all the complications of the narrative: James’s conclusion must, however, have perplexed readers of the Atlantic. Lizzie first appears to do the “right” romantic thing in breaking her engagement to Bruce after Ford’s death, and angrily protests when he refuses to leave: “But for all that, he went in” ( James 1999a: 66). Wedding bells are clearly imminent. Is this really a “happy ending”? The war hero has been defeated by the country lawyer, a denial of readerly expectations, but also of common ideas of war and the performance of masculinity. But it is Lizzie’s happy ending: she has opted for the more viable mate. Rawlings puts Lizzie among James’s “predatory women” (Rawlings 2005: 51), though she is hardly calculating enough for that. She wants to be – we want her to be – a sentimental heroine. But when James replaces the Madonna icon that starts the story, and which is central to the Christian family-ideal, with the virgin huntress, the “sculptured Artemis,” at the end, he is evoking a natural force to whom issues of sentiment and morality are immaterial. Lizzie is thinly drawn, but Gertrude Whittaker of “Poor Richard,” the object of the eponymous Richard’s love, is recognizably a Jamesian girl rather than a standard magazine heroine, being large, plain, rich, and clear-eyed. Richard – “an ill-natured fool, dull, disobliging, brooding, lowering” ( James 1999a: 156) – makes a wretched hero in comparison with two other suitors, both soldiers. Leon Edel, in his introduction to Watch and Ward, sorts Jamesian suitors into three types: the Loyal, the Strong, and the Cunning ( James 1979: 15). Here, Richard is loyal, Captain Severn, strong and Major Luttrell, cunning. Gertrude, though kind to the doggedly devoted Richard, falls in love with the scholarly Captain Severn, but through the deceit of Richard and Luttrell, Severn returns to battle without seeing Gertrude, and is killed. Richard confesses his lie, and in finding the courage to do so, finds his male identity, and – here is the shock – falls out of love. With Richard’s retrieval of self-respect, Gertrude recognizes that he is “abundantly a man and she loved him . . . if he had opened his arms, Gertrude would have come to them.” Instead, he goes off to war, and the narrator rather brutally declares, “with their separation our story properly ends” ( James 1999a: 159, 208). James’s “appended paragraph,” filling in future events, is extraordinarily disconcerting. Richard has a good war, returns, but heads for a new life in the West; Gertrude becomes the woman found so often in James’s life and work – rich, independent, and living in Italy, for whom “a little romance is occasionally invoked to account for her continued celibacy.” Richard’s discovery of a male identity has directed him to physical effort, to male society, away from female zones, and James does not suggest he is any the better for this. Both are thus given reasonable but separate outcomes: “This is not romance,” as Gertrude observes of Richard, “it’s reality” ( James 1999a:

James’s Shorter Fiction, 1865–1878

21

208, 178). Reality, then, unusually for the world of magazine fiction, need not include getting married. Romance of a kind does conclude “A Day of Days,” written just before “Poor Richard,” but not romance and marriage. For the space of a fine September day Adela Moore and Thomas Ludlow enjoy one another’s company. Ludlow is due to leave for Europe and admits it would be “very heroic, very poetic, very chivalric to lose his steamer” – but for an idea, a fancy? “Why spoil it?” ( James 1999a: 104) he thinks, and leaves. It is a perfectly inconclusive conclusion, in which both characters keep an ideal image of one another in perpetuity, foreshadowing by nearly forty years James’s darker, sadder ending in “Altar of the Dead.” The story is one of the most satisfying of this period in its representation of ideal companionship, in which sexual complications and possibilities remain forever suspended in an autumnal glow. It is also as defiant of literary convention, as devoid of plot and comfort as a Beckett play. We can look at the failure to find good marriages in another way, and argue, as Philip Sicker does, that the quest for love in James’s fiction “is a continued quest for identity” (Sicker 1980: 10). Even if the quest is inconclusive – if it ends in marriage bad or indifferent, in separation or in death – identity, James seems to be saying, is nevertheless forged by way of the “great relation between men and women.” It was this relation which James accused nineteenth-century Anglo-American novelists of evading, of keeping “so desperately, so nervously clear of,” preferring to deal in wildlife adventure, mystery and murder, “tortured childhood and purified sin” ( James 1984a: 107, 1402). And because so much of the “great relation” passes unseen, within the consciousness of characters, elements of the supernatural, which is always, for James, a matter of consciousness, can also be woven into his fiction. In “A Most Extraordinary Case,” for example, we see the supernatural at work in the effect Caroline Hoffman has on Ferdinand Mason. Mason, a wounded war hero, returns to be nursed by his aunt, Caroline’s guardian. Caroline is one of James’s big healthy girls, sumptuously beautiful this time, and Mason duly falls in love. Although Dr. Knight declares Mason is recovering, every contact with the girl unaccountably weakens him, though she is attentive and kind. She, on the other hand, blooms: “she has the inviolable strength of a goddess,” Knight says, “it’s the sound of Diana on the forest leaves.” When Caroline becomes engaged to Knight, Mason admits defeat: “to have broken down in his country’s defence will avail her nothing”; she needs “a being complete, intact, well-seasoned, invulnerable” ( James 1999a: 296, 284). Resolved “to purchase one short hour of enjoyment” with Caroline, the sickly Mason enters the ballroom, as if it were a battlefield, and conducts himself “with unprecedented gallantry.” His aunt, alarmed, remarks how “these dreadful girls . . . like a man to look as if he were going to die.” The “battle” indeed ends in his death, but James concludes – almost mockingly – with marriage: “Miss Hoffman’s wedding was not deferred” ( James 1999a: 289, 301, 303). In “A Most Extraordinary Case” the supernatural is internalized; over-excitement could almost have accounted for Mason’s relapses. It is “the revealed effect” ( James 1987: 191), as James says in his notes on The Sense of the Past, that is significant and alarming:

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Freud’s “uncanny,” in other words, where events are susceptible to neither rational nor supernatural explanation. The career of Margaret Aldis of “De Grey: A Romance” of 1868, is more explicitly “uncanny” than that of earlier heroines, and setting the story in the historical past licenses the ghostly, as does Paul De Grey’s Catholicism and European ancestry. James indeed uses a familiar Gothic ploy, placing the poor orphaned Margaret with the De Greys, so that when the heir, Paul, returns to America from his European trip, the two fall in love. It is not parental ire that is roused but a family curse: the true love of all male De Greys will die within a month of betrothal. Margaret, refusing to flee, takes the missal containing this prediction and overrides it with a curse of her own. Instead of fading away her mousy looks develop a mature beauty, and Paul finds his “exquisite feeling of pity [for] . . . her appealing weakness, her heavenly dependence” altering to respect. He had plucked “this pallid flower” and “dipped its slender stem in the living waters of his love” and she has flourished: he hastens the wedding lest fear overtake love. Clearly, James is signaling that “something wicked this way comes,” but we might wonder why a girl’s emergence from pitiable dependence into strength and beauty should be menacing, and how a society can erect for itself so feeble an ideal of womanhood. Margaret throws herself into wedding preparations, taking “an active, violent delight in procuring quantities of the richest stuffs – a fierce defiance of impending calamity.”2 Virginia Fowler has pointed out how James’s American heroines offer an alternative not only “to the old corruption of Europe” but also to the “rampant materialism of America” (Fowler 1984: 8). Nevertheless, to be American is to be implicated in materialism, as we see in “Daisy Miller,” Portrait of a Lady, and Wings of the Dove. Displaying a length of satin, Margaret cries: “Isn’t it a lovely pink – it’s almost red . . . the colour of my love – of my death!” (James 1999a: 349). It is Paul, however, who fades and dies; Margaret becomes insane. The color of the silk represents not only death but also the money that she has innocently drained from Paul. James’s conclusion substitutes madness for marriage, satisfying the curse; but in fact the curse is no more than a device to drive the plot. Marriage is impossible, not on account of ancient maledictions, but because Paul is wedded to a moribund image of womanhood, superimposed on the girl’s living reality. Through access to his love and money, she prospers to become the spirited American girl, soon to be familiar to James’s readers, but – fatally for Paul – unable to coexist with fiction’s domestic Angel. And as will so often be the case in James’s later work, we cannot be sure whether there is not indeed something quite alarming about such girls. For her time, Margaret is unusually independent, but questions of female education and rights were live issues in the post-Civil War years.3 In James’s first novel of 1871, Watch and Ward, Nora, another orphan child, is rescued by Roger Lawrence, a man of leisure and means. Roger, from an early age, has been fixed on the idea of marriage: “There glimmered mistily in the young man’s brain a vision of a home-scene of the future” – placid wife, golden haired babe, and “in the midst, his sentient self.” After

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his proposal to the accomplished Miss Morton fails, he stumbles upon Nora, left defenseless and bereft by her father’s suicide. Like Paul De Grey, he is drawn to her situation as “a little forlorn, precocious, potential woman.” He adopts her “for better or for worse,” thinking of the day “when she should break into tears and tell him . . . that she loved him.” He writes to Miss Norton – now Mrs. Keith – that he has “begun at the beginning; it will be my own fault if I have not got a perfect wife” ( James 1979: 27, 33, 46, 52). In the stories that follow, dolls and statues often figure as metaphors for the century’s construct of womanhood. Roger here becomes something between Shelley’s Frankenstein and Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, creating a child-wife to meet his requirements. He sends Nora off to school, while he himself travels; en route toying with a South American beauty, who has “the charm of absolute naiveté” but is “as illiterate as an angel,” and has dirty fingernails besides. On his return, he redecorates his house for Nora in “chintz and muslin, flowers and photographs and books” (having the kind of “modest taste for upholstery” which we will later encounter in Gilbert Osmond). He wants to remind Nora “of all that she owed him.” Unable to voice this crass truth, he tells himself that “her little nameless services and caresses were a kind of acknowledgement and promise”; but though Nora feels her duty is to make him happy, she also warns that “I am not your little girl” ( James 1979: 56, 61, 62, 64). Nora herself is attracted by two men: Fenton, a confidence-man, down on his luck, and Hubert, handsome clergyman friend of Roger’s. It is Fenton who spots what lies ahead. “What in the world did he expect to do with you?” he asks – “Do you expect to marry him?” When she recoils, saying she will always be a child to Roger, Fenton laughs: “he will like a child of twenty.” The American girl, however, needs a European “finish”; so before proposing marriage – before “calling in his debts,” as it were – Roger sends her to Europe with Mrs. Keith who will, she promises, make her “the most charming girl in America” ( James 1979: 85, 88, 113). Because Roger has fallen ill, it is Hubert who first sees the finished product. Nora seems to him “a Western Pallas Athene,” sprung fully armed – and recalling earlier stories one feels nervous for Roger at the arrival of a goddess. When she understands what he proposes for her, however, Nora feels as if “a sudden horror had sprung up in her innocent past, and it seemed to fling forward a shadow which made the future a blank darkness. She felt cruelly deluded and injured . . . all this was an intolerable thing” ( James 1979: 145, 180, 190). She flees, first to Fenton and then to Hubert, who both back off in panic. On the street, with nowhere to turn, whom should she see but Roger, a providential deus ex machina, into whose arms she falls. The last paragraphs are barely readable, as Nora sobs that she is “a wiser girl” and Roger murmurs “My own poor child!” ( James 1979: 237, 238). And this time there are wedding bells and Roger gets his “placid wife.” The refusal of conventional narrative expectations seems to have been avoided here, and the novel is unsatisfying and finally unconvincing as a result. James tried to forget it, calling the novel “thin” and “cold” ( James 1979: 9), belonging to a period of trial

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and error. It did however run to several editions and does represent an aspect of James’s experiments, since all the elements of a challenge to narrative conventions are there: they are just compromised by the ending. What we also see here is a shift from the victim-man, wracked and destroyed by romantic suffering, to the free-spirited girl, trapped by ignorance, and whose future is trammeled by the imperatives of the marriage market. James’s girls now move to Europe, appearing most presciently in “The Last of the Valerii” of 1874. The love-lives of the men of the early tales have, as we have seen, been a miserable business. They are an unheroic lot, “bewildered, mentally or physically disabled” (Sicker 1980: 26). Even their military credentials fail to shore them up, and they find themselves, according to Rawlings, “occupying the feminine-gendered position of victim” (Rawlings 2005: 67). The Italian Count Camillo, however, in “The Last of the Valerii,” shifts the ground on which James’s victim-heroes stand. He marries American Martha, and while he is extremely handsome, in a sculptural way, “it’s the villa she’s in love with,” her mother says, “quite as much as the Count.” As for the Count, the narrator, Martha’s godfather, believes that while he loves her, he cannot have overlooked her “pretty fortune” ( James 1999a: 799), given the disrepair of his own. Love – whether of money, dresses, art, buildings, or antiquity, let alone that between or among the sexes – sets in motion forces that have incalculable consequences, marriage being only one, not necessarily conclusive, result. Once married, Martha sets about restoring the villa and disinterring its Roman remains. The Count warns her to let the statues be: “What do you want of them? We can’t worship them. Would you put them on pedestals to stare and mock at them?” ( James 1999a: 806). He has earlier defined himself as a pagan, and to the narrator he seems to have “no beliefs nor hopes nor fears” ( James 1999a: 803). For the Count, the remains are ancestral beliefs, now supplanted, but to be respected, in contrast to Martha’s touristic art-collecting passion that wants them on display. Undeterred, Martha persists and her workers uncover a superb statue of Juno. When the Count sees the goddess, he orders her put in a garden-house, which only he may visit, revering her “as if she were a sacrosanct image of the Madonna.”4 James has made clear that this is not Venus, but Juno, neither a Christian motherfigure nor a pagan seductress, but a jealous goddess-wife. The Count becomes withdrawn and “from his wife he kept his face inexorably averted,” meeting her touch “with an ill-concealed shudder” ( James 1999a: 812, 813). The narrator grows to hate the Count’s blood-soaked “interminable ancestry . . . the long fitfully glaring dusk of early ages” and is shocked when Camillo declares himself “the happiest of men,” now at peace in his garden with “the old Romans and the old gods” ( James 1999a: 814, 815). James said he wanted to create a “palpable imaginable visitable past” ( James 1984b: 1177) in his fiction, not, as he wrote to Sarah Orne Jewett, a pastiche of “little facts that can be got from pictures & documents, relics & prints” (Horne 1999: 360). Camillo now lives in a past that is visitable and, to him, preferable to the present.

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“You admired his antique simplicity,” the narrator says crossly to Martha, “you see how far it goes . . . Camillo is a pagan!” For Martha, however, the gulf between them is not religious but representational: “Juno’s the reality; I’m the fiction!” ( James 1999a: 822). The effect that the Juno has on Camillo reconstitutes the past within the present, and replaces it: he becomes the ancient Roman more authentically and alarmingly than if he were tricked out in toga and sandals. Martha has thus become science-fiction to the Count, a visitant from the future, a theme that James was to revisit in his last novel, The Sense of the Past. The Sense of the Past remained unfinished partly because James could not find a way to return Ralph Pendrel to his twentieth-century fiancée, Aurora, from his nineteenthcentury cousin, Nan, more real to him than Aurora. But Martha “plucks victory from the heart of danger” and “smothers” Juno’s beauty “in the dreadful dust” ( James 1999a: 823, 825) of a Christian burial. Camillo returns as she sits embroidering like a Victorian angel-wife, and buries his head in her lap – an ending of “dessert and ices,” surely, as matrimonial order is restored and the narrator tiptoes out? In James’s “appended paragraph,” however, Camillo conceals a fragment of the statue; and if we look ahead forty years to the conclusion of The Golden Bowl, where Prince Amerigo buries his head in Maggie’s breast to blot out Charlotte, “happily ever after” seems unlikely. The past, the other self, is suppressed but not forgotten or destroyed, the line between victor and victim blurred. The American girl has become an occupying force – for the moment. If “The Last of the Valerii” begins with a marriage undertaken for mixed motives, the conclusion, while apparently reverting to a marital status quo, uncovers fault-lines that James continued to probe. William Thackeray, as Jenni Calder points out, “was the first novelist to reject marriage as a happy ending,” though still accepting it as an ideal. But after George Eliot’s depiction of Lydgate’s destructive union in Middlemarch of 1871, and George Meredith’s removal of marriage “from the iron grip of social expectations” (Calder 1976: 26, 210) in the 1860s and 1870s, marriage had become a novel’s problem not its resolution. Legislation in Britain in favor of women’s rights over children and property had intensified and polarized debates.5 The American girl of this period, as beneficiary of liberal American attitudes to gender relations and with immense spending powers, had become the object both of envy and attack, as well as the means by which European aristocrats mended their fortunes. Martha, in “The Last of the Valerii,” is as yet a sketchy version of this American girl, but this is an important hint of the character who was to find her iconic moment in “Daisy Miller” of 1879. Martha is not referred to as “the Countess” in “The Last of the Valerii” until she has buried Juno and become in truth the Count’s wife. But Euphemia de Mauves is almost exclusively “Madame de Mauves” throughout the story of that title of 1874. The salient fact of her marriage, already in the past at the start of the story, when Longmore first sees her, is the nail on which the plot hangs: her married state is therefore foregrounded. James is not particularly interested in marriage as an institution, but what does concern him are its effects on the individual, its human relations,

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its unseen intimacies and cruelties, the web of involvements, loyalties kept or betrayed. Longmore, an American in Paris, becomes “involved” with Euphemia: attracted by her gentle beauty, but confused by her behavior, “at once alert and indifferent, contemplative and restless.” Mrs. Draper, another American, puts this down to unhappiness: “ ‘What else is possible,’ [Longmore] asked himself, ‘for a sweet American girl who marries an unclean Frenchman?’ ” ( James 1999a: 830, 831). James’s fight against “a superstitious evaluation of Europe” is not just against uncritical American worshipfulness, but also against assumptions, like those of Longmore, about wholesome Americans and nasty foreigners – literary as well as popular stereotypes. The marriage-plot here underlines the conflicts in James’s international drama, the contrast, as Wegelin sees it in “Madame de Mauves,” between “the integrity of American idealism and opportunistic French realism” (Wegelin 1958: 32, 39). Mrs. Draper describes Euphemia’s situation as “the miserable story of an American girl, born to be neither a slave nor a toy, marrying a profligate Frenchman, who believes that a woman must be one or the other,” and encourages Longmore, “to draw the sadness from [Euphemia’s] desperate smile” ( James 1999a: 832, 833), an undertaking he accepts, though instinct warns him against it. The narrative shifts to Euphemia’s early history, blurring perspectives and unsettling our prejudices. As a girl “she dreamed of marrying a title . . . because she had a romantic belief that the best birth is the guarantee of an ideal delicacy of feeling. Romances are rarely constructed in such perfect good faith and Euphemia’s excuse was the primitive purity of her imagination”; James, however, goes on to call this romantic belief a “pernicious conceit.” In the New York Edition of the story he expands the passage to underline the naivety of Euphemia’s notions, and replaces “imagination” with “moral vision” ( James 1908: 224). Longmore’s emotions become further involved, encouraged by Euphemia’s cynical sister-in-law – a dry run for the Countess Gemini of Portrait of a Lady. Baron de Mauves, having mended his fortunes “by pretending to fall in love” is “a thoroughly perverted creature,” pursuing an adulterous career in Paris. He is not averse to Longmore’s suit, however, as long as it remains discreet, but Madame de Mauves is steadfastly “pure” in her rejection of it. She insists that her marriage had been “a perfect love-match,” and Longmore, reporting to Mrs. Draper, believes that the Baron can’t forgive a “little American bourgeoise” for having “fancied him a finer fellow than he is, or than he at all wants to be” ( James 1999a: 862). For Longmore, the crisis comes when she refuses his plea to flee her hateful marriage, believing this act would taint their relationship, and leaving him no option but to return to America. Integrity and purity are satisfied, the American victims of decadent “old” Europe “have their goodness now,”6 though without wedding bells. James’s stories, however, do not stop “when the hero is dispatched” and his conclusion throws all into disarray. Reporting back to Longmore two years later, Mrs. Draper describes meeting a friend of the de Mauves, who had called Euphemia “the charming little woman who killed her husband.” Baron de Mauves, apparently moved by his wife’s steadfast virtue,

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had reformed and begged forgiveness, but she continued steadfast: “she was stone she was ice, she was outraged virtue”; and so he blew his brains out. This would seem the cue for Longmore to return to Europe, but he remains, his fervor chilled “by a feeling for which awe would hardly be too strong a name” ( James 1999a: 903). Does he hesitate through humility, or fear of purity more baleful than the corruption it confronts? At all events, marriage to pure, faithful, beautiful Madame de Mauves has been and is impossible, her “moral vision” frozen into received images and ideas – about marriage and social class, of herself and of what constitutes virtu in human relations. It is not her nationality that is tested, but her humanity; neither Longmore nor the reader can reach for national stereotypes to account for the débacle. As Wegelin observes, “Madame de Mauves” is transitional, “its author had objectified only a part of his American point of view,” but it is a story that “points across the whole of his career” (Wegelin 1958: 46). This is where we can surely not resist the temptation to read back from the major fiction. And reading back deepens our understanding as we reach for comparisons. Isabel Archer’s return to Osmond takes on a note of menace; Morris Townsend looks sadder; Mrs. Ambient more intelligible; Maggie Verver’s stratagems are an intelligent replay of Euphemia’s; and Madame de Vionnet’s more poignant wistful desire to be the woman Strether had idealized. All can be read as a return to the broken figure of de Mauves. The story’s conclusion leaves everything in the air: blame and sympathy cannot be apportioned, there is no outlet for the reader’s sympathies. For whatever reasons the married state was entered, it is a minefield. Social expectations, popular culture’s representation of gender relations, cannot bear much reality, as James sees it, and this is surely an important step in that process by which he sets about stripping marriage of all supports and disguises. The Civil War had played its part in James’s early attempt to articulate a modern manhood, though, as we saw, military conflict was to become a metaphor for the other battle of the sexes. In the postwar years, the performance and measure of American masculinity had shifted to the world of commerce, and to concomitant success in the roles of suitor, spouse, and father. James was as uneasy with business as he had been with war, but at least war had an end and the civilized life could be resumed. What James now became aware of and explored through his fiction was the abyss of difference that was opening up in advanced capitalist society between male and female spheres: women were to be kept ignorant of the world of work and money, and men deprived of and indifferent to cultural matters; a state of affairs not easily mended and inimical to a civilized society. In opposition to the “quintessential American matrix of married domesticity and commercial or professional industry,” as Eric Haralson describes it, James’s fictions were increasingly to valorize “the disaffiliated aesthete” (Haralson 2005: 31, 3). I have not, so far, touched on the question of James’s own celibacy, though many of the stories I refer to are from the years before Minny Temple’s death, when James’s marriage to any one of a number of women might have seemed a possibility.

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James was aware of the anxiety of family and friends to see him settled. He wrote to Grace Norton in 1880 that he would not marry; “I am too good a bachelor to spoil.” She must have persisted, since he expanded on the topic four years later: “I shall never marry . . . if marriage is perfectly successful it is the highest human state,” otherwise “it is an awful grind, an ignoble, unworthy condition” ( James 1974–84: II: 323; III: 54). Crawford, in “Crawford’s Consistency” of 1876, is an aesthete who has, according to his friend the narrator, “done a thing which required a good deal of charitable explanation”: he has given up business because “he hated buying and selling,” an apparently innocuous decision not to do what society expects of him. Instead he fills his house with books, and, though not a success by late nineteenth-century American standards, as “master of an all-sufficient fortune and of the best education . . . goodlooking, gallant, amiable, urbane,” he is, his friend the narrator says, “the most propitious victim to matrimony” ( James 1999b: 127, 128). The narrator has “extreme admiration and affection” for Crawford, though as a poor doctor for whom marriage is a distant prospect, he also envies him. But since Crawford can afford it, he urges him to marry. Crawford replies that he is happy as he is: “A man should only marry in self-defence . . . a desire to lead a single life is not necessarily proof of a morose disposition” ( James 1999b: 126, 130). Crawford, yielding to social pressure, falls for Elizabeth Ingram; to the dismay of the narrator, however, for lovely as she is, “she had always inspired me with a vague mistrust.” He has no time himself for a “blooming statue,” an “inanimate” ideal like Elizabeth; in marriage he, the narrator, will be “the planet . . . not the satellite.” The doctor has rightly diagnosed the pernicious nature of current icons of femininity. His objection is not that these are unreal, but that the male position is unacceptably submissive. He describes Elizabeth as having been kept “behind high walls,” because the Ingrams were poor, and “their daughter was their golden goose.” As provider of the “eggs” Crawford is a good match, though as a disaffiliated aesthete, “not a splendid one.” For all that, it was “a bad year in the matrimonial market . . . the ideal suitor did not present himself ” ( James 1999b: 126, 127, 133) and so the marriage is agreed. Elizabeth then breaks the engagement, and the distraught Crawford demands her reasons: “I do not love you,” she replies. The narrator is outraged: “had she literally no more sensibility than an expensive wax doll? . . . there was something monstrous in her quiet, flute-like utterance of Crawford’s damnation” ( James 1999b: 138, 139). We do not “go behind” Miss Ingram; she is seen only in the hostile glare of the narrator’s eye, but she in fact releases Crawford from the future hell of a loveless match. Crawford, however, self-destructs, marrying a woman of the streets, savagely described by him as “the last word, the flower” of American civilization. In the woman’s account, Crawford had offered her money to marry him: he had, the narrator says, “dragged her out of her friendly obscurity, and placed her unloveliness aloft upon the pedestal of his contrasted good manners” ( James 1999b: 149), a revenge upon the “monstrous regiment of women,” perhaps, but pointlessly cruel. When “bad years”

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then hit his finances, she feels cheated and becomes a fury. It is a short step to poverty, violence, and her death from drink. In the narrator’s eyes Crawford has never lost his “equanimity,” but to the reader, not perhaps sharing the doctor’s “extreme admiration and affection,” Crawford has surely only replaced the commerce he hated with barter in the marriage market – “consistency” of a sort. Unable to purchase the love of the imagined Angel, in savage fury he has procured the Whore, disregarding human reality in either case – “a thing which requires a good deal of charitable explanation.” There is, for James, an atypical neatness to this story. The anonymous doctor, however, lurks as potentially interesting. James is using the nineteenth-century novel’s ploy of a reliable professional man as narrator, but this narrator’s passionate prejudices – about women and about Crawford – throw into question his whole account. Living vicariously through Crawford, his friend’s final degradation is his own; the matrimonial markets have surely closed for him too, psychologically if not literally. In the grotesque ending of “Rose Agathe,” of 1878, it seems that James can only find a way out through the surreal and absurd. The narrator – again unnamed – sees his friend apparently falling in love and eloping with the pretty wife of a Parisian hairdresser, an adventure he encourages with vicarious zest. In fact his friend adores a wax bust in the hairdresser’s window, which he finally buys and installs in his home. This lunacy, in retrospect, is preferable to the narrator’s callous encouragement of an imagined seduction, perfectly expressed by his assumption that when his friend says “one never knows what one may pick up,” he means sex, not shopping. Marriage, then, the desired ending for readers and publishers of periodicals, neat narrative termination that traditionally closes one part of a life, leaving the rest to guesswork, has reached an impasse. James was not alone in his resistance to the wedding finale. Meredith’s The Egoist of 1879 eviscerated the whole courtship/marriage process, and even Trollope, arch purveyor of fictional “dessert and ices,” begins the last chapter of Ayala’s Angel of 1881 wearily sending yet another two couples down the aisle: “If marriage be . . . the only ending, as this writer takes it to be, which is not discordant – surely no tale was ever so properly ended as this one. Infinite trouble has been taken . . . arranging these marriages” (Trollope 1929: 624). He nevertheless continued to confect his inevitable “only endings,” meriting James’s accusation in his essay of 1914, “The New Novel,” against his Victorian confrères, of being “as sentimental, as romantic . . . as shamelessly ‘dodgy’ . . . just in order not to be close and fresh, not to be authentic” (James 1984a: 130). James, as we have seen, resisted “dodginess” from the start. These early stories direct our reading and understanding in various ways, but in no way more seriously or more disturbingly than in their exploration of the bad deals that marriage can offer. He chooses the traditional courtship/marriage paradigm as the “adventure” undergone by the greater part of humankind, the experience in which individuals are tested and measured in all their depths and shallows – the opportunity to hunt whales or track savages is not, after all, given to many. We have not got the psychological depth and cultural complexity that the major novels will offer us here, but the bones of matter

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are exposed to us already. Powerful, challenging women simply can’t match their desires with those of weaker, intelligent, sensitive but so often secretive and deceitful men. Clever, decent men can’t reconcile themselves to the banalities of late nineteenth-century domesticity, or the traps for individual freedom in the world of business. The fictional mold for the exploration of the psychological problems that interest James is the matrimonial market: but these were bad years for matrimony in James’s fiction – and so they would continue to be through a career that leads to the richer delights of the later greater works.

Notes 1

2

This may be the point at which to address F. R. Horowitz’s The Uncollected Henry James (London: Duckworth, 2004), a group of unsigned magazine stories written between 1852 and 1869 and attributed to James by Horowitz. The attribution is implausible, and the stories’ sole merit is to expose the dismal fare available to magazine readers, and by contrast to highlight the superiority of James’s earliest writings to this kind of dross. James here introduces two elements into the story that were to continue to preoccupy him: dress and money. In James’s first ghost story, “A Romance of Certain Old Clothes” of 1868, two sisters fight over a man. Actually, the fight is for the gorgeous dresses of one sister’s trousseau. To acquire these, the other must eliminate her sister and marry the man; which she does, but is mysteriously struck dead as she opens the trunk of clothes.

3

The first American conference of feminists was held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. 4 James had translated Prosper Merimée’s “The Venus of L’Ille,” a story of rivalry between a bronze Roman Venus and a young bride, in which the bridegroom is found dead with marks of a metal body upon him. 5 The most notorious of the reactionary attacks on new Womanhood was Eliza Lynn Linton’s articles in The Saturday Review of 1868, under the title The Girl of the Period, a phrase that became a byword. William Dean Howells saw Daisy Miller and her compatriots as James’s transatlantic equivalents. 6 The concluding lines to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, when a wife watches her Puritan New England husband go to his death.

References and Further Reading Calder, Jenni (1976). Women and Marriage in Victorian Fiction. London: Thames and Hudson. A sociological study of the nineteenth-century British novel, from a sanely feminist viewpoint. Dupee, Frederick (1956). Henry James: Autobiography. London: W. H. Allen. James’s autobiographical writings. Fiedler, Leslie (1982 [1960]). Love and Death in the American Novel. London: Penguin. Classic introduction to the American novel and its European context.

Fowler, Virginia (1984). Henry James’s American Girl. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Expands the image of the American girl beyond the “international theme.” Haralson, Eric (2005). Henry James and Queer Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Recent reading of James within the context of gender studies. Horne, Philip (1999). Henry James: A Life in Letters. London: Penguin. Invaluable synthesis of biography and letters.

James’s Shorter Fiction, 1865–1878 James, Henry (1908). “Madame de Mauves.” The Reverberator & Other Tales. Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 13. New York: Scribners. James, Henry (1974–84). Henry James Letters. Ed. Leon Edel. 4 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. James, Henry (1979). Watch and Ward. Ed. Leon Edel. New York: Grove Press. James, Henry (1984a). Literary Criticism, Vol. 1: Essays on Literature, American Writers and English Writers. New York: Library of America. James, Henry (1984b). Literary Criticism, Vol. 2: French Writers, Other European Writers; The Prefaces to the New York Edition. New York: Library of America. James, Henry (1987). The Complete Notebooks. Ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers. New York: Oxford University Press. James, Henry (1999a). Complete Stories, 1864–1874. New York: Library of America. James, Henry (1999b). Complete Stories, 1874– 1884. New York: Library of America.

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Kaplan, Fred (1992). Henry James: The Imagination of Genius. New York: William Morrow. PostEdel reinterpretation of James’s life. Krook, Dorothea (1967). The Ordeal of Consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Irreplaceable examination of the major novels. Rawlings, Peter (2005). Henry James and the Abuse of the Past. Houndmills: Palgrave. New insights on James’s use of history – especially good on the Civil War. Sicker, Philip (1980). Love and the Quest for Identity in the Fiction of Henry James. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pre-gender studies, but still interesting. Trollope, Anthony (1929 [1881]). Ayala’s Angel. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Deservedly neglected late novel. Wegelin, Christophe (1958). The Image of Europe in Henry James. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press. A bit dated, but still worth reading. West, Rebecca (1916). Henry James. London: Nisbet. A warm though not uncritical tribute.

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What Daisy Knew: Reading Against Type in Daisy Miller: A Study Sarah Wadsworth From the beginning he was an enigma. From the very moment that he insinuated himself, unbidden, into her field of vision, his peculiar inconsistencies defied explanation. His surreptitious glances in her direction, the superficial banter he carried on with her younger brother, the stiff affectation with which he used his cane as a sort of stage prop – his entire repertoire of familiar gestures and quaint mannerisms conveyed an ambiguous mixture of piqued interest and feigned indifference. Or was the indifference genuine and the interest merely feigned? Even his nationality appeared confused and unstable, a farrago of German inflections and British reserve, with a dash of American aplomb and yet a spice too of native expertise, suggesting a more intimate relationship to the Swiss surroundings than could conceivably be acquired as a casual tourist, no matter how deeply read in Baedeker or Murray. This elusive cosmopolitan quality contributed to a sense of perplexity born of the setting itself: a fairy tale hamlet on the shore of Lake Geneva, but with so pronounced an infusion (or rather invasion) of American tourists as to create the singular impression of a picturesque Swiss resort uprooted and transplanted intact into the homely precincts of Saratoga or Newport. When he rose to address her, she hesitated inwardly, masking her uncertainty with redoubled attention to her exquisitely flounced and beribboned dress. But her interlocutor would detect in her no trace of unease. She was Annie P. Miller of Schenectady, New York, United States of America, thank you very much, and whether he finally made up his mind to advance or retreat was a question over which she would allow herself to lose no sleep.

Point of view in Henry James’s Daisy Miller is possibly the most frequently discussed formal attribute of the text. That observation accounts for the playful pastiche with which this essay begins: through it I dramatize the surprising reflections, resemblances, and reversals between Daisy and Winterbourne that become apparent when one seeks to reimagine the story from Daisy’s vantage point. After all, both are “queer” or “odd mixture[s]” ( James 1986: 76, 101), and each is perplexed in the attempt to decipher the other. Each is overseen by a maternal figure, in the father’s absence. Both have questionable liaisons with members of the opposite sex (foreigners, to boot), and both become subjects of gossip, speculation, and “contradictory accounts” ( James

A Companion to Henry James. Edited by Greg W. Zacharias © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-14042-3

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1986: 116) with regard to their putative paramours: each one is “extremely amiable” ( James 1986: 48), but both are “talked about” ( James 1986: 92). Nevertheless, both Winterbourne and Daisy are described as “innocent” ( James 1986: 64, 115). Under the circumstances, the ambiguity is only to be expected: R. P. Draper points out that “we know very little about Daisy at first-hand” (Draper 1969: 602), while Robert Weisbuch observes that “it is startling what we do not know about Winterbourne” (Weisbuch 1993: 67). As the reader quickly discerns, however, James consistently presents his portrait, or “study” (the novella’s original subtitle), of Daisy through the eyes of Winterbourne, relentlessly suppressing Daisy’s thoughts and thereby obscuring the double standard that underlies the story’s highly gendered social codes. That the young man’s perspective has been skewed by his long absence from his native country and the gradual supplanting of the American sensibility with that of a Europeanized one complicates his response to Daisy, and by extension, our own response as readers. Dazzled by Daisy’s beauty and insouciant charm yet blind to her inward purity of character, Winterbourne vacillates in large part because he has lost his cultural moorings and is consequently “booked to make a mistake” ( James 1986: 116). So skillful is James in presenting the story through the eyes of this erring youth that the values and judgments of the supercilious, hypocritical American colony to which he is attached seem almost to become normative as one reads the novella. Indeed, a survey of the criticism and scholarship on Daisy Miller suggests that only gradually have readers shaken off the prejudices of this close-knit clique and made way for generally positive and sympathetic readings of Daisy’s character, along with more clear-sighted and skeptical interpretations of Winterbourne’s. Yet even as the critical tide has turned, and Winterbourne has come in for his share of knocks (see, for example, Gargano 1960; Draper 1969; Kennedy 1973; Weisbuch 1993), until recently Daisy has remained something of a cipher. Although readers moved away from the once-popular view that Daisy was “an outrage on American girlhood” (a verdict James perpetuated in the Preface to the New York Edition) ( James 1986: 41), she seemed to be redeemed in a secondhand fashion. As readers, we become convinced of Daisy’s innocence insofar as Giovanelli vouches for her virtue, Winterbourne finally recognizes and rues his mistake, and James himself vindicates her both in his Preface (“my supposedly typical little figure was of course pure poetry”) ( James 1986: 43) and in his famous letter to Eliza Linton (“Poor little D.M. was . . . above all things innocent”) (quoted in Jobe 1997: 84). Recently, however, critics have interpreted Daisy Miller in a larger context than that suggested by the nagging question Winterbourne asks of Daisy: “What if she were a clever little reprobate?” ( James 1986: 111). Setting aside the question of innocence or guilt opens up the story to a broader range of interpretations, and as feminist, new historicist, and cultural critics have shown, invites us to ask entirely new and sometimes unexpected questions of Daisy Miller. This essay pursues these new directions, recovering, in the process, an alternative, female frame of reference anchored in both the post-Civil War boom in women’s travel writing and in a pervasive late nineteenth-century ideology of types. A reconsideration of James’s novella in light of

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social types pertaining to gender, leisure, class, and nationality provides insight into the cultural meaning of the American girl abroad, both within and outside of James’s text. Critics have often analyzed the characters in Daisy Miller as literary types (Coffin 1958; Fowler 1984; Shriber 1981; Wardley 2001), as archetypes (Fiedler 1960; Kennedy 1973; Welter 1976), and even, most recently, as “an emblem of otherness”: “an emblem of the foreignness of his [James’s] own native land” (Pahl 2001: 157, 145). Considering the novella in the context of nineteenth-century social types reveals how James’s text reconfigures the parameters of commonly held notions about national and gender identity in a way that brings anxieties about class and sexuality to the fore. In The American 1890s: A Cultural Reader, Susan Harris Smith and Melanie Dawson observe the frequency with which references to “types” appear in late nineteenth-century periodicals, noting that such references “[allow] for broad generalizations about large groups of people” (Smith and Dawson 2000: 75). Along with groups defined by race and nationality (see Blair 1996), girls and women were “typed” relentlessly in nineteenth-century periodicals (Banta 1987). Magazine articles such as Junius Henri Browne’s “Types of American Beauty” (1871), Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen’s “Types of American Women” (1889), “Types of American Girls” by Adeline Dutton Train Whitney, Isabel A. Mallon, Edith Sessions Tupper, and Ruth Ashmore (1891), F. Marion Crawford’s “The American Woman as Seen After an Absence of Ten Years” (1893), Mrs. Rhodes Campbell’s “The American Girl: Her Faults and Her Virtues” (1898), and “The Girl of the Period,” by Eliza Linton (to whom James defended Daisy in the letter quoted earlier) drilled into their readers the notion that national and gender characteristics were distinct, easily definable coordinates positioned within a finite, socially and biologically determined grid of physical, mental, and behavioral traits. From early to late, James’s fiction participates (often ironically) in this general cultural preoccupation with the meaning of types. According to Smith and Dawson, “The language of ‘types’ . . . combines ideas of class with ideas about patriotism, upward mobility, and cultural skills” (8). In addition, types, in late nineteenth-century usage, “[emphasize] continued and often conflicting efforts to define identities and confirm prejudices about where and how individuals fit into society” (Smith and Dawson 2000: 75). Yet, as Smith and Dawson point out, the ideology of types was at variance with the reality of a rapidly changing society; the assumption that individuals fall neatly into fixed categories effectively masked the complexity of the social fabric: In a time of radical demographic change, the language of “types” could be deployed to create the illusion of stable hierarchies. In other words, the ideological dimension of such language conjured what was for some readers a reassuringly fixed state, or, as historian Henry Seidel Canby claimed, this was the last time in living memory “when everyone knew exactly what it meant to be an American.” (Smith and Dawson 2000: 8)

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This question, what it means to be an American, lies at the very heart of James’s fiction and, indeed, of the large body of literature by or about Americans abroad. Placing Daisy Miller within this broader context allows us to see quite clearly how James deconstructs and then reconstructs the prevailing feminine and national types. As Elizabeth F. Hoxie detailed, the unchaperoned state of Mrs. Miller and her teenage daughter became a rallying point for writers of etiquette manuals shortly after the initial appearance of Daisy Miller, when “the heroine actually stepped out of the pages of her book and helped to set standards of decorum for her sex in America.” But if, as Hoxie noted, “the self-appointed authorities on etiquette . . . appropriated Daisy and displayed her as an example of what American girls should not be and do” (Hoxie 1946: 474), what kind of models of behavior and advice for American girls traveling abroad existed prior to the publication of Daisy Miller? Critics have offered up numerous examples to illustrate how late nineteenthcentury readers and texts responded to Daisy Miller, but the ways in which the novella itself responds to the social conditions of the 1870s has received less attention. An especially fruitful area of cultural production to consider in light of these questions is contemporary American women’s travel writing: that is, semi-fictional and autobiographical narratives by American women of the Gilded Age, who, like Daisy, journeyed abroad undaunted, unfettered, and triumphantly independent. The 1870s ushered numerous volumes of travel writing into the American literary marketplace, many of them by women, and, indeed, many by women who journeyed abroad unchaperoned. If, as James Schramer and Donald Ross suggest, Lee Meriwether’s A Tramp Trip: How to See Europe on Fifty Cents a Day (1886) “represents a declaration of American travel independence” (Schramer and Ross 1998: xv), the narratives of these venturesome women are the female travelers’ own version of this revolutionary pronouncement. Critics have often pointed out that the settings of Daisy Miller are symbolically significant and rich with allusive resonance. Scholars have explored the associations of Geneva with Calvinism (Barnett 1979), Rome with Roman Catholicism, the Golden Age (Grant 1974), and Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (Bisztray 1991), the Coliseum with Lord Byron’s “Manfred” (Kirk 1980), and the Castle of Chillon with both the freedom-fighter Bonnivard and Byron’s “The Prisoner of Chillon” (Kirk 1980). More recently, Dennis Pahl has pointed out that Saratoga and Newport (to which Winterbourne likens Vevey) are “actually suggestive of two quite different classes of wealth in America” according to James’s own travel writing: one corresponding to the “Europeanized aristocrats” of America and the other corresponding to “the vulgar, ‘democratic,’ money-making type of Americans” (Pahl 2001: 147). As Motley Deakin (1983) has demonstrated most thoroughly, all of the sites featured in Daisy Miller were popular destinations frequented by British and American travelers in the nineteenth century, described and celebrated in countless guide books, magazine sketches, and full-length travel narratives.

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Vevey, where the novella begins, has prompted fewer critical observations, although Geoffrey Moore juxtaposes the “icy Geneva” and “the magic world of Vevey” (10), and both Moore and Carey H. Kirk see Vevey as “a kind of middle ground,” suggesting “compromise or resolution of opposites” (Kirk 1980: 280), “a sort of no man’s land, half-way between the grim certainties of Geneva and the moral laxity of Rome” ( James 1986: 9). Patricia Crick’s notes to the Penguin edition point out that Vevey was the setting of Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, suggesting the possibility that “James deliberately introduces his heroine in this same setting because he wishes to remind us of Rousseau’s belief that the innocence and contentment of ‘natural’ man have been destroyed by the conventions of ‘civilized’ society” ( James 1986: 119). These contextual and intertextual glosses substantially enrich our understanding of James’s ingenuity in weaving together setting and theme in Daisy Miller. In the 1870s, however, many Anglo-American readers, particularly girls and young women, would have been more recently acquainted with Vevey through a crucial episode in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868): after Beth’s death a bereaved Amy, traveling abroad with relatives, falls in love with Laurie in the garden of her pension, and the two become engaged while rowing together, side by side, on the Alpine lake. As she sets the scene, Alcott simultaneously evokes and deflates the familiar associations: They had been talking of Bonnivard as they glided past Chillon, and of Rousseau as they looked up at Clarens, where he wrote his Heloise. Neither had read it, but they knew it was a love story, and each privately wondered if it was half as interesting as their own. (Alcott 2001: 440)

To conceal her emotion, Amy offers to help row the boat; Laurie, insisting he is not tired, nevertheless slides over to make space for her. The chapter ends with Amy, nestled alongside Laurie on her “third of a seat,” accepting his marriage proposal, and as “they both stopped rowing . . . unconsciously [adding] a pretty little tableau of human love and happiness to the dissolving views reflected in the lake” (Alcott 2001: 441). When James published Daisy Miller in The Cornhill Magazine, precisely a decade after the appearance of Little Women, Alcott’s widely read romantic tableau provided both a context and a precedent for the abortive têta-á-tête on Lake Geneva, in which Winterbourne was to “[guide] through the summer starlight a skiff freighted with a fresh and beautiful young girl” ( James 1986: 71), as well as Daisy’s and Winterbourne’s unescorted excursion by steamer to the Castle of Chillon. Although Little Women was not immune from critical barbs, Amy’s unchaperoned liaisons with Laurie escaped censure – hardly surprising considering that the decade between the publication of Little Women and Daisy Miller was apparently something of a Golden Age for American women traveling abroad. As Hoxie’s study reveals, however, the popular reception of Daisy Miller created a backlash that signaled the end of an era of unprecedented freedom and opportunity for American women travel-

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ers. Writing in 1904, Margaret Sangster observed, “ ‘Daisy Miller,’ as Henry James painted her, is a good specimen of the American girl who used to go to Europe. She does not often go now in that way. Daisy Miller is almost an extinct species” (qtd. in Hoxie 1946: 483–4). Before she vanished, however, the American girl of Daisy’s type left her mark on American literature, not only in James’s fiction but in a host of other narratives, non-fiction and semi-fictional, focused on the experiences of American women abroad. Daisy Miller can thus be seen as both the culmination of the post-Civil War reign of the independent American woman traveler and an unwitting agent of her demise. Alcott’s Shawl-Straps (1872), the second volume of Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag, was among the best known and most widely circulated of these narratives of American women abroad.1 A thinly fictionalized account of her journey abroad at the age of 37, propelled by the international success of Little Women, Shawl-Straps relates the trials and triumphs of “Lavinia” (Alcott), “Matilda” (Alcott’s younger sister May, aged 30, the model of Amy March), and “Amanda” (Amy’s 24-year-old friend Alice Bartlett) through France, Switzerland, Italy, and England. More than a travelogue, however, Shawl-Straps is also a rallying cry for independent female travelers. As Alcott explains of her traveling trio, “No lord and master, in the shape of brother, spouse, or courier, ordered their outgoings and incomings; but liberty the most entire was theirs, and they enjoyed it heartily” (Alcott 1872: 73). In her conclusion to the narrative, Alcott adopts the stance of one vindicated by experience, offering the following “triumphant statement as a moral” to her tale: in spite of many prophecies to the contrary, three women, utterly unlike in every respect, . . . lived happily together for twelve long months, . . . travelled unprotected safely over land and sea, . . . experienced two revolutions, an earthquake, an eclipse, and a flood, yet met with no loss, no mishap, no quarrel, and no disappointment worth mentioning. (Alcott 1872: 224–5)

Alcott advises “all timid sisters . . . lingering doubtfully on the shore” to “Wait for no man” but pack their bags and “push boldly off,” as “They will need no protector but their own courage, no guide but their own good sense and Yankee wit, and no interpreter if that woman’s best gift, the tongue, has a little French polish on it” (Alcott 1872: 225). With this vindication of the rights of women to travel abroad independently, Alcott joined a chorus of American women writers of the decade in celebrating this newfound freedom (see Wadsworth 2006). The disparity between the European experiences narrated by Alcott and other women travelers of the 1870s and the experience of James’s fictional American girl abroad are worth contemplating. Is it Daisy’s lack of “good sense and Yankee wit” or her lack of finesse (what Alcott terms “French polish”) that condemns her to a fate of ostracism and death? In Shawl-Straps Alcott takes pains to point out that her party of “free and easy Americans” (Alcott 1872: 19) traveled “wisely and well too; for, though off the grand route, they behaved themselves in public as decorously as if the

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eyes of all prim Boston were upon them, and proved by their triumphant success, that the unprotected might go where they liked, if they conducted themselves with the courtesy and discretion of gentlewomen” (Alcott 1872: 73). Were New York girls simply unaccustomed to exercising this kind of Bostonian restraint? Or does Daisy’s provincialism prevent her from adapting to the restrictive social codes of Europe? Is some other failing responsible, or is Daisy’s downfall merely a cruel twist of fate? A closer look at depictions of American girls abroad in the 1870s suggests that in certain respects James stacked the deck against her, compounding her vulnerability through manipulation of the late nineteenth-century ideology of types. In Shawl-Straps Alcott offers considerable insight into the way in which independent American women travelers perceived themselves and one another. In her descriptions of her three travelers and their encounters with others, Alcott is unambiguous about which characteristics are to be cultivated and which are to be eschewed and scorned. Adaptability, independence, and a taste for adventure tempered by a sense of propriety serve the women well. As they “wander through France at their own sweet will,” “Not a fear assailed them; for all men were civil, all women friendly, and the world wore its sunniest aspect” (Alcott 1872: 72). At the same time, the narrative disparages “dear, title-loving Americans” who make much of the nobility (Alcott 1872: 12), as well as “English mammas with prim daughters of thirty or so still tied to their apron-strings” (Alcott 1872: 130). Moreover, just as Winterbourne – and many readers of Daisy Miller – regarded Daisy as “typical” and thus fashioned her into a cultural “type” (or stereotype), so Alcott presents a cameo portrait of “the group that one meets everywhere on the Continent”: the typical American family touring in Europe: The father and mother stout, tired, and rather subdued by the newness of things; the son, Young America personified, loud, important, and inquisitive; the daughter, pretty, affected, and over-dressed; all on the lookout for adventures and titles, fellow-countrymen to impress, and foreigners eager to get the better of them. (Alcott 1872: 76)

Certainly, a superficial similarity exists between these ubiquitous Americans and the Miller family; but the resemblance breaks down upon close examination. Mrs. Miller, of course, travels without her husband; Randolph (while undoubtedly “loud, important, and inquisitive”) is not so much “Young America personified” as infantile America lampooned; and Daisy, although pretty, is natural and impeccably dressed, instead of affected and over-dressed. Moreover, although Daisy seeks adventure, fun, and lively companions, she has little interest in titles, takes no pains to impress other Americans, and never allows Giovanelli or any other foreigner to get the better of her. Alcott’s stereotyped American family is a rough approximation of the Millers, but James’s highly nuanced “study” sharpens the focus on the American girl, blurs the boundaries that separate distinct but contiguous social groups, and softens the “atmospheric

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medium” (to borrow a phrase from Hawthorne) to bring out the subtle interplay of light and shadow that endows the scenes with richness and depth. The contrast between Alcott’s and James’s narratives is revealing in other respects, too, for in addition to examining the question of national identity from a transatlantic perspective, Alcott presents Europe from a distinctly feminine point of view. Perhaps the episode most revealing of a female sensibility is the humorous yet frank account of Amanda’s (Bartlett’s) infatuation with an Italian soldier. As Shirley Foster has observed, Italy had a “special significance” for Victorian women travelers (Foster 1990: 29): their experiences there often stood apart from their lives at home and their travels elsewhere because Italy seemed to invite “self-indulgence” and the “fulfillment of desire” (Foster 1990: 40, 30). Such seems to be the case for Alcott’s “Amanda”: Going one day to Rome, on business, she found herself shut up in a car with a gorgeous officer and a meek young man, who read papers all the way. The tall soldier in his gray and silver uniform, with a furred, frogged, and braided jacket, not to mention the high boots and spurs, or the becoming cap, was so very polite to the lone lady that she could not remain dumb without positive rudeness. So Amanda conversed in her most charming manner, finding inspiration, doubtless, in the dark eyes and musical voice of her handsome vis-à-vis, for the officers from Turin are things of beauty and joys for ever to those who love to look on manly men. (Alcott 1872: 182–3)

Much to her surprise, upon departing from Rome that afternoon, the same “dark face . . . peer[s] in at the car window, and the melodious voice ask[s] if he might be permitted to enter” (Alcott 1872: 184). A tête-à-tête ensues, during which the winning officer invites Amanda and her lady friends to visit his regiment during their stay at Albano. Exceedingly taken with the handsome soldier, Amanda is greatly tempted to accept his offer. Prudently, however, she promises nothing until the arrangement is approved by “certain American gentlemen and married ladies” (Alcott 1872: 184). When her carriage fails to meet her at the station and her “Colonel” steps up to act as escort and protector, Amanda is even more inclined to pursue this interesting relationship. Disappointingly, however, the “highly respectable Americans who were to serve as the link between the soldiers and the ladies” firmly reject the invitation, “objecting to the martial gentlemen as being altogether too dangerous to bring into the dove-cot” (Alcott 1872: 187). The episode would appear to be over, but Lavinia (Alcott’s persona) soon becomes convinced that both Matilda and Amanda are positively “losing [their] head[s]” over the uniformed men, and it becomes “evident . . . that in some unguarded moment the impetuous Mat would yield to the spell and go gambading away for a ride sans duenna, sans habit, sans propriety, sans every thing” (Alcott 1872: 187). With a “stern countenance” and a firm resolve (for she, too, is enchanted by these “manly men”), Lavinia packs them off to Venice for fear that “Amanda’s indignant relatives would rise up and stone [her] if [she] let her canter into

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matrimony with the fascinating Colonel, who may have a wife and ten children in Turin, for all [she] know[s]” (Alcott 1872: 188). The episode has obvious relevance to James’s novella, with its tension between propriety and impulsiveness, innocence and experience, American and European, transparency and deception, chastity and sexual intrigue. Still, the adventures of the three women in Shawl-Straps open yet another window into the world Daisy Miller inhabits. For Alice Bartlett (“Amanda”), the traveling companion of Louisa and May Alcott, was soon to become a close companion, neighbor, and Italian tutor of James’s in Rome during the five-year period leading up to Daisy Miller. A peripheral figure in the biographies of both Alcott and James, Bartlett takes center stage as the link between the two writers and a common source of information, if not inspiration, in their respective studies of the American girl abroad. Curiously, although Alcott and James were only distantly acquainted, Bartlett was a cherished friend of both, and she remained a close associate of each long after her travels abroad had ended. To Alcott, she was “true and very interesting” (Alcott 1997: 178), a kindred spirit and “a friend to her mind” (Alcott 1872: 223). To his brother William, James described Bartlett as “superior & very natural,” confiding, “I feel very much as if she were a boy – an excellent fellow,” although he also found her “limited by a kind of characteristic American want of culture” (W. James 1992: 198). Although no letters between the two have surfaced, James’s references to Bartlett in his correspondence with others reveal that they particularly enjoyed reading Tasso together in Italian and riding horseback on the Roman Campagna, sometimes in the company of the “charming” soon-to-be-divorced Alice (Mason) Sumner, the estranged wife of senator Charles Sumner. Moreover, just as she provided Alcott with racy material for Shawl-Straps, Bartlett is also commonly credited with offering up the germ of Daisy Miller to the receptive, ever-observing James (Edel 1985: 214; see also James 1986: 40). Bartlett was not known as a writer of fiction, but she did pen a number of illuminating travel sketches, which she published in Old and New between April 1871 and March 1873. Her two-part sketch “Our Apartment: A Practical Guide to Those Intending to Spend a Winter in Rome” (April and June 1871) recounts in amusing detail the joys and frustrations she and the Alcott women experienced while renting a flat in Rome. More pertinent to Daisy Miller, however, is her 1871 essay “Some Pros and Cons of Travel Abroad.” In this piece of advice literature Bartlett subjects to close scrutiny “that wonderful, ever-increasing, unaccountable, and uncounted army, the women travellers from the other side of the Atlantic” (Bartlett 1871: 433). The large number of these women (they were apparently ubiquitous) prompts her to perceive them initially as a unified entity, but she quickly turns from the group as a whole to observing the surprising variety of characteristics and circumstances these women possess: They travel with or without matrons; they have good or bad manners, as the case may be. . . . Some are invalids; some mere pleasure-seekers; some intent on art, and others not; some make you ill with horror, others make you proud to call them fellow

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country-women. There is no possible kind of woman which can not be found among them. (Bartlett 1871: 433–4)

On closer consideration, however, Bartlett finds that these women share certain qualities which she identifies as distinctly American: “they are in a certain way alike, at least in not resembling the women of any other nation in such a way as to deceive an intelligent foreigner” (Bartlett 1871: 434). The foreign perspective is of particular concern in this article as Bartlett is evidently privy to the perceptions of European and “Anglo-foreign” women. According to Bartlett, “the young women of America have made a certain impression in Europe, . . . they are regarded as a class apart, and . . . even when they are accepted as all right, they are not thoroughly understood” (Bartlett 1871: 434). Bartlett does not attempt to dispel this lack of understanding (after all, she writes for an American readership). Rather, she hopes to caution wouldbe travelers as to the likelihood and possible consequences of such grievous misunderstanding. First, however, she finds it necessary to discriminate between two classes of “la demoiselle Américaine”: those who are presumed by foreigners to be “typical” and those who are indeed truly representative of the national type. Of the first class, Bartlett explains: . . . the idea of the demoiselle Américaine most prevalent among Europeans, as a whole, from servants up to the very pope himself, is derived from a class of young girls who have made our name almost a reproach and by-word. Being the most numerous, the most evident, and by far the most startlingly un-European of our travellers, they are naturally regarded as the true type; and the mild wonder expressed by [foreign friends] is changed into positive disgust and terrible misunderstanding when they become the subject of remark. (Bartlett 1871: 434)

After assuring her readers that she “speak[s] not as critical outsider, looking down from a seat of scorn, but as [herself] a demoiselle Américaine, standing in the crowd with the others, loving them well enough, and caring enough for what is thought of them by nice people all over the world, to run the risk of saying unpalatable things,” Bartlett goes on to describe these supposedly typical American girls: . . . they belong in a social division, the members of which, in other countries, do not travel, or, if they travel, do not make themselves conspicuous. . . . Papa, as a rule, stays at home. He has his newly-made money to look after, and mamma and the girls must get through the unknown regions as they best may without him. Mamma is a wellmeaning woman, of vulgar features and vulgar mind. She has had no education to speak of, either intellectual or social, and she is as unfamiliar with the queen’s English as she is with her own gorgeous new clothes. She knows this, and so do her daughters; and the result is, that the poor woman is sadly set upon by those young persons, who conceive themselves to be quite up in the ways of the world, and make her accept their dicta as to what is right and proper, however much her own homely sense of the fitness of things may revolt. So, at the very start, they are as good as without a matron . . . (Bartlett 1871: 435)

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But their unguarded, undisciplined condition is only part of the problem, Bartlett explains, for these quasi-orphans lack restraint and harbor dangerous misconceptions about Europe and about themselves: . . . these young women mean to be controlled by no one. They are a social law unto themselves, and have come abroad to have a good time in their own loud, silly way. They have an idea that Europe is bristling with lovers and adventurers; and they intend to have at least a fair share of both. They also suppose that their own personal appearance, their clothes and the other evidences of their wealth, are matters of interest and admiration to all beholders. They are utterly ignorant of what is really worthy of admiration in women, and I presume have no idea whatever that they are not behaving themselves with the most distinguished propriety and grace. (Bartlett 1871: 435)

As a result of their “fearful lack of education,” these girls “do strange and untoward things” (Bartlett 1871: 435). Indeed, their behavior conforms so little to that of the truly feminine type that Bartlett “can only liken them, in the other sex, to some wretched boy, who thinks he is seeing life like a gentleman, because he smokes and drinks and gambles, and is familiar with low amusements” (Bartlett 1871: 435). Harboring no hope of thinning the numbers or mending the manners of these girls, Bartlett feels only “sorrow and despair” toward them. She hopes, however, that “in time . . . all persons on the other Continent will know, what some have already found out, that they are not fair representatives of American women, and have no place in polite society at home” (Bartlett 1871: 435) – just as the Americans in James’s novella “desired to express to observant Europeans the great truth that, though Miss Daisy Miller was a young American lady, her behavior was not representative – was regarded by her compatriots as abnormal” ( James 1986: 106). Like Mrs. Walker and Mrs. Costello, Bartlett hopes that Europeans will learn to dismiss these gauche young women as completely and as mercilessly as she has. Bartlett’s handling of class in this essay is provocative. Conscious that she may be regarded as a snob, she nevertheless holds a magnifying glass to the behavior of fellow Americans she believes to be beneath her. Evidently threatened by the ever-increasing numbers of the nouveaux riches who travel to Europe in search of culture and leisure, Bartlett meticulously constructs and demarcates opposing social classes and valiantly scaffolds the straining barriers between them. In “Pros and Cons of Travel Abroad” she sketches this upwardly mobile class in detail only to demolish it the more thoroughly. Ultimately, Bartlett’s deeper concern is shoring up the integrity of her own class. She proceeds by offering a few cautionary words “of, and to, much nicer girls” – those who are truly representative, although now sadly outnumbered by young women of the earlier description. But these girls, too, must mend their ways:

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For I am afraid that some of them come to Europe without understanding that customs differ, and that if they go into foreign or Anglo-foreign society they will be judged according to the laws of the place in which they are. What a girl can do without notice, or at least with impunity, in her own land, at once condemns her in another. Whether the one nation or the other has the most sense and right on its side is not the question. The question is, whether the girl wishes to keep her reputation, or lose it, in the eyes of a certain number of people. (Bartlett 1871: 436)

To illustrate her point, she presents a scenario that is strikingly similar to the ones Alcott depicted in Shawl-Straps and James was to “dramatize” in Daisy Miller: “In ignorance, or in an uncontrolled pursuit of pleasure, American girls accept invitations which the men giving them would not dare suggest to any respectable country-woman of their own.” Moreover, they “do things which in foreign eyes admit of but the worst interpretation.” To avoid losing her reputation, Bartlett advises, the American girl must set aside her accustomed ways and comport herself as a European. She exhorts her readers to imagine how they must appear through foreign eyes: . . . find out how your American freedom may be misunderstood, – find out in how different a relation women stand to men in foreign society, and in what a different light they are regarded by them in many instances, and under many circumstances; and when you have found these things out . . . govern yourself accordingly. (Bartlett 1871: 436)

Finally, she concludes with a plea for self-denial and a warning about gossip: “do not deceive yourself into thinking that it makes no matter if you go a little far in having a good time, as long as you are on your travels,” for “whatever you do of an extraordinary nature will be eagerly seized upon to make piquant items in home letters, which, as we all know, are well read and handed round among many people” (Bartlett 1871: 436). The American girl abroad, as Bartlett perceives her, is imperiled by thoughtless, if not malicious, Americans as well as by uncomprehending foreigners. Like Bartlett, James reveals an ongoing preoccupation with types, in particular feminine ones and national ones, that mirrors the nineteenth-century fascination with cultural, national, gender, and generational taxonomies. In a letter to William, written from Rome during the period in which he frequently enjoyed Bartlett’s company, James reported, “I have seen few people & no new types . . .” ( W. James 1992: 198). It is quite likely that the “types” to which James refers were a subject he discussed with Bartlett. Indeed, one wonders, upon reading Bartlett’s piece, how much their conversations may have influenced his characterization of Mrs. Walker, who “was one of those American ladies who, while residing abroad, make a point, in their own phrase, of studying European society” and who “had . . . collected several specimens of her diversely born fellow-mortals to serve, as it were, as textbooks” ( James 1986: 96). Of course, Winterbourne also manifests this tendency to “study” and classify people, “chopping logic” ( James 1986: 107) when it comes to

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categorizing Daisy Miller. On observing Daisy for the first time, his impulse is to generalize: “How pretty they are!” ( James 1986: 51). He believes he has never before “encountered a young American girl of so pronounced a type,” although “he had never, as yet, had any relations with young ladies of this category.” Deriving a sense of security from his reliance on the prevailing typology, with its predictability and attendant “regular conditions and limitations” of conduct, he feels “almost grateful for having found the formula that applied to Miss Daisy Miller” ( James 1986: 57–8). The other Americans similarly generalize (“ ‘She has that charming look that they all have’,” declares Mrs. Costello, “ ‘I can’t think where they pick it up . . . where they get their taste’ ”) ( James 1986: 62); but of course in their estimation Daisy is ultimately “assigned to a vulgar place among the categories of disorder” ( James 1986: 105). Conspicuous in Bartlett’s version of the popular ideology is her particular emphasis on class as a polarizing factor in the calculus of types. Indeed, along with H. H. Boyesen, who remarked that “the highest civilization is hostile to types” (Boyesen 1889: 340), Bartlett implies that “types,” by definition, occupy an inferior station in the social hierarchy. The true American girl may be “representative,” but she cannot be reduced to a type. Curiously, James conflates what Bartlett identifies as two distinct classes (the supposedly typical and the truly representative) and embodies the two in a single character: Daisy Miller. He thereby simplifies the panoply of feminine types, but in doing so he complicates the representation of the American girl abroad. Ironically, far from submerging the issue of class, this strategy ultimately further emphasizes and problematizes it. Although James’s novella has been widely read as a dramatization of conflicting national types, it is really much more about class types, as throughout the text, class anxieties take precedence over national ones. Indeed, contrary to first appearances, the telling contrast is not the one between America and Europe or Americans and Europeans. It is between two classes of Americans: those who adopt European codes of behavior (as Bartlett advised American girls to do when traveling abroad) and those who stubbornly retain their American ways. Or, as Dennis Pahl has conceived of it, the conflict is between a “foreign” (to James) “downtown” society, an “alien and altogether contaminated world of the ‘new money’ ” (Pahl 2001: 144) and the “uptown” world of genteel Anglo-American society: “a social class desiring to protect itself from the seemingly harmful effects of others” (Pahl 2001: 132). Adaptability – in this context, the ease of adopting European customs and manners – was considered by many to be a distinguishing feature of the American girl.2 Ironically, this particular attribute of “Americanness” is its own undoing. That is, those who exhibit or express this particular national trait (often by marrying foreigners) become less “American” in doing so. In addition, those who are highly adaptable run the risk of “moulding” themselves on inferior or inappropriate models. In Daisy Miller Mrs. Costello, Winterbourne, and Mrs. Walker conduct themselves in a manner that earlier writers scorned as “aping” European ways: demonstrating a form of adaptability that constitutes a cardinal sin against the American ideals of democracy and equality. In contrast, Daisy is uninterested in titles and social climbing

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and fitting herself into the European mold. She shows no signs of adapting to European society, and in fact she resists the efforts of those who would help her to blend into the Anglo-American colony. Yet Daisy is highly adaptable in another respect: as Lynn Wardley points out, Mrs. Costello’s “discomfort in Daisy’s presence stems . . . from the fact . . . that she learns only too easily how to emulate and to replicate the likes of Mrs. Costello: the speech, fashions and customs, the manners and morals, of Mrs. Costello’s hierarchically organized and tidily transplanted Forty-Second-Street clan” (Wardley 1991: 249). James’s treatment of class in Daisy Miller suggests that for Winterbourne and the other members of the American colony in Rome, aping Europeans is no longer the ultimate taboo for Americans abroad. The greater threat to their identity comes from uncultured, newly rich upstarts aping the old guard American “aristocracy.” Class insecurity has evidently trumped the earlier anxiety about the national deficit of “culture,” signaling an important shift in the way American writers responded to the Old World. In this novella James reveals even more intense discomfort on the subject of class than Alcott and Bartlett. In Vevey and in Rome the classes of American travelers mix, and they do so with unsettling results: the Millers of the world are infiltrating the higher ranks of expatriate society, and the Costello-Walker contingent do not like it. Bartlett is able to write them out completely in a way that James cannot (or will not) do. The Millers are not aggressive about their infiltration; they seem hardly to notice or care. Their infiltration comes about spontaneously, effortlessly, and their very passivity in the face of open hostility seems to bode ill for those who would keep them at bay. Moreover, not only do the classes of Americans “mix,” but as Wardley argues, Daisy’s flirtation with “ ‘third-rate Italians’ . . . conjures the picture of cross-cultural or interracial mixing” (Wardley 1991: 245), so that “what might be at stake . . . is the possibility of affiliation across the constructed borders of race, ethnicity, gender, and class” (Wardley 1991: 250). In this formulation, the mixing of types and blurring of social categories reflect more general anxieties about cultural purity and privilege. James’s version of social typology contrasts with Bartlett’s in another respect, too. In addition to acknowledging the vulgar but supposedly typical along with the less common but actually representative American girls, Bartlett’s “Pros and Cons” makes a passing reference to a third category of girls, one that, to her, merits scant attention: girls who are “fast.” For Bartlett, “fast” is not an ambiguous characteristic, as it is for Winterbourne, and she rejects this category altogether as being beneath one’s notice. In Daisy Miller, however, a great deal of ambiguity and intense interest surround the subject. Like Bartlett, Winterbourne acknowledges three female types (see Kennedy 1973: 145), but only two types of the American girl. The “charming,” “pretty,” “innocent” yet flirtatious girl and the “designing,” “audacious,” and “unscrupulous” girl seem to be measured against a third type with whom Winterbourne is evidently more familiar: older, married women, resident in Europe, who are “great coquettes – dangerous, terrible women, with whom one’s relations were liable to take a serious turn” (James 1986: 58). Unlike Bartlett, the apparently more experienced Winterbourne is unable to decipher and dismiss the sexual element from his

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classification system. Instead, it becomes a point of fixation, and the question of whether Daisy is “fast” or merely “a pretty American flirt” ( James 1986: 58) continually haunts him. James’s bringing the matter of sexuality forward, rather than isolating and quarantining it as Bartlett does, complicates the issue of class further by conflating the fear of social inferiority with that of sexual impurity. This association is intensified in the New York Edition of Daisy Miller, when, as Frederick Newberry argues, James revised the text to repeat the word “horror” (a word Bartlett uses in her piece), which, as applied by Mrs. Costello to Daisy, is plausibly interpreted by Winterbourne as “whore.” Far from shunning such implications, some feminist critics have fruitfully explored the implications of Daisy’s scandalous reputation. Lisa Johnson, for example, links Daisy’s connection with “various outlaw female subjectivities” (including the prostitute) with a particularly rebellious and energetic version of feminism – “cowboy feminism” ( Johnson 2001: 45) – and with “the dis-closure, or prying open, of existing social categories for women” ( Johnson 2001: 43). The ambiguity of Daisy Miller is reflected in James’s use of name symbolism. The common association of the daisy with innocence has often been cited as a kind of badge of virtue for James’s heroine. (For a succinct commentary on the connotations of Daisy’s name, see Grant 1974: 19.) Yet it is important to note that pre-Victorian flower symbolism associated the daisy with dissembling (Shakespeare 1994: 122n), as in Act 4, Scene 5 of Hamlet. Winterbourne has often been linked with a certain iciness or frigidity, but the name has other symbolic associations as well. As Pahl remarks, the “bourne” in Winterbourne means “boundary” (Pahl 2001: 147), and, significantly, much of the recent criticism devoted to Daisy Miller has revealed the provocative ways in which James’s character study redraws various boundaries: those between masculine and feminine (Wardley 1991), American and “alien” (Pahl 2001), conventional and transgressive ( Johnson 2001). Like the analysis of types presented here, these new approaches allow us to see that on many levels James’s “study,” far from an entrenchment of the existing ideology of types, actually critiques the practice of pigeonholing individuals, exposing, through Winterbourne, the folly – and the danger – of “typing” groups of people in a way that denies them their individuality and predetermines their fate. In William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham, the reporter Bartley Hubbard describes Lapham’s wife as “one of those women who, in whatever walk of life, seem born to honor the name of American Woman, and to redeem it from the national reproach of Daisy Millerism” (Howells, 2002: 19). The term was an anachronism in this realist novel set in 1875, but, ironically, Howells defended the usage as aptly evoking “the complexion of the period” and providing “a characteristic tint in the portraiture” (Howells 1885: 477). In sum, Howells maintained, “it is the effect of contemporaneousness that is to be given, and the general truth is sometimes better than the specific fact” (Howells 1885: 477). The proliferation of the terms “Daisy Miller” and “Daisy Millerism” as a convenient shorthand in the late nineteenth century reveals the extent to which this brash American ingénue resonated with

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readers, becoming emblematic of a widely perceived “truth” about American girls of a particular age and class. Yet at the same time, James’s novella dramatizes a tension between the “general truth” and the “specific fact,” or, as Winterbourne wonders, “how far her eccentricities were generic, national, and how far they were personal” ( James 1986: 107). With Daisy Miller, James may have responded to a cultural phenomenon (the American girl abroad), but he also created one. For Daisy Miller took on a life of its own, engendering imitators, inspiring a chorus of responses in fiction, verse, and nonfiction prose, and prompting numerous revisions and adaptations on the part of its author. In fact, when James retooled the story to adapt it to the stage, he evidently tried to “correct” the popular misreadings of Daisy by saving his heroine in the end and rewarding her virtue by uniting her with Winterbourne.3 Many years later, however, when he once again refashioned Daisy for the New York Edition, he made her detractors in the story articulate even more harshly than before their judgments of her, even as he softened the depiction of Daisy herself: a strategy that, Viola Dunbar has suggested, was probably intended to “bring out more clearly the meaning of the situation – to make the reader feel more deeply the pathos of appealing innocence misjudged by inflexible formalism” (Dunbar 1950: 316–17). This pattern of writing, reading, response, and revision – creating, in effect, a circular flow of influence from author to text to audience and back to author and then returning to the text – suggests both the resistance to and the persistence of cultural types in the popular and critical response to Daisy Miller over the last century and a quarter. For all the attention the novella has attracted, however, recent interpretations suggest that critical approaches will no more conform to static and predictable patterns than James’s most celebrated heroine did. For as Daisy herself observed, “People have different ideas!” ( James 1986: 98).

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Heather Hathaway, Jodi Melamed, Donald Ross, and Angela Sorby for critiquing an early version of this essay and providing very helpful suggestions.

Notes 1

2

Shawl-Straps went through forty-four printings from its initial appearance in 1872 through 1909, amounting to some forty thousand copies (Myerson and Shealy 1990: 86). In addition, readership was augmented by the prior publication of much of the work in The Christian Register and The Christian Union. See, for example, Boyesen (1889) and Campbell (1898).

3

One reviewer speculated that in the “Comedy” of Daisy Miller James seemed to be motivated by “an unfortunate desire to make obvious to an obtuse public all the fine points they failed to understand.” (Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, 2.2 (1883): 554–7. APS Online.)

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Alcott, L. M. (1872). Shawl-Straps. Boston: Roberts Brothers. Volume of travel sketches originally published as a series of newspaper articles. Alcott, L. M. (1997). The Journals of Louisa May Alcott. Ed. J. Myerson and D. Shealy. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Unabridged edition of Alcott’s diaries. Alcott, L. M. (2001). Little Women. Ed. Anne Hiebert Alton. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press. Scholarly edition supplemented with publication history, reviews, source material, correspondence, and related texts. Banta, M. (1987). Imaging American Women: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History. New York: Columbia University Press. Encyclopedic study of the portrayal of American women from 1876 to 1918, with considerable attention to Henry James. Barnett, L. K. (1979). “Jamesian feminism: Women in Daisy Miller.” Studies in Short Fiction, 16: 281–7. Persuasively argues that Daisy Miller contains James’s sharpest indictment of the way society restricts women. Bartlett, A. A. (1871). “Some pros and cons of travel abroad.” Old and New, 4.4 (October). APS Online. A young woman’s advice to American girls and women planning to visit Europe, written by a close associate of James’s. Bisztray, G. (1991). “The role of Rome in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun and Henry James’s Daisy Miller.” Rivisti di Studi Italiani, 9: 43–52. Discusses the influence of the Italian setting on Hawthorne’s and James’s characters, paying particular attention to the changes wrought both in Italy and America between the two writers’ generations. Blair, S. (1996). Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Situates James’s work within the context of contemporary ethnography, particularly racial taxonomies and theories of cultural types. Boyesen, H. H. (1889). “Types of American women.” Forum (November): 337–46. Nineteenth-century commentary on the attributes of American women and the prevailing feminine types.

Campbell, R. (1898). “The American girl: Her faults and her virtues.” The Arena, 20 (no. 105): 254–60. Coffin, T. P. (1958). “Daisy Miller: Western hero.” Western Folklore, 17: 273–5. Pithy analysis of the way Daisy conforms to the cowboy figure in American Westerns. Deakin, M. (1983). “Two studies of Daisy Miller.” Henry James Review, 5.1: 2–28. Detailed examination of the settings of Daisy Miller, together with an analysis of James’s authorial voice as it pertains to Daisy and Winterbourne. Draper, R. P. (1969). “Death of a hero? Winterbourne and Daisy Miller.” Studies in Short Fiction, 6.5: 601–8. Argues that Winterbourne is the true center of the novella, while Daisy serves as a focal point for the young man’s moral confusion. Dunbar, V. R. (1950). “The revision of Daisy Miller.” Modern Language Notes, 65.5: 311–17. Brief yet careful comparison of the original 1878 text of Daisy Miller and the revised text of the New York Edition (1909). Edel, L. (1985). Henry James: A Life. New York: Harper and Row. Abridgement of the monumental five-volume biography. Fiedler, L. (1960). Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Criterion. A classic work of literary history and psychological criticism, including a brief discussion of Daisy Miller as a mythic “Good Bad Girl.” Foster, S. (1990). Across New Worlds: NineteenthCentury Women Travellers and Their Writings. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Informative chapter on Victorian women in Italy provides a useful context for Daisy Miller. Fowler, V. C. (1984). Henry James’s American Girl: The Embroidery on the Canvas. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Analysis of the symbolism and psychology of the American girl abroad in James’s fiction. Gargano, J. W. (1960). “Daisy Miller: An abortive quest for innocence.” South Atlantic Quarterly, 59: 114–20. Argues that Daisy Miller is truly the story of the young man’s quest for innocence

Reading Against Type in Daisy Miller and moral growth in a cruel and corrupt world. Grant, W. E. (1974). “Daisy Miller: A Study of a Study.” Studies in Short Fiction, 11: 17–25. A reading of Daisy Miller as a “study” of Winterbourne and of the American colony in Rome. Howells, W. D. (1885). “Anachronism.” The Century, 29: 477. Howells’s defense of his use of the term “Daisy Millerism” in a novel set before the publication of Daisy Miller. Howells, W. D. (2002). The Rise of Silas Lapham. New York: Penguin Putnam. Novel by an influential friend of James’s about a self-made millionaire and the rejection of his family by the established Boston elite. Hoxie, E. F. (1946). “Mrs Grundy adopts Daisy Miller.” New England Quarterly, 19: 474–84. Pioneering article tracing the influence of Daisy Miller on late nineteenth-century etiquette guides. James, H. (1986). Daisy Miller. Introduction by Geoffrey Moore. New York: Penguin. This edition reprints the original version as it appeared in The Cornhill Magazine. James, W. (1992). The Correspondence of William James, Vol. 1: William and Henry, 1861–1884. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Contains the complete extant correspondence between Henry James and his brother William during the period. Jobe, S. (ed.) (1997). “Henry James and the innocence of Daisy Miller: A corrected text of the letter to Eliza Lynn Linton.” American Literary Realism, 29: 82–5. Reprints in full James’s often-quoted letter to Linton on the subject of Daisy Miller. Johnson, L. (2001). “Daisy Miller: Cowboy feminist.” Henry James Review, 22.1: 41–58. Revisionist interpretation of the novella as a “parable for gender outlaws,” with a nod to Coffin’s article. Kennedy, I. (1973). “Winterbourne: The good bad boy in Daisy Miller.” Arizona Quarterly, 29: 139–50. Reading of Winterbourne’s character as an archetypal vicious and sexually dangerous male: a response to Fiedler’s interpretation of Daisy. Kirk, C. H. (1980). “Daisy Miller: The reader’s choice.” Studies in Short Fiction, 17: 275–83.

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Analyzes the rhetorical strategies James employs to challenge readers’ interpretive skills. Myerson, J. and D. Shealy (1990). “The sale of Louisa May Alcott’s books.” Harvard Library Bulletin, n.s. 1: 47–86. Provides detailed sales data from the records of Alcott’s nineteenthcentury publisher. Newberry, F. (1982). “A note on the horror in James’s revision of Daisy Miller.” Henry James Review, 3.3: 229–32. Linguistic analysis of James’s 1909 revision of Daisy Miller, focusing on the semantic possibilities of James’s reiteration of the word “horror.” Pahl, D. (2001). “ ‘Going down’ with Henry James’s uptown girl: Genteel anxiety and the promiscuous world of Daisy Miller.” LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, 12.2: 129–64. Provocatively links social hierarchy in Daisy Miller to larger socioeconomic and cultural issues concerning class tensions, xenophobia, and racial mixing. Schramer, J. and D. Ross (1998). “Introduction.” Dictionary of Literary Biography 189: American Travel Writers, 1850–1915 (pp. xv–xx). Detroit: Gale Research. Succinct yet wide-ranging overview of American travel writing of the period. Shakespeare, W. (1994). Hamlet. Ed. S. L. Wofford. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s. Critical edition of Shakespeare’s play. Shriber, M. S. (1981). “Toward Daisy Miller: Cooper’s idea of ‘the American girl.’ ” Studies in the Novel, 13: 237–49. Study of James Fenimore Cooper’s portrayal of the American girl as an important precursor to James. Smith, S. H. and M. Dawson (eds.) (2000). The American 1890s: A Cultural Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Anthology of essays, criticism, and fiction drawn from periodicals of the 1890s. Wadsworth, S. A. (2006). In the Company of Books: Literature and Its “Classes” in Nineteenth-Century America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Places Daisy Miller within the context of nineteenth-century narratives of American women in Europe. Wardley, L. (1991). “Reassembling Daisy Miller.” American Literary History, 3.2: 232–54. Relates Daisy Miller to nineteenth-century accounts of

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adolescence, revealing the ways in which the novella elicits anxieties about racial, cultural, and sexual difference. Weisbuch, R. (1993). “Winterbourne and the doom of manhood in Daisy Miller.” In V. R. Pollak (ed.) New Essays on Daisy Miller and the Turn of the Screw (pp. 65–90). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Examines the character

of Winterbourne in light of the rapidly changing definition of manhood in late nineteenthcentury America. Welter, B. (1976). Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Athens: Ohio University Press. Groundbreaking work of women’s history that includes discussion of Daisy Miller as an archetypal figure.

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Growing Up Absurd: The Search for Self in Henry James’s The American Wendy Graham

My essay takes up a theoretical frame of reference I employed long ago in an article published in Arizona Quarterly (Graham 1998), “Henry James and the MotherComplex,” which is refashioned, here, to address the gender and sexual dynamics of Henry James’s 1877 novel, The American. I welcome the opportunity to revisit the phase of my work connected with Freudian and post-Freudian analysis, because I have just about given up on it outside the classroom. I elected to omit the Arizona Quarterly article from my book, Henry James’s Thwarted Love (Graham 1999), because it seemed too schematic and insufficiently historical in orientation. Today, in a Jacobean moment of revision and reevaluation, I want to ask: “Is it valid to read James’s thematic obsession with orphans, intrusive or wicked mothers, and unconsummated love affairs through the lens of James’s own personal history, fantasies, or mode of embodying masculine subjectivity in the Victorian period?” In the classroom, I don’t think we can responsibly neglect the work of Shoshana Felman or even Edmund Wilson on The Turn of the Screw because it is no longer fashionable to read literature through the lens of Sigmund Freud’s On The Interpretation of Dreams. However, psychoanalytic approaches to literature must avoid the trap of schematization and overreaching. Wilson’s memorable equations: lake = womb and tower = penis (Wilson 1976: 90) have their contemporary echo in the “Bunker Hill obelisk” anchoring biographer Sheldon Novick’s improbable contention that James was fooling around with Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Civil War veteran, whose family residence was in the near neighborhood of that suggestive monument (Novick 1996: 472, note 48). James’s precocity in illustrating neurotic and, occasionally, psychotic complexes has drawn attention through the years, although his work has not figured prominently in historical accounts of the rise of American psychology, such as those focused on the contribution of William James. Sibling rivalry has dulled, rather than whetted, the curiosity of William James scholars, who, taking their cue from him, choose to ignore his “younger and shallower and vainer brother” (Edel 1984: IV: 787). Period

A Companion to Henry James. Edited by Greg W. Zacharias © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-14042-3

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reviews and later criticism of Henry James’s The Bostonians stressed the psychological description of James’s protagonist, Olive Chancellor, a hysteric and lesbian avant la lettre. In the 1950s, Oscar Cargill praised “Henry James as Freudian Pioneer,” notable for his precise textbook depictions of hysteria: “While most critics would concede that an author of genius could in his characterization anticipate a later scientific elucidation of behavior, none has held that James in his study of the governess combined the perceptions of genius with actual technical knowledge” (Cargill 1956: 21). This stage was followed by the anti-Jacobite backlash; Maxwell Geismar focused on James’s personal anomalousness (psychosexual infantilism or arrested development) as a factor in the voyeuristic tendencies (primal scene fantasies) of his protagonists (Geismar 1963: 70, 209). I will devote a good deal of attention in the body of my essay to the next major trend in subjecting James himself to analysis (object relations), where fiction and autobiographical writing are deployed to substantiate theories about James’s attachment disorders, narcissism, and the like. I jump ahead to the 1970s, where feminism and queer studies converged to produce the next dominant trajectory, wherein the psycho-social intuitions of James’s fictional writing, divorced from the author’s conscious intentions, were seen to transcend their temporal and cultural moorings and to convey, with surprising clarity, insights into a range of concepts “popularized” by Lacanian and post-Freudian theory: “Since Americans and American ego psychologists valorize the adaptive function of the ego, they are poorly positioned to appreciate James’s insight that American ‘normalcy’ tends toward narcissistic pathology” (Ash 1990: 126; my emphasis). As a reader of James’s fiction, letters, and autobiographical volumes, as a “witness” to James’s early emotional experiences, I have always borne in mind the particular formations and repressions of Victorian patriarchy that shaped James’s self-understanding, especially in relation to gender deviance and sexual dissidence. I have drawn inferences about James, the man, from his fiction. And I have liberally translated James’s insights into the psychological dimensions of his characters into a lexicon he would not have recognized. Through my reading of The American, I want to demonstrate that such an approach is not anachronistic because the language of psychoanalysis belatedly actualizes or reveals the “virtual significance” of James’s prior “literary” account of the self-same terrain plumbed by Freud and Lacan ( Jauss 1986: 176). The extended metaphors James forges in The American between money = human waste or filth (“Upon the uses of money, upon what one might do with a life into which one had succeeded in injecting the golden stream, he had up to his thirty-fifth year scantily reflected”) ( James 1986: 54; my emphasis), reverberate within the extra-textual symbolic field of AngloAmerican convention, custom, and hierarchy without the help of or reference to Freud’s “Character and Anal Eroticism” (1905). When metaphor functions as a symbol, it refers the reader to a “culturally encoded experience” to sort out textual meaning (White 1986: 402). Newman’s sudden, inexplicable “disgust” for business and his desire to “wash [his] hands” of it ( James 1986: 57) illustrate a reaction-formation

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with deep roots in the American psyche; the Protestant work ethic also entails a conversion of material into spiritual gain. Complaining about the thwarted expectations of the reader regarding the romance plot of the novel and its utility as a coming-of-age narrative for a nation bent on cultural parity, an early reviewer of The American assumed chauvinistically “that it would have seemed the most natural thing in the world for [Newman] not only to marry Madame de Cintré, but to become the guiding head of the whole house of Bellegarde”(Gard 1968: 47). This reviewer mythologized American manhood, constructing a retroactive model of Manifest Destiny whereby the “spread eagle” conquered the New World and rejuvenated the Old World ( James 1986: 122): “Big, rich, frank, simple-hearted, straightforward, and triumphantly successful, [Newman] satisfied us entirely by his genuine and hearty manliness, and seemed to carry in his very blood a genius for success in any direction” (Gard 1968: 47). However, the personal epiphany that sets the novel’s protagonist in motion – “I seemed to feel a new man inside my old skin, and I longed for a new world” ( James 1986: 57) – defies the nationalistic narrative assumption that the new man longs for the new world. James’s bait and switch, flirting with and defying the spread eagle, illustrates Hayden White’s point that the “explanatory force” of a narrative depends on the contrast between the original “encodation” of a figurative mode and a later “recodation” of that tropological mode (White 1986: 405). As manhood and national identity are inter-implicated in “Newman’s” history, I read the explanatory force of James’s fictional account of Newman’s homoeroticism, sexual anesthesia where women are concerned, and renunciation of sexual intercourse as significant for James as well. I have always been interested in James’s motivation for repudiating heterosexual intimacy. With George Moore, who declared in 1886 that “the reviewer in us would like to ask Henry James why he never married; but it would be vain to ask, so much does he write like a man to whom all action is repugnant” (Gard 1968: 172), I have a notion that the answer is encrypted in works such as The American. My aim in this essay is to modify a specific psychoanalytic characterization of Henry James as an emotional eunuch and to suggest, very briefly, how object-relations theory may yet lead us to a better understanding of James’s sexual persona and fiction. Ever since Harry Guntrip called James “a relatively normal schizoid personality,” it has been difficult to see beyond James’s emotional detachment, his “evasion of permanent ties” (Guntrip 1969: 98). Certainly, James’s contradictory longing for and avoidance of intimacy are characteristic of the schizoid personality, which exhibits a regressive urge to remain dependent and a developmental need to establish a separate identity. In “The Sense of Desolation in Henry James,” B. D. Horwitz (1977) picked up where Guntrip left off, identifying patterns of regression, as well as repression of anger, in many of James’s male characters, reflecting their ambivalence over the need to maintain a dependency relationship with an unreliable mother. Regression to the narcissistic stage is indicated in “The Great Good Place” where the story’s characters are said to dwell like “babes at the breast” in an “endless roll of serenity” ( James 1945:

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408). During times of illness, Henry habitually regressed: “your poor old infant is feeling rather seedy” (Edel 1975: II: 294). A week before his thirty-sixth birthday, Henry wrote to his mother: “But when one is ill one longs for one’s dearest mammy, and short of that, nothing will avail” (Edel 1975: II: 228) James addressed his mother as “Mammy” throughout her lifetime, a moniker associated with her powers as a wetnurse. Mrs. James understood the source of Henry’s affection for her, reminding her lonely, homesick son of the comforts of the maternal bosom shortly after he moved to London: “your life must need this succulent, fattening element more than you know yourself”(Edel 1953: 47). In an unpublished letter of 1869, generously supplied to me by Pierre Walker, Mary Walsh James told her “dearly beloved child” of 26, “Your letter last evening opens the deepest fountains in my soul, and my bosom seems as if it would burst with its burden of love and tenderness,” eloquently translating the physical sensation of the “letting down” of breast milk into psychical terms ( James, Mary Walsh 1869). The separation from the maternal breast was a keen memory of exclusion for Henry James. In May of 1844, when Henry Junior was thirteen months old, Henry James Senior suffered a nervous breakdown. Henry Senior’s account of this event, rendered in Society the Redeemed Form of Man, suggests that his incapacity made extraordinary claims on Mrs. James, who had two-year-old William on her hands as well. Henry Senior described himself as “reduced from a state of firm, vigorous, joyful manhood to one of almost helpless infancy,” possessed by “the greatest desire to run incontinently to the foot of the stairs and shout for help to my wife” (Lewis 1991: 48–53, 51). Apparently, Henry Senior routed his sons from the nursery. This event may have precipitated a curt and hasty withdrawal of the breast, resulting in what Edmund Bergler has called “weaning shock” in young Henry (1944: 264). I believe Henry James’s renunciation of heterosexuality is overdetermined by this disappointment in his mother’s love, for James never fully detached his passions from their earliest emotional sources. Without downplaying the impact of Mrs. James’s temporary abandonment of her son, I would argue that her erratic behavior (her transformation from an attentive to a negligent parent) was far more damaging than any one incident in Henry’s childhood. As Guntrip notes, Mrs. James was guilty of what D. W. Winnicott calls “impingement,” forcing herself on her child in ways and at times that he could not handle (Guntrip 1969: 67–8). Mrs. James apparently resumed her lavish attentions to her children once Henry Senior regained his sanity. Mrs. James spent most of her adult life nursing her husband and children. The advice she offered her career invalids tended to infantilize them: stay in bed, don’t work too hard, and so forth: Since your last letter darling Harry I have had a new anxiety awakened in my too susceptible mind by thinking of you traversing alone those mountain solitudes. Of course I know you would not attempt any dizzy heights or any but well beaten tracks without a guide. But you might easily over estimate your strength, and sink down with sudden exhaustion. ( James, Mary Walsh 1869)

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James hardly exaggerates the comprehensiveness of his mother’s anxious forebodings and niggling directives when he writes, “Beloved mammy, a line of response to your tender letter of Aug. 23rd: the one in which you enclose the head-ache prescription from Alice, etc. Perturb yourself not, sweet mother, on the subject of my head-aches, of my exhausting life, of my burning the candle at both ends, of my being nipped in the prime of my powers – or of any other nefarious tendency or catastrophe” (Edel 1975: II: 305). Evidently, James resented her efforts to curtail his activities and freedom as much as he treasured her affectionate preoccupation with his health. Mrs. James tried to keep all her children dependent well into adulthood. In an 1874 letter to William James, in which she described her son Wilky’s conduct following his marriage, Mrs. James evoked a familiar theme: “He writes more affectionately to me, a good sign that his wife has not weaned his love from his mother” (Maher 1986: 127; my emphasis). First she bound them to her bosom, later to her apron strings, and finally to her purse strings. If Mrs. James encouraged dependency in her adult children, it seems likely that she discouraged their desire to separate from her in infancy, thus complicating her children’s path towards autonomy. The baby of the average mother is disturbed by her periodic absences and invests the mother with a dual identity in order to reintegrate the mother of separation (loss, fear, discomfort) with the “all good” symbiotic mother. This process is fraught with anxiety for children, as Margaret Mahler explains in The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant: “But the constancy of the object implies more than the maintenance of the representation of the absent love object . . . It implies the unifying of the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ object into one whole representation” (Mahler, Pine, and Bergman 1975: 110). The child of an engulfing, suffocating mother has a much harder time achieving separation-individuation, primarily because he is likely to prematurely push the mother away. According to Mahler, “The desire to function by one’s self may be particularly threatening to the child at the very point in development when one’s own feelings and wishes and those of the mother are still poorly differentiated” (Mahler, Pine, and Bergman 1975: 96). Mahler and her school have come under fire from many quarters. Daniel Stern, in his influential work The Interpersonal World of the Infant, argues that there is no symbiotic phase and that phenomena such as splitting, which rely on capacities for symbolization, play no role in infant life before these capacities develop at 18 to 24 months (Stern 1985: 10–11). Without taking sides in this debate, I feel that Mahler’s and the baby watchers’ observations of infant behavior and interpersonal relationships are a necessary complement to theoretical explanations for Henry’s withdrawal into the shell-like existence noted by Guntrip and Horwitz. Horwitz identified James’s libidinal investment in his mother as the key factor in his sexual anesthesia, inadvertently supplying grist for the mill of post-Freudian theories emphasizing the importance of the oral stage in the psychical genesis of homosexuality. According to Bergler, the pre-Oedipal, phallic mother takes precedence over the “woman with the breast” in the psyches of male offspring whose libidinal investment in the mother has been shaken during the trauma of weaning. This

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conception facilitates identification with the mother, “woman with the penis,” while allowing the child to transfer part of his libidinal investment in the mother to his own, and later to a partner’s, penis (Bergler 1944: 263). In Bergler’s theory, the penis functions as a transitional object, a substitute for the withdrawn breast; thus, James’s libido need not have remained shackled to the mother’s breast or invested in internal objects as Guntrip and Horwitz have argued. Focusing on the first twelve months of life or “oral phase,” object-relations theory has contributed little to our understanding of sexuality. Fairbairn dismissed the Oedipus complex as a minor event in psychical development: “the goal of libidinal need is not pleasure but the object (at first the breast and the mother)” (Guntrip 1969: 44–5). For my purposes, the “breast complex” anticipates, rather than obviates, the Oedipal scenario, with the maternal phallus standing in for the absent father’s masculine attributes. This explanation of the function of transitional objects in sexual life delimits one corner of the topographical field of the unconscious where the subject becomes fixated on a fetish-substitute because he cannot recognize his “true” object (Lacan 1986: 751). Put another way: “You may depend upon it that there are things going on inside of us that we understand mighty little about” ( James 1986: 57). According to Freud, male children who formed close emotional attachments to their adoring mothers during infancy may be traumatized by their discovery of the anatomical differences between the sexes: “When the child discovers that his mother does not in fact have a penis like his own, he is both horrified and disgusted. His loved mother now becomes an object of loathing to him, and he recoils in horror from the thought that he too may share a similar fate” as punishment for his own erotic striving for her (Freud 1979: 206–7). Bergler argues that castration anxiety is a biproduct of weaning shock rather than a development of the Oedipal period: “Much of what in psychoanalytic literature goes under the heading of ‘not being able to come to terms with the penislessness of the woman’ stems from the breast complex,” the infant’s attempt to reassure himself that he has lost nothing by the mother’s withdrawal of her breast because he has a penis himself (Bergler 1944: 263–4). This compensatory notion is only partly successful in assuaging the boy’s anxiety over his loss, as he jealously guards his penis from predatory females throughout his life. While submitting to the father’s sexual domination might entail psychic emasculation, this erotic option remains desirable because it also permitted merger with a stronger male as a compensation. Indeed, James’s disavowal of his aggressive impulses in relation to the “ambivalently loved” father and the idealized older brother informs Horwitz’s contention that a submissive and masochistic personality such as Henry James would be prone to fears of homosexuality” (Horwitz 1977: 471). In “Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia, and Homosexuality,” Freud discusses the emotional transition from rivalry to neutrality to love. According to Freud, early childhood impulses of jealousy directed against older brothers and derived from a “mothercomplex” of very great intensity give way under the “influences of upbringing” (and a persistent sense of personal inferiority) so that the rivals of the earlier period became

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the first homosexual love objects (Freud 1979: 206–7). This thesis is compressed into a truism in The American. According to Valentin de Bellegarde, “Well-bred people always love their brothers” ( James 1986: 154). Approaching the problem from another perspective, Mahler has suggested that castration anxiety derives from the son’s apprehension that his mother wishes to take his penis away from him and possess it herself: “In some cases in which the mother has been interfering with the boy’s autonomy, establishment of his early gender identity is threatened and disturbed, particularly if she is unable to relinquish her son’s body and the ownership of his penis to him” (Mahler, Pine, and Bergman 1975: 215). The resulting ambivalence towards the mother in individuals burdened by the “breast complex” would explain James’s ambiguous portraits of women throughout the canon (Bergler 1944: 264). The attempt to champion the nurturing Madonna and deny the pre-Oedipal harpy is a mainstay of James’s fiction. One reading of this “splitting” effect suggests that the mother’s bad aspects are denied for fear of the self-reproaches and rage they might arouse in an individual who has incorporated her gratifying, frustrating, and punitive qualities. In The Princess Casamassima, Hyacinth Robinson despairs over the “horror of the public reappearance, in his person, of the imbrued hands of his mother,” a murderess (James 1922: 419). Hyacinth is driven to suicide by his desire to preserve the “redeemed” mother who resides in the ego from recontamination by the “polluted” mother who is identified with the id. In a roundabout fashion, James signifies the retributive character of Hyacinth’s suicide, which is triggered by the Princess’s repetition of the birth mother’s abandonment during the oral phase: “Mr. Robinson has shot himself through the heart. He must have done it while you were fetching the milk; the mother went . . . round the corner there, to buy a pennyworth of milk . . . ; she stayed at the grocer’s, where she got the milk, to have a little conversation with a friend she met there” ( James 1922: 431, 426, my emphasis). I propose that what set James apart from bisexuals, what prevented James from repudiating homosexuality, was the unshakeable conviction that the mother was the chief threat to his masculinity and all the privileges to which it entitled him. James never transferred this threat from mother to father in keeping with the Oedipal model: “ ‘With me,’ he went on, ‘you will be as safe – as safe’ – and even in his ardour he hesitated a moment for a comparison – ‘as safe’, he said, with a kind of simple solemnity, ‘as in your father’s arms’ ” ( James 1986: 242). The absent, weak, or abject fathers of James’s fiction suggest that James’s male characters occupy an “intermaternal order in which the mother represents the law under certain prescribed conditions; she generates the symbolism through which the masochist expresses himself” (Deleuze 1989: 63). Monsieur Nioche’s abjection, which “expressed the state of mind of an innocuous insect, flat in shape, and conscious of the impending pressure of a boot-sole, and reflecting that he was perhaps too flat to be crushed” ( James 1986: 261), is a textual index of the potential for male victimization at the hands of sexually predacious women throughout the novel and elsewhere in the canon. Cuckolded by his wife

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during their marriage (“ ‘She was my purgatory, monsieur!’ ‘She deceived you?’ ‘Under my nose, year after year . . . I loved her – I can’t tell you how much. She was a bad woman’ ”), Monsieur Nioche recognizes the signs of hereditary promiscuity and lawlessness in his daughter, Nomie: “Her mother was one before her” ( James 1986: 89). Obstructing patriarchal authority, Madame Nioche and the Marquise de Bellegarde encourage their children to identify with the mother’s strength and to resist the father’s abjection: “ ‘My power’, said Madame de Bellegarde, ‘is in my children’s obedience’ ” ( James 1986: 317). Significantly, Madame de Bellegarde’s sexual aspects have been repressed, split off, and transferred intratextually to the Nioche women, whose murderous capacities (monstrosities) are enacted in the realm of eros: “Yes, she’s a frightful little monster!” ( James 1986: 268). In this sense, castration anxiety is less a universal signifier of male dread projected onto women and more explicitly tied to the prohibition against incest. Identification with the mother, repression of her sexual nature, is a hedge against incest where the father is not a strong enough presence to intercede on behalf of the Law. Eric Haralson has deftly scripted along Freudian lines the beating fantasy that undergirds Newman’s complicity in his shaming at the hands of the Bellegardes, where the cruel mother-figure of fantasy is read as a substitute for a father whose “traumatic appeal” incites repression (Haralson 1992: 483). Noting the “extraordinary lability in the gendering of power positions within sadomasochistic fantasy” (Haralson 1992: 483), Haralson bypasses an opportunity to parse James’s misogyny. With the reactionaries fully encamped on the side of adaptational psychoanalysis, which rejects homosexuality as a perversion of “natural” mating instincts, it is difficult to raise the thorny subject of misogyny among male homosexuals, a thematic which figures prominently, as I have shown, in the discourse of men like Bergler. Reminding her readers that, in the bad old days, homosexuality was seen as “an epitome, a personification, an effect, or perhaps a primary cause of woman-hating,” Eve Sedgwick virtually proscribes thinking along these outmoded and stereotypical lines, declaring that even to remark a connection between male homosexuality and misogyny would be “homophobic” (Sedgwick 1985: 20). I don’t want to reassess Sedgwick’s theorization of homophobia per se. I accept her claim that much of the hostility directed against “effeminate” homosexuals is inspired by misogyny; however, I want to cross over into that forbidden territory: misogyny expressed by some but not directed at “all” male homosexuals. The American’s dénouement revolves around the question of whether Madame de Bellegarde has blood on her hands and can be held accountable for the murder of her unfaithful husband. Madame looms in Newman’s conception as a woman who, while deprived of the cash-signifier of power, nevertheless wields tremendous social and personal clout; from a psychological standpoint, she is identified with the phallic mother: “Madame de Bellegarde, with a movement very eloquent of what he would have called her ‘grit,’ her steel-cold pluck and her instinctive appeal to her own resources, drew her hand out of her son’s arm and went and seated herself upon the bench” ( James 1986: 412). Presumably, her murderous capacities impede her sons’

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election of her as the prototype for their future love objects. Valentin de Bellegarde, who occupies Henry James’s position in the birth order, indirectly accuses his mother, as head of the family, of having interfered with his autonomy: “When I was twenty, I looked around me and saw a world with everything ticketed ‘Hands Off!’ And the deuce of it was that the ticket seemed meant only for me. I couldn’t go into business, I couldn’t make money, because I was a Bellegarde” ( James 1986: 140). And she has obstructed his development: “I have done nothing – I can do nothing!” ( James 1986: 137). Acting out the tendency to debasement in the field of love, Valentin selfdestructively pursues women of the demimonde, serving the double aim of avoiding the mother prototype, which he abhors, and the sister prototype with whom he fears to commit incest: “we are such a brother and sister as have not been seen since Orestes and Electra” ( James 1986: 151). His safest option would be homosexuality. Unfortunately for Valentin, on an unconscious level, he is drawn by his sister’s vulnerability and more than a little fascinated by his mother’s formidable quality. Taking as his protégé an Italian lady whose husband, a Frenchman, had beaten her and spent her money (“she had a little blue spot somewhere, which she showed to several persons, including Bellegarde”), Valentin inverts and then carefully segregates his family and love lives: “My sister can’t see that sort or person. Madame Dandelard is nothing at all; they would never meet” (James 1986: 149). Yet, the dysfunctional family nucleus imperils the development of healthy extra-familial intimacies, for the unconscious strategy of avoiding the mother-sister archetype is a virtual guarantee of her return in some disguised form. In Nomie Nioche, Valentin has unwittingly found a sexy, declass version of his murderous mother, who “has not a grain more sentiment or heart than if she were scooped out of a big amethyst”; Valentin finds Nomie both extremely pretty and “intelligent, determined, ambitious, unscrupulous, capable of looking at a man strangled without changing colour” ( James 1986: 264). Newman aptly characterizes this “fine list of attractions” as the sort of catalog that “would serve as a police-detective’s description of a favorite criminal” ( James 1986: 265) and warns Bellegarde: “ ‘Drop that girl short’, said Newman, ‘don’t go near her again’ ” ( James 1986: 268). Newman intuits a common nature between Nomie and Urbain de Bellegarde’s wife, a strumpet with a pedigree: “She reminded Newman of his friend, Mademoiselle Nioche; this was what that much-obstructed young lady would have liked to be” ( James 1986: 181). Even Newman, the untitled Westerner, finds it odd that “the wife of the Marquis de Bellegarde, a daughter of crusaders, heiress of six centuries of glories and traditions” aspires to no higher form of amusement than to attend a students’ orgy on the Left Bank in his company ( James 1986: 297). The marquise emulates the femme fatale; she concocts a fancy-dress toilet, complete with an ornamental dagger of diamonds on a crimson background, which she calls “A murder by moonlight” ( James 1986: 274). Newman’s witticism, that he seems to be looking at her “through a telescope,” compactly summarizes his desire to distance himself from this forward woman. Her vanity has received a check from the frosty marquis, who appears to be “without means” in vulgar parlance as well as in a financial sense: “Pity a poor woman

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who is married to a clock-image in papier mâché!” ( James 1986: 270). When she declares, “I’m on my knees to money,” the marquise celebrates Newman’s millions as signifiers of flesh and blood manliness ( James 1986: 131). Newman is deaf to her line of entreaty and obtuse to her offer to perform a sexual favor for him, “I expect to take my revenge with you” ( James 1986: 215). I will return to this issue of Newman’s “habitual reserve” on questions of sexual conquests ( James 1986: 145) when I unpack his attraction to the anemic Claire, a “marble goddess” ( James 1986: 223). Urbain de Bellegarde is described as “the old woman second-hand” ( James 1986: 183); although he has attained an erect carriage, superior demeanor, and arrogant attitude towards the world in imitation of her hauteur, his virility is compromised by his identification with the phallic mother: He was “distinguished” to the tips of his polished nails, and there was not a movement of his fine perpendicular person that was not noble and majestic. Newman had never yet been confronted with such an incarnation of the art of taking oneself seriously; he felt a sort of impulse to step backward, as you do to get a view of a great façade. ( James 1986: 184)

Urbain’s hobbies reflect the subjective viewpoint of the epicene aristocrat. He is writing a history of the virgin princesses of France and studying ethnology with the aim of confirming the Bellegardes’s position at the pinnacle of the racial pyramid ( James 1986: 154): “Newman for a few moments watched him sliding his white hands into the white kid, and as he did so his feelings took a singular turn. M. de Bellegarde’s good wishes seemed to descend out of the white expanse of his sublime serenity with the soft scattered movement of a shower of snow flakes” ( James 1986: 185; my emphasis). Whiteness is a marker of racial purity, and it also stands for the family’s repression of sexuality and avarice as untoward interests deemed unworthy of such “urbane” and distinguished individuals: “His manners seemed to indicate a fine nervous dread that something disagreeable might happen if the atmosphere were not purified by allusions of a thoroughly superior cast” ( James 1986: 207; my emphasis). The unconscious association of money with feces – “filthy lucre,” “goose with the golden eggs” – informs the Bellegardes’s collective hallucination that they can smell the stink of enterprise behind Newman’s fortune: “Madame de Bellegarde made a little grimace. ‘Leather? I don’t like that. Wash-tubs are better. I prefer the smell of soap’ ” ( James 1986: 130; my emphasis); “Between him and Newman, his whole manner seemed to declare that there could be no interchange of opinion; he was holding his breath so as not to inhale the odour of democracy” ( James 1986: 227; my emphasis). The Bellegardes’s reactively reinforced purity is a hallmark of the anal personality, which has undergone a transformation and now regards with disgust what it formerly regarded with interest. The stigmata of the anal personality are easily remarked in the old marquise, whose “conservative orifice, a little pair of lips at once plump and pinched,

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that looked, when closed, as if they could not open wider than to swallow a gooseberry or to emit an ‘Oh dear, no!’ ” instantiates the term “displacement” ( James 1986: 179). The figurative conflation of Madame’s oral and anal orifices symbolizes the denial of sensuality and constipation peculiar to this personality type, which are narratively reinforced by a servant’s assessment of the lady’s unhappy marriage: “They were not a loving couple” ( James 1986: 379; my emphasis). The servant, Mrs. Bread, provides a contrast between the mother-mistress of denial and the nurturing maternal woman. Overflowing with gratitude to this kindly person, Newman jokes that her name ought to be changed to “Mrs. Cake” ( James 1986: 233). The emphasis on oral pleasure within the domain of adult male or genital sexuality underscores the regressive or infantile complexes shared by the novel’s protagonists, as when Valentin observes of Nomie’s brilliant pink toilet: “It makes her look as white as new milk” ( James 1986: 291). In spite of James’s assurances that Newman has carnal knowledge of and sexual capacity with women (“You talk like Sardanapalus”) ( James 1986: 73), the textual evidence is inconclusive. There is bravado, but no conviction or follow through, in Newman’s claim to be pulling out all the stops in his pursuit of his ideal woman, unless he plans to remove this paragon from the wall of a museum gallery. Newman abandons his excursion to Damascus and Bagdad, where he would have met with a wider selection of “harem” exotics and “Circassian” beauties than he encountered in the gaming salons of Baden-Baden ( James 1986: 73). Although he strikes up a conversation with Mademoiselle Nioche because he finds the little copyist “with the boyish coiffure . . . uncommonly taking” ( James 1986: 36; my emphasis), Newman does not flirt with her. She is the “pick up artist” not Newman, and her sexual candor scares him. Like Zola’s Nana, she is a narrative embodiment of the challenge posted by Manet’s Olympia (1865), where the nude’s cool confrontation with the potential purchaser of her services, undifferentiated from the viewer of the canvas, unsettled Paris. The very first words that Newman addresses to Nomie, “Combien?,” set the stage for their future dealings, in which money is liberally exchanged for services – although not precisely on the terms the young lady has in mind ( James 1986: 36). The prostitute-courtesan-mistress is no longer confined to the shadows; she is highly visible, impertinent, and newly confident that she’s as good as anyone, even though her gentlemen friends beg to differ: “She’s the most mercenary little jade” ( James 1986: 267). One of Nomie’s most threatening aspects is her ability to impersonate the demeanor and elegant appearance of the well born. From her lookout in the Louvre, Nomie can display her charms before the male museum patrons desirous of feminine companionship, while she studies the ladies of “high fashion,” who are “dressed with great splendour,” dragging “silken trains and furbelows” over the “polished floor” ( James 1986: 195). As a lady-copyist who paints like a “cat” ( James 1986: 97), Nomie’s most successful creation is herself: “She looked consummately pretty, and the front of her dress was a wonderful work of art” ( James 1986: 435), lace, embroidery, or

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needlepoint. Nomie’s expertise in the art of self-fashioning is textually intricated with needlework, a traditional field of employment for working women from premodern through industrial times. Nomie throws up a job making bonnets ( James 1986: 90), before she abandons the design of working as a lady’s companion. Through this ingenious metaphor, James signals Nomie’s quasi-respectability, as the trade was poorly rumunerated and needle-women and textile workers were said to supplement their incomes by means of prostitution. Far from creating sympathy for Nomie, this conceit reinforces her ferocity. When Valentin calls Nomie an “ingenious piece of machinery,” Newman regales him with an anecdote about a death he witnessed in a needle factory, when one of the machines killed a gentleman from the city who had stepped too near. The image of the machine’s dinner (“picked up as neatly as if he had been prodded by a fork, swallowed down straight, and ground into small pieces”) recalls the vagina dentata or castration fantasy that the vaginal orifice has teeth ( James 1986: 265). James seems particularly anxious to account for Newman’s lack of sexual interest in this “coquette” ( James 1986: 100), who rebukes him vigorously for his indifference: “Do you call that caring for me? I’m afraid you know little about women. You were not gallant; you were not what you might have been” ( James 1986: 260; my emphasis). The hero’s reaction to this tirade, “Newman flushed, a trifle fiercely” ( James 1986: 260), belies his pretension that he is embarrassed for Nomie, for she brazenly impugns his virility. Janine Chassaguet-Smirgel, who unaccountably links the ascent of civilization with the repression of homosexuality, has pointed out the significance of “the fear of going red” as a sign of the “imminent emergence of anal wishes,” wishes that might be interpreted as an offer to play the passive part during sodomy ( James 1986: 158). This interpretation of flushing as the sign of sexual panic explains the behavior of Lord Deepmere, an aptly named individual, who expresses deep confusion and changes color several times in Newman’s presence ( James 1986: 284), ostensibly because he’s playing him a mean trick: “Lord Deepmere, he observed, was very red in the face, and he had twisted his gloves into a tight cord as if he had been squeezing them dry. These, presumably, were tokens of violent emotion” ( James 1986: 286). James employs Benjamin Babcock, a diminutive New England minister, who is said to be as unworldly as a “nursing infant,” as a foil for Newman’s masculine prowess ( James 1986: 105). Babcock’s stomachic disorder (he eats only hominy and Graham bread) and sexual panic metonymically link ingestion, digestion, and excretion with amativeness or the lack thereof. Appetite, whether signified by repugnance or craving, is the most pregnant metaphor of James’s novel, since the mouth and the anus are “erotogenic zones which are undecidable with respect to gender” (Silverman 1992: 165). The strategy of affirming Newman’s virility through the male spinster’s point of view deserves further remark: “You appear to care only for the pleasure of the hour, and you give yourself up to it with a violence which I confess I am not able to emulate” ( James 1986: 110–11). Much has been made of Babcock’s presumed role as a straight man (“But if Newman plays flexible ‘femme’ to Bacbock, he gets to play ‘butch-femme’ with an Englishman he meets shortly after his break up with

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Babcock”) (Person 2003: 75). While Leland Person is quick and correct to affirm the protean nature of Newman’s performance of masculinity, I confess Babcock’s rigor strikes me as a needful self-delusion, a strategy for misapprehending the nature of his attraction to Newman: “He often tried, in odd half-hours of conversation, to infuse into Newman a little of his own spiritual starch, but Newman’s personal texture was too loose to admit to stiffening” ( James 1986: 108; my emphasis). Here, repressed erotic impulses (penetration, sharing bodily fluids) burst the bounds of the metaphoric frame meant to contain them. I don’t want to spend a great deal of time on the iconic figurine Newman sends Babcock as a parting gift and commentary on their relationship, as this has furnished Cheryl Torsney, Leland Person, and Eric Harlson with ample food for reflection. Briefly, my reading of the ivory statuette of the anorectic monk barely concealing a fat capon, depending from his waist, beneath the monastic garb, differs from Torsney’s conclusion that it represents a “displacement of desire onto the substitute phallus” (Torsney 1993: 174). I see it as a flash of recognition, on Newman’s part, of the intermediate gender (capons are emasculated cocks that have taken on flesh like hens) of the little New England cleric. In spite of my interest in comparing James’s psychical complexes with those of his characters, I want to de-emphasize James’s conscious management of his readers’ inferences and suggest, instead, that The American insists on the importance of the individual characters’ points of view. This would mean that the narrator might not know whether Newman’s gesture is “a cynical stroke” or not ( James 1986: 112). Further, the topic of celibacy and ascetism pops up in the course of Newman’s budding intimacy with another male companion, the sybarite, Valentin de Bellegarde: “I am good for another five years, perhaps, but I foresee that after that I shall lose my appetite. Then what shall I do? I think I shall turn monk. Seriously, I think I shall tie a rope round my waist and go into a monastery” ( James 1986: 141). Like Babcock, Valentin is oppressed by a sense of duty, even if this mental burden doesn’t much interfere with his pursuit of pleasure. While one might accuse Bellegarde of hypocrisy or knavery – this is the same man who fought in the cause of the Holy Roman Father, but wryly observed that “Rome was doubtless a very amusing place in the days of Caligula, but it has sadly fallen off since” ( James 1986: 140) – Valentin’s code of honor is as rigid as his amatory conduct is lax. And, of course, the confluence of these two modalities in a chivalric drama costs him his life. Babcock’s homosexual panic clearly suggests that Newman is erotically interesting to men: “I have a great personal esteem for you, and hope that some day, when I have recovered my balance, we shall meet again” ( James 1986: 111; my emphasis). Newman is in the passive and “feminine” position of the beloved rather than that of the lover in this instance. Newman also toys with the notion of same-sex intimacy when he writes Mrs. Tristram to say that his nearest approach to securing a “first-class wife” on his trip was an encounter with “a Unitarian minister from Boston, who very soon demanded a separation for incompatibility of temper” on the grounds that Newman was “low-minded, immoral, a devotee of ‘art for art’ – whatever that is” ( James 1986:

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116; my emphasis). Newman’s unfamiliarity with the works of Theophile Gautier, Algernon Swinburne, and Walter Pater, popularizers of the aesthetic doctrine of sensuous impressionism, makes him the unwitting agent of the reader’s comprehension that Babcock’s frantic plea for order, balance, purity, and uplift through art represents an active suppression, rather than an unconscious repression, of a robust lust of the eyes. The aura of sexual prowess clinging to Newman’s 6-feet plus of glorious manhood (Babcock’s “immeasurable friend”) ( James 1986: 109) is diminished by his obsession with the cold and bland Madame de Cintré. Claire remains a cipher to facilitate Newman’s immersion in the family milieu, which is really the point of the drama. One would suppose that Newman’s hatred of Madame de Bellegarde would be intense and lasting, as it is she, principally, who obstructs his cherished design of marrying Claire. Yet, Christopher Newman, an orphan, is unwittingly eager for the surrogate mother’s regard: “ ‘You’re a mighty plucky woman, madam’, he continued. ‘It’s a great pity you have made me your enemy. I should have been one of your greatest admirers’ ” ( James 1986: 415). Newman projects his desire to be unconditionally admired by the other onto Madame de Bellegarde, whose self-love is imperturbable: “Madame de Bellegarde stared; it was presumably the first time she had been condoled with on her losses. ‘I am content with what I have’, she said with dignity” ( James 1986: 182). Newman’s search for “narcissistic confirmation” of the ego-ideal of the moment (how he wishes to be seen) means that he relates to other people “merely as supports for the ego,” confirming Beth Sharon Ash’s claim that James contributes to our understanding of narcissistic personality disorder (Ash 1990: 132). Newman’s grandiosity, relieved by fits of abjection (tolerance for abuse), as well as his difficulty in discriminating between the emotions he projects onto others and what they feel (failure in relation), attests to his borderline personality: “ ‘Your only reason is that you love me!’ he murmured, with an eloquent gesture, and for want of a better reason Madame de Cintré reconciled herself to this one” ( James 1986: 244). Newman imagines a scenario, reminiscent of Lacan’s mirror stage, where the Bellegarde women’s adoring gaze will validate his prowess (an ego-ideal incommensurate with reality) and provide a reason for his meaningless existence (Lacan 1986: 735). Rather than emphasize the castration threat attending the boy’s emergence from narcissistic symbiosis into fragile separation and individuality, I want to remind the reader that the mirror stage is also the moment when the male child invests his genitals with “the significance of the phallus,” as a bi-product of his mother’s regard, and enters the realm of the symbolic (Lacan 1986: 735). In The American, the mother’s castration is disavowed intra-psychically and within the family (the phallus remains fixed in her camp), whereas the Name of the Father and His Law may be presumed to still operate in the world at large. James has narrated an alternative path to the resolution of the Oedipus complex (castration complex in Lacan’s parlance) for a parentless youth, who nevertheless retains a vivid impression of the maternal phallus and the weakness

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of the father imago. However, the phallic woman appears in only one of her two potential incarnations; she is the mother of denial and not the all-gratifying mother. Thus, women/mother remain a threat so that the boy is motivated to enter society almost with the expectation that he is leaving danger, chaos, uncertainty behind in his pursuit of worldly success. Emerging from an atypical family that has denied him an essential psychological endowment (the méconnaissance that penis = phallus) (Lacan 1986: 737), Newman enters the patriarchal order in search of the phallus: wealth, homoerotic attachments, a “magnificent woman” to possess ( James 1986: 70). This psycho-social state of betwixt and between, where there is no internal core or set of traditions belonging to the self, only way-stations in transition to a higher plateau or rung of the ladder, is ratified by Newman’s queer protest, “I shouldn’t like to resemble anyone. It is hard enough work resembling oneself” ( James 1986: 234). While Newman reciprocates the Marquis de Bellegarde’s disdain, he may well envy and begrudge Urbain “the impressive image projected upon his own intellectual mirror” ( James 1986: 226–7). The lack that occasions Newman’s wish for symbolic realization through a belated but enabling mother-son exchange (reinforced by the absence of the father) also informs Newman’s relationship with Madame de Cintré: “he always came back to the feeling that when he should complete himself by taking a wife, that was the way he should like his wife to interpret him to the world” ( James 1986: 165, my emphasis). Newman’s conscious aim of attaining “the best article on the market” for a wife provides a framework for elaborating the ideological bases of Newman’s psychic reality ( James 1986: 71) – the connection between the imaginary, the symbolic order, and capitalism. In spite of James’s scattered references to “seraglios” and student Bohemias ( James 1986: 79), a sublimation of eros drives Newman’s pursuit of a titled bride. He did not marry in “hot haste” when he was twenty, and the expressive vehemence of the forty-year-old Newman is the only textual evidence that he has fires in need of stanching ( James 1986: 70). In the novel’s third chapter, Newman boasts, “I would marry a Japanese, if she pleased me,” one of the novel’s awkward indulgences in Orientalist fantasy ( James 1986: 73). Why then does he select Claire, a woman as sexless as the nun she’s predestined to become? All this, as I have affirmed, made her seem rare and precious – a very expensive article, as he would have said, and one which a man with an ambition to have everything about him of the best would find it highly agreeable to possess. But looking at the matter with an eye to private felicity, Newman wondered where, in so exquisite a compound, nature and art showed their dividing line. ( James 1986: 165)

Certainly, Newman thinks like a capitalist. His objectification of Claire is patent; what is more interesting is that he has broken down her charms into functions expressly connected with the role of leisure-class wife, who interprets, to use Newman’s own term, her husband’s wealth and status to the world:

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Wendy Graham You have been holding your head for a week past just as I wanted my wife to hold hers. You say just the things I wanted her to say. You walk about the room just as I want her to walk. You have just the taste in dress that I want her to have. In short, you come up to the mark; and, I can tell you, my mark was high. ( James 1986: 271)

Thorstein Veblen has laboriously described the social psychology of pecuniary emulation, vicarious leisure, and conspicuous consumption, but James’s illustration of the phenomena is more poignant. Claire recognizes that Newman’s “ideal” is an abstract quantity loosely based on “her type.” As such it is an inhuman and unapproachable model “perched on the pile” of Newman’s money, “like a statue on a monument” ( James 1986: 71). Having read Freud, we know that Newman’s plan to exchange his gold for “aristocratic” status has its origins in infant experience; early control of the bowels being identified with the capacity and desire to make money (earn rewards). That is why Newman keeps insisting, against all reason, that he began earning his living when he was “almost a baby” ( James 1986: 186; my emphasis); his earliest achievement set the stage for his later success. Although Newman insists that he takes enormous pride in his hard work and deprecates loafing, in truth, he wishes to ameliorate the sordid aspects of the struggle for wealth – exemplified by the curious incident of Newman’s scheming to bankrupt a rival in the stock market, only to “loathe the whole business” and “wash his hands of it” ( James 1986: 56–7). Newman’s outlook is surprisingly consistent with the psychology of the market revolution, which promoted regular conduct and morality to produce conditions favorable to industry and commerce. Christopher Newman might have been the representative figure in Democracy in America, for Newman admits to having gained and lost several fortunes (Tocqueville 1945: 248). Additionally, Tocqueville noted that Americans had no adolescence; Newman claims to have held a job as “a small boy” ( James 1986: 187), a disingenuous representation given the narrator’s prior information – that Newman found himself homeless and penniless at the age of fourteen ( James 1986: 53). In keeping with this joyless personal history, Newman belongs to a culture in which the gratification of desire and the pursuit of happiness are sacrificed to the tireless pursuit of wealth. As Tocqueville argued, the habits of unremitting toil, prudence, and self-restraint cannot be discarded once the individual has attained financial security; they have become fixed character or mental traits. Similarly, Newman’s determination to “treat” himself to a wife does not profoundly alter his outlook ( James 1986: 71). Newman’s declaration, “I want to make a great hit,” sounds more like a businessman’s strategy for launching a product or picking a stock than a method for choosing a wife ( James 1986: 70). Newman’s acquisitive stance strikes even Mr. Tristram, a man of few illusions, as inhuman: “I didn’t suppose you would be so cold-blooded and calculating” ( James 1986: 71). Newman’s tendency to exaggerate the obstacles placed in his path as a youth, dire as they were, is consistent with the American “rags-to-riches” narrative popularized by Ben Franklin, who makes a cameo appearance in the novel: “If he did not, like Dr. Franklin in Philadel-

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phia, march along the street munching on a penny loaf, it was only because he had not the penny loaf necessary to the performance” ( James 1986: 53). Valentin de Bellegarde underestimates both the trials of poverty and the inevitability of success when he exclaims: “Ah, but your poverty was your capital. Being an American, it was impossible you should remain what you were born, and being born poor – do I understand it? – it was therefore inevitable that you should become rich” ( James 1986: 140). In contrast to this indulgent mirroring of the spread eagle mentality, Valentin’s countryman, Alexis de Tocqueville, paints a cynical portrait of the American’s bloated sense of his achievements and self-importance: “An American leaves his country with a heart swollen with pride; on arriving in Europe, he at once finds out that we are not so engrossed by the United States and the great people who inhabit it as he had supposed, and this begins to annoy him” ( James 1986: 183). Newman is similarly annoyed by the anti-American sentiments of Mr. Tristram, a Civil War veteran and naturalized French citizen: “He had never been a very conscious patriot, but it vexed him to see [the United States] treated as little better than a vulgar smell in his friend’s nostrils” ( James 1986: 65; my emphasis). Whether one takes a psychoanalytic tack in parsing Newman’s search for “narcissistic confirmation” (Ash 1990: 132) or turns to history for an assessment of the emergence of the “modern concept of personality” in the nineteenth century, “which turned attention to man’s external standing before other men” rather than his spiritual standing before God (Haltunen 1982: 50), Newman’s search for self entails treating other people “merely as supports for the ego” (Ash 1990: 132). For this reason, Newman vehemently rejects the Bellegardes’s accounting of his place in the world: “Your brother told me that my antecedents and occupations were against me; that your family stands somehow on a higher level than I do. That is an idea which, of course, I don’t understand and don’t accept” ( James 1986: 168). Newman’s rhetoric smacks of a righteous democratic defiance of caste privilege; the same note can be heard in Mrs. Tristram’s jingoistic celebration of the “spread eagle” (American manhood) as a defense against the Old World coercion of prospective brides in marriages of economic convenience ( James 1986: 122). However, as a member of the nouveaux riches pursuing Madame de Cintré for no better nor more obvious reason than that she and her people are “all mounted upon stilts a mile high, and with pedigrees long in proportion. It is the skim of the milk of the old noblesse” ( James 1986: 75), Newman is in an untenable position, claiming that social status is an antiquated convention that has no bearing on his thoughts and actions. Newman’s conviction “that I’m as good as the best” affirms that American selfhood is competitive and invidious rather than self-reliant ( James 1986: 160). Not coincidentally, the position of unwelcome interloper in the upper echelons of society, “we really cannot reconcile ourselves to a commercial person” ( James 1986: 318), is one that Newman shares with his feminine nemesis, Mademoiselle Nioche. In many respects, Newman is pursuing a feminine route to a stable sense of self-worth and social prestige – hoping to get married, like the beggar-maid, to a King Cophetua ( James 1986: 155).

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Ash, Beth Sharon (1990). “Frail vessels and vast designs: A psychoanalytic portrait of Isabel Archer.” In New Essays on The Portrait of a Lady (pp. 123–62). Ed. Joel Porte. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bergler, Edmund (1944). “Eight prerequisites for the psychoanalytic treatment of homosexuality.” Psychoanalytic Review, 31: 253–86. Cargill, Oscar (1956). “Henry James as Freudian pioneer.” Chicago Review, 10.2: 13–29. Chassaguet-Smirgel, Janine (1985). The Ego-Ideal: A Psychoanalytic Essay on the Malady of the Ideal. New York: Norton. Deleuze, Gilles (1989). Coldness and Cruelty. New York: Zone Books. Edel, Leon (1953). Henry James: The Untried Years. New York: Avon. Edel, Leon (ed.) (1975). Henry James Letters. Vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Edel, Leon (ed.) (1984). Henry James Letters. Vol. 4. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Felman, Shoshana (1982). “Turning the screw of interpretation.” In Literature and Psychoanalysis (pp. 94–207). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Freud, Sigmund (1979). “Some neurotic mechanisms in jealousy, paranoia and homosexuality.” In On Psychopathology (pp. 197–208). Vol. 10. Standard Edition. London: Penguin. Gard, Roger (ed.) (1968). Henry James and the Critical Heritage. London: Routledge. Geismar, Maxwell (1963). Henry James and the Jacobites. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Graham, Wendy (1998). “Henry James and the mother-complex.” Arizona Quarterly, 54.1: 28–64. Graham, Wendy (1999). Henry James’s Thwarted Love. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Guntrip, Harry (1969). Schizoid Phenomena, ObjectRelations and the Self. New York: International University Press. Haltunen, Karen (1982). Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Haralson, Eric (1992). “James’s The American: A (New)man is being beaten.” American Literature, 64.3: 475–495.

Horwitz, B. D. (1977). “The sense of desolation in Henry James.” Psychocultural Review, 1: 466–491. James, Henry (1922). The Princess Casamassima. Vol. 6. The Novels and Tales of Henry James. New York: Scribner’s. James, Henry (1945). “The Great Good Place.” The Short Stories of Henry James. New York: Random House. James, Henry (1986). The American. New York: Penguin. James, Mary Walsh (1869). Unpublished letter (24, 25 July). Houghton Library. bMS Am 1093.1 (34). Jauss, Hans Robert (1986). “Literary history as a challenge to literary theory.” In Critical Theory Since 1965 (pp. 164–183). Ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle. Tallahassee: Florida State University Press. Lacan, Jacques (1986). “The agency of the letter in the unconscious or reason since Freud.” In Critical Theory Since 1965 (pp. 738–756). Ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle. Tallahassee: Florida State University Press. Lacan, Jacques (1986). “The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience.” In Critical Theory Since 1965 (pp. 734–738). Ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle. Tallahassee: Florida State University Press. Lewis, R. W. B. (1991). The Jameses: A Family Narrative. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Maher, Jane (1986). Biography of Broken Fortunes: Wilkie and Bob, Brothers of William, Henry, and Alice James. Hamden: Archon. Mahler, Margaret, Fred Pine, and Anni Bergman (1975). The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant. New York: Basic Books. Novick, Sheldon (1996). The Young Master. New York: Random House. Person, Leland (2003). Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Sedgwick, Eve (1885). Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press.

The Search for Self in The American Silverman, Kaja (1992). Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York: Routledge. Stern, Daniel (1985). The Interpersonal World of the Infant. New York: Basic Books. Tocqueville, Alexis de (1945). Democracy in America. New York: Vintage. Torsney, Cheryl (1993). “Henry James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and the fat capon: Homoerotic desire in The American.” Henry James Review, 14.2: 166–78.

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White, Hayden (1986). “The historical text as literary artifact.” In Critical Theory Since 1965 (pp. 394–407). Ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle. Tallahassee: Florida State University Press. Wilson, Edmund (1976). “The ambiguity of Henry James.” In The Triple Thinkers (pp. 88– 132). New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux.

4

Vital Illusions in The Portrait of a Lady Peter Rawlings

The Portrait of a Lady is in large measure both an exploration of the commonly held illusion that the world of human experience is one of freedom of choice and a penetrating analysis, at the levels of its own fiction and metafiction, of the validity of debates raging at the time of its publication concerning whether the plot of a novel should or could be subordinated to the agency and importance of its characters. This essay considers the extent to which these questions in James’s novel converge as they bear on the disparate range of philosophical and scientific discourses framing The Portrait of a Lady.1 The mid-to-later-Victorian preoccupation with character and plot in the novel took its cue from “an ancient-debating point in the theory of drama and the epic,” and it was intensified by an increasing interest in “human motives and psychology” (Graham 1965: 97). An emphasis on plot came to be regarded in the critical quarter that James occupied at least as antique and unreal. When addressing what he saw as the “old-fashioned distinction between the novel of character and the novel of incident,” between the “novel and the romance,” Henry James argued in his landmark essay “The Art of Fiction” for the interdependence of “character” and “incident”; indeed, given that the “terms may be transposed,” the assertion is of some kind of seamless unity ( James 1984a: 54). Wallace Martin believes that in “The Art of Fiction,” “function and characters cannot be separated because they are always in a reciprocal relationship, one determining the other” (Martin 1986: 116).2 James might have wanted to argue for this kind of reciprocity, but character emerges as dominant nevertheless: character is the “determination of incident” whereas incident is only the “illustration of character.” For James, the novel “as a living thing,” an “organism,” could only thrive if there was this hierarchy of interdependent parts ( James 1984a: 54). Consonant with his emphasis on character in “The Art of Fiction,” James celebrated in Ivan Turgenev what he construed as novels and stories organized around and generated by character rather than plot. “Character, character expressed and exposed, is in

A Companion to Henry James. Edited by Greg W. Zacharias © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-14042-3

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all these things what we inveterately find,” he wrote. Yet that appositional “character expressed and exposed” undermines the primacy of “character,” and implies that notions of individual choice, freedom, and control are highly tenuous. At one pole, the simplest account of Turgenev “is to say that the mere play of character constitutes in every case his sufficient drama” (and how close, in expressing this admiration, James moves towards his own Dr. Sloper in Washington Square); at the other, “it is of his essence that he sets in the general flood of life, steeped in its relations and contacts, struggling or submerged, a hurried particle in the stream ( James 1896–7: 15061). On the discursive plane, character is all; but in “essence” such characters struggle in, and are submerged by, the “general flood of life.” This polarization is acutely relevant to my reading of The Portrait of a Lady. I want to argue that the representation of Isabel Archer’s experience directly contradicts the New York Edition preface’s account of her germination, and that it annuls, whatever James’s intentions, the theory he regarded Turgenev as propounding. “Trying here, for recognition, the germ of my idea,” the preface has it, “I see that it must have consisted not at all in any conceit of a ‘plot,’ nefarious name, in any flash upon the fancy . . . but altogether in the sense of a single character . . . to which the usual elements of a ‘subject,’ certainly of a setting, were needed to be superadded” ( James 1934: 42). More generally, James declared that he “seemed to have met the trick of investing some conceived or encountered individuals” – here, Isabel Archer – with “germinal property and authority,” and that he “could think so little of any fable that didn’t need its agents positively to launch it” ( James 1934: 44). In the preface, then, the “plot” is clearly subordinated to that “character” from which it appears to emerge. But imbricated in the preface’s formulations are not only problems of authorial control but the vexatious question of any sense of life predicated on precepts of free will and the like. The notebook entries are relevant in that they indicate just how aware James was of the antagonistic relation between his text and its paratexts. “The idea of the whole thing is that the poor girl, who has dreamed of freedom and nobleness, who has done, as she believes a generous, natural, clear-sighted thing, finds herself ground in the very mill of the conventional” ( James 1987: 15). The phrase “ground in the very mill of the conventional” is given by James to Ralph Touchett at the end of the novel; and its significance will be considered later. What matters for the moment is that there is no sense in the actual planning of The Portrait of a Lady of a character somehow floating before the author and generating in his mind the action of the novel. The dispelling notebook entries – which were not (immediately, at least) intended for public consumption – indicate that James was highly conscious of the degree of artifice involved in fabricating both the illusion of life in the text and a sense of textual vitality free from the mechanics of a plot. In projecting and attempting to construct a life-like text about a life freely experienced, wittingly or unwittingly, a searing correspondence is arranged between Isabel Archer’s failure to realize the latter and the unsuccessful execution of the former. There is an ambiguity in James’s notes which hints at the reflexive mode of the novel: “Isabel awakens from her sweet delusion – oh,

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the art required for making the delusion natural! – and finds herself face to face with a husband who has ended by conceiving a hatred for her own larger qualities” ( James 1934: 15). Sharply double-edged is that phrase “the art required for making the delusion natural”: it relates not only to the novel’s strenuous naturalizations of its enmeshing artifice, but also to the delusions stimulated in its paratext of critical writings. Ellman Crasnow contends that in what he calls James’s “countertext,” or “scenario” (extending James’s use of the term), his “non-fiction . . . functions as both pretext and metatext” in that its topic is recurrently another writing which it both engenders and proleptically describes (Crasnow 1984: 150). Looked at in Crasnow’s way, however, the preface to The Portrait of a Lady could be regarded as more of an analeptic than a proleptic engendering of the novel in that it amounts to the retrospective provision of an environment for the organism of the text (and, arguably, this is a general function of all James’s prefaces). Whereas the novel, and the theories on which it is predicated, expire, the preface attempts to perform an act of reinspiration. Intention and execution, then, are destructively juxtaposed in The Portrait of a Lady. The metafictional and fictional dimensions of the novel consist of an exploration of the theory of life on which its founding aesthetic is based; an exploration that notwithstanding artful dissimulations “dis-covers” the theory’s essential incoherence. The novel grounds the post-Romantic organicist ideals of “The Art of Fiction” and in the process, I shall argue, exhibits its clear affinities with Kant’s views on freedom and necessity in his Critique of Judgment. In novelistic practice, as distinct from the theory of preface and essay, Isabel’s animated speculations are available for writing out and, in turn, writing off. But The Portrait of a Lady also secures at its close the kind of vital illusions, the saving of appearances, adumbrated in Kant’s Prolegomena (1972). To begin with, the novel hinges on a double transplantation: that of James’s original conception of Isabel Archer as a “character” into the text of the novel – the initiating “story” as “The Art of Fiction” has it ( James 1984a: 54) – and her own movement into the texture of a Europe thick with plots. She is an idea requiring and resisting form, an American initially independent in spirit but with an imagination – and eventually, with fatal consequences, the financial means – for much more. Isabel is presented as being egotistical and imaginative; she is punished not just because she is both, but also because she is a woman who has dared to imagine first that she can live without men, and second that she can marry on the basis of some kind of design of her own. Isabel’s desperate avowals of having chosen freely correspond to the preface’s privileging of character over plot and to intratextual allocations of and claims for the origination of the determining intrigue that are self-erasing not least because their terms are extremely volatile.3 Both character and text depend for their misguided sense of life on a concealing of the contingency of plotting on plots, artifice, craftiness, and craft, and on doomed efforts to shore up a binary opposition between the organic, the vital and free, and the destructively deterministic and mechanical which was as

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insecure when James appropriated it as at the time it was being championed by the German idealists and Coleridge, among others.4 Isabel is launched in terms of spontaneity, naturalness, and freedom. “I’m not,” she early has it, “a candidate for adoption,” “I’m very fond of my liberty” ( James 1985: 209).5 The narrator describes her as a “spontaneous young woman from Albany” ( James 1985: 254) and raises the question of freedom and necessity later revisited in the preface: “She was intelligent and generous; it was a fine free nature; but what was she going to do with herself?” ( James 1985: 254). Towards the outset, Isabel announces (with all dramatic irony intended) that she does not “need the aid of a clever man to teach” her “how to live,” for she can “find it out for” herself ( James 1985: 353) and “choose,” in a telling paradox, her own “fate” ( James 1985: 356). The project is restricted, though, to the ideal, the imaginary, and to the simulacra of experience: “There were essential reasons why one’s ideal could never become concrete. It was a thing to believe in, not to see – a matter of faith, not of experience. Experience, however, might supply us with very creditable imitations of it, and the part of wisdom was to make the best of these” ( James 1985: 383). Isabel has ideals, and is thereby in part ideal; but she is ideal because initially unrealized, a steady state that is maintainable only if she can (or is allowed) to continue to recoil from the practical world of concrete experience.6 Isabel occupies, in fact, the very space specified by the preface as the location of her germination and generation. Any movement from the “ideal” to the “real,” for both character and narrative (author), is fraught with danger: realizations entail loss, disappointment, and death. Isabel is “natural” and ideal not least, of course, because she is unmarried; and her commitment to remaining so marks her unconventional, aberrant, condition. Resisting marriage, as she does until encountering Osmond, Isabel is initially detached from the plot awaiting most women in the nineteenth century and beyond; in the corresponding metafictional mode, the novel has found a temporary strategy for freeing itself from the popular, conventional, and mechanical. In an exchange with Ralph Touchett, Isabel establishes her precise position: “You talk about one’s soaring and sailing, but if one marries at all one touches the earth” ( James 1985: 549). There is also Madame Merle’s rueful conviction that “a woman, it seems to me, has no natural place anywhere; wherever she finds herself she has to remain on the surface and, more or less, to crawl” ( James 1985: 392). Necessarily, then, the question of Isabel’s development at the thematic and narrative levels is attended by menacing and predatory images of her containment: she begins by seeking to preserve a freedom whose metafictional correlative is James’s insistence on the superiority of character over plot. When Warburton, for example, takes his prosaic interest in developing Isabel by proposing marriage, she sees herself as “some wild caught creature in a vast cage” ( James 2003: 162).7 Similarly, whereas Isabel’s enthusiasm is for independent development (a pleonasm in this novel), the speculation is nevertheless that Caspar Goodwood might “some day prove a sort of blessing in disguise – a clear and quiet harbour,

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enclosed by a brave granite breakwater” ( James 1985: 421). (I shall return to Goodwood and his harbour at the end of the essay.) Osmond, in language that connotes the mechanical and menacing transposition of the sexual act (integral, of course, to Isabel’s parodic felix culpa,8 her encounter with experience and knowledge), describes himself as being “as rusty as a key that has no lock to fit it” ( James 1985: 456). Appropriately enough, after formulaically informing Isabel that he is “thoroughly in love” ( James 1985: 509) with her, there appears, in the New York Edition at least, a phallic-charged image of incarceration: “[t]he tears came into [her] eyes: this time they obeyed the sharpness of the pang that suggested to her somehow the slipping of a fine bolt – backward, forward, she couldn’t have said which” ( James 2003: 360).9 When there is something like a full realization (in all available senses) of the circumstances, Isabel sees “this rigid system closing about her, draped though it was in pictured tapestries, that sense of darkness and suffocation . . . took possession of her; she seemed to be shut up with an odour of mould and decay” ( James 1985: 635–6). Arising in a conversation between Madame Merle and Isabel is the whole question of the unsatisfactory nature of any realizations of the ideal, of its materialization and production, and the extent to which self-expression is determined by externals. James struggles in his preface to reassert for his character and novel the very spontaneity and freedom denied to Isabel by the plot. If James rejects the character-compelling nature of fiction always ultimately constituted by the mechanics of a plot, Isabel, egotistical and self-absorbed, cannot acknowledge that she is a function of her relations with others and that life is an affair of limiting entanglements. She dismisses Madame Merle’s contention that “every human being has his shell . . . the whole envelope of circumstances. There is no such thing as an isolated man or woman” and goes on to deny, as she clings to her prelapsarian innocence, that her “clothes” are expressive ( James 1985: 397): “I don’t know whether I succeed in expressing myself, but I know that nothing else expresses me. Nothing that belongs to me is any measure of me; on the contrary it’s a limit, a barrier, and a perfectly arbitrary one” ( James 1985: 398). Once married, Mrs. Osmond encounters and is shaped by frames in abundance, boundaries, and rigidities of all kinds. Far from being an autonomous individual with organic imperatives, by then, there is “something fixed and mechanical” in her expression ( James 1985: 596). Predictably enough, the rhetoric of Isabel’s representation after her marriage is that of production, the mechanical, art, and the artificial: “Now, at all events, framed in the gilded doorway, she struck” Rosier “as the picture of a gracious lady” ( James 1985: 570). How cluttered she now is with those clothes whose function as an expression of identity she earlier sought to repudiate: “Her light step drew a mass of drapery behind it; her intelligent head sustained a majesty of ornament. The free, keen girl had become quite another person” ( James 1985: 597). Again, the sexual metaphors are cumulatively potent in this narrative of Isabel’s development towards completion. For Osmond, the sexual act involves a destructive penetration of appearances and an arrival at carnal knowledge; and to clamor for freedom is futile and pretentious: “But she was, after all, herself – she couldn’t help

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that; and now there was no use pretending, playing a part, for he knew her and he had made up his mind” ( James 1985: 630). By contrast with the terms on which she is launched, Isabel is described as “a woman who knew that she had thrown away her life” ( James 1985: 638); now, she says, “I enjoy things when they are done; but I have no ideas. I can never propose anything” ( James 1985: 588). More pointedly, “she had lost her illusions” ( James 1985: 712). The world of Isabel’s habitation has been a figment of her imagination, a world of no substance. She is as much a function of the intrigues and productive capacities of others as ( James’s denials notwithstanding) characters in novels are determined by an existing archive of plot and genre. Isabel has portrayed Osmond in self-serving ways that become self-destructive; and this is a thematization of James’s deceptions about the plot-generating potential of character in his “The Art of Fiction” and the novel’s preface. The ambiguity of the novel’s title, which proposes a commentary on James’s way with Isabel, is highly significant. Osmond is the ill-conceived and badly executed portrait of a lady: “[s]he had not read him right. A certain combination of features had touched her, and in them she had seen the most striking of portraits” ( James 1985: 631).10 Freedom and self-determination, together with the idea that an author is at liberty to introduce a character into a narrative environment and watch her organic development, are chimeras: it is in the realms of mechanism and death that certainties dwell. Isabel is likened to an Eve, her taking of the fruit, and the original sin that propelled humankind from innocence into experience. Osmond – “[t]he finest – in the sense of being the subtlest – manly organism she had ever known” – had, Isabel initially believed, “become her property,” and the “recognition of her having but to put out her hands and take it had been originally a sort of act of devotion” ( James 2003: 477).11 Isabel is a long way here from the illusions fostered by the New York Edition preface where plots and intrigues are made to seem entirely peripheral to the importance of character and any merely “superadded” machinations ( James 1934: 42). Isabel, because no longer (as she wanted to imagine it) an end in herself, but merely a means towards the ends of others, is now more a mechanical entity than the organism the preface attempts to reconstruct: “She saw . . . the dry, staring fact that she had been a dull unreverenced” tool ( James 1985: 759).12 Mechanical imagery replaces the natural and the organic as her ideals, in the process of realization are, unavoidably, conventionalized, and as James’s theory of the novel comes under scrutiny and revision in its execution. The ranking of the organic above the mechanical, or of freedom above necessity, is central to “The Art of Fiction”; and it is this ordering, thematically, that The Portrait of a Lady reverses: Many people speak of [the novel] as a factitious, artificial, form, a product of ingenuity, the business of which is to alter and arrange the things that surround us, to translate them into the conventional, traditional moulds. This, however, is a view of the matter which carries us but a very short way, condemns the art to an eternal repetition of a few familiar clichés, cuts short its development, and leads us straight up to a dead wall. ( James 1984a: 397–8)

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Originally ideal and idealistic, free, and spontaneous, it is to this “dead wall” that Isabel is led as the novel demonstrates both the impossibility of arrogating character over plot and the inevitability of compromise and worse in the world of experience: “[s]he had suddenly found the infinite vista of a multiplied life to be a dark, narrow alley, with a dead wall at the end” ( James 1985: 629). I have already drawn attention to the reconstructive efforts of the preface: the attempts made there, that is, to recuperate organicist notions of character. In this respect, the following two passages can tellingly be juxtaposed; the first is from the preface, the second from the text of The Portrait of a Lady itself: The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million – a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather; every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will. These apertures, of dissimilar shape and size, hang so, all together, over the human scene. . . . They are but windows at the best, mere holes in a dead wall, disconnected, perched aloft; they are not hinged doors opening straight upon life . . . they are, singly or together, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher – without, in other words, the consciousness of the artist. ( James 1984c: 1075) Now that she was in the secret, now that she knew something that so much concerned her, and the eclipse of which had made life resemble an attempt to play whist with an imperfect pack of cards, the truth of things, their mutual relations, their meaning, and for the most part their horror, rose before her with a kind of architectural vastness. . . . All purpose, all intention, was suspended; all desire, too, save the single desire to reach her richly-constituted refuge. Gardencourt had been her starting-point, and to those muffled chambers it was at least a temporary solution to return. ( James 1985: 768–9)13

Isabel’s fate is to confront a “dead wall” ( James 1985: 629) and enter a world of “[d]isconnected visions” ( James 1985: 768); the fate of the narrative is to discover not only the power of plot over character James struggles to disavow paratextually, but the power of age-old forms of fictional and social entrapment for women embodied and encoded in marriage. The process in which Isabel, author, and reader are involved is identified in part by Pierre Macherey: “When we explain the work, instead of ascending to a hidden centre which is the source of life (the interpretative fallacy is organicist and vitalist), we perceive its actual decentred-ness” (Macherey 1978: 79). Ironically, given the arduous work of the preface in a contrary direction, The Portrait of a Lady testifies to James’s contention in “Guy de Maupassant” that “the work is often so much more intelligent than the doctrine” ( James 1984b: 521). The Portrait of a Lady is rendered incoherent, and therefore interesting, by an underpinning theory it eventually, to use Wayne C. Booth’s concept, “overstands.”14 In “Guy de Maupassant,” James fully acknowledges that theory, character, and characters realized have an uneasy, even destructive, set of relations: “There is many a creator of living figures whose friends . . . will do well to pray for him when he sallies forth into the dim

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wilderness of theory” ( James 1984b: 521). We are at a bleak distance here from “The Art of Fiction” and its apparent confidence in the agency of character.15 Pierre Macherey offers a revealing perspective on these complex interchanges between theory and practice, writing and reading, and the dependence of (fictional) texts on silence or non-realization: There is a profound difference between the vague language of the imagination and that of the text; within the limits of the text this language is in several senses deposited (fallen, forsaken and gathered). The literary work interrupts and solidifies the apparent motion of the former – in which words are moved to no purpose; in this space where language confronts itself, is constructed that true distance which is the condition of any real progression – the discourse of the book. Determinate reverie: a true and necessary fiction, making its way to a specific destination. This is why, once again, there is little point in denouncing the myth which would endow the book with a semblance of life. Since it is built from the formless language of illusion, the book revolves around this myth; but in the process of its formation the book takes a stand regarding this myth, exposing it. (Macherey 1978: 63)

“The Art of Fiction,” the preface, and Isabel have the “vague language of the imagination” in common, a language much concerned with a “semblance of life.” Once that language is “deposited” into the text of the novel, it becomes post-lapsarian (“fallen, forsaken and gathered”); and solidification and purpose, an arrest of motion, come into play. The reluctant discovery (for Isabel and James) is that “character” is only a “potential story,” and that “every new character signifies a new plot” (Todorov 1977: 70). As a “pure concept[tion]” (Kant 1972: 71) – of James’s and of her own – Isabel can occupy a fragile position as an unfettered entity; once she is developed and develops, she inevitably enters the world of appearances, or representation. “[N]ecessity will attach to all connections of cause and effect in the sensuous world,” for “freedom can” only “be granted to the cause which is itself not an appearance” (Kant 1972: 85).16 For Isabel, her famous fireside vigil (chapter 42), in which she reflects on the webs in which she is caught, is a kind of “determinate reverie” (Macherey 1978: 63). In the process of this vigil, and beyond, the myth of life at the text’s margins of organicist discourse is exposed. It is Ralph who delivers that judgment on Isabel first made by James in his notebook ( James 1987: 15): “You wanted to look at life for yourself – but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the conventional!” ( James 1985: 785). Both in “life” – in terms of realism, or an illusion of the real – and as a character in the discourse of the novel, Isabel is now conventionally constituted, complete and, therefore, as lifeless for James as the character he dismisses in Alphonse Daudet’s Fromont Jeune for being “a mechanical doll with nothing of the imagination to take hold of” ( James 1984b: 224). From their inception, Isabel’s ambitions in the direction of choice and agency are authorial in proportions. But her “house of fiction” becomes the “house of darkness,

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the house of dumbness, the house of suffocation” ( James 1985: 633). Gardencourt, for Isabel, is a crucial element of the narrative’s symbolic infrastructure over which she seeks to assume control. It is Osmond, however, who frequently occupies the position of the author, or surrogate author: that of the “watcher” with the “consciousness of the artist”: “Osmond’s beautiful mind, indeed, seemed to peep down from a small high window and mock at her” ( James 1985: 33). In this cleft James’s own investment in Osmond’s subjugation of Isabel appears: Osmond, and ultimately James, cannot countenance rivals, let alone the idea of any kind of female creativity. The Portrait of a Lady arranges a final recuperation of Isabel’s limitable powers of imagination and of its own textual “life” as it attempts to reinscribe the terms on which organicist discourse might “live”: the spinning of a life-saving fiction of renunciation predicated on absence, denial, and negation.17 These terms, however, serve to render Isabel’s situation, and that of the aesthetic by which she is constituted, dire indeed. As a prelude to contemplating this situation, it is salutary to consider a few aspects of the huge terrain of which it is a part. Immanuel Kant’s concept of “appearances” implies an inaccessible realm of the objective whose secrets – “too deeply buried for our investigation” – it constructs by keeping. Better, perhaps, that inaccessibility than a paralyzing realization that human experience – conventional, mechanical, and everywhere determined – offers only the appearance of independence and free agency. Better still is Kant’s commitment, in the interests of mystification, to the possibility of a common principle for the mechanical and seemingly organic (vital, spontaneous, free) dimensions of the world and its experiencing subjects: “[t]he principle common to the mechanical derivation, on the one hand, and the teleological, on the other, is the supersensible. . . . But of this we are unable from a theoretical point of view to form the slightest possible determinate conception.” The principle is common to the phenomenal and transphenomenal: it presupposes “a supersensible ground” and thereby offers the possibility of a reconciliation of the two. The tangled skeins of organicist discourse, including scientific and philosophical approaches to the problem of how to define life, have always traded in secrets and the unknowable, depth and the concealed: “[w]hen I speak of objects in time and space, it is not of things in themselves, of which I know nothing, but of things in appearance, i.e. of experience, as a particular way of cognizing objects which is only affordable to man” (Kant 1972: 82). The “idea” of the “thing in itself” has “certainly to be introduced on the basis of the possibility of . . . objects of experience, although it cannot itself be elevated or extended into a cognition” (Kant 1928: I: 13). In such a discourse, “[a]nimals species differ at their peripheries, and resemble each other at their” unspecifiable, indeterminable, unlocatable “centres; they are connected by the inaccessible, and separated by the apparent” (Foucault 1970: 267). George Henry Lewes consigned life to the “unknowable,” its being “one of the many mysteries surrounding us” which “cannot be unveiled” (Lewes 1869: II: 46). The French anatomist and biologist Xavier Bichat was keen to restrict the reach of his analysis and, significantly, he expressed such restrictions in terms of veils, reading, and the forbidden: “[s]o narrow indeed are the

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limits of human understanding, that the knowledge of first causes has almost always been interdicted. The veils, which cover them, envelopes with its innumerable folds whoever attempt to read it” (Bichat 1824a: 422–3). Bichat’s ultimate exploration was of “the limits of every organized part,” the nature of their “textures” remaining “unknown” (Bichat 1824b: I: lv). For Berzelius, “the chain of experience must always end in something inconceivable,” but “unfortunately, the inconceivable something acts the principal part.” Such a “something” is twice-removed, being both “inconceivable” and “deeply hidden from our view” (Berzelius 1818: 5, 8). Claude Bernard, whose understanding of human beings in terms of scientific investigation would be so important to naturalist theories of fiction, acknowledged his boundaries, observing that the “manifestations of life cannot be wholly elucidated by the physio-chemical phenomena known in inorganic nature.” Even more strikingly, he approached the entity of life itself as a discursive formation: “[t]he words life, death, health, disease, have no objective reality. When a physiologist calls in vital force of life, he does not see it; he merely pronounces a word” (Bernard 1949: 68). Vital “causes” were simply supposed by Bichat – “let us suppose causes, and attach ourselves to their general result” (Bernard 1949: 79) – and regarded, by Bernard, as “just a kind of medical superstition” (Bernard 1949: 68). For Lewes in theory, and Isabel Archer in practice, life “is a fiction; but we do not on that account reject it. Fictions are potent. . . . This fiction has been tested, and has proved a failure. Nevertheless it has left behind it a convenient phrase” (Lewes 1869: II: 46). Kant dogmatically asserted – proscribing in the process any attempt to gain knowledge of this kind – that it is “quite certain that we can never get a sufficient knowledge of organized beings and their inner possibility, much less get an explanation of them, by looking merely to the mechanical principles of nature.” This pursuit is “absurd”; and “such insight we must absolutely deny to mankind” (Kant 1928: II: 54). The resonance here is of that primal injunction against the “tree of knowledge” and death in Genesis 2: 17).18 Examined too deeply, there is an equivalence between “life” and “death,” in terms of essential mechanism, which organicist discourse (the main constituent of James’s “The Art of Fiction” and the preface to The Portrait of a Lady, at least) works to defer and conceal. Unsurprisingly, Kant quotes with approval the inscription on the Temple of Isis: “I am all that is, and that was, and shall be, and no mortal hath raised the veil of my face” (Kant 1928: I: 179n). Confining the imagination, denying access to knowledge, and arguing for the ultimate imponderability of life imply (respectively) absolute realms beyond, the possibility of complete knowledge, and powerful secrets. The intersection is between the present, contingent, and apparent, and the absent, incontingent, and real. Life is possible, bearable, significant, and even interesting, not for what it is, but for what it is not. Renunciation and denial, and negative definitions of what life is or might be, return us to The Portrait of a Lady itself. Isabel’s refusal of Lord Warburton’s offer towards the outset of the novel is important not least because it represents a rejection of a conventional romance, with its plot revolving around the marriage of an American “innocent” to an English aristocrat.

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Isabel’s reach extends way beyond her grasp as she moves towards the empowering, compensatory, possibilities of an unhappiness and suffering whose formal correlatives at the end of the novel are tragedy and a lack of closure. If life is what it is not, rather than what it is, then the illusion of being able to grasp can in part be preserved by not reaching out and by not grasping.19 The consequence of marrying Warburton, Isabel believes at this stage, would be that of being quarantined “[f]rom the usual chances and dangers, from what most people know and suffer” ( James 1985: 327). Isabel yearns, as James does for his novel in its preface, to develop from within, to resist artifice and the artificial, and to see life as an affair of spontaneity and choice. The irony is that in avoiding a marriage with Warburton, Isabel is released only into exercising her imagination, facilitated by Ralph, in the direction of constructing a complex set of previously inconceivable determinants.20 Unable or unwilling to recognize his simple constitution as a vengeful fortune-hunter, she constructs a fantastical Gilbert Osmond who eventually becomes the principal means by which she achieves, dubiously, a life-affirming renunciation. Like Bichat, Berzelius, and Lewes, for three, her sense of life is contingent on acknowledging that any analysis of it must be bounded. Until her ultimate rejection of Goodwood and her imaginative (imaginary) securing of an alternative life not pursued, direct suffering and experience displace mere observation and imitations of experience. But Isabel’s initiating rejection of Warburton is also important because it signifies a freedom to choose predicated on denial, surrender, and absence. The outcome of the novel is a measure of how unacquainted with her own “nature” and the structure of the processes of imagination and freedom Isabel earlier was when she declared that “[i]t’s not my fate to give up – I know it can’t be” ( James 1985: 326). By definition, the arena of the imagination, like that of the philosophical and scientific accounts of life outlined above, is that of absence, the unknown, and what is not chosen; its canons are those of concealment, illusion, ignorance, and denial, rather than those of revelation, truth, and knowledge. The novel comes full circle with Isabel’s return to Gardencourt; or rather, Isabel journeys merely to the physical place where she began, for in reality hers is a spiral movement from innocence to the higher plane of experience.21 Away from Italy, Isabel seems once more to be in a position where she is free to choose. As Goodwood observes: “It’s too late to play a part; didn’t you leave all that behind you in Rome?” ( James 1985: 797). The renewed struggle, however, is yet again to avoid being in a text written by others. Isabel’s return to Italy is a denial of an alternative life, of an apparently unconventional kind, with Goodwood. More urgently, it is the conversion of a potential determinant into an absent alternative against which the life of the present – an illusion, that is, of its being freely chosen – can be defined. There is a perfect fit between Isabel’s position and Althusser’s account of the subject as a “subjected being . . . stripped of all freedom except that of freely accepting his submission” (Althusser 1971: 169). Ultimately, or penultimately at least, and at the second attempt, the appearance is that of Isabel’s locating a form of expression, or non-expression, whose syntax is that

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of the via negativa: appropriately enough, in the garden where she first sought an independent life, the temptation of Goodwood’s tree of knowledge is resisted in favor of the cup of Gethsemane; the meshes of Ralph’s posthumous schemes are avoided. When Judas kisses Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, it initiates (within a Puritan, Christian, discourse) redemptive suffering, resignation, and death; this is also Isabel’s trajectory as she locates hers and America’s Puritan origins. Goodwood’s kiss – Is it only a kiss? Is there a more erotic moment in the James corpus? – supplies Isabel with her vector.22 She shrinks from this sexual encounter – anchored as all such encounters are in the deep structure of knowledge, carnal knowledge, and the loss of appearances and life-enabling fictions – partly because her appetite for knowledge, and especially the ur-knowledge of sex, has always been self-protectively low in the extreme: He glared at her a moment through the dusk, and the next instant she felt his arms about her, and his lips on her own lips. His kiss was like a flash of lightning; when it was dark again she was free. . . . His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed; and it was extraordinarily as if, while she took it, she felt each thing in his hard manhood that had pleased her, each aggressive fact of his face, his figure, his presence, justified of its intense identity and made one with this act of possession. . . . But when darkness returned she was free. . . . She had not known where to turn; but she knew now. There was a very straight path. ( James 2003: 635–6)23

Twice in the novel James echoes “the world was all before them” of Milton’s Paradise Lost, thereby reinforcing the Isabel-Eve analogue and compelling the reader to consider paradises lost, if not regained.24 The first occurrence is before Isabel’s marriage, when she seems (as a result of her inheritance, at least) to have immense freedom: “The world lay before her – she could do whatever she chose” ( James 1985: 522). The second is in Gardencourt’s composite of the biblical gardens of Eden and Gethsemane when Goodwood tells her that “[t]he world is all before us – and the world is very large” ( James 1985: 798).25 Contraction rather than expansion, however, is now the issue for Isabel as she flees from experience in a desperate attempt to recover some form of lost innocence. Knowledge, experience, sex, and indeed life itself, are simply grist for her tragic mill. When Isabel earlier sought to exercise her imagination, the narrator had nothing but satirical observations to make; now that she is bound for a life of renunciation, now that she occupies as a woman the familiar terrain of misfortune, and tragedy, she is readily endorsed.26 If independent life for Isabel began with refusing Warburton’s proposal, then a concentration on her rejection of Goodwood rather than on accepting her fate with Osmond allows at least an illusion of its continuing. This is the sense in which Goodwood has proved to be, as Isabel earlier suspected he would, “a sort of blessing in disguise – a clear and quiet harbour, enclosed by a brave granite breakwater” ( James 1985: 421).27 Isabel’s “life,” then, is not an affair of being and doing, but one of not

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being and not doing. Expression and realization are allies of death, rather than life; life is best defined in terms of what is not, or cannot, be expressed and realized. Until meeting Osmond, Isabel is not-Lady-Warburton; now, in effect, she can be not-Mrs.Goodwood rather than simply, if at all in reality, Mrs. Osmond. The homologies are with those strategies identified in organicist discourse for denying, in the interests of saving appearances, any knowledge of what life is, for regarding vital principles as absent, or necessarily concealed, rather than present or revealable. Incoherent, perilous, and insubstantial as it is, the negative construction is of some kind of life-enabling fiction, of a paradise regained.28 Significantly, Isabel’s initial sense of life is defined in terms of circumscribed knowledge, ignorance, and essential secrets. She “had no wish to look out, for this would have interfered with her theory that there was a strange, unseen place on the other side” ( James 1985: 214). Even more tellingly, the commentary later has it that “[w]ith all her love of knowledge, Isabel had a natural shrinking from raising curtains and looking into unlighted corners. The love of knowledge coexisted in her mind with a still tenderer love of ignorance” ( James 1985: 395). The principle is one observed by Gaston Bachelard: “There will always be more things in a closed, than in an open, box. To verify images kills them, and it is always more enriching to imagine than to experience” (Bachelard 1969: 88). It is not only, I would argue, the capacity to “see through all false appearances” (Tanner 1965: 218) that frames James’s artistic vision, but the ability after such seeing to construct the death-deferring fictions that obstruct knowledge. In the fate of Isabel, then, the novel can be seen as deconstructing the theory of plot-generating, independent and vital character, and the specious sense of life on which it depends, a theory that the preface to the novel seeks to recuperate. At Gardencourt-Gethsemane, though, as distinct from Gardencourt-Eden, life is hollowed out as no more, at best, than a painful fiction.

Notes 1

Armstrong engages aspects of the phenomenological and proto-existentialist texture of the novel in a powerful reading whose focus, in part, is on how Isabel “can transcend the bondage of a sick soul without reverting to the fallacies of her demand for independence” (Armstrong 1983: 121); this takes the argument away from my terrain of freedom and the illusion of a vital realism into questions of “intersubjectivity” and “care” (Armstrong 1983: 135). 2 Contrast Todorov: “If the two are indissolubly linked, one is more important than the other

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nonetheless – character, that is, characterization, that is, psychology” (Todorov 1977: 66). Mrs. Touchett “rescues” Isabel from her New York life; Ralph persuades his father to change the Will, but he agrees to do so; Madame Merle brings Osmond and Isabel together; Osmond ensnares Isabel, but the plot is also Madame Merle’s; even Henrietta Stackpole plays a part, along with Caspar Goodwood; and on it goes. Isabel, of course, insists on her own agency notwithstanding the “mill of the conventional” ( James 1987: 15) in which she has actually been ground.

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At the end of the eighteenth century, it became common for German philosophers such as Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845) to insist on the distinction between “mechanical” and “organic” form. This distinction had a strong influence on the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) and found its way into American thinking largely through the writings of the New England essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82). Where the form is mechanical, the parts of any object (such as a watch) are brought together from the outside by some external agent and the object is simply the sum of its parts. As Coleridge expressed it: “The form is mechanic, when on any given material we impress a pre-determined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material . . . The organic form, on the other hand is innate; it shapes, as it develops, itself from within” (Coleridge 1883: 229). If the form is organic (as in a tree), the object (or organism) develops from some central point in the subject itself and is not shaped by outside considerations; and, as James says in “The Art of Fiction,” in “each of the parts there is something of each of the other parts” ( James 1984a: 54). An organism, unlike a mechanism, is a whole which is greater than the sum of its parts. For James, this became the most important model for the structure of the novel. It is one of the aspects of his thinking on which the New Critics pounced. For a discussion of these issues see Rawlings (2006) and Wellek (1965). With one or two exceptions which are clearly indicated, references are to the original 1881 edition of the novel as reprinted in the Library of America Henry James: Novels, 1881–1886 (1985), and not to the New York revision (1907–9). The proximity of the first edition of the novel to the 1884 “The Art of Fiction,” and its comparative distance from the New York preface, is crucial to the architecture of my argument. In keeping with this, Isabel chooses books by their frontispieces ( James 1985: 214), so nearly their covers; and her grandmother’s furniture, as a metonym of Isabel’s attach-

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ment to surfaces and concealment, is shrouded in the “brown Holland” much used at the time for book covers ( James 1985: 333). This New York Edition revision of the 1881 “led captive” ( James 1985: 302) emphasizes yet further Isabel’s determination at this juncture to resist Warburton’s power to limit her freedom. Felix culpa literally means “happy fault”; allusively the phrase refers to Adam and Eve’s Fall in the Garden of Eden, a sin which resulted in the happy consequence of redemption. This is much less menacing in the 1881 text: “The tears came into Isabel’s eyes – they were caused by an intenser throb of that pleasant pain I spoke of a moment ago” ( James 1985: 509). Buchanan, in identifying “two incarnations of the title” – “Isabel Archer from her first appearances” and “that unhappy possession of Osmond’s ‘dressed in black velvet’” – overlooks the fact that Isabel also paints (Buchanan 1995: 129). The imagery of the original sin is less pronounced in the 1881 version: “The finest individual she had ever known was hers; the simple knowledge was a sort of act of devotion” (James 1985: 632). Or as the New York Edition has it: “She saw . . . the dry staring fact that she had been an applied handled hung-up tool, as senseless and convenient as mere shaped wood and iron” ( James 2003: 598). In his The Critique of Judgment, Immanuel Kant envisaged a “kingdom of ends” (Kant 1928: 110) in which, he earlier argued in the Critique of Practical Reason, as “man (and every rational being) is an end-in himself,” he is “never . . . to be used as a means for someone (even for God) without at the same time being himself an end” (Kant 1956: 136). For Kant, humans are organisms by virtue of being ends, and are final rather than effective causes. By analogy, James seeks to privilege character over plot to convey a sense of the novel’s vitality and organic, inner-directed, structure. But the freedom Isabel initially envisages and, correspondingly, the freedom James attributes to the novel form, is not available

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Peter Rawlings in Kant’s variety of the “German Thought” over whose “sandy plains” Isabel “trudge[ed]” in New York ( James 1985: 215). Or rather, it is restricted to the realm of the noumena (things in themselves) (Kant 1972: 84). “We can,” announces Kant lugubriously, “find no concept of freedom suitable to purely rational beings” (Kant 1972: 85n). Isabel, in earlier denying that clothes “express” (James 1985: 397) her, clings on to an essential sense of self that Kant disallows in the world of appearances and representation to which he sees mortals as necessarily confined: the “ego . . . is only the indication of the object of the internal sense” (Kant 1972: 75), and this “internal state” is merely an “appearance” (Kant 1972: 77–8). There is an incisive discussion of architectural imagery and The Portrait of a Lady in Coulson (2007). In The Company We Keep: The Ethics of Fiction, Booth identifies “three kinds of question: those that the object seems to invite me to ask; those that it will tolerate or respond to, even though perhaps reluctantly; and those that violate its own interests or effort to be a given kind of thing in the world.” It is the third question that entails “overstanding” or “violating” a text or theory (Booth 1988: 90). “What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?” ( James 1984a: 55). “[A]ll the actions of rational beings, so far as they are appearances (encountered in some experience), are subject to the necessity of nature; but the same actions, as regards merely the rational subject and its faculty of acting according to mere reason, are free” (Kant 1972: 86). William Dean Howells regarded the reader as the “arbiter of the destiny of the author’s creations” (Howells 1882: 28), and critics have seized on this duty towards Isabel with such alacrity that it is impossible to give anything other than an indication of some of the critical lines pursued. Kettle remarks that “when Isabel takes her decision to return to Rome the dominant sense is not of the waste

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and degradation of a splendid spirit, but of a kind of inverted triumph” (Kettle 1953: II: 34). For Poirier, renunciation is the means by which Isabel ultimately exercises her freedom: it “becomes a form of indifference to the fact that returning to Rome will, as Caspar admonishes, cost her her life” (Poirier 1960: 246); all this is evidence of James’s “unorganized sense of the connection between sexual psychology, on the one hand, and, on the other, the desire for freedom and death” (Poirier 1960: 245). “Spiritual suicide,” by contrast, is the phrase used by Montgomery; and she regards Isabel’s flight from Gardencourt as a “romantically conceived unhappy ending” which “appears unjustified” (Montgomery 1968: 64). Geismar sees the final pages of the novel as exhibiting a defining Jamesian trait: Isabel is free “to continue her solitary existence of suffering, the pursuit of her own heightened sensibility at the expense of all common human pleasure” and to return to the “one man who would never awaken her” (Geismar 1964: 46–7). Isabel Archer’s escape, for Dupee, is from “the innocence of imagining that you can do what you like, the innocence of inexperience” (Dupee 1951: 123). Sabiston suggests that “[e]very reader has his own theory as to why Isabel returns to Osmond . . . existential commitment, flight from Caspar Goodwood, fidelity to the marriage bond, the protection of Pansy, the belief that Isabel, like Strether in The Ambassadors, must gain nothing for herself – it remains evident that she is spiritually free and launched on a life of fine perception” (Sabiston 1986: 42). In a shrewd reading of the novel, Jöttkandt argues that in “[r]epeating her choice, Isabel acts in an unprecedented fashion, testifying, in the sole manner available to her, to her absolute freedom of choice” (Jöttkandt 2004: 85). “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Genesis 2: 17). “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what’s a heaven for?” (Browning 1940: 433).

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In a rather different formulation, Santos argues that by going back to Osmond, Isabel invests “with freedom, retrospectively, her initially determined, conditioned choice” (Santos 1987: 309). For Jöttkandt, however, this choice represents “something more fundamental (and paradoxical), namely, the phenomenal expression of the original free choice by which she first chose her destination” (Jöttkandt 2004: 83). For an account of this romantic spiral in James, see Fogel (1981). Fogel draws, in part, on Abrams: “[i]n the most representative Romantic version of emanation and return, when the process reverts to its beginning the recovered unity is not, as in the school of Plotinus, the simple, undifferentiated unity of its origin, but a unity which is higher, because it incorporates the intervening differentiations. ‘We have now returned,’ as Hegel said in a comment which was added to the conclusion of his shorter Logic, ‘to the notion of the Idea with which we began,’ but ‘this return to the beginning is also an advance.’ The self-moving circle, in other words, rotates along a third, a vertical dimension, to close where it had begun, but on a higher plane of value” (Abrams 1971: 183–4). I would challenge the passivity and timorousness to which Fischer consigns Isabel as a consequence of this kiss: “[s]he flees from this revealing, illuminating light [the “white lightning” of the kiss] back to the security of the house” in Rome, a house which “ulti-

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mately becomes a palimpsest of refuge, physical reality, and Osmond’s mind” (Fischer 1986: 55). James felt less able to charge the passage so erotically in the coyer year of 1881: “His kiss was like a flash of lightning; when it was dark again she was free. . . . She had not known where to turn; but she knew now. There was a very straight path” (James 1985: 799). “The world was all before them, where to choose / Their place of rest . . .” (Milton 1990: 441). See Weisbuch (1998) for an excellent analysis of some of the novel’s Miltonic dimensions. For a rather different consideration of The Portrait of a Lady and gardens, see Buitenhuis (1986). In his “Framing James’s Portrait: An Introduction,” Fogel concentrates on “the complex ambivalence of the narrator’s view” of Isabel “and, even more, of the author’s” (Fogel 1986: 1). McFadden’s emphasis on Goodwood’s “aggression” as the reason why Isabel returns to Rome strikes me as an oversimplification (McFadden 1988: 214). The paradigm for these fictions is the “as if” maneuvers made by Kant, Jeremy Bentham, and others. “The expression suited to our feeble concepts,” wrote Kant in his Prolegomena, is that we conceive the world as if [original emphasis] it came . . . from a Supreme Reason” (Kant 1972: 99). On this paradigm, see Vaihinger (1935) and Rawlings (2005, especially the afterword).

References and Further Reading Abrams, M. H. (1971). Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Althusser, Louis (1971). “Ideology and ideological state apparatuses (notes towards an investigation).” In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (pp. 121–73). (Ben Brewster, Trans.) London: Verso. Original work published 1970.

Armstrong, Paul B. (1983). The Phenomenology of Henry James. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Bachelard, Gaston (1969). The Poetics of Space. (Maria Jolas, Trans.) Boston: Beacon. Original work published 1958. Bernard, Claude (1949). An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine. (Henry Copley Greene,

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Trans.) New York: Schuman. Original work published 1865. Berzelius, Jöns Jacob (1818). A View of the Progress and Present State of Animal Chemistry. (Gustaus Brunmark, Trans.) London: Hatchard. Original work published 1810. Bichat, Marie François Xavier (1824a). Physological Researches on Life and Death (1815). Vol. 2. (F. Gold, Trans.) London: Longmans. Original work published 1810. Bichat, Marie François Xavier (1824b). General Anatomy: Applied to Physiology and to the Practice of Medicine. 2 vols. (Constant Coffyn, Trans.) London: n.p. Original work published 1801. Booth, Wayne C. (1988). The Company We Keep: The Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press. Browning, Robert (1940). “Andrea del Sarto.” The Poetical Works of Robert Browning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Buchanan, D. (1995). “‘The candlestick and the snuffers’: Some thoughts on The Portrait of a Lady.” Henry James Review, 16: 121–30. Buitenhuis, Peter (1986). “Americans in European gardens.” Henry James Review, 7: 124–30. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1883). Lectures and Notes on Shakspere and other English Poets. Ed. T. Ashe. G. Bell and Sons: London. Coulson, Victoria (2007). “Prisons, palaces, and the architecture of the imagination.” In Peter Rawlings (ed.) Palgrave Advances in Henry James Studies. Palgrave Advances Series (pp. 169–91). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Crasnow, Ellman (1984). “James as Janus: Opposition and economy.” In Ian F. A. Bell (ed.) Henry James: Fiction as History (pp. 137–55). London: Vision. Dupee. F. W. (1951). Henry James. London: Methuen. Fischer, Sandra K. (1986). “Isabel Archer and the enclosed chamber: A phenomenological reading.” Henry James Review, 7: 48–58. Fogel, Daniel Mark (1981). Henry James and the Structure of the Romantic Imagination. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Fogel, Daniel Mark (1986). “Framing James’s Portrait: An introduction.” Henry James Review, 7: 1–8.

Foucault, Michel (1970). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Tavistock. Original work published 1966. Geismar, Maxwell (1964). Henry James and His Cult. London: Chatto and Windus. Graham, Kenneth (1965). English Criticism of the Novel, 1865–1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Howells, William Dean (1882). “Henry James, Jr.” Century Illustrated Magazine (new series), 25: 25–9. James, Henry (1888). Partial Portraits. London: Macmillan. James, Henry (1896–7). “Ivan Turgenieff.” In Charles Dudley Warner (ed.) The Library of the World’s Best Literature Ancient and Modern. Vol. 24 (pp. 15057–61). New York: Peate. James, Henry (1984a). “The Art of Fiction.” In Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers. Literary Criticism (pp. 44–65). Library of America. New York: Literary Classics of the United States. Originally published 1884. James, Henry (1984b). “Alphonse Daudet” and “Guy de Maupassant.” In French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition. Literary Criticism (pp. 223–49, 521–49). Library of America. New York: Literary Classics of the United States. Originally published 1883 and 1888. James, Henry (1984c). Prefaces. The Novels and Tales of Henry James. New York Edition. French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition. Literary Criticism (pp. 1035–341). New York: Literary Classics of the United States. Originally published 1907–9. James, Henry (1985). The Portrait of a Lady. 1881. Henry James: Novels, 1881–1886 (pp. 191–800). Library of America. New York: Literary Classics of the United States. Originally published 1881. James, Henry (1987). The Complete Notebooks of Henry James. Ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. James, Henry (2003). The Portrait of a Lady. London: Penguin. Work originally published 1907–9 as part of the revised New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James.

Vital Illusions in The Portrait of a Lady Jöttkandt, Sigi (2004). “Portrait of an act: Aesthetics and ethics in The Portrait of a Lady. Henry James Review, 25: 67–86. Kant, Immanuel (1928). The Critique of Judgement. (James Creed Meredith, Trans.) 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Original work published 1790. Kant, Immanuel (1956). Critique of Practical Reason. (Lewis White Beck, Trans.) New York: Bobbs-Merrill, Original work published 1788. Kant, Immanuel (1972). Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that will be Able to Come Forward as Science. (Paul Carus, Trans. Revised by James W. Ellington.) Indianapolis: Indianapolis University Press. Original work published 1783. Kettle, Arnold (1953). An Introduction to the English Novel. 2 vols. London: Hutchinson’s University Library. Lewes, George Henry (1869). The Physiology of Common Life. Series 1. Vol. 2. Edinburgh. McFadden, George (1988). “A note on ‘Goodwood’s Lie’ in The Portrait of a Lady.” Henry James Review, 9: 212–14. Macherey, Pierre (1978). A Theory of Literary Production. (Geoffrey Wall, Trans.) London: Routledge. Original work published 1966. Martin, Wallace (1986). Recent Theories of Narrative. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Milton, John (1990). Complete English Poems, Of Education, Areopagitica. Everyman’s Library. 4th edn. London: J. M. Dent and Sons. Montgomery, Marion (1968). “The flaw in the portrait.” In Peter Buitenhuis (ed.) TwentiethCentury Interpretations of “The Portrait of a Lady”:

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A Collection of Critical Essays (pp. 60–6). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Poirier, Richard (1960). The Comic Sense of Henry James: A Study of the Early Novels. New York: Chatto and Windus. Rawlings, Peter (2005). Henry James and the Abuse of the Past. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rawlings, Peter (2006). American Theorists of the Novel: Henry James, Lionel Trilling, and Wayne C. Booth. New York: Routledge. Sabiston, Elizabeth (1986). “Isabel Archer: The architecture of consciousness and the international theme.” Henry James Review, 7: 29–47. Santos, Marie Irene Ramalho de Sousa (1987). “Isabel’s freedom: The Portrait of a Lady.” In Harold Bloom (ed.) Henry James (pp. 301–13). New York: Chelsea House. Tanner, Tony (1965). “The fearful self: Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady.” Critical Quarterly, 7: 205–19. Todorov, Tzvetan (1977). The Poetics of Prose. (Richard Howard, Trans.) Oxford: Blackwell. Vaihinger, Hans (1935). The Philosophy of “As if”: A System for the Theoretical and Religious Fictions of Mankind. (C. K. Ogden, Trans.) London: Routledge. Original work published 1911. Weisbuch, Robert (1998). “Henry James and the idea of evil.” In Jonathan Freedman (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Henry James (pp. 102– 19). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wellek, René (1965). “Henry James.” In A History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950, Vol. 4: The Later Nineteenth Century (pp. 213–37). London: Jonathan Cape.

5

The Bostonians and the Crisis of Vocation Sarah Daugherty

The Bostonians is a challenging novel. James’s own “sense of knowing terribly little about the life [he] had intended to describe” (Horne 1999: 184) was paralleled by the complaint of a suffragist reviewer who accused him of neglecting his putative topic, the women’s movement. A more accurate title, she suggested, would have been The Cranks (Habegger 1989: 228). Compounding the problems facing readers is a voluble narrator as cranky as the characters – a persona who runs the gamut from militant satire through defensive irony to genuine uncertainty. At the heart of this troubled narrative is an issue linking James with his imaginary figures: how can bourgeois intellectuals find remunerative and meaningful work in an emergent culture of capitalism? Basil Ransom aspires to be a social critic as he deploys military metaphors to compensate for his marginalization; Olive Chancellor makes a career of mentorship, only to discover its financial and psychic costs; and Verena Tarrant falls victim to a system that commodifies both women and ideas while foreclosing the possibility of political action. Despite his authorial distance, James too harbored ambitions that might be thwarted in the marketplace. As Michael Anesko explains, in the 1880s James was enjoying “the greatest popularity of his career” following the success of “Daisy Miller” and The Portrait of a Lady. Yet his future was hardly secure: editors at the Atlantic Monthly and Houghton Mifflin refused his request for higher royalties, and his composition of The Bostonians was interrupted because “want of money” obliged him to write for the newspapers (Anesko 1986: 70–80, 86). Also crucial was the pressure James exerted on himself. Anesko cites a notebook entry of 1882: I have hours of unspeakable reaction against my smallness of production; my wretched habits of work – or of un-work. . . . When I am really at work, I’m happy, I feel strong, I see many opportunities ahead. It is the only thing that makes life endurable. I must make some great efforts during the next few years, however, if I wish not to have been on the whole a failure. I shall have been a failure unless I do something great! (Anesko 1986: 81; James 1987: 232–3)

A Companion to Henry James. Edited by Greg W. Zacharias © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-14042-3

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These reflections, I would add, evoke the influence of Balzac, the prodigious worker and supremely self-confident artist who aimed at nothing less than “a complete portrait of the civilization of his time,” with an emphasis on money and sex ( James 1984b: 39, 34, 62). Particularly revealing are James’s comments, in his 1875 essay, on Balzac’s representations of “middle-class ignorance, narrowness,” and “dreariness” ( James 1984b: 56): Balzac and his comrades hate the bourgeois, in the first place, because the bourgeois hates them, and in the second place, because they are almost always fugitives from the bourgeoisie. ( James 1984b: 57)

In “The Lesson of Balzac” (1905) James would hail the French novelist as “the father of us all” ( James 1984b: 120) – a belated tribute to an author who inspired his successors to make literary capital of their antipathy to their middle-class origins.1 When The Bostonians, originally planned as a six-episode narrative for The Century Magazine, “ballooned” to thirteen installments (Anesko 1986: 85), James may have valued this affinity more than he feared the loss of formal control. Lengthy serialization (from February 1885 through February 1886) also accommodated his evolving conceptions of his characters. Basil, at first the novel’s representative man, becomes the target of satire aimed at professional failure coupled with heterosexual egotism. The characterization of Olive follows the opposite pattern as she eclipses the conventional Verena and engages the aspiring novelist. Alfred Habegger has argued that James “stands behind Basil more than the prevailing narrative tone admits” (Habegger 1989: 189). I concur, though I believe that James’s focus shifts as he represents his protagonist’s dangerous pursuit of romance and marriage. According to Habegger, the novelist was influenced by his father’s theories on gender differences (Habegger 1989: 201–8); but even more crucial, in my view, were James’s professional ambitions in an increasingly competitive economy requiring men to make their own way without paternal support. James projects Basil as an unsuccessful alter ego, a traveler on the road not taken by the creative artist. Basil’s honorable service in the Civil War recalls that of James’s younger brothers – and even the plans of the youthful Henry, who probably wanted to enlist until his back injury and his literary ambitions altered his career (Kaplan 1992: 53–6). Significantly, the narrator refuses to transcribe Basil’s Southern accent, trusting “the initiated reader” to imagine speech devoid of vulgarity ( James 1980: 2). The implied author thus distances himself and his protagonist from the stereotypes of dialect novels while creating a bond among gentlemen of discernment. Despite his provincial origins, Basil epitomizes manly virtue, becoming, “as a representative of his sex, the most important personage in my narrative” ( James 1980: 2). He appears to best advantage in front of Harvard’s Memorial Hall, “a kind of temple to youth, manhood, generosity” ( James 1980: 198). Readers, in turn, are asked to be generous to him – and to share his scorn for Verena as she denigrates the monument with “feminine logic” ( James 1980: 199).

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In the aftermath of war, the veteran is more vulnerable than his female relatives, including the mother and sisters who receive “the remnants of his patrimony.” Basil, we are told, “longed for some work which would transport him to the haunts of men” ( James 1980: 9). The position James invents for him – that of a failed lawyer who makes a mess of “small jobs” and gets cheated by his partner ( James 1980: 152) – was doubtless inspired by the author’s experience at Harvard Law School (1862–3). During his one appearance in moot court, James “quavered and collapsed into silence,” allowing his opponent an easy victory (Kaplan 1992: 58; Edel 1985: 65). Basil, too, is an “unpractical” man ( James 1980: 153) whose lack of marketable skills dooms him to isolation in New York City. In “The Jolly Corner” (1909) James would memorably project his own fear of success, but for the aspiring professional the most frightening specter in “the haunts of men” was that of failure. Again like James, Basil seeks to make a living by writing reviews for the periodicals. “Readers perhaps would come, if clients didn’t” ( James 1980: 153). But the novel satirizes the character’s un-Jamesian turn toward politics, his opinions being too outdated to be accepted by modern editors. Nonetheless, Basil’s stance recalls James’s review of Whitman’s Drum-Taps, with the critic’s ringing defense of “the grand, the heroic, and the masculine”; and Basil’s condescension toward Olive as one of “the people who take things hard” echoes James’s critiques of women’s sentimental fiction ( James 1984a: 633, 225). Also relevant is James’s literary admiration of one of Basil’s heroes, “the late Thomas Carlyle” ( James 1980: 154). In his 1883 review of Carlyle’s correspondence with Emerson (likewise published in the Century), James ignores political issues but praises Carlyle’s “inimitable use of language,” his “satiric fury,” and his impatience with “babblement” and jargon. “It is one of the strangest things,” adds James, “to find such an appreciation of silence in a mind that was, before all things, expressive” ( James 1984a: 234, 235, 244). With Carlylean panache James renders Basil’s diatribe to Verena: The whole generation is womanised; the masculine tone is passing out of the world; it’s a feminine, a nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age, an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy and exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities, which, if we don’t soon look out, will usher in the reign of mediocrity, of the feeblest and flattest and most pretentious that has ever been. The masculine character, the ability to dare and endure, to know and yet not fear reality, to look the world in the face and take it for what it is – a very queer and partly very base mixture – that is what I want to preserve, or rather, as I may say, to recover; and I must tell you that I don’t in the least care what becomes of you ladies while I make the attempt! ( James 1980: 275)

As a contributor to the Century and the North American Review, James understood the futility of Basil’s ambitions: the South had lost the cultural war, minor journals could hardly compete with major ones, and professional historians were destined to supplant Victorian men of letters. But James shared Basil’s desire for the reconstruction of masculinity in postwar culture. Initiated readers – those familiar with James’s efforts

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at cultural criticism – would have discerned the author’s bond with his hero. Uninitiated readers, particularly women who preferred love stories, would have confirmed James’s fear that serious men had been marginalized. Basil garners further sympathy as he is pursued by Mrs. Luna, the embodiment of aggressive femininity. At first she hires him as a tutor for her son, an “insufferable child” who kicks him in the shins ( James 1980: 156); then she lures him with tea by the fireside ( James 1980: 159–61). Momentarily tempted by the thought of support for his writing, Basil escapes, to recover his self-respect through planning the rescue of Verena. But the plan threatens his future along with hers. As Habegger notes, at the time of composing The Bostonians James was defending his “singleness” in letters to his friend Grace Norton, who was urging him to marry. No, replied James, citing his “prospects, tastes, means,” and “absence of desire to have children” (Habegger 1989: 204). Basil’s error is comically rendered in the scene in Central Park, when his impulse is to respond to Verena’s awkward question – “Aren’t you getting on quite well in this city?” ( James 1980: 272) – by giving her “a deliberate kiss.” Continues the narrator: If the moment I speak of had lasted a few seconds longer, I know not what monstrous proceeding of this kind it would have been my difficult duty to describe; it was fortunately arrested by the arrival of a nursery-maid pushing a perambulator and accompanied by an infant who toddled in her wake. Both the nurse and her companion gazed fixedly, and it seemed to Ransom even sternly, at the striking couple on the bench; and meanwhile Verena, looking with a quickened eye at the children (she adored children), went on – “It sounds too flat for you to talk about your remaining unheard of. Of course you are ambitious; any one can see that, to look at you . . .” ( James 1980: 273)

When one of his articles is finally accepted, Basil believes he has found his place in the world (James 1980: 302), but James and his readers know better. Ominously, Basil’s campaign to win Verena is fueled by jealousy that may result in abuse: “if he should become her husband he should know a way to strike her dumb” ( James 1980: 264). He plans his “attack” in Marmion, a mouldering seaport emblematic of the decline of men’s economic power in the North as well as the South ( James 1980: 286, 289). At the theater, he pictures himself as an assassin before using “muscular force” to wrench Verena from the women ( James 1980: 353, 370); but the real jobs belong to the policeman and the publicist. The frustrated veteran thus becomes a dangerous figure, one who undermines the popular conception (advanced by William James, among others) that military service is a “school of manly virtue” and a useful preparation for civilian life (Croce 2003: 32). Moreover, the novel makes marriage appear “odd” (Van Leer 1999: 109) – one might even say queer2 – within an economy in which a man can barely support himself. As a would-be critic, Basil loses James’s endorsement when he assumes his culturally prescribed role, ignoring its dangers and contradictions.

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The more subtle dynamics of Olive’s characterization have provoked critical disagreement. For Wendy Graham, she is a pathological figure shaped by the medical discourses of the nineteenth century; for Terry Castle and Hugh Stevens, she is a tragic heroine whose passion for Verena reflects James’s sympathy with lesbian bonds (Graham 1999: 145–76; Castle 1993: 150–85; Stevens 1998: 92–103). In my view, James’s representation of her undergoes a fundamental change that subordinates her sexuality to her social and ethical predicament. At first portrayed as a morbid special case, she increasingly typifies scrupulous persons of her class and era. Initially, the satire aimed at Olive is far more hostile than the irony at Basil’s expense. Her “silent rage” at “the usual things of life” sets her in opposition to the realism of the novel, while her status as a cold spinster suggests frigidity rather than lesbianism ( James 1980: 8, 13). Her hope for an alliance of women is undercut by her social disdain for “shop-maidens” ( James 1980: 29) and by the self-absorption of her bourgeois sisters: flirtatious Mrs. Luna, ineffectual Miss Birdseye, ambitious Dr. Prance, and conventional Mrs. Farrinder, who poses a key question when Olive offers to contribute to the women’s cause despite her lack of eloquence. “What have you got? . . . Have you got money?” ( James 1980: 28). Olive indeed has money but no program. Even the unlikely scheme to “take up” Basil was her mother’s idea, not hers ( James 1980: 9). For the bourgeois novelist, the limitations of the bourgeois spinster pose an aesthetic problem. Easy to satirize, she is a difficult figure to animate in a meaningful narrative. Verena comes to fill a void created more by middle-class existence than by sexual desire. Despite the passion in Olive’s offer of friendship ( James 1980: 65), her fastidious response to Verena’s talk of “free unions” signals a rejection of deviancy. The real queerness, Olive believes, lies in the young woman’s upbringing by her “trashy” parents ( James 1980: 67, 93). Significantly, Olive’s plan – to redeem the American girl from vulgarity – follows the formula James had used in his bid for literary success. The author implicitly allies himself with Olive as he portrays the Tarrants with Balzacian malice. We meet Selah, “longing for the moment when Verena should be advertised among the ‘personals’ ” ( James 1980: 82) and eager to sell her to the unscrupulous Matthias Pardon. We share Olive’s view of Mrs. Tarrant, whose “soft corpulence” and waxy features suggest decayed gentility ( James 1980: 91). And we see the Tarrants’ “temporary lair, a wooden cottage, with a rough front yard, a little naked piazza . . . facing upon an unpaved road, in which the footway was overlaid with a strip of planks” ( James 1980: 93). Whereas Basil sometimes speaks for the male critic, Olive embodies the hopes of the more ambitious, androgynous novelist. The critic, writing in a masculine tradition, assumed the mantle of Carlyle or Matthew Arnold; the novelist sought not only to critique his culture but to create alternatives for the benefit of his female readers. Olive’s role in James’s project is signaled by the description of her tasteful home, where Verena blossoms like the winter roses ( James 1980: 142). But this feminine abode excludes the larger world, the factories and slums visible from the drawing room window, as Olive plays hostess to ladies whose books and nosegays are “presents

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to each other” ( James 1980: 143, 145). Olive’s lessons in women’s history are vivid, if biased ( James 1980: 144, 149), but the political slogans repeated by Verena are notable for their vagueness: “Producing a pressure that shall be irresistible. Causing certain laws to be repealed by Congress and the State Legislatures, and others to be enacted” ( James 1980: 119). The only emissary from the realm of action is Miss Birdseye, now described sympathetically as she recalls her days of “carrying the Bible to the slave,” rescuing Irish women from their alcoholic husbands, and bathing the children of the poor ( James 1980: 147). Perhaps James tempered his earlier satire out of respect for Elizabeth Peabody and readers who defended her (Horne 1999: 169–70). Yet he also may have shared his characters’ nostalgia for “the heroic age of New England life” ( James 1980: 147), if only because the limited roles played by genteel women restricted the development of his plot. James creates drama, however, through his representations of Olive’s struggles with her conscience. As Robert Pippin has observed, the ethical conflicts in James’s fiction often involve a character seeking love and fulfillment who must confront “the claims of others to be and to be treated as free, equally independent end-setting, end-seeking subjects” (Pippin 2000: 29). For Olive, the conflict is poignant because it arises from Verena’s heterosexuality. In the scene outside the Tarrants’ cottage, Olive reminds readers of the sinister Dr. Sloper in Washington Square, as the winter weather accentuates the coldness of her demand: “Promise me not to marry!” ( James 1980: 109). But unlike the doctor, she apologizes for her jealousy, adding, “[Y]our safety must not come from your having tied your hands. It must come from the growth of your perception” ( James 1980: 111, 112). In New York, she is pained to discover that Verena herself invited Basil to the speech at Mrs. Burrage’s; yet she admits her own inclination “to suffer” and Verena’s “to enjoy” ( James 1980: 239). A subsequent scene with Mrs. Burrage, who offers her son Henry as a substitute for Basil, tests Olive’s courage when the worldly woman threatens her by slyly alluding to lesbianism. With difficulty, however, Olive stands her ground: “[Verena] is absolutely free; you speak as if I were her keeper!” ( James 1980: 252). Olive’s scruples make her an effective foil to Basil while allowing James to intensify the themes he had developed in The Portrait of a Lady. At Marmion, the site of Basil’s victory, Olive finally wins the respect of the narrator, who maintains his distance as she contemplates Verena’s betrayal. Olive’s recognition transcends the categories of gender and sexuality: These hours of backward clearness came to all men and women, once at least, when they read the past in the light of the present, with the reasons of things, like unobserved finger-posts, protruding where they never saw them before. The journey behind them is mapped out and figured, with its false steps, its wrong observations, all its infatuated, deluded geography. They understand as Olive understood, but it is probable that they rarely suffer as she suffered. The sense of regret for her baffled calculations burned within her like a fire, and the splendour of the vision over which the curtain of mourning now was dropped brought to her eyes slow, still tears, tears that came one by one, neither

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Sarah Daugherty easing her nerves nor lightening her load of pain. She thought of her innumerable talks with Verena, of the pledges they had exchanged, of their earnest studies, their faithful work, their certain reward, the winter-nights under the lamp, when they thrilled with previsions as just and a passion as high as had ever found shelter in a pair of human hearts. The pity of it, the misery of such a fall after such a flight, could express itself only, as the poor girl prolonged the vague pauses of her unnoticed ramble, in a low, inarticulate murmur of anguish. ( James 1980: 337–8)

When Verena returns, Olive forebears to reproach her but sits in the darkness, holding her hand ( James 1980: 339). In a novel filled with chatter and cant, Olive achieves a silent dignity. But The Bostonians differs from The Portrait of a Lady or The Ambassadors, narratives that foreground ethical conduct (including respect for the protégé) as the path to self-fulfillment. The final episodes of this novel highlight Olive’s precarious position as a member of the declining haute bourgeoisie. In Marmion, Dr. Prance tells Basil, “four ladies” – herself, Olive, Verena, and the dying Miss Birdseye – are uncomfortably “grouped together in a small frame-house” ( James 1980: 288). Clearly, Verena’s education in New York and Europe (not to mention Olive’s payments to the girl’s family) has exacted a financial toll as well as an emotional one. The women reintroduced by James also provide a disheartening context for Olive’s ambitions. If Miss Birdseye represents a political past that cannot be revived, Dr. Prance personifies a future in which “professional activity” will overshadow the “general ideas” of the women’s movement ( James 1980: 309). Though Olive laments such narrowness, the new woman will have to earn her own living. Olive’s future remains uncertain. The dénouement at the Boston theater reveals that both she and Verena are in the hands of Mr. Filer, the agent who runs the “lecture-business” ( James 1980: 360): the feminist message cannot reach a mass audience without being commercialized. Faced with Verena’s desertion, Olive musters the courage to stand up and speak for herself. In the process she is foiled by the novel’s conventional women, all of them helpless and ineffectual: Mrs. Tarrant, Mrs. Farrinder, Mrs. Burrage, and of course Verena as Basil bears her away. But James declines to represent the content of Olive’s speech or the response of a public awaiting the red-haired young celebrity. At this point the novelist had reached an impasse. Olive’s success with an audience would be utterly implausible, given her lack of eloquence and her inability, shared by James, to escape the confines of her social class. Then again, a débacle confirming her worst fears (“I am going to be hissed and hooted and insulted!”) ( James 1980: 370) would be out of keeping with James’s increasingly artful representation of her honor and courage. The remaining option was an indeterminacy that would frustrate the readers James hoped to impress. According to Anesko, the narrator’s hint – “even when exasperated, a Boston audience is not ungenerous” ( James 1980: 370) – may have expressed the novelist’s hope for the reception of his own performance (Anesko 1986: 98). Yet given the cool response to

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the inconclusive ending of The Portrait of a Lady, James probably foresaw further resistance. Compared with Olive, in whom James invests his creative energies, Verena is a derivative figure. Originally he conceived of her as “the heroine” whose name would furnish the title of the novel ( James 1987: 30). To his publisher, James Osgood, he promised a “tale” relating “the struggle that takes place in [Verena’s] mind” and ending in “a terrible final interview” with Olive as the girl “[gives] herself up to her lover” (Horne 1999: 145). But the defiant woman proved a more interesting subject than the compliant one. Further, James cared too little for politics to represent much of a struggle. When Basil argues that a woman’s place is in the home, Verena indeed offers an objection: And those who have got no home (there are millions, you know), what are you going to do with them? You must remember that women marry – are given in marriage – less and less; that isn’t their career, as a matter of course, any more. You can’t tell them to go and mind their husband and children, when they have no husband and children to mind. (James 1980: 276)

Yet when Basil suggests, incongruously, that Verena use the dining room table as a lecture platform, she is speechless (James 1980: 320). Likewise she cannot stand up to Olive, her usual gesture being to bury her head childishly in her mentor’s lap. Verena’s inertia results in large measure from James’s dependence on his literary sources. The Bostonians recalls The Blithedale Romance, a text James took seriously because, as Richard Brodhead notes, he shared Hawthorne’s belief that personal motives underlie political movements. Brodhead adds that James tried to convert the passivity of Priscilla, the romancer’s ingénue, into “a positive will to submission” (Brodhead 1986: 148, 152). But this effort is unpersuasive even to James’s narrator, who says of Verena’s attitude, “I despair of presenting it to the reader with the air of reality” ( James 1980: 311). Why indeed should Verena think so little of the lucrative career that distinguishes her from her pallid predecessor? The truth seems to be that James doubted his own premise. Another influence was the writing of George Sand, whom James envied for her stylistic fluency. The characterization of Verena, an “improvisatrice” who “speechifie[s] as the bird sings ( James 1980: 164, 185), echoes the terms James used to portray an author with an “unequalled faculty of improvisation” and the “capricious . . . imagination of a woman” ( James 1984b: 718, 699). Likewise Verena’s speeches parallel Sand’s defenses of women’s inspiration: “We are the Heart of humanity, and let us have the courage to insist on it!” ( James 1980: 218). But Sand was a troublesome model, especially for a character supposed to be an American feminist. Despite her opposition to arranged marriages, Sand’s romances promoted women’s self-sacrifice in the name of love (Daugherty 1989: 44–5). As a critic, James smugly bemoaned “the laxity of the feminine intellect” ( James 1984b: 731): he obviously knew Basil from

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the inside. Yet he sacrificed Verena, and the interest she might generate, when he made her an easy victim. His experience as a reviewer, a key context for his fiction, was thus a liability as well as an asset. He was an astute analyst of his literary sources, including a large number of women’s novels that undermined their authors’ progressive intentions. Yet in relying on these sources, as he was obliged to do in the absence of direct political knowledge, he perpetuated the stereotypes he had disparaged. James signals his discomfiture by alluding to another source: William Dean Howells’s A Woman’s Reason (1883), which serves as the title of Verena’s speech in Boston ( James 1980: 322). This novel is one of Howells’s weakest because it is mired in a marriage-plot to which it offers no alternatives. Like The Bostonians, it evokes the decline of the New England economy when the protagonist’s father, a sea captain in the once thriving India trade, dies bankrupt and leaves her in poverty. The unfortunate Helen Harkness, ignorant of “the hard realities of bread-winning” (Howells 1884: 8), fails at painting china, coloring photographs, reviewing books, and designing fashionable bonnets. Marriage is the only way out, although – in a mocking salute to James – Howells shows his heroine rejecting a proposal from an English lord. Eventually the novelist contrives the return of her true love (who has been marooned on a desert island), conceding that the cardboard hero looks like “the figment of some romancer’s brain” (Howells 1884: 421). As for Helen, she “remains limited in her opinions and motives by the accidents of tradition and circumstance that shape us all,” content with “the duties of a life which . . . should never be splendid or ambitious” (Howells 1884: 466). For James, Howells’s self-satire must have been disconcerting: Balzacian ambitions might end in American bourgeois triviality. Yet James could hardly deny his kinship with Howells, whose plots, like his own, were constrained by the dearth of opportunities for women and by essentialist conceptions of feminine nature. Without examining these causes, reviewers complained that James and Howells made their novels dull and inconclusive. A critic in the Boston Beacon repeated the standard formula when he referred to the two founders of “the analytical school of novel writers” and leveled the usual charge against The Bostonians: “To be plain about it, people want a story, they like dash and dramatic action, and they do not take naturally to Mr. James’s highbred way of viewing things” (quoted in Hayes 1996: 159). James responded by turning his back on both the American middle class and the marriage-plot. The Tragic Muse (1890), with its portrayal of a successful actress on the London stage, represents his escape from the banality of Verena’s story. Still later, after his failure as a dramatist, he developed the style that marked his break from earlier influences and commended him to an elite audience. Yet in 1908, as he worked on revisions for the New York Edition, he wrote a wistful letter to Howells recalling The Bostonians as a novel that had failed to receive “justice.” Nonetheless, he added, revising it would be difficult or impossible:

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it will take, doubtless, a great deal of artful re-doing – and I haven’t, now, had the courage or time for anything so formidable as touching and re-touching it. I feel at the same time how the Series suffers commercially from its having been dropped so completely out. (Horne 1999: 464)

James still yearned for a larger readership but could hardly recreate the conditions of his former productivity: the uncertainty that inspired his experiment with narrative voice and the serial format that invited his changing representations of his characters. Then, too, the novel’s inconsistencies probably embarrassed the formalist master. To have revisited his characters – especially the formidable Olive Chancellor – might well have required more courage than he possessed. Even as a theorist, however, James believed that the novel “appear[s] more true to its character in proportion as it strains, or tends to burst, with a latent extravagance, its mould” (James 1984b: 1075). On the margins of The Bostonians are the workingclass figures poised to compete with the ineffectual bourgeoisie and to reappear in the non-fictive record of The American Scene (1907):3 the “poor girls” Olive encounters on the street-cars; “the unemployed, the children of disappointment from beyond the seas, propped . . . against the low, sunny wall” in Central Park; the porters on the “rickety carry-all” which takes Basil to Marmion; the “itinerant boys” at the theater hawking photographs of Verena ( James 1980: 17, 280, 283, 353). The Bostonians may find a new audience in a world of anxious job-seekers.

Notes 1

Among the many sources of The Bostonians is L’Évangélise (1883), a novel by another follower of Balzac, Alphonse Daudet (James 1987: 19– 20). Although James regarded Daudet as “a great little novelist,” he himself had larger ambitions. The development of Olive’s character owes something to James’s dissatisfaction with Daudet’s Madame Authemann, portrayed simply as a fanatic. See James (1984b: 223, 225–6).

2

3

The word “queer” appears repeatedly in the novel as a signifier for whatever appears strange. For an illuminating discussion of a word that only gradually came to signal homoeroticism, see Haralson (2003: 1–26). In a 1914 letter to poet and novelist André Raffalovich, James linked The Bostonians with The American Scene and described the latter as “a better book” (Horne 1999: 531–2).

References and Further Reading Anesko, Michael (1986). “Friction with the Market”: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship. Oxford: Oxford University Press. An indispensable account of the conflicts and convergences between James’s literary ambitions and the demands of his readers.

Brodhead, Richard (1986). The School of Hawthorne. New York: Oxford University Press. An analysis of Hawthorne’s influence highlighting James’s problems with realist revisions. Castle, Terry (1993). The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. New

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York: Columbia University Press. A chapter discusses The Bostonians as an important and influential lesbian novel, Olive being a “tragic heroine” too often belittled by homophobic critics. Croce, Paul Jerome (2003). “Calming the screaming eagle: William James and his circle fight their Civil War battles.” New England Quarterly, 76: 5–37. An article documenting the James family’s varied and shifting responses to military experience and “war fever.” Daugherty, Sarah B. (1989). “Henry James, George Sand, and The Bostonians: Another curious chapter in the literary history of feminism.” Henry James Review, 10: 42–9. A more detailed account of Sand’s writings, which invited James’s skeptical rejoinders despite his interest in feminine style. Edel, Leon (1985). Henry James: A Life. New York: Harper and Row. A revised and condensed version of Edel’s magisterial five-volume biography. Gooder, Jean (2001). “Henry James’s Bostonians: The voices of democracy.” Cambridge Quarterly, 30: 97–115. An essay linking James with Whitman and Henry Adams as a critic of fragmentation in post-Civil War America. Graham, Wendy (1999). Henry James’s Thwarted Love. Stanford: Stanford University Press. A chapter in this Freudian study stresses Olive’s morbidity, though Graham concedes that the author’s solicitude derails his anti-feminist satire. Habegger, Alfred (1989). Henry James and the “Woman Business.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. A shrewd discussion of James’s masculine bias, though Habegger exaggerates the influence of James Sr. Haralson, Eric (2003). Henry James and Queer Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Though Haralson deals primarily with male homoeroticism, his discussion of “protogay aesthetics” provides a context for this novel. Hayes, Kevin J. (ed.) (1996). Henry James: The Contemporary Reviews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This useful anthology includes sixteen British and American reviews of The Bostonians, the majority published in newspapers.

Horne, Philip (1999). Henry James: A Life in Letters. New York: Viking. A reliable edition of the author’s important letters, with notes and narrative links. Howells, William Dean (1884). A Woman’s Reason. Boston: Osgood. Originally published 1883. A novel illustrating – yet also satirizing – the perils of the marriage-plot. James, Henry (1980). The Bostonians. Intro. by Louis Auchincloss. New York: Signet/Penguin. Novel originally published in 1886. Auchincloss presents The Bostonians as “a great novel about sex” despite the absence of explicit scenes. James, Henry (1984a). Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers. Ed. Leon Edel and Mark Wilson. New York: Library of America. James, Henry (1984b). Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition. Ed. Leon Edel and Mark Wilson. New York: Library of America. This is the standard two-volume anthology of James’s criticism, a key context for his fiction. James, Henry (1987). The Complete Notebooks of Henry James. Ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. An important (if sometimes fragmentary) record of the novelist’s creative process. Kaplan, Fred (1992). Henry James: The Imagination of Genius: A Biography. New York: Morrow. A biography that draws on James’s letters and autobiographical writings. Pippin, Robert B. (2000). Henry James and Modern Moral Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. A study treating James as a defender of good faith whose exemplary characters act on their growing perceptions of relations between themselves and others. Salmon, Richard (1997). Henry James and the Culture of Publicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. A study of the permeable boundaries between the public and the private realms, Basil’s resistance to publicity being “an effect of publicity itself.” Stevens, Hugh (1999). Henry James and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. A chapter supports Castle’s view of Olive as a tragic lesbian and treats the novel as a critique of heteronormativity.

The Bostonians and the Crisis of Vocation Van Leer, David (1999). “A world of female friendship: The Bostonians.” In John Bradley (ed.) Henry James and Homo-Erotic Desire (pp. 93–109). New York: St. Martin’s. This essay explores the tension between the narrator’s rancor toward the female characters and the novel’s challenge to marriage as a standard of normality.

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Wegener, Frederick (1997). “ ‘A line of her own’: Henry James’s ‘sturdy little doctress’ and the medical woman as a literary type in Gilded-Age America.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 39: 139–80. An article treating Dr. Prance as the real “new woman,” with attention to her release from the marriage-plot.

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“The Abysses of Silence” in The Turn of the Screw Kimberly C. Reed

The Turn of the Screw occupies a unique place in Henry James’s fiction. It is neither novel nor short story, neither ghost story nor realist narrative, recounted by a woman neither servant nor family member, featuring (in part) beings neither living nor dead. Few if any other of James’s fictions demand the degree of interpretive work on the part of the reader as does this novella – and as a corollary, no other work of James’s has generated such an impassioned critical controversy, with readers and scholars arguing for a hundred years about the “correct” way to read it. With such a wellknown and loaded back story, contemporary readers are understandably likely to bring a hermeneutical bias to their initial reading of this tale. Yet they do so at their peril, for the enigmas of this text demand that they question, reconsider, and often reject their original interpretation in favor of another one, until another detail reveals the insufficiency of that reading – and on and on. At some point, readers may well decide that this maze, this “challenge of bewilderment” as one scholar has described James’s technique (Armstrong 1987), has no exit. Yet this text, like all texts, does tell a story, does have a meaning, and to lose sight of that fact is to lose connection with one of the greatest novellas in English fiction. For The Turn of the Screw, far from being a mere “potboiler,” as James disparagingly termed it, foregrounds the very act of reading the world, of discerning matter and meaning, via a truly terrifying series of events (Horne 1999: 312). Understanding the various back stories of this novella – how James came to write it, how critics argued about it, how nineteenth-century English cultural forces shaped the governess’s worldview – sets the stage for a reading that embraces both ghostly hauntings and neurotic imaginings.

Background Such a complicated text has a seemingly simple genesis: one night in January 1895, Henry James listened to a ghost story told to him by his friend the Archbishop of

A Companion to Henry James. Edited by Greg W. Zacharias © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-14042-3

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Canterbury, and later jotted down some thoughts about it in his notebook. As in the novella itself, the story had three narrators; that is, Archbishop Benson had heard it from a woman who, James notes, recounted the tale “very badly and imperfectly . . . [with] no art of relation, and no clearness” (Edel and Powers 1987: 109). But perhaps the genesis was not so simple after all. The early 1890s had been a difficult time for James: his career had suffered a downturn in the popularity of his fiction, and he was painfully aware that his reading public had dwindled since the days of his initial success with Daisy Miller. As a resident of London, he frequented the theaters and saw firsthand the successes, both critical and financial, of producers, actors, and playwrights. To write for the stage, he decided, would allow him to earn enough so that he could devote himself to the art of fiction without financial worries. After several of his original plays were rejected for performance, he succeeded in getting Guy Domville produced in January 1895. On opening night, James found himself to be inordinately nervous, signing a note to his brother William, “your plucky, but all the same lonely and terrified Henry” (Edel 1985: 415). He avoided the premiere by attending Oscar Wilde’s new play, An Ideal Husband, just down the street in the West End of London, and only as the audience for Guy Domville was applauding did he enter the theater where it had just ended. Responding to calls of “Author!” from James’s friends in the audience, the stage manager led James onto the stage – only to be confronted with both derisory hoots and loyal applause. The long minutes on the stage and the night afterward, James wrote, were the “the most horrible hours of my life,” with the result that he felt “weary, bruised, disgusted, sickened” (Edel 1978: 83–84). He would give up the “unspeakable” theater, he said, to “let it so much alone that abysses of silence will but poorly represent my detachment” (Horne 1999: 274). The humiliation of that night only deepened the gloom that had been slowly descending on him due to the losses he had endured in the recent years: the passing of friends such as Robert Louis Stevenson and of family members, especially his beloved sister Alice. The death – a likely suicide – of his friend and fellow novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson left James with the uneasy suspicion that she might have died because of her unrequited love for him. “I see ghosts everywhere,” he wrote in a letter in October, 1895 (Esch and Warren 1999: 102). Yet even as he evoked the “abysses of silence” about his theater experience, he wrote in his notebooks: “[i]t is now indeed that I may do the work of my life” (Edel and Powers 1987: 109). He was right: the work of his life was waiting for him, much of it already germinating in his musings on his life and the literary tradition that he had inherited. He was well aware of the narratives of supernatural events that abounded in the late nineteenth century; his own brother William, the renowned psychologist and philosopher, served as president of the British Society for Psychical Research. As a literary critic and theorist himself, James had read the great works of European and American fiction and situated his place in that history. In his essay on the French novelist Honoré de Balzac, James credited Balzac with the “art of complete representation” ( James 1984b: 134). Like Balzac, James was a realist for much of his career,

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but unlike Balzac (who died aged 51 in 1850), his realism began to evolve during the 1890s into a modernist sensibility that reconsidered how the literary artist should accomplish this complete representation. Although he wrote ghost stories throughout his career, much of James’s later work is suffused with a sense of hauntedness, of loss, of uncertainty – all of which provided him with different ways of attempting to represent reality, ways that sometimes were terrifying in their evocation of the abyss. Such, then, were the histories, the losses, the humiliations, the worries that were confronting James when Collier’s Weekly, a New York magazine with a wide readership, unexpectedly commissioned him in 1897 to write a ghost story. He had just signed a 21-year lease on a house in Rye, East Sussex, and the “potboiler,” as he later called this story, would earn him money that he could put towards the costs of a new home (Horne 1999: 312). He recalled the Archbishop’s ghost story – told to him only days after the débacle of Guy Domville – and realized that despite the tale’s vagueness, that “vividest little note for sinister romance that [he] had ever jotted down” could yield a wonderfully rich and endlessly provocative story ( James 1984b: 1183). And so he began The Turn of the Screw.1

Readers, Reviewers, and Critics The Turn of the Screw was serialized from January through April 1898 in Collier’s Weekly, and then reprinted in a collection of two tales in The Two Magics, published in England and America in late 1898. (James revised the tale somewhat for the New York Edition of 1908.) Contemporary reviewers, to a large extent, reacted strongly: The New York Times described the story as “a deliberate, powerful, and horribly successful study of the magic of evil,” while the Independent called it “the most hopelessly evil story that we have ever read in any literature, ancient or modern” (Esch and Warren 1999: 149, 156). One reviewer, after calling the tale “a very up-to-date and absorbing ghost-story,” warned his readers, “Henry James, I ought to add by way of caution, is by no means a safe author to give for a Christmas gift” (Esch and Warren 1999: 154). The critic for the Bookman perceptively noted, “Nearly all [James’s] later stories have been tending to the horrible, have been stories of evil, beneath the surface mostly, and of corruption” (Esch and Warren 1999: 153). Most of James’s contemporaries accepted the story at face value as a particularly terrifying ghost story. Soon, however, the current of criticism changed course. Harold C. Goddard wrote an essay around 1920 in which he argued that the governess was insane, although his essay was not published until 1957 (Goddard 1957). In 1924, Edna Kenton found that the unsuspecting reader is caught in the “trap” that James described in his preface to the New York Edition, which for Kenton was the trap of believing the governess’s view of events (Kenton 1924: 254). Edmund Wilson expanded her argument in his seminal essay of 1934, “The Ambiguity of

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Henry James.” In it, Wilson famously wrote that the governess was a “neurotic case of sex repression”: having fallen in love with the children’s London-based uncle, who forbids any further contact after he hires her, she represses her sexual desires and has hallucinations that reveal her displacement of those desires (Wilson 1963: 115). Wilson’s approach opened a floodgate for articles in which critics argued that the governess was delusional, mad, or evil herself, turning much of the critical reception of the novella from the 1930s until the 1970s into a debate between so-called apparitionist and non-apparitionist approaches. The apparitionists argued that Goddard, Kenton, Wilson, and their followers overlooked key passages in the novel that support a reading of the governess as sane and the ghosts as real. Various critics argued that she was sufficiently regarded to receive another position after her experience at Bly; others pointed out that Douglas speaks of her as “the most agreeable” governess he had ever met ( James 2004: 24). The argument that caused Edmund Wilson to retract his thesis (temporarily) focused on Mrs. Grose’s identification of Quint after she heard the governess’s description of the man at the window – whom the governess had never seen before. In the 1970s, however, critics began to move to a more postmodern approach, one that no longer automatically opposed the apparitionist/non-apparitionist viewpoints. Tzvetan Todorov described the “fantastic” in literature as a genre that is defined by the inability of the reader to determine whether apparently supernatural events have a natural or supernatural explanation. The fantastic, he wrote, forces the reader to hesitate throughout the reading of the text and never arrive at a conclusion; the perfect example of this, he argued, is The Turn of the Screw (Todorov 1973: 43). Other critics, such as Christine Brooke-Rose and Shlomith Rimmon, embraced the ambiguity of the novella. Shoshana Felman, influenced by theorists Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, argued that the text traps its readers by forcing them to perform the same interpretive work that the characters must do, thus signaling the textuality of all interpretation (Felman 1977: 97). Still others, such as Terry Heller (1989), observed that the novella requires two readings: the first will almost always cause the reader to find the governess a straightforward chronicler of a horrific tale; the second – provoked by the ambiguity surrounding Miles’s death at the end – will lead the reader to recognize the instability of the governess’s narrative and thus begin to question her veracity. More recently, critics have turned away from the issue of the reality of the ghosts towards other elements in the text that had not yet been mined. Marxist critics focus on the issue of social class interplay in the novel, suggesting that the struggle between the upper and lower classes spills over into the governess’s interpretive abilities, so that the struggle is transmogrified into spectral hauntings. Critics who examine gender and sexuality view this text as a goldmine: the possible sexual interaction between the dead servants and the children, the indisputable desire of the governess for the master, the possibly homoerotic attraction between the unnamed narrator and Douglas, the unrepeatable words that Miles used with his schoolmates, the patriarchal

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system to which the household at Bly must conform – all expose the anxieties of Victorian attitudes toward sex and gender. Postcolonial theorists examine the role of the British Empire in this text, with the children’s parents dead in India and the great country house essentially abandoned by the white British owner who leaves in his wake the marginalized members of society to survive – or not – as well as they can. The intensely dramatic elements of the tale have inspired many artists to adapt it for other media. Benjamin Britten maintained the text’s ambiguity in his opera The Turn of the Screw (1954) with the alternating musical motifs that variously suggest innocence and corruption. Of the numerous film adaptations, Ben Bolt’s The Turn of the Screw (2000) and, especially, Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961) make best use of the conventions of cinema to exploit the novella’s interpretive possibilities. So we return to the quandary articulated at the beginning of this essay: what does the reader do in the face of such disparate accounts of this novella? Even so cursory a review of the rich, disputatious, and complicated reception of this text makes it clear that the reader shares the governess’s onerous task of interpretation. James alluded to this fact when he wrote in his preface to the New York Edition of this tale: Make him [the reader] think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you [the author] are released from weak specifications . . . [M]y values are positively all blanks save so far as an excited horror, a promoted pity, a created expertness . . . proceed to read into them more or less fantastic figures. ( James 1984b: 1188)

The reader, then, as Shoshana Felman points out, becomes a performer of the interpretive work required by this text. Such a daunting task in the face of such textual ambiguity causes interpretive hesitation, a concept at the heart of Todorov’s important work on the literary fantastic. Todorov defines the fantastic as a genre in its own right, one that is temporally determined, based on the notion of readerly hesitation. That is, the implied reader of the text, when faced with an event that appears contrary to the reality of the universe as constructed by the text, hesitates until s/he makes one of three epistemological choices: the event or apparition is supernatural, in which case the text is “marvelous”; the event may be explained by laws of the natural world, in which case the text is “uncanny”; or the reader finds that s/he cannot decide, in which case the text belongs to the pure fantastic (Todorov 1973: 41). The fantastic text, then, evokes hesitation in a character and/or reader because its events seem impossible in the reality as constructed by the universe of the text. The Turn of the Screw, Todorov argues, is one of the rare examples of the pure fantastic, for the reader can never conclusively decide on an interpretation (Todorov 1973: 43). Rosemary Jackson extends Todorov’s theory by treating the fantastic as a discourse that reveals (at least partially) the repressed elements of a given ideology. Jackson’s work enlarges Todorov’s notion of the fantastic as a means of transgressing laws with her greater emphasis on the social implications of those transgressions. She finds the

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fantastic to be a “literature of desire, which seeks that which is experienced as absence and loss” ( Jackson 1981: 3). Thus, the fantastic suggests both the order upon which the textual culture is based and the “illegality . . . the unsaid and the unseen of culture: that which has been silenced, made invisible, covered over and made ‘absent’ ” ( Jackson 1981: 4). Indeed, one might argue that the fantastic’s very function is to interrogate the ostensible verification of reality that is the underlying assumption of the realist project. Such an interrogation brings the text – and the reader – to the edge of that terrifying abyss, which Jackson calls “an area of nonsignification” ( Jackson 1981: 41). As does Todorov, Jackson finds that fantastic narratives often thematize problems of vision with images of “formlessness, emptiness and invisibility,” thereby destabilizing a notion of reality as verifiable ( Jackson 1981: 49). The narrator and reader thus find interpretation of events difficult, if not impossible. Jackson borrows Freud’s description of the uncanny,2 noting that his term das Heimlich means both that which is familiar and that which is concealed from others. Das Unheimlich (the uncanny) connotes that which is unfamiliar or alien. Therefore, the uncanny combines the connotations of these two terms: “It uncovers what is hidden and, by doing so, effects a disturbing transformation of the familiar into the unfamiliar” ( Jackson 1981: 65). This uncovering of what is hidden explains the fantastic narrative’s tendency towards nonsignification: “There can be no adequate linguistic representation of this ‘other,’ for it has no place in life” ( Jackson 1981: 69). Thus, a fantastic narrative radically questions the epistemological stability of the “real.” Because the fantastic gives voice to that which is marginalized in a given culture, it reveals that society’s latent fears and repressions – thereby paradoxically arriving more closely to James’s goal of “complete representation.” The fervor, even anxiety, with which critics have approached The Turn of the Screw may well have been sparked by their sense that this text spotlights the threat of the other, the abyss of nothingness. The reader’s bewilderment derives from James’s mastery in highlighting the provisional nature of all texts and of all interpretations. This novella, then, subverts the ideology of the traditional realistic text, with its goal of stable, coherent representation of a particular hegemonic reality. In the governess’s case, as I will shortly argue, that hegemony derives from her history as the daughter of a poor Anglican clergyman.

The Governess’s Background “And what did the former governess die of? Of so much respectability?” Our friend’s answer was prompt. “That will come out. I don’t anticipate.” ( James 2004: 28)

The sardonic question that one of Douglas’s listeners poses about the cause of Miss Jessel’s death refers to the repeated use of “respectable” in the narrative immediately

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preceding this exchange. Although this novella has three narrators (an unnamed houseguest, Douglas, and the governess), still another narrative voice intrudes at this point in the prologue: that of the children’s uncle. The third-person voice here metamorphoses into one that we might expect to hear from a sophisticated, upper-class, urbane man of the times, a person who clearly understands how to manipulate language in order to persuade the young woman as he zeroes in on the safety and respectability of the children’s household: It had all been a great worry and, on his own part doubtless, a series of blunders, but he immensely pitied the poor chicks and had done all he could; had in particular sent them down to his other house, the proper place for them being of course the country, and kept them there from the first with the best people he could find to look after them, parting even with his own servants to wait on them. . . . There had been for the two children at first a young lady whom they had had the misfortune to lose. She had done for them quite beautifully – she was a most respectable person – till her death. . . there were, further, a cook, a housemaid, a dairywoman, an old pony, and an old groom and an old gardener, all likewise thoroughly respectable. ( James 2004: 27–8)

The word “respectable” operates on different registers. To the governess, it serves to assuage her qualms about accepting this position. To Douglas’s listeners – who are likely very similar to the uncle, since the narrator notes that the uncle was a type that “never, happily, dies out” – the word functions ironically, signaling certain ideological and theological views that these worldly listeners clearly do not share. If even the old pony at Bly was “respectable,” then the term for Douglas and his listeners has in fact been exhausted of content. While fully recognizing the textuality and therefore provisionality of my own reading of this novella and (all) other texts, including the non-fiction ones below, I wish to argue that the governess’s concept of respectability propels her interpretations and actions during the events at Bly. Indeed, the drive to establish and maintain her respectability incites the governess to flush out and destroy anything and anyone that would keep her from achieving it – or who would reveal her own less-than-respectable desires. But how would her society have trained her to understand and embody this sort of respectability? To suggest an answer to that question, we must examine one facet of the governess that critics have not thus far extensively treated: her background as the daughter of a poor country parson. Her profession as governess has rightly been the subject of much critical attention, but her childhood formation – or at least, what we can know of it – deserves more scrutiny than it has received, since it is as much a part of her as her occupation. While the references to her family life are sparse and frequently ambiguous – another series of blanks – her childhood exposures to theology, social class, and aberrant sexuality create and shape her faith in respectability. In order to understand how this notion of respectability took root, we must consider the facts associated with life in a country vicarage in the early nineteenth century,

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facts that most contemporary readers would have taken for granted but that are not so apparent to twenty-first-century readers.3 In the primary narrator’s account of Douglas’s prologue we read that the governess was a “fluttered, anxious girl,” the youngest of several daughters of a “poor country parson” in Hampshire ( James 2004: 26). She is likely Anglican: although the Oxford English Dictionary notes that “parson” may refer to those of Dissenting or Nonconformist Protestant traditions, the 1851 Census of Religious Worship showed the Southern counties of England – including Hampshire – as favoring the Church of England (Snell and Ell 2000: 71). In addition, to leave the Anglican Church frequently indicated a rebellion against traditional class-bound forms of Anglican worship, in which the village squire and vicar held sway over poorer parishioners (Snell and Ell 2000: 130). Indeed, some Victorians attributed the conversion of churchgoers from Anglican to Methodist to the class hierarchies of church seating. A Methodist lay preacher wrote in 1898 about his Anglican childhood: I can remember when the squire and the other local magnates used to sit in state in the centre of the aisle. They did not, if you please, like the look of the agricultural labourers . . . it was if they were unclean. (Arch 1966: 25–6)

“I wanted to know,” the preacher wrote plaintively, “why my father was not as good in the eyes of God as the squire” (Arch 1996: 26). The governess’s intense desire to conform to social expectations, to avoid any kind of rebellion against what is most respectable – and for others to do so as well – suggests that she comes from this sort of Anglican background.4 The fact that her family was poor would likely not have surprised a nineteenthcentury reader, for the appalling conditions in which many rural clergymen were required to work earlier in the century helped propel important revitalizations in the Church. Many country churches had fallen into disrepair; some clergymen were known to be so impoverished as to risk dying of starvation (Knight 1995: 130). One scholar has established that an income of £300 or more was required for a reasonably comfortable middle-class lifestyle (Haig 1984: 304). In 1830, when the governess would have probably been a small child, approximately 53 percent of English benefices were valued at £300 or less (Knight 1995: 131). We know that she is from a poor family with numerous children, since she is the youngest of “several daughters” ( James 2004: 26).5 Douglas says that she hesitated before agreeing to take on this task, but since the salary was much higher than she had expected, “she faced the music, she engaged” ( James 2004: 28). Although she is the youngest of the daughters, her family may well have expected her to send home money; we can be fairly certain that at the very least, she knew she had to provide for herself. A difficult question thus arises, one that surely affected the governess’s sense of her place in the world: how could one grow up to be a respectable gentleman or lady, yet live destitute? In society’s eyes, clergy were de facto gentlemen; however, treating

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parsons as both clergymen and gentlemen invited confusion, for their income tended to match that of lowly farmers while their education matched that of the comfortable gentry (Obelkevich 1976: 124, 126). Much has been written about the liminal social position of governesses in nineteenth-century England, but I want to stress the fact that the effects of that liminality were augmented for those women raised as children of poor clergy. Therefore, we can more easily understand the governess’s anxiety about policing the borders of social class; in many ways, she is forced to remain an outsider looking in not only because she is a governess – neither family nor servant – but also because of this confusing, frustrating mixture of gentility and poverty from which she comes. This particular socioeconomic situation for a poor parson’s daughter was fed by popular ideas about theology. In much of the religious literature from the midcentury, writers argue that one’s actions in this life greatly influence the possibility of salvation in the next (Knight 1995: 48). In the first half of the century, the “four last things” – death, judgment, heaven, and hell – held the imagination of many believers, with the notion of hell as a literal reality gaining prominence from roughly 1800 until 1850 or so. The governess almost certainly would have read the religious writings published by various Anglican clergy; during this period, such literature tended to feature deathbed scenes, as did fiction, poetry, and biography (Knight 1995: 49–50). Frances Knight writes that a “fever pitch of eschatological excitement” rose in the 1840s and 1850s, so that that public demand for this kind of literature, both popular and literary, was “insatiable” (Knight 1995: 50). Mingled with this emphasis on death and judgment was the problem of sin. In the popular imagination, the Devil was the very embodiment of temptation, vice, and wanton desires. In some stories told of him, he appears in the guise of a clergyman, dressed in black, from whom sinners shrank in terror – another manifestation of the (un)heimlich. James Obelkevich notes, “This combination – terrifying external menace and the intimacy of a psychological ‘double’ – gave popular religion not merely a dramatic but also a moral and psychological dimension” (Obelkevich 1976: 278). The threat of the Devil’s power precluded mentioning his name, for to do so was to attract his presence. That power of naming extended to language in general: in the popular religious culture of the time, words enjoyed an incantatory power, a power that the governess both desires and fears (Obelkevich 1976: 276). Just as she likely absorbed popular theological discourse, the governess also probably would have heard references to immoral sexual behaviors. With the ever-growing concern for child welfare in the nineteenth century, concerned activists formed various associations to protect children’s rights in several arenas, including that of sexuality. The discourse about sexual abuse of children finds its way into the governess’s account. For example, “corruption” – a term she uses – was a common euphemism to replace more concrete descriptions of illicit sexuality ( Jackson 2000: 2). One gynecologist who worked with the Birmingham constabulary in the latter part of the century almost always blamed the victims; they were “virulent little minxes,” “chits,” and “dirty little wretches” ( Jackson 2000: 84) – again, epithets that the governess echoes.

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Sometimes even euphemisms signified more than society could manage: the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children frequently noted that they had to maintain a silence about details of various cases, as the situations involved “evil which is altogether unmentionable,” too “sad and too dreadful to relate” ( Jackson 2000: 55). In addition, the status of children who had been abused was often compromised by the mere fact of that abuse: parents of other children would often consider the abused child to be immoral. Thus, families were pressured to pull the injured children out of school – as happens with Miles – and even institutionalize them ( Jackson 2000: 68). As for the perpetrators, legal justice for men accused depended frequently on their socioeconomic standing, just as social reputation for women depended on their morality, especially regarding sexuality ( Jackson 2000: 108). Thus, Louise Jackson argues that the Victorian notion of “respectability” involved a complex mixture of class, status, age, gender, race, and religion. As a result, accused men of the lower or “vicious” classes were often assumed to be guilty of child abuse, whereas the “respectability” of middle- or upper-class men protected them from suspicion ( Jackson 2000: 108).

The Text With these facts, speculations, and interpretations about the governess’s cultural background in mind, I will offer one interpretation of this text that examines the governess’s use of sight and sound – or the lack thereof – as epistemological tools to help her maintain her worldview, her respectability. For the sake of brevity, I will assume that my reader has already read the novella as a straightforward ghost story with an honest, courageous heroine who is strangely but fortunately at the helm of this mystifying vessel. In this (second) reading, the governess’s theology and ideology, morality and class are inextricably intertwined. She is unable to accommodate any deviance from her view; indeed, as Millicent Bell observes, she is an “absolutist of the Manichean interpretation of the Christian tradition” (Bell 1984: 68). In this reading, vision/non-vision and speech/silence represent on the thematic level certain ungovernable threats to a woman whose only given nomenclature exposes her will to govern. Social-class struggle, unpoliced sexuality, and the related ultimate interpretive chaos all menace – indeed, literally haunt – her nineteenthcentury petty bourgeois Anglican worldview, which values respectability above all. The era of the story may be mid-century, but the novella itself dates from the turn of the century, written in the wake of social-class revolts, workers’ movements, and exposures of forbidden sexuality – including the trial of Oscar Wilde. Debates about these issues were raging in both public and private discourse – and found their way into this text. Silence looms as an interpretive quandary for the governess. Before her manuscript actually begins, Douglas explains to his auditors that her employer, the owner of Bly and the uncle of Miles and Flora, put one condition on her accepting the post: she

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was not, under any circumstances, to contact him. This forbidding injunction to silence forms her first impression of her new life, but she apparently does not ask the master to clarify the reason for it. Her apprehension over this interdiction increases when, during her first week at Bly, she receives a cryptic letter from Miles’s headmaster at school. The letter indicates that the boy has been expelled, but gives no reason for the expulsion. After meeting Miles and succumbing to his charm, she decides how she will handle the problem: she will not answer the letter, nor write to his uncle, nor speak to the boy about the incident. As time goes by, she grows more puzzled because Miles seems so innocent: [D]eep obscurity continued to cover the region of the boy’s conduct at school. It had been promptly given me, I have noted, to face that mystery without a pang. Perhaps even it would be nearer the truth to say that – without a word – he himself had cleared it up. He had made the whole charge absurd . . . he was only too fine and fair for the little horrid unclean school-world, and he had paid a price for it. . . . He never spoke of his school, never mentioned a comrade or a master. ( James 2004: 43)

Her silence results from her attempt to govern the situation, to maintain the respectability of her little family, since she believes she has been “given” the duty to “face that mystery without a pang” ( James 2004: 43). She at first extrapolates from Miles’s good-natured behavior that the fault must lie elsewhere, in his schoolmates or masters rather than in himself. The arbitrariness of her conclusion may give readers pause: why does she insist on Miles’s cherubic innocence? Is she relieved to have a pleasant (and lucrative) situation for her employment (unusual for nineteenth-century governesses)? Has she displaced her obvious desire for the master onto Miles? Is she falling in love with Miles himself (in which case she would be repeating the pedophilia of which she later suspects Peter Quint and Miss Jessel)? Or is she correct in her assumption that sometimes appearances do in fact reveal depths? Her desire to know why he was expelled grows despite her almost constant protestations of his angelic innocence. While her silence has, she believes, a benevolent purpose providentially decreed, Miles’s silence reveals the uncanny inversion of that providence. This lack of knowledge begins to prey on her so that she comes to suspect that while they were still alive, Miss Jessel and Quint “corrupted” the children and that the servants’ ghosts now haunt them. The reader will note that the governess never specifies exactly how the adults have corrupted the children, nor do the children ever admit seeing the ghosts. Yet it is precisely Miles’s and Flora’s silence that confirms for the governess both the ghosts’ presence and the children’s knowledge of it, as she explains to Mrs. Grose: The more I’ve watched and waited the more I’ve felt that if there were nothing else to make it sure it would be made so by the systematic silence of each. Never, by a slip of the tongue, have they so much as alluded to either of their old friends, any more than

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Miles has alluded to his expulsion . . . even while they pretend to be lost in their fairytale they’re steeped in their vision of the dead restored to them. ( James 2004: 76)

The “unnamed and untouched” subject of Miss Jessel and Quint becomes “forbidden ground” between the governess and the children ( James 2004: 78–9). Aware as she likely is of the tendency to remove sexually abused children from school because of their alleged immorality, she grows ever more obsessed with confronting her charges with her belief that the four enjoy some sort of diabolical intercourse; she rehearses this confrontation in her room, in private, but stops short of the “monstrous utterance of names.” Ending this silence, she recognizes, would be monstrous (in fact, it will be murderous), but she feels a moral duty to exorcise the evil spirits and thus restore respectability. Frightened of the menace of silence overcoming them all, she fills the air with meaningless talk: After these secret scenes I chattered more than ever, going on volubly enough till one of our prodigious palpable hushes occurred – I can call them nothing else – the strange dizzy lift or swim (I try for terms!) into a stillness, a pause of all life, that had nothing to do with the more or less noise we at the moment might be engaged in making and that I could hear through any intensified mirth or quickened recitation or louder strum of the piano. Then it was that the others, the outsiders, were there. ( James 2004: 81)

“The others, the outsiders” announce themselves with an unnatural, uncanny silence; when the governess first sees Peter Quint, she writes: I can hear again, as I write, the intense hush in which the sounds of evening dropped. The rooks stopped cawing in the golden sky and the friendly hour lost for the unspeakable minute all its voice. But there was no other change in nature. ( James 2004: 40)

The sounds of Nature grinding to a sudden halt can only portend the intrusion of evil into her Paradise. She cannot tolerate this uncanny silence; when she enters the empty schoolroom and sees Miss Jessel, the governess breaks the silence by calling her a “terrible miserable woman” ( James 2004: 88). Her speech to the ghost thus echoes her “try[ing] for terms,” her attempt to speak of the unspeakable, to govern what she cannot control. When the governess recounts the scene to Mrs. Grose, she belies Miss Jessel’s apparent silence by quoting her: Miss Jessel has confessed, she claims, to suffering the “torments” of the “lost” and the “damned” and seeks to share those torments with Flora ( James 2004: 90). Given her religious and class-conscious upbringing, she can justify her pronouncement about Miss Jessel; the governess believes her to be an unmarried woman who got pregnant, and, worse still, a pedophile who transgressed Victorian social and moral laws. Yet even if she is wrong about Miss Jessel’s erotic involvement with the children, her dogmatic religious beliefs at least provide her the vocabulary to denounce and thus contain the threat of the unpoliced sexuality that Miss Jessel’s silence may represent. This tendency to describe a scene

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in one way to the reader and in another to Mrs. Grose not only reveals her awareness of the menace of silence to respectability, of the void at the center of her perceptive framework, but also calls into legitimate question her reliability as a storyteller and interpreter. Just as she apparently spoke for Miss Jessel, she begins to speak for Miles and Flora as well, telling Mrs. Grose that the children’s private conversations, if they could be overheard, would “appall” the adults ( James 2004: 99). The logical flaw here – knowing the nature of conversations that she has not heard – may strike the reader as another example of the governess’s intense desire to fill a silence with words, especially with words of apparent immorality that would support her ever-solidifying view of events. Yet it is her naming of Miss Jessel before Flora that, uncannily, appalls; her “breach of the silence” is reminiscent of “the smash of a pane of glass” and is an act of “violence” ( James 2004: 101). When she finally forces Miles to break his silence and utter the name of Peter Quint, his heart fails, just as the governess’s “monstrous utterance” of Miss Jessel’s name causes Flora to reject her ( James 2004: 81, 103). As I noted earlier in my discussion of popular religious views of the incantatory power of naming, the sanctity involving the names of the ghosts must be feared; to name them is to break some unspoken vow of silence surrounding them and to evoke their presence. The nature of that vow holds the key: if the governess is correct that the children are haunted to the point of possession by the malign spirits of these dead beings, she must paradoxically violate this sanctity in order to succeed at the exorcism that she so earnestly desires. If, however, she mistakes the ghosts’ intentions – or if there are no ghosts at all – forcing the children to hear or pronounce their names only turns the screw of torture on them; it is the governess who haunts. Miles never tells exactly what he said at school that caused him to be expelled; the governess therefore again has the opportunity to formulate her own interpretation. But his admission that he spoke only to those he liked throws her into a state of confusion: I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker obscure, and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity the appalling alarm of his being perhaps innocent. It was for the instant confounding and bottomless, for if he were innocent what then on earth was I? ( James 2004: 119)

What, indeed? The rumblings of the earthquake that ends this story begin at this point in the narrative. She briefly considers the possibility that the silence surrounding Miles’s dismissal may be essentially meaningless, rather than charged with malignant import; for that moment, the bottomless abyss gapes, allowing her a glimpse of herself as unspeakably evil. She cannot tolerate such a revelation, for to do so would destroy her view of herself as the embodiment of the kind of spiritual and moral good – the respectability – that can overcome, with determination and courage, the evil of the ghosts and children. She is “paralysed” by this thought and “suffer[s]” at the implication that there may be no ghosts, no “contamination,” no evil after all ( James 2004:

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119). Even though this new interpretation would ostensibly be preferable, it would destroy her construction of respectability. Indeed, its radical divergence from the text that she has been writing suggests that the “fury of intention” she earlier attributed to Miss Jessel was not Miss Jessel’s at all; it has been, uncannily, hers all along ( James 2004: 57). The role that silence plays on the thematic level of the text often parallels the role of vision. We have seen how the ghosts make their presence known through a sort of supernatural silence and how the children’s silence feeds the governess’s impression of evil. But the ghosts also are revealed visually to the governess in moments of silence. For example, the governess’s first sighting of Peter Quint is a “bewilderment of vision” ( James 2004: 39). Coupled with her description of that confusion is a surprisingly defensive assertion: “An unknown man in a lonely place is a permitted object of fear to a young woman privately bred” ( James 2004: 40). Why does she need permission to be afraid? Almost any woman confronted with a mysterious male intruder would feel some anxiety – but for the governess, the distinction is that she is “privately bred.” That is, her society would excuse her fear precisely because she is the daughter of a respectable Anglican clergyman; she therefore must have more reason than (for example) a scullery maid at Bly to recognize the possibility of harm. Her interpretation of the man as a herald of evil is strengthened upon her next sighting of him at the dining-room window, when the two stare silently at each other through the glass. “It was as if I had been looking at him for years and had known him always,” she writes, and his breaking of the stare to look around the room sends a shock of understanding through the governess: he had come for Miles. This new comprehension galvanizes her: she experiences a “sudden vibration of duty and course” ( James 2004: 44–5). The importance of vision and specifically of the stare as an epistemological tool rises to the forefront here, although the prologue’s narrative has already signaled its function. When Douglas brings up the subject of this tale, he “turns his eyes” over the group, puts his hands over his eyes, and looks at the primary narrator as if “he saw what he spoke of” ( James 2004: 23). He and the narrator “fix” each other, a then-common term for holding a gaze, and that “fixing” seems to imply a covert relationship of some sort.6 Her staring at Quint allows the governess to describe him to Mrs. Grose as not a gentleman but as someone wearing someone else’s fine clothing. The governess and Quint have developed a relationship based on this kind of gaze, one whose terms are also unspoken and perhaps unspeakable, essentially as inaccessible to the reader as that between Douglas and the first narrator.7 She explicitly makes the connection between her vision of the ghost and the accompanying silence when she sees Peter Quint on the staircase late one night: “It was the dead silence of our long gaze at such close quarters that gave the whole horror, huge as it was, its only note of the unnatural” ( James 2004: 68). In other words, she realizes that this figure is a supernatural apparition because he does not speak as a real intruder would; the silence is “dead” because one of the gazers is dead, but she does not seem to recognize her pun. After their long stare terminates, the apparition

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vanishes: “I can’t express what followed it save by saying that the silence itself . . . became the element into which I saw the figure disappear” ( James 2004: 68). The governess admits her terminological quandary; in order to avoid silence, she is forced to reify it, with Quint disappearing into it so that nothingness – the ghost – disappears into nothingness – the (paradoxical) blackness of silence. As Rosemary Jackson says of the uncanny, “there is no adequate linguistic representation of this ‘other,’ for it has no place in life” ( Jackson 1981: 41). The governess is with Flora at the estate’s lake when she first sees Miss Jessel; again, an unnatural silence reigns once she becomes aware of the apparition. When she tells Mrs. Grose of her vision, there is a curious emphasis on looking, on fixing, on the eyes: Mrs. Grose, at this, fixed her eyes a minute on the ground; then at last raising them, “Tell me how you know,” she said. “Then you admit it’s what she was?” I cried. “Tell me how you know,” my friend simply repeated. “Know? By seeing her! By the way she looked.” “At you, do you mean – so wickedly?” “Dear me, no – I could have borne that. She gave me never a glance. She only fixed the child.” Mrs. Grose tried to see it. “Fixed her?” “Ah with such awful eyes!” She stared at mine as if they might really have resembled them. “Do you mean of dislike?” “God help us, no. Of something much worse.” “Worse than dislike?” – this left her indeed at a loss. “With a determination – indescribable. With a kind of fury of intention.” I made her turn pale. “Intention?” “To get hold of her.” Mrs. Grose – her eyes just lingering on mine – gave a shudder . . . ( James 2004: 57)

The governess interprets Miss Jessel’s stare rather precisely: the ghost’s eyes silently reveal her demonic plans for the small girl, just as the governess knew with certainty that Peter Quint was seeking Miles when he peered into the dining room. Yet in this passage the governess herself is an object to be viewed; Mrs. Grose alternately avoids her glance and then holds it, thus guiding the reader with her shifting gaze that seems to manifest her reaction to the governess’s perceptions. In like manner, the governess reads the children’s interpretations of her by studying how their faces reflect hers. While talking to Miles, she says, “I seemed to see in the beautiful face with which he watched me how ugly and queer I looked” ( James 2004: 84). When she insists to Flora that Miss Jessel is watching them, she sees in Flora’s face an “expression of hard still gravity,” which appears to “read and accuse and judge” her ( James 2004: 102). The girl – once described as a “vision” of “angelic beauty”

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( James 2004: 30) – fixes her with a “mask of disaffection,” which causes the governess to perceive her as “hideously hard.” Having turned “common and almost ugly,” Flora speaks to the governess as would a “vulgarly pert little girl in the street” ( James 2004: 103). When Mrs. Grose comes in the next day to discuss their plans for Flora, the governess reacts with hysteria: “Oh I see her perfectly from here. She resents, for all the world like some high little personage, the imputation on her truthfulness and, as it were, her respectability. ‘Miss Jessel indeed-she!’ Ah she’s ‘respectable,’ the chit!” ( James 2004: 105)

Echoes of the tendency to blame the victim, as I observed earlier in my discussion of the Victorian concept of respectability, reverberate in the governess’s hysteria. With such hypersensitive concern over social class and illicit sexuality, the governess displaces her fear of the transgressor, Miss Jessel, onto Flora, and articulates her displacement by bitterly mocking Flora’s desire to be seen as truthful, as respectable. The governess is, after all, herself a sort of transgressor, living with a wealthy family (at least, with the children), treated as the moral and spiritual leader of the household even though she is actually an outsider. To acknowledge the liminality of her position, that she is both a familiar and an unfamiliar member of the household, terrifies her. Describing Flora as an “old, old woman” with an expression of “fixed reprobation” when Miss Jessel appears, the governess unwittingly glimpses the uncanny inversion of her relationship to Flora. The governess becomes the child whose understanding cannot be trusted, or the servant whose class cannot be respectable, or the madwoman whose rantings will lead to death. Nevertheless, she is aware that her reactions to the mysterious events cause the others to scrutinize her just as she fixes them. Vision and silence, then, are both heimlich and unheimlich: the governess perceives and is the object of perception, just as silence conceals and reveals. Both objective and subjective vision are tied in this tale to accusation, moral guilt, or danger; visual and auditory perception, therefore can never be morally (and therefore, epistemologically) neutral. The most disturbing consequence of her fear of mingled silence and the unseen occurs in the final scene. Having sent Flora away with Mrs. Grose to London, she queries Miles about why he was expelled from school and squeezes a confession from him that he said things to boys at his school, things too bad for the headmaster – no doubt a subscriber to Victorian respectability – to name. As his confession comes out, bit by bit, she finds herself “blind with victory” but realizes that the moral battle is not over when Peter Quint appears at the window ( James 2004: 118). The governess again violates the sanctity of the name by calling out Miss Jessel’s name in response to Miles’s question, “Is she here?” and then points to the “coward horror” staring through the window. Miles, however, does not see Quint – and the governess seems to understand that, for she writes, “[Miles] was at me in a white rage, bewildered,

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glaring vainly over the place and missing wholly.” Nevertheless, she has summoned all her righteous outrage and is determined to win her battle; she knows that the only way for her to exorcise the demon is to force Miles to end his silence and his refusal (or inability) to see, and acknowledge Quint by speaking his name. She will not accept “It’s he?” as the exorcising enunciation; instead, she demands the name itself. In the most crucially ambiguous wording in the text, Miles says, “Peter Quint – you devil!” – but whether the “you devil” is directed to Quint or to the governess is impossible to determine definitively ( James 2004: 120). With his use of “devil,” Miles either confirms the governess’s belief that Quint possesses him and that her theology and ideology have served her well, or strongly suggests a reading of the governess as misguided, mad, or evil in her totalitarian, absolutist approach. The use of silence and of vision thus reveals the impossibility of a stable interpretation of the events in this text even as it spotlights the governess’s dread of socialclass and sexual transgressions of respectability. The reader has, roughly speaking, the following choices regarding the moral behavior of Quint and Miss Jessel: (a) there was nothing illicit between them, in which case the governess has been misguided by her assumptions based on their social class and what she would see as related sexual tendencies; (b) the two had some sort of sexual relationship with each other, thus flouting sexual and social conventions of bourgeois Victorian England; and/or (c) the two had some sort of sexually abusive relationship with the children, combining social and sexual transgressions with criminality. If the first choice is correct, then the governess’s obsession with policing transgressions of moral and social-class laws takes on a misguided, if not vicious, cast. In the event of either of the last two possibilities, the illegality is obvious. In all of these scenarios, the governess demonizes Quint and Miss Jessel because they represent what Rosemary Jackson calls the “illegal” in this society: illicit sexuality, pedophilia, interpretive chaos – all uncanny inversions of her own illicit desires and behaviors that threaten her construction of respectability. This reading is inevitably provisional not only because of the text’s famous ambiguity, but also (in part) because my interpretations of both the literary and the nonfiction texts are rooted in my own background, my own heimlich. Another critic could provide other non-fiction texts from mid-century, other readings of passages from this literary text itself, other interpretations of James’s life and times, other theories of the fantastic. Because of this paradoxically permanent provisionality, the text is never resolved as uncanny or marvelous in Todorov’s terms; instead, it disquiets precisely because it denies the possibility of final and full knowledge. The Turn of the Screw refuses to provide any stable interpretive grounding, so that the traditional realist project of an unmediated depiction of reality instead reveals the uncanny inversion of itself. For James, this was a step towards the goal of complete representation; for the history of literature in English, this was an early step towards the challenges of postmodernism. The novelist and essayist Cynthia Ozick acknowledges the difficulty of this and other of James’s late texts:

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The pivotal truth about the later Henry James is not that he chooses to tell too little . . . but that he knows too much, and much more than we, or he, can possibly take in. . . . James, like Kafka, enters mazes and penetrates into the vortex of spirals; and again like Kafka, the ghost in the vortex sometimes wears his own face. (Ozick 1996: 103–4)

The ghost that wears his author’s face: Ozick recognizes that James’s horrors are horrors because they hint rather than tell. She considers James’s description of “the dear old sacred terror” as the “withheld glimpse” of “dreadful matter” and wisely concludes that we readers of James cannot look into the abyss of nothingness: The glimpse is withheld; to be permitted more than the glimpse would be to know too much. The sacred terror is, in fact, the sensation – not simply fright, but a kind of revulsion – that comes when glimpse perilously lengthens into gaze. (Ozick 1996: 111)

Another novelist, Virginia Woolf, also understands this power of averting the gaze. Because she had not found James’s earlier ghost stories to be frightening, she writes, one night she reads The Turn of the Screw just before bedtime. It is the silence that lingers after she turns out the light, as she thinks of the rooks that stop their cawing in the golden sky while an “unutterable obscenity” intrudes. Although Quint may haunt the reader, Woolf writes, it is not Quint whom we should fear; rather, “[w]e are afraid of something, perhaps, in ourselves”: In short, we turn on the light. If by its beams we examine the story in safety, note . . . how beauty and obscenity twined together worm their way to the depths – still we must own that something remains unaccounted for. We must admit that Henry James has conquered. That courtly, worldly, sentimental old gentleman can still make us afraid of the dark. (Woolf 1981: 72)

Silence, darkness, beauty and obscenity, dreadful matter: no reader or critic can really explain them. Read and reread this tale as we will, Henry James has conquered. Notes 1

2

Peter G. Beidler’s edition of The Turn of the Screw (the edition used in this essay) includes a more detailed overview of the genesis as well as critical reception of the novella. For an even more extended examination, see Hoople (1997). I should note that Todorov’s use of “uncanny” refers to the genre adjacent to the fantastic. For this essay, my use of “uncanny” will follow Jackson’s as derived from Freud.

3

If the primary narrative is set roughly at the time of the novella’s publication (1898), then 1848 would likely be the year of the events the governess describes. Douglas tells us that she was ten years older than he, and since they met while he was at university, she was likely around thirty then, which means that ten years had elapsed since her time at Bly, since we know she was twenty when she accepted the position there. One of Douglas’s fellow house-

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mates notes that he has kept her story a secret for forty years; thus, the events seem to have happened fifty years earlier. The fact that she has read Jane Eyre suggests that the events take place after that novel’s publication in 1847, but of course the governess is writing this narrative many years later so that the rhetorical question “Was there a ‘secret’ at Bly – a mystery of Udolpho or an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in unsuspected confinement?” (James 2004: 41) could have been added at the time of her writing the manuscript. Most scholars agree that the events at Bly take place around mid-century, and because the governess was twenty years old when she accepted the position, she would have been born around 1828. Whether her father was of the High Church, Low Church, Broad Church, or Evangelical party cannot be determined with so little information. Because of what I perceive to be the governess’s rigid adherence to her precon-

5

6

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ceived notions about class and sexuality, I would speculate that she is from a High Church background: “High Church novelists and heroines had to concern themselves with high standards of genteel behavior; . . . Low-Church women, less encumbered by such ideas, were allowed much greater scope for action” (Melnyk 1988: 110). Why the narrator only mentions daughters at this point in the text is not clear, since the governess speaks of her brothers later (see James 2004: 66). See Beth Newman, “Feminine Identity and Scopic Crisis” in Cornwell and Malone (1998) for a fuller examination of the term “to fix” in this text. This “fixing” works both ways: the governess says twice that Quint “fixed” her from his vantage point on the tower with “just the question . . . that his own presence provoked” (James 2004: 40). One wonders how Quint interpreted the governess.

References and Further Reading Arch, Joseph [John Gerard O’Leary] (1966). The Autobiography of Joseph Arch. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Armstrong, Paul B. (1987). The Challenge of Bewilderment: Understanding and Representation in James, Conrad, and Ford. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Armstrong, Paul B. (1988). “History and epistemology: The example of The Turn of the Screw.” New Literary History, 19.3 (Spring): 693–712. Argues against replacing epistemology with history, since history is another text with specific epistemological assumptions, exemplified by the conflicts over The Turn of the Screw. Banta, Martha (1972). Henry James and the Occult. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Enjoyable examination of James’s choices and uses of occult material in his fiction. Beidler, Paul G. (1993). Frames in James: The Tragic Muse, The Turn of the Screw, What Maisie Knew, and The Ambassadors. Victoria, BC: University of Victoria Press. A Derridian analysis of James’s

use of frames, with a helpful chapter on The Turn of the Screw. Beidler, Peter G. (1989). Ghosts, Demons, and Henry James: The Turn of the Screw at the Turn of the Century. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Provides historical accounts of ghost sightings, spiritualism, and demonic possession, and makes a compelling argument that this novella is the story of ghostly possession. Bell, Ian F. A. (1984). Henry James: Fiction as History. Totowa, NJ: Vision. Collection of essays that includes Millicent Bell’s well-argued essay on the governess as a writer of romance. Cornwell, Neil, and Maggie Malone (eds.) (1988). The Turn of the Screw and What Maisie Knew. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Collection of excellent theoretical essays by writers such as Shoshana Felman and John Carlos Rowe. Edel, Leon (1978). Henry James: The Trcacherous Years: 1895–1901. New York: Avon Books. Edel, Leon (1985). Henry James: A Life. New York: Harper and Row.

The Turn of the Screw Edel, Leon and Lyall H. Powers (1987). The Complete Notebooks of Henry James. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Esch, Deborah and Jonathan Warren (eds.) (1999). Henry James, The Turn of the Screw. 2nd edn. New York: W. W. Norton. Includes helpful sections on textual variants, contemporary reviews, essays from the mid-twentieth century, and more recent readings. Felman, Shoshana (1977). “Turning the Screw of Interpretation.” Yale French Studies, 55/56: 94– 207. Seminal and brilliant essay in which Felman, drawing on Derrida and Lacan, argues that the text resists mastery of any kind, “luring the reader into attempting to avoid the trap, into believing that there is an outside to the trap” (p. 199). Goddard, Harold C. (1957). “A pre-Freudian reading of ‘The Turn of the Screw.’” Nineteenth Century Literature, 12: 1–36. Griffin, Susan M. (ed.) (2002). Henry James Goes to the Movies. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Essays on different texts by James that have been adapted, with an interesting analysis by Anthony J. Mazzella of Jack Clayton’s adaptation, The Innocents. Haig, Alan (1984). The Victorian Clergy. London: Croome Helm. Heller, Terry (1989). The Turn of the Screw: Bewildered Vision. Boston: Twayne. Engaging exploration of the process of (re)-reading the novella. Hoople, Robin P. (1997). Distinguished Discord: Discontinuity and Pattern in the Critical Tradition of The Turn of the Screw. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Indispensable for a thorough understanding of the history of the novella’s reception. Horne, Philip (ed.) (1999). Henry James: A Life in Letters. New York: Viking. Highly readable collection of letters combined with biographical background. Jackson, Louise A. (2000). Child Sexual Abuse in Victorian England. London: Routledge. Excellent study of the cultural and political agendas regarding sexual abuse of children. Jackson, Rosemary (1981). Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. New York: Methuen. Compelling articulation from a psychoanalytic view that considers the fantastic as a manifestation of cultural anxieties.

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James, Henry (1984a). Literary Criticism: American Writers, English Writers, Essays on Literature. New York: Library of America. James, Henry (1984b). Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition. New York: Library of America. These two volumes of James’s critical writings are invaluable for his views of other writers and for his prefaces to the New York Edition of his works. James, Henry (2004). The Turn of the Screw. Ed. Peter G. Beidler. 2nd edn. Boston: Bedford. In addition to the literary text, this volume provides historical and biographical backgrounds, an overview of the novella’s reception, case histories of governesses and supernatural occurrences, as well as five different theoretical approaches. Kenton, Edna (1924). “Henry James to the Ruminant Reader: The Turn of the Screw.” The Arts, 245–55. One of the first articles to espouse the non-apparitionist view. Knight, Frances (1995). The Nineteenth-Century Church and English Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Argues that the Anglican church maintained an important hold on middle-class England in the nineteenth century. Lustig, T. J. (1994). Henry James and the Ghostly. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Examination of James’s frequent use of liminality in his fiction, not just in his ghost stories; includes a long essay on The Turn of the Screw. McCormack, Peggy (ed.) (2000). Questioning the Master: Gender and Sexuality in Henry James’s Writings. Delaware: University of Delaware Press. Treats a number of James’s works; Eric Haralson’s essay on The Turn of the Screw argues convincingly that the tale is an allegory of sexual panic. Melnyk, Julie (ed.) (1988). Women’s Theology in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Transfiguring the Faith of Their Fathers. New York: Garland. Essays on Victorian women writing about theology. Obelkevich, James (1976). Religion and Rural Society: South Lindsey 1825–1875. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Social history of religion as practiced in rural England. Ozick, Cynthia (1996). Fame and Folly. New York: Vintage. Essays on authors and their

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personal struggles; the essay on James provides a good summary of his dark period of the 1890s. Pollak, Vivian R. (ed.) (1993). New Essays on Daisy Miller and The Turn of the Screw. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Includes an excellent essay by Millicent Bell in which she expands on her earlier views of the governess in light of her gender, class, and profession. Snell, K. D. M., and Paul, S. E. (2000). Rival Jerusalems: The Geography of Victorian Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Uses information from the 1851 census (among other

data) on religion to help delineate the various religious groupings in nineteenth-century England and Wales. Todorov, Tzevtan (1973). The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press. Wilson, Edmund (1963). “The Ambiguity of Henry James.” A Casebook on Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. Ed. Gerald Willen. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell. Woolf, Virginia (1981). Granite and Rainbow. London: Hogarth. Collection of essays on the arts of fiction and biography.

7

On Maisie’s Knowing Her Own Mind Robert B. Pippin

I Throughout Henry James’s novel What Maisie Knew many people claim to speak for Maisie Farange. Since Maisie is a child, ranging from about six to about twelve in the novel, this is not in itself unusual. Neither, given her age, is it unusual that for most of this time one of the people speaking for Maisie is not Maisie. This is so because most of the novel is not about what Maisie knew but what she didn’t know, and so what she had to learn. One thing she had to learn of course is the dreary truth that hardly anyone who claims to be speaking for her really is. The five adults nominally in charge of her care are each speaking rather grotesquely only for themselves. (This turns out to be true even of the apparently motherly Mrs. Wix.) All of this is not easy for Maisie to see because each of these five characters is more or less “modern” in their exercise of social authority and power. They do not simply want to coerce or bully Maisie, at least not openly. They want everything that they want Maisie to do or to accept to seem to Maisie something that she, Maisie, wants to do or to accept, and aside from her horrid birth mother, Ida, they are not bad at such a strategy.1 But to understand that all this is so, Maisie has to learn something: how one might speak for oneself. She has to learn how to “know her own mind,” even how “to come into possession” of her own mind. Now there is a long contestation in modern philosophy about what in general this sort of knowledge, the sort that I (and only I) can have of myself, or “first-personal” knowledge, consists in. Philosophers have been impressed with the asymmetries between first- and third-personal knowledge. That is, I can know of your attitudes only by observation and inference, but I don’t need to observe or infer anything to know that I am sad, or that I hate reality television. When I avow such things I am not reporting an observation or drawing a conclusion from evidence. And they have been impressed by the striking difference it makes in my adoption of both a third person and a first person attitude toward myself. That is, I can believe what my analyst tells me about my resentment of a sibling without

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experiencing such resentment “first-personally,” without my being able to recognize what I am feeling toward the sibling as resentment.2 All of these issues will come into play in the discussion which follows, but James’s novel raises that kind of issue at another register than that addressed by the question of first person authority itself. For a person can sincerely exercise such authority, in all its asymmetricality from third person knowledge, and still be evincing and avowing what others want one to; one can avow something other than what one would, were it not for such manipulative interference.3 Being minded in a distinct way and knowing, uniquely, first-personally, what that way is, is one thing; having a mind of one’s own is another. The latter is a difficult achievement, and while it relies on the notion of distinctly first-personal knowledge, it extends that issue into much more difficult territory.4 What Maisie Knew presents us with an extremely rich, dense picture of this common and arguably most important form of self-knowledge: “knowing one’s own mind,” that condition necessary to realize the greatest of modern values, freedom, living one’s own life.5 As in its ordinary sense, here in the novel, this means for Maisie in particular coming to know what “really” matters to her, what philosophers sometimes think of as her motivated desires or deliberated attitudes. These must be “motivated” and “deliberated” because, given the seriousness of the consequences, she needs to know what really matters to her, not what seems to at a given moment nor (especially in this case) what it would please others for her to count as mattering. None of this “backing” relies on long moments of extended calm and quiet reflection; indeed, since she is a child, it cannot depend on any mastery of the concepts of deliberation, warrant, and so forth. But as in ordinary life, her coming to a resolution is a process much more deeply entwined with the ordinary, everyday business of leading a life, reacting to surprises, incorporating new experiences, taking on the weight and direction provided by experiences, and so forth.6 As we shall see, at a crucial point in the dénouement, she is asked to make a terribly difficult choice, and in order to choose, she needs not merely to be able to express what she feels as inclinations and aversions. It is especially important that we come to see that Maisie’s knowing her own mind is essentially finally making up her own mind about both what to believe and what to do. “Having a mind of one’s own” that one might know reliably is shown to be inseparable from in effect formulating and resolving to have such a mind of one’s own, and in most cases, perhaps ultimately in all, it is thereby inseparable from a kind of thrust outward into the world, affecting and changing what others would otherwise have been able to think or to do.7 (One must stand behind a resolution for it to count actually as a resolution, for one’s mind to count as one’s own and as finally made up, and in the social world that James presents to us again and again, that always involves the resolute willingness to sacrifice other possible courses of action and endure the opposition of others whom one’s resolve and actions affect.) The most fascinating thing about What Maisie Knew is how James imagines for us the development of this capacity, Maisie’s ultimate ability to separate her own concerns from what she has been told are her own concerns

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and in effect to commit to what she has resolved for herself, to stand behind them when challenged. She is shown to develop this self-knowledge without it having much to do with “getting better in touch with herself,” as if she were to find something in an innerself, buried beneath the self-serving versions of what ought to matter to her that are provided by so many others. Knowing/having her own mind involves much more the achievement of abilities like the following: a kind of navigational ability, an ability to steer her own course in a hostile and complicated environment; a capacity to interpret and resist the characterizations of others, to manage the social conflict James seems to treat as essential to, constitutive of, sociality itself; the attainment of a position where she can assume some even minimal responsibility for her own commitments; and very much a kind of practical or know-how sort of knowledge, rather than a theoretical sort. (The most frequent image for this capacity is knowledge of how to play a game.)8 James, in other words, is not treating “knowing one’s own mind” as a perceptual turn inward, but as involving a number of practical abilities concerned with what we have to be able to understand and especially what we must be willing and able to do in order to come to occupy such a “genuinely” first-personal position. We will see Maisie’s dawning self-awareness in this unusual sense, and its various conditions, displayed in a kind of organically growing, developing, somewhat unstable social world, as it “lives,” James might say, in a network of densely related, finally inseparable, contesting lives. The result will be a lesson of sorts in what a difference it makes to view ordinary, everyday self-knowledge embedded in such a web of social contestations, practical tasks, and temporal fluidity, rather than as a cognitive task performed by an isolated, reflective individual.9 Understanding all of this will also be important in coming to terms with a conclusion as dramatic and ambiguous as any in James. Maisie learns all of this, in other words, but the final turn of the self-knowledge screw visible in the ending is paradoxical. Once one has gotten over the shock at how subtle, complex, and pointed Maisie’s proposed “deal” is, another question inevitably arises. Has she learned all this too well? The past tense in the title could refer to a kind of knowledge and (innocent?) self-knowledge Maisie had, but lost when she takes up her new “experienced” position.

II This is a lot to ask of a “slip of a girl” ( James 1998: 6) and a lot to ask of a novel not generally treated as one of James’s greatest. To say anything about any of this, I need to summarize the plot. This is not easy; it is a kind of French farce in its complicated erotic geometry. Our story begins at the conclusion of a nasty divorce between Beale and Ida Farange, two middle-class, fairly well off, deeply selfish people. Ida is often

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described as a garish woman who wears too much make-up, chases men, and plays a lot of billiards. Apparently the only notable thing about Beale Farange is his great beard “burnished like a gold breast-plate” ( James 1998: 16). They have a child, Maisie, of whom the father originally gains full custody; something, we are given to believe, he wants only to spite his former wife. Mr. Farange cannot, though, account for twenty-six hundred pounds placed in his keeping by his wife for the care of the child three years before and so Mrs. Farange gains half custody as part of a “deal.” We are given to believe that she is pleased by this only because it thwarts what she believes are her husband’s wishes. This does not bode well for the little girl’s shared life, and indeed Maisie is treated horribly when she is treated at all, and is rightly referred to as a tennis ball or shuttlecock in a game between the two former spouses. Her governess when she lives with her father is a Miss Overmore, a beautiful and accomplished young woman whom Maisie likes very much. (More than her father actually, although the narrator tells us this while admitting that Maisie “couldn’t” or “at least didn’t” put it to herself this way ( James 1998: 28). These unusual ways of referring to Maisie’s views of her own attitudes will recur frequently.)10 While at Ida’s, her governess is the “grey, greasy” Mrs. Wix, a name perhaps calculated to draw our attention to the issue of “candle power,” of which the poor Mrs. Wix has precious little. This sad widow has lost a child in a traffic accident and enthusiastically adopts Maisie as a surrogate, devoting herself to the child even though completely unable to play the traditional role of a governess. She cannot teach Maisie anything because she knows so little and instead either tells her romantic stories, or gossips with her about her wayward parents. She is indeed “as ignorant as a fish” ( James 1998: 53). It isn’t long before three things happen. Ida marries a younger man, Sir Claude. Of all the characters he might be said to be the most sympathetic to Maisie, inclined even to occasional protective and nurturing acts. Maisie is immensely fond of him, a fact that will play a large role in the novel’s conclusion. Beale Farange meanwhile has fallen for the governess, Miss Overmore, and they marry. (Miss Overmore is thereafter referred to by everyone as Mrs. Beale.) Their pre-marriage affair and post-marriage gallivanting about insure that Maisie receives in effect no education at all in either household. She will learn a great deal but the narrator goes to some lengths to establish a contrast between the richness of this sort of wisdom and the poverty of Maisie’s official “learning.” Secondly, both birth parents come to realize that it would injure the other much more not by taking Maisie for his or her six-month turn, but by conniving to escape such a responsibility, a strategy that does not of course leave Maisie feeling wanted and loved. Third, in the final major complication the two new stepparents, Mrs. Beale and Sir Claude, find that their new marriages are not much to their respective liking, and take up with each other. Maisie must try to follow all of this and has understandable difficulty. (At various points she finds it hard to understand the content of a concept like “parent.”) So the question between Beale and Ida becomes how best to use Maisie

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to inconvenience the other; and the question for Mrs. Beale and Sir Claude becomes how they might escape their marriages to Maisie’s birth parents (“be free”) and preserve at least some modicum of respectability. They see that Maisie might be useful for this purpose, perhaps in the eyes of the world redeem their illicit liaison. For Mrs. Wix, who in effect spends more time with Maisie than anyone (at no point are playmates of either gender or any normal social contact with other children mentioned), the question has become how to convince Sir Claude, who, she rightly sees, is the only person involved who feels any pull from the question of what would it be right by Maisie to do, to set up some sort of domestic arrangement for the three of them, free from all of these immoral entanglements. This all comes to a head when Sir Claude, in an apparently very poorly thought out plan, spirits Maisie away to Folkstone and then to Boulogne in France, in preparation for some sort of escape from his wife. Ida hears of it and travels there herself, concerned about how any aspect of such a plan will affect her. There is a scene, she leaves and conspires to send Mrs Wix over, on the correct view that Mrs. Wix’s narrow, rigid moralism, combined with Maisie’s attachment to her, will spoil any plans Claude and Mrs. Beale may have made for a life together in France (that natural home, apparently, for free spirits and escapees from bourgeois rectitude). Mrs. Beale then shows up and the final plans of each player now become apparent. First Mrs. Beale tries to convince Mrs. Wix to agree to Sir Claude and Mrs. Beale as a morally acceptable couple (at least in France), and the four of them will live together. That fails. Mrs. Wix wavers, but finally rejects the idea. Sir Claude then tries to convince Maisie to “give up” Mrs. Wix and join the two of them for a domestic trio. Mrs. Wix wants Maisie simply to leave this den of iniquity and return to England with her. (It is not irrelevant here that Maisie has become for Mrs. Wix a meal ticket.) Maisie must herself decide how all these purported adults are to live their lives. Then the most amazing and complicated event in the novel occurs. Without prejudging the moral status of her action, it could be said that Maisie reveals that she has learned how to play this game very well. She tells Sir Claude that she, Maisie, will give up Mrs. Wix if he, Sir Claude, will give up Mrs. Beale; if just the two of them set up house. By this point the whole weight of meaning in the novel comes heavily down on this proposition; on, that is, what Maisie means by it, how she understands it, what she is trying to do by offering it, what she must have learned to be offering it. She may be trying to say what she already knows: that her love for Sir Claude is greater than his for her, given what each is and is not willing to give up. If this somewhat adult reading is true, she may be trying mainly to get rid of Mrs. Beale as a rival and have Sir Claude for herself. She may have figured out that this is simply the only outcome that will leave something for her. Mrs. Wix seems to have convinced her that there is no real possibility of simply running off with the unmarried pair, and/or Maisie may have figured out what her status would be like in such a threesome, given Sir Claude’s much discussed weakness and fear of women. It may all be a test; to see just how much she can or cannot count on Sir Claude. At any rate, it is what is presented to us as Maisie finally knowing her own mind, as “what Maisie

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knew.” That comes down to her staking everything on this complicated conditional, and her living with the outcome; which is, predictably, that she and Mrs. Wix sail back to England together; Sir Claude stays with Mrs. Beale.

III Let us say, with convention, that at the end Maisie has lost her innocence and become experienced. To understand what that means and how it bears on her assertion of her own view of things, we need to understand three things: Maisie’s original state of mind; what she has learned; and the nature of the difference between her original and her altered state of mind. The Maisie we first come to know, when she is six, in the immediate aftermath of the divorce, is described in ways that seem very deliberately to raise questions both about her own state of mind and her relation to her own mind. Her division from herself is first described as her being able “to see much more than she at first understood,” even though she was also able “at first to understand much more than any little girl” ( James 1998: 18). When her first nurse, Moddle, remarks that Maisie must be feeling the great strain of the divorce, we are told, “Thus from the first Maisie not only felt it [the strain], but knew she felt it” ( James 1998: 19). This is an odd way of speaking since it implies the possibility that she could experience something like this strain without knowing that she was, but the scene and the phrase suggest that it is because of Moddle’s remark that she learns to call whatever she was feeling as “the strain”11 and that she notices things in this reflective way. She raises a striking, unusual question about her father. Her mother had told her frequently that her father “lies and knows that he lies,” and Maisie wants especially to know not whether he actually lies but “Does he know he lies?” (a question that seems to reveal a settled view on the first of the mother’s claims, even if it also slightly hints at quite sophisticated a hope on Maisie’s part, as if Beale might be unknowingly telling her things that weren’t true, but not lying “because he didn’t know”). Maisie is once said to “feel something” with Mrs. Wix, and that later she knew what it was, even though, even at that, “she couldn’t have made a statement of it” ( James 1998: 29).12 We don’t know yet if this inability is more like her inability to admit to herself that she likes Miss Overmore more than her father (a kind of moral hesitation simply to put it that way, that bluntly) or whether she is really being said to have determinate experiences which she cannot name or comprehend (something that would again be philosophically obscure). The experience is determinate enough – that Mrs. Wix had been, and is now acting like, a mother, something her own mother was not – and perhaps that already indicates that the description, in the pain it would cause Maisie to admit it, amounts to the former sort of hesitation.

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Maisie is said to be fatalistic, but essentially not to know this; she has an “unformulated fatalism” ( James 1998: 47). And there is Maisie’s early and sustained strategy for what is increasingly referred to as the “game” that Maisie must learn how to play. Her first move in it at such a young age is startling. After she realizes or (“senses”) what her parents are doing in using her to carry messages like “He lies and knows that he lies,” and “you’re a nasty, horrid pig”: She had a new feeling, the feeling of danger; on which a new remedy rose to meet it, the idea of an inner self, or, in other words of concealment . . . She would forget everything, she would repeat nothing, and when, as a tribute to the successful application of her system, she began to be called a little idiot, she tasted a pleasure new and keen. ( James 1998: 23)

This might seem an odd strategy, as if she is pretending to be ignorant of motives and meanings that she really is ignorant of, but Maisie is feigning stupidity, not ignorance.13 That is, she at least knows there is much that she doesn’t know, and she quickly learns that she cannot evince any such sense and must play stupid and slow to avoid the burdens placed on her by her hateful parents. It is in this sense that she sees but does not understand. That is she sees; something is marked in her experience as requiring an interpretation she cannot yet give. She knows this about her own experiences but she pretends not even to be aware of this gap or lack. (She sees “that everything had something behind it; life was like a long, long corridor with rows of closed doors” ( James 1998: 36), all without knowing what is behind the doors.) So the first manifestation of “her own mind” is this act of resistance or refusal. It is not a defense of her private views from inspection and manipulation; it is the creation of such a false front even though there as yet is next to no content in such an inner-self. She does not have a worked out view of what to think about what her parents are using her for or why, but she intuits that whatever it is, it has little to do with her and it is by resisting their incursions that she comes to have a concealed or inner-self. This is not yet a mind of her own, but it is something not theirs. Feigning stupidity, creating misreadings on their part, is what gives her that odd, striking as yet unnamable “pleasure,” the pleasure of subjectivity, one might call it.

IV Here and in other novels and stories, James seems to suggest a link between a resistance to the exercise of power over one and the achievement of an inner realm of one’s own as well as a link between a first-personal avowal or expression or assertion of such a view of one’s own and a stand taken in the social world that affects what others would otherwise be able to do, often against what they propose to do, and in a way that can function as a sort of test of the genuineness of the avowal. He treats these two dimensions, private

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and social, as virtually co-constitutive; it is by resisting the “incursions” of others that such a realm is achieved. Its boundaries are the boundaries of such resistance.14 This is contrary to views of some prior private, inner realm, prior in the sense of being formulable as that which one has and defends against the control of others, or possessed and protected prior to and against the refusals of acknowledgment and the contrary interpretations, contesting moves, by others. Maisie’s mindedness and her coming to attain a position from which she can assert her own mind “come to be over time,” before our eyes as it were, and is not merely something “there” more and more “manifested.” Our intuitions tell us that one comes to be sure of oneself, for oneself, and one then and partly thereby acquires the courage to claim something for oneself, against others. But our narrative does not separate things this way. Maisie becomes “Maisie” only against Ida, finally against the originally beloved Mrs. Beale, with, but not really for, Mrs. Wix, for and at the same time against Sir Claude, and so forth. But this will require seeing more of what happens to Maisie. To anticipate this whole process a bit, consider one last example of the unusual reflexive language of the book. Towards the end, it has become clear to Maisie and Mrs. Wix that their only, if often unreliable, ally has been Sir Claude, and they admit, as if two school girls, that they both have mighty crushes on him. Neither is too enamored at this point of Sir Claude’s lover, Mrs. Beale, and Mrs. Wix is therefore prompted to ask an obvious “self-knowledge” question of Maisie. “Has it never occurred to you to be jealous of her [meaning Mrs. Beale, their rival]?” The narrator then tells us, “It never had in the least [occurred to Maisie to be jealous]; yet the words were scarce in the air before Maisie jumped at them.” The passage then goes on: She held them [the words] well, she looked at them hard; at last she brought out with an assurance, which there was no one, alas, but herself to admire: “Well, yes – since you ask me.” She debated, then continued: “Lots of times!” ( James 1998: 220)

As in other similar instances about what Maisie has seen but not understood, this one can suggest that Maisie has had experiences which she didn’t know that she had, even that she has felt things that she didn’t know she felt. But the context and language here suggest otherwise. Mrs. Wix’s question had not been, “Aren’t you jealous of Mrs. Beale?” nor is it “Have you ever been jealous?” but, “Has it never occurred to you to be jealous of her?” This has the tone much more of a suggestion about what attitude Maisie should have taken up, should take up now, as “Don’t you think you should start acting jealously toward Mrs. Beale?” And Maisie’s response is telling. We know from the narrator that Maisie has not in the least been jealous, but at this point she “does” an extraordinary number of things with that “Lots of times.” Primarily she takes up a stance towards Mrs. Beale, a commitment to regarding her as, and so treating her as, a rival, something that will have momentous implications later, when Maisie acts out that commitment at the end of the novel. This in effect is a way of admitting that she sees now that she should have been jealous. (Her answer does not

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involve a report about an inner state but a reflexive stance taken up for reasons in a social world.) We are also told though, that she did not want to appear “simple” (James 1998: 250) and so gave out as if she had felt that way all along, trying to influence Mrs. Wix’s perception of her. (Of course she is also, in admitting jealousy, admitting to a state she only imperfectly understands.) She does this because she knows that Mrs. Wix thinks that Maisie’s “moral sense” is more feigned than real, and that this is “discouraging” Mrs. Wix. So she tries to influence Mrs. Wix’s perception of her honesty and forthrightness, hoping that by admitting to “the most restless of passions,” one that persons are reluctant to admit to, she will influence Mrs. Wix’s estimation of her “sincerity,” something she hopes will carry over to the estimation of the sincerity of her moral sense. (This is all quite different of course from trying to have a better moral sense, a goal never really of much interest to Maisie.) This succeeds and they have a conversation of “unprecedented frankness,” all based on the otherwise deceptive “report” (that is not really a report and is not true) of Maisie’s prior “jealousy.”

V There are many more passages about self-knowledge like the ones just cited, but they all contribute to a point being made that is sometimes neglected in philosophical discussions of self-knowledge: it is hard to know one’s own mind, and the task of achieving a “mind of one’s own” to know is unavoidable, even for a little girl, especially for this little girl, the object of the manipulations of so many. The fact that such knowledge does not seem to be observational nor inferential does not mean it is, in its purported “immediacy,” easy, and the difficulty in question does not seem to be wholly one of clarity or acuity of perception.15 Maisie’s being able to see much in the world around her that she cannot understand applies reflexively too, and the growth of her sureness afoot about the former seems linked to the latter, again deeply linked. She is inclined towards descriptions, attitudes, avowals, commitments without yet being able actually to make them, to “make up” her mind, and the novel makes it easy to see why. She is caught up in so many different, bewildering agendas that her being a child does not seem explanation enough for her confusion. The difficulty she has though in making up her mind about the conduct of others around her and therewith coming to know her own mind is not the only aspect of her difficulty that is stressed. By the end of the first third or so of the novel, by chapter 12, she has made extraordinary progress in settling on her own views about what is going on in the circus she must live in. The narrator speaks of a “high quickening of Maisie’s direct perceptions, of her sense of freedom to make things out for herself” ( James 1998: 85). In fact, Maisie has learned partly to enjoy her frustrating position of “spectatorship” at her own life ( James 1998: 90). She has in effect learned to

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understand the game (football is mentioned) and considers that theatrical display in all its fascinating complexity (much of which she now “gets”) is a sort of “compensation” for the fact that she is made to, only allowed to, adopt a third person perspective about her own fate, a compensation for “the doom of a peculiar passivity” ( James 1998: 90). This is put in a very striking way: It [this experience of spectatorship] gave her often an odd air of being present at her history in as separate a manner as if she could only get at such experience by flattening her nose against a pane of glass. (James 1998: 90–1, my emphasis)

This suggests that she can be said in some sense to know her own mind, but in a truncated, incomplete way, “separate” from the living out of her own history. She has come to have views, reactions, interests, aspirations, and these can be in some sense attributed to her, but too much in the way one would attribute them to others, as if it all (her “history”) were happening to someone she is observing. Something is still lacking; practical views about what ought to be done, what ought always to be avoided, never accepted and so forth, must be views for which she can take responsibility, express in action, and all that is denied to Maisie. She is trapped as if in a glass box, trying to figure out what she thinks, but never sure of any such possible commitments “as her own” precisely because so prevented from “acting them out,” so trapped.16 There are by this point, though, intimations of her escape out from behind such a glass barrier. After a particularly complicated conversation with Sir Claude about where they all stand, this new, slightly more advanced state of mindedness is introduced first “by an emotion more mature than she had yet known” ( James 1998: 99). Claude had asked her if she felt any “dread” at encountering her father at Mrs. Beale’s, and Maisie, rather than merely take mental inventory, as it were, feels a sense of shame if, by her answer, she were to seem disloyal to her blood relative. However, remembering that Sir Claude himself had once mentioned that no one was really afraid of her father, sees a good, somewhat evasive way to answer: “Oh I dare say I can manage him” ( James 1998: 99). She sees in other words that she cannot answer the question about “dread” (a question about “her own” mindedness) without taking into account what such a response would mean to Sir Claude, what her expressing it there then would mean to him, given Claude’s current position in the social struggle they are all engaged in, and that it would manifest a disloyalty (commit her to other claims) she is not yet prepared to make.17 (Not to mention that such disloyalty would also seem to commit her to future courses of action which she is not yet in a position to assume responsibility for.) She is aware of a certain sort of dread in meeting up with her father, but one tinged with this sense of shame and disloyalty, and a reticence to declare such dread under these circumstances. This is what all the emotional flushes, blushing and coloring mean, and it is therefore quite

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apposite for Claude, who senses why Maisie had answered as she had, to have a reaction described as: “It was as if he had caught his first glimpse of her sense of responsibility” ( James 1998: 99). Once again, Maisie’s “interiority” is linked with her capacity to understand the complex possibilities of meaning in any putative report of her inner states, and so her capacity to “take responsibility” for her views and even for her immediate reactions (even her blushing, one might say), and that capacity is influenced by her position in the social world (what is allowed or denied her) that is independent of her and that she must work out for herself, must make a space for herself.18 She needs room for action like this in order fully to embody her sense of herself, to come to occupy a truly first-personal perspective, and so to have a mind of her own.

VI But Maisie is still suffering from her “dim apprehension of the unuttered and unknown,” however much progress she has made. The narrator must still report her condition in elaborate counterfactuals testifying to both the presence and absence of other- and self-knowledge. “Maisie could only have a sense of something that in a maturer mind would be called the way history repeats itself” ( James 1998: 137). She has at this point only “possibilities of vibration, of response” ( James 1998: 143). A great leap in her “education” occurs in a tense scene with her father. Maisie’s real brilliance breaks through in this scene, as she intuits rightly, first, that her father is asking her to play a certain game, to “pretend” that Beale knows something at all about his daughter’s life, or cares about it, and then she sees that the game is almost a farce, that her father is asking her “to go away with him to America” only so that she will refuse, so that he will be “let off” any guilt for abandoning her by having pretended to want her along. As the scene is set James is willing to go very far in elaborating Maisie’s knowledge, so far as almost to parody his own familiar depictions of sociality, as if to embrace the discomfort his brother William and so many other readers have so often expressed about the fussiness of James’s novels: . . . but if he had an idea at the back of his head she also had one in a recess as deep, and for a time, while they sat together, there was an extraordinary mute passage between her vision of this vision of his, his vision of her vision, and her vision of his vision of her vision. What there was no effective record of indeed was the small strange pathos on the child’s part of an innocence so saturated with knowledge and so directed to diplomacy. ( James 1998: 145)

There is a marvelous example of this dialectical “innocence so saturated with knowledge,” as Maisie sees exactly what to say that will both amount to a refusal to let her

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father off, and yet will allow no accusation that she is trying to make him feel guilty, that she is out for herself, or that she is insincere. “Dear Papa, I’ll go with you anywhere” ( James 1998: 146.) Farange nevertheless tries to accuse her of insincerity, of “humbugging” him, but he is not quick enough to keep up with Maisie. Because she sees what he’s after, she can safely continue to report her willingness to go with him (not her desire to, but her willingness in principle) in a way very differently inflected than if she had sensed he meant his offer seriously. He knows this; she knows he knows this, he knows . . . and so forth. But Beale’s insistence that they deal with each other as strategic bargainers does manage to move the conversation to a somewhat cruder, more direct model, and it culminates in a strange, unsettling frankness. For Beale realizes (and calls Maisie a “deep little devil” in realizing it) that Maisie is far beyond thinking of her negotiating options as limited to her birth parents. Beale reacts with a kind of “Aha!” realization: “You’ve settled it with the other pair!” “Well, what if I have?” She sounded to herself most bold. Her father, quite as in the old days, broke into a peal. “Why, don’t you know they’re awful?” She grew bolder still. “I don’t care – not a bit!” ( James 1998: 149)

This is quite a new Maisie and it will take the reader a while to assess what has happened to her. And she is still a beginner at this game. When Ida storms into Folkstone, determined to part from Maisie in a way that will not reflect badly on her publicly, Maisie feels the flush of her “deep diplomacy,” but plays her hand too strongly, forgets “that she had never been safe unless she had also been stupid” ( James 1998: 173). She remarks that one of Ida’s lovers, with whom Maisie had had a long private conversation, had remarked that Ida was “good,” a report Maisie means to carry to her as a compliment. But it reveals immediately that there is in general and for Maisie some real question of her being good, and Maisie’s remark clumsily appeals for authority to someone Ida announces is “the biggest cad in London,” in effect revealing how low one has to go to find someone who will issue such praise of the make-up abusing, billiard playing mama. But even this mistake teaches Maisie a great deal, for she now allows herself to become angry in response to Ida’s rage and insults (“the first flare of anger that had ever lighted her face for a foe”) ( James 1998: 175), or she knows what she feels about Ida, how she evaluates Ida in a way that can be expressed, in an attitude she can manifest and stand behind. She can resist Ida’s fury (Maisie could now “look up quite as hard as anyone could look down”) ( James 1998: 175). It is by virtue of this insight, both emotionally embodied as her own, and expressed in resistance to Ida, that Maisie can also carry it to a new level of imagination, can see her mother’s possible, pitiful fate, could see “madness and desolation . . . ruin” ( James 1998: 175).

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VII So Maisie, despite some missteps, has learned a great deal about how to play this game, has had the courage to live out, embody, her self-avowed attitudes and evaluations, and has seen what she must be willing to risk and endure in order thereby to have a mind of her own. But there is a last great test of this new capacity. The fate of Sir Claude and Mrs. Beale and Mrs. Wix have all come to rest on a decision by Maisie, and with resolve, courage, grace, confidence, and, one must say, not a little cunning, she makes one. The option of all four living together has been taken off the table by Mrs. Wix. In explaining her reasons, she reverts often to the need for Maisie to have a “moral sense,” something she discusses as if it were an instrument that could be found and lost rather easily, such that she, Mrs. Wix, is needed to keep it from being permanently misplaced by Maisie. It is remarkable how easily this supposed problem rolls off Maisie, never seems to grab her. She seems to have some intuitive sense of how much it suits Mrs. Wix’s interests to give out that she, Mrs. Wix, is still needed to teach Maisie something, when it is obvious to everyone that Maisie is already lightyears ahead of Mrs. Wix’s point of view.19 And what Mrs. Wix means is simply that Sir Claude and Mrs. Beale are adulterers, as if that, and not their irresponsibility with regard to Maisie and their thoughtlessness and narcissism and selfishness, is their great sin. (This kind of moralism, the view of morality as a set of fixed, completely determinate principles about the forbidden and the obligatory which one must obey as if external, divine commands, is always treated ironically by James, as with Henrietta Stackpole in Portrait, and the Pococks in The Ambassadors among many others.) At any rate, Maisie clearly doesn’t see it that way ( James 1998: 210) and never so much as pauses to give the issue much thought.20 But she still must decide between living with the two of them without Mrs. Wix, living with Mrs. Wix alone, or, as she chooses, trying to convince Sir Claude to live with her alone, such that each of them will “give up” someone close to them and live together. Since it is clear that it is not a violation of her moral sense which excludes the first, we are brought to see that what Maisie is doing is refusing to function merely as a cover or beard for Sir Claude and Mrs. Beale, refusing to pretend to Wixian moral indignation, and, in essence for the first time, expressing what she wants, what arrangement seems to her the best. Somehow, now that it was there, the great moment was not so bad. What helped the child was that she knew what she wanted. All her learning and learning had made her at last learn that . . . Bewilderment had simply gone or at any rate was going fast. ( James 1998: 270)

This moment of resolve manifests many of the elements stressed throughout here: that she had to learn to have her own mind, learn that being minded in such a way

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is a distinct mode of comportment towards the world, one that is expressed in one’s resolution about what is to be done, and that such a realization is necessary for such an attitude actually to be the attitude or evaluation one takes it to be, and that some complex negotiation between dependence on others and independence from them is often at stake in such a making up of one’s (own) mind. But it all clearly comes at a certain price. Maisie’s play in the game may be, as Sir Claude says, “exquisite” ( James 1998: 270), but just to the extent that Maisie has matched them all in resolve and even shrewdness, she has nevertheless begun playing an adult “game” that can be as sordid and depressing as it can be exhilarating and fascinating. She has no choice in the matter; she will remain easy prey if she doesn’t, but knowing her own mind has landed her on a boat steaming away from the person she cares most about, Sir Claude. A little more innocence and unknowingness (or perhaps self-deceit) and it could easily have been Mrs. Wix sailing away alone. But Maisie is up to such a choice and seems content with its costs. At any rate, she will not hide from them. As they sit on the boat, Mrs. Wix, typically, in a kind of enactment of her own, often willed ignorance, does not look back to see if Sir Claude is still on the balcony. Maisie does look back, and reports that Sir Claude wasn’t there. Mrs. Wix notes that he has returned to “her,” Mrs. Beale, and Maisie says simply, “Oh I know,” prompting the book’s pregnant last line: “Mrs. Wix gave a sidelong look. She still had room for wonder at what Maisie knew” ( James 1998: 275).

VIII One last philosophical coda. It is not easy to do full justice to the position that Maisie has achieved. I have argued that Maisie’s history reveals a link between the possibility of one’s own mindedness and a capacity for the public expression of such attitudes, a capacity to be responsive to and capable of engaging what one understands to be how others will take up and respond to what one says and does, and a capacity for actions consistent with and flowing from such mindedness, and so being responsible for such a mindedness and for such actions. This latter is often a possibility created by the play of circumstances beyond one’s control; very often it is a matter of seizing opportunities, and both conditions are relevant to Maisie’s case. Knowing one’s own mind, in other words, turns out to be “having a mind of one’s own,” which, in turn, must be wrested from others and protected in ways neither indifferent to nor submissive to the demands and interpretations of others, and it means a form of mindedness that one must be able to express and act out, “realize” in the world. But does this mean, one might ask, that one cannot be said to harbor “one’s own” commitments, evaluations, attitudes, and preferences “first-personally” that one has no intention of ever acting on or avowing? Indeed, isn’t this also the situation of Maisie when she discovers the value, even the indispensability, of a “secret” inner-life, one

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that can be protected from intrusions and manipulation by others just by never being expressed or “acted out”? An adequate answer to such a question would have to be quite complicated and very sensitive to the description of the context of any orienting example. So many factors are at play that no general theoretical account of this “link” may be possible. But in the case of Maisie’s secret life, I have tried to show that this sort of enforced secrecy is just what keeps her feeling so oddly alienated from her own self. Her being denied permission and opportunity to express and act on any preference or attitude of her own is what accounts for her feeling behind that pane of glass, merely observing her own history. Her posing of the offer to Sir Claude amounts to what it takes to step out from behind it. Still, one might persist, surely there are examples of hypocrisy, where expressions say one thing and actions signal one thing, but an agent’s first-personal or secret attitudes are quite clearly (for herself, in her own mind) different. But the point is that there must be some sort of expression, social responsiveness, and action in the world consistent with such attitudes for a description of the agent to be coherent (not that all expressions and actions must be). One can express trust for another and manifest in what one does what look like actions based on such trust while profoundly mistrusting someone, but it would be paradoxical to the point of incoherence actually to entrust one’s fate to another whom one actually mistrusted, rather than seeming to. Indeed, this fact is what is responsible for situations in which hypocrisy can be detected, and why those who suspect it often try to engineer just such “tests.” Finally, none of this denies that one’s expressions and actions can come apart from what one genuinely believes to be one’s attitudes, evaluations and the like. But in such cases, all one needs to say here, is that something has gone wrong, does not make sense, requires perhaps the assumption of an “unconscious” for it finally to make sense, and that concession (that something would not make sense in such a case) is all that is needed here.

Notes 1

2

3

Cf. the narrator’s remarks about each having “doubtless the best conscience in the world” (James 1998: 22). Cf. Moran (2001: 32) and Finkelstein (2003: 20–7). But see Shoemaker’s objections (Shoemaker 2003: 393–5), and Moran’s reply, which seems to me compelling (Moran 2003: 406ff.). There are obviously benign and helpful forms of influence too. I mean to focus only on the

4

issues highlighted by James; that is, such manipulative influences as are evident in the treatment of Maisie. The account that follows is in agreement with many of the most important claims of Moran (2001). These include the asymmetry between first and third person knowledge, the denial that, because first person knowledge is not observational or inferential, it must therefore be “immediately” inner-perceptual, the claim

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that first-personal knowledge is more in the way of an avowal than a report, that such a subject must be much more understood as an agent than a reflective knower and therefore that, in first person ascriptions, one’s attitude towards oneself is “deliberative” not “theoretical,” and especially accords with his claims about the “transparency” of such avowals, that the situation of beliefs, where determining what I believe is determining what ought to be believed, is a model for many cases of first person avowals, and so that “being minded in a way” is “making up one’s mind.” My claim here and elsewhere (see Pippin 2004) is that the picture of such authority changes a good deal when we also consider proper “ownership” of such subjective attitudes and commitments, when we consider what it is not just to be minded in a way, but what it is for that mindedness to count as one’s own. This issue “reflects back” on the first issue, rendering many first person avowals merely provisional, subject to a good deal of correction when aspects of our social dependence are taken into account. 5 There are a great many different issues in discussions of the self-knowledge problem, ranging from issues of sentience (my awareness of my own sensory and affective states) to complex issues of sapience (in what sense I can be said to know my own beliefs and standing attitudes). See Finkelstein (2003) for an account of the current state of play in these discussions and the importance of this distinction. 6 I don’t pretend this is an adequate account of what a “practically embedded” form of deliberation is. Moran, I think, needs some such position, lest his conclusions be based on too narrow a notion of responsiveness to reasons. 7 This somewhat Sartrean language is prominent in Moran’s (2001) book. At least the notion of consciousness always “transcending” itself in this way is Sartrean. The “opening outward” language is a well-known formulation of Gareth Evans’s (1982: 225). But it is Sartrean only up to a point. While this sort of language (“making up one’s mind”) can sound voluntarist, James never

treats such resolutions as arbitrary, the product of “absurdly free” choice and so forth. Maisie is learning, in effect learning how to have her own point of view and what that entails for her engagement with others. All of this involves a certain responsiveness to reasons (a way of getting it right), even if not a matter of explicit deliberation and argument. 8 A sampling of the many game references: James (1998: 65, 82, 90, 114 [where we are reminded that Ida likes billiards, a game where the pieces knock against each other violently], 221, 227). 9 So much philosophy is so unavoidably guided by intuitions, and such intuitions are so formed by examples, and such examples must of necessity present so cropped and abstract a picture of an instance or event or decision, that, left to its traditional methods, philosophy might be ill-equipped on its own to answer a question like one about the true content of a historical ideal like “knowing one’s own mind,” or authenticity or “leading a free life.” One needs to bring so many factors into play at once that one non-traditional but more promising path might be through reflection on the modern novel (or modern drama, or poetry or even visual art). For a discussion of similar themes, see my account of Marcel’s “becoming who he is” in Pippin (2005). 10 In this case, Maisie finds a way of expressing this to herself by allowing herself only to affirm what would in effect be her rejoinder to the accusation that it is not proper for a little girl to like her governess more than her father (the thought that she somehow has but will not allow herself to affirm) – that Beale also likes Miss Overmore very much indeed. This all in just the last three sentences of chapter 3. The self-referential complexities will grow. 11 There is of course much that Maisie, amazingly, does see. Her inference about the way Mrs. Wix must have “sidled and ducked through life,” given her “elation” at petty acts of normal consideration, is a striking inference for a young child ( James 1998: 65). Not to mention her very brave “ ‘Mama doesn’t

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13 14 15

16

17

care for me,’ she said simply. ‘Not really’ ” ( James 1998: 73). The inherent “belatedness” of self-knowledge is a major theme in James in general and in particular in What Maisie Knew. Cf. James (1998: 142) and the discussion in Pippin (2001). She is said to practice “the pacific art of stupidity” ( James 1998: 63). The evidence for attributing such views to James is presented in Pippin (2001). The social world within which Maisie comes to maturity makes all this doubly hard. She must, as it is sometime said, see everything for herself ( James 1998: 37). There seems to be very little in the way of a shared form of ethical life in the novel, not much for poor Maisie to get her bearings from. For more on this theme, see Pippin (2001). I don’t mean that first person avowals, especially of intentions, are like predictions about what one will do that one has a stake in seeing come true, as in Vellemin (1989). Such avowals are commitments, and until realized in the world they all must have a merely provisional status, could always be exaggerations, fantasies. See Pippin (2004). Cf. Wittgenstein (1958: II §i) and Finkelstein’s very helpful gloss and expansion

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(Finkelstein 2004: 104–12). Finkelstein’s general position, that “mental life is lived in the logical space of animated life,” (Finkelstein 2003: 145) and so that “inner and outer” cannot be understood as distinct in first person ascriptions (Finkelstein 2003: 144) has much in common with what is discussed here and what I attribute to Hegel in Pippin (2004), at least with respect to selfascriptions of our standing attitudes and if we bracket the questions of animal sentience and sapience. It is significant that when Maisie wants in effect to work things out for herself, she imitates adult conversations and dealings with her “French doll,” rather than, like Isabel Archer before the fire, sorting out what she has gotten herself into. See James (1998: 121), for example. Cf. Mrs. Wix’s own revealing worries about how much Maisie has learned and how little there is left to justify her own presence (James 1998: 216). See James’s remarks about his family’s common horror of moralism, “the conscious conscience – the very home of the literal, the haunt of so many pedantries” ( James 1913: 215–16, quoted in Johnson 1974: 172 and in Tanner 1965: 291).

References and Further Reading Evans, Gareth (1982). The Varieties of Reference. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Finkelstein, David (2003). Expression and the Inner. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. James, Henry (1913). A Small Boy and Others. New York: Scribner’s. James, Henry (1998). What Maisie Knew. Ed. Adrian Poole. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Johnson, L. A. (1974). “James’s Mrs. Wix: The ‘dim, crooked reflector’.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 29: 174–72. Moran, Richard (2001). Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Moran, Richard (2003). “Responses to O’Brien and Shoemaker.” European Journal of Philosophy, 11: 402–19. Pippin, Robert B. (2001). Henry James and Modern Moral Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pippin, Robert B. (2004). “Hegels praktischer Realismus: Vernünftiges Handeln als sittliches Leben.” In Hegels Erbe. Ed. B. Christoph Halbig, Michael Quante, and Ludwig Siep. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Pippin, Robert B. (2005). “On becoming who one is (and failing): Proust’s problematic selves.” In The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Shoemaker, Sidney (2003). “Moran on selfknowledge.” European Journal of Philosophy, 11: 391–401. Tanner, T. (1965). The Reign of Wonder: Naivety and Reality in American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Vellemin, J. David (1989). Practical Reflection. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1958). Philosophical Investigations. (Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe.) New York: Macmillan.

8

“What woman was ever safe?” Dangerous Constructions of Womanhood in The Ambassadors Anna Despotopoulou

In an article entitled “French Traits – Women” in Scribner’s Magazine in 1889, the critic, editor, and literary advisor to Charles Scribner’s Sons, W. C. Brownell, wrote the following: “In fine to estimate the Frenchwoman’s moral nature with any approach to adequacy it is necessary entirely to avoid viewing her from an Anglo-Saxon standpoint” (Brownell 1889: 77). And in order to assume such an alien standpoint himself, Brownell felt the need to incorporate a six-page address by an imaginary Frenchman who eloquently delineates the traits of his countrywomen. Fourteen years later, Lambert Strether, in James’s last novel set in France, would be trying to do exactly what Brownell warned against: interpreting a Parisian femme mondaine from his narrow New England perspective. To some degree Strether’s failures of perception in Paris may be attributed to his difficulty adapting to or even adopting the French cultural construction of womanhood as that had evolved in the post-revolution years. Brownell’s comment, quoted above, and the contents of his fourteen-page article, which compares French to American and English women in terms of attitude, behavior, dress, and relationship to men, suggest that Europe and the United States were experiencing a period of transition during which gender roles, which had been carefully constructed as natural and universal by authors such as Rousseau, Ruskin, and Comte, were seen as contingent on cultural parameters and were thus being destabilized and rearticulated. James’s novels may be interpreted as participating in this rearticulation, as they often question the self-sacrificial, maternal, domestic model of “essential” womanhood. Novels like The Awkward Age and What Maisie Knew have provocatively challenged prudish notions of a woman’s natural maternalistic tendencies, providing complex varieties of feminine sexual experience without necessarily limiting the female sex within other patriarchal constructions and stereotypes like that of the femme fatale or the fallen woman. By centering on a male reflector, The Ambassadors complicates James’s exploration of feminine experience, emphasizing the clash between the male point of view and female agency. The women of the novel may indeed be expressing previously unacknowledged sexual awareness and motivation, but Chad – and this

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could also be applied to Strether, despite his formative adventure – “was none the less only Chad” ( James 1998: 408). Many recent studies have looked into Victorian discourses of sexuality, pointing out the incompatibility between widely accepted earlier views of Victorian sexual repression and covert or even overt acknowledgments of sexual behavior or desire in medical, social, and cultural texts of that time.1 What most of these revisionist inquiries agree upon is that Victorian society, rather than denying the existence of women’s sexuality, accepted and even promoted sex in women’s lives as a means of experiencing strong bonds of love and achieving good health.2 Insofar as the sexual instinct was proclaimed as a crucial driving force for both sexes, it nevertheless had to be contained within marriage and regulated through avoidance of excess, lest it should become dangerous or destructive.3 In the United States, especially, it was clear that, in the words of Steven Seidman, “To benefit humanity, clear moral boundaries had to be erected around the sex instinct” (Seidman 1990: 62). In England as well, cultural texts often exhibit the tension between an overflowing female sexuality and the male attempts to subdue or limit it. William Holman Hunt’s 1853 painting, The Awakening Conscience, is perhaps one of the most famous examples of this unease, in which the fallen woman literally rises from an unequivocally sexual posture (sitting on her lover’s lap), after having realized the “unnaturalness” of her errant ways. Hunt’s painting didactically conveys that salvation lies only in self-sacrifice, marriage, and conventional domestication, while the sexual pleasure derived by the kept woman until that moment of sudden illumination can only be attributed to unacceptable and reproachable egotism. At the same time, however, the painting constructs a scene of a playful sexual encounter, which, though interrupted by the woman’s awakening conscience, does establish the prominence of sexual desire in woman and her potential gratification from the sexual act. The obsession with and fear of women’s sexual knowingness was often illustrated in literary texts, which included stereotypical depictions of the adulterous wife, the prostitute, or the femme fatale, who by the end of the novel had to be punished not only for her ethical transgressions but also for the potential for individual agency and rebellion that she personified. In his examination of fin de siècle cultural iconography related to women, Bram Dijkstra has identified the tropes of the weak, dying, collapsing, or sleeping women, who were often portrayed in antithesis to the sexually active one, and who fulfilled two roles: firstly, they represented the dormant or unconscious sexuality that rendered them pure and selfsacrificial, and secondly, they fulfilled the voyeuristic impulses of men who were free to peek at a woman’s unintentional beauty (Dijkstra 1988: 69–82). Nevertheless, even such paintings reveal an uncomfortable tension between the awareness of woman’s sexual potential and the artist’s wish to contain it. Dijkstra reads the emphasis on nature in such artwork as negotiating these contradictions: By placing woman in nature in a state of utter exhaustion, the painters were trying to indicate that although she was no longer an ideal creature, and instead very much a part

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of nature, she was still not an active threat to man, who was, after all, in many ways far superior to brute nature. In a sense, she was still part of the flowers, a self-contained “plant-like entity” with all the static indolence of nature’s vegetable matter. (Dijkstra 1988: 82)

In other words, the Anglo-Saxon attitude towards ideal womanhood still extolled, even in late Victorian times, the image of the angel in the house, in her various fin de siècle mutations, while at the same time acknowledging and often lamenting her gradual desecration by sexuality. In France as well, the post-revolution years saw an emphasis on establishing a new form of domesticity, which, if instilled successfully in women, would chastise the country from the decadence of the old regime. However, as Margaret Darrow has pointed out, “French domesticity was quite different from the English phenomenon. It is a truism that in France, marriage liberated a woman while in England it confined her” (Darrow 1979: 57). Nina Auerbach has grasped the paradoxical implications of the English “angel in the house” motif: “the Victorian angel is defined by her boundaries.” Women were in reality captive angels, whose powers as domestic saints were granted at the cost of flight (Auerbach 1982: 72). “In France,” Darrow argues, a more positive spirit reigned. The wife was extolled as the maîtresse de la maison (mistress of the house), directress and manager of domestic affairs rather than a simple ménagère (housewife). . . . Frugality and efficiency, moreover, were to be complemented by elegance, wit, and charm; domestic responsibilities would allegedly only enhance a woman’s fascination. (Darrow 1979: 58)

After the 1850s, however, the earlier, moderate, worldly attributes were to be supplemented by a liberally received active sexuality. As Michèle Plott argues, “upper-middle-class women could construct a sexual sense of self while remaining respectable. . . . In Paris, relations between men and women were often flirtatious and were never based on an assumption of women’s asexuality” (Plott 2002: 531–2). Brownell’s 1889 imagined Frenchman may be interpreted as implying precisely this legitimacy of a woman’s sexuality when he remarks that “To love intensely and passionately is [a Frenchwoman’s] ideal. It is so much her ideal that if marriage does not enable her to attain it, it is a virtue rather than a demerit in her eyes to seek it elsewhere” (Brownell 1889: 81). Indeed it appears that “the discreet infidelities of uppermiddle-class women were increasingly tolerated in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century” (Plott 2002: 532). In The Ambassadors Lambert Strether seems trapped within the matrix of conflicting constructions of womanhood between Europe and America. His predicament suggests that female identity was subject to the various sociocultural constructions conveyed through systems of representation, discourses, and practices, as patriarchal society always tried to confine women within rigid stereotypes which were then deemed part

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of their “essential” nature. Most of James’s novels and tales recognize that identities are subject to external construction, often including, as in The Portrait of a Lady, debates on the compromise of the self by the commodities that had started to define it.4 In The Ambassadors Waymarsh, for example, is deemed a “success” because of the money that he earns ( James 1998: 18). “One may speak of Jamesian ‘realism,’ then,” Eric Sundquist argues, “only by recognizing how urgently the concentration on the within presumes the prior incorporation of magnified and ever-accelerating values derived from without” (Sundquist 1982: 22). When Lambert Strether first arrives in Europe he is immediately struck by a “consciousness of personal freedom” and a “deep taste of change” ( James 1998: 1), which immediately introduce the possible dissolution of given identities in favor of more transient and hence more transformable states of being. Strether’s constantly shifting perception, therefore, becomes the lens through which other similarly unfixed identities are processed and determined from without. Maria Gostrey, the first woman encountered by Strether, embodies the constructedness of identity but also the possibility of feminine self-fashioning: “she explained moreover that wherever she happened to be she found a dropped thread to pick up, a ragged edge to repair, some familiar appetite in ambush, jumping out as she approached, yet appeasable with a temporary biscuit” ( James 1998: 26). Maria is identified by a nomadic existence, easy adaptability, and volatility, characteristics of identities perpetually in the making, which, lacking the stability of a home, depend on temporary socioeconomic arrangements to grant them value. She is a representative of city life, and as such her movement within it is unknown and unpredictable.5 Favoring independent and solitary meditation, dispensing with male accompaniment, riding on carriages alone, all these daring features suggest her comfortable appropriation of the city and the transitoriness of its fleeting rhythms. Lacking the sinister motives of Madame Merle from The Portrait of a Lady, Maria is, nevertheless, the paradigm of the former’s speech about the common fate of women: “a woman it seems to me, has no natural place anywhere; wherever she finds herself she has to remain on the surface and, more or less, to crawl” ( James 1984: 248; my emphasis). Maria Gostrey’s and Madame Merle’s physical mobility may be interpreted as representing this destabilization of gender categories and the cross-cultural contest over the natural disposition of women during the fin de siècle. Madame Merle’s speech about the defining effect of one’s “shell” ( James 1984: 253) disposes of “natural” selves in favor of surfaces, a condition that had already been noted by progressive writers like John Stuart Mill and George Eliot. In Hugh Stevens’s words, “James’s fiction returns again and again to the meeting of ‘culture’ and ‘the self,’ a meeting in which the terms of the construction of a sexed, gendered self are always interrogated, never taken for granted” ( James 1998: 3).6 Unaccustomed to viewing women as sexual beings, in his first encounter with Maria Gostrey, a woman on the frontier who escapes specific cultural appropriation, Strether interprets the unexpected intimacy between them in fraternal and paternal terms – “they might have been brother and sister” ( James 1998: 6), and later he passes “his hand into her arm in the manner of a benign dependent paternal old person”

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( James 1998: 14) – thus mentally dispelling the sexual threat implied by their physical proximity. Strether is shaken from his Anglo-Saxon perspective for the first time when he notices the fashion choices of Maria Gostrey, whose dress was “cut down,” as he believed the term to be, in respect to shoulders and bosom, in a manner quite other than Mrs. Newsome’s, and who wore round her throat a broad red velvet band with an antique jewel – he was rather complacently sure it was antique – attached to it in front. Mrs. Newsome’s dress was never in any degree “cut down,” and she never wore round her throat a broad red velvet band: if she had, moreover, would it ever have served so to carry on and complicate, as he now almost felt, his vision? ( James 1998: 34)

The contrast between Maria’s red band and Mrs. Newsome’s “black silk dress” and ruff ( James 1998: 34, 35) bewilders him as it seems to reflect a cultural difference in behavioral and ethical standards. Maria’s low-cut dress expresses an acknowledged sexuality and a comfortable acceptance of the male gaze, while Mrs. Newsome’s ruff, which makes her look like Queen Elizabeth ( James 1998: 35), exemplifies for Strether an authority derived from sexual purity and rigid moral codes. Nevertheless, despite the difference, the encircling of the throat in both cases suggests the constricting effect of the roles that each society has constructed for its perfect women. Maria Gostrey is the first person in Strether’s life to blur the distinctions between “good” and “bad” women. Before coming to Europe, he had a very clear-cut opinion of women, classifying them according to social respectability and puritanical conventions. For example, Marie de Vionnet, before he meets her, is readily judged as a “wicked woman,” “base, venal – out of the streets” ( James 1998: 37), whereas Mrs. Newsome is in every respect “admirable” ( James 1998: 38). Maria, like Mary Stuart to whom she is compared ( James 1998: 35), represents the threatening ambiguous “other” in the sense that she escapes and complicates the Anglo-Saxon binary categorization of women as idealized or vilified, the virgin or the whore. In Europe, Strether is unable to safely pigeonhole Maria, and Marie later on, exactly because the French cultural codes signify different constructions of the feminine and appearances have different relations to ethical standards. Strether’s question at the end of the above quoted passage suggests his inability to match, in his New England habitual manner, external with internal codes, Maria’s provocative appearance with the specific morality that he would have attributed to her if he were still at Woollett. Maria’s ambiguous position is also reinforced by the paradoxical contrast between her own enigmatic existence – Strether never knows exactly where she is, and her past is not disclosed – and her strange powers of penetration with which she accesses Strether’s mind, guessing at all times his thoughts and feelings. As a sphinx-like presence, she presents Strether with the riddle of womanhood. Strether’s mystification with the discrepancy between appearance and essence is nowhere more pronounced than at the theater in London where “he couldn’t have said if it were actors or auditors who were most true.” “It was an evening, it was a world

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of types, and this was a connexion above all in which the figures and faces in the stalls were interchangeable with those on the stage” ( James 1998: 36). As Strether confesses, at Woollett types were restricted to the two sexes which represented stable gender categories, but at the theater, the interchangeability between actors and auditors implies an emphasis on roleplaying which makes essence irrelevant and generates the potential for innumerable constructions of gender. The successive employment of theatrical and acting metaphors in the first chapters of the novel thus suggests the dissolution of boundaries between true, essential, selves and performed, constructed identities. The new versions of men and women that he detects are “stamped” “from without” ( James 1998: 36), their public persona taking over their whole being. Nevertheless, Strether finds difficulty negotiating the conflict between the constructions of gender that have so far determined his existence, including his relationships with women at Woollett, and the new types that he encounters. As Robin Hoople writes: The significant fact is that Strether’s concern for type once again attaches him to the New England of his forebears and restates the sense in which Strether retains his fidelity to his own gods. . . . For typology was the index-language, as Bercovitch, Brumm and others have shown, by which the New Englanders of the earliest times strove to render intelligible the challenging environment which their very presence in New England sought to solve and redeem. (Hoople 1988: 425)

Therefore, despite the fluidity of types, resorting to New England constructions of gender, and femininity in particular, becomes for Strether a convenient way of interpreting surfaces in Paris. Even Maria does not completely escape such typology despite her cultural marginality. Unable to account for her overtly commercial relationships – her discourse is imbued with recurrent economic metaphors and diction – and her pragmatic attitude to life, Strether will ultimately fit her into the self-sacrificial model of womanhood: “she hadn’t interfered on any chance – and chances were specious enough – that she might interfere to her profit” ( James 1998: 417). Strether’s typology does not extend merely to women but also to men and most poignantly to himself. As a long-term widower he has internalized the stereotypes characterizing American bachelorhood throughout the nineteenth century. Pondering the pain of having lost his wife and son when he was young, Strether recalls only his failures rather than the successes of his consummate though brief married life: “there remained an ache sharp enough to make the spirit, at the sight now and again of some fair young man just growing up, wince with the thought of an opportunity lost” ( James 1998: 59). Favoring conjugal domesticity, American society from the early ante-bellum years was suspicious of the “old” bachelor, whose idiosyncratic sexual circumstances, as Bryce Traister has illustrated, disqualified him as a man, and whether a bachelor chose the life of (presumptive) celibacy or had his bachelorhood conferred upon him by the trials of failed courtship, he passed

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through the world as incomplete, as an example of unrealized potential, and finally, as one wasted in carnal and . . . literary dissipation. (Traister 2002: 114)

In contrast to Strether, Jim Pocock represents successful masculine development because of his domestication through marriage, which defines his existence and constructs his identity: as Strether admits, Jim is distinguishable as a man only insofar as he is Sally’s husband ( James 1998: 50). And as Vincent Bertolini puts it, unlike comfortably settled men, bachelors were “located in a kind of negative conceptual space, on the threshold between domestication and transgression” (Bertolini 1996: 709). Bitterly conscious of not having fulfilled his potential, albeit not accurately a bachelor, Strether later in the novel imagines his position viewed by the Newsome women as transgressive, aberrant, and intolerable: “but men of my age, at Woollett – and especially the least likely ones – have been noted as liable to strange outbreaks, belated uncanny clutches at the unusual, the ideal” ( James 1998: 289). Strether deviates from the acceptable New England role of manhood because rather than having produced tangible results in his life – children and profits – he indulges in a passive, aesthetic, approach to experience, a position of feminized indolence. Mrs. Newsome and Waymarsh make him anxious from the start of the novel lest he should be enjoying his unmanly leisurely time in Paris too much for his own masculine good. However, in an ironic reversal of perspectives, Strether regards Mrs. Newsome’s business concerns, rather than his own idle preoccupations, “as the hum of vain things” ( James 1998: 57). It is in this vein, then, that Strether can be associated, as Eric Haralson has done, with the figure of the late Victorian “male deviant” (Haralson 2003: 128), in the sense that his general unproductivity – economic but also ambassadorial – emasculates him in the eyes of his compatriots.7 Moreover, his position as potential consumer, for example during his shopping spree with Maria, marks him as feminized. Strether’s identity as a widower, therefore, is tentative and dubious, rescuable only by his presence on the cover of the magazine that he edits. While not granting him economic success, his commitment to the Review, a public medium, and the public display of his name, help satisfy one out of the three requirements of acceptable American masculinity – publicity, the other two being business involvement and marriage. Nevertheless, Strether himself is conscious of the paradoxical fact that this publicity is not proof of popularity or success but rather it is what grants him a temporary position within the boundaries of American gender ideology: “He was Lambert Strether because he was on the cover, whereas it should have been, for anything like glory, that he was on the cover because he was Lambert Strether” ( James 1998: 59). In Paris, however, he is struck by the different possibilities open to men, and seeing Little Bilham on Chad’s balcony for the first time, Strether conceptualizes the difference between subjective masculine experience and objective gender role stereotypes: “To him too the perched privacy [of the balcony] was open” ( James 1998: 70). Weighed down by his Woollett duties and mentality, Strether looks up, dreaming of

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an ascending journey – facilitated perhaps by the “wild waving of wings” that he imagines a few pages earlier ( James 1998: 66) – a freedom from the prescribed domesticity that the Woollett community envisages as the ideal goal of a man. The subjective experience that the perched privacy of the balcony seems to represent, like one of James’s windows in the house of fiction, suggests a parallel between unconstrained subjective observation and unlimited gender construction. Maria’s fireside is also seen in the light of this perched privacy ( James 1998: 70) because, albeit enclosed and domestic, it represents untypical codes of conduct between men and women and the ambiguity of his and Maria’s relationship. Considered by her fireside, Maria is nothing like the domestic Woollett matron: “She gave him . . . no further sign than to show how she dealt with boys; meeting them with the air of old Parisian practice that she had for every one, for everything, in turn” ( James 1998: 90). So like Chad’s balcony, Maria’s space represents indeterminate gender constructions which both allure and mystify Strether because he himself exists in the margins of late Victorian normative masculinity. As Tessa Hadley contends, “Into a world changed with a very masculine sexual energy and élan he intrudes qualities of gentleness and conscientiousness . . . which read as coming rather from the Anglo-Saxon novel tradition” of the romantic age (Hadley 2002: 107). Just as Maria’s house does not impart clear information about the occupant’s sexual desires, Marie de Vionnet’s shell similarly confuses Strether to the extent that to neutralize the threat, throughout the novel, he will be trying to fit Marie into typical Victorian constructions of womanhood. During their first encounter at her house, the accumulation of decorative items with historical significance helps situate Marie within a system of class and heredity while at the same time bestowing on her the “air of supreme respectability” ( James 1998: 173), which for the New England mentality, is infallibly the mark of aristocracy. Oblivious to the French society conventions, Strether interprets her respectability as a moral category, and, as a result, his initial suspicion of Marie belonging to the fallen woman class dissolves, and from victimizer she becomes victim.8 By associating her setting with “some glory, some prosperity of the First Empire, some Napoleonic glamour, some dim lustre of the great legend,” “the world of Chateaubriand, of Madame de Staël” ( James 1998: 172), Strether immediately embeds her within a rigid patriarchal society with little tolerance for revolutionary women. His association of her with Madame de Staël and later on Madame Roland renders her bold but ultimately victimized, assertive but hunted down and ineffectual, and as such he immediately places her within the damsel-indistress framework: “She was the poor lady for Strether now because clearly she had some trouble, and her appeal to him could only mean that her trouble was deep” ( James 1998: 175). From his comparison of the two new women in his life, Marie and Maria, the latter comes out as more aggressive, rummaging, purchasing, exchanging, sifting, selecting, collecting ( James 1998: 172), while the former passively appropriates a setting which in turn absorbs her, constructing her as a victim of the systems that it represents. “I’ve been trembling,” she says, fulfilling Strether’s new perception of her as a weak woman,

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“as if we were to stand or fall by what you think of me; and I’m even now,” she went on wonderfully, “drawing a long breath – and yes, truly taking a great courage – from the hope that I don’t in fact strike you as impossible.” ( James 1998: 176)

Not unlike the Misses Molyneux, who in The Portrait of a Lady, “sitting in a vast drawing-room . . . in a wilderness of faded chintz” ( James 1984: 130), suggested to Isabel the passive role that she would have to assimilate were she to marry into Lord Warburton’s territorial, political, and social system represented by the evocatively named castle, Lockleigh, with the moat, Marie de Vionnet inspires in Strether an impulse to save her from the New England system which has imposed its own interpretations on her: “I’ll save you if I can” ( James 1998: 180). Strether’s decision to save Marie de Vionnet is mostly, however, the outcome of his new belief that she has saved Chad. Despite her undomestic life as a femme du monde, Marie is fitted into the category of the woman whose duty is to save a man from the ravages that his involvement with the public sphere has incurred and from the everyday anxieties and irritations of the marketplace and its power struggles. As Auguste Comte wrote in 1852 in the System of Positive Polity, “the mission of Woman is to save Man from the corruption, to which he is exposed in his life of action and of thought” (Comte 1875: 171–2). The proliferation of Marias in the novel can be seen as a playful interrogation into the plausibility of the saving function of womanhood, which in the nineteenth century should ideally resemble that of the Virgin Mary. Amusingly, the Marias are involved in a saving game whose principal agents often become the objects of the rescue and vice versa: Strether arrives in Paris to save Chad but now finds himself saving Marie who has saved Chad; Maria saves Strether from his early blunders and loneliness, just as he saves her from her more commercialized relationships; and towards the end, Mamie (whose name resembles Marie’s while at the same time sounding like the maternal “mummy”), who was supposed to save Chad, has nobody to save after all, except perhaps Little Bilham. Convinced that “the attachment’s an innocent one” ( James 1998: 188), Strether ascribes all the beneficial changes that he detects in Chad to Marie, the paradoxical madonna figure: “She has saved him”; “I’m speaking – in connexion with her – of his manners and morals, his character and life”; “She has simply given him an immense moral lift” ( James 1998: 202). Strether here, already under the influence of the interchangeability between surface and depth, equates outer with inner, assuming that Chad’s external refinement reflects an inner moral amelioration which has been the result of the “purifying influence of woman” (Brownell 1889: 86). Marie, thus, in Strether’s imagination, embodies the virtue, sensitivity, and frailty of typical Mary figures of French Romantic fiction, an impression also substantiated during the church scene where she strikes him as “romantic . . . far beyond what she could have guessed”: If it wasn’t innocent why did she haunt the churches? – into which, given the woman he could believe he made out, she would never have come to flaunt an insolence of guilt. She haunted them for continued help, for strength, for peace – for sublime support. ( James 1998: 210)

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With voyeuristic uninvolvement, Strether is charmed by Marie’s veiled presence in the church, noticing her suffering, and, in line with the virtuous identity that he has conceptualized for her, he ascribes to her a madonna-like ability to endure this pain ad infinitum, sacrificing her own pleasure for the welfare of Chad. At the same time, Marie’s association with Madame de Staël and Madame Roland aligns her also with the freedom and rationality that the French legendary figure of Marianne embodied. In her examination of the two prevailing female figures in French culture, the Virgin Mary and Marianne, Lisa Lieberman argues that nineteenth-century French literature had its share of Mariannes as well – active, independent, and rational women who made their own way in the world. Such characters often possessed a vitality not found in their modest sisters, along with a decidedly unvirginal inclination to seek sexual gratification outside of marriage. Unfortunately, Marianne figures usually did not fare well. (Lieberman 1999: 132–3)

Until the last few chapters of the novel, Strether similarly sees Marie as a daring but victimized romantic heroine who, not having received any benefit from her relationship with Chad, is in danger of being unjustly sacrificed. Strether’s fanciful impression of Marie as producing a “half mythological and half conventional” effect similarly corroborates his view of her as combining power with impotence: “He could have compared her to a goddess still partly engaged in a morning cloud, or to a sea-nymph waist-high in the summer surge” ( James 1998: 192). As goddess or sea nymph, Marie epitomizes the heroine of Pre-Raphaelite art, which, as Nina Auerbach (1982) has shown, obsessively returned to the theme of the mythological or nymph-like woman in order to expose and often neutralize her mysterious powers. Marie’s multiple transformations – “she had aspects, characters, days, nights . . . showed them by a mysterious law of her own” ( James 1998: 192) – identify her with Auerbach’s woman of “self-transforming powers” (Auerbach 1982: 41). Such powers, on the one hand, enable her to escape the definitions imposed on her from without, but, on the other, make her a threat to patriarchal mentality as she exemplifies the ability to transform man as well – Chad being the perfect example. Like the Pre-Raphaelite heroines, in Strether’s imagination Marie is bound by the elements which constitute her setting, her immersion in the cloud and the surge representing the limitations of her godlike potency. Strether, thus, combines aestheticism with morality, confining Marie de Vionnet within a normative frame of beauty, power, and self-sacrifice. Believing all the time in her selfless nature, at the Lambinet scene he will be shocked to discover that Marie may actually be deriving personal gratification from her sexual relationship with Chad. In projecting Victorian Anglo-Saxon ideals to Marie de Vionnet, Strether completely ignores aspects of French culture of which she is the product. As Brownell admitted, “The genius for renunciation so conspicuous in many of our New England

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women is, in [the Frenchwoman’s] composition quite lacking” (Brownell 1889: 83). On the contrary, Brownell writes: To be the ornament of a society, to awake perpetual interest, to be perpetually and universally charming, to contribute powerfully to the general aims of her environment, never to lose her character as woman in any of the phases or functions of womanly existence, even in wifehood or maternity – this central motive of the Frenchwoman’s existence is cordially approved by the Frenchman. (Brownell 1889: 76)

Brownell’s description suggests that the gender category “woman” in France, in contrast to the Anglo-Saxon perspective, could not be identified with wifehood or maternity, which are deemed mere “functions of womanly existence,” but with social prominence and distinction, aims which lay more emphasis on the woman’s personal ambition and gratification. In this sense, if woman’s nature is not a stable, universal category, gender may be seen as a role which is performed to suit the particular sociocultural demands.9 As Michèle Plott has shown, “Parisian women self-consciously created a feminine persona and ‘performed’ that self” (Plott 2002: 533). Marie’s performances are indeed conscious in the sense that they derive from both the AngloSaxon and the French constructions of womanhood, depending on the interlocutor, but it is only at the end of the novel that Strether sees the irrelevance of these stereotypes and the independence of moral character from roleplaying. With the benefit of hindsight as regards Marie’s all too sexual relationship with Chad, it is evident to the reader that she is the product of a social history that since the Renaissance had promoted a more public role for women as salonnières or mondaines. As Steven Kale argues, women in France were ascribed the role of “civilizers,” which was considered “not merely a feminine attribute but a social and political responsibility” (Kale 2002: 147). In this respect women were expected and desired to take part in activities which were denied them elsewhere. Strether is surprised, for example, to witness Miss Barrace partaking in the smoking after-dinner session with the men ( James 1998: 81). But as Brownell’s Frenchman declared, After an hour of feminine society we do not repair to the club for a relaxation of mind and spirit . . . and to find in unrestrained freedom an enjoyment that has the additional sense of being a relief . . . our mixed society gains immensely in interest and attractiveness, and our women are more intimately companionable than yours. (Brownell 1889: 79)

Brownell suggests that the homage that men paid to women in France was respectful of women’s contribution to their social and not just their domestic life. Kale notes that “the salon eventually became the principal depository of this legacy of noble civility and sexual ‘commerce’ ” (Kale 2002: 147). In this sense, as Brownell concludes, “if [their influence upon men] is not what we mean by ‘purifying’ it is assuredly

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refining. It is as hostile to grossness as women’s influence with us is to immorality” (Brownell 1889: 87). Strether unwillingly confuses the two distinct notions of refinement that each culture had adopted for its women, conflating Chad’s behavioral improvement with a supposed moral purification which, in France, was not on either women’s or men’s agenda. Chad’s Parisian cultivation then is the result of the French preoccupation with creating and upholding a pleasing, sociable personality. As Michèle Plott maintains, “Parisian society placed a far greater emphasis on preserving appearances than on actual virtue – and thus gave both men and women greater latitude in pursuing their desires, as long as they were able to observe the proprieties while doing so” (Plott 2002: 532). Marie de Vionnet does not go out alone with Chad in public because the French codes of conduct demand a respectability which depends on the secrecy of the affair. Plott argues that “discreet adultery . . . may have been more respectable than divorce and remarriage to one’s lover at the turn of the century. It left the surface of society calm and undisturbed” (Plott 2002: 553). Even James in his 1894 notebook entries admitted that for the French, society affairs, and especially those between mature women and younger men, were “inevitable” ( James 1947: 170). Nevertheless, Marie’s status as a femme séparée makes her vulnerable to gossip, and the only way to preserve her reputation is by enacting the role of the confined, cut off, victimized woman: in self-effacing humility she describes herself as “a quiet creature living in [her] hole” ( James 1998: 212). I have been arguing that even though Maria Gostrey and Marie de Vionnet are the most enigmatic women of the novel, characterized by obscure roles and multiple transformations, Strether fits them into aesthetic or gender categories which render them accessible to the Anglo-Saxon perspective. On the other hand, the Newsome women are from the start deemed predictable and constant. Strether, for example, is able to imagine the exact dialogue mother and daughter might be engaged in while still at Woollett ( James 1998: 117). While the American women’s meanings are explicit and unmistakable, like “ ‘headings’ above a column of print” or “capitals almost of newspaper size” ( James 1998: 117), Maria and Marie often keep Strether guessing with their characteristic indeterminate and open-ended utterances. It is paradoxical therefore that it is the Woollett women who are repeatedly constructed as ominous and deadly by Strether in the course of the novel. Strether’s fear of them may be linked to James’s criticism of American women in The Speech and Manners of American Women (1906–7), where he chides them for “indiscriminant spooning” of food, things, and people (quoted in Berman 1996: 66). In her reading of this text, Jessica Berman concludes that women’s inability to cultivate differences and distinctions in America is a “national failure” (Berman 1996: 66) which is attributed to the faults of the New World (Berman 1996: 63–4). Indeed a comparison between James’s European and American travel narratives reveals the author’s cherishing of the preservation and perpetuation of differences in the former settings and his deploring of uniformity in the latter.10 The Newsome women think in terms of the Woollett mentality described by Strether early in the novel, according to which differences are limited to the two sexes and their prescribed rigid roles. Unable to appreciate variety,

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they envision a version of Marie as a femme fatale, a sexually assertive woman who brings moral atrophy and degeneration.11 Moreover, it is their tone and manners that may also be causing Strether’s anxiety. Berman writes: James implores women to modulate their tone, to become models of decorum and charm, to demonstrate modesty, and to encourage men to resume their rightful place within the social world. American women have been damaged by the absolute freedom they have been granted and by the very fearlessness that makes them unique. For James, the pressure of a more complex social order and the necessity of navigating within it produces a discipline necessary to the mature social being and lacking in American women. (Berman 1996: 63)

The Newsome women lack those qualities of sophisticated refinement with which James endowed his more favored female characters, usually Europeanized American, and which Strether appreciates in Marie de Vionnet. In contact with the complex social order of Paris, Strether softens to the elegant speech and manners of the femme mondaine, gradually constructing her counterparts as nightmarish, threatening tormentors or predators: Sarah “loom[s] at him larger than life; . . . He saw himself, under her direction, recommitted to Woollett as juvenile offenders are committed to reformatories” ( James 1998: 246); Mrs. Newsome “had been quiet at feeding-time; she had fed, and Sarah had fed with her, out of the big bowl of all his recent free communication” ( James 1998: 265). Whereas in the case of Marie de Vionnet Strether neutralizes her potency through his own subjective interpretive endeavor, in the case of the Newsome women, he is unable to mitigate the threatening effect they have on him, because their blatant motives and predictable responses allow no room for glossing over: “What is she coming for? – to kill me?” ( James 1998: 339). The construction of Mrs. Newsome and Sarah throughout the novel resembles the description of the ideal American woman in Brownell’s article: Your ideal is pretty closely the Alruna woman – an august creature spiritually endowed with inflexible purity and lofty, respect-compelling virtues, performing the office of the “guiding-star” amid the perplexities of life, whose approval or censure is important in a thousand moral exigencies. (Brownell 1889: 77)

It is because of these matriarchal qualities that Sarah is linked to the salon de lecture, with its associations of exposition and verbal and moral inflexibility, while Marie is associated with boats, which suggest her uncertain, floating, and dangerous existence. The boat metaphors ( James 1998: 271, 283) that culminate in the Lambinet scene thus evoke the precarious position of the sexually aware woman, whose floating voyage, like Ophelia’s or the Lady of Shalott’s in the Millais and Waterhouse paintings respectively, proves perilous. Marie’s boat starts rocking as soon as Sarah arrives,

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reminding Chad of the American gender expectations he has to fulfill. As Tessa Hadley points out: In the gynocentric world James imagines for Woollett, the women are full (even too full) of the conviction of their rights and their privileges, and feel under no obligation to charm; and nor do they fear the loss of their youth, their looks, their men. They are not afraid that they will be boring. In James’s Paris there is more charm and less tedium all round, and even the women whose “attachments” are not “virtuous” have their share in the sun. (Hadley 2002: 110)

But, in the end, Hadley continues, Madame de Vionnet, deserted with nothing but an old female wisdom, is united with “a whole history of abandoned women in a gender commonality of powerlessness and emotional subjection” (Hadley 2002: 110). Marie’s doom is the outcome of the typical late Victorian fate of the fallen woman: disowned by the man who led to her fall. Ironically, Marie’s more liberated sexuality has provided Chad with more opportunities for exploitation, since, because of her relaxed morality, Chad can forsake her with an easy conscience: from an Anglo-Saxon perspective, as a fallen woman, she is not worth sacrificing one’s career. After all, Chad claims to have an eye for advertising, and the commonest assumptions of the advertising business are consumerism and reproducibility. Marie proves expendable to Chad because she is consumable, and having fulfilled her purpose of granting a young man knowledge about sex and conduct, she can be discarded so that he can move on to the next commodity. At the end of the novel, Marie progressively becomes, in the eyes of Strether, from the clinging to the collapsing and finally to the sinking woman:12 “a maidservant crying for her young man” ( James 1998: 409); “what wonder that the water rose? And it had never surely risen higher than round this woman” ( James 1998: 408). All these images combine to reproduce late Victorian conceptualizations of woman as more demanding and hence more vulnerable to the punishment that her craving for gratification would bring about. The metropolitan woman is thus linked to the working-class woman (the maidservant), who was often depicted as the public or the fallen woman.13 No woman is ever safe in The Ambassadors ( James 1998: 418). Marianne DeKoven maintains that “the reinstatement of conventional patriarchal gender relations” at the end of the novel “signals James’s retreat from [the] reconstruction [of gender]” (DeKoven 1997: 114). Indeed, both Marias are sacrificed in a manner which confirms the late Victorian fear that instead of wanting to efface themselves, women would embrace and succumb to their sexuality. Like another Madame Roland, Marie in her white dress on the symbolic scaffold combines the purity that Strether has always bestowed on her with the sexual awareness that he now acknowledges and for which she has to be renounced, not unlike Nanda of The Awkward Age. Maria Gostrey, whose name, sounding like “go astray” as William Veeder has noticed (Veeder 1971: 123), always hinted at her divergence from conventional roles, is similarly discarded because

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her relationship with Strether, never clarified, threatens to become too comfortable, like her house: the place had never before struck him as so sacred to pleasant knowledge, to intimate charm, to antique order, to a neatness that was almost august. To sit there was, as he had told his hostess before, to see life reflected for the time in ideally kept pewter; which was somehow becoming, improving to life. ( James 1998: 433)

The description of her setting as sacred, august, and ideal indicates that Maria has transposed Mrs. Newsome in Strether’s heart: he attributes to the former qualities that in the beginning of the novel fitted the latter. Nevertheless, his perspective is the same, as he is still burdened with the Anglo-Saxon gender expectations which generated a shock at the sight of Chad and Marie in the boat and which require of him now to renounce a life of selfish erotic gratification with a woman whose position in society is, in reality, as sexually ambiguous as Marie de Vionnet’s. Just as he had, until the boat scene, consciously excluded desire from the framework of Chad’s Parisian improvement, he now refuses to allow it to compromise his own improvement. This is perhaps what he means when he tells Maria that, even though she amounts to much more than the “wonderful impressions” that he has amassed in Paris, “It’s you who would make me wrong” ( James 1998: 438). He gives her up in order to preserve the pure unsexual respect she has inspired in him all along. And this is what it means for a New Englander “to be right” ( James 1998: 438).

Acknowledgment I would like to thank the Special Account for Research Grants of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, which funded the research for this chapter.

Notes 1 2

See Degler (1981), Mason (1995), Nye (1994). Seidman quotes from William Acton’s The Function and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs (1865): “Regular and moderate sexual intercourse is, on the whole, of advantage to the [physical] system at large”; and from Henry Guernsey’s Plain Talk on Avoided Subjects (1882): “Sexual matters are so thoroughly interwoven with the highest destinies of the human race, physically, mentally, and spiritu-

3

ally, there is scarcely any function of higher import . . . than that assigned to the genital organs. No function more deeply concerns the healthiness of the body, the clearness and brilliancy of the intellect” (Seidman 1990: 49). Many Victorian advice manuals or medical texts highlighted the dangers of sex for the sole purpose of sensual pleasure and maintained that “sexual pleasure is legitimate only as an unintended consequence of the procreative act” (Seidman 1990: 52).

154 4 5

6

7

8 9

Anna Despotopoulou See Despotopoulou (2002). Marianne DeKoven writes that “Strether’s opening shopping trip chaperoned by Maria Gostrey signals the text’s preoccupation with the reconstruction of gender in urban modernity” (DeKoven 1997: 114). Stevens explains that “one of the reasons why the constructionist/essentialist debate seems to provide such a useful framework for examining sexuality in James’s writing is that in the late nineteenth century this debate had already taken on a decisive importance” (Stevens 1998: 2). Indeed the “true nature of womanhood” was examined not only in medical texts but also in progressive social texts like Mill’s The Subjection of Women and even conventional conduct books like Sarah Stickney Ellis’s Women of England. For a comprehensive summary of the critical treatment of Strether from the perspective of his sexuality, see Haralson (2003: 108). For an analysis of the Victorian fallen woman iconography see Auerbach (1980). For the formulation of the constructionist argument permeating the whole chapter I

rely on Judith Butler’s initial premise that “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (Butler 1990: 25). 10 The American Scene famously laments the elimination of differences between settings, behavior, and people in James’s home country. Moreover, Gray Fielder’s disbelief, in The Ivory Tower, with the fact that “everyone addressed everyone as he had nowhere yet heard the address perpetrated” (James 1917: 81) in America matches Strether’s sense of being affronted when he receives Sarah’s lexical blows towards the end of the novel. Having experienced a more refined method of communication, he prefers keeping one’s thoughts private. 11 For an analysis of the late Victorian femme fatale figure, see Stott (1992). 12 See Dijkstra’s (1988) analysis of the figures of these types of women in late Victorian art. 13 See Auerbach (1980).

References and Further Reading Auerbach, N. (1980). “The rise of the fallen woman.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 35: 29–52. Auerbach, N. (1982). Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Berman, J. (1996). “Feminizing the nation: Woman as cultural icon in Late James.” Henry James Review, 17: 58–76. Bertolini, V. J. (1996). “Fireside chastity: The erotics of sentimental bachelorhood in the 1850s.” American Literature, 68: 707–37. Brownell, W. C. (1889). “French traits – women.” Scribner’s Magazine, 5: 74–87. Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Comte, A. (1875). System of Positive Polity, vol. 2. (Trans. F. Harrison.) New York: Burt Franklin. Darrow, M. H. (1979). “French noblewomen and the new domesticity, 1750–1850.” Feminist

Studies, 5: 41–65. Degler, C. (1981). At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DeKoven, M. (1997). “Walking on water: The metropolitan feminine in The Ambassadors.” Henry James Review, 18: 107–26. Despotopoulou, A. (2002). “Penetrating the Vitrine: Henry James and the challenge of publicity.” English Language Notes, 39: 39–59. Dijkstra, B. (1988). Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hadley, T. (2002). Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haralson, E. (2003). Henry James and Queer Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dangerous Womanhood in The Ambassadors Hoople, R. (1988). “Iconological characterization in James’s The Ambassadors.” American Literature, 60: 416–32. James, H. (1917). The Ivory Tower. London: W. Collins. James, H. (1947). The Notebooks of Henry James. Ed. F. O. Matthiessen and K. B. Murdoch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. James, H. (1984). The Portrait of a Lady. London: Penguin. James, H. (1998). The Ambassadors. Ed. C. Butler. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kale, S. D. (2002). “Women, the public sphere, and the persistence of salons.” French Historical Studies, 25: 115–48. Lieberman, L. (1999). “Crimes of reason, crimes of passion: Suicide and the adulterous woman in nineteenth-century France.” Journal of Family History, 24: 131–47. Mason, M. (1995). The Making of Victorian Sexuality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nye, R. (1994). “Sexuality, sex difference, and the cult of modern love in the French Third Republic.” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques, 20: 57–76.

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Plott, M. (2002). “The rules of the game: Respectability, sexuality, and the femme mondaine in latenineteenth-century Paris.” French Historical Studies, 25: 531–56. Seidman, S. (1990). “The power of desire and the danger of pleasure: Victorian sexuality reconsidered.” Journal of Sexual History, 24: 47–67. Stevens, H. (1998). Henry James and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stott, R. (1992). The Fabrication of the Late-Victorian Femme Fatale: The Kiss of Death. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Sundquist, E. (1982). “Introduction: the country of the blue.” American Realism: New Essays (pp. 3–24). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Traister, B. (2002). “The wandering bachelor: Irving, masculinity, and authorship.” American Literature, 74: 111–37. Veeder, W. (1971). “Strether and the transcendence of language.” Modern Philology, 69: 116–32.

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Unwrapping the Ghost: The Design Behind Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove Evelyne Ender

The first lineaments of the book that became The Wings of the Dove can be traced back to a letter Henry James wrote to his brother William on March 29, 1870, following the news of the death of their beloved cousin Mary (Minny) Temple from consumption. He was twenty-seven, and she twenty-four. In this effusive document (eighteen handwritten pages, with the end of the letter missing), James addresses his cousin with words that reverberate over a long stretch of his life, until the publication of the novel: “Twenty years hence we shall be loving with your love and longing with your eagerness and suffer with your patience.” In 1895 James jots down in his Notebooks a list of projected novels, “La Mourante: the girl who is dying, the young man and the girl he is engaged to” figures at the top, but the book will be long in the making ( James 1987a: 146). It will take the author close to an extra ten years to fulfill this promise through the invention of Milly Theale, the heroine of The Wings of the Dove. That James should expound over this loss and grief in the pages of a long letter to his brother should not surprise us; he himself implies that writing might help soften the blow, changing what is a “hard fact” into a “soft idea.” It cannot have been an easy letter to write. James, who in those days thought of himself (and took care of himself) as an invalid, seems to have felt some survivor guilt, beyond the sorrow of losing a cousin whom he idealized. They were both young, she cared for him (as the remaining letters of her correspondence amply show) and he cared for her, as this early letter reveals and will be proven if he can commemorate her death (as well as her life) through his fiction.1 There remains, however, the haunting thought that he can go on “scribbling” while she is now “locked away, incorruptibly, within the crystal walls of the past.” The circuitousness of James’s meaning reflects what is best described as a certain embarrassment:

A Companion to Henry James. Edited by Greg W. Zacharias © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-14042-3

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But I have scribbled enough. While I sit spinning my sentences she is dead: and I suppose it is partly to defend myself from too direct a sense of her death that I indulge in this fruitless attempt to transmute it from a hard fact into a soft idea. Time, of course, will bring almost even-handedly the inevitable pain and the inexorable cure. I am willing to leave life to answer for life; but meanwhile, thinking how small at greatest is our change with her change and how vast an apathy goes to our little measure of sympathy, I take a certain satisfaction in having simply written twelve pages. ( James 1987a: 79)

James’s words, a few lines later, help us put this embarrassment in sharper focus: “It’s the living ones that die; the writing ones that survive.” In light of what we know, through Lyndall Gordon’s painstaking biographical research, of James’s last dealings with his cousin, this sentence might hide an avowal. It seems only too true that the artist’s survival instinct got the better over the ailing girl’s will to live: it enabled him not to hear the urgent plea behind the words she sent him, as she was about to face another winter in the damp and cold American Northeast that would be the death of her. In 1869, Minny writes to Henry: “This climate is trying, to be sure, but such as it is I’ve got to take my chance in it, as there is not one I care enough for, or who cares enough for me, to take charge of me to Italy, or to the south anywhere.”2 Earlier on, she had boldly, and yet lightly, addressed the question of a final leave-taking. The letter accompanied a photograph of herself: “You may never see me again, you know, and if I were to die so far away you’d be sorry you hadn’t taken leave of me, wouldn’t you?” (cited by James 1983: 531). Henry missed that opportunity for a farewell, and he never acceded to her request, when all other plans with relatives of friends had failed, to take her with him to Rome.3 Here, the reader of James’s novel is faced with a moral dilemma. It is one thing to see the struggle between the demands of life and the exigencies of art played out, masterfully, in James’s fiction and short stories, but it is another to uncover, from among the retrieved private and published materials that surround the novel, the troubling story of James’s flight from his dying cousin’s plea. It seems ironic furthermore that our consideration of the author’s behavior should touch the same raw nerve that is exposed in The Wings of the Dove, as we learn what men and women can do to each other out of passion (for power, for money, for sex, or romance even). But in the years of Minny’s decline, James was already set on the course that was to define the rest of his life: literature had become his passion and there would be only one place to show that he cared for his cousin, namely his books. Thus, James’s conversion of a “hard fact” into a soft, literary idea leaves us uneasy: the letter smacks of the artist; it shows him a little too eagerly embalming the beautiful girl for public viewing. Troubling questions then spring to mind: Did this distance help him write a better novel? Was her death, as it were, providential – in providing James with an inspiring muse? Did she have to die so that he could show how much he cared? These and such questions have haunted me ever since Gordon’s biography uncovered the fuller subtext of The Wings of the Dove. That subtext put in focus, around

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James’s women, the relation between his art and his life and raised the old ghost of the Jamesian artist in his ivory tower sacrificing everything on the high altar of art. Leo Bersani’s strong indictment of The Wings of the Dove on the grounds that it shows a “passionless indulgence of design” can stand for a rich strand of criticism that faults the author for being too artful in his presentation of his subject (Bersani 1976: 145). It does not help that James himself boasts, in his preface, of the “supersubtleties, arch-refinements, of tact and taste and design and instinct” that went into the making of this novel ( James 1990: xlviii). Reading these words by an author obsessed with method and artistry, one ends up wondering, albeit a little naïvely, how much room is left for the expression of feeling that his cousin’s sad demise demands. The criticism, often-leveled at James, that he “aestheticized” and “sublimated” his heroine ultimately goes back to the same suspicion – that too much art stands in the way of genuine empathy.4 Might it be true that Henry James’s passionate commitment to design removed him from the sympathy that her demise and their friendship demanded? Gordon’s narrative of James’s artistic progress through his encounters with women has given this question a new, unexpected edge.5 It also forces us, in an age when “high literature” is often accused of lacking relevance, to entertain a quandary that can be summed up as follows: while most of us believe that works of art should be granted ultimate freedom of design and imagination, new trends in criticism have given increasing weight to social and historical issues. It would seem at the outset that an appreciation of the literary craft and aesthetic features displayed in James’s Wings of the Dove excludes a reading built around ethical or political considerations.6 The Wings of the Dove has carried a moral stain ever since feminist readings argued that James appropriated himself of his cousin’s death for the purposes of his art, while recent biographical criticism has intensified this suspicion. But rather than widening the divide between aesthetics and ethics, I propose to trace, through an analysis of James’s design and strategies of representation, how his novel responds to a broader moral imperative. Far from instigating a withdrawal from existential questions, design is precisely what supports, or rather, enables, the deployment of psychological, philosophical, and ethical issues in this text. The impetus behind this interpretation is not purely academic: it attests, in the wake of other readers’ similar experience, to this book’s haunting power. Ross Chambers has suggested that certain texts, of a testimonial nature, produce a “textual haunting of the living by the dead that may outlive the ‘death of the author’ in the literal sense of that phrase” (Chambers 2004: xxvi). The Wings of the Dove is one such text: for several years, it has stood by me as I watched someone dear to me struggle through a terminal illness – because of its psychological, philosophical, and moral intensities. But the scenes I highlight in my discussion of The Wings of the Dove were not chosen merely for their sentimental power: they show how fiction can make us witness existential crises and see their meaning.7 They also prove, if need be, that James’s highly crafted écriture does not work against the novel’s profound humanity, but on the contrary, in its favor.

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James’s Aesthetic Instincts As we have understood, endorsing Minny’s care as a chaperon and sometime nurse in Italy seemed out of the question for James in view of his literary calling. Yet from the moment of her death, the figure of the young woman writes itself into James’s future as a book in the making. The March 1870 letter announces a form of haunting: it says that she would “be forever talking to [him].” In his Notes of a Son and Brother, written in 1913 (more than a decade after The Wings of the Dove), Henry James speaks of the book that was “to seek to lay the ghost by wrapping it . . . in the beauty and the dignity of art.” The embarrassment seems however to have lingered even beyond the time when his cousin came to be enshrined in the novel. On the last page of the autobiography, having just praised the “gallantry and beauty” of one of Minny’s letters, James declares, in his most circuitous fashion, “But there came a moment, almost immediately after, when all illusions failed; which it is not good to think of or linger on, and yet not pitiful not too note” ( James 1983: 544). Combining an oddly impersonal phrasing with a double negative and not even identifying the actors implicated in this momentous event, the author seems eager to back away from his subject, as if it were easier to bury Minny behind a “soft idea” than address her plight openly. In truth, there is only one place where Minny’s story can be properly told and that is in James’s fiction – for the fiction alone can provide him with what Sigmund Freud, in his prescient essay on creative writers, has called ein Schauspiel (Freud 2003: 25–6). A Schauspiel is properly speaking a spectacle, but the word’s etymology also suggests the idea of play (spielen) while implying the notion of the scene, in which something offers itself for show (from schauen). The Wings of the Dove provides a stage for the drama of Minny’s death as well as the possibility of laying her ghost to rest – in a complex literary gesture where the play of fantasy paves the way towards atonement. Indeed, while Minny’s death signifies “the end of our youth” (as he notes at the end of Notes of a Son and Brother), it simultaneously marks Henry’s coming fully into his identity as a man of letters (James 1983: 544). When all his other writings on his cousin show him fumbling for words and unable to mourn her with proper decorum, The Wings of the Dove will gradually shape itself as Henry James’s song of experience. From what we know of the origins of the novel (the notebooks are themselves, one must assume, the precipitate of earlier, purely mental elaborations), James never erred in his conviction that he must add a love-plot to the elements provided by his cousin’s life-story. The central elements of the fiction are thus (1) she is dying, she hasn’t lived, let her have love (but not sex, because that would be the stuff of a French naturalist novel of the kind James despises); (2) the man she loves is not in love with her but with another woman to whom he is engaged but cannot marry because money is too scarce. James’s erotic plot reads then like the perversion, as well as the inversion in terms of the sexes, of a courtly romance and its modern avatar, the novel of adultery.8

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It tells a modern love story in which a man is fortunate enough to be loved by two women. Illicit lovers indulge in hidden assignations and secret pledges, while their love burns all the more feverishly for having to be kept under the bushel – until the story takes a dramatic turn through the death of one of the women. With the invention of Kate Croy, James has achieved more, however, than a malecentered story of modern love. He also emphasizes the plight of his two female protagonists, who each seem in dire need of a husband. He makes room, in this fashion, for an aspect of Minny Temple’s plight that had to be emphasized: poor and sick as she was, she would have needed a man to look after her. Thus James reveals in his fiction a more vivid understanding of his cousin’s condition of dependent celibacy (ascribing that part of her story to Kate Croy) and of her passionate, idealistic nature (in Milly’s selfless love for Densher) than he does elsewhere. Whereas he unexpectedly blurts out in his letter to his brother that Minny “has gone where there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage!,” he makes it clear, in his notebooks, that living, for Milly Theale, would have to involve “the chance to be loved and to love” ( James 1987a: 169; my emphasis).9 In the space of fiction, James uncovers then, with an acute feminist awareness, women’s desire as well as their entrapment in the marriagegame.10 At one end of the spectrum, we find Kate Croy caught painfully between love, sex, and marriage and at the other, the almost comic allusions to Milly’s need for a husband to look after her (or her money?), as well as the conversation between Aunt Maud and Susan Stringham suggesting that marital sex might be the “specific” for Milly’s condition ( James 1990: 207).11 Thus, a crisscross of related themes – love, marriage, and fatal illness – bind the fiction to an existential subtext. The novel provides James with story-elements in which he reveals (how consciously we will never know) his entanglement in the dying girl’s story. A striking example of this convergence between fiction and revelation appears in James’s description, in Notes of a Son and Brother, of his final, one-hour visit to her house: it reads like a distorted echo of Densher’s Venetian visits, which are similarly fraught with ambiguously romantic overtones.12 Writing the fiction may have prompted the memory, or more subtly, perhaps, fiction provides a template for a particularly charged moment (a visit to his dying cousin that might be the last) that could then be remembered more than forty years later, in the autobiography. In this hall of mirrors, the figure of Densher, a man a little too kind and vain not to want to play the role of a romantic suitor, reflects the image of a younger, inexperienced James. The love-plot thus serves James doubly: not only does it intensify the tragedy of the young woman’s death, it enables the staging of vicarious atonement. Ironically, however, the acknowledgment of responsibility in the dying woman’s fate goes together with a gesture of exculpation. The Schauspiel is indeed designed in such a way as to serve its hero in several ways. Firstly, in placing Densher at the center of a love triangle and creating a hero fortunate enough to be loved by two women, James provides himself with the elements of “an egocentric story” and creates a figure

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“for whom,” to borrow Freud’s idea, “the author seeks to win our sympathy” (Freud 2003: 30).13 Then, this egocentric fantasy provides the benefit of a perfect excuse: engaged as he is to another woman, the hero of the novel could of course never “make up” fully to the ailing, dying girl. In the end, however, the detours of a fictional plot will have led James to the scene that matters most, the one in which he might be able to lay to rest the ghost of his cousin. As was the case in James’s life, given what we know of his extended broodings over Minny’s death (from 1870 to his autobiography written in old age), the hero of his fiction will only understand belatedly and posthumously the extent of his loss. It is by virtue of its peripeteia, of what Leo Bersani very aptly identified as the hero’s “anguished shift of emotion from Kate to Milly,” that the gesture of atonement becomes possible (Bersani 1976: 144). At the same time as this plot reversal gives vivid expression to the haunting presence of the mourante, it also provides a scenario for redemption: Densher, the writer’s alter ego, shows his goodness and redeems himself by belatedly falling in love with the dying girl.14 The stage is set then for a decisive scene laced with figural and autobiographical meanings. It takes the form of an autobiographical encounter in which the hero meets his specular double in the form of a “young man far off.” He himself for that matter took in the scene again at moments as from the page of a book. He saw a young man far off and in a relation inconceivable, saw him hushed, passive, staying his breath, but half understanding, yet dimly conscious of something immense and holding himself painfully together not to lose it. The young man at these moments so seen was too distant and too strange for the right identity; and yet, outside, afterwards, it was his own face Densher had known. ( James 1990: 463)

In this uncanny moment, the author seems to have caught in the mirror of his fiction the disfigured image of himself, repentant as well as ever so sorry for the young woman. This passage unquestionably evokes a transfer of emotion onto the literary page, a transfer that is enabled by a mechanism of remembrance analyzed by Freud in his essay on “screen memories.” In the process of writing his fiction, James has produced an observer-memory, a memory, that is, where a subject looks onto a moment of his own past as if from outside (Freud 1959: 321). In the young man “far off,” “too distant and too strange for the right identity,” and “holding himself together painfully not to lose it,” we recognize the young man at twenty-seven whom we know from the letter written to his brother. Densher, in short, is the literary encapsulation of Henry James. However, the momentary alignment that shows a young James soon gives way again to the disfigurations of the fiction: the face in the mirror, we are ultimately reminded, must be Densher’s. The window that opens onto Henry James’s soul soon closes again. But this is no simple confessional revelation: the lingering figure of “the haunted man – a man haunted with a memory” at the end of The Wings of the Dove is the

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creation of James’s art. In other words, a highly constructed and contrived effort to design a fiction worthy of his subject is what enabled the transfer, onto the page of a book, of a redemptive moment of personal remembrance. On this subject, too, James’s text speaks to us – in providing an allegory for the gesture of autobiographical inscription. Fiction, we see now, is the creative process that enables the birth of an earlier self who is made to stand out “from the page of a book.” When he writes The Wings of the Dove, James has brought to perfection his mastery of “reflectors” and his ability to muster up scenes. Design is then what makes for a fable in which art and experience can reverberate off each other. Paradoxically, it is not through a return to life, but through a gesture of dissociation from the existential context, in other words by retreating to the ivory tower of his art, that James meets his younger self, in an autobiographical moment whose intensity, though secret and private, is unmistakable. Such poignant, haunting scenes give The Wings of the Dove its human face.

M.T.’s “heroism of the last chance” The transformation of the momentous event into fiction that we just witnessed was part idea (adding the theme of love) and part imagination (shaping the drama and the characters). As we know, James had right away intuited that need for an idea – except that in his young years, he wanted it to be “soft.” But over time his perspective on Milly gained focus as the pathos of her condition came to be weighted with philosophical significance. Putting Milly Theale at the center of an existential drama, James replaced the early sentimentality with a more serious purpose: he endowed his heroine with a burden of anguish and consciousness that gave her a truly tragic grandeur. Indeed, if James’s novel haunts us, it cannot be merely because of its pathos or even its biographical undercurrents. It haunts us because it involves us deeply in the story of the human condition, as we watch from the wings, just like the novel’s protagonists, the heroine’s gradual descent into death. In recounting M.T.’s anguished progress towards her death, James extols what Emmanuel Levinas has called, in his discussion of death in Time and the Other, the “heroism of the last chance” (1983: 61).15 Meanwhile, as James celebrates a woman’s forbearance and courage he breaks away, in a decisive and self-conscious fashion, from a tradition that typically associates death with virile heroism. James’s allegiance to his memories of Minny Temple’s courage is all the more striking when one considers that the years of her sickness were also those, post-Civil War, that extolled the values of male heroism and of a virility founded on military prowess. It must have taken a strong conviction and not a little courage for James to commit to paper the idea that a woman might be more capable of heroism in the face of death than a man – after all, he had seen his own brother, as well as acquaintances and friends, come back from the war horribly wounded

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or dying.16 But, as he explains carefully in the preface, in his mind the figure of a mourante trumps that of a male invalid: Ralph Touchett was chosen in A Portrait of a Lady not for “his fact of sex; since men, among the mortally wounded, suffer on the whole more overtly and more grossly than women, and resist with a ruder, an inferior strategy” ( James 1990: xxxiii). The Wings of the Dove, by contrast, will feature “the central figure [of] a sick young woman” so as to represent “the unsurpassable activity of passionate, of inspired resistance” in the most appropriate “vessel of sensibility” ( James 1990: xxvi). In attributing to a female figure the burden of consciousness that a genuine confrontation with death entails, James adopts a pathbreaking strategy, one that brings him surprisingly close to Levinas’s notion (expounded more than forty years later) that a full engagement with death signifies the demise of “virility and pride and sovereignty” (Levinas 1983: 35).17 The possibility of such a demise lurks behind one of the earliest scenes involving Milly – the scene on the Brünig in which a concerned Susan Stringham catches sight of the heroine perched on a cliff, in a décor evocative of a romantic suicide. These Alpine heights, it turns out, provide Milly with a moment of “uplifted and unlimited possession” – the last and only such moment that the heroine is given to experience ( James 1990: 89). For her tragedy to make full sense, it must indeed begin with a gesture of hubris: the heroine faces the world in an attitude not unlike that, described by Levinas, “of a romantic and Byronic psychology of a proud, aristocratic, genial solitude” (Levinas 1983: 35). Milly’s state of “aloneness” in the world and her apparent mastery embodies here a philosophical awareness that Levinas associates with existence and with a fundamental freedom that initially allows a human being to “exert on his (or her) existence a subject’s virile power” (Levinas 1983: 34).18 Soon enough, however, like Levinas’s philosophical subject, James’s heroine will have to experience “the anguish that is the fact that dying is impossible” (Levinas 1983: 29). Soon enough, as her illness becomes apparent, she will learn of her feminine powerlessness, and will be forced to shed, in the process, her early Byronic or Christ-like features. The story that ensues is that of a mourante on whom the fatal illness had enforced a constant, unremitting deployment of self-awareness Levinas will call “a neverceasing vigilance without the refuge of unconsciousness” (Levinas 1983: 27). Here again, we can see how carefully and self-consciously James devises a mode of presentation that gives a dramatic, quasi-plastic shape to his heroine’s predicament. In his preface, James rightly warns us that, in Book Fourth “all the offered life centres, to intensity, in the disclosure of Milly’s single throbbing consciousness” ( James 1990: xlii). He explains also that elsewhere her condition is rendered through his “registers or ‘reflectors’ ” – imperfect as these reflectors may be, given that “Milly’s situation ceases at a given moment to be ‘renderable’ ” ( James 1990: xliii). Thus, to a large extent, we only know of Milly’s brave and vigilant battle for her life through the indirect presentation of those who, watching over her or needing her, never cease speculating about her fate. Relying on “reflectors,” James ensures that, like the novel’s protagonists, we will try to cull the smallest signs of the mourante’s

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decline. Every sign (her palor, her evasiness, her sudden retreat, her insomnia) becomes evidence of the impending tragedy, and most telling among them is the insomnia that plagues her, because it is proof of her “throbbing consciousness,” of her “vigilance without the refuge of consciousness.” At the increasingly still center of The Wings of the Dove, there unfolds the story of one who must learn about our unremitting, unrelenting subjugation to mortality – through the exemplary condition of “pain that is, a little too lightly, called physical” ( James 1990: 55).19 Physical pain is “unequivocal,” and more anguishing than moral pain (la douleur morale), Levinas argues, helping us understand why James, while he teases us with the idea of Milly’s hysteria, yet has her endure a physical illness. It was only by moving beyond hysteria (but also beyond a definite description of her physical symptoms) that he could endow her “condition” with its ultimate philosophical significance.20 Whatever Milly’s mysterious illness, it would have to be such that it could only be resolved in terms of absolutes: dying or living. In fact, “to live” is exactly what Sir Luke’s oracular prescription amounts to: in response to her growing uncertainty and anguish, he exhorts her to take up life ( James 1990: 176). But here the physician becomes a surrogate for the author, for whom the supreme value is life – as we know from The Ambassadors, when James imparts to us his “great categorical imperative” in the form of “live all you can.”21 The preface to The Wings of the Dove explains, similarly, that the key to Milly’s character lies in her achieving “the sense of having lived” and in “her impulse . . . to wrest from her shrinking hour still as much of the fruit of life as possible” ( James 1990: xxxiii). Indeed, the addition of a love-plot to his initial donnée offers James much more than the possibility of plotting a scene of vicarious attrition through the figure of Densher. It provides him with an opportunity to lay out his philosophy on the grand stage of his fiction. As a woman in love, Milly fights harder to remain alive and feels all the more poignantly the loss of her life. Not only will she want to live to keep her love, but her will to live (call it her “libidinal energies”) will grow accordingly. Sir Luke’s words, “isn’t to ‘live’ exactly what I’m trying to persuade you to take the trouble to do?” provide the setting for the remarkable scene that follows Milly’s second visit to her doctor – the scene in Regent’s Park in which Milly’s “throbbing consciousness” is given its fullest deployment.22 Sir Luke’s pronouncement, which leaves Milly’s fate hanging in her hands, sends her looking for a space where she can think. In the park she discovers a world filled with images of ordinary living, a world in which she can begin to weigh, each against the other, the three shifting tokens of her existence: her will to live, her powers of heroic resistance, and her fate as a perhaps terminally ill creature. “It is perhaps not right to say that we live in order to eat, but it is not more accurate to say that we eat in order to live,” Levinas writes in a teasing conundrum (Levinas 1983: 45). In this momentous scene of his fiction, James teases us, similarly, in opposing desire and possibility, playing one against the other the two phrases: “one could live if one would” and “one would live if one could.”

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Through weighing the meaning of these two propositions, James’s tragic heroine comes closest to articulating her anguish. Once again, it takes a Levinas to help us grasp the full significance of this existential riddle. The fact of death, the philosopher tells us, threatens man’s (or woman’s) seemingly sovereign power over existence: “what is important with the approach of death,” he declares, “is that at a certain moment we are deprived of the possibility of power (nous ne pouvons plus pouvoir)” (Levinas 1983: 62). The question of what Milly can do – of her power – lies at the heart of the revelation she experiences during her walk in the park. Whereas everything seemed possible before, need and the ability to fend for oneself are the rule in the universe that now unfolds in front of her. The sick girl must understand that there can be no respite from the anxiety of wanting to live. Her mounting awareness is first articulated in the collective plural, while she is looking at the men and women in the park who live, to use James’s own phrase, “in a box”: Their box, their great common anxiety, what was it, in this grim breathing place, but the practical question of life? They could live if they would; that is, like herself, they had been told so: she saw all about her, on seats, digesting the information, recognizing again as something in a slightly different shape familiar enough, the blessed old truth that they would live if they could. ( James 1990: 178)

Proximity to death calls for an intensification of the life-struggle, but Milly knows that fighting a heroic last battle like “a veritable young lioness” may not suffice. The “cleft stick” that she must face because of Sir Luke’s refusal to share his diagnosis forces her to articulate her predicament in a dilemma whose overall sense is, to use Levinas’s language, that “our daily life amounts to a preoccupation about our fate (notre salut)” (Levinas 1983: 39). Milly then understands that “it was perhaps superficially more striking that one could live if one would; but it was more appealing, insinuating, irresistible in short, that one would live if one could” ( James 1990: 181). The tragedy lies in that final “could” – the tell-tale sign of Milly’s subjugation to that other that is death. Here, however, we reach the limits of a philosophical reading of James’s fiction, for while it could indeed be argued that the use of the impersonal pronoun “one” emphasizes the universal significance of Milly’s discovery, we could just as easily say that this disembodied voice expresses the heroine’s reluctance to fully assume her fate in the first person singular. Thought may be no more than a temporary cover for that stifled cry of a heroine who refuses to give in (“appealing, insinuating, irresistible” as that thought may be) and prepares herself for a heroic last-ditch effort – un héroïsme de la dernière chance – under the illusion that living is a matter of will, of desire, and of love. Milly is kept alive by her desire for jouissance – until her decisive abnegation, when, in James’s vivid image, “she turned her face to the wall” ( James 1990: 449). Indeed,

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whereas the other protagonists of The Wings of the Dove relate to the world in terms of instrumentality (they “work” upon the world to obtain what they want, be it sex, money, or marriage, or are worked upon), only Milly, because she is dying, reaches the disinterested experience defined by Levinas in Time and the Other. There, objects of desire are nothing more (and nothing less) than sources of nourishment and pleasure – the source of pure jouissance. Thus, Milly’s acute (to the point of blindness) erotic engagement with life, down to her naïve need to “love and be loved,” is the clearest sign of her unremitting will to live. Indeed, what is there to oppose to thanatos, if not eros? Meanwhile, like Levinas, James has understood that for death to take on a human dimension, his heroine needed to be shown facing the other not merely in the absolute form of death, but in the mundane, moving act of being in love. The philosopher argues in his essay that “to overcome death means cultivating a relation that must remain personal with the otherness of that event.” He also suggests that a deep analogy unites the otherness of death and that of sexual difference as experienced in an erotic relation (Levinas 1983: 73). James’s philosophical genius (or was it just his uncanny instinct for imagining meaningful stories?) led him to write the story of a mourante through the intertwining of desire and death. The novel thus reveals a palpable intensification of otherness: as critics have remarked, sexual difference or rather a sexual divide constitutes a pervasive theme of The Wings of the Dove, a theme that goes beyond mere psychology.23 James’s intuition about sexual difference might explain why the novel could only close with a scene that reveals the différend between Kate and Densher – a disagreement that speaks of the sexual difference. Before Lacan said it in a famous quip, James knew already that il n’y a pas de rapport de sexe.24 Thus James’s novel crosses the threads of love and death differently for each of the protagonists: while Milly must learn to die, Densher must learn to love. The hero’s “shift of allegiance” represents his belated and painful discovery of true love. As for Kate, she must be sacrificed, irredeemably tainted as she is by her need for power. Her dismissal places Densher and Milly center stage so that they can embody, to the greatest tragic intensity, the “relation that forever eludes us,” a relation that Levinas defines as “the pathos of love” (Levinas 1983: 78). They are, each of them, subjected to an insurmountable, double divide: not just a man and a woman but a dead girl and her bereaved lover.25 If further evidence is needed of James’s touch of genius in adding the ingredient of love to the story of his mourante, it is to be found in the closing moment of the novel, as Densher rehearses in his mind what he thinks must be the “unapproachable terror of the end” ( James 1990: 462). In that scene, Densher remembers the young woman’s fate through the powerful figure the author had invented in his notebooks: “she is like a creature dragged shrieking to the guillotine – to the shambles” ( James 1987a: 103). Milly is entrusted with the same figure, as she realizes that Sir Luke shows pity “like a head on a pike, in a French revolution” ( James 1990: 172). In the closing pages of the novel, the image, now embedded in Densher’s brooding and haunted memory, reaches a new intensity:

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Milly had held with passion to her dream of a future, and she was separated from it, not shrieking indeed, but grimly, awfully silent, as one might imagine some noble young victim of the scaffold, in the French Revolution, separated at the prison-door from some object clutched for resistance. ( James 1990: 462)

With these words, James found his way towards expressing what must have long seemed unimaginable: not the idea, but the experience of M.T.’s anguished pain and stifled shriek in the face of death.

Becoming a “near witness” When placed in its biographical context, James’s novel forces on us a questioning that goes beyond philosophical issues to make us ask, more pointedly, if the work can be an occasion for goodness in spite of its inauspicious origins. In the aftermath of Minny Temple’s death, testimonial writing was the only alternative to silence or the kind of embarrassed reticence we saw earlier. James says as much in Notes of a Son and Brother, albeit in a convoluted way, when he describes Minny’s heroism in terms of a spectacle: “She was absolutely afraid of nothing she might come to by living with enough sincerity and enough wonder . . . to see her launched on that adventure in such bedimmed, almost tragically compromised conditions . . . one is caught by her title to the heroic and pathetic mark” ( James 1983: 509). More forcefully, he speaks of himself in the next sentence as being “the near witness” of her tragic fate. True to Ross Chambers’ (2004) conception of testimonial writing, James will fulfill, through his literary work, an imperative of remembrance, an overcoming of indifference, as well a need for a ceremonial, public mourning. But in order to endorse the position of witness, James had to overcome his initial impulse, which was merely to bring back her ghost through a form of perverse identification, as when he vouched that “we shall be loving with your love and longing with your eagerness and suffer with your patience.” For merely to reanimate the dead girl accomplishes nothing – and James understood that Minny will only have been properly mourned if he can “lay the ghost by wrapping it . . . in the beauty and dignity of art” ( James 1983: 544). Instead of identifying with the victim, the artist must reach for an aesthetic transformation; he needs to translate raw human drama into art.26 Our earlier analyses, each emphasizing one side of the face to face with Minny’s death, have already established the scope of this task: the writing will need to do more than bear witness to the experience of a mourante, it must make reparation for an earlier neglect, and this in words that may never be good enough to represent a dying person’s pain and anguish. Here again, as we consider more closely questions of representation in The Wings of the Dove, the novel benefits from being read proleptically, this time in light of Ross Chambers’ attempt to establish the aesthetic categories that witnessing imposes on a writer.

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Using the example Still/Here, a work by the choreographer Billy T. Jones “on the theme of the commonality of human mortality,” Chambers demonstrates at the inception of his study that art cannot represent the pain and anguish of dying; it can only rework or translate it (Chambers 2004: xiv). The terms he uses to define the rhetoric of testimonial writing correspond to James’s often commented upon style in The Wings of the Dove: For the hauntedness of such writing, that is, the loss or lack that it makes manifest, derives specifically from its ability to represent, a function of the mechanism of denial that . . . has the effect of making the return of the traumatic a matter of assemblage and indexicality, implying indirection and deferment, appropriation and bricolage – that is, of inflicting a kind of death on the author, understood as the master of language’s power to represent. (Chambers 2004: xxvii)

Chambers’ analysis usefully signposts the main features of James’s strategies of representation in this novel. Thus it is indeed through “indexical signs,” such as Milly’s paleness, her donning of a white dress at her last party, or the action of turning to the wall, that James marks her descent into death. His reliance on paintings in The Wings of the Dove has often been noticed, but what has been overlooked is how he choreographs the heroine’s descent in a discourse that is intensely plastic and theatrical. As for indirection, it can be seen in his commitment to his “reflectors” and his disproportionately sparse use of Milly’s point of view. James’s writing becomes testimonial precisely to the extent that it proceeds by indirection and ellipses: not only has he renounced the idea of omniscient narration, but he comes shy of representing Milly’s illness except through indexical signs.27 As for her actual death, that moment is left to the reader’s imagination: Milly Theale dies, we are led to believe, in a grandiose room of a Venetian palace. Such is the irony of James’s fiction that it takes its heroine to Italy (the country where Milly Temple wanted to live) – to die, away from everyone’s gaze, in the most fabled of Italian cities. Although this is never seen, its reverberations are overwhelming: they bring about a startling realignment of passion and power among the threesome of Milly, Kate, and Densher. Coming between the two survivors and leading to their separation, the ghostly presence of the dead girl speaks of the need to reckon with the difference that death makes. Chambers warns in his book that in the aftermath of traumatic events, our first instinct is denial, until we are ready to say, perhaps, “it happened, but we are united and strong” (Chambers 2004: xxi). Through his fable, James addresses the very terms of Chambers’ indictment of our natural indifference to the plight of the dying. Death prevents closure in his novel, bringing in its trail remembrance, difference, and disturbance. Haunted by the memory and imagination of Milly’s ordeal, Densher mourns her almost religiously. Meanwhile, between the lovers, as the cliché goes, things will never be the same.28 Although the

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power wielding ethos explicitly laid out in this novel leads us to expect the smooth, glorious triumph of the two “survivors” – of Kate and Densher – James devises for his tale an ending that makes it impossible to say “it happened, but we are united and strong”; instead, he clinches his novel with the resounding phrase “we shall never be as we were.” As Densher is brought into the limelight as the sole survivor of the tragedy, holding his anguished vigils while Milly is dying or perhaps already dead, we see him experience the state of mind that Chambers analyzes across a host of testimonial narratives, namely a haunting that signifies a return of “the pain, the injustice, the suffering, and the guilt” (Chambers 2004: xxi). What befalls the hero in the last pages of the novel is more than an acute consciousness of Milly’s pain; he must now experience the double burden of conscience and self-consciousness. Like the witness defined by Chambers, Densher (and with him, in his shadow, the author himself) is someone who “know[s] himself to be haunted” (Chambers 2004: xxv). But the haunting that death imposes on its witness is not merely a matter of memory, emotion, and conscience. It also involves a radical change in the phenomenology of time. “Death,” Chambers writes “confound[s] the categories of past, present, and future by making its presence felt in the after as well as the before” (Chambers 2004: x). Indeed, what makes reading The Wings of the Dove such a gripping as well as moving experience is the sense of waiting for death that it imparts on us, its readers, as we watch Densher mark and bide his time while Milly lies dying.29 Here our discovery of Milly’s fate through a complex temporality made of alternation of acts of retrospection and anticipation seems to parallel the fact that, as we saw, from 1870 to 1914, and perhaps beyond (but we wouldn’t know), M.T.’s story unfolds in front of James as of the past, the future, and the present. The fiction chronicles a death foretold in such a fashion that the narration will circle around the event, while the “moment . . . not pitiful not too note” ( James 1983: 544) remains truly unrepresentable. In this fashion, the novel enforces on us a persistent awareness of death, revealing forever the untimeliness of M.T.’s death and her timeless presence. This is why like the spectators of a Greek tragedy, we watch the bereaved Densher, in pity and terror even – a hero fallen from his passion and pain-stricken in his remembrance of the mourante.30 Chambers’ book Untimely Interventions has helped us identify the moral intensities of The Wings of the Dove. It also provides us with a sharper sense of how James’s design (as representation, figuration, and narration) responds to the testimonial imperative. The significant difference between Chambers’ work and our task lies in the novel’s narrowness of focus. While he places his analysis on the global, the world-stage of the AIDS epidemic, the ethical compass defined by a study of James’s text, with its narrow décor of a New England parlor or bedroom, rich dinners in London, and a palazzo in Venice, may appear troublingly small. Yet, the story of illness he depicts in his fiction still matters – and not only because it enables us to revisit a significant feminist questioning that has emerged around a work of art that,

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like many others, seizes on a beautiful suffering female to tell a moving romantic story. James raises, through Milly’s story, questions that seem just as timely now as they were when he started to reimagine his cousin’s story, not in medical, clinical ways but in terms of a lived experience.31 There was not a day, in late August 2005, that my mind did not turn to The Wings of the Dove as I was reading, in the New York Times, the stories of patients left waiting in anguish for a medical diagnosis, terrified meanwhile that they could be suffering from an illness for which there might be no “specific,” and yet desperately trying not to give up.32 I learned then that James’s fiction, with its images, scenes, or dialogues staged around a mourante, would help me grasp what the articles merely alluded to, namely the pain and the heroism of those called upon to battle for their lives because of illness. James could only imagine what such an experience felt like: as we know, he had closed the doors of his ailing cousin’s room behind him, to follow his literary calling and to write fiction. There is then really only one last question we must ask: how good was his imagination, how close did it bring him to bearing witness to the death of a young woman of tuberculosis in New England in the nineteenth century? As an event, Milly’s death remains unrepresentable; it is a moment suspended between a waiting and re-minding. Yet it is remembered as well as figured in the decisive rearticulation of the drama that occurs with Densher’s shift of allegiance. As we saw, Densher feels the loss, so terribly that he comes face to face with the telling image of the agonizing shriek never uttered of the “victim taken to the scaffold.” It is through the very intensity of this figure that the author bears witness to the dying woman’s anguish and to her pain. The book is then truly a “re-minding of the phenomenon that witnessing writing seeks to bring about” – or perhaps not so much a reminding as an enactment (Chambers 2004: xxix). A hundred or so pages earlier, James had written about his hero that his visits to Milly suggested “a clever cousin calling on a cousin afflicted, and bored for his pains” ( James 1990: 341). Perhaps The Wings of the Dove needed to be designed in this way just so as to remove this bad impression. Through writing The Wings of the Dove, Henry James was finally able to enter, through memory and imagination, into the universe of the dying young woman that was his cousin. It would not have escaped James, one assumes, that in removing Densher from the worldly drama in the name of a higher ethical calling he had created an alter ego for himself as well as an indirect way of bearing witness to a “heroic” and “pathetic” death that he had never been able to face before.33 We know how he had answered Minny’s plea: “you are sick,” he wrote to her in substance in the winter that preceded her death, “I am an invalid too, what a sorry pair we are.”34 But The Wings of the Dove does more than gesture towards reparation: James finds eloquent and haunting words, in his fiction, to express his love. That these words are entrusted to his reflector, Densher, does not change their intensity, nor does the fact that the figure refers to a thought (thought, as we know, is the richest and truest medium of our experience for James):

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He kept it back like a favourite pang; left it behind him, so to say, when he went out, but came home again the sooner for the certainty of finding it there. Then he took it out of its sacred corner and its soft wrappings; he undid them one by one, handling them, handling it, as a father, baffled and tender, might handle a maimed child. ( James 1990: 502)

“Figural discourse can give us more to be read than language conventionally permits to say,” Chambers argues (2004: xxviii). Thus, one runs away from one’s ghosts, but one rushes towards one’s child, and yet, as the emphatic “it” reminds us, the object of one’s tenderness, care, and imagination is inanimate: only through the animating power of a metaphor can she be brought back to life. But it looks as if these images refer to a memory rather than a thought: in the early days after Minny Temple’s death, Henry urged William to send him a precious mnemonic device – the photograph of Milly – with almost the same urgency that he ascribes to Densher.35 The preface reveals, meanwhile, another, even more telling overlay in acknowledging that the author’s responsibility towards his subject is, just like Densher’s towards his mourante, that of “a fond parent [who] watches a child” ( James 1990: xxxv). James is of course not the first among male writers to consider his book like a progeny. What seems new and striking, however, is his reliance on this figure to evoke what he calls, perhaps a little too coyly, a “painter’s tenderness of the imagination” ( James 1990: xlviii). Fiction speaks in figures and what The Wings of the Dove ends up saying is how much Henry James, the author and the man, cared for his subject – cared, that is, for M.T.36

Acknowledgments Work on this project was made possible by a fellowship at the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington, Seattle. My special thanks to Kathleen Woodward and to the scholars at the Center for their valuable comments. I also wish to thank Gregory T. Polletta for his generous suggestions, Marc Lucht for his advice on philosophical matters, and Otilia Baraboi for her editorial help.

Notes 1

2

Here is an instance of a Jamesian trap: in trying to describe the complex, ambiguous relation between James and his cousin I seem to turn into Susan Stringham, the “lady-novelist” whom he gently derides in his fiction. James, who cites this letter in Notes of a Son and Brother (1983: 510), does not give dates. I follow Gordon, who carefully lays out the

3

sequence of letters and the narrative that emerges from them. Cynthia Ozick vividly expresses the indignation one might feel on reading about James’s cavalier behavior towards his cousin: “He may have cherished what he saw as Minny’s ‘intellectual grace’ and ‘moral spontaneity’ . . . but he fled. Intellectual grace and

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Evelyne Ender moral spontaneity were not to intrude on his siege of the citadel of art – until, after Minny’s death, they, and she, became the brightest stuff of his novels and tales” (Ozick 2000: 142). See Bersani (1976: 133–8), as well Freedman (1990) and King (2000). Lyndall Gordon (1998) argues that James’s most intense and meaningful relations with young women such as Minny Temple provided inspiration and material for artistic appropriation (e.g., pp. 302–7, 327–8). The letters the older James wrote to the Emmet sisters (Minny’s nieces) “reveal,” she writes, “an amorous predator of the soul” (Gordon 1998: 319). Bronfen provides overall theoretical foundations as well as a compelling case for such an interpretation (1992: 368–71). Some years ago, Martha Nussbaum (1990) did much to save James from a lingering accusation of overindulging in mind or word games, when she analyzed The Golden Bowl as an example of moral fiction. Beside James’s own references to his scenic method (see, for instance, James 1990: xlii), Alexander Gelley writes that “the scene brings into play a type of specular investment that reveal the reader as both an agent of disclosure and an object of fixation” (Gelley 1987: 158). See also Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen’s (1988) discussion of fantasy, mimesis, and identification. For an example of perversion, see how James rewrites of the pledge of love in the form of sexual blackmail, when Densher forces Kate to “come to him” ( James 1990: 360–1). As Gordon shows through the letters of young men who were part of her circle (among them William James), at the first hints of a serious illness, Minny became de facto unmarriageable (Gordon 1998: 91–2). The “gilded cage” of marriage is a theme James had already tackled in The Bostonians. In the Victorian world of hysterical women, “marital” sex was a remedy commonly prescribed by physicians. James shows us, with characteristic indirection and irony, that in Milly’s entourage the idea lingers on that there might be nothing the matter

12

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with her, except hysteria. This is one of the interpretations that emerges from Sir Luke’s second conversation with Milly ( James 1990: 170–6), which I discuss below. See also, for example, “some complicated matter of nerves” ( James 1990: 83) and the conversation between Susan Stringham and Aunt Maud ( James 1990: 296–8). Henry James was well informed about hysteria, a condition ascribed to his long-ailing sister, Alice. He would have read about it in her diary, where she discusses her 1868 breakdown on October 26, 1890 (“when I . . . had violent turns of hysteria”) ( James, A. 1964: 149). To William James, the term would have been even more familiar, since he had seen the “great Charcot” at the Salpêtrière, knew the work of Pierre Janet, and later attended Freud’s lectures at Clark University (see James, A. 1964: 15; Strouse 1980: 117– 25; Bronfen 1992: 384–5). Cited by Alice in this same diary entry, William had written on hysteria in “The Hidden Self.” The full passage from Notes of a Son and Brother emphasize this point; for example, “it was, strangely enough, a laughing hour together, coloured with the vision of the next winter in Rome, where we could romantically meet” ( James 1983: 514). Many readers have wondered why Densher is “let off ” so easily. The reason may be that the author himself is looking towards exculpating himself. The text offers several variations of Densher’s newly found love for Milly (see James 1990: 451, 456, 508–9). “M.T.” is an abbreviation James himself used (see Gordon 1998: 351), but it serves me well to highlight the superposition between the fictional and the real character of the mourante. Thus, for instance, both Minny and Milly become insomniac. Gordon discusses how the Civil War redefined the “idea of manhood” in terms of heroic deeds (Gordon 1998: 75–6), while James saw himself as ailing and thus justified in his retreat from the battle scene towards his books and his writing. Levinas’s discussion of “virility” in this context, as well as his reliance on the

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feminine, is part of his critique of Heidegger. With “his appeal to goodness” – in Tina Chandler’s apt phrase (Chandler 2001: 257) – he is clearly the right thinker to use for these reflections on The Wings of the Dove. (All translations of Levinas are mine; the page numbers refer to the French text.) Levinas was taken to task very early for his use, or rather misuse, of femininity, by Simone de Beauvoir, in the introduction to The Second Sex. Yet, like Chandler, I see him reach in this early essay for “a sexual metaphorics” (Chandler 2001: 250). If indeed, as she argues, femininity in Time and the Other is “not a being, but a tendency, a way, a regime” then it becomes possible, as I have done here, to state this existential question in universal terms (Chandler 2001: 251). Both women and men, in their subjugation to death, must give up an attitude of virile assertion. “The facts of physical suffering, of incurable pain, of the chance grimly narrowed, had been made, at a stroke, intense,” is how James puts it ( James 1990: 432). Physical pain imposes an unequivocal engagement with existence, Levinas argues. I disagree with Sigi Jöttkandt’s “psychosomatic diagnosis” of Milly’s hysteria ( Jöttkandt 2005: 45–8) on several grounds, but above all because the text’s lack of specificity about the nature of the illness enables us to grasp the same idea as Levinas conveys here: a conception of illness in which it becomes meaningless to separate body from mind. Whether physiological or psychological in its origins, Milly’s pain is part of her dying. In refusing to define Milly’s bodily symptoms, beyond her paleness and intimations of her physical pain, James endows her suffering with a meaningful generality. By the time he wrote this novel, James had read his sister’s diaries, and had seen the entry where she welcomes the diagnosis of cancer, as if she had long been in search for an objective, physical correlative for her anguish. See Henry James’s letter addressed to Mr. & Mrs. William James of May 28, 1894 ( James 1987b: 275). These are Strether’s words of insistent and almost poignant advice to Little Bilham in The Ambassadors ( James 1978: 139–40). I

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owe the phrase “categorical imperative” to Gregory T. Polletta. The scene is in Book Fifth, chapter 4 ( James 1990: 176–81). Many of the dialogues between Kate and Densher reiterate the sense of a sexual divide as a difference of “being.” Meanwhile, Densher’s concern that he may be unmanned by a “circle of petticoats” and his need to prove himself a man by “having” Kate are strong reminders of the need to maintain this difference ( James 1990: 367). For a detailed discussion see Olin-Ammentorp (1994). For a valuable discussion of otherness and sexual difference, see Geneviève Fraisse (1996: esp. 114–18). Writing in a tradition of postHeideggerian European philosophy and of French psychoanalysis, Fraisse, herself a feminist philosopher, argues that sexual difference in its otherness is “an abstract category as well as a concrete reality . . . from the imaginary to the real, and in both directions” (1996: 115). Whatever the vagaries of his own desires, James, I am arguing, made the philosophical choice of representing the idea of living (or as the philosophers would say of “existence”) within the paradigm of heterosexuality. Thus he finds himself discussing the otherness or sexual difference between two human beings within the same indeterminate space of the imaginary and real (and of essentialism and gender) as Fraisse defines. If, as Levinas writes, “eros is neither possession nor power,” then Densher’s and Kate’s relation, which is marked by the need to possess or to assert power over the other, falls outside of eros (Levinas 1983: 81). A translation into art, and not just “thought.” James’s first gesture was to make a spirit out of Minny: “The more I think of her the more perfectly satisfied I am to have her translated from this changing realm of fact to the steady realm of thought. There she may bloom into a beauty more radiant than our dull eyes will avail to contemplate” (to William James, March 29, 1870). Critics have taken offense at the smugness of this comment and at James’s early attempt at evading Minny’s pain through her “spiritualization,” most

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Evelyne Ender notably Elizabeth Bronfen, Lyndall Gordon, and Cynthia Ozick. Chambers follows Charles S. Peirce in explaining that “Indexical signs do not mimic their object through various forms of resemblance; they are indicators, ‘pointing’ to an object that can only be deduced from the signs, in the way that a fire one cannot see, feel, or smell can be deduced from the presence of smoke” (Chambers 2004: xv). Densher’s visit to Brompton Oratory, perfunctory as it may seem since it is devoid of religious feeling, adds a spiritual dimension to Densher’s “conversion” to Milly. Among the moving records of Minny Temple’s last year is her quest for “truth,” which took her to Philadelphia, for example, to hear a famous preacher, but she remained a renegade (Gordon 1998: 98–9). In “Waiting in the Wings,” Diane Elam suggests, very aptly, that “waiting incorporates an active working through and working out one’s relationships with others” (Elam 2003: 41). Changing sides, we might also feel pity for the jilted Kate Croy – as we are invited to do through Helena Bonham-Carter’s moving

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interpretation of Kate at the end of Iain Softley’s film version of the novel. Here again, the fiction departs from its biographical subtext: Minny alerts the readers of her letters to the seriousness of her illness in recounting how she coughs up blood. See Gordon (1998: 91–8, 109). For a compelling study of the medical significance of James’s fiction, see Charon (1999). Charon’s thesis is that illness should be an occasion for goodness. The words are James’s in Notes of a Son and Brother ( James 1983: 509). I have cited Minny’s plea, above. James lays out his own health concerns, in the form of a veiled and delayed excuse, in the same March 1870 letter written after her death ( James 1987b: 77). “The photograph . . . is before me as I write and blessedly helpful to memory,” James writes in Notes of Son and Brother ( James 1983: 530–1). “What else is this novel but one magisterial meditation on the desire, need, and demand of care and caring,” Gregory Polletta writes in an email (October 21, 2005). I thank him for this exchange.

References and Further Reading Bersani, Leo (1976). “The Jamesian lie.” In A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature. Boston: Little, Brown. Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel (1988). “Dreams are completely egoistic.” In The Freudian Subject (pp. 10–52), Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bronfen, Elizabeth (1992). Over Her Dead Body. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Brooks, Peter (1976). The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, and the Mode of Excess. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Cameron, Sharon (1989). “Thinking it out in The Wings of the Dove.” In Thinking in Henry James (pp. 122–68), Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chambers, Ross (2004). Untimely Interventions: AIDS Writing, Testimonial, and the Rhetoric of

Haunting. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Chandler, Tina (2001). Time, Death, and the Feminine: Levinas with Heidegger. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Charon, Rita (1999). “ ‘The great beheld sum of things’: Intersubjective studies of Henry James, literary studies of medicine.” PhD dissertation, Columbia University. Elam, Diane (2003). “Waiting in the wings.” In Acts of Narrative, ed. Carol Jacobs and Henry Sussman (pp. 32–46). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Fraisse, Geneviève (1996). La Différence des sexes. Paris: PUF. Freedman, Jonathan (1990). Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

The Design Behind The Wings of the Dove Freud, Sigmund (1959 [1899]). “Screen memories.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 3, pp. 303–22). (Trans. and under the direction of James Strachey.) London: Hogarth Press. Freud, Sigmund (2003 [1908]). “The creative writer and daydreaming.” In The Uncanny (pp. 25–34). (Trans. David McLintock.) New York: Penguin. Gelley, Alexander (1987). Narrative Crossings: Theory and Pragmatics of Prose Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gordon, Lyndall (1998). A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art. London: Chatto and Windus. James, Alice (1964). The Diary of Alice James. London: Penguin. James, Henry (1962). The Art of the Novel. Ed. R. P. Blackmur. New York: Scribner’s. James, Henry (1978). The Ambassadors. London: Penguin. James, Henry (1983 [1914]). Notes of a Son and Brother. In Autobiography. Ed. Frederick Dupee. Princeton: Princeton University Press. James, Henry (1987a). The Complete Notebooks of Henry James. Ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers. New York: Oxford University Press.

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James, Henry (1987b). Henry James, Selected Letters. Ed. Leon Edel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. James, Henry (1990 [1902]). The Wings of the Dove and “Preface.” Ed. Peter Brooks. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jöttkandt, Sigi (2005). Acting Beautifully: Henry James and the Ethical Aesthetics, Albany: State University of New York Press. King, Kristin (2000). “Ethereal Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove: The transparent heart of James’s opaque style.” Henry James Review, 21: 1–13. Levinas, Emmanuel (1983). Le Temps et l’autre. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Nussbaum, Martha (1990). Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press. Olin-Ammentorp, Julie (1994). “ ‘A circle of petticoats’: The feminization of Merton Densher,” Henry James Review, 15: 38–54. Ozick, Cynthia (2000). “The selfishness of art.” In Quarrel and Quandary (pp. 127–47). New York: Vintage International. Strouse, Jean (1980). Alice James: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Yeazell, Ruth (2004). “Sex lies, and motion pictures.” Henry James Review, 25: 87–96.

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Truth, Knowledge, and Magic in The Golden Bowl Sigi Jöttkandt

Perhaps as a result of the novel’s formal structure itself, responses to The Golden Bowl typically tend to fall into one of two kinds. The first, taking their cue from the Prince’s researches into the complexities of the Verver’s moral form in the earlier half of the book, devote themselves to deciphering the novel’s formal questions. The signification of the bowl – or, more typically in recent readings, its unsignifiability – forms the centerpiece of these readings, where the bowl is found to carry the weight of James’s formal concerns to do with reading, the production of meaning and value, the failure of closure, and so on. A recent essay by Brenda Austin-Smith offers an exemplary instance of this approach. In “The Counterfeit Symbol in Henry James’s The Golden Bowl,” Austin-Smith interrogates to wonderfully persuasive and, to my mind definitive, effect the bowl’s “sufficiency as a sign,” concluding that “rather than refer only to imperfect marriages or persons, the crack refers to the bowl itself as a flawed signifier, forever barred from achieving whatever exalted status as symbol it might have enjoyed in other literary worlds” (Austin-Smith 2004: 55).1 The other main approach focuses on Maggie’s “act.” These readings see the novel presenting an occasion – the pre-eminent one even, in Martha Nussbaum’s case – for readerly judgment, and themselves fall into one of two camps: those who, like Nussbaum and J. Hillis Miller (albeit very differently), see Maggie’s act in heroic terms – as the triumph of love over moral absolutism in one case, and as the creation of an ethically charged, specifically linguistic reality where words “[bring] about the thing they name” in the other (Miller 2001: 280). On the other side are critics such as Beth Sharon Ash who regard Maggie’s act in distinctly less laudable terms. For Ash, it represents an ultimate, narcissistic failure to attain a “mature” understanding of sexuality “tempered by the limiting conditions of adult relatedness (and absence, loss, difference, incompletion even in fulfillment)” (Ash 1994: 82). Between these two moral judgments lies a spectrum of gradated responses, the majority finding less fault with Maggie’s aims than Ash, but deliberating on her ultimate success in: creating a “feminine” script (Walton 1992), fully comprehending the extent and inevitable

A Companion to Henry James. Edited by Greg W. Zacharias © 2008 Sigi Jöttkandt. ISBN: 978-1-405-14042-3

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incompletion and indeterminacy of her “artistic design” (Craig 1982), maintaining the “permeability” of self that Charlotte and Amerigo’s relation holds up to her as a more desirable form of being (Priest 1999). At the far end of this spectrum lies a consideration of the effect of Maggie’s “act” on poor Charlotte, who must bear the brunt of Maggie’s reshaping of the familial relations, and whose “high coerced quaver” continues to resound for Hugh Slavens above the ostensible harmony of the “aesthetic and marriage,” calling their “apparent victory” into ethical question (Slavens 1993). Interestingly, this division between the responses to the novel seems to “perform” the division between the two books of the novel while reflecting a certain tension in the ethical “turn” in literary studies over the past twenty odd years: should ethics be concerned with the formal conditions of (the possibility of) judgment itself (i.e., the implicit stakes of a language-oriented, poststructuralist ethics)? Or is it primarily a matter of practical action and its empirical effects (as the new historicists hold)? The answer is: both, yet neither can be taken on the same plane with the other, as we will shortly see. In the following, Maggie’s act will be discovered as a precise point of cross-over between two logically incompatible, but nonetheless intimately related, realms. We will see how her act is a form of “magic” through which she accomplishes her will, while at the same time remaining faithful to a certain modernity whose ethical premises disallow all forms of agency save those found in signifying systems.2 Maggie’s act, in other words, will be found to effect significant change at the social level with recourse neither to the unethical violence of the purely subjective will, nor to a transcendent Other – to some kind of master magician mysteriously directing operations from some external point above the action. To succeed in this, it will be necessary to reinterrogate the concept of mimesis – or, as it is troped here, “homeopathy” – to see whether it can be retrieved from the political and ethical disfavor it has fallen into since poststructuralism.3 At the heart of our investigation will be the concept of causation in Maggie’s triumphant statement, “that’s how I make them do what I like.” Two questions are explored: (1) how does Maggie make them “do,” and (2) perhaps just as interestingly, what does Maggie “like”? The second question is perhaps easiest to answer, at least at first sight. To briefly recap the events, by the beginning of Book Second Maggie is beset by a gnawing suspicion that all is not what it appears in her marriage, and she devotes many hours to “thinking” about the relation between the members of her immediate family: her father Adam, her stepmother Charlotte, her husband the Prince Amerigo. It comes to her, in a series of inspirations, that Amerigo and Charlotte are having an affair and are managing this by “treating” her as if she were, ultimately, too innocent – “stupid” is Maggie’s word for it – ever to come to this realization by herself. It is this innocence or “stupidity” that is supposed to make them “safe.” The essence of Maggie’s plan, her sole “act,” is simply to continue to behave as though she were indeed so stupid, yet by doing so she forces Amerigo to choose between herself and his lover. What Maggie “likes” is thus not so much Amerigo himself (although James is particularly fulsome in his descriptions of her ardent response to

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his simple presence, as for example in the coach ride home to Portland Place in chapter 27). What she likes, that is, is not the simple success of recapturing her husband, as an elated Fanny, in an unusual display of obtuseness, gushes: “You’ve done it . . . They’re going.” “Is that what I wanted?” is Maggie’s quick rejoinder ( James 1984: 461). Revealing her affinity with an earlier James heroine for whom freedom is the key word,4 what Maggie “likes” is for her husband to freely choose (her). Simply banishing her husband’s lover is not enough for this acute young woman; she wants him to actively want her. The question the novel raises, then, is how do you get someone to want you? How do you elicit desire in another, particularly when they already desire someone else? In this sense, surely it is Maggie who is the “adulterer” here as she shifts the direction of Amerigo’s desire away from Charlotte and towards herself? Maggie’s deeply felt guilt towards her old friend evinces her recognition of this and her “groveling” ( James 1984: 467) attempts to allow Charlotte to retain her pride in the face of Amerigo’s betrayal of her suggests nothing so much as the deeply conflicted feelings of a woman who has walked off with her best friend’s husband. How do you get someone to desire you, then? As an entire literary tradition founded on courtly love has taught us, desire is not something that simply erupts spontaneously; it can be cultivated, made to appear. It can be “forced” (to borrow a term from set theory). Desire possesses “rules,” as a popular handbook of desire reminds us (Fein and Schneider 1996). The first, and easiest, method is to have other people to desire you first. Maggie seems well aware of René Girard’s theory of the triangular structure of desire which, after all, played an important role in the formation of her own desire for Amerigo. Recall how, in the first book, Maggie jokes with Amerigo how she would forgive her husband anything, even should he some day get drunk and beat her, the spectacle of him with hated rivals would, after no matter what extremity, always, for the sovereign charm of it . . . suffice to bring her round. ( James 1984: 108–9)

Nothing makes Amerigo more attractive to her than when she sees other women desire him: she never admired him so much, or found him heart-breakingly handsome, clever, irresistible, in the very degree in which he had originally and fatally dawned upon her, as when she saw other women reduced to the same passive pulp that had then begun, once for all, to constitute her substance. ( James 1984: 108)

Although James suggests (through Maggie) that her desire for Amerigo was already well in place before the narratorial consciousness shifts to her in Book Second, my sense is that it is only with her growing consciousness of the possibility of Amerigo and Charlotte’s affair that Maggie truly begins to desire her husband, that

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is, to the extent that she can joke about her jealousy with the Prince, she doesn’t yet desire him in the profound way that comes truly to “constitute her substance,” as Fanny’s comment seems to confirm: “[Maggie] has begun to live” ( James 1984: 249). Yet aside from her father, there are few men around to effect the turn in Amerigo’s attention in her favor. What other options are available then to Maggie? In her own experience with Amerigo, Maggie seems to have learnt something fundamental about desire, which is that it is profoundly mimetic. Desire does not exist in a vacuum but requires a social context in which to appear, and Maggie’s “mimetic” desire for Amerigo is just one (and the least complex) of the forms that this mimesis can take. But despite her own desiring structure being expressed in this simple, first-level mimetic way, this is not to say that “our young woman,” despite her professions, is “stupid.” Maggie is clever enough to realize, for example, that simply by acting like Charlotte (“She would go to balls again”) (James 1984: 268), she will have little prospect of changing Amerigo’s feelings for her. Imitating the object of her beloved’s desire will merely make her pathetic in his eyes, and go nowhere towards lighting the spark of desire in him.5 Maggie’s “plan” in fact evolves into a far more subtle understanding of mimesis than a simple imitation of Charlotte; more subtle, too, than Girard’s triangular model that organizes her own desire. As I said, Maggie’s “plan” is simply to act as if she doesn’t know what is going on, as if she were just as “stupid” as her friends believe. Yet by imitating a certain state among the four participants, she actively brings about its reality. This will require an understanding of mimesis that is more than merely imitative; it must be creative. By acting “like” her husband desired her, and that the relations among the four are precisely as they appear, she makes the imitation into a fact, that is, into a truth.

Truth and Knowledge At the heart of Maggie’s plan is the problem of knowledge: who knows what and when. Maggie is forced into the ruses of knowledge once she obtains definite “proof” of Amerigo’s infidelity through the golden bowl. Previously, all she had to go on were her hunches – her exquisite sense of being mysteriously “treated” ( James 1984: 290); after the bowl, she makes first the Prince, and then Charlotte, wonder (“think”) about how much she knows. As she puts it to the Prince after their momentous interview following Fanny’s smashing of the bowl: “Find out for yourself!” ( James 1984: 397). The Prince’s immediate question, on knowing that Maggie knows, is how much her father knows and this question will occupy him and guide his subsequent actions in this second half of the novel. Charlotte’s question, on the other hand, is what and how much Maggie herself knows. Maggie, furthermore, remains ignorant of the extent

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of Adam’s knowledge to the end. Indeed, her entire plan revolves around her never knowing what he knows or, more precisely, her refusal to entertain the idea that he might know, since the plan is put into action on the basis of the idea that Adam neither knows, nor ever must know, that they have been deceived. It is for Adam, as Fanny in her more usual acuteness observes, that she acts: “To live . . . for her father – which is another pair of sleeves!” ( James 1984: 251). It is Adam, above all, who must be sheltered from knowledge, a point whose significance we will come back to shortly. Meanwhile, it suffices to observe how this quartet of knowing and non-knowing persons bears a number of striking similarities to a certain logical problem that Lacan discusses in his essay, “Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty: A New Sophism” (1988). Here, Lacan discusses a logical problem: a prison warden will release one of his three prisoners if they can pass a test. If they can determine what color disk he has placed on their backs, they can go free. There are five discs altogether, two black and three white. 1

Possibility one: prisoner A sees two black discs. She makes the immediate deduction that she must be white and runs for the door. 2 Possibility two: prisoner A sees a white disc on B and a black disc on C. Since B is not running for the door, she concludes she must be white and runs for the door. 3 Possibility three: prisoner A sees two white discs, which means she must make a supposition in order to determine her color. Suppose she is black? She now watches what prisoner B does. If A is indeed black, and B also supposes that he is black, then C should be seeing two blacks and be running for the door. However, C does not run, so B can conclude (as A did in possibility two), that he is white. But what if B also does not run? In this case, prisoner A must revise her initial supposition and conclude she is white. She, along with the other two (who have meanwhile reached the same conclusion), all run for the door at the same moment – and the warden is obliged to release them all. For Lacan, the interest of this logical dilemma resides in what he calls the “ontological form of anxiety” pertaining to prisoner A’s conclusion. As Ed Pluth and Dominiek Hoens explain, A “is not anxious about losing the game, but anxious that [she] simply will not be able to make a conclusion” (Pluth and Hoens 2004: 184).6 This is because A’s reasoning depends upon her understanding B and C’s standing still as a hesitation, during which they are in the process of making the same deductions as herself. The result is as follows:

If A realizes that [she] can come to a conclusion if [she] interprets the others’ standing still as a hesitation, then [she] also realizes that the others must not move. If the others

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head for the door of the prison, [she] can no longer use B and C’s hesitation as an element in [her] line of reasoning. (Pluth and Hoens 2004: 184)

The consequences are clear: A must immediately act, even before concluding the train of her thought. As Pluth and Hoens put it, she must “jump to a conclusion that closes the time for comprehending, and makes that time retroactively meaningful. . . . A does not make an additional step on the level of thinking.” Rather, she “can and has to end [her] thinking by an act” ( James 1984: 184). Although Lacan’s interest in this dilemma has to do with something very different than with the emergence of desire,7 the schema outlined here possesses striking similarities to the situation in which our foursome find themselves. Let us imagine Maggie in the position of prisoner A in the first possibility, allowing the bowl to act as the definitive “proof” of the Prince’s and Charlotte’s infidelity. In this schema, she “sees” two black discs, as it were, she “sees” their guiltiness and should be able to run for the door. Next, the Prince occupies the position of prisoner A in the second possibility: he sees Maggie wearing a white disc and Charlotte a black and, knowing what he does about himself, imagines he also is wearing black. However, since Maggie doesn’t act, he must logically conclude that he is white. Let us now add Charlotte to the schema: Charlotte occupies the position of prisoner A in the third possibility. She sees only two white discs on Maggie and the Prince (i.e., she doesn’t know what Maggie knows, and nor does she know what the Prince knows about Maggie’s knowledge). Supposing herself to wear black, and supposing the Prince to think he also wears black, she imagines he puzzles why Maggie doesn’t immediately “run” (i.e., accuse him). But since Maggie doesn’t, the Prince, like prisoner A in possibility two, must be concluding that he is white. However, since the Prince himself then doesn’t run – which he would were she, Charlotte, wearing black – Charlotte must revise her initial supposition and conclude she is white, like them all, in which case they must all make a run for the door. The core of Charlotte’s problem, what makes the game so incomprehensible to her, is precisely Maggie’s immobility – Maggie doesn’t run. Charlotte believes she knows she and the Prince are wearing black discs and, with her “perfect critical vision” ( James 1984: 272), believes Maggie is gradually coming to recognize this. As Maggie herself admits to the Prince at the end of the novel, “she [Charlotte] knows, she knows! . . . She knows enough” ( James 1984: 489). What Charlotte can’t understand, then, is why Maggie, presumably seeing the two black discs so clearly, remains still, making the Prince hesitate about what he sees. Is Maggie standing still because she is stupid and genuinely sees black as white (i.e., the very same stupidity that was originally supposed to “save” the two adulterers)? Or is her immobility the result of hesitation? Charlotte’s inability to answer this question – her inability to “close the time of comprehending” (Pluth and Hoens 2004: 184) and act – dooms her to the permanent imprisonment to which James so unambiguously condemns her in the final chapters of the novel.8

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The Prince, meanwhile, has a different set of problems on his hand. His question is what Adam knows. Adam will decide for him whether the Prince is wearing black or white, forging a “cord” between father and husband which, if broken, will decisively determine the young couple’s fate. It is the Prince’s “ignorance” as to his father-in-law’s knowledge that sustains them “in the right”: [Maggie] had handed him over to an ignorance that couldn’t even try to become indifferent and yet wouldn’t project itself, either, into the cleared air of conviction . . . it had bitten into his spirit, and more than once she had said to herself that to break the spell she had cast upon him and that the polished old ivory of her father’s inattackable surface made so absolute, he would suddenly commit some mistake or some violence . . . In that way, fatally, he would have put himself in the wrong – blighting by a single step the perfection of his outward show. ( James 1984: 458)

If Charlotte’s fate was decided by her failure to conclude, dooming her to the cage of indecision,9 Maggie (and the Prince) remains safe for as long as the Prince continues to hesitate. Much depends for Maggie, then, not on what the Prince is thinking but for how long he can continue to think. Maggie must use the Prince’s “time of comprehending” to baffle Charlotte, making it impossible for Charlotte to arrive at the moment of action. For as long as the Prince continues to think, Charlotte must waver in indecision, in a paralysis that makes Maggie free to act: “ ‘They’re paralysed, they’re paralysed!’ she commented, deep within; so much it helped her own apprehension to hang together that they should suddenly lose their bearings” ( James 1984: 297). We saw how Maggie’s sole “act” is simply to keep still, to keep “quiet” ( James 1984: 405). But this act, which I am calling “mimetic,” is not without an active decision on her part. As she tells Fanny, “I have judged . . . I did judge. I made sure he understood – then I let him [Amerigo] alone” ( James 1984: 403). By standing still, and leaving the Prince to “do” for her, Maggie puts Amerigo “in possession of the difference” ( James 1984: 403), an interesting phrase that conveys something of the Lacanian distinction between knowledge and truth. To the extent that Maggie “knows” about the Prince and Charlotte’s adultery, she inhabits the realm of empirical knowledge where causes and effects follow in a linear trajectory, and appearances reflect a preexisting reality. To be in “possession of the difference,” on the other hand, is to occupy a logical moment characterized by a temporal and spatial impossibility. It is the “time” of the act that precedes complete certainty – the moment when, faced with the immobility of the other prisoners, A must “jump to a conclusion that closes the time for comprehending, and makes that time retroactively meaningful” (Pluth and Hoens 2004: 184). To “possess the difference” is thus very different from merely knowing (whether or not Charlotte and the Prince were lovers, and whether the father and daughter are aware of this). To “possess the difference” is to act such that one’s act makes a (new) knowledge, transforming it into a truth, as we will now see.

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Magic: Homeopathic and Contagious What I am proposing might seem a little wishful, not unlike the “magical thinking” Ash detects in Maggie’s need to arrange the inconvenient realities into the harmonious design of her “narcissistic illusion.” But, in truth, what I am proposing is precisely a kind of magic, its difference from the childish, narcissistic universe being that, in this case (as indeed in the Freudian conceptualization Ash originally draws from),10 the magic works. In his strikingly similarly named study of mythology, The Golden Bough (Frazer 2002), James Frazer identifies two forms of “sympathetic magic” whose basic principles he discovers operating across manifold cultures and epochs. The first type he terms “homeopathic.” Homeopathic magic works according to the Law of Similarity, where “the magician infers that he can produce any effect he desires merely by imitating it” (Frazer 2002: 11). The other form is “contagious.” Its Law is of “contact,” operating on the principle that things that have once been joined continue to be so, across the distances of time and space. Thus the magician “infers that whatever he does to a material object will affect equally the person with whom the object was once in contact, whether it formed part of his body or not” (Frazer 2002: 11). Both forms of magic are relevant to our discussion, but it is clearly the first, “homeopathic” kind that speaks most directly to Maggie’s “plan.” Let us look more closely at the way it is to work. Both homeopathic and contagious magic, Frazer tells us, operate under the general Law of Sympathy (Frazer 2002: 12). Its basic presupposition is that objects can influence each other from afar. Things are assumed to possess a “secret sympathy” (Frazer 2002: 12) that binds them unerringly together, whose impulses are transmitted to one another through a kind of “invisible ether” (Frazer 2002: 12). While contagious magic depends upon the existence of a prior link between objects such that anything done to one will also be felt in the other (giving rise to the various charms involving hair, nails, teeth, afterbirth, etc. Frazer provides as examples), homeopathic magic acts according to the principle that “like produces like.” Here the examples are predominantly of representations: the creation of images that are to transform what they represent into reality. Thus Frazer describes the Ojebway Indian who “makes a little wooden image of his enemy and runs a needle into its head or heart”; or the Sumatran woman who makes “a wooden image of a child [and holds it] in her lap, believing that this will lead to the fulfillment of her wish” (Frazer 2002: 13–14). Other forms of homeopathic magic, Frazer tells us, involve the “banishing” of properties in an effort to cure sickness. Describing the “ancient Hindoos,” Frazer relates how an elaborate ceremony was performed against jaundice “whose main drift was to banish the yellow colour to yellow creatures and yellow things, such as the sun, to which it properly belongs, and to procure for the patient a healthy red color from a living, vigorous source, namely a red bull” (Frazer 2002: 15).

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Although Frazer never addresses this point explicitly, the overarching principle driving both homeopathic and contagious magic is the idea of equilibrium. Actions performed on one thing (whether directly or mimetically) create an imbalance in the world which is then rectified by the charm. An unspoken Law of Equilibrium thus supercedes even the Law of Sympathy beneath which Frazer consigns the two forms of magic. The difference between homeopathic and contagious magic lies in their concepts of what causes the disturbance in equilibrium. In one case, the effect is transmitted through a prior identity that causes all future influences on one to be felt by the other (contact). In the other, effects on one object are generated through a likeness that is mimetically created – the “cause” of homeopathic magic is produced by a representation of the desired effect. Both types of magic thus rely on the concept of identity, but in the first the identity is pre-given (as in the prior attachment of the body parts to the victim), while in the other it is brought into being as a result of an imitative act. A wooden image of a child has no prior necessary link to the actual desired child. Its connection is derived as a result of the mimetic act (of placing it in the woman’s lap). Bearing this distinction in mind, let us turn back to The Golden Bowl and the question of how one generates desire in another person. If to fall in love with someone is to fall to some extent under their “spell” – a word that appears with increasing frequency towards the end of the book, particularly in relation to Adam who is several times described as having an “indescribable air of weaving his spell” ( James 1984: 448)11 – what form of “unfailing magic” ( James 1984: 300) does desire take? The Girardian notion of mimetic desire that characterizes Maggie’s own desiring structure initially seems to fall fairly comfortably within the basic idea of contagion. I fall in love with someone because someone else to whom I am in some way connected also loves him; I “catch” their desire (through direct contact). But recall how contagion actually requires a prior contact: things that have once been conjoined will ever be so. Contagious magic thus seems better to describe the relation between the Prince and Charlotte whose mysterious “identities of impulse,” “kinship of expression in the two faces,” and “identities of behaviour, expression and tone” ( James 1984: 232, 286, 290) increasingly begin to strike Maggie.12 She reflects how “They’ll do everything in the world that suits us, save only one thing – prescribe a line for us that will make them separate” ( James 1984: 311). Although this link or bond should be irrevocable, it seems it can be superceded by a magician of superior powers who can forge his own connection with the object, as Adam does when he appears to Maggie as if in possession of a “long silken halter looped round [Charlotte’s] beautiful neck” ( James 1984: 450). The very strength of this form of magic is thus also its weakness. There is nothing to prevent a magician of still more superior powers from cutting Adam’s leash and binding Charlotte to him. This hints, too, at the inherently violent and acquisitive nature of contagious magic, precisely the charges on which Adam (and Maggie) have frequently been arraigned.13 But with Maggie things are different. Despite their formal relation as a married couple, there exists no prior emotional link between her and Amerigo and it is this

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link she must try to forge. But differently from Adam, she approaches the problem from the homeopathic angle. She must make the link and, unlike the obligatory or necessary bond of contagious magic (with all of the violent implications this carries), this link must be voluntary: Amerigo must actively choose her, rather than, like Charlotte with Adam, be forcibly bound to her. He must be made to “like” Maggie, in the homeopathic sense – to gravitate towards her just as yellow things gravitate towards other yellow things. As we saw, Maggie’s approach to this is mimetic: she acts “like” there is nothing wrong between her and her husband, and this likeness ultimately produces its result: “See?” asks Amerigo in the closing words of the novel, “I see nothing but you” ( James 1984: 502). Maggie imitates a state of being that ultimately becomes a reality. And because it is produced homeopathically (i.e., voluntarily), this reality is far less brittle and therefore less likely to break than her father’s. Amerigo has “chosen” her as a result of their mutual affinity, just as yellow “chooses” to be with yellow. However, the word “voluntary,” in this context, is a little misleading, because it implies an act of free agency, whereas magic inevitably presupposes that one is making others do your will. And it remains my sense that the novel does indeed describe the ultimately successful bending of the others’ realities to Maggie’s own will. It would not be enough simply to have Amerigo suddenly discover that he loves Maggie better than Charlotte – this might be a happy novelistic ending, but it wouldn’t be a James novel. As Maggie discovers, and as I indicated above, one doesn’t “freely” desire (in the sense of a consciously chosen act of will); one is rather, and quite specifically, “forced.” The term is borrowed from set theory and it describes a way of making predictions about the contents of a set that, for various technical reasons unnecessary to go into here, one cannot ever directly know or see.14 “Forcing” establishes a set of conditions according to which, if it is true in one set, one can determine that it will be true in the other set. When I say, then, that Amerigo is “forced” to desire Maggie, this doesn’t refer to any act of violent imposition. Rather, it means that Maggie puts in place a number of conditions such that, if it is true in one (state or condition or more generally, set), then it will (have been) true in the other. By acting like Amerigo desires her, in other words, by setting this as a condition in one set (her own), she “forces” it to be true in the other (Amerigo’s). How Maggie achieves this goes back to our discussion of the prisoners. The crucial point, as this logical problem shows, is the dimension of intersubjectivity for, at the most fundamental level, without the presence of the other two, Maggie would be incapable of ever discovering the color of the disc on her back. But even though she “sees” enough to enable her to arrive at an immediate conclusion (i.e., as prisoner A in the first possibility: she sees two blacks which make her white), she nevertheless imitates the others’ hesitations. She acts like she sees what she wants them to see (i.e., all whites), which in turn makes the others hesitate as to what they see. In effect, Maggie creates a condition in her “set” that “forces” a truth in the sets – in the totality of their knowledge – of the others, namely, that they are not guilty (whose ultimate

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meaning is that it is Maggie whom Amerigo desires). What makes this act an act of forcing, i.e., what makes it “true” rather than merely the wishful deluded act of narcissistic illusion, is, as I said, its intersubjective dimension. Because this is a truth that is in the end “assented” to by the others (Charlotte cannot move first because she cannot conclude, while the Prince comes to “see” what Maggie sees), it escapes being the purely subjective act of an individual and acquires the status of a collective truth.15

Equilibrium We saw how both contagious and homeopathic magic are governed by a larger principle of equilibrium which holds that something that happens to one will happen to the other and restore the balance. Note how this implies an Aristotelian conception of the world as a plenum – as something “full” in which there are no gaps or void, and over which energy is dispersed in equal measure. Note, too, how this Law of Equilibrium is the principal law governing Maggie’s world. Everything she does is in order to return the state of things to “the equilibrium, the precious condition” ( James 1984: 311). The image she devises for this is of a family coach for which Charlotte was originally “had in” to supply a fourth wheel: . . . if their family coach lumbered and stuck the fault was in its lacking its complement of wheels. Having but three, as they might say, it had wanted another, and what had Charlotte done from the first but begin to act, on the spot, and ever so smoothly and beautifully, as a fourth? ( James 1984: 298)

This need for a fourth is very telling, for it expresses something very important about the possibility for a logique collective which, for all of the intersubjective thinking and “universal truth” generated among the three prisoners, is ultimately without consequence without the presence of the prison warden, the one for whom the thinking is ultimately done. This fourth, who must remain outside the thought exchange, will never know how the decision was reached. All he will know is that it took place (confronted as he is now with one, two, or three prisoners clamoring for release). In this sense, the warden remains the “stupid” one of the title of Pluth and Hoens’ essay. Rather than a possibility, the Other must be stupid in order for the truth to emerge.16 This is perhaps easiest to explain by returning to our Jamesian foursome. It seems clear that none of Maggie’s “thinking” would have had effect on the Prince had it not been for the question of what Adam knows. In this triangulation, Charlotte must remain the stupid one, cut off from the intersubjective thinking process of the other three. But in Maggie’s case, it is Adam who must remain “stupid.” He must be kept outside the loop of knowledge in order for her “occult power” ( James 1984: 444) to

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work. It is precisely because she acts not for herself but for her father that her act is saved from being the merely individual expression of will, i.e., an act of contagious magic that violently subjugates her husband beneath her superior powers. It is this, I believe, that is ultimately the cause of the Prince’s desire for her. It is what makes him begin to “think” of her in his long hours alone at Portland Place while the others spend the last summer at Fawns ( James 1984: 455). Such thinking, before and after, is the prerequisite to any act of desire. For once he has begun to “think” of Maggie, the battle is half over: thinking is both the source and nourishment of desire. Why is thinking the source of desire? It is because it brings the other’s name, i.e., a linguistic term, a signifier, into one’s head. Thinking of someone, we cannot help but think of their name. Desiring someone, we obsess over their name, repeating it to ourselves like a talisman or good luck charm capable of warding off all negative feelings of shame and guilt. Thus, although I previously asserted that Maggie’s desire for the Prince was generated by a Girardian structure of imitation, this is only part of the story. There must be something already there upon which such mimetic desire can grow – some seed that was planted, some original spark that can be fanned. In Maggie’s case, too, then, it is Amerigo’s name that precedes him in her desire. As Fanny tells Bob, “ ‘The connexion became romantic for Maggie the moment she took [Amerigo’s name] in . . . ‘By that sign,’ I quite said to myself, ‘he’ll conquer’ ” ( James 1984: 53). In this sense, desire really does follow rules. Although it can be diverted, trammeled, fanned, or extinguished by our thinking, its original cause lies in a linguistic signifier over which we have (barely) any control. To make a person desire you, all you can do is try to make them think of you and in that way plant your name in their heart. Maggie makes the Prince begin to think of her by a mimetic act: she acts like her husband desires her. Yet this “acting like” would have had no effect on the Prince had it not been done for her father – it is done in his name, if you like. This is what the Prince calls Maggie’s “idea” and the idea of her having ideas makes him begin “to think more of her” ( James 1984: 482). Like all genuine ideas, Maggie’s “idea” opens the Prince out onto a New World whose existence he had never suspected, and it is this surprise – the true surprise that is the encounter with another subject17 – that makes him begin to think of her. Maggie’s mimetic act could thus be regarded as the efficient cause of Amerigo’s desire whose material cause lies in the planting of her name. But there is another concept of cause present as well, one involving a paradox of desire isomorphic to that of logical time: the name planted in the other has effect only if the other already desires you. Yet the planting of the name is the cause of that desire. In other words, the name only has meaning once it has been invested with desire, but the name is itself the source or “cause” of that desire. This paradox recreates the paradox of the prisoners who find that, at a certain moment, they must act. Thinking will only get you so far, then a decision must be made to act, even though one is never certain of the rightness of one’s conclusion. In

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such cases, one acts in accordance with what Lacan calls “anticipated certainty”: it will have been right. The future anterior tense helps indicate the extent to which the act is productive of the ultimate truth of the decision. The act makes the decision the right one (because it is only the simultaneous acts of the others that together make it correct, i.e., an intersubjective truth). If one lingers too long, it will not have been true, and the whole thought process must begin again. Similarly, desire takes place in “anticipated certainty.” By acting like the other desires you, you make them begin to think. But at a certain moment, they must make a decision and act, as Maggie herself discovered: She had seen herself at last, in the picture she was studying, suddenly jump from the coach . . . She looked at the person so acting as if this person were somebody else . . . The person had taken a decision – which was evidently because an impulse long gathering had at last felt a sharpest pressure. ( James 1984: 279)

At some point in one’s thinking, one has to make a choice to hold the other’s name dear, which sends one off on further thinking adventures (which psychoanalysis calls fantasy). It is only after this choice that the name will have become meaningful. In the set that constitutes her knowledge, Maggie can never know whether her mimetic act will succeed with the Prince. All she can know is that, by acting, she puts him into the position of choice: he will either act “with”18 her or not but, by forcing a truth from him, she puts him in the terrifying “possession of the difference” that constitutes the real freedom of desire, and whose “instant of terror” ( James 1984: 501) Maggie experiences when she buries her face in Amerigo’s breast at the end of the novel. “See? I see nothing but you.” And the truth of it had, with this force, after a moment, so strangely lighted his eyes that, as for pity and dread of them, she buried her own in his breast. ( James 1984: 502)

Maggie’s terror here is that of a subject who has been freed from her prison by her own self-liberating act and discovers a world beyond it. It is the terror of the subject who sees now for the first time that the prison warden is just another prisoner engaged in his own thought dilemma, who can no longer guarantee the consistency of the four square walls of her world. And it is the terror, too, of seeing for the first time that Amerigo has also escaped from his “monastic cell” (James 1984: 482) and begun the process of looking around him. Nothing guarantees that he will stay with her. All she can do from her “advanced post” in the “geography of the fundamental passions” ( James 1984: 473) is, as Amerigo requests, “ ‘Wait,’ he repeated. ‘Wait’ ” ( James 1984: 491). Maggie’s homeopathic magic depended on the warden’s existence, but once outside the cell her magic has no more power. With her “jump” ( James 1984: 279) a void has been created in the plenum that constituted the set of all knowledge. The world

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outside possesses no “equilibrium” that dictates the Law of Sympathy and distributes balance among all existing elements. Now there is no necessary reciprocity between a cause and its consequence, and actions performed on one thing are not necessarily returned to its connected pair. Yet although the Law of Equilibrium has been broken, this doesn’t mean that Maggie’s new world is completely lawless. The space of desire has its own “laws.” Desire, as I suggested, operates according to certain fixed laws that are linguistic in nature, that is to say, it follows the law of the signifier. The signifier of the beloved’s name inscribes itself upon one’s mind and the extent of its occult power perhaps explains why some lovers attempt to deflect it by tattooing it on their skin, as if by writing it down, one will be able to silence the endless repetition inside one’s head. This is perhaps a more powerful intuition than it initially seems, and it goes to the heart of our initial question regarding the gulf separating theoretical judgment and practical action. We saw how this gulf can be crossed only by an act of decision that closes the moment of comprehending (thinking) and replaces it with an act. We saw, too, how – the thinking that preceded it notwithstanding – this decision is necessarily without ground. Based on an anticipated certainty, it is only after the fact that the previous thought process is verified as having been correct. But more than this, it is the act itself that makes the thinking correct – the act “causes” the truth of the prisoners’ line of reasoning. This notion of a retroactive cause, familiar to us from Lacanian psychoanalysis, I have explored elsewhere in James ( Jöttkandt 2005). What The Golden Bowl adds is to reveal its peculiar, unexpected affinity with the Kantian notion of teleological cause. Teleological or “final” cause, in Kant, is bound up with an object’s “purposiveness” or “final purpose” and it is brought into play when “we attribute causality in respect of an object to the concept of an object” (Kant 1951: 206). Kant explains how: Experience leads our judgment to the . . . concept of a purpose of nature, only when we have to judge of a relation of cause to effect which we find ourselves able to apprehend as legitimate only by presupposing the idea of the effect of the causality of the cause as the fundamental condition, in the cause, of the possibility of the effect. (Kant 1951: 213; my emphasis)

In teleological judgment, the effect somehow precedes the cause, seemingly directing it from the future or from a position of omniscient knowledge (like the warden). Nothing could seem less psychoanalytic than this idea of a “final purpose,” an ultimate physical and moral “destination,” for isn’t desire precisely the expression of an absolute freedom of choice? Isn’t it precisely this “freedom” I cited as at the kernel of Maggie’s plan: to force Amerigo into a position of having to freely choose (or, in Lacanian terms, to undergo “subjectification”)? And isn’t it this that makes desire’s

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freedom specifically ethical – the way it impossibly suspends the ordinary sequence of cause and effect to create a new and different reality? And yet, as my discussion of the paradox of the beloved’s name has shown, desire is not entirely free. You cannot simply choose to desire someone, although this is not to say that desire cannot be led. There must be some fertile ground in which the seed can be planted, some warm embers on which to blow. There must, in other words, be an unconscious receptivity or inclination – a likeness – to which one’s objects of desire “homeopathically” can align themselves, certain primordially worn paths along which desire can flow. These are the rivulets that have been carved by the signifier: the earliest words and sounds that have become invested with libidinal meaning only to be subsequently concealed and overlaid – “gilded” – with the shared meanings of a fully representational, symbolic system. Yet they remain present, like the cracks in the golden bowl, determining along which lines our desire will run, into which three (or more) pieces our lives will fall. They are, if you will, the arche-inscriptions of our desire. These strange, senseless sounds and letters that carve themselves into our minds are what bridge the gap separating the act from the thinking that always precedes and follows it. They constitute the “teleological” cause of our desire, determining who, among the infinite variety of desirable subjects, we will “like.” The key difference between Kant’s teleological cause and the Lacanian retroactive cause is the freedom with which we can interpret these letters, rearranging them into different configurations and “readings.” But given the uncanny persistence of this core group of signifiers, let me end with a word of advice you are not likely to find in The Rules: if all else has failed, and your beloved still cannot see you, you might consider changing your name.

Notes 1

Other examples can be found in Teahan (1995) and Davis (2001). 2 My argument is thus not so far from Miller’s, differing mainly in its attempt to map out the formal operations of the “leap” he identifies with the speech act. 3 See, for example, Cohen (1994), for whom mimesis has become a master trope of the delusions of aesthetic ideology. A notable exception, as Pieter Vermeulen reminded me, is Geoffrey Hartman, who has developed a similar link between mimesis and homeopathy (Hartman 2002: 208). See also his chapter “Romanticism and Anti-Self-Consciousness” in Beyond Formalism (1970) for a succinct description of homeopathic logic.

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For an analysis of Isabel’s freedom, see my first chapter, “Portrait of an Act: Representation and Ethics in The Portrait of a Lady,” in Jöttkandt (2005). This is a lesson poor Charlotte fails to learn when she is left at the end of the novel trying to catch up with Maggie, telling her in the garden “I see, I must act” ( James 1984: 469). By this time, she has realized she has missed the moment of action, although she hopes that by imitating Maggie she will still reap some of the benefit. But her mimetic act has come too late, depriving it of the power to create a truth. I gladly acknowledge my debt to their explication of the problem in this essay.

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Lacan’s concern is to develop a more general “collective logic” (Pluth and Hoens 2004: 182). Recall James’s descriptions of “gilt wires and bruised wings, the spacious but suspended cage, the home of eternal unrest, of pacings, beatings, shakings, all so vain, into which the baffled consciousness helplessly resolved itself” ( James 1984: 413). Which is also, as James reminds us, “the deluded condition” ( James 1984: 413), i.e., the belief that one can ever completely secure one’s logical reasoning before the necessity of acting. For Freud, the “hallucinations” of the organism’s pleasure economy are ultimately so successful that a reality principle must enter into play to attend to the Not des Lebens (the necessities of life) – a reality principle that is itself ultimately in the service of the continuation of pleasure. For a detailed explanation of how this works, see Freud (1966). See also James (1984: 452, 459). Note, too, how Maggie fears Amerigo will break the “spell” she cast over him ( James 1984: 458). They are also described as “conjoined” ( James 1984: 331), two faces on a medallion “for ever face to face, and when she looked from one to

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the other she found in Charlotte’s eyes the gleam of the momentary What does she really want? that had come and gone for her in the Prince’s” ( James 1984: 287). See Kairschner (1984) and Alberti (1991). See also Nussbaum (1990). For those interested, it is a question concerning the existence of “non-constructible” sets, i.e., sets that cannot be organized according to the principle of “well-ordering.” For an introduction to the principle of forcing as it relates to Alain Badiou’s philosophy, some of whose insights I have been drawing on here, see Hallward (2003). “What was subjective about the line of reasoning gets de-subjectified, and becomes a shared, intersubjective truth. Beginning with an uncertain, singular decision A reaches a certain and ‘universal’ truth’ ” (Pluth and Hoens 2003: 184). Understood this time as the warden and not one of the prisoners as in Pluth and Hoens’ discussion. On the role of surprise in psychoanalysis, see Reik (1948). This is another term that increasingly appears towards the end of the novel. See, for example, James (1984: 472, 483).

References and Further Reading Alberti, John (1991). “The economics of love: The production of value in The Golden Bowl.” Henry James Review, 12: 9–19. Ash, Beth Sharon (1994). “Narcissism and the gilded image: A psychoanalytic reading of The Golden Bowl.” Henry James Review, 15.1: 55–90. Austin-Smith, Brenda (2004). “The counterfeit symbol in Henry James’s The Golden Bowl.” Henry James Review, 25.1: 52–66. Cohen, Tom (1994). Anti-Mimesis From Plato to Hitchcock. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Craig, David M. (1982). “The indeterminacy of the end: Maggie Verver and the limits of imagination.” Henry James Review, 3.2: 133–44.

Davis, Theo (2001). “Out of the medium in which books breathe: Tactile abstraction in The Golden Bowl.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 411–33. Fein, Ellen and Sherrie Schneider (1996). The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right. New York: Warner Books. Frazer, Sir James (2002). The Golden Bough: A Study in Religion and Magic. New York: Dover. Freud, Sigmund (1966). “A project for a scientific psychology.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 1, pp. 283–397). (Trans. James Strachey.) London: Hogarth Press. Girard, René (1965). Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. (Trans. Yvonne

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Freccero.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hallward, Peter (2003). Badiou: A Subject to Truth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hartman, Geoffrey (1970). Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays, 1958–1970. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hartman, Geoffrey (2002). Scars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against Inauthenticity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. James, Henry (1984). The Golden Bowl. Everyman’s Library. London: Dent. Jöttkandt, Sigi (2005). Acting Beautifully: Henry James and the Ethical Aesthetic. Albany: State University of New York Press. Kairschner, Mimi (1984). “Traces of capitalist patriarchy in the silences of The Golden Bowl.” Henry James Review, 5.3: 187–92. Kant, Immanuel (1951). Critique of Judgment. (Trans. and intro. J. H. Bernard.) New York: Hafner Press. Lacan, Jacques (1988). “Logical time and the assertion of anticipated certainty: A new sophism.” (Trans. Bruce Fink and Marc Silver.) Newsletter of the Freudian Field, 2.2: 4–22. Miller, J. Hillis (2001). “How to be ‘in tune with the right’ in The Golden Bowl.” In Todd F. David and Kenneth Womack (eds.) Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary

Theory (pp. 271–85). Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Nussbaum, Martha (1990). “ ‘Finely aware and richly responsible’: Literature and the moral imagination.” In Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (pp. 148–67). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pluth, Ed and Dominiek Hoens (2004). “What if the other is stupid? Badiou and Lacan on ‘logical time.’ ” In Peter Hallward (ed.) Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy (pp. 182–90). London: Continuum. Priest, Ann-Marie (1999). “Risking the cracks: The mystic self in Henry James’s The Golden Bowl.” Twentieth Century Literature, 45.2: 210– 35. Reik, Theodor (1948). Listening With the Third Ear. New York: Farrar, Strauss. Slavens, Hugh (1993). “Sexuality and the aesthetic in The Golden Bowl.” Henry James Review, 14.1: 55–71. Teahan, Sheila (1995). “The Golden Bowl and the shattered vessel of consciousness.” In The Rhetorical Logic of Henry James (pp. 131–42). Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Walton, Priscilla L. (1992). “A mistress of shades: Maggie as reviser in The Golden Bowl.” Henry James Review, 13: 143–53.

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Henry James and the (Un)Canny American Scene Gert Buelens

A good starting point for reflection on Henry James’s response to his native American scene is the monograph Hawthorne, published in 1879, when James had been a writer for some fifteen years and had just achieved his first public success with “Daisy Miller.” The short book, published in Britain as a part of Macmillan’s “English Men of Letters” series (Hawthorne was the only American subject, as was James the only American contributor), is still worth reading, but now strikes most readers as laboring under an anxiety of influence that caused its composer, just emerging as an important American writer in his own right, to overemphasize in Hawthorne a “provincialism that the self-styled cosmopolitan sought to escape” (Daugherty 1993: 28). In order to communicate that provincialism, James constructs a long list of all the things that “are absent from the texture of American life”: No State. . . . No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities, nor public schools – no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class – no Epsom, nor Ascot! ( James 1984a: 351–2)

Certainly, James is here contrasting the dearth of the landscape Hawthorne looked out upon to that “denser, richer, warmer European spectacle” he could have enjoyed (and which James himself did in fact enjoy) ( James 1984a: 351). Yet, as the insistent anaphora suggests, there is a rhetorical excess in the list that should alert readers (but has not commonly done so) to its staged character. That James was not altogether serious in presenting this catalog of supposed absences is betrayed by a number of other facts as well. For one, its original occurs in James’s notebook for 1879, but is there cooked up as something that “In a story, some one says”: “ ‘Oh yes, the United

A Companion to Henry James. Edited by Greg W. Zacharias © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-14042-3

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States – a country without a sovereign, without a court . . . without an Epsom or an Ascot, an Eton or a Rugby . . . !!’ ”; perhaps the double exclamation marks on which the passage closes betray clearest of all that these are sentiments its author would not subscribe to in quite such a tone of voice (not to mention that Epsom, Ascot, Eton, or Rugby are hardly sites that managed to fire the Jamesian imagination to any noticeable extent) ( James 1987: 12). For another, the context in which the enumeration appears in Hawthorne rather qualifies its thrust. The introductory and concluding sentences reveal that, far from voicing its author’s deeply held convictions, the list constitutes James’s attempt to have some fun at the expense of his native country and for the benefit of his intended English audience: The negative side of the spectacle on which Hawthorne looked out . . . might, indeed, with a little ingenuity, be made almost ludicrous; one might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left. No State . . . ( James 1984a: 351–2)

The modal disclaimers (“might,” “almost,” “might,” “should”), as well as the admission that some “ingenuity” is needed to arrive at a catalog that would make the American spectacle seem nearly “ludicrous,” are usually elided from reproductions of the list, as is the redemptive observation on which it concludes: Some such list as that might be drawn up of the absent things in American life – especially in the American life of forty years ago, the effect of which, upon an English or a French imagination, would probably as a general thing be appalling. The natural remark, in the almost lurid light of such an indictment, would be that if these things are left out, everything is left out. The American knows that a good deal remains; what it is that remains – that is his secret, his joke, as one may say. ( James 1984a: 351–2)

Ensuring that his enumeration will come across as “ludicrous,” “appalling,” “almost lurid,” James manages to attribute to an American imagination such as Hawthorne’s a power that is both canny and uncanny. The American has to overcome greater odds, needs to draw on a greater fund of canniness, than did a contemporaneous English or French writer. What exactly it is that the American can draw on cannily stays “his secret,” a heimlich (hidden, domestic) secret about his home that is rendered all the more unheimlich (mysterious), to activate the Freudian twin terms, by the rhetorical emphasis on the uncanny character, the “appalling” quality, of the American scene. However, it is not downright luridness that the sketch aims at, but merely the “almost lurid,” saved from any confusion with the properly gothic by the “ludicrous” element that is present throughout, reminding us that something of a “joke” is involved in the whole affair.

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Surprisingly, a similar stress on amusement marks James’s characterization of the “sense of sin” in Hawthorne: Nothing is more curious and interesting than this almost exclusively imported character of the sense of sin in Hawthorne’s mind; it seems to exist there merely for an artistic or literary purpose. . . . It was a necessary condition for a man of Hawthorne’s stock that if his imagination should take licence to amuse itself, it should at least select this grim precinct of the Puritan morality for its play-ground. ( James 1984a: 363)

The American scene of Hawthorne’s time was, according to James, a scene of great innocence, which led its eminent literary inhabitant to select subjects for “their picturesqueness, their rich duskiness of colour, their chiaroscuro”; never as “the expression of a hopeless, or even of a predominantly melancholy, feeling about the human soul. . . . He is to a considerable degree ironical . . . ; but he is neither bitter nor cynical – he is rarely even what I would call tragical” ( James 1984a: 364). Again, there is an uncanny dimension to Hawthorne’s tales of Puritan morality, to be sure, but in James’s view that dimension remains firmly in the grasp of a canny artistic command that selects subjects for their effect rather than allowing what is buried beneath the moral surface to structure the entire creative edifice. Hawthorne died in 1864 (the year Henry James began his professional writing career) and was unable to digest the full significance of the Civil War, though he was “horrified and depressed by it; it cut from beneath his feet the familiar ground which had long felt so firm, substituting a heaving and quaking medium in which his spirit found no rest” ( James 1984a: 427). The imagery James here activates is suggestive of Freud’s characterization of “the uncanny” (unheimlich) as “something which is secretly familiar [heimlich-heimisch], which has undergone repression and then returned from it” (Freud 1978: 245). In James’s estimate, the Civil War “left a different tone from the tone it found. . . . It introduced into the national consciousness a certain sense of proportion and relation, of the world being a more complicated place than it had hitherto seemed, the future more treacherous, success more difficult” ( James 1984a: 427–8). James dwells extensively on how innocence left the American scene when the fact that had never cast more than “a faint shadow in the picture – the shadow projected by the ‘peculiar institution’ of the Southern States” – the repressed of American culture – finally managed to return and “darken the rosy vision of most good Americans” ( James 1984a: 426). He goes on to use a biblical metaphor that we will see recur, with interesting doublings and variations, in his later writings on the American scene: “At the rate at which things are going, it is obvious that good Americans will be more numerous than ever; but the good American, in days to come, will be a more critical person than his complacent and confident grandfather. He has eaten of the tree of knowledge” ( James 1984a: 428). If the threat to Hawthornian innocence had emanated from the institution of slavery and the challenge to the Union that its controversial character constituted, for

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James himself, returning to the United States in 1904 after an absence that he recalled as having lasted nearly a quarter century (it was actually twenty-one years), the test came first and foremost from the “inconceivable alien” with whom it was his “American fate to share the sanctity of his American consciousness, the intimacy of his American patriotism” ( James 1993: 426–7). Comments such as these, taken from James’s travelogue The American Scene (1907), and apparently voiced by “a more critical person” than “complacent and confident” Hawthorne, have increasingly occupied the forefront of scholarly attention to James in an age of cultural studies. At this writing, the online MLA Bibliography lists 86 items that discuss this work of James’s, 45 of which were published in the past ten years; 18 between 1981 and 1994; 13 prior to 1980. While there is a general increase in research on James, the 340 items on The Portrait of a Lady, say, are less strikingly concentrated in the recent past: 116 since 1995; 134 between 1981 and 1994; 90 prior to 1980 (the Bibliography states that its coverage extends back to 1963, but actually lists a dozen older articles too). The American Scene is a book that consists of fourteen chapters recording James’s impressions of New England, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, Charleston, and Florida, ten of which had first appeared as essays in the periodicals North American Review, Harper’s Magazine, and Fortnightly Review. In the course of his year-long tour of the United States, during which he gave lectures that “more than covered” his expenses ( James 1993: 805), James also visited Chicago, St. Louis, Indianapolis, and the west coast, but his response to these sites remained unchronicled, except for some scattered comments in his letters and notebooks (see, for instance, James 1987: 234–43). Two main strands may be distinguished in the reception of James’s American Scene, which can be usefully summarized by pointing to two influential studies that appeared in the early phase of this intensified interest, in both of which the travelogue featured prominently. Yet, before explaining what sets these interpretations apart, it is imperative to note that they (and the other analyses they are here taken to represent) share a vital belief in the seriousness of James’s endeavor. It is the self-identified “restless analyst” of the American scene that recent scholarship has set out to question or defend. After reviewing some of the major work that has been devoted to this effort, I will go on to explore the possibility that James is at his most fascinating not in his guise of that “more critical person” who has lost any trace of Hawthornian innocence, but when he more closely corresponds with his own version of his august predecessor and displays in his travelogue a similarly playful, joyous rhetorical distance from his subject. In Henry James and the Art of Power (1984) Mark Seltzer posits that “James’s techniques of representation discreetly reproduce social modes of policing and regulation and reproduce them the more powerfully in their very discretion, in the very gesture of disowning the shame of power” (Seltzer 1984: 139). Desire, in James, is “the occasion for mastery to be exerted” (Seltzer 1984: 141). Ross Posnock’s The Trial of Curiosity (1991), by contrast, pursues “James’s surrender to urban experience” (Posnock 1991: 154). James’s is a “self of the ‘margin,’ a realm comprised of ‘immense

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fluidity.’ . . . A zone of uncertainty, the margin is a veritable quicksand engulfing all pretensions to mastery, control, and stable identity” (Posnock 1991: 88). Thus, James’s account of one of the phenomena that he finds most strikingly American is assessed very differently by these critics: the “amazing hotel-world,” first broached in the guise of New York’s Waldorf-Astoria ( James 1993: 440). Seltzer and Posnock both focus on the “master-spirits of management” that James imagines gingerly but potently operating behind the scenes for the benefit of the guests’ enjoyment ( James 1993: 444). Seltzer emphasizes the disciplinary aspect of this subtle exertion of power and James’s complicity in such strategies of veiled but no less violent management: “Like the novelist whose narrative authority is at once omniscient and immanent, the presiding power [of the hotel world] exerts a comprehensive supervision over his characters while perpetuating the ruse of their freedom” (Seltzer 1984: 114). Posnock attempts to dissociate the author from these master-spirits: James considers it a “plague upon the American scene” that there are no “checks on the workings of the ‘hotel-spirit’ ”; he consistently rejects the “conception of man as a kind of puppet, of the sort that [he] encountered at the Waldorf”; and “James’s manipulations, after all, [serve to make] freedom more than mere illusion and experience more than dissimulation” (Posnock 1991: 23, 258, 248). These two strands – one stressing Jamesian (reactionary) mastery, the other Jamesian (liberal) surrender – can be recognized in many of the studies that have been devoted to The American Scene before and since Seltzer’s and Posnock’s books. They emerge at their clearest when the narrator’s response to ethnic others is considered. In 1963, Maxwell Geismar claimed that James fervently hoped for a knight who would “combat [the immigrant,] this ominous and threatening menace to his American scene” (Geismar 1963: 350; emphasis in original). No one came to the rescue, “unless it was the Germanic Hitler who used a more barbarous mythology, combined with all the skills of scientific industrial technology, to quell the same alien presence” (Geismar 1963: 350). Slights like these have been repeated by more recent critics. In 1986 Donna Przybylowicz imputed to James an unconscious desire for “some ultimate solution which would remove the aliens from the scene” (Przybylowicz 1986: 259). More recent critics have been far more balanced in their critique (for a survey, see Buelens 2002: 23–32, 50–2, 74–6). Most of the recent work, though, has tended to stress James’s liberal stance in varying degrees. Writing a little earlier than Posnock, William Boelhower had briefly propounded essentially the same thesis with regard to James and the “aliens,” finding that James displays a remarkable openness to “the interpretative dynamics of the other,” and is eager to submit to “a fluid process of ethnic semiosis,” in which both self and ethnic other “are decentered onlookers, both on the margins” (Boelhower 1987: 23). In Henry James’s Last Romance, Beverly Haviland finds The American Scene to be very different from contemporaneous writing, whose reactionary impulses and infelicitous imagery are far more glaring. She situates James’s relation to the sociocultural other in the context of the social theories that were being developed by Peirce, Veblen, Du Bois, and Riis. Haviland moreover stresses that James did not return to

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the country of his birth “as a native but as an alien,” and she argues that the Jews stand as an “encourag[ing]” example for James: they have “escaped falling prey to . . . typical American dangers . . . by holding on to a sense of their past, by making continuity crucial to their ethnic identity” (Haviland 1997: 135, 152–3). Sara Blair, too, has contextualized The American Scene very broadly. She agrees with Posnock that “The American Scene attempts to create a space of cultural agency and production beyond the reach of bourgeois and progressive expertise,” yet she qualifies James’s success in this project, adding that the book “nonetheless remains vitally alive to the power of those [bourgeois and progressive] habits of seeing, recording, and constructing preeminently racial feeling”: if James cannot escape from the practice of “extending linked idioms of racial panic and progressivism, . . . his narratives of phantasmagoric ‘excess’ and ‘multiplication’ nonetheless contest the forms of mastery and management through which America is being constructed under the sign of entertainment” (Blair 1996: 13–14). In his discussion of “Henry James and the discourses of antisemitism,” Jonathan Freedman zooms in on certain moments in The American Scene (which he identifies as the central Jamesian text on the topic) which “suggest that, while James here writes in fear of the proliferative energy of the alien in general and the Jew in particular, he simultaneously glosses those very qualities as signs of a thoroughly praiseworthy vitality” (Freedman 1996: 67). Freedman eloquently argues that “James’s own, heavily culturally overdetermined aspirations for ‘mastery’ . . . involved a process by which he was forced to repress with particular vigor all the messy, fluid formations of his own psyche” (Freedman 1996: 79). Freedman’s essay also covers a wide range of contemporaneous eugenicist material that allows him to conclude that James’s antisemitism, while showing disturbing parallels, was relatively gentle in comparison. The studies by Haviland, Blair, and Freedman offer detailed and much-needed contextualization of James’s response to the American scene at the beginning of the twentieth century. Yet, the considerable amount of space that is set aside in these works for examination of contemporary material leaves less room for that close analysis of James’s words, sentences, and paragraphs that may be just as essential to a proper assessment of his perspective on the ethnic other, and that may bring to light the canny way in which he manipulates rhetorical effect. For instance, Blair’s frequent emphasis on James’s “contestatory interest in the framing of racial and national fate” associates his writing with a degree of “aggressive” purposiveness that may well facilitate an educative parallel to progressivism, but that also comes across as insensitive to the very different style of The American Scene (Blair 1996: 7); while, in spite of dubbing The American Scene “James’s most extensive and most explicit commentary on the presence of Jews in American life,” Freedman’s essay does not devote the attention to this text that would adequately demonstrate the accuracy of this scholar’s crucial claim that, “[i]nflating the power of the artist-Jew, James connects that figure to all the things in his own sexual and emotional makeup that he is forced to deny himself, but at the same time constructs that figure as one connected to filth, degeneration, decay” (Freedman 1996: 64, 79).

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Thus, the passage on the “inconceivable alien” deserves to be considered in more detail than I have so far devoted to it. Here it is in full: I think indeed that the simplest account of the action of Ellis Island on the spirit of any sensitive citizen who may have happened to “look in” is that he comes back from his visit not at all the same person that he went. He has eaten of the tree of knowledge, and the taste will be for ever in his mouth. He had thought he knew before, thought he had the sense of the degree in which it is his American fate to share the sanctity of his American consciousness, the intimacy of his American patriotism, with the inconceivable alien; but the truth had never come home to him with any such force. In the lurid light projected upon it by those courts of dismay it shakes him – or I like at least to imagine it shakes him – to the depths of his being; I like to think of him, I positively have to think of him, as going about ever afterwards with a new look, for those who can see it, in his face, the outward sign of the new chill in his heart. So is stamped, for detection, the questionably privileged person who has had an apparition, seen a ghost in his supposedly safe old house. Let not the unwary, therefore, visit Ellis Island. ( James 1993: 426–7)

Clearly, this passage adopts an “American” perspective, where the term “American” excludes the immigrant, sharply marginalized as “the inconceivable alien” whose disturbance of the “sanctity of [the American’s] consciousness” turns Ellis Island into veritable “courts of dismay.” Several critics have found these comments problematic. In spite of holding up The American Scene as a blueprint of what pragmatic openness to the reality of ethnic interaction could look like, Boelhower registers the narrator’s visit to Ellis Island as a counter-instance. “Henry James . . . left the scene with a metaphysical feritas . . . What caused ‘the new chill in his heart’ was knowledge that he had ‘to share the sanctity of his American consciousness, the intimacy of his American patriotism, with the inconceivable alien’ ” (Boelhower 1987: 18). Yet, for a number of reasons, we should not take the extract at face value. Rather, we should note the many parallels to the rhetorical excess that characterized James’s comments on the (un)canny American scene in Hawthorne. If, first of all, the earlier text employed anaphora of the word “No” to create an unrelenting effect in its list of things that are missing from America, here it is the word “American” that is repeated more insistently than seems warranted by the demands of stylistic elegance: “the degree in which it is his American fate to share the sanctity of his American consciousness, the intimacy of his American patriotism.” If, in Hawthorne, James invokes the biblical figure of the tree of knowledge to mark the effect of the Civil War, here that same figure indicates the loss of innocence experienced by Americans who realize that their country is being shaped to the core by new immigrants: “He has eaten of the tree of knowledge, and the taste will be for ever in his mouth.” And when James talks of “the lurid light projected . . . by those courts of dismay,” we should remind ourselves of “the almost lurid light” that was cunningly projected by his humorous “indictment” of the supposed poverty of the American scene in Hawthorne ( James 1993: 352). The ominous imperative on which the passage ends – “Let not the unwary,

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therefore, visit Ellis Island” – serves to bring the segment’s auxesis to a properly portentous conclusion. Indeed, the passage on the “inconceivable alien” is qualified quite as much as was James’s earlier critique of America by rhetorical complexity. Notice the two very odd clauses which create a distinct distance between narrator (“I”) and subject (“he,” i.e., “any sensitive citizen”). The unpleasant “truth” which is brought home to the citizen “shakes him,” the Jamesian narrator claims, “to the depths of his being”; “or I like at least to imagine it shakes him,” he surprisingly intersperses. Similarly, when he goes on to say: “I like to think of him . . . as going about ever afterwards with a new look, . . . the outward sign of the new chill in his heart,” the first elision embraces the narrator’s unexpected exhortation to himself: “I positively have to think of him [in this manner].” In both cases, there seems to be room for doubt, and the narrator’s decision to adopt the chosen point of view is one that is highly conscious and somewhat artificial: he needs to convince even himself that this is the correct way “to think of [the sensitive citizen]” just as he needs to insist on the “American” citizenship of that person. There is a distancing at work in these interpolations that betrays a selfawareness of the staging that is taking place – that brings to the fore its performative dimension – and that heightens the force of the incrementum that marks the passage. Furthermore, the extract’s penultimate sentence strongly suggests that James was already toying with the germ of his uncanny story “The Jolly Corner,” on which he began work just a few months later. James’s active dramatizing of the “action of Ellis Island on the spirit of any sensitive citizen” in the non-fictional American Scene may well have much in common with the effects he seeks in his fictional ghost stories and tales of the supernatural. As he puts it in the preface to the New York Edition of stories like “The Jolly Corner,” “[often,] in quest . . . of the amusing, I have invoked the horrific” ( James 1984b: 1260). This is true, too, of several moments in The American Scene whose remarkable rhetoric it is above all that stops the cultural commentary from remaining stuck at the level of reactionary response that could be derived from such isolated observations as an appreciative one on the value of the country club (“the ample, spreading, galleried house, hanging over the great river, with its beautiful largeness of provision for associated pleasures”) ( James 1993: 622), or a censuring one on the effect of Jewish immigrants on the English language (“one stared at this allunconscious impudence of the agency of future ravage” wreaked by “this immensity of the alien presence climbing higher and higher”) ( James 1993: 470). If The American Scene merely contrasted such positive and negative values in all seriousness, it would be the product of that “more critical person” only that James implicitly aspired to be when he distanced himself from Hawthornian innocence. Yet, the truly interesting James that we most enjoy reading is the one who continues to practice what he attributed to Hawthorne these many years ago and mirrored in his own discourse: the canny art of manipulating the uncanny, never allowing the latter to descend into the tragic, by virtue of the playfulness that is always retained in the writing’s rhetorical excess, its staged quality, its hyperperformativity.

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A crucial aspect of this performative dimension is the doubling between the nativeborn and the foreign-born in The American Scene. It is in that sense that the passage on the “inconceivable alien” becomes truly uncanny, since the ghost in the house is a foreign ghost that claims a shared identity with the American, claims an equal right to take up an abode in the safe old house. According to Freud, uncanny experiences are “all concerned with the phenomenon of the ‘double’, which appears in every shape and in every degree of development [and can be] marked by the fact that the subject identifies himself with someone else, so that he is in doubt as to which his self is, or substitutes the extraneous self for his own” (Freud 1978: 234). Thus, ruminating “the great ‘ethnic’ question,” James wonders: “Who and what is an alien . . . in a country peopled from the first under the jealous eye of history? . . . Which is the American . . . – which is not the alien . . . and where does one put a finger on the dividing line . . . ?” ( James 1993: 459). Indeed, James’s own “native” status is a rather questionable one. He often labels himself the “restored absentee,” a cognomen that reminds the reader of his scant right to claim the country of his birth as truly his and of the near-interchangeability of his own identity with that of the “aliens” ( James 1993: 457). James’s return to the United States in 1904–5 not only resulted in the fourteen chapters of The American Scene, but also in three related texts. “The Question of Our Speech” was first delivered in 1905 as an address to the graduating class at Bryn Mawr, the Pennsylvania women’s college. The two other, longer essays, “The Speech of American Women” and “The Manners of American Women,” are elaborations upon the lecture, and were published in the women’s periodical Harper’s Bazar in 1907. The essays argue that there is a need for constraints in order for a society to function properly. Such constraints are in plentiful evidence in Europe, yet are as good as absent from the America that James is visiting. The fact that American men hardly figure on the American social scene – restricting themselves instead to the business world – is not just problematic in its own right, but also amounts to an abdication of their responsibility to afford “the woman, as a social creature, her lead and her cue” ( James 1999: 110). It is easy to read these essays as so many instances of conservative cultural criticism, emphasizing as they do the need not just for distinctions, but for hierarchies: “The [American] soil has undergone, for the plant of the fine individual life, none of the preparation of the grinding, the trampling, the packing into it of other lives, lives resigned to a mere subsidiary and contributive function” ( James 1999: 62). Pierre A. Walker’s introduction to a collection that has made these essays newly available in print resists such a reading. It highlights rather how, for one part, the essays on speech anticipate structuralist linguistics in their insistence on “the mutual dependence of consonants and vowels upon each other and the importance of distinguishing – discriminating – between variations of sound” ( James 1999: xxxi). However, linguistics has moved on from the structuralist paradigm to include sociolinguistic insights that seem just as relevant to James’s statements. Thus, when he expresses irritation in “The Question of Our Speech” over the fact that present-day

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Americans say “arrt” instead of “art,” he is displaying an ignorance of the sociohistorically documentable distribution of rhoticity over the map of English as a world language ( James 1999: 50). In fact, the rhotic accent (pronouncing the “r” in a word like art) is not something that emerged in the United States, but that was brought to the country by the colonists who settled in the Chesapeake Bay area, most of whom came from the West of England, where the accent was standard. Ironically, far from being a debased form of English, as James would have it, this variety of English, David Crystal notes in his Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, is “sometimes said to be the closest we will ever get to the sound of Shakespearean English” (1995: 93). James’s assumption that “arrt” constitutes a development away from “art” is probably based on the fact that he was most familiar as a child with the speech of New England, whose original settlers came from the East of England, where the “r” was commonly dropped after a vowel. Due to the accident of geographical proximity to the center of Empire, this accent and its peculiar elisionary practices had obtained the status of Received Pronunciation in Britain by the time that James was domiciled there (Crystal 1995: 365). Walker further points out that James’s sharp criticism of women in these essays does not reflect a sexist bias, but rather springs from his attempt to take upon himself “the role that American men have abandoned, making himself the ‘real’ man, the kind of man who can set a corrective example, which in turn incites women to further corrections of their own” and to balancing corrections of the men ( James 1999: xxxiii). This is a useful statement, but it will not persuade all students of James that we should continue to read this work. The fascination of an essay like “The Speech of American Women” may more clearly lie in the way it enacts what it argues, rather than in the argument itself. When James identifies American women’s freedom to behave as they please as a key problem, then he is unlikely to command the attention of many present-day readers. His reiteration of the – to him – amazing fact that American women have nothing to fear seems quaint, to say the least ( James 1999: 59–63). What proves more precious to a twenty-first-century Jamesian is the final section, in which the essay stages an encounter with one young woman, who is strangely prepared to engage in conversation on the subject of her own alleged deprivation of anything like a proper standard of English ( James 1999: 75–81). The appeal of this portion does not emanate from the debate it reproduces on the subject of the “tongueless slobber or snarl or whine,” the “debased coinage,” that James charges her with employing ( James 1999: 76), but from the manner in which he eventually seems to be instilling in his interlocutor precisely that fear that the opening section had diagnosed as the missing element in the composition of the American woman’s existence. “My victim had at last gathered herself – I saw the end of our passage,” James informs us, indicating that little time is left to conclude his assault on this “victim” of his (James 1999: 80). When she challenges him with the “great card” she had had, “all the while, up her sleeve” – “ ‘Why is it, then, that, all the world over,

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people so admire us just as we are?’ ” – he is thrilled to find himself so magisterially prepared: Because, designated as I admit you all to have been for a remarkable fate, it was needful you should see certain things apparently done, you should feel certain illusions created, you should be blind to the baiting of certain traps, that are all part and parcel of the fulfilment of your destiny. This destiny you are carrying out, to the joy of the ironic gods – who have locked you up, as an infatuated, innumerable body, a warning to the rest of the race, in perhaps the very best-appointed of all the fools’ paradises they have ever insidiously prepared for humanity. ( James 1999: 81)

If the staged quality of the passage on the “inconceivable alien” in The American Scene owed much of its appeal to the ghost in the house it invoked in anticipation of “The Jolly Corner,” the intertext here is clearly James’s 1903 story “The Beast in the Jungle,” with its protagonist who was to “suffer” his “fate,” not to “know” it ( James 1996: 531). John Marcher’s special destiny is said to be “in the lap of the gods” in that tale ( James 1996: 513), and he spends his entire life awaiting the event that will vindicate his belief that he is exceptional, only to realize at the very end that he had in fact “justified his fear and achieved his fate; he had failed, with the last exactitude, of all he was to fail of”: “he had been the man of his time, the man, to whom nothing on earth was to have happened” ( James 1996: 540). In “The Speech of American Women” James comes close to casting his young interlocutor in the role of John Marcher, imputing to her a similar blindness to the special destiny that she is fulfilling, and emphasizing her powerlessness to escape that fate. “My friend gave me, for this, one of her longest stares” – as well she might! – “and I am not sure that, under the effect of my words, she had not really turned pale,” James continues ( James 1999: 81). What he is in effect doing is exerting that psychological pressure on the young woman that he had noted at the outset of the essay is wholly missing from American society, “as it is of the nature of the different parts of old and dense civilizations to press – and to press especially where weakness and sensibility prevail,” so that a proper sense of “fear” might be produced ( James 1999: 59). Yet in an unusual twist that again pleasantly reminds us of James in his uncannyfictional rather than culture-critical mode, a possibility of escape is held out to the young woman after all, with James himself tantalizingly holding the key that might unlock the prison-house of language to which she has been condemned. “Locked us up – ?” the bewildered woman asks. “Yes, for I doubt if, within any measurable time, you’ll be able, as an imprisoned mass, to get out. . . . Still, I won’t answer for it that there may not be here and there hope of escape for individuals,” he encouragingly confides to his auditor. “I had spoken in such evident good faith,” he comments, “that I made her out at last as touched with dismay” ( James 1999: 81). We do well briefly to recall the “courts of dismay” that Ellis Island had presented to the American citizen, and the extent to which a “chill” was struck in that person’s heart by what he had to

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witness there. Here it is James himself who, in perfect good faith, is setting about to cause dismay in the feelings of a young American, who “could only echo: ‘Hope – ?’ ” and have him rejoin: “Yes, of your perhaps quietly slipping out one by one” ( James 1999: 81). Here it is James, too, who imparts the chill of his own breath rather than undergoing any such horrific effect: And then as, distinctly, alarm had stirred in her at the chill of my breath, “You want to know how that may be managed?” I asked. “Well, by letting me just hover at the gate and have speech of you when you steal away. Only look for the gleam of my lantern, and meet me by this low postern. I’ll take care of the rest.” ( James 1999: 81)

The essay ends on this monologic note, leaving readers to conjecture that James may well have been entirely successful in his rhetorical strategy, and that the young woman has finally fled the scene in horrified fear – precisely that fear whose absence Part One of the essay had pointed to as the defining mark of women in the American democracy. The interest of a moment like this is considerable, yet rare in these essays. When James, say, invokes the tree of knowledge metaphor in “The Manners of American Women” he does so with less narrative subtlety than in The American Scene, where we saw the image play a crucial role in the production of a hyperbolic sense of the ethnic uncanny that culminated in the exclamation: “Let not the unwary, therefore, visit Ellis Island!” ( James 1993: 427). In the essay, the knowledge that is being tasted is knowledge of the lack of manners of young American women, whose pampered state has made them take for granted any service rendered to them. The scene that illustrates this finding takes place in Europe, where James had taken part in a bicycle trip. Two bicycles broke down and were “promptly, even if a little awkwardly,” restored to working order by a young American male member of the party ( James 1999: 111). The first belonged to a European young woman: “I was struck by the charming tone of the explicit and insistent tribute of thanks rendered to this slight service”; the second to an American: she dropped him, as she remounted, a thin, short, perfunctory “Thanks” which had the effect of making our eyes, his and mine, the next moment, meet in wondering intelligence. . . . She was blind, she was deaf, to the stops of the social pipe, and its broken fragments seemed to crunch under her as she passed. All of which sudden perception was, dimly, dawningly, in the eyes of our bewildered swain, who struck me as having for the first time, poor youth, really tasted of the tree of knowledge. He had caught a snatch of the finer music, and I have asked myself repeatedly since, what it is that restored to his native order, he must have begun to fancy he misses. ( James 1999: 111–12)

While this little vignette, with which the essay ends, is certainly a memorable one, it does not possess any of the self-distancing that could be observed in the rhetorically

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rich equivalent passage in The American Scene. If eating from the tree of knowledge there is an experience that “shakes” the narrator “to the depths of his being,” we must recall how that observation is qualified by the interpolation “or I like at least to imagine it shakes him” and how the passage ends on a distinctly uncanny note ( James 1993: 426). Any doubling that could be said to take place is restricted to the narrator’s attribution to the “swain” of a shared knowledge, which with him is as yet dim and dawning, so that the narrator’s is by implication clear and achieved – the knowledge possessed by the (conservative) cultural critic. There is little trace of the uncanny here. I want to conclude this overview of James’s engagement with the American scene with a present-day doubling that adds a fascinating dimension to the discussion. In “The Question of Our Speech” James had warned his audience that they should be vigilant over the state of their language: All the while we sleep the vast contingent of aliens whom we make welcome, and whose main contention . . . is that, from the moment of their arrival, they have just as much property in our speech as we have, and just as good a right to do what they choose with it . . . : all the while we sleep the innumerable aliens are sitting up (they don’t sleep!) to work their will on their new inheritance . . . ( James 1999: 55)

These immigrants to American shores have “the sublime consciousness . . . of speaking, of talking, for the first time in their lives, really at their ease.” They enjoy “an infinite uplifting sense of freedom and facility” and what “they may best do is play, to their heart’s content, with the English language” ( James 1999: 54). Cynthia Ozick has carefully engaged with James’s argument here, gently introducing into her reading that ethnic double which is not, in “The Question of Our Speech,” allowed to assume a savingly ghostly character. James gave his address at Bryn Mawr, Ozick notes, “exactly one year and two days before my mother, nine years old,” arrived in New York (1989: 151). “My mother was an immigrant child, the poorest of the poor. She had come in steerage; she knew not a word of English when she stepped off the horsecar into Madison Street; she was one of the innumerable unsleeping aliens” (Ozick 1989: 160). Ozick points out the misguidedness of James’s critique: the “aliens,” hard-pressed by the scramblings of poverty and cultural confusions, had no notion at all of linguistic “freedom and facility,” took no witting license with the English tongue, and felt no remotest ownership in the language they hoped merely to earn their wretched bread by. If they did not sleep, it was because of long hours in the sweatshops . . . (Ozick 1989: 154)

Tracing the process by which her mother was successfully introduced to the English language, Ozick is able to demonstrate James’s deep limitation as a social theorist. Exhorting the young women in his audience to imitate models of tasteful speech

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( James 1999: 56), he never offers them any advice on which models to adopt. Who exactly is it that should be emulated? “The absence of models,” Ozick states, “was not simply an embarrassment.” “It should have hinted at the necessary relinquishment of who [the mode of the novel of manners] in favor of what [the mode of social theory]: not who appoints the national speech, but what creates the standard” (Ozick 1989: 158). Never having received any public schooling in the United States, James misses the point that is obvious to the child of Russian Jewish immigrants: it is not by imitating models of speech that a correct command of the English language is achieved; it is by being submerged from as young an age as possible in the riches print culture has to offer. Ozick quotes Scott’s “Lady of the Lake,” an early set text of her mother’s at P.S. 131 on the Lower East Side. “She never forgot it. She spoke of it all her life. Mastering it was the triumph of her childhood [and] enduringly typified achievement, education, culture” (Ozick 1989: 159). To consent to become an American is to be prepared to adjust one’s imagination to the assumptions inherent in the texts that shape the nation’s culture. “Reading governs speech, governs tone, governs manner and manners civilization” (Ozick 1989: 168). Inserting herself into the position of the ethnic alien who is relegated to the outside of James’s argument in “The Question of Our Speech,” Ozick is able to show up the limitations of his achievement as a social theorist or cultural critic. As I have argued in the course of this essay, James’s reflections on the American scene take on a greater interest when he adopts the mode of the novel of manners, cannily enacting roles whose uncanny dimensions are welcomed rather than avoided. Ozick finds it “striking beyond anything that James left out, in the course of his lecture, any reference to reading” and that he failed to realize that “immigrants who learned to read learned to speak,” whereas “[t]hose who only learned to speak did not, in effect, learn to speak” (Ozick 1989: 155). She does not come up with any possible explanation for this strange oversight. Perhaps, though, in focusing his critique of America so strongly on the failures of its oral culture, James was testifying to the depth of the trauma that he carried with him ever since 1895, when he had been booed on the London stage as the failed author of a play – that venture into aural culture of his? Maybe that is the true ghost vainly seeking entry into James’s essays on the speech and manners of American women: the Master’s ultimate inability to accept that he too is a finite human being, with a limited existential, national, and even artistic range.

References and Suggested Reading Blair, Sara (1996). Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation. New York: Cambridge University Press. Enthusiastic, enticing account of James’s documentary and contestatory project in his writing on the American progressive era.

Boelhower, William (1987). Through a Glass Darkly: Ethnic Semiosis in American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press. Good discussion of the detail of Jamesian style that lends his response to the multicultural scene theoretical interest.

Henry James and the (Un)Canny American Scene Buelens, Gert (2002). Henry James and the “Aliens”: In Possession of the American Scene. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Shows how James derives mastery from the very act of surrendering to the mass of “aliens” on the American scene. Caramello, Charles (1993). “The duality of The American Scene.” In Daniel M. Fogel (ed.) A Companion to Henry James Studies (pp. 447–73). Westport: Greenwood Press. Thorough and balanced survey of the significance of James’s travelogue, and of its reception up to the late 1980s. Crystal, David (1995). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Daugherty, Sarah B. (1993). “James as critic and self-critic.” In Daniel M. Fogel (ed.) A Companion to Henry James Studies (pp. 25–37). Westport: Greenwood Press. Freedman, Jonathan (1996). “Henry James and the discourses of antisemitism.” In Bryan Cheyette (ed.) Between ‘Race’ and Culture: Representations of ‘the Jew’ in English and American Literature (pp. 62–83). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Sophisticated, mainly psychoanalytical, discussion of what is seen as James’s complex relation to anti- and philosemitism. Freud, Sigmund (1978). An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works (1917–19). Standard Edition. Vol. 17. London: Hogarth. Geismar, Maxwell (1963). Henry James and the Jacobites. Boston: Houghton. The classic attack on James’s reputation, stressing his immense egotism. Haviland, Beverly (1997). Henry James’s Last Romance: Making Sense of the Past and the American Scene. New York: Cambridge University Press. Strong defense of James’s sociopolitical stance in the fourth phase of his writing. James, Henry (1984a). Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers. Ed. Leon Edel and Mark Wilson. New York: Library of America. James, Henry (1984b). Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, French Writers, Other European Writers,

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The Prefaces to the New York Edition. Ed. Leon Edel and Mark Wilson. New York: Library of America. James, Henry (1987). The Complete Notebooks of Henry James. Ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. James, Henry (1993). Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America. Ed. Richard Howard. New York: Library of America. James, Henry (1996). “The Beast in the Jungle.” Complete Stories, 1898–1910. Ed. Denis Donoghue. New York: Library of America. James, Henry (1999). Henry James on Culture: Collected Essays on Politics and the American Social Scene. Ed. Pierre A. Walker. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Ozick, Cynthia (1989). “The question of our speech: the return to aural culture.” In Metaphor and Memory: Essays (pp. 146–72). New York: Knopf. Sensitive response to “The Question of Our Speech,” questioning several of its assumptions. Posnock, Ross (1991). The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity. New York: Oxford University Press. Deeply influential account of James’s wide-eyed openness to urban experience. Przybylowicz, Donna (1986). Desire and Repression: The Dialectic of Self and Other in the Late Works of Henry James. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Argues that James was utterly unable to deal with cultural otherness in The American Scene. Seltzer, Mark (1984). Henry James and the Art of Power. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Highly intelligent Foucaultian reading of Jamesian technique as complicit with, yet in overt denial of, the machinery of power, e.g. in America. Tanner, Tony (1995). Henry James and the Art of Nonfiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Lucid, short, elegant study of James’s achievement outside fiction.

12

Revisitings and Revisions in the New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James Philip Horne

Between 1907 and 1909 Charles Scribner’s in New York and Macmillan in London published The New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James, twenty-four handsome, and hefty, volumes weighing in at about 36 pounds.1 It was a huge undertaking – taking James four years of exhausting work, in which he revisited his fictional works, back at least to 1871, selecting those to be included, writing prefaces to them, collaborating with the photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn on frontispieces – and carefully, often massively, revising the texts themselves. The regular and limited issues of the New York Edition are now collector’s items, costing from several thousand to tens of thousands of dollars, depending on condition. The prefaces have become classic texts, foundations for critical discussion of the novel, yielding phrases now in common currency like “the terrible fluidity of self-revelation,” or “Really, universally, relations stop nowhere” ( James 1984b: 1316, 1041). Coburn’s photographs are more than ever the subject of discussion, both in relation to James and as part of the history of photography at a defining moment. And the Edition’s vast labor of revision, to which James in his prefaces and letters gives a startling importance, has entered literary history as an exemplary case of authorial afterthought, along with Wordsworth’s revisions of the Prelude, Auden’s reframing of his poems, or Shakespeare’s putative revisions of King Lear. When it began to appear, Scribner’s advertised the enterprise, in the way of publishers, as “the definitive edition of the fiction of the first of American novelists,” and as “an elaborate edifice whose design and execution are absolutely unique in their kind owing to their complete unity of effect.” Terms like these – “definitive” and “complete unity” – make claims that arouse our suspicions, or at least beg legitimate questions in an age when the critical habit is skeptical of overt claims to authority. My first question is prompted by the title. By the time the New York Edition appeared, James, aged sixty-three, was settled in his coastal hilltop retreat of Lamb House, in Rye, Sussex, and had until 1904 – pointedly, it seemed – stayed out of the United States, and out of his native city, for twenty-one unbroken years. One might

A Companion to Henry James. Edited by Greg W. Zacharias © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-14042-3

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well, therefore, start by wondering what title he had to call it the “New York” Edition? Would not the “Sussex Edition” have been more apt? (James’s friend Rudyard Kipling’s “Sussex Edition” did not claim that heading till 1937.) James offered his own answer. Writing to Scribner’s from Lamb House on July 30, 1905, he declared: If a name be wanted for the edition, for convenience and distinction, I should particularly like to call it the New York Edition if that may pass for a general title of sufficient dignity and distinctness. My feeling about the matter is that it refers the whole enterprise explicitly to my native city – to which I have had no great opportunity of rendering that sort of homage. ( James 1974–84: IV: 368)

The title thus names an origin and pays a “homage.” When he wrote this, James was freshly back from nearly a year in his homeland: revisiting old friends; meeting all kinds of people; going back to earlier haunts, including New York; going for the first time to the South and the West; lecturing widely (on Balzac, and on American elocution); and gathering material for his profoundly original book of travel meditations, The American Scene (1907). The publicity raised in America by his return – not all of it favorable, as his combination of expatriation and the elaborateness of his late fiction had inspired a good deal of hostility – procured more purchasers, if not more readers, for his latest novel, The Golden Bowl (1904), making James once again into a currently important American author.2 The title of the Edition thus publicly marks and consolidates James’s reclaiming of his American identity, inviting American readers especially to revisit his works, as he was to do in building this “elaborate edifice.” One can furthermore read the Edition and the return visit which set it up ( James’s agent J. B. Pinker came over from London to negotiate its basis during the trip) as part of a larger retrospective movement in James’s career. This phase started perhaps with the memoir of William Wetmore Story and his Friends, published in 1903, where he had, unwillingly – Story’s family having exacted a promise – found himself looking back to the past, his own and that of this old acquaintance, a second-rate American sculptor and poet in Rome (who had been a friend of Browning, Mrs. Gaskell, and Hawthorne). The rich imaginative interest of the past James discovered there, and the challenge of writing at length about it – for a writer hitherto more preoccupied with developing new forms to catch the trick of life in its international modernity – seems to have drawn him in a new direction, towards a revisiting of associated personal, cultural, historical pasts, and towards the evolution of a kind of writing to record that revisiting.3 Those who pay return visits may find traumatic changes, and may feel themselves unwelcome strangers. Even in benign cases, time will have taken its toll. James dramatized the predicament of the retrospective, reflective sensibility, and specifically of the revisiting expatriate, in his extraordinarily powerful and densely packed ghost story “The Jolly Corner” (1908), written in 1906 while he was busy preparing the New York Edition. Its hero Spencer Brydon, who is fifty-six, has been away in Europe

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for longer than his creator – for thirty-three solid years – when he comes back to New York “to look at his ‘property’ ” ( James 1996: 698). Coming back to the now-deserted house where he was born (on the “jolly corner” of the title), Brydon finds himself haunted by, visited by, another presence – that, it transpires, of the American self he might have been had he stayed, not – like his present self – a man of culture and leisure, but a hard-bitten, ravaged man of business, a presumed millionaire who is associated with Wall Street. This other self turns out to be a tragic specter full of rancor towards the real, living Brydon because – as a mere possibility – he has never been allowed to exist. As Brydon says, musing on his past, It comes over me that I had then a strange alter ego deep down somewhere within me, as the full-blown flower is in the small tight bud, and that I just took the course, I just transferred him to the climate, that blighted him for once and for ever. ( James 1996: 707)

The story is a meditation on lives and their missed or latent possibilities, on the way an identity is formed at the expense of other, “blighted” identities that will never have the chance to develop. It’s also, though, a consolidation or affirmation of a kind of unity, for Brydon shows his unsuspected mettle in practical affairs, successfully supervising works on another family property, and thus showing that he still includes, as it were, the alter ego. It constitutes in itself, furthermore, an artistic return to, and a repossession of, New York, where James had not directly set a fictional scene since 1887.4 In 1902 James had told Edith Wharton of his desire to admonish you, I say, in favour of the American Subject. There it is round you. Don’t pass it by – the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist’s that it waits for . . . What I would say in a word is: Profit, be warned, by my awful example of exile & ignorance . . . Do New York! The 1st-hand account is precious. (August 17, 1902; James 1999: 368)

Wharton’s tragic novel of social observation The House of Mirth (1905), her next, had “done New York” with a fullness “The Jolly Corner,” a short story in a fantastical genre, does not, the year after, try to emulate. Nonetheless, with characteristic Jamesian indirection, the tale is an attempt at “the American Subject,” suggesting something of James’s preoccupations at this time, his continuing meditation on his own muchquestioned Americanness and on the series of alter egos, as might be said, who had written the works he was in the course of revisiting for the New York Edition. One crucial difference from the ghostly tale is, though, that these earlier selves had an existence, one registered in these earlier texts, and made part of the legitimate, sympathetic succession of actual selves leading from James’s youth to his twentiethcentury Mastership. The act of revision – which for James requires a responsible

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rethinking and repossession of his earlier works – is in one sense a reconnection, a symbolic reunification of selves, a bringing-up-to-date of his relation to his works. There is, however, room for skeptical questioning here. For one thing, not all James’s fictions were included in the Edition’s consolidated oeuvre. For reasons of taste, and of space, and with a mixture of relish and regret, James selected for the blight of exclusion seven novels – Watch and Ward, The Europeans, Washington Square, Confidence, The Bostonians, The Other House, and The Sacred Fount. At least four of these continue to be regarded as serious, non-negligible achievements – so that they haunt and mutely challenge the monumental “edifice” from which they are shut out. And then, since James was an inveterate mental reviser of others’ works – he told H. G. Wells, for instance, that “I re-write you, much, as I read” ( January 29, 1900; James 1974–84: IV: 133) – it is possible to wonder about the extent of his reconnection, about just how far his intimate reworking of the texts is a proof of his personal recapturing of his original intentions, for it may simply mark the creative intensity of James’s imaginative reading – of works by anyone. The disturbing clash of selves in “The Jolly Corner” recalls a well-known cartoon by James’s acquaintance and admirer Max Beerbohm of the earlier James and the later Master.5 The cartoon shows a younger, bearded James on the right, facing an older, clean-shaven James on the left. They glare at each other in dismay, the elder man more in sorrow than in anger, the younger, it seems, more in anger than in sorrow. A single speech bubble is coming out of both their mouths as they denounce each other, with only one letter’s difference between their words: “How badly you wrote!” says the Master. Says the younger man, “How badly you write!” It’s a comic comment on the distance that has opened up between the revising James of the twentieth century, the Master of the late style, and the same writer when younger, with a style retrospectively perceived as having been less elaborate, less difficult, less mannered. Beerbohm’s cartoon expresses the general sense in James’s own time of a contest or rivalry between the revised texts of works like “Daisy Miller” and The Portrait of a Lady and those works in their original form, the form in which readers had first read and had often learned to love them. Readers felt the works had become their property, that the fact of previous publication had meant they were given irrevocably to the public, and thus not reclaimable by James for re-authoring – as if his control of them, his rights over them, had expired when they became books. Thus Edward Everett Hale reviewed the New York Edition in 1908 under the title “The Rejuvenation of Henry James,” deploring the way in which “The friend of our youth has decided upon a gold wig,” and aligning himself with “the Irreconcilables, those who read The Portrait of a Lady with the fevers and pulses of youth, and strove unto death with somnolence over The Wings of the Dove” (Rawlings 1993: 99). And Montgomery Schuyler’s review of the New York Edition in the New York Times on January 11, 1908 had as a subtitle “Later Mannerisms Forced Into Earlier Text to Detriment of Its Vigor” (Rawlings 1993: 104). Revision, as these small examples remind us, touches on

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profound questions and can arouse startling animosities, like the territorial dispute in “The Jolly Corner” – something shown freshly by the controversial status of the “director’s cut” of films a century later. It also raises some fascinating critical problems: focusing as it does the issues of “the author,” of identity and its continuity or discontinuity, of intellectual property, and of the significance of style, among others. To this day, a tendency to partisanship, to impatience and dismissiveness, may be noted in discussions of James’s revisions, in attitudes to the monument. Let us now approach the gilded threshold of James’s great self-consolidation and look at a volume of the New York Edition, as published by Scribner’s. To quote the description in A Bibliography of Henry James by Leon Edel and Dan. H. Laurence, it was Issued in smooth silky plum cloth, single-rule border and circled monogram device in gilt on front cover, lettering and volume number in gilt on spine; white end papers; top edge trimmed and gilt, other edges untrimmed. (Edel and Laurence 1982: 135)

When James received his first copy, he wrote to Scribner’s on December 31, 1907 that “I am delighted with the appearance, beauty and dignity of the Book – am in short almost ridiculously proud of it” (Horne 1990: 343–4). The Edition took its place in the imposing array of such monuments built up during the “golden age,” as Andrew Nash calls it, of the collected or De Luxe edition – James thereby following in the footsteps of Tennyson, Browning, Stevenson, Meredith, Hardy, and others – and was an “elaborate edifice,” in Scribner’s grandiloquent phrase, that embodied James’s “dignity” for posterity and represented a highly self-conscious “construction of authorship,” in David McWhirter’s phrase – a provocation to the “deconstructive” critical habits of a later age.6 It cost $2 per volume – about $45 in 2007, though equivalences are inexact – and was thus distinctly a luxury item. The English edition by Macmillan – who bought the sheets from Scribner’s and put them in a more ornate green buckram binding, with densely looping ornamental devices on the spine which look as if they might be diagrams of the structure of a late-Jamesian sentence – was sold at 8s.6d. per volume (approximately £30 in 2007). The high price signified that this was definitely not a “Cheap Edition,” as Dickens had called one of his in 1847, aimed at what he called “the humble shelf where there are few books” (quoted in Nash 2003: 6). When the publisher T. Fisher Unwin wrote to James in 1895, asking for permission to make the tale “The Figure in the Carpet” (published in a magazine) a volume in a cheap series, James had declined, not only because it was already destined for his own next collection, but also because I have my individual objection to appearing, ever, in a series or in an exceptionally inexpensive form. It may be presumptuous, but I like to be a detached object – & just a little dear. (Quoted in Horne 1996: 20)

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James seldom allowed his works to be published “in a series” – until the New York Edition, which amounts to a series of a different kind, a “detached” one in which he appears gloriously on his own, over and over again. His pun on “dear” conveys that he likes his books to be treasured, and to be valuable. The language of money and costliness came home to roost for James in a counting of the cost, in fact, towards the end of his work on the New York Edition, when Macmillan charged him “cost price” (what they were paying Scribner’s) for copies of two of the works which he happened to need. As he told Pinker ruefully, in a letter on October 13, 1908, “It all adds to my sense of literature being for me, somehow, ever only an expensive job” (quoted in Horne 1990: 1). The Edition was indeed, financially, a relative failure. Scribner’s wrote in some embarrassment to Pinker on October 6, 1908 that “I wish very much that the sale of the New York Edition of Mr. James’s books justified a substantial remittance” (quoted in Horne 1990: 1). There were deep-seated reasons for this disappointing return in the way the project had been framed, even beyond the fact that James was not appealing to wide popular audiences. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. of Boston, who had held the copyright of some of the works and expressed disapproval of authors who switched between publishers as James had (in his attempts to get a better return on his efforts), made it a condition that the Edition be printed by their Riverside Press rather than Scribner’s own – which diminished its profitability, as did settlements with other copyright holders for the release of other works.7 Fourteen days later James had been informed, and was plangently confiding his reactions to Pinker: I return you the Scribner’s documents – which have knocked me rather flat – a greater disappointment than I have been prepared for; & after my long & devoted labour a great, I confess, & a bitter grief. I hadn’t built high hopes – had done everything to keep them down; but feel as if comparatively I have been living in a fool’s paradise. Is there anything for me at all? (Horne 1990: 351)

Not long after this, to make things worse, Scribner’s discovered an error in the calculations of page-lengths per volume which meant a wholesale restructuring of the volumes of Tales, partly spoiling James’s careful arrangements and categorizings and sequencings, and forcing a corresponding rewriting of what he called, on December 14, 1908, “the two or three compromised Prefaces” (Horne 1990: 352).8 Once again drawing on the rich metaphorical suggestiveness of economic terms, James told them also that he now felt, after his long labor and these financial and artistic losses, “rather completely spent!” (Horne 1990: 352). Well before this he had been complaining that “The Edition has smothered me . . . like an enormous featherbed” ( James 1999: 460–1). Nonetheless, costly as they were in more than the intended ways, the volumes remained a source of pride to James and a profoundly impressive achievement of design and organization. Beneath the gilt of the covers, the elegant title-page proclaims at the top, in red ink, the title of the given work – “RODERICK HUDSON”

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Figure 12.1 “Henry James” by Alvin Langdon Coburn, frontispiece, Roderick Hudson (New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James, Vol. 1).

in Volume 1 – with “BY / HENRY JAMES” in black ink below that. Next down, at the center of the page, sits what the Edel-Laurence Bibliography calls a “ship and bridge device, in orange-tan and dull brown, within blind impression” (Edel and Laurence 1982: 135). This small image portrays the Brooklyn Bridge with a skein of smoke from the funnel of a steamer drifting across the curving cables of the vast structure – marking James’s work as somehow representative of the modern New York with which he had recently renewed acquaintance (the bridge had opened on May 24 1883, a few months before James had left the US for his longest absence). The publisher’s details and the year appear at the bottom of the page. Across from the title-page is what the Bibliography terms a “tissue-guard fly-leaf,” tipped in, through which one can dimly see a photographic frontispiece. In the case of Roderick Hudson, the image, once the veil is lifted, reveals itself as a slightly hazy, quasi-painterly photographic portrait of James himself (taken on July 3, 1906): in profile, gazing in unsmiling seriousness to our right, from verso to recto – into the main body of the work, as it were. His penetrating look seems to bear out the testimony of his contemporaries, who wrote of “the strange power of his eyes.”9 His impressive, high-browed bald head

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stands out against a dark background, and the photographer Coburn makes interesting abstract patterns, which might suggest the symbolically potent designs of James’s fictions: from a shimmeringly white high collar with folded-down tips, from the jagged notch in the lapel of James’s dark suit, from a mysterious diagonal framework in white wood beyond James (perhaps the corner of a greenhouse in the Lamb House garden?), the diamond-point of which picks out the gleaming point of the Master’s tie-pin. This image seems to stand as an emblem of what the Edition is to contain. James had met Coburn, then twenty-three, in New York in 1905, but the long-haired young American photographer, an associate of his cousin F. Holland Day, and a friend and associate of Edward Steichen and Alfred Steiglitz, New York champions of photography as an art form, was already part of the London artistic scene. He had photographed G. B. Shaw (a keen amateur photographer), G. K. Chesterton, and George Meredith, so Coburn may have reminded James of his own younger self, making his way in London – or of the painter John Singer Sargent or the sculptor Hendrik Anderson, whom he had also helped. Primarily, though, James must have seen the potential for his purpose of Coburn’s transformative style, which refused “non-photographic” manipulations of the image with gum and retouching, but involved painstaking hours in the darkroom to achieve a bold, often geometrically composed image abstracted from reality. (Coburn was later associated with Pound and Vorticism, and thus a significant figure in photographic modernism.)10 Giving instructions to Coburn for finding a suitable frontispiece for The Ambassadors, he notes that “some view, rightly arrived at, of Notre-Dame would also serve – if sufficiently bedimmed and refined and glorified” (quoted in Coburn 1978: 54). This is evidently addressed to Coburn’s particular bedimming, refining, glorifying process and style. In the final preface, which is to The Golden Bowl, James writes with regard to the photographs, in mixed critical-and-anecdotal mode, that he had always distrusted the “illustration” of fiction, on the ground that Anything that relieves responsible prose of the duty of being, while placed before us, good enough, interesting enough and, if the question be of picture, pictorial enough, above all in itself, does it the worst of services . . . ( James 1984b: 1326)

In other words prose should be “responsible” for imaginatively stimulating the reader’s pictorial sense, without reliance on constant interspersed illustrations (which James had often resented, especially in magazine publication, where it was a widespread practice). James, however, was a devotee of the visual arts, as an independent realm of achievement, and revisiting the topic here, with the stimulus of the grand project of the Edition, saw another, more desirable relation between picture and text, one less rivalrous, neither of slavish dependence nor of tactless interference.

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The image he uses, for the text inspiring independent creation in another art form, is of its seed causing the springing of fruit – but, precisely, in that other artist’s garden. His own garden . . . remains one thing, and the garden he has prompted the cultivation of at other hands becomes quite another; which means that the frame of one’s own work no more provides place for such a plot than we expect flesh and fish to be served on the same platter. One welcomes illustration, in other words, with pride and joy; but also with the emphatic view that, might one’s “literary jealousy” be duly deferred to, it would quite stand off and on its own feet and thus, as a separate and independent subject of publication, carrying its text in its spirit, just as that text correspondingly carries the plastic possibility, become a still more glorious tribute. ( James 1984b: 1326–7)

Another rivalry is reconciled, another harmonious reconciliation worked out between an older and a younger artist, through James’s close involvement in the making of Coburn’s photographs, all of which, portraits of places in one way or another, were taken especially for the Edition. He gave immensely detailed instructions in long, circumstantial letters about the kind of images he wanted, and where to look for them in Paris, Venice, Rome, and New York – though scrupulously allowing for Coburn’s own independent imaginative response, for instance when he suggests Ca’ Capello in Venice as a subject for the frontispiece to The Aspern Papers: “You must judge for yourself, face to face with the object, how much, on the spot, it seems to lend itself to a picture” (quoted in Coburn 1978: 56). In Coburn’s words: Though sixty-three years old, H.J. was like a boy, always displaying unquenchable and contagious enthusiasm over every detail concerning these illustrations. This made it a joy to work with him. (Coburn 1978: 54)

James in the preface describes the excitement of this collaborative aspect of his project, in which his “literary jealousy” was appeased by agreement over the role the images should play. He and Coburn undertook a hunt for a series of reproducible subjects . . . the reference of which to Novel or Tale should exactly be not competitive and obvious, should on the contrary plead its case with some shyness, that of images always confessing themselves mere optical symbols or echoes, expressions of no particular thing in the text, but only of the type or idea of this or that thing. They were to remain at the most small pictures of our “set” stage with the actors left out; and what was above all interesting was that they were first to be constituted. ( James 1984b: 1327)

Unlike, say, the George Du Maurier illustrations of Washington Square, these photographs make no attempt to show us characters in the works, let alone events or crises. As “mere optical symbols or echoes,” they stand for things in the work in an abstract-

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ing, generalizing way, usually by representing the real places where a significant part of the action occurs. If James’s text is a representation of a particular imagined case of something that is a general phenomenon, Coburn’s image is to be a representation of another particular imagined case, a separate artistic response to the general phenomenon, “the type or idea of this or that thing.” James’s analogy, drawing on his frustrating but formative years in the theater, is that of set design (though given that the places pictured are real, we might see it as proto-cinematic): “They were to remain at the most small pictures of our ‘set’ stage with the actors left out.” Opening the title-page of the book is thus like seeing the curtain rise on the set before the action starts. Coburn recalls in his autobiography that the most intimate and personal of all the questing for pictures was the search for and capture of the London scenes, for with most of these I had the personal guidance and collaboration of the author. (Coburn 1978: 56)

Accompanying the younger artist, James revisited the places in London that had originally inspired his literary fictions, needing them to reinspire him, and Coburn, to fresh creation in a different medium. James’s preface speaks of this most actively collaborative part of the “hunt,” through “the street-scenery of London,” as “an amusing search” – “amusing” because of the critical tact involved in finding “the aspect of things or the combination of objects that might, by a latent virtue in it, speak for its connexion with something in the book, and yet at the same time speak enough for its odd or interesting self” ( James 1984b: 1327). It also involved James, as an artistic flâneur, in the kind of purposeful wandering in search of impressions that had preoccupied him most recently in The American Scene; only that here, and now, the impressions would be registered by the mechanism of Coburn’s camera. James had in 1883 entitled a book Portraits of Places, and now that metaphor came much closer to being actualized. For the final volume of the Edition (and second of The Golden Bowl), James wanted an image, “some generalised vision,” of Portland Place, location of the grand London residence of Adam Verver; and here, as he says, “The thing was to induce the vision of Portland Place to generalise itself ” ( James 1984b: 1329). The reflexive here (“generalise itself ”) marks James’s insistence on the independent life of his subjects, on the justifying externality that saves creation from solipsism: in the Romantic understanding of the imagination, and after, the mind half-creates its “vision,” but also halfperceives it, remains dependent on reality. Portland Place thus has its own part to play in the process, which keeps the thrill of the “hunt” alive – the searching artist’s edge of anxiety as to whether it will break cover. James, though, has confidence in “the prodigious city,” which “does on occasion meet halfway those forms of intelligence of it that it recognises.” And this means, he goes on, “that at a given moment the great featureless Philistine vista would itself become interesting, would become interesting, for a splendid atmospheric hour, as only London knows how; and that

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Figure 12.2 “Portland Place,” frontispiece to second volume of The Golden Bowl (New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James, Vol. 24).

our business would be then to understand” ( James 1984b: 1329). The depreciation here of Portland Place, which was less than a century old, as “featureless” and “Philistine” – its broad, then quite unbroken roadway, its grand six- and seven-storey houses – makes it a “miracle” that it should “become interesting” on the given wintry day when James and Coburn subject it to the test of a visit. It does, however – becomes, indeed, perhaps the most memorable image in the Edition. The misty winter twilight, with a thick frost or light snow on the ground, leads the eye off through layers of gray into a white infinity in which regularly spaced lamp-posts disappear into a wall of white fog (like the white wall of fog in Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym mentioned by James in the novel).11 But what draws our eye to the whiteness is the dramatic outline, silhouetted against it, of a two-wheeler, twoperson hansom cab, slightly to the right of the frame, either heading away from us or sitting in the center of the expanse of road plying for hire.12 The driver in his bowler hat is looking off to the left; the composition might remind us of the significance of carriages in the novel (the word “carriage” occurs twenty-eight times, “hansom” three times, the posher “brougham” five).13 The tall whip, its long lash hanging down ominously, the projecting lamps on the sides, the wheels seen from directly behind so they form long, baguette-shaped black streaks – the sharp centrality

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of this dark shape may conjure up the intimate space of two-seater carriages and the tête-à-têtes of which so much of the novel consists; or, if we apply the “set stage” idea, the cabman may be looking off to the side in readiness for characters in the book to emerge from one of the houses and hail him. We can, of course, here imagine James behind Coburn’s camera, like a film director, feeling the place “generalise itself.” After the frontispiece and title-page in each volume comes the apparently routine copyright page – though copyright was, as we have seen, a vexatious and compromising issue in the Edition – and then (except when a work occupies two volumes) the preface. The discussion of illustration just examined is a good example of James’s critical meditations and dialogues with himself in the prefaces, broadening specific remembered cases into types of a general literary or artistic question. James carefully thematizes different prefaces so they are preoccupied with issues like the “terrible fluidity of self-revelation” ( James 1984b: 1316) in first person narration (The Ambassadors); the distinction between “the real” and “the romantic” (The American) ( James 1984b: 1062–3); the concept of “operative irony,” whereby fiction’s idealizations become satirical criticisms of life’s stupidity (“The Lesson of the Master”) ( James 1984b: 1229); the “eternal time-question” (Roderick Hudson) ( James 1984b: 1048); or the delicate balance of “intelligence” and “bewilderment” needed in a hero to bring out a story’s drama and involve the reader (The Princess Casamassima) ( James 1984b: 1090). Overall, the prefaces, as a weary James, with a couple still to do, told W. D. Howells on August 17, 1908, are, in general, a sort of plea for Criticism, for Discrimination, for Appreciation on other than infantine lines – as against the so almost universal Anglo-Saxon absence of these things; which tends so, in our general trade, it seems to me, to break the heart . . . They ought, collected together, . . . to form a sort of comprehensive manual or vade-mecum for aspirants in our arduous profession. ( James 1999: 463)14

The “so almost universal Anglo-Saxon absence of these things” from which James suffers was indeed no accident, but the result of an active hostility to analysis or dissection in a field – fiction – that was thought to be best kept for entertainment, or reserved for pleasurable sentiment. James’s old friend Charles Eliot Norton, in failing health, did not read the prefaces, but reported in a severe letter to Howells in March 1908 that his daughter had: I have not read them, but Sally has read them and finds them too self-occupied, and dislikes the disturbances of her old associations with the stories, and dislikes also the unreality which this criticism of the old characters gives to them. She does not like to have her puppets taken to pieces and the wires which moved them shown to her; nor does she think it a dignified proceeding to take for granted so largely the interest of the public in the conception and execution of the work of the living writer. (Quoted in Anesko 1997: 422n1)

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This remarkably overt response to the novelty of the Edition – the sense that it’s an indecorous act for a “living writer” to disturb his or her readers’ existing relations with the texts and characters through undue analysis, and, to boot, an undignified case of the egotistical sublime – suggests why Howells wrote to James on August 2, 1908 that “It took courage to do those introductions” (Anesko 1997: 423).15 Howells, who has been reading the prefaces aloud en famille, goes out of his way to praise James’s critical frankness about being dissatisfied with aspects of his own work (usually a refined perfectionist’s dissatisfaction that no common reviewer has shared): We especially enjoyed you where you rounded upon yourself, and as it were took yourself to pieces, in your self-censure . . . I think the public will understand from them . . . that you have imagined your fiction, as a whole, and better fulfilled a conscious intention in it than any of your contemporaries. (Anesko 1997: 422–3)

What Howells relishes here, and sees the danger (need for “courage”) of, is James’s freedom in his treatment of his past works, in his critical judgment of them, his radically indecorous explicitness (though in our confessional age we may see it as highly selective) about the mechanics, as it were, of fictional creation. As Howells says, James does not spare himself when his revisiting of a text leads to disappointment: discussing the inadequate treatment of time in Roderick Hudson, for instance, he declares that “The damage to verisimilitude is deep” ( James 1984b: 1052). Sally Norton’s representative response seems to echo James’s critical dismay in 1883 at Anthony Trollope’s Thackerayan overtness about the status of his fictions as “only, after all, a make-believe” ( James 1984a: 1343). But of course in that case Trollope’s alienating explicitness occurs within the fictional text: in a preface, an act of free criticism, such discussion, James would say, ought not to come under the same restriction. James’s large-scale textual revision of his earlier work was taken as an even greater, and more offensive, or at least dubious, freedom on his part, a comparable violation. Here he does not just comment on the works he revisits – he makes himself at home on the old premises, he changes them. The readers who had welcomed James’s fictions as an intimate part of their own earlier life – “those who read The Portrait of a Lady with the fevers and pulses of youth,” in Edward Everett Hale’s phrase – were disconcerted by the free hand with which James reworked his older, or younger, texts. Quoting his own earlier declaration about the revised travel essays collected in English Hours (1905), James brazenly announces, in the preface to The Golden Bowl, “I have ‘nowhere scrupled to re-write a sentence or a passage on judging it susceptible of a better turn’ ” ( James 1984b: 1046). He realizes that “scruples” are in the air, but unscrupulously goes ahead. In their feverish, pulsating youth, Hale’s band of Jamesian veterans had read, at the end of their old editions of The Portrait of a Lady (1881), the following exchange between Caspar Goodwood and Henrietta Stackpole on the latter’s doorstep in London.

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(Henrietta has just told Goodwood that Isabel has returned to Rome, and thus, in some sense, to her malign husband Osmond.) Caspar Goodwood was not looking at her; his eyes were fastened on the doorstep. “Oh, she started – “ he stammered. And without finishing his phrase, or looking up, he turned away. Henrietta had come out, closing the door behind her, and now she put out her hand and grasped his arm. “Look here, Mr. Goodwood,” she said; “just you wait!” On which he looked up at her. ( James 1882: 520)16

It’s a remarkably tight-lipped ending for such an expansive novel; a daring manifestation of the technique Ora Segal has described as “gradual authorial withdrawal,” and one of the most notable marks of James’s anticipation of modernist “impersonality” (Segal 1969: 55). James, while writing The Portrait, had remarked in his notebook that although he would be criticized for leaving Isabel en l’air, up in the air, by not ending her marriage to Osmond or settling her future relation to Goodwood, in fact The whole of anything is never told; you can only take what groups together. What I have done has that unity – it groups together. It is complete in itself – and the rest may be taken up or not, later. ( James 1987: 15)17

The indignant British reviewer R. H. Hutton had, however, got the wrong end of the stick, and assumed Henrietta was assuring Goodwood Isabel would soon leave her husband and live in sin with him. As John Sutherland has suggested, this may have been partly why, when James reread The Portrait, he evidently didn’t feel it was quite “complete in itself” (Sutherland 1996). That final sentence, pointing off into the novel’s hereafter, receives a further completion, angling it a bit differently: On which he looked up at her – but only to guess, from her face, with a revulsion, that she simply meant he was young. She stood shining at him with that cheap comfort, and it added, on the spot, thirty years to his life. She walked him away with her, however, as if she had given him now the key to patience. ( James 1907–9: IV: 437–8)

More than thirty years after the novel’s first publication, James might, here, be consciously correcting Hutton’s misapprehension by stating that “she simply meant he was young” – didn’t mean, that is, that Isabel really loved him and would return to him. Whatever James’s primary motive for it, though, the revision clarifies a possibly unhelpful ambiguity – does “looked up” imply he thinks things are looking up for him? – by conveying the immediate disappointment that he reads from Henrietta’s facial expression, characterized in the next sentence as “shining at him with that cheap comfort.” This treats Henrietta as a negligible reader of emotionally and

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psychologically complex situations, but it also allows James to feed us a touch more information about Isabel’s state of mind on her way back to Rome, via the friend with whom she has been staying. Goodwood has no reason to hope – and a vista of the next “thirty years” opens up – decades in which we may wonder what will become of Isabel, for whom, we have been told the page before, “There was a very straight path” ( James 1882: 519; 1907–9: IV: 437–8) – the path of duty, it seems implied, though Hutton had read it as “ ‘a straight path’ to a liaison with her rejected lover” (Sutherland 1996: 178). And now the book ends not with the tableau of the exchange of looks between Caspar and Henrietta, but setting things again in motion: “She walked him away with her . . .” However, for the reader, another kind of doubt remains: for John Sutherland, the revision effaces “what is arguably the most delicately understated ending in all Victorian fiction” (Sutherland 1996: 176). This is one small but vital example of the kind of change made by the revising James, in the face of a disapproving prejudice of which he was fully aware, and to which the discussion of revision in the preface to The Golden Bowl is a conscious reply. For the young American novelist Robert Herrick, visiting James at Lamb House in 1905 and hearing, read aloud by James himself, first the original and then the revised versions of passages from The American, James was making a deep mistake. I ventured after a while (as the effects of his “re-touching” became more and more painfully evident) to remonstrate – to say something about the respect owed to one’s past, living or buried, and the impossibility of this sort of resurrection by breathing the breath of one’s present life into what for good or ill had been done and finished under another inspiration, as a different if inferior person. (Herrick 1923: 734)

Herrick’s freighted language here, in this 1923 recollection after James’s death, suggests the power of the taboos James is transgressing in his revision. He is accused of a failure of self-respect, namely of respect for his past self (the Nortons, remember, thought his proceeding undignified); and it is declared an “impossibility” to undertake such a “resurrection” (as if James were espousing some exploded religious belief ). James’s secretary from the time of the Edition till his death, the formidable Theodora Bosanquet, acknowledges Herrick’s criticism in her Henry James at Work (1924), but argues on the contrary, in favor of the revised version, that It is not so smooth, nor so easy, nor, on the whole, so pretty as the older form. But it is nearly always richer and more alive. Abstractions give place to sharp definite images, loose vague phrases to close-locked significances. (Bosanquet 1924: 17)

She gives as an example of “a gain of beauty as well as of significance” a scene in The American where the hero Newman sits in Notre Dame cathedral and renounces his revenge. As she says, the early version reads:

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“He sat a long time; he heard far-away bells chiming off, at long intervals, to the rest of the world.” In the definitive edition of The American the passage has become: “He sat a long time; he heard far-away bells chiming off into space, at long intervals, the big bronze syllables of the Word.” (Bosanquet 1924: 17)

Bosanquet does not argue in detail; we can, though, give substance to her claim. The revised version assigns a meaning to the bells, by taking the first version’s intransitive “chiming” and making it transitive, so that it takes an object: “chiming . . . the big bronze syllables of the Word.” We can also trace the way James’s revising imagination seizes on a phrase in the original, “to the rest of the world,” and breaks it down, first into “off into space,” a paraphrase evoking a more cosmic or ethereal dimension; and then takes “world” and turns it into “Word” (in a sense its opposite). The gain of “beauty” comes with the more rapturous or transcendent cadence of the sentence, the gain of “significance” with the more overt reference to the Christian meaning of the cathedral bells, which are more in tune with his renunciation of an unchristian purpose of revenge on the Bellegardes. But whether the reader wants sentences in a novel to be so poetically loaded with significance and association, or would prefer the lighter touch of the original, is a question that cannot be closed. Readers’ attitudes to the revisions will continue to depend on their tastes and their beliefs (about identity, inspiration, authorship, readers’ rights, stylistic complexity or simplicity, and about art). But the way an author revises, or doesn’t, can be a deeply suggestive sign of the nature of his or her imagination; and in James’s case one could argue that he is anyway, in a broad sense, the most revisionary of authors. In his evolved later syntax he is constantly questioning, qualifying, reframing earlier statements, piling clause on clause, making us experience the coils of a character’s uncertain, meditative thought, so that by the end of a sentence we may have twisted and turned till we are some distance from where we started. And in his fictional conceptions he frequently starts from an existing work – one of his own, or of another writer’s – and works variations on it until it has become his own.18 To think of James’s imaginative theory and practice in these revisionary terms is only to follow his own lead. For in the preface to The Golden Bowl, James’s eloquent defense of his process of revision becomes one of his most profound meditations on the nature of writing and of his art. He says, of the obscure inner process involved that generates new words in the place of old, through the mere act of renewed attention: “I could but dream the whole thing over as I went – as I read” ( James 1984b: 1337). If revising is like dreaming, one might suggest, only halfplayfully, that revision has a force of revelation for James equivalent to that of the interpretation of dreams for his contemporary Freud, which Freud called “the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind” (Freud 1977: 769). He calls the discoveries it brought “almost as enlivening, or at least as momentous, as, to a philosophic mind, a sudden large apprehension of the Absolute” ( James 1984b: 1330).

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The Golden Bowl preface, written as the last major act in the long process of preparing the New York Edition, justifies revision through a tour de force of James’s metaphorical imagination, which produces a sequence of ironic, potent metaphors for the relations involved in revision, one of them the parental. James recalls that he long delayed rereading his past works, and that anxiety built up about what he would find when he did, and what might be involved in preparing them for respectable republication. These past works become “the uncanny brood,” and James imagines their appearance in the grand surroundings of the Edition as “a descent of awkward infants from the nursery to the drawing-room.” Revision is here imaged as a mending of “superannuated garments” and a “splash of soap-and-water.” He imagines the Herricklike injunction, “Hands off altogether on the nurse’s part!” ( James 1984b: 1331) – only to dismiss it. More serious is his own critical anxiety about the value of his works. Sometimes, on rereading, the work breaks down; its inner life seems to have leaked out. In such cases, “The old reasons then are too dead to revive; they were not, it is plain, good enough reasons to live” ( James 1984b: 1046). Some of the works omitted from the Edition appear to have been left out on these grounds, though we may wonder if James found them inconvenient for the narrative of his career (as an experimental explorer of consciousness) he was constructing. Some works stand up to James’s demanding rereading, especially the more recent ones, and he is doubled into two selves – and here the doppelganger is not hostile, as he is in “The Jolly Corner.” The other self is “the historian,” the teller of the tale, and there is a miraculous fit of visions, expressed in a pair of satisfying images: Into his very footprints the responsive, the imaginative steps of the docile reader that I consentingly become for him all comfortably sink; his vision, superimposed on my own as an image in cut paper is applied to a sharp shadow on a wall, matches, at every point, without excess or deficiency. ( James 1984b: 1329)

James’s narrative gait now accords with that in the past work: the printed words on the page are presented as “footprints”; the silhouette fits the shadow. Other images offer the repossession of the past work as more like the kind of “resurrection” about which Herrick is so skeptical. James describes the test of rereading as a test of “the buried, the latent life of a past composition” – and whether it will vibrate into activity “at renewal of touch” ( James 1984b: 1335), as if the hand of the artist had supernatural powers. This looks back to the first preface, that to Roderick Hudson, where James had made high, mystical-sounding claims for the effect on the artist of rereading a long-neglected work: It helps him to live back into a forgotten state, into convictions, credulities too early spent perhaps, it breathes upon the dead reasons of things, buried as they are in the texture of the work, and makes them revive, so that the actual appearances and the old motives fall together once more, and a lesson and a moral and a consecrating final light are somehow disengaged. ( James 1984b: 1045–6)

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Belief is recovered here, and the language of religion is, as so often with James, applied to aesthetic processes. In this rhetoric, the work comes to imaginative life again – which is of course the characteristic of successful works of literature, cold material objects that revive only when read. What might seem the crucial question here is whether the author’s “old motives” in initially composing the work are recoverable through rereading, whether a creative (as well as a legal) property over the work persists for its original author into the present. For James, though, the artist’s continuing relation to his or her work is a matter of moral responsibility, an aspect of the vocation: Not to be disconnected, for the tradition of behaviour, he has but to feel that he is not; by his lightest touch the whole chain of relation and responsibility is reconstituted. ( James 1984b: 1340–1)

It is then a “tradition of behaviour,” in which words are taken as seriously as acts; the “renewal of touch” re-establishes a duty as much as a privilege.19 David McWhirter has persuasively argued that what is at stake for James in the New York Edition is less a claim about the essential identity of the self over time than a moral requirement, the necessity of what the philosopher Paul Ricoeur calls “keeping one’s word in faithfulness to a word that has been given” (McWhirter 1995: 15). Part of James’s revelation in revision seems to be that an author’s fictions are justified by faith – the belief of their creator, which is a condition of that of their readers. We may be reminded of Peter Pan, by James’s friend Barrie (first performed in 1904), when the Golden Bowl preface describes the past works, the “blest good stuff,” “sitting up” and saying, “ ‘Actively believe in us and then you’ll see!’ ” ( James 1984b: 1334).20 In the case of works written more than a dozen or so years before, James says, his style and fictional approach have changed so much since that the expression has to change, active revision is needed, and the image of the matching footprints has to change correspondingly: It was, all sensibly, as if the clear matter being still there, even as a shining expanse of snow spread over a plain, my exploring tread, for application to it, had quite unlearned the old pace and found itself naturally falling into another, which might sometimes indeed more or less agree with the original tracks, but might most often, or very nearly, break the surface in other places. ( James 1984b: 1330)

In these cases James’s gait has changed, so although the action itself remains substantially the same (he takes few large-scale liberties with events or plotting in revision), the expression of it becomes often very different (pages on end of The American had to be retyped for the compositors, for example, so heavy did James’s marginal revisions become). And the revelation for James is that the process occurs unconsciously for him in the act of reading, as if it were outside him: he is struck by “the high spontaneity of these deviations and differences, which became thus things not of choice, but

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of immediate and perfect necessity” ( James 1984b: 1330). One of the several intriguing metaphors by which he attempts to convey the way these “deviations” came, came “naturally,” is that of organic growth: the act of revision, the act of seeing it again, caused whatever I looked at on any page to flower before me as into the only terms that honourably expressed it. ( James 1984b: 1332)

And the flower image returns a few pages later to express the spontaneity of the process, the way the revisions seem to come to James from outside himself: The term that superlatively, that finally “renders,” is a flower that blooms by a beautiful law of its own (the fiftieth part of a second so often sufficing it) in the very heart of the gathered sheaf; it is there already, at any moment, almost before one can either miss or suspect it – so that in short we shall never guess, I think, the working secret of the revisionist for whom its colour and scent stir the air but as immediately to be assimilated. ( James 1984b: 1335)

Is this mystification? Not necessarily, for the revision from The American examined earlier – in that it arises by working through the texture and associations and appearance of the words on the page in the original edition – is indeed, one could say, “there already,” “in the very heart of the gathered sheaf.” James’s faith in language, his profound engagement with its associative life, is constantly rewarded in his revisiting of these early texts, where he makes himself uncannily at home. The French poet Paul Valéry, in a hyperbolic statement of aesthetic perfectionism and human inadequacy, famously declared that “Un ouvrage n’est jamais achevé . . . mais abandonné” (“A work of art is never completed . . . but abandoned”) (Valéry 1936: 60). The words of the publishers in describing the New York Edition as “definitive,” and the oppressively lapidary monumentality of their account of it as “an elaborate edifice whose design and execution are absolutely unique in their kind owing to their complete unity of effect,” are not James’s own, and while they provoked a good deal of hostile reaction, fail of justice to the flexibility, the “spontaneity,” the imaginative energy and heroism of James’s process – and his care for the freedom, the necessary imaginative contribution, of the reader. James himself, who had once declared, “Nothing is my last word about anything” ( James 1999: 104), and who recognized himself as an adherent of his brother’s pragmatistic philosophy of constant readjustment and provisionality, chose to summon, late in the Golden Bowl preface, the memory of Balzac, as an arch-reviser and at the same time an energetic, authoritative, fresh creator. Alien to James as the word “definitive” may be, here he suggests the paradoxical correlation between the artist’s endless process of art – the labor, the responsibility, the fun – and the audience’s sense of a satisfactory ending, that works are somehow complete.

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We owe to the never-extinct operation of his sensibility . . . our greatest exhibition of felt finalities, our richest and hugest inheritance of imaginative prose. ( James 1984b: 1336)

“Never-extinct” and “felt finalities”: these terms are interdependent, then. James’s exhaustive and exhausting achievements in the New York Edition – his restless, persistent efforts towards finer, truer expression – command respect, and deserve serious attention, even if they cannot – should not – abolish the questions that will always hang over this extraordinary enterprise.

Notes 1

2

3

4

Michael Anesko’s chapter on “The Eclectic Architecture of the New York Edition” gives an astute and lucid account of the story behind the Edition, laying to rest the notion, originating with Leon Edel, that James himself was the one who decided it should contain twenty-three volumes because that was the number in Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine (Anesko 1986: 141–62). It was Scribner’s who came up with that figure, then switched to twenty-four because of miscalculations about the quantity of material in the volumes. For other accounts of the history of the New York Edition, see the first chapter of Philip Horne (1990); also various chapters in David McWhirter (1995). Michael Anesko wittily notes of the market in collected editions at the end of the nineteenth century that “people were willing to purchase books for many reasons beyond a desire to read them” (Anesko 2003: 76). He wrote again in travel essays about sites he had first discussed decades before (e.g., “Siena Early and Late” (1873 and 1909) in Italian Hours); and in literary essays about authors and works he had originally tackled long before (e.g., George Sand, whom he discussed in 1868, 1876, 1877, 1897, 1902, and 1914). In “The Modern Warning” of that year. In 1888 “The Patagonia” begins with a scene in Boston; in 1899 “Europe” takes place in a Boston suburb. In 1888 James had already written to his friend Grace Norton that “I am

getting to know English life better than American, of which to day I see nothing” (September 30, 1888; James 1999: 207). 5 The cartoon was sketched by Beerbohm on the blank facing page of his copy of Art and The Actor of 1915, in which James revised his 1887 essay on the French actor Coquelin. See the reproduction of the cartoon in McWhirter (1995: 10). 6 Nash (2003: 7); McWhirter (1995). 7 Like “the fell Heinemann” (Horne 1990: 340), who approached Macmillan wanting remuneration from the Edition for his outstanding losses on the James works he had published (see Anesko 1995: 83–4). The grasping, “utterly shabby” Herbert Stone of Chicago, was nearly another: he misrepresented the contractual position and claimed still to hold copyright on In the Cage and What Maisie Knew until Pinker saw him off (Horne 1990: 9–10). 8 For a full account of this affair, see Hicks (1995). 9 The phrase here comes from Elizabeth Jordan, James’s editor at Harper’s Bazar (NowellSmith 1947: 6). His secretary, Theodora Bosanquet, wrote of his “keen grey eyes” (Nowell-Smith 1947: 6); the lively Violet Hunt was stirred by his “deep, wonderful eyes” (Nowell-Smith 1947: 2); his longstanding friend Edmund Gosse even recalled “the intolerable scrutiny of his eyes” (NowellSmith 1947: 5). Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford) characteristically made a vivid, self-

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boosting anecdote of them, implying he had lots of servants and lots of visits from James: “His eyes were singularly penetrating, dark and a little prominent. . . . My servants used to say: ‘It always gives me a turn to open the door for Mr. James. His eyes seems to look you through to the very backbone’ ” (NowellSmith 1947: 8). 10 Nadel (1995) argues that the modernity of the medium in itself declares James a modern artist, and that “photographs act to transport his works from their original date of publication . . . into the present if not the future” (Nadel 1995: 95). This suggests another way in which we might read the photographs as re-visions. Timothy Dow Adams (2000) has a stimulating, informative discussion of the frontispieces. See also Graham (2003) and McWhirter (2006). I am grateful to Tamara Follini, Christopher Horne, and David McWhirter for their kind help with my treatment of Coburn here. 11 In the book’s first chapter, the Prince reflects on “that element of the impenetrable which alone slightly qualified his sense of his good fortune,” and is reminded of Poe’s “story of the shipwrecked Gordon Pym, who, drifting in a small boat further toward the North Pole – or was it the South? – than any one had ever done, found at a given moment before him a thickness of white air that was like a dazzling curtain of light, concealing as darkness conceals, yet of the colour of milk or of snow. There were moments when he felt his own boat move upon some such mystery. The state of mind of his new friends, including Mrs. Assingham herself, had resemblances to a great white curtain” (James 1905: I: 22, 23). James picks up the image later when he says that Adam Verver “had been inscrutably monotonous behind an iridescent cloud. The cloud was his native envelope” ( James 1905: I: 128). 12 In Coburn’s memoirs, the photograph is reproduced more sharply, less impressionistically – as is marked in the clear legibility there – and not in the New York Edition – of the cab number, 9107. If Portland Place is to “generalise itself,” a cab mustn’t be allowed to particularize itself, but must be bedimmed, refined, glorified.

13

14

15

16

17

18 19

20

One of the most erotically charged scenes in the novel (and in this second volume), occurs in a carriage, where Maggie, in close physical proximity to the Prince, and “exquisitely solicited,” to sexual and moral surrender, to which “every throb of her consciousness prompted her,” is tempted to relinquish her plan (James 1905: II: 56, 57). Paul B. Armstrong sees the prefaces, persuasively, as exemplary texts of an open, nondefinitive educative process whereby the reader is indirectly taught how to read James: “The trick is to create an indirect relation between the prefatory document and the main text which suggests kinds of interpretive attitudes without closing off analysis and imagination as a definitive statement would” (Armstrong 1995: 127). The “courage” could also be read as that demanded to go before the Anglo-American public as a votary of fiction as an art. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1995) finds other, further-out, kinds of daring. This is the edition on sheets of which James made his handwritten revisions for the New York Edition; parts of that manuscript survive, and are now in the Houghton Library, Harvard: MS Am 1237.17, HOLLIS number 008742252. There is some evidence that James toyed with the idea of a sequel: in 1898 he wrote to A. C. Benson that “I shall never write a sequel to the P. of an L. . . . It’s all too faint and far away – too ghostly and ghastly” ( James 1920: I: 279). This argument is made more fully in Horne (1989). James enunciates a high ideal in this regard: “we recognize betimes that to ‘put’ things is very exactly and responsibly and interminably to do them. Our expression of them, and the terms on which we understand that, belong as nearly to our conduct and our life as every other feature of our freedom; these things yield in fact some of its most exquisite material to the religion of doing” ( James 1984b: 1340). Compare: “Do you believe?” he cried. / Tink sat up in bed almost briskly to listen to her fate. / She fancied she heard answers in the affirmative, and then again she wasn’t sure. /

Revisions in the New York Edition “What do you think?” she asked Peter. / “If you believe,” he shouted to them, “clap your hands; don’t let Tink die.” ( J. M. Barrie, The Adventures of Peter Pan, ch. 13, “Do You

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References and Further Reading Adams, Timothy Dow (2000). “Material James and James’s material: Coburn’s frontispieces to the New York Edition.” Henry James Review, 21.3: 253–60. Anesko, Michael (1986). “Friction with the Market”: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship. New York: Oxford University Press. Anesko, Michael (1995). “Ambiguous allegiances: Conflicts of culture and ideology in the making of the New York Edition.” In The Construction of Authorship (pp. 77–89). Ed. David McWhirter. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Anesko, Michael (1997). Letters, Fictions, Lives: Henry James and William Dean Howells. New York: Oxford University Press. Anesko, Michael (2003). “Notes towards the redefinition of culture.” In The Culture of Collected Editions (pp. 69–79). Ed. Andrew Nash. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Armstrong, Paul B. (1995). “Reading James’s prefaces and reading James.” In The Construction of Authorship (pp. 125–37). Ed. David McWhirter. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bogardus, Ralph F. (1984). Pictures and Texts: Henry James, A. L. Coburn, and New Ways of Seeing in Literary Culture. Studies in Photography, No. 2. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press. Bosanquet, Theodora (1924). Henry James at Work. London: Hogarth Press. Coburn, Alvin Langdon (1978 [1966]). Alvin Langdon Coburn: Photographer: An Autobiography with over 70 Reproductions of his Works. Ed. Helmut and Alison Gernsheim. New York: Dover. Edel, Leon and Dan H. Laurence (1982). A Bibliography of Henry James: Third Edition, revised with the assistance of James Rambeau. Soho Bibliographies 8. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Freud, Sigmund (1977). The Interpretation of Dreams. Penguin Freud Library, vol. 4. (Trans. James Strachey.) London: Penguin. Graham, Wendy (2003). “Pictures for texts.” Henry James Review, 24.1: 1–26. Herrick, Robert (1923). “A visit to Henry James.” Yale Review, NS 12.4: 724–41, 734; 13.1: 206–8. Herron, Bonnie (1995). “Substantive sexuality: Henry James constructs Isabel Archer as a complete woman in his revised version of The Portrait of a Lady.” Henry James Review, 16: 131–41. Hicks, Priscilla G. (1995). “A turn in the formation of James’s New York Edition: Criticism, the historical record, and the siting of The Awkward Age.” Henry James Review, 16.2: 195–221. Horne, Philip (1989). “Writing and rewriting in Henry James.” Journal of American Studies, 23.3: 357–74. Horne, Philip (1990). Henry James and Revision: The New York Edition. Oxford University Press. Horne, Philip (1996). “Henry James and the economy of the short story.” In Modernist Writers and the Marketplace (pp. 1–35). Ed. Ian Willison, Warwick Gould, and Warren Chernaik. London: Macmillan. Horne, Philip (1998). “Henry James at work: The question of our texts.” In The Cambridge Companion to Henry James (pp. 63–78). Ed. Jonathan Freedman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Horne, Philip (2003). “Henry James and the cultural frame of the New York Edition.” In The Culture of Collected Editions (pp. 95–110). Ed. Andrew Nash. Palgrave: Basingstoke. James, Henry (1882). The Portrait of a Lady. London: Macmillan. James, Henry (1905). The Golden Bowl. 2 vols. New York: Scribner’s.

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James, Henry (1907–9). The Novels and Tales of Henry James [“New York Edition.”] 24 vols. (Two posthumous vols added, 1918.) New York: Scribner’s [London: Macmillan, 1908–9]. James, Henry (1920). The Letters of Henry James. 2 vols. Ed. Percy Lubbock. New York: Scribner’s. James, Henry (1974–84). Henry James Letters. 4 vols. Ed. Leon Edel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. James, Henry (1984a). Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers. Ed. Leon Edel and Mark Wilson. New York: Library of America. James, Henry (1984b). Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition. Ed. Leon Edel and Mark Wilson. New York: Library of America. James, Henry (1987). The Complete Notebooks of Henry James. Ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. James, Henry (1996). “The Jolly Corner.” In Complete Stories 1898–1910 (pp. 697–731). New York: Library of America. James, Henry (1999). Henry James: A Life in Letters. Ed. Philip Horne. London: Allen Lane. Leuschner, Eric (2001). “ ‘Utterly, insurmountably, unsaleable’: Collected editions, prefaces, and the ‘failure’ of Henry James’s New York Edition.” Henry James Review, 22.1: 24–40. Macnaughton, William R. (1992). “The New York Edition of Henry James’s The Tragic Muse.” Henry James Review, 13.1: 19–26. McWhirter, David (ed.) (1995). Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Contributions by John Carlos Rowe, Ross Posnock, Stuart Culver, Sara Blair, Michael Anesko, Ira S. Nadel, Jerome McGann, Paul B. Armstrong, J. Hillis Miller, Julie Rivkin, Carol Holly, Alfred Habegger, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Martha Banta. McWhirter’s The Construction of Authorship contains a useful appendix, a “Chronologi-

cal List of Secondary Works on the New York Edition.” McWhirter, David (2006). “Photo-negativity: The visual rhetoric of James’s and Coburn’s New York Edition frontispieces.” English Language Notes, 44: 101–16. Murtaugh, Daniel J. (1996). “An emotional reflection: Sexual realization in Henry James’s revisions to Roderick Hudson.” Henry James Review, 17.2: 182–203. Nadel, Ira B. (1995). “Visual culture: The photo frontispieces to the New York Edition.” In D. McWhirter (ed.) Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship (pp. 90–108). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Nash, Andrew (2003). “Introduction.” The Culture of Collected Editions (pp. 1–15). Ed. Andrew Nash. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Nowell-Smith, Simon (compiler) (1947). The Legend of the Master. London: Constable. Parker, Hershel (1984). “Henry James ‘In the Wood’: Sequence and significances of his literary labors, 1905–1907.” Nineteenth Century Fiction, 38:4: 492–513. Powers, Lyall H. (1986). “Visions and revisions: The past rewritten.” Henry James Review, 7: 105–16. Rawlings, Peter (ed.) (1993). Critical Essays on Henry James. Aldershot: Scolar Press. Sedgwick, Eve K. (1995). “Shame and performativity: Henry James’s New York Edition prefaces.” In D. McWhirter (ed.) Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship (pp. 206–39). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Segal, Ora (1969). The Lucid Reflector: The Observer in Henry James’s Fiction. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sutherland, John (1996). “Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady: R. H. Hutton’s spoiling hand.” In Is Heathcliff a Murderer? (pp. 176–83). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Valéry, Paul (1933). “Au Sujet du ‘Cimetière Marin’.” Variété, 3. Paris: Gallimard.

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What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Love: Henry James’s Last Words Michael Anesko

When Henry James set about to collect his very last short stories between the cloth covers of a published volume, he had occasion to reprise a role that one of these tales comically anticipates. In “The Velvet Glove,” a rising literary star (whose commercial success stretches from the bookstalls to the stage) finds himself confronted by a temptingly beautiful “lady” writer who works her romantic magic to secure from him a “lovely, friendly, irresistible log-rolling Preface” for her latest contribution to sentimental literature ( James 1996: 754). John Berridge refuses the woman’s shameless request (sending her off with a lip-smacking kiss, no less), but the author himself could not resist the urge to give his own work what he imagined would be a thumping push in the literary marketplace. James didn’t write a preface for The Finer Grain (and wouldn’t have wanted to, having just exhausted himself on eighteen of them for the New York Edition), but he did compose dust jacket copy for the book, at least some of which, apparently, was adopted by his British publisher. In his literary memoir, E. V. Lucas provides us the full text of James’s promotional puff: The Finer Grain consists of a series of five Tales representing in each case a central figure (by which Mr. Henry James is apt to mean a central and a lively consciousness) involved in one of those greater or less tangles of circumstance of which the measure and from which the issue is in the vivacity and the active play of the victim’s or the victor’s sensibility. Each situation is thereby more particularly a moral drama, an experience of the special soul and intelligence presented (the sentient, perceptive, reflective part of the protagonist, in short), but with high emphasis clearly intended on its wearing for the hero or the heroine the quality of the agitating, the challenging personal adventure. In point of fact, indeed, it happens in each case to be the hero who exhibits this finer grain of accessibility to suspense or curiosity, to mystification or attraction – in other words, to moving experience: it is by his connection with its interest in the “grain” woman that his predicament, with its difficult solution, is incurred. And the series of illustrations of how such predicaments may spring up, and even be really characteristic, considerably ranges: from Paris to London and New York, and then back again, to

A Companion to Henry James. Edited by Greg W. Zacharias © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-14042-3

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ambiguous yet at the same time unmistakable English, and ultra-English, ground. (Lucas 1932: 184)1

What few comprehensive assessments there are of this collection of tales typically begin by reprinting this statement and then working out from it to assert that, unique among James’s named story sequences, The Finer Grain distinguishes itself by virtue of an intrinsic principle of design, a unified thematic structure (Martin and Ober 1986; Gage 1988; Lyons 1990). Richard A. Hocks has pointed out the shortcomings of this approach, remarking that “the most salient feature of this supposedly descriptive passage is its rich elliptical abstractionism” – which is to say the same quality we find everywhere in late James, not just in this aggregation of stories (Hocks 1995: 7). Distrust of James’s explicit intention increases when we acknowledge – as he did – that the book’s coming together was a literary happenstance. “It is very difficult indeed to find a title covering at all happily such a fortuitously collected group of tales,” he admitted to his agent, “& I have done the best I can in this case & think the one I have chosen will serve the turn. ‘The Finer Grain’ seems to me a thing to ‘ask for’ ” ( James 1910). No doubt some people did ask for it. But not many. As a reviewer for the Spectator confessed – with a certain degree of awe – he could think of no other living writer with “such a sovereign disregard for the ordinary passports to popularity.” However uncontestable his literary virtues, James nevertheless remained for this reader “the high priest of the inconclusive” (Anon. 1910d). Less charitably, the Nation felt that, at last and all inexorably, James had descended to the level of unconscious self-parody. “Never has his substance seemed so attenuated, his manner so uselessly finicking,” that journal complained (Anon. 1910b). The relentless psychological probing of James’s characters inevitably meant that the reader had to deal with specimens, more or less completely developed, of the type of which – in literature – James himself was “the perfect flower”: specimens (the New York Times was not afraid “to put it brutally”) “whose machinery of feeling and thinking has been refined to a point where it is too delicate for the gross material it has to work with” (Anon. 1910c). What James understood as “moral drama” and “personal adventure” was stillborn for these bookmen, at least. As the Independent summed things up, The Finer Grain too perversely went against the grain of common experience, exhibiting a “feminine use of a masculine mind” that could only be “queer and distracting to normal readers” (Anon. 1910a). With the beast peering out of the closet as early as 1910, it might seem surprising that modern criticism only recently has tried to come to terms with James’s queer circumlocutions. Still, it is helpful to know that even the New York Times beat Eve Sedgwick to the punch by many decades.2 To “the more robust,” that paper laconically noted, reading The Finer Grain would leave a singular impression of its author: “that of a mincing fop with a monocle” (Anon. 1910c). Not every contemporaneous review inclined toward the homophobic sneer. If to the Independent James’s mind was discomfortingly “feminine,” the Chicago Evening Post

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preferred to describe the author’s sensibility as “feline,” imagining him as “a superior animal, choice in its friendships, appreciative but undemonstrative, and preserving always the demeanor of spiritual chastity.” Like a cat’s, James’s curiosity was his signature characteristic, a trait that found its “essential preoccupation in the aesthetics of private relations” (Hackett 1918: 75, 79). The Boston Evening Transcript effloresced even more lyrically about Jamesian ambiguity and the art of ellipsis that his stories exemplified. Anticipating T. S. Eliot’s more famous remark that James (and Hawthorne before him) “perceive by antennae,” this reviewer also noted – with a sense of wonder – that his characters “converse without speech. When they employ words, their speech is a skirting the shores of tumbling seas of meanings unexpressed. So much more is meant than meets the ear that the fifth rereading is as fresh as the first; for, though we walk the same strand, the whole seascape is changed by new winds, other weathers” (Eliot 1918: 51; P., L. 1910). These more generous assessments offer us a way of better understanding what really is at stake in The Finer Grain. What do James’s characters talk about when they talk about love? For all of them, “the agitating, the challenging personal adventure” consists in sounding what James elsewhere had the felicity of calling the “fathomless depths of English equivocation” ( James 1907–9: XXIII: 353) “The Velvet Glove” was the first of what turned out to be five short stories that James composed in order to discharge an obligation to the editor of Harper’s Monthly, who had asked him for a 5,000-word tale. That customary length (“detestable numbers!” James called them) threw the Master into a desperate fit of creativity. Even though he had pared the story down – carved it out, really, from a much longer one – “The Velvet Glove” still stretched to twice the requisite size, and James knew that Harper’s editor Henry Mills Alden wouldn’t take it. Confronting the Procrustean limit of a magazine installment, the author’s letters to his agent betray an almost comic rage. “It is absurd,” James moaned, the labour I have incurred by trying to produce 5000 words of fiction – detestable numbers! – for Alden (Harper), as . . . I had engaged, or promised, to do. I have one consequent thing of 10000 finished, another of about 8000 almost finished & two others started which, or one of which, will be a true 5000. But all of them will be too good & too done to sacrifice – & the two shortest shall presently go to Alden; in fact all 4 ought to. It will make five (with the ‘Velvet Glove’) started for his benefit – a most ridiculous commentary on my ruinously expensive modes of work, & the annoyance of his asking me for things of a form that I can’t but assent to for the money’s sake (so pressed I am now for that article) & of which the interrupting botherment is yet so much greater than the chance or the glory – or the larger profit. ( James 1909)

Despite these grim affirmations, none of the stories that James wrote could be kept within bounds; and, with an irony he must have appreciated, “The Velvet Glove” turned out to be the shortest of them. (“Crapy Cornelia,” the tale that Alden finally

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took, is a tad longer, but the appeal of its New York setting must have assuaged editorial scruples about surplus column inches.) Appropriately enough, through the meteoric career of John Berridge, “The Velvet Glove” immediately presents us with the paradoxical whims of the literary marketplace, where desire and celebrity irresistibly entangle. Though often read as a parable about Art structured in terms of binary opposition between the aesthetic integrity of John Berridge and the commercial hucksterism of “Amy Evans” (the pseudonymous lady novelist),3 “The Velvet Glove” subverts these categories as it playfully constructs them. Borne along by the “affluents of the golden stream” – a torrent of royalties from his bestselling novel (multiplied exponentially by its booming career as a stage play) – John Berridge can afford to indulge, if not discipline, his imagination. Evidence of popularity seldom conveys authorial endorsement in James’s work (“failure” was much more interesting to him), so when we are invited – in the story’s opening line – to share Berridge’s taste of “the sweets of success,” we might do well to approach him and his inferences with skepticism. The fact that The Heart of Gold, already in everyone’s hands, has now enjoyed “incredible luck” as a play (seen by the multitudes not just in New York, London, and Paris but “over German, French, Italian, Russian, Scandinavian foot-lights”) gives Berridge an exaggerated sense of his own importance, even as James’s insistently peripatetic language takes us right over the top. The title of Berridge’s “prodigious ‘hit’ ” not merely reeks of sentiment (what other quality could enable its success “as just a slightly too fat volume” and “just a fifth-act too long play”?); it also betrays the connotatively salacious aroma of prostitution ( James 1996: 732). Berridge’s “ardent and acute” imagination plays him many tricks ( James 1996: 733). Swept by his celebrity into the dazzling current of European society, the writer is approached by a splendid Lord (every inch of him a Romantic hero) who seeks a special favor. Would he, the literary lion, take the trouble to offer a verdict on the work of an aspiring talent (a Princess, no less)? Ordinarily, this would be a tiresome request: already Berridge’s daily post-bag is “distended” by similar appeals from fledgling authors. But when Berridge lays eyes upon the lady-novelist herself, and, through his “inveterate habit of abysmal imputation,” imagines a tantalizingly illicit relation between these aristocratic exemplars, he becomes the victim of his own erotic fantasy ( James 1996: 738). To Berridge, the couple seem to inhabit a world of Olympian – which is to say, less euphemistically, Dionysian – freedom. Spurred by the memory of having encountered the pair before (some months prior he had stumbled into their railway compartment on a sojourn through the Italian countryside), Berridge’s imagination is drawn irresistibly to a presumptive spectacle of sexual transgression:

Who had they been, and what? Whence had they come, whither were they bound, what tie united them, what adventure engaged, what felicity, tempered by what peril, magnificently, dramatically attended? These had been his questions, all so inevitable and so

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impertinent, at the time, and to the exclusion of any scruples over his not postulating an inane honeymoon, his not taking the “tie,” as he should doubtless properly have done, for the mere blest matrimonial. ( James 1996: 739)

With his mind working at this fevered pitch, when the Princess herself renews the supplication (and even invites him to dine in her private salon), Berridge swells at the prospect of his erotic good fortune. En route to her boudoir, they drive through the starlit streets of Paris in her gilded coach (“let us prolong it,” Berridge implores, “let us prolong everything; don’t let us have it over – strange and beautiful as it can only be!”) ( James 1996: 752), and the story reaches its comic climax. What she wants, after all (though Berridge doesn’t see it until the literal words drop from her lips), is the puff, not his person – a flattering introduction for her latest romantic fiction, The Velvet Glove. To recover from this unexpected deflation, Berridge retreats into the closed citadel of “Art.” One can almost hear the clanking chains as he hoists the drawbridge of vulnerability by telling her, all too prosaically, “Your Preface – the only one worth speaking of – was written long ages ago by the most beautiful imagination of man” (James 1996: 758). La belle dame sans merci, the Princess then openly wonders if he deprecates not from professional pride but instead from a deficiency of critical intelligence: “Ah, if you’d only think,” she urges, “if you’d only try – !” Lacerated by this further embarrassment, Berridge needs to have, not only the last word, but also the last gesture. He terminates their conversation by repeating his generic mantra – “You are Romance” – and punctuates the story with graphic force, driving his judgment “intimately, inordinately home, his lips, for a long moment, sealing it, with the fullest force of authority, on her own” ( James 1996: 759). At last Berridge exhausts the language of euphemism. If the velvet glove fits, we must not acquit. None of the other stories in The Finer Grain shares the comic exuberance of “The Velvet Glove.” Misperception and miscommunication similarly abound, but lead instead toward more sorrowful consequences or implications. “Mora Montravers,” for example, again confronts us with a presumptively diametric opposition between the stolid bourgeois moralism of Wimbledon and the erotically suggestive hedonism of la vie bohème. Deliberately forsaking the protection of the relatives who have taken her in, the title character abandons her aunt and uncle in favor of Walter Puddick, “a little painter-man” who has “no pretensions to being a gentleman,” from whom she has taken lessons in the art of drawing and, one imagines, the art of life ( James 1996: 761).4 Her abrupt departure smashes the Traffles’ middle-class decorum into “smithereens,” occasioning curious errands for poor Sidney on behalf of his “anxious, conscientious wife” Jane, who wants to bribe the notorious couple into respectability by offering them a financial settlement – £450 a year – if only they take proper vows ( James 1996: 761, 760). Such stark contrasts (reminiscent of The Ambassadors) work to invite unanticipated ambiguities, especially in the mind of uncle Sidney, whose own artistic career (he, too, is a painter of sorts) suddenly strikes him as pallid and lifeless. Returning from his first failed mission (a visit to Puddick’s studio to rescue

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a damsel not in any particular distress), Sidney cannot help contrasting the “polish and poverty” of his own workplace with the signs of life he has witnessed there. The visual survey of his own studio is sadly sobering. “Spotless it might be, unlike any surface or aspect presented under the high hard Puddick north-light, since it showed no recording trace, no homely smear – since it had had no hour of history” ( James 1996: 764). Again, like The Ambassadors’ Lambert Strether, Traffle begins to interrogate the cost of presumptive virtue and the diminished range of experience of which he now becomes aware. “What do we know about the sense of life,” he asks his wife, “when it breaks out with real freedom? It has never broken out here, my dear, for long enough to leave its breath on the window-pane” ( James 1996: 766). Such sensuous solicitations of metaphor are too much for Jane, who recoils from her husband’s “choice of terms” ( James 1996: 769). To her the choices – and the words – are brutally simple: why should they not insist upon “decency”?; what possibly can redeem her niece’s “disgrace”?; what other conclusion can there be?: Mora is a “monster” ( James 1996: 766, 765, 769). A prisoner of his wife’s narrow field of discourse, Traffle yearns to break free through sympathetic engagement with Mora, with Puddick – with anyone, that is, but Jane. Attaching a name to Mora’s presumed transgression seems less important to Jane than covering it up, averting a Wimbledon scandal. When Puddick arrives to protest her innocence, Sidney cannot help admiring his pluck. Taken back by Jane’s sordid bribe of respectability – “Is what you want me to understand then that you’ll handsomely pay her if she marries me? Is it to tell me that that you asked me to come?” he incredulously inquires ( James 1996: 780) – Puddick wins Sidney’s respect even as Jane’s merciless jibes at last bring “a pair of hot tears” to his eyes. “They stood for queer, deep things, assuredly, these tears[,]” Sidney reflects, “they spoke portentously, since that was her note, of wonderful Mora; but there was an indelicacy in the pressure that had thus made the source of them public” ( James 1996: 784–5). Embarrassed by his wife’s rhetorical assault (and his own silent, squirming complicity in it), Traffle tenderly escorts the young man out, expressing his camaraderie by putting an arm across his shoulder, patting him on the back, and giving voice to sympathetic words. Vicariously admiring Puddick as a man of the world, Traffle wants to express a kind of homosocial brotherhood with him. “For us only one kind of irregularity is possible,” he has said (rather wistfully) to his wife, “for them, no doubt, twenty kinds” (James 1996: 767). The tell-tale ambiguity of pronoun reference here works to create a kind of erotic penumbra that hovers at the margins – if not at the very center – of James’s story. “Them” might be only Puddick and Mora; just as fluidly it might refer to anyone outside the restrictive boundary of the Traffles’ heteronormative Wimbledon world. Sidney’s estrangement from the categorical moral imperatives of that world invites him to seek some kind of accommodation beyond it, but James’s tale does not afford him (or us) that comfort. While Mora does appear before a magistrate to enact a civil marriage to Puddick, thereby to secure for the artist Jane’s yearly £450,

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just as promptly, she then seeks to divorce him, freeing her to pursue higher social prey in the aristocratic shape of Sir Bruce Bagley, Baronet. Discarded and even more socially dingy, Puddick now attracts the consoling attentions of none other than Jane Traffle, whose sympathy for the young painter seems to effect a kind of somersault within her previously constricted moral compass. “Lord, the fun some people did have!” Traffle, at the close, can only exclaim: “Even Jane, with her conscientious new care – even Jane, unmistakably, was in for such a lot.” A lot from which Sidney, we freely assume, will be excluded. The layered ironies of James’s progressive revelations about the endless exchangeability of affection smother the story’s comic propensity (Reeve 1997: 154). More alone than ever, Traffle stares out the window, watching the approach of evening, held, ever fast, by “the vague grey prospect” of impending gloom. Even as his thoughts stray once more to the image of Sir Bruce and Mora (Traffle speculates – salaciously – “how far perhaps even they had got by that time”) ( James 1996: 817), one can only wonder if the wholly vicarious life really is worth living. Hugh Stevens usefully reminds us that in asking what James avoids in his fiction, “reticence should not be equated with timidity” (Stevens 1998: 125). That observation has especial relevance to “A Round of Visits,” a story in which characters stammer, talk past each other, or suspend their speech at every turn. A melodramatic tale about the exposure of fiduciary malfeasance, “A Round of Visits” concerns itself less with the nameable facts and figures of financial loss than with the psychological implications of personal betrayal. Mark Monteith has come back from Europe to New York to confront his absconding third-cousin, school-fellow and later college classmate – the “so beautifully good-looking,” “so charming and clever and frank” Phil Bloodgood ( James 1996: 898) – not in hope of recovering his money, but of redeeming his wounded pride and interrogating the other’s motives. The swindler’s other victims, all chattering women, preoccupy themselves exclusively with the raw vulnerability of their leisure class status, even as they are compelled to display what remains of their wealth (as Veblen trenchantly understood) in the floridly artificial world of Manhattan hotel life. Mrs. Folliott knows how to count her losses, but nothing else; and Monteith is repulsed by her “vulgarity of analysis and . . . incapacity for the higher criticism” of the fate that has befallen them ( James 1996: 901). From another female acquaintance, Florence Ash, Monteith receives no comfort either; her talk is only of herself, and the abuse she has suffered from a treacherous husband (a man whose adulterous liaisons include, almost comically, dear financially denuded Mrs. Folliott). Dispirited and eager for some kind of metaphysical companionship, Monteith makes his way to the uptown apartment of another boyhood friend, Newton Winch, of whose recent distress and illness he has heard from an all-too-talkative luncheon companion earlier that day. Inexplicably, some variety of religious experience illumines Monteith’s consciousness as he trudges northward through the snow-filled streets, an almost sacred recognition that his purpose in coming back to New York is not to voice his own discontents but to relieve others of theirs. “Providence had, on some obscure

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system, chosen this very ridiculous hour to save him from cultivation of the sin of selfishness, the obsession of egotism, and was breaking him to its will by constantly directing his attention to the claims of others” ( James 1996: 909). The promise of some kind of genuine verbal communion seems imminent. Complicating Monteith’s new awareness of his role as a kind of spiritual confessor is the fact that Newton Winch seems to have anticipated an equivalent role for himself, for he greets his old acquaintance with words of unexpected consideration. “See here, you know,” Winch immediately says, “you must be ill, or have had a bad shock, or some beastly upset: are you very sure you ought to have come out?” Monteith is not prepared for magnanimity from a man he only remembers as having been “coarse” and “common”: on the spot he must recalibrate his estimate and the terms of their renewed relation. “Why, how do you know? How can you?” he openly wonders ( James 1996: 911–12). A kind of uncanny reciprocity rapidly establishes itself, as each verbally ministers to the other’s perceived inward hurt: “it was indeed for some minutes next as if each tried to see which could accuse the other of the greater miracle of penetration” ( James 1996: 913). Haltingly, certain facts and inner secrets come to the surface of their speech, encouraged, too, by intimate gestures of touch. When Monteith admits that he would like to confront Bloodgood face to face, Winch must have another answer. “You would go to him – in kindness?” “Well – to understand.” “To understand how he could swindle you?” “Well,” Mark kept on, “to try and make out with him how, after such things – !” But he stopped; he couldn’t name them. It was as if his companion knew. “Such things as you’ve done for him of course – such services as you’ve rendered him.” “Ah, from far back. If I could tell you,” our friend vainly wailed – “if I could tell you!” Newton Winch patted his shoulder. “Tell me – tell me!” “The sort of relation, I mean; ever so many things of a kind – !” Again, however, he pulled up; he felt the tremor of his voice. “Tell me, tell me,” Winch repeated with the same movement. (James 1996: 917)

The depths of English equivocation don’t get much more fathomless than this. Edging up to the abyss of the unnamable, the two men are locked in an embrace of closeted euphemism. Everything points to a shared and secret past between Monteith and Bloodgood, services rendered and things done, the names of which cannot be voiced. As one critic innocently has observed, Monteith’s conversation is like “a dance of courtship, an alternation of veiled advance and retreat that Winch, from entirely different motives, is glad to participate in” (Purdy 1969: 425). At last Monteith discovers that Winch, too, has fleeced his friends and partners but, unlike Bloodgood, intends to face the consequences. When Monteith absents the room to answer the entrance bell (the police finally have come), Winch raises a revolver to his temple and pulls

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the trigger. “Don’t you think, sir, you might have prevented it?” one of the officers asks Monteith. To which he can only answer, “I really think I must practically have caused it” ( James 1996: 923–4). Outwardly, “A Round of Visits” resembles a lurid criminal melodrama; beneath the surface of its circumlocutions, it becomes a grim parable of outing. Several critics have noted that the middle-aged protagonist of “Crapy Cornelia,” White-Mason, is the quintessential Jamesian hero: a (relatively) poor, sensitive gentleman blessed with a consciousness “subject to fine intensification and wide enlargement” ( James 1984: 67). At the age of forty-eight, the dilettantish cosmopolite has come back to New York for marriage and money, to request the bejeweled hand of Mrs. Worthingham, a much younger widow endowed with “rings and brooches and bangles” ( James 1996: 822). Interrupted intention is the theme of the tale, however, as White-Mason can never quite bring himself to voice his proposal. For some reason, he cannot escape “the charm of procrastination”; indirectly, we learn that “the other time, the last time” the question again has lapsed (this time “through the irritating and persistent . . . presence of others”), suggesting a whole series of past occasions when he has failed to translate desire into speech ( James 1996: 818–19). The present occasion is no different as, once again in her drawing room, he discovers their privacy compromised by “the presence of a third and quite superfluous person, a small black insignificant but none the less oppressive stranger” ( James 1996: 822–3). Utterly plain and unadorned – in stark contrast to Mrs. Worthingham’s “rococo curves and convolutions” – Cornelia Rasch is an emblem of old New York, the world of White-Mason’s past; she is the relic of a simpler, less vulgar and ostentatious society ( James 1996: 822). She has known White-Mason from long ago, and their renewed acquaintance, so unexpected, inevitably results in “the queer miscarriage of his adventure”; once again his offer of marriage is deferred ( James 1996: 828). With its contrast of manners and money, “Crapy Cornelia” might seem to be a page that James ripped from Edith Wharton’s playbook, borrowing a theme already so brilliantly developed in The House of Mirth (1905). As in that novel, the moral erosion occasioned by the avalanche of fortune has transformed New York’s social landscape. “In his time,” White-Mason reflects, when he was young or even when he was only but a little less middle-aged, the best manners had been the best kindness, and the best kindness had mostly been some art of not insisting on one’s luxurious differences, of concealing rather, for common humanity, if not for common decency, a part at least of the intensity or the ferocity with which one might be “in the know.” ( James 1996: 829)

Such thematic parallels, fairly obvious ones at that, have tended to obscure the story’s other affinities, for the pattern of White-Mason’s curiously halting life aligns him squarely with another more widely recognized Jamesian figure: John Marcher in “The Beast in the Jungle.”

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As in that story, forms of knowledge are psychologically paramount in this later tale; at least one critic has affirmed that, in essence, “Crapy Cornelia” unfolds as “a set scene in which two characters are able to carry on, because of their intelligence, what amounts to a courting in word-play, word-play involving one word” – the verb to know (Purdy 1967: 148). Just as important, however, is that fact that White-Mason’s verbal courtship of Cornelia Rasch ends nowhere – or, rather, sequesters them in a kind of sterile utopia of memoried association. At best they are “conscious, ironic, pathetic survivors together of a dead and buried society” ( James 1996: 833). What, then, does Cornelia Rasch know about White-Mason? That he has been turned down by several other women in the past? That his courtship of Mary Cardew (“in the autumn of ’68”) so closely parallels his present case with Mrs. Worthingham ( James 1996: 838)? That, even after thirty years, he can inspire adoration from a woman that he cannot bring himself to reciprocate? That he plays a flirtatious game to disguise reality from others – and even from himself? As surely as May Bartram has fathomed the truth of John Marcher’s secret life – that the beast in the jungle (or the closet) is destined never to spring – Cornelia Rasch has plumbed the psycho-sexual meaning of White-Mason’s eventless history. “But what – since you can’t marry me! – can you do with me?” she finally asks. “Well, he seemed to have it all. ‘Everything.’ ” Their honeymoon of talk is far from over. “I shall turn up here – well, daily,” he anticipates. “I can live with you just this way,” he says, dropping into a chair by her fire. “I can’t give you up. It’s very curious. . . . That’s my taste. I’m old” ( James 1996: 845–6). No doubt, like Prufrock, he shall also wear his trousers rolled. James tests the limits of euphemism in the very first paragraph of “The Bench of Desolation,” as vulgar intimations, distilled by the alembic of the law, reduce themselves into ugly, awful words: She had practically, he believed, conveyed the intimation, the horrid, brutal, vulgar menace, in the course of their last dreadful conversation, when, for whatever was left him of pluck or confidence – confidence in what he would fain have called a little more aggressively the strength of his position – he had judged best not to take it up. But this time there was no question of not understanding, or of pretending he didn’t; the ugly, the awful words, ruthlessly formed by her lips, were like the fingers of a hand that she might have thrust into her pocket for extraction of the monstrous object that would serve best for – what should he call it? – a gage of battle. ( James 1996: 847)

The “vulgar menace” is the threat of a lawsuit, about to be prosecuted by Herbert Dodd’s betrothed for breach of their engagement contract. Anxious to avoid the publicity of the law courts, Dodd abjectly agrees to a judgment of £400 and loses his business in the scramble to raise the money (at the end of six months he manages to pony up £270 but then, ruined and exhausted, calls it quits). Meanwhile, this purveyor of second-hand books and faded champion of fine scruples marries another

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woman, by whom he fathers two ill-fated daughters. The grim pressure of poverty takes all of his family to the grave, leaving Dodd at the end of ten years broken and resentful. One resource he has is a seaward vista at the far end of Properley’s shoreline Promenade, the central feature of the provincial town in which he lives. From the bleakness of his desk job at the Gas Works, he wends his way to his “bench of desolation,” from which point he ritually takes in “the immortal flush of the westward sky” and the gray-green eternity of the sea. “He might in these sessions,” we are told, “have been counting again and still recounting the beads, almost all worn smooth, of his rosary of pain – which had for the fingers of memory and the recurrences of wonder the same felt break of the smaller ones by the larger that would have aided a pious mumble in some dusky altar-chapel” ( James 1996: 859–60). How much James invites us to pity this afflicted sensibility! Revisiting this haunt one day, Herbert Dodd spies (from a distance) a severe, refined woman occupying his familiar seat at Land’s End, and apprehends that she, in fact, is waiting for him. His surprise at seeing Kate Cookham (she of the vulgar menace) and the awkward reestablishment of relations between them – the matter of a fortnight – makes up the final half of the story. Kate has returned to repay the sum Dodd has forfeited (with interest – and then some). Her magnanimity springs not from afflicted conscience but rather, as she declares, from deliberate calculation. She has squeezed the money out of Dodd precisely to husband it for this occasion: for its multiplied return and (she hopes) the resumption of their intimacy. At a critical moment of conversion (or, possibly, surrender), Dodd accepts not only the money but, more pointedly, Kate’s version of herself, her story, and of his. The whole tale spins out from Dodd’s consciousness, but Kate turns out to possess a remarkable kind of omniscience, having seen and understood all of his pain vicariously, and having come now to redeem it – and him – by the example of her own humility. James’s central character – assuming it’s Herbert Dodd – does not, in the end, impress the reader as possessing the finer grain or possibly any grain (or grit) whatsoever. Like many of James’s other “heroes” (one has to bracket the term with inverted commas), Dodd finally comes across as “pathologically timid,” refined in a way that unfits or unmans him for right action (Tintner 2000: 214). Not once – but twice – in this tale, Dodd breaks down in tears. In the story’s final paragraph, having submitted to Kate’s will, Dodd can only lean forward on the bench, “dropping his elbows to his knees and pressing his head on his hands. So he stayed, saying nothing; only, with the sense of her own sustained, renewed and wonderful action, knowing that an arm had passed round him and that he was held” ( James 1996: 895). Like “The Beast in the Jungle,” with which it shares certain psychological affinities, “The Bench of Desolation” presents us with a protagonist who unwittingly has constructed the castrating fate that envelops him. At the very moment when he and Kate are reunited after the long interval of dead and dreary years, Dodd admits to himself, “Yes, he had come back there to flop, by long custom, upon the bench of desolation as the man in the

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whole place, precisely, to whom nothing worth more than tuppence could happen,” deliberately echoing the dreadful formulation of John Marcher’s empty life history ( James 1996: 867).5 We know that Dodd has always had a taste for society fiction; and without that more-or-less discriminating literariness, maintained long after he has abandoned his bookshop, he would not appreciate the distinction of being invited to join Kate Cookham for tea at five in the afternoon the following day. He didn’t so much as answer it – though he could scarcely believe his ears. To-morrow was Sunday, and the proposal referred, clearly, to the custom of “five-o’clock” tea, known to him only by the contemporary novel of manners and the catchy advertisement of table-linen. He had never in his life been present at any such luxurious rite, but he was offering practical indifference to it as a false mark of his sense that his social relation had already risen to his chin. ( James 1996: 870)

Their next-day meeting in Kate’s sitting room at the Royal (the most conspicuously up-scale hotel on the Promenade) immediately impresses Dodd with a solid sense of her prosperity. As if to confirm the security of what she intends to offer him, Kate dismisses another visitor (“a swell,” as Dodd quickly sees, “moustachioed, waistcoated, necktied to the highest pitch, with an effect of chains and rings, of shining teeth in a glassily monocular smile”) in order to give priority to his appointed time ( James 1996: 873). The fact that Captain Roper resents this cool treatment, has obviously been set up for sacrifice, appeals irresistibly to Herbert Dodd’s attenuated sense of self-worth. His trespass across class boundaries can only signify to him as an adventure, not least because his exposure to British literature has conditioned him to interpret it in these terms. His reading has not prepared him, however, for the action that follows. Uncertain of Kate’s real motives, Dodd has come not merely to mollify class envy but also to satisfy his intensely aroused curiosity. Yes, she has come back to show him she has money; yes, she has taken rooms in the best hotel to confirm it; but mostly she has come back to make him understand all her prior perfidy: “I did it for you – I did it for you!” she exclaims ( James 1996: 876). Kate’s elliptical language of compensation and exchange confounds Dodd, who (for several pages) interrogates her to discover her true meaning and purpose. Exasperatedly, Kate blurts out, “Can you imagine nothing, or can’t you conceive – ?”; but, having exposed the limitations of Dodd’s victimized self-knowledge, she leaves this question hanging in the air and resorts to her previous asseveration: “It was for you, it was for you!” At last Dodd catches a glimmer. “Am I to understand that you offer to repay me?” he asks. “ ‘I offer to repay you with interest, Herbert Dodd’ – and her emphasis of the great word was wonderful” ( James 1996: 878). The great word – interest – almost clinches the case, but still Dodd must struggle to accommodate the adequacy of proffered compensation to the suffering he has endured. The ghostly image of his dead wife rises before him, haunting him not

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with the prospect of infidelity to her memory but rather with a question that she had thrust at him more than once in their brief, blighted married life. Why had he not contested Kate Cookham’s claim? Why had he simply surrendered? His pitiable answer all along had been that his instinctive refinement and gentlemanly reserve constrained him from lowering himself in such a manner. But now he needs to know the truth from Kate. “Can you give me your word of honour that I mightn’t, under decent advice, have defied you?” It made her turn very white; but now that she had said what she had said she could still hold up her head. “Certainly you might have defied me, Herbert Dodd.” “They would have told me you had no legal case?” Well, if she was pale she was bold. “You talk of decent advice – !” She broke off, there was too much to say, and all needless. What she said instead was: “They would have told you I had nothing.” “I didn’t so much as ask,” her sad visitor remarked. “Of course you didn’t so much as ask.” “I couldn’t be so outrageously vulgar,” he went on. “I could, by God’s help!” said Kate Cookham. ( James 1996: 882)

It’s not every day that outrageous vulgarity receives Providential endorsement in James’s fiction, but Dodd’s eventual acceptance of Kate as “the mistress of his fortune” ( James 1996: 854) would seem to vindicate the masterful Hand (scarcely invisible) of the Market. “I’ve brought everything fivefold back to you,” she announces. The perspiration broke out on his forehead. “Everything’s mine?” he quavered as for the deep piercing pain of it. “Everything!” said Kate Cookham. So it told him how she had loved him. ( James 1996: 881)

The sharp recognition that his whole life has proceeded from a dreadful mistake – and that she has known it, all the while – reduces him once more to tears. Groping for the accoutrements of his shabby gentility (his hat, his stick, and “his new tan-coloured gloves – they had cost two-and-thruppence and would have represented sacrifices”), Dodd tiptoes out of her room to spend a fateful week in deliberation ( James 1996: 883).6 Dodd’s pained ambivalence is almost heart-breakingly palpable as he begins “to look his extraordinary fortune a bit straighter in the face and see it confess itself at once a fairy-tale and a nightmare” (James 1996: 883). Again and again he returns to the bench of desolation, weighing alternatives, revisiting cruel episodes of the past, trying to form the resolve to answer Kate negatively and preserve “what he would have called his self-respect” (James 1996: 884). After seven days pass, Dodd makes his way down the Promenade on a perfect Sunday morning, avoiding church almost

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as if to tempt the fate that awaits him on the bench of desolation. Kate is there, he discovers, anticipating his approach; and considerable suspense builds as he wonders what exactly she will say to break their weeklong silence. The answer is almost breathtakingly Philistine: “There are twelve hundred and sixty pounds, to be definite, but I have it all down for you – and you’ve only to draw.” Kate’s snare, it turns out, is not so much material as verbal; what captivates Dodd is not so much the sum thus specified but rather the suggestive resonance of her final infinitive: They lost themselves, these words, rare and exquisite, in the wide bright genial medium and the Sunday stillness, but even while that occurred and he was gaping for it she was herself there, in her battered ladylike truth, to answer for them, to represent them, and, if a further grace than their simple syllabled beauty were conceivable, almost embarrassingly to cause them to materialise. Yes, she let her smart and tight little reticule hang as if it bulged, beneath its clasp, with the whole portentous sum, and he felt himself glare again at this vividest of her attested claims. She might have been ready, on the spot, to open the store to the plunge of his hand, or, with the situation otherwise conceived, to impose on his pauperised state an acceptance of alms on a scale unprecedented in the annals of street charity. Nothing so much counted for him, however, neither grave numeral nor elegant fraction, as the short, rich, rounded word that the breeze had picked up as it dropped and seemed now to blow about between them. “To draw – to draw?” Yes, he gaped it as if it had no sense; the fact being that even while he did so he was reading into her use of the term more romance than any word in the language had ever had for him. ( James 1996: 889)

The erotics of money so powerfully conveyed by James’s prose reveal that the commensurability of exchange value can almost never be fixed. Kate’s word becomes flesh – or at least a letter of credit – which Dodd takes in his hand, “appearing embarrassed with it, nervously twisting and flapping it, yet thus publicly retaining it” ( James 1996: 889). Eventually, Dodd slips the envelope into the inner pocket of his coat, over his heart, “letting it settle there securely,” a gesture that confirms his reconciliation to Kate Cookham’s love. “You’re too wonderful,” he simply says ( James 1996: 892). Well, maybe she is. In this contest of nightmare and fairy tale, victory becomes a matter of suppression. Having decided upon a future together, they must close the past irrevocably behind them. Dodd’s curiosity lingers about the hidden means and motives for Kate’s extraordinary patience and her uncanny ability to multiply his modest principle. “You can’t think I can have made so much money in the time and been honest?” she anticipates; but, predictably, Dodd’s gentlemanly residuum comes to the rescue: “Oh, you’ve been honest!” he allows. A series of clipped interrogations follows – culminating in Dodd’s hopeful question, “Oh, we can talk then?” – but Kate terminates the conversation with absolute foreclosure: “ ‘Never,’ she all oddly replied. ‘Never,’ said Kate Cookham” ( James 1996: 894). Like the pressure of Maggie Verver’s final embrace (in the last paragraph of The Golden Bowl), Kate’s intent is to

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bury what must remain unspoken. Herbert Dodd apparently accepts the force of her exclusions, but the reader is not similarly constrained. Just how did Kate Cookham come by that £1,260? We know she has served for a time as a governess, taught an occasional pupil, but her formal education can only have been modest. Shortly after she levels her claim against Dodd, she disappears into the distant shadows of London, where the systematic appreciation of his capital begins. Her testimony on this point is, to say the least, cryptic: “I’ve led my life, which has been an affair, I assure you” ( James 1996: 881). Since Herbert Dodd seems least capable of understanding the literal, it’s no wonder he doesn’t catch the note of this remark, either. How else but through a kind of upper-crust prostitution could she have brought back Dodd’s money fivefold in ten years, and supported herself in the meantime? What really can explain Captain Roper’s presence in her hotel room? (“He’s an acquaintance, but a bore,” is all Kate admits. “He turned up yesterday, but I didn’t invite him, and I had said to him before you came in that I was expecting a gentleman with whom I should wish to be alone”) ( James 1996: 874). Why, in the midst of their own tense conversation at the Royal, should Dodd find himself at the window, looking down to see “a man he knew, Charley Coote, outside on the Parade, under favour of the empty hour and one of the flaring lamps, making up to a young woman with whom (it stuck out grotesquely in his manner) he had never before conversed” ( James 1996: 880)? This last detail is all the more telling, because James has already given us reason to suspect that Herbert Dodd is not altogether the patron saint of genteel suffering that he pretends to be. He obviously knows a pick-up when he sees one; and, for all of its sacred aura, his bench of desolation has witnessed more than one assignation: For himself his seat, the term of his walk, was consecrated; it had figured to him for years as the last (though there were others, not immediately near it, and differently disposed, that might have aspired to the title); so that he could invidiously distinguish as he approached, make out from a distance any accident of occupation, and never draw nearer while that unpleasantness lasted. What he disliked was to compromise on his tradition, whether for a man, a woman or a connoodling couple; it was to idiots of this last composition he most objected, he having sat there, in the past, alone, having sat there interminably with Nan [his wife], having sat there with – well, with other women when women, at hours of ease, could still care or count for him, but having never shared the place with any shuffling or snuffling stranger. ( James 1996: 863)

The effect of this disclosure is to erase the moral distinction that Dodd seeks to claim for himself: even educated fleas do it, and he’s been guilty of connoodling, too. On the bench of desolation Dodd has schooled Kate Cookham in the beauty of south-coast sunsets, “as he had taught her plenty of other things, but that was a different matter” ( James 1996: 853). Sequestered places naturally come at a premium in a town called

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“Properley.” The proper ending of “The Bench of Desolation” – affirming hallowed sacrifice, renunciation, and reconciliation – cannot completely efface the intimation of kinds of carnal (and capital) exchange that, euphemistically, and all improperly, shuffle or snuffle beneath the surface of James’s text. In compiling The Finer Grain, Henry James could have taken inspiration from another American writer whose work he belatedly came to admire. At the conclusion of the first edition of Walt Whitman’s “Calamus” poems (1860), the poet offers us a discreet confession of feeling and intention: Here my last words, and the most baffling, Here the frailest leaves of me, and yet my strongest lasting, Here I shade down and hide my thoughts – I do not expose them, And yet they expose me more than all my other poems.

Likewise, James’s last words on the subject of human affection can tell us much – even when they tell us, literally, nothing. By cloaking his intentions in the language of euphemism and deliberate indirection, James all the more compellingly can explore what that early critic astutely called “the aesthetics of private relations.” Necessarily, unavoidably, James’s fiction can educate us in the not always flattering art of power. But if we remain attentive to less strident motives, attuned to the rustling of his frailest leaves, he can also school us in the power of art to expose – and express – hidden depths of human feeling.

Notes 1

This text is also reprinted in James (1987: 577). The rear cover of the Methuen edition dust jacket prints this statement: “ ‘The Finer Grain’ consists of a series of five stories, the central figure in each is involved, as Mr. James loves his characters to be, in one of the tangles of highly civilized existence. By the ‘finer grain’ the author means, in his own phrase, ‘a peculiar accessibility to surprise, to curiosity, to mystification or attraction – in other words, to moving experience.’ It is needless to add that the book exhibits the most delicate comedy throughout.” Apparently excerpted from James’s description, the blurb substitutes “accessibility to surprise” in place of suspense, as given in Lucas’s text. The author would like to thank the staff of the Special Collections Department at the University of Virginia Alderman Library for providing a photocopy

2

of the dust jacket that encloses their first edition of The Finer Grain (PS2116.F5 1910c). Critics generally acknowledge that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s essay “The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic” (first published in 1986) ushered in a new phase of literary criticism dedicated to exploring that writer’s work through the lens of queer theory. Her title plays with the object of analysis, James’s late tale “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903), the protagonist of which (John Marcher) wastes his life waiting for an onrush of overwhelming feeling (presumably love) for which he feels he is predestinated but which never materializes, despite the companionship of a woman who has agreed to wait and watch with him. Only after her death does Marcher recognize that repression – with all its crush-

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4

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ing emptiness – has been his fate, a fate that both epitomizes and expresses the closeted homosexuality of James and can also be discovered in the careers of many of his other male characters. See Yeazell (1986: 147–86). A biographical variant of this approach reads the story as a kind of inside joke that James (Berridge) played at the expense of Edith Wharton (“Amy Evans”). See, for example, Tintner (1975) and Blackall (1985). Neither approach takes into account the more skeptical reading of Stein (1974). Technically, Mora Montravers is a more distant relation, as she is the orphaned daughter of Jane Traffle’s half-sister. Cf. “The Beast in the Jungle”: “The fate he had been marked for he had met with a vengeance – he had emptied the cup to the lees; he had been the man of his time, the man, to whom nothing on earth was to have happened” (James

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1996: 540). Whereas in the earlier tale James abruptly intervenes to supply Marcher with his meaning (he’s too stupid to have figured it out), the indirect narration of “The Bench of Desolation” consistently addresses us as the expression of Dodd’s reflective consciousness. Indeed, the passage just cited can almost be seen as an introverted example of James’s endless penchant for revision, only in this case the colloquial emendations (“flop,” “the man in the whole place,” “nothing worth more than tuppence”) to the text of the earlier story come not, so to speak, from the author but from this later principal character (who seems to have read “The Beast in the Jungle”). 6 As James Griffiths rightly points out, “The frequent conditionals of James’s narration at once magnanimously participate in Herbert’s creative imagination, and detachedly insist on his wrong-headedness” (Griffiths 1993: 50).

References and Further Reading Anon. (1910a). Review of The Finer Grain by Henry James. Independent, November 17: 1091. Anon. (1910b). Review of The Finer Grain by Henry James. Nation, 91 (December 1): 522–3. Anon. (1910c). Review of The Finer Grain by Henry James. New York Times, November 5: 614. Anon. (1910d). Review of The Finer Grain by Henry James. Spectator, 105: 864–5. Blackall, J. F. (1985). “Henry and Edith: ‘The velvet glove’ as an ‘in’ joke.” Henry James Review, 7: 21–5. Eliot. T. S. (1918). “Henry James.” Little Review, 5: 44–53. Gage, R. P. (1988). Order and Design: Henry James’ Titled Story Sequences. New York: Peter Lang. Griffiths, J. (1993). “James’s stories and his characters: A reading of ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ and ‘The Bench of Desolation.’ ” Cambridge Quarterly, 22: 43–59. Hackett, F. (1918). Horizons: A Book of Criticism. New York: B. W. Huebsch. Reprints review of The Finer Grain that first appeared in the Chicago Evening Post, December 2, 1910.

Hocks, R. A. (1995). “Henry James’s incipient poetics of the short story sequence: The Finer Grain (1910).” In J. G. Kennedy (ed.) Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and Fictive Communities (pp. 1–18). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. James, H. (1907–9). The Golden Bowl, The Novels and Tales of Henry James, 24 vols. The New York Edition. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. James, H. (1909). Letter from Henry James to James B. Pinker, January 3, 1909 (Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale). Quoted by permission of the Henry James Estate. James, H. (1910). Letter from Henry James to James B. Pinker, May 3, 1910 (Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale). Quoted by permission of the Henry James Estate. James, H. (1984). The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces. Ed. R. P. Blackmur. Intro. R. W. B. Lewis. Boston: Northeastern University Press. James, H. (1987). The Complete Notebooks of Henry James. Ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers. New York: Oxford University Press.

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James, H. (1996). Complete Stories, 1898–1910. New York: Library of America. Lucas. E. V. (1932). Reading, Writing and Remembering: A Literary Record. New York: Harper and Brothers. Lyons, R. S. (1990). “Ironies of loss in The Finer Grain.” Henry James Review, 11: 202–13. Martin, W. R. and Ober, W. U. (1986). “Introduction.” The Finer Grain (pp. v–xxix). Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints. P., L. [Price, (Junius) Lucien] (1910). Review of The Finer Grain by Henry James. Boston Evening Transcript, December 21: 20. Purdy, S. B. (1969). “Conversation and awareness in Henry James’s ‘A Round of Visits.’ ” Studies in Short Fiction, 6: 421–32. Purdy, S. B. (1967). “Language as art: The ways of knowing in Henry James’s ‘Crapy Cornelia.’ ” Style, 1: 139–49. Reeve, N. H. (1997). “Living up to the name: ‘Mora Montravers.’ ” In N. H. Reeve (ed.)

Henry James: The Shorter Fiction, Reassessments (pp. 138–55). New York: Macmillan/St. Martin’s. Sedgwick, E. K. (1990). Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stein. A. F. (1974). “The hack’s progress: A reading of James’s ‘The Velvet Glove.’ ” Essays in Literature, 1: 219–26. Stevens, H. (1998). Henry James and Sexuality. New York: Cambridge University Press. Tintner, A. R. (1975). “The metamorphoses of Edith Wharton in Henry James’s The Finer Grain.” Twentieth Century Literature, 21: 355–79. Tintner, A. R. (2000). The Twentieth-Century World of Henry James. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Yeazell, Ruth Bernard (1986). Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Henry James, Cultural Critic Pierre A. Walker

“I don’t care if he is a great critic,” wrote Mabel Tilton, a bored Smith College undergraduate in 1905, after hearing Henry James lecture on Balzac, “I never hope to [hear] anything so uninteresting again” (Tilton 1905). Today we think of Henry James first and foremost as a novelist, and we forget about much of his criticism. Yes, his most important non-fiction writing on literature, such as “The Art of Fiction,” the prefaces to the New York Edition, or his book on Hawthorne, are still considered important contributions to literary history and have been anthologized and reprinted often. But James was a prolific non-fiction writer. In addition to his non-fiction books – Picture and Text, The American Scene, William Wetmore Story and His Friends, and his autobiographies – James during his career contributed over three hundred non-fiction articles to periodicals. The great majority of these contributions are literary criticism, either general essays or book reviews, but James also published travel writing, drama and art criticism, and other essays on a range of contemporary topics. It is important not to forget that these contributions, and especially the last group, which I label James’s cultural criticism, are a significant portion of James’s oeuvre and merit scholarly attention. Aside from the still well-known texts, like “The Art of Fiction,” the prefaces, The American Scene, and perhaps the autobiographies and at least some of the travel writing, most of James’s non-fiction appears, at least at first glance, not to have more than a highly specialized appeal today. Often its appeal today is only historical: the book, art, and drama reviews are often about works that are now largely forgotten, and most of the travel essays can hardly serve as a guide today to the places they describe. And yet it is well worth remembering that James was a critic as much as a creative writer and that in his own day his prominence as a critic was at least as great as his prominence as a novelist, as Tilton’s calling him “a great critic” suggests. But while Tilton may have found James a boring critic, there is no reason that students and scholars of James today should find even his most heterogeneous non-fiction uninteresting and

A Companion to Henry James. Edited by Greg W. Zacharias © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-14042-3

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irrelevant to understanding this author, his work as a writer, and contemporary Western literature. Studying all of James’s criticism is not easy, for there has never been an edition of his complete non-fiction. (Today the autobiographies and the biography of William Wetmore Story are still hard to find.) During the mid-twentieth century selected groups of his non-fiction essays were published in a variety of editions, and it wasn’t until 1984, when the Library of America published its two-volume collection of James’s literary criticism, that students of just the literary criticism could stop relying on the various assorted selected editions of the criticism (like Albert Mordell’s Literary Reviews and Essays on American, English, and French Authors) and photocopies from old periodicals. ( James scholars active before 1984 will recall, no doubt with mixed emotions, how indispensable William T. Stafford’s A Name, Title, and Place Index to the Critical Writings of Henry James was). But even the Library of America literary criticism volumes are incomplete, as some of the drama criticism that is about plays (rather than about performances) is omitted, as are James’s memorial essays on the American writers Wolcott Balestier (1892) and Charles Eliot Norton (1909) and his introduction to a 1900 edition of Oliver Goldsmith’s novel, The Vicar of Wakefield. The situation is similar in respect to James’s complete travel writing, which was not collected into one edition until the Library of America published its two-volume Collected Travel Writings in 1993. While all of James’s travel essays would have fit into one volume, the Library of America chose to publish two volumes in order to include The American Scene (which arguably is a travelogue) and James’s major essays on World War I, which can hardly be considered travel writing, although scattering these last between the two volumes. While there is no question that these two volumes make working on James’s travel writing far more convenient than before, they do not help the student or scholar who might wish to compare different versions James published of the same essay, for instance essays published first in a periodical, then in Transatlantic Sketches (1875), then in Italian Hours (1909). With James’s art and drama criticism the situation is even worse, for in spite of the publication over the years of a number of volumes of James’s art and drama criticism, including Picture and Text, James’s own collection of art criticism ( James 1893), a significant number of James’s periodical publications on these subjects have still never been published in book form.1 As a result, anyone wanting to study James’s entire career as a writer about art and the theater has to rely on photocopies of original periodical articles and on a number of different selected editions, several of which are out of print. The haphazard state of James publication and the less than ideal access that results hinder the systematic study of James’s non-fiction. This is particularly the case with James’s cultural criticism, those heterogeneous essays that don’t easily fit the obvious categories of literary criticism, drama criticism, art criticism, or travel writing. In 1999 I collected and published Henry James on Culture: Collected Essays on Politics and the American Scene in order to make available in one volume published by a reliable

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scholarly press all of James’s published political commentary (none of which had ever before been published in book form), all of James’s published writing on World War I (which had never before been published all together in the same volume), as well as all the publications, with the exception of The American Scene, that resulted directly from James’s 1904–5 trip to the United States (his 1904 interview with the New York Herald, “The Question of Our Speech,” “The Speech of American Women,” and “The Manners of American Women”), and James’s metaphysical essay, “Is There a Life After Death?” These essays, I argued in my introduction, were important in and of themselves and unjustifiably neglected. Furthermore, along with the drama and art criticism and the journalism (more on which later), they demonstrate that James was not just a literary critic but a cultural critic, interested in writing about a wide variety of cultural topics. Perhaps most significantly these essays presented a side of James that scholars until very recently had paid little attention to: the James engaged in the political, social, and cultural (in the broad sense) world around him. As a fiction writer, James was a poster boy of sorts for the formalistic types of literary criticism that flourished in academia prior to the 1980s; think for instance how central James’s fiction is to Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) or to Tzvetan Todorov’s Poetics of Prose (1971), two landmark works of, respectively, narratology and structuralism. During the 1980s, however, the limited literary canon of the New Critics began to open, and New Historicism and postcolonial studies, inspired to a great extent by the emphasis of Edward Said and others on the worldliness of literary texts (see Said 1983), began to take for granted the importance of the connection between texts and the world at large (whereas most formalisms, but especially American New Criticism, neglected this connection). At the same time (before 1980), a Romantic and Modernist James held sway: an artist as high priest devoted to his art at the cost of, or rather in opposition to, the “vulgar” material world. This James began to come under attack during the 1980s; Michael Anesko’s “Friction with the Market” (1986), which documents James’s careful conduct of the business of writing and publishing and reads James’s fiction from that perspective, was an important early shot. Part of its significance is that it showed James not to be writing “art for art’s sake” but consciously attempting as a writer to engage a readership and working to market his wares. A number of excellent books conceived or published during the 1990s went further, showing how James’s writing engaged its contemporary cultural moment, especially in relation to issues of race, class, and gender: Ross Posnock’s The Trial of Curiosity (1991), David McWhirter’s Henry James’s New York Edition (1995), Kenneth Warren’s Black and White Strangers (1993), Sara Blair’s Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation (1996), Beverly Haviland’s Henry James’s Last Romance (1997), John Carlos Rowe’s The Other Henry James (1998), Mona Ozouf’s La Muse démocratique (1998), Gert Buelens’s Henry James and the “Aliens” (2002), and Leland S. Person’s Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity (2003) were all influential in this respect.

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These scholars, in sum, tried to show “an other Henry James,” to use Rowe’s words, a James who was more attentive to questions of class, race, gender, and sexual preference relevant to the changing social order of his time. The other Henry James is no longer the master of the modern novel, the willful inheritor of the great tradition of English and American letters, but often a baffled and conflicted man struggling with the complex realities of his age. (Rowe 1998: 36–7)

In other words, for recent James scholars, James’s writings lend themselves very much to the politically and theoretically informed academic literary criticism of the last twenty-five years. As a result, James’s own published political and social commentary deserves more scholarly attention than it appeared to merit to previous generations of scholars. Among the many similarities that unite much of the James scholarship of the last twenty-five years is an explosion in attention by James scholars to The American Scene. A recent search for items about The American Scene on the online MLA Bibliography yields eleven hits for material published during the twelve-year period 1967–79, twenty-four for 1980–92, and forty-eight for 1993–2005. In other words, during each twelve-year period the amount of published work listed in the MLA Bibliography on The American Scene doubled. (By comparison, there are twenty-three, forty-one, and twenty-two hits for The Princess Casamassima for the same respective twelve-year periods.) The exponential growth in scholarly attention to The American Scene results from the interest of scholars since 1980 in studying James in the context of his contemporary political, social, historical, and cultural situation. This increased attention is, no doubt, both a symptom of and a contributing factor to the Henry James that has emerged during the last twenty-five years, a James very different from the Romantic art-for-art’s sake Modernist James that prevailed before. One of the many interesting things about The American Scene is that it defies classification (in spite of the Library of America’s inclusion of it in James’s Collected Travel Writings): it is neither autobiography, travelogue, nor social study, and yet it is at times all of these things. And the reason this is interesting is because it reminds us how poorly much of James’s published non-fiction lends itself to early twenty-first century classifications. I conceived of collecting the political and social commentary essays that make up Henry James on Culture as my own modest contribution to the emerging new Henry James. James had written and published a number of articles that could be considered ancillary to The American Scene: a group of essays of political commentary published in 1878–9, essays published around the same time James wrote The American Scene that treat related topics, and the “World War I” essays, a group of eight essays that James wrote in reaction to the outbreak of the Great War and the continued neutrality of the United States. By publishing these essays as a group, I hoped to show through

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James’s own words that James was indeed engaged with the worldly events of his day: its politics, its popular culture, and its principal current events. None of the eighteen essays I collected in Henry James on Culture had been published before in a significant volume of James’s non-fiction (with the exception of the five World War I essays included in the posthumous 1918 Within the Rim and Other Essays).2 By making this entire group of essays more widely available I hoped to show that there was more fuel to add, as it were, to the same fire upon which James scholars had been grilling The American Scene. In addition to James’s art and drama criticism and to the political and social commentary essays that I collected in Henry James on Culture, there remains among James’s cultural criticism his journalism proper, by which I mean the twenty letters from Paris that James wrote for the New York Tribune in 1875–6, the nine articles, all entitled “London,” that James published in Harper’s Weekly during the first eight months of 1897, and the eleven “American Letters” that James contributed in the spring of 1898 to Literature (later the Times Literary Supplement). Like the social and political essays I collected in Henry James on Culture, the journalism is significant for also showing James engaged in the political, social, and cultural world in which he lived. Calling anything of James’s “journalism,” of course, would seem at first to be a way of dismissing it, for readers of The Reverberator and “The Papers” know James to have been highly critical of contemporary journalism. But James’s career coincided with the rise of syndication and sensationalism in the newspaper world (after all, the career of William Randolph Hearst overlapped James’s). And while James wrote primarily for highbrow magazines, it is important to acknowledge that as a publishing writer James tried in a number of ways to use the contemporary press to his advantage. Important studies in the last decade, such as Salmon (1997) and Johanningsmeier (1998), have demonstrated that James’s relationship with the press wasn’t simply one of unambiguous criticism but in fact one of complex critique and engagement. And in my introduction to Henry James on Culture I suggested that there was much to learn from how during World War I James used daily newspapers to further his advocacy for the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps, for American understanding of the Allied cause, and ultimately for US intervention on the Allied side ( James 1999: xxvi–xxvii, xxxvii–xxxviii). During 1914–15, James wrote six substantial essays on the war, collaborated on a New York Times profile of himself, and published a short memorial notice on one of the victims of the sinking of the Lusitania. Three of these, the profile, the memorial piece, and “Refugees in England,” were first published in the New York Times ( James 1999: 138–45, 159–68). Another of the substantial essays, “The Question of the Mind,” was reprinted, entitled “The Mind of England at War,” in the New York Sun and the Philadelphia Ledger ( James 1999: 151–8). This last article appeared in the New York Sun on August 1, 1915, three days after James had become a British subject. The following editorial passage introduces James’s article:

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The following essay by Henry James on “The Mind of England at War” is the first article written by him in relation to the conflict in Europe. It possesses special interest at the present time because Mr. James took the oath of allegiance to Great Britain last week and became a British citizen. It may be assumed that it throws light on his change of nationality and that his decision in the matter was influenced by the same course of reasoning which he follows in discussing “the whole ‘psychological’ mystery marking the people of Great Britain.” ( James 1999: 201–2)

If the article sheds a light on James’s reasons for changing nationality, it hardly sheds a very clear one on this now fraught topic, and what is interesting about the editorial introduction is the apparent attempt to make newsworthy both James’s new nationality and the opinions his article expresses about the war. For James scholars today, the placement of this article, in a newspaper at all to begin with, and then situated as it is with its intrusive editorial introduction and facing, on the opposite page, a blood-curdling description of the Russians’ bad treatment of Jewish war refugees, is one case in point that James’s relationship with daily newspapers is not as simple as The Reverberator might suggest. How James, during World War I, managed to place so many articles in daily newspapers, especially American ones, and in their particular form and setting, is a subject that would surely reward further investigation. The forty articles written for the Tribune, Harper’s Weekly, and Literature precede the World War I essays by twenty-eight, seventeen, and sixteen years, respectively, and show that James worked closely with the press at various times in his career. These articles, therefore, are also important in understanding James’s relationship with the periodical press. Financial need may have been a major motivation for James’s contracting at these times to become a regular periodical contributor (as was certainly the case when James pitched the idea of contributing from Paris to the Tribune). Nonetheless, it is still significant that at these three times during his career James established a formal and regular (although ultimately short-lived) relationship with a particular periodical and its readership to provide commentary on a variety of subjects. While James may often have criticized the contemporary press, the fact of his own contributions to the press shows that his response to the new journalism was not purely negative. In other words he did not just criticize; he also tried to provide examples of what journalism could be; in his original pitch to the Tribune, for instance, James asserted that his “letters would always have more or less the literary turn” ( James 1965). However, if calling James a journalist remains a tough pill to swallow, calling him a cultural critic should be perceived as a compliment. Inherent in that label is the notion that critics should not have to limit themselves to only literary criticism, only art criticism, only drama criticism, etc. While James wrote far more literary criticism than other kinds of criticism, he wrote and published often enough about other topics, especially art and drama but not only art and drama, to merit the broader

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label of cultural critic. And his widely varied practice shows that, like Matthew Arnold, he saw no self-evident limits to the aspects of culture to which a critic should attend. Understanding James as a cultural critic makes it much easier to grasp all of James’s literary, art, and drama criticism and his miscellaneous journalism and political and cultural commentary as a whole. Therefore, students and scholars should pay attention not to just what is readily available today in print, and it would be desirable if a conscientious publisher would make the complete corpus more readily available. Some of the journalistic articles may be familiar to students and scholars of James: Leon Edel and Ilse Lind collected the Tribune articles in the 1957 book Parisian Sketches, and these essays have been of some significance to biographical study of the year James resided in Paris before settling in London. Edel also collected the “American Letters,” in The American Essays (1956), and as they consist largely of book reviews, the “American Letters” also appear as a group in the Library of America’s two-volume edition of James’s literary criticism ( James 1984). The nine “London” articles have never been published in book form as a group, though, and only five of them have been reprinted in their entirety since their initial 1897 appearance in Harper’s Weekly; the other four have only been reprinted in excerpts.3 This is because these essays do not fit neat categories (literary criticism, art criticism, drama criticism, etc.), and because they, like the Paris letters for the Tribune (some of which have also been excerpted in The Scenic Art and Essays on Art and Drama), each treat of a variety of topics. For instance, the final “London” essay ( James 1897e) is about the Jubilee celebration of Queen Victoria’s reign, Gustave Flaubert, the death of Mrs. Oliphant, and Mrs. Oliphant’s book, Kirsteen, and the sixth essay (James 1897c) is about exhibits at the Guildhall and the Royal Academy as well as Anatole France’s L’Orme du mail. As might be expected, throughout the Paris letters for the Tribune, the “London” letters for Harper’s Weekly, and the “American Letters” for Literature, James reviews plays, art exhibits, and books (both fictional and non-fictional); however, he also discusses (among other things) Victoria’s Jubilee (again), Theodore Roosevelt, American education, the gestation of France’s Third Republic, and the election of its legislative bodies. It would be much easier to study and understand the significance of these forty essays (and the eighteen essays collected in Henry James on Culture) to James’s complete corpus if they were published as a whole in a single edition. Reading James’s journalism or cultural criticism as a whole also applies to reading each article as a whole. At first glance most of James’s contributions, especially to the Tribune, Harper’s Weekly, and Literature, look like a miscellany of paragraphs tacked randomly together. But in fact the apparent heterogeneity of each of the articles is a way of showing that, as James said in his preface to the New York Edition of Roderick Hudson, “Really, universally, relations stop nowhere” ( James 1984: II: 1041). The key is to see that the different sections of each of these articles are in a metonymic relation to the other sections of the same essay.

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One detailed example serves as an indication of how to read all the journalistic writing, or cultural criticism: “Versailles As It Is,” which James dated December 16, 1875, and which appeared in the Tribune on January 8, 1876. James had settled in Paris only the previous month, and he happened to have picked an interesting time in French political history for a year’s residence. The Second Empire had fallen only five years before James’s arrival, and the new Republic was little more than four years old. By no means was the future of the Republic secure; Monarchist (both Bourbon and Orleans) and Bonapartist factions on the right and radical left factions were struggling to hinder the emergence of a moderate parliamentary republic. When James arrived in Paris, the likelihood that the Republic would survive was just becoming apparent, and James writes in the context of – as well as in reference to – this extremely important turn in the history of the French government, and he treats of these matters in a number of his contributions to the Tribune. “Versailles As It Is” is the third of the twenty articles James contributed from Paris, and it has three topics: the election of permanent senators; the recent publication of L’Ancien régime, the first volume of Les Origines de la France contemporaine, Hippolyte Taine’s six-volume history of the French Revolution and its aftermath; and the palace of Versailles (where the National Assembly was meeting). What is particularly striking about the article, and what makes it so representative of James’s cultural criticism, is the degree to which James actually weaves the three apparently disparate topics together, thus implying the extent to which the Revolution, the history of Versailles under the ancien régime, and the current French political situation are interconnected. The article begins by mentioning first the upcoming election of the permanent senators, then Versailles, and then Taine’s book. Then the article discusses in greater detail the grounds around the palace at Versailles and “its fine historic flavor” ( James 1876: 24), following which it describes in equal detail the National Assembly’s meetings in the theater at Versailles (the same theater where Molière performed for Louis XIV). The article concludes with a lengthy discussion of Taine’s treatment of the Revolution and of “the structure and condition of the French society that preceded the Revolution” ( James 1876: 29).4 By jumping around amongst his topics, James literally intertwines them, and of course it is quite appropriate that he does so. The current election is a significant event in the establishment of the Third Republic, and upon the success of the Republic lies the hope that three generations of French political turmoil – amongst royalist, Bonapartist, and republican factions – will finally end. The cause of the continued turmoil and the reason that republican government had not prevailed in France after the Revolution of 1789 was that again and again an autocrat had assumed power: Napoleon I, Napoleon III, the restored Bourbon monarchs, and the Orleans monarchy. Of course, France’s most noted example of autocratic government was the reign of Louis XIV, the king who built Versailles, the palace which, in the early days of the first French Revolution, under the reign of Louis XVI, became the symbol of the decadence of the French monarchy. James speaks of Taine’s setting “forth with his usual vividness and vigor the prodigious wastefulness of the

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manners and customs introduced by Louis XIV” ( James 1876: 24). “A more damning indictment than [Taine’s] picture of the social orders that the Revolution swept away,” continues James, “cannot be imagined” ( James 1876: 30). And of course the decadence of these social orders was part of what sparked the Revolution of 1789, which in turn set off the eighty years of political turmoil that followed. That, in sum, is Taine’s thesis, according to James: the decadence and corruption of the monarchy (beginning especially under Louis XIV and Louis XV) caused the Revolution, and the excesses of the Revolution were the reason for what followed in the ensuing decades. L’Ancien régime, the first volume of Taine’s history of the Revolution, had just appeared when James wrote “Versailles As It Is,” and in discussing it James focuses on the attention Taine gives to the causes of the Revolution. Thus it makes perfect sense that James should intertwine his discussion of the publication of this book with his description of the palace at Versailles and his mention of the senatorial election, for what James is doing is using the juxtaposition of these three subjects (the election, Versailles, and Taine’s history of the Revolution) to reiterate Taine’s point: that what Versailles stood for before the Revolution – the grandeur and decadence of the ancien régime – has everything to do with the current political situation. The hope that James expresses at the beginning of the article that the new Republic would at last bring to an end the decades of post-Revolutionary political turmoil (as in fact it eventually did) is all the more to the point because of the living historical reminder (the palace of Versailles) of what sparked that turmoil in the first place (the series of republican, royal, and imperial coups and counter-coups that characterize French history from 1789 to 1873). What James shows through metonymic juxtaposition in this article is how three subjects that at first glance might not seem to have much to do with each other are in fact highly interrelated. Furthermore, the relation between these three subjects demonstrates how James views connections across political, historical, and cultural lines. The cultural event of today, the publication of a new book by Taine, which James calls “the literary event of the day” ( James 1876: 28), has everything to do not only with the politics of today but also with the history of the previous two centuries. Those politics are precisely what they are because of that history. The palace at Versailles is, therefore, no simple landmark, but living history, both as symbol of the past and site for the making of contemporary history (and what an irony that contemporary history should unfold in the palace’s theater!). Had James simply reviewed Taine’s book, he would not have been able to express in the same way its significance to the contemporary political situation. It would be possible (were there more space) to demonstrate how many, if not all, of James’s journalistic articles address a similar variety of topics in order to foreground the connections between the cultural, the political, the social, and the historical spheres. What is clear is how varied and eclectic James’s interests as a non-fiction writer are. And what should be even clearer is that James attempts to render, in a highly complicated manner, to his readers the degree to which so many aspects of human life are intertwined. These articles were not written by an author focused

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exclusively on his vocation as an artist (as older generations of James scholarship would have it), nor on cranking out hack work for pay, but by an author well aware of – and devoted to representing – something of the full complexity of society. James’s journalism, or cultural criticism, is, therefore, about relations or connections, connections among the subject matters addressed. These articles are also about connections between readers and foreign places: James wrote the Paris letters of 1875–6 for the benefit of American readers, among whom, James had written John Hay on July 21, 1875, he believed there was “a standing demand, for information about all Parisian things.” His letters were, therefore, an attempt to connect the demand and the information. Similarly, in the 1897 “London” articles for Harper’s Weekly, James presents London’s cultural scene to American readers, and in the 1898 “American Letters” he reverses his position and presents the American cultural scene to British readers. This is significant because while the articles attempt to show the connections amongst the subject matter addressed, they also attempt to forge a connection between cultural events in one place and readers in another. Thus, just as James’s articles are by no means narrow in their focus but on the contrary try to embrace a wide range of material, at the same time the function of those articles is to construct cultural bridges across the Atlantic. James as transatlantic bridge-builder should come as no surprise, for as a literary critic and a travel writer, James frequently presented things French and Italian to the English-speaking world and things British and American to each other. What is different in James’s journalism is that as a literary critic James seeks only to bring a foreign literary scene to his readers’ attention, whereas as a journalist or cultural critic he seeks to represent the cultural scene as a whole for his readers’ benefit.

Notes 1

James published a total of fifty-nine pieces of art criticism, of which eleven have never been collected in book form. The collected art criticism has been published in Picture and Text ( James 1893), The Painter’s Eye ( James 1956), Parisian Sketches (Edel and Lind 1957), and Essays on Art and Drama ( James 1996). The uncollected pieces include articles on Frank Duveneck, Veronese and Millet, the Paris Salon of 1876, Henri Regnault, the National Gallery, John Gibson, Elizabeth Thompson, the Grosvenor Gallery and the Royal Academy, Thiers, various 1879 London exhibits, and George Du Maurier. James published fortyeight pieces of drama criticism; all but one have been scattered among The Scenic Art ( James 1948), Mordell (1957), Parisian Sketches (Edel and Lind 1957), Literary Criticism ( James

1984), and Essays on Art and Drama ( James 1996). One piece has never been collected: “The British Theatre Libre” ( James 1889). 2 “The American Volunteer Motor-Ambulance Corps in France,” “France,” “Refugees in Chelsea” (originally entitled “Refugees in England”), “The Long Wards,” and “Within the Rim.” 3 The first, third, sixth, and seventh “London” letters, those published January 23, February 20, June 5, and June 26 ( James 1897a, 1897b, 1897c, 1897d), have never been reprinted complete. 4 Page references to quotations from “Versailles As It Is” are to Edel and Lind (1957), but the text of the quotations is from the original periodical publication.

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References and Further Reading Anesko, M. (1986). “Friction with the Market”: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship. New York: Oxford University Press. Blair, S. (1996). Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Booth, W. C. (1961). The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Buelens, G. (2002). Henry James and the “Aliens” in Possession of the American Scene. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Edel, L. (ed.) (1956). The American Essays of Henry James. New York: Vintage. Edel, L. and I. D. Lind (eds.) (1957). Parisian Sketches: Letters to the New York Tribune 1875–1876. New York: New York University Press. Haviland, B. (1997). Henry James’s Last Romance: Making Sense of the Past and the American Scene. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. James, H. (1965 [1875]). James to Hay. July 21, 1875. Letter 1 of Henry James and John Hay: The Record of a Friendship (pp. 81–3). Ed. G. Monteiro. Providence: Brown University Press. James, H. (1876). “Versailles as it is.” New York Tribune, January 8, 1876: 2. Rpt. in L. Edel and I. D. Lind (eds.) (1957). Parisian Sketches: Letters to the New York Tribune 1875–1876 (pp. 23–32). New York: New York University Press. James, H. (1889). “The British theatre libre.” Weekly Comedy, 1 (December 21): 6. James, H. (1892). “Wolcott Balestier.” Cosmopolitan Magazine, 13 (May): 43–7. Rpt. as the introduction to W. Balestier (1972). The Average Woman (pp. vii–xxviii). London: Heinemann. James, H. (1893). Picture and Text. New York: Harper Brothers. James, H. (1897a). “London.” Harper’s Weekly, 41 ( January 23): 78. James, H. (1897b). “London.” Harper’s Weekly, 41 (February 20): 183. James, H. (1897c). “London.” Harper’s Weekly, 41 ( June 5): 562–3. James, H. (1897d). “London.” Harper’s Weekly, 41 ( June 26): 639–40. James, H. (1897e). “London.” Harper’s Weekly, 41 (August 21): 834.

James, H. (1900). “Introduction.” The Vicar of Wakefield. By Oliver Goldsmith (pp. xi–xx). New York: Century. James, H. (1909). “An American art-scholar: Charles Eliot Norton.” Burlington Magazine, 14 (January), 201–4. Rpt. in (1914) Notes on Novelists with Some Other Notes (pp. 412–23). New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,. James, H. (1918). Within the Rim and Other Essays. London: Collins. James, H. (1948). The Scenic Art: Notes on Acting and the Drama: 1872–1901. Ed. A. Wade. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. James, H. (1956). The Painter’s Eye: Notes and Essays on the Pictorial Arts. Ed. J. L. Sweeney. London: Rupert Hart-Davis. James, H. (1984). Literary Criticism, vols. 1–2. New York: Library of America. James, H. (1993). Collected Travel Writing, vols. 1–2. New York: Library of America. James, H. (1996). Essays on Art and Drama. Ed. P. Rawlings. Aldershot: Scolar Press. James, H. (1999). Henry James on Culture: Collected Essays on Politics and the American Social Scene. Ed. P. A. Walker. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Johanningsmeier, C. (1998). “Henry James’s dalliance with the newspaper world.” Henry James Review, 19: 36–52. McWhirter, D. (ed.) (1995). Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Mordell, A. (ed.) (1957). Literary Reviews and Essays on American, English, and French Authors. By Henry James. New York: Vista House. Ozouf, M. (1998). La Muse démocratique: Henry James et les pouvoirs du roman. Paris: Calmann-Lévy. Person, L. (2003). Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Posnock, R. (1991). The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity. New York: Oxford University Press. Rowe, J. C. (1998). The Other Henry James. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Said, E. (1983). The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Salmon, R. (1997). Henry James and the Culture of Publicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stafford, W. (1975). A Name, Title, and Place Index to the Critical Writings of Henry James. Englewood: Microcard Editions. Taine, H. (1876). L’Ancien régime. Vol. 1 of Les Origines de la France contemporaine, 6 vols. Paris: Hachette.

Tilton, M. (1905). Letter to her mother. May 11, 1905. College Archives and Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College. Todorov, T. (1971). Poétique de la prose. Paris: Seuil. Warren, K. (1993). Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

15

Timeliness and Henry James’s Letters Greg W. Zacharias

Henry James suggested the significance of letters overall and thus of his own letters through the importance he placed in critical essays and reviews on the letters of others, such as those of André Marie and Jean-Jacques Ampère, Balzac, Ximenes Doudan, Flaubert, Eugénie de Guérin, Gustave de Molinari, Henri Regnault, Sainte-Beuve, William Ellery Channing, Carlyle and Emerson, and Lord Byron, among others. One motive for paying close attention to letters, as James wrote in his preface to Rupert Brooke’s Letters from America, was because: Nothing more generally or more recurrently solicits us, in the light of literature, I think, than the interest of our learning how the poet, the true poet, and above all the particular one with whom we may for the moment be concerned, has come into his estate, asserted and preserved his identity, worked out his question of sticking to that and to nothing else; and has so been able to reach us and touch us as a poet, in spite of the accidents and dangers that must have beset this course. ( James 1984: 747)

But letters and letter-writing were important not only in James’s understanding of others. They were central in his own life, too. Not only did he write letters as a way to conduct his business as a professional writer, he wrote them to maintain relations with family, friends, acquaintances, and colleagues. The more than 10,400 extant letters supplement his twenty-plus novels, more than one hundred short stories, a number of plays, and thousands of pages of criticism, travel writing, and political essays to provide a more complete portrait of man and author. But the letters cover more of his life than any other form of writing. Thomas Jefferson contended that the “letters of a person, especially of one whose business has been chiefly transacted by letters, form the only full and genuine journal of his life” ( Jefferson 1823). This is as true for Henry James as it is for any other writer who wrote so obsessively and with such necessity.

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James wrote as a way to organize his life. But he also wrote with an awareness of how his letters would be read and received by his correspondents. His use of colloquialisms, his displays of great kindness and empathy and, when necessary, anger, his way of ingratiating himself with his parents when, as a young man living in Europe he needed money, and his confidences, for example, are all evidence of his close attention to those who would read his letters. James also knew that some of his letters could be read by those other than the addressed reader. Letters sent home, for example, were passed among the family members, at least. If there were something James wished to have read by only a certain person, he would signal the restriction with “private” or another such sign. (See, for example, James 1873.) Likewise, we can assume that James must have considered that readers like us might one day read letters that had been sent privately. Given his awareness of how public his private letters could become, and thus as guarded though he must have been as a letter writer much of the time, his letters nonetheless reveal a great deal about him as an individual, thinker, and writer. Written routinely, regularly, compulsively over the course of his adolescent and adult life, Henry James’s letters provide both a record of his life and a representation of his mind in action. In the custom of his family, James tended to pack many of his letters with details of what he saw and heard and felt; with him impressions of the usual and the unusual. He seems to have known what would satisfy and, often, surprise and delight his correspondents. He also used letters as we use email or text messaging – to arrange last-minute plans (and cancel them), to confirm or nurture friendships and business arrangements. And a lifetime of such letters from a gifted, alert, introspective, articulate, comical, sympathetic writer are rich in significant biographical detail and reading pleasure. The letters also show in their corrections and alterations that James tended to write quickly, editing himself almost as he wrote so that adjustments in the meaning are apparent as one word, partially completed, is cancelled in favor of another. Family letters were also important to James. Editing freely excerpts of letters from his father and brother William for what would become Notes of a Son and Brother, James incurred the irritation of his nephew, William’s son, Harry (Henry James III). When, as Leon Edel gives the story, the nephew accused him of altering his father’s words, Henry James answered that he wished to make the letters more “readable, and thereby more tasted and liked” (Edel 1953–72: V: 457). In addition, James argued that he took the meaning of the letters to be his own, to do with what he wished. He likewise had altered his father’s letters. Thus a coherent representation of his brother and father in the context of his own life, more than an accurate representation of his brother’s or father’s letters, seems to have provided the rationale for James’s editing. Percy Lubbock remembers that, for James, “It was absolute . . . that the work of the imagination was the highest and most honourable calling conceivable, being indeed nothing less than the actual creation of life out of the void” ( James 1920: I: xv). Yet, it must be admitted, there is a fundamental difference between using letters selectively to create “life out of the void” through the editor’s craft and

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representing all a writer’s extant letters so that readers themselves might work at the interpretation of them. James used letters both as repositories and triggers for memory. His urge to alter letters written by others so that they would fit neatly with his memory and thus his autobiography suggests that his understanding of the power of correspondence to reveal and to conceal, to shape and to misshape relations, must have been close to that of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Like Hawthorne, James must have had an understanding that the power of a letter’s meaning must reside in its material elements – the elements of writing itself on the page – as well as in the imagination of the letter’s reader. Hawthorne elaborated this concept of the completeness of the historical document and thus the incompleteness of its reproductions when he located the document’s power to generate meaning in its material and historical existence: Strange, that the mere identity of paper and ink should be so powerful. The same thoughts might look cold and ineffectual, in a printed book. Human nature craves a certain materialism, and clings pertinaciously to what is tangible, as if that were of more importance than the spirit accidentally involved in it. And, in truth, the original manuscript has always something which print itself must inevitably lose. An erasure, even a blot, a casual irregularity of hand, and all such little imperfections of mechanical execution, bring us close to the writer, and perhaps convey some of those subtle imitations for which language has no shape. (Hawthorne 1844: 454)

Hawthorne’s comments, like Jefferson’s, lead one to consider how the meaning that resides in material aspects of Henry James’s letters – so important for understanding how James represented himself – may be preserved when they make their way to print, or lost, if they do not. Hawthorne’s comments help explain why the material details of a letter’s text – especially one of Henry James’s letters – deserve particular attention as they are altered by editing and reproduction. Like Henry James’s writing of his own letters and his editing of his father’s and brother’s, the ways James’s editors have edited his letters is consistent with the way they thought of themselves in relation both to the texts they edited and the readers they imagined would read their work. Each volume or edition of letters must grapple with the same problems Henry and William James wrestled with when they edited their father’s papers: to what degree should an editor aim to represent for readers what the writer of the original actually wrote? To what degree should an editor aim to represent what his study and expertise tells him the author of the original document meant? Thus each editor at each point in time for each audience answers such questions differently. With every shift in editorial approach, from the earliest publication of James’s letters in Lubbock’s two-volume edition to Edel’s four-volume Henry James Letters to the ongoing The Complete Letters of Henry James, editors brought and will continue to bring to their readers through their editing of his letters a new version of Henry James.

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Soon after Henry James died, family members began to plan an edition of his letters. Such literary memorials were a part of the family’s practice. Under William James’s leadership they had edited Henry James, Sr.’s papers in The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James (1884). They regarded Alice James’s Diary (printed privately in 1894) in the same way.1 Concealing – as much as revealing – is a relevant concept in the editing of Henry James’s letters. Henry James himself had used for his own purposes William’s letters in his autobiographical volumes, A Small Boy and Others (1913) and Notes of a Son and Brother (1914). And William’s family memorialized at least one child, Alexander, in a still unpublished family book of mementos that they must have wanted to use to remember and represent him. After serious discussion concerning the person who would edit the letters, the James family chose Percy Lubbock over other candidates, several of whom, including Edmund Gosse, were more experienced.2 Yet the family’s decision that Lubbock would not see all of the original letters during his preparation of the edition suggests that they had less than full trust in him to distinguish so soon after Henry James’s death what would be suitable for readers and what should remain private. Instead, family members themselves reviewed a great many of the letters and decided which should be included and which kept out. In a sense, the family turned the tables on uncle Harry. They worked closely with Lubbock to select and edit the letters so that their version of Henry James would be represented. Many of the Henry James letters in the Houghton Library at Harvard, for example, show the blue-pencil marks probably made by a family member marking out sections with brackets or parentheses and a direction to “omit.” Following the family’s review of the manuscripts, typescripts were created to represent what the James family wished to leave in and keep out of the letters they reviewed. The typescripts were then corrected against the manuscripts, probably by Harry James (Henry James III), William’s son. At that point, additional cuts were signaled in ink, either by brackets and an “omit” note or by striking in ink through the objectionable material. Most, if not all, of this signaling was done by Harry. That a few additional corrections and cuts are given in pencil on some typescripts suggests that yet another round of reading was conducted (e.g., May 28, 1894 to William James). The typescripts were then sent to Lubbock. One complication of this work procedure is that while the first round of omits made on the manuscripts and thus not typed – except in the cases where the typist copied material that should have been cut (e.g., April 26, 1893 and December 22, 1894 to William James) – would not have been seen by Lubbock, the material selected to be cut from the edition following the completion of the typescript would have been, overall, legible to him if he wanted to read through the cancellation marks. The significance is that knowing the process moderates the level of protection the family is presumed to have had for Henry via his letters. Rather than send the corrected typescripts back to the typist for a final cleaning up and excision of objectionable material, they were sent ahead to Lubbock. Other correspondents of James’s were asked to contribute letters to the edition.

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Lubbock collected a number himself. The degree to which the James family altered the letters that came first to Lubbock is not clear.3 But it makes sense that Lubbock would have seen first the ones that came first to him. The publication of Lubbock’s two-volume Letters of Henry James, delayed by war, occurred in 1920, only four years after James’s death. The edition served as a kind of family memorial to their relative. While it is a critical edition in the sense that its editors – the James family and Percy Lubbock – made choices about what to put into the edition and what to leave out, it is not a scholarly edition. It contains no apparatus aside from ellipses marking cuts that would explain to readers how the published text differs from the manuscript it represents. As editor, Lubbock provides information that helps readers understand more clearly James’s letters. He included short biographical essays that introduce sequences of letters and thus portions of James’s life, short headnotes to some letters, and one footnote in the edition. Such supplemental material casts some light on details of the letters that might have been unfamiliar to Lubbock’s readers. In addition, the Letters of Henry James is a corrected clear-text edition. That is, Lubbock’s and the James family’s rationale for representing the manuscripts and typescripts was to offer what they judged as Henry James’s final intention, as it were, not a version of what a correspondent would have seen when she opened any one of the letters they selected for the edition and read it. There are no cancellations, insertions, overwriting, strikethroughs. Spelling errors are corrected. Letter formatting is standardized. Private letters are thus altered to suit the manners of the day and in that way become public literature. Lubbock’s Letters of Henry James comprised the main collected edition of James’s letters from its publication in 1920 until Edel’s four-volume Henry James Letters, which was published between 1974 and 1984. Like Edel’s edition, and like James’s treatment of letters in A Small Boy and Others (at least), the Letters of Henry James involved the James family. Lubbock’s edition also has in common with every other edition of James’s letters the fact that each editor or group of editors selects and represents the original letters to offer a particular version of James that would accord with their sense of the novelist. They did not seek to represent the original letters themselves. Edel attends rather closely in his introduction to Lubbock’s lack of access to many of the original letters and, implicitly, to Lubbock’s consequent lack of control of the editorial process overall. Such emphases represent important considerations in the story of the first edition of Henry James’s letters, although Edel might have overemphasized Lubbock’s isolation from the texts of the original letters. But aside from the accuracy of the history of Lubbock’s edition, the story Edel relates also provides him with a context from which to highlight aspects of his own work. For if Edel’s statement in 1974 in his Introduction that “[t]o this day Lubbock’s volumes remain the most important collection of Henry James letters in print” ( James 1974–84: I: xxii) held significance, it held such only until the next sentences, in which Edel highlights the advances of his edition over Lubbock’s:

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The present edition is the first to draw upon the full epistolarium, now available, after half a century. There are still some James letters hidden from sight; but there are now representative letters for all the decades of his maturity and certain illuminating letters out of his adolescence. The few peripheral collections, published since Lubbock, not all authorized, have added minor glimpses of the protean artist. Lubbock’s image of James was set for fifty years, the figure of the fictional lawgiver, as well as the gregarious expatriate. But James was never seen in these volumes as relaxed and unbuttoned: he is always in a top hat. The editing was sparse and objective: James was allowed – and this was a merit – to talk, unencumbered by irrelevant footnotes. An occasional headnote gave some guidance when necessary. ( James 1974–84: I: xxii)

Edel goes on to describe the criteria for the selection of letters in his edition after telling us that he read “thousands” that were not available to Lubbock. But in his attempt to elevate the status of his edition, Edel tends to overstate the weakness of Lubbock’s. At the same time Edel points to the “unbuttoned” version of James his edition provides, he distinguishes explicitly between letters that are worthy of inclusion in his edition and the types of letters that are not. Overall, he prefers to include letters that he judges include “a manner of saying things that was memorable . . . an overflow of this style into his daily life,” letters that show James’s “play of mind” ( James 1974–84: I: xxviii, xxiv). He offers letters when he can to avoid “redundancies.” Most of all, he aims to offer the “ ‘best’ ” letters, letters that are the most “ ‘representative’,” “ ‘useful’,” “and as a guide to the ‘epistolary James’ ” ( James 1974–84: I: xxv, xxxvi). The rest he deprecates as “insubstantial,” “telephone talk.” At the same time, perhaps more realistically, he recognizes that “the large James archives in many libraries will provide opportunities for amplification and further collections in the years to come” ( James 1974–84: I: xxx, xxxvi). Like the Lubbock edition, Edel’s Henry James Letters was suited to its time. Preceded by a single-volume collection of Selected Letters (1955), Edel’s four volumes contains 1,069 letters. Most are full letters. But a few lack a postscript and others contain what can be read only as intentional and silent alterations.4 Edel’s edition is a critical one. But it is not scholarly. Informational notes are rare. Like Lubbock’s edition, and consistent with many similar editions of its day, Edel’s Henry James Letters is a clear-text edition that aims to represent Henry James’s final intentions, as it were, as the editor understands them. Edel’s edition was probably a product of his work on the monumental biography, Henry James, which he published in five volumes between 1953 and 1972 and which depended a great deal on James’s correspondence, access to which Edel controlled very closely during the time he worked on the letters and the biography.5 Although access to the largest collection of letters at the Houghton Library, Harvard University, is not now restricted for those who can show a need to use them, some folders containing James’s letters still show notes such as “reserved for professor Edel,” which belies his claim that outside of what he published, “[s]cholars [could] read for themselves the holographs which today are so easily copied” ( James 1974–84: I: xxxii). Edel’s

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strategy for restricting access was probably threefold, at least. First, as Pierre A. Walker has shown, Edel had invested his professional life in Henry James scholarship and seemed to believe that he was entitled to first use and thus according to the manners of the day virtual ownership of the material. In a Time magazine review of the second and third volumes of Edel’s biography of James, the reviewer introduces readers to the current state of scholarship then in an essay titled “Who Owns Henry James?”: In the old days, once a biographer-critic got on top of a really big writing name he was likely to stay there for a lifetime. But today, scholarly competition is cutthroat, and the great writers of the past are likely to be swarmed over as an elephant carcass is swarmed over by ants. . . . [Yet] [n]obody has to ask “Who Own Henry James?” A professor at New York University named Leon Edel has for years. (Anon. 1962)

At least as far as this article and its readership were concerned, Edel’s dominance of James studies, as well as his course to that status, are unquestionable. Second, Edel might have been reluctant to see others test his particular representation of James as the “Master,” which he developed in his biography. As we’ve seen since the archive has been opened to more public access, Edel’s version of James is just that – a version that stresses certain elements of his life and deemphasizes others that don’t easily correspond to the first. Third, Edel, like Percy Lubbock before him, worked closely with the James family. William’s son Harry, who also worked with Lubbock, “gave [Edel] all possible assistance and access to the family papers,” beginning in the late 1930s ( James 1974–84: I: xxx). After working with Harry, Edel cooperated with his brother, William (Billy), and later Billy’s son, John, after which he allied himself with John’s cousin, Alexander R. James. Edel selected letters, he wrote, that would contain neither “telephone talk” nor “ ‘the mere twaddle of graciousness’ ” ( James 1974–84: I: xxx, xxxii), that he claimed Henry James (and thus the relatives with whom Edel worked) would not have approved for publication. This degree of editorial decision making regarding what readers should prefer seems not to have been out of the ordinary at the time. After all, Edel’s status depended in large part on James’s, access to which depended, in turn, ultimately, on the James family. Thus, while Edel protectively refers in his biography to James’s “homoeroticism,” he could be more direct in his correspondence with Mark Carroll, his editor at Harvard University Press, referring to a number of James’s communications as his “homosexual letters” (Edel 1972). Although Edel, unlike Lubbock before him, offered letters that are for the most part without cuts to their contents, the particular selection of letters themselves might have been made in order to protect the family’s sense of their relative’s privacy. However, now, in a time of student-centered pedagogy and of multiple version texts, there may be readers who, for a range of reasons, might not similarly devalue casual letters, intimate letters, non-professional letters, and the like. Rather than being throwaways, such letters might be seen as treasures for certain readers and

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biographers. At the same time, it is revealing of Edel’s strategy to coordinate the picture of James in Henry James Letters with that in the biography that outside his introduction to the letters he seems to have valued those very letters he deprecated in the introduction as “telephone talk” and “the mere twaddle of graciousness.” In a Time magazine article titled “The Lesson of the Master,” Edel, quoted as he taught a class at Dartmouth, said, “Even [James’s] acceptances or regrets to social events – and in his later years, his telegrams – are written in the grand manner. . . . One could do ‘The Collected Social letters of Henry James’. . . . Yes, or even [‘]The Collected Telegrams’ ” (Edel 1977: 47). Given Edel’s unsurpassed knowledge in 1977 of James’s letters, his statement is remarkable. He identifies explicitly the value of what he called only a few years before in the Introduction to Henry James Letters “telephone talk” and “the mere twaddle of graciousness” for a deep understanding of Henry James. In addition, he implies the partiality of his own edition of letters and, perhaps, his biography of James in citing the importance of that which he left out. Leon Edel’s Henry James Letters is a monumental work by one of the great literary scholars of the twentieth century. Having read many, if not most, of the available letters while writing his equally magisterial five-volume biography, Henry James (1953–72), Edel shaped to a large degree Henry James studies in the second half of the twentieth century.6 Although Edel wrote that “I enjoy a freedom no editor of James’s letters has had hitherto” ( James 1974–84: I: xxxiv), it is worth noting that his freedom went beyond the unprecedented access to James’s letters. The terms by which he selected letters so that they would construct a portrait of James consistent with that given in his biography is one element of that freedom. Edel’s clear-text approach to editing the letters, an approach though while lacking a scholarly apparatus that would record any emendation Edel made to a letter, was consistent with the general standards and expectations of his day, is another. The edition’s influence resides in its power to shape our impression of James’s letters overall and thus of Henry James himself. That impression, however, might not be consistent with the complete texts of the letters themselves. In addition, his editing and representation of those letters may leave readers with a partial and thus mistaken understanding of the letter manuscripts and of James as a letter writer. Edel was clear about his conception and goals for his edition: letters “should be edited to be read as one reads books: with an avoidance of brackets and an economy of footnotes. The & should certainly read ‘and,’ and all abbreviations and shortcuts of hasty writing deserve to be spelled out” ( James 1974–84: I: xxxv). In so framing his rationale for Henry James Letters, Edel represented the editorial standards of his day. Ignas Skrupskelis and Elizabeth Berkeley used the first three of their twelve-volume Correspondence of William James to publish almost all of the 306 extant letters from Henry to his brother, in addition to most of William’s letters to Henry.7 Their strategy allows readers to see a consistent correspondence that lasts nearly the entire lifetimes of the brothers. Skrupskelis and Berkeley’s approach to editing the letters is

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scholarly and critical. The scholarly apparatus allowed readers for the first time in an edition of Henry James letters to reconstruct the texts of the manuscripts in terms of the corrections Henry James made in his own letters. Although that apparatus is assigned to the back of each volume and requires readers who seek to reconstruct the texts of the originals from the edited texts and the apparatus to flip from letter to apparatus, such reconstruction enables readers with ready access to original documents to trace James’s composition almost as if one were watching him think his way through the sense of the letter. More, while the editing practice was a clear-text one, the editors did not correct errors. Instead, they sought to preserve the “capitalization, punctuation, and spelling of the original letters” ( James, W. 1992– 2004: I: lv). Thus, for the first time in an edition of letters, some of James’s compositional idiosyncrasies as a writer were represented, not only his “final intention.” At the same time, some regularizing corrections were made, which may affect certain readers’ understanding of James’s letters themselves. These include a regularization of punctuation in relation to quotation marks, the spacing of compounds such as “anyone” or “any one” in terms of James’s “usual practices” ( James, W. 1992–2004: I: lv–lx) and other rather minor standardizations of James’s strategies for underlining. Such alterations may mislead readers from the content of James’s actual letters. Still, the first three volumes of The Correspondence of William James serve as a great advance in putting readers in closer contact with Henry James’s original letters. It was what the times demanded. There have been a number of important volumes of selected letters, which provide the kind of amplification Edel foresaw. Michael Anesko’s collection of Henry James and William Dean Howells letters in Letters, Fictions, Lives (1997) includes excellent annotation and textual notes as well as superb introductory and explanatory essays about James’s relation to Howells and James’s and Howells’s roles in the literary culture of the time. Building on interest in James’s relations with men, Susan E. Gunter and Steven Jobe edited a selection of James’s letters to Hendrik Andersen, Jocelyn Persse, Howard Sturgis and Hugh Walpole ( James 2001). Gunter also edited a volume of James’s letters to several women: Alice Howe Gibbens James (William James’s wife); Mary Cadwalader Jones; Margaret Frances Butcher Prothero; Lady Louisa Erskine Wolseley ( James 1999). Rosella Mamoli Zorzi edited both Italian and English language versions of James’s letters to Hendrik Andersen, with whom James was close for a number of years later in his life, and also James’s letters to Jessie Allen, with Italian translations (Henry James: Lettere a Miss Allen, 1899–1915; Beloved Boy: Letters to Hendrik C. Andersen, 1899–1915) ( James 2004). Philip Horne edited the best volume of selected James letters I know, Henry James: A Life in Letters (1999), which I admire for its superb headnotes and for the clear sense one receives from it about James. George Monteiro and Rayburn Moore each published important volumes of James’s letters to particularly significant recipients: Henry Adams and John Hay ( James 1992; Monteiro 1965); and the Macmillan publishing directors and Edmund Gosse ( James 1993, 1988). The next large edition of James letters, The Complete Letters of Henry

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James, edited by Pierre A. Walker, Greg W. Zacharias and a team of Jamesians (2006 and ongoing) takes the opportunity not only to provide edited versions of all of Henry James’s known letters, notes, and telegrams, but to provide them in a way that helps readers read them more like the letters James’s correspondents would have read. Among other single-correspondent editions of Henry James’s letters are those to Thomas Sergeant Perry (Harlow, Thomas Sergeant Perry), Edith Wharton (Powers, Henry James and Edith Wharton), Elizabeth Robins (Robins, Theatre and Friendship), Robert Louis Stevenson (Smith, Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson). James’s letters to Bruce Richmond (Horne, Pardon My Delay) and those “On the Drama” (A Most Unholy Trade) are notable for their superb page design. Each of these singlecorrespondent editions is important because each brings James’s letters into public view. Finally, Steven Jobe’s and Susan E. Gunter’s online Calendar of Henry James Letters (www.jamescalendar.unl.edu) is a superb resource for locating published and unpublished letters. While Henry James’s letters have been edited in general in order to present readers with what editors determine was James’s final intention, The Complete Letters of Henry James project edits the letters with the aim of supplying readers with a reliable and readable substitute for the original documents themselves.8 In order to accomplish this, the edited letter texts include either in the letters themselves or in textual annotation a representation of every addition or deletion James made to his letters. The editors also record the hyphenation of all words and offer spelling and punctuation as they appear in the texts of the letters themselves. They include drawings when James used them. James’s cancellation and underlining practices are followed. That is, when James strikes out a single character or entire word with one, two, three or more lines, the edited text represents that same degree of deemphasis, as it were. When James underlines a word or phrase with one, two, three or more lines, the edited text represents that same degree of emphasis through underlining. James’s spelling and punctuation are retained, as are other elements of the letter text, such as his way of indenting (or not) to indicate a new subject. The edition also offers more complete annotation than any previous edition of Henry James’s letters. As a complement to the accurate rendering in print of James’s letters, the annotation helps readers to understand any particular letter more nearly as James’s correspondent might have understood it. Previous editions of James’s letters, having been edited to show his “final intention,” may give the impression that his letters were as polished as his fiction and critical writing. A few were. But certainly the majority of them were not. To be able to see what James struck out and what he substituted for the cancelled material is to be able to see his mind in action as he wrote. And while very few drafts of his published fiction and criticism survive, each letter contains its own “draft” by merit of the adjustments to meaning it provides. Showing even a simple change from “you” to “we” in his July 17, 1873 letter to Grace Norton reveals the degree to which James was sensitive to recording intimacy with his friend. Important in this regard are the representation in the edited letter text of James’s changes from “you” to “we” and

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from “between” to “to,” all of which figure James more closely with Grace Norton. Thus: You say excellently that your country is yours very much as your body is and that though you may like it little better you feel a necessary confusion between its being, its future, + your own. This it is – as you must so often have felt – that sets a kind of impassable limit (which you ∧we[∧] hardly know whether to accept or to resent) between ∧to[∧] all our perception, contemplation + enjoyment of the things of this old world; and offers as a last resort a kind of rest + fixedness in the sense of our own native atmosphere – a something in which, in spite of pains and distastes, we yet vaguely expand and aspire, as over here, in spite of pleasures and appreciations ineffable, we yet, beyond a certain point, contract, congeal + fall out of step. ( James 1873)

Or the following, also to Grace Norton, from August 2, 1884, in which James’s alteration of “of ” to “+ the” in the sentence intensifies for his reader the work situation he finds himself in. Thus, “I must therefore glue myself to my writing-table for many weeks to come till I have got out of the woods of ∧+ the[∧] raw young bristling woods – of my incipient phase. After that I can take breath, look around me, answer letters, count my strains, + go on at a more comfortable pace” ( James 1884a). To apprehend the following change is to realize how quickly James drove his pen and to see how he would alter a phrase even in the midst of writing it. To Henrietta Reubell he wrote on December 31, 1884: “Besides, I owe you a rejoinder + to your great courses at chantilly with the said Augustus Augustule,) + in which you ask me whether I have read Tolstoi’s novel” ( James 1884b). In addition to offering details of the letters on the edited letter page that were never before included in an edition and thus offering complete letters, The Complete Letters Edition avoids selecting letters for readers and shaping a particular view of James. Instead, the edition will include every extant and available letter, note, and telegram by James. But while the editors hope for the edition’s long and useful life, they also realize that that edition, like any one before or after it, is a product of its editors, readers, and the times in which they live.

Notes 1

While immediate family members were rather surprised by Katherine P. Loring’s private printing of four copies of Alice James’s Diary and Henry was anxious about the potential violations to the privacy of individuals named in it (especially by the fact that a number of the potentially embarrassing tales come from him (see James, W. 1992–2004: II: 310–11), Alice’s sanctioning of the project

2 3

quickly brought their sympathy, if not endorsement. For an explanation of Lubbock’s selection, see James (1974–84: I: xii–xxiv). It is perhaps most revealing that Lubbock gives no account of the conditions under which he was selected to edit Henry James’s letters. The only mention of the James family Lubbock gives in the edition is in the “Note” that

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immediately precedes the first introductory essay to the letters themselves: “The best thanks of the editor are due to Henry James’s family, and particulary to his niece, Mrs. Bruce Porter, for much valuable help. Mrs. Porter undertook the collecting and copying of all the letters addressed to correspondents in America; and it is owing to her that the completion of these volumes, inevitably hindered by the war, has not been further delayed” (James 1920: I: xxii). For example, Edel regularly supplied paragraph indentations where James offered long dashes and Edel judged that that dash signaled a paragraph-like change of subject. Edel would expand James’s abbreviations and complete incomplete words (e.g., “P[all] M[all] G[azette]” and “Prosper[o]”) and thus supply in the letters what James never wrote (James 1974–84: III: 40). He supplies underlining in the form of italics where no underline existed in James’s letter (e.g., “Requiescat!”; James 1974–84: III: 94). He sometimes converts the numeric to the word (for example, “2” to “two,” James 1974—84: III: 102; “6” to “six,”

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James 1974–84: IV: 467). He inserted a postscript remark into the text (“This was plainly what Alexander thought, who absolutely jumped at the play” (omitting HJ’s underline beneath “jumped,” James 1974–84: III: 516); and “I mean the special ones recommended to me” ( James 1974–84: IV: 15). See Walker (2000) and Crane (2008). In addition to “Who Owns Henry James?” (Anon. 1962), Edel’s place in Henry James studies was recognized in the popular print media in 1977 in “The Lesson of the Master” (Anon. 1977) and in a special “Profile” essay in the New Yorker magazine in 1971 as the “The Chairman of the Board” (Hellman 1971). James’s April 26, 1893 letter to William James, which survives in a typed copy in the Lubbock collection at Harvard, was not included in the Henry-William James letters. I surmise that Skrupskelis and Berkeley used only manuscripts and didn’t review typed copies for their edition. For a more complete explanation of the edition’s rationale, see Walker and Zacharias (2006b).

References and Further Reading Anesko, Michael (1997). Letters, Fictions, Lives: Henry James and William Dean Howells. New York: Oxford University Press. Anon. (1962). “Who owns Henry James?” Time, 80 (November 30): 98. Anon. (1977). “The lesson of the Master.” Time, 110 (August 22): 47. Crane, Brian (2008). “From Family Papers to Archive: The James Letters.” Henry James Review, 29.2: 144–162. Edel, Leon (1953–72). Henry James. 5 vols. Philadelphia: Lippincott. Edel, Leon (1972). Letter to Mark Carroll, April 10. Edel Archive, McGill University. Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1844). “A Book of Autographs.” United States Magazine and Democratic Review (November): 454–61. Hellman, Geoffrey T. (1971). “Profiles: The chairman of the board.” The New Yorker (March 13): 43–86.

Horne, Philip (1999). Henry James: A Life in Letters. London: Penguin. James, Henry (1873). Letter to William James, May 31. Houghton bMS Am 1094 (1952). James, Henry (1873). Letter to Grace Norton, July 17. Houghton bMS Am 1094 (897). James, Henry (1884a). Letter to Grace Norton, August 2. Houghton bMS Am 1094 (959). James, Henry (1884b). Letter to Henrietta Reubell, December 31. Houghton bMS Am 1094 (1057). James, Henry (1920). The Letters of Henry James. Ed. Percy Lubbock. 2 vols. New York: Scribner’s. James, Henry (1984). “Rupert Brooke: Preface to Rupert Brooke’s Letters from America.” Henry James, Literary Criticism: English Writers, American Writers. New York: Library of America. James, Henry (1974–84). Henry James Letters. Ed. Leon Edel. 4 vols. Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard University Press.

Timeliness and Henry James’s Letters James, Henry (1988). Selected Letters of Henry James to Edmund Gosse, 1822–1915: A Literary Friendship. Ed. Rayburn Moore. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. James, Henry (1992). The Correspondence of Henry James and Henry Adams: 1877–1914. Ed. George Monteiro. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. James, Henry (1993). The Correspondence of Henry James and the House of Macmillan: 1877–1914. Ed. Rayburn Moore. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. James, Henry (1999). Dear Munificent Friends: Henry James’s Letters to Four Women. Ed. Susan E. Gunter. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. James, Henry (2001). Dearly Beloved Friends: Henry James’s Letters to Younger Men. Ed. Susan E. Gunter and Steven H. Jobe. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. James, Henry (2004). Beloved Boy: Letters to Hendrik C. Andersen, 1899–1915. Ed. R. Mamoli Zorzi. Introduction by M. Bell. Afterword by E. di

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Majo. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. James, William (1992–2004). The Correspondence of William James. Ed. Ignas Skrupskelis and Elizabeth Berkeley. 12 vols. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Jefferson, Thomas (1823). Letter to Robert Walsh Jr., April 5. Thomas Jefferson Papers: Series 1. Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Monteiro, George, ed. (1965). Henry James and John Hay: The Record of a Friendship. Providence: Brown University Press. Walker, Pierre A. (2000). “Leon Edel and the ‘policing’ of the Henry James letters.” Henry James Review, 21.3: 279–89. Walker, Pierre A. and Greg W. Zacharias (2006a). The Complete Letters of Henry James: 1855–1872, vols. 1–2. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Walker, Pierre A. and Greg W. Zacharias (2006b). “General editors’ introduction.” In The Complete Letters of Henry James: 1855–1872, vol. 1 (pp. xlix–lxviii). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Part II

Contexts for Reading Henry James

A Companion to Henry James. Edited by Greg W. Zacharias © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-14042-3

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A Brief Biography of Henry James Jennifer Eimers

Henry James’s family established itself in the United States in 1789 when James’s paternal grandfather, William James (known later as William James of Albany), emigrated from County Caven, Ireland. According to family legend, he came with “a very small sum of money, a Latin grammar in which he had already made some progress at home, and a desire to visit the field of one of the revolutionary battles” ( James 1920: 2). After settling in Albany, New York, where he eventually amassed a fortune as a businessman and investor, James married three times, the first two wives dying shortly after childbirth. His third wife, Catharine Barber, whose grandparents also emigrated from Ireland, became the mother of Henry James (Senior) in 1811. Henry Sr.’s relationship with his father was largely defined by resistance to William James of Albany’s strict Presbyterianism, a struggle that would direct his life. His life was also affected by an accident in the summer of 1824; he suffered serious burns to his right foot and leg when he rushed to extinguish a blazing cloth balloon that had landed in a nearby stable. Previously an active boy who loved the outdoors, the young teenager was bedridden for four years and suffered two major amputation surgeries, the second one ending his leg above the knee. His wooden leg now forced a life of mental exertion. The accident did not tame his resistance to his father’s Presbyterian discipline and belief in hard work, however. Entering Union College in Schenectady in 1828, Henry drank, gambled, and ran up debts. When his father died one of the richest men in America four years later, leaving a net worth of $1,200,000, Henry Sr. was willed a relatively small amount ($1,250 a year), presumably as punishment for his rebellion (Habegger 1994: 112, 110). He challenged the will, however, and it was eventually broken. Though the real-estate was not entirely and finally distributed until 1846, by early 1837 Henry knew he would be “leisured for life” (Habegger 1994: 137; Lewis 1991: 30). He would never add to the capital, and by the time of his death in 1882 he had dipped into it so often that he left his five children a less substantial inheritance.

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As the estate battle made its way through court, Henry enrolled in Princeton Theological Seminary in 1835. Two years later he became discontented with Calvinism and, following an enlivened conversation with Hugh Walsh, the two men left the seminary. Soon after, Walsh introduced his sister, Mary Robertson Walsh, to Henry. The Walshes, like the Albany Jameses, were of Irish and Scottish descent, and were strict Presbyterians. Henry Sr. began visiting Mary regularly, and eventually proposed marriage. At her parents’ home on Washington Place in New York City on July 28, 1840, Henry James Sr. and Mary Walsh exchanged vows in a civil ceremony. Eighteen months later, in January 1842, their first child, the future philosopher, William James, was born at the Astor Hotel. He was followed fifteen months later, on April 15, 1843, by Henry James, Jr., who was born at 21 Washington Place. In October of that year, the James family, accompanied by Mary’s sister Catherine (Aunt Kate) and servants, sailed to Europe, where the young Henry would spend portions of his childhood. During their first trip to England, Henry’s father had a life-changing experience. In May 1844 Henry Sr. suffered a nervous collapse, which he described as “a perfectly insane and abject terror” and “an ever-growing tempest of doubt, anxiety, and despair” (quoted in Lewis 1991: 51). His recovery was slow until, weeks later, he was introduced to the works of Swedenborg, the eighteenth-century Swedish mystic. Here he found relief, and a purpose that would occupy the rest of his life. In the words of his grandson Henry, “the only business of [Senior’s] later life was the formulation and serene reutterance, in books, occasional lectures, and personal correspondence, of his own conception of God and of man’s proper relation to him” ( James 1920: 12–13). Henry Sr. had recovered enough to take his family to Paris at the beginning of 1845.1 His second son later dated his earliest memory, of the Place Vendôme, to this time. In the spring of 1845 the family returned to America, where Garth Wilkinson ( July 21, 1845), named after the Swedenborgian J. J. Garth Wilkinson, and Robertson (August 29, 1846) were born. In April 1848 Henry Sr. bought 58 West Fourteenth Street, where his last child and only daughter, Alice, was born (August 7, 1848). The family’s residence there, until June 1855, was their longest stay in any one house. New York offered a cultural education, which the James children were allowed to experience fully. In their New York City years, the family often went to the theater, art shows, and Barnum’s American Museum. The James children were also surrounded by books, and allowed to read nearly anything that came into view. Dickens was a favorite of Henry, and he would meet the literary giant a dozen years later. Other eminent literary figures of the time who visited the Jameses included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, William Cullen Bryant, Charles Dana, William Thackeray, and Henry David Thoreau. The young Henry also met Washington Irving in 1850, when Irving related the news of Margaret Fuller’s drowning to Henry Sr.

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Like their cultural education, the formal education of the James children was diverse, involving a long list of tutors and schools in both America and Europe. Because he spent his time writing pamphlets and delivering lectures on religious and philosophical questions, their father, unlike other fathers, was at home and could thus supervise his children’s education. His wish was to surround them “with an atmosphere of freedom” (quoted in Lewis 1991: 79). Due to his own “instability” (Walker and Habegger 1994: 110), Senior’s failure to settle on a method for achieving this outcome, however, resulted in an inconsistent and irregular education for his children. After spending a year at Vergnès’s Institute for Young Gentlemen, William and Henry were transferred in September 1853 to a school run by Richard Pulling Jenks at 689 Broadway (Habegger 1994: 313–14). The following autumn they were taught by Forrest and Quackenbos. Continuing concern for his children’s education led Henry Sr. to move the family, with Aunt Kate, to Europe on June 27, 1855. William, Wilky, and Bob were enrolled in school in Geneva, but after a mere two months at the Pensionnat Roediger, during which Henry Jr. had bouts of malarial fever, Henry Sr. decided Swiss schools were “greatly overrated” (Habegger 1994: 367–8, 371). That autumn the family returned to London, where a Scotsman named Robert Thomson, whom Henry Jr. would remember fondly, was hired as their tutor. Six months later, however, in the early summer of 1856, the family moved to Paris. After four or five months of being tutored by Monsieur Lerambert, William and Henry were enrolled in the Institution Fezandié, which Henry Sr. characterized as an experimental Fourierist school (Habegger 1994: 390). During their year in Paris, Henry Jr. became fluent in French and took long walks to the Louvre with William. Throughout his erratic education, his love of reading and writing remained constant. As his father wrote to Catharine Barber James in October 1857, Henry Jr. was “not so fond of study, properly so-called, as of reading. He is a devourer of libraries and an immense writer of novels and dramas. He has considerable talent, but I am at a loss to know whether he will ever accomplish much” (quoted in Lewis 1991: 89). The young writer was recovering from typhus during this time, which offered him the opportunity to pursue his interests in reading and writing fiction. As he grew older and his talent developed, his cosmopolitan and varied education provided him with much material for his work. In the spring of 1858 the family returned to America, settling in Newport, Rhode Island, a town of genteel wealth. Their unsettled lifestyle had forced the James children to rely largely on each other for companionship, but in Newport they began to form lifelong friendships. Thomas Sergeant Perry, a great-grandson of Benjamin Franklin, a grandson of Oliver Hazard Perry, and a great-nephew of Commodore Matthew Perry, was one such friend. Another was John La Farge, who came to Newport in the summer of 1859 to study painting with William Morris Hunt. William James, who was also studying with Hunt, was attracted by La Farge’s talent, while his European background and cosmopolitan attitude attracted Henry.

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Though the James children were delighted with Newport, their father again became unhappy with American education and took the family back to Europe in October 1859. William attended the Geneva Academy, while Henry was enrolled in the Institution Rochette, to which he was not suited. By April 1860, however, the younger Henry was relieved of his unhappiness and allowed to sample classes at Geneva Academy. He now had time to read Trollope, Thackeray, Dickens, and Eliot and, according to Wilky, to work covertly at becoming an author (Kaplan 1992: 42). While Henry attacked the literary arts, eighteen-year-old William finally admitted to his father that he wanted to study visual art seriously. So in September the family returned to Newport, where William resumed his studies with Hunt, and Henry, whose father had discouraged college, accompanied him, though he had no serious wish to be a painter as his older brother did. Henry resumed his friendships with Perry and La Farge, and he continued to write. Early in 1861 he also began to spend time with four of his Temple cousins, who had been orphaned in 1854. Henry Jr. was particularly attracted to Mary (Minny), who at seventeen was “slim and fair and quick, all straightness and charming tossed head” ( James 1914: 78). Her friendship and her early death in March 1870 profoundly affected Henry, who wrote to his mother that “I felt for her an affection as deep as the foundations of my being” (Edel 1974–84: I: 221). Years later, his memory of her would play a part in creating his fictional heroines Isabel Archer and Milly Theale. Just after the Temples moved to Newport, the Civil War began, and on Henry’s eighteenth birthday President Lincoln issued a call for volunteer soldiers. Wilky and Bob both enlisted before they turned eighteen and served in African-American regiments, but neither William nor Henry participated in the war. Henry’s abstention is partially explained by an “obscure hurt” he claimed to have suffered to his back while helping to extinguish a stable fire in October 1861. This injury, which doctors could not physically locate, flared up through his life. After spending the first two years of the war in Newport, Henry was surprised when his father agreed to his request to attend Harvard Law School, which he entered in September 1862. He withdrew, however, after a semester, more determined than ever to pursue a literary career. Having written in secret for years, James finally found the courage in late 1863 to send an unsigned tale, “The Tragedy of Error,” to Continental Monthly, which published his story in February 1864. Around the same time, he struck up a friendship with Charles Eliot Norton, co-editor of the North American Review. The next year he began to publish reviews in the NAR and The Nation, and his first signed tale, “The Story of a Year,” appeared in the March 1865 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. From 1866 to 1868 he continued to write reviews, and more of his short stories were published, including “A Landscape Painter,” “A Day of Days,” “Poor Richard,” “The Story of a Masterpiece,” and “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes.” Three of these stories were published in the Atlantic, and by the end of 1866, James had also become good friends with its assistant editor, William Dean Howells. The

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two men shared similar ideas about “the true principles of literary art,” namely that it should be realistic and psychological. Howells wrote to a friend that James “is a very earnest fellow, and I think extremely gifted – gifted enough to do better than any one has yet done toward making us a real American novel” (Howells 1979: 271). Howells later assumed editorship of the Atlantic and achieved an influential position in American letters as a novelist, editor, and critic. Despite these friendships and his publication success, in 1868 Henry was restless in Cambridge, where the family had moved from Boston in November 1866. He wanted to go to Europe, but his siblings were depleting his father’s resources: William was in Europe for his health, Alice was ill with an unexplained nervous condition, and Wilky and Bob’s plantation venture in Florida required costly subsidies. With William’s return, however, Henry was finally given permission to go to Europe, sailing in February 1869. In London he visited sites such as the British Museum and the National Gallery. He also began to establish social connections there, meeting William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Charles Darwin, John Ruskin, and George Eliot, among others. After a three week stay in Malvern to undergo Dr. Raynor’s water cure for constipation, James spent three weeks touring England – Tintern Abbey, Gloucester, Warwick Castle, Kenilworth, Stratford-onAvon, Oxford, Tewkesbury, and Salisbury (Horne 1999: 24). He did little reading during this time, focusing instead on gathering impressions to use later. In a November 1869 letter to Grace Norton, a lifelong friend and Charles Eliot Norton’s sister, James wrote that he had collected such a crowding multitude of impressions that my brain contains as yet but a confused mass of brilliant images which I devoutly trust will be reduced with time to some degree of harmony & logic. . . . My mind swarms with effects of all kinds – to be introduced into realistic novels yet unwritten. (Horne 1999: 28)

Many of these effects were produced by art, an interest that James cultivated throughout his life. He saw a clear relationship between visual and literary art, wrote numerous art reviews, and established friendships with well-known artists. This interest prompted him to view as many paintings as he could when, in late August, he arrived in Italy for the first time. Relaying his impressions to his family while in Venice, he extolled the virtues of Veronese, Tintoretto, and Bellini, and these impressions were confirmed in Florence as he visited the Uffizi and the Pitti Palace. After returning to the United States on May 10, 1870, James spent the next two years in Cambridge. During these two years James’s first novel Watch and Ward, which he preferred not to acknowledge in his later career, was serialized in the Atlantic (August to December 1871). Howells had taken over as the magazine’s editor in July, and thus supervised the novel’s appearance. In a letter to Charles Eliot Norton, James praised Howells as editor and writer, but lamented his lack of imagination, which James considered crucial for American authors:

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[Howells] seems to have resolved himself, however, into one who can write solely of what his fleshly eyes have seen; and for this reason I wish he were “located” where they would rest upon richer and fairer things than this immediate landscape. Looking about for myself, I conclude that the face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. This I think Howells lacks. (Of course I don’t!) To write well and worthily of American things one needs even more than elsewhere to be a master. But unfortunately one is less! (Edel 1974–84: I: 252)

James himself was looking to escape the “immediate landscape” of America, confessing to Charles Eliot Norton that he carried the desire of getting to Europe “to a morbid pitch, & I exaggerate the merits of Europe. . . . It’s a complex fate, being an American, & one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe” (Horne 1999: 48). Superstitious or not, his wish was realized in May 1872. Alice was recovering from a nervous collapse, and since Europe had improved William’s and Henry’s health, their parents hoped it would have the same effect on her. Aunt Kate and Henry served as her chaperones, and from London to Paris to Geneva to Venice, Alice remained well most of the time. According to Aunt Kate, Henry’s “care and consideration for Alice is unceasing” (quoted in Strouse 1980: 147). Returning to London by way of Paris, the three travelers spent a few days in London before Alice and Aunt Kate sailed back to America on October 15. James had decided he would stay in Europe after the two women left, feeling “as if my salvation, intellectually and literarilly, depended upon it” (Edel 1974–84: I: 297). He supported himself by writing European travel sketches for The Nation, and when William criticized them for over-refinement, James dismissed popular taste: The multitude, I am more and more convinced, has absolutely no taste – none at least that a thinking man is bound to defer to. To write for the few who have is doubtless to lose money – but I am not afraid of starving. (Edel 1974–84: I: 301)

Intellectually, James was far from starving. After an autumn in Paris, where he walked through the Louvre with Emerson one November morning, the young author settled in Rome, where he met Sarah Butler Wister and her mother Fanny Kemble, with whom he became good friends. He also met Matthew Arnold and William Wetmore Story, and found time to write, publishing “The Madonna of the Future” in the March 1873 issue of the Atlantic. Though “for ‘impressions’ [Rome] was priceless” (Edel 1974–84: I: 397), James left Italy in May and spent his summer in Switzerland and Germany. He returned to Florence that fall, and began writing Roderick Hudson. Back in Cambridge in September 1874, James focused on finishing Roderick Hudson, which Howells serialized in the Atlantic in 1875. In October 1874 James wrote to

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Bob in Wisconsin that “I confess I have become very much Europeanized in feeling, and I mean to keep a firm hold of the old world in some way or other” (Edel 1974–84: I: 467). In the meantime, he moved to New York for six months and wrote several pieces for the Nation. He also saw his first two books published: a collection of tales titled A Passionate Pilgrim, and Transatlantic Sketches. At the same time, he sought a way to get back to Europe and stay there without his father’s financial support. Thus he arranged, through John Hay, to write commissioned articles on Parisian cultural and social life for the New York Tribune. With the promise of this income, and the intention of beginning another novel, James sailed for Europe in October. From London on November 1 he wrote to his family that “I take possession of the old world – I inhale it – I appropriate it!” (Edel 1974–84: I: 484). Eleven days later James arrived in Paris. He soon met Turgenev, whom he especially liked and later saw several times. The Russian author introduced him to Gustave Flaubert, whom James liked better as a man than as a writer (Edel 1974–84: II: 36). At Flaubert’s home on several different Sundays, he met Zola, Daudet, and Maupassant. Though he was not particularly interested in the gritty naturalism of their work, he was delighted to be in a community of writers. His own writing was causing some difficulty for him. He felt uncertain about the topics and the tone of the Tribune letters, and by August they had been suspended at the editor’s suggestion that they were more appropriate in a magazine than a newspaper. James was hurt over this treatment, but he had begun writing a novel set in Paris, The American, which was published June 1876–May 1877 in the Atlantic. In a letter to Howells, who was disappointed with the ending, James defended his realistic conclusion: If I had represented [Mme de Cintré] as [scrambling over the wall] I should have made a prettier ending, certainly; but I should have felt as if I were throwing a rather vulgar sop to readers who don’t really know the world & who don’t measure the merit of a novel by its correspondence to the same. Such readers assuredly have a right to their entertainment, but I don’t believe it is in me to give them, in a satisfactory way, what they require. (Horne 1999: 83)

This would not be the last time James would be disappointed in the public’s response to his work. Abandoning the Tribune letters left James free to leave Paris, where he felt he would always be an outsider to the literary scene. London, on the other hand, as the center of the English literary world and a great cosmopolitan city, would be the right place for his art to prosper. Thus, in December 1876, James permanently settled in London. He never seriously considered returning to live in the United States, though he felt an affinity for his native country – Europe offered him richer ground for gathering impressions and building a career. As he wrote to William, he was “by no means cut

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off from getting American impressions here. . . . I have always my eyes on my native land” (Edel 1974–84: II: 171). Away from the United States at present, London proved to be the environment he needed. By mid-January James was dining out regularly and meeting writers and artists such as Robert Browning, George Henry Boughton, the Punch cartoonist George Du Maurier, John Addington Symonds, and Anthony Trollope. In August he wrote to Grace Norton, “I feel now more [at home] in London than anywhere else in the world” (Edel 1974–84: II: 134). The next winter banished any doubts of his being an outsider. He dined out almost every night – 107 times according to James (Edel 1974–84: II: 240). During these dinners he had the opportunity to talk with literary and artistic figures such as Tennyson, Arnold, Burne-Jones, Walter Pater, James Whistler, and John Millais. He also met Robert Louis Stevenson and Edmund Gosse in the summer of 1879. Despite his busy social life, James continued to think about his career as a writer. In January 1878 he was “weary of writing articles about places, and mere potboilers of all kinds” and intended “to do some [work] this year which will make a mark”; in six months he wished to “give myself up seriously to ‘creative’ writing. Then, and not till then, my real career will begin” (Edel 1974–84: II: 150–1). Indeed, six months later he had begun The Portrait of a Lady, “the history of an Americana – a female counterpart to Newman” (Edel 1974–84: II: 179), and he was also working on other fiction. The Europeans was serialized from July-October 1878 in the Atlantic, and “Daisy Miller” and “An International Episode” also appeared that year in Cornhill Magazine. In the fall of 1879 James stayed in Paris, where he wrote most of Washington Square and finished Hawthorne. Despite these accomplishments, James hoped his next novel would have “a larger success than I have yet obtained” (Horne 1999: 113). As the serialization of The Portrait of a Lady came to an end in Macmillan’s and in the Atlantic, James returned to Cambridge in early November 1881 as a famous author. His older brother had married Alice Howe Gibbons in 1878, and Henry met her and his nephew Henry for the first time. He was also seeing America for the first time in six years, and he was pleasantly surprised at the change that had taken place: “The increase of civilization, of wealth, luxury, knowledge, taste, of all the arts and usages of life, is extremely striking” (Edel 1974–84: II: 367). After Christmas, James traveled to Washington, DC to spend six weeks with Henry and Clover Adams. He was delighted with the city and with the people he met, with the exception of Oscar Wilde, who was in America on a lecture tour. But this trip was cut short on January 29 by news that his mother was “exceedingly ill.” She died that same night, as James traveled north to be with her. At her funeral her five children were together for the first time in fifteen years and for what would be the last time. Shortly after her death, James wrote in his notebook that, “It is impossible for me to say – to begin to say – all that has gone down into the grave with her. She was our life, she was the house, she was the keystone of the arch” (Edel and Powers 1987: 229).

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A week after his mother’s funeral, James moved to Boston, though he continued to visit Alice and his father daily in Cambridge. Alice had had delicate health and periods of nervous collapse for years, but was much stronger now, perhaps because she had a purpose, taking care of her father. A few months later, the family sold the house on Quincy Street and moved into one in Boston, closer to the bookstores their father loved. Meanwhile, James worked on a stage version of Daisy Miller, arranging a private printing in May. That month he returned to London, where he made an unsuccessful effort to have the play performed. After staying in London for the summer, James traveled in France from September to November gathering ideas for the travel sketches that would become A Little Tour in France. To Isabella Stewart Gardner, a Boston art collector and close friend, he wrote in November, “I have seen more of France than I had ever seen before, and on the whole liked it better” (Edel 1974–84: II: 387). Returning to London in late November, James received word that his father was ill, and on December 12 he sailed for America. He reached New York on the day of his father’s funeral, December 21, 1882. Henry Sr. had named his second son executor of his will, and Henry, who quickly dropped the “junior” from his signature, stayed in America until September settling his father’s affairs. In January 1883 he made a brief trip to Milwaukee to discuss the estate in person with Bob and Wilky, who was seriously ill (he would die in November), then traveled to Syracuse to survey family owned property. Henry Sr. had left Wilky out of his will, claiming he had already received his inheritance in the Florida plantation fiasco. Henry Jr., however, arranged for the property to be divided evenly among the brothers (Alice was separately provided for), though William was reluctant to give up his share. After the estate was redistributed, Henry signed over his income from the Syracuse property to Alice, presumably satisfied to live by his pen (Edel 1974–84: III: 15). Though he went through periods of financial difficulty, by and large James was able to support himself. As his success as a writer increased, he was often asked why he did not “renounc[e] his happy state” to marry. He answered his friend Elizabeth Boott, an American painter living in Italy, that, “I never shall [marry], my dear Lizzie, for I find life quite interesting enough as it is, without such complicated and complicating appendages” (Edel 1974–84: III: 17). Also, James’s letters to men such as Paul Joukowsky, Hendrik Andersen, Jocelyn Persse, and Morton Fullerton suggest attractions that James’s Victorian discretion might have kept him from making public. In February 1884 James left England for a short stay in Paris, where he sought out Daudet, Goncourt, and Zola. He had not kept in contact with the French authors since he met them in the winter of 1875–6, and on renewed acquaintance, their dedication to literature impressed him: there is nothing more interesting to me now than the effort & experiment of this little group, with its truly infernal intelligence of art, form, manner – its intense artistic life.

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They do the only kind of work, to-day, that I respect; & in spite of their ferocious pessimism & their handling of unclean things, they are at least serious and honest. (Horne 1999: 153)

Later that year he published his own theory of fiction, “The Art of Fiction,” which drew connections between painting and writing and established the technique of literary impressionism for which James would become famous in his later novels. In March 1886, as The Bostonians was finishing its run in the Century and The Princess Casamassima was halfway through its run in the Atlantic, James moved from 3 Bolton Street to 34 De Vere Gardens in Kensington. His new flat provided more space and better light, both of which he enjoyed. That December he traveled to Italy, and spent the next six months shuffling between Florence and Venice. In Florence, he visited Elizabeth Boott Duveneck, a new wife and mother, her father, Francis Boott, and Constance Fenimore Woolson. Woolson, a writer and a grandniece of James Fenimore Cooper, came to Europe in 1879 with a letter of introduction from one of Minny Temple’s sisters. After failing to find James in London, Woolson had finally met him in Florence in April 1880. They struck up a friendship, spending much time together in England and in Italy, where Woolson sought to alleviate her chronic depression. During this particular visit, James also took time to stay with the Curtises, fellow American expatriates, in Venice at the Palazzo Barbaro. There he completed “The Aspern Papers” and a few other stories. The late 1880s were a productive period for James. Nonetheless, the author constantly felt himself in danger of poverty, often without immediate reason. Over the years he had done a fair job of managing his accounts and copyrights, but having received far less for The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima than he had hoped, and chafing from the delay of a number of short stories already accepted by periodicals, he decided to hire A. P. Watt as his business manager. With Watt’s help, James earned more money in 1888 than he had ever made or ever would make again. In December 1888 Edward Compton, an actor and theater manager, sent James a proposal to dramatize The American. In his notebook he reflected that his “long cherished dream of doing something for the stage, for fame’s sake, and art’s, and fortune’s . . . has revived, on a new and a very much humbler basis, and especially under the lash of necessity” (Edel and Powers 1987: 52). The play opened January 3, 1891 near Liverpool, and it had modest success as it made its way through the English provinces. Encouraged by the success, James wrote two more plays as he waited for the September 26 London opening. There, The American ran for two months and received mixed reviews. One of James’s most devoted supporters in his enterprise to write plays was his sister Alice. She had moved to England with Katharine Loring, her friend and caretaker, in November 1884, and James visited her as often as he could. In January 1891 she rejoiced in her journal that “The great family event, over which I have been palpitating for the last 18 months or more has come off: The American was acted for the

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first time” (Edel 1999: 161). Four months later Alice was diagnosed with breast cancer, fulfilling her longing “for some palpable disease” (Edel 1999: 206). At the end of the year, when The American closed in London, she wrote, “I have to thank the beautiful play for all the interest and expectancy with which it has filled the last two years” (Edel 1999: 224). Alice James died March 6, 1892 with her brother, Henry, and her companion, Katharine Loring, by her side. In addition to Alice’s death, James grieved over the deaths of his good friends Elizabeth Boott, Fanny Kemble, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Lizzie had died suddenly in March 1888, while Fanny Kemble, whom he had known for more than twenty years, died in January 1893 at the age of eighty-three. Woolson died a year later after a fall or jump from her third story apartment in Venice. Following Woolson’s death, James spent two months in Venice taking care of her things and writing “The Coxon Fund.” The next year, in December 1894, he read in the London newspaper that Robert Louis Stevenson had died in the South Pacific of tuberculosis. The two men had become friends in April and May 1885 when James spent time in Bournemouth with his sister, Alice. Stevenson left England in the summer of 1887 in search of a climate more conducive to his health. Though separated by a great distance, the two writers corresponded until Stevenson’s death. At the time of Stevenson’s death, James’s play Guy Domville was in rehearsal. The hopeful playwright also published four unproduced plays that year, Theatricals: Two Comedies, and Theatricals: Second Series. Unfortunately, the premiere of Guy Domville did not increase his success as a playwright. At its opening on January 5, 1895, James’s nervousness led him to watch Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, which was being performed nearby. When he returned to his own play, he allowed himself to be led onto the stage afterwards, only to be greeted by an abominable quarter of an hour during which all the forces of civilization in the house waged a battle of the most gallant, prolonged and sustained applause with the hoots and jeers and catcalls of the roughs, whose roars (like those of a cage of beasts at some infernal “zoo”) were only exacerbated (as it were!) by the conflict. (Edel 1974–84: III: 508)

The play finished its five week run, but James felt a deep humiliation about his failure as a playwright. His effort to comfort himself is evident in a January 26, 1895, notebook entry. Hurt over the poor premiere of Guy Domville and still nursing a twentyyear hurt over his failed Tribune letters from Paris, he developed an idea for the story that became “The Next Time.” He clearly identifies with the main character, who tries “to ‘meet’ the vulgar need, to violate his intrinsic conditions, to make, as it were, a sow’s ear out of a silk purse” only to find “it’s all of no use – it’s always ‘too subtle,’ always too fine – never, never vulgar enough” (Edel and Powers 1987: 110). The story was published in July, and James pushed his dramatic failures behind him.

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In the second half of the 1890s, James returned to the literary forms with which he had had success. Having decided not to tie his hands with fiction while he focused on writing drama, he now adapted his play scenario for The Other House into a novel, and wrote The Spoils of Poynton and What Maisie Knew. He also published two of his more well-known short stories in 1898, “The Turn of the Screw” and “In the Cage.” While writing Maisie in February 1897, James bought a typewriter and began dictating to a stenographer, William MacAlpine. Many scholors have noted the almost immediate change in his writing style, which becomes most obvious in his novels of 1901 to 1904. In 1898 he also hired an agent, James B. Pinker, who did an excellent job of placing James’s stories. He soon had enough money for the initial payment of Lamb House in Rye, which he leased in 1897 and then bought in 1899. Just after the turn of the century, James experienced a period of optimism, energy, and creativity. In the spring he shaved his beard, which he had worn for decades and which was turning white, and he felt “forty and clean and light” (Edel 1974–84: IV: 139). In July he finished The Sacred Fount, which was published the next year, and wrote The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl. With four years of hard work behind him, and after a twenty-two year absence, James decided to visit his native country. His idea was to write a book of American sketches, which would cover the expenses of his trip, and to visit parts of the country he had not previously seen. He arrived in the United States on August 30, 1904. In addition to visiting his brothers, he called on Grace Norton, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Edith Wharton. Though he had met and exchanged letters with Wharton, their friendship solidified during this visit. He also spent time exploring Boston and reminiscing there. After Christmas, he visited New York City before beginning his lecture circuit in Philadelphia. From there he traveled to the nation’s capitol, where he was Henry Adams’s guest and dined one night with the American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens and President Theodore Roosevelt. After a week in Philadelphia and a week at George Vanderbilt’s Biltmore in North Carolina, James journeyed to Charleston, South Carolina. Owen Wister, whose mother (Sarah Butler Wister) James had visited days before in Philadelphia, guided him through Fort Sumter, where Wilky had been wounded in 1863. In February he also traveled to Palm Beach and St. Augustine, Florida, where Bob’s family was vacationing, before returning to Boston at the end of the month. On March 4 James headed west, delivering “The Lesson of Balzac” in St. Louis, Chicago, South Bend, and Indianapolis, with a side trip to Milwaukee to visit Wilky’s wife and children. From Chicago he went straight to Los Angeles on March 20. He lectured there and in San Francisco before traveling to Seattle to visit Bob’s oldest son Edward. Arriving in New York in late April, he stayed until June exploring the city. That month he also briefly visited with his family and with Wharton before sailing for England on July 5. Prior to leaving America, James had begun to make arrangements for a “definitive edition” of his novels and tales, to be called the New York Edition. His agent, James B. Pinker, came to New York in early June to successfully negotiate with Scribner’s,

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and by August James was revising Roderick Hudson as well as working on The American Scene, which was collected into book form in 1907. James spent the years 1905 to 1909 ceaselessly toiling on his definitive edition. Though Scribner’s was willing to publish all of James’s work (in thirty-five volumes), James wanted a selective edition (Edel 1985: 624): “I have made up my mind not to let it include absolutely everything. It is best I think that it should be selective as well as collective; I want to quietly disown a few things by not thus supremely adopting them” (Horne 1999: 412). The final number of the volumes would be twenty-four, and each volume or novel contained its own preface, “representing, in a manner, the history of the work or the group, representing more particularly, perhaps, a frank critical talk about its subject, its origin, its place in the whole artistic chain”; James hoped “that it might count as a feature of a certain importance in any such new and more honorable presentation of my writings” (Edel 1974–84: IV: 367). In addition to the prefaces, “some scene, object, or locality . . . associated with some one or other of the tales in the volume” was to be included in each volume (Edel 1974–84: IV: 408). James recommended Alvin Langdon Coburn, a young American, as the photographer for these, and Coburn began photographing for the first volumes in 1906. The volumes were published between 1907 and 1909, but the financial reward James hoped for was not forthcoming, many of the profits having been absorbed by copyright fees. In the spring of 1907, with The American Scene in press and a good start on the New York Edition, James decided to visit Edith Wharton in Paris. Two weeks later, on March 21, they left the city on a three-week motor tour of France. After another month in Paris, James traveled to Rome, Florence, and Venice, arriving back at Lamb House in July. He anticipated quite rightly that it would be his last trip to Italy, though he would visit France again. In fact, he took a break from the New York Edition to make another, briefer, spring trip to Paris to see Wharton. In the autumn of 1909 the heart strain that William suffered over a decade prior while climbing the Adirondacks began to cause him severe angina. Aware that both he and William were getting older, and perhaps suffering himself from depression, James burned nearly all the letters written to him. In January he suffered a collapse and took to his bed. William and Alice’s son Harry took him to a doctor in London, but the doctor could find nothing physically wrong. In late March, William and Alice came over to England themselves. Eventually the author began to improve, but William’s heart condition worsened, and by July 10 he could not get out of bed. After receiving news of Bob’s death that month, and with William in rapid decline, the two remaining James brothers sailed for America with William’s wife on August 12. Two weeks later William died in Chocorua. William’s death made Henry James the sole survivor of his immediate family, and he began to reminisce about his childhood. After returning to England the next summer, he put these thoughts in writing, intending them as a tribute to his older brother. Two autobiographical works, A Small Boy and Others (1913) and Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), were the result. As he was composing these two works, he sat for a portrait painted by his friend John Singer Sargent. It was a seventieth birthday

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gift from his friends, who also presented him with a golden bowl. James accepted the portrait on the condition that his friends would remain its guardians. It later passed to the National Portrait Gallery. In August 1914 Europe went to war. That autumn, as a way to contribute to the war effort, James became the honorary president of the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps. He also participated in relief work for Belgian refugees and visited wounded Belgian and British soldiers. Traveling as an American citizen became increasingly difficult and personally annoying to James. In addition, he was frustrated with America’s continuing neutrality. Given the restrictions placed on his travel and his frustration with the United States, in addition to his long residence in England, James decided to become a British subject, throwing “his moral weight and personal allegiance, for whatever they may be worth, into the scale of the contending Nation’s present and future fortune” (Horne 1999: 556). Shortly before his death, James’s petition to become a British subject was granted. On December 2, 1915, James suffered a slight stroke while at his London flat, and then a more serious one the next day. Over the next three months he went in and out of consciousness. Henry James died on February 28, 1916. His remains were cremated, and William’s wife Alice, who had taken care of him since December, smuggled his ashes across the Atlantic Ocean, back to the United States, and buried him next to his family, in his native country.

Note 1

Habegger writes that the James family left Liverpool for New York on October 12, 1844 (1994: 234).

References and Further Reading Edel, Leon (ed.) (1974–84). Henry James Letters. 4 vols. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Edel, Leon (1985). Henry James: A Life. New York: Harper and Row. Edel, Leon (ed.) (1999). The Diary of Alice James. Introduction by Linda Simon. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Edel, Leon and Lyall H. Powers (eds.) (1987). The Complete Notebooks of Henry James. New York: Oxford University Press.

Gordon, Lyndall (1999). A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art. New York: W. W. Norton. Habegger, Alfred (1994). The Father: A Life of Henry James, Sr. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Horne, Philip (ed.) (1999). Henry James: A Life in Letters. New York: Viking. Howells, William Dean (1979). Selected Letters of W. D. Howells: 1852–72. Ed. George Arms, Richard H. Ballinger, Christopher K.

A Brief Biography of Henry James Lohmann, and John K. Reeves. 6 vols. Boston: Twayne. James, Henry (1913). A Small Boy and Others. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. James, Henry (1914). Notes of a Son and Brother. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. James, Henry III (ed.) (1920). The Letters of William James. 2 vols. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press. Kaplan, Fred (1992). Henry James: The Imagination of Genius: A Biography. New York: Morrow. Lewis, R. W. B. (1991). The Jameses: A Family Narrative. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Maher, Jane (1986). Biography of Broken Fortunes: Wilkie and Bob, Brothers of William, Henry, and Alice James. Hamden, CT: Archon Books.

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Matthieson, F. O. (1947). The James Family. New York: A. A. Knopf. Novick, Sheldon (1996). Henry James: The Young Master. New York: Random House. Skrupskelis, Ignas and Elizabeth M. Berkely (eds.) (1992–2004). The Correspondence of William James. 12 vols. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Strouse, Jean (1980). Alice James: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Walker, Pierre A. and Alfred Habegger (1994). “Young Henry James and the Institutuion Fezandié.” Henry James Review, 15.2: 107–20.

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When narrative prose deploys the trope of personification, the results can seem rather startling. At the outset of Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1857), for instance, when the narrator describes an August day in Marseilles, he represents the glare from buildings and streets as an extended act of staring: “Strangers were stared out of countenance by staring white houses, staring white walls, staring white streets, staring tracts of arid road, staring hills from which verdure was burnt away” (Dickens 2003: 15). Within a realist register, the brightness of the sun’s reflection has been transformed into a kind of ubiquitous gaze, the gleam of surveillance. In the work of Henry James, though, built space is no more inclined to stare than to stammer, as though dramatizing what remains undisclosed by realism’s commitment to the visual dimension. The American Scene (1907), an account of his trip back to the United States in 1904 (after a twenty year absence), gives voice to a variety of buildings, from houses along the Jersey shore (“we are awfully dear, for what we are and for what we do”) to New York’s Trinity Church (“the wretched figure I am making . . . is the fault of the buildings whose very first care is to deprive churches of their visibility”) ( James 1968: 8, 78). As W. H. Auden wrote of the travel narrative, “Outside of fairy tales, I know of no book in which things so often and so naturally become persons” (Auden 1946: xi). The intensity of the personification in this late autobiographical work ought to complicate any generalization about James as the American novelist most responsible for redirecting the genre away from material culture, away from the physical environment, “from the observed object toward the observing subject, away from exterior description toward inner apprehension,” to borrow Alex Woloch’s formula for what happens to the novel with the advent of modernism (Woloch 2003: 28). James may well serve as a kind of hinge opening away from the extraordinary record of life’s material context in the pages of Dickens or Balzac and onto (or into) the life of the mind as recorded by the likes of Virginia Woolf. In his preface to The Portrait of a Lady, for instance, he argues that he began with a character, to which such “usual elements” as “setting” had to be “superadded” ( James 1995: 4). And yet Woolf herself

A Companion to Henry James. Edited by Greg W. Zacharias © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-14042-3

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considered it our responsibility as readers to “gaze through [the individual novelist’s] eyes until we, too, understand in what order he ranges the large common objects upon which novelists are fated to gaze” (Woolf 1932: 52). When it comes to James, our responsibility is to recognize that when he orders common objects, large and small, he doesn’t seem to be “superadding” setting (the look and feel of London or Paris) as a “usual element”; he seems to conjure up an object culture wherein human aspirations, calculations, and frustrations lie congealed, to the point where the characters themselves resist distinguishing between the animate and inanimate, subject and object, the human and non-human. In The Spoils of Poynton (1896), Mrs. Gareth proclaims of the treasures she collected with her husband, “they were our life, they were us.” “They’re living things to me,” she explains to her son, “they know me, they return the touch of my hand” ( James 2003: 231). Such conflations of personality and property nonetheless have obvious limits. In The Bostonians (1886), the southerner Basil Ransom experiences Boston in its object culture: it seemed to him he never experienced an interior that was so much an interior . . . he had never felt himself in the presence of so much organized privacy or of so many objects that spoke of habits and tastes. . . . He had always heard that Boston was a city of culture, and now there was culture in Miss Chancellor’s tables and sofas, in the books that were everywhere . . . in the photographs and water-colours that covered the walls, in the curtains that were festooned rather stiffly in the doorways. ( James 2000: 14–15)

As William James put it, in his Principles of Psychology (1890), collections “become, with different degrees of intimacy, parts of our empirical selves” ( James, W. 1983: 281). Which isn’t to say that they disclose the self tout court. Ransom’s access to “organized privacy,” to this “interior that was so much an interior,” hardly provides access to what we call human interiority. Objects can reveal character, but they can also conceal it. That antagonism lies at the heart of a famous exchange in Portrait of a Lady (1881), where Madame Merle passionately works to persuade her young interlocutor, Isabel Archer, of the importance of material possessions to one’s self-production: What shall we call our ‘self ’? Where does it begin? Where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us – and then it flows back again. I know a large part of myself is in the clothes I choose to wear. I’ve a great respect for things! One’s self – for other people – is one’s expression of one’s self; and one’s house, one’s furniture, one’s garments, the books one reads, the company one keeps – these things are all expressive. ( James 1995: 222–3)

William James came to argue that the distinction “between what a man calls me and what a man calls mine the line is very difficult to draw” ( James, W. 1983: 279). But this is an argument that Isabel Archer adamantly contests, proclaiming that she “think[s] just the other way”: “Nothing that belongs to me is any measure of me;

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everything’s on the contrary a limit, a barrier, and a perfectly arbitrary one” (James 1995: 223). But this question of whether things reveal or conceal the self is just one of the questions prompted by the role of inanimate objects in James’s fiction. Indeed, even though he has come to be regarded as the protomodernist who portrays, above all, the drama of consciousness, critics have repeatedly been drawn to the topic of “things” in his fiction.1 No reader of James, however, can fail to recognize how “things” – a privileged term in his lexicon – is a word that can denote something physical or metaphysical, the oscillations and transpositions between which will be the topic of the following pages. At first, though, I want to track the object relations in Portrait of a Lady, and then to demonstrate how The Spoils of Poynton seems to engage a decorating impulse of the era even while disengaging from the task of representing material culture. “Things” come to name a structuring absence in the novel – structuring in the sense that “their” lack of descriptive appearance within the text legitimizes Mrs. Gareth’s and James’s own taste, organizes the novel’s relation to Balzac (whose “mighty passion for things” always fascinated James) ( James 1984b: 48), and transforms the physical presence of objects into a metaphysical potency, the auratic power of “things.” I’ll then turn to The Golden Bowl (1904) to show how the ubiquitous reification of people (the inverse of the Jamesian personification of things) might be understood both as a social condition and as a psychological process wherein the self’s relation to itself achieves the canniness of settling into one’s mind as though one were settling into one’s study. Most simply, ideas and ideation begin to assume a thing-like quality; the collection of what we are asked to apprehend as materialized or externalized thoughts seems far more “massive” than any collection of objects. This is to argue, then, that as James turns away from exterior description and toward inner apprehension, his rendering of inner apprehension comes to have the look and the feel of exterior description. Two decades before that transformation in his work, his characters often seem to be constituted through their relation to objects: they are their object relations – a set of responses (attraction, obsession, repulsion) to particular objects that clearly motivate them. In The Portrait of a Lady, for instance, it would be far too simple to argue, on the grounds of that famous exchange between Madame Merle and Isabel, that the novel makes sense according to a simple materialist/antimaterialist binary. This becomes clear when Isabel’s friend, the coarse and aggressive (yet benign) Henrietta Stackpole, tours the National Gallery and declares that she has no “sympathy with inanimate objects” ( James 1995: 161). In contrast, the novel describes Isabel (as a young girl in America, and as a mature woman in Italy) as having an innate capacity to sympathize with objects and to elicit something like sympathy from them. Within her grandmother’s house in Albany, she considers the attic a “chamber of disgrace for old pieces of furniture whose infirmities were not always apparent (so that the disgrace seemed unmerited and rendered them victims of injustice) and with which, in the manner of children, she had established relations almost human, certainly dramatic”

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( James 1995: 40). Her own “respect for things” involves a sense of justice. When, after living her new life in Europe and recognizing what a ruin she has made of that life, she wonders through Rome, a city with which she has become “deeply, tenderly acquainted,” she takes comfort in the physical space that always “interfused and moderated her passion.” “She had long before this taken old Rome into her confidence, for in a world of ruins the ruin of her happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe. She rested her weariness upon things that had crumbled for centuries and yet still were upright” ( James 1995: 551). Her intimacy with the inanimate object world proves self-sustaining. This relation she has to objects, which depends on a kind of personification that is not rhetorical but emotional, is antipathetic to the merely possessive relation to objects that animates her husband, Gilbert Osmond. Madame Merle explains to him: “I should have liked you to do so many other things.” “Things,” she goes on, “that were impossible.” Instead of doing things, Osmond has made a career out of having things; the thing he has done is, with incomparable taste, to collect things. “She looked about the room – at the old cabinets, pictures, tapestries, surfaces of faded silk. ‘Your rooms at least are perfect. I’m struck with that afresh whenever I come back; I know none better anywhere. You understand this sort of thing as nobody anywhere does’ ” ( James 1995: 265). Osmond’s understanding extends “to mak[ing] one’s life a work of art,” and to considering his new wife as one more object within his exquisite collection: “this lady’s intelligence was to be a silver plate, not an earthen one – a plate that he might heap up with ripe fruits, to which it would give a decorative value, so that talk might become for him a sort of served dessert” ( James 1995: 333, 378). Whereas Isabel personifies objects, Osmond reifies people. One way of understanding the distinction between his proprietary concern for objects and her non-proprietary appreciation is to characterize her interest as disinterested, and thus to align it with aesthetic appreciation in a traditional, Kantian sense. But in fact her relation to the inanimate object world, from the start of the novel, has assumed an ethical dimension as well. Thus, in the Jamesian universe, materialism can hardly be homogenized and coded as immoral, not even when it becomes crass or grandiose. “ ‘Things’ were of course the sum of the world; only, for Mrs. Gareth,” in The Spoils of Poynton, “the sum of the world was rare French furniture and oriental china. She could at a stretch imagine people’s not ‘having,’ but she couldn’t imagine their not wanting and missing” ( James 2003: 227). Her new young friend, Fleda Vetch, proves the exception because the issue of “wanting” does not concern her; her satisfaction derives from elaborate acts of appreciation. She proves the point argued by Vernon Lee, in Art and Life (1896), that the “aesthetic sentiment” replaces “the legal illusory act of owning by the real spiritual act of appreciation” (quoted in Saisselin 1984: 160)2 But this disparity between the two women in no way diminishes their growing intimacy, which, from the first pages of the novel, depends on their shared horror of bad taste, an aesthetic bond, a solidarity built on the mutual recognition of despicable décor. The

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relationship between the two women develops in the context of Mrs. Gareth’s sudden metamorphosis from “having” to “missing.” Because she has lost her husband, she must lose her home, English law dictating that the intact estate will be inherited by her one son, Owen. Although granted another house (Ricks) in which to live, Mrs. Gareth must abandon the things she has devoted her life to acquiring, “things your father and I collected,” as she says to her son, “things that we worked for and waited for and suffered for” ( James 2003: 231). She substantiates what Jean Baudrillard terms “the miracle of collecting,” the fact that “what you really collect is always yourself ” (Baudrillard 1996: 91). Mrs. Gareth understands the things at Poynton not as an accumulation of isolated acquisitions, and she “care[s] nothing for mere possession” ( James 2003: 357); she understands “the things” as a single work of art she has produced. The “things” at Poynton are not so much objects as they are congealed actions, passionate acts of seeking, selecting, and situating. And this is why thinking “solely and incorruptibly of what [is] best for the objects themselves,” she cannot help but think of her self, even as she invests taste with an all but ecological dimension ( James 2003: 357). Exiled to Ricks, she has all the things secretly and swiftly transported from Poynton, only to comply with the law and return all the things when she believes that Fleda has supplanted Mona as the object of her son’s affections. But though Fleda and Owen have expressed their love to one another, Fleda will not interfere with his prior commitment: she forfeits both Owen and the spoils. Mrs. Gareth must forfeit Fleda as a potential member of the family, but not as the friend with whom, because she so thoroughly intuits the grandeur and grace of the woman’s decorating touch, Mrs. Gareth has come to enjoy an inexpressible intimacy, an intimacy based on their joint superiority: “there are always things you and I can comfortably hate together” ( James 2003: 378). Although things thus compose the axle around which the plot turns, and through which this intimacy is achieved, the things at Poynton hardly appear in the novel’s visual register. Whereas the first chapter describes the hideous décor at Waterbath in detail, Poynton conspicuously receives no such particularizing description, although we’re told that “the exquisite old house” is “early Jacobean, supreme in every part,” and that “there were places much grander and richer, but no such complete work of art” ( James 2003: 219). Despite the novel’s eventual reference to two specific objects – a “great Italian cabinet” in the red saloon and the Maltese cross, described as “a small but marvelous crucifix of ivory, a masterpiece of delicacy” ( James 2003: 259, 261) – Poynton, above all, is all awash in overarching characterization: “the shimmer of wrought substances spent itself in the brightness; the old golds and brasses, old ivories and bronzes, the fresh tapestries and deep old damasks threw out a radiance” ( James 2003: 250). It is as though James reserved detailed description for the elements of bad taste alone, or as though it were in bad taste to visualize exquisite taste. James renders the mise-en-scène at Poynton as a matter of aura, not artifacts – an accomplishment to be registered, even, by the non-visual senses: the “beauty” of Poynton “throb[s] out like music” ( James 2003: 228).

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By having the overall effectiveness of Poynton obscure particular objects, James accomplishes several objectives. The novel appears to certify Mrs. Gareth’s own conclusion that there is no way to choose a few things from among all the things. Though Owen grants her such a choice, “the general effect made preferences almost as impossible as if they had been shocks” ( James 2003: 225). The lack of specifying, individuating attention also underscores how Mrs. Gareth’s accomplishment lies not in the act of acquisition but in the art of composition. “It’s your extraordinary genius,” Fleda says to her, that “you make things ‘compose’ in spite of yourself ” ( James 2003: 380). Finally, by emphasizing design over detail, the novel itself, as a manifestation of taste, participates in the aspirations outlined by the decorating discourse of the day, which ultimately advocated transforming the physical into something, say, metaphysical. In what remains one of the best-known American decorating texts, The Decoration of Houses (1897), Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman excoriate “the accumulation of superfluous knick-knacks,” extol the “supreme excellence [of] simplicity,” and focus on the “beautiful thing” that lies in excess of mere things: “that something, indefinable . . . which gives repose and distinction to a room” is, “in its effects as intangible as that all-pervading essence which the ancients called the soul” (Wharton and Codman 1997: 88, 192, 33). To the degree that Mrs. Gareth’s success lies in the “arrangement and effect of everything” she has performed the decorating feat of the day ( James 2003: 380). This was a feat espoused beyond the rarefied argument of Wharton and Codman. Edward Bok had used the Ladies’ Home Journal to advocate domestic simplicity over and against ornateness (Shi 1985: 181–9). Other voices formed a chorus adamantly arguing against “meaningless bric-à-brac” and “indiscriminate riff-raff” (Morse 1893: 181). It is the profusion of such riff-raff at Waterbath – “trumpery ornament and scrapbook art, with strange excrescences and bunchy draperies” ( James 2003: 215) – that provokes Fleda Vetch’s dismay (and initiates her friendship with Adela Gareth) within “the little tale” that Henry James called “The House Beautiful” while he worked on the manuscript, situating the text within the decorating discourse of the era, from Clarence Cook’s The House Beautiful: Essays on Beds and Tables, Stools and Candlesticks (1878) to the magazine House Beautiful, which began to appear in 1896, meant not simply to solidify notions of good taste, but to generate a public devoted to analyzing and expressing the aesthetics of the home.3 The assault on superfluous things harks back to Thoreau just as it prefigures the attack on “that ‘Balzacian mentality’ so despised by Le Corbusier,” as one architectural historian puts it (Vidler 1999: 63). And during the same decade that Le Corbusier published Vers une architecture (1923), Willa Cather published a manifesto about prose fiction rendered as an attack, above all, on the way that the novel had “been overfurnished”: “The property man has been so busy on its pages, the importance of material objects and their presentation have been so stressed” that the genre, by Cather’s light, had been reduced to the act of observation, hopelessly confused for the art of writing (Cather 1936: 43). In the act of representing Mrs. Gareth’s decorating acuity, James manifests what would become Cather’s dictum that scenes must be presented by “suggestion rather than by

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enumeration”: “It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named,” she argues, “the emotional aura of the fact or the thing . . . that gives high quality to the novel” (Cather 1936: 43, 48, 50). In Fleda’s words, “It’s a presence, a perfume, a touch” ( James 2003: 249). “Were they saving the things?” Fleda wants to know in quiet desperation as she learns that “Poynton’s on fire” in the closing pages of the novel ( James 2003: 381). But the contents of the estate, around which the plot of The Spoils of Poynton has turned, disappear without a trace. This dramatic dénouement thus allegorizes (or, say, literalizes) the absence of the spoils within the novel’s descriptive register. To recognize that James was writing a novel about things, but without visualizing things, is to appreciate the fire as an act (or rather a mark) of purification. Though Cather would go on to declare “How wonderful it would be if we could throw all the furniture out of the window” (Cather 1936: 51), James had, in his way, already burned it up. One might imagine that – within that conflagration – the genre of the novel as such is being purified of the realism associated with Balzac, whom Cather singles out as the showman who “tried out the value of literalness in the novel . . . with the inflamed zest of an unexampled curiosity” (Cather 1936: 46). James similarly considers Balzac’s “passion for bric-à-brac” as the source of the “enumerations of inanimate objects” in which he “often sins by extravagance” ( James 1984b: 50). Indeed, just as “things” mediate the relation among so many of James’s characters, so “things” mediate James’s own relation to his French predecessor, both early and late in his career.4 James considers Balzac “one of the finest of artists and one of the coarsest,” whose “great general defect,” as he put it in French Poets and Novelists (1878), amounts to “the absence of fresh air” ( James 1984b: 67, 33). However claustrophobic he found this atmosphere, though, James “often prefer[ed] his places to his people,” and recognized that, for Balzac, the “mise en scene” is no less significant than an “event.” Having claimed that “to live greatly in all one’s senses, to have plenty of things – this was Balzac’s infinite,” James goes on to specify this “living greatly” as a matter of human-being as such: “There is nothing in all imaginative literature that in the least resembles his mighty passion for things – for material objects, for furniture, upholstery, bricks and mortar. The world that contained these things filled his consciousness, and being, at its intensest, meant simply being thoroughly at home among them” ( James 1984b: 50–1, 48). James fully senses that the canny comfort of being-at-home with one’s things – a comfort which could be dismissed as complacent bourgeois repose – might amount to an ongoing state of fervor. Only with such a sense of James’s ambivalence toward Balzac’s materialism can a reader appreciate The Spoils of Poynton as a radical experiment in Balzacian realism. By the time James wrote his preface to the New York Edition of the novel, this is how he himself had come to understand it. He describes himself as having recognized that the story might illuminate “that most modern of our current passions, the fierce appetite for the upholsterer’s and joiner’s and brazier’s work, the chairs and tables,

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the cabinets and presses, the material odds and ends, of the more labouring ages” ( James 1934: 123). The conception of the novel did not begin with a character. “On the face of it,” James writes, “the ‘things’” would achieve “heroic importance” ( James 1934: 123), which would require a Balzacian effort to render the things descriptively visible within the pages of the text. “They would have to be presented, they would have to be painted – arduous and desperate thought; something would have to be done for them not too ignobly unlike the great array in which Balzac, say, would have marshaled them” ( James 1934: 123–4). Instead, he ultimately displaced “the Things, always the splendid Things” with their effects, “lodg[ing] somewhere at the heart of one’s complexity an irrepressible appreciation,” which he fashioned in Fleda ( James 2003: 126, 129). According to the preface, then, character comes into being as a system for registering the effectiveness of physical objects, which, as an effect, are not objects but “things.” The Spoils of Poynton is about the impressions that things leave on people – which is really to say the impressions that constitute character. However dubious this narrative of the novel’s composition, it helps to explain why Fleda mediates the consumation of the spoils as a triumph, declaring to herself that “They were nobody’s at all – too proud, unlike base animals and humans, to be reducible to anything so narrow. It was Poynton that was theirs; they had simply recovered their own” (James 2003: 372). Fleda’s claim, which relishes the moral superiority of these things, shows how seriously they remain at the center of the novel, however absent they seem to be. Thus, though the novel itself maintains an utterly spare décor, James intensifies Balzac’s investment in things, granting them not a physical but a metaphysical potency. He concludes of the finished novel that the “ ‘things’ are radiant, shedding afar, with a merciless monotony, all their light, exerting their ravage, without remorse” ( James 2003: 129). Human relationships become the medium for expressing things, for apprehending the intensity of their being, for recognizing that the being of things lies no more in the details of their mere physicality than does the being of humans. Having begrudgingly returned the things to Poynton, and anticipating Fleda’s upcoming visit, Mrs. Gareth writes to her friend that, “with nothing else but my four walls, you’ll at any rate be a bit of furniture. For that, a little, you know, I’ve always taken you – quite one of my best finds” ( James 2003: 378). These words bluntly manifest the older woman’s proprietary objectification of the younger. But far from being alarmed by the claim, Fleda seems to appreciate the objectification, part of her overarching appreciation of all that Mrs. Gareth’s does with objects: “The position of a bit of furniture was one that Fleda could conscientiously accept, and she by no means insisted on so high a place in the list” ( James 2003: 378). Insofar as Mrs. Gareth exemplifies the “real collector” for whom, as Walter Benjamin put it, “ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to things,” her proprietary objectification of Fleda amounts to her most genuine expression of warmth (Benjamin 1999: 492). To apprehend the adequacy of her words (their adequacy from Fleda’s point of view) requires thinking outside a familiar paradigm, where pieces of furniture attain

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their anthropomorphic value because they incarnate the “emotional bonds” of the family (Baudrillard 1996: 16). Instead, Mrs. Gareth’s relation to furniture, her emotional bond with the physical object world, is the ground for feeling as such. Declaring Fleda a piece of furniture does not diminish her to the status of a commodity object; it elevates her to a status beyond (socially determined) value, and it envelops her in the kind of affection Mrs. Gareth generally reserves for objects (and does not expend, for instance, on her son). Indeed, given the woman’s own status as an object among objects – “Wherever she was she was herself the great piece in the gallery” – the novel allows us to consider the relation between the two women as an intimacy between one thing and another ( James 2003: 260). James treats this topic most extensively in his last complete novel, The Golden Bowl (1904), which opens by explicitly and theatrically emphasizing an Italian Prince’s new role as an object. Having strayed into Bond Street, he stops before the shop windows without interest in the “objects massive and lumpish, in silver and gold, . . . tumbled together as if, in the insolence of Empire, they had been the loot of far-off victories” ( James 1999: 3). Amerigo cannot concentrate on such objects because he’s distracted by his own new status as an object, an imperial purchase by Adam Verver, meant to serve as his daughter’s husband – rich in looks, charm, and history. Maggie Verver has been playfully frank with her fiancé about the part he is meant to play: “You’re at any rate a part of his collection . . . one of the things that can only be got over here. You’re a rarity, an object of beauty, an object of price. . . . You’re what they call a morceau de musée” ( James 1999: 10). The Prince cheerfully participates in the analogy: “I shall be one of the little pieces that you unpack at the hotel” ( James 1999: 11). Because Adam Verver applies “the same measure of value to such different pieces of property as old Persian carpets, say, and new human acquisitions,” he can appreciate Charlotte, his daughter’s friend and his future wife, as the “real thing” ( James 1999: 145, 144). But acquisition is hardly a necessary condition for this logic of reification. The great collector thinks about his daughter by analogizing her to a statue, and he thinks about her son, his only grandchild, as one of the “small pieces”: “he had handled nothing so precious as the Principino, his daughter’s first born . . . [whom he could] almost already toss and catch again, as he couldn’t a correspondingly rare morsel of an earlier pâte tendre” ( James 1999: 138–9, 108). While the novel thus offers an extensive portrait of the collector’s imagination, where no person escapes his powers of objectification, such powers are hardly reserved for the collector alone. Maggie strikes the Prince, for instance, “in respect to the beautiful world, as one of the beautiful, the most beautiful things” ( James 1999: 9). And during his first reencounter with Charlotte, she appears fully reified, affecting him “as a cluster of possessions . . . items in a full list, items recognized, each of them, as if, for the long interval, they had been ‘stored’ – wrapped up, numbered, put away in a cabinet. While she faced Mrs. Assingham the door of the cabinet had opened of itself; he took the relics out, one by one” ( James 1999: 35). Just as Auden was struck by the way that “things so often and so naturally become persons” in The American

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Scene, one might be no less struck by the way that, in The Golden Bowl, persons so naturally become things. At times that transformation is motivated psychologically. “Representative precious objects, great ancient pictures and other works of art . . . so engaged” Adam Verver “that the instinct, the particular sharpened appetite of the collector, had fairly served as a basis for his acceptance of the Prince’s suit” ( James 1999: 103). More often, though, the transformation is, as it were, merely rhetorical, a result of the novel’s own reification of its characters, its production of one rematerializing analogy after another (as though the human relations within the diegesis were simply a means of motivating the rhetorical device). The Prince’s face is described at length as a building, with his “dark blue eyes . . . resembl[ing] nothing so much as the high windows of a Roman palace, of an historic front by one of the great old designers, thrown open on feast-day to the golden air” ( James 1999: 32). Described at length, Adam Verver’s “neat colourless face” “resemble[s] a small decent room, clean-swept and unencumbered with furniture” ( James 1999: 125–6). The “chamber of his brain” is described at length as “a strange workshop,” as an elaborately detailed forge ( James 1999: 94). What reads like an irrepressible impulse to describe people as things – an impulse that is not always focalized through a character – has the curious effect of producing a novel that is replete with objects that “exist” only within the Jamesian conceit. Unlike The Spoils of Poynton, the novel does devote attention to cataloging physical objects and such “usual elements” as “setting,” but those catalogs and details assume nothing of the “breadth” and “mass” of the figural objects. It as though, having unfurnished the novel in Spoils, James completely refurnishes it, but he refurnishes it, above all, with figures. Moreover, though objects traditionally have a metonymic relation to characters in the realist novel, here they have an overwhelmingly metaphorical relation: they don’t express characters, they substitute for them, they translate them into something visible, valuable, exchangeable. If The Golden Bowl finally feels as fully furnished as any novel by Balzac – not with superfluous objects but with the material weight of metaphor – this is because it is far more than physical features that get elaborated as inanimate objects; the novel hardly stops by describing bodies and faces as purses, coins, rooms, precious objects. As in the case of the forge that illustrates Adam Verver’s mind, the novel transforms mental acts – attention, afterthought – into physical operations, externalizing the thought process by internalizing the physical world. This is why thought assumes such physical force in the novel – why, even casually, with a character like Fanny Assingham, we read that she can be found “wrapped in her thoughts still more closely than in the lemon-coloured mantle that protected her bare shoulders” ( James 1999: 267). Thought assumes a physicality of its own. The process of thinking has been materialized, let us say, to the point where it hardly makes sense to describe a self or a subject who thinks; rather, a subject appears within the process of thinking and finds the opportunity there to enter a mind. Although readers might be struck by the way people are thought about as things, the novel’s most striking and famous passages

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describe thinking itself as a kind of thing, or as a kind of thinging, that constitutes both the subject and the object of thought. One way to read The Golden Bowl, then, would be to argue that James’s portrait of the Ververs amounts to his contribution to the psychology of collecting. Adam Verver – incomparably rich, a “consummate collector” with “infallible high authority” ( James 1999: 498) – belongs to that company of famous American collectors who threatened to drain England and Europe of their treasures.5 But you could also say that James intensifies and extends any understanding of the accumulating instinct by internalizing the operation – that is, by rendering thinking itself as a mode of accumulation, and thus making Adam Verver’s work of amassing European rarities seem the merely physical version of a mental process, which is in large measure the process of making thoughts physical. In conversation with his daughter, Adam Verver, we’re told, “might have been seeing things to say” ( James 1999: 491). Thought and speech, speech and objects, objects and thought – the ontological distinction between these things, these “things,” have been effectively erased. The materialization of thought – understood either as thought’s externalization or as the internalization of the physical object world – serves not just to contain anxiety but to work on and in that world. This is to suggest that the narrative of collecting (people and things) can be understood as a Jamesian feint, or as the diegetic motivation for the spatializing poetics of cognition, if not simply for the elaborate conceits as such. James’s final novel thus redevelops the thematics of collection that preoccupied his French predecessors. Both Balzac and Flaubert conclude their careers by challenging – in Cousin Pons (1848) and in Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881) – the fantasy of collecting as a mode of control. The Golden Bowl never questions Adam Verver’s incomparable (and inexplicable) taste; it never challenges his well-meaning aspiration to create a “museum of museums” where he means to demonstrate “positively civilization condensed, concrete, consummate” ( James 1999: 107). But the potency of the museal operation – what Tony Bennett has called the “object lessons in power – the power to command and arrange things” – is as nothing in The Golden Bowl in contrast to the potency of reifying and organizing thoughts, and of a self-alienation that enables one to assemble and exhibit one’s life to oneself (Bennett 1995: 63). In the first chapter of the Second Book, awaiting her husband’s return from his adventure with Charlotte at Matcham, Maggie finally assumes agency in the drama, she behaves with design and “an infinite sense of intention,” and she effects the “great moment . . . for conscious repossession” by awaiting Amerigo’s return not at her father’s house, Eaton Square, but at her own house, Portland Place ( James 1999: 304, 305). “[W]atching by his fireside for her husband’s return,” Maggie keeps asking herself questions about Charlotte that she cannot answer, questions that simply add to the “accumulations of the unanswered” ( James 1999: 307). They were there, these accumulations; they were like a roomful of confused objects, never as yet “sorted,” which for some time now she had had been passing and re-passing, along

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the corridor of her life. She passed it when she could without opening the door; then, on occasion, she turned the key to throw in a fresh contribution. So it was that she had been getting things out of the way. . . . What she should never know about Charlotte’s thought – she tossed that in. It would find itself in company, and she might at last have been standing there long enough to see it fall into its corner. The sight moreover would doubtless have made her stare, had her attention been more free – the sight of the mass of vain things, congruous, incongruous, that awaited every addition. It made her in fact, with vague gasp, turn away, and what had further determined this was the final sharp extinction of the inward scene by the outward. The quite different door had opened and her husband was there. ( James 1999: 307–8)

The deictic certainty with which these accumulated thoughts are externalized (“they were there”), which is the clarity with which Maggie’s mental operations are spatialized, casts the passage as an elaborate account of containment, the first move of which is to materialize not just abstractions but negative abstractions: “what she does not know about Charlotte’s thought.” This is the will to figure (or to “remake”) abstract anxiety concretely, however amorphous it remains. The task of “getting things out of the way” in this novel is, first off, a matter of turning things into things – more precisely, imaging abstract things as concrete objects. The image spatializes time (“the corridor of her life”) and memory (“passing and repassing”) so that, however “confused” the objects are, there is a floor plan for managing them. James thus requires his readers to think not about the thingness of objects, as he had in The Spoils of Poynton, but about the objectness of things, the transformation of the metaphysical into the physical. Peculiar as the image is, there is little doubt that it describes an increasingly powerful mode with which Maggie has come to organize her thoughts, and, indeed, to organize the thoughts of others. For when Maggie eventually recognizes how Charlotte suffers, trapped by having intuited Maggie’s new intuitions, she detects in Charlotte “a new complication and had begotten a new anxiety – things, these, that she carried about with her done up in the napkin of her lover’s rebuke, while she vainly hunted for some corner where she might put them down” ( James 1999: 506). It is as though the intensity of the Ververs’ collecting passion – “looking at things” was “almost as much a feature of their life as if they were bazaar-opening royalties” ( James 1999: 405) – precipitates a capacity to objectify thoughts and emotions, and to imagine managing them physically. The elaborate conceit with which Book Two of the novel opens makes it clear how Maggie does not define herself through her possessions, but rather attains “conscious repossession” of herself through a strange act of materialization ( James 1999: 305). The conceit begins as an image of the “situation so long present to her as practically unattackable”: This situation had been occupying, for months and months, the very centre of the garden of her life, but it had reared itself there like some strange, tall tower of ivory, or perhaps

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rather some wonderful, beautiful, but outlandish pagoda, a structure plated with hard, bright porcelain, coloured and figured and adorned, at the overhanging eaves, with silver bells that tinkled, ever so charmingly, when stirred by chance airs. She had walked round and round it – that’s what she felt; she had carried on her existence in the space left her for circulation, a space that sometimes seemed ample and sometimes narrow; looking up, all the while, at the fair structure that spread itself so amply and rose so high, but never quite making out, as yet, where she might have entered had she wished. ( James 1999: 299)

James tries to simplify the description (elaborated at much greater length) by saying that the “image” may “represent our young woman’s consciousness of a recent change in her life” ( James 1999: 300). “The pagoda in her blooming garden,” he goes on to clarify, “figured the arrangement – how otherwise was it to be named? – by which, so strikingly, she had been able to marry without breaking, as she liked to put it, with her past” ( James 1999: 300), in other words the arrangement whereby the two marriages enable her to maintain her intimacy with her father, to live her life more with him than with the Prince. James’s simplification and clarification of the conceit disclose his own sense of the difficulty of what he’s trying to accomplish, or what his character accomplishes: not the objectification of people (a relatively easy matter, demonstrated throughout the text) but the objectification of the relations among them. A mode of sociality has become an “outlandish edifice.” But the manifestation of those complex dynamics as a static physical form perpetuates the logic (indeed, in the Second Book, it really initiates the logic) whereby familiar relationships become defamiliarized through the image-making process. Thus, the “arrangement” through which Maggie lives her daily life suddenly appears as strange to her as a “Mahometan mosque, with which no base heretic could take a liberty” ( James 1999: 300). The orientalized building demonstrates less how foreign the arrangement is than how foreign Maggie feels. But that foreignness serves as the precondition for her capacity to touch the august exterior of the situation she’s in. If the point of the museums and exhibitions of the second half of the nineteenth century was to enable people to see “themselves from the side of power, both the subjects and objects of knowledge, knowing power and what power knows, and knowing themselves as (ideally) known by power,” then James might be said to insist, in contrast, on recognizing how such seeing operates within consciousness (Bennett 1995: 63). Such attention to consciousness no doubt explains Edith Wharton’s query to the author: “What was your idea in suspending the four principle characters in ‘The Golden Bowl’ in the void?” James responded by saying, “My dear – I didn’t know I had” (Wharton 1934: 191). And indeed, however diminutive they seem in relation to objectified thought, objects assume obvious significance in the novel – both the objects that Adam Verver collects (such as the Damascene tiles that are described in detail) and the eponymous object of The Golden Bowl, a “drinking-vessel larger than a common cup, yet not of exorbitant size, and formed, to appearance, either of old fine gold or of some material once richly gilt,” an object described again and again

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( James 1999: 84). It is, after all, the object around which the plot is organized, the object through which Maggie learns of her husband’s past, a thing through which she learns “things that hadn’t been told me,” as she says to the Prince in their scene of confrontation, “the horror of the thing hideously behind, behind so much trusted, so much pretended, nobleness, cleverness, tenderness” ( James 1999: 446, 471). And yet the significance of the object (metaphoric, allegorical, or metonymic) remains perpetually in doubt. As a gilded object that is cracked, or as the object desired first by Charlotte (as a wedding gift for her friend Maggie) then by Maggie (as a birthday gift for her father, after he has married Charlotte), it offers both readers of the novel and characters in the novel opportunities to read symbolically, metaphorically, or metonymically. When Adam Verver claims to the Prince that “you’re a pure and perfect crystal” ( James 1999: 102), the Prince responds by saying, “Oh, if I’m a crystal I’m delighted that I’m a perfect one, for I believe that they sometimes have cracks and flaws – in which case they’re to be had very cheap!” ( James 1999: 103). When they are about to launch on their illicit adventure to Gloucester, the Prince says to Charlotte that he feels “the day like a great gold cup that we must somehow drain together” ( James 1999: 263). When Maggie explains to Fanny Assingham that the bowl has a crack, the older woman responds by saying, “Then your whole idea has a crack” ( James 1999: 429). In or out of view, the object appears so often within the expressions of the characters that it gradually assumes – or accretes – significance. But the pursuit of these opportunities hardly clarifies what the object means, though it powerfully demonstrates the extent to which readers of the novel, like Maggie herself, long for there to be some physical object with which, or through which, we can organize and stabilize knowledge and power, human emotion and human history. Indeed, an alternative way to read The Golden Bowl as a collecting novel is to imagine that it documents not the way people collect objects, but the way that objects collect meaning, the way an object can crystallize events, relations, situations. It is as though James insists, in this final novel, that in the formal features of objects lie the form of human knowledge – not just the absences around which we manufacture some hard surface, and not just the multiple surfaces, but also the all but wholly hidden crack within that surface, a crack that calls into question the boundary between surface and interior, as between absence and presence. What is finally remarkable about the golden bowl in The Golden Bowl is that it seems to signify so much while it in fact signifies so little, precisely because it seems to signify so much. And the representation of the bowl, its powers of figuration, and its status as a site of projection – these clarify how the human longing for objects is a longing for what we might call the materialization of events within objects, including the events of feeling and thinking. Among the philosophers who have addressed the role of objects in the life of human subjects, Hannah Arendt proves especially clarifying when it comes to thinking about Jamesian matter, which itself complicates her claims. She argues that our sense of ourselves and what we call identity stabilize foremost in relation to concrete objects. The “things of the world have the function of stabilizing human life,” she writes; people “retrieve their sameness, that is, their identity, by being related to the same

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chair and the same table” (Arendt 1958: 137). In James’s fiction, though, characters are more likely to recognize their difference – their difference from their former selves – in relation to the objects they have come to know well. In the penultimate chapter of The Portrait of a Lady, when Isabel returns to Gardencourt (her uncle and her cousin having died and the extent of her tragedy fully exposed), she feels as “if the objects about her had begun to show for conscious things, watching her trouble with grotesque grimaces” ( James 1995: 604). But her discomfort resolves as she walks through the gallery, the drawing room, the library, recalling the pleasures of the place: “it might have been only yesterday she had stood there. She envied the security of valuable ‘pieces’ which change by no hair’s breadth, only grow in value, while their owners lose inch by inch youth, happiness, beauty” ( James 1995: 604). In her case, the august stability of the things dramatizes the instability of human life. Of course, most things of this world – the food and clothes and drapes, the cars and planes and computers – are eminently consumable, fungible, disposable; far from interrupting or dramatizing the transience of our lives, they illustrate ephemerality at its crudest. This is why Arendt distinguishes between labor and work, between human effort that disappears without a trace and that which results in reification, some more enduring product, a material externalization of human will. Arendt underscores the “outstanding permanence” of artworks as the quality that makes art such a significant part of the human condition. “Nowhere else,” she argues, does the “thing-world reveal itself so spectacularly as the non-mortal home for mortal beings. It is as though worldly stability had become transparent in the permanence of art” (Arendt 1958: 168). On James’s seventieth birthday in 1913, his friends in England honored him by presenting the author with what he called “a really splendid ‘golden bowl,’ of the highest and most perfect taste,” his appreciation of which might be said to bespeak his ongoing investment in objects (Edel 1972: 485; James 1987: 409). But that investment had already had a more spectacular manifestation in his decision, at the age of sixty-two, to select, revise, and introduce his tales and novels in what he called “The New York Edition” of his work, published by Scribner’s in twenty-four volumes (1907–9). As Leon Edel argued long ago, the edition itself was “a vast work of art – a crowning work – in the long productive life of Henry James,” a work “deriving its inspiration from Balzac,” from what James himself referred to as “23 huge octavo volumes in the stately but inconvenient édition définitive” (Edel 1951: 170, 177, 174). Although James hoped the edition would be commercially successful and secure him the more general popularity he always desired, he was also helping to secure his perpetuity by retransposing his thought into one august and beautiful thing.6

Notes 1

See Anderson (1977). And see, for a historical range of approaches to the novels I consider in this chapter, Snow (1963); Tinter

(1972); Ryan (1988); Arata (1993); Sarris (1996); Savoy (2001); Brown (2003: 136–89).

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3 4

5

As Saisselin (1984: 160) importantly comments, because “the mental image” is always preferred to the “tangible object,” Lee’s aesthetics could be used to prevent the rich from feeling guilty about possessing art. For an overview of this discourse, see Halttunen (1989). Thus, in his preface to Roderick Hudson, James writes in one paragraph that the novelist “embarks, rash adventurer, under the star of ‘representation,’ and is pledged thereby to remember that the art of interesting us in things – once these things are the right ones for the case – can only be the art of representing them”; he then writes, in the next paragraph, that “one nestled, technically, in those days, and with yearning, in the great shadow of Balzac” ( James 1984b: 1044). In a chapter on “Art and America,” Charles Edward Jerningham and Lewis Bettany declare

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the three “R’s of British History: Reformation, Revolution, and Removal,” the transfer of treasures to the US. With surprising admiration for the taste of both the American collectors and their agents “scouring the land,” they conclude that in time “the vast mass of oldworld work will be in the United States” ( Jerningham and Bettany 1911: 310–13). For an account of the premiere agent of the era, see Saisselin’s (1984) chapter on Bernard Berenson. See also Constable (1964); Harris (1990); Saarinen (1958); McCarthy (1982). For a reading of The Golden Bowl in the context of the museum movement in America, see Arata (1993). 6 On James’s lifelong sensitivity to his popularity, see Anesko (1986); and for recent engagements with the edition, see Nadel (1995).

References and Further Reading Anderson, Charles R. (1977). Person, Place, and Thing in Henry James’s Novels. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Anesko, Michael (1986). “Friction with the Market”: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship. New York: Oxford University Press. Arata, Stephen D. (1993). “Object lessons: Reading the museum in The Golden Bowl.” In Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender and Narrative Closure (pp. 199–229). Ed. Alison Booth. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Arendt, Hannah (1958). The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Auden W. H. (1946). “Introduction.” The American Scene (pp. v–xxvi). New York: Scribner’s. Baudrillard, Jean (1996). The System of Objects. (Trans. James Benedict.) London: Verso. Benjamin, Walter (1999). “Unpacking my library.” Selected Writings, vol. 2: 1927–1934 (pp. 486– 93). (Trans. Rodney Livingstone et. al.) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bennett, Tony (1995). The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. New York: Routledge.

Brown, Bill (2003). A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cather, Willa (1936). “The novel démeublé.” In Not Under Forty (pp. 43–51). New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Constable W. G. (1964). Art Collecting in the United States of America: An Outline of a History. London: Thomas Nelson. Dickens, Charles (2003). Little Dorrit. New York: Penguin. Edel, Leon (1951). “The architecture of Henry James’s ‘New York Edition.’ ” New England Quarterly, 24.2 (June): 169–78. Edel, Leon (1972). Henry James 1901–1916: The Master. Philadelphia: Lippincott. Halttunen, Karen (1989). “From parlor to living room: Domestic space, interior decoration, and the culture of personality.” In Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 1880–1920 (pp. 157–90). Ed. Simon J. Bronner. New York: Norton. Harris, Neil (1990). “Collective possession: J. Pierpont Morgan and the American imagination.”

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In Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. James, Henry (1934). The Art of the Novel. New York: Scribner’s. James, Henry (1968 [1907]). The American Scene. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. James, Henry (1984a). Henry James: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers. Ed. Leon Edel. New York: Library of America. James, Henry (1984b). Henry James: French Writers, Other European Writers, the Prefaces to the New York Edition. Ed. Leon Edel. New York: Library of America. James, Henry (1987). Henry James: Selected Letters. Ed. Leon Edel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. James, Henry (1995). The Portrait of a Lady. New York: Oxford University Press. James, Henry (1999). The Golden Bowl. New York: Oxford University Press. James, Henry (2000). The Bostonians. New York: Penguin. James, Henry (2003). The Spoils of Poynton. Henry James: Novels 1896–1899. New York: Library of America. James, William (1983). Principles of Psychology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jerningham, Charles Edward and Lewis Bettany (1911). The Bargain Book. London: Chatto and Windus. Lee, Vernon [Violet Paget] (1896). Art and Life. East Aurora, NY: Roycroft Print Shop. McCarthy, Kathleen D. (1982). Noblesse Oblige: Charity and Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago, 1849–1929. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morse, Florence (1893). “About furnishings.” In Household Art. Ed. Candace Wheeler. New York: Harper and Brothers. Nadel, Ira B. (1995). “Visual culture: The photo frontispieces to the New York Edition.” In

Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship (pp. 90–108). Ed. David McWhirter. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ryan, Judith (1988). “Validating the possible: Thoughts and things in James, Rilke, and Musil.” Comparative Literature, 40.4: 1–13. Saarinen, Aline B. (1958). The Proud Possessors: The Lives, Times, and Tastes of Some Adventurous American Art Collectors. New York: Random House. Saisselin, Remy G. (1984). The Bourgeois and the Bibelot. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Sarris, Fotios (1996). “Fetishism in The Spoils of Poynton.” Nineteenth Century Literature, 51.1: 53–83. Savoy, Eric (2001). “The Jamesian thing.” Henry James Review, 22: 268–77. Shi, David E. (1985). The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Snow, Lotus (1963). “ ‘A story of cabinets and chairs and tables’: Images of morality in The Spoils of Poynton and The Golden Bowl.” ELH, 30: 413–35. Tinter, Adeline R. (1972). “ ‘The old things’: Balzac’s Le Curé de Tours and James’s Spoils of Poynton.” Nineteenth Century Fiction, 26: 436–55. Vidler, Anthony (1999). The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wharton, Edith (1934). A Backward Glance. New York: Appleton-Century. Wharton, Edith and Ogden Codman, Jr. (1997). The Decoration of Houses. New York: W. W. Norton. Woloch, Alex (2003). The One vs. the Many. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Woolf, Virginia (1932). “Robinson Crusoe.” The Common Reader (pp. 51–8). 2nd series. London: Hogarth, 51–8.

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Henry James and the Sexuality of Literature: Before and Beyond Queer Theory Natasha Hurley

At the end of “The Beast in the Jungle,” John Marcher is confronted with his road not taken: “The escape would have been to love her [May Bartram]; then he would have lived” (quoted in Sedgwick 1990: 202). Marcher might not have worried so much about the extent to which he had lived, if he could have seen how memorably he lives on the pages of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s classic essay, “The Beast in the Closet.” But that is just the point: Marcher could not have known, just as he never really did know what it was that made it impossible for him to love May Bartram. Sedgwick could see it in him and she helped us to see it, too: In “The Beast in the Jungle,” written at the threshold of the new century, the possibility of an embodied male-homosexual thematics has, I would like to argue, a precisely liminal presence. It is present as a – as a very particular, historicized – thematics of absence, and specifically of the absence of speech. The first (in some ways the only) thing we learn about John Marcher is that he has a “secret” (358), a destiny, a something unknown in his future. “ ‘You said’,” May Bartram reminds him, “ ‘you had from your earliest time, as the deepest thing within you, the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible, that was sooner or later to happen’ ” (359). I would argue that to the extent that Marcher’s secret has a content, that content is homosexual. (Sedgwick 1990: 201)

In shedding so bright a light on the rhetorical structures of secrecy operating in James’s story, Sedgwick effectively reframed and refocused our attention on a particular “something” that has generated a substantial body of critical work on Henry James. This something is not just the content, but the form homosexuality takes in

A Companion to Henry James. Edited by Greg W. Zacharias © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-14042-3

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fiction – even, and especially, where it is not recognized as such. Sedgwick’s essay was instrumental to the rise of queer literary theory. This body of work articulates in intricate detail the forms that this “thematics of absence” – understood not as sexual identity per se, but nonetheless generated around homoerotics – takes in literature. Longtime readers and literary critics of James will recognize that Sedgwick did not inaugurate a Jamesian reading of sexuality. Indeed, some scholars might well wish she had not continued what is actually a longstanding tradition of reading sexuality in James; they might prefer that the matter be left alone, holding perhaps to Maxwell Geismar’s reading of James as a prude: in James’s world, he declared, “the worst crime, next to being poor was to be sexual” (Geismar 1963: 6). It is all the more remarkable that in spite of (yet also because of) persistent readers of his prudery, Henry James has been instrumental in teaching us how to read sexuality in literature. Ever since Edmund Wilson published his now famous essay on The Turn of the Screw, James has found himself at the heart of a nimiety of literary criticism (particularly surrounding The Turn of the Screw) that has debated how, and whether, to read sexuality in his work – sometimes even how to read James’s own sexuality. This longstanding critical interest in, and controversy over, the status of sexuality in Henry James’s writing (and no less, even, for Henry James’s self ) indexes the extent to which what is at stake in James is not just whether John Marcher was a gay man who couldn’t see the fact for himself. That, we will never know, in any case. What is at stake, rather, is the very reading practices we bring to bear on sexuality in literature and the way literature itself comes to bear on sexuality. This essay charts the relationship between Henry James and queer theory by situating the rise of queer theory in the context of literary criticism about Henry James. First, it looks at the prehistory of queer theory in James scholarship, articulating through survey some of the most important scholarship about James’s writing that has emerged under the rubric of queer theory since Sedgwick’s influential essay. This scholarship deploys queer theory, often in its dominant deconstructive and psychoanalytic modes, to expand our readings of such James texts as Roderick Hudson, The Bostonians, What Maisie Knew, Daisy Miller, “The Pupil,” and The Turn of the Screw. But in this interface between James and queer theory, James’s writing is not just a text that has been read through the lens of theory: it has, in the hands of queer theory’s best practitioners (like Sedgwick), transformed the ways we read sexuality. James’s scrupulous attention to the social, and to the literary forms that make it visible in his fictional worlds, has required queer theory to bethink itself so as to consider the formal and historical configurations of queerness and sexuality more carefully. In other words, queer theory has not just expanded our understanding of James; James has expanded queer theory’s understanding of itself. It is not just that James has been read in light of queer theory, but that James’s writing – and writing about his writing – continue to inspire and revise our thinking about the epistemologies of sexuality that his literature conveys.

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A History of Reading Sexuality; or, a Prehistory of Queer Theory, James-style Mrs Griffin, however, expressed the need for a little more light. “Who was it she [the governess] was in love with?” “The story will tell,” I took upon myself to reply. “Oh I can’t wait for the story!” “The story won’t tell,” said Douglas; “not in any literal vulgar way.” ( James 1984b: 147)

The scholarly drama of reading sexuality in Henry James can be traced back with a precision (and a popularity) that is rare for literary criticism. Its history is tied directly to this moment in the framing narrative of The Turn of the Screw: whom, if anyone, does the governess love and does the story tell or not? The debate begins in 1934, with Edmund Wilson’s now famous reading of sexuality as textual unconscious in The Turn of the Screw. (The debate has become so notorious as to earn an honorable mention in the CBS crime drama, CSI). In “The Ambiguity of Henry James,” Wilson infamously declared the governess of the story to be “a neurotic case of sex repression” (Wilson 1960: 115). In so doing, some critics claim, Wilson was trying to translate James’s ambiguity, the “repression” he saw in James’s text, into a certainty. As Robert Heilman put it, Wilson’s psychoanalytic reading reduced the text to “a commonplace clinical record” (Heilman 1947: 443). Since that time, generations of critics have been polarized, arguing over whether the governess really saw the ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel: in fact they have been dueling over the relevance of Freudian criticism more generally. The debate raged intensely from the time Wilson published his article until at least the mid-1960s. Even scholars such as Heilman, who believed that the Freudian reading of the text had been thoroughly discounted, could not resist continuing to insist that the Freudian reading had been discounted. “It is probably safe to say,” he ventures in a later essay, “that the Freudian interpretation of the story, of which the best known exponent is Edmund Wilson, no longer enjoys wide critical acceptance” (Heilman in Willen 1960: 175). In a footnote to this sentence, Heilman catalogs anti-Freudian readings by Philip Rahv, Katherine Anne Porter, Mark Van Doren, and Allen Tate to support his claims. In protesting so much against Wilson, scholars ironically continued to prop up Wilson’s reading, allowing it to haunt criticism and making Wilson’s essay perhaps one of the most influential pieces of literary scholarship ever written. A survey of articles on The Turn of the Screw uncovers an assortment of defenses (among the hundreds of books and articles that appear in print on the text) that have been mounted on the governess’s behalf: assaults on Wilson’s hostility; sympathetic accounts of the loneliness that attends being a governess; and proposals that the governess actually was in love with, variously, Douglas (the storyteller who presents her manuscript to the fireside circle), the Master of the house (the bachelor who hired her), the children she was caring for (particularly Miles), and Peter himself (the ghostly

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valet). Evidence that confirms or denies that the governess did, or did not, see the ghosts often turns on readings of her sexual interests. The anti-Freudian readings try to avoid sexuality altogether, focusing instead on James’s presumed intentions in writing the tale or on the governess as archetype or symbol (either of innocence or evil). In effect, even Wilson’s detractors somehow concede that to read the sexuality of the text at all is to read as a Freudian: for them, then, it is a question not of how to read sexuality, but of whether to read it at all. In conceding the terrain of reading sexuality to the Freudians, the anti-Freudians ironically affirmed the methodology of reading sexuality as textual unconscious and sexuality as the meaning of the text’s ambiguity by so vehemently disagreeing with it. In what arguably became the most important reading of the text after Wilson’s own, Shoshana Felman’s “Turning the Screw of Interpretation” intervened on behalf of both Wilson’s detractors and his supporters. Felman’s argument is significant in the history of reading sexuality in The Turn of the Screw – and in James more generally – because it is perhaps the earliest (and best) yoking together of psychoanalytic and deconstructive methodologies in producing a strategy for reading the text for sexual form. Felman takes issue with the certainty of Freudian readers, agreeing with Mark Spilka’s diagnosis that “these Freudian critics have not been sufficiently Freudian” (quoted in Felman 1977: 103). She continues: Considered from the “Freudian point of view,” sexuality, valorized as both the foundation and the guidepost of the critical interpretation, thus takes on the status of an answer to the question of the text. Logically and ontologically, the answer (of sexuality) in fact pre-exists the question (of textuality). The question comes to be articulated (rhetorically, thematically, and narratively) only by virtue of the fact that the answer is as such concealed. Indeed the question is itself but an answer in disguise: the question is the answer’s hiding place. The Freudian critics’ job, in this perspective, is but to pull the answer out of its hiding place. . . . (Felman 1977: 105)

To look for sexuality in the text is already to know what sexuality looks like; to seek it out in the text is already to know what counts as evidence of sexuality. The problem with such certainty is that “sexuality is precisely what rules out simplicity as such” (Felman 1977: 111). It points rather to a multiplicity of conflicting forces, to the complexity of its own divisiveness and contradiction[;] its meaning can by no means be univocal or unified, but must necessarily be ambiguous. It is thus not rhetoric which disguises and hides sex; sexuality is rhetoric, since it essentially consists of ambiguity: it is the coexistence of dynamically antagonistic meanings. . . . (Felman 1977: 112)

The key difference between Wilson’s psychoanalytic reading of the text and Felman’s is this: where Wilson reads the ambiguity of the text and its rhetoric and insists upon one meaning, Felman reads the ambiguity of the text and its rhetoric to insist upon

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a play of meanings. It is the conclusiveness of interpretation that most bothers her. What The Turn of the Screw offers, in the spirit of James’s tantalizing invitation to readers, is an “amusette to catch those who would not be caught” ( James 1984a: 1185). What the critics circle around is the extent to which sexuality is textual repression. What they debate, ultimately, is whether sexuality can be read literally. What is at stake in the discussion is nothing less than a figuring out of what sexuality actually is, how it is produced textually, and how it can be read. Felman’s methodology of reading, as we shall see, is not so different from Wilson’s (or later, from that of queer theorists like Sedgwick and Eric Savoy). She, too, is interested in the moments where Douglas says the story about the governess “won’t tell; not in any literal vulgar way” (quoted in Felman 1977: 118). “The literal” says Felman, is “vulgar” because it stops the movement constitutive of meaning, because it blocks and interrupts the endless process of metaphorical substitution. The vulgar, therefore, is anything which misses, or falls short of, the dimension of the symbolic, anything which rules out, or excludes, meaning as a loss and as a flight, – anything which strives, in other words, to eliminate from language its inherent silence, anything which misses the specific way in which a text actively “won’t tell.” (Felman 1977: 107)

For Felman, creating meaning is always about loss and flight. To read is to read for what the text “won’t tell.” She says this more explicitly later: Reading, then, begins with an awareness, with a perception of ambiguous signifiers: an enigmatic letter, an unfamiliar and uncanny ghost. The meaning they imply is a knowledge from which the governess is barred (“He’s – God help me if I know what he is!”; ch. 5 p. 22). If it is precisely out of lack of knowledge that the reading-process springs, the very act of reading implies at the same time the assumption that knowledge is, exists, but is located in the Other: [. . .] The governess naturally thus postulates that the signified she is barred from, the sense of what she does not know, exists and is in fact possessed by – or possessing – someone else. (Felman 1977: 157)

To read is to read for the gap in the text’s knowledge. It is to read, in essence, as the governess herself read: “To see (and by the same token, to read: ‘to see letters,’ ‘to see ghosts’) is therefore paradoxically not only to perceive but also not to perceive, to actively determine an area as invisible, as excluded from perception, as external by definition to visibility. To see is to draw a limit beyond which vision becomes barred” (Felman 1977: 166). Although Felman argues that Wilson is wrong to read conclusively, he is not wrong to find meaning in the unconscious of the text and its characters. For this, in Felman’s estimation, is how all reading happens. Having already established in her argument that “Repression is constitutive of sexuality” (Felman 1977: 110), she insists that the complications of sexuality can be found in precisely those moments in the text where meaning is not clear or is refused altogether.

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What distinguishes Felman’s reading from Wilson’s is therefore her desire to see sexuality as a structure of complication, not a structure of coherence that can be diagnosed. This desire to see the incoherence of sexuality (where sentences trail off, are interrupted, or where characters are rendered speechless) will become key for later queer theorists reading James (of the Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick school). As queer theory develops through Sedgwick and others, however, it will also enact a paradox: insisting that sexual meaning in texts is unstable while simultaneously insisting that the instability of meaning is an index of sexuality gone queer. On the one hand, the deconstructive mode of queer theory gravitates toward the play of meaning, the competing interpretations that vie for authority in the gaps of the text; on the other hand, queer theory often flirts with the certainties of sexuality within a range of meaning. We can see this in the example of Marcher, whose sexual indeterminacy Sedgwick insists upon, even as she invites us to read that indeterminacy as homosexual. In many ways queer theory has its Edmund Wilson and its Shoshana Felman all at once and its Henry James. What queer theory retains of both, in its readings of James, is a focus on the gaps of the text as evidence, even if, in Felman’s reading, those textual gaps are assumed to have a far more complex literary form. At the same time that psychoanalysis and deconstruction were coming together in Jamesian literary criticism, several other critical developments were taking place in James studies that would also impact on late permutations of queer theory. In “The Jamesian Lie” (in A Future for Astyanax), for instance, Leo Bersani emphasizes the textuality of James’s writing and argues that The Turn of the Screw is actually James’s “least ‘psychological story’ ” (Bersani 1976: 139). It is, rather, a story that raises no questions because it is so interested in the problem of asking questions to begin with. What the story seeks, he argues, is its own story. Rather than look at the text’s unconscious for evidence of characters already-organized interior desires, Bersani insists that social encounters dissolve the boundaries of individual types for Henry James’s characters.1 It must also be acknowledged that before Sedgwick’s work on James became foundational to the field of queer literary studies, critics had already been generating individual readings of the homoerotics of James fiction, under the rubric of gay and lesbian studies – as well as feminist studies, particularly in treatments of The Bostonians. Important to this project was its proponents’ insistence that there was a tradition of homosexual writing in literature. Some of this work – particularly the strain of criticism debating Leon Edel’s approach to James in his biography – directs itself to readings of James’s own sexuality, insisting that James himself was homosexual. (For an excellent summary of these sources, see the introduction to Person 2003.) Traces of this biographical approach to James would persist in later discussions of Jamesian queerness. (The best examples of this work use James’s life to illuminate the concerns of his writing, as in Moon 1998; Ellman 1999; and Cannon 1994.) But many of the most important contributions to this field of scholarship – arguably less indebted to the influences of high theory – focus on uncovering representations of same-sex intimacy in James’s texts and on the historical con-

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texts of James’s writing. (Two important examples are Sarotte 1978 and Martin 1978.) The dominant theoretical approaches to James via queer theory following Sedgwick’s essay were deconstructive and psychoanalytic. As scholars continue to chart new directions in the field of both sexuality studies and James criticism, James’s texts continue to be marshaled in the service of further complicating the ways of reading that queer theory advanced.

After Sedgwick; or, How to Read Henry James Like a Queer Theorist The various deconstructive, psychoanalytic, and gay-studies-oriented strains of criticism that had been circulating around Henry James in the literary critical orbit all seemed to come into alignment with the appearance of Sedgwick’s “The Beast In the Closet.” In some respects, this commingling of approaches had already begun to take place. In Felman’s essay, psychoanalysis and deconstruction had come together, but without the inversion of psychoanalysis, from the perspective of homoerotic and homosocial attachments, that would come to be a hallmark of queer theory. While homoerotic readings of James and his fiction focused on the peculiarities of Henry James’s sexual being-in-the-world, these seemed to some people too insufficiently evidenced in his writing. Many scholars, in the wake of a seemingly endless and futile debate over The Turn of the Screw, felt, as Heilman points out, that purely psychoanalytic readings of characters tried too hard to translate James’s writerly complexity into a clinical record. What makes Sedgwick’s work so compelling is the way she foregrounds the form of James’s writing in a deconstructive analysis of implicitly psychoanalytic categories. In other words, Sedgwick does use categories of psychoanalytic thinking (the very idea of heterosexual and homosexual identities) and a focus on the unconscious of characters in stories, but she is most interested in the rhetorical forms that nonnormative sexuality took. Rather than simply diagnose or describe characters, she focuses on the ways those characters existed in language and on the complex ways that text refused to overtly tell the story of sexuality. This is why she became so interested in forms of the unspoken and the unspeakable: preterition, the thematics of absences, etc. She considers that at the time James was writing, homosexual love was presumed to be “the love that dare not speak its name.” What she calls attention to were the complex ways in which, at the fin de siècle, James’s texts staged this refusal of speech. In Epistemology of the Closet she would situate James vis-à-vis a range of other writers deploying similar strategies at the time, but her analysis indeed began with James. This initial essay, it turns out, merely scratched the surface. In the act of expanding on Sedgwick’s insights, an entire generation of scholars has been engaged in unpacking the formal complexity involved with making the unspoken an absence that could be recognized as such.

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One might well wonder: why James? If Sedgwick’s argument is an argument about a particular historical phenomenon, could these readings not have been produced about any text during that time? What became increasingly clear in the work that Sedgwick both produced and inspired was that the very form of James’s writing communicated something about his writing that mere content could not. One would be hard-pressed to find any self-identified gay men and lesbians in James’s texts, but it was precisely James’s layers of perspective and point of view that would lead Sedgwick and others to recognize that the “epistemology of the closet” – whereby individuals refused to disclose openly their sexual being-in-the-world – also calls attention to the ways in which people nonetheless try to read sexuality from outside perspectives, however limited those perspectives might be. Thus the significance of the “open secret” that is now attributed to John Marcher. Of course, James has been roundly acknowledged for his intricate narrative perspectives and points of view. He is as well a masterful writer of indirection, occlusion, and incommensurability. Think not only of Marcher’s passionate attempts to “avoid” the Beast at the end of “The Beast in the Jungle,” think also of the elusive structures of secrecy and their connection to Hugh Vereker in “The Figure in the Carpet,” and the odd, but evasively articulate rendezvous between the narrator and Ford Orbert in The Sacred Fount, where the characters confuse the boundaries of their individual identities, raising questions about the indeterminate boundaries of male homosocial relations. Even in The Bostonians, arguably James’s most explicit treatment of homosexuality, Olive Chancellor can only imagine kissing Verena Tarrant – making the kiss illusory for the characters precisely at the moment it becomes visible for the reader. In the spirit of the formal complexity with which James renders the social worlds of his stories, it may come as no surprise, therefore, that critics have begun to articulate queer theory as itself a formalist project. Eric Savoy describes his reading of The Turn of the Screw as being governed by a methodological portmanteau that he calls “queer formalism,” which brings together the methods of deconstructive and psychoanalytic criticism to focus specifically on non-normative and homoerotic sexualities. Savoy points out that The Turn of the Screw is a prime example of “ludic, deconstructive textual pleasure avant la lettre” (Savoy 2004: 249), but he insists that deconstructive tracking alone will not take us very far into the “something” that occupies what Cathy Caruth terms “a locus of referentiality,” a “something” that, because of “its very unassimilated nature – the way it was precisely not known in the first instance – returns to haunt the survivor later on.” Rather, deconstructive poetics are framed by James’s psychoanalytic matrix. . . . (Savoy 2004: 247)

Where Savoy reads the occlusions of The Turn of the Screw from the perspective of the governess’s trauma, other scholars of queer James have focused on slightly different aspects of the rhetorical structure of sexuality in the text, as we have seen above. In another reading of the Turn of the Screw, operating in the same vein, Ellis Hanson

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defines queer theory specifically as “the deconstruction of sexual rhetoric” (Hanson 2003; 368). And in an analysis of The Sacred Fount, Stacy Margolis (2001) described her mode of reading James as “homo-formalism.” Had we world enough and time in this essay to do justice to them, we could look in greater detail at Wendy Graham’s Henry James and Thwarted Love, Hugh Stevens’ Henry James and Sexuality, Leland Person’s Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity, and the impressive array of essays by Eric Savoy on Jamesian queerness – all excellent studies of the queerly formalist permutations of James’s literary project. What all of these approaches to James have in common is their focus on reading the gaps of James’s text using the methodologies of deconstruction and, with varying degrees of self-awareness, psychoanalysis. This focus on preterition and on reading queer sexuality in gaps of Henry James’s text did not just breathe new life into the academic cottage-industry that is Turn of the Screw criticism (although new queer readings of The Turn of the Screw have indeed appeared). It led to new readings of a range of James’s works, including (but not limited to) The Wings of the Dove, The Awkward Age, “The Pupil,” Roderick Hudson, The Bostonians, “The Jolly Corner,” “The Figure in the Carpet,” and The Ambassadors. Even to imagine such a list in a cursory form would inevitably mean leaving something out of the impressive array of queer textual readings overall. If one of the limits of formalism, at least since its New Critical incarnation, has been its tendency to treat the text as a vacuum, queer theorists who sought to circumvent this potential criticism were careful to try to draw claims that were about rhetorical structures that could be seen in a panoply of cultural texts at the same time in history. Recall that Sedgwick insists she is examining “a very particular, historicized – thematics of absence” (Sedgwick 1990: 191, 201). What these approaches have in common, it is worth re-emphasizing here, is their collective description of rhetorical patterns that bear a family resemblance to each other. This vast accumulation of evidence about the rhetorical structures of sexuality at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has recently begun to show signs of moving in new directions – its vastness being perhaps both the best evidence of its critical success and the motor for its own regeneration in new forms. In queer theory’s efforts to articulate the limits of concrete, sexualized literary meaning, it has earned the reputation of being a theory driven by the hermeneutics of suspicion: a poststructuralist-inflected approach that focuses on the deferral of meaning rather than its stability. In retrospect, it may always have been that queer theory was interested as much in the ways absences, gaps, and textual reflexivity operate as a generative force of meaning as it is in those absences and gaps themselves. But the sheer force of queer theory as a dominant approach to literary texts eventually began to produce some moments of reflexiveness for the field itself – from no less an auspicious interlocutor than Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick herself. Writing reflectively on the rise of queer theory in the 1980s and 1990s, Sedgwick later meditates on the methodology of this way of reading sexuality in somehow

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different terms than she advanced in “The Beast in the Closet.” In “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is About You,” she notes that “Paranoia, thus, became by the mid-1980s a privileged object of anti-homophobic theory” (Sedgwick 1997: 6). She then immediately wonders, “How did it spread so quickly from that status to being its uniquely sanctioned methodology?” (Sedgwick 1997: 6). Her explanation is that paranoia is contagious. It might be said that the widespread practice of reading what isn’t there in a text (a practice of reading enjoyed by queer theorists, deconstructionists, and new historicists alike) also has something to do with it. For what is paranoia if not the imagination of possible interpretations that are not explicitly laid out? Moreover, as Sedgwick points out, paranoia is a strong theory: “It seems no wonder, then, that paranoia, once the topic is broached in a nondiagnostic context, would seem to grow like a crystal in a hypersaturated solution, blotting out any sense of the possibility of alternative ways of understanding or things to understand” (Sedgwick 1997: 10–11). What Sedgwick proposes as palliative to a paranoid reading is a reparative reading; reading with love, not the hermeneutics of suspicion. This particular essay did not have quite the same transformative impact on literary critical practice as Sedgwick’s earlier work did – perhaps because, by this time in the late 1990s, scholars had already begun to articulate new directions for queer theory. It will come as no surprise to readers that new readings of Henry James’s fiction would again be at the heart of rethinking critical approaches to sexuality. The last section of this essay will point to some of these new directions as queer theorists respond to the influence queer theory has itself exerted. If they can be said to have anything in common, it is their effort to think beyond gaps and absences as the primary, animating textual forces and to think more about the textual and formal plenitudes of James’s texts.

Queering the Queer; or, How to Read Queerness Like Henry James Just as Sedgwick’s project should be seen less as a break with earlier modes of criticism, so too should responses to queer theory be seen less as Oedipal breaks and more as contiguous approaches. Often, critics are not just pointing out the ways in which, as Michael Moon has claimed, James’s texts “disorient” sexuality (Moon 1998: 4), but the ways in which they generate – not just reflect – forms of sexuality according to their own historical circumstances. While it would be premature to begin cataloging directions that are only beginning to take shape, one such direction deserves notable mention for the fine work it has already generated. This new direction in James and queer studies attends to the circulation of James’s texts and those texts’ orientation, movement, and reproduction within and beyond the discursive contexts of his time.

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Among the very best books to be published recently on Henry James generally (and not just on Henry James and queer theory) has to be Eric Haralson’s Henry James and Queer Modernity (2003). A tour de force of cultural references and a level of contextual detail that amounts to thick description, this book indexes the generative force of queer cultural circulation as it relates to James. Haralson does not just acknowledge that literature reflects its age’s particular attitudes toward sexuality; he insists that literature generates ways of seeing the world that might not have occurred to readers. What we get is not just Haralson’s reading of James, itself an astute summary of the particular kind of queerness James embodies in his work (which both “fosters” and “constrains” a linkage between queer and homosexual) (Haralson 2003: 3). He offers us intricate and entertaining readings of other modernists, reading James. Gertrude Stein, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, and Sherwood Anderson all demonstrate an “alert receptivity” to the kind of queerness at play in James and which he bequeathed to modernism (Haralson 2003: 2). For Haralson, James spearheads a movement that permeates modernism tout court: Whatever is “queer” in literature seeps into the queerness of modern social reality, just as whatever is “queer” in reality may turn up in literature. In pointing to this coincidence or interpermeability of zones of queernesses, James instructs his readers that they, too, should be prepared for startling recognitions such as Strether’s [in The Ambassadors]: for the exposure of a potent secret of “a lie in the charming affair” that constitutes the public surface of social life, and more particularly, for the revelation of a “deep truth of . . . intimacy” precisely where they (like Strether) have labored not to notice or acknowledge it – in other words, where they have not dared to feel it. (Haralson 2003: 4)

Haralson points here to the ways queer literary form and queer social reality are mutually constituting. Central to this constitution are forces of literary and social circulation. In its circulation among a range of audiences during (and beyond) the modernist period, James’s writing both frames and is framed by queer contexts of reading and writing. At the turn of the century, Rupert Brooke and James Strachey were confessing their love of James in love letters to each other (Haralson 2003: vi); during the early 1930s, Gertrude Stein wrote “Nobody is alike Henry James” (quoted in Haralson 2003: 205); by the 1950s, James’s work functioned as both “intellectual credential” and the source of pickup lines for gay undergraduates (James had become Hattie Jacques, and Chadwick Newsome and Lambert Strether of The Ambassadors had morphed into Chapstick Nuisance and Lamebrain Stretcher – the latter, from Asshole, Mass.) (Haralson 2003: 103). The more Henry James’s literary work circulates as queer, the more the queerness of Henry James evolves, even and perhaps especially, in response to those who fervently defend James’s sexual innocence. Another recent book to consider James’s attentiveness to the circulation of language around him in queer terms is Michael Trask’s Cruising Modernism: Class and Sexuality in American Literature and Social Thought (2003). Where Haralson looks at the diachronic circulation of James across later generations of queer writers and readers, Trask

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considers the synchronic cross-overs of James’s language with other discourses of his time – particularly the language of class – as well as the circulation of people as imagined in this language. He writes, “I include under a single rubric such distinct groupings as immigrants, vagrants, casual laborers, and the marginal sexual populations of prostitutes and inverts because the epithets pinned on any one class of persons in the first quarter of the century tended to flow into descriptions of the others” (Trask 2003: 1). Like Haralson, Trask also discusses a larger circle of modernist writers, including Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, and Hart Crane. But it is James he uses to stage the convergent and circulatory multivocality he diagnoses for the period: The equation of erotic desire with a failure of agency in twenties leftism focused the problem of modernity with a coherence that often eluded modernity’s observers – for whom the epistemological uncertainty to which modern culture gave rise was so diffuse as to negate any equations or reductions. The question that occupies James’s Kate Croy early on in The Wings of the Dove might be taken as a version of the problem that flusters contemporary theorists – that of improper or improbable movement, of “strange situations” and “aimless” advance. “Why should a set of people,” Kate asks herself with regard to her family’s disappointed circumstances, “have been put in motion . . . only to break down without an accident, to stretch themselves in the wayside dust without a reason?” (Trask 2003: 7)

The shifting people and their presumably shiftless discourse appear as an affront to reason itself, and “Perversion becomes both problem and explanation for the period’s excesses of mobility and uncertainty” (Trask 2003: 10). While earlier essays on queer James do discuss the coincidence of James’s language with that of other cultural phenomena (notably, Neill Matheson’s (1999) treatment of the significance of the Oscar Wilde trials), Trask’s work begins to build on these earlier important essays and calls our attention to a different kind of formal evidence and, in turn, different ways of reading James’s engagement with and representations of sexuality. Neither Haralson nor Trask sees himself overturning the insights of earlier queer readings, exactly. In fact their work might be said to expand upon what is at the heart of earlier readings of sexuality: the formal ambiguities that James’s writing produces. Rather than interpret these catachreses in the text, they describe the linguistic effect animated by them to articulate the cultural productivity in James’s form. In this sense they might also be said to have much in common with other recent works on James that highlight the plurality of meanings, genders, and queernesses in James’s work: Leland Person’s (2003) focus on the manifold masculinities of James’s work, for instance, or Lynda Zwinger’s (1997) critique of the singular content Sedgwick reads in the gaps of “The Beast in the Closet.” Yet another indicator of the shift in the ways we read James’s rendering of sexuality would also be David Van Leer’s reading of The Bostonians:

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The Bostonians is a novel about lesbianism not because it contains characters who could be called lesbian, but because it so carefully creates a world in which homosexuality is not judged in terms of the criteria of marriage and procreation traditionally used to prove it “unnatural.” On every page, the reader is encouraged to ask about lesbianism, to wonder who is or is not adequately so described. If by the end such questions seem unanswerable, it is not because heterosexuality has triumphed or because we do not believe in the existence of same-sex desire. It is because we refuse to accept answers which seem to internalize the discriminatory distinctions they mean to overturn. (Van Leer 1999: 107–8)

Van Leer focuses not just on characters and their desires, but on the world James has created – a world in which those characters make sense. To see queerness as a project of world-making, not just of character formation, desire, or identification, is necessarily to take stock, again, of a different order of textual evidence. However much it would seem from the account above that recent turns in James criticism are reacting against the work of queer theory as embodied by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, it would be a mistake to assume that, in responding to early versions of queer theory, these more recent critical contributions pit themselves in opposition to it. Just as Haralson theorizes the significance for queer modernity of circulating James’s texts, so too might we theorize the circulation of literary criticism for the ways it creates the conditions under which sexuality comes to be made and unmade in the reading of literature. In other words, recent interest in queer circulation has been enabled by the rise of queer theory itself. What Jamesians and queer theorists alike keep coming back to is the connection of the literary and the sexual in James. Whether we are concerned with the ambiguity of Henry James (as Edmund Wilson was), the sexuality of textuality itself (as Shoshona Felman was), the complicated structures of preterition (as Eve Sedgwick was), or the force of circulation that produces more language for and about James, what we ultimately confront are the formal enigmas James so carefully crafts in his rendering of complex human relationships. It is always James’s form – a cornucopia of absences, a plenitude of detailed layerings, and mystifying partial points of view – that breathes new life into the existing paradigms for reading him. At this level of form, James not only shows us where the meaning of erotic attachments is disrupted; his work continually offers us ways of reconceptualizing some of the very things we take to be most obvious about sexuality itself. Sexuality, we might say, is just as mysterious as any seemingly endless sentence from a late James novel: we don’t really know where it comes from or why. We can only try to make sense of it as it makes itself present to us in all its complexity. It is this complexity made manifest in his rendering of human desire that James’s work continues ultimately to offer us. Given the generative force not of James form, the circulation of his fiction, as well as the circulation of James criticism, who knows what other sexual lives John Marcher might yet live, how many more screws may yet be turned?

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In his later contributions to queer theory, Bersani works further toward turning the assumptions of psychoanalytic discourse inside out: in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” he argues that individuals only become open to desire through

social encounters, and that the shattering of the boundaries of the psychic self through sexual encounters actually serves the life of the subject. See Bersani (1987).

References and Further Reading Bersani, Leo (1976). A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature. Boston: Little Brown. Bersani, Leo (1987). “Is the rectum a grave?” In AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism (pp. 197–222). Ed. Douglas Crimp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cannon, Kelly (1994). Henry James and Masculinity: The Man at the Margins. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Ellmann, Richard (1999 [1983]). “James among the aesthetes.” In Henry James and Homo-erotic Desire (pp. 25–44). Ed. John R. Bradley. New York: St. Martin’s. Felman, Shoshana (1977). “ ‘Turning the screw of interpretation’”: The question of reading otherwise. Yale French Studies, 55–6: 94–207. Fletcher, John (2000). “The haunted closet: Henry James’s queer spectrality.” Textual Practice, 14.1: 53–80. Geismar, Maxwell (1963). Henry James and the Jacobites. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Graham, Wendy (1999). Henry James’s Thwarted Love. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hanson, Ellis (2003). “Screwing with children in Henry James.” GLQ, 9.3: 367–91. Haralson, Eric (2003). Henry James and Queer Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heilman, Robert (1947). “The Freudian reading of The Turn of the Screw.” Modern Language Notes, 62.7: 433–45. Heilman, Robert (1948). “The Turn of the Screw as poem.” University of Kansas City Review, 14: 277–89. Rptd. in Gerald Willen (ed.) (1960). A Casebook on Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (pp. 174–88). New York: Thomas Y. Crowell.

James, Henry (1984a). Henry James: Literatary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, the Prefaces to the New York Edition. Ed. Leon Edel. New York: Library of America. James, Henry (1984b). “The Turn of the Screw.” The Aspern Papers and the Turn of the Screw. Ed. Anthony Curtis. London: Penguin. McCormack, Peggy (ed.) (2000). Questioning the Master: Gender and Sexuality in Henry James’s Writings. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Margolis, Stacy (2001). “Homo-formalism: Analogy in The Sacred Fount.” Novel, 34.3: 391–410. Martin, Robert K. (1978). “The ‘high felicity’ of comradeship: A new reading of Roderick Hudson.” American Literary Realism, 11: 100–8. Matheson, Neill (1999). “Talking horrors: James, euphemism, and the specter of Wilde.” American Literature, 71.4: 709–50. Moon, Michael (1998). A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiation in American Culture from Henry James to Andy Warhol. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Person, Leland (2003). Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Sarotte, George-Michel (1978). Like A Brother, Like a Lover: Male Homosexuality in the American Novel and Theatre from Herman Melville to James Baldwin. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday. Savoy, Eric (1999). “The queer subject of the ‘Jolly Corner.’” Henry James Review, 20.1: 1–21. Savoy, Eric (2004). “Theory a Tergo in The Turn of the Screw.” In Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children (pp. 245–75). Ed. Steven Bruhm and

Henry James and the Sexuality of Literature Natasha Hurley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1990). “The beast in the closet.” In Epistemology of the Closet (pp. 182–212). Berkeley: University of California Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1997). “Paranoid reading and reparative reading; or, you’re so paranoid, you probably think this introduction is about you.” In Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (pp. 1–40). Ed. Eve Kososfsky Sedgwick. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stevens, Hugh (1998). Henry James and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trask, Michael (2003). Cruising Modernism: Class and Seuxality in American Literature and

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Social Thought. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Van Leer, David (1999). “A world of female friendship: The Bostonians.” In Henry James and Homoerotic Desire (pp. 93–109). Ed. John R. Bradley. New York: St. Martin’s. Willen, Gerald (ed.) (1960). A Casebook on Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell. Wilson, Edmund (1960 [1934]). “The ambiguity of Henry James.” In Gerald Willen (ed.) Casebook on Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (pp. 115–53). New York: Thomas Y. Crowell. Zwinger, Lynda (1997). “Henry James returned.” Arizona Quarterly, 53.4 (Winter): 1–6.

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Exuberance and the Spaces of Inept Instruction: Robert Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys and Henry James’s The Art of the Novel Denis Flannery One must keep one’s head and not lose one’s way. Henry James, preface to The Ambassadors Deduction is just like reading a book. Robert Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys

Robert Baden Powell’s Scouting for Boys was first published in 1908, around the same time that Henry James was writing and publishing the prefaces to his New York Edition, texts which were later collected under the title of The Art of the Novel. The first volumes of James’s monumental collection appeared in December 1908 and the last about July 1909 (Kaplan 1992: 504). Despite this historical congruity and despite their sharing an uncannily large range of preoccupations, generic peculiarities, and cultural impacts, the differences between Baden-Powell’s painful and bouncy “handbook for instruction in good citizenship” and James’s analytic and lyrical account of “the continuity of an artist’s endeavour, the growth of his whole operative consciousness” are more evident than the similarities ( James 1984b: 1039–40). In this essay, I want to address, and celebrate, those similarities and to claim that the sheer and compellingly odd exuberance of both texts is readable in four interesting ways. First, the features of superabundance, copiousness, redundancy of expression, and luxuriant productivity attributed (at least by the OED online) to exuberance are not just differently apt ways of describing Scouting for Boys and James’s prefaces, but they also have a quality of the irresistible and the inscrutable. Second, in this way exuberance can be linked to recent work by, say, Matthew Jordan and Leo Bersani on Jamesian mourning and James’s readability in terms of psychoanalysis. Both writers emphasize the centrality in James of “kernel of loss,” an “it,” some kind of affect and subjectivity-making hardness whose formative impact on states of feeling, potential and consciousness is deeply compelling and visible ( Jordan 2002: 81–2; Bersani 2006: 212). Like trauma, these hard sentient centers emphasized by Jordan and Bersani are both

A Companion to Henry James. Edited by Greg W. Zacharias © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-14042-3

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provocative of narrative and resistant to making into a story. James’s – and BadenPowell’s – undoubted qualities of exuberance might be imagined as the exterior, glossy, yet still ultimately resistant exterior manifestations of these modes of formative, grounding psychic base. Third, exuberance has a particular relationship to pedagogy – albeit, in the case of the James of The Art of the Novel, one somewhat imposed and constructed after the fact. That construction, which I will discuss later, might be said to be responsive to James’s own representations of pedagogical processes in texts like “The Pupil” (1891) and The Turn of the Screw (1898) where exuberance, be it of the pupil’s family milieu or of both teacherly practice and student response, functions as the narrative signal of kernels of psychic loss and id-like drives in both texts. Pedagogy and the emergence of psychology as a discipline and cultural practice are, of 1 course, as Shoshana Felman demonstrated, intensely and antagonistically related. It seems obvious to say that the therapeutic encounter and the practice of learning to negotiate that encounter, however conceived, is teacherly, however imagined. Fourth and finally, biographical discussion of Baden-Powell’s life and critical discussion of James’s prefaces has emphasized albeit in sometimes homophobic and clichéd ways a connection between exuberance and queer reading. Exuberance makes both Scouting for Boys and The Art of the Novel tantalizingly informative about a range of sexual psychologies yet trenchantly resistant to psychosexual definition – in short, queer at the level of representation as opposed to “gay” as a “feature” perceived through writing assumed to be primarily referential. It also, I think, explains not only the monumental pedagogical success of both texts but it also, because of the way in which exuberance blocks and sabotages pedagogy as a mere exchange or transmission of “useful” information, creates another kind of resistance but one which, I will argue, in fact explains the success of Scouting for Boys and The Art of the Novel. Later on I will discuss how what we might term this exuberant pedagogy of sabotage and which also allies them with other kinds of later “manuals” – Austin’s account of performative language, How to Do Things with Words (1962) and Roland Barthes’s lexicon of love, A Lover’s Discourse (1977). While I passionately believe in the affiliations I’ve just outlined (between BadenPowell and James, certainly, and between both texts of 1908 and Austin and Barthes), the last thing I want is for my reader to walk away with Baden-Powell’s genre-exploding words of guidance and James’s genre-expanding “convictions, meditations, fantastications . . . on the great craft & mystery” inextricably linked in her head ( James, quoted in Kaplan 1992: 502). So I will begin by addressing some clear and key distinctions. If nothing else, James’s prefaces are, and have been read as, exercises in taste, nuance, discrimination, delicacy. James writes, for example, of Strether in The Ambassadors: “The actual man’s note, from first of our seeing it struck, is the note of discrimination, just as his drama is to become, under stress, the drama of discrimination” ( James 1984b: 1311). Although sometimes framed in a language of ironic, selfmocking anxiety, these and related terms occur throughout the prefaces. Distinction is not only cherished and admired in the preface to The Awkward Age, but it is “divine”

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( James 1984b: 1131). Throughout the prefaces James berates and sardonically disparages the Anglo-Saxon public for precisely their want of discrimination and delicacy, their imputed lack of interest in the processes and the specifics of cultural work: A comedy or a tragedy may run for a thousand nights without prompting twenty persons in London or in New York to desire to that view of its text which is so desired in Paris, as soon as the play begins to loom at all large, that the number of copies of the printed piece in circulation far exceeds at last the number of performances. ( James 1984b: 1127)

And all this occurs in the interests of developing a sufficiently plausible and subjectivized mode of representation: What a man thinks and what he feels are the history and the character of what he does; on all of which things the logic of intensity rests. Without intensity where is vividness, and without vividness where is presentability? ( James 1984b: 1092)

Such questions do not of course trouble the author of Scouting for Boys. If, over the course of a century, Baden-Powell has endeared himself to the public which provoked such despair in James and which he treats with such arch disparagement, then that is because Scouting for Boys takes vividness, very problematically, for granted. In BadenPowell, the mere mention of something, the speediest recounting, the crudest drawing, is as confidently and flat-footedly sufficient for him as the most thought-through and exquisite rendering was for the James who appears from time to time in the prefaces, the James delighted with his work, who notes his achievements with pride. Compare, for example, any of the restrained and never-quite-told anecdotal moments in James – the opening of the prefaces to, say, The Portrait of a Lady or The Spoils of Poynton – with the following piece of tagged-on narration by Baden-Powell entitled “Winter’s Stob; or the Eldson Murder.” Thanks, in Baden-Powell’s story, to the priggish observational technique of a young shepherd, a certain “Willie Winter, a gipsy” is hung for the murder of an old woman, Margaret Crozier. Baden-Powell delights in recounting how the convicted man was hanged at Newcastle and his body brought to near the scene of the murder and hung on a gibbet at a place called Stang’s Cross. Further rambling anecdotage (Baden-Powell recounts how the mother of R. B. Haldane saw the body hanging on the gibbet in chains which “rattled on the lonely moor”; he also lets his reader know that “some foolish people” believed that rubbing the teeth with chips taken from the gibbet could cure toothache) flows into the following brief paragraph: Winter belonged to a notable family. He was not the only one who distinguished himself, for his father and his brother were also hanged for different offences. Another brother, feeling the disgrace of belonging to such a family, changed his name from Winter to Spring, and became – a prize fighter. (Baden-Powell 2004: 32)

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Baden-Powell’s attempt at stylistic formulation, his insertion of that pausing dash before the words “a prize fighter,” a dash which might suggest that Scouting for Boys is a text which, like James’s prefaces, is utterly indebted to the voice, serves to highlight the derivative and formal aimlessness of this nonetheless very targeting anecdote. And the sheer tastelessness not only of the anecdote but of this cheering piece of family reportage sits in vivid contrast to the practice of taste in James and, more fundamentally, to his belief in taste as a kind of spiritual index. Even when Baden-Powell’s clunky compositional powers do not engage in the particular forms of grotesque moral hectoring, not to mention class and race warfare (it’s difficult to work out if B-P regards murder, being a gypsy, or being poor as worse), evidenced in “Winter’s Stob,” his prose is something from which, as James’s narrator puts it at the beginning of The Spoils of Poynton, “the principle of taste ha(s) been extravagantly omitted” ( James 1982: 3). But for all the reminiscent tone and retrospective of The Art of the Novel James’s taste is as committed to modernity as it is critical of the excesses of the modern world. Furthermore, it is committed to a powerful linkage between modernity and mystery. In the New York Edition this is nowhere more evident than in Alvin Langdon Coburn’s sparse and haunting photographs with their brusque modernity, gentle tense anticipation, and historical sense. For Baden-Powell, modernity means nothing but risk and decline. If there is a proximity between modernity and the mysterious in James then that is because his New York Edition, in its texts, prefaces, photographs and its commemorative state is not only marked but brought into being by powerful senses of mortality and termination. In the preface to volume 17 which contains “The Altar of the Dead,” James asks “for what sort of free intelligence would it be that, addressed to the human scene, should propose to itself, all vulgarly, never to be waylaid or arrested, never effectively inspired, by some image of the lost Dead?” ( James 1984b: 1246). This is clearly a key question for the story in question and for most of the others that accompany it – “The Beast in the Jungle” being the most famous and intense other example. And the inclusion of many major novels in the New York Edition – The Wings of the Dove and The Portrait of a Lady being the two most obvious examples – is clearly fueled by it. More of a rhetorical plea than a literal question, James’s wondering posits the existence of a free intelligence impervious to the affective and generative impact of the Dead as an impossibility, a positing undermined later by the anecdotes of London indifference to the Dead he later recounts in his preface ( James 1984b: 1248). It is also undermined from within by the qualifiying adjective “free,” whose presence posits the existence of abundantly unfree but nonetheless real intelligences. If it can be argued (and it can) that a reaction towards termination and decline inspires Baden-Powell’s writing, then the displacement of that consciousness of mortality onto an empire and its frantic, eroticized imposition onto the bodies of boys, however much it may be a driving force of Scouting for Boys, is not an acknowledged source of inspiration and a marker of human agency, autonomy, and intelligence as it is for James. The Art of the Novel is, to put it formulaically, tremblingly inspired by death, while Scouting for Boys is provoked into its panicked

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existence by death as a prospect. Consequently the theory of representational practice in both texts is different, but tellingly related. Baden-Powell and James have utterly antagonistic senses of representation, but their writing is fueled by an intense sense of representation’s importance. James exuberantly believes, as he declares in the preface to Roderick Hudson, that “relations stop nowhere” ( James 1984b: 1041). Baden-Powell, it might be said, knows this and wishes it could be otherwise even as he invests in and elevates the cultural centrality of the roaming expansive Boy. Despite this investment, Scouting for Boys believes that relations can be made to stop and similarly that the field of relationality should be made to stop. This is true of the text’s maintenance of class and nationality and it is also true of Baden-Powell’s advice on sexual pleasure and restraint. One of the more breathtaking pleasures of Scouting for Boys is its gleeful flattening of historical distance. “Scout” is a term, for Baden-Powell, that is applicable to everyone – medieval knights, John Smith, Zulu warriors, Kipling’s Kim, and US President Theodore Roosevelt. The term is not only applied with a necessary feigned indifference to Baden-Powell’s own construction of it, but at other times Baden-Powell himself engages in a joking, uncanny, flat, and uncomfortable recognition of the kinds of heritage-making anti-historicism which marks Scouting for Boys. In the course, for example, of a diatribe against smoking, Baden-Powell’s sense of historical distance and contingency momentarily wakes, albeit in a peculiarly flat, self-defeating and embarrassed way. “I heard another reason given the other day,” he writes, “for not smoking, and that was St. Paul did not smoke. I don’t suppose he did. Tobacco wasn’t invented in his time” (Baden-Powell 2004: 284–5). If Baden-Powell flattened historical epochs and if Scouting for Boys’ sheer historical confusion is in part responsible for its weird charm and ongoing popularity, then it is perhaps important to bear in mind that James’s prefaces are also themselves part of a project of monumentalization and revision based on his desire to create and maintain a certain (illusory) consistency of posture and aesthetic disposition between his earlier and later works. Baden-Powell’s culturally constructive and targeted historical disregard sits uneasily, it is true, with James’s acute and inventive modernity. But both Scouting for Boys and The Art of the Novel share a will to acknowledge, indeed honor, the past yet at the same time to maintain false temporal continuities within the phenomena they champion – the scouting movement on the one hand and James’s writing on the other. This is by no means the only parallel that can be drawn between them. Reading and rereading these unwieldy, impassioned and, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick puts it of the James, “way out there” texts, I’ve been as struck by what they share as I’ve been happy to maintain a sense of their mutual strangeness and separateness (Sedgwick 2003: 39). A full account of those similarities would take up far more space than I have here; it would in fact be immense. There are three points of contact between Baden-Powell’s manual and James’s essayistic reminiscences – historical, figurative, and interpretive – on which I will concentrate, but first I want simply to list some of the key parallels between them.

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The first is part-publication. Elleke Boehmer recounts how Scouting for Boys was published in parts every other Wednesday from January 15, 1908, with book publication taking place in May 1908 (Boehmer 2004: xii). According to Tim Jeal, it was (unlike James’s New York Edition) “one of the steadiest best-sellers in the history of publishing” ( Jeal 2001: 396). Similarly, what we now know as The Art of the Novel appeared piecemeal as, plagued by uncertainty, compromise, and disappointment, the volumes of James’s New York Edition were published by Charles Scribner’s Sons between December 1907 and July 1909. It was only in 1934 after turning down R. P. Blackmur’s plea for a single-volume collection but then changing their minds in the wake of a series of appeals from a Professor Alpheus Smith and in the light of an imminent disappearance of copyright control, that Scribner’s published the collected prefaces under the title by which they are now known (Anesko 2006: 270). The choice of title, as well as the assembly of the prefaces and the writing of the introduction, was the work of Blackmur. It is in huge part not only Blackmur’s title, but also his introduction with its worshipful tones and its “handy” divisions of James’s astoundingly baroque, mellifluous prose into topical sections that has given the prefaces their perhaps dubious status as instruction manual, if not for scouts then for novelists. These subdivisions include “On the Use of Wonder to Animate a Theme,” “Geographical Representation,” “The Necessity of Fools,” and “The Use of Muddlement” (Blackmur 1935: xxi, xxiii, xxiv). This kind of subdivision echoes Baden-Powell (it would be interesting to know if Blackmur ever read Scouting for Boys and if therefore we can not only draw parallels between it and the prefaces, but if it is in some uncanny and residual way responsible for the ways in which those prefaces have been organized and perceived), yet also goes against the grain of James’s own organization and writing. Thus any reader (or hopeful novelist) wanting information on how “Wonder” might “animate a theme” would go to volume 11 (the preface to Lady Barberina and Other Tales), but the same reader needing guidance in the area of “Geography” would need to skip back to volume 1, the preface to Roderick Hudson. “The Necessity of Fools” is treated according to Blackmur in volume 5 (the preface to The Tragic Muse), but also in volume 10 (the preface to The Reverberator and Other Tales) and, again, in volume 11’s preface. Both Baden-Powell and James may in their different ways advocate the organic integrity of nations, empires, and fictions, but the compositional structure of the texts where they do so is a model of things coming together in a more disputingly uneven and heterogeneous way. Both Baden-Powell and James are also obsessed with theatricality; this is most vividly, but not exclusively, true of the preface to The Awkward Age. “Playing” and “acting” animate Scouting for Boys all kinds of ways, though whether words like “divine” or, indeed, “distinction” can be applied to Baden-Powell’s theatrical adventures is another question entirely. Those included in Scouting for Boys (many more animated his whole life and military career) include the play of “Pocahontas,” featuring a young boy scout in “Red Indian” drag (a drawing helpfully supplied), “The Diamond Thief” and the display, whether so extraordinarily inept or extraordinarily extravagant, it’s hard to say, of “The Whale Hunt.” All of these bespeak on the one

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hand an astonishing naïvety and on the other a knowing anti-aesthetic crudity. BadenPowell also manages to detonate ingrained puritan objections to the theater by claiming that the encouragement of young boys to save up their pennies in order to be able to afford trips to the theater can be “the first step towards thrift” (Baden-Powell 2004: 312). A similar argument could be made about the importance of photography as a key feature of the New York Edition, especially as James rhapsodizes over Alvin Langdon Coburn’s photographs ( James 1984b: 1327) and the way in which the ecologically sensitive Baden-Powell argues for photography as a mode of hunting (Baden-Powell 2004: 104–5). In terms of literary influence Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling are crucial for both writers. Scouting for Boys builds the figure of the scout from, in part, Kipling’s fictional creation of Kim. Stevenson is a key point of reference for James, especially in the preface to The Portrait of a Lady. And the very existence of the New York Edition was in part inspired by the example of the no-doubt scouting-exemplary appearance of Scribner’s Outward Bound edition of Kipling’s works (Anesko 1987: 150). The whole community of pedagogic scouting relationships envisioned in BadenPowell’s writing owes much to the kinds of rough and ready, intimately companionable relationships between adolescent boys and slightly older (but still young) men set out and celebrated in Robert Louis Stevenson’s work. We might think in this regard of the risk-laden, trusting, but never-quite-sanctioned or categorizable loves between, say, David Balfour and Alan Breck in Kidnapped (1886), more famously, the relationship between Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver in Treasure Island (1883). As a friend and admirer of Stevenson, James remarked a certain “absence of care for things feminine” ( James 1984a: 1233) in his work and went on to emphasize “What he prizes most in the boy’s ideal [was] the imaginative side of it, the capacity for successful make-believe” ( James 1984a: 1236). A figure like Alan Breck, then, can be read as the internal manifestation of Stevenson’s writerly care, a care for autonomous seriousness of boy’s imaginative lives, as celebrated by James and made explicitly manifest in writing – and institutions – by Baden-Powell. A vast and self-perpetuating network of relations between older and younger men and boys is as much the envisaged fantasist content of Scouting for Boys as it historically became the text’s real-world outcome. This is embedded in the structure of Baden-Powell’s text, its levels of address to boys in standard type and in italics to instructors. In James’s writing this takes a number of different forms, for example his tender and solicitous love for younger male characters, particularly Hyacinth Robinson in The Princess Casamassima. James’s construction of himself as the younger object of the love and care of one of his own characters is also operative in the preface to The American, where he represents his relationship to his hero as one where he clings to his hero “as to a tall, protective, good-natured elder brother in a rough place” ( James 1984b: 1069). And throughout the James writing his prefaces is engaged, as Sedgwick has put it, in an effort to “figure his relation to the past as the intensely charged rela-

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tionship between the author of the prefaces and the much younger man who wrote the novels and stories to which the prefaces are appended – or between either of these men and a yet younger figure who represents the fiction itself” (Sedgwick 2003: 39). It is frequently remarked that Baden-Powell was himself remarkably relaxed and free both in his writing and the conduct of his professional life about his love for, involvement with, and admiration for other, usually younger, men (Boehmner 2004: xxiv). The terms in which Baden-Powell wrote about these relationships are affectionate, solicitous, and erotic. Of the tears of one such soldier, Baden-Powell wrote that after comforting him in the wake of a bereavement he “sent him out with a ‘don’t be a fool’ pat on the shoulder, but my right hand was richer for a hot and grimy tearsplash” ( Jeal 2001: 100). The James of the prefaces is similarly affectionate, solicitous, and erotic, a peculiar combination of the flaunting and the blushingly (in)discreet. Any apprehension either man might have felt about the homoerotic practice or potential of their writing (we might think in this regard of what seems now to be the blatant double entendre of the title Scouting for Boys) seems to get transferred onto something else entirely – the presence of some remarkably evident tics of style. “Be Prepared!” Baden-Powell endlessly intones all the way through Scouting for Boys. With hardly less frequency but, unsurprisingly, more self-consciousness, James endlessly repeats “Dramatise it! Dramatise it!” ( James 1984b: 1241) as he recounts one or other situation or idea for a story. This phrase tends to become “dramatise, dramatise, dramatise!” ( James 1984b: 1242) and, noticing the feature but refusing either to stop or correct it, the James of the preface to “The Author of Beltraffio” refers to “my inveterate ‘Dramatise!’ ” ( James 1984b: 1244). And one of the reasons Baden-Powell chooses so to intone his motto is that it chimes with his own initials as he himself very frequently and openly points out (Baden-Powell 2004: 35). In James’s case his initials are literally stamped onto the pages of his New York Edition. Every page of the original had, as a watermark on its beautiful paper, an insignia “HJ” with one letter superimposed in the other. So the performances of mastery and homoerotic pedagogy in both texts exist along a linguistic anxiety and nervousness evident in the formidable repetitions of both guides and in the physical fixation on the initials of both writers. And these last features connect intrinsically, I think, to a peculiar feature of both Scouting for Boys and The Art of the Novel – the way in which they both combine the monumental and the oracular, the utterly inspired and the totally, disappointingly, flat. In thematic and historical terms both are also fixated on tracking and detection. For Baden-Powell, this is a key part of the Scouting fantasy. If, for James, his texts can – like the young men of his fiction and his younger writing self – be physically responsive objects of love, then the tracking metaphors he employs complement his conceit, making the texts and his relations to them more charged and animated. Sometimes James’s texts are the objects of his tracking energies: “ ‘Flickerbirdge’ indeed I verily give up,” he writes, “so thoroughly does this highly-finished little anecdote cover its tracks” ( James 1984b: 1283). Elsewhere James, rather than loving

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his younger self or his earlier texts, goes actively in pursuit in terms Baden-Powell would have found all too recognizable: The blest good stuff, sitting up, in its myriad forms, so touchingly responsive to new care of any sort whatever, seemed to pass with me a delightful bargain, and in the fewest possible words. “Actively believe in us and then you’ll see!” – it wasn’t more complicated than that, and yet was to become as thrilling as if conditioned on depth within depth. I saw therefore what I saw, and what these numerous pages record, I trust, with clearness; though one element of fascination tended all the while to rule the business – a fascination, at each stage of my journey, on the noted score of that so shifting and uneven character of the tracks of my original passage. ( James 1984b: 1334)

What is even more striking in this passage than the thrilling and uncanny capacity of his early texts (his “blest good stuff”) to speak, is the notion of James, sounding not unlike his own governess in The Turn of the Screw, tracking himself. James is fascinated (very consciously, I think, he uses the word “fascination” twice here) by the “shifting and uneven” character not so much of his earlier writing but the bodily movement, the passage (bodily in so many senses) of that work, its capacity to change and move. In articulating this fascination as the raison d’être of the New York Edition, James gives the tracking metaphor an intense and uncanny force of fantasy – and these 2 are by no means the only occasions when the prefaces employ this metaphor. Tracking the physical movement of this younger self, retrieving that movement, furthermore, as a solid entity – these become the fantasist but intense and physically based modes of articulating James’s project of revision and assembly. The James who, in 1884’s “The Art of Fiction,” quoted his own piece of advice to an aspiring novelist as “Try to be one the people on whom nothing is lost!” ( James 1984a: 53) could almost be a source for the powers of observation and deduction Baden-Powell attempts to instil in would-be scouts: In the same way in scouting in civilized countries you read the tracks of men, horses, bicycles, etc., and find out from these what has been going on; noticing by small signs, such as birds suddenly starting up, that someone is moving near, though you cannot see them. (Baden-Powell 2004: 21)

Baden-Powell’s sentence begins with tracking and its fantasist attempt is to turn the day-to-day impoverished suburban spaces of Edwardian Britain into a space of frontier possibility that can not only be read but read as if it were exotic, oriental, and other. This level of fantasy applies not only to daily inhabited space but also to the (at times quite extraordinary) powers of perception represented as necessary for survival in that space: One of the most important things that a scout has to learn, whether he is a war scout or a hunter or a peace scout, is to let nothing escape his attention; he must notice

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small points and signs, and then make out the meaning of them: but it takes a good deal of practice before a tenderfoot can get into the habit of really noting everything and letting nothing escape his eye. It can be learnt just as well in the town as in the country. I was walking with one [a scout] the other day in Hyde Park in London. He presently remarked “that horse is going a little lame” – there was no horse near us, but I found he was looking at one far away across the Serpentine: the next moment he picked up a peculiar button lying by the path. His eyes, you see, were looking both far away and near. (Baden-Powell 2004: 66)

This fantasy of doubly intense focus is integral not only to Baden-Powell’s construction of the scout in (and via) this anecdote. It also has its counterpart in the aesthetic demands made of his readers by James in the preface to The Portrait of a Lady, and more particularly when James rather typically describes the production of “little touches and inventions and enhancements” as bricks in a larger construction, one of whose overall shape James wants his reader to be aware without for one minute losing sight of the nature, texture, and number of its participating elements ( James 1984b: 1083). There, according to J. Hillis Miller, the reader “must simultaneously pay attention to innumerable details and at the same time be aware of the shape and proportions of the large architectural construction those multitudinous bricks constitute. This is an exceedingly difficult prescription to fulfill” (Miller 2005: 49). If the tracking metaphor in James is part of an uncanny process of infusing his texts with speech and endowing himself with the capacity to track the movement of his younger self and writing as if they were physical entities, then for Baden-Powell tracking, which we might expect to be in his case all the more quotidian, pushes him into the attribution of these exuberantly powerful capacities of deduction to a fictional friend. It is striking that James also assumes, expects, and enforces such capacities on the part of his readers. For the James of the preface to The Golden Bowl, revision and rereading are fundamentally the same thing and equally, for Baden-Powell, it is the model of adequate reading which enables him to enforce his epistemology of tracking at the same time that it transforms the world, turning it into something more thrilling than its regular banalities might suggest and making the entire world a text: “Deduction,” he writes, “is exactly like reading a book” (Baden-Powell 2004: 90). Philip Horne’s very recent work on the relationship between James and Teddy Roosevelt gives the emphasis both men place on the tracking-reading-writing relationship another kind of historical basis. Roosevelt was a keen hunter and a man of prodigious energy. “No man over forty,” Henry Adams commented, “had the force to meet him without nervous prostration” (quoted in Horne 2006: 245). Documenting both the personal encounters between James and Roosevelt in 1883 and 1905 and the ways in which Roosevelt – bizarrely – made the name “Henry James” synonymous with political weakness and party-political betrayal, lends, for Horne, a very solid and physical source to the operation of hunting metaphors in James’s 1908 story “The Jolly Corner,” an emphasis which readings of that story in terms of, say, race or queer

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theory have tended to downplay or overlook. If a certain amount of historical research and literary-critical detective work can show us the “presence” of Roosevelt in James’s life and “The Jolly Corner,” then Roosevelt’s presence is more explicitly present in Scouting for Boys: Mr. Roosevelt, President of the United States of America, writes; “The qualities that make a good scout are, in large part, the qualities that make a good hunter. Most important of all is the ability to shift for one’s self – the mixture of hardihood and resourcefulness which enables a man to tramp all day in the right direction, and, when night comes, to make the best of whatever opportunities for shelter and warmth may be at hand. Skill in the use of the rifle is another trait; quickness in seeing game, another; ability to take advantage of cover, yet another; while patience, endurance, keenness of observation, resolution, good nerves, and instant readiness in an emergency, are all indispensable to a really good hunter.” Roosevelt is not, like certain men I know of, a man who pays others to do his fighting for him, but, when America went to war with Spain about Cuba, he went to the front as a soldier – like many good Britons did in South Africa – and was of greatest value to his side because he had begun life as a scout. (Baden-Powell 2004: 284)

I am reasonably sure that James and Baden-Powell never met, although they did know 4 people in common and Roosevelt was one of them. If the 1905 meeting of the US President and James brought twenty-two years of mutual acrimony to a harmonious end, then the by-now former President Roosevelt’s 1912 meeting with Baden-Powell at Oyster Bay was similarly joyous and culminated in Roosevelt being given the award “Chief Scout Citizen” ( Jeal 2001: 489). The range of points of comparison between Scouting for Boys and The Art of the Novel is immense. In my view the two on which we have just concentrated – the way in which tracking and the practice of reading, revision, and rewriting are intimately linked, and the historical presence of Teddy Roosevelt – are, figuratively and historically, the most obvious and the most enabling response to any assertion that these two texts can have nothing to do with each other. But the parallel which is most interesting in interpretive terms and the one which tells us the most, I feel, about the linkage of these two texts and psychology is that of exuberantly inept instruction (but instruction nonetheless) which in its very failures and extravagances has more pedagogical value and allure and is more telling in terms of reading and affect. Such a form of effectively skewed pedagogy is part of the common literary genealogy of Scouting for Boys and James’s prefaces. It features in nearly all the texts that both bodies of writing look to in common. In the case of one, Stevenson’s Kidnapped, the whole novel’s actional, ideological, and affective impact is built on the possibilities and energies opened up by the relationship between its young hero David Balfour and his eventual mentor figure, Alan Breck. Kidnapped’s emotional climax is the muted emotional departure of the stolid Scots narrator-hero and the extravagant, flirtatious,

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risky, and protective older man, with his dark face, smallpox-marked skin, silver pistols, and eyes “which were unusually light and had a kind of dancing madness in them” (Stevenson 1994: 57). There are certainly other more worldly or more respectable mentor figures in Kidnapped; if anything, the novel is too full of them, but the presence of these figures serves as a contrastive setting for Breck’s practically endangering and inept but emotionally attaching pedagogical impact with its animating narrative status and control. In many ways it is precisely this kind of pedagogical practice, narrative status, and companionable relation that both Baden-Powell and James are setting out to attain in Scouting for Boys and The Art of the Novel. And if these two texts echo back to an earlier literary and cultural genealogy then they also can be said to have produced a genealogy. Alan Breck’s pedagogical style might also be allied to psychoanalysis. In both there is a too much and a too little and in both there is a transmission (of, for example, transference or ignorance) which has a triple status of being, first an accompanying energy to the main business of the therapeutic or pedagogic exchange, second a potentially dangerous distraction from that exchange, and third a reason for returning, an obscure and attractive impulse of sheer refusal and resistance that generates, rather than repudiates, devotion and adhesion. This productive and resistant exuberance manifests itself in other, perhaps more instructional, texts of (post)modern speculation and theory. I’m thinking in this regard of J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words and Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, the first of which tells you in fact more about what words do to you (or how words do you) and the second of which endlessly promises and interminably withholds a systematization of love but does so through promise, provoked return, and textual loyalty. And if this is true for psychoanalysis, then it is true for the fiction of Henry James. The pedagogical scenarios I have outlined would be all too familiar to James’s readers: they are the scenarios of “The Figure in the Carpet,” The Turn of the Screw, “The Beast in the Jungle,” The Golden Bowl – all texts which employ tracking and hunting metaphors which Baden-Powell would have recognized as jolly or quite quotidian realities. With Scouting for Boys and The Art of the Novel this is accentuated because what both manuals hold out (and in the case of James have been made to hold out by virtue of the quite eclectic and multi-faceted prefaces being gathered in the 1930s into one instructional-looking volume complete with a somewhat text-defying apparatus) is the promise of delivery, the promise of instruction. The reality is something quite different. How does this operate? Reading and rereading Scouting for Boys is an experience which gives the reader pause in many ways. Its utter exuberance, its casual racism and class discrimination, its queer combinations of pastoral fantasy and military culture, its semi-blind, semi-conscious homoeroticism, and its range of double entendres would all cause one, as James himself might have put it, to “rub one’s eyes.” Baden-Powell’s use of the word “camp” in the sense of that which pertains to an outdoor dwelling place haloes quite hilariously into the term’s more sexualized and queer senses. So the varying stiff,

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austere and, in their geeky way, quite sexy illustrations accompanied by words such as “camp loom,” “camp candlesticks” and – my favorite – “camp fork” are open to a range of queer, possibly cruel, but pretty irresistible reading. What these double entendres permit is a veering off into realms of fantasy in a way which creates a kind of semantic and signifying space, first between the different senses of words or phrases – “Scouting for Boys,” “a camp fork” – and then, almost inevitably, between signifiers and signifieds. As in psychoanalysis, as in teaching, this double entendre streak of Baden-Powell’s writing opens up a space where things become possible in unforeseen and, perhaps more importantly, hitherto unimagined ways and in ways not necessarily visible to either occupant of the category teacher/student, therapist/patient, writer/reader. There are two aspects of both Scouting for Boys and The Art of the Novel which echo this provision of pedagogical, teacherly, therapeutic space. The first is their utter (I would argue, their necessary) failure, as practical manuals, although in this I disagree with Kurt A. Johnson, a recent enthusiastic reviewer on Amazon.com who claimed to have benefited greatly from Baden-Powell’s instructions on how to lace one’s shoes (“I never thought,” Johnson enthuses, “of tying my shoes like that!”). There is a sense in which the compositional and publishing history of James’s text, the unique generic nature of the prefaces and the particularities of James’s writing, make this kind of failure almost a forgone conclusion. But it is nonetheless the case that The Art of the Novel produced a kind of imitative discursive formation which goes on to this day and of which (it might be argued) this essay is part. I’m thinking in this regard of Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction, Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction, and other – more theoretical – offshoots of that James-emulating partially 5 pragmatist movement. What all this work either consciously (in the case of Lubbock) or less explicitly (in the case of Jonathan Culler) does is take the promises inherent in The Art of the Novel in some way literally. Other work on the prefaces has tended more to read them in terms of the trajectory of James’s career, or symptomatically or 6 in terms of cultural affiliation and practice. In either case these different kinds of work are, I think, both haunted and enabled by what the prefaces have been made to promise and by how, in their writing, they hold back where they promise delivery and – like the best teachers and shrinks – deliver something entirely different. The energy produced by the gap between these two positions is what makes James’s writings of 1907–9 not only of interest, but also explains why they are objects of continual return and why they have been linked, with such obscure success, to performativity. If the prefaces are “performative” then maybe they are most so in terms not necessarily of what they promise but how a promising effect is imputed to them. Of course, the generic convention of any prefaces and the specific rhetorics of promising in which the James of The Art of the Novel engages both mean that any such imputation has at least three sources: first, the generic alliance between preface and promise; second, the ways in which James’s writing plays with that generic capacity; and third, the promising effect imposed on the prefaces by their single-volume publication and the partially imitative critical and cultural works that publication engendered. As J. Hillis Miller

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writes of James’s commentary on The Awkward Age: “The preface is a promise. It promises that if you are one of those with eyes to see and ears to hear and understand you will be rewarded with the pleasure of seeing a hundred bright phenomena. If not, not” (Miller 2005: 98). It is in the depths of James’s sensuous, sonorous syntax that this dynamic is enacted and held. Reading Scouting for Boys next to James enables one to see this process unfold with greater but more evident crudity. Consider, for example, the following instructional action, entitled “Display,” from Baden-Powell: Act a scene of castaways on a desert island. They make camp fire: pick seaweed, grass, roots, etc., and cook them. Make pots, etc., out of clay. Weave mats and grass: build raft and if water is available get afloat in it: put up a mast and grass mat sail, etc.: and punt or sail away, or can be rescued by sighting ship and making smoke signals or getting a boat’s crew of sailors to come and fetch them. (Baden-Powell 2004: 181)

Scouting for Boys is full of writing like this. Tonally abrupt and confident in its acts of instruction, it is nonetheless useless as a mode of practical instruction. The thought of a scout troop in, say, Leeds or Dublin or London trying at any time between 1908 and the present day to actually do this (or trying to work out what practical or ideological work this “Display” is trying to get them to do) all but overwhelms the imagination. And this is by no means the only instance of this kind of overwhelmingly ludicrous pedagogy found in Baden-Powell’s text. Here, for example, is a tip for a “Non-Scouting Game . . . Useful for Evenings in the Club or in Camp”: Over a door drape a curtain, in the centre of which is hung a frame through which can be thrust the heads of various persons chosen from those present. These heads are to be attired in such a fashion as to represent various well-known characters such as Christopher Columbus, Queen Victoria, etc. The audience are to be informed that they are at liberty to make frank criticisms on these animated pictures for the purpose of causing a smile. In case the audience is successful in identifying within a certain time, the person who represents the picture must pay a fine. (Baden-Powell 2004: 343)

Such writing is the stuff of fantasy that permits the exercise of the imagination in an uneasy, late-industrial protestant epoch while pretending to practicality, the maintenance of the boy-body and national strength. The ineptitude permits fantasy and also reflects some of the limitations of possibility in the communities which adopted scouting and had such practical and affective need of it. The very ineptitude of the instruction is therefore a movement-forming and cult-making strength. Just as with Scouting for Boys’ omnipresent sexual double entendres, such apparent ineptitude opens a space between the achievable and the ludicrous, the practical and the frenziedly imaginative, into which readers can insert themselves in fantasy, but in a covert, resistant (yet, crucially, sanctioned) way.

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The Art of the Novel is no stranger to such spaces. It can be argued that the Jamesian sentence itself performs a kind of representational work not in fact wildly distant from the dazzlingly awkward (and successful) gestures of Baden-Powell. When James is writing at either his most obscure, or at his most beautiful, something, in fact, quite similar happens. Here is a lyrical and beautiful James describing another imaginary curtain – the “featureless” wall opposite the Piccadilly house where, in 1883, he lived, wrote, and presumably read Treasure Island: This surface hung there like the most voluminous of curtains – it masked the very stage of the great theatre of the town. To sit for certain hours at one’s desk before it was somehow to occupy in the most suitable way in the world the proportionately ample interacts of the mightiest of dramas. When I went out it was as if the curtain rose; so that, to repeat, I think of my tolerably copious artistry of that time as all the fruit of interacts, with the curtain more or less quietly down and with the tuning of fiddles and only the vague rumble of shifted scenery playing round it and through it. ( James 1984b: 1220–1)

There are many things about this passage that are simply beguiling. This is James at his most complexly pellucid, sonorously lyrical, and tenderly imaginative. The “mightiest of dramas” refers clearly to the London life which some of his fiction of the 1880s documents, but it also posits the existence of two dramas going on either side of this imaged curtain, the drama of the great city and the drama of James’s own creativity which matches, albeit in a tenderly self-deprecating way, the urban spectacle with a quieter energy of its own and, with equal tenderness, relegates London’s selfimportance to the tuning of fiddles and the rumble of moving scenery. In aural, visual, rhythmic, and urban terms, James is representing himself in space and creating space for his reminiscing self and for his readers. It’s not that The Art of the Novel doesn’t do what Scouting for Boys does in terms of the space of the double entendre and the space created by perverse and exuberant pedagogy. Sedgwick’s work on the anal thematics of the prefaces as a “virtually absolute symbol of imaginative value” has documented this very keenly (Sedgwick 2003: 48). Despite their shared preoccupation with the theatrical curtain, the rhythmic, elegant sophistication and sheer beauty of James’s writing is obviously worlds away from the crudities of Baden-Powell. But the effect of James’s writing is also, I would argue, not entirely different from what BadenPowell does with his apparent ineptitudes, his double entendres, and the sheer representational queerness of Scouting for Boys. James’s elegance and Baden-Powell’s crudeness, aided by the triggering roles of double entendres, writerly exuberance, and strategically pedagogic non-delivery, both create crucial fantasist spaces for their readers, spaces which invite replication, return, and perpetually curious devotion to the authors of these texts. I want to conclude by picking up on one small, final, and very specific representational practice which both texts have in common. That is the very striking use of

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inverted commas around specific words. Sedgwick touches on this briefly in her discussion of the preface to The American, pointing out that at one point James has the verb “to assist” “in scare quotes here, and it’s not easy (it hardly ever is in James) to 7 see why” (Sedgwick 2003: 57). There is, however, more to this than sheer difficulty or the anal double entendre which Sedgwick claims for this particular instance of Jamesian scare-quoting. Like Baden-Powell’s endless reiteration of his initials and James’s repetition of the self-imperative “Dramatise,” this is a kind of writerly tic both men share. A drawing in Scouting for Boys of two boys locked in a leaning, possibly combative, pushing embrace has the tag “The ‘Struggle’ for strengthening the heart” (Baden-Powell 2004: 194). Earlier, discussing knots, Baden-Powell writes: “A bad knot, which is called a ‘granny,’ is one which slips away when a hard pull comes on it, or which gets jammed so tight that you cannot untie it” (Baden-Powell 2004: 128). Towards the end of the book, Baden-Powell insists that “If every member of the Y.M.C.A. took a friend as his second-in-command and six boys as pupils, each of them prepared to bring in another recruit, and then acting as leaders and instructors to further patrols of six, there would at once be the commencement of a great ‘snowball’ movement for good” (Baden-Powell 2004: 306). Here is James, in the preface to The Portrait of a Lady, discussing Isabel’s night vigil in that novel’s famous chapter 42: “Reduced to its essence, it is but the vigil of searching criticism; but it throws the action further forward than twenty ‘incidents’ might have done” ( James 1984b: 1084). Looking at a later phase of his career, James explains his decision to make his Maisie a heroine rather than a hero: All this would be to say, I at once recognised, that my light vessel of consciousness, swaying in such a draught, couldn’t be with verisimilitude a rude little boy; since, beyond the fact that little boys are never so “present,” the sensibility of the female young is indubitably, for early youth, the greater and my plan would call, on the part of my protagonist, for “no end” of sensibility. ( James 1984b: 1159)

On some levels there are obvious reasons for this shared and persistent stylistic feature. If James puts inverted commas around “assist” in the preface to The American, he does so to mark not only the provenance of that word from French but his willful importation into a new context, something which changes its common meaning in English. But if this is the case then why doesn’t he do this with other, even more exotic verbs in the prefaces (such as “to constate,” for example)? The idea of Baden-Powell engaging in this kind of linguistic, nuancing importation of French words is so unthinkable I will just let it pass, but his inverted commas around “granny” acknowledge the movement of a term from one sphere to another with a consequent (and perhaps misogynistic) shift into trivial, but slightly unpleasant, metaphor. Slang usage may perhaps inform James’s decision to put the phrase “no end” into inverted commas in his discussion of What Maisie Knew, but again the question of the occurrence of unmarked slang in the prefaces would seem to throw this into question. Baden-Powell

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also seems to use scare quotes to highlight “snowball” as slangy and metaphorical but, again, he doesn’t do this elsewhere in Scouting for Boys. So that leaves other words – Baden Powell’s “ ‘struggle’ for strengthening the heart,” the “incidents” James imagines as unable to carry out the narrative force of his chapter 42, and his belief that boys are never so “present.” As well as unevenly indicated foreign provenance and self-conscious, misogynist metaphor, these more obscure uses of scare quotes seem to me to have other functions that connect with the exuberant pedagogic and affective impacts and insights of Scouting for Boys and The Art of the Novel. If part of the appeal of both texts lies in seductively inadequate instruction, in a skewed (or simply non-) delivery, then this use of scare quotes provides a textual and linguistic manifestation, a kind of objective correlative on the page, of this pedagogical form and of the consequent affective and semantic space the form provides. In the case of words like “struggle,” “incidents,” and “present” the quotation marks indicate a certain speculative provisonality which, again, creates imaginative space into which readers can, with quiet intensity, place themselves, turning and refiguring the nature of gendered presentness and what that might mean, having their sense of what amounts to both incident and narrative force subjected to a gentle pressure which might downplay, might expand, but in either case will alter their sense of what those entities are. If Baden-Powell had chosen not to place quotation marks around “struggle” then the visible bodily contact between the two boys/men in the drawing would, again, be deprived of space, the space, on the one hand, to see the “struggle” as merely metaphor and an exercise in practicality only and, equally, the space to run with the metaphor of struggle, to see the word’s reference as pointing to a range of things, partially metaphorical, mostly erotic, and to see in turn the word “heart” as metaphoric with all the affective consequences and expansions that entails. These aspirational, discreetly reader-directed outcomes made manifest in Baden-Powell’s and James’s writing by a peculiarity of punctuation signal and point back to their sowinning combination of pedagogical, writerly, and psychic exuberance in the guides by which they still seem to be asking us to proceed.

Notes 1

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Felman makes the case for psychoanlysis functioning as what might be termed a “critique” of pedagogy (Felman 1982: 23). Reflecting on his relationship to the source material for “The Aspern Papers,” James writes: “It was a question of covering one’s tracks” (James 1984b: 1179). Again, in a rather Baden-Powell-esque spirit, James writes in the preface to The American: “The panting pursuit of danger is the pursuit of life itself”

(James 1984b: 1063). Most pertinent of all is the moment in the preface to The Awkward Age when, like Baden-Powell later, James evokes James Fenimore Cooper: “The revived interest I speak of has been therefore that of following critically, from page to page, even as the Red Indian tracks in the forest the pale-face, the footsteps of the systematic loyalty I was able to achieve” ( James 1984b: 1135).

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But if Roosevelt and hunting are present in “The Jolly Corner” then such images also turn up in “The Figure in the Carpet” (1896) and The Turn of the Screw (1898). Another figure both men quite probably knew in common was Richard Haldane who, according to Leon Edel, informed about Wilde’s state in prison in 1896 and later served as Secretary of State for War and was also a major actor on Baden-Powell’s writing and on the Scouting movement (Jeal 2001: 386–7). We might think in this regard of the work of Jonathan Culler, both a book like, say, Structuralist Poetics, and his more recent work on omniscience.

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As well as Sedgwick’s work we might think of Vivien Jones’s account of the legacies of James’s prefaces in James the Critic (Jones 1984: 188– 201) and Sharon Cameron’s account of the oppositional nature of consciousness in the prefaces (Cameron 1988: 64). Despite this claim, Sedgwick goes on to point out the existence of a play between the obstetric and the theatrical senses of the verb and links it, via an emphasis on James’s description of Newman seated in the preface and his recouting of his own “sedentary” life, to a double entendre around the French verbs assister and s’assesoir which, even though they aren’t related, “sound alike via the resonant syllable ass-” (Sedgwick 2003: 57).

References and Further Reading Anesko, Michael (1987). “Friction with the Market”: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship. New York: Oxford University Press. Anesko, Michael (2006). “O O O O That Ja-hamesian Rag/It’s so elegant/So intelligent: Tracing appropriations of the Master’s aura in modernist critical discourse.” Henry James Review, 27: 264–74. Baden-Powell, Robert (2004 [1908]). Scouting for Boys. Ed. Elleke Boehmer. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics. Bersani, Leo (2006). “The it in the I: Patrice Lecomte, Henry James, and analytic love.” Henry James Review, 27: 202–14. Blackmur, R. P. (ed.) (1935). The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces by Henry James. London: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Boehmer, Elleke (2004). “Introduction” to Scouting for Boys: A Handbook for Instruction in Good Citizenship. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cameron, Sharon (1988). Thinking in Henry James. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Culler, Jonathan (2004). “Omniscience.” Narrative, 2: 22–35.

Felman, Shoshana (1982). “Psychoanalysis and education: Teaching terminable and interminable.” Yale French Studies, 63: 21–44. Horne, Philip (2006). “Henry James and the ‘forces of violence’: On the track of ‘big game’ in ‘The Jolly Corner.’ ” Henry James Review, 27: 237–47. James, Henry (1982). The Spoils of Poynton. Ed. Bernard Richards. Oxford: Oxford University Press. James, Henry (1984a). Henry James: Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers. Ed. Leon Edel. New York: Library of America. James, Henry (1984b). Henry James: Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition. Ed. Leon Edel. New York: Library of America. Jeal, Tim (2001). Baden-Powell: Founder of the Boy Scouts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Jones, Vivien (1984). James the Critic. London: Macmillan. Jordan, Matthew (2002). “Mourning, nostalgia and melancholia: Unlocking the secrets of Truffaut’s The Green Room.” In Henry James Goes to the

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Movies (pp. 76–98). Ed. Susan M. Griffin. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Kaplan, Fred (1992). Henry James: The Imagination of Genius. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Miller, J. Hillis (2005). Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James. New York: Fordham University Press.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (2003). Touching Feeling: Affect Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stevenson, Robert Louis (1994). Kidnapped. Ed. Donald McFarlan. New York: Penguin.

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Nothing Personal: Women Characters, Gender Ideology, and Literary Representation Donatella Izzo

Asking the “Woman Question” Let me start with an unassailable critical commonplace: few male writers have devoted to women the sustained and coherent attention that Henry James displayed throughout his career. Most of James’s novels have women protagonists, and even the few that do not, such as The Ambassadors, feature prominent women characters. This, to be sure, had been the rule with the British women novelists in the “great tradition,” as well as with the American practitioners of the domestic and sentimental novel, but it is definitely an exception as regards male writers: possibly no other male novelist in English, and certainly none among the few that enjoy a comparable canonical status, has focused on women to a similar extent. And yet, while James’s canonical status and his mastery at portraying women, taken separately, may both be regarded as impregnable critical platitudes, their conjunction is not at all to be taken for granted. Surely James’s canonical status cannot be ascribed to his focus on women either as characters or as readers; quite the reverse, it emerged as a result of the critical appreciation of his oeuvre by a restricted circle of literary males, who, in their construction of a genealogical narrative for modernism, extolled him as a writers’ writer and a Master of literary craft. At a historical watershed when the literary field, in getting professionalized, was rapidly expelling women writers from the sphere of “high” art and relegating them to the inferior echelon of marketable mass culture, such an appreciation by literati was unequivocally gendered as masculine. And it is beyond question that, while he never ceased to hope for success with the wider public, James was a key figure in the professionalization of letters at the turn of the century and in the creation and defense of the highest possible aesthetic standard for the novel as an art form. Why, then, would a professional writer, bent on winning recognition in the uppermost reaches of literary life, jeopardize his standing by a choice of subject matter that laid his work open to invidious comparisons with the “inferior” production of popular

A Companion to Henry James. Edited by Greg W. Zacharias © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-14042-3

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women writers? James’s consistent focus on women, far from being a matter of course, appears, in the literary context of his age, as a phenomenon worthy of investigation. In recent years, critics have described this phenomenon as a kind of literary crossdressing, and have accounted for it by resorting to James’s own psyche, to his “marginal masculinity,” to his fixation on his prematurely deceased cousin Minnie Temple, and to his tendency to identify with feminine passivity. More interesting than James’s individual psychic constitution, though, is probably his historical and cultural predicament as an American man of letters in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. As recent studies on the construction of American manhood have shown, hegemonic masculinity in the USA revolved around success in the marketplace, aggressive business competition, and a ruthless exercise of physical and economic power. On the other hand – as James never tired of noting, and as his friend W. D. Howells explicitly underscored in his 1893 “The Man of Letters as a Man of Business” – the sphere of culture and society was coded as feminine. In pursuing a career as a novelist of manners, James was placing himself outside the boundaries of sanctioned American masculinity, with its constitutive world of interests, roles, and activities, and entering the “feminine” world of mind and conscience, imagination and expression – a move that involved not just expatriation to a place where an exercise of his intellect could be a serious career for a man, but an unceasing renegotiation of the notion of masculinity itself, and – what interests us here – a choice of subject matter that both reflected and investigated the gendered, differential distribution of the inner and the outer life, the cultural and the economic, manners and sports, morals and profit, in the social life of his country. A semi-closeted male homosexual “unsexed” by his choice of the literary life but bent on reclaiming its full masculine quality and social dignity; an expatriate with a cosmopolitan, transnational experience and education; the child of a family whose atypical notions and habits had placed him “thoroughly outside of the dominant cultural institution of his own moment in all of its attitudinal, moral, and social dimensions at precisely the moment of its social institutionalization” (Freedman 1998: 4), James was in an ideal position to analyze the gender arrangements of his age with an inquiring and critical, but also passionate and participant, eye. Cognizant of the gender politics of his age to a degree possibly unequalled by any contemporary male writer (and by many female ones), and fully alive to its crucial importance in the general operation of society, Henry James could not have failed to address what, exactly in those years, came to be termed the “woman question.” James’s attitude to the “woman question” – that is, the unequal balance of power between men and women, the exclusion of the latter from the public sphere and from a number of crucial civil rights, their legal and practical subordination to men, their confinement to the domestic world as keepers of morals and manners, and the repression of their sexuality – has been both a central and a controversial issue in James criticism for over two decades. What is at stake is, of course, our possibility of

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reading, teaching, studying, and enjoying James with a clear conscience within a “gender-politically correct” frame, whether we are female or male readers; but what is at stake is also, and perhaps more importantly from an intellectual and critical point of view, our understanding of the ways James’s works operate to convey their famously “ambiguous” meanings, and to challenge or reinforce the ideological assumptions of his age, and of our own. The point that has occasioned most critical divergence is the extent to which James’s oeuvre was complicitous with, or instead critical of, the existing gender inequality. Early feminist criticism of James, starting with Judith Fetterley’s influential The Resisting Reader (1978), in reappraising his work from this vantage point (a process which led to the rediscovery of such a relatively less canonical novel as The Bostonians), read it as an honest and sympathetic, but also fatalistic and disillusioned depiction of women’s subordination as both iniquitous and inevitable. Thus, the argument goes, James’s realistic representation has a consciousness-raising value for women readers, capable of conveying a “revolutionary message” (Fetterley 1978: 152) in spite of his personally conservative attitude to women’s liberation. On different theoretical grounds, the idea of James’s works as capable of transcending the ideological limits of patriarchal culture was also upheld by Elizabeth Allen, who moved the woman question from a historicizing, thematic reading to the semiological terrain of the representational processes whereby, in patriarchal culture, women become signs of a male signified that negates them as persons (Allen 1984: 7); and by Priscilla Walton (1992), whose poststructuralist feminist reading sees the Jamesian oeuvre as one that allows an unprecedented room for the emergence of the feminine – the feminine being no longer sought in realistic plots or characters but rather formulated, after Lacan and Derrida, in psychoanalytical, philosophical, or linguistic terms, as that pluralizing factor that unsettles the phallogocentric closure of the realist text. For all its theoretical variety, the feminist critical assessment of James, with a few exceptions, has been a favorable one. Moved by the wish to retool such a canonical figure for the purposes of their newly established critical enterprise, and still under the influence of an idea of the author and the work as capable of transcending the limitations of their times, feminist critics of James seem to have been impelled by a paradoxical need to rescue him from the possible political accusations of feminists. A second wave of critics, however, has been less lenient with regard to James’s reliance on stereotypical plots of women’s submission, seeing them as proof that James’s novels, far from aesthetically transcending the limitations of his patriarchal culture, fully subscribed to its gender ideology. Two influential studies of the 1980s, in particular, dispute James’s status as a proto-feminist, engaging his treatment of the woman question as related to his self-construction as an artist vis-à-vis the success of his contemporary female writers. For John Carlos Rowe, “Henry James, the Master, uses feminism, uses the ‘other sex’ as part of his own literary power for the sake of engendering his own identity as an Author” (Rowe 1984: 91), as is revealed in his

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authoritarian stance with regard to his women characters. For Alfred Habegger, James’s reactionary gender politics is revealed by his unacknowledged appropriation of women’s domestic and sentimental tradition, which he ostensibly disparaged, and by the “elusive male authoritarianism” exerted on the fates of his rebellious heroines, who “have been lamed in secret by their author” (Habegger 1989: 26) in the interest of his conservative view of gender arrangements. In tune with the New Historicist critique of the “subversive hypothesis,” which depicted the author as always inevitably enmeshed in and complicitous with the power structures of his day, both Rowe and Habegger are primarily interested not so much in James’s insights into women’s condition, as in challenging the authority of the author: hence their severity compared with the assessments of feminist critics. On the other hand, the latter had fully mirrored the obliviousness to class and race typical of early American feminist criticism: positing “woman” as a fairly homogeneous term, they tended to take James’s women characters as representative of “woman,” a tendency undoubtedly favored by the very continuity between those characters – white, bourgeois, intellectual – and themselves. In more recent years, however, as “woman” became less monolithical in feminist theory and concerns of race and class grew increasingly current in James criticism, critical interest has extended to other forms of oppression. Some critics have sought to reclaim James under these new headings (Rowe 1998); others have denounced his insensitivity to race and class issues, thus underscoring also the limits of his “feminism.” In Martha Banta’s neat synthesis: “It will not do to think of James as a proto-feminist. One should know better than to go to his writings for brilliant insights into the lives of working-class women, of women of color, or of the female members of the ‘new alien’ hordes.” Of course, this is exactly what early feminist critics did not do. However, when inviting the reader to “[v]alue him for what he gives, which is a good deal, especially when compared with what Theodore Roosevelt and like-minded males had to offer” (Banta 1998: 23), Banta seems to be again begging the question: what is it, after all, that James had to say about women?

The Strange Case of the Missing Happy Ending The undeniable difficulty of nailing James’s texts down to a univocal meaning and a definite ideological stance as regards women (as with most other issues), witnessed by the divergence of critical assessments, is not just the result of his celebrated ambiguity, indirection, and stylistic obscurity, but comes from the very difficulty of interpreting his plots in the light of the expectations created by preexisting genres. However much he may have drawn from his predecessors’ literary tradition, selfconsciously rewriting it in emulation or criticism (Daugherty 2000; Habegger 1989; Veeder 1975), James gives it strange, original, and unsettling twists. While they constantly evoke recognizable scripts revolving around courtship, marriage, adultery, or the social progress of the gifted but needy heroine, James’s plots are seldom sealed

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by a conventionally satisfactory resolution: they either give one an impression of being left in mid-air – like the famously inconclusive conclusion of The Portrait of a Lady – or lead to a dénouement that the reader neither expects nor desires. The lack of a traditional sense of closure, the frequently disappointing turn of events, and the reticence as regards the motive of decisions that are unaccountable in terms of traditional plot development, make it frequently hard for the reader to interpret the significance of the story. What are we to make, in particular, of James’s obstinate refusal to grant his heroines anything that resembles a traditional happy ending? Daisy Miller meeting her early death in a Roman hotel; Claire de Cintré immuring herself in a Catholic convent in The American; Catherine Sloper sewing away in solitary old age in her Washington Square house; Isabel Archer returning to the “house of darkness” to rejoin the husband that had deceived and exploited her; Bostonian Olive Chancellor deserted by Verena Tarrant, in her turn destined to a life of tears with a sexist southerner; Maisie Farange and Nanda Brookenham burnt out and discarded by the people they love, and consigned to a sort of early retirement in the care of aged guardians; Fleda Vetch in The Spoils of Poynton, losing at once her erotic and her aesthetic objects of desire; Kate Croy defeated, Milly Theale deceived and dead; Charlotte Stant exiting the scene of The Golden Bowl as a prisoner at the end of an invisible tether: all of James’s better-known heroines – with the possible exception of Maggie Verver, whose last recorded act in the novel is nevertheless to ominously “bury” her eyes “as for pity and dread” – conclude their careers in ways that are sad, if not downright tragic. How are we to read this record of defeat, renunciation, and death – as the proof of James’s realism, society being what it is? As evidence of his desire to outdo his women colleagues at their own sentimental game? As the result of his sadistic tendencies toward an otherwise menacing, because powerful, femininity? As the manifestation of his masochistic identification with women’s passive and sacrificial position? As the means of his own bid for authority as an author and a Master? As has been seen, critical answers to this question cover a wide spectrum. But irrespective of the way one chooses to answer it, the question is in itself meaningful; indeed, the very need to pose it bears witness to the uniqueness of James’s narrative treatment of women. Sacrifice, self-denial, and renunciation have long been perceived as appropriate feminine choices both in society and in literature, and a whole sentimental tradition has not scrupled to decree the long-suffering heroine’s death, when it could be construed as a luminous if lachrimose example. On the other hand, women’s attempts at independence have often been curbed: while the domestic and sentimental novel frequently features strong-willed, self-reliant, and energetic heroines, it just as frequently teaches them to channel their admirable powers in duty, nobly repudiating self-interest and self-empowerment in the name of the true womanly mission, self-denial and service to others. Countless plots have conspired in disciplining women into submissiveness and chastity, dealing out rewards and punishments according to a shared social pedagogy that both mirrored and circulated patriarchal values. In other words, with women heroines in the nineteenth-century novel,

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renunciation and abnegation are frequently endorsed as themselves part of the happy ending the novel offers. What is it, then, that makes us perceive the sacrifice of James’s heroines as an unhappy ending? Are we just ahistorically superimposing on James our different gender politics, or is the question raised by something within the texts themselves? Paraphrasing Ralph Touchett in chapter 7 of The Portrait of a Lady, this question is irregular, since with most women characters one has no occasion to ask it: they wait, in attitudes more or less gracefully passive, for a man to come their way and furnish them with a destiny. What makes us sensitive to the bleak endings of James’s plots, I believe, is that his women characters so much give an impression of having, like Isabel Archer, intentions of their own. They are not simply gifted with the stereotypical heroine’s virtues: while never swerving from representational verisimilitude, they are in many ways larger than life. Their superior beauty, intelligence, and intellectual refinement, often accompanied by fabulous purchasing power; their richly textured consciences, capable of moral alertness and psychological perceptiveness; and above all, their capacity and desire to master their own lives (and perhaps also the lives of others), endow them with unique agency. James’s women protagonists enter the stage richly endowed for life. They are determined to feel and understand, to experience and to know “so as to choose,” in Isabel Archer’s words. Then, they make the wrong choice. This is not the result of moral flaws; indeed, their decisions, however fatal in their consequences, are (with the possible exception of the ambiguous situations of the “major phase”) unexceptionable on ethical grounds and prompted by the purest intentions. In a strangely antipedagogical fashion, error comes without guilt and punishment does not lead to correction and improvement. This inexplicable dissonance between their gifts and their destinies is what makes, in true tragic fashion, the heroines’ fall so resonant and so, quite literally, unbearable – not to themselves, who bear it with all the dignity becoming to their role, but to their readers and critics. These have traditionally tried to redeem the outrage of so much waste by transvaluing it on a different plane. Well into the 1960s, James criticism, true to an aesthetic heritage that valued literature as the means to a transvaluation of the strife and struggle of life into detached, disinterested contemplation, extolled the sacrifice and renunciation of the Jamesian hero as the most exquisite form of intellectual life. The circumstance that the Jamesian hero frequently happened to be a heroine made no difference: this idealizing reading utterly disregarded the gender angle, along with any social and cultural determinant capable of qualifying the transcendental import of the ascetic conquering of the basest passions. Later critics, with different aesthetic and political agendas, have chosen different strategies of intellectual salvage. Perceiving the fate of James’s heroines as the result of injustice rather than the fulfillment of some superior destiny, they have protested the injustice rather than redeeming it. Some, as has been seen, have made the author into the main influence crippling his heroines, as if, without that influence, a right

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to happiness were granted women as a matter of course. Others have placed the roots of the characters’ defeat entirely in social history, thus implicitly presenting the narratives as unmediated reproductions of real life. James’s writings, though, are anything but straightforward and unmediated. The question, then, is trying to understand how character as a literary construction relates to woman as a socio-historical actor in his works. Or, to put it differently, how to reconcile, in our reading of James’s women, a capacity to respond to their ethical and political dimensions with a perception of their textual and formal complexities. It is of course possible to read the paradoxical fate of James’s heroines with reference to a wide range of philosophical, psychoanalytical, and intertextual frameworks. What I propose to do is read it as Henry James’s way of inscribing the operation of gender ideology in his texts, foregrounding the power that it wields even under the best of circumstances and even on individuals that enjoy extraordinary privileges. To demonstrate my point, let me turn to two of James’s better-known works: “Daisy Miller” and The Portrait of a Lady.

Framing the American Princess: “Daisy Miller” The first significant avatar of the American princess, Annie P. Miller is an unusual eponymous heroine. Constantly addressed through a nickname that is as diminishing as graceful, she is virtually without a voice of her own: the reader is offered no direct access to her consciousness and motives apart from her acts and the few lines she speaks. On the other hand, she is under the constant scrutiny of a male “reflector,” constantly assessing her behavior according to a set of established norms and categories. The story thus unfolds as the record of Winterbourne’s interpretive activity, with Daisy as the object of both his speculation and his attempts at romance, the great question for him being whether she should be the legitimate object of a lawful or else of a lawless passion. This mutual positioning is not simply a narrative arrangement, but a cultural one: in fact, it exactly reproduces the very structure of the nineteenth-century gender system, with woman as the passive and voiceless object of man’s authority, judgment, social power, and erotic initiative. Winterbourne is not just an individual, “cold” and “limited” as his name suggests: he is the voice of society, the legitimate representative of a gender ideology based on an asymmetrical distribution of roles, on a double standard in sexual mores, on saving appearances, and on a rigid chastity for young women – the criteria governing his endless categorizing: coquette vs. flirt, immoral vs. innocent, vulgar vs. ignorant. Posing as an objective and detached judge, despite his own very substantial breaches of etiquette and the liberties he takes with Daisy, Winterbourne casts her “habitual sense of freedom” ( James 1999: 261) into the

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straitjackets of his behavioral clichés. He denies Daisy’s individuality from her very first appearance, immediately collapsing her into that ready-made ideological instrument, the generalizing stereotype: “She was dressed in white muslin . . . and she was strikingly, admirably pretty. ‘How pretty they are!’ thought Winterbourne” ( James 1999: 241). The shift from the narrator’s “she” to Winterbourne’s “they” sums up the whole substance of Daisy’s predicament, her individuality finally crushed by the alternating, contrasting but equally reifying stereotypes of the pretty American innocent and the reckless reprobate. Winterbourne’s obsessive labels and standards, however, are not just his own. Bearing witness to their socially shared and disciplinary quality, “Daisy Miller” is entirely pervaded by an activity of visual control and judgment that involves all characters in the story: not just Mrs. Walker and Mrs. Costello, whose role as keepers of morals and manners is repeatedly made explicit, but even tourists, passersby, and servants: “I’m told that at their hotel every one is talking about her, and that a smile goes round among the servants when a gentleman comes and asks for Miss Miller” ( James 1999: 277). Gender ideology straddles nation and class divides, and is all the stronger for being impersonal and pervasive. Its ritualized quality is epitomized by Mrs. Costello celebrating, from her “little portable stool at the base of one of the great pilasters” in Saint Peter’s, a liturgy of her own, where “poor little Miss Miller’s going really ‘too far’ ” (James 1999: 285–6) is suitably deprecated. The religious metaphors accompanying the deployment of these secular pieties will of course culminate in the Colosseum scene, where Daisy’s martyrdom is decreed by Winterbourne’s implacable verdict. In the long run, the impersonal and disseminated power of ideology, like the miasmas of the Roman fever, proves stronger than the individual will. This theatrical display of gender ideology at its most normative and oppressive might certainly be read as effect and evidence of the author’s subscribing to it, were it not for the textual organization. An unobtrusively ironic narrating voice frames in its turn the male character’s point of view: “I hardly know whether it was the analogies or the differences that were uppermost in the mind of a young American . . .” ( James 1999: 238). Coming immediately after the long opening paragraph – whose worldly, tourist-guidebook tone is a veritable tongue-in-cheek exercise in transforming culturally relative judgments into allegedly neutral description – this sentence simultaneously reveals the presence of a subjective “I” undermining the apparent objectivity of the preceding paragraph, and introduces Winterbourne’s point of view, foregrounding its interpretive function and drawing attention to its modes of operation. Surfacing again at crucial points of the tale, the narrator’s voice highlights the subjectiveness of his truths and underscores alternative possibilities at his moments of choice. By framing Winterbourne’s point of view and foregrounding the partiality of its evaluative mechanism, the narrating voice creates an effect of ironic distancing that undermines the absolute authority of his point of view, enabling us to see through the character and reach beyond him, at the ideological apparatus of which he is the bearer.

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Once we perceive the textual signals inviting us to read against the grain of Winterbourne’s vision rather than simply through it, “Daisy Miller” appears as a confrontation between a woman and the ideological gender system framing and constricting her. And indeed Daisy Miller, while traditionally seen as the epitome of innocence – a label implying lack of awareness as well as purity of heart – seems to be marked by her refusal of conformity and by her active resistance to being pigeonholed, as recent critics have pointed out. The few words she speaks in the tale disclose a self-awarely defiant heroine: “She doesn’t want to know me! . . . Why don’t you say so? You needn’t be afraid. I’m not afraid!” ( James 1999: 254); “I don’t like the way you say that . . . It’s too imperious. . . . I have never allowed a gentleman to dictate to me, or to interfere with anything I do” ( James 1999: 272); “If this is improper, Mrs. Walker . . . then I am all improper, and you must give me up” ( James 1999: 276). Even Winterbourne suspects at one point that “she carried about in her elegant and irresponsible little organism a defiant, passionate, perfectly observant consciousness of the impression she produced” ( James 1999: 287). If she is a victim, Daisy Miller is by no means a helpless one. Even in her death she continues to resist ideological classification: after her conviction and execution, the reopening of the case through Giovanelli’s testimony to her innocence reinstates Winterbourne’s former oscillation between contrasting verdicts, while suspending forever the solution of what had repeatedly been called “a riddle,” in a finally sealed stalemate of ideological interpretation.

The Portrait of a Lady, or the Limits of Free Will In “Daisy Miller,” both protagonists are comparatively uncomplicated in terms of characterization, their traits mainly functional to their respective roles in the conflict they stage. What is relatively straightforward in a story, however, becomes more complex in a mature novel. One of the great achievements of The Portrait of a Lady is the way James takes up the same conflict between a woman’s desire for freedom and self-determination and the pressure of social and ideological forces, and gives it a whole new, much subtler and deeper turn. While Daisy Miller’s judges and executioners are represented as external agents, Isabel Archer’s have been interiorized, a fact that makes this novel a possibly unsurpassed investigation of the operation of patriarchal ideology within the individual mind. As with “Daisy Miller,” the celebrated opening paragraph of The Portrait of a Lady, with its careful staging of a highly ritualized social scene, is an astonishing exercise in revealing ideology at work, exposing the ways in which historically specific social relations – the “circumstances” highlighted in the very first sentence – are naturalized in the eyes of their participants. In this light, the deferral of Isabel Archer’s entrance in the scene, framed by the other characters’ comments no less than by the doorway,

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takes on a special significance: social practice preexists the individual; only within this supraindividual discourse can the subject be constituted. The incipit of the novel thus foretells something that its protagonist will only come to realize much later: the free and self-legislating subject is, in Louis Althusser’s words, “the elementary ideological effect,” expressing “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (Althusser 1994: 129, 123). Isabel is constantly talking about freedom, and during the well-known “metaphysical conversation” in chapter 19 she voices a notion of the self as unencumbered by the “envelope of circumstances.” Ralph Touchett knows better, as he shows when asking his father to bequeath her the money she needs to “meet the requirements of [her] imagination”: “If she has an easy income she’ll never have to marry for a support. . . . She wishes to be free, and your bequest will make her free’ ” ( James 1975: 160). Being rich, however, is not enough. By enfranchising Isabel from material need, her uncle’s bequest sets her “free,” literally, from everything but her imagination, thereby constituting her as the perfect case study of the ideological as well as economic roots of women’s subalternity – that is, of ideology as a “lived relation” whereby social arrangements are reproduced, says Althusser, “in the ‘consciousness,’ i.e., in the attitude of the individual-subjects” (Althusser 1994: 136). Isabel Archer’s story is a compelling exposure of the inscription of gender ideology in the imagination of a character who seems to be otherwise fully equipped for freedom. One of the powers colonizing her imagination is literature: The Portrait of a Lady, like many other Jamesian works, insists on literature’s role in shaping the individual and collective imagination by disseminating ideological representations. Explicit literary stereotypes recurringly dictate the protagonist’s responses to experience, simultaneously highlighting the scripts that underlie James’s story and the way it systematically deviates from their conventions: the courtship-plot; the seduction-plot, evoked by her much-quoted mention of a “swift carriage, of a dark night” – as Veeder has shown, a veritable topos in popular fiction – as her “idea of happiness” ( James 1975: 146). What makes Isabel Archer an exemplary representative of the inherent instability of women’s identity in bourgeois culture is exactly this contrast between her assertive individualism and overt belief in female independence, and the images of submissiveness and self-surrender that keep surfacing in her imagination in terms worthy of a sentimental novel (“Deep in her soul – it was the deepest thing there – lay a belief that if a certain light should dawn she could give herself completely”), and of which she declines to be fully aware: “but this image, on the whole, was too formidable to be attractive. Isabel’s thoughts hovered about it; but they seldom rested on it long; after a little it ended in alarms” ( James 1975: 56). If the first part of the novel revolves around the hidden power of an imagination of romance, with its unacknowledged sexual suggestions, the chapters following Isabel’s marriage are an elaborate staging of patriarchal authority as a quintessential ideological effect. Negatively defined through a listing of the assets he does not possess,

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deceptively offering full play to the self’s freedom, Osmond is in fact the perfect representative of a power that derives entirely from his gender positioning, unrelated as it is to any other form of superiority, be it of wealth or status. Significantly enough, his only qualification on his first appearance is as father, a role recalling the cruel authority exerted by Dr. Sloper in Washington Square. As “her appointed and inscribed master” ( James 1975: 386), Osmond is the solemnly invested representative of a sacred institutional power, capable of inspiring an awe (“afraid” is a recurring word in the Rome section of the novel, as it had been in Catherine Sloper’s response to her father) that quite transcends his own individual capacity to coax or coerce: “His last words were not a command, they constituted a kind of appeal . . . they represented something transcendent and absolute, like the sign of the cross or the flag of one’s country” ( James 1975: 446). The final sensational disclosures, while refuting Isabel’s delusion of having been a free agent all along, also divest Osmond’s ascendancy of any moral or emotional justification. Laid bare of all personal motives, his power is the impersonal one of the ideological apparatus inscribed within the individual consciousness: “constantly present to her mind were the traditionary decencies and sanctities of marriage” ( James 1975: 386). Thus, with truly amazing clear-sightedness, the novel represents the roots of Osmond’s domination as lying entirely within Isabel’s imagination: “She still wished to justify herself; he had the power, in an extraordinary degree, of making her feel this need. There was something in her imagination he could always appeal to against her judgement” ( James 1975: 445). This analysis of women’s deeply interiorized response to men’s patriarchal authority, already launched in Washington Square, helps account, incidentally, for the apparent paradox of The Bostonians, a novel entirely devoted to the feminist movement and displaying, as critics have shown, a remarkable knowledge of its positions and historical actualities, which nevertheless seems meant only as a critique, despite the noble qualities ascribed to some of its representatives. In chapter 39 of the novel, with Verena’s desertion drawing near, the narrator surmises that Olive Chancellor may have come to despair at having spent her life “to save a sex which, after all, didn’t wish to be saved, and which rejected the truth.” Women’s subjection, James seems to imply, lies deeper than the laws excluding them from suffrage, and their liberation is not only a matter of winning political rights. It might of course be argued that Isabel Archer’s respect of the matrimonial institution is another admirable moral trait, or else her too lively imagination a fatal flaw, in her character. In other words, it might be argued that these elements are, so to speak, merely personal – relevant to her complex psychological construction as a fully realized novel character rather than pointing to any wider implication. While Isabel Archer undoubtedly is a wonderfully full-fledged novel character, however, she is such exactly by virtue of her exemplary historical and ideological positioning, and of the ways this is simultaneously revealed as a social condition and cast as her very own. It is the dialectics between her blindness to the socialized representations inhabiting her

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imagination and her progressively dawning awareness of “circumstances” that creates her appeal and complexity as a character. Significantly, these circumstances do not regard her story only, but extend to wider concerns, offering the heroine’s predicament as a highly individualized narrative instantiation of what is nevertheless presented as a suprapersonal system. Pansy Osmond is Isabel’s inverted mirror, the living emblem of women’s acquiescence as the result of an apparatus producing that “perfect amenity under acute constraint” which, as Isabel realizes during the party scene in chapter 43, “was part of a larger system” ( James 1975: 367). With Pansy’s reclusion, patriarchal authority openly reveals its oppressive logic and coercive mode of operation. The convent, as Osmond remarks, “is a great institution; we can’t do without it; it corresponds to an essential need in families, in society” ( James 1975: 442). Divested of any religious significance, it stands out as the quintessential repressive institution, supplementing ideological persuasion to enforce individual conformity; in Isabel’s view, it appears as a prison – a Foucaultian place, the eloquent metaphor of the social disciplinary system producing feminine submission. During her visit to Pansy in chapter 52, Isabel’s encounter with Madame Catherine, the nun, and with Madame Merle, the adulteress and thwarted mother, offers her additional insights into the manifold forms of women’s oppression. Significantly, Isabel’s visit to the convent, with her pledge to Pansy, also marks the dawning of a woman-woman relation that, unlike her friendship with Madame Merle, is inherently anti-patriarchal in origin and intent. It is in the light of such a pledge that one might wish to describe Isabel’s final return to Rome as her return not to Osmond, but against Osmond – not a surrender to the ideological power of a hollowed-out institutional tie, but an act of resistance. Similarly, it is in the light of this pledge that one might also assess Isabel’s rejection of Goodwood’s offer, which many critics have read as a recoiling from sexual passion or from independent life, a triumph of the death drive or of traditional morality. A delusive alternative to institutional marriage, Goodwood’s romantic love, with its promise of protection, redemption, and happy ending, is actually presented as an extension of Osmond’s domination, since it is premised on an identical arrangement of man-woman relations. His chivalrous rhetoric; his coercive and overwhelming attitude, suggested by the recurring images of physical violence and possession; his claim to legitimacy, grounded in his having been entrusted the care of Isabel by her nearest male relative, all converge in marking Goodwood as another representative of patriarchal rule, significantly eliciting from Isabel the same response of obedience and fear formerly evoked by Osmond. In following him, Isabel would once again be yielding to an imagination of surrender. Isabel, though, has outgrown that script, and James’s novel does not reinstate it. Instead, the novel’s ending – in a move so unconventional that its value cannot be overestimated – leaves us with Isabel Archer possessed of a new knowledge and impelled by motives and goals we are not told, free to invent her own script over which no one, not even the author, is accorded the last word.

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Emancipations and Empowerments Whether Isabel Archer will find her freedom in a self-aware acceptance of social constraints or on different and perhaps more rewarding terms, no reader of course can tell. Or rather, every reader has to tell, since James’s textual strategy, here as elsewhere, includes the reader as an integral part of its operation. In fact, one of the major effects of James’s play with and deviance from narrative conventions is to provoke his readers – both female and male – into an active role, unsettling their generic expectations, challenging them to fill in the unsaid and make sense of puzzling discrepancies, forcing them into uneasy identifications and disidentifications with characters that magnify or subvert culturally shared traits. By constructing his female characters as both individualized, psychologically credible agents of free will, in an updated version of the “character-effect” of the realist tradition, and objects and vehicles of a sophisticated deconstructive strategy bearing on the set of ideological strictures that socially construct them as women, James creates a situation that extends its reverberations to the author and to the reader. The very forces that limit the characters’ agency, predefine their existential paths, and foreclose their desire for freedom, simultaneously constrict the author’s own range of narrative possibilities, and dictate to the reader a set of ready-made ethical and aesthetic responses. The struggle between agency and objectification, freedom and control, thus becomes enacted at all levels of James’s texts: as an issue in characters’ lives; as a mode of operation pertaining both to the society represented and to the one producing and consuming the representation; and as an issue of narrative and rhetorical liberty and mastery, played out in the dynamics of textuality and opening unsettling interpretive spaces within worn-out conventions. How complex and pervasive the presence of the “woman question” is in James’s oeuvre, we are probably only just beginning to see. From the international theme – offering an occasion to highlight and question the relative, arbitrary quality of models of femininity allegedly rooted in female “nature” – to the stories of the artistic and literary life – staging the ways in which women are either subsumed into the aesthetic domain as art objects and collectors’ items, or abjected from it as competitors and antagonists – women are closely interwoven with James’s better-known thematic motifs. Having repeatedly underscored the issue of readerly freedom, it may now seem contradictory, as well as overly ambitious, to offer a reading of the overall design and direction of James’s lifelong engagement with the woman question. Elsewhere I have proposed that James’s representation of women in his stories is a story in its own right, governed by an emancipatory pattern, and sealed by the memorably straightforward statement of the woman protagonist of his last completed tale, “Mora Montravers”: “I want to be free” (Izzo 2001). To conclude, I will now offer a few avowedly biased notes gesturing toward a reading of James’s novels as another story – a story of empowerment, whose title might be something like “From helpless orphans to wily wives.”

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The helpless orphan is of course Nora Lambert, the protagonist of James’s first novel, Watch and Ward. She enters the stage totally dependent: an indigent little girl, whom an adult benefactor, just rejected by the woman he loves, decides to rescue, raise, and educate so that she will in due course become his wife: not, however, out of a sense of duty and gratitude, but choosing him in an exercise of her own free will. Which she finally does, but only after attempting to choose her own path, escaping, being betrayed by the man she loves, and dishonored by the cousin she has turned to. If ever a heroine’s free will was exposed as a fraud, the result of a carefully prearranged male scenario, that was Nora Lambert’s: while infinitely less subtle than The Portrait of a Lady, and heavily indebted to the ambiguous Oedipal strain of much nineteenthcentury girls’ fiction (which would endorse the “happy ending” much less qualifiedly than James’s novel does), Watch and Ward is already rehearsing the theme of the limits of women’s free will. Washington Square, with the cruel, masterminding father sadistically enjoying the loving daughter’s agonized resistance to his authority, and the calculating young suitor ruthlessly exploiting his deceptively romantic appeal, will definitively cast off the pretence of successfully combining the fulfillment of the heroines’ wishes and the self-righteous satisfactions of Victorian morality, opening that fissure between drives and duties where the protagonists’ (and the readers’) rebellion may take root. How far, intellectually, James had come from the helpless orphan by the end of his career is witnessed by his last women characters, who, explicitly discarding all remaining subjection to sanctioned nineteenth-century roles, seem to experiment with them in a self-aware performative fashion. In both The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, the single heroine of previous novels has been split into two equally powerful, antagonistic figures, each simultaneously victimized and victimizer. In both, within settings ever more fabulously saturated with money, the protagonists’ struggles for self-determination increasingly become power struggles, involving the ruthless use of one’s resources and the conscious reification of others as tools to one’s ends. In The Wings of the Dove, Kate Croy’s ploy to get both love and money is finally defeated, Milly Theale’s power over Densher’s imagination is mainly posthumous, and Densher himself is the emblem more of an attenuated masculinity than of patriarchal ideology’s impersonal power. But finally, The Golden Bowl features James’s one victorious woman protagonist. Taking place, as it does, in James’s last published novel, this victory seems to seal the novelist’s “woman question” on a triumphant note. All the more reason, therefore, to briefly investigate the conditions and costs of this triumph. Despite its appearance of bringing about a (puzzlingly) conventional restoration of legitimate marital order through the final banishment of both unlawful passion and Oedipal excess, thanks to the selfless redemptive effort of the pure and passionate heroine, The Golden Bowl is an unnervingly complex and ethically ambiguous novel, and a chillingly explicit representation of gender and sexual relations as power relations. With its foursome of characters, whose mobile arrangements witness to multiple and unruly currents of desire, it explores the entanglements of the sexual and the

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social, the aesthetic and the economic, investigating the different kinds of power, unequally distributed among the characters, that each of these dimensions wields. Socially superior and intellectually refined, morally sublime and simultaneously relentless in pursuing their aims “at any price,” these characters seem to be quite beyond both social and literary conventions, wholly exempt from that ideological subjection that, in similar circumstances, had so powerfully affected Isabel Archer. Charlotte Stant attempts to get both wealth and passion, and unlike Kate Croy, she even manages to have both for a while; her exit from the scene, repeatedly termed “splendid” and “great,” is as a magnificently dignified character bound for a high destiny as American patroness of the arts; less a punished adulteress than a betrayed lover, she is proud and unrepentant to the end; and Adam Verver’s invisible tether, the effective and appalling metaphor for his power, is less the result of his inherent ideological authority as a husband than of his very material position as detainer of both the wealth on which she depends and the knowledge that might socially ruin her. Amerigo, in his turn, is scarcely more credible as an embodiment of patriarchy. A strongly aestheticized and racialized character, the bearer of a value that, while linked to the immaterial aura of his ancestral history, is fully convertible in modern currency, the Prince is throughout associated to a precious collectible work of art, with both Maggie and her father as collectors: a situation that, by putting him in a position constantly occupied by women in James’s oeuvre, twice feminizes him, both through its reversal of gender positions as regards Maggie, and by having him acquired and collected by another man. Rather than embodying patriarchal authority, his masculinity is defined in fundamentally sexual terms: as is abundantly made clear in chapter 3, Amerigo is a self-aware prototype of the “Latin lover,” whose erotic appeal and sexual prowess – frequently alluded to and evidenced by his procreative ability – he uses as a medium of exchange and as the conscious ground of his power over women: “This was his, the man’s, any man’s, position and strength – that he had necessarily the advantage, that he only had to wait.” This is the power he lavishly exerts over his wife, and it is particularly in this connection that Maggie Verver’s story provides a significant departure from the previous heroines’. A thoroughly sexualized character, Maggie fully responds to her husband’s appeal: her struggle to keep him, more than by family pieties or the exquisite aesthetic harmony of the quartet, is prompted first and foremost by her own desire. Her sexual feelings, however, along with an imagery of natural immersion and joyous fulfillment, are conveyed through a wide range of metaphors of physical violence and abjection. These translate her initially complacent and then growingly anxious perception of sexuality as a power game, with woman as the predestined loser, since in the unequal distribution of intensities and responsibilities, the outcome of passion is – as stated in the penultimate chapter – “always terrible for women.” The terror, as countless passages in the novel highlight, is the terror not of disembodied authority, but of the disabling “weakness” and “surrender” unfailingly produced by sexual desire; her constant effort to “keep her head” and resist Amerigo’s consciously brandished sexual appeal is a move that, by altering the power balance between them, amounts as much

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to seduction as to threat. It is, finally, as repeatedly underscored in the novel, her possession of knowledge that enables Maggie to achieve her ends, just as Charlotte’s lack of knowledge is her main punishment. But what Maggie clearly knows is not so much her husband’s adultery – a fact of which only subjective evidence is provided in the novel – as the mechanisms of his power over her. Her resistance to sexual attraction and her self-awarely deceptive performance (underscored by theatrical and circus images) of that Jamesian stereotype, the American innocent (whose ambivalent potentialities James had just explored in Milly Theale), are both predicated on an awareness not just of her own self, but of the crude dynamics of love relations as power relations. It is this awareness that finally positions James’s last heroine outside the gilt cage that repeatedly figures the romantically obfuscated, ideologically mystified notion of the characters’ relations initially entertained by Maggie, and still imprisoning Charlotte at the end: “The cage was the deluded condition, and Maggie, as having known delusion – rather! – understood the nature of cages,” we read in chapter 35. No one, however, as Althusser reminds us, can be wholly outside of ideology. And if the protagonist of James’s last novel in some ways seems to mark the final superseding of patriarchal gender ideology in a clear exposure of its inherent sex and power structure, surely her empowerment is not just the fruit of a supreme clarity of vision, but also of other, much coarser gifts. Maggie’s triumph of love and self-awareness is also a triumph of money, as James will not let us forget, when in the final chapter, depicting Amerigo and Charlotte as “high expressions of the kind of human furniture required, aesthetically, by such a scene,” he presents them as not just the fruits of a “triumph of selection” but also, “to a lingering view, a view more penetrating than the occasion really demanded, . . . concrete attestations of a rare power of purchase.” No longer the submissive or rebellious daughter vis-à-vis a benevolent or tyrannical patriarchal rule, Maggie Verver is explicitly represented, at the end of chapter 37, as the proud and willing inheritor of her father’s power – a power whose trademark is bland and inscrutable omnipresence, and whose ground is no longer exquisitely ideological, or rather, is fully ideological, but no longer gender-specific. Hence, possibly, the disquieting and rather chilling effect of Maggie Verver’s final version of women’s empowerment. What James finally represents in The Golden Bowl is the power not of gender ideology, but of money, knowledge, and a transcendental conviction of being in the right. As the pervasive language of geographical exploration, conquest, and empire in the novel shows, the twentieth century was opening another era for American power relations, with gender inequality receding to the background of other, more pressing concerns. But that, of course, is a different story.

References and Further Reading Allen, E. (1984). A Woman’s Place in the Novels of Henry James. London: Macmillan. A semiological reading of James’s work as

exploring the conflict between women’s selves and their status as “signs” in patriarchal culture.

Women Characters, Gender Ideology Althusser, L. (1994 [1970]). “Ideology and ideological state apparatuses (notes toward an investigation).” In S. Žižek (ed.) Mapping Ideology (pp. 100–40). New York: Verso. An influential theorization of ideology, with particular relevance for a reading of literature and of James’s work. Banta, M. (1998). “Men, women, and the American way.” In J. Freedman (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Henry James (pp. 21–39). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Daugherty, S. B. (2000). “James and the representation of women: Some lessons of the Master(’)s.” In P. McCormack (ed.) Questioning the Master: Gender and Sexuality in Henry James’s Writings (pp. 176–95). Newark: University of Delaware Press. Fetterley, J. (1978). The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. The first important reassessment of James from a feminist point of view. Freedman, J. (1998). “Introduction: The moment of Henry James.” In J. Freedman (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Henry James (pp. 1–20). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. A brilliant and concise revision of James’s position in his cultural moment and in our own. Habegger, A. (1989). Henry James and the “Woman Business.” New York: Cambridge University Press. A critique of James’s fame as a protofeminist writer, and a reading of his relationship with his father and cousin and of his covert use of women’s sentimental tradition. Izzo, D. (2001). Portraying the Lady: Technologies of Gender in the Short Stories of Henry James. Lincoln:

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University of Nebraska Press. A reading of James’s tales focusing on the way they foreground the question of gender representation both in society and in literature. James, H. (1975 [1881]). The Portrait of a Lady. Ed. R. D. Bamberg. New York: Norton. James, H. (1999 [1878]). “Daisy Miller.” In W. L. Vance (ed.) Henry James. Complete Stories 1874– 1884 (pp. 238–95). New York: Library of America. McCormack, P. (ed.) (2000). Questioning the Master: Gender and Sexuality in Henry James’s Writings. Newark: University of Delaware Press. A collection of essays on gender by prominent James scholars, covering various topics and approaches. Rowe, J. C. (1984). The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. An assessment of James, including his defective feminism, in the light of contemporary theoretical discourse. Rowe, J. C. (1998). The Other Henry James. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. An attempt to investigate James’s concern with his age’s conflicts over gender, race, class, and sexuality. Veeder, W. (1975). Henry James – The Lessons of the Master: Popular Fiction and Personal Style in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. An astute analysis of James’s borrowings from and rewritings of popular women’s fiction. Walton, P. L. (1992). The Disruption of the Feminine in Henry James. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. A poststructuralist reading of the emergence of “the feminine” as a destabilizing factor in James’s work.

21

The Others: Henry James’s Family Linda Simon

There were eight: Henry Sr.; his wife Mary; their five children, born within six years of one another – William, Henry (Harry), Garth Wilkinson (Wilky), Robertson (Bob), and Alice – and Mary’s sister, Catharine Walsh. In 1861, when Henry James was eighteen, his brother William drew a cartoon sketch of the “heavenly group” that comprised the James family. William, then a student at the Lawrence Scientific School in Cambridge, is missing from the sketch, as is Wilky, who was visiting him at the time. But the other six are ranged in a row: Henry Sr. at the center, leaning on his cane; Harry, slightly taller, beside him on the right; Mary on her husband’s left; Catharine Walsh, holding Harry’s hand; Alice, thirteen, standing alone at one end; Bob at the other. Lines of energy, or perhaps illumination, emanate from each person’s head – most emphatically and erratically from Bob’s – but the expression on each face contrasts with this insistence on brightness: except for Harry, who looks a bit puzzled, and Henry Sr., whose mouth seems set in determination, this family is decidedly unhappy. They are frowning, they look angry. Something is not right. Henry James was born in New York City on April 15, 1843, fifteen months after William. He was named for his father, and that was the first mistake. Henry Sr. hoped for a son who would carry on his own eccentric, often incomprehensible philosophical inquiries and strident social criticism, but Harry was not to become that son. He was shy, in a family that acclaimed vociferous sociability; he stammered, in a family that praised articulate, clever, tireless banter; he wanted nothing so much as to be off alone, reading, in a family that did not allow for privacy and suspected solitude. The James family was comprised of strong and contrasting personalities, and Harry was not like the others. But he sensed, from an early age, that who he was, what he desired, and how he responded to the world needed to be kept secret and protected. Certainly his fictional portrayal of children suggests their vulnerability at the hands of manipulative and often malevolent parents: Catherine Sloper in Washington Square, Morgan Moreen in “The Pupil,” Miles and Flora in The Turn of the Screw, Pansy Osmond in The Portrait of a Lady: all these children were victimized by adults who

A Companion to Henry James. Edited by Greg W. Zacharias © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-14042-3

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pretended to care for them. Self-protection required dissimulation. As the young Maisie reflects in What Maisie Knew, “the idea of an inner self” necessitated the response “of concealment” ( James 1985: 23). Among the Jameses, however, vulnerability was caused not only by having a different sensibility, but also from the competitiveness promoted by the family’s particular dynamics. Although Harry became his mother’s favorite, he realized that status in the family resulted from Henry Sr.’s esteem and approval. That approval was difficult to earn.

Father Henry Sr. grew into adulthood carrying a legacy of guilt and shame.1 He had not pleased his own father, the captain of industry William James (William James of Albany): as an adolescent, a rash action resulted in the amputation of one leg – punishment, Henry Sr. decided, for his impetuousness. At Union College he indulged in alcohol and gambling, inciting his father’s wrath, and when William James of Albany died suddenly of a stroke, Henry Sr., then twenty-two and employed as a writer for a minor Albany newspaper, discovered that he had been cut out of his father’s will – punishment again for his independent spirit. Henry Sr. successfully sued his father’s estate, giving him an ample income for the rest of his life. But he could not bequeath to himself his father’s blessing; his father’s disdain haunted him, echoed as it was by others’ reception of his work and ideas. Although he was only thirty-two when Harry was born, Henry Sr. expected more recognition for his writing and lecturing than he had so far achieved, and Harry’s birth precipitated feelings of worthlessness and depression that recurred throughout his life. His “fine little boy,” he wrote to his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, “preaches to me that I must become settled somewhere at home.”2 Settled in a position, settled in a home of his own, settled in a community: his children reminded him of all he was not and all he should be. As his family grew, Henry Sr. repeatedly complained about his enslavement to their welfare: he was condemned, he wrote, to live “under law successively to his wife, his children, his relatives, his neighbors, his fellow countrymen. . . . The sentiment of responsibility grinds human life into the dust” ( James Sr. 1850: 60). He regretted the limits to his own development imposed by his children. Innocent and happy, they had everything to look forward to; Henry, disillusioned and ignored, could hardly find inspiration to work. The problem, he decided, was American culture. Because he despaired of finding an audience in a country that he deemed callow and superficial, he decided to move abroad. Harry was only six months old when he was bundled onto the Great Western, bound for England, where his father hoped to find a welcome by such luminaries as Carlyle. But no one offered that welcome, and three months later, Henry moved the family to France, where, isolated by his lack of French, he again was roiled by restlessness. Again, the entourage packed up and boarded a ship back to England, this time to Windsor, where Harry celebrated his first birthday. He was distressed, partly from

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teething, partly, no doubt, from the atmosphere of anxiety that characterized the family’s life at that time. Henry Sr. simply could not find a place to call home; he felt rebuffed and misunderstood by the men whose respect he coveted. The household became focused on Henry Sr.’s needs – needs that intensified in late May, when he suffered what we might call a panic attack; he was overcome, he said, by self-hatred and a feeling of “inmost, implacable unrest” ( James Sr. 1879: 43). From that moment on, he needed Mary’s constant attention; he needed to be protected from the demands of his two young sons. He withdrew from his role as parent and became, instead, a demanding adult. Besides Mary’s ministrations, Henry sought professional help for his distress, and physicians advised hydrotherapy. Although he found no relief from the water cure, he did meet a fellow patient at one spa who suggested that Henry Sr.’s dilemma was what the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg called “a vastation”: a catharsis that inevitably would lead to renewed health. Henry was taken with the idea, and resolved to learn all he could about, and from, Swedenborg. What Swedenborg taught him, and what became his legacy to his children, was his professed rejection of selfhood. Ambition, pride, competitiveness, desire for recognition – all these interfered with one’s potential for true enlightenment, which could come only from being open to God’s grace. Henry Sr. decided that his task in life was simply to be: an eternal student, a seeker of truth, and a recipient of Divine love. In this task, he was bound to succeed, and even to gain renown. The world became a simpler and brighter place where Henry Sr., blessed by his sense of enlightenment, would shine. His apparent rejection of striving was accompanied, after all, by abiding narcissism. By fall, 1844 Mary was pregnant, and Henry Sr., after another brief sojourn in Paris, decided to take his family home to America. A third son, Garth Wilkinson, named for a physician and Swedenborgian who befriended James after his epiphany, was born in July 1845. The family, William four, Harry two, and the new infant, spent the next few years shuttling between a rented house in Manhattan and various relatives in Albany. Just after Wilky turned one, Robertson was born. Now with four children urging Henry Sr. to become settled, the Jameses decided to establish a home base, and in the spring of 1848 moved into a brownstone just north of Washington Square in Manhattan. Alice, the only daughter and last child, was born there in August. Until he was six, Harry played in the streets of New York with his closest companion, his older brother, William, whom he idolized. William was aggressive, independent, brilliant. Harry was gentle, obedient, cautious. Both boys longed for praise; but both seemed repeatedly to displease their father. Henry Sr.’s expectations were confusing: he wanted his sons to be free of societal constraints, and yet he railed against their boisterousness. He wanted them to reject cultural values of success, but the values that he substituted – spiritual enlightenment – seemed elusive. He taught them, Harry remembered, that their task in life was to convert “simply everything that should happen to us, every contact, every impression and every experience we

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should know” into “Virtue, as a social grace and value” ( James 1983: 123). He wanted to preserve what he believed was the children’s essential spiritual purity – a reflection, as he saw it, of his own spirit. Determined to provide an education that would promote his own beliefs, Henry Sr. hired tutors, and, when the children were older, sent his sons to a succession of schools; all proved unsatisfactory. The children were confused, believing sometimes that they were moved from school to school because of their own shortcomings: perhaps, Harry speculated, their “presence had been inveterately objected to” ( James 1983: 11). But Henry Sr. could not decide what kind of education would support his educational mission to raise children who would reject the world’s false values of success – the values, he believed, that frustrated his own career. His indecisiveness was complicated by his failure to perceive his children’s talents and interests. When Harry was eleven, he and William were sent to a local school offering two tracks of instruction: one Classical, and the other, Industry and Usefulness. For reasons that Harry never understood, Henry set William on the Classical route and Harry the vocational track. For a family that seemed to be constantly in conversation, the children were often at a loss to understand their parents’ decisions. Moreover, Harry saw a contradiction between the freedom their parents professed to offer, and the narrow reality of the children’s experiences. “I marvel,” he wrote, “at the manner in which the door appears to have been held or at least left open to us for experiment, though with a tendency to close, the oddest yet most inveterately perceptible movement in that sense, before any very earnest proposition in particular” ( James 1983: 302). One earnest proposition, for example, was William’s and Harry’s desire to go to Union College, where a friend was enrolled. It seemed natural for the James boys to go on to college, like other young men; they were unprepared for their father’s strident refusal to consider the idea. Harry suspected that this attitude stemmed from Henry Sr.’s own experiences as a college student, but it was merely speculation, and he did not know for sure. Certainly, Henry seemed unwilling to recognize what a college education might offer his two oldest sons. Harry noted repeatedly a misassessment of his abilities and potential that was not confined to education. His parents and aunt constantly presented a reality that seemed at odds with what Harry actually experienced. His own feelings contradicted what his elders told him he should feel; his own needs were not accounted for. Yet, in early childhood, Harry believed what his parents told him about himself: “they had by the contagion of their good faith,” he recalled, “got me in a manner to agree with them; since I could almost always enter, to the gain of ‘horizon’ but too often to the perversion of experience, into any view of my real interests, so-called, that was presented to me with a dazzling assurance” ( James 1983: 241). It is no wonder that Harry envied the many orphans among his cousins. Their lives, he noted, seemed “somehow more thrilling than parentally provided ones.” He longed to “to be so little fathered and mothered. . . . We were intensely domesticated,” he confessed. “Homesickness was a

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luxury I remember craving from the tenderest age – a luxury of which I was unnaturally, or at least prosaically, deprived” ( James 1983: 10–11). The domestication of the James family intensified more deeply in 1855, when Harry was twelve. Once again Henry Sr. was restless, and this time he rationalized a move abroad by claiming the need to extricate the boys from the intolerably bad influence of the city’s street life. The family left for Europe, bound for Switzerland, where Henry Sr. had found a school with a headmaster reputed for his skill in turning unruly boys into gentlemen. The curriculum aimed to prepare students for careers as engineers, architects, or other technical professions, and Harry had no idea what he was doing there. “I so feared and abhorred mathematics that the simplest arithmetical operation had always found and kept me helpless and blank,” he remembered in his Autobiography. “I found myself able to bite . . . into no subject there deemed savoury; it was hard and bitter fruit all and turned to ashes in my mouth.” But even more mystifying to him was his inability to protest his parents’ decision to send him there, despite his increasing sense of becoming “an obscure, a deeply hushed failure” ( James 1983: 240–1). He came to believe that the choice of a technical school reflected his parents’ fear that he withdrew too attentively into reading novels. Yet the journey turned out to be memorable precisely because it convinced Harry that this world of the imagination would be his destiny. Early in the trip – the family still were in London – Harry fell severely ill with fever and chills, diagnosed as malaria, which he had caught, so the family believed, the previous summer in the wilds of Staten Island. Although this was not the first time he had been ill, the occasion was sufficiently dramatic to stand out in his memory even decades later. Besides becoming suddenly the most important and “determinant” member of the family – they could travel only on days when he felt well enough – he recalled “certain short sweet times when I could be left alone – with the thick and heavy suggestion of the London room about me, the very smell of which was ancient, strange, and impressive, and new revelation altogether, and the window open to the English June and the far off hum of a thousand possibilities” ( James 1983: 158). A few weeks later, when the family was able to move on to Paris, his certainty of these possibilities was confirmed. Looking out from a balcony over the rue de la Paix, he felt overwhelmed by “the whole perfect Parisianism”; “Had I ever till then known what a charm was? . . . It was, at all events, this mystery, one’s property – that of one’s mind; and so, once for all, I helped myself to it from my balcony and tucked it away” ( James 1983: 159). He had begun to separate himself from the mind of the family, to identify his sense of a distinct – and secret – self.

Mother Although the mind of the James family was dominated by Henry Sr., Mary Walsh James was more than an accomplice to her husband’s ideas. Mary was nearly thirty

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when she married Henry, a friend of her brother who visited the Walsh house from time to time. Although Henry admired her for the spiritual superiority that he ascribed to all women, he also believed that in a family’s hierarchy, wives were inferior to husbands and must acquiesce to their wishes and decisions. Yet as much as Mary professed to agree with Henry’s philosophical passions – Fourier’s ideas on laissez-faire child-rearing, for example – in practice, she followed her own instincts. Children could become tyrants, she believed, if they were indulged. As each child was born when the last had hardly begun to walk, she shoved them off, as she put it, to her sister’s care.3 The children noticed the sudden shift in attention: “I often like to contemplate myself as a baby,” Bob wrote later, “and wonder if I was really as little appreciated as I fully remember feeling at the time. I never see infants now without discerning in their usually solemn countenance a conviction that they are on their guard and in more or less hostile surroundings” (Maher 1986: 3). With Henry Sr. resentful of his children for impinging on his creativity and freedom, with Mary resentful of childish behavior and demands, the family atmosphere often became tense and even assaulting. Sometimes Henry Sr. encouraged the tension, which burst forth during dinner conversations and in theatrical productions that the children mounted as entertainment for themselves and visitors. But sometimes, the tension erupted as anger. “I go to the James’s, the parents are away, and those unhappy children fight like cats & dogs,” the children’s friend Tom Perry recorded in his diary. Perry was struck especially by the lack of privacy; any attempt at solitude was rudely interrupted. He felt so sorry for Harry, he said, that he invited him to stay with his family (Harlow 1950: 18). Yet another visitor also noted an atmosphere of “poky banality” generated by Mary James and her sister, “large florid stupid seeming ladies” (Strouse 1982: 44). Mary seemed not really to understand her husband’s ideas, but put on a show of affirming them. Harry understood how necessary those performances were; for his father, Mary was an essential crutch, “a support on which my father rested with the absolute whole of his weight” ( James 1983: 342). Still, one of the family’s favorite “pastimes” was deriding their father’s odd ideas, which Harry came to feel showed “a certain narrowness of exclusion as to images otherwise,” and a certain monotony ( James 1983: 342–4). He intuited that his mother felt the same. After she died, Harry praised his mother, extravagantly, for her selfless devotion to the family, and yet his letters to her often reveal an underlying irritation. Compared with letters to William, or even his father, Harry’s letters to his mother presented a reality that reflected her needs: assuring her that Harry had internalized her own values, assuring her that he needed her, and assuring her that he behaved as she wanted him to. Yet even Harry could arouse her suspicions. When he was twenty-six and traveling in Europe, she expressed disapproval of a proposed trip to Scotland. “I was slightly disappointed at mother’s reply . . . & at her apparent failure to suspect that it was not as a spree but as part of an absolute remedy that I thought of the journey,” he complained to William, asking him to intervene on his behalf. “I have no desire to be restless or fanciful or wasteful,” he continued, “. . . & I shall by no means

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feel so blissfully commissioned until I have brought the sacred influences of home into harmony with my idea.”4 His mother’s disapproval generated annoyance and defensiveness. Once she was dead, though, it was safe to extol her many virtues: “She was our life, she was the house, she was the keystone of the arch. She held us all together, and without her we are scattered reeds,” Harry wrote to William just days after Mary died in 1882. “She was patience, she was wisdom, she was exquisite maternity. Her sweetness, her mildness, her great natural beneficence were unspeakable, and it is infinitely touching to me to write about her here as one that was” ( James 1987: 229). Angelic in death – as many women tended to be in Harry’s characterizations – Harry knew that Mary James could be suffocating in life, keeping them tethered to her through her expectations of their neediness. Even their emotional dependency, however, needed to be kept in check. Mary found William, especially, irritatingly self-absorbed, a tendency that she criticized impatiently. Harry, on the other hand, was her Angel. He preserved her appraisal, in part, by keeping his deepest feelings and desires secret. Unlike William, who insisted on his parents’ attention to all his childhood writings and drawings, Harry did not share his own work with anyone. At the beginning of his writing career, he sent a story to the Atlantic, instructing them “to send their letter of reject, or accept” to Tom Perry. “I cannot again stand the pressure of avowed authorship (for the present) and their answer could not come here unobserved.”5 Harry’s remark urges us to imagine the interactions that would have occurred when a letter from the Atlantic arrived at the James home. A rejection could have confirmed Henry Sr.’s feelings about American readers and conflated the son’s fate with the father’s. There would have been an outpouring of sympathy, perhaps in excess of what Harry needed, tending to make him feel that the rejection was even more momentous than it really was. He would have felt like a failure in the eyes of his family; he might have questioned his talents, or others might have questioned those talents as the family ruminated, as they were sure to do, about the letter. An acceptance would increase “the pressure of avowed authorship”: pressure about what he would write next, perhaps advice about his work, surely intense scrutiny about the progress of his writing. Moreover, in the James family, letters were not seen as private communications. This one might have been passed on to others and read aloud to visitors: in short, Harry’s privacy would have been invaded, and the event would have been usurped by others who would explain it and, therefore, own it. This was a risk that Harry was not willing to take.

Aunt Kate In effect, Harry had three parents: his father, his mother, and his mother’s older sister, Catharine. An energetic and forceful woman, Kate shared Mary’s preference for obedient, cheerful children; and she shared, too, the many fears and anxieties that

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beset both parents. She could imagine the worst possible outcome for every situation, and was forthright about sharing her worries. “Poor Aunt Kate’s life on looking back to it . . . must seem to our point of view such a failure,” Alice James wrote to William shortly after Kate died, “a person so apparently meant for independence & a ‘position’ to have been so unable to have worked her way to them & instead to have voluntarily relegated herself to the contrary. But the truth was . . . that she had but one motif, the intense longing to absorb herself in a few individuals, how she missed this & how much the individuals resisted her, was, thank Heaven! but faintly suspected by her.”6 As they grew up, the children resisted her mightily, mocking her behind her back and trivializing her concerns. When Harry was ten, Aunt Kate, then forty, married Captain Charles Marshall, a sixty-year-old widower, and left the James household. But Marshall proved to be a difficult and demanding husband, and two years later Kate divorced him, resumed her maiden name, and moved back with the Jameses. Although family letters hint that she wished to remarry, she did not, and nursed Mary and Henry through their final illnesses, served as a traveling companion for Alice, and, in general, absorbed herself in the life of the Jameses.

Wilky and Bob “[O]ur father’s family,” Harry noted in his autobiography, “was to offer . . . a chronicle of early deaths, arrested careers, broken promises, orphaned children” ( James 1983: 10). His parents presented stories of alcoholism, mental breakdowns, mysterious deaths, and accidents as cautionary tales for their children. Both William and Harry were aware of the danger that they, too, like the other men before them, could take a misstep and end up destitute or, perhaps, dead. But the two James children who seemed to suffer most from this heritage were Wilky and Bob. Both were gregarious, funny, and playful, but these were not qualities that sufficed to win admiration in the James household. Neither had the intellectual intensity that they needed to engage in the family’s often combative conversations. Whenever the Jameses made decisions about their children’s schooling, they focused on William and Harry, with Wilky and Bob almost as afterthoughts. As Henry Sr. became increasingly invested in the professional fate of his eldest son, and Mary increasingly doted upon Harry, there seemed to be less room in their hearts for the other boys. Perhaps the most notable event reflecting this division of affections occurred when Wilky and Bob enlisted to fight in the Civil War. Although Henry Sr. protested that he was holding onto the coattails of his two older sons, he allowed the others to join, even though Wilky was merely seventeen and Bob was underage. The war, Henry believed, would provide an alternative to what he saw as their “indolence and vanity.”7 If their service gave them a certain status in their community, it made little lasting difference about their status in the family. Wilky was seriously wounded and

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recovered at home under the care of his mother and aunt. Bob, wounded also, continued to serve in the 55th Massachusetts regiment, a unit of black soldiers, where he was promoted to captain. But despite the suffering that he saw and endured, when Bob returned home at the age of nineteen, he did not look forward to prospects different from those he had had at sixteen. He and Wilky decided to go to Florida, where they tried to run a plantation. But a combination of bad luck and inexperience caused that project to fail. Then they moved to Milwaukee, where both married into wealthy families and engaged in various business ventures. For a while, it seemed that they would succeed. “I never think without silent applause of your hard laborious career,” Harry wrote to Bob in 1874; “fortune and fame, I doubt not, will crown it in the end.”8 But fortune and fame did not crown either of the younger brothers. Wilky died at the age of thirtyeight of kidney disease; Bob, after many business failures, suffered from the alcoholism and depression that had plagued so many others among his ancestors, and in his last years he spent time in various mental institutions. He died in 1910. Harry could not understand why his brothers, apparently able and intelligent, could fall on such hard times. Bob’s “chronicle” appears the more tragic; but from early childhood, he felt expendable. And he, like Harry, took from their father a “sense of ‘dissipation’ as an abounding element in family histories.” Henry Sr.’s stories of his youth imparted one lesson: “that each contemporary on his younger scene, each hero of each thrilling adventure had, in spite of brilliant promise and romantic charm, ended badly, as badly as possible” ( James 1983: 10).

Alice As she lay dying from breast cancer, Alice James exhorted William to think of her not “simply as a creature who might have been something else had neurotic science been born,” but as a woman of accomplishment; “notwithstanding the poverty of my outside experience,” she told him, “I have always had a significance for myself, & every chance to stumble along my straight & narrow little path, & to worship at the feet of my Deity, & what more can a human soul ask for!”9 Yet although in her diary Alice referred to herself as “that most interesting being,” she seems to have suffered even more than her brothers from her parents’ misinterpretation of her intelligence and potential. Mary saw her as essentially weak and frail, a woman whose fragile health required constant vigilance, a woman prone to inexplicable breakdowns and hysteria, which first occurred when she was eighteen. Her father was forthright about pointing out her many shortcomings, “and I can remember,” she confessed in her diary, “how penetrated I was, not for the first time, b[ut] often, with the truth of it, and saw the repulsion his nature with its ripe kernel of benignancy felt” ( James, A. 1999: 192). Besides recognizing his repulsion, Alice also heard his messages about what constituted success in the world: that is, annihilation of one’s selfhood. More than once she thought of killing herself. And

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more than once, apparently, she felt so angry at her “benignant pater” that she thought of killing him, instead. Only through the most ardent effort at self-control was she able to suppress these “waves of violent inclination” ( James, A. 1999: 149). Like her brothers, Alice competed for her father’s approval, harder for her to earn simply because she was a woman. Where her brothers had the possibility of proving themselves intellectually through academic successes, Alice – unlike her friends and female cousins – never was sent to school. Her position in William’s cartoon, standing alone at one end of the family line, her hands defiantly set on her lap rather than reaching out for her mother, reflects her isolation. Alice’s many emotional and physical symptoms – depression, anxiety, insomnia, fatigue, digestive problems, sometimes paralysis – fell under the broad nineteenthcentury diagnosis of neurasthenia, or nerve weakness. According to medical theory at the time, neurasthenia was caused by stress, sometimes related to new technologies, such as the telegraph; sometimes related to intellectual exertion (it was a common illness among “brain workers”); sometimes, in women, caused by over-exertion of caring for a family. Grief could precipitate neurasthenia, as could loss of religious faith. In all cases, the neurasthenic felt a sense of powerlessness, weakness, inability to envision a positive future. Alice became increasingly aware of her powerlessness as she grew up infantilized by her parents, forced into an ill-fitting model of womanhood as exemplified by her mother and aunt. Alice’s life is characterized by resistance: she tried to overcome her neurasthenia through various alternative medical treatments – electrotherapy, gymnastics, massage, rest cure. She felt considerably better when she traveled in Europe during the summer of 1872, accompanied by Aunt Kate and escorted by Harry, and when she returned, she seems to have enjoyed an active social life and local travel. When she was twentyseven, she became a teacher of history in an enterprising educational project, the Society to Encourage Studies at Home. “I think I shall enjoy it & I know it will do me lots of good,” she wrote to a friend.10 Working under Katharine Loring, the head of the history department, who became Alice’s lifelong companion, Alice was in charge of about twenty students for whom she designed an individualized correspondence course. William, who had been trying to find Alice a job at one of Harvard’s museums, approved, as did Harry. But Alice’s involvement – and the pride and satisfaction that she took in her work – did not preclude another breakdown, which occurred in the summer of 1878, coincident to her brother William’s marriage, as well as the marriage of several of her friends. Nearly thirty, Alice realized that when the last of her siblings left home, she would be alone, forever, with her parents. Four years later, though, both parents were dead, and after a brief respite of good health, Alice began to decline mysteriously. She decided to leave America and settle in England with Katharine Loring, who had gone abroad to nurse her sister. Besides her desire to be near to Katharine, Alice looked forward to Harry’s solicitous companionship. In fact, their relationship deepened as Harry came to know Alice as a feisty, witty, and opinionated woman who was, at the same time, fiercely loyal to him and unwaveringly convinced of his talents.

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Alice had been suffering from a variety of physical and psychological ailments before she left Boston, and her symptoms worsened in London. Physicians summoned by Harry investigated the pains in her legs, stomach, and head, but could find no organic cause. Alice became impatient with their examinations; she felt invaded, she said, and at the same time ignored. Their various diagnoses – gout, anxiety, strain, too frequent menstruation – did not convince her. Harry remained as puzzled as he always had been about the cause of Alice’s maladies. Still, clearly Alice was comforted by living close to “the excellent Henry, whose anxious and affect[ionate] mind is gratified by keeping a daily eye upon the fading flower” ( James, A. 1999: 150). Although Katharine was the central figure in Alice’s well-being, Harry was her link to the world, bringing her gossip, sharing his news. Alice’s diary is testimony to what she believed was his sincere friendship and even admiration for her, and his letters, especially those to William, reflect his concern. Alice finally was diagnosed correctly in 1891: she had breast cancer. “To him who waits, all things come!” she exclaimed in her diary. “Ever since I have been ill, I have longed and longed for some palpable disease, no matter how conventionally dreadful a label it might have, but I was always driven back to stagger along under the monstrous mass of subjective sensations, which that sympathetic being ‘the medical man’ had no higher inspiration than to assure me I was personally responsible for” ( James, A. 1999: 206–7). At last, she was not the instrument of her distress; the cause of her pain was organic, and she was exonerated from the blame and guilt that had blighted her life. She died in March 1892.

William When they were young, Harry often felt that he lived in William’s shadow, and he coveted the attention and the easy friendships that his older brother was able to achieve. When Harry was about twelve, he wrote a brief note to the boys’ friend Edgar Van Winkle, which reveals his desire to be included as one of the popular boys: “As I heard you were going to try to turn the club into a Theatre And as I was asked w’ether I wanted to belong here is my answer. I would like very much to belong.”11 But belonging never came naturally to Harry, who seemed always to hold himself apart from family and friends. When he was in his thirties, newly settled in London, he boasted to William about his heady social life: “I go on seeing a good many people, & yet I seem to myself to be leading a very tranquil life. I suppose it is because my relations with the people I see are very superficial & momentary, & that I encounter no one of whom I hanker to see more” ( James, W. 1992: 280). Even friendships that clearly were not superficial and momentary – with Constance Fenimore Woolson, for example, or the sculptor Hendrik Anderson – the apparent effusiveness of Harry’s letters often seems a crafted literary effort rather than a true and spontaneous revelation of feeling.

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In the end, no one was closer to Harry than William, no one had as enduring a friendship (more than sixty years, until William’s death in 1910), no one was as trusted a confidant; still, their relationship reflects the rivalry and secrecy that characterized all relationships in the James family. Besides sharing the burden of being Henry Sr.’s sons, striving for their father’s recognition, they shared a bond of physical and emotional ailments, fears, and anxieties, themselves legacies of their upbringing. Scholars have noted that in the James family, when one child attained healthfulness, another collapsed, and William’s and Harry’s chances of escape from what Harry called “the inner sepulchre” of their Cambridge, Massachusetts home depended on their need for restorative experiences abroad ( James, W. 1992: 25). When Harry traveled to Paris, or Rome, or a spa at Great Malvern, William remained at home despondently trying to decide what to do with his life; when Harry was home, watchfully monitoring his health with an eye to leaving, William was in Dresden, or on a research expedition in Brazil, or seeking restoration at a spa in Teplitz. They claimed to miss one another, and yet the one at home knew what he really missed was freedom. “You must have been envying me within the last few weeks,” William wrote to Harry in the summer of 1868, when he revisited “the sacred scenes of our youth” in Geneva. “The only pang that I have felt has been caused by your absence, or rather by my presence instead of yours, for I think that your abstemious and poetic soul wd. have got infinitely more good out of the things I have seen than my hardening and definite growing nature” ( James, W. 1992: 54). No doubt Harry agreed; and when he was in London the next year, he wrote a similar letter designed to incite William’s envy: a chronicle of events and social engagements, museum visits and dinners, that generated in Harry “the most superior spirits” ( James, W. 1992: 58–60). Letters between Harry and William comprise the first three volumes of The Correspondence of William James, and they reveal, at once, the brothers’ comfortable interdependency and their bristling striving for independence. They confided in each other the most intimate details of their physical maladies (Henry’s included dyspepsia and recurring constipation; William’s, eyestrain and insomnia), their bouts of neurasthenia, and their experiments with medical treatments and potions. They gave one another advice: here, William, to Henry’s irritation, sometimes assumed the authoritative role of their father. William felt free to criticize Harry’s writing, especially the later novels that he saw as convoluted and obscure, and yet he offered his admiration, as well, for Harry’s successes and talents. When he first began to write reviews, in fact, William sent them to Harry for “correcting the style and thoughts”; Harry, after all, by the age of twenty-four had been publishing reviews and stories for several years ( James, W. 1992: 18). Harry, for his part, responded to William’s works with undiluted praise. What irritated Harry more than William’s aesthetic preferences was his attitude of superiority about practical decisions. When Harry decided to buy a home in Rye, for example, William cautioned against it in detailed, and supercilious, letters. “I do, strange as it may appear to you, in this matter, know more or less what I’m about,” Harry retorted. At the age of 56, he was old enough, he maintained, to do

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what he wanted, to assess the relative value of the property, and to make his own decisions. William backed down immediately, apologized, and offered, instead, his congratulations. He had misinterpreted the situation, he explained: he thought Harry was asking for advice ( James, W. 1994: 71, 76). It was impossible, after all, to know for certain what anyone else was thinking. “[T]he breach from one mind to another is perhaps the greatest breach in nature,” William wrote in his first book, The Principles of Psychology ( James, W. 1977: 31). Besides grappling with the moral and ethical questions that had occupied their father, both William and Harry devoted their work to problems of consciousness, perception, and the limits of what one person ever can know about another. Part of the legacy that they inherited from their parents, after all, was a suspicion of intimacy and the possibilities of empathy. William married in 1878, at the age of thirty-six, but he had spent the previous twenty years convincing himself – and a few women who were interested in him – that he was unmarriageable. The bravado that he practiced at his father’s table served to mask the insecurities and self-recrimination that characterized him throughout his life. He needed constant reassurances, from his colleagues, students, and finally his wife, that he was worthy. Harry seemed to suffer from this fear of intimacy even more deeply than William. After William’s wife had spent some time with Harry, remarking on how guarded he seemed, William replied: Yes, Harry is a queer boy, so good, & yet so limited, as he had taken an oath not to let himself out to more than half of his humanhood, in order to keep the other half from suffering, & had capped it with a determination not to give anyone else credit for the half he resolves not to use himself. Really is it not oath or resolve, but helplessness. ( James, W. 1997: 411)

Harry was forty when William wrote this comment, and he had had ample time and many opportunities to observe Harry’s self-protectiveness. What William perceived as his brother’s emotional limitations shaped the work that Harry undertook as homage to his family: A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother – the first two volumes of his autobiography. Harry saw this project as a chance to own the narrative of his life, without fear of contradiction, and to situate himself, finally, as the central and “determinant” figure in his family’s drama. “I daresay,” he wrote to his nephew, William’s eldest son, “I did instinctively regard it at last as all my truth, to do what I would with” ( James 1974–84: IV: 803). He had, after all, survived the others.

Notes 1

See Holly (1995) for a thorough discussion of the theme of failure in James’s life and works.

2

Henry James Sr. to Ralph Waldo Emerson, May 11, 1843 (Perry 1935: 48).

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Mary James to Mrs. Garth Wilkinson, November 29, 1846. Quoted in Maher (1986: 2). Henry James to William James, May 30, 1869 ( James 1992: 75). Henry James to Thomas Sergeant Perry, March 25, 1864 ( James 1974–84: I: 50). Alice James to William James, March 22, 1889 (Yeazell 1981: 162). Henry James Sr. to Elizabeth Peabody, July 22, 1863 (quoted in Maher 1986: 24). Henry James to Robertson James, October 13, 1874 ( James 1974–84: I: 467). Alice James to William James, July 30, 1891 (Yeazell 1981: 187).

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Alice James to Annie Ashburner, December 26, 1875 (Yeazell 1981: 70). Henry James to Edgar Van Winkle, 1856 ( James 1974–84: I: 5). Edel probably misdated this letter, which was sent on stationery made in Paris (thus Edel’s assumption that it was sent from Paris). However, since the envelope in which it was contained has neither a street address, postage nor postmarks, the letter was probably delivered by hand in New York before the James family left for Europe on June 27, 1855.

References and Further Reading Harlow, Virginia (1950). Thomas Sergeant Perry: A Biography. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Holly, Carol (1995). Intensely Family: The Inheritance of Family Shame and the Autobiographies of Henry James. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. James, Alice (1999). The Diary of Alice James. Boston: Northeastern University Press. James, Henry (1974–84). Henry James Letters. 4 vols. Ed. Leon Edel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. James, Henry (1983). Henry James Autobiography. Ed. F. Dupee. Princeton: Princeton University Press. James, Henry (1985). What Maisie Knew. New York: Penguin. James, Henry (1987). The Complete Notebooks. Ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers. New York: Oxford. James, Henry, Sr. (1850). “Socialism and civilization in relation to the development of the individual life.” Moralism and Christianity. New York: Redfield. James, Henry, Sr. (1879). Society the Redeemed Form of Man. Boston: Houghton, Osgood.

James, William (1977). The Writings of William James. Ed. John McDermott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. James, William (1992). The Correspondence of William James, vol. 1. Ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth I. Berkeley. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. James, William (1994). The Correspondence of William James, vol. 3. Ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth I. Berkeley. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. James, William (1997). The Correspondence of William James, vol. 5. Ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth I. Berkeley. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Maher, Jane (1986). Biography of Broken Fortunes. Hamden, CT: Archon. Perry, Ralph Barton (1935). The Thought and Character of William James, vol. 1. Boston: Little, Brown. Simon, Linda (1998). Genuine Reality: A Life of William James. New York: Harcourt. Strouse, Jean (1982). Alice James. Boston: Houghton. Yeazell, Ruth Bernard (ed.) (1981). The Death and Letters of Alice James. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Beyond the Rim: Camp Henry James Jonathan Warren So complicated are [Henry James’s] feelings about Paris and its preponderance of manner and artfulness that he is reported to have warned Edward Marsh, when the latter was going on his first trip to that city, not to be ‘put off by its superficial and external aspect,’ and then to have explained that the ‘true superficial and external aspect of Paris has a considerable fascination,’ and that Mr. Marsh is, therefore, only to be wary of ‘what I may call the superficial and external aspect of the superficial and external aspect of Paris.’ Poirier (1960: 51), citing a conversation reported in Nowell-Smith (1947: 99) The excruciating is also one of the tonalities of Camp; it is the quality of excruciation in much of Henry James (for instance, The Europeans, The Awkward Age, The Wings of the Dove) that is responsible for the large element of Camp in his writings. Sontag (1999: 62) There is a curious stylistic imaging of the fusion of tragedy and comedy in his use of the word ‘funny’ in the late novels. As he uses it in progressively more sinister circumstances, he seems to add tragic overtones to the meanings of ‘queer’ and ‘ironic’; yet the very homeliness of the word makes it retain the element of laughter. Leyburn (1968: 137)

My first encounter with the writings of Henry James came in ninth grade at Hunter College High School when my English teacher assigned The Portrait of a Lady, a circumstance that allowed her to take some, we all suspected, malevolent delight in cowing her pupils with both the book’s daunting heft and its story of grim comeuppance for a young know-it-all. Nonetheless, Mrs. L – ’s pitch-perfect dour theatrics tended to tickle and encourage us, and we were soon caught up in the story of Isabel Archer and her ambiguous acts of judgment and volition. And we discovered solidarity in the surprising pleasure of tracking the intricacies of Isabel’s massive blunder. An inadvertent, ad hoc subaltern communal affiliation took form, one coalescing in response to the challenge of two, we thought, glamorous, idiosyncratic, occasionally severe, and cultivated masters, Mrs. L – and Henry James. The flag of our allegiance took the form of a curious and queer fairy tale. James’s novel offered up its magic

A Companion to Henry James. Edited by Greg W. Zacharias © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-14042-3

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godmother, secretly beneficent elves, disguised witch, loathsome villain, sinister lair, vulnerable child, munificent ghost, and iconic, goddess-like protagonist, combining the allure of scandalous intrigue and the grandeur of myth. Moreover, that irresistible blend of the base and the exalted allowed plenty of opportunity for dialogue brimming with ominous innuendo and insinuated abysses, for plot rife with theatrical, over-the-top turnabouts, and for character and situation broadly evoking despicable extremity barely concealed – or, for those with cunning eyes to see, ironically advertised – by the accouterments of excessive refinement. And if a too-great concern for such “things” were code for an otherwise unspeakable moral hideousness that repulsed the narrative from a greater specificity, why was the tension of such suppressed scandal so attractive and featured so often? Hidden in plain sight were pulpy thrills, selfreferential stagecraft, exaggerated performances of selfhood and dramatic type, and maudlin and vicious ironies no less sincere for their willingness to risk going too far. As Isabel plays out her drama of how best not to choose a husband, it’s not that we turned for compensation to the novel’s extravagant array of melodramatic motifs and gestures, but that we discovered Isabel’s grave and important crises were inextricable from such pleasures. That revelation was electrifying. In the era of Dallas and Dynasty, the qualities onto which we glommed were not merely the projections of a teenaged proclivity for soap-operatic melodrama and vixen-on-vixen ferocity. Though much of our giddy delight with Henry James might have seemed inadvertent excesses from the point of view of a lesson driven by the determination of a moralistic thematic point, those early exercises in the complicated pleasures of Henry James brought together a host of features, constitutive of James’s enduring and indispensable camp aspect, including:

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markedly unpersuasive aloofness about sordid materiality and commodification ironically denoting an enthralled fascination with the senseless violence and immoderation of the market; selfconscious-seeming melodramatic theatricality; go-for-baroque syntactical ornateness; difficulty and pleasure taken in difficulty; children obscurely evil, feeble playthings of fortune and treachery, or secret prodigies, sometimes possibly squeezed to death; puzzlingly insidious Catholics; accounts of lifelong sexual abstinence; women compared to paintings, cups, and other things; pity (for bad decisions) always at risk of being overwhelmed by the tormenting, shallow spirit of I-told-you-so (Lavinia Penniman, etc.); the surmise in the ample psycho-biographical criticism of James that he plays out his “own” psycho-sexual-familial crises through projections onto female characters on various verges of horrendous catastrophe;

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Jonathan Warren Minnie Temple: the fact of her death’s lingering fascination for James and the exquisite appropriateness of her name in that regard; the “horrid even if obscure hurt” ( James 1914: 297–8) suffered by James in young adulthood, that so entices biographical criticism to ruminate on James’s testicles, back, bottom, as historical and culturally inflected indices of power, masculine suitability, military non-conduct, etc.; representational extravagance concentrated into simple diction barely able to contain its own overdetermination; names outstripping Dickens’s for witty connotation, deformation, or ominous obscurity of type: Winterbourne, Goodwood, Grose, Fanny Assingham, Stackpole, Vetch, “Pinnie,” Archer, Light, Wix, Verver, Daisy, Pansy, Flora; the glorification of character: hyper-acute minds in states of continual incandescence; extreme states of feeling; the inadequacy of masculine power; a regular equivalence of conventional sincerity with simple-minded philistinism or intellectual narrowness (Susan Stringham, Fanny Assingham, Mrs. Wix, Henrietta Stackpole); the heroism of climactic inaction; conversations about conversations about conversations; “hanging fire”; eros in voluptuous forbearance.

Chief among these at the time was the suspicion that the allure of virtue was likely to be overwhelmed by the stylishness of vice or at least of virtue’s climactic undoing or ambiguation. And we began to bask in our accrued air of tickled discernment, under the banner of esoteric fascination, in the thrall of a looming queen. In short, we were becoming Jamesians. Unwittingly, our high school teacher shepherded us into the fold of a long line of readers who have discerned James’s rich double discourse, at once drawn to the gravity of exemplary ethical crises – definitive of relations existential, national, economic, sexual, marital, familial, and social – and apt, in the account of that deep solemnity always to risk, by the very extremity of narrative sobriety and stylistic care, funny, ironic counter-suggestions.1 By what signs is such a camp distinguishable? Put another way: what is Jamesian camp? A good way to start its taxonomy is to ask what features of appreciation and modes of understanding do James’s texts beseech. Whether by ironical remoteness, theatricalized repetition, disdainful detachment, over-the-top self-commitment, or some other spectacular performance of vexed involvement, James’s consummate outsiders descry the discursive artificiality at work in assertions of the inevitably natural, reasonable, and beautiful in their worlds. James’s campiness manifests as the exposure of the elaborate stylistic inventedness of the putatively normal, given, and goodly by

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means, surpassing mere didacticism or straightforward satire, typically as critical as they are provocatively appreciative of falsehood, as committed to upsetting the regulatory center of discovered corruption as they are to staging and occupying a stylistic intensification of its very features. Moreover, such inexhaustible and voluptuous parody of both the normative and the means by which parody of the normative unfolds are important signs by which James is curiously associated with an imputed homosexual identity and with a queer critical regime interrogating the very logics of identity’s tenability. . . . of all liberties the one [Isabel] herself found sweetest was the liberty to forget. ( James 1985b: 242)

In Portrait, a story in which so much turns on misreading, James obliges readers to attend to our own reading practice, our own susceptibility to astonishing lies, and our own self-assurance. But we miss so much if we smugly indulge in the simplicities of the novel’s apparent dramatic ironies, safely ensconced in a knowledge ostensibly superior to Isabel’s, watching her estimable consciousness fall for such a simple con, one that we presume we see more keenly for the grift that it is. The magnificence of Portrait and of James’s writing generally derives from its capacity to inculpate the reader in Isabel’s manner of judging and misjudging even as we might feel superior to it. Portrait only seems to invite the wagging of a finger at Isabel – for recklessness, for careless forgetting, for precipitous action, for late-blooming discrimination – while it maintains an extraordinary ambivalent sympathy for the undeniable allure by which Isabel is suckered. What shallow moralist honestly hopes that Isabel will make the right choices and marry well? How dull must one be not to gape with happy wonder at the thrilling magnitude of Isabel’s ultimate crises and at Madame Merle’s exquisite modulation from restrained fierceness to her consummate performance of defeat and incipient exile? The wonder of Portrait is that it endorses each lush feature of Isabel’s seduction even as it seems so powerfully to lament it. Such delicious and unresolvable ironic interplay makes James’s story of aspiration to right reading remarkably and enduringly vexed. James’s penchant for sustaining ambiguity is the principle by which he fashions his finest grammatical whirligigs. Difficult, wordy, elliptical, discouraging, challenging, complex, problematic, mannered, labyrinthine: enthusiastic readers of James are accustomed to the vocabulary of recoil when recommending his work to others. Indeed, obtuse anguish over James’s style – his idiosyncratic curlicues of syntax, his palimpsestic multiplication of qualifying subordinate phrases, his emphatic foregrounding of inaction, his obscuring of plain reference, his insistent attention to the suggestiveness of manner, his location of pivotally telling archness in super-subtle nuance, his aching concern for finding ways to figure the unsaid, undone, and unimagined – often usurps his plots, his characters, his imagery, his ideological dimensions, and his cultural interconnections and aspirations for precedence and emphasis

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when James’s writing is invoked in the world outside of Jamesian criticism and scholarship. Backhanded admiration for Jamesian meticulousness, when it comes, misses the deep and conflicted funniness of James’s stylistic extremity. His “smoothly ironical, dexterously enwinding” style (Van Doren 1929) is, in the finicky and scrupulous syntactical elaborateness of its sentences, in the curious abstruseness and hesitancy of its moral programs, and in its eventual hand-wringing anxiety over the violence implicit in even the subtlest misarticulation, the manifestation of an ironic aesthetic. Any apparent commitment of James’s writing to the patient exposure of a real or a true beneath or beyond all sham postures tends to give way instead to tormented revelry in the power of complicated perversions of such simplistic desiderata. The object in Jamesian narrative – epitomized by the governess at Bly, in The Turn of the Screw, who wants literally to lay her hands on an irrefutable end to ambiguity or by the expectation of John Marcher, in “The Beast in the Jungle,” that he is “being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible, that was sooner or later to happen” ( James 2001: 431) to him – regularly collapses into and is taken up as the subject of such ironic stylistic elaboration. What does the desperate craving for an end to desire look like? How can one say whether its urgent pursuit or its intense not-yet-ness is not its only availability? Far from advancing a realist panegyric to a phenomenality outside the text or to moral verities that precede or supercede fiction, James always imagines such ostensible realities and truths as the spectral obverse to an elaborately available suspicion of their unavailability. James rallies various modes of outlandish emphasis to overcome the absence of an intrinsic and stabilizing core beyond such worried jeopardy. It is not at all clear, finally, whether James’s texts want us to sympathize more with characters like the governess in her scramble for stable truth or to repudiate such quests as doomed from the start. After all, James’s most sincere seekers are also his most ridiculous dupes. His most grandiose or base villains are among his most astute creatures, damned typically because they, too, have a heart-felt objective to realize. This is the unavoidable, nasty funniness so appealingly there in everything James wrote and so inextricable from a circuitous style of evocation that always withholds what it appears so generously determined to provide. James rhapsodizes on the “full-blown flower of high fancy” ( James 1999: 123), The Turn of the Screw, on just this point: There is not only from beginning to end of the matter not an inch of expatiation, but my values are positively all blanks save so far as an excited horror, a promoted pity, a created expertness – on which punctual effects of strong causes no writer can ever fail to plume himself – proceed to read into them more or less fantastic figures. ( James 1999: 128)

What James gives is the polished withholding of the crudity of direct giving. What James supplies is the sense of paltry coarseness at work in such grasped-for ideals as accomplishment, satisfaction, or completion. For all his texts’ propensity to hold fire,

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to feature forbearance, to taxonomize the unsaid thing, James affords plenty of satisfaction in the realization of a finely wrought phrase articulating a sense of accomplishment’s inevitable failure or of the limits to representable knowledge. Failure, limitation, inaction: these are the judgments of a standard alien to James’s exultation in the success of denoting the undenotable. Jamesian exhilaration in hesitancy, discretion, patience, occult knowing, and deformations of closure is only ironic if one forgets that such regular features of James’s writing are always also their own opposites. James’s writing perpetually theatricalizes this kind of instability, even growing markedly fretful in his late-life memoir writing about the possibility that noting the instability itself might somehow numb its liveliness. While the conventional Realist novel devotes itself to evoking a solid, social world of actual things with the presumption that such a world is out there to be so alluded to, James’s writing indicts and explodes that presumption while still using the familiar motifs from the realist’s representational arsenal. James’s novels are populated by real-seeming people who speak to one another in actual words while inhabiting recognizable places, but each such realness is under duress and not because James has some alternative stabilizing truth to expose. Rather, James features the ostensible real as a stylistically redolent mask that is, by being such a persuasive façade, such an effective sham, paradoxically indistinguishable from essence. The more one strives to get to irrefutable truth, the more layers of truth’s constitutive modality one discovers and the more susceptible one is to the inviting suasion of a stylishness so much more palpably present than the certainty one might hope it obscures. It is in light of just this aspect of his writing that, when reading James’s account of his return visit to the United States in 1904 after an absence of twenty years, we become accustomed to attend as well to the described contours of coastline and horizon, lobby and loge, as to the just as frequently encountered and predictably patterned textual counter- or para-geography, one comprising meditations on the difficulty of adequate account, admissions of failure rich and compensatory in their own right, and reflections on the limits of knowing, sometimes articulated in provocative commingling with the imagery of the scene, encountered as the profoundly vexed palimpsest of such overdetermination. The sheer solidity of America’s physical features and built forms, attributes that one might otherwise take for granted, has its counterpoint in the formidable impenetrability against which James sees himself striving in relating them to his readers. So much is this the case in The American Scene that it may become a challenge to distinguish the memoir’s text, presumably the report of a literal journey through actual places, from a persistent subtext that everywhere asserts itself as the main story, the account of the hazards of undertaking such a project and the rich terrain glimpsed and maybe even manifested by the daring eye of a reporter stumped and ironically compensated by the thereby exposed and enthralling vastness and intricacy of his surprisingly productive ineptitudes. Exemplifying this slippage, James, looking back over the whole of the volume, devotes almost the entirety of his book’s short preface to remarking on his own failure to receive and impart “information” ( James 1968: xxvi) despite what might have seemed

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a promising “freshness of eye, outward and inward, which, with the further contribution of a state of desire, is commonly held a precious agent of perception” ( James 1968: xxv). “Is it funny.” Thus, finally, she again dropped her eyes on it, drawing in her lips a little. “No – I call it grave.” ( James 1985a: 209)

One might expect that the admission of failure would be a signal crisis for an author so evidently committed to fine discrimination of perceived detail. Yet the recognition of the impossibility of seeing the American scene and, in light of this, the discovered possibility of only being able to account for that scene by way of ruminations on the impossibility of doing so, become no matter for hand-wringing. Even or especially in the midst of the most thematically somber or weighty moments, slippage between the apparently grave and the simultaneously funny captivates James. Funny or grave: this is an exemplary and much repeated quandary in James’s writing. Turning up in The Turn of the Screw, The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl and elsewhere, such a matching of incommensurate appraisals is itself funny. For how might the superlatively serious also be funny? In Portrait’s superabundance of camp possibility, the ne plus ultra naming of phallusas-would-be-inamorato, Caspar Goodwood, vies with the femme-fatale, laconic tragivillainy of Madame Merle. James’s duplicitous fair-haired blackbird (McCullough) accrues diva-esque grandeur with every revealed facet of her characterization and with each portentous utterance. Serena Merle’s renowned sequences of pitched augury – from her first appearance, playing Schubert “just du bout des doigts” ( James 1985b: 184) with her back importantly to Isabel while Daniel Touchett dies somewhere else in the house – commingle conduct of and claims to hyper-refinement with the whiff of the scandalous and of the unspeakably horrid. Riveting and magnetic, “Serena Merle hasn’t a fault” ( James 1985b: 208), thinks she looks always the same and that she is, in that way, wonderful ( James 1985b: 255–6), and, especially in light of the “wee bit of a tiny crack” ( James 1985b: 571) to her precious tea-cup, makes the extremity of a flawed pose of flawlessness and of a finally fragile show of inviolability simultaneously the height of pathos and the depths of bathos. Isabel falls for Merle’s scheme, and James encourages us also to give in to the histrionic allures of a distressed mother whose crisis manifests never as tawdry sentimentality but through panache – “Madame Merle glanced at Isabel with a sort of world-wide smile, a thing that overreached frontiers. ‘I was born under the shadow of the national banner’ ” ( James 1985b: 187) – and stagey direness – The other rooms meanwhile had become conscious of the arrival of Madame Merle, who, wherever she went, produced an impression when she entered. How she did it the most

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attentive spectator could not have told you, for she neither spoke loud, nor laughed profusely, nor moved rapidly, nor dressed with splendour, nor appealed in any appreciable manner to the audience. Large, fair, smiling, serene, there was something in her very tranquillity that diffused itself, and when people looked round it was because of a sudden quiet. ( James 1985b: 404)

James’s presentation of Merle as the uncanny, accumulated effect of so many noncauses is a strategy that recurs in his description of Kate Croy at the opening of The Wings of the Dove: She was handsome, but the degree of it was not sustained by items and aids; a circumstance moreover playing its part at almost any time in the impression she produced. The impression was one that remained, but as regards the sources of it no sum in addition would have made up the total. She had stature without height, grace without motion, presence without mass. ( James 1984: 2–3)

Transfixing because elusive, these are as much descriptions of the failure of reportage and of the women’s surpassing of representational control as of their appearances. Each manifests as the exceeding of portrayal. James only half agrees with Ralph Touchett when Isabel’s cousin catalogs Merle’s off-putting voluptuousness: “Her merits are immense,” said Ralph. “She’s indescribably blameless; a pathless desert of virtue; the only woman I know who never gives one a chance. . . . she pushes the search for perfection too far – . . . her merits are in themselves overstrained. She’s too good, too kind, too clever, too learned, too accomplished, too everything. She’s too complete, in a word.” ( James 1985b: 270)

Unlike Ralph, James recognizes and prizes the curious treasure of a performance overplayed, for its manifold implications of occult motives, for such cloaked reasons that tend to multiply the extremity of Merle’s very signification, building to the novel’s climactic eruptions, discharges of all that over-strained intensity in an effulgence of uncomfortably (and happily so) intermixed sincerity, irony, and aloof composure: “Who are you – what are you?” Isabel murmured. “What have you to do with my husband?” It was strange that for the moment she drew as near to him as if she had loved him. “Ah then, you take it heroically! I’m very sorry. Don’t think, however, that I shall do so.” “What have you to do with me?” Isabel went on. Madame Merle slowly got up, stroking her muff, but not removing her eyes from Isabel’s face. “Everything!” she answered. ( James 1985b: 563)

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James’s exquisite detailing in this important moment – Isabel’s indignation underscoring the irony of her resentment, Merle’s metafictional detachment and savage, dramatic instincts, and her awful, sensuous fondling of the furred, dead thing in her hands, even the wicked impossibility of an unlikely double entendre – inextricably intertwine the poignant and the theatrical, marking the scene’s importance not merely for its exposé of truth but for its gripping deployment of grandiose theatricality. When, a few chapters later, Merle takes her leave of Isabel and us, in that way in which Adam and Charlotte will at the end of The Golden Bowl, the gravity of her last utterance – heightened by its relative syntactical frugality and direct diction – abbreviates and recalls all those earlier combinations of earnestness and affectation: “I shall go to America” ( James 1985b: 610). The gravity of Merle’s assumption of the burden of exile cannot be separated from the overdetermination of the Jamesian gesture which not only passingly lambastes the United States as a despicable waste land but also exalts it as the place most apt (because of its size? because of its moral laxity?) to provide a home for his bereft monster-mother. A great part of the bliss of reading James derives from a wondrous appreciation at the challenge of reconciling oneself to his conjunction of an obligation to probe ethical quandaries with a sybaritic fascination with the troublesome beauty of problems as such. James theatrically insists upon the magnetism of a moral aberration for which his texts’ disdain is detached even when it is most over-the-top. James’s writing is always as critical of outrage – be it treachery wrought by Merle, Osmond, Croy, or Stant, or dull-wittedness evinced by Fleda Vetch, Susan Shepherd, Fanny Assingham, or Henrietta Stackpole – as it is provocatively appreciative of it. James renders this ambivalence in Portrait’s villainous, “sterile dilettante” ( James 1985b: 374), Gilbert Osmond through a heightened awfulness discernible in his accouterments. He is attended by a pubescent daughter who might have been pulled from the feminine vulnerability cabinet of fiction’s central casting office for a gothic horror story, in hats too large and skirts too short, to rattle around in her father’s oppressive house of dumbness while dreaming of marrying papa ( James 1985b: 341). That kind of excess finds its stylistic counterbalance in Osmond’s dissipated sister, Amy, the Countess Gemini, who spills the beans about Osmond and Merle because “I’ve been so bored with your not knowing” ( James 1985b: 592). And, in reply to Isabel’s challenge of the veracity of her story, “Let us assume that I’ve invented it!” ( James 1985b: 598). The scintillation of evil’s possibility is inextricable from and multiplied by this further injury of its being couched in such decadent diffidence. “The husband of Madame Merle would be likely to pass away.” ( James 1985b: 190)

By way of a novel all but lacking a single other “good” marriage, James commits his fiction to an engagement between ostensible truth beyond feigning, on the one hand, and the glamorous attractions of an elaborate stylishness that knows no end to mas-

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querade, on the other. As surely as Isabel pledges herself to Gilbert Osmond, the novel about vexed marriage betroths itself not to a program of ultimate moral clarity and conventional closure, but to the appealing ambiguities of precise, stylish richness. Isabel’s witless “bad” marriage is a metaphor for the fate James wittingly chooses for his fiction. So wrongly sold on Osmond’s vacuousness, Isabel marries the novel’s main personified instance of falsity, but she cleaves finally to that decision, returning to Rome in the end. We should not misconstrue James’s novel as throwing in its lot with the Gilbert Osmonds. Jonathan Freedman persuasively charts Osmond’s satirical monstrosity in the context of Aestheticism’s shift from “coterie concern to public sensation” in the first years of the 1880s (Freedman 1990: 146) after the fashionable “aesthetic craze” of the 1870s (Freedman 1990: 147). A movement in British art and literature, Aestheticism rejected the moral or transparently representative functions of literature, endorsed most famously by Matthew Arnold who believed that the world could be known as it, in fact, is. Casting in their lot instead with Walter Pater who, among his many other distinctions, was an Arnoldian antagonist, Britain’s aesthetes allowed that one could only know one’s shifting impressions of the world and that one should strive to intensify and multiply those impressions so as to have more of life. Aestheticism’s cultishness manifested chiefly as a veneration of beauty for its own sake and a disregard for a received tradition of moral didacticism. Locating in Osmond evidence of Aestheticism’s most frequently attacked affectations – indolence, snobbery, exaltation of taste, and self-regard – Freedman helps us to see how plainly James’s book demonizes him as a dilettantish scoundrel (Freedman 1990: 147–9). Nonetheless, in a splendor of appealingly grand formulations of indignity and denunciation for the wicked – “[Osmond’s] egotism lay hidden like a serpent in a bank of flowers” ( James 1985b: 466), for example – James’s novel also foreswears any incontrovertible pretending that it even wants fully to elude or transcend Osmond and Merle’s world of calumny or that it believes it can seriously try. The grandeur of Isabel’s error redounds in appalling elevation – leading her from Osmond’s sinister manse to the Roman Colosseum itself, historic epicenter for the sacrifice of doomed martyrs – but its enormity features as well in passing details. And if, as Freedman reminds us, Lord Warburton shares in Isabel’s disparagement of Osmond’s “genius for upholstery” (Freedman 1990: 147; James 1985b: 418), James does not deny himself the pleasures of inventing and insisting upon the importance of surfaces well-decorated. From the bland words James uses to signal the unnerving vagueness of little Miles’s misdeeds in The Turn of the Screw, to the pinches and shoves passingly reported to evoke child abuse in What Maisie Knew, James relishes the indication of pitched circumstances by way of intensely abbreviated signals. That predilection for metonymic concentration often dwells on the deep suggestiveness of displays of and conversations about apparent superficialities or trivialities, clothing and accouterments, insinuating James’s commitment to the mystical quality of the surface, an attachment given most regularly to his ostensible frauds. Hinted depths become surprisingly interchangeable with observed surfaces as James charges his

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veneers with occult profundity. Consider the famous exchange between Madame Merle and Isabel Archer on the topic of clothes: “When you’ve lived as long as I you’ll see that every human being has his shell and that you must take the shell into account. By the shell I mean the whole envelope of circumstances. There’s no such thing as an isolated man or woman; we’re each of us made up of some cluster of appurtenances. What shall we call our ‘self’? Where does it begin? where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us – and then it flows back again. I know a large part of myself is in the clothes I choose to wear. I’ve a great respect for things! One’s self – for other people – is one’s expression of one’s self; and one’s house, one’s furniture, one’s garments, the books one reads, the company one keeps – these things are all expressive.” This was very metaphysical; not more so, however, than several observations Madame Merle had already made. Isabel was fond of metaphysics, but was unable to accompany her friend into this bold analysis of the human personality. “I don’t agree with you. I think just the other way. I don’t know whether I succeed in expressing myself, but I know that nothing else expresses me. Nothing that belongs to me is any measure of me; everything’s on the contrary a limit, a barrier, and a perfectly arbitrary one. Certainly the clothes which, as you say, I choose to wear, don’t express me; and heaven forbid they should!” “You dress very well,” Madame Merle lightly interposed. “Possibly; but I don’t care to be judged by that. My clothes may express the dressmaker, but they don’t express me. To begin with it’s not my own choice that I wear them; they’re imposed upon me by society.” “Should you prefer to go without them?” Madame Merle enquired in a tone which virtually terminated the discussion. ( James 1985b: 216)

Occurring early in their acquaintance, the conversation nonetheless allows Merle to taunt Isabel for a naïve faith in her own essential selfhood and for Isabel’s neglect of the constitutive implications of her thingly retinue. In presuming that there is something more to her than her clothes and the ways in which they are perceived by others who thereby assign her value, Isabel thinks that she is piercing to a deeper depth than Merle who perversely delights in the signifying power of a shell that, to the extent that its meanings are scripted by others, might not even be her “own.” Isabel’s recourse to essentialism does indeed mark her as different from Merle, and Merle’s fascination with the socially determined relativism of her kaleidoscopic being signals her antagonism to Isabel’s would-be solidity. Yet the dupe here is Isabel and the presumption of solid essential certainty that she represents against savvy aestheticized impressionism. Isabel’s own manner of presuming depth, despite her purported fondness for metaphysics, is ironically thin: she can only assert her beliefs without defense. By taking depth for granted, Isabel espouses a kind of thoughtless conventionality, a weak position known as such for its failure to generate more than the paltriest arsenal of analytical application when tested. Isabel is oblivious to the fact that her faith in

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some obscure abiding anchored selfhood is a fashion that she wears, a signal of her lack of study in the arts of aesthetic self-defense, a mark of her weakness. James does not simply endorse either aestheticism or essentialism in the contest he stages, though Merle plays a more witting game certainly; his narrative exults in the drama of the former stalking the latter. “My dear child, we move in a labyrinth.” “Of course we do. That’s just the fun of it!” said Milly with a strange gaiety. Then she added: “Don’t tell me that – in this for instance – there are not abysses. I want abysses.” ( James 1984: 133)

The terrain of James’s world is supercharged from his earliest stories to his last memoirs with ominous implication, and its chief players move through it as though through a booby-trap-laden opera, eager at once to avoid snares and pitfalls as to feature their sinister deliciousness by so risking them, ostensibly desirous of the clear light of truth but inveterately suspicious that any such thing exists except to cast an indirect and ironically appreciative glow on the draperies that would obscure it. In Portrait, certainly we are encouraged to care for Isabel’s well-being, but we are also set up to be enthralled by threats to it. Moreover, James regularly allows us to be tickled by the limited imaginations of characters, in his novels, who would guard against jeopardy with too blithe a confidence in their own righteousness: Susan Stringham, Fanny Assingham, Henrietta Stackpole, etc. James’s hand never comes down too heavily in favor of his resilient heroine, as his book takes evident delight in the stamina not just of characters but of achieved tones of duress, of subtle accomplishments of vexed foreboding. For James, as for Poe and Hawthorne before him, what is awful is also scintillating; what is dangerous is also sensationally attractive; what is deceitful is also glamorous; what is good is also infuriating; what is true is also unspeakable; what is solemn is also bizarre. While Portrait appears on the one hand to insist that the right course of action is the one that knows how not to be seduced by superficial appearances and how to get at more sober and decisive underlying truths, on the other hand, it would be hard to exaggerate James’s ambivalence about such an agenda here and throughout his writings. Acting ethically, knowing carefully, choosing wisely, all these things are inseparable from conversing in codes that are as ominous as they are flamboyant and as philosophically loaded as they are exquisite. Ending up with a proper husband and realizing most admirably the fortune with which the Touchetts fill her sails are only the opposite of mucking up her marriage and wasting her vast potential if one does not have eyes to see the satisfying novelistic rightness of choosing wrongly and the narrative profit of spinning through a labyrinth of befuddling waste and demoralizing degradation. Only if one wants to save Isabel from her doom and thereby sterilize the novel’s finest moments of sheer awfulness is her failure not also a definitive success. To want Isabel put right – whatever that would mean – is to read like a Caspar

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Goodwood who would impose his expectations on a character who is most of all a would-be free agent, loathe to acquiesce to others’ terms: “Young girls here – in decent houses – don’t sit alone with the gentlemen late at night.” “You were very right to tell me then,” said Isabel. “I don’t understand it, but I’m very glad to know it.” “I shall always tell you,” her aunt answered, “whenever I see you taking what seems to me too much liberty.” “Pray do; but I don’t say I shall always think your remonstrance just.” “Very likely not. You’re too fond of your own ways.” “Yes, I think I’m very fond of them. But I always want to know the things one shouldn’t do.” “So as to do them?” asked her aunt. “So as to choose,” said Isabel. ( James 1985b: 70–1)

James both exploits a readerly disposition toward happy closure and scolds any reader who would too eagerly insist on it. We root for Isabel as she gives her aunt a lesson in the forthrightness of new American girlhood, but we are forbidden to want anything too specific for her unless we don’t mind getting corralled with those dullards and dilettantes who do nothing but work to script her future. Superficially, a story about and encouraging the most careful exercise of care, Portrait offers its happy readers the plotty allures of a famously and only putatively hypersensitive protagonist feeling and judging her way through a maze of loaded and menacing situations. If the novel is the story of Isabel Archer’s progress, Portrait’s Bildungs affect accommodates and even encourages the mild surmises of a Jamesian international theme – the untried American orphan confronts the unimagined, deep games of Old World conspiracy as Osmond and Merle connive to entrap the unsuspecting heiress. Yet Isabel’s progressive uncovering of miserable truth is no more potent than James’s stylish withholding of it. Certainly, the sumptuous iniquity of Merle and Osmond’s concealment makes the hidden truths matter so much more, and James acts as canny co-conspirator, delaying Isabel’s epiphany about her new family until the fifty-first of his fifty-five chapters. Portrait devotes much more time to featuring the elaborate apparatus of secrecy and deceit than it does to the concentrated eruptions of truth. And the climactic exposés are grand at least as much because of the power of the verity unconcealed – Osmond and Merle were a couple, Pansy is Merle’s child, Isabel has been a dupe – as because of the stunningly stagey turns of phrase, dialogue, and gesture by which its proffering is realized. In 1964, Susan Sontag, in her controversial and catalyzing, 58-point list of camp’s “notes,” designates number 23, “the essential element”: “seriousness, a seriousness that fails” (Sontag 1999: 59). The “irrepressible” sensibility (Sontag 1999: 59) of James’s writing consists of its not being susceptible to a closed diagnosis of achieved

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or failed seriousness. Jamesian success consists in the marked ambivalence of grandiose gesture. In advance tribute to Sontag’s camp exemplar, “a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers” (Sontag 1999: 59), here is the possibility of depravity in the Countess Gemini: Isabel could see that she was a woman of fashion. She was thin and dark and not at all pretty, having features that suggested some tropical bird – a long beak-like nose, a small, quickly-moving eyes, and a mouth and chin that receded extremely. Her expression, however, thanks to various intensities of emphasis and wonder, of horror and joy, was not inhuman, and, as regards her appearance, it was plain she understood herself and made the most of her points. Her attire, voluminous and delicate, bristling with elegance had the look of shimmering plumage, and her attitudes were light and sudden, like those of a creature that perched upon twigs. She had a great deal of manner; Isabel, who had never known any one with so much manner, immediately classified her as the most affected of women. She remembered that Ralph had not recommended her as an acquaintance; but she was ready to acknowledge that to a casual view the Countess Gemini revealed no depths. ( James 1985b: 274)

With flourishes like this, if James fashions an international encounter between dogged American virtue and its dissipated antagonists, we have to acknowledge that he does so never plainly to endorse the former and often to luxuriate in the articulation of the latter. Indeed, James demonstrates how dazzling the showmanship of degeneracy, dullardness, excruciating patience, and forbearance can be as showmanship, with an always most productively ambivalent regard for the ostensible moral substance of his invented crises in their work-up and eventual climaxes. Portrait is an exemplary instance of James’s penchant for such ironic melodramatic intensity, a proclivity one can trace from his earliest stories to his final memoirs. The novel does much more than clad a complicated morality tale in bijoux apt to snare the attention and delight of readers disinclined to care for morality tales or complication. His novel disputes the separability of dry questions of right and wrong, good and bad, from matters of style and stylishness, grandiloquence and overthe-top drama. Every quandary – even those that might seem finally pretty straightforward, like the question of whether Osmond should have been known from the start as a scheming petty monster – is heightened, and, at each step, the discovery of information is the glimpsing of appalling abysses. Instead of the conventional bourgeois comforts afforded by traditional melodramas which resolve their depictions of threat with achieved vengeance or rescue or sentimental gush, James invents something different. His writing does not indulge in counter-melodrama in which the villain wins and stability is achieved in a lamentably reverse fashion. Rather, James favors counter-counter-melodrama in which the righteous and the wicked are both subverted amid an unconcealed celebration of the magnetism of their competing stylishness.

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When we read Portrait for the first time or the hundredth, the extremity and uncertainty of Jamesian style must catch us, and we delight in its conflation of subtle refinement, in just the right shading of the dire, say, and melodramatic hyperbole. What could be more delicious than the shocking revelation that the woman who aspired to move in the zones of superlative nuance turned out to be a used tool? Only that James’s novel takes such evident delight in smacking the horrid point home. Somehow the putatively lamentable awfulness of Isabel’s discovery in the convent that she has been duped by Merle and Osmond seems less the point than the relished magnificence of the turnabout itself, brilliant in both the creeping increments and sudden finale of its astonishing accomplishment and satisfying in the full realization of its operatic staging. The aesthetic and dramatic vavavoom of James’s writing, here and throughout his work, keeps stealing the limelight from any ostensible educative program that does not include his tutelage in the odd beauty of relishing the overdeterminations of an unbridled camp possibility.

Note 1

Eric Haralson reminds us that, in light of such restless duplicities, “Henry James” has long served as a camp catchword: “Apparently a knowledge of James’s work functioned as no mere intellectual credential among gay undergraduates of [mid-century New York], but

also (and comically) as a pickup line for ‘get[ing] laid’: ‘you couldn’t get anybody to even . . . play you his [Edith] Piaf records until you said something about poor old Hattie Jacques” (Haralson 2003: 103, quoting McCourt 1993: 229–38).

References and Further Reading Freedman, Jonathan (1990). Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Haralson, Eric (2003). Henry James and Queer Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. James, Henry (1914). Notes of a Son and Brother. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. James, Henry (1968 [1907]). The American Scene. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. James, Henry (1984 [1909]). The Wings of the Dove. Oxford: Oxford University Press. James, Henry (1985a [1909]). The Golden Bowl. London: Penguin. James, Henry (1985b [1907]). The Portrait of a Lady. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

James, Henry (1999 [1898]). The Turn of the Screw. New York: Norton. James, Henry (2001). “The Beast in the Jungle.” In Henry James: Selected Tales (pp. 426–61). Ed. John Lyon. London: Penguin. Leyburn, Ellen Douglas (1968). Strange Alloy: The Relation of Comedy to Tragedy in the Fiction of Henry James. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. McCourt, James (1993). Time Remaining. New York: Knopf. McCullough, Joseph B. (1975). “Madame Merle: Henry James’s ‘White Blackbird.’ ” Papers on Language and Literature, 11: 312–16. Nowell-Smith, Simon (1947). The Legend of the Master. London: Constable.

Beyond the Rim: Camp Henry James Poirier, Richard (1960). The Comic Sense of Henry James. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sontag, Susan (1999 [1964]). “Notes On ‘Camp’.” In Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing

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Subject: A Reader (pp. 53–65). Ed. Fabio Cleto. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Van Doren, Carl (1929 [1921]). The American Novel. New York: Macmillan. Chapter 8, “Henry James.”

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Henry James and the United States John Carlos Rowe

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A Companion to Henry James. Edited by Greg W. Zacharias © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-14042-3

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Henry James and Britain Nicola Bradbury

Henry James, American born to American parents in Washington Place, New York on April 15, 1843, chose as an adult to live and work in England. During the Great War, shortly before his death in 1916, he applied for British citizenship: a petition signed by the Prime Minister Herbert Asquith. The story of Henry James and Britain has a biographical and a historical dimension, personal and public aspects, but both are mediated through a third term: the literary. Britain, for James, is a cultural myth articulated through writers from Shakespeare to Dickens and Thackeray, absorbed, emulated, even resented and recast, by an author constructing the reality of his own achievement through the development of his fictional world. The deliberate adoption of a culture at once familiar and inexorably alien assured James the ideal stance for his narrative and critical persona: that of the intimate outsider. The James family, founded in New England on the fortune made by William James (1771–1832), an Irish Protestant who had emigrated from Co. Cavan in 1789, had its roots in Britain; the maternal line, too, was Scots-Irish in origin. The novelist’s father brought his family to Europe for two years when Henry was just six months old: later, James wrote that “the nostalgic cup had been applied to my lips even before I was conscious of it – I had been hurried off to London and to Paris immediately after my birth” ( James 1962: 195). In 1859, Henry and his brother William were sent to school for a spell in Germany and Switzerland. England, then, via Liverpool or Southampton docks and by train to London, was the gateway to European civilization, France and Italy. But it was more than a staging-post. As the country of Shakespeare, Johnson and the eighteenth-century essayists, Wordsworth, and the nineteenth-century men of letters and ideas, from Carlyle to Ruskin, and the poets Tennyson and Browning; as the home of Thackeray, Dickens, and George Eliot, this was the capital of the English literary world. Britain was an ancestral, a geographical, political, and economic power base; but it was above all a cultural construct for the young Henry James. Shaped and inhabited by the writers who had played such a part in his own imaginative formation, what Britain represented was a personal and a

A Companion to Henry James. Edited by Greg W. Zacharias © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-14042-3

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professional opportunity: the full challenge of a literary career. Paradoxically, for the young American, this was the site of independence. Socially, James settled successfully in England. When he wrote on March 20, 1869 to George Abbot James, “I have seen a moderate number of people & things & made the most of my small opportunities” (Horne 1999: 23), he had already, as Philip Horne notes, met “Leslie Stephen (1832–1904), . . . Dickens’s daughter Kate, the poet Aubrey de Vere (1814–1902), and, most notable perhaps, William Morris and John Ruskin himself. The day after this letter HJ would lunch with Charles Darwin” (Horne 1999: 23n1). When he returned to England in 1875, James took rooms in Bolton Street off Piccadilly, and became an honorary member of the Athenaeum Club. He mingled with London’s great men, writing insouciantly to William James: London life jogs along with me, pausing every now & then at some more or less succulent patch of herbage. I was almost ashamed to tell you thro’ mother that I, unworthy, was seeing a bit of Huxley. I went to his house again last Sunday evening – a pleasant, easy, no-dress-coat sort of house . . . Yesterday I dined with Lord Houghton – with Gladstone, Tennyson, Dr Schliemann (the excavator of old Mycenae &c) & half a dozen other men of “high culture.” I sat next but one to the Bard. . . . (Horne 1999: 79–80)

In the winter of 1879 James confessed to dining out on 109 nights. But his standing shifted over a long residence in Britain, and he was more proud in 1898 to establish himself as a home owner, moving out of London to the quiet of Lamb House in Rye on the Sussex coast. James was in his twenties and had begun to publish short stories in the Atlantic Monthly and notices in the Nation when he first ventured to Europe alone in 1869. Another ten years would pass before he set out in the controversial monograph on his dominant American predecessor, Hawthorne, what in effect was a cultural apologia for his own decision to work in Britain. James itemizes, surely with ironic bravura, the negative attributes of his native land as a cultural field: [O]ne might enumerate the items of high civilization . . . which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left. No State, in the European sense of the word, and indeed barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools – no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class – no Epsom nor Ascot! ( James 1887: 43)

The catalog has often been solemnly decried, but it is presented as “almost ludicrous.” If these trappings of “civilization” are scarcely more than tourist-fodder, what they hint at is the “accumulation of history and custom . . . a complexity of manners and types [that] form a fund of suggestion for a novelist.” They propose the latent

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paradigm that James identifies as a prerequisite for art. For the aspiring author in Britain, an established cultural grammar provides the conditions of articulacy: a shared language for expression. Having to learn that language as a visitor from abroad promotes the artist’s conscious awareness of its functions, and confronts him with the differential levels of fluency between subject and object through which this very difficulty can become a critical resource in his art. “[T]o see deep difficulty braved” is “for the really addicted artist” a “beautiful incentive” ( James 1962: 50). James’s attraction to Britain as a cultural opportunity was always, however, counterpoised by his sense of the claims of America. At the “late” climax of his career, he advised the younger Edith Wharton: “Profit, be warned, by my awful example of exile & ignorance.. . . Do New York!” (Horne 1999: 368). But his early letters to family and friends frequently display a lively consciousness of what he wrote to Charles Eliot Norton in 1872: “It’s a complex fate, being an American, & one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe” (Horne 1999: 48). Writing to Edwin Lawrence Godkin on June 5, 1882 after returning from a visit to Ireland, James clothes New York with “the golden mists of memory,” and reports, “London seems big & black & actual – it is a brutal sort of place compared with New York. But I revert to it with a kind of filial fondness – which is a proof, I suppose, that I have become brutalized” (Horne 1999: 139). To William James in October 1888, his tone is less facetious – though not necessarily less performative: For myself, at any rate I am deadly weary of the whole “international” state of mind – so that I ache, at times, with fatigue at the way it is constantly forced upon one as a sort of virtue or obligation. I can’t look at the English or American worlds, or feel about them, any more, save as a big AngloSaxon [sic] total . . .

This cultural weariness, however, gives way to a positive affirmation: I have not the least hesitation in saying that I aspire to write in such a way that it wd. [sic] be impossible to an outsider to say whether I am, at a given moment, an American writing about England or an Englishman writing about America (dealing as I do with both countries) & so far from being ashamed of such an ambiguity I should be exceedingly proud of it, for it would be highly civilized. (Horne 1999: 213)

The statement is riddled with “ambiguity” on every level, from the public perspective of two nations to the personal note of the term “outsider.” James seems caught between the anxieties of ambition and rejection. Equally striking, however, is his confident phrase: “dealing as I do with both countries.” The author’s grasp, not only of the cultural complexities of the “international theme,” but also of his own ambivalent position, is what allows him a distinctive insight into the intersection of personal integrity and social tyranny that plays through the cultural nexus.

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This culturally sophisticated, ideologically informed, and ethically motivated vision is what situates the aesthetic imperative for James in Britain throughout his career, and it makes a fascinating development. James wrote descriptive “travel” books, including the essay “London” (1888) not only as a newcomer, but throughout his career. What he attempts is not reporting but the self-conscious registration of impressions which are the essence rather than merely the location of his work. So, recalling first coming to London, what he notes is the sense of approach ( James 1960: 1), the “horrible . . . dusky, tortuous miles,” and the “humiliation” of not knowing where you are in “the general immensity. The immensity was the great fact, and that was the charm” ( James 1960: 3). The city is enhanced by fog, because “mysteriousness” is its central quality. In James’s fiction, an early “picturesque” take on Englishness is epitomized in “A Passionate Pilgrim,” a tale colored by “infantine experience” ( James 1978: 640), boyhood reading, and a tourist’s delight at the countryside, country houses, and their impressive collections of old masters, though not devoid of the young professional’s self-positioning irony. The initial mode is succeeded by increasing “realism” during the 1880s from The Portrait of a Lady to The Princess Casamassima, where “Experience . . . is our apprehension and our measure of what happens to us as social creatures” ( James 1962: 64–5). “In the Cage” (1898) uses the urban geography of London and a south coast resort, much as The Ambassadors (1903) does the street plan of Paris and a day in the country, to register via realistic detail but with a telegraphic, or nearsymbolist, economy of form, the social fabric of class and gender structures operating in the tale. James then develops a further aesthetic refinement amounting to a quasimodernist abstraction in his “late phase” work, both fiction and other writings, of the twentieth century. The physical and social structures of The Golden Bowl (1904) swerve between substantial reality and symbolic or psychological essence. So there is a fellowship of kind between the “monumental” staircase where Charlotte pauses before descending to the Prince ( James 1995b: 141) and the outlandish pagoda Maggie elaborates in her own mind ( James 1995b: 233), and which figures her own exclusion. Analyzing key texts highlights James’s stylistic evolution; but it also hints how far the cultural complexity of the late work may be anticipated throughout his career, where the challenge is always already there. Certain situations and themes recur to be explored differently or further. Echoes, not only from James, but other writers too, demand to be “dealt with” in a process of authorial negotiation for which the “international” approach sets distinctive terms of engagement. Shakespeare is the first such precursor, and James’s fiction is full of the reverberations of his work. “A Passionate Pilgrim,” James’s first significant tale addressing the “international theme,” takes its very title from a collection of poems supposed to be by Shakespeare. In 1867 a very rare book, one of only two surviving printed copies, including “The Passionate Pilgrim” with Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis,” had been “discovered” in an attic at the Lamport Hall home of the family of the early book collector Thomas Isham (Thomas 1988: 260–1). The story must have been the talk

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of literary London when James ventured on his own “pilgrimage,” reversing the direction of the American founding fathers. His tale recounts the fortunes of Clement Searle, an American who comes to England half in quest of a lost inheritance, finds an Elizabethan house, “duly stocked with old pictures, old tapestry, old carvings, old armour, with all the constituent properties of an English manor” ( James 1978: 63), the portrait (by Joshua Reynolds) of an ancestor to whom he bears an unarguable resemblance, and a charming, unmarried cousin. The tale moves through romance and melodrama to pathos. Shakespeare’s “Passionate Pilgrim” may echo behind this, but James has swerved some distance from his Venus and Adonis in tonal register, context, and treatment. The first words uttered by the tale’s protagonist are “Horrible, horrible!” (James 1978: 45), recalling the ghost of Hamlet’s father, while the narrator mingles Antony and Cleopatra with The Tempest: “O mighty world . . . to hold at once so rare an Italy and so brave an England!” (James 1978: 53) and “Listen! The air is thick with arrested voices” ( James 1978: 91). Smollett and Boswell, Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, Dickens, and Tennyson are also invoked as cultural markers, just as English and European masters, Lely and Kneller, Vandyke, Rubens, Rembrandt, Claude, Murillo, Greuze, and Gainsborough, are woven into the tapestry of the visual arts, and Oxford is added to London in the touristic itinerary: the coffee-room of the Red Lion inn, Covent Garden, the Bank of England, Hampton Court, and Christ Church Meadow jumble into the picturesque mise-en-scène. “A Passionate Pilgrim” sounds “the sombre charm of London, the mighty mothercity of our mighty race” ( James 1978: 58) to excess, but it does so consciously. The tale can scarcely justify the proclamation that “There are few sensations so exquisite in life as to stand with a companion in a foreign land and inhale to the depths of your consciousness the alien burden of the air and the tonic picturesqueness of things” ( James 1978: 51). But James is setting out here, with the exuberance of inexperience perhaps, but a qualifying irony too, what is to become his cultural field of action. The phrasing fraught with sentimentality in 1870 re-echoes poignantly at the opening, a decade later, of James’s most celebrated expression of Englishness in The Portrait of a Lady, where, “Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.” The motifs of inheritance and pilgrimage, the unmarried lady of a certain age, the lure of ghosts, the weight of the past, and the exigency of wealth to sustain a certain style of life, located within a culture sustained by colonial fables of care veering towards imperial myths of dominance, mediated through a narrative point of view at once implicated yet semi-detached: these inform James’s work throughout his career. The paradigm persists though his treatment of the themes evolves. Britain constitutes neither paradise lost nor a promised land, but a field of life: experience available to the imagination precisely because it is coded alien. Here in terms accessible yet distinct for the novelist is the cultural location of his central concern: the constitution of the self in due relation to others, and to the full possibilities of phenomenal existence, in the teeth of entrenched interests and the threat of failure.

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As for Shakespeare: although James was regretfully compelled by ill health to decline the British Academy’s invitation to deliver the Shakespeare Tercentenary lecture of 1916 (Horne 1999: 564), he had in 1907 written an introduction to The Tempest, considering what Shakespeare signifies. James savors “the Questions . . . the innumerable dim ghosts that flit, like startled game at eventide, through the deep dusk of our speculation” ( James 1968d: 343), surrounding “the subject itself intact and unconscious, seated as unwinking and inscrutable as a divinity in a temple, save for that vague flicker of derision, the only response to our interpretative heat, which adds the last beauty to its face” ( James 1968d: 344). Shakespeare’s power, specific though scarcely definable, is “the joy of sovereign science” ( James 1968d: 345). It is neither the works of Shakespeare nor the dramatic technique that James seizes on, but the writer as myth: the type of genius. Shakespeare exemplifies artistry at a level beyond emulation, and “unresistingly aware, in the depths of his genius, that nothing like it had ever been known, or probably would ever be again known, on earth” (James 1968d: 345). What James celebrates here is the consummation of consciousness, distilled into the “intact . . . unconscious”: the equipoise of the artist who has arrived. If Shakespeare is blissfully beyond competition, authors of the contemporary canon offer a challenge. Thackeray, amongst the novelists named by Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove as the creators of their idea of London ( James 1965: 114, 127), offers an English version of Balzacian realism, the “solidity of specification” that James thought “the supreme virtue of a novel” ( James 1968c: 86–7). James, however, can wrongfoot him technically, as he does in the preface to his own “realistic” novel The Tragic Muse, where The Newcomes is grouped with Dumas’ Les Trois mousquetaires and Tolstoy’s Peace and War [sic]: it “has life” but “what do such large loose baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary, artistically mean?” ( James 1962: 84) Thackeray’s fiction belongs to a period when “there was a comfortable, good-humoured feeling abroad that a novel is a novel, as a pudding is a pudding, and that our only business with it could be to swallow it” ( James 1968c: 78). That James digested Thackeray is evident in frequent mentions of The Newcomes, Pendennis, and Vanity Fair; but what the work represents is a former world, “naif” and ripe for conquest by an international author au fait with Turgenev’s notions of the “architecture” of the novel ( James 1962: 43) and ready to practice a consciously selective “fabulist’s art.” George Eliot provides stiffer competition, though James also attacks her structural control: Middlemarch is “a treasure-house of details but it is an indifferent whole” ( James 1873: 424). Yet James praises the “really philosophic” scope of “a mind in which imagination is illumined by faculties rarely found in fellowship with it” ( James 1873: 424), and he places Eliot in relation to contemporary men of science, Darwin and Huxley, as well as novelists from Fielding to Dickens. Writing to his father on first meeting George Eliot, the young pretender’s irreverence, couched in the terms of romance, is punctuated by the vocabulary of power: “Yes behold me literally in love with this great horse-faced blue-stocking. I don’t know in what the charm lies,

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but it is thoroughly potent” ( James 1974: 116). In published criticism and his own prefaces, James pays George Eliot serious attention. She creates his model for the female protagonist as the primary fictional vehicle of human consciousness. Hetty Sorrel and even Dinah Morris in Adam Bede may be “frail vessels” (George Eliot is twice quoted by James in his preface to The Portrait of a Lady), but Maggie Tulliver, Dorothea Brooke, and Gwendolen Harleth are women of substance, complex characters who foreshadow James’s heroines of resistance from Daisy Miller to Isabel Archer, Maisie and Nanda to Milly Theale and Maggie Verver: those who “insist on mattering.” Ideologically committed to the “religion of humanity,” and with a reverence for human capacity equalled by her acknowledgment of individual responsibility, George Eliot develops the fictional mode of realism to extend the scope of the novel in two directions. The complexity of the social organism is matched by the intricacies of personal psychology, rendered dramatically and symbolically though mediated by the omniscient narrator. If James, as her junior, took a critical line on George Eliot as his magisterial precursor, there can be no doubt of her importance to his own achievement. She was the voice of the serious English novel, “a voice soft and rich as that of a counselling angel – a mingled sagacity and sweetness” ( James 1974: 116): a voice both to answer the French writers James had met in Paris before he settled in London, and to respond to his New England heritage from Emerson to Hawthorne. George Eliot’s novel form is calibrated to convey the interconnectedness of human experience: an ethical as well as a phenomenal reality. Such an ambitious purpose is what James ostensibly critiques in “Daniel Deronda: A Conversation” (1876), where his imaginary speaker Constantius opines, “Yes, I think there is little art in Deronda, but I think there is a vast amount of life,” and Theodora responds, “It is full of beauty and knowledge, and that is quite art enough for me.” Pulcheria closes the debate, “(to the little dog) We are silenced, darling, but we are not convinced, are we?” ( James 1962: 77). Ironically, it is in the uses of silence, specifically in relation to knowledge, that James’s appropriation from George Eliot is most fully articulated. The Portrait of a Lady follows Middlemarch (as F. R. Leavis discussed in The Great Tradition, 1948) as the chronicle of a failed marriage, and James sites Isabel’s marital home where Eliot’s Dorothea spent her miserable honeymoon, in Rome: the eternal city standing for unending despair. George Eliot devotes three chapters to her heroine’s initiation into the miseries of frustration, using a vocabulary of passionate recoil which is essentially moral, and only figuratively physical, to signify sexual catastrophe for “a girl whose ardent nature turned all her small allowance of knowledge into principles, fusing her actions into their mould, and whose quick emotions gave the most abstract things the quality of a pleasure or a pain” (Eliot 2004: 180). Two passages on a single page (180) express Dorothea’s sufferings phenomenologically and symbolically, in ways that find an echo in James. First the grandeur of St.

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Peter’s is enlisted with a kind of monstrous redundancy of substance to act figuratively as a pathological symptom for Dorothea’s state of mind, not just now but throughout her life. The sentence structure laboriously accumulates the oppressive weight of the girl’s situation, while the invasive advance of the image from figurative “magic-lantern pictures” via spectacular mosaics to the physical inner eye is horrific: Our moods are apt to bring with them images which succeed each other like the magiclantern pictures of a doze; and in certain states of dull forlornness Dorothea all her life continued to see the vastness of St. Peter’s, the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics above, and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina.

The passage haunts James, but its reflections in his work are, intriguingly, more positive, less grotesque. The sense of foreboding collapsing distinct periods of psychological development into the recurrent experience of dissociation, caught in Dorothea’s “certain states of dull forlornness,” is re-echoed as Isabel Archer returns towards the end of The Portrait of a Lady from Rome to Gardencourt where Ralph is dying. As she sits on the train, “She had plenty to think about; but it was neither reflection nor conscious purpose that filled her mind. Disconnected visions passed through it, and sudden dull gleams of memory, of expectation” ( James 1995a: 595). Then, in What Maisie Knew, James recalls the “phantasmagoric” imagery of magic-lantern pictures, to figure the infant Maisie’s confused but acute sense of her precarious annexation to a drama of sexual betrayal which is inaccessible but crucial to the child. “ She was taken into the confidence of passions on which she fixed just the stare she might have had for images bounding across the wall in the slide of a magic lantern” ( James 1969: 21). The childish game is tellingly counterpoised against her parent’s erotic irresponsibility: “Strange shadows dancing on a sheet” ( James 1969: 21). Dorothea’s innocence, her misery, and its source in the dangers of adult sexuality is recast here, but the fantastic magic-lantern image is retained. In Middlemarch, the narrator withdraws to the distance of generalized observation, only to amplify once again the force of her figurative drama: That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotions of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

Silence here acts like a green baize door between distinct levels of consciousness, standing for the social prohibition on the discourse of sexuality. Dorothea’s presumably unconsummated marriage is unspeakable. For James’s heroine, the abyss is

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differently situated, but he uses a comparable technique to articulate the inexpressible precisely through suppression: not once, but by a structural sleight of hand, twice over. The early years of Isabel’s dreadful marriage are actually excised from the narrative in a two-year gap between chapters 35 and 36; but in chapter 39 there is the briefest possible acknowledgment of the chasm within that chronological fissure: “She had lost her child; that was a sorrow, but it was a sorrow she scarcely spoke of; there was more to say about it than she could say to Ralph” ( James 1995a: 422). It is of course Gilbert Osmond, the most sinister of James’s expatriates, who enjoins on Isabel (herself an American abroad) the mute oppression of decorum; and the silent fissures of their union are European rather than British in complexion. Yet The Portrait of a Lady is the novel where James makes the most articulate use of Englishness, in culture, ideology, but first and most memorably, in place. The novel opens at the close of the afternoon, at tea in Gardencourt, where the house and grounds, its geographical and historical location, its furnishings, even to the very dogs in attendance – a bustling terrier who takes to Isabel, and a beautiful collie “watching the master’s face almost as tenderly as the master took in the still more magisterial physiognomy of the house” ( James 1995a: 19) – substantiate in every detail the significance of English ceremony, which is not a ceremony of innocence but of custom and concord. Indeed, tea for American bankers on the lawns of an Elizabethan country house might be seen in the light of a wry postcolonial comment from a former Bostonian. So James makes these characters, in anticipation of Isabel’s eventual unraveling of her own position, piquantly conscious of their ambiguous privilege. Mrs. Touchett is “not fond of the English style of life”: “She detested bread-sauce . . . objected to the consumption of beer by her maid-servants; and she affirmed that the British laundress . . . was not a mistress of her art” ( James 1995a: 38). Mr. Touchett “had no intention of disamericanising” ( James 1995a: 54), as the narrator’s convoluted coinage underlines. Her host indicates to Isabel (an ironic foreshadowing of her coming deception by Americans concealing their own prehistory) the negative quality of English conventionality: “They’ve got everything pretty well fixed. . . . It’s all settled beforehand – they don’t leave it to the last moment” ( James 1995a: 75). Even Ralph speaks, surely for James, in acknowledgment that “[O]ne doesn’t give up one’s country any more than one gives up one’s grandmother. They’re both antecedent to choice – elements of one’s composition that are not to be eliminated” ( James 1995a: 109). On the other hand, England signifies positive values, as Isabel recognizes in Lord Warburton, a “specimen of an English gentleman” ( James 1995a: 83), and in the quiet eyes of his sisters the Misses Molyneux: “the peace, the kindness, the honour, the possessions, a deep security” as well as something unacceptable (and again, intriguingly phrased by James) “a great exclusion” ( James 1995a: 154). At the end, Isabel comes back to Gardencourt and Ralph’s deathbed, “even quieter” than at first, and able now to see the ghosts she longed for; though she is also strong enough to make the decision finally to leave.

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James too returns, in his preface to The Portrait of a Lady, written twenty-six years later for the New York Edition. Concerned with the story of his story, the circumstances and procedures of writing, James develops several important critical ideas in this preface; but he also leaves traces of stories untold, and perhaps suppressed. So he mentions in passing that “I had, within the few preceding years, come to live in London, and the ‘international’ light lay, in those days, to my sense, thick and rich upon the scene” ( James 1962: 57–8), but he swerves away: “It was the light in which so much of the picture hung. But that is another matter. There really is too much to say.” Yet, earlier in the preface, he has confessed: “Strangely fertilising, in the long run, does a wasted effort of imagination often prove” ( James 1962: 41–2). That moment is associated with Venice; this with London, and his early residence there: the time when James presumably visited what probably became the model for Gardencourt, Hardwick House, on the banks of the Thames forty miles from London. Venice is associated in James’s biography with one episode of “waste”: the suicide of his close friend Constance Fenimore Woolson in 1894. Hardwick House was lived in from 1877 by Charles Day Rose, whose mother, Charlotte Temple, was the aunt of James’s cousin, Minnie Temple (Richards 1981). Her death of tuberculosis in 1870 was the epitome of waste; but her bright promise provokes all James’s American girls: here in Isabel Archer. The preface picks up the theme of waste; the first adult experience of England; the figure of the female protagonist, as treated by a series of British authors, from George Eliot to Shakespeare, and Dickens to Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson. It also elaborates the image of the house itself. Here, James imagines “the house of fiction,” with “a number of possible windows not to be reckoned . . . ; every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will” ( James 1962: 46). The conceit, generally construed as an illustration of “point of view,” also bears the weight of the author’s self-construction: his individual need. In the context of his developing career, James’s “structural” phraseology takes on a different urgency: “They are but windows at the best, mere holes in a dead wall, disconnected, perched aloft; they are not hinged doors opening straight upon life.” James goes on to work with the figure of his protagonist too in an interiorized architectural setting: the “dusky, crowded, heterogeneous backshop of the mind” (James 1962: 47), which he envisages at some length in terms that clearly anticipate his later novel, The Golden Bowl, and the two figures there of Charlotte Stant and Maggie Verver, who haunt such places both in literal and figurative inflections of reality, circling around the dealer’s in Bloomsbury where the bowl is found. For the present, The Portrait of a Lady itself is “the large building” ( James 1962: 48) under construction. Gardencourt, Hardwick, England, personal and professional opportunity, and the threat of waste, circling around the figure of the American girl, and marshaled through the discipline of fictional architecture, provide material even richer than this novel can contain: material for more work, throughout James’s career, and the subject of reflection in the late phase of the prefaces to the New York Edition.

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George Eliot contributes to the conception of the novel for James, and there is more than coincidental similarity linking their work, but the relationship is neither one of influence nor mastery, but rather of enablement. Eliot’s “circumference” ( James 1974: 116) is encouraging to James in ways perhaps analogous to that of Emerson, for whom this was also a significant term: it is a promise of scope and significance. In an essay on James and Britain the list of writers who play some part in his finding and modulating his authorial voice is extensive. It includes poets and prose writers as well as novelists and playwrights: Tennyson and Browning beside Carlyle, Arnold, and Ruskin; Scott from the early nineteenth century, but Stevenson near the end, and even H. G. Wells in the twentieth century, with whom James had a close literary friendship that became combative as late as 1915. When Wells satirized James’s style: “It is a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost, even at the cost of its dignity, upon picking up a pea” (Wells 1915), James replied, not with a counter-attack, but reaffirming his own aesthetic: “It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its progress” (Horne 1999: 555). What James gains from each literary encounter resists analysis, since his reading is appropriative: he takes and transforms. When friends offered manuscripts, James replied with a goodwill that invariably gave way to critical candor of devastating clarity. So, acknowledging Edmund Gosse’s romance The Secret of Narcisse (1892) as “your beautiful tale . . . very graceful, very easy . . . curious, naturally, and picturesque,” within four sentences James is writing: “What I am really struggling thus ungraciously to say is that I think it is a defect in the execution of the little problem to which you addressed yourself that it is not, as we say, more personal” (Horne 1999: 252). Faced with a “situation” or donnée, he could only begin to “treat” it as his own. His dialogue with British authors is therefore an extension of the interrogative conversation with himself that James conducted throughout his notebooks and other critical writings. All are marked by the same energy and excitement, the same rhythms and figurative drama, as his fictional prose. This stylistic engagement is what illuminates James’s most intriguing British literary involvement, that with Charles Dickens: a creative struggle that persisted throughout James’s life, generating enormous energy. Certainly, James overtly denied this. Leon Edel (1953–72: 100) remarks that James avoided direct critical analysis of this great predecessor, unlike George Eliot, Balzac, even Hawthorne. Dickens was different. In 1880 James declined to write on Dickens for the English Men of Letters series (Horne 1990: 195). He reviewed Our Mutual Friend in damning terms: “Bleak House was forced; Little Dorrit was laboured; the present work is dug out with a spade and pickaxe” ( James 1968a: 31). Yet the autobiography tells a different story. Dickens’s influence on the young James is invoked obliquely at first via the recollection of Dickens adaptations for the stage, and the vivid Cruickshank illustrations. The novels are introduced through family readings, and a dramatic encounter with David

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Copperfield ( James 1913: 124). But behind these memories lies a “power” that is still a “presence.” Encoded in James’s figurative lexicon is a creation myth. Dickens is the very “author” of being – the great taboo: Such at least was to be the force of the Dickens imprint, however applied, in the soft clay of our generation; it was to resist so serenely the wash of the waves of time. To be brought up thus against the author of it, or to speak at all of the dawn of one’s early consciousness of it and of his presence and power, is to begin to tread ground at once sacred and boundless. ( James 1913: 122)

The Dickens imprint leaves traces throughout James: verbal and figurative, in the energy of metaphor; structural, in the use of tonal alternation and the scenic frame; in genre and mode, particularly interweaving melodrama with romance. Both James and Dickens are masters of expression, fascinated by the limits of articulacy. Both challenge the cultural values incorporated in a society characterized by economic exchange. They respect what resists commodification: a quality celebrated by Dickens in the child and the childlike, but shared in James by figures as remote as Shakespeare, “the subject itself intact and unconscious” and Catherine Sloper, mute over her embroidery, “for life, as it were” at the conclusion of Washington Square. The “Dickensian” appears in James’s verbal and figurative strategies: the dissecting eye which reads the body as an assemblage of sexual, social, moral, spiritual, or philosophical signs. This James is the anatomist who tracks Fleda Vetch moving on metaphorical tiptoe while Mona Brigstock keeps “dropping her eyes, as she walked, to catch the sheen of her patent-leather shoes, which resembled a man’s and which she kicked forward a little – it gave her an odd movement – to help her see what she thought of them” ( James 1967: 23): the physical gait choreographing (and the sentence rhythm orchestrating) an inner drama of self-appraisal as an aspect of romantic rivalry. Self-consciousness, James’s fictional hallmark, is not generally associated with Dickens, but this is a critical oversight. The preface to The Tale of Two Cities (1859) traces like a tragic drama the evolution of a work which “throughout its execution . . . has had complete possession of me” in a densely self-referential and selfconscious analysis of the process of creation, where Dickens sounds like James, both in subject and syntax. Conversely, in the preface to What Maisie Knew, playing with a series of images from childish games to a pet dog on the loose, James sounds like Dickens, almost reduced to excited spectatorship as the creatures of his imagination take on an unruly life of their own. Just as Dickens’s preface focused on the author’s experience in terms linked with the themes of his novel – “execution” here becomes a macabre figure of speech – so James’s preface to What Maisie Knew explores the dynamic of the work in tandem with that of the writer. The novelist’s pursuit of his theme is positively sporting, and what he enjoys is precisely its independence:

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Once “out,” like a house-dog of a temper above confinement, it defies the mere whistle, it roams, it hunts, it seeks out and “sees” life; it can be brought back but by hand and then only to take its futile thrashing. ( James 1962: 144)

Conversely, “another and well-nigh equal charm – equal in spite of its being almost independent of the acute constructional, the endless expressional question” is the challenge of Maisie’s “resistance” to discovery: Successfully to resist (to resist, that is, the strain of observation and the assault of experience) what would that be, on the part of so young a person but to remain fresh, and still fresh, and to have even a freshness to communicate? ( James 1962: 146)

Her “freshness” is the answer to his scrabbling earlier, when, like the sporting dog which popped up first as the figure of his theme, the author caught the trail of something pungent: It lurked in the crude postulate like a buried scent; the more attention hovered the more it became aware of the fragrance. To which I may add that the more I scratched the surface and penetrated, the more potent, to the intellectual nostril, became this virtue. ( James 1962: 141)

That “virtue” has shifted from the “buried scent” of James’s donnée to Maisie’s power to “remain fresh . . . and to have even a freshness to communicate.” What James is doing – returning to Dickens’s theme of the child, and recognizing that child as central to his story’s technique – is celebrating through her “freshness to communicate,” “some continuity of resistance” which constitutes the core of the novel. For all the technical dexterity of this highly plotted and brilliantly worked, very adult text, Maisie survives, through the resistance of her childhood. In this she is not the passive subject but the active agent of her story. Her agency is “of the essence of the subject,” and it is this essence which achieves a “presence and power” in the novel that both challenge and paradoxically confirm the presence and power of the author. The artistry, passion, and intellect of Dickens and James operate in all aspects of their work. They emerge in the imagery of their analytical prose and the narrative of memory. Both have a way with words: the inner ear which picks up the false note, or spies the dormant image, and works through metaphor. This subversive poetics relates to the issue of creation: the “execution” which is “done and suffered” – the drama of the novel, reflected in preparatory writings and supplementary prefaces as well as the text proper. It also links with the thematic interest in vulnerability, particularly in the treatment of the child. No wonder it is David Copperfield that surfaces in James’s autobiography, an autobiography which itself emerges out of the project to tell his brother’s, and his father’s, lives. It is Dickens’s London that lurks behind the construction of “Britain” even in late James. The Wings of the Dove opens in a “vulgar little room” where James’s anti-heroine

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is waiting for her father: “changing her place, moving from the shabby sofa to the armchair upholstered in a glazed cloth that gave at once – she had tried it – the sense of the slippery and the sticky” ( James 1965: 5). The furniture, in Dickensian fashion, gives substantial, almost animate, form to the ethical slide Kate Croy is destined to execute in her plot. When Milly Theale comes “to see the places she had read about” ( James 1965: 99), she inaugurates her career as both victim and mistress of her situation by recognizing that the working and the worked were, in London . . . the parties to every relation. . . . The worker in one connexion was the worked in another; it was as broad as it was long – with the wheels of the system, as might be seen, wonderfully oiled. ( James 1965: 118)

James’s “system” is a Dickensian conceit – indeed it might recall or may even originate in the Reverend Chadband from Bleak House, whose conspicuous consumption of eatables and spewing forth of religiose hot air suggested “a good deal of train oil in his system” (Dickens 1996: 304). As Lord Mark extricates information from Milly about Kate, she recognizes that she had, on the spot, with her first plunge into the obscure depths of a society constituted from far back, encountered the interesting phenomenon of complicated, of possibly sinister, motive. ( James 1965: 102)

In The Golden Bowl, while three protagonists are American and the fourth Italian, “the obscure depths of a society constituted from far back” are again realized in British terms. It is worth noting how securely Book 1 “The Prince” is placed in London, Brighton, and the country house at Matcham, with an adulterous interlude (improbably, even cheekily) in Gloucester, while Maggie’s Book 2 is less grounded: opening with the pagoda of her own fancy, prowling through Fawns like a staged miseen-scène, and haunted by the American city of Adam’s intended destination. The Princess lives in her imagination, though the machiavels make free of England: “The Prince had always liked his London . . . ; he was one of the modern Romans who find by the Thames a more convincing image of the truth of the ancient state than any they have left by the Tiber” ( James 1995b: 3). This is a field of conquest, where “objects, massive and lumpish, in silver and gold” are displayed in a Bond Street window “as if, in the insolence of Empire, they had been the loot of far-off victories.” Adam’s town house is in “Portland Place, where Mr Verver had pitched a tent suggesting that of Alexander furnished with the spoils of Darius” (James 1995b: 13). American economic imperialism fetches up in England as the British earlier asserted their dominance over the world, and Rome, and Alexander before them. James is steeped in the social realities and political economy of his adoptive home; but he brings to bear on it both a historical comparativism and the culturally alert intelligence of the observer abroad. What he makes of his material can be indicated from his preface to The Golden Bowl, where he recounts the search for appropriate

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photographic subjects to accompany his New York Edition. He is in search of a correlative image: one that will not illustrate, but stand beside what he has to say; and this is what London itself is to do for his novel: The thing was to induce the vision of Portland Place to generalise itself. This is precisely, however, the fashion after which the prodigious city . . . does on occasion meet halfway those forms of intelligence of it that it recognises. All of which meant that at a given moment the great featureless Philistine vista would itself perform a miracle, would become interesting, for a splendid atmospheric hour, as only London knows how; and that our business would be then to understand. ( James 1962: 335)

James’s “business” with Britain throughout his career was to engage with “the prodigious” phenomenon of a culture that was “constituted from far back,” with all the density impacted by custom, but remarkable, “interesting,” to the observer. He lived in England to work there, but kept that edge of otherness: even in 1905 he could propose to Edith Wharton: This absurd old England is still, after long years, so marvellous to me, & the visitation of beautiful old houses (as to “buy” – seeing them as one then sees them,) such a refinement of bliss. Won’t you come out with Pagello, & a luncheon-basket, & feign at least an intention of purchase – taking me with you to do the lying? (Horne 1999: 422)

Eventually, the British literary establishment honored James, commissioning a portrait by Sargent, paid for by subscription, and now in the National Portrait Gallery. James decided in 1915 to take citizenship, to affirm his support for the British stand in the Great War. In the New Year’s Honours list of 1916 he was awarded the Order of Merit, and when he died in February there was debate over a memorial in Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey, where a memorial marker rests today. James’s most enduring memorial, however, was in his work, and the contribution he made to British letters. As he found inspiration and provocation in the English novel, so the Master became a model for later generations. Joseph Conrad explains why in terms that link James’s most abstract psychological and philosophical concerns with his immediate cultural context: Fiction is history – human history – or it is nothing. But it is also more than that; it stands on firmer ground, being based on the reality of forms and the observation of social phenomena. . . . Mr. Henry James is the historian of fine consciences. (Conrad 1945: 44)

References and Further Reading Conrad, Joseph (1945) “Henry James: An Appreciation (January 1905).” In F. W. Dupee (ed.)

The Question of Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays. New York: Henry Holt.

Henry James and Britain Dickens, Charles (1952 [1859]). A Tale of Two Cities. London: Collins. Dickens, Charles (1996 [1853]). Bleak House. Ed. Nicola Bradbury. London: Penguin. Edel, Leon (1953–72). The Life of Henry James. 5 vols. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott. Eliot, George (2004 [1871–2]). Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life. Ed. Gregory Maertz. Toronto: Broadview. Horne, Philip (1990). Henry James and Revision. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Horne, Philip (1999). Henry James: A Life in Letters. London: Allen Lane, Penguin. James, Henry (1873). “Middlemarch.” Unsigned review, Galaxy, 15 (March): 424–8. James, Henry (1887 [1879]). Hawthorne. London: Macmillan. James, Henry (1913). A Small Boy and Others. London: Macmillan. James, Henry (1960 [1905]). “London.” In Alma Louise Lowe (ed.) English Hours. Illustrations by Anthony Gross. London: Heinemann. James, Henry (1962 [1934]). The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces by Henry James. With an Introduction by R. P. Blackmur. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. James, Henry (1965 [1902]). The Wings of the Dove. London: Penguin. James, Henry (1967 [1897]). The Spoils of Poynton. London: Penguin. James, Henry (1968a [1865]). “Our Mutual Friend.” In Morris Shapira (ed.) Henry James Selected Literary Criticism (pp. 31–5). London: Peregrine. James, Henry (1968b [1876]). “Daniel Deronda: A conversation.” In Morris Shapira (ed.) Henry James Selected Literary Criticism (pp. 60–77). London: Peregrine.

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James, Henry (1968c [1884]). “The Art of Fiction.” In Morris Shapira (ed.) Henry James Selected Literary Criticism (pp. 78–97). London: Peregrine. James, Henry (1968d). “The Tempest 1907.” In Morris Shapira (ed.) Henry James Selected Literary Criticism (pp. 343–57) London: Peregrine. James, Henry (1969 [1897]). What Maisie Knew. London: Penguin. James, Henry (1974). Henry James Letters, Vol. 1: 1843–75. 5 vols. Ed. Leon Edel. London: Macmillan. James, Henry (1978 [1871]). “A Passionate Pilgrim” In Maqbool Aziz (ed.) The Tales of Henry James, Vol. 2: 1870–1874 (pp. 42–101). Oxford: Clarendon Press. James, Henry (1995a [1881]). The Portrait of a Lady. Rpt. with introduction and notes by Nicola Bradbury. Oxford: Oxford University Press. James, Henry (1995b [1904]). The Golden Bowl. Rpt. with introduction and notes by Nicola Bradbury. London: Wordsworth. Moore, Harry T. (1974). Henry James and His World. London: Thames and Hudson. Richards, Bernard (1981). “Transformed into fiction: Henry James and Hardwick House.” Country Life (October 29): 1500–3. Thomas, Alan G. (1988). Great Books and Book Collectors. London: Spring Books. Tintner, Adeline (1987). The Book World of Henry James: Appropriating the Classics. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. Wells, H. G. (1915). “Of art, of literature, of Mr. Henry James.” In Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and the Last Trump: Being a First Selection from the Literary Remains of George Boon, Appropriate to the Times. London.

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Henry James in France Julie Wolkenstein

If not in his heart, France held a foremost place in James’s memory. One of his oldest remembrances came from there (he was not even two years old), when he had seen the column Vendôme: Conveyed along the Rue St-Honoré while I waggled my small feet, as I definitely remember doing, under my flowing robe, I had crossed the Rue de Castiglione and taken in, for all my time, the admirable aspect of the Place and the column Vendôme. ( James 1956: 33)

As a child he regularly traveled to France with his family, staying either in Paris or in Boulogne-sur-Mer, precociously initiated to the French aesthetic and cultural patrimony, French literature and museums. In 1875 and 1876, he spent one year in France. As a correspondent for the New York Tribune he rapidly became bored and left France. He had been on good terms with a literary circle, meeting Turgenev, Flaubert, Edmond de Goncourt, Zola, and Maupassant. But at the same time, he placed some distance now between himself and the French novel that had inspired him. As Mona Ozouf wrote: We can read the disgust James felt in his most determinate admirations . . . In his eyes, Flaubert lacks charm and soul. . . . As for the great Balzac, from whom James drew his approach of French regions, he thought, unlike for George Eliot, that he never managed to draw the humane, tolerant portrait of a woman. It is probably from there that comes the gallery of steely French women, who blend intellectual intensity and moral dryness, in James’s own novels. (Ozouf 1998: 194–5)

It’s worth noting that while in touch with this writers group in Paris, he was glad to share their fascination for style. Ozouf elaborates:

A Companion to Henry James. Edited by Greg W. Zacharias © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-14042-3

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So started his artistic emancipation, from the decency which so evidently printed James’s evolution as critic, between French Poets and Novelists written in his youth and the Notes on the Novelists from his maturity, without forgetting Partial Portraits and Essays in London. . . . James discovered the serious passion those “unclean” writers invested in their discussions about art. This seriousness was about form, while the Anglo-Saxon novel, maybe because it was mainly illustrated by women, did not care about formal requirements. (Ozouf 1998: 200–1)

Through the years, James enriched his experience and knowledge of France, without ever departing from a certain reserve toward the country: England reassured him, Italy seduced him, but French history and habits remained unfamiliar to him. So that France, compared to its two European neighbors, did not appear very often in his work. Rather than attempting to survey James’s opinions and attitudes about France, it seems more interesting to look mainly at two novels, The Portrait of a Lady and The Ambassadors, where we can see the phantasmic image he gives of France in his fiction and observe the literary or pictorial connotations of France in the eyes of American characters who travel in that country, dream it, reinvent it. Through these novels especially, and in their relation to each other, we shall study the representation of France James worked out in his fiction.

The American, The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, and the French Ancien Régime When The Portrait of a Lady dedicated only a few pages to Paris, reducing its appearance to a parenthesis within the initiatory journey leading Isabel to Italy, France appeared in two different ways, heterogeneous but coherent. The heterogeneous way was made of descriptive or analytical elements, most of which were concentrated in the chapter taking place in Paris. These elements are taken essentially from historical and aesthetic registers, and aim to evoke Paris in the eighteenth century more than the emerging Third Republic. Faithful to her democratic principles, Henrietta Stackpole alone reacts to the historical. In the late fall of 1871, barely six months after the Commune, we would expect Thiers’ France, more than England, placed under the sign of historical fracture and reform. However, in James’s novel, a repressive system was set up, borrowing the older times for the present, under the form of a systematic setback, which stopped at the end of the ancien régime, one century earlier. To evoke that older time, James uses a minor character, an American living in Paris, Mr. Luce. Luce’s surname (Luce, from the Latin lux, “light”) revealed the era selected by James as the most suitable to France. Its place in the novel was to be the Age of Enlightenment. Luce regretted the Second Empire, but more for aesthetic than political reasons. He missed the court’s rebuilt splendor; with some imagination, which he did not seem to have, he could have rebuilt the original royal setting.

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In the same way, Edward Rosier’s obsession for style guided his choice of a Parisian residence. As a collector of precious bibelots, he naturally went back to older times than his friend Mr. Luce, and thus invoked the preeminence of the eighteenth century in the representation of France. The text lingers twice over Versailles, among all Parisian monuments, again through Henrietta: “There were no dukes and marquises there now; she remembered on the contrary one day when there were five American families, walking all round” ( James 1984: 540). Henrietta analyzed the course of history in terms of personal statistics and telescoped several scenes from different periods, announcing a world-scale truth: only the American presence could endow modern values on the vestiges of that royal past. Beyond these few allusions to French history, we find a few more references to French literature, solely presented through the romantic period, following the same principle of looking to the past. Osmond’s late mother is evoked in the text through her nickname of “Corinne américaine.” This process was precisely the one which delegated to some characters a demand for their anachronistic quality. Their seeming to belong to a remote period marks the retrospective way France is presented throughout the novel. Such glances into the last years of monarchy appeared in other episodes than the Parisian one, through Madame Merle’s words. While chattering, she gives herself, as a joke, some strange, but significant, origins: “I’m old, stale and faded,” she said more than once . . . “I speak as if I were a hundred years old, you say? Well, I am, if you please; I was born before the French Revolution. Ah, my dear, je viens de loin; I belong to the old, old world.” ( James 1984: 247–8)

Beyond the exaggeration and the supernatural implications of such an assertion, we are given to read here the deep relationship between the two most romantic characters, Osmond and Madame Merle, and other heroes from French literature at the end of the eighteenth century. Thus the second way in which France is presented in the novel is an intertextual one: the clear reference, in the setting of the plot itself, to Les Liaisons dangereuses, by Choderlos de Laclos. This intertextual moment is easily overlooked. But the coincidence between the dramatic structure in Les Liaisons and The Portrait did not occur by chance. The analysis of the balance of power which developed between three people – an elderly widow, her former and still-attractive lover, and an innocent victim – was odd enough to ascribe its presence to James’s intention. The two novels, moreover, show an obvious similitude, even in their outcome: in both cases, there is a marked plot reversal and the victim achieves a relative victory. Indeed, at the end of Les Liaisons, Madame de Tourvel dies, but only after prompting Valmont’s jealousy and his death. As for Isabel, she chooses to assume her position of abused woman and makes Osmond pay for his abuse with exile. There is an important difference, of course, between the two plots in terms of Isabel’s character: she did not have Cécile’s innocent stupidity nor the president’s

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Christian virtue, and even borrowed some of Merteuil’s features. Symmetrical games might have perverse effects: Pansy’s love – like Cécile, she just left the convent – for Rosier, supposedly some avatar of the Chevalier Danceny, was sustained by Isabel, who saw a way to counter the young woman’s wedding with her former suitor, Lord Warburton. In doing so, Isabel partially reproduced Madame de Merteuil’s attitude, who, while encouraging Cécile’s love, pushed her towards Valmont in order to jeopardize her wedding with one of her former suitors. Finally, a comparison between the two works underlines the aristocratic connotation of Madame Merle’s appearance when we note the similarity of her last name with that of her model, Madame de Merteuil. This is the same sort of transformation as that of Valmont into Osmond. The most melodramatic aspect of Isabel’s destiny, her realization that she is Osmond’s victim, did not, however, fortuitously come from this French fiction. Instead, James’s attention to Isabel’s consciousness of her situation stresses the anti-realistic status of France in the novel rather than the more historical social dimensions of the perversity of power attributed to Old Europe. James implicitly used another source from French literature in his essay on Flaubert in 1902, more than twenty years after the publication of both The Portrait of a Lady and Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale: Our complaint is that Emma Bovary, in spite of the nature of her consciousness and in spite of her reflecting so much that of her creator, is really too small an affair. . . . if he imagined nothing better for his purpose than such a heroine and such a hero, both such limited reflectors and registers, we are forced to believe it to have been by a defect of his mind. . . . The book is a picture of the middling as much as they like, but does Emma even attain to that? Hers is a narrow middling even for a little imaginative person whose “social” significance is small. It is greater on the whole than her capacity of consciousness, taking this all round; and so, in a word, we feel her less illustrative than she might have been not only if the world had offered her more points of contact, but if she had had more of these to give it. ( James 1963: 222–4)

And if there were a novel which was allusively sketched in The Portrait of a Lady, and which, in a certain way, James were rewriting, it was, of course, Madame Bovary. The following marks the comparison. First, Portrait and Isabel: “A swift carriage, on a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see – that’s my idea of happiness” “Mr. Goodwood certainly did not teach you to say such things as that – like the heroine of an immoral novel.” (James 1984: 219)

The way Isabel repeats, word for word, Emma’s daydreams – “Au galop de quatre chevaux, elle était emportée depuis huit jours vers un pays nouveau” (Flaubert 1972: 258) – also followed by an immediate rebuke, lets us read The Portrait of a Lady as James’s answer to Flaubert, less a charge than a tribute, which at the same time strives

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to surpass its model. Isabel would then only be a sophisticated reincarnation of Madame Bovary, some idealized version which would cover up the drawbacks of Flaubert’s novel, a palimpsest in which James would put into practice the objections formulated twenty years after its writing. An inspired “reflector,” a smart reader, an imaginative heroine, Isabel moves in a hyperbolically fictional world, with which James offered her multiple “points of contact.”1 Isabel or the anti-Emma: such a definition of the character implies that we accept the central position in the novel given to the Romance, to its representation, its criticism, its renewal. Should it be referenced, implicit, integrated in a realistic or metaphorical form, the European novel revealed, just beneath the surface, an original literary project: Isabel’s adventures set a mise en abyme within the reader’s pact and established its limits. France, without ever being a setting, also appears in The Wings of the Dove as a country, similar to its deployment in The Portrait of a Lady, where time stopped and, under the monarchy, remained at a standstill. France constitutes some incongruous allusions, which are all centered on Milly. Susan Stringham formulates the first two, based on a few known elements in her friend’s family past: The luxuriant tribe of which the rare creature was the final flower, the immense extravagant unregulated cluster, with free-living ancestors, handsome dead cousins, lurid uncles, beautiful varnished aunts, persons all busts and curls, preserved, though so exposed, in the marble of famous French chisels. ( James 1986: 126)

Such phantasmagoria, inserting the heroine into a funerary composition, borrowed its libertines and sculptors from French imagery. The second reference is not so clear. Like the previous one, though, it refers to the young American woman’s origins, such as Susan imagines her “forefathers fond of Paris, but not of its higher sides, and fond almost of nothing else” ( James 1986: 128). In its concision, the allusion is ambiguous, for the word “forefathers” prevents the simplest explanation from being convincing, which would be, as for Isabel Archer, the frustration Milly felt when she had come to Europe before with her too-frivolous parents. Paris thus inspires a stereotypical representation, reducing the city to a place of debauchery, rooting it, moreover, despite the lack of all credibility, in the preceding century. In The Wings of the Dove, we find two more explicit occurrences of France, associated with Milly and the ancien régime. The first one is a violent, incongruous image, some strange allegory of pity, which occurs when the young woman first visits her doctor, Sir Luke Strett: “And when pity held up its telltale face like a head on a pike, in a French revolution, bobbing before a window” ( James 1986: 209). The allusion to the Reign of Terror illustrates Milly’s future, linking her destiny to that of French aristocrats. The association between those ideas is strong enough, if not yet founded, for James uses it again, this time from Densher, who explains to Mrs. Lowder the scene of Milly’s defeat “as one might imagine some noble young victim of the scaffold, in the French revolution, separated at the prison-door from some object clutched for resistance” ( James 1986: 468). This reference, depending on the implications of

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Milly’s “princely” status, gives a new morbid variation on this historical theme. Her repeated identification, in front of all the characters, with a princess coming from tragedy, grounds this strange metaphor. It appears during one of the numerous conversations between Densher and Mrs. Lowder, immediately preceding the final interview of the young man with his old enemy. The last time Milly let him see her (a scene that James omits), the textual death of the character, is soon followed by one that is thus presented: The gossip – for it came to as much at Lancaster Gate – wasn’t the less exquisite for his use of the silver veil, nor on the other hand was the veil, so touched, too much drawn aside. He himself for that matter took in the scene again at moments as from the page of a book. ( James 1986: 468)

This last appearance roots Milly more clearly in a French intertextual context. We have already noticed the way James works references to monarchist France in The Portrait of a Lady via Les Liaisons dangereuses. This peculiar intertext also appears in The Wings of the Dove. The resemblance between the two stories becomes still clearer, since, as Valmont did, Densher subordinated the conquest of his victim to the possession of his mistress. Like Madame de Tourvel’s in Les Liaisons dangereuses, the cost of Milly’s seduction was Kate’s surrender, accepting an erotic bargain to ensure the success of her plan. Much more than in Portrait, Wings blends the two love stories and foregrounds Densher’s character, which, like Valmont’s, attains a central position in the structure of the novel. In addition, James might have borrowed from Laclos an ending in which two central characters, now separated from their victim, each discovers thoughts and feelings held in relation to that victimized character. Milly’s posthumous victory looks like Madame de Tourvel’s in the sense that virtue and spiritual love overcome fleshly compromises and personal ambitions. Reading intertextually explains references to France under the monarchy and images of a sacrificed princess accompanying Milly. There are also observations to make about another reference and a consequent intertextual reading. In this reading, the “dove” did not move aside by chance, as Densher believed. Instead, James borrows from the heroine of Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, who, after an agony also marked by the “sublime,” was also covered with a shroud, which materialized through “un voile d’or brodé de perles” (Rousseau 1967: 561). Thus, on a single page, James slid from a novelistic historical vision (a young French aristocrat woman going up to the guillotine) to a metaphor of narrative distance, using the same accessory (a precious veil), and concluded describing the scene as the page of a book, so confirming Densher’s belonging to a precise literary heritage. The Portrait of a Lady illustrates James’s use of intertextual French material, an implicit use of the European motive, reactivated through the single image, in the tradition of the Romance. The example of Laclos enabled us to measure the new status of France. Yet Les Liaisons dangereuses had already appeared in The American, in which James focuses on a self-made man’s naïveté and the French aristocracy’s perversity.

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But two things were lacking to show the essentially literary status of France. First, the virulent denunciation and criticism of European conventions, reduced to a narrow representation of the aristocratic way of life, were related to a social satire more than to an international cultural confrontation. Being American, Christopher Newman corresponds with the pattern, but a local parvenu would have been almost as good. Nontheless, Newman-as-adventurer, lost in the Faubourg Saint-Germain jungle, has something of the Bourgeois Gentilhomme: each hero wants in imagination. In Newman’s case, the novel emphasizes his lack of imagination: Newman did not know anything about painting, he “never read a novel!” (James 1980: 28), he was a “miserable letterwriter” (James 1980: 68). Given such limits, James’s location of Newman at the center of the novel gains humor but sacrifices depth and introspective value. Newman’s incompetence thus prevents the work from rising above mere detail and transcending the confrontation of the the old and new worlds as James represents them. Let’s look at one example of the approach, which here involves Les Liaisons dangereuses. Note how James’s representation of the French work in association with Newman renders its particular meaning in The American: Newman listened attentively to the instructions he gave him before retiring, and took mechanically from his hand a small volume which the surgeon recommended as a help to wakefulness, and which turned out to be an old copy of Les Liaisons dangereuses. ( James 1980: 234)

If this novel had some indirect link with The American, the reference, made via Newman, can occur only on a superficial level and could not cultivate any deeper intertextual dialogue.

The Ambassadors and the “dreadful little old tradition” In The Ambassadors, the way James dealt with the French setting appeared as an aesthetical solution of an ideological paradox. The subject of the novel was not part of any international debate, even if it was inspired by an anecdote which took place in Paris: William Dean Howells’s sudden awareness, in his old age, of time gone and lost. Travels, the experience of difference, the obsession of otherness and possible alteration, were simple means, given to some frantic exploration of what someone was, could have been, would never be. In 1895, when James started the novel, the hero had no definite nationality. Little by little, his condition of being an American man became clear, as well as the setting. As if reluctantly, James seemed to submit to some imperious necessity, both denigrating his choice and stressing its evidence. He was quite conscious of the clichés the story would be exposed to, inserted within the limits of a French context. Written before The Wings of the Dove, but released after, The Ambassadors reprised the theme of the international contrast, even as James may have

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distrusted it. Such a paradox was from an ideological order: James refused to substantiate current prejudices, the literary and sophisticated doxa, which turned France into an univocal symbolical space and reduced it to the coarse elements of corruption, illicit love, and apparently frivolous ways of life. In the New York Edition, he thus summed up his project: There was the dreadful little old tradition, one of the platitudes of the human comedy, that people’s moral scheme does break down in Paris. Another surrounding scene would have done as well for our show could it have represented a place in which Strether’s errand was likely to lie and his crisis to await him. The likely place had the great merit of sparing me preparations. ( James 1985: xxxvii–xxxviii)

Such justification included some contradictions. James was willing to overlook the accuracy of the French setting and its culture. While James makes fun of a tradition going back to Balzac – his reference to the “comédie humaine” – and denies subscribing to it, he also expresses the singularity of the Parisian image and explains his shaping it to the theme of The Ambassadors as a function of easiest utility. James, at the same time, seems to have supposed that his reader would possess the capacity to understand the phantasmal substratum associated with his Paris and also the ability to understand beyond such connotations; a system of reference and the power to forget it. This choice for Paris, made reluctantly between different European places, was more important than James said, since it helped to situate the problem of the point of view. Paris was, finally, the main thing to look at, the one the preface explicitly pointed out as demanding an anamorphic reading and vision. The anamorphosis, in the novel’s title itself, perhaps from Holbein’s picture of the same name, appeared as the aesthetic solution of an ideological paradox, and offered in different ways in the novel. One important consquence of the narrative in The Ambassadors is that it invalidates all the generalizations about France worked out in the preceding novels, whether or not those generalizations were represented through a character’s sensitive or dull consciousness. Strether did not lose anything in Europe, but discovered a previous loss. It was not two Frances that he confronted, Romantic and the real, but presence and absence, life and nothingness. In addition, Paris found the justification of its existence in the novel by being opposed to the always named but never shown American referent: Woollett, Massachusetts. And for the first time James entrusted an older American man to approach Europe. In so representing Strether, Newman’s youth found itself scattered about, willingly dissociated from true age. The Ambassadors thus raises the question of youth, or time, all the more efficiently because James disconnects it from actual age and presents the pain of age as something that can be mysteriously and, as in Strether’s case, surprisingly suffered. In The Ambassadors too we find again the literary function of Europe and its assimilation to the fictional place, as well as its separation from the actual place. However, in The Ambassadors the final treason of the image did not abolish the European status of the Romanesque;

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it did necessitate an ultimate accommodation for the eye, but did not destroy the basis of a universe. The Ambassadors drew an optimistic representation of the powers of the novel. James dreaded the Parisian thing, assimilated to numerous literary stereotypes, as much as he saw its necessity. Since The American, the French city only fugitively appeared in international works. Before The Ambassadors, James’s representation of Paris borrowed elements from royalty. But Strether’s Paris follows another logic, which is rooted in the Premier Empire and emerging Romanticism. Gloriani’s garden, where Strether utters his famous declaration to “live all you can,” was inspired by Whistler’s, and situated where Chateaubriand ended his life. James knew the place. Twenty-five years earlier, he had visited a Scottish woman there, who remembered her well-known neighbor, Chateaubriand, for James. Madame de Vionnet’s apartment is full of Napoleonic relics, setting her into a tradition, sharply contrasting with the seventeenth-century austerity of the hôtel de Bellegarde, described in The American. In The Ambassadors, however, Strether found himself making out, as a background of the occupant, some glory, some prosperity of the First Empire, some Napoleonic glamour, some dim luster of the great legend; elements clinging still to all the consular chairs and mythological brasses and sphinxes’ heads and faded surfaces of satin striped with alternate silk. The place itself went further back – that he guessed, and how old Paris continued in a manner to echo there; but the post-revolutionary period, the world he vaguely thought of as the world of Chateaubriand, of Madame de Staël, even of the young Lamartine, had left its stamp of harps and urns and torches, a stamp impressed on sundry small objects, ornaments and relics. ( James 1985: 172)

Madame de Vionnet is introduced as the heiress of a more modern government that is artistically richer than the one the appalling aristocrats from The American claimed to belong to. The discrepancy between the new social class Newman stands for and the Bellegarde’s criminal conservatism thus gives way in The Ambassadors to a subtler representation within the continuity of French history of the forces of renewal and of progress. During his first walk, Strether notices that the Tuileries Palace had disappeared. Thus, a symbol of a regime has been swept away by democracy, which is evoked in and around the Quartier Latin by Flaubertian images of bohemian life. So begins an actualization of French life. The Ambassadors thus offers humanistic refinement and creative vitality in place of a representation of the simple status quo, which inspired The American. Now Woollett stands for social prejudices and conventions and Paris projects figurative tolerance and adaptation. Such a strategy enables James to evade the dangerous stereotypes linked to an evocation of Paris. First, the city was described in a paradoxical way: precise in the street names and geography, but otherwise dependent on Strether’s point of view. Thus James superimposes on a “factual” Paris Strether’s immediate reality, which depends on memories of an earlier stay. In this way Paris gives James the opportunity

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to develop a metaphor of the city, which bonds the most concrete material to the purest abstraction. Thus, Paris seems to Strether as if [i]t hung before him this morning, the vast bright Babylon, like some huge iridescent object, a jewel brilliant and hard, in which parts were not to be discriminated nor differences comfortably marked. It twinkled and trembled and melted together, and what seemed all surface one moment seemed all depth the next. ( James 1985: 63)

Such an association opens the way to the process of anamorphosis as the different facets of Paris are identified with the object looked at and exposed to ocular acrobatics. Anamorphosis, in turn, suggests the doubt with which Strether must understand anything he sees. It compresses all doubts of perception, of interpretation, which will signify James’s representation of Strether. Strether’s Paris, unlike the one briefly sketched and only perceived in terms of the Pococks’ Woollett bias, is a fairy world of particularly evocative names: the bank of the rue Scribe, near his hotel, where he started his epistolary trade with Woollett; the boulevard Malesherbes, where he expected to find the “bad seed” of the Newsome family; then the rue de Bellechasse, which underlined several features of the woman living there: seduction, but also the fundamental question of her status – predator or prey? Beyond this rather precise and peculiar topographical representation, Paris is mainly reduced to a kind of rumor, of which Madame Vionnet gives nothing else than a confused echo. Far from making her the archetype of the Parisian woman, James blurs her identity, isolating her from the national context by multiplying the possibilities of foreignness. Like Claire de Cintré in The American, Mme de Vionnet is half-English, but the double ancestry alone does not define her as a foreigner. She and her daughter carry a concerted vagueness about their origins: “American, French, English, Polish?” ( James 1985: 132). In addition, there is a certain indefinable and also perceptible difference about her: It would doubtless be difficult today, as between French and English, to name her and place her; she would certainly show, on knowledge, Miss Gostrey felt, as one of those convenient types who don’t keep you explaining – minds with doors as numerous as the many-tongued cluster of confessionals at Saint Peter’s. You might confess to her with confidence in Roumelian, and even Roumelian sins. ( James 1985: 162)

Miss Gostry thus represents the anamorphic principal in The Ambassadors: always to revise one’s judgment, to accommodate one’s eye, to alternate one’s perception. The image of the polyglot confessional, even when discreetly setting the character into a Catholic culture, looks strangely similar to the metaphor of fiction James elaborated in the preface to The Portrait of a Lady. This parallel indicates Isabel Archer’s essentially imaginary, literary status, her belonging to an enlarged community, free from any national hindrance. Strether’s vision will help to define him and his novel as an

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alternative to Isabel Archer and her novel, when he distinguishes the feminine figure from himself by raising it to the level of a legendary heroine: “One of the rare women he had so often heard of, read of, thought of, but never met, whose very presence, look, voice, the mere contemporaneous fact of whom, from the moment it was all presented, made a relation of mere recognition” ( James 1985: 178). Like Paris, Madame Vionnet seems to issue from a cultivated phantasm more than a connotative reality. Once again, the international theme bumps against the literary question. We find in The Ambassadors a coherence with James’s use of artistic quotations. Either pictorial or literary, they are the sign of a new need for reference, for their quality, no longer as accessories but as adjuvants. In fact, the text itself offers proof of this common status between literature and painting. Les Maîtres d’autrefois, by Fromentin, was the book evoked in The Ambassadors. The only way to explain why Strether found it in the Pococks’ suite comes through its content, free as it is from context or pretext. Published in 1876, Les Maîtres d’autrefois is a study of Flemish painting, which gives a modern look, fed by a romantic approach to art, on works from the past. Fromentin, who was also a novelist, thus give James the opportunity to set a point of intersection between literary and pictorial works. Already indicated through the title of the novel, James’s choice to assert the literary-pictorial intersection is exemplified in the way two particular series of pictorial quotations are treated. The same apparent contact between James’s use of pictorial and literary references, as well as the same implicit denunciation of artistic illusion, reinforces the corresponding relation of the reality described in the fiction and the images it evokes. The first picture to be quoted is Titian’s Man with a Glove, in front of which Strether meets younger Little Bilham. Here, the Louvre is the setting. James’s use of this picture in The Ambassadors differs significantly from that in The American. In the earlier novel, it serves to underscore Newman’s lack of any aesthetic or critical sensibility. In The Ambassadors, the very pointedness of the allusion reveals the importance of the choice. The gallery of the Louvre in which the picture is hung, Apollo’s Gallery, had personal significance for James. It was when he was younger the place of some nightmarish hallucinations, as he wrote in A Small Boy and Others: This comes to saying that in those beginnings I felt myself most happily cross that bridge over to Style constituted by the wondrous Galerie d’Apollon, drawn out for me as a long but assured initiation and seeming to form with its supreme coved ceiling and inordinately shining parquet a prodigious tube or tunnel through which I inhaled little by little, that is again and again, a general sense of glory . . . so that one’s stretched, one’s even strained, perceptions, one’s discoveries and extensions piece by piece, come back, on the great premises, almost as so many explorations of the house of life, so many circlings and hoverings round the image of the world. . . . But I had also looked at France and looked at Europe, looked even at America as Europe itself might be conceived so to look, looked at history, as a still-felt past and a complacently personal future, at

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society, manners, type, characters, possibilities and prodigies and mysteries of fifty sorts. ( James 1956: 196–9)

Besides the importance of the place itself, which is a symbolic space of initiation for James, we can see here how the representations of the Old and the New Worlds rely on pictorial art and how images impress, even before the words, foreign eyes. Thus, perhaps for the first time, The Ambassadors allowed James to express, even if only through allusions, the influence of images on a mental representation of the world, even of foreignness itself. In our anticipation of the knowledge of the other (Europe), the significant place given to painting has been thus substituted by reading via the novel. This new attention given to the pictorial object is mainly to be read through explicit details. But it also works in a subterranean way through a network of images which serve, even more than the quoted texts, to draw not only the lines that define a subjective France, but also show a connection between fiction and reality. Here in The Ambassadors is, then, a coherent project, which from the title and throughout the narrative uses seeing as its main medium. The narrative that relies on seeing is exemplified with a description of the French landscape, where the truth about the relationship Chad had with Madame Vionnet is finally discovered. In the scene, James’s representation of the countryside is marked with unreality, discovered by chance, and defined through its perfect adequacy to its most traditional predecessors. The generalizing scope of such an evocation induces a fantastic atmosphere and prepares the reader for the unlikely coincidence of Chad’s and Madame Vionnet’s appearance together in a boat, which was the only one to suit Strether’s disillusion and maintain a relative innocence to his dream. Thus this landscape is presented as the object of an aesthetical quest, the improbable model of some picture he liked: that French ruralism, with its cool special green, into which he had hitherto looked only through the little oblong window of the picture-frame. . . . he could thrill a little at the chance of seeing something somewhere that would remind him of a certain small Lambinet that had charmed him, long years before, at a Boston dealer’s and that he had quite absurdly never forgotten. . . . he never found himself wishing that the wheel of time would turn it up again, just as he had seen it in the maroon-colored, sky-lighted inner shrine of Tremont Street. It would be a different thing, however, to see the remembered mixture resolved back into its elements – to assist at the restoration to nature of the whole far-away hour: the dusty day in Boston, the background of the Fitchburg Depot, of the maroon-colored sanctum, the special green vision, the ridiculous price, the poplars, the willows, the rushes, the river, the sunny silvery sky, the shady woody horizon. ( James 1985: 380–1)

Here the narrative explores Strether’s American past and its relation to memory, which, as with Proust, requires a sensitive reconstitution for it to have meaning. The picture by Lambinet, a painter James admired as a child, is set as an absolute of

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imagination. That imaginative absolute then becomes the basis from which Strether conducts his unreasoned quest for a model. This interior travel brings him, almost magically, to discover an ideal landscape: He hadn’t gone far without the quick confidence that it would be quite sufficiently kept. The oblong gilt frame disposed its enclosing lines; the poplars and willows, the reeds and river – a river of which he hadn’t known, and didn’t want to know, the name – fell into a composition, full of felicity, within them; the sky was silver and turquoise and varnish; the village on the left was white and the church on the right was grey; it was all there, in short – it was what he wanted: it was Tremont Street, it was France, it was Lambinet. ( James 1985: 381)

Within this fantasizing parenthesis, reality suddenly becomes a picture. Strether’s quest is not motivated by the desire to know some otherness, which had been delivered to him, up to that moment, only under the mask of its representation and which he would recover in its difference. His quest was entirely interiorized: he longed for the world as far as this world could turn him back to an already felt representation. What he described insistently was the Lambinet, not a reality which could look like it. Strether’s view of the landscape near the Cheval Blanc was so conditioned by its relation to the Lambinet that the text was able to assimilate, as a fantastic virtuosity, Strether’s walk as an immersion into the picture and to draw from it, a few lines down, this surrealistic consequence: He did this last for an hour, to his heart’s content, making for the shady woody horizon and boring so deep into his impression and his idleness, that he might fairly have got through them again and reached the maroon-colored wall. ( James 1985: 381–2)

So behind this quintessence of the French countryside does Strether put up the obstacle/backdrop of Boston (the maroon wall of the shop in Tremont Street), of his history, his past, his imagination. In so doing he reaches his own limits, which are metamorphosed into the lack of depth of his dreams, into which he runs as if bumping into a wall. The use of the pictorial reference was pushed, in the penultimate book of the novel, both literally and surrealistically, into the last entrenchment of its status: inspired from reality, unable to substitute itself for its immediate perception, but reduced to its own materiality, its insertion into both dimensions and the limits of the painting. We find in the Cheval Blanc scene a metaphorical process often illustrated in the last part of The Portrait of a Lady. In The Portrait James marks that process through Isabel’s representation within the closed space of the portrait and the problematic of her liberation. To achieve independence would cost the failure of novelistic representation. It was not Strether who, here, endures this picturesque confinement, since he was the eye, the exclusive look which reported on the novelistic world. In the last

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pages of the novel space comes to a standstill. In so doing it takes on the fixity of matter, pigments and composition. In The Ambassadors’ representation of Europe as literary space, the change of the French landscape into a picture illustrates the whole difficulty of reading – of reading France, of reading the couple Chad/Vionnet, of reading the whole novel – free from old stereotypes, old representations. Strether’s progress of knowing did not manage to solve the palimpsest. While he could, more or less, express his aesthetic imprisonment, and happiness for him did exist through enchanted wanderings inside a work of art, there is also, immediately after, disillusionment. So it is not by chance that Strether’s last visit to Madame Vionnet repeats this feeling of walking through artificial space, which is assumed by the focalizing eye: “He was moving in these days, as in a gallery, from clever canvas to clever canvas” ( James 1985: 400). Here the text avoids precise references: the Lambinet/Cheval Blanc episode is enough to transform Strether, to show Europe to him as the product of some artifice, as the accomplished version of a reality his consciousness could only bump into in the same way he bumped into the figurative wall of the Tremont Street shop, the true obstacle of his unaccomplished life. However, this last visit enables Strether’s desire to express itself. This is also the desire to maintain an artistic illusion, even if artificial, instead of a deceiving reality. Strether’s imagination, now defined as such, lingers on this particular confrontation – in spite of the coincidence and revelation the Lambinet contained – the style of his understanding inspired from the beginning by the character of the countess and her apartment: His hostess was dressed as for thunderous times, and it fell in with the kind of imagination we have just attributed to him that she should be in simplest coolest white, of a character so old-fashioned, if he were not mistaken, that Madame Roland must on the scaffold have worn something like it. This effect was enhanced by a small black fichu or scarf, of crape or gauze, disposed quaintly round her bosom and now completing as by a mystic touch the pathetic, the noble analogy. ( James 1985: 401)

Madame Vionnet’s last portrait reorients Strether’s reading, but under his own impulse: the picture he superimposes on his hostess’s face, a touching painting of a woman sentenced to death2 and praying on the day before her execution, was a work of pure imagination that also describes the last stage in his development. The sacrificial dimension of what he projects on the heroine of his novel in that last portrait inspires him to his final confrontation. He decides to see the young woman as a victim. Consequently, Strether would rather become the champion of his threatened love and thus extorts from Chad the promise never to abandon her. Although French visual culture is significant in the novel, French literature supplies a series of quotations. The most evident one is in the hero’s name, Louis Lambert, borrowed from Balzac’s eponymous novel. Jean Perrot provided a demonstration of the reasons for such a transparent use of the context:

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The story of The Ambassadors is one of a changing viewpoint, of a slow anamorphosis, spread on over four hundred pages, which follows an individual from his puritan New England utilitarian viewpoint to the esthetical, cosmopolitan vision of an idle Parisian of the golden Bohemia. At once, the attention of any critical reader is stimulated by the forenames the author gave to the central character who, at the end of his spiritual adventure, hesitated between those two conceptions of life. As a matter of fact, Louis Lambert Strether explicitly refers us to the swedenborgian androgyny represented in Louis Lambert of Balzac. (Perrot 1982: 266–7)

Swedenborg, who had an influence on James’s intellectual formation through James’s father, certainly oriented him toward Balzac’s novel. The elements Jean Perrot mentions – split personality, androgyny, initiatory quest – are evident when one compares the two characters. Other aspects of Balzac’s novel may enlighten James’s objectives in The Ambassadors: the Parisian corruption Balzac denounced was precisely one of the stereotypes James wanted to fight against; and the fact that Balzac’s hero is taken into Madame de Staël’s protection corresponds to and reinforces the setting of James’s novel in the post-revolutionary period. But most striking is the extent to which James takes the reference. As soon as he is named, Strether questions the value of the suggested model: “Mr. Lewis Lambert Strether” – she sounded it almost as freely as for any stranger. She repeated, however, that she liked it – “particularly the Lewis Lambert. It’s the name of a novel of Balzac’s.” “Oh I know that!” said Strether. “But the novel is an awfully bad one.” “I know that too,” Strether smiled. (James 1985: 9)

Such double depreciation shades the impact of the reference: Strether is reduced to a scriptural identity. Maria Gostrey says Strether’s complete name, for she is discovering it, on the calling card he gave her. In this first scene, the effect of the reference is directed more to the literary essence of the character than on the novel which inspired the names. James also represents Paris through a series of quotations. In that series, each quotation brings its own references. The parts of the series taken together stress Strether’s evolution in relation to Paris more than they work to represent the actual city. On Strether’s first walk in Paris, for example, his perception of Chad is still controlled by a Woollett stereotype of the younger man’s exile. When Strether walks through the Quartier Latin, he apprehends a romantic version of the students’ bohemian lifestyle. This apprehension calls attention to two explicit quotations, both of which involve images inspired by the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. The first quotation refers to characters from Henri Mürger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème, a collection of articles published in 1848. With this reference, James plays again on the stereotype of the corrupt Parisian. But he does so in order to emphasize their inadequacy within his

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own narrative. Indeed, Chad’s appearance refutes the stereotype itself and thus contributes to Strether’s adjustment to Paris and to himself. The second reference, to Omnes vulnerant, ultima necat, the Latin motto Strether quotes from Théophile Gauthier’s Voyage en Espagne (1845), is more allusive. The Gautier reference can be explained by the fact he belonged to the preceding generation. Like Balzac or Mürger, Gautier embodied French Romanticism and the quotation serves this particular section of the novel as a look back to the earlier part of the century. The reference thus functions to denounce the literary image of the Left Bank as romantic myth and an anachronism, unable to say anything about modernity and young people. The second series of Parisian quotations to strike Strether are literary ones concerning Notre-Dame de Paris. Already seen in the last pages of The American, the cathedral, like St. Peter’s in The Portrait of a Lady, enables James to describe the ascendancy Catholicism may reach in the Protestant mind. But the difference between Christopher Newman and Lambert Strether in this respect rests in Newman’s relative lack of culture and the capacity for introspection, two elements which explained the simplicity of the international theme in The American in comparison to that in The Ambassadors. For Newman, the church is, nevertheless, a theater for resignation, but he himself could not analyze it: He was very tired; this was the best place in the world he could be in. He said no prayers; he had no prayers to say. . . . Somewhere in his mind, a tight knot seemed to have loosened. . . . Whether it was Christian charity or unregenerate good nature – what it was, in the background of his soul – I don’t pretend to say. ( James 1980: 321–2)

Just as Newman’s character is treated in such a way as to reproduce his superficial habit of looking at the world and at himself, so Strether displays if not his lucidity, then at least his passion to analyze. To describe the cathedral, James redeploys features used for St. Peter’s in The Portrait of a Lady and also for the National Gallery sequence in The Wings of the Dove. Just as in Milly’s surprise meeting with Densher and Kate Croy in the National Gallery, Strether’s unexpected meeting with Madame Vionnet in Notre Dame is indirectly presented. Densher, under the influence of the National Gallery, had been identified as a portrait. Strether sees the countess from behind and notices her contemplation, but without identifying her. The revelation of her identity brought to the credit of the woman through the fantasies her back had created for Strether. But the only text cited in this excerpt was, consistent with the novel’s narrative logic, Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris from the earlier, Romantic generation. Thus Strether had bought “seventy blazing volumes that were so out of proportion” ( James 1985: 211). Without seeing Strether as Quasimodo, we can read, or guess, from this pure image the unknown person, Esmeralda’s shadow. The justification of such references, here, holds both to the fact that Strether’s feelings had to be commanded by his readings and also to Strether’s memory of the books themselves, since

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the representation of Paris he formulated was based on previous travel and his regret not to have taken more French books back home. The preeminence of the romantic in the description of a place may influence the way to read what is going on. Madame Vionnet pretended to share with Strether his passion for churches. The meeting was to be decisive for their relationship. But we can only interpret such faith as false in the same way that Valmont used to be respected by Madame de Tourvel in Les Liaisons dangereuses. Here again, we see how the quotation underlines the gap between Strether and the world and makes obvious his need to decipher what he sees, to change his Woollett way of seeing, to seize another reality.

How Did France Receive Henry James? We can wonder about the interval it took for James to be welcomed in France, for the translation, reading, and relative success of his work took a while. Except for a few short stories, The Portrait of a Lady (translated in 1933), and What Maisie Knew (translated in 1947), most of his novels were first translated in the 1950s. Only in the last twenty-five years of the century did publishers promote James titles. The Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Gallimard), which published Poe in 1932, Hemingway in 1966 and Faulkner in 1977, published Henry James’s novels for the first time in 2004. Several adaptations for the theater and movies have been made in France. Marguerite Duras’s plays: The Aspern Papers (from Michael Redgrave’s English version), and The Beast in the Jungle, with Sami Frey and Delphine Seyrig, directed by Alfredo Arias. Jean Pavans, a prolific translator of James’s novels and short stories, did several adaptations for the stage: Retour à Florence (1985) and The Aspern Papers, which was performed in 2002 by the Comédie Française. French filmmakers were also interested in James. François Truffaut discovered James through Jeanne Moreau, an actress with English origins, and asked for the translation, in the 1970s, of several texts never published in French. Truffaut borrowed from The Altar of the Dead, The Friends of the Friends, and The Beast in the Jungle for La Chambre verte (1978). Jacques Rivette was freely inspired by The Other House in Céline et Julie vont en bateau (1974). Benoît Jacquot transposed The Wings of the Dove (1981), with Isabelle Huppert, and Olivier Schatzky adapted The Pupil (1996), while several adaptations are being produced on television.

Notes 1 In the chapter following the allusion to Flaubert, Ralph will obtain from his father the making of Isabel’s fortune, so that the accomplishment of some of her wishes will be in his power.

2

He was not, this time, an aristocrat, but a progressive: again, the will to modernize the image of France.

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References and Further Reading Flaubert, Gustave (1972). Madame Bovary. Paris: Gallimard. James, Henry (1956). A Small Boy and Others. In Autobiography. London: W. H. Allen. James, Henry (1963). Selected Literary Criticism. London: Heinemann. James, Henry (1980 [1877]). The American. London: Signet Classic, Penguin. James, Henry (1984 [1908]). The Portrait of a Lady. London: Penguin. James, Henry (1985 [1909]). The Ambassadors. London: Penguin.

James, Henry (1986 [1907]). The Wings of the Dove. London: Penguin. Ozouf, Mona (1998). La Muse démocratique, Henry James ou les pouvoirs du roman. Paris: Calmann-Lévy. Perrot, Jean (1982). Henry James, une écriture énigmatique. Paris: Aubier-Montaigne. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1967). Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion.

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Henry James and Italy Rosella Mamoli Zorzi

Art and Italy Not only did James admire Titian’s Virile Portrait (or Portrait of a Young Englishman) in the Pitti Palace in Florence, which Titian painted in 1540–5, he invented a story from it: The great Titian, in portraiture . . . remains that formidable man in black, with the small compact head, the delicate nose and the irascible blue eyes. Who was he? What was he? “Ritratto virile” is all the catalogue is able to call the picture. “Virile!” Rather! you vulgarly exclaim. You may weave what romance you please about it, but a romance your dream must be. Handsome, clever, defiant, passionate, dangerous, it was not his fault if he had n’t adventures and to spare. He was a gentleman and a warrior, and his adventures balanced between camp and court. I imagine him the young orphan of a noble house, about to come into mortgaged estates. One would n’t have cared to be his guardian, bound to paternal admonitions once a month over his precocious transactions with the Jews or his scandalous abduction from her convent of such and such a noble maiden. ( James 1992: 256–7)

This is a mini-story, one may say, but a story all the same, in which the personality of the young man is given a physical and a psychological interpretation, through a string of five qualifying adjectives, and is also shown as the subject acting out an (imaginary) plot. A plot in the sense of the plot of a story, and a plot in the sense that the young man of the portrait is supposed to be “plotting” against his presumed guardian, by “precocious” and secret dealings with some Jews or in his plans to abduct some “noble maiden.” This is just one example of the power exerted by Italian art, and Italy, on Henry James: a power which moved his imagination, causing the writer to use Italian paintings, scenery, and settings, and some Italian characters mainly employed to oppose them to his American ones, in his novels and stories, and to write a series of essays

A Companion to Henry James. Edited by Greg W. Zacharias © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-14042-3

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about Italy. Other examples are possible, like the story James built around the figure of the Venetian noblewoman in Sebastiano del Piombo’s St. John Chrysostomos and Saints in San Giovanni Grisostomo in Venice: The picture represents the patron-saint of the church, accompanied by other saints and by the wordly votaries I have mentioned [the three figures of Venetian ladies which occupy the foreground]. These ladies stand together on the left, holding in their hands little white caskets; two of them are in profile, but the foremost turns her face to the spectator. This face and figure are almost unique among the beautiful things of Venice, and they leave the susceptible observer with the impression of having made, or rather having missed, a strange, a dangerous, but a most valuable acquaintance. The lady, who is superbly handsome, is the typical Venetian of the sixteenth century, and she remains for the mind the perfect flower of that society. Never was there a greater air of breeding, a deeper expression of tranquil superiority. She walks a goddess – as if she trod without sinking the waves of the Adriatic. It is impossible to conceive a more perfect expression of the aristocratic spirit either in its pride or in its benignity. This magnificent creature is so strong and secure that she is gentle, and so quiet that in comparison all minor assumptions of calmness suggest only a vulgar alarm. But for all this there are depths of possible disorder in her light-coloured eye. ( James 1992: 28)

The Titian painting, just like the Sebastiano del Piombo, can stand out as the symbolic epitome of what Italy – and Europe – represented for James, an American expatriate who chose England as his residence, and looked for “romance” in Italy, at least up to the early 1900s, when, after a lifetime spent abroad, he thought he would find “romantic” his own native land, because of “time, absence, and change,” as he wrote to his brother William in 1903 ( James 1974–84: IV: 272). He did find it immensely changed, if not quite the seat of romance, and described and analyzed it in The American Scene (1907). To James, Italy was definitely Goethe’s “das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn,” the land of the South, opposed to the “genius of the North,” “frozen and fixed,” as we read in the early tale “Travelling Companions” (1870), a key text to sound James’s early reactions to Italy (Maves 1973: 10–18; Tanner 1992: 160–5). Italy was “the South in nature, in man, in manners,” identified as the “genius of the picturesque.” On approaching Italy in 1869, writing to his sister Alice, James hinted at “the delight of seeing the North melt slowly into the South” ( James 1974–84: I: 181, 183, 128). In the early tale “At Isella” (1871), at the frontier town of Isella, the narrator, who defines himself a “stolid child of the north,” meets a “bella donna” who seems to be the essence of romance. The young narrator says to her: Ever since I could use my wits . . . I have done little else than fancy dramas and romances and love-tales, and lodge them in Italy. You seem to me as the heroine of all my stories. ( James 1999a: 630)

“At Isella” is thus a comment on the idea of the romance connected with Italy. Italy was also the country that offered whatever exoticism James could take. Again in

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“Travelling Companions,” James’s first-person narrator, Mr. Brooke, wanders under the “long mosaic saints who curve gigantically with the curves of domes and ceiling” in the Venice church of St. Mark’s, in the “scintillating darkness,” and declares: “I had left Europe; I was in the East” ( James 1999a: 192). Contrary to many of his contemporaries and friends, from Vernon Lee to John Singer Sargent, James never actually wanted to go to Egypt or to the East, where his friend Mrs. Curtis would entice him to go. He was content with listening to Mrs. Curtis telling him her “glittering fairy tale,” her “world of elephants and carbuncles,” when she had returned from India and the East (Zorzi 1990: 108), on the breezy balcony of the Palazzo Barbaro on the Grand Canal in Venice. Italy, and Venice especially, offered enough exoticism to him. The “picturesque” of Italy, a term used over and over again, both human and architectural ( James 1974–84: I: 167), was sufficient for James’s imagination. Mr. Brooke’s voice, which at times merges in “Travelling Companions” with James’s voice in his letters, also adds: “The great mosaic images, hideous, grotesque, inhuman, glimmered like the cruel specters of early superstitions and terrors” ( James 1999a: 193). Another element appears immediately in the appreciation of the land of art and history, that is the element of prejudice and superstition. Its inhabitants are “so beautiful, . . . so civil, so charming, and yet so mendacious and miserable!” ( James 1999a: 191). The double image of Italy, which had been present in English literature from Elizabethan times onwards, seems present also in the early James. The oriental slyness of its people, the abysses of prejudice, are flaunted, together with the beauty of art, in the face of art-lacking, but truthful, America. Morals are not what manners promise (Perosa 1979). Even Titian’s Young Englishman, however princely and handsome, plots a devious scheme. The symbolic Roman “mal aria” (bad air, Roman fever) of the Coliseum kills Daisy Miller (1878). In The Portrait of a Lady (1881), the Italianized Osmond impersonates both beauty – his art collection – and betrayal, in relation to the too innocent American girl, Isabel Archer. The beauty and somber quality of the Palazzo Roccanera show a real and symbolic place inhabited by such duplicity. The residence appeared as a dark and massive structure overlooking a sunny piazzetta in the neighbourhood of the Farnese Palace. . . . a kind of domestic fortress, a pile which bore a stern old Roman name, which smelt of historic deeds, of crime and craft and violence, which was mentioned in “Murray” and visited by tourists who looked, on a vague survey, disappointed and depressed, and which had frescoes by Caravaggio in the piano nobile and a row of mutilated statues and dusty urns in the wide, noble-arched loggia overhanging the damp court where a fountain gushed out of a mossy niche. ( James 1960: 395)

Architectural beauty and historic crime, art and a past presented as destructive of beauty (the statues are mutilated) characterize the palace and represent Jamesian biases about Italy.

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Even the past can be too much: in “The Last of the Valerii” (1874), the statue of the gorgeous Juno which has been dug up in the Valerii garden in Rome must go back, under the earth again, to allow the young couple, the Italian Count Camillo and the American Martha, to resume their loving relationship, free of the influence of the heathen past.1 The heathenish past of the engraved topaz in “Adina” (1874) causes an unmoral behavior in the American protagonist, although it leads to a marriage of passion between an American girl and a Roman “shepherd,” a “natural,” not a cultured or intellectual character, strangely similar to Count Camillo, and descending in part from Hawthorne’s Donatello in The Marble Faun. Too much past can blight human relationships, as deeply as James might have missed it in the US, again in the wake of Hawthorne. Only art seems to “save” Italy: there are no reservations on James’s part on its great painters of the past, his beloved Tintoretto, with whom the writer clearly identified, as a very young man, owing to Tintoretto’s power to represent life “not as a mere subject and fiction – but as a great fragment wrenched out of life and history, with all its natural details clinging to it and testifying to its reality” ( James 1974–84: I: 140), and to Tintoretto’s ability to use point of view (“you seem not only to look at his pictures but into them”) (quoted in Zorzi 1996: 209). If young Henry James had felt his “inexorable Yankeehood” in front of the sensual and bright beauty of Veronese’s Rape of Europa, “a great rosy blond, gorgeous with brocade and pearls and bouncing with salubrity and a great mellow splendor of sea and sky” ( James 1974–84: I: 138), he gradually shed it, learning to love both Veronese and the city of Venice. Paintings allow plots to develop, characters to be defined. In front of Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love the two young protagonists of “Travelling Companions” find their peace in the promise of a wedding. In front of Bronzino’s Lucrezia Panciatichi Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove (1902) sees clearly her approaching death; it is the artwork of a historical palace that she chooses as her “ark” or “fortress” against treason and death.

James’s Visits to Italy James’s experience of Italy was long and varied. He visited the country many times during his lifetime, from his first visit in 1869 to his last in 1907. As busy as he may have been with his writing, which represented the “felicities” of his life (James 2004: 18), in London and then in Rye, the yearning for Italy would always surface, after his first enthralled visit to Rome, where he wrote, in a letter to his brother William, this often quoted passage: From midday to dusk I have been roaming the streets. Que vous en dirai-je? At last – for the first time – I live! It beats everything: it leaves the Rome of your fancy – your education – nowhere. It makes Venice – Florence – Oxford – London – seem like little

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cities of pasteboard. I went reeling and moaning thro’ the streets, in a fever of enjoyment. In the course of four or five hours I traversed almost the whole of Rome and got a glimpse of everything – the Forum, the Coliseum (stupendissimo!),2 the Pantheon, the Capitol, St. Peter’s, the Column of Trajan, the Castle of St. Angelo – all the Piazzas and ruins and monuments. The effect is something indescribable. For the first time I know what the picturesque is. ( James 1974–84: I: 160)

The experience of Italy would always prove enchanting, if not so exciting as in the first Roman visit, and its power did not decline, over the years, in spite of the vulgarization and modernization of the country which James lamented in several letters, and in spite of James’s own changing, of which he was totally aware. The reeling joy of roaming the streets of Rome may be linked with James’s temporary demise of consciousness, a negative and weighty condition in the young James, even if it became the necessary condition in order to survive in old age, a condition worth cultivating, as he wrote in a famous letter to Henry Adams in 1914 ( James 1974–84: IV: 706). In 1869 he had written to his sister Alice: Wherever we go we carry with us this heavy burden of our personal consciousness and wherever we stop we open it out over our heads like a great baleful cotton umbrella, to obstruct the prospect and obscure the light of heaven. ( James 1974–84: I: 145)

Rome provided the free milieu where art and life could be enjoyed without the “baleful” shade of one’s own consciousness; but these moments were fairly rare in the young James. This consciousness surfaced again and again in James’s constant questioning of himself on his own reactions, as compared to his past impressions, or imagining them in the future. To his brother William he wrote in 1869: I’m curious to know how this enchanted fortnight will strike me, in memory, eleven years hence – for altho’ I’ve got used to it all, yet there is a palpable sub-current of delight. ( James 1974–84: I: 142)

Again, James seems to want to be able to analyze his own “enchanted” experiences, after the emotion and the enjoyment have subsided. Often, the enchantment takes on the aspect of a dream. As early as 1873, he wrote to a friend from Perugia: Rome has already begun for me to belong to the irrevocable past & my whole stay there wears the coloring of a dream. . . . Everything that happened last winter takes on the most iridescent hues. (May 23, 1873, to Lizzie Boott: Houghton Library bMS Am 1094 [507])

In fact, “The swarming shimmering prodigality of the landscape” in Italy ( James 1974–84: I: 130) would delight James again and again. As he wrote to Grace Norton in 1870:

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The wish – the absolute sense of need – to see Italy and especially Florence again increases in force every week that I live. I dream therefore of going forth before the chill of old age has completely settled upon me. ( James 1974–84: I: 246)

James was only twenty-seven when he wrote this; he would take up the idea of old age later, in 1903, when he again wrote: “I greatly yearn to go back, before I descend into the deep tomb, to dear old Italy for a year” ( James 1974–84: IV: 266): between those dates he did go to, and write on, Italy. He would always find again the power “to be delighted to find myself again in this land of every charm,” that was always “a substantial joy in life” (December 7, 1886, Houghton bMS Am 1094 [971]). In Italy James would lift his voice “in joy” (May 15, 1890: Houghton bMS Am 1094 [1092]), writing to his correspondents, for instance to Henrietta Reubell in 1890: for the sense of being in Italy again is delightful to me, thank heaven, as ever. That trick is never played out – that magic always works, & as long as this is the case I shall never grow quite old. (May 15, 1890: Houghton bMS Am 1094 [1092])

Even in the worst of circumstances, when he was sorting out Constance Fenimore Woolson’s papers in Venice, as her literary executor after her suicide, and trying to come to terms with his sense of guilt for her death, when Venice seemed “blighted” and the “bright Venetian air” dulled, James could write: “It has been cold and wet; but Italy is always Italy – and the only thing really to be depended on quand même” (May 3, 1894, to George du Maurier: Houghton bMS Am 1237.16, Box 1: A-G [Du Maurier]). In 1899 his elation was still there: The clatter, the chatter and chiasso of the Genoese street comes into my room almost as a deafening – but it comes in with such sunny warmth of Italian air and shuffle of Italian memories, that I am all for the joy of feeling myself here again – after the long interval and letting it give me once more as many as possible of the little old throbs and thrills of the great old superstition. ( James 1974–84: IV: 105)

“J’y suis trop peu – et j’en rêve toujours,” he wrote to Urbain Mengin in June 1900 ( James 1974–84: IV: 147). In his last visit of 1907, he knew he was taking leave of Italy forever. During the horror of his last years, when “the blackness of darkness and the cruellest melancholia” were James’s “chronic enemy and curse” ( James 1974–84: IV: 556) and during the years of the war, there was no more space even for dreams. In those years no memories or dreams could bring relief to James’s anguished awareness of young lives destroyed by war. The relation of the enjoyment of Italy to the possibility of writing was, however, at times difficult. James generally enjoyed the Southern quality of Italian life, as he wrote for example to Grace Norton from Genoa: “the air is warm & full of colour & noise; my window is open in a great chattering square, & the sense of Italy is in

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everything” (May 18, 1890: Houghton bMS Am 1094 [983]). But this very quality made it at times difficult for the writer to concentrate on his work, as was the case with the writing of Portrait of a Lady. He tried, as he recalls in the novel’s preface, vainly, to go on with the novel in 1881, when he was in Venice: the waterside life, the wondrous lagoon spread before me, and the ceaseless human chatter of Venice came in at my windows, to which I seem to myself to have been constantly driven, in the fruitless fidget of composition, as if to see whether, out in the blue channel, the ship of some right suggestion, of some better phrase, of the next happy twist of my subject, the next true touch for my canvas, might n’t come into sight. ( James 1984b: 1070)

The words of the preface echo those of an earlier letter from Venice: “It is true that the eyes are a great deal distracted here, & I have wasted many half-hours at my window, with an opera-glass” (May 11, 1881: Houghton bMS Am 1094 [1914]). Experience, of course, was never “wasted” for James, but sometimes it was too much for the moment: its fruit would appear much later. The writing of The Aspern Papers in Florence in 1887 was not disturbed by outdoor life. Thus: I spent my time very well in Florence & worked to my satisfaction. It was not warm – Florence has a real little northern winter – but it was beautifully bright. (February 26, 1887, to Catherine Walsh: Houghton bMS Am 1094 [1342])

And thus: I am settled on this beautiful hilltop till the first of June; having a vast vaulted, romantic apartment on the ground floor, with a terrace from which the divinest view on earth hangs before me, and a servant who does everything for me, including cooking and cheating. (April 24, 1887, to Alice Gibbens James: Houghton bMS Am 1237.16 [Box 2])

The Aspern Papers was mostly written in Florence, and it was sent off in June from Venice, from the gorgeous rooms of the Palazzo Barbaro, without any distraction. No view or gondola interfered with the pressure of finishing the novella. Also the heat and “languor” caused by the Scirocco could be adverse to writing in the Southern climate of Italy, although at times James enjoyed them to a point, as in March 1873: My only complaint is of the climate, which takes a good deal more strength from you than it gives. But Rome with a snap in the air would not be Rome, and the languor that one continually feels has something harmonious and (intellectually) profitable. ( James 1974–84: I: 362)

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The well-known and un-Puritan “dolce far niente,” or “languor,” so commonly observed by Americans in Italy, was in fact part of the genius loci. If the Scirocco and the languor prevented James from working, he would leave Rome or Florence and go to the hills of Albano near Rome or to Switzerland to recover “the lucidity of my intellect” ( June 12, 1873, to Elizabeth Boott: Houghton bMS Am 1094 [508]), or to cool Vallombrosa where he could write: but now I am tasting of pure bliss, at 3,200 feet in the air, amid lovely shade & views that almost tempt me to commit the epistolary crime of “description.” ( July 19, 1890, to Francis Boott: Houghton bMS Am 1094 [610])

The languor that to James had always been such an important element of Italy’s particular “southernness” was also used in novels and stories: Roderick Hudson is ruined by the excess of art and the languor of Rome, and Osmond3 in The Portrait of a Lady believes he “might have been a better man if he had spent less of his life there. It made one idle and dilettantish and second rate” ( James 1960: 278). Even if the experience of writing in Italy about Italy might prove too difficult, as James at times felt he could only “scratch” the surface of the rich Italian soil, the results of James’s writing belied his fear.

The Name of Italy, “sweet for all its dimness” James’s first direct experience of Italy in 1869 had, as is always true, some preexisting conditioning, linked with his knowledge of works of art and literature. From his very early infancy James had been familiar with images of Italy, in particular with a view of Florence by Thomas Cole, which made him feel “how long before my attachment had started on its course”: the name of Italy, already sweet to me for all its dimness – even could dimness have prevailed in my felt measure of the pictorial testimony of home, testimony that dropped from the ample canvas of Mr. Cole, “the American Turner,” which covered half the side of our front parlour, and in which . . . I could always lose myself as soon as look. It depicted Florence from one of the neighbouring hills – I have often since wondered which, the picture being long ago lost to our sight; Florence with her domes and towers and old walls, the old walls Mr. Cole had engaged for, but which I was ruefully to miss on coming to know and love the place in after years. ( James 1956: 269)

Other Italian elements were present in the Jameses’ household, as, again, the novelist reminisced in his autobiography:

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We had Italy again in the corresponding room behind – a great abundance of Italy I was free to think while I revolved between another large landscape over the sofa and the classic marble bust on a pedestal between the two back windows, the figure, or part of the figure, of a lady with her head covered with wine-leaves and her hair disposed with a laxity that was emulated by the front of her dress. . . . This image was known and admired among us as the Bacchante. ( James 1956: 269–70)

The well-known definition of fascinating Rome as the “disheveled nymph” (Edel, in Tuttleton and Lombardo 1990: 8) may have some link with the image of the attractive and disheveled, and disrobed, Bacchante of James’s adolescence. The “large landscape” mentioned in the passage above was a work by the French painter Charles Lefèvre4 and, apparently, was a “rural scene of some exuberance, a broken and precipitous place,” considered in the family as Tuscany ( James 1956: 269). Both images, given their persistence, suggest the foundational quality of Italy in James’s imagination. Among his early New York experiences, James recollected his visit to “Bryan’s Gallery of Christian Art,” where he was taken as a little boy, in an omnibus, after dinner. His recollection of the visit seems to have influenced his lifelong (lack of) appreciation of early Tuscan painters, which he remembered as follows: It cast a chill, this collection of worm-eaten diptychs and triptychs, of angular saints and seraphs, of black Madonnas and obscure Bambinos, of such marked and approved “primitives” as had never yet been shipped to our shores. ( James 1956: 268)

In The Portrait of a Lady, in Osmond’s Florentine villa, among the objects of luxury set out with refined taste, there are “angular specimens of pictorial art in frames as pedantically primitive” ( James 1960: 245). Thus a memory of Italy from James’s childhood, unmodified by later art criticism reading, seems to have been made into an available trope for his fiction. As a slightly older boy in Newport, James could see the casts of Renaissance and classic sculpture, particularly in William Holman Hunt’s studio, where a cast of “the sublime uplifted face of Michael Angelo’s ‘Captive’ ” ( James 1956: 80) was there to inspire the young William James or John La Farge, at the time practically the only pupils of Hunt. In his family visits to the Louvre and the National Gallery, James experienced the splendor of Leonardo, Titian, and Veronese, as again he recalled in his autobiography: “I had looked at pictures, looked and looked again, at the vast Veronese . . . at Leonardo’s almost unholy dame with the folded hands, treasures of the Salon Carré as that display was then composed” ( James 1956: 351–2); while in the National Gallery in London he recalled the emotion of seeing Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne, “during a renewed gape,” “in the same breath with Mr. Swinburne” ( James 1956: 52–3). The power of the Italian pictures, expecially, was not to be lost on James. Like the pictures he remembered in his childhood home, they must have contributed to his anticipation and enjoyment of Italy later in life.

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Other New York experiences from James’s boyhood seem to have influenced his perception of Italy. Among those that lasted a lifetime, memories of the variously valued world of opera singers, actors,5 and tightrope dancers, shown in their exotic lure on street billboards, had special power. The James parents went to the opera “to come back on us sounding those rich Italian names, Bosio and Badiali, Ronconi and Steffanone.” The young Henry himself was taken once to hear “that rarest of infant phenomena, Adelina Patti,” whose youth qualified her as, “one of us, even though at the same time the most prodigious of fairies, of glittering fables.” On another occasion he witnessed the “acclamation” given to singer Countess Rossi, whose “clear birdnotes” the people were applauding, and he also remembered being so close to the amateur singer of “Casta Diva,” that his “nose was brushed by [her] petticoats” ( James 1956: 114–15). In Boston other Italian singers would “warble” to the enchanted young crowd, who admired in “Brignoli the sweet and vague, in Susini the deep and rich” ( James 1956: 506). Opera singers seemed to merge in James’s imagination with acrobats or tightrope dancers, indifferently French or Italian, like the Martinettis, the “offshoots” of “the French acrobats, dancers and pantomimists,” the Ravels, or Signor Léon Javelli, “in whom the French and Italian charm seem to have met,” perhaps only in his tightrope dancing ( James 1956: 168). A theatrical element – having to do with shows, operas, appearances – would always accompany James’s perception of the beauty of Italy. The whole of the world of what James would call the “predecessors” in William Wetmore Story and His Friends (1902), a recreation of the world of the expatriate American sculptors and painters of the preceding generation, was somehow familiar to him as a young boy, since he remembered vividly Washington Irving’s announcement of the death of Margaret Fuller in 1850, on the steamboat taking him and his father from New York to Fort Hamilton. In addition to William Wetmore Story (1819–95), other sculptors such as Joseph Mozier (1812–70) (who had taught sculpting to Fuller’s husband in Florence in 1849–50, with no success according to Hawthorne’s nasty comment), and Horatio Greenough (1805–52), a friend of Thomas Cole, were part of James’s early family “acquaintances.” James’s visits to Rome and the individuals he met there in the winter of 1872 and spring of 1873 gave James an understanding of the American expatriate community in Rome – and the complications of living with them there. It also informed the character of Roderick Hudson. Not only were the Storys in their immense Palazzo Barberini, filled with William Wetmore Story’s statues, a center of attraction for American artists, other studios had open doors for tourists and friends alike, including that of Hattie Hosmer (1830–1908), who, although she looked “like a remarkably ugly little grey-haired boy, adorned with a diamond necklace,” was “both ‘vivacious’ and discreet,” and “better . . . than her statues” ( James 1974–84: I: 339). In Lizzie Boott’s studio James saw a model, “a wondrous youth in a sheepskin jacket and bandaged legs and flowing curls and the most pictorial complexion,” very similar to the models that Hawthorne had seen sitting on the steps of the Trinità dei Monti. In important ways, also, that

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Roman community in 1872–3 was James’s first away from his own in the United States. Before actually meeting John Ruskin in London in 1869, James was surely aware of Ruskinian art theories through John La Farge and Charles Eliot Norton, who was in great part responsible for spreading the very welcome Ruskinian art gospel in the US in the 1850s.6 Norton was in fact one of James’s most important “guides” in Rome in 1869. Of course, James’s perception of Italy was also conditioned by his readings: for Venice, as he wrote in the essay “Venice” (1882), by his familiarity with Ruskin’s Stones of Venice (1851–4), and of course also by the memory of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Canto IV, 1818), Shelley’s Julian and Maddalo (1818), and going back in time, by Shakespeare’s Venetian tragedies, Ben Jonson’s Volpone (1606), and by such classics set in Venice as Schiller’s Der Geisterseher (1787–8) and Voltaire’s Candide (1759), with its Venetian banquet. James’s readings – and his reviews – of writing having to do with Italy continued as he matured. We find references to William Dean Howells’s Venetian Life (1866), Stendhal’s Chartreuse de Parme, Théophile Gautier’s Italia, and Auguste Laugel’s Italia, Sicile, Bohême. James reviewed Laugel’s Notes de voyage, Henri Regnault’s Correspondence, Ernest Renan’s At Ischia, and Hippolyte Taine’s Italy: Rome, and Naples. James also read novels with Italian settings, such as Consuelo or La Daniella by George Sand. And he read the eighteenth-century letters of Charles de Brosses. One should also mention the importance of Dante, whose Divine Comedy James read in the edition illustrated by Gustave Doré, whom James compared once to the highly esteemed Tintoretto. James also read Dante with interest through the translation of fellow Cambridge, Massachusetts, resident, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In his walks and rides in Italy James would at times find “the elder Italy of one’s imagination,” a literary imagination, as he did when he saw in the Villa Mellini near Rome “the Italy of Boccaccio and Ariosto,” contrasting its actual inhabitants with those of the stories he had read: There are [at the Villa Mellini] twenty places where the Florentine story-tellers might have sat round on the grass. Outside the villa walls, beneath the overcrowding orange-boughs, straggled old Italy as well – but not in Boccaccio’s velvet: a row of ragged and livid contadini, some simply stupid in their squalor, but some downright brigands of romance, or of reality, with matted locks and terribly sullen eyes. ( James 1992: 182).

Or in the following one referring to Ravenna: The suffocating air helped me to believe for a moment that I walked in the Italy of Boccaccio, hand-in-hand with the plague, through a city that had lost half its population by pestilence and the other half by flight. This at last was the old-world

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dulness of a prime distillation; this at last was antiquity, history, repose. ( James 1992: 295)

Other important readings regarding Italy were the plays of Goldoni, the innovative books by Pater and Symonds on the Renaissance, and, in a different key, related to an actual connection with the places he visited, Massimo d’Azeglio’s “delightful Ricordi” ( James 1992: 161). James’s essays on Italy were always based, as for any cultured visitor, both on his direct experiences and his rich readings. The search for antiquity and for literary Italy proceeded along with the shocking discovery of the modernization of a country that was changing over the years, particularly after it had become a united kingdom under the house of Savoia in 1861. In the long period of James’s visits to Italy, the Italy of one’s imagination became more difficult to find, changing as the country was under the impulse of modernity, of what then seemed mass tourism, of motorization. Its charm, however, if imperilled, never ceased for James.

“A chain of cities” The rich and repeated Italian stays, fourteen in number, offered James also material for essays which were first published in The Nation, Century Magazine, Scribner’s, the Atlantic Monthly and others, between 1872 and 1902, but mainly in the 1870s. These essays on Italy were collected, with additional essays, in Italian Hours in 1909. Not only did the publication of Italian Hours confirm the place of Italy in James’s life and imagination, but the fact that his publishers sought them from him confirm their importance among his readers as well. James spent long periods of time in Florence, Rome, and Venice, but he also traveled and wrote about other cities, a very long “chain of cities,” including San Remo, Genoa, Spezia, Leghorn, Milan, Verona, Vicenza, Bologna, Ravenna, Siena, Pisa, Lucca, Pistoia, Montepulciano, San Gimignano, Perugia, Arezzo, Assisi, Orvieto, Cortona, and Volterra, not to mention Naples, with Sorrento, Posillipo, Capua, Gaeta and Pompeii, Capri, and all the delightful villages and towns in the Roman campagna. Some visits were paid in homage to great writers, like that to Recanati,7 “to visit the birthplace of the divine Leopardi – the dull little town on a mountain-top in which he languished for many years of his unhappy life” (May 11, 1881, to Henry James Sr.: Houghton bMS Am.1094 [1914]), or that to Lerici, in memory of Shelley: The place was very lonely – all overwearied with sun and breeze and brine – very close to nature, as it was Shelley’s passion to be. I can fancy a great lyric poet sitting on the terrace of a warm evening and feeling very far from England in the early years of the century. In that place, and with his genius, he would as a matter of course have heard in the voice of nature a sweetness which only the lyric movement could translate. ( James 1992: 110).

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With the help of Murray’s and Baedeker’s guidebooks, James visited other cities to look at architecture, paintings, frescoes. In Turin, for example, in 1872 James saw Veronese’s Queen of Sheba and The Feast in Casa Levi, the first of which was to become the Veronese most likely referred to in The Wings of the Dove (Clegg, in Perosa 1987: 163). In Milan, it was Leonardo’s Last Supper, which James described in 1872, after having used it as the place where the two young protagonists of “Travelling Companions” (1870) meet. In the many wonderful descriptions of Italian cities present in the various essays collected in Italian Hours, or in James’s letters, one element seems to recur quite often: the sense of color, of the mellow light of Italy, that “deep yellow light that enchants you and tells you where you are” ( James 1992: 96), of which there are innumerable variants in the description of Florence or Rome: “All this brightness and yellowness was a perpetual delight” ( James 1992: 111). This quality of Italy also appeared in James’s fiction, for instance in the story “The Diary of a Man of Fifty,” in which the diarist who has gone back to Florence after twenty-seven years writes: “It is the warmth of this yellow sun of Florence that has been restoring the text of my own young romances” ( James 1999b: 452). In writing of Rome, also in later years, the “golden light” of the city merges with that of memory. Quite often the picturesque quality of Italy would strike James as operatic: one does go back to James’s early perception of the opera, when one finds him wondering where he “had seen it all before,” looking in Cadenabbia8 at the pink-walled villas gleaming through their shrubberies of orange and oleander, the mountains shimmering in the hazy light like so many breasts of doves, the constant presence of the melodious Italian voice. ( James 1992: 87)

The answer was “Where indeed but at the Opera?” The “mahogany-coloured, barechested mariners with earrings and crimson girdles” of the Genoa port seemed to belong to the chorus of Masaniello ( James 1992: 108). A young man appearing out of nowhere in the mountains is described as follows: There was no one in sight but a young man who slowly trudged upward with his coat slung over his shoulder and his hat upon his ear in the manner of a cavalier in an opera. Like an operatic performer too he sang as he came; the spectacle, generally, was operatic, and as his vocal flourishes reached my ear I said to myself that in Italy accident is always romantic and that such a figure had been exactly what was wanted to set off the landscape. ( James 1992: 107)

Italy as a setting for an opera also comes up often in James’s letters: for instance, as he wrote in a letter to Miss Jessie Allen, all the stories that were going on in Venice, and which Miss Allen was obviously reporting to him, should be seen as “from our comfortable opera-box” ( James 1993: 140). James was perhaps using theatrical meta-

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phors to show the necessity of a barrier, a space, between himself and the sensuous charm of Italy. But this picturesque Italy was giving way to modern Italy, in particular in Rome, as we shall see. If James gave the bigger cities, Florence, Venice, and Rome, more space in his novels and stories, some of the smaller cities crop up in the most unexpected places in his creative work: just to give a couple of early and late examples among many, Confidence (1880) opens in Siena; Mantua and Cremona appear in “The Velvet Glove” (1909), Salsomaggiore and Verona in The Outcry (1911).

Florence and Venice, Rome The cities where James spent longer periods of time were Florence, Venice, and Rome, and all of them can claim a particular place in James’s life and work. By 1874 James, who had first gone there in 1869, and returned in 1873, felt Florence as “an old story – though like all masterpieces one reads and re-reads it with pleasure” ( James 1974– 84: I: 444). By 1894 Florence had become for James such a perfect cemetery of ghosts that there is little joy in it left for me – or rather there would be little, if I had not deep-seated dispositions to find myself secretly, even whenever so sadly, fond of the company of the relics of the dead. (James 1974–84: 1: 494)

Among the older ghosts, there were those of the Brownings: in Florentine Notes (1874) the statue of the Grand Duke Ferdinand I is described as the one “Browning’s heroine used to watch for – in the poem ‘The Statue and the Bust’ – from the red palace near by” ( James 1992: 267). James enjoyed the quiet of Florence, the view of the yellow houses on the Arno bank when he was in the city, and the magnificent view from Bellosguardo. It was the ideal place to work, with the not too distant Vallombrosa to repair to when it would get too hot, but it was also, just like Venice, a place where the “queer polyglot promiscuous society” was at times too much, and was felt by James as “a vain agitation of insignificant particles” ( James 1974–84: III: 169). As much as James resented it when he was working, he also enjoyed being lionized there in 1886–7, and had close friends in Florence. Among these was the American doctor William W. Baldwin, with whom James went on trips around Florence, and of whose family and children he would ask affectionate news. James was also close to Francis Boott, the painter, an old family friend, who lived on Bellosguardo in the Villa Castellani, with his daughter Lizzie, also a painter, married to another painter, Frank Duveneck, and destined to an untimely death in 1888, in Paris, but buried in the Allori cemetery in Florence. “The most intelligent person in Florence” was for James Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), a childhood friend of John Singer Sargent. In her work James tasted deeply “the redolence of the unspeakable Italy” ( James 1974–84: III: 276).

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James described Florence in several important novels and stories: it is the setting of “The Madonna of the Future” (1873), where the languor of the South seems to kill off whatever serious art the painter Theobald might be able to produce, in particular his “Madonna of the Future,” never completed; of the “The Diary of a Man of Fifty” (1879), where a story of love seems to echo, at the distance of a generation, that of the “man of fifty”; of part of The Portrait of a Lady (1881), where Isabel Archer is a devoted visitor of galleries and pictures with her cousin Ralph, and a guest in her aunt’s Palazzo Crescentini. For her, “to live in such a place, was . . . to hold to her ear all day a shell of the sea of the past” (James 1960: 266). In Florence, Roderick Hudson measures his “wasted time” confronting the masterpieces of the Pitti ( James 1980: 231). Florence did not become the setting of one particular story James had heard in Florence, which struck his imagination in 1887. This was an anecdote told by Vernon Lee’s half-brother about Byron’s mistress, Claire Claremont ( James 1987: 33–4). She had been still alive in Florence, although very old, even when James had been there. The Florentine story of Captain Silsbee, who tried to get the papers of Shelley and Byron, which were still in the hands of the very old lady, and was given the possibility of having them as long as they remained in the family, by way of his marriage to Miss Claremont’s niece, became the story of the Misses Bordereau and the precious papers of Jeffrey Aspern. James, however, transposed it to Venice and used it as the “germ” for the dilapidated old palace of Juliana and Tina, the Palazzo Capello of Rio Marin, where Eugene Benson lived with Constance Fletcher’s mother and Constance herself. James gave some reasons for his choice to move the story from Florence to Venice: “Delicacy had demanded” the shifting of the scene ( James 1984b: 1179). But it is the very essence of the “visitable past” mentioned in the same preface that seems to have been the real reason for this shift. James chose a city that had a long tradition of representation in terms of intrigue and corruption, but renewed it by making it a reflection of the labyrinths of the minds of the protagonists, and a mirror that intensifies the devious schemes in the protagonists’ plotting. He succeeded in avoiding the Venice of clichés which was evoked, critically, in William Wetmore Story and His Friends. If Florence and Venice were connected in the story of the writing of The Aspern Papers, other elements unite closely James’s Florence and his Venice experiences. Just before writing The Aspern Papers James had shared a villa, Villa Brichieri at Bellosguardo, with Constance Fenimore Woolson, living, however, on different floors (Edel 1962–9: III: 202–3). It was this separate co-habitation, which might have meant a deeper relationship, that unleashed a deep, if unjustified, sense of guilt when Woolson committed suicide in Venice in January 1894. Having been named Woolson’s literary executor, James spent several weeks in the very house where Woolson had lived, the modest Casa Biondetti on the Grand Canal, where he sorted and disposed of her papers and clothes. This particular Venetian sojourn of James, an exception to his usually being a guest of the Curtises at the gorgeous Palazzo Barbaro, across from the Casa Biondetti, was a very dark and tragic one, as is well known.

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Strange stories circulated in the Anglo-American milieu about James being rowed out into the lagoon to “drown” Woolson’s papers and black dresses, which would menacingly float up again in black balloons (Cagidemetrio, in Perosa 1987: 54–5). The experience of death in Venice, however, together with other memories of death, including the memory of the early death of Minnie Temple (Edel 1962–9: III: 386–7), evoked in the preface, was essential in James’s rendering of the city in one of his greatest novels, The Wings of the Dove (1902). The city is no longer the bright, luminous city of the earlier works, it is a wind- and rain-swept Venice, very close to that which had already appeared in a story of 1891, “The Pupil.” The Venice of The Wings of the Dove was the fruit of the experience and memory of deaths, and of a lifelong passion for the city, and for its Palazzo Barbaro (see Zorzi, in James 1998: 28–33). Venice had not conquered James immediately in 1869, when he first went there, but by 1882 his resistance to beauty as a “poor, pining yankee” had turned into a love-story.9 By staying on in Venice, as he wrote in “Venice” (1882): Tenderly fond you become; there is something undefinable in those depths of personal acquaintance that gradually establish themselves. The place seems to personify itself, to become human and sentient and conscious of your affection. You desire to embrace it, to caress it, to possess it; and finally a soft sense of possession grows up and your visit becomes a perpetual love-affair. ( James 1992: 12)

In 1887, after a first visit as a guest of Mrs. Bronson in the Palazzo Giustinian, in the rear of Mrs. Bronson’s Casa Alvisi, right across from the Salute on the Grand Canal, James had gone back to Venice and had stayed, for the first time, in the Palazzo Barbaro, as a guest of the expatriates Daniel Sargent and Ariana Curtis. He had been enchanted by their wonderful palazzo, “all marble and frescoes and portraits of the doges”: As you live in it day after day its beauty and its interest sink more deeply into your spirit; it has its moods and its hours and its mystic voices and its shifting expressions. ( James 1992: 39)

James described at length how the Barbaro was “divine and divinely still” ( James 1974–84: III: 294) in his letters and in his essays, and finally offered it the greatest tribute in creating, after its image, his own palace made of words, the Palazzo Leporelli, in The Wings of the Dove, where the great salon that had been painted by Sargent in 1898, a painting he “adored,” was described as follows: Not yet so much as this morning had she felt herself sink into possession; gratefully glad that the warmth of the southern summer was still in the high, florid rooms, palatial chambers where hard, cool pavements took reflections in their lifelong polish, and where the sun on the stirred sea-water, flickering up through open windows, played over the painted “subjects” in the splendid ceilings – medallions of purple and brown, of brave

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old melancholy colour, medals as of old reddened gold, embossed and beribboned, all toned with time and all flourished and scolloped and gilded about, set in their great moulded and figured concavity (a nest of white cherubs, friendly creatures of the air), and appreciated by the aid of a second tier of smaller lights. ( James 1965: 282)

This was a tribute which can be compared to that paid by Isabella Stewart Gardner to the same palace, by building her own Boston museum in the image of the Barbaro. In spite of his admiration for the Barbaro, James never seemed to consider important the huge canvasses by eighteenth-century painters such as Giambattista Piazzetta, Sebastiano Ricci, Antonio Zanchi, and Antonio Balestra which adorned his beloved Palazzo Barbaro, or the “pompous Tiepolo ceiling” (in reality a copy) (Zorzi, in Chong et al. 2004: 149) under which he remembered writing “A London Life” ( James 1934: 135). It seems as if this was a remnant of Ruskin’s influence on James, who had first visited and admired the city following in Ruskin’s footsteps. The novelist’s admiration for Tintoretto was certainly initially based on Ruskin’s appreciation of the great painter. Over the years, James shed some of Ruskin’s influence, even if he never really admired such Palladian churches as St. George or the Redentore, or the paintings in the Barbaro. In Florence James had tested Ruskin’s theories of art, and shown his irritated reactions to Ruskin’s imperatives – such as, for instance, Ruskin’s negative judgment of the frescoes of Ghirlandaio – both in “Florentine Notes” ( James 1992: 259) and, in an even more elaborate form, in the later essay “Italy Revisited” (1878): I had really been enjoying the good old city of Florence, but now I learned from Ruskin that this was a scandalous waste of charity. I had taken great pleasure in certain frescoes by Ghirlandaio . . . but it appeared from one of the little books [Mornings in Florence] that these frescoes were as nought. ( James 1992: 114–15)

Venice, although a hackneyed subject, as James clearly recognized at the beginning of his second essay on Venice (1882), did become the setting of a number of his stories and novels according to the right of any writer to choose to write on any theme he might be “in love with” ( James 1992: 7). From the guidebook Venice of “Travelling Companions” (1870), to the labyrinthine Venice of The Aspern Papers (1888), to the low-life and Sargentesque Venice of the young water-carriers described in Hyacinth Robinson’s letter in Princess Casamassina (1885), to the social Venice of “The Chaperon” (1891) and the dark Venice of “The Pupil” (1891), Venice appeared again and again in stories, novels, and essays. In his masterpiece, The Wings of the Dove, James contrasted the view of the Venice of art – that of Milly Theale’s Palazzo Leporelli – to the poor, dilapidated, dark Venice which he had observed, represented in the novel in the Venice of the poor rooms of Merton Densher near the Rialto.

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James’s love-affair with Rome was not a slowly developing story, as in the case of Venice, but a real coup de foudre, as we have seen in James’s 1869 letter to William. The Southern atmosphere of Rome, thick with classic history and myth, with bloody stories of gladiators, Borgia and Cenci, rich in pagan ruins and Catholic churches, seems to have taken by storm James’s self-defensive consciousness. Rome is celebrated in the early Watch and Ward (1870) in Nora’s letters from Rome; it is, tragically, an essential part of Roderick Hudson’s, Daisy Miller’s, and Isabel Archer’s destinies. James’s very longing for Rome is sometimes expressed referring to Rome’s bloody history, as when he wrote to Maud Howe, on August 27, 1899: “I do envy you much your so well-understood, even if so wicked, old Borgian dusk, your cinque-cento siesta” (Houghton, bMS Am 1094.1 [130]). No city, as enchanting as it might be, stood out, if compared to Rome, as James wrote in May 1873: I have been strolling about gently and looking at Florence, but finding in her I blush to say how little of her old magic. Rome has murdered her – Rome a hundred times more wondrous in retrospect. Her great smiting hands have snapt the tender chords of perception to which Florence appeals. ( James 1974–84: I: 392)

Or as he wrote a year later, with some humor, describing the rich banquet of Rome from which he had been suddenly taken away: I have been jerked away from Rome, where I had been expecting to spend the winter, just as I was warming to the feast, and Florence, tho’ very well in itself, doesn’t go so far as it might as a substitute for Rome. It’s like having a great plum-pudding set down on the table before you, and then seeing it whisked away and finding yourself served with wholesome tapioca. ( James 1974–84: I: 426)

If his surrender to Rome had taken place on his first visit in 1869, James surrendered again to the city and to the open expression of his feelings, thirty years later, in 1899, in his encounter with a young sculptor, Hendrik C. Andersen, who produced exactly the same works Roderick Hudson had wanted to make in James’s novel of 1879. Says James’s character: I mean to go in for big things; that’s my notion of my art. I mean to do things that will be simple and sublime. You shall see if they won’t be sublime.

And they shall be simply divine forms. They shall be Beauty; they shall be Wisdom; they shall be Power; they shall be Genius; they shall be Daring. ( James 1980: 86, 87)

Roderick’s words, which were based on the type of sculptures that were in the tradition of the Roman studios, W. W. Story’s among others, seem to anticipate the huge,

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symbolic, and cold marble statues that Andersen sculpted. Andersen, as a person and as a sculptor, whose youth, beauty, and promising art obviously fascinated James, was addressed by the novelist, in his letters, with extraordinarily tender and erotic language, used in similar ways in letters to other friends ( James 2001: 5). It was a language that mirrored the enchantment of James’s first impression of Rome and the eroticization of the city. “Beloved boy,” “I hold you close,” “my arm is over your shoulder,” “how long & close, in imagination & affection, I hold you!” (James 2004: 29, 25, 55, 62) – James wrote to Andersen. Even if one must not forget that the codes of communication in Victorian language were different from those of our time (“beloved,” for instance, was often used by Henry when addressing his brother William), there is no doubt that there is a new, freer expression of feelings and physical sensations in James’s letters to Hendrik.10 In a period when queer criticism has examined in a new light many of James’s works, starting perhaps with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s reading of “The Beast of the Jungle” in 1983–4 (see Sedgwick 1990), many speculations have been made on James’s love for Hendrik C. Andersen. What one can say is that in 1899 James had a much more relaxed relation with tender or erotic language, in his letters to the young and handsome Norwegian-American artist. The essence of the sensuality of Rome, which James had expressed in the character of Prince Amerigo (Maves 1973: 142) in The Golden Bowl, came out in these letters. James’s early encounter with Rome and his later Roman encounter with Andersen seem to conflate at the very end of the 1909 essay “Other Roman Neighborhoods,” where he remembers the impression of an evening meal spread, in the warm still darkness that made no candle flicker, on the wide high space of an old loggia that overhung, in one quarter, the great obelisked Square preceding one of the Gates, and in the other the Tiber and the far Trastevere and more things than I can say – above all, as it were, the whole backward past, the mild confused romance of the Rome one had loved and of which one was exactly taking leave under protection of the friendly lanterned and garlanded feast and the commanding, all-embracing roof-garden. It was indeed a reconciling, it was an altogether penetrating, last hour. ( James 1992: 204)

That James would and could so remember Rome is important because memory seems to defeat the impressions of the city’s “cockneyfications” ( James 1974–84: II: 141), the “enormous crowds, the new streets, the horse-cars . . . the ruination of the Coliseum, the hideous iron bridge over the Tiber, the whole desecration of the Pincio” ( James 1974–84: II: 283), of the “thousand vulgarities perpetrated during the last fifteen years” ( James 1974–84: III: 473), of the “abatements and changes and modernisms and vulgarities,” which in 1907 made James declare that he would never go back to Italy again ( James 1974–84: IV: 449). The price the modern world had to pay as regards art had also another aspect in James’s late years: American wealth comes in and buys ceilings for the Newport man-

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sions, objects, paintings, furniture for museums in Boston or Chicago, or for Adam Verver’s museum in “American City” in The Golden Bowl (1904), where even a Roman prince can become almost an object for a collector. Again, Italy stands for the art of Europe, now endangered, everywhere, also in England – as in The Outcry, written as a play in 1909 – by the great American wealthy collectors. James wavers between the sense that a spoliation is taking place and a sense of admiration for the energy and power of these creators of public museums, in particular as regards Isabella Stewart Gardner, a dear friend, who is described as arriving in England from Brussels “charged with the spoils of the Flemish school” ( James 1974–84: IV: 124), hardly an appreciative sentence, but about whom James also wrote “Mrs. Gardner . . . is de plus en plus remarquable”and her “palais-musée is really a great creation” ( James 1974–84: IV: 389), praising her finally in The American Scene for the “results magnificently attained, the energy triumphant over everything” of the “fine old disinterested Boston tradition” ( James 1968: 255).

Notes 1

2

3

4

For a reading of the story as a representation of James’s fear of the threatening power of the New Woman, see Rowe (2002: 85). For a reading of “Adina” as a text of James’s perception of the new “instabilities of sexuality and gender occasioned by the nineteenth century women’s rights movements,” see Rowe (2002: 111). James’s knowledge of Italian at this time seems mostly limited to the use of common Italian words, such as “basta,” “caro,” “padrone,” etc. He could write in fairly fluent if not quite correct Italian as early as 1875 (letter of March 8, 1875, to Lizzie Boott), and could read Italian. James’s sense of language, however, made him use the Italian diminutive (or superlative as in “stupendissimo,” “most stupendous”) in creative ways, in his invention of nicknames, such as “Sacramentina” (Mrs. Howells), “Whartonina” (Edith Wharton), “Peggottina” (niece Peggy), “Prodigina” (Miss Allen) (James 1993: 162). On Osmond as a representative of aestheticism and in general on the relation of James’s to British aestheticism, see Freedman (1990). The painting was a Landscape by Charles Lefèvre. It was exhibited as Landscape no. 327

5

6 7

8

9

at the National Academy of Design annual exhibition of 1851, and it was lent by Henry James Sr., who was an honorary member of that academy. I owe this identification to the generosity of Professor William Gerdts. See Bartlett Cowdrey, National Academy of Design Exhibition Record 1826–1860 (New York: New York Historical Society, 1943, vol. 1: 260). On James’s appreciation of Italian actress Adelaide Ristori, of actors Tommaso Salvini and Ernesto Rossi, see Giorcelli (1968: 127). The whole book is a very good overview of James and Italy. On Ruskin in America, see Stein (1967). James mentions Leopardi’s “infinitely touching letters” in his notebooks (James 1987: 222). The description of the “oleander and myrtle and terrace-steps,” of the hamlets and villas, of the “consummately romantic” landscapes of Como, also in Roderick Hudson, is referred to the already seen image of the Italy from “the steel-engravings in old keepsakes and annuals, from the vignettes on music-sheets and the drop-curtains at theatres” (James 1980: 342–3). On the feminization and eroticization of Venice, see Tanner (1992: 171–2).

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Rosella Mamoli Zorzi One wonders if James’s appreciation of Gabriele D’Annunzio, a writer who “concentrated almost wholly on the life of the senses,” as James wrote in his essay of 1904, may have had to do with this freer vision of life and

literature. The same might be true for James’s appreciation of Matilde Serao (1901). These were the only two Italian contemporary writers on whose work James wrote at some length.

References and Further Reading Battilana, M. (1971). Venezia sfondo e simbolo nella narrativa di Henry James. Milan: Laboratorio delle Arti. Bell, M. (1991). Meaning in Henry James. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chong, Alan, Elizabeth A. McCauley, Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, and Richard Lingner (eds.) (2004). Gondola Days: Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Palazzo Barbaro Circle. Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Edel, Leon (1962–9). The Life of Henry James. 5 vols. New York: Avon. Freedman, Jonathan (1990). Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism and Commodity Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Giorcelli, Cristina (1968). Henry James e l’Italia. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura. James, Henry (1903). William Wetmore Story and His Friends. London: Thames and Hudson. James, Henry (1934). The Art of the Novel. Ed. R. P. Blackmur. New York: Scribner’s. James, Henry (1952). The Golden Bowl. Introduction by R. P. Blackmur. New York: Grove Press. James, Henry (1956). Autobiography. Ed. F. W. Dupee. Princeton: Princeton University Press. James, Henry (1959). Watch and Ward. Introduction by L. Edel. New York: Grove Press. James, Henry (1960). The Portrait of a Lady. Introduction by G. Greene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. James, Henry (1963). The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers. Introduction by Kenneth B. Murdock. London: Dent. James, Henry (1965). The Wings of the Dove. London: Penguin. James, Henry (1968). The American Scene. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. James, Henry (1974–84). The Letters of Henry James. 4 vols. Ed. Leon Edel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

James, Henry (1980). Roderick Hudson. Ed. Tony Tanner. Oxford: Oxford University Press. James, Henry (1984a). Literary Criticism, Essays on Literature, American Writers and English Writers. New York: Library of America. James, Henry (1984b). Literary Criticism, French Writers, Other European Writers; The Prefaces to the New York Edition. New York: Library of America. James, Henry (1987). The Complete Notebooks of Henry James. Ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers. New York: Oxford University Press. James, Henry (1992). Italian Hours. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. James, Henry (1993). Lettere a Miss Allen/Letters to Miss Allen. Ed. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi. Milan: Archinto. James, Henry (1998). Letters from the Palazzo Barbaro. Ed. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi. London: Pushkin Press. James, Henry (1999a). The Complete Stories: 1864– 1874. New York: Library of America. James, Henry (1999b). The Complete Stories: 1874– 1884. New York: Library of America. James, Henry (2001). Dearly Beloved Friends: Henry James’s Letters to Younger Men. Ed. Susan E. Gunter and Steven H. Jobe. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. James, Henry (2004). Beloved Boy: Letters to Hendrik C. Andersen, 1899–1915. Ed. R. Mamoli Zorzi. Introduction by M. Bell. Afterword by E. di Majo. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. MacDonald, Bonney (1990). Henry James’s Italian Hours: Revelatory and Resistant Impressions. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. Machor, J. L. (ed.) (1993). Readers in History: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Contexts of Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Henry James and Italy Martin, Robert.K. and Leland S. Person (eds.) (2002). Roman Holidays: American Writers and Artists in Nineteenth-Century Italy. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Maves, Carl (1973). Sensuous Pessimism: Italy in the Works of Henry James. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pemble, John (1995). Venice Rediscovered. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Perosa, Sergio (1979). L’Euro-America di Henry James. Vicenza: Neri Pozza. Perosa, Sergio (ed.) (1987). Henry James e Venezia. Florence: Leo S. Olschki. Rowe, John Carlos (2002). The New American Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1990). Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stein, Roger B. (1967). John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Tanner, Tony (1992). Venice Desired. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tintner, Adeline (1986). The Museum World of Henry James. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. Tuttleton, James W. and Agostino Lombardo (eds.) (1990). The Sweetest Impression of Life: The James Family and Italy. New York: New York University Press. Zorzi, Rosella Mamoli (1990). “Henry James in a Venetian Diary.” Henry James Review, 11.2: 101–10. Zorzi, Rosella Mamoli (1996). “Tintoretto e gli angloamericani nell’Ottocento.” Annali di Ca’ Foscari, 35.1–2: 189–224. Zorzi, Rosella Mamoli (ed.) (2004). “Gondola Days.” Isabella Stewart Gardner e il suo mondo a Palazzo Barbaro-Curtis, Mariano del Friuli, Edizioni della Laguna. Zorzi, Rosella Mamoli (2005). In Venice and in the Veneto with Henry James. Venice: Supernova.

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Henry James in the Public Sphere Richard Salmon

In his 1892 story “The Private Life,” Henry James constructs a geometrical model of the divisions between private and public existence in two contrasting figures of creative subjectivity comprising what he was later to term a “whimsical theory” ( James 1986: 51). According to this theory, the private life of the artist is hermetically screened off from his public persona, sealed within one of “two quite distinct and ‘watertight’ compartments,” the presence of “either of which . . . involved the entire extinction of the other,” and vice versa ( James 1986: 51–2). On one side of the equation rests the case of Clare Vawdrey, a celebrated novelist whose genius is manifested only in private, while, on the other side, sits Lord Mellifont, a socialite whose creative self resides essentially in public performance. Considering these two antithetical, but complementary, figures alongside each other, James’s narrator thus arrives at the neatly symmetrical proposition: “He was all public and had no corresponding private life, just as Clare Vawdrey was all private and had no corresponding public” ( James 1986: 215). Expressing polar oppositions in terms of similitude, the relationship between Vawdrey and Mellifont seems designed to reinforce the same absolute separation in the demarcation of cultural space, rather than to offer any real alternative in negotiating its boundaries. On closer inspection, however, James’s “whimsical” fable opens up less rigidly schematic interpretive possibilities. In the first place, the inverse symmetry of the narrator’s formula for comparing his two exempla turns out to be somewhat less impartial than it initially appears. Whereas, in the case of Vawdrey, the separation of private and public lives produces a doubling of identity, or splitting of the self in the familiar terms of late-Victorian gothic fantasy, Mellifont’s corresponding embodiment of this separation is presented as the depletion of a unitary self, resulting in the converse mathematical operation: as the narrator’s co-interpreter, Blanche Adney, surmises, “if Clare Vawdrey’s double . . . his lordship there has the opposite complaint: he isn’t even whole” ( James 1986: 213–14). Mellifont’s antithetical model of private/

A Companion to Henry James. Edited by Greg W. Zacharias © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-14042-3

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public self-division does not, therefore, produce a truly symmetrical alternative to Vawdrey’s. Though the latter may induce a sense of jarring discrepancy, of disappointment at the inadequacy of Vawdrey’s public self-representation, the former leads to a scenario which is literally unrepresentable: the supposition that the interior space of the self is entirely void. James may not himself have identified with the supposedly bifurcated personality of Robert Browning, on whom the figure of Vawdrey was based, as Ross Posnock has suggested, but it clearly bears closer resemblance to his repeated defense of the integrity of the private sphere of authorship than Mellifont’s blank interior (Posnock 1985: 29–31). In the key iconographic moment of the narrative, the narrator’s illicit glimpse of Vawdrey’s “private” self provides an image of the author’s creative labor which directly anticipates one of James’s most celebrated statements on the difficulty of successfully representing those whose task it is to represent, from his preface to The Tragic Muse (1908): the image of the author whose back “turns to us as he bends over his work” ( James 1995: 13; Posnock 1985: 49). The narrator’s intrusion upon Vawdrey’s private life appears to reveal not Vawdrey, the empirical biographical individual, but “Vawdrey,” the author whose identity is defined solely by what he produces. Nevertheless, in “The Private Life” James does not represent privacy as an inviolable ontological condition, one which remains utterly immune from contact with the outer world. For while the narrator interprets the significance of Vawdrey’s private space as a retreat from social intercourse, one might equally emphasize its role in the formation of public opinion, thereby reversing the process of exchange. The narrator’s theory of the novelist’s divided self reflects not only the necessity for writers of preserving certain boundaries between private and public spheres, but also their necessary porosity. It is only because the narrator can measure Vawdrey’s public persona against the contradictory evidence of his publicly disseminated private texts that he is able to uncover the existence of the author’s “secret” in the first place. Likewise, Vawdrey’s public embarrassment is that he cannot avoid being held accountable for the productions of his private self. Thus, the story unobtrusively reminds us that it is for the very purpose of authorial publication that the space of the private self is required. From this perspective, it is possible to construe James’s narrative as a fantastic allegorization of an entirely mundane, normative model of the literary public sphere which prevailed throughout much of the nineteenth century. Within the classical “bourgeois” form of the public sphere, as defined by Jürgen Habermas, what constitutes the expression of “public” opinion is the discursive interaction of private individuals, as distinct from the public authority of the state. According to this model, private and public space should remain segmented but with permeable borders: just as the “public” sphere is composed of autonomous private individuals, so the “subjectivity of the privatized individual was related from the very start to publicity” (Habermas 1989: 50). Through the characteristic literary forms of the eighteenth century (epistolary novels, published letters, diaries, etc.), Habermas traces the development of what he terms “audience-oriented subjectivity”: a mode of intimacy which is always already on display. Yet he then proceeds to show how the mediated privacy

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of the bourgeois public sphere was subsumed by new forms of publicity during subsequent transformations of modern culture. Situating “The Private Life” within the immediate context of James’s own career as a published author suggests that the story may well reflect some of the anxieties attendant upon this broader cultural narrative. If Vawdrey’s split self could, in one sense, be deemed a normative condition, the sense of unease and uncanniness generated by its fantastical trappings is, of course, not to be discounted. The earliest reference to the story recorded in James’s notebooks dates from July 27, 1891, in the midst of his preparations for the London production of his first professional play, a dramatic version of The American, and following not long after its English première in January of the same year ( James 1961: 109). As has been well documented, James found the business of negotiating the material aspects of theatrical production an arduous and disillusioning task, and in a notebook entry recorded on October 22, 1891 he directly links “all the déboires and distresses consequent on the production of The American” to a desire to re-enter a Vawdrey-like space of creative labor ( James 1961: 111): Meanwhile the soothing, the healing, the sacred and salutary refuge from all these vulgarities and pains is simply to lose myself in this quiet, this blessed and uninvaded workroom in the inestimable effort and refreshment of art, in resolute and beneficent production . . . As soon as I really re-enter it – cross the loved threshold – stand in the high chamber, and the gardens divine – the whole realm widens out again before me and around me. ( James 1961: 111)

Here, then, James embraces a conception of the artist’s private self as “refuge” from the manifold sufferings of the “outside” world, focused upon his characterization of the theatrical world as a site of vulgar publicity. His “blessed and uninvaded workroom” offers a concrete image of that more abstract and symbolic figure of authorial space, “the luminous paradise of art,” which is clearly reminiscent of the allegorical dimensions of Vawdrey’s turned back ( James 1961: 111). Although James acknowledges, in this entry, the painful necessity of crossing the “threshold” between the artist’s private and public worlds, the experience of the theater derived from his failed attempt to become a popular and commercially successful dramatist during the early to mid-1890s was only to reinforce his anxiety that the aesthetic values associated with “privacy” were under increasing threat of “invasion” from a hostile public sphere. Indeed, James’s second (and temporarily final) professional play, Guy Domville (1895), may be read as an unintentionally ironic allegory of precisely this conflict, as I have argued elsewhere (Salmon 1997: 69–70). From early in his career, James expressed similar concerns (bordering on outrage) at the journalistic and biographical “invasion of privacy,” mounting both moral and aesthetic objections to such practices. In numerous reviews of the published correspondence of his fellow novelists, for example, he called into question “the growing

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taste of the age for revelations about the private life of the persons in whose works it is good enough to be interested,” insisting that, as the “life” of an author is distinct from his “work,” so “an intimate knowledge of the one is not at all necessary for a genial enjoyment of the other” ( James 1984c: 214–15). Such criticism is, of course, ruefully self-reflexive, commenting on the very medium of the texts in which James as a reviewer has declared an interest. In his study of the “rise” of biography as an institutionalized discourse, and its relationship to the creation and exploitation of authors’ literary estates, Ian Hamilton argues persuasively that James’s vehement resistance to biographical exposure of the “life” was, in part, conditioned by his capacity to experience the fascination of “biographical curiosity” (Hamilton 1992: 212). In an extraordinary passage of his discussion of the notoriously candid correspondence of George Sand and Alfred de Musset, published in The Yellow Book in 1897, James demonstrates a self-conscious understanding of the reciprocity of these conflicting urges. Criticizing Sand for her lack of confessional restraint, James calls instead for a more balanced struggle between the “reporter” and the “reported”, for acts of “resistance” to biographical inquiry which knowingly inflame the “cunning of the inquirer,” whose “subtlety and ferocity” would then “exceed . . . anything we to-day conceive, and the pale forewarned victim, with every track covered, every paper burnt and every letter unanswered, will, in the tower of art, the invulnerable granite, stand, without a sally, the siege of all the years” (James 1984c: 742–3). The “right to privacy” is thus installed at the hermeneutic center of a “will to knowledge” of Nietzschean proportions. The scenario envisaged in this review is, in fact, one that James reenacted obsessively in numerous fictional narratives examining the dangers of literary publicity. “The Private Life” is only one of a multitude of short stories, mainly from the 1890s, in which the private self of a celebrated author, or other public figure, is cruelly or tantalizingly exposed to public view, either threatened with imminent extinction by callous journalists or biographers, or revealed in all its teasing negativity. Such tales as “The Aspern Papers” (1888), “Sir Dominick Ferrand” (1892), “The Death of the Lion” (1894), “The Figure in The Carpet” (1896), “John Delavoy” (1898), and “The Real Right Thing” (1899) are remarkably homogeneous in their mobilization of an underlying structural pattern of hermeneutic desire and resistance, as Tzevtan Todorov once demonstrated, despite having superficially different satirical targets: the “low” cultural form of the New Journalism (interviewers, magazine editors), on the one hand, and a perverse form of “high” culture (literary scholarship and biography), on the other. Of this considerable body of James’s work, Michael Anesko’s suggestion that “the hopes – and fears – that he associated with the fate of his literary commodity in the public sphere become translated into fictional parables of exposure” serves as a useful template (though it refers ostensibly to James’s earlier novels of the 1880s, which I discuss below) (Anesko 1986: ix). Though it would be oversimplistic to reduce James’s “parables” of literary life to a series of transparently autobiographical projections, it would be equally implausible to deny any connection between the consistent

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form and content of these narratives and their author’s own anxieties as a producer of literary commodities.

“Sketching one’s age” To consider James’s writings in relation to the public sphere, however, is not merely to document the growth of a personal preoccupation derived from the experience of a narrow professional culture and reflected in a series of self-referential narratives. His earlier work as a novelist of manners, whose reputation was built on his invention of an “international theme” of transcultural conflict, and, later on, as a social realist and Francophile naturalist, concerned to render the most salient characteristics of modern life, also foregrounds the shifting divisions between private and public spheres that accompany the growth of a culture of publicity in its modern sense, and does so at a broader and more detached level. In a notebook entry recorded towards the end of this earlier period – November 17, 1887, to be exact – James forcefully outlines the significance of his conception of “publicity” in relation to the two major novelistic forms with which his fiction had been hitherto associated: One sketches one’s age but imperfectly if one doesn’t touch on that particular matter: the invasion, the impudence and shamelessness, of the newspaper and the interviewer, the devouring publicity of life, the extinction of all sense between public and private. It is the highest expression of the note of “familiarity,” the sinking of manners, in so many ways, which the democratization of the world brings with it. ( James 1961: 82)

From the perspective of the committed realist and naturalist writer of the 1880s, the “devouring publicity of life” constitutes one of the cultural phenomena central to the novelistic enterprise of representing contemporary society as a complex organic totality. Such symptomatically “new” cultural forms as the newspaper, interview, or advertising comprise the sociological raw material from which fictional characters and narrative scenarios are generated, as an examination of James’s notebooks from this period confirms. Hence, the theme of publicity is significantly developed in four out of the six substantial novels which James wrote during the decade: The Portrait of a Lady (1880–1), The Bostonians (1884), The Reverberator (1888), and The Tragic Muse (1890): a body of work on which James’s contribution to the realist tradition largely rests. At the same time, from the perspective of the Anglo-American novelist of manners, publicity is a key element in the cultural politics of the international theme, a recurrent source of friction in its representation of cultural encounters between American and European “values.” Defining the publicity of modern culture as the “extinction of all sense between public and private,” James identifies a phenomenon which was commonly associated with the distinctive development of American political culture, at least by many European observers of the nineteenth century, including Alexis de Tocqueville, Charles Dickens, and Matthew Arnold. Not coincidentally,

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James’s notebook exposition of the “democratization of the world” immediately follows a recollection of an anecdote concerning the indiscretion of an American woman, who had written an “inconceivable” letter to the New York World, betraying the confidences of the “Venetian society whose hospitality she had just been enjoying” (James 1961: 82). This anecdote, which was to provide James with the “germ” of The Reverberator, offers a concrete illustration of the abstract condition which it precedes, for what strikes him most is “the strange typicality of the whole thing” ( James 1961: 82). The centrality granted to a thematic exploration of publicity in James’s mid-period fiction might thus be viewed as a reflection of the cultural experience to which he was particularly attuned as an American writer and which developed through subsequent mutations of his national-cultural perspective. James, in other words, appears to have recognized in publicity a distinctive – though not, of course, exclusively – American subject, which required novelistic recognition not only in contrast with European public culture, but also as a medium of national cultural expression in its own right, as his greatest attempt to write a novel of American manners – The Bostonians – suggests. It was, arguably, de Tocqueville, the early nineteenth-century French observer of American democratic culture, who first codified the reconfiguration of private and public spheres to which James attests as both a cultural anxiety and a literary opportunity: In Europe we frequently introduce the ideas and the habits of private life into public affairs; and as we pass at once from the domestic circle to the government of the State, we may frequently be heard to discuss the great interests of society in the same manner in which we converse with our friends. The Americans, on the other hand, transfuse the habits of public life into their manners in private; and in their country the jury is introduced into the games of schoolboys, and parliamentary forms are observed in the order of a feast. (Tocqueville 1862: 378)

The distinction resembles that which I have suggested could be made in interpreting the allegorical significance of Clare Vawdrey’s “private life,” as both necessarily open to the public sphere and threatened with extinction by it, although James’s story typically makes ambiguous the elegant inversions of de Tocqeville’s formula. More explicitly, though, it provides a template for many of James’s ethnographic observations on the differences between European and American public cultures, from as early as The American (1876–7) to as late as The American Scene (1907). Insofar as de Tocqueville saw American “public life” as the characteristic embodiment of modern democratic culture, his geographical dichotomy may also be arranged in temporal order, so that it reflects the transition to the new “age” represented in the realist novel, presaging (as James described the American journalist Henrietta Stackpole in The Portrait of a Lady) the “smell of the Future” ( James 1975: 88). Reviewing the novels of the 1870s and 1880s in order of composition, it is possible to discern a shift in James’s response to American practices of publicity, which, by

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the time of The American Scene, reaches its apotheosis. In The American, first of all, James works on a scenario of comic intercultural miscomprehension, centered on the appropriate segmentation of private and public space, which closely resembles the germ of The Reverberator, yet its narrative development is dramatically different in tone. The “international” topography of The American is represented, at its most simplified level, as a twofold binary articulation of cultural space: American space, as emblematized by Christopher Newman, being essentially “public,” European space, as inhabited by the Bellegardes, being conspicuously “private.” Evidence of this basic topography can be found in the architectural trope contrasting Newman’s first encounter with the Bellegardes’s domestic environment – “those gray and silent streets of the Faubourg St. Germain, whose houses present to the outer world a face as impassive and as suggestive of the concentration of privacy within as the blank walls of Eastern seraglios” – with his own spatialized imagination of “grandeur” as “a splendid façade, diffusing its brilliancy outward too, irradiating hospitality” ( James 1981: 79). Whereas in the first of these two figures, the domestic façade functions primarily as a way of marking a stable boundary between interior and exterior space, of screening the private sphere from the intrusive gaze of the “outer world,” in the latter, the façade appears to externalize its “internal” attributes, simultaneously inviting the spectator within (the gesture of “hospitality”) and forcing him outside (because nothing is concealed from view). Just as the Faubourg St. Germain provides an ominous spatial archetype for the condition of “fantastic privacy” within which Claire de Cintré will be permanently immured at the novel’s end, so Newman’s countervailing “ideal” prefigures a habitual association with the unbounded exteriority of public space: a preference for spacious rooms “in which you wanted to keep your hat on,” or, more iconically, an affinity with the open horizons of the Western Prairies ( James 1981: 124, 119). Newman’s narrative agency in seeking to penetrate the façade of “old” Europe, to dispel its “secrets,” to bring Claire “out of” domestic confinement rather than entering “into” the family himself, thus rendering her “visible,” is directly analogous to the function of the professional American publicist in later novels such as The Reverberator (George Flack) and The Portrait of a Lady (Henrietta Stackpole) ( James 1981: 225, 214, 79). This functional and rhetorical resemblance becomes clear enough when James has Newman threaten to “expose” the pernicious “secret” of the Bellegardes in the hope that Claire will “rise to the surface, return to the light”: the “light” of publicity being a standard metaphor for the democratic political legitimacy of the press exploited by the figure of the journalist in the latter texts ( James 1981: 360; cf. James 1989: 203). Mrs. Bread’s query to Newman: “You want to publish them – you want to shame them?” carries some of the revelatory force of the accusation of “publishing scoundrel,” more famously leveled at the investigative narrator of “The Aspern Papers,” inasmuch as her use of the word “publish” identifies the same cultural connotations ( James 1981: 375). Yet although Newman’s ultimate refusal to pursue his threat of exposure is seemingly intended to demonstrate that he is no “scoundrel,” the principle of publicity itself is accorded a more sympathetic treatment

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in The American than in any of James’s later texts. Here, the narrative function of bearing light furnishes “an antidote to oppressive secrets,” an alternative to the gothic enclosure of the Bellegardes which seems genuinely liberating by comparison ( James 1981: 225). Thus, for example, when Newman sends telegraphs to America to broadcast the news of his engagement to Claire, the joke is rather at the expense of the Bellegardes’s comically exaggerated horror, than at his characteristic use of modern communications technology. In The Portrait of a Lady, the role of probing the gothic recesses of a corrupt domestic sphere is transferred to one of the novel’s less central figures, Henrietta Stackpole, a reporter for the New York Interviewer whose professional mission is to uncover the “inner life” of Europe ( James 1975: 78). James’s treatment of Henrietta is certainly more ambivalent than that of Newman, but also, from the other side of the spectrum, than that of subsequent American publicists: while Isabel Archer’s recognition that Henrietta has “no sense of privacy” may read like a damning authorial judgment, it should be remembered that Isabel’s own sense of privacy has yet to be shaped by her experience of inhabiting Osmond’s oppressively proprietorial demarcation of private space, as embodied in the gothic prison of the Palazzo Roccanera ( James 1975: 82). “Privacy,” in other words, is scarcely an unequivocal value in the novel: as in The American, it encodes a root meaning of “privation,” especially when ascribed to the position of women within European familial structures, which both texts work to expose. Despite the comic superficiality of her claim to intimate knowledge of European culture, Henrietta is, in fact, one of James’s most benign journalist-figures, whose investigative mission preserves a discernible link with the emancipatory potential of the bourgeois public sphere. In comparison, the journalists of The Bostonians and The Reverberator are straightforwardly satirical objects, conceived with the premeditated design of exemplifying a sustained authorial critique of the American culture of publicity. There is nothing ambivalent, or especially nuanced, about the reactions which James engenders to the repulsively exploitative figures of Matthias Pardon in the former text and George Flack in the latter. Whilst, in both novels, James continues to debate differing interpretations of the legitimate function of the public sphere, emphasis is now firmly placed on the damaging consequences of publicity in its modern cultural forms. The famous ending of The Bostonians, for instance, in which Basil Ransom finally erases the “social visibility” (to use Jennifer Wicke’s term) of Verena Tarrant, a celebrated public speaker, presents a mirror image of Newman’s desire to liberate Claire de Cintré from a claustrophobic privacy, and while this is not to suggest that James condones Ransom’s action, his strikingly iconoclastic gesture suitably figures the problematization of public representation which the novel has explored (Wicke 1988: 97). If Verena’s life with Ransom is unpromising, as the concluding sentence of the novel hints, her alternative career as a prospective celebrity, a commodified product of journalistic promotion whose mass-produced image on posters and in photographs turns her into a “walking advertisement,” is not one that James contemplates with equanimity either ( James 1984a: 261). It is in this novel,

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indeed, that James first articulates a concerted critical sense of “that mania for publicity which is one of the most striking signs of our times” ( James 1961: 82).

Public Knowledge This critical sense was to extend, and grow in intensity, throughout the remainder of James’s career. From the end of the 1880s, however, James’s fiction shifts simultaneously both from the representational realist ambition of “sketch[ing] one’s age” and from the strident satirical manner in which its portrait of publicity was commonly figured. In James’s fiction of the 1890s and beyond, there remain barbed caricatures of journalists and other invaders of privacy, as in “The Death of the Lion” for instance, but these are often subordinate to a more nuanced exploration of the social and psychological forces behind the voracious growth of publicity culture. It is misleading to suggest, as some critics have, that James’s distaste for the vulgarities of this culture led to an increasing retrenchment from the public sphere when, if anything, it is James’s later work which tends somewhat to embrace the imaginative possibilities of publicity as both a creative mode of representation and a distinct, albeit flawed, way of knowing. It is in this later work, too, that schematic divisions between private and public space, of the kind witnessed in The American, become virtually impossible to sustain, as James becomes more fully cognizant of the destabilization of these categories through modern publicity. Perhaps the clearest example of this tendency is the novella “In the Cage” (1898), a text recently brought into greater critical prominence during the 1990s. The strikingly modern situation of this story – the title refers to the segregated enclosure for encoding and decoding messages within a Post and Telegraph Office, a nodal site for the transmission of discourse within the new telecommunications network established across Europe and North America from the 1860s onwards – has led some critics to read it as a paradigmatic statement on the development of what we might now call a “knowledge economy.” As a matter of fact, telegraphs appear on a regular basis in James’s international fiction, from The American (as noted above) to The Ambassadors, an interesting reminder of the material-technological basis on which the cultural interchange of this fiction was able to thrive, but it is not before “In the Cage” (a story focused resolutely on local or national, rather than international, communicative networks) that James consciously scrutinizes the cultural effects of telegraphy in reshaping the boundaries of space and time, author and reader, and private and public spheres, from the perspective of an individual consciousness. Commenting on the story in The Other Henry James (1998), John Carlos Rowe describes telegraphy as a “decidedly public mode of communication” in that the uncoded message of the sender requires the external mediation (translation into Morse code) of a “hired technician,” in this case the unnamed female protagonist, and suggestively compares the relationship between telegraphy and “the privacy of writing and its assorted rituals” with a contemporaneous shift in James’s own authorial practice, from writing by hand

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to dictation to a shorthand “amanuensis,” who later transcribed the text using another recent mechanical innovation, the typewriter (“In the Cage” thus being one of the earliest products of a method of textual production apparently reflected in its own thematic content) (Rowe 1998: 156–8). James certainly foregrounds the “intense publicity” of the Telegraph Office, both as a public space in which “personal” messages are produced and in which the medium employed to encode these texts (“an obscure little public servant”) is herself open to visual scrutiny ( James 1962–4: X: 142, 146). On the one hand, the telegraphist laments the lack of “elegant privacy” in her depersonalized professional function, an exposure reflecting her subordinate class and gender status, but, on the other hand, it is this very public position which grants her unique access to the “silly, guilty secrets” of her wealthy customers ( James 1962–4: X: 161, 154). The telegraphist’s functional self-display becomes, paradoxically, the condition of her social invisibility. In Rowe’s account of the novella, this peculiar situation emphasizes the subversive potentiality of modern communications technology, inasmuch as the lowly telegraphist gains a power of “surveillance” over the formerly “secret world of the ruling class,” which enables her to intervene actively within the communicative flows of which she is a supposedly impassive transmitter (Rowe 1998: 160, 165). Though James exploits the telegraphist’s imaginative absorption in the personal affairs of Captain Everard as a source of comic misprision, the implications of her “claim to knowledge” are, indeed, taken seriously (Rowe 1998: 167). Like the controversial narrator of “The Aspern Papers,” the telegraphist is driven by a potentially insatiable, narcissistic epistemophilia: “How much I know – how much I know,” she exclaims on one occasion, “I know, I know, I know,” on another ( James 1962–4: X: 181, 198; original emphases). Unlike her predecessor, though, the telegraphist’s will to knowledge is more openly and playfully engaged in the novelist’s creative faculty of imaginative speculation, “read[ing] into the immensity” of telegraphic communication “stories and meanings without end,” spinning a “web of revelation” of the kind attributed to the process of artistic consciousness in “The Art of Fiction” ( James 1962–4: X: 155, 176; cf. James 1984b: 52–3). Yet it is important to acknowledge that the subversive and/or creative potential of telegraphy is, at the same time, placed under severe constraints in James’s construction of the telegraphist’s situation. Most obviously, the very title of the story draws our attention to the physical and intellectual limitations of the telegraphist’s experience, the material and cultural deprivations on which the necessity of her imaginative life is founded. The telegraphist’s figurative imprisonment within the bureaucratic “cage” of modern communications technology is, I would maintain, a symbol of her alienated labor in the sense that it represents a lack of meaningful control over the circulation of discourse of which she is an instrumental function. The fact that the telegraphist only gains access to one side of the telegraphic exchange may be imaginatively liberating, since it compels her to fill in the informational gaps, but it remains testimony to her peripheral role in the primary process of communication. Thus, James ultimately asks us to question the extent to which knowledge of other people’s

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private lives can really be attained through what has been described as a form of “mediated intimacy” (Thurschwell 2001: 10). The telegraphist’s overweening claims to knowledge hint at epistemological self-delusions which become readily apparent in the narrative dénouement. When it becomes clear that her friend Mrs. Jordan is better informed about Captain Everard’s affairs than she is, and by more orthodox means, the telegraphist is forced to relinquish her “dreams and delusions” and “return to reality,” as comically embodied in the figure of Mr. Mudge. Appropriately for her epistemological venture, James leaves the telegraphist suspended in a state of literal “fog” on the final page. In its ironic deflation of the telegraphist’s attempt to control the distribution of knowledge and power within modern communications systems, “In the Cage” bears a strong resemblance to another of James’s late novellas, the brilliant, though lesserknown, satire on the newspaper industry, “The Papers” (1903). Here, too, James acknowledges the aesthetic enticements of publicity – its capacity to generate new forms of identity and self-expression through cultural representation – only to expose their pitifully delusive character in the final reckoning. Like the telegraphist, the journalists, Howard Bight and Maud Blandy, occupy a professional position which grants them a privileged insight into the internal workings of the publicity machine, which is the autonomous corporate agency of The Papers: disdainful of the gullibility of the general public, they alone, it appears, know the “inside story” of the public fictions which newspapers produce. Howard, in particular, prides himself on being a successful publicist, one capable of sustaining fictive identities for his clients, the willing subjects of journalistic representation. His experience thus differs from that of previous journalists in James’s fiction by virtue of the fact that his exposure of the private life seems to be no longer a matter of controversy; instead of meeting resistance, he encounters only an “eagerness to figure,” to be transfigured in the representational medium of the public sphere. Yet through the case history of the foremost contemporary celebrity, Sir A. B. C. Beadel-Muffet, KCB, MP, Howard is eventually forced to recognize the limitations of his own manipulative or inventive powers. His endeavor to “write” the plot of Beadel-Muffet’s mysterious disappearance conspicuously fails, whilst paradoxically succeeding in making the celebrity’s absence from public view the very signifier of his media profile. The publicity machine of The Papers is thus depicted as a monstrous organic force, an irrational Fate, which cannot be controlled by any one of its constituent parts. Towards the end of the tale, Howard and Maud renounce journalism for more “littery” pursuits in open recognition of their defeat, yet there is little to suggest that their individual authorial prowess will rival, or transcend, the anonymous creative power of The Papers ( James 1962–4: XII: 17– 18, 115, 122). “Literature” does not trump “journalism,” as might have been expected from such a dénouement, since the case of Beadel-Muffet has already proved so outrageously fictive. For this reason, it seems unlikely that the skeptical consciousness of the two journalists is proposed by James as a successful model of critical public reason, in contradistinction to the distorted medium of The Papers, as Mary Esteve has

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claimed (Esteve 2003: 79). Their inside knowledge of the mechanisms of publicity turns out to be almost as misguided as the hapless “spectators” whom they deride, and is indeed caught up in the same mimetic desires.

“Optical Commerce” Elsewhere, however, in James’s fiction of the twentieth century, the pervasiveness of such desires leads to the diffusion of publicity as a thematic concern in the relatively discrete form of his earlier realist novels. The cultural historian Jackson Lears is one of several recent critics to have noticed James’s recognition of “the centrality of spectacle in modern urban society,” and this recognition is not simply reflected in overt forms of satire or cultural criticism (Lears 1994: 273). Rather, James’s later fiction tends to articulate an experience of the public sphere less as a site of struggle between consciously opposing cultural forces and more as a field of visual representation in which the perceiving subject is always already immersed. This process could be described as a form of “optical commerce,” to use a phrase which appears in another of James’s late stories, “The Bench of Desolation” (1910), referring to the “casual obliquity” with which the protagonist Herbert Dodd visually encounters the artfully constructed window-displays of his antiquarian bookshop ( James 1962–4: XII: 373). Though, in fact, self-consciously engineered, Dodd’s oblique, seemingly accidental consumption of a commercial spectacle (which happens to be his own) might serve as a model for the more general exchange between private consciousness and the public sphere in James’s later fiction. It is no coincidence that the specific figure of the shop-window display features repeatedly in the novels of the “major phase,” most prominently in The Ambassadors (1903) and The Golden Bowl (1904). Emblematic of the dissolution of boundaries between interior and exterior cultural space, as Walter Benjamin’s study of the nineteenth-century Parisian arcades was perhaps the first to critically articulate, the shop-window display provides later James with a metaphor for the capacious “reflective” process of consciousness itself, as well as suggesting its mediation of historically specific forms of cultural representation (Benjamin 1976: 36–7). The first chapter of The Golden Bowl is a case in point. The novel’s opening scene shows Prince Amerigo reflecting upon the imperial character of London as he wanders into Bond Street, “where his imagination, working at comparatively short range, caused him now and then to stop before a window in which objects massive and lumpish, in silver and gold, in the forms to which precious stones contribute, or in leather, steel, brass, applied to a hundred uses and abuses, were as tumbled together as if, in the insolence of the Empire, they had been the loot of far-off victories” ( James 1985: 43). Here, then, the contents of the shop window correspond exactly to the content of the Prince’s thoughts, providing an objective correlative of his consciousness, or, in more apposite terms, a material self-reflection. James appears to be

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thinking of this particular scene when describing the structural centrality of the Prince’s consciousness to the first half of the novel in his 1908 preface: Having a consciousness highly susceptible of registration, he thus makes us see the things that may most interest us reflected in it as in the clean glass held up to so many of the “short stories” of our long list; and yet after all never a whit to the prejudice of his being just as consistently a foredoomed, entangled, embarrassed agent in the general imbroglio, actor in the offered play. ( James 1985: 20–1)

The consciousness of the Prince is thus conceived as analogous to the medium of “clear glass” through which he gazes in the opening scene and by which he himself is made visible to the gaze of the reader. In the shop windows of Bond Street, the Prince finds a reflection of his own reflections on the transference of Empire’s centripetal power from Rome to London, which, in turn, prefigures the novel’s subsequent displacement of power to the future imperial center of Adam Verver’s “American City.” A few pages later, he notes explicitly that “the plate glass . . . was money, was power, the power of the rich peoples”: an equation by which, again, the “machinery” of the shop window becomes a model for the operation of consciousness, including the screening of memories as if by the “iron shutter of a shop” ( James 1985: 52–3). The Prince, at this stage, positively embraces the rational modernity of the shop window as a welcoming protection from the “superstition” of his old imperial self. Later in the novel, though, it becomes clear that the medium of the shop window does not permit the security of detached spectatorship to those figures who are themselves endowed with what James’s preface to the novel terms “representational values” ( James 1985: 35). Both Prince Amerigo and Charlotte Stant are ultimately imprisoned within the field of visual representation which they appear, initially, to survey: while, in Book 1, they figure (to varying degrees) as mobile consumers of London’s imperial spectacle, in the later Books we watch them being frozen into the prized exhibits of a new imperial museum. The obverse side of the process of “optical commerce” is embodied by the image of the “glass case,” wherein the Ververs figuratively contain Charlotte and the Prince at the end of the novel. Adam’s passion for acquiring the assets of European collections so as to display them within an American setting suggests the creation of a new medium of publicity, an “exhibitory temple” to rival even the British Museum, where Maggie goes to exult in the records of the Prince’s ancestry, both extending and supplanting the commodified spectacle of the shop window. His desire to frame all conceivable objects of acquisition behind glass, from the church at Fawns to Charlotte herself, reflects an aggressive manipulation of the terms of access to visual representation which appears, simultaneously, to eschew control through the transparency of its mediation. Perhaps the richest and most disturbing invocation of this figural motif occurs at the moment in Book 6 when Maggie becomes aware that “[b]ehind the glass lurked the whole history of the relation she had so fairly flattened her nose against it to penetrate – the glass Mrs. Verver might at this stage have been frantically tapping from within by way of supreme irrepress-

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ible entreaty”: a perception which both unites and divides external and internal perspectives on the exhibitory space by playing upon the paradoxical opacity of glass ( James 1985: 147, 427, 552). According to some cultural historians, the commercial shop-window display also provided a model for the reorganization of space within American domestic architecture at the turn of the century, the framework of public exhibition entering the private home. The increasing use of glass to demarcate spatial boundaries within domestic buildings, both urban skyscrapers and suburban villas, was part of a process which Philip Fisher has described as the creation of “a new internal openness . . . breaking down the cell-like home of the Victorian middle class” (Fisher 1986: 169). In The American Scene (1907), his most important work of cultural criticism, James relocates the disorienting interfusion of surface and depth, private and public manners, which pervades The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl in a diffuse manner, to a whole series of concrete cultural spaces, which he encounters on his return to the United States after an absence of more than two decades: hotels, clubs, railroad-cars, civic halls, apartments, villeggiatura, though, arguably, not shop windows, which he finds crudely aggressive by comparison with those of Europe. He expresses bewilderment when forced to overhear private conversation on public transport, is struck by the intimacy and accessibility of public buildings, as well as the exhibitionism of private houses, and discovers in hotels an undecidable boundary between gregarious spontaneity and administrative coercion. What appears to unify these disparate spaces is a principle of architectural design reflecting a “conception of life” which James finds profoundly alienating: Thus we see systematized the indefinite extension of all spaces and the definite merging of all functions; the enlargement of every opening, the exaggeration of every passage, the substitution of gaping arches and far perspectives and resounding voids for enclosing walls, for practicable doors, for controllable windows, for all the rest of the essence of the room-character, that room-suggestion which is so indispensable not only to occupation and concentration, but to conversation itself, to the play of the social relation at any other pitch than the pitch of a shriek or a shout. ( James 1987: 119–20)

It is easy to view James’s anxiety around the blurring of spatial boundaries, both between and within the demarcation of private and public spheres, as voicing a nostalgic preference for the “cellular” structure of nineteenth-century bourgeois domestic life, especially within the European forms to which James had grown accustomed. It is, correspondingly, hard to disagree with Peter Conn’s observation that The American Scene manifests a “fear of the boundless, of the gaping, of the void” derived from an “aesthetic commitment” rooted “in closure, in human scale, in limits and boundaries” (Conn 1983: 39). Yet, in emphasizing exclusively James’s anxious retreat from “modernity,” this reading overlooks the explicitly social dimension of privacy in James’s thinking, its capacity to produce “not only . . . occupation and concentration, but . . . conversation itself”: a twofold conception of the function of privacy which, as

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I suggested earlier, may be related to James’s definition of an operative public sphere. What is disturbing about the reconfiguration of cultural space which James observes in the American scene of 1904 is perhaps less its threat to interiority per se (“the complete proscription of privacy” which James frequently laments) than its apparent extinction of the established hermeneutic structure by which private and public spheres are regulated in dialectical opposition ( James 1987: 120). In much of James’s earlier work this hermeneutic structure is tested, often to breaking point, by the forces which comprise the “devouring publicity” of modern life, yet the strategies by which privacy is “invaded” invariably invoke the very boundaries which they claim to dispel, thus reinscribing these boundaries through transgression. It is in this light, most notably, that James presents the struggle for knowledge between biographers or journalists and their subjects (either willing or unwilling) in his fiction and literary criticism of the 1880s and 1890s. As I have sought to demonstrate in this essay, the advantage of this hermeneutic model was that it provided James with opportunities for imaginatively trespassing upon the borders of intimate consciousness which the formal resolutions of his narratives ultimately curtail. Conversely, the sense of openness, of the “void,” which James often remarks in The American Scene, testifies to an absence of spatial boundaries of such extent that the very mechanisms of publicity itself are rendered unfamiliar or redundant. If nothing in the constitution of American domesticity appears “inwardly projected,” so nothing can be exterior to it, nothing threatens to expose it, in the manner of the publicity with which James was previously acquainted: “It was as if the projection had been so completely outward that one could find one’s self almost uneasy about the mere perspective required for the common acts of the personal life,” a disorientation affecting both internal and external points of view ( James 1987: 7–8). Though The American Scene is, in many ways, a reprise of observations and concerns long established in James’s cultural criticism – America’s culture of publicity stretching like an umbilical cord from his earliest novels of the 1870s through to The Bostonians and beyond – it also marks a point of departure, a loss of familiar moorings in the dialectic of revelation and concealment, and the inauguration of new modes of being in public.

References and Further Reading Anesko, Michael (1986). “Friction with the Market”: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship. New York: Oxford University Press. Benjamin, Walter (1976). Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. (Trans. Harry Zohn.) London: Verso. Conn, Peter (1983). The Divided Mind: Ideology and Imagination in America, 1898–1917. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Esteve, Mary (2003). The Aesthetics and Politics of the Crowd in American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fisher, Philip (1986). “Appearing and disappearing in public: Social space in late-nineteenth century literature and culture.” In Sacvan Bercovitch (ed.) Reconstructing American Literary History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Henry James in the Public Sphere Habermas, Jürgen (1989). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. (Trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence.) Cambridge: Polity Press. Hamilton, Ian (1992). Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography. London: Hutchinson. James, Henry (1961). The Notebooks of Henry James. Ed. F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock. New York: Oxford University Press. James, Henry (1962–4). The Complete Tales of Henry James. Ed. Leon Edel. London: Rupert Hart-Davis. James, Henry (1975). The Portrait of a Lady. Ed. Robert D. Bamberg. New York: W. W. Norton. James, Henry (1981). The American. Ed. William Spengemann. London: Penguin. James, Henry (1984a). The Bostonians. Ed. Charles R. Anderson. London: Penguin. James, Henry (1984b). Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers. New York: Library of America. James, Henry (1984c). Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, the Prefaces to the New York Edition. New York: Library of America. James, Henry (1985). The Golden Bowl. Ed. Gore Vidal. London: Penguin. James, Henry (1986). The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories. Ed. Frank Kermode. London: Penguin.

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James, Henry (1987). The American Scene. London: Granville Publishing. James, Henry (1989). A London Life and The Reverberator. Ed. Philip Horne. Oxford: Oxford University Press. James, Henry (1995). The Tragic Muse. Ed. Philip Horne. London: Penguin. Lears, Jackson (1994). Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America. New York: Basic Books. Posnock, Ross (1985). Henry James and The Problem of Robert Browning. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Rowe, John Carlos (1998). The Other Henry James. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Salmon, Richard (1997). Henry James and the Culture of Publicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thurschwell, Pamela (2001). Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tocqueville, Alexis de (1862). Democracy in America [vol. 1]. Tr. Henry Reeve. London: Longman. Todorov, Tzvetan (1977). The Poetics of Prose. (Trans. Richard Howard.) Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wicke, Jennifer (1988). Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertisement, and Social Reading. New York: Columbia University Press.

28

James and Film Susan M. Griffin

Henry James’s fiction has proved a remarkable resource for filmmakers, inspiring well over 100 film and television adaptations, both of which I include in the category of “Jamesian film.” In addition to the predictable – Merchant-Ivory and Masterpiece Theatre – James has attracted directors as diverse as François Truffaut, Vincente Minnelli, and Peter Bogdanovich, actors from Montgomery Clift to Robert Cummings, producer Roger Corman, and screenwriters Alan Jay Lerner, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Film versions of “The Turn of the Screw” have featured Deborah Kerr, Ingrid Bergman, Lynn Redgrave, Amy Irving, and Valerie Bertinelli as the governess, Linda Hunt and Marianne Faithfull as narrators. Starting in 1933, with Berkeley Square, starring Leslie Howard, and continuing into the twenty-first century’s The Golden Bowl, featuring Uma Thurman, Henry James’s prose has engaged artists and audiences worldwide. Film has brought him the popular audience he never reached during his lifetime. In turn, James offers complex characters, intriguing plots, and vivid visual imagery, not to mention cultural capital and cachet, to those who create and watch films.1 For all of James’s reputation as an ivory-tower practitioner of literary art aimed at the elite few, we know that his first experience of film was definitely not a highbrow one: in 1897, he watched, enthusiastically, the seventy-minute film of the CorbettFitzsimmons world championship prizefight. He saw, too, a short film about the Boer War in 1900. Although there are no other recorded instances of his attendance at the movies, given his active social life and love of public entertainments, James is likely to have visited the cinema again. Certainly, film’s structures of seeing intrigued him: he used its technology metaphorically in a late (1909) story, “Crapy Cornelia.” James describes Cornelia Rasch’s first appearance to the protagonist, White-Mason, as an incongruous object usurping at a given instant the privilege of the frame and seeming, even as he looked, to block the view. The incongruous object was a woman’s head, crowned with a little sparsely feathered black hat, an ornament quite unlike those the women mostly noticed by White-Mason

A Companion to Henry James. Edited by Greg W. Zacharias © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-14042-3

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were now “wearing,” and that grew and grew, that came nearer and nearer, while it met his eyes, after the manner of images in the kinematograph. It had presently loomed so large that he saw nothing else. ( James 1909a: II: 825)

What the “cinematograph” analogy allows James is a vivid illustration and concentration of his character’s literal point of view. Drawing on his readership’s movie theater experiences, James is able to metaphorically describe the trajectory of the story, in which White-Mason’s attentions shift from Mrs. Worthingham to Cornelia, from modern New York to the New York of the past that the older woman embodies and exemplifies. Perception – and particularly visual perception – saturates the structures of both Jamesian thought and Jamesian narrative. Thus, cinema, like other technologies of perception, serves a practical need in James’s texts. Would Henry James have written for the cinema? His eager embrace of new technologies, lifelong penchant for the theater, repeated efforts to reach a popular audience, and the visual bent of his imagination, suggest that James might have been eager to work in this new medium. While his repeated failure to “make a go of it” in playwriting makes the surety of his success questionable, the temptation to imagine a screenplay by Henry James is irresistible. Would he have banked on what he saw as the popular appetite for melodrama (just as he chose The Other House and The American as good bets for the theatrical productions)? Certainly, it is striking that two of the more successful James films – Berkeley Square (itself remade several times) and The Heiress – were adapted from stage plays. Or would he have tried to do for film what he did for the novel – raise it to an art form? Perhaps the hapless examples of Fitzgerald and Faulkner in Hollywood should warn us away from such speculation. What makes James’s writing so appealing to filmmakers? Although the explicit borrowing from filmic experience in “Crapy Cornelia” is unique in James’s writing, readers have often described his narratives as “cinematic.” For those who complain that nothing happens in James’s fiction, such a designation may seem odd. But the centrality of recognition scenes to novels like The Portrait of a Lady and The Ambassadors, the dominance of point of view as a Jamesian narrative practice, the structural and thematic importance of the gaze in James, and the pervasiveness in his fiction and criticism of metaphors and symbolism drawn from the visual arts, combine to offer filmmakers rich visual texture and scenic structures. And artists from François Truffaut to Jane Campion have, accordingly, turned to James for material. Paul Unwin, director of the PBS production of The American, makes one of James’s appeals plain: “What I love about James is the way he describes characters” (quoted in O’Neil 2005), a statement echoed by Agnieszka Holland and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (Crnkovic: 1999). We have only to think of Daisy Miller, Austin Sloper, Isabel Archer, Peter Quint, Juliana Bordereau, or Charlotte Stant to agree. Indeed, it is – counter-intuitively – James’s psychological plotting, the internal action of his plots, that has interested many of his adapters. “The internal monologues are very rich, providing a lot of material that you can make into scenes,” James Ivory claims. “The material is there to guide the adaptor along in all sorts of ways, and

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actually does provide you with clues and even raw material for scenes, which then make the story clearer to a viewer” (quoted in O’Neil 2005). So, too, Jamesian ambiguity, a narrative quality that might seem to work against translation into another medium, is perceived by many adaptors of James as peculiarly cinematic. Hossein Amini, screenwriter for the 1997 The Wings of the Dove, argues that “film as a medium is so well suited to subtext,” and, hence, James. “You’re able to tell two different stories at the same time, which I think is the essence of James’s kind of work” (quoted in O’Neil 2005), Amini explains. Image, music, dialogue, and all of those can be working against each other, which is, in a way, what James’s prose often does. There are three or four ideas going on at the same time, which makes a film so tempting to try, to capture some sense of that. But I still think it’s almost impossible to capture what he does with his prose. (Quoted in O’Neil 2005)

The 1970s British television series Affairs of the Heart, with its subtitles of a single woman’s name (e.g., Affairs of the Heart: Daisy based on “Daisy Miller” and Affairs of the Heart: Bessie taken from “An International Episode”), underscores another great appeal of James’s fiction: its focus on women. Karen Michele Chandler classifies William Wyler’s The Heiress (1949) as a “woman’s film” (Chandler 2002: 177) and surely Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady (1996) performs a variation on that genre. Agnieszka Holland’s Washington Square foregrounds James’s – and her own – interest in the woman’s role as an entertainment commodity, what Nancy Bentley, quoting James, describes as the “conscious observation of a lovely woman” (2002: 127). The question that James asks in the preface to The Portrait of a Lady – how “the mere slim shade of an intelligent but presumptuous girl . . . [can be] endowed with the high attributes of a Subject?” – is answered in the many Jamesian narratives and films centered on a female character and illustrating how “In these frail vessels is borne onward through the ages the treasure of human affection” ( James 1908a: 292).2 In making “women’s films,” filmmakers have both continued and commented upon James’s own complex relationship with “female” genres, as exemplified in the influences and denials that thread through his writing and are thematized in short stories like “Greville Fane” (1892) and “The Velvet Glove” (1909). Critical responses to films based on James fictions regularly devolve to the question of whether the filmmaker has created an appropriately “serious” work of cinematic art, a question often framed as one of gendered genres. Critics like Dale Bauer and Dianne Sadoff have deftly analyzed the “cultural capital” that “Henry James” offers cinema. The Master’s guarantee of artistic worth and seriousness redounds not only to those involved in the Jamesian film’s creation, of course, but also proves attractive to what Sadoff labels a “middlebrow” audience (viewers among whom I count myself), marking both “class” and class (Sadoff 2002: 255). This appeal is most obvious, perhaps, in Merchant-Ivory/Masterpiece Theatre

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productions, though it appears too in less predictable venues, as, for example, when a Julia Roberts/Hugh Grant movie like Notting Hill uses “Henry James” as shorthand for “serious acting.” Though what are we to make of the example of Roger Corman’s production of The Haunting of Hell House, which was at one point advertised as “Henry James’s The Haunting of Hell House” and even retained the Jamesian title of The Ghostly Rental in some markets? James’s preface to the volume of the New York Edition that contained both The Aspern Papers and “The Turn of the Screw” suggests some possibilities for further thought: The thing had for me the immense merit of allowing the imagination absolute freedom of hand, of inviting it to act on a perfectly clear field, with no “outside” control involved, no pattern of the usual or the true of the terrible “pleasant.” ( James 1908b: 338)

The genre of “fairy tales,” broadly construed, offers the writer “an annexed but independent world in which nothing is right save as we rightly imagine it” ( James 1908b: 339). This world, what Hawthorne in the preface to the Marble Faun calls a “fairy realm,” is, I would suggest, the setting of many James films.3 Another – nearer ? – version of this realm is, of course, “romance.” Rereading The American in order to write its preface for the New York Edition, James discovers that, though he had thought in the 1870s that he was writing realism, he now sees what he created was a romance. The real represents to my perception the things we cannot possibly not know, sooner or later, in one way or another; it being but one of the accidents of our hampered state, and one of the incidents of their quantity and number, that particular instances have not yet come our way. The romantic stands, on the other hand, for the things that, with all the facilities in the world, all the wealth and all the courage and all the wit and all the adventure, we never can directly know; the things that can reach us only through the beautiful circuit and subterfuge of our thought and our desire. ( James 1907: 279)

Eschewing the terms “romance” or “romancer,” Michael Wood nonetheless echoes James’s description of himself as a realist with difference. He calls James a “possibilist, eager to imagine what we could be like, even if there are no literal examples to hand” (Wood 2005: 8). Interestingly, Wood articulates “the criticism that any possibilist is sooner or later going to have to face: these creatures of yours don’t exist in reality” in the voice of a film character played by Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot: “Nobody talks like that” (Wood 2005: 9). Lemmon’s criticism of what is essentially a Cary Grant imitation is, of course, made by a man who flamboyantly performs as a woman in this film; a performance that Joe E. Brown as Osgood Fielding III stubbornly and comically reads as “real” in the movie’s closing line. Film, in other words, and especially genre film, can highlight the problems of representation, can at once point to and disguise its construction of a space elsewhere.

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I would suggest that the definitions that James and Wood are exploring speak not only to the generic distinctions among fictional modes but also to the issue of Jamesian adaptation itself. Jacques Rivette, director of Celine et Julie vont en bateau (1974), claimed that James is one of the “unfilmable” authors, who “can be filmed diagonally, taking up their themes, but never literally” (quoted in Horne 2000: 35). Needless to say, not all films based on James stories adhere to that indirection.4 Indeed, many critics and viewers complain about how modern filmmakers feel the need to make visually explicit what James himself left to the reader’s imagination. Sex scenes in Unwin’s The American and Softley’s The Wings of the Dove are trumped only by moments like those when Catherine Sloper urinates on herself or throws her body in the muddy street in Holland’s Washington Square. However, Rivette’s notion of filming diagonally describes not only his own avant-garde, free adaptation of James’s text (in this case, The Other House), but also an engagement with James’s own attempts to explore “the beautiful circuit and subterfuge of our thought and our desire” ( James 1907: 279). One signal that a film may have aspirations to what James calls elsewhere in the preface to The American “experience liberated . . . experience disengaged, disembroiled, disencumbered” ( James 1907: 280) is the appearance of its characters in historical or exotic costumes. What we might loosely group as Jamesian costume dramas include Hollywood movies like The Heiress (1949) and Daisy Miller (1974), BBC/PBS literary productions like The American (2001) and The Golden Bowl (1973), and art house experiments like The Portrait of a Lady (1996) and What Maisie Knew (1975). My term “costume dramas” is somewhat misleading here; James himself warned against using “costume” as a litmus test for genre (“Where again then does costume begin or end? – save with the ‘run’ of one or another sort of play? We must reserve vague labels for artless mixtures”) ( James 1907: 280). The historical settings of these films, marked not least by scenery and clothing, flaunt their authenticity, yet their settings in the past nonetheless free their creators from certain realist demands. Thus, The Wings of the Dove lovingly and lavishly recreates period clothing and sets, but Softley feels free to change the time period of James’s story by a decade. The point is not that the setting is 1902, as such, but that it be recognizably not our time. As James says of the fairy tale: “The charm of all these things for the distracted modern mind is in the clear field of experience, as I call it, over which we are thus led to roam” ( James 1908b: 339). In an era when the past – especially the artistic past – has been marketed so successfully to “distracted modern minds” (museum gift shops offer only the most obvious example), part of that “charm” is acquisitive. Softley, for one, knows his audience: The costumes in particular are important here because they’re the things that house the acting, but they’re also an expression of the characters. I told the designer that I wanted people to want these costumes. If people are saying, ‘I want to wear that!’ that’s a long way on the road to understanding the characters. (Quoted in Ian 2000: 214–15)

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A very different “desire” than both what James has in mind in defining “romance” and that of film studies’ “gaze”! Nonetheless, Softley’s understanding of audiences’ “want[s]” is not simply consumerist, as his own example attests. Our eyes trace the folds of the gorgeous textures of Milly and Kate’s costumes in his Wings of the Dove, prompting a tactile imagining and indirectly sensual experience.5 “Costume” signals as well filmmakers’ engagement with James as a novelist of manners, a choice that allows for minute examination of mores and behaviors. The detailed representation and interpretation of motive and perception entailed in such texts fosters a filmic turn away from external “action” towards psychological analysis and development. These are works that can be plotted around the question of “what Maisie knew” or the national natures and understandings of female “innocence.” While such topics and narrative structures need not, of course, be treated in historical dramas, genre expectations among contemporary audiences are such that the past is deemed an appropriate realm for finely tuned explorations of morals and mores. And “costume” connotes what has come to be called James’s “international theme.” James’s narrative explorations of the cultural ethnography, characters, conflicts, and plots revolving around nineteenth- and early twentieth-century transatlantic encounters and exchanges were timely. Their marked but limited distance from twentieth- and twenty-first-century audiences at once allows for historical filmmaking and opens up a realm for exploration of contemporary global questions. The opportunities provided are evidenced by the sheer number of James films based on fictions in which he treats the clash of American and European cultures. A partial list includes productions of The Ambassadors in 1950, 1965, and 1977; The American in 1950, 1956, and 2001; Daisy Miller in 1974 and 1975; The Europeans in 1958 (with Zsa Zsa Gabor!) and 1971; The Golden Bowl in 1973 and 2000; “The Jolly Corner” in 1975; The Portrait of a Lady in 1968 and 1996; The Reverberator in 1956; The Sense of the Past in 1933, 1948, 1949, 1951, 1959, and 1970; and The Wings of the Dove in 1952, 1959, 1965, 1975, 1979, 1981, 1997, and 1998. Jane Campion opens her Portrait with voices and images of late twentieth-century Australian women and illustrates Isabel’s world travels with photographs of colonialist travel. Merchant and Ivory use newsprint and newsreel images to establish Adam Verver’s status and practices as the capitalist collector who scours the globe for treasures to bring home to America. Gothic James provides a different, albeit sometimes overlapping, path to that artistic realm where the imagination is freed, as James says, from the “terrible ‘pleasant’.” James’s darker writings have inspired not only The Haunting of Hell House but also auteur films like La Chambre verte: François Truffaut insisted that his adaptation took from James’s short stories the quality of “a thriller” (quoted in Horne 2000: 36). So, too, Amini says that in Wings, “[My script] was heavily influenced by film noir – everything from the staccato dialogue through these meetings in murky, Venetian courtyards and corners. It had very much a sort of that plot” (quoted in O’Neil 2005). Paul Unwin talks of his deliberate decision to heighten the tension of The American

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by opening with the murder mystery that unfolds more gradually in – but is at the heart of – James’s narrative. James’s eerie unfinished fantastic narrative of time-travel, The Sense of the Past, provided material for not only the very first James film, Berkeley Square (1933), but a series of remakes including I’ll Never Forget You (1951) and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970). And the most-often adapted James fiction is what he called his “pot-boiler,” “The Turn of the Screw” – sixteen versions at last count (Koch 2002). The inspiration for James’s story was, he said, “the vividest little note for sinister romance that I had ever jotted down” ( James 1908b: 338), and surely it is that sinister note that was visually orchestrated into films like The Innocents (1962) and The Nightcomers (1971), with their imagery of beetles, turtles, and toads. While most readers think of “Turn” as James’s only ghost story, it was, in fact, a genre that he turned to throughout his career. An 1868 supernatural story, “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes,” along with yet another murder mystery, The Other House (1896) – both tales of murder and violent sexual jealousy – provide the raw material for Jacques Rivette’s Celine et Julie vont en bateau. Darkest James offers characters and plots; supernatural forces and ghosts; violence and betrayal. This is a James congenial to the shadows of Expressionist cinema and film noir. As with what I have called “costume drama,” the “look” of these films signals affinity, theme, and genre. However, here costume as such signifies less than cinematography. Paul Unwin, The American’s director, recognized that he wanted to set his viewers on a gothic path at the start: “Is it going to be as dark and mysterious as it appears to be? I felt that placing the secret at the beginning would give us that trajectory” (quoted in O’Neil 2005). This rearrangement of James’s plot is not a matter of mere verbal exposition. The opening shot of The American tracks back and forth across the surface of a medieval tapestry (woman, man, forest, man, woman). Behind the hanging we hear heavy breathing (sex? fear? dying?). We then see a woman’s hand pour a powder (medicine? poison?) into a glass which turns its contents cloudy. The camera pans to show a terrified young woman listening behind heavy draperies. Presented with this enclosed, darkened mise-en-scène, we know, even before we hear and see the black-clad Diana Rigg (that voice and face now invariably associated with Mystery! and mystery), that we have entered the gothic, following an innocent young woman as she explores a house of horrors. Screenwriter Michael Hasting’s sometimes facile rendering of James’s narrative (of Claire de Cintré, he says “this particular girl has low self-esteem”) (a talk, 2005) nonetheless hones in on and cinematically displays the melodramatic and gothic elements of James’s text. The shadowy half-revelation – both literal and figurative – that puts this American in motion points to what is perhaps most appealing to filmmakers about this strain in James’s work: the relations it creates with its audience. Again, James’s analysis of the problems of writing “The Turn of the Screw” proves instructive. Mulling over the matter of the ghosts, Quint and Jessel, James recalls his greatest creative problem:

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Portentous evil – how was I to save that, as an intention on the part of my demon-spirits, from the drop, the comparative vulgarity, inevitably attending, throughout the whole range of possible brief illustration, the offered example, the imputed vice, the cited act, the limited deplorable presentable instance? To bring the bad dead back to life for a second round of badness is to warrant them as indeed prodigious, and to become hence as shy of specifications as of a waiting anti-climax. ( James 1908b: 342)

James recalls his own disappointments as a reader: the tension and anticipation of pushing through to a promised revelation of evil that, when revealed, seems merely petty and mean. His solution, most famously in “Turn of the Screw” itself, is to make evil the reader’s part: Only make the reader’s general vision of evil intense enough, I said to myself – and that already is a charming job – and his own experience, his own imagination, his own sympathy (with the children) and horror (of their false friends) will supply him quite sufficiently with all the particulars. Make him think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications. ( James 1908b: 343)

James sounds positively Hitchcockian; or, perhaps, as I am suggesting, Hitchcock’s filmmaking – and that of those who follow him – is positively Jamesian. What might comprise “Jamesian film” under this understanding poses an interesting question. Unwin ratchets up audience suspense in The American by means of what James calls a ficelle, the reader’s – or in this case, the viewer’s – friend. Mrs. Bread directs our imaginations, sometimes almost pornographically, without, as James says, specifying: “I want to tell you something about the one you love,” she confides to Newman, “Certain abominable acts took place. In the bedroom. They were indescribable. But that’s why she can’t . . ..” Later, the film’s visual spaces literalize an opening or blank for audience projection. Newman finds the door to the Bellegardes’s home open. He walks in to find the furniture shrouded and flowers strewn about. To his demanding, “What is it?” Bread replies, “Sir, I can’t tell you what I fear.” Two films based on The Aspern Papers, The Lost Moment (1947) and Hullabaloo over Georgie and Bonnie’s Pictures (1978) commingle costume drama and gothic mystery in distinctly different proportions, demonstrating the rich resource that a single James story can offer filmmakers. These films, separated by some thirty years, declare their genre allegiances from the start: the film noir lighting and shadows of The Lost Moment stand in marked contrast to the brightness and color that renders the India of Hullabaloo. While both are tales of Americans abroad, Lost Moment uses Venice merely as a background to provide a bit of local color (or, rather, shade). The cultural clash between Americans and Europeans, and between Europeanized and “native” Americans; the genealogy of American art and artistic exile; the increasingly intrusive power of American publishers and press, all topics and tensions that pervade The Aspern

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Papers, are missing from The Lost Moment. These Jamesian concerns are, as such, absent from Hullabaloo as well. Nonetheless, James’s international theme is omnipresent in the later movie, albeit in altered form. Merchant-Ivory rework James’s dark narrative of Americans in Venice into an international comedy of manners, teasing out the comic resonances too often ignored by readers of The Aspern Papers. (Ironically, the deadly seriousness of The Lost Moment sits uneasily with later audiences. Given the subsequent television careers of Bob Cummings and Agnes Moorehead, it’s hard to keep from imagining Endora’s flaming red wig under Juliana’s black veil.) But the fact that both films are in some sense ghost stories shows as well the limitations of strict generic distinctions. At times, The Lost Moment’s film noir techniques mirror Henry James’s insistence that the audience do the imaginative work of the gothic. The film begins with a camera panning over a darkened study, settling finally on a shelf of books from which a volume is clearly missing. “In that empty space,” the protagonist/narrator muses, “there might have been a book . . .,” immediately inviting viewers to creatively fill the space, to write, as it were, their own books. The voiceover continues to prompt audience anticipation when the scene shifts to Venice, where Venable intones, “I felt the past close in around me like a fog, filling me with a nameless fear.” Philip Horne notes that “Walter Wanger’s production plays up the gothic elements in the tale, in the spirit of his Secret Beyond the Door (1948), directed by Fritz Lang” (Horne 2000: 50), a stylistic and cinematographic decision that can be seen when, for example, Venable follows mysterious music through what seems the almost Escherlike architecture of the palazzo: “Make him [the reader] think the evil” ( James 1908b: 343). But the Hollywood film refuses, finally, to trust its audience. Teasing out a possibility raised by, but never addressed in, James’s story, The Lost Moment reveals itself none too mysteriously as a murder mystery. Director Martin Gabel cannot resist clumsily cluing us in to the foul play early on in the film when he has us read that Jeffrey Ashton “disappeared under mysterious circumstances” and, in case we missed that clue, he has the gondolier/gardener pointedly remark an area of earth in the garden where – somehow – nothing will grow. Formulaically, the film devolves into the “specifications” and “vulgarity” that James eschews in both The Aspern Papers and “The Turn of the Screw.” We can see other Hollywood conventions at work in the way the prim, repressed, hostile Miss Tina by day becomes at night the beautiful Juliana: the daytime Tina borrows her dress, hairstyle, posture, and gaze from the Mrs. Danvers of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 Rebecca, while in her midnight guise she resembles no one so much as The Wizard of Oz’s Glinda, as portrayed by Billie Burke in 1939. And, while the film retains James’s focus on the narrator, the villainy of the “publishing scoundrel” in Lost Moment is mitigated by his rescue of Tina. He saves her from what is in effect a living death, rescuing her into a present – and presumably future – of love and happiness. This is, of course, the romantic happy ending that James so resented and resisted as a writer, most famously in his refusal – despite William Dean Howells’s

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plea – to marry off The American’s Christopher Newman and Claire de Cintré. Reviewers regularly complained about the unhappy endings of James’s fictions. The Hollywood film formulaically evades that particular audience complaint.6 Symptomatic of this shift is the film’s introduction of a ring, bought by Jeffrey Ashton for his beloved, an object that appears nowhere in James’s story. Although Juliana and Tina vie with one another and Venable for Ashton’s letters, Gabel’s camera lingers not on these papers but on the ring. The first shot of Juliana, the narrator’s and audience’s first vision of her, is of her right hand, dominated by a large dark rectangular jewel. Neither a wedding nor an engagement ring, nor a pretty girlish token, the lover’s gift ritually begins Tina’s transformation into Juliana. While Venable – like James’s narrator – fetishizes Aspern’s papers and portrait, we viewers are directed to this token of female sexuality. If the ambiguity, slippage, and imaginative freedom of the ghost story is largely subsumed into a heterosexual romance, the film’s form – an open-ended frame narrative resembling that of “The Turn of the Screw” – hints that the couple’s happiness may not be “ever after.” Lost Moment begins where The Aspern Papers ends, with the male critic alone in his study, gazing at the artifacts of his beloved Jeffrey, expressing his deep regret for what might have been. Marriage to Tina/Juliana seems not to have fully compensated Venable for the loss of the letters, the “lost moment” of encounter with the male poet. In the film’s final image, the camera cuts away from Louis’s and Tina’s embrace to a fragment of Ashton’s writing: “Forever Jeffrey.” Although largely covered over in the Hollywood film by a heterosexual love story, we glimpse nonetheless the deep and enduring homosocial attachment that James’s novella explores. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s screenplay for Hullabaloo is a much freer variation on James’s text than her later, more literal translations of The Europeans and The Golden Bowl to the screen. Nonetheless, it sets the terms of these later adaptations. Although he does not mention Hullabaloo explicitly, O’Neil (2005) notes how the elements of Merchant-Ivory’s later James films had been laid out in earlier films. In making The Europeans, The Bostonians, and The Golden Bowl, Ivory drew on his own body of work, which already had themes found in James’s work. “Our Indian films were very much about outsiders in India, and India as viewed by outsiders, and so forth,” says Ivory. Those stories were in a way like Henry James’s. Someone comes from the West, usually a girl, gets involved, usually romantically, with Indians, suitable or otherwise, comes to a bad end or doesn’t come to a bad end. It was an area of storytelling that we had already worked in. And so there was already a propensity to do what you might call a cultural clash film. (Quoted in O’Neil 2005)

Hullabaloo is, in short, a comedy of manners, propelled by the international theme, and emphasizing point of view. It centers around the Tasveer treasures, a collection of Indian paintings, inherited by the current Maharajah of Tasveer (Georgie) and his

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sister (Bonnie), sought after by both an American (Clark Haven) and a British (Lady Gee) art collector. The film follows the plots and counterplots of these characters as they vie for ownership of the collection, which vividly and explicitly represents India’s past. The narrow nationalism that informs and, in part, motivates the narrator of The Aspern Papers is reworked into the colonialist sensibility of the Anglo-American art collectors. (The film also harks back to James’s “The Outcry,” a work focused on the buying and selling of national art treasures.) “It’s always been our duty to take them away,” pronounces Lady Gee, intent on snatching the Tasveer collection for her museum. As Orientalists and as moderns, Lady Gee and Haven believe that they have the historical perspective necessary to save India from Indians. But the British and American insistence on seeing India as an Eastern realm where time stands still is brought up short by the very contemporary Indian characters Merchant-Ivory introduce. Hullabaloo is a historical film with a difference. It analyzes the present’s complex relations with the past, parsing not only national differences but also the heterogeneity of attitudes within what the Anglo-Americans initially see as a monolithic “India,” and it does so with particular attention to gender. This range of subject positions and identities is vividly signified by clothing. On display is what will come to be Merchant-Ivory’s signature emphasis on scrupulously researched detail, along with their penchant for exoticism. Thus the Maharajah – or Georgie as he is sometimes called – appears in a series of outfits, ranging from squash togs to “traditional” dress to a Father Christmas suit, suggesting his British education as well as his ancestral loyalties. His personae are cumulative and cosmopolitan; his insistence on keeping his ancestral home intact entails retaining not only “genuinely” Indian art, but also his forebear’s collection of English china. “I also love to think of how everything is still there. I know nothing is forever. But I’d like to keep it all together.” His sister’s seemingly more “modern” attitude towards these treasures from the past is that they should be converted into the money that she so desperately desires, into “something I really want at last. I know it’s something better than ‘pictures’.” But Bonnie, as a female, appears to have no control over the family inheritance that she supposedly shares. Her desire for money stems from her need to escape her fixed place as (neglected) wife and sister. Haven, for one, insists on viewing Bonnie as part of India’s timeless charm: “Maybe they [the pictures] belong here the same way you do.” We never see Bonnie in Westernized dress. Rather, the camera’s – and Haven’s – eye follow her appearances in a series of beautiful saris. Worldly, rather than innocent, cynical, rather than childish, Bonnie nonetheless resembles Tita in her powerlessness, her proximity to, but lack of control over, the treasures. And, despite the married Bonnie’s experience, she is, like Tita (and like Lost Moment’s Tina), a Princess in the Tower, the Lady of Shalott, longing for she knows not what, for reality that seems to be more real than the palace that confines her, a situation depicted vividly in the scene in which she sits looking longingly out the window of the ancient harem (a scene staged and photographed by Haven).

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However, despite Bonnie’s melancholy, this is a (literally) lighter, brighter variation on James’s narrative. Though set in picturesque Venice, The Aspern Papers is remarkably colorless, so much so that three mentions in the text stand out: the green coat that Jeffrey Aspern wears in his portrait, Juliana’s “horrible green” eyeshade, and the faded green of the trunk where the papers have been stored. The colorful visual thread that runs through Hullabaloo is – in what it is tempting to read as pointed contrast – a cheerful red, including not only saris, but the turbans of the Maharajah’s servants and the cloths that cover the precious pictures. (Merchant-Ivory amusingly comment on Lady Gee’s position as a British Old Hand in India by dressing her in coral.) The “past” of The Aspern Papers remains one of darkness and mystery – we never even see the fire in which the papers are said to be burnt. Like Lost Moment, Hullabaloo engages its audience through the filmic conventions of mystery – even, it is hinted, a murder mystery – and ghost story. Privy to more knowledge than any one of the other characters, we are at once in on the various plots to steal and save the pictures and, since we witness silent unexplained actions, led into speculation. But our engagement is more that of a parlor game than that of film noir’s plunge into moral uncertainty or the horror film’s visceral terror. For example, Hullabaloo plays with the idea of burning the treasures – indeed, the Maharajah tricks the others into thinking they are destroyed by the fire that we see leaping from the palace windows. But they reappear, safe in their red wrappers, and, when revealed, depict beautiful scenes of pleasure. The ghost story that Merchant-Ivory find in The Aspern Papers is, like the one that Louis Venable discovers in The Lost Moment, that of a lovely young woman, bent on pleasure. Susan Hayward’s double identity as Tina/Juliana is also echoed by Jane Booker’s two roles as Lynn, Lady Gee’s English companion who visits the palace in the present, and the ghost, her counterpart in the past. This ghost is, like Jeffrey Ashton, “forever” present, but the lens of the early Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala film focuses neither on the triumph of heterosexual love nor the endurance of homosocial attachment. Instead, we see in the dancing woman a ghost of British India. It is Lady Gee who introduces characters and audience alike to the film’s ghost story: “Did you know that among your possessions you had an English ghost?” she asks the Maharajah. Recounting this legend of a bright young thing from the twenties, Lady Gee says that when her body was discovered in the purdah car “there wasn’t a mark on her,” phrasing guaranteed to raise suspicions, especially when Lady Gee goes on to comment, “They said her heart failed.” Her next remark, however, seems to back away from the hints of foul play: “One likes to think she died from an excess of happiness.” Although the viewing audience sees images of the live woman both dancing and dead, the ghost does not actually appear until the very end of the film. Again, she is summoned by Lady Gee, this time by her declaration that “Art isn’t all that eternal anyway. Any more than we are.” The visitors then catch sight of the ghost

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in the grounds, sitting on a swing. “Well she’s here forever anyway,” comments Lady Gee, and Lynn, who should know, says, “She had a good time here.” This ghost of an English girl is a “possession” of the palace. Like the English china acquired by the Maharajah’s predecessor, it demonstrates that, even as a British possession, India in some senses acquired its “mother country.” If the lesson of the pictures is that India is no longer a place where the British serve as self-appointed stewards, supposedly protecting India from its inhabitants, the ghost demonstrates that India can be said to contain part of Britain’s history. It is – among many other things – a place where the British can remember and revisit their past. And the story that they tell is a distinctly happy one of gracious Maharajahs and grateful guests. That there are other stories to be told – and not just English murder mysteries – is a possibility we glimpse only at the edges of the film’s frame. The double focus on past and present that Hullabaloo affords is, of course, distinctly Jamesian, perhaps for him the most privileged means of connecting the audience’s here and now with spatial, cultural, and temporal otherness. Recalling the composition of The Aspern Papers – that story of a figure from an earlier era, who, by living on, brings the past into the present – James reveals that the “air of the past” that most appeals to him is “a palpable imaginable visitable past – in the nearer distances and the clearer mysteries, the marks and signs of a world we may reach over to as by making a long arm we grasp an object at the other end of our own table” ( James 1908b: 333–4). James is not concerned with the past as such, but, rather, in our relations to it, our reading of it. Characters visit the past metaphorically throughout James’s fictions, but one also does so literally in The Sense of the Past (1917). Originally conceived as a ghost story to follow up on the success of “The Turn of the Screw” (see Gale 1989: 598), the manuscript expanded – not an unusual occurrence for James – to novel length, but was never finished. It became the source for first the stage play and then the film Berkeley Square (1933), both starring Leslie Howard. This first James film exists only in a very few silver nitrate prints, which puts it beyond the reach of most viewers – at least for the present.7 This is a Jamesian past we may not readily visit. The New York Times praised the production: “In the matter of poetic charm, nothing quite like it has emerged from Hollywood. It is an example of delicacy and restraint, a picture filled with gentle humor and appealing pathos” (Hall 1933). Other reviews, however, faulted the film’s believability: “If it is fair to ask that a fantasy possess some logic to hold it together, ‘Berkeley Square’ falls down, for it is full of holes” (Newsweek 1933). Richard Dana Skinner in The Commonweal worried too about the story’s abnormality and lack of realism: “by the very margin by which it crosses the border line of reality, and remains across that border, it has a quality of morbidity which I would rather not see brought to the stage or screen” (Skinner 1933: 104). These seem curious reactions to an entertainment that openly takes time-travel as its premise and plot mechanism. What, one wonders, did these professional viewers expect? Philip Horne’s reading of the film interprets Berkeley Square as “a kind of allegory” of the near-inevitable “false notes” that fatally flaw most historical fiction, that is as a film that foregrounds the problems of representing the

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past. After all, Horne points out, what finally “outs” James’s time-travelling protagonist is his modern, slangy speech (Horne 2000: 50). Warrant for this reading can be found in the lengthy “Notes” that James dictated as he prepared to pick up the manuscript of The Sense of the Past after fourteen years. James repeatedly describes his writerly situation as doubling that of the novel itself: when I try to recover what I so long ago had in my head about this there glimmers out, there floats shyly back to me from afar, the sense of something like this, a bit difficult to put, though entirely expressible with patience, and that as I catch hold of the tip of the tail of it yet again strikes me as adding to my action but another admirable twist. ( James 1976: 299)

The word “glimmers” recurs throughout the “Notes” – exemplifying James’s tendency to imagine, not only representation, but thought itself in visible terms. Recurrent too is the example of “The Turn of the Screw,” in which James finds solutions to the technical problems that he faces in “my turning of my present screw” ( James 1976: 307). As so often in James’s notes to himself, the issue is how to compress his seemingly limitless sense of complexities and connections into the limits of a readable fiction. “Screw,” with its reliance on “foreshortening” and its representation of the unknowable in “concrete and definite” appearances ( James 1976: 311), provides a model for the later fiction in which a “real” character, by visiting the past, becomes an alien – even a ghost – not only to others but also to himself. Ever mindful of the difficulty of transporting audiences “elsewhere,” James offers his readers a ficelle, who, like Mrs. Bread in Unwin’s The American, both grounds the narrative and gestures towards the unknown. The Ambassador is visited by Ralph Pendrel, the protagonist of Sense of the Past, just before journeying to the past: “Ralph, taking leave of the Ambassador, the depositary of his extraordinary truth and the (as he hopes) secured connection with the world he cuts himself loose from, dropping as from a balloon thousands of feet up in the air, and not really knowing what smash or what magically soft concussion awaits him . . ..” Reworking the balloon metaphor from the preface to The American, James proposes the Ambassador not only as a Janus figure, connecting past and present, but also as a linchpin between the real and the romantic. In the spirit of indirection that characterizes so much Jamesian film, I want to approach The Sense of the Past by looking briefly at Vincente Minnelli’s 1970 On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, locating in that film’s Doctor Marc Chabot (played by Yves Montand) another Jamesian ambassador who stands at the thresholds between past, present, and future. On a Clear Day You Can See Forever and Sense of the Past are linked in their explorations of the connections between past and present, their goal of making visible the “invisible elsewhere” of history. Both works explore the relative crudeness and refinement of historical and contemporary cultures; both are structured around the standard romance-plot of mismatched lovers. But On a Clear

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Day You Can See Forever is a long way from James’s unfinished novel. The film’s screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner was an adaptation of his stage play of the same name, the play itself an adaptation of Berkeley Square. The movie was a star vehicle for Barbra Streisand, given a touch of European sophistication and sexuality by the presence of Montand, as well as the very latest mod outfits by Arnold Scaasi (and the most anachronistic “historical costumes” by Cecil Beaton). Indeed, its most obvious source is a different, more famous, Lerner project: the 1964 film of My Fair Lady (another adapted stage play, of course), from which it borrows not only the conceit of the vulgar girl transformed by her role as subject of “scholarly experiments” performed by the learned, brusque, male professor, but also the physical details: Chabot’s study, complete with library steps, resembles that of Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison), and the dance scene is borrowed straight from the Mayfair ballroom in which Eliza makes her debut – not to mention the proliferation of empire-line dresses that Beaton uses to signal “past” sophistication. Rex Harrison’s rendition of “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” is even echoed by Montand’s performance of “Come Back to Me,” both professors talk-singing their longing for the absent woman who is at once familiar and foreign. Beginning as a figure of scientific rationality, Doctor Chabot gains access, through psychiatric sessions with vulgar, modern Daisy Gamble (Streisand), to her past identity, a sophisticated, sexually alluring British woman named Melinda Winnifred Wayne Moorpark Tentries. Melinda appears in that now-familiar Jamesian realm signaled by the past, the space of desire and “mystery”: “You have brought something into my life I never knew existed,” the doctor tells his patient, “Mystery.” “Melinda” is at once vivid – “If I’m not on guard every moment you steal across the border into reality,” Chabot complains – and temporally unavailable, existing only in the past, and, perhaps, in the future, but never in the present. A figure that corresponds to James’s “things that can reach us only through the beautiful circuit and subterfuge of our thought and our desire” (James 1907: 279), Melinda is distinctly a creature of film. Chabot watches, with and for the audience, scenes from Daisy’s past life as “Melinda,” scenes that we experience as a film within the film. Foregrounding the technology of this time-travel, Minnelli repeatedly focuses on Chabot’s tape recorder, a device that stands in for the movie camera. On a Clear Day You Can See Forever is exactly the sort of film that makes many loyal Jamesians crazy – a splashy Hollywood property that vulgarizes the Master’s prose. Without championing Minnelli’s film, we can recall that James himself was interested in, and performed, related acts of reappropriation, acts that connect past and present in complex and changing patterns. After all, it is James who, in the preface to The Golden Bowl, and using himself as an example, argues that revision is rereading: “To revise is to see, or to look over, again – which means in the case of a written thing, neither more nor less than to re-read it” ( James 1909b: 384–5). Most vividly, James describes re-encountering his own texts as walking across a snowy landscape, sometimes stepping in his earlier set of tracks, sometimes creating new marks. A second extended set of metaphors used in the preface to figure revising and rereading are

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those of organic form: “The term that superlatively, that finally ‘renders’” revision, James says, is a flower that blooms by a beautiful law of its own (the fiftieth part of a second often so sufficing it) in the very heart of the gathered sheaf; it is there already, at any moment, almost before one can either miss or suspect it. ( James 1909b: 387)

In the blatant symbolism of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, Daisy Gamble’s liberatory potential and growth are imaged in her extraordinary ability to grow flowers (the film’s opening shot is of Streisand’s hands planting bulbs, which, as she sings and we watch, flower with a rapidity that recalls time-lapse photography). In their library sessions, Chabot, in turn, “revises” – recognizes and releases – what is “there already” in Daisy. While we may or may not like what Minnelli sees when he reenvisions James – or, more likely, re-envisions others’ revisions of James – his practice follows James’s own perhaps most precisely when it discerns and then traces out narrative potential in what James himself so often refers to as a narrative “germ.” Writing on “The Art of Fiction,” James maintains: Humanity is immense, and reality has a myriad forms; the most one can affirm is that some of the flowers of fiction have the odour of it, and others have not; as for telling you in advance how your nosegay should be composed, that is another affair. ( James 1884, 1888: 171–2)

For some filmmakers, James’s writing is a Borgesian “Garden of the Forking Paths” that needs to be simplified. Making movies with James can be a matter of sticking to established paths or of following James’s wandering example of re-vision. Always it is a matter of selection and composition. And tracing what is Jamesian about filmic “arrangements,” in turn, brings James’s writing to flower in ways both predictable and surprising. After all, as James taught us, A novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like any other organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found, I think, that in each of the parts there is something of each of the other parts. ( James 1884, 1888: 174)

Notes 1

The suggestions for further reading that follow this essay, as well as the references within it, suggest the body of critical work on Jamesian film that has developed, especially in recent years. I’ve chosen to focus largely on lesserknown James films in part because of that work. But I have also wanted to suggest ways to rethink what we understand as Jamesian

film, especially in relation to genre, and to approach “diagonally” James’s – often indirect – influences on cinema. 2 James is (slightly) misquoting George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (chapter 11) here: “In these delicate vessels is borne onward through the ages the treasure of human affections.”

488 3

4

5

Susan M. Griffin

See Alan Nadel’s suggestive analysis of the “imaginary ‘elsewhere,’” that, he cogently argues, characterizes both James’s fiction and mainstream cinema, exploiting a “tension between infinite possibility and necessarily partial representation” (Nadel 2002: 196). Phillip Horne proposes “three rough categories of ways films have taken Henry James”: “faithful” adaptations, free variations, and “Jamesian” films (Horne 2000: 39). See Sadoff (2002) for a discussion of how The Wings of the Dove draws on “soft-porn” film.

6

7

Interestingly, when it came time to rewrite The American for the stage, James did give in on the matter of the happy ending, a recognition of genre difference that might suggest that he could have worked successfully in film after all, if the theater production itself had not met with such a tepid audience reception. As Koch (2002) points out, new technologies mean that “lost” James films may become available in time. Horne was able to see a version stored in the British Film Archive. See his evaluation of the film in Horne (2000).

References and Further Reading Bauer, D. (2002). “Content or costume? James as cultural capital.” In S. M. Griffin (ed.) Henry James Goes to the Movies (pp. 240–53). Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Bentley, N. (2002). “Conscious observation: Jane Campion’s Portrait of a Lady.” In S. M. Griffin (ed.) Henry James Goes to the Movies (pp. 127–46). Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Bradley, J. R. (ed.) (2000). Henry James on Stage and Screen. New York: Palgrave. Chandler, K. M. (2002). “‘Her ancient faculty of silence’: Catherine Sloper’s ways of being in James’s Washington Square and two film adaptations.” In S. M. Griffin (ed.) Henry James Goes to the Movies (pp. 170–90). Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Crnkovic, Gordana P. (1999). “Interview with Agnieszka Holland.” Film Quarterly, 52.2: 2–9. Gabel, Martin (dir.) (1950). The Lost Moment. Perf. Susan Hayward, Robert Cummings, Agnes Moorehead, and Joan Lorring. Republic Pictures. Gale, R. L. (1989). A Henry James Encyclopedia. New York: Greenwood Press. Griffin, S. M. (ed.) (2002). Henry James Goes to the Movies. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Hall, M. (1933). “Leslie Howard and Heather Angel in the pictorial version of ‘Berkeley Square.’” New York Times, September 14: 26.

Horne, P. (2000). “Henry James: Varieties of cinematic experience.” In J. R. Bradley (ed.) Henry James on Stage and Screen (pp. 35–55). New York: Palgrave. Horne, P. (n.d.). “‘It works diagonally’: A conversation with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala on The Golden Bowl and the Art of Adaptation.” www.thegoldenbowl/ruth.html. Ian, M. (2000). “How to do things to words: Making language immaterial in The Wings of the Dove.” In J R. Bradley (ed.) Henry James on Stage and Screen (pp. 212–39). New York: Palgrave. Ivory, James (dir.) (1978). Hullabaloo Over Georgie and Bonnie’s Pictures. Perf. Peggy Ashcroft, Larry Pine, Saeed Jaffrey, Victor Banerjee, Aparna Sen, and Jane Booker. Merchant Ivory Productions. James, H. (1884, 1888). “The art of fiction.” In W. Veeder and S. M. Griffin (eds.) The Art of Criticism (pp. 165–96). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. James, H. (1907). Preface to The American. In W. Veeder and S. M. Griffin (eds.) The Art of Criticism (pp. 271–85). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. James, H. (1908a). Preface to Portrait of a Lady. In W. Veeder and S. M. Griffin (eds.) The Art of Criticism (pp. 286–99). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. James, H. (1908b). Preface to The Aspern Papers. In W. Veeder and S. M. Griffin (eds.) The Art of

James and Film Criticism (pp. 330–45). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. James, H. (1909a). “Crapy Cornelia.” In Henry James: Complete Stories 1898–1910 (pp. 818–46). New York: Library of America. James, H. (1909b). Preface to The Golden Bowl. In W. Veeder and S. M. Griffin (eds.) The Art of Criticism (pp. 376–422). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. James, H. (1976 [1917]). The Sense of the Past. Fairfield, NJ: Augustus M. Kelley Publishers. Koch, J. S. (2002). “A Henry James filmography.” In S. M. Griffin (ed.) Henry James Goes to the Movies (pp. 335–58). Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Mazzella, A. J. (1981). “A selected Henry James artsography.” Henry James Review, 3: 44–58. Minnelli, Vincente (dir.) (1970). On a Clear Day You Can See Forever. Perf. Barbra Streisand and Yves Montand. Paramount Pictures. Nadel, A. (2002). “Ambassadors from an imaginary ‘elsewhere’: Cinematic convention and the Jamesian sensibility.” In S. M. Griffin (ed.) Henry James Goes to the Movies (pp. 193–209). Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Newsweek (1933). “Berkeley Square: The sweet sorrow of the eighteenth century.” Newsweek, 23 (September), 2: 32–3.

489

O’Neil, C. (2005). Adapting the Master. PBS.org. March 14. www.pbs.org.wgbh/masterpiece/ americancollection/american/adapting.html. PBS.org. (2005). A talk with screenwriter Michael Hastings. March 14. www.pbs.org/wgbh/ masterpiece/americancollection/american/ei_ hastings.htm. Sadoff, D. F. (2002). “‘Hallucinations of intimacy’: The Henry James films.” In S. M. Griffin (ed.) Henry James Goes to the Movies (pp. 254–78). Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Sadoff, D. F. and J. Kucich (2000). “Introduction: Histories of the present.” In D. Sadoff and J. Kucich (eds.) Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century (pp. ix–xxx). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Skinner, R. D. (1933). “The screen and stage.” The Commonweal, 19: 103–4. Tintner, Adeline (1979). “Henry James at the movies: Cinematograph and photograph in ‘Crapy Cornelia.’” Markham Review, 6: 1–8. Unwin, Paul (dir.) (1998). The American. Perf. Matthew Modine, Aisling O’Sullivan, Diana Rigg, and Brenda Fricker. PBS Pictures. Wood, M. (2005). “We offered them their chance.” London Review of Books, June 2: 7–9.

Index

Adam Bede (Eliot), 406 Adams, Henry, 269, 284, 288, 333, 438 Adams, Marian “Clover,” 284 “Adina” ( James), 437 Affairs of the Heart (television series), 474 Alcott, Amos Bronson, 278 Alcott, Louisa May, 36, 37–40, 43, 45 Alcott, May, 37 Alden, Henry Mills, 233 Allen, Elizabeth, 345 Allen, Jessie, 269, 446 “The Altar of the Dead” ( James), 21, 327, 432 Althusser, Louis, 80, 352 The Ambassadors (film, 1950), 477 The Ambassadors (film, 1965), 477 The Ambassadors (film, 1977), 477 The Ambassadors ( James), 94, 133, 139–40, 141–53, 164, 215, 219, 235, 236, 288, 317, 319, 325, 343, 380, 391, 403, 417, 422–32, 464, 467, 469, 473 “The Ambiguity of Henry James” (Wilson), 102–3, 311, 312–14 The American (film, 1950), 477 The American (film, 1956), 477 The American (film, 2001), 476, 477–8, 479, 485 The American (novel) ( James), 51, 52–3, 57–67, 219, 222–3, 225, 226, 283, 286, 330, 339, 347, 391, 393, 397,

422, 424, 425, 431, 461, 462–3, 464, 473, 475, 476, 481, 485 The American (play) ( James), 286–7, 458 The American Essays (Edel), 255 “The American Girl: Her Faults and Her Virtues” (Campbell), 34 The American Henry James (Anderson), 394 “American Letters” ( James), 253, 255, 258 American Literary Scholarship, 2 The American Novels and Stories of Henry James (Matthiessen), 394 The American Scene ( James), 97, 196, 197–9, 200–1, 203, 204, 205, 209, 217, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 289, 292, 379–80, 435, 453, 461, 462, 469–70 “The American Woman as Seen After an Absence of Ten Years” (Crawford), 34 Amini, Hossein, 474, 477 Ampère, André, 261 Ampère, Jean-Jacques, 261 Andersen, Hendrik, 215, 269, 285, 370, 451–2, 452 Anderson, Quentin, 394 Anderson, Sherwood, 319 Anesko, Michael, 88, 94, 251, 269, 459 Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare), 404 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 390–1, 392 Arendt, Hannah, 305–6 Arias, Alfredo, 432 Arizona Quarterly, 51

A Companion to Henry James. Edited by Greg W. Zacharias © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-14042-3

Index Arnold, Matthew, 92, 255, 282, 284, 383, 410, 460 Art and Life (Lee), 295 Arthur Gordon Pym (Poe), 218 “The Art of Fiction” ( James), 1, 17, 70–1, 72, 75, 77, 79, 249, 286, 332, 465, 487 Art of the Novel ( James), 324–5, 327–8, 329, 331–2, 334, 336–7, 338–40 Ash, Beth Sharon, 64, 176, 183 Ashmore, Ruth, 34 The Aspern Papers ( James), 216, 286, 432, 440, 448, 450, 459, 462, 465, 475, 479–80, 481, 482, 483, 484 The Aspern Papers (play, 1959), 432 Asquith, Herbert, 400 At Ischia (Renan), 444 “At Isella” ( James), 435 Atlantic Monthly, 17, 20, 88, 280, 281, 283, 284, 286, 366, 401, 445 Auden, W. H., 208, 292, 300–1 Auerbach, Nina, 141, 148 Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag (Alcott), 37 Austen, Jane, 404 Austin, J. L., 325, 335 Austin-Smith, Brenda, 176 “The Author of Beltraffio” ( James), 331 Autobiography ( James), 364 The Awkward Age ( James), 139, 317, 325–6, 329, 337 The Awkward Conscience (Hunt), 140 Ayala’s Angel (Trollope), 29 Bacchus and Ariadne (Titian), 442 Bachelard, Gaston, 82 Baden-Powell, Robert, 324, 325, 326–33, 334, 335–6, 337, 338–40 Baldwin, William W., 447 Balestier, Wolcott, 250 Balestra, Antonio, 450 Balzac, Honoré de, 89, 101–2, 226, 261, 292, 294, 298–9, 301, 302, 410, 423, 429–30 Banta, Martha, 346 Barrie, J. M., 225

491

Barthes, Roland, 325, 335 Bartlett, Alice, 37, 39, 40–3, 44, 45 Baudrillard, Jean, 296 Bauer, Dale, 474 Beacon, 96 “The Beast in the Closet” (Sedgwick), 309–10, 315, 318, 320 The Beast in the Jungle (film, 1988), 432 “The Beast in the Jungle” ( James), 203, 239, 241, 309, 316, 327, 335, 378, 432, 452 Beaton, Cecil, 486 Beerbohm, Max, 211 Bell, Millicent, 109 Bellini, Giovanni, 281 Beloved Boy: Letters to Hendrik C. Andersen (Zorzi), 269 “The Bench of Desolation” ( James), 240–6, 467 Benjamin, Walter, 299 Bennett, Tony, 302 Benson, Edward White (Archbishop of Canterbury), 100–1, 102 Bentley, Nancy, 474 Bergler, Edmund, 54, 55–6, 58 Bergman, Ingrid, 472 Berkeley, Elizabeth, 268–9, 371 Berkeley Square (film, 1933), 472, 473, 478, 484–5, 486 Berman, Jessica, 150, 151 Bernard, Claude, 79 Bersani, Leo, 158, 161, 314, 324–5 Bertinelli, Valerie, 472 Bertolini, Vincent, 145 Berzelius, Jöns Jacob, 79, 80 Bibliography of Henry James (Edel and Laurence), 212, 214 Bichat, Xavier, 78–9, 80 Black and White Strangers (Warren), 251 Blackmur, R. P., 329 Blair, Sara, 198, 251 Bleak House (Dickens), 410, 413 The Blithedale Romance (Hawthorne), 95 Boehmer, Elleke, 329 Boelhower, William, 197, 199 Bogdanovich, Peter, 472

492

Index

Bok, Edward, 297 Bolt, Ben, 104 Booker, Jane, 483 Bookman, 102 Booth, Wayne C., 76, 251, 336 Boott, Elizabeth, 285, 286, 287, 443, 447 Boott, Francis, 286, 447 Borges, Jorge Luis, 487 Bosanquet, Theodora, 222–3 Boston Evening Transcript, 233 The Bostonians (film, 1984), 481 The Bostonians ( James), 52, 88, 89–97, 211, 286, 293, 310, 314, 316, 320–1, 345, 353, 460, 461, 463–4, 470 Boswell, James, 404 Boughton, George Henry, 284 Bourgeois Gentilhomme (Molière), 422 Bouvard et Pécuchet (Flaubert), 302 Boyesen, Hjalmar Hjorth, 34, 44 Britten, Benjamin, 104 Brodhead, Richard, 95 Bronzino, Agnolo, 437 Brooke, Rupert, 261, 319 Brooke-Rose, Christine, 103 Brosses, Charles de, 444 Brown, Joe E., 475 Browne, Junius Henri, 34 Brownell, W. C., 139, 148–9, 149–50, 151 Browning, Robert, 209, 212, 284, 400, 410, 447, 457 Bryant, William Cullen, 278 Buelen, Gert, 251 Burke, Billie, 480 Burke, Kenneth, 1, 3 Burne-Jones, Edward, 281, 284 Burney, Fanny, 404 Byron, George Gordon, 35, 261, 444, 448 “Calamus” (Whitman), 246 Calder, Jenni, 25 The Calendar of Henry James ( Jobe and Gunter), 270 The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (Crystal), 202 Campbell, Mrs. Rhodes, 34 Campion, Jane, 395, 473, 474, 477

Candide (Voltaire), 444 Cantos (Pound), 393 Capote, Truman, 472 Cargill, Oscar, 52 Carlyle, Thomas, 90, 92, 261, 361, 400, 410 Carroll, Mark, 267 Castle, Terry, 92 Cather, Willa, 297, 298, 319, 320 Céline et Julie vont en bateau (film, 1974), 432, 476, 478 Century Magazine, 89, 90, 286, 445 Chambers, Ross, 158, 167–8, 169, 171 La Chambre verte (film, 1978), 432, 477 Channing, William Ellery, 261 “The Chaperon” ( James), 450 “Characters and Anal Eroticism” (Freud), 52 Chartreuse de Parme (Stendhal), 444 Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine, 62 Cheah, Pheng, 390, 392 Chesterton, G. K., 215 Chicago Evening Post, 232–33 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Byron), 444 Claremont, Claire, 448 Claude Lorrain, 404 Clayton, Jack, 104 Clift, Montgomery, 472 Coburn, Alvin Langdon, 208, 214–15, 216, 217, 218–19, 289, 327, 330 Codman, Ogden, 297 Cole, Thomas, 441, 443 Coleridge, Samuel, 73 Collected Travel Writings ( James), 250, 252 Collier’s Weekly, 102 Commonweal, 484 A Companion to Henry James (Zacharias), 2–3 The Complete Letters of Henry James (Walker and Zacharias), 263, 269–71 Compton, Edward, 286 Comte, Auguste, 139, 147 Confidence ( James), 211, 447 Conn, Peter, 469 Conrad, Joseph, 414 Consuelo (Sand), 444 Continental Monthly, 280 Cook, Clarence, 297

Index Cooper, James Fenimore, 18, 286 Corman, Roger, 472, 475 Cornhill Magazine, 36 The Correspondence of William James (Skrupskelis and Berkeley), 268–9, 371 Correspondence (Regnault), 444 “The Counterfeit Symbol in Henry James’s The Golden Bowl” (Austin-Smith), 176 Cousin Pons (Balzac), 302 “The Coxon Fund” ( James), 287 The Craft of Fiction (Lubbock), 336 Crane, Hart, 320 “Crapy Cornelia” ( James), 233–4, 239–40, 472–3 Crasnow, Ellman, 72 Crawford, F. Marion, 34 “Crawford’s Consistency” ( James), 28–9 Crick, Patricia, 36 Critique of Judgment (Kant), 72 Cruising Modernism (Trask), 319–20 Crystal, David, 202 Culler, Jonathan, 336 Cummings, Robert, 472, 480 Curtis, Ariana, 286, 436, 448, 449 Curtis, Daniel, 286, 448, 449 Daisy Miller (film, 1974), 476, 477 Daisy Miller (film, 1975), 477 Daisy Miller ( James), 22, 25, 32–4, 35–7, 38–9, 40, 42, 43–7, 88, 101, 193, 211, 284, 285, 310, 349–51, 391, 436, 450, 474 Dana, Charles, 278 “Daniel Deronda: A Conversation” ( James), 406 La Daniella (Sand), 444 Dante, 444 Darrow, Margaret, 141 Darwin, Charles, 281 Daudet, Alphonse, 77, 283, 285–6 David Copperfield (Dickens), 410–11, 412 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 442, 446 Dawson, Melani, 34 Day, F. Holland, 215 “A Day of Days” ( James), 21, 280

493

Deakin, Motley, 35 “The Death of the Lion” ( James), 459, 464 Decoration of Houses (Wharton and Codman), 297 “De Grey: A Romance,” 22 DeKoven, Marianne, 152 Democracy in America (Tocqueville), 66, 67 Derrida, Jacques, 103, 345 Diary ( James), 264 “The Diary of a Man of Fifty” ( James), 446, 448 Dickens, Charles, 278, 280, 292, 376, 400, 404, 405, 409, 410–11, 412–13, 460 Dickenson, Emily Dijkstra, Bram, 140–1 The Divine Comedy (Dante), 444 Doré, Gustave, 444 Doudan, Ximenes, 261 Draper, R. P., 33 Drum-Taps (Whitman), 90 Du Bois, W. E. B., 197 Dumas, Alexandre, 405 Du Maurier, George, 216, 284 Dunbar, Viola, 47 Duperray, Annick, 2 Duras, Marguerite, 432 Duveneck, Elizabeth Boott see Boott, Elizabeth Duveneck, Frank, 447 Edel, Leon, 20, 212, 214, 255, 262, 263, 265–8, 306, 314, 410 The Egoist (Meredith), 29 Eliot, George, 25, 142, 280, 281, 400, 405–7, 408, 409, 410 Eliot, T. S., 233, 390, 392 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 90, 261, 278, 282, 361 English Hours ( James), 220 Epistemology of the Closet (Sedgwick), 315–16 Essays in London and Elsewhere ( James), 417 The Europeans (film, 1958), 477 The Europeans (film, 1971), 477 The Europeans (film, 1979), 481 The Europeans ( James), 211, 284

494

Index

Fairbairn, William E., 56 Faithfull, Marianne, 472 Faulkner, William, 432, 473 The Feast in Casa Levi (Veronese), 446 Felman, Shoshana, 51, 103, 104, 312–14, 315, 321, 325 Fetterley, Judith, 345 Fiedler, Leslie, 18 Fielding, Henry, 405 “The Figure in the Carpet” ( James), 212, 316, 335, 459 The Finer Grain ( James), 231–3, 235, 246 Fisher, Philip, 469 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 390, 473 Flaubert, Gustave, 18, 255, 261, 283, 302, 416, 419–20 “Florentine Notes” ( James), 447, 450 Fortnightly Review, 196 Foster, Shirley, 39 Fowler, Virginia, 22 France, Anatole, 255 Franklin, Benjamin, 66–7 Frazer, James, 183–4 Freedman, Jonathan, 198, 383 French Poets and Novelists ( James), 298, 417 “French Traits – Women” (Brownell), 139 Freud, Sigmund, 22, 51, 52, 56–7, 66, 105, 159, 160–1, 195, 201, 223, 311 Frey, Sami, 432 “Friction with the Market” (Anesko), 251 “The Friends of the Friends” ( James), 432 Fromentin, Eugene, 426 Fromont Jeune (Daudet), 77 Fuller, Margaret, 278, 443 Fullerton, Morton, 285

Der Geisterseher (Schiller), 444 Ghirlandaio, Domenico, 450 The Ghostly Rental (film, 1999), 475 Girard, René, 178, 179 “Girl of the Period” (Linton), 34 Goddard, Harold C., 102, 103 Godkin, Edwin Lawrence, 402 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 435 The Golden Bough (Frazer), 183–4 The Golden Bowl (film, 1973), 476, 477 The Golden Bowl (film, 2000), 394–5, 472, 477, 481 The Golden Bowl ( James), 25, 176–80, 181–3, 184–7, 188–90, 209, 215, 217–18, 220, 222, 223–4, 225, 226, 244, 288, 294, 300–5, 333, 335, 347, 356–8, 380, 382, 392, 403, 409, 413–14, 452, 453, 467–86 Goldsmith, Oliver, 250 Goncourt, Edmond de, 285–6, 416 Gordon, Lyndall, 157, 158 Gosse, Edmund, 264, 269, 284, 410 Graham, Wendy, 51, 92, 317 Grant, Cary, 475 Grant, Hugh, 475 “The Great Good Place” ( James), 53 The Great Tradition (Leavis), 406 Greenough, Horatio, 443 Greuze, Jean-Baptiste, 404 “Greville Fane” ( James), 474 Guérin, Eugénie de, 261 Gunter, Susan E., 269, 270 Guntrip, Harry, 53, 54, 55, 56 Guy Domville ( James), 101, 102, 287, 458

Gabel, Martin, 480 Gabor, Zsa Zsa, 477 Gainsborough, Thomas, 404 “Garden of the Forking Paths” (Borges), 487 Gardner, Isabella Stewart, 285, 288, 450, 453 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 209 Gautier, Théophile, 64, 431 Geismar, Maxwell, 52, 197, 310

H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), 390 Habegger, Alfred, 89, 91, 346 Habermas, Jürgen, 457–8 Hadley, Tessa, 146, 152 Hale, Edward Everett, 211, 220 Hamilton, Ian, 459 Hanson, Ellis, 316–17 Haralson, Eric, 27, 58, 63, 319, 320, 321 Hardy, Thomas, 212 Harlow, Virginia, 270

Index Harper’s Bazar, 201 Harper’s Magazine, 196 Harper’s Monthly, 233 Harper’s Weekly, 253, 254, 255, 258 Harrison, Rex, 486 Hastings, Michael, 478 Haunting of Hell House (film, 1999), 475, 477 Haviland, Beverly, 197–8, 251 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 35, 95, 193, 195, 196, 200, 209, 249, 263, 385, 410, 437, 475 Hawthorne ( James), 193, 194–5, 199–200, 249, 284, 401 Hay, John, 283 Hayward, Susan, 483 Hearst, William Randolph, 253 Heilman, Robert, 311, 315 The Heiress (film, 1949), 473, 474, 476 Heller, Terry, 103 Hemingway, Ernest, 319, 390, 432 “Henry James” (Coburn), 214–15 Henry James (Edel), 268, 314 “Henry James” (Zacharias), 2 Henry James and Queer Modernity (Haralson), 319 Henry James and Sexuality (Stevens), 317 Henry James and the Abuse of the Past (Rawlings), 19 Henry James and the “Aliens” (Buelen), 251 Henry James and the Art of Power (Seltzer), 196 “Henry James and the Mother-Complex” (Graham), 51 Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity (Person), 251, 317 Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation (Blair), 251 Henry James and Thwarted Love (Graham), 317 Henry James at Work (Bosanquet), 222–3 Henry James: Essays on Art and Drama (Rawlings), 255 Henry James: Lettere a Miss Allen, 1899–1915 (Zorzi), 269 Henry James Letters (Edel), 263, 265–8

495

Henry James on Culture (Walker), 250–1, 252–3, 255 Henry James Review, 2 Henry James’s Last Romance (Haviland), 197–8, 251 Henry James’s New York Edition (McWhirter), 251 Henry James’s Thwarted Love (Graham), 51 Herrick, Robert, 222 Hocks, Richard A., 232 Hoens, Dominiek, 180–1, 186 Holbein, Hans, 423 Holland, Agnieszka, 473, 474, 476 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 51 Hoople, Robin, 144 Horne, Philip, 269, 333, 401, 480, 484–5 Horwitz, B. D., 53, 55, 56 Hosmer, Hattie, 443 House Beautiful (Cook), 297 House Beautiful (magazine), 297 House of Mirth (Wharton), 210, 239 Howard, Leslie, 472, 484 Howells, William Dean, 45, 96, 219, 220, 269, 280–2, 283, 344, 444, 480–1 How to Do Things with Words (Austin), 325, 335 Hoxie, Elizabeth F., 35, 36–7 Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of (Twain), 18 Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (Pound), 392 Hughes, Langston, 390 Hugo, Victor, 431 Hullabaloo over Georgie and Bonnie’s Pictures (film, 1978), 479, 480, 481–2 Hunt, Linda, 472 Hunt, William Holman, 140, 442 Hunt, William Morris, 279 Hutton, R. H., 221, 222 Huxley, Aldous, 405 An Ideal Husband (Wilde), 101, 287 I’ll Never Forget You (film, 1951), 478 Independent, 102, 232 The Innocents (film, 1962), 104, 478

496

Index

“An International Episode” ( James), 284, 474 Interpersonal World of the Infant (Stern), 55 In The American 1890s: A Cultural Reader (Smith and Dawson), 34 “In the Cage” ( James), 288, 403, 464, 465 Irving, Amy, 472 Irving, Washington, 278, 443 Isham, Thomas, 403 “Is There A Life After Death?” ( James), 251 Italian Hours ( James), 250, 445 Italy: Rome, and Naples (Taine), 444 “Italy Revisited” ( James), 450 Ivory, James, 473–4, 481 Jackson, Louise, 109 Jackson, Rosemary, 104–5, 114 James, Alan, 390 James, Alexander R., 264, 267 James, Alice, 55, 101, 264, 278, 281, 282, 285, 286, 287, 360, 362, 365, 367, 368–70, 435, 438 James, Alice Howe Gibbens, 269, 284, 289, 290, 372 James, Catharine Barber, 277, 279 James, Edward (Ned), 288 James, Garth Wilkinson (Wilky), 19, 55, 89, 162, 278, 279, 280, 281, 285, 288, 360, 362, 367–8 James, George Abbot, 401 James, Henry “Adina,” 437 “The Altar of the Dead,” 21, 327, 432 The Ambassadors, 94, 133, 139–40, 141–53, 164, 215, 219, 235, 236, 288, 317, 319, 325, 343, 380, 391, 403, 417, 422–32, 464, 467, 469, 473 “The Ambiguity of Henry James,” 102–3, 311, 312–14 The American (novel), 51, 52–3, 57–67, 219, 222–3, 225, 226, 283, 286, 330, 339, 347, 391, 393, 397, 422, 424, 425, 431, 461, 462–3, 464, 473, 475, 476, 481, 485 The American (play), 286–7, 458 “American Letters,” 253, 255, 258

The American Scene, 97, 196, 197–9, 200–1, 203, 204, 205, 209, 217, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 289, 292, 379–80, 435, 453, 461, 462, 469–70 “The Art of Fiction,” 1, 17, 70–1, 72, 75, 77, 79, 249, 286, 332, 465, 487 Art of the Novel, 324–5, 327–8, 329, 331–2, 334, 336–7, 338–40 The Aspern Papers, 216, 286, 432, 440, 448, 450, 459, 462, 465, 475, 479–80, 481, 482, 483, 484 “At Isella,” 435 “The Author of Beltraffio,” 331 Autobiography, 364 The Awkward Age, 139, 317, 325–6, 329, 337 “The Beast in the Jungle,” 203, 239, 241, 309, 316, 327, 335, 378, 432, 452 “The Bench of Desolation,” 240–6, 467 The Bostonians, 52, 88, 89–97, 211, 286, 293, 310, 314, 316, 320–1, 345, 353, 460, 461, 463–4, 470 “The Chaperon,” 450 Collected Travel Writings, 250, 252 Confidence, 211, 447 “The Coxon Fund,” 287 “Crapy Cornelia,” 233–4, 239–40, 472–3 “Crawford’s Consistency,” 28–9 Daisy Miller, 22, 25, 32–4, 35–7, 38–9, 40, 42, 43–7, 88, 101, 193, 211, 284, 285, 310, 349–51, 391, 436, 450, 474 “Daniel Deronda: A Conversation,” 406 “A Day of Days,” 21, 280 “The Death of the Lion,” 459, 464 “De Grey: A Romance,” 22 “The Diary of a Man of Fifty,” 446, 448 English Hours, 220 Essays in London and Elsewhere, 417 The Europeans, 211, 284 “The Figure in the Carpet,” 212, 316, 335, 459 The Finer Grain, 231–3, 235, 246 “Florentine Notes,” 447, 450 French Poets and Novelists, 298, 417 “The Friends of the Friends,” 432

Index The Golden Bowl, 25, 176–80, 181–3, 184–7, 188–90, 209, 215, 217–18, 220, 222, 223–4, 225, 226, 244, 288, 294, 300–5, 333, 335, 347, 356–8, 380, 382, 392, 403, 409, 413–14, 452, 453, 467–9, 486 “The Great Good Place,” 53 “Greville Fane,” 474 Guy Domville, 101, 102, 287, 458 Hawthorne, 193, 194–5, 199–200, 249, 284, 401 “An International Episode,” 284, 474 “In the Cage,” 288, 403, 464, 465 “Is There A Life After Death?”, 251 Italian Hours, 250, 445 “Italy Revisited,” 450 “John Delavoy,” 459 “The Jolly Corner,” 90, 200, 203, 209–10, 211, 212, 224, 333–4 Lady Barberina and Other Tales, 329 “A Landscape Painter,” 280 “The Last of the Valerii,” 17, 24–5 “The Lesson of Balzac,” 89, 288 “The Lesson of the Master,” 219 Little Tour in France, 285 “London,” 253, 255, 258 A London Life, 450 “The Long Wards,” 397 “Madame de Mauves,” 25–7 “Madonna of the Future,” 282, 448 “Manners of American Women,” 201, 204–5, 251 “Mind of England at War,” 253–4 “Mora Montravers,” 235–7, 355 “A Most Extraordinary Case,” 19, 21–2 New York Edition, 26, 33, 46, 47, 71, 74, 75, 96, 102, 104, 200, 208–9, 210–11, 212–27, 231, 249, 255, 288–9, 298, 306, 324–5, 327, 329, 330, 331, 332, 409, 414, 475 “The Next Time,” 287 Notes of a Son and Brother, 159, 160, 167, 262, 264, 289, 372 Notes on Novelists, 417 The Other House, 211, 288, 432, 473, 476, 478

497 “Other Roman Neighborhoods,” 452 The Outcry, 447, 453, 482 “The Papers,” 253, 466–7 Partial Portraits, 417 “A Passionate Pilgrim,” 403–4 A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales, 283 “The Patagonia,” 394 Picture and Text, 249, 250 “Poor Richard,” 19, 20–1, 280 The Portrait of a Lady, 22, 26, 70, 71–6, 77–8, 79–82, 88, 93, 94, 133, 142, 147, 163, 196, 211, 220–2, 284, 292, 293–5, 306, 326, 327, 330, 333, 339, 347, 348, 349, 351–5, 356, 360, 374–5, 377, 380–8, 391, 393, 403, 404, 406, 407–9, 417–20, 421, 425, 428–9, 431, 432, 436, 440, 441, 442, 448, 450, 460, 461, 462, 463, 473 Portrait of Places, 217 The Princess Casamassima, 57, 219, 252, 286, 330, 403, 450 “The Private Life,” 456–8, 459 “The Pupil,” 310, 317, 325, 360, 449, 450 “The Question of Our Speech,” 201–2, 205–6, 251 “The Question of the Mind,” 253 “The Real Right Thing,” 459 “Refugees in England,” 253 The Reverberator, 253, 254, 329, 460, 461, 462, 463 Roderick Hudson, 213–15, 219, 220, 224–5, 255, 282, 289, 310, 317, 328, 329, 450 “Romance of Certain Old Clothes,” 280, 478 “Rose-Agathe,” 29 “A Round of Visits,” 237–9 The Sacred Fount, 211, 288, 316, 317 The Scenic Art, 255 The Sense of the Past, 21–2, 25, 477, 484, 485–7 “Sir Dominick Ferrand,” 459 A Small Boy and Others, 264, 265, 289, 372, 426–7

498

Index

James, Henry (cont’d) The Speech and Manners of American Women, 150 “The Speech of American Women,” 201, 202–4, 251 The Spoils of Poynton, 288, 293, 294, 295–300, 301, 303, 326, 327, 347 “The Story of a Masterpiece,” 280 “The Story of a Year,” 19–20, 280 Theatricals: Second Series, 287 Theatricals: Two Comedies, 287 “The Tragedy of Error,” 280 The Tragic Muse, 96, 329, 391, 392–3, 405, 457, 460 Transatlantic Sketches, 250, 283 “Travelling Companions,” 435, 436, 437, 446, 450 “The Turn of the Screw,” 51, 100–1, 102–17, 288, 310, 311–14, 316–17, 325, 332, 335, 360, 378, 380, 383, 391, 472, 475, 478–9, 480, 481, 484, 485 The Two Magics, 102 “The Velvet Glove,” 231, 233–5, 447, 474 “Venice,” 444 “Versailles As It Is,” 256–7 Washington Square, 71, 93, 211, 216, 284, 353, 356, 360, 411 Watch and Ward, 17, 20, 22–4, 211, 281, 356, 450 What Maisie Knew, 121, 122–35, 139, 288, 310, 339, 361, 383, 393, 407, 411–12, 432 William Wetmore Story and his Friends, 209, 249, 250, 443, 448 The Wings of the Dove, 22, 156, 157–8, 159–62, 163–7, 168–71, 211, 288, 317, 320, 327, 356, 380, 381, 391–2, 405, 412–13, 420–1, 422, 431, 432, 437, 446, 449–50 Within the Rim and Other Essays, 253 James, Henry, III (Harry), 262, 264, 267, 278, 284, 289

James, Henry, Sr., 54, 89, 263, 264, 277–8, 280, 285, 360, 361–3, 364, 365, 367, 368, 369 James, John, 267 James, Mary Robertson Walsh, 54–5, 278, 284, 285, 360, 362, 364–6, 367, 368, 369 James, Robertson (Bob), 19, 89, 278, 279, 280, 281, 283, 285, 288, 289, 360, 365, 367, 368 James, William, 40, 43, 51, 54, 55, 91, 101, 131, 156, 171, 262, 263, 264, 268–9, 278, 279, 280, 281, 282, 283, 289, 293, 360, 362, 363, 365, 366, 367, 369, 370–2, 400, 401, 402, 435, 437, 438, 442, 451 James, William (of Albany), 277, 400 James, William, III (Billy), 267 “The Jamesian Lie” (Bersani), 314 Jeal, Tim, 329 Jefferson, Thomas, 261, 263 Jenks, Richard Pulling, 279 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 24 Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer, 395, 472, 473, 481 Jobe, Steven, 269, 270 Johanningsmeier, Charles, 253 “John Delavoy” ( James), 459 Johnson, Kurt A., 336 Johnson, Lisa, 46 Johnson, Samuel, 400 The Jolly Corner (film, 1975), 477 “The Jolly Corner” ( James), 90, 200, 203, 209–10, 211, 212, 224, 333–4 Jones, Billy T., 168 Jones, Mary Cadwalder, 269 Jonson, Ben, 444 Jordon, Matthew, 324–5 Joukowsky, Paul, 285 Julian and Maddalo (Shelley), 444 Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (Rousseau), 36, 421 Kale, Steven, 149 Kant, Immanuel, 72, 78, 79, 189, 190 Kaplan, Fred, 18 Kemble, Frances Anne (Fanny), 282, 287

Index Kenton, Edna, 102, 103 Kerr, Deborah, 472 Kidnapped (Stevenson), 330, 334–5 King Lear (Shakespeare), 208 Kipling, Rudyard, 209, 330 Kirk, Carey H., 36 Kirsteen (Oliphant), 255 Kneller, Godfrey, 404 Knight, Frances, 108 Krook, Dorothea, 18 Lacan, Jacques, 52, 64–5, 103, 180, 181, 188, 345 Laclos, Choderlos de, 418–19, 421 Ladies’ Home Journal, 297 Lady Barberina and Other Tales ( James), 329 “Lady of the Lake” (Scott), 206 La Farge, John, 279, 280, 442, 444 L’Ancien régime (Taine), 256–7 “A Landscape Painter” ( James), 280 “The Last of the Valerii” ( James), 17, 24–5 Last Supper (Da Vinci), 446 Laugel, Auguste, 444 Laurence, Dan H., 212, 214 Lears, Jackson, 467 Leavis, F. R., 406 L’Education sentimentale (Flaubert), 419 Lee, Vernon (Violet Paget), 295, 436, 447, 448 Lefèvre, Charles, 442 Lely, Peter, 404 Lemmon, Jack, 475 Lerner, Alan Jay, 472, 486 “The Lesson of Balzac” ( James), 89, 288 “The Lesson of the Master” ( James), 219 Letters, Fictions, Lives (Anesko), 269 Letters from America (Brooks), 261 Letters of Henry James (Lubbock), 264–6 Levinas, Emmanuel, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166 Lewes, George Henry, 78, 79, 80 Les Liaisons dangereuses (Laclos), 418–19, 421, 422, 432 Lieberman, Lisa, 148 Life in Letters (Horne), 269

499

Lincoln, Abraham, 280 Lind, Ilse, 255 Linton, Eliza, 33, 34 The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James ( James), 264 Literary Reviews and Essays on American, English, and French Authors (Mordell), 250 Literature, 253, 254 Little Dorrit (Dickens), 292, 410 Little Tour in France ( James), 285 Little Women (Alcott), 36, 37 “Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty: A New Sophism” (Lacan), 180 “London” ( James), 253, 255, 258 A London Life ( James), 450 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 444 “The Long Wards” ( James), 397 Loring, Katharine, 286, 287, 369, 370 L’Orme du mail (France), 255 The Lost Moment (film, 1947), 479–80, 481, 482, 483–4 Lover’s Discourse (Barthes), 325, 335 Lubbock, Percy, 262, 263, 264–6, 267, 336 Lucas, E. V., 231–2 Lucrezia Panciatichi (Bronzino), 437 MacAlpine, William, 288 Macherey, Pierre, 76, 77 Macmillan’s, 284 McWhirter, David, 212, 225, 251 Madame Bovary (Flaubert), 18, 419–20 “Madame de Mauves” ( James), 25–7 “Madonna of the Future” ( James), 282, 448 Mahler, Margaret, 55, 57 Les Maîtres d’autrefois (Fromentin), 426 Mallon, Isabel A., 34 Manet, Edouard, 61 “Manfred” (Byron), 35 “Manners of American Women” ( James), 201, 204–5, 251 “The Man of Letters as a Man of Business” (Howells), 344 Man with a Glove (Titian), 426

500

Index

The Marble Faun (Hawthorne), 35, 437, 475 Margolis, Stacy, 317 Marshall, Charles, 367 Martin, Wallace, 70 The Master (Tóibín), 397–8 Matheson, Neill, 320 Matthiessen, F. O., 394 Maupassant, Guy de, 283, 416 Melville, Herman, 18 Mengin, Urbain, 439 Meredith, George, 29, 212, 215 Meriwether, Lee, 35 Middlemarch (Eliot), 25, 405, 406–7, 408 Mill, John Stuart, 142 Millais, John, 284 Miller, J. Hillis, 176, 333, 336–7 Milton, John, 81 “Mind of England at War” ( James), 253–4 Minnelli, Vincente, 472, 485, 486, 487 MLA International Bibliography, 2 Moby Dick (Melville), 18 Molière ( Jean-Baptist Poquelin), 256 Molinari, Gustave de, 261 Monteiro, George, 269 Moon, Michael, 318 Moore, Geoffrey, 36 Moore, George, 53 Moore, Rayburn, 269 Moorehead, Agnes, 480 “Mora Montravers” ( James), 235–7, 355 Mordell, Albert, 250 Moreau, Jeanne, 432 Morris, William, 281 “A Most Extraordinary Case” ( James), 19, 21–2 Mozier, Joseph, 443 Mürger, Henri, 430 Murillo, Bartolome, 404 La Muse démocratique (Ozouf), 251 Musset, Alfred de, 459 My Fair Lady (film, 1964), 486 Nabokov, Vladimir, 23 Nafisi, Azar, 395–6 A Name, Title, and Place Index to the Critical Writings of Henry James (Stafford), 250

Nash, Andrew, 212 Nation, 232, 282, 283, 401, 445 Newberry, Frederick, 46 The Newcomes (Thackeray), 405 New York Edition ( James), 26, 33, 46, 47, 71, 74, 75, 96, 102, 104, 200, 208–9, 210–11, 212–27, 231, 249, 255, 288–9, 298, 306, 324–5, 327, 329, 330, 331, 332, 409, 414, 475 New York Herald, 251 New York Sun, 253 New York Times, 102, 170, 232, 253, 393, 398, 484 New York Tribune, 253, 254, 255, 256, 283, 287, 416 New York World, 461 “The Next Time” ( James), 287 The Nightcomers (film, 1971), 478 North American Review, 90, 196, 280 Norton, Charles Eliot, 219, 222, 250, 280, 281–2, 402, 444 Norton, Grace, 27, 91, 270–1, 281, 284, 288, 438, 439 Norton, Sally, 219, 220, 222 Notes de voyage (Laugel), 444 Notes of a Son and Brother ( James), 159, 160, 167, 262, 264, 289, 372 Notes on Novelists ( James), 417 Notre-Dame de Paris (Hugo), 431 Notting Hill (film, 1999), 475 Novick, Sheldon, 51 Nussbaum, Martha, 176 Obelkevich, James, 108 Old and New (Barlett), 40 Oliphant, Margaret, 255 Olympia (Manet), 61 On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (film, 1970), 478, 485–7 O’Neil, Caitlin, 481 On The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud), 51 Les Origines de la France contemporaine (Taine), 256 Osgood, James, 95 The Other Henry James (Rowe), 251, 252, 464–5

Index The Other House ( James), 211, 288, 432, 473, 476, 478 “Other Roman Neighborhoods” ( James), 452 “Our Apartment: A Practical Guide to Those Intending to Spend a Winter in Rome” (Barlett), 40 Our Mutual Friend (Dickens), 410 The Outcry ( James), 447, 453, 482 Ozick, Cynthia, 116–17, 205–6 Ozouf, Mona, 251, 416–17 Paget, Violet see Lee, Vernon Pahl, Dennis, 35, 44, 46 “The Papers” ( James), 253, 466–7 Paradise Lost (Milton), 81 “Paranoid Reading and Preparative Reading” (Sedgwick), 318 Parisian Sketches (Edel and Lind), 255 Partial Portraits ( James), 417 A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales ( James), 283 “A Passionate Pilgrim” ( James), 403–4 “The Patagonia” ( James), 394 Pater, Walter, 64, 284, 383, 445 Pavans, Jean, 432 Peabody, Elizabeth, 93 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 197 Pendennis (Thackeray), 405 Perrot, Jean, 429–30 Perry, Matthew, 279 Perry, Oliver Hazard, 279 Perry, Thomas Sergeant, 270, 279, 280, 365, 366 Person, Leland S., 63, 251, 317, 320 Persse, Jocelyn, 269, 285 Peter Pan (Barrie), 225 Philadelphia Ledger, 253 Piazzetta, Giambattista, 450 Picture and Text ( James), 249, 250 Pinker, James B., 209, 213, 288 Pippin, Robert, 93 Plott, Michèle, 141, 149, 150 Pluth, Ed, 180–1, 186 Poe, Edgar Allen, 218, 385, 432 Poetics of Prose (Todorov), 251

501

Poirier, Richard, 393 “Poor Richard” ( James), 19, 20–1, 280 Porter, Katherine Anne, 311 “Portland Place” (Coburn), 218–19 The Portrait of a Lady (film, 1968), 477 The Portrait of a Lady (film, 1996), 395, 474, 476, 477 The Portrait of a Lady ( James), 22, 26, 70, 71–6, 77–8, 79–82, 88, 93, 94, 133, 142, 147, 163, 196, 211, 220–2, 284, 292, 293–5, 306, 326, 327, 330, 333, 339, 347, 348, 349, 351–5, 356, 360, 374–5, 377, 380–8, 391, 393, 403, 404, 406, 407–9, 417–20, 421, 425, 428–9, 431, 432, 436, 440, 441, 442, 448, 450, 460, 461, 462, 463, 473 Portrait of Places ( James), 217 Posnock, Ross, 196–7, 198, 251, 457 Pound, Ezra, 215, 390, 392, 393 The Prelude (Wordsworth), 208 The Princess Casamassima ( James), 57, 219, 252, 286, 330, 403, 450 Principles of Psychology ( James), 293, 372 “The Prisoner of Chillon” (Byron), 35 “The Private Life” ( James), 456–8, 459 Prolegomena (Kant), 72 Prothero, Margaret Frances Butcher, 269 Przybylowicz, Donna, 197 Psychological Birth of the Human Infant (Mahler), 55 Punch, 284 The Pupil (film, 1996), 432 “The Pupil” ( James), 310, 317, 325, 360, 449, 450 Queen of Sheba (Veronese), 446 “The Question of Our Speech” ( James), 201–2, 205–6, 251 “The Question of the Mind” ( James), 253 Rahv, Philip, 311 Rape of Europa (Veronese), 437 Rawlings, Peter, 19, 20, 24, 255 Raynor, Dr., 281 Reading Lolita in Tehran (Nafisi), 395–6

502

Index

“The Real Right Thing” ( James), 459 Rebecca (film, 1940), 480 The Reception of Henry James in Europe (Duperray), 2 Redgrave, Lynn, 472 “Refugees in England” ( James), 253 Regnault, Henri, 261, 444 “The Rejuvenation of Henry James” (Hale), 211 Rembrandt, 404 Renan, Ernest, 444 The Resisting Reader (Fetterley), 345 Retour à Florence (Pavans), 432 Reubell, Henrietta, 439 The Reverberator (film, 1956), 477 The Reverberator ( James), 253, 254, 329, 460, 461, 462, 463 Rhetoric of Fiction (Booth), 251, 336 Ricci, Sebastiano, 450 Richmond, Bruce, 270 Ricoeur, Paul, 225 Rigg, Diana, 478 Riis, Jacob, 197 Rimmon, Shlomith, 103 The Rise of Silas Lapham (Howells), 45 Rivette, Jacques, 432, 476, 478 Robbins, Bruce, 390, 392 Roberts, Julia, 475 Robins, Elizabeth, 270 Roderick Hudson ( James), 213–15, 219, 220, 224–5, 255, 282, 289, 310, 317, 328, 329, 450 “Romance of Certain Old Clothes” ( James), 280, 478 Roosevelt, Theodore, 255, 288, 333, 334 Rose, Charles Day, 409 “Rose-Agathe” ( James), 29 Ross, Donald, 35 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 281 “A Round of Visits” ( James), 237–9 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 36, 139, 421 Rowe, John Carlos, 251, 252, 345, 346, 464–5 Rubens, Peter Paul, 404 The Rules (Fein and Schneider), 190

Ruskin, John, 139, 281, 400, 410, 444, 450 Sacred and Profane Love (Titian), 437 The Sacred Fount ( James), 211, 288, 316, 317 Sadoff, Dianne, 474 Said, Edward, 251 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, 261 Saint-Gaudens, Augustus, 288 Salmon, Richard, 253 Sand, George, 95, 444, 459 Sangster, Margaret, 37 Sargent, John Singer, 215, 289, 436, 447, 449 Savoy, Eric, 313, 316 Scaasi, Arnold, 486 Scènes de la vie de bohème (Mürger), 430 The Scenic Art ( James), 255 Schatzky, Olivier, 432 Schiller, Friedrich von, 444 Schramer, James, 35 Schuyler, Montgomery, 211 Scott, Walter, 206, 409, 410 Scouting for Boys (Baden-Powell), 324, 325, 326–33, 334, 335–6, 337, 338–40 Scribner’s Magazine, 139, 445 Sebastian del Piombo, 435 The Secret of Narcisse (Gosse), 410 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 58, 232, 309–10, 313, 314, 315–16, 317–18, 321, 328, 330–1, 338, 339, 452 Segal, Ora, 221 Seidman, Steven, 140 The Selected Letters of Henry James (Edel), 266 Seltzer, Mark, 196, 197 “The Sense of Desolation in Henry James” (Horwitz), 53 The Sense of the Past (film, 1933), 477 The Sense of the Past (film, 1948), 477 The Sense of the Past (film, 1949), 477 The Sense of the Past (film, 1951), 477 The Sense of the Past (film, 1959), 477 The Sense of the Past (film, 1970), 477

Index The Sense of the Past ( James), 21–2, 25, 477, 484, 485–7 Seyrig, Delphine, 432 Shakespeare, William, 208, 400, 403, 404, 405, 409, 411 Shaw, George Bernard, 215 Shawl-Straps (Alcott), 37–40, 43 Shelley, Mary, 23 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 444, 445, 448 Sickler, Philip, 17, 21 “Sir Dominick Ferrand” ( James), 459 Skinner, Richard Dana, 484 Skrupskelis, Ignas, 268–9, 371 Slavens, Hugh, 177 A Small Boy and Others ( James), 264, 265, 289, 372, 426–7 Smith, Alpheus, 329 Smith, Susan Harris, 34 Smollett, Tobias, 404 Society the Redeemed Form of Man ( James), 54 Softley, Iain, 394, 476–7 Some Like It Hot (film, 1959), 475 “Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia, and Homosexuality” (Freud), 56–7 “Some Pros and Cons of Travel Abroad” (Bartlett), 40–3, 45 Sontag, Susan, 386–7 Spectator, 232 The Speech and Manners of American Women ( James), 150 “The Speech of American Women” ( James), 201, 202–4, 251 Spilka, Mark, 312 The Spoils of Poynton ( James), 288, 293, 294, 295–300, 301, 303, 326, 327, 347 St. John Chrysostomos and Saints (Sebastian del Piombo), 435 Stafford, William T., 250 Steichen, Edward, 215 Steiglitz, Alfred, 215 Stein, Gertrude, 319, 320, 390, 393 Stendhal (Henri Beyle), 444 Stern, Daniel, 55 Stevens, Hugh, 92, 142, 317

503

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 101, 212, 270, 284, 287, 330, 334–5, 409 Still/Here ( Jones), 168 Stones of Venice (Ruskin), 444 Story, William Wetmore, 282, 443, 451 “The Story of a Masterpiece” ( James), 280 “The Story of a Year” ( James), 19–20, 280 Strachey, James, 319 Streisand, Barbara, 486, 487 Sturgis, Howard, 269 Sumner, Charles, 40 Sundquist, Eric, 142 Sutherland, John, 221 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 362 Swinburne, Algernon, 64 Symonds, John Addington, 284, 445 System of Positive Polity (Comte), 147 Taine, Hippolyte, 256–7, 444 A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens), 411 Tate, Allen, 311 The Tempest (Shakespeare), 404, 405 Temple, Charlotte, 409 Temple, Mary (Minny/Minnie), 27, 156–7, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 167, 169, 170, 171, 280, 286, 344, 376, 409, 449 Tennyson, Alfred, 212, 284, 400, 404, 410 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 25, 278, 280, 400, 405 Theatricals: Second Series ( James), 287 Theatricals: Two Comedies ( James), 287 Thomson, Robert, 279 Thoreau, Henry David, 278, 297 Thurman, Uma, 472 Tilton, Mabel, 249 Time (magazine), 267 Time and the Other (Levinas), 162, 166 Tintnor, Adeline, 2 Tintoretto, 281, 437, 444, 450 Titian, 426, 434, 435, 436, 437, 442 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 66, 67, 460, 461 Todorov, Tzvetan, 103, 104, 105, 116, 251, 459 Tóibín, Colm, 397–8 Tolstoy, Leo, 405

504

Index

Torsney, Cheryl, 63 “The Tragedy of Error” ( James), 280 The Tragic Muse ( James), 96, 329, 391, 392–3, 405, 457, 460 Traister, Bryce, 144–5 Tramp Trip: How to See Europe on Fifty Cents a Day (Meriwether), 35 Transatlantic Sketches ( James), 250, 283 Trask, Michael, 319–20 “Travelling Companions” ( James), 435, 436, 437, 446, 450 Treasure Island (Stevenson), 330, 338 The Trial of Curiosity (Posnock), 196–7, 251 Les Trois mousquetaires (Dumas), 405 Trollope, Anthony, 29, 280, 284, 392 Truffaut, François, 432, 472, 473, 477 Tupper, Edith Sessions, 34 Turgenev, Ivan, 70–1, 283, 416 The Turn of the Screw (film, 2000), 104 “The Turn of the Screw” ( James), 51, 100–1, 102–17, 288, 310, 311–14, 316–17, 325, 332, 335, 360, 378, 380, 383, 391, 472, 475, 478–9, 480, 481, 484, 485 The Turn of the Screw (opera, 1954), 104 “Turning the Screw of Interpretation” (Felman), 312–14 Twain, Mark, 18 The Two Magics ( James), 102 “Types of American Beauty” (Brown), 34 “Types of American Girls” (Dutton, Whitney, Mallon, Tupper, Asmore), 34 “Types of American Women” (Boyesen), 34 Untimely Intervention (Chambers), 169 Unwin, Paul, 473, 476, 477–8, 479, 485 Unwin, T. Fisher, 212 Valéry, Paul, 226 Vanderbilt, George, 288 Van Doren, Mark, 311 Vandyke, Anthony, 404 Vanity Fair (Thackeray), 405 Van Leer, David, 320–1

Van Winkle, Edgar, 370 Veblen, Thorstein, 66, 197 Veeder, William, 152 “The Velvet Glove” ( James), 231, 233–5, 447, 474 Venetian Life (Howells), 444 “Venice” ( James), 444 “Venus and Adonis” (Shakespeare), 403, 404 Veronese, Paul, 281, 437, 442, 446 “Versailles As It Is” ( James), 256–7 Vers une architecture (Le Corbusier), 297 The Vicar of Wakefield (Goldsmith), 250 Vidal, Gore, 472 Virile Portrait (Titian), 434, 435, 436 Volpone ( Jonson), 444 Voltaire, 444 Voyage en Espagne (Gautier), 431 Walker, Pierre, 54, 201, 202, 250–1, 252–3, 255, 263, 267, 269–71 Walpole, Hugh, 269 Walsh, Catharine (Catherine), 278, 279, 282, 360, 366–7 Walsh, Hugh, 278 Walton, Priscilla, 345 War and Peace (Tolstoy), 405 Wardley, Lynn, 45 Warren, Kenneth, 251 Washington Square (film, 1997), 395 Washington Square ( James), 71, 93, 211, 216, 284, 353, 356, 360, 411 Watch and Ward ( James), 17, 20, 22–4, 211, 281, 356, 450 Watt, A. P., 286 Wegelin, Christophe, 26, 27 Weisbuch, Robert, 33 Wells, H. G., 211, 410 West, Rebecca, 17 Wharton, Edith, 210, 239, 270, 288, 289, 297, 304, 402 What Maisie Knew (film 1975), 476 What Maisie Knew ( James), 121, 122–35, 139, 288, 310, 339, 361, 383, 393, 407, 411–12, 432 Whistler, James, 284

Index White, Hayden, 53 Whitman, Walt, 90, 246 Whitney, Adeline Dutton Train, 34 “Who Owns Henry James?” (Anonymous), 267 Wicke, Jennifer, 463 Wilde, Oscar, 101, 109, 284, 287, 320 Wilkinson, J. J. Garth, 278 William Wetmore Story and his Friends ( James), 209, 249, 250, 443, 448 Wilson, Edmund, 51, 102–3, 310, 311, 312, 321 Wilson, Woodrow, 390, 395 The Wings of the Dove (film, 1952), 477 The Wings of the Dove (film, 1959), 477 The Wings of the Dove (film, 1965), 477 The Wings of the Dove (film, 1975), 477 The Wings of the Dove (film, 1979), 477 The Wings of the Dove (film, 1981), 432, 477 The Wings of the Dove (film, 1997), 394, 474, 476, 477 The Wings of the Dove (film, 1998), 477 The Wings of the Dove ( James), 22, 156, 157–8, 159–62, 163–7, 168–71, 211,

505

288, 317, 320, 327, 356, 380, 381, 391–2, 405, 412–13, 420–1, 422, 431, 437, 446, 449–50 Winnicott, D. W., 54 Wister, Owen, 288 Wister, Sarah Butler, 282, 288 Within the Rim and Other Essays ( James), 253 The Wizard of Oz (film, 1939), 480 Woloch, Alex, 292 Wolseley, Louisa Erskine, 269 A Woman’s Reason (Howells), 96 Wood, Michael, 475 Woolf, Virginia, 117, 292–3 Woolson, Constance Fenimore, 101, 286, 287, 370, 409, 439, 448, 449 Wordsworth, William, 208, 400 The Yellow Book, 459 Zacharias, Greg, 2–3, 263, 269–71 Zanchi, Antonio, 450 Zola, Emile, 61, 283, 285–6, 416 Zorzi, Rosella Mamoli, 269 Zwinger, Lynda, 320