Palgrave Advances in Henry James Studies

Palgrave Advances in Henry James Studies Edited by

Peter Rawlings

10.1057/9780230288881 - Palgrave Advances in Henry James Studies, Edited by Peter Rawlings

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palgrave advances in henr y james studies

Palgrave Advances Titles include:

Phillip Mallett (editor) THOMAS HARDY STUDIES Lois Oppenheim (editor) SAMUEL BECKETT STUDIES Jean-Michel Rabaté (editor) JAMES JOYCE STUDIES Peter Rawlings (editor) HENRY JAMES STUDIES Frederick S. Roden (editor) OSCAR WILDE STUDIES Jane Stabler (editor) BYRON STUDIES Nicholas Williams (editor) WILLIAM BLAKE STUDIES Forthcoming: Larry Scanlon (editor) CHAUCER STUDIES Anna Snaith (editor) VIRGINIA WOOLF STUDIES Suzanne Trill (editor) EARLY MODERN WOMEN’S WRITING

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John Bowen and Robert L. Patten (editors) CHARLES DICKENS STUDIES

edited by

peter rawlings

university of the west of england, bristol

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Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Peter Rawlings 2007 All chapters © Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 2007

notes on contributors vii chronology x introduction

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1. mastering critical theory 11 sheila teahan 2. narratives of theory and theories of narrative: point of view and centres of consciousness 35 peter rawlings 3. the genius of the unconscious: psychoanalytic criticism 59 julie rivkin 4. reconceiving feminism, gender, and sexuality studies 80 priscilla l. walton 5. entre chien et loup: henry james, queer theory, and the biographical imperative 100 eric savoy 6. belatedness and style 126 kevin ohi 7. scene and screen 147 clair hughes 8. prisons, palaces, and the architecture of the imagination 169 victoria coulson 9. the sense of the past: history and historical criticism 192 gert buelens and celia aijmer

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contents

palgrave advances in henry james studies

10. “a geometry of his own”: temporality, referentiality, and ethics in the autobiographies 212 tamara l. follini 11. editing the complete letters of henry james 239 pierre a. walker and greg w. zacharias 12. talking about money: art and commerce in america 263 collin meissner 13. henry james and globalization 283 john carlos rowe index 301

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Celia Aijmer (Göteborg University) received her PhD in 2003. Her dissertation, Houses of Fiction: Henry James and the Art of Homelessness, investigates the relationship between modernism, aestheticism and domesticity in James’s writings. Pursuing her interest in the genesis of modernism, Aijmer is currently working on a study of modernist little magazines. Gert Buelens (Ghent University) has edited Enacting History in Henry James (Cambridge UP, 1997) and has several essays on James in journals such as Canadian Review of American Studies, Texas Studies in Literature and Language and PMLA. Henry James and the “Aliens” (Rodopi, 2002) won the American Studies Network Book Prize. Victoria Coulson lectures in American Literature at the University of York. Her articles include “Sticky Realism: Armchair Hermeneutics in Late James,” which won the 2004 Leon Edel Essay Prize in The Henry James Review. Her monograph Women, Realism, and Henry James is forthcoming; her second book focuses on architecture, sexuality, and thinking, in James, Freud, and Winnicott. Tamara L. Follini is a Fellow and Lecturer in English at Clare College, Cambridge University. Her articles and reviews on James and issues in autobiography have been published in The Henry James Review, The Cambridge Quarterly, The Journal of American Studies, and elsewhere. Clair Hughes, educated in Scotland and the Universities of Bristol and London, taught Literature and Art History in institutions of higher vii

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notes on contributors

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palgrave advances in henry james studies

Collin Meissner is Assistant Professor of American Studies and associate director of the PhD in Literature Program at the University of Notre Dame. His publications include Henry James and the Language of Experience and essays on James and the novel. He is currently working on two book projects, one tentatively entitled “Capital Crimes: The Role of Money in American Literature and Culture,” the other “Reading and the Public Sphere.” Kevin Ohi is the author of Innocence and Rapture: The Erotic Child in Pater, Wilde, James, and Nabokov (Palgrave, 2005). He is Associate Professor of English at Boston College and is currently completing a book entitled On the Queerness of Style: Henry James and the Erotics of Form. Peter Rawlings is Professor of English and American Literature at the University of the West of England, Bristol (UK). He has published widely on Henry James, American theories of fiction in the nineteenth century, and the American reception of Shakespeare. Among his most recent books are Henry James and the Abuse of the Past (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and Three American Theorists of the Novel: James, Trilling, and Booth (2006). Julie Rivkin is Professor of English at Connecticut College, where she teaches courses in American literature and literary theory. She is the author of False Positions: The Representational Logics of Henry James’s Fiction (Stanford 1996) and the co-editor with Michael Ryan of Literary Theory: An Anthology (Blackwell 1998, second ed. 2004). John Carlos Rowe is USC Associates’ Professor of the Humanities, English, and American Studies at the University of Southern California. His most recent books are The New American Studies (2002) and Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II (2000). Among his numerous publications are three books on Henry James. Eric Savoy is Professeur agrégé de littérature comparée at Université de Montréal. He has published widely on James and Queer Theory, and is completing a book entitled Conjugating the Subject: Henry James and Queer Formalism.

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education in the UK and Japan until she retired to France in 2004. She has published articles on Henry James, Anglo-Irish Literature, and art; her books include Henry James and the Art of Dress (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001) and Dressed in Fiction (2005).

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Sheila Teahan, Associate Professor of English at Michigan State University, is the author of The Rhetorical Logic of Henry James and of essays in Arizona Quarterly, The Henry James Review, Studies in American Fiction, Symbiosis, and elsewhere, and edited the Bedford/St. Martin’s Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism Turn of the Screw. She was president of the Henry James Society in 2001. Pierre A. Walker is Professor of English at Salem State College. He is the author of Reading Henry James in French Cultural Contexts, editor of Henry James on Culture, creator of www.dearhenryjames.org, and co-general editor of The Complete Letters of Henry James. Priscilla L. Walton is a Professor of English at Carleton University in Canada. She is the author of Our Cannibals, Ourselves: The Body Politic, Patriarchal Desire and Victorian Discourse: A Lacanian Reading of Anthony Trollope’s Palliser Novels, and The Disruption of the Feminine in Henry James. She has also published numerous articles, and is the editor of the Canadian Review of American Studies. Greg W. Zacharias is Professor of English and Director of the Center for Henry James Studies at Creighton University. He is co-general editor of The Complete Letters of Henry James and has published on Henry James, Mark Twain, and John Milton, in addition to other subjects.

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notes on contributors

15 April 1843: born in New York, N.Y. 1843–45: Family visits England and France. 1843–55: Family returns to New York and settles there. 1855–58: Travels to England and on to Paris, Lyon, and Geneva. 1858–59: Returns to America; resides in Newport, Rhode Island. 1859–60: Still dissatisfied with American education, Henry James Sr. takes the family back to Geneva. 1860–02: Returns to Newport. 1861–65: American Civil War: did not enlist owing to a back injury described by James as an “obscure hurt.” 1862–63: At the instigation of his father, reluctantly enters Harvard Law School where he mostly attends lectures on literature. 1864: Family moves to Boston. First short story (112 were eventually written), “A Tragedy of Error,” published anonymously in the Continental Monthly (New York). 1865: Begins writing reviews and essays on an industrial scale in journals such as the North American Review, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Nation. William Dean Howells (novelist and editor) promotes his work by writing enthusiastically about some of the early short stories. Together, Howells and James emerge as the enfants terribles of “realism.” 1869: Steeped in the literature of the Old World, especially that of England and France, James begins to make frequent trips to Europe where he develops a particular passion for Italy. 1871: Watch and Ward, the first novel, appears in serial form (Atlantic Monthly); published in one volume in 1878.

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chronology (including major publications)

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1875: A Passionate Pilgrim gathers together six of the early short stories including the 1871 “A Passionate Pilgrim” which focuses on American cultural encounters and entanglements with the Old World (the socalled “international theme” that preoccupied James throughout his life). Transatlantic Sketches, a collection of travel essays, is published. James wrote numerous travel essays throughout his career. Roderick Hudson. 1875–76: Lives in Paris where he comes under the influence of writers such as Turgenev, Flaubert, Zola, and Maupassant. 1876: Moved to and settles in London where he associates with Tennyson, Browning, Meredith, Stevenson, among many others; he dines out extensively and becomes a prominent figure on the London social and cultural scene. In 1879, James wrote “dined out during the past winter 107 times.” 1877: The American. 1878: French Poets and Novelists (a collection of critical essays which includes significant assessments of Balzac and, notwithstanding that he was Russian, Turgenev). Watch and Ward (first serialized in 1871). The Europeans. Daisy Miller: A Study. 1879: Confidence. Hawthorne: a study of the life and work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, a writer whose work had a large impact on James’s fiction. 1880: Washington Square. 1881–83: Returns to America after an absence of six years; parents die. 1881: The Portrait of a Lady. 1883: Portraits of Places (travel essays; the volume includes the first of a number of pieces on Venice). 1884–86: Visits Paris; then decides to settle permanently in London. Moves to Kensington, London in 1886. “The Art of Fiction” (1884): a landmark intervention in the theory and criticism of fiction. A Little Tour in France (1884). The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima; a novel steeped in the political and cultural turmoil of England in the 1880s (and as close as James came to a naturalist idiom) (1886). 1888: Partial Portraits: a collection of essays which includes a slightly revised “The Art of Fiction” (1884) and two pieces on George Eliot. The Reverberator. “The Aspern Papers.”

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chronology

palgrave advances in henry james studies

1890: The Tragic Muse; for the next decade or so, James anchored his fiction mostly in London; during its first half, he had a fateful and fatal encounter with drama and the theatre. 1891: The American: A Comedy in Four Acts: a play in which James supplies a happy ending to the earlier novel. The play was moderately successful. 1893: Picture and Text: a collection of essays mainly concerned with art and illustration (it includes a piece on John Singer Sargent); James produced a prolific amount of art and drama criticism. Essays in London and Elsewhere: notable here is an essay on Flaubert and an early, nervous, evaluation of Ibsen. 1894: Theatricals: Two Comedies: Tenants and Disengaged. Guy Domville: Play in Three Acts. Theatricals: Second Series: The Album and The Reprobate. 1895: The first night of Guy Domville is a disaster; James begins to refocus on fiction. 1896: The Other House: a novel which developed from a discarded play scenario. 1897: The Spoils of Poynton. Moves to Lamb House, Rye, Sussex. What Maisie Knew. 1898: In the Cage. “The Turn of the Screw” (first appeared in Collier’s Weekly; reprinted with “The Two Magics” in a volume entitled The Two Magics (1898)). 1899: The Awkward Age. 1901: The Sacred Fount. 1902: The Wings of the Dove: the first of three novels which constitute what the critic F. O. Matthiessen dubbed the “major phase.” 1903: The Ambassadors: “the best, all round, of my productions” (James). William Wetmore Story and His Friends (biography). 1904: The Golden Bowl. Commonly regarded as James’s final novel; but The Outcry was published in 1911. Henceforth, however, the main concentration was on non-fiction (what has been termed the “fourth phase”). Leaves for the United States in August, 1905 (after being away for twenty years). 1905: English Hours (collected travel writing). 1906: Returns from the United States to England. 1907: The American Scene (travel writing; and a searing analysis of early twentieth-century American culture and society).

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1907–09: The Novels and Tales of Henry James: “New York Edition” (24 volumes); two posthumous volumes were added in 1918: The Ivory Tower and The Sense of the Past (both unfinished). The prefaces to each volume have become a locus classicus for theorists and critics of fiction. 1909: Italian Hours (collected travel writing). 1911: The Outcry (a novel transposed from an earlier play). 1912: Honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of Oxford. 1913: A Small Boy and Others (autobiography). Moves from Rye to Chelsea. 1914: Notes of a Son and Brother (autobiography). A third autobiographical volume, The Middle Years (unfinished), appeared posthumously in 1917. Notes on Novelists: the final volume of critical essays; it includes James’s shrewd assessment of contemporary fiction “The New Novel” (which had appeared earlier under the title of “The Younger Generation” in The Times Literary Supplement). 1915: Becomes a British Citizen; receives the Order of Merit. 28 February 1916: dies in London.

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chronology

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peter rawlings The aim of this collection is to guide non-specialist and specialist readers alike through some of the dense thickets of Henry James criticism. The attempt is not only to survey past and contemporary critical and theoretical terrains, but also to anticipate future developments. More than this, every contributor has published extensively in her areas of intervention; in all cases, therefore, these essays are part of a conversation which their writers have been involved in instigating or developing. Whereas previous anthologies have tended to adopt a textual focus for each chapter, this Palgrave Advances volume is organized around themes and issues pertinent to how James is being approached in the new millennium. But as the essays in Palgrave Advances in Henry James Studies are both accounts and demonstrations in practice of each critical or theoretical area, contributors map the issues (to varying degrees) by engaging in an angled close reading of the James texts especially salient to their argument. In this way, a balance has been struck (in the collection as a whole, rather than necessarily in each essay) between description and demonstration, exposition and analysis, or interpretation and critical engagement. Before offering an overview of the essays, I want to construct a context for speculating about why James continues to attract scholarly and critical attention at stratospheric heights scaled elsewhere only by huge circulators of cultural capital such as Shakespeare and Beckett. Famously, James (1843–1916) complained that America lacked the “complex social machinery” to “set a writer in motion” (Hawthorne 320). After his unlikely year at Harvard (1862–63) and further trips to Europe, he settled in England in 1876, twelve years after the appearance of his first reviews and fiction. James returned to America only occasionally (most noisily in 1904, the result of which was The American Scene [1907]), and became a naturalized British citizen shortly before his death. Apart from Hawthorne, a series of prefaces to the New York edition of his fiction (1907–09), and 1

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introduction

palgrave advances in henry james studies

the numerous reviews and essays he never collected, James produced five volumes of literary criticism and theory: French Poets and Novelists (1878), Partial Portraits (1888), Essays in London and Elsewhere (1893), Picture and Text (1893), and Notes on Novelists (1914). Most of this material had been published previously in journals such as the Atlantic Monthly and the Nation. James was a prolific writer of fiction, of course, as well as a critic: there are twenty-two novels (two were unfinished) and over a hundred short stories (and some are not so short). He also wrote a number of very bad and spectacularly unsuccessful plays such as Guy Domville (1894). From his youth on, James read widely in English and European as well as American literature. His fiction and criticism emerged in the cleavage between the social and moral intensities of English novelists such as George Eliot and the formal self-consciousness of French writers (especially Balzac and Flaubert) who often held conventional moral imperatives in contempt. James was pulled in two directions: towards the (mainly French) world of art with its increasing devotion to form and technique, and the morally intense world of his American context (especially that of Boston, with those powerful residues of Puritanism, in which he began to write). Engendered here for James was a besetting anxiety about the perils of artful theory as distinct from the easy securities of artless moralizing. Or as the essay on “Guy de Maupassant” has it: “the work is often so much more intelligent than the doctrine” (244), and “[t]here is many a creator of living figures whose friends . . . will do well to pray for him when he sallies forth into the dim wilderness of theory” (243). James did, however, sally forth into that “dim wilderness” producing, in the process, essays such as “The Art of Fiction” (1884) that have set the theoretical agenda for well over a century. If this critical corpus and its reflexiveness have been one source of James’s enduring appeal to the academic world, the complexities of his late prose (and their uses) have been another. There is also the protean reach, in disciplinary and cultural terms, of his theory and practice, and the chameleon-like nature of his texts in the jungle of always endangered, and mutating, species of theory. James entered the fictional and critical arena when the appetite for a serious discussion of fiction was growing in the transatlantic world; and he has been at the centre of critical and theoretical debates ever since. Recruited by the New Critics whose organicist approach to literary texts he in part fostered, James’s work was also brought into the cultural, material, and political paradigms of the 1930s and 1940s by critics as diverse as Philip Rahv, F. O. Matthiessen, and Lionel Trilling. The infamous difficulties of the late fiction were as appealing to the New

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Critics as they have been for major structuralist choreographers such as Tzvetan Todorov. John Carlos Rowe, in one of the most significant books of the last century on any writer, consummately demonstrated James’s yield for poststructuralist approaches in The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James (1984). More recently, Sheila Teahan and Eric Savoy have again pushed close reading up the agenda, but within a rigorous rhetorical framework as, far from coincidentally, James’s texts have been swept along, in the post-feminist era, by a surge of interest in masculinities and their construction, and queer theory. It is certainly the case, in the broad context of gender studies, that speculations about the ambiguous, perhaps imponderable, nature of James’s own sexual proclivities have been enduringly thrilling for a diverse range of commentators then and now. This prurience has generated exhaustive (and frequently exhausting) biocritical appropriations, manipulations, and misprisions, notably at the hands of Leon Edel, Fred Kaplan, Sheldon Novick and, more recently, Colm Tóibín. Sheila Teahan’s “Mastering Critical Theory,” as I turn to the essays themselves, offers an account of James’s own critical and theoretical positions before going on to examine aspects of the subsequent critical reception of his work. Emphasizing James’s heterogeneity and healthy incoherence as a critic, Teahan argues that “James either anticipates or contributes directly” to a wide range of “critical formations”; among these are “phenomenology, Russian formalism, New Criticism, AngloAmerican narrative theory, queer theory, and deconstruction” (11). If the critical work on Henry James is vast, then a good deal of it has gone in the direction of his The Turn of the Screw (1898). The second part of Teahan’s essay explores some of this critical material in terms of its “strikingly incoherent and incompatible array of . . . responses” (25). Teahan concludes by suggesting that one future trajectory of James studies lies in the return to formalism, and especially the queer formalism of Ellis Hanson, Kevin Ohi, Eric Savoy, and others. For these critics, “the queerness of James’s writing inheres less in the overt representations of sexualities than in the registers of style and rhetoric” (28). My own essay, “Narratives of Theory and Theories of Narrative: Point of View and Centres of Consciousness,” focuses on James’s involvement in what Teahan calls “Anglo-American narrative theory” (11). The first part outlines and contests the received narrative of this involvement. In line with Teahan’s emphasis on heterogeneity, and the line she draws from Kant to “The Art of Fiction,” I argue that James’s organicist aesthetic inclined him against dogmatic, a priori, theories of narrative, and that his was not an insistence on a monolithic restricting of the point of

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introduction

palgrave advances in henry james studies

view in narrative fiction to centers of consciousness (a phrase he never used). The narrating (or authorial, as James called it) voice was always supremely important for James. In any case, he was far from being the first advocate, where he was, of restricted points of view: G. P. Lathrop, for one, was debating this issue long before the 1907–09 prefaces to the New York Edition of James’s work. The second part of the essay, which also engages with The Ambassadors and What Maisie Knew, suggests that future approaches to James’s theories of narrative might well move in the direction of situating them much more firmly within the turn of the nineteenth-century climate of pragmatism, phenomenology, perspectivism, and British empiricism. Few writers since the 1890s or so, and especially not Henry James as Julie Rivkin cogently demonstrates, have been immune to psychoanalytic criticism. In “The Genius of the Unconscious: Psychoanalytic Criticism,” Rivkin shows how difficult it is “to find a preoccupation of psychoanalysis that is not also a preoccupation of James and of his critics”. Among the critics considered by Rivkin, before her own “reading of The Ambassadors and The Wings of the Dove that responds to the current work in gender and queer theory on the dynamics of identification and desire,” are Edmund Wilson, Shoshana Felman, John Carlos Rowe, Dennis Foster, Kaja Silverman, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Michael Moon, and Eric Savoy (59). Rivkin predicts that “just as psychoanalysis has been so important for queer theory, it will undoubtedly find new uses as postcolonial and global James studies unfold” (76). In the three essays that follow Rivkin’s (although less overtly so in Kevin Ohi’s), sex and gender are at the core. Priscilla L. Walton’s “Reconceiving Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies” opts for a particularly sharp focus. Resisting the temptation to indulge in yet another “post-feminist diatribe,” Walton seeks to “coalesce some of the problems in feminist research,” especially as they relate to James, “and to try to produce a more inclusive form of scholarship” (80). The essay is preoccupied, in particular, with the question of whether “feminism, queer theory, sexuality studies, and gay history” have “parted ways” and “if so, why” (81). This preoccupation takes Walton to Gert Buelens’s “Henry James’s Oblique Possession: Plottings of Desire and Mastery in The American Scene” in an effort to see whether its strategy of marrying gay and lesbian studies under the banner of queer theory can also be appropriated, if feminism is added to the union, for a reading of Washington Square. Ultimately, Walton finds that Buelens’s concept of “oblique possession,” where self-possession is achieved in the very act of submitting to the power of another erotic

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force, “is a useful paradigm for pulling together the commonalities of” gay, lesbian, queer, and feminist theoretical approaches (98). Eric Savoy, in an essay of rare distinction and originality (“Entre chien et loup: Henry, James, Queer Theory, and the Biographical Imperative”), begins by considering James’s short story “The Pupil” in relation to the “highly vexed” questions it raises about a “pedophilic attachment that remains, in erotic terms, potential but unrealized” (100). Taking the measure of these questions, for Savoy, is to “comprehend the distance between the certainties of gay literary culture” (“The Pupil” having been used by Edmund White to “out” James in his 1991 The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction) and the “fascinating uncertainties of what began to be called—coincidentally, around 1992—Queer Theory” (101). Savoy exemplifies in his own analysis of the tale that “queer work on James can proceed only by a species of close reading” he has elsewhere designated as “queer formalism” (103). These readings have their teleology (and Kevin Ohi’s interpretative strategies in his “Belatedness and Style” correspond to them in part) in the locating of “an ephemeral—but nonetheless specifiable—homosexual ‘subject’ on the far side of James’s thematics, in the nuanced unfolding of volatile tropes in complexly crafted syntax” (103). It is at this level that Sheila Teahan’s regard for rhetoric and formalism and Eric Savoy’s analyses converge. Savoy has a magisterial command of the intercalating yet often oppositional projects of gay and queer studies, and the seminal work in these areas; in particular, he identifies the failure of biography and biocriticism to “provide persuasive accounts” of James’s “private life” (114). Despite his initial intentions to the contrary, Savoy avers that “there is no arbitrary distinction to be made between gay histories and queer modes of reconstructing that history,” and that for the future, “the specific protocols of ‘reading’ and ‘recognition,’ and their mutual interlinearity, had best remain in open question, not subject to institutional prescription or any other form of regulatory prescription” (119). Kevin Ohi explores the extent to which novels such as The Ambassadors move into a quite different focus once a way of reading akin to “queer formalism,” as distinct from the older approaches to style enshrined in the work of Seymour Chatman and others, is undertaken. A contemporary current in James studies, he argues, understands “James’s style in biographical terms”; that is, “its opacities or seeming evasions point to the way the man himself diffused, postponed, avoided, sublimated, obscured, or more or less missed, ‘life’” (126). Ohi seeks to resist this model of “the mimetic capturing of experience” in which “[t]he vexing mimetic representation in James’s style is thereby made a (mimetic)

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palgrave advances in henry james studies

representation of a ‘missed’ life” (127); and he organizes his resistance by following such critics as Julie Rivkin, Mary Cross, and Sheila Teahan, “who suggest that” the plot of The Ambassadors should “be understood in relation to the linguistic practices of James’s text” (127). At the center of what Strether has missed, so to speak, for Ohi is belatedness (and he believes that this is also the case in The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl). His ultimate emphasis, as he articulates with Savoy, is on the “effect of style on a project of representation” and its affinities with the “biological investments of criticism” in James’s later work and the “‘reparative’ [Sedgwick], which is to say the queer, potential of Lambert Strether’s belatedness” (141). The next two essays, although in quite different ways, deal with James and cultural forms other than the purely literary. The first, Clair Hughes’s “Scene and Screen,” examines James’s failures as a playwright, and the critical traditions which give accounts of it, against the paradoxical fashion for and success of many of the film-versions of his novels and tales. Victoria Coulson, in the second—“Prisons, Palaces, and the Architecture of the Imagination”—pursues what she establishes as a locus classicus in James criticism: “the meaning of architecture, and the architecture of meaning” (170). For Hughes, James’s plays are neither as bad, nor as unsuccessful, as a raft of critics slavishly following Leon Edel have claimed. At the center of her analysis, in keeping with her study Henry James and the Art of Dress, are the semantics of dress in some of the variably detaining filmic transpositions of James’s fiction. Coulson construes James’s criticism and fiction in its neoclassical and gothic domains as “remodeling . . . the building tradition of both nineteenth-century literature and architectural theory” (171). It is clear that there is a need for a critical extension of the filiations Coulson establishes between, among others, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and Henry James. Her essay goes on to reflect on “The Art of Fiction” and its dialogue with The Portrait of a Lady, arguing powerfully that the preface’s house of fiction metaphor is the “archetype” of the “imprisoning places” abundantly to be found in James’s fiction and that its “various enclosures imaged . . . are of the constraining structures of the novelist’s imagination” (176). Coulson’s final section looks at what might be “beyond architecture” in James, a “beyond” that promises much more than is deliverable: it is constituted by homeless, peripatetic, women; water and the sea; and the portmanteau, with the “freedom of movement” (185) it seemingly represents. Identified, finally, are “uncanny affinities” between James’s “critique of the architecture of the imagination” and a range of “contemporary writers on architecture” (186).

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Two essays concern themselves with James and the past: Gert Buelens and Celia Aijmer’s “The Sense of the Past: History and Historical Criticism,” and Tamara L. Follini’s “‘A geometry of his own’: Temporality, Referentiality, and Ethics in the Autobiographies.” Buelens and Aijmer argue that writing as he was at a time when anti-positivist attacks on the sterilities of nineteenth-century written history were intensifying, James was nevertheless (and therefore) acutely aware of the pressure of the past and its poetic, thematic, potency. Crucially, they insist that “to excavate the meaning of history in James is also to begin to uncover the place of history in critical writings about James” (193); and they offer an invaluable survey and synopsis of some of this work. Among the fiction scrutinized are the unfinished novel The Sense of the Past, “The Art of Fiction,” Washington Square, “The Beast in the Jungle,” “The Jolly Corner,” and the sine qua non for any readers interested in James and history, “The Aspern Papers.” Towards the end, there are richly provocative sections on “Ghosts: history as nightmare” and “Art versus history.” James’s “formalism departs from elegiac nostalgia, collective memory, and history as grand narrative,” Buelens and Aijmer contend, for his is a “temporally specific theory of art; not one that is somehow beyond history” (207–8). Tamara L. Follini’s contribution is not only a shrewd and highly erudite intervention in the arena of James and his autobiographies, it is an incisive account of where life-writing is at the theoretical level. In the fiction itself, Follini traces the prevalence of “[e]pisodes that dramatize the intensification of an individual’s grasp of his or her life history” and the simultaneous occurrence of a “heightened awareness of the passage of time” (212). Consonant with these episodes, “James himself repeatedly questioned his own understanding amidst chronology’s obscurities and cruelties” (213). If Teahan is concerned in her essay to foreground James’s heterogeneity, Follini also emphasizes that James’s autobiographical writings “evade a general grouping, and contest and confound any one generic boundary” (215). This emphasis is supported by a foray into the plethora of critical and theoretical material on James and life-writing. This acts as a prelude to an investigation of the manner and mode in which “James’s critics and autobiographical theorists have been debating the transgressive nature of the genre, especially in terms of how it complicates referentiality, for a long time” (221), and to a discussion of James’s own alertness to “the ethical issues surrounding biography and autobiography” (225). Rather than acquiescing in the easy consolations of “certainty and directness” (231), Follini urges critics to allow themselves “the provisionality that James claimed” so that “we

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palgrave advances in henry james studies

may be better able to pursue the truth of each of our readings of these works and perceive the fallibilities of them all” (232). Follini reflects on the contentious issue of James’s revision of the family letters he included in his autobiographical writing, and biographers of James would be in a sorry plight were it not for the voluminous correspondence that survives. Pierre A. Walker and Greg W. Zacharias point out in their “Editing The Complete Letters of Henry James,” however, that such biographers and critics have been mainly confined in print-form to no more than twenty-five percent of the extant 10,500 letters, and then often in the most garbled (and in the case of Leon Edel, self-serving) forms. A complete and inclusive edition of the letters scattered around 130 archives has never been published; and Walker and Zacharias are currently editing such a collection for Nebraska University Press. The editors insist on some key principles ignored, they protest, by all previous editors. The edition should be complete, not a whimsical selection, for no editor can judge the future importance of what may now appear ignorable. Clear-text editing, and this is considered at length, should give way to plain-text editing in the interests of making available versions that represent deletions, underlinings, forms of emphasis, and the like. “Readers of The Complete Letters of Henry James,” write Walker and Zacharias, “will discover . . . much to delight in, much to speculate about, and many avenues of research to pursue about James and the world in which he lived” (256). This edition will shape biocritical work on James for all future critics. As Sheila Teahan eloquently shows at the outset of this collection, it has long been unfashionable, indeed impossible, to endorse the position of 1920s commentators such as Van Wyck Brooks on James. In his Henry Adams and Henry James: The Emergence of a Modern Consciousness, The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James, and The Other Henry James, to name but three, John Carlos Rowe (whose “Henry James and Globalization” is the culminating essay) has long been in the ground-breaking critical vanguard. Whereas Meissner, in the penultimate “Talking About Money: Art and Commerce in America,” drawing on the work of Georg Simmel, sees the late New York tales as mounting a critique of the hollowing out of culture for which capitalism and the deification of money are held to account by James, John Carlos Rowe is more interested in why Henry James continues to hold such a high exchange value in the global markets of cultural capital. It seems curious that the novels and tales that are read by Meissner as lambasting the market forces that lie at the very foundations of western culture are held in such high regard by the academy and, to return to Clair Hughes’s domain, film directors and the box-office.

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Rowe hypothesizes that the renewed interest in James in the 1990s may be a result of the extent to which his fiction presents “a refreshing alternative to the superficiality of postmodern culture” (283). If Rowe is right to detect such a localized return of interest in James (and it is most clearly visible in the cinema), it supports Meissner’s argument: for the Anglo-American 1990s can be read as having a less avaricious, materialistic, culture than that of the 1980s. But Rowe holds that this use of James is reactionary and neo-conservative: its attack on popular (or mass) culture leaves the network of global capitalism securely in place. If, however, the neo-conservatives were to read James in Meissner’s way, they would be less keen on conscripting him into their ranks. In rejecting this neo-conservative James, Rowe focuses on the “problems and contradictions” in his “life and work” that “have made him a topic of the greatest interest for scholars” (285). In addition to the sheer complexity of a prose style anchored in his romantic predecessors and, eventually, heavily inflected by proto-high-modernism, the “social, economic, political, and cultural changes in James’s lifetime have also contributed to the difficulty of his works for today’s reader” (285). This adds up to an answer, for Rowe, to the question of why contemporary readers are, and should, be reading James. It is not just (if at all) that as a “good” novelist trading in difficult prose, James (back to the neo-conservatives) can act as a corrective to the drift of postmodern culture; actually on offer is a “contradictory, sometimes confused, and yet always intelligent” curiosity about the “modern world that changed so dramatically in his lifetime” (287). James’s responses to modernization, for Rowe, with its tracing of “many modern problems back to the conquest and colonization of the Americas” (288), “anticipate many of our concerns with the oneway globalization practiced by first-world nations and transnational corporations” (287). Teased out is a number of telling imperial themes and transnational elements: “[t]he most provincial settings in Henry James often turn out, weirdly, to be the most transnational” (293): Thus James’s famous international theme frequently enacts the new U.S. will-to-power in the polite drawing rooms, public gardens, galleries, and artists’ workshops of American expatriates in Italy, where they have traveled to study how to recapture the glory that was Rome and forget just what horrors are inscribed dimly on those pillars and capitals in the Forum and the Coliseum. (289) Henry James’s cosmopolitanism, Rowe suggests, “has been extensively commodified by the academic and mass media generation of his genius”;

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introduction

palgrave advances in henry james studies

but James himself constantly resisted the “incipient commercialization of the aesthetic process.” Rowe, in our closing cadence, proposes that Henry James “would not be at home in our postmodern, commodified, globalized world, but he helps us to understand it” (298–9). This collection, then, both surveys landmark advances in Henry James theory and criticism and offers contemporary demonstrations of those advances; it also hazards a plotting of future trajectories. James wrote in his 1884 essay “The Art of Fiction” that “the only obligation, to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting” (LCEL 49). I believe that these essays everywhere demonstrate that the work of Henry James continues to meet this obligation incomparably.

abbreviations: henr y james LCEL—Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers. Literary Criticism. Vol. 1. Library of America. New York, N.Y.: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1984.

works cited Buelens, Gert. “Henry James’s Oblique Possession: Plottings of Desire and Mastery in The American Scene.” PMLA. 1116 (2001): 300–13. Hughes, Clair. Henry James and the Art of Dress. Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke and New York, 2001. James, Henry. “Guy de Maupassant.” Partial Portraits. Macmillan: London, 1888: 243–87. ——. Hawthorne. 1879. LCEL 315–457. Rowe, John Carlos. Henry Adams and Henry James: The Emergence of a Modern Consciousness. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1976. ——. The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James. Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1984. ——. The Other Henry James. Durham: Duke UP, 1998.

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sheila teahan In his first published essay (1864), James observed of the volume under review: We opened this work with the hope of finding a general survey of the nature and principles of the subject of which it professes to treat. Its title had led us to anticipate some attempt to codify the vague and desultory canons, which cannot, indeed, be said to govern, but which in some measure define, this department of literature. We had long regretted the absence of any critical treatise upon fiction.1 James’s pronouncement in this inaugural review is highly prophetic: if his “regret was destined to be embittered by disappointment” (LCEL 1196) with the contents of Nassau W. Senior’s Essays on Fiction, he was nonetheless prescribing for himself a half century’s program of critical reflection on the nature and principles of the novel. Following Matthew Arnold’s exalted view of the profession of letters, James both claims for the novel the highest philosophical and aesthetic value and conceives of literary criticism as a discipline whose aesthetic and social benefit is “inestimably precious and beautiful” (LCEL 98). Over his long career, James produced a substantial body of critical and theoretical writings the sum of whose parts is much more than a “critical treatise upon fiction.” Despite subsequent efforts to codify and systematize his thinking, this body of writing is strikingly heterogeneous in its theoretical implications. It is precisely because of this heterogeneity that James either anticipates or contributes directly to critical formations as different as phenomenology, Russian formalism, New Criticism, Anglo-American narrative theory, queer theory, and deconstruction. 11

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1 mastering critical theory

palgrave advances in henry james studies

In affronting (as James might say) the complex topic of James’s relation to critical theory, we must take account of his interrelated roles as one of the most influential critics of his time, as a theoretician of the aesthetic whose ideas continue to resonate in current discourse, and as a major artist whose fictions are themselves implicitly works of “theory” that investigate many of the same questions of form, representation, and reader-experience that shape and determine his explicitly theoretical works. In this essay, I shall first consider James’s multifaceted contribution to critical theory and then offer a brief history of some major critical and theoretical appropriations and constructions of his thought. I shall then focus on The Turn of the Screw as an exemplary text whose critical history illustrates both the continuities and the ironies of James’s reception. Finally, I shall reflect on possible future trajectories of our ongoing engagement with James as a speculative writer who continues to speak to the evolving concerns of literary and cultural studies.

the house of criticism In a charming passage in “The Science of Criticism” (1891) that complements and anticipates the famous “house of fiction” metaphor of his much later preface to The Portrait of a Lady, James describes as follows the critic’s lived relation to his subject: There are a hundred labels and tickets, in all this matter, that have been pasted on from the outside and ap pear to exist for the convenience of passers-by; but the critic who lives in the house, ranging through its innumerable chambers, knows nothing about the bills on the front. He only knows that the more impressions he has the more he is able to record. (LCEL 99) This formulation is consummately Jamesian on several counts. First, the neo-Kantian valorization of the impression relates directly to James’s radical redefinition of the central subject of fiction as consciousness itself. This phenomenological principle is formalized in the representational strategy of the “center of consciousness” or “reflective center,” the limited third-person narration (one source for which may well be Emma, Jane Austen’s masterpiece of sustained ironic free indirect discourse) exemplified by such characters as Rowland Mallet in Roderick Hudson, Maisie Farange in What Maisie Knew, and Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors. For James, the novel is not a mimesis of any particular external referent, but the representation of a mental construction.

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Ultimately, it is not answerable to any extraneous standard or principle: “Think as we may, there is nothing we can mention as a consideration outside itself with which it must square” (LCEL 105). Privileging character over plot, James conceives his fictions as dramas of consciousness—an emphasis that aligns him with phenomenology and links him to such modernist successors as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett.2 Woolf, for instance, wrote: “The books of Henry James are in truth the bridge upon which we cross from the classic novel which is perfect of its kind to that other form of literature which if names have any importance should someday be christened anew—the modern novel, the novel of the twentieth century.”3 James’s impressionist aesthetic applies equally to the critic, whose infinite receptivity to impressions is required by the rich potentiality of his subject. Much as fiction’s plasticity furnishes the novelist with countless possible points of view—figured in the preface to The Portrait of a Lady as a million windows each with its watcher—so, too, the critic must be attuned to the architectural complexity (“innumerable chambers”) of his object of analysis (LCEL 1075). Like the artist, the critic would do well to aspire to be “one of the people on whom nothing is lost” (LCEL 53). One might say that James not only inhabited the house of criticism; he built it. He has been called the most important critic of fiction in the nineteenth century (Daugherty 25), and it would be difficult to exaggerate the range and influence of his hundreds of essays and reviews—including those collected in French Poets and Novelists (1878), Partial Portraits (1888), Essays in London and Elsewhere (1893), and Notes on Novelists (1914)—in addition to the prefaces composed for the New York Edition. Arguably the first internationalist critic, he wrote prolifically on English, European, and American literature, producing important essays on such figures as Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, Robert Browning, Anthony Trollope, Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Ivan Turgenev, and Nathaniel Hawthorne (including the influential 1879 critical biography of Hawthorne commissioned for the English Men of Letters series). Among these, Arnold is arguably the key precursor for James’s self-conceptualization as critic, and his 1865 essay on Arnold is a virtual manifesto for his own critical program. Quoting approvingly and at length from “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” he cites Arnold’s work as “a model of what criticisms should be” (LCEL 718), and repeats Arnold’s indictment of the provincial and didactic character of contemporary English criticism—an indictment that for James applies even more forcefully to its American counterpart.

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mastering critical theory

palgrave advances in henry james studies

Arnold’s superiority as a critic is rooted, for James, in his literary sensibility as a poet, while his critical genius illustrates “poetic feeling subserving the ends of criticism” (LCEL 714). Most important, the “critical movement advocated by Mr. Arnold” is potentially “unlimited” in its range and implications because its emphasis on the conceptual and formal principles of the literary transume the merely practical and occasional: “It takes high ground, which is the ground of theory” (LCEL 717). In “The Science of Criticism,” James similarly distinguishes between genuine criticism and mere quotidian reviewing, comically figuring periodical magazines that are filled with ephemeral reviews as railway cars whose seats are occupied with place-holding manikins or “dummies of criticism” (LCEL 95). By contrast with the mechanically produced and consumed obsolescent work James associates with periodical reviewing, the genuine “critical literature” he envisions would be “the real helper of the artist, a torch-bearing outrider, the interpreter, the brother” (LCEL 98). Criticism is for James fundamentally social in character because, while ideally never didactic or prescriptive, it contributes to the moral life of culture. And in a preemptive retort to complaints half a century later by Van Wyck Brooks and others about James’s alleged imperviousness to the contingencies of history, he singles out for particular praise Arnold’s historical sensibility, finding him to be “profoundly conscious of his time” (LCEL 719). “The Art of Fiction” (1884) is a key essay that marks the transition to the major critical work of the 1880s and 1890s (the others being “The Science of Criticism,” 1891, “The Present Literary Situation in France,” 1899, and “The Future of the Novel,” 1899). Written in response to popular novelist Walter Besant’s lecture of the same title, it offers a major articulation of the critical thought James was to elaborate in his subsequent essays and fiction alike.4 Starting from the premise that the English novel had until recently “no air of having a theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself behind it—of being the expression of an artistic faith, the result of choice and comparison,” James argues that critical discourse creates a “fertilising” effect on the “successful application of any art” (LCEL 44, 45). Yet the bulk of the essay is devoted not to the didactic articulation of principles, but to a refutation of Besant’s own prescriptive judgments about the form, subject matter, and moral import of fiction. Successful fiction, James asserts, may take anything whatsoever as its subject matter; no subject is by its nature either moral or immoral: “We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donnée: our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it” (LCEL 56). Further, works of art generate their own aesthetic principles, and should not be judged on the basis of critical preconceptions about form. In fact, the only obligation to which the

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novel may be held is that “it be interesting,” that it convey “a personal, a direct impression of life” (LCEL 49, 50). As “the very air we breathe,” impressions indeed constitute experience (LCEL 53). Given James’s assumption that the representation of consciousness is the novel’s central concern, it follows that, contrary to Besant’s insistence on the priority of what he terms “story,” character and plot are for James inseparable: “What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?” (LCEL 55). So too, no absolute distinction can be made between subject and treatment in fiction; such elements as description, narration, dialogue, and plot “melt into each other at every breath,” for 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” (LCEL 54). In this organicist expression, we see James’s continuity both with Romantic thinking about poetic form and with the New Criticism, for which he is a major precursor, especially in his assertion of the inseparability of form and content. Some twenty years after “The Art of Fiction,” he would affirm that we “see the grave distinction between substance and form in a really wrought work of art signally break down.”5 Finally, James emphasizes that the moral sense of fiction depends not on preconceived notions about what art should or should not represent, but on the artist’s quality of mind: “the deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer” (LCEL 64). This powerful equation of the ethical and the aesthetic will resonate through the James corpus, culminating—in the preface to The Golden Bowl, the final preface for the New York Edition—in the Emersonian affirmation that “literary deeds” belong to “the whole conduct of life,” because our “expression” of experience, “and the terms on which we understand that, belong as nearly to our conduct and our life as every other feature of our freedom” (AN 347).6 At the same time, James sounds markedly poststructuralist in his emphasis on the writer’s indirect and “strained” attachment to his works, which “go forth into the world and stray even in the desert” (AN 347–8). If the work of art reflects its author’s quality of mind, it nonetheless attains an autonomy that complicates, though it hardly severs, the link between text and author. And in an important qualification of his proto-New Critical affirmation of the inseparability of content and form, James asserts that “deviations and differences . . . became . . . my very terms of cognition” (AN 337). His insistence on the deviation and difference constitutive of cognition looks forward to Kenneth Burke’s notion of rhetorical “deflection,” and reflects a decon-

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palgrave advances in henry james studies

structive insight into the potential discontinuity between content and form (75). In his recognition of the dialectical and diacritical character of language and representation, James both predicts Ferdinand de Saussure’s insight that language is constituted by a system of differences without positive terms and anticipates Jacques Derrida’s non-concept of “différance.”7 If “The Art of Fiction” defines the alternately formalist and phenomenological axes of James’s critical thought, the eighteen prefaces composed between 1906 and 1908 for the New York Edition of his selected novels and tales aspire to furnish something like the “critical treatise upon fiction” whose absence James had lamented in 1864. Published separately in 1934 by R. P. Blackmur under the title The Art of the Novel, the prefaces have been widely perceived as the “first substantial contribution in English to the poetics of fiction”8 (Leitch 56), and they elaborately engage such technical matters as point of view, characterization, and structure. In a 1905 letter to Scribner, James suggested that each preface would offer “a frank critical talk about its subject, its origin, its place in the whole artistic chain, and embodying, in short, whatever of interest there may be to be said of it” (quoted in Leitch, 56). As we shall see, the view that the prefaces articulate a systematic theory of fiction was largely the posthumous imposition of later critics. But such critics can hardly be blamed for emulating James’s own retrospective project in constructing the New York Edition itself, an ambitiously self-monumentalizing and self-canonizing endeavor which he not only selected the works to be included and composed prefaces for each volume, but revised in his late style the earlier fictions included, as if to impose a unifying synchronic unity on the corpus as a whole.9 As Derrida has taught us, the preface is by its nature a paradoxical supplement that “recreates an intention-to-say after the fact” and seeks preemptively to shape and control one’s reading of the work that experientially follows (yet temporally precedes) it (Derrida, Dissemination 7). With what degree of irony it is difficult to discern, James explains to William Dean Howells in 1908 that the prefaces aspired to furnish a “sort of comprehensive manual or vade-mecum for aspirants in our arduous profession,” and speculates that it “will be long before I shall want to collect them together for that purpose and furnish them with a final Preface” (Anesko 426). However, readers expecting to find a “frank critical talk” or straightforward exposition of individual works are likely to be baffled by the prefaces’ figurative density, range of allusion, and complexity of argumentation. As a full discussion of the prefaces is beyond the scope of this essay, I propose to take the opening pages of

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the opening preface, that to Roderick Hudson, as representative of the challenges and rewards of the entire series. The preface to Roderick Hudson is characteristic in its movement between biographical information about the novel’s time, place, and circumstances of composition, on the one hand, and abstract theoretical reflection on the other. It is also characteristic in its toleration of paradox: in only the second sentence, James opines that the artist is “condemned forever” to study “the veiled face of his Muse,” suggesting thereby that the preface’s enterprise of illuminating the origin and dynamics of the creative experience may be an impossible one (AN 3). Nevertheless, he proposes nothing less than a complete recovery of the “continuity of an artist’s experience, the growth of his whole operative consciousness,” even as his “notes” tracing this trajectory expose their own “tendency to multiply,” revealing that the very process of retrospection alters, as well as re-creates, one’s memory of aesthetic experience (AN 4). The prefaces do not only rediscover intention and meaning, but invent them. Indeed, James warns that the arduous character of the questions posed by the “art of representation” are such as to create for the artist and critic alike a progressively widening “circle” of material (AN 3). James returns to this trope of the circle two paragraphs later in his celebrated statement of the necessary incompleteness of any representation of “the related state, to each other, of certain figures and things” that is the artist’s subject: “Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so” (AN 5). Thus, the ever-widening field of experience, art, and criticism alike requires the imposition of a preemptive limit that creates the illusion of closure and authority. The prefaces themselves both draw such a preemptive circle of apparent mastery and, by pursuing to their limits the questions with which the art of representation bristles, as James would say, reveal the fragile contingency of the imposed circle of closure. In particular, they stage an ongoing intertextual dialogue with the novels they address, occasionally revisiting and revising key passages to uncanny effect. As John Carlos Rowe has shown, for example, James’s narrative in the preface to The American of how that novel’s subject came to him in a “horse-car” replays the narrator’s account of Christopher Newman’s unconscious determination to renounce an opportunity for revenge on an enemy (Rowe, Theoretical Dimensions 238–9). Typically, the novels and prefaces work dialectically with and against one another in this mutually recursive fashion, a recursiveness highlighted by the fact that James’s composition of the prefaces was contemporary with his revision

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of the novels selected for inclusion in the New York Edition. The sheer complexity of figuration in the prefaces is often in tension with James’s argumentation—if the distinction between figuration and argumentation can indeed be made. Thus the “house of fiction” passage in the preface to The Portrait of a Lady compounds rather than resolves the ambiguity of such architectural images in the novel as the description of Gilbert Osmond’s ominously carceral Florentine villa, even as James pushes the narratological trope of the house of fiction, with its multitudinous doors, windows, apertures, watchers with glasses and so on well past the point of coherence, much less the point of recuperation, into an identifiable theory of point of view in fiction.10 Such rhetorical complexity makes it impossible ultimately to distinguish the prefaces’ discourse rhetorically from the discourse of the fictions themselves. Eliot recognized as much in 1918 in his praise of James’s criticism, which he finds to be “in a very high sense creative” (110); the absence of any absolute ontological distinction between critical and creative discourse is also captured in Eliot’s striking comment that “[a]s a critic, no novelist in our language can approach James” (109). By describing Roderick Hudson as a “safe paradise of selfcriticism” (AN 10), James similarly implies that the novel articulates theoretical questions consistent with those explored in the prefaces. If one topic of the preface to Roderick Hudson is the element of fictional invention attending James’s account of the “wondrous adventure” afforded by the “growth of [the artist’s] whole operative consciousness,” an example of this invention is provided by his statement in the second paragraph that “‘Roderick Hudson’ was my first attempt at a novel, a long fiction with a ‘complicated’ subject” (AN 4). In fact, however, Watch and Ward had been serialized four years before the appearance of Roderick Hudson. To be sure, Watch and Ward is half the length of Roderick Hudson, and James would be justified in characterizing the former as a novella rather than a “long fiction.” But the exclusion of Watch and Ward from the New York Edition creates for Roderick Hudson an inaugural status in the James corpus that the preface performatively foregrounds. This is far from the only instance in which James re-writes history: the preface to What Maisie Knew gets that novel’s date of composition wrong by an entire decade (1907 instead of 1897).11 The point is not that James deliberately misleads, but that the prefaces repeatedly dramatize such moments of self-fashioning and retrospective falsification. Even the most factual details about the inception and production of individual works become rhetorically and epistemologically fraught. In the preface to Roderick Hudson, for example, James associates its composition with problems of temporal and geographic dislocation. He explains that the novel was not

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yet completed when its serialization began in Atlantic Monthly in 1875, a situation that created a disconcerting sense of incompletion that he recalls as “an experience of difficulty and delay” (AN 6). Further, James discovers a chiasmic inversion between the fictional setting and the site of novelistic composition that undermines any sense that Roderick Hudson may be organically rooted in geographical place. Whereas he claims to have struggled, while writing the novel in the Black Forest and in New England, to sustain the “illusion of the golden air” of Italy, where Roderick Hudson is primarily located, he retrospectively finds its opening chapters, which are set in Northampton, Massachusetts, perversely to be imbued instead with the ambiance of the cab-stand at Piazza Santa Maria Novella in Florence (AN 6–7). This chiasmic inversion between represented setting and evoked atmosphere ironizes any explanatory power we might impute to the kind of referential information the preface offers. Less than one third into the first of the eighteen prefaces, then, we have encountered a narrative far more complex and elusive than the totalizing theoretic system that some subsequent critics would discern. As Hershel Parker comments about James’s ambivalent and emotionally fraught reunion in the prefaces with his earlier works in particular, the James who emerges in such pages is more interesting than James the master-reviser, or even James the aesthetic law-giver . . . In remounting the stream of time James was recapturing, however imperfectly, not only something of what existed on the printed pages before him but also much that had never known the permanence of ink. He was entering into a life not just of visible achievement but also of pervasive if invisible loss. (294) The New York Edition’s commercial failure—profoundly ironic in view of the major achievement we now recognize the Edition to be—gave poignant, tangible, form to this sense of loss.

lessons of the master Given his exceptional self-consciousness about his own representational procedures and formal choices, it is no surprise that James has always attracted critical attention that is highly theoretical in nature. As Richard Hocks has observed, the “history of James criticism is also, in part, the history of modern criticism, with labyrinthine corridors of methodology, cultural analysis, and hermeneutical bias” (3).12 Putting aside James’s seminal act of self-interpretation in the prefaces themselves, that history

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might be said to begin with the 1918 memorial volume of The Little Review, which included contributions by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. In the same year, Joseph Warren Beach’s The Method of Henry James lauded James for his “preoccupation with matters of form” and his fusion of the ethical and the aesthetic (24). Beach is prescient in his privileging of the late novels (a move that anticipates Matthiessen’s “major phase”; see below), his appreciation of the prefaces, and his analysis of James’s practice of constructing novels around ideas and abstract themes rather than conventional plots. He strikes a nationalist note in his praise of James as “[o]ur American novelist” whose “studied art” was lacking in the British novel, asserting that he “was the first to write novels in English with a full and fine sense of the principles of composition” (Beach 27, 1, 37). As its title reflects, Percy Lubbock’s 1921 The Craft of Fiction follows Beach in foregrounding James’s formalist achievement. Lubbock not only valorizes the “center of consciousness” strategy as a superior narrative form, arguing that the “art of dramatizing the picture of someone’s experience touches” the “limit” of narrative art, but codifies the compositional principles he believes to be advocated by the prefaces (171). He does so by applying prescriptively the principle of the reflective center to writers as different as Dickens, Balzac, and Tolstoy, on the ground that “the story that is centered in somebody’s consciousness . . . . [is] a story dramatically pictured, and is a story, therefore, of stronger stuff than a simple and undramatic report” (Lubbock 271–2). Thus Lubbock criticizes War and Peace for its alleged lack of organic unity and its “loose, unstructural form” (Lubbock 41). Lubbock’s highly influential presentation of James as master formalist epitomizes and consolidates the critical construction of James the Master initiated by Percy Lubbock (McWhirter, Henry James’s New York Edition 1–19). Ironically, the same formalist achievement extolled by Lubbock would provoke criticism in the 1920s by Van Wyck Brooks, E. M. Forster, and Vernon Parrington.13 In Aspects of the Novel (1927), for example, Forster responds ambivalently to James and Lubbock alike. He praises the “hour glass” pattern of The Ambassadors, but finds the novel’s form to have entailed a “sacrifice” and laments the “stingy” characterization of the late novels (153, 159, 160). Even so, Forster’s organicist terminology is consummately Jamesian, as in his insistence that every “action or word ought to count; it ought to be economical and spare; even when complicated it should be organic and free from dead-matter” (88). Lubbock’s canonization of a perceived system of Jamesian aesthetics was extended by the New Critical legacy associated with, among others, R. P. Blackmur with his 1934 collection of the New York Edition prefaces

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resonantly entitled The Art of the Novel. Blackmur’s influential introduction compares the achievement of the prefaces to that of Aristotle’s Poetics and declares them “the most eloquent and original piece of literary criticism in existence” (AN xvi). As in his chapter on James in the 1946 Literary History of the United States, Blackmur praises James for an organicism that unifies subject and narrative technique so as to render literary form moral in its intent (Blackmur, “Henry James”). René Wellek, a central figure in the American New Criticism, echoes Blackmur in asserting that “harmony of form and substance is James’s constant requirement” (316). Wellek attributes to James the invention of “the psychological, moral novel which is also a work of art and form” (307). In significant tension with Wellek’s assumption of the inseparability of content and form, the concomitant New Critical valorization of irony, ambiguity, and paradox as fundamental ontological principles of literary form (especially, in New Critical practice, as applied to the lyric) would prove fruitful for students of Jamesian ambiguity and, later, undecidability. Two figures besides Blackmur dominate James criticism in the 1940s: F. O. Matthiessen and F. R. Leavis. The former, author of the classic American Renaissance (1941), published Henry James: The Major Phase in 1944, which, like American Renaissance, coined a phrase that has stuck for decades. Matthiessen’s “major phase” comprises the late triad The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl, in addition to the unfinished novel The Ivory Tower and the masterpiece of cultural criticism The American Scene; his appendix essay “The Painter’s Sponge and the Varnish Bottle” offers one of the earliest studies of James’s revisions for the New York Edition.14 Matthiessen develops the first substantial formal readings of the late novels, and does so in the self-consciously polemical context his preface adumbrates. The 1943 centenary of James’s birth, Matthiessen observes, witnessed a curious bifurcation in his reputation. Whereas the “creative writers of [Matthiessen’s] generation have recognized and assimilated” James’s aesthetic values, the public view of James in 1943 remained largely that of Van Wyck Brooks and Vernon Parrington, who denigrated James for his cosmopolitanism and expatriation. Matthiessen finds in Brooks, in particular, a “neglect [of] form and content alike,” attributing to this the “disasters . . . written large over the history of James’s reputation” (x–xi). The Major Phase is thus offered as a deliberate corrective, and Matthiessen performs this recuperation of James in the name of an ideological rationale that is uncannily prescient of the current call for globalization in literary and cultural studies: “It is a particular pleasure at this time, when the vitality of our future culture will have to

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depend more and more upon its international relations, to dwell upon James as a forerunner of such an awareness” (Matthiessen xi).15 Leavis’s equally influential The Great Tradition (1948), which places James at the center of a narrow canon of “the great English novelists” (Eliot, James, and Conrad, with attention to Austen and Lawrence), reverses Matthiessen’s valences, judging James’s major achievement to have preceded The Awkward Age. For Leavis, The Portrait of a Lady is “one of the great novels of the English language”; but the late novels of Matthiessen’s major phase are marred by a “disproportionate doing” found to be antithetical to “life” (161). Despite James’s centrality to his great tradition, thus does Leavis ironically echo figures like Van Wyck Brooks and Vernon Parrington, for whom the formal elaboration of James’s late prose is symptomatic of experiential malaise: Leavis concludes that in his preoccupation with “technical elaboration,” James had “lost his full sense of life and let his moral taste slip into abeyance” (161). Two major studies of the 1960s represent a summa of the formalist James invented by the New Critics, although both depart in significant ways from New Critical assumptions. Wayne Booth’s seminal The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) makes a major theoretical intervention in its critique of the concept of “point of view.” By proposing a more discriminating taxonomy of varieties of narratorial dramatization, distance, and reliability, Booth advances considerably the formalist strand of AngloAmerican narrative theory inaugurated by James’s prefaces. But he rejects Lubbock’s progressivist account according to which the Jamesian center of consciousness represents a turning-point in novelistic history. Indeed, Booth suggests that James’s narrative practice exacts a “sacrifice” by compromisng “absolute reliability,” and finds Jane Austen to be comparatively more “economical” in her use of free indirect discourse, for example in her combination of protagonist and commentator in the character of Knightly in Emma (175, 253). Laurence Holland’s remarkable The Expense of Vision (1964), a powerful intertextual study of the prefaces in relation to seven novels, is proto-deconstructive in its attention to the often irresolvable complexity of James’s figuration. Holland’s readings anticipate poststructuralist work of the 1990s: where Blackmur and Wellek had found organic unity, Holland discerns discontinuity and dissonance. As Richard Poirier observes in his preface, Holland “demonstrates that the novel—the genre that with James went through one of its most decisive transformations—is in itself a kind of critical text, an inquiry into the movements of power, the nature of temporality, the virtues of fabrication, the pains of transgression, and the repression of desire by the exigencies of form” (vii).

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What one might term the “political James” constructed by postwar critics is as contested as the “formal James.” Whereas Maxwell Geismar renewed the Brooks–Parrington line of critique in his 1961 Henry James and the Jacobites, Lionel Trilling in his 1951 essay on The Princess Casamassima lauds that novel and The Bostonians for their power of “social observation” (66). Rejecting the notion that James “could move only in the thin air of moral abstraction,” Trilling emphasizes the historical accuracy of James’s representation of the English working class of the 1880s and specifically of the anarchist movement (79). For Trilling, “moral realism is the informing spirit” of The Princess Casamassima (93). Trillling’s insight into the political dimension of James’s fiction resurfaces in three key texts of the 1880s that consider the ideological implications of Jamesian aesthetics. First, Fredric Jameson’s Political Unconscious finds James’s perspectivism to be symptomatic of a mystified bourgeois individualism: “Jamesian point of view, which comes into being as a protest and a defense against reification, ends up furnishing a powerful ideological instrument in the perpetuation of an increasingly subjectivized and psychologized world” (221–2). In a Foucauldian rather than Marxist vein, Mark Seltzer’s Henry James and the Art of Power (1984) posits a complicitous continuity between omniscient narrative and surveillance by aligning omniscient narration with Foucault’s panopticon. For Seltzer, as for Trilling, The Princess Casamassima is a key text in which James displaces his own narrative authority onto the novel’s revolutionary figure, Diedrich Hoffendahl. In a third key sociological study, Donna Przybylowicz in Desire and Repression combines Marxist critique with Lacanian analysis in a sophisticated investigation of James’s ambivalent oscillation between aestheticist selfreflection and social critique. As the examples of Jameson, Seltzer, and Przybylowicz illustrate, James criticism of the 1980s had become overtly theoretical in its concerns. To be sure, the 1970s had witnessed the appearance of several works informed by structuralism, notably Todorov’s essay on the “absent center” (“The Secret of Prose”) of James’s fictions and Shlomith RimmonKenan’s highly technical study of ambiguity, which was influenced by structuralist linguistics. But the self-conscious “theorization” of James studies is marked especially by the appearance of John Carlos Rowe’s 1984 ground-breaking The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James, which both formalized the long-standing theoretical bent of James criticism and identified James’s own formidable powers as theoretician in his criticism and fiction alike. Rowe’s book has proven so influential and prescient that it might be said to divide James criticism into a “before” and “after”; and its organization into the permeable and interpenetrating categories of

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critical thought Rowe finds to be dramatized in the fictions themselves (feminist, psychoanalytic, deconstructive, Marxist, phenomenological, reader-response) reads like a critical program for the two decades that followed its appearance. To some degree, post-Rowe criticism has divided along the same “formal” and “political” axes that had emerged before the 1980s, albeit in a manner now informed by poststructuralist thought. On the “political” side, there has been an explosion of work on gender, sexuality, class, and race too vast to trace here. In contrast to the often avowedly anti-formalist New Historicist work on American literature that characterized the 1980s and early 1990s, the sophisticated new historicisms of such critics as Sara Blair, Jonathan Freedman, and Wendy Graham wed historical research to textual analysis in a way that honors both James’s emphasis on the importance of historical sensibility and his reverence for the word. These critics have put to rest what should now be recognized as a simplistic and sterile binary opposition between “history” and “form.” As reflected by the title of Gert Buelens’s 1997 collection Enacting History in Henry James: Narrative, Power, and Ethics, James’s writings are increasingly understood to be centrally engaged with questions of history. Recent work on The American Scene suggests that the mid-twentieth-century suspicion of James as an allegedly apolitical or ahistorical writer who either eschews or mystifies questions of race, class, and gender has been supplanted by an evolving appreciation of James as a cultural critic and speculative writer whose insights and limitations alike have much to teach us as readers of our own cultures.16 Pound’s comments of 1918 appear prophetic: “No man of our time has so labored to create means of communication as did the late Henry James. The whole of great art is a struggle for communication . . . And this communication is not a leveling, it is not an elimination of differences. It is a recognition of differences, of the right of differences to exist, of interest in finding things different” (30). James has continued to attract consistent attention of a deconstructive or otherwise formalist character. (It should be noted here that an antithesis between the formal and the political is precisely the kind of binary opposition deconstruction seeks to contest.) Many James critics remained committed to close textual analysis even during the antiformalist heyday of the 1990s, and the philosophical and rhetoric work of Derrida and de Man is central to an important strand of deconstructively inflected scholarship exemplified by such critics as Deborah Esch, J. Hillis Miller, Julie Rivkin, Eric Savoy, and Jonathan Warren, whose

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work variously engages the dynamics of Jamesian figuration in its ethical, narrative, and temporal dimension.

The Turn of the Screw (1898) is a key text whose historical reception illuminates some of the recurring preoccupations of James criticism. This mid-career masterpiece, poised between the big “social” novels of the mid-1880s and early 1890s (The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima, and The Tragic Muse) and the intricate hermeneutic dramas of the turn of the twentieth century (The Sacred Fount, The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl), is James’s “most frequently read, taught, and discussed piece of fiction,” as Peter Beidler has observed, the subject of hundreds of essays, book chapters, dissertations, and even book-length studies (Beidler, ed., The Turn of the Screw 190). The Turn of the Screw is exemplary not only for the sheer volume of critical commentary it has accrued, but because its explicit thematization of questions of reading and interpretation make it an uncannily receptive canvas for critical transference. Even in the prolific industry of James studies, rarely has a text attracted such a strikingly incoherent and incompatible array of critical responses; as Wayne Booth notes, readers have proven unable to agree even about such rudimentary matters of plot and character as whether the governess is sane, whether or not the ghosts exist, or whether Miles dies at the end (Booth, “‘He began to read to our hushed little circle’” 239).17 James’s retrospective preface is both suggestive and misleading, appearing at once to invite and to deflect critical elucidation. He obliges by identifying the tale’s “germ” offered him by Edward White Benson, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who had shared with James an anecdote about children corrupted by servants and haunted by their ghosts. Far from providing a reliable origin or ground, however, this multiply occluded “shadow of a shadow”—Benson’s source for the narrative had herself “lost the thread” of the particulars—yields an oxymoronic “withheld glimpse,” a play of concealment and exposure akin to that of the preface itself (AN 170). There, James places his cards on the table—face down. With what degree of irony it is difficult to discern, he not only describes the novella as a “fairy-tale pure and simple,” but asserts that it is so authoritatively self-explanatory as to preempt critical commentary altogether: it “rejoices, beyond any rival on a like ground, in a conscious provision of prompt retort to the sharpest question that may be addressed to it” (AN 171, 169). The Turn of the Screw exemplifies the kind of story “least apt

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to be baited by earnest criticism” (AN 169). So much for the voluminous critical archive we are about to plumb! Criticism on The Turn of the Screw divides, in the main, along the question of whether the ghosts of Quint and Jessel are spirits of the dead or mere hallucinations. On the one hand, a large body of scholarship connects the novella with contemporary psychical research and to the genre of the ghost-sighting narrative.18 On the other, numerous critics, beginning with Edna Kenton in 1924, have approached it as a psychological case study. It has even been seen as a biographical portrait based on Alice James or on one of Freud’s patients (Cargill). In his famous 1934 essay “The Ambiguity of Henry James,” Edmund Wilson analyzes the governess as “a neurotic case of sex repression” whose hysteria produces the ghosts (88). On this view, the governess’s infatuation with the children’s uncle is displaced onto the hallucinated figure of Quint, who first appears atop a phallic tower. Wilson’s influential thesis inaugurates an entire tradition of psychoanalytic readings and a counter-tradition of readings refuting Wilson’s. For Robert Heilman, for example, the tale is an allegorical dramatization of “the struggle of evil to possess the human soul” (278). Perhaps the most frequently cited piece of evidence in favor of the governess’s sanity is her description of Quint, which for some readers furnishes proof that Quint is no hallucination. However, Stanley Renner argues that Quint’s appearance conforms to a widely circulating stereotype of the Victorian sexual predator. The interpretive malleability of the passage in question—its susceptibility to being adduced as evidence either of the governess’s sanity or of her reliability—reflects the extraordinary reflexivity of The Turn of the Screw. No James text is more overtly concerned with questions of reading and interpretation. It seems impossible for a reader to make any move that has not been anticipated in the story itself. Furthermore, many details lend themselves equally to the psychoanalytic and the ghost tale “schools” of interpretation. Accordingly, The Turn of the Screw has attained the status of the most consummately undecidable fiction. Todorov adduces The Turn of the Screw as a privileged example of the fantastic, whose defining feature is its capacity to be seen as either natural or supernatural in origin (The Fantastic 43). And in a magisterial essay whose influence continues to resonate, Shoshana Felman’s Lacanian-deconstructive reading demonstrates that James constructs a hermeneutic trap for the reader, whose interpretive choice between accepting and questioning the governess’s reliability are preemptively dramatized in the text by Mrs. Grose and the governess respectively. The 1980s and 1990s produced a number of other powerful post-structuralist readings.19 For many of

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these critics, as for Felman, the import of the undecidability of The Turn of the Screw is not the governess’s potential mental instability, but the epistemological and rhetorical indeterminacy of narrative itself. In the 1970s, criticism on The Turn of the Screw moved in an ideological direction reflective of James criticism more broadly, as critics shifted their attention to questions of class and gender.20 Most recently, there has emerged a rich body of work on homoerotic and/or queer sexualities. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s influential essay on “The Beast in the Jungle” (in Epistemology of the Closet 182–212) has been an important precursor for many of these. Neill Matheson has related the novella to the trials of Oscar Wilde; and Michael Moon suggests that the alleged misconduct for which Miles has been suspended from school is associated with the sexual practices to which he has been introduced by Quint. Eric Haralson reads The Turn of the Screw as an “allegory of sexual panic, as well as a subtle intervention in fin-de-siècle sexual politics” (88). Most recently, Eric Savoy, in an ambitious essay that both extends and challenges Felman’s thesis, investigates the tropes of prosopopoeia and aposiopesis as elements of “a sustained exploration of the ‘sinister’ figurative process that attends the arousal of horrified suspicion of a child’s sexual precosity” (“Theory a Tergo in The Turn of the Screw” 247). The sheer volume of critical scrutiny of The Turn of the Screw has been such as to prompt one scholar to irritated reaction against the very enterprise of literary studies; thus does Dieter Freundlieb opine that “interpretation should never have been turned into an academic discipline” (94). But the production of scholarship on this most indeterminable and reflexive of James’s narratives shows no signs of abating.

the future (at the present time) of james criticism Although we can expect James scholarship to continue to surprise in its diversity and sheer abundance, several emergent patterns promise to transform the field as much in the next decade or two as we have witnessed in the last. It is an irony of James scholarship that, despite James’s prolific output in a variety of genres (biography, autobiography, cultural criticism, travel writing, letters, and plays, as well as fiction), the critical canon remains surprisingly limited. For example, criticism on the short fiction has tended to focus on a small number of texts: while the body of work on such tales as “The Aspern Papers,” “The Figure in the Carpet,” “The Jolly Corner,” and “The Beast in the Jungle” grows annually, many important stories (“The Next Time” and “The Great Good Place” come to mind)

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have received little critical attention. One hopes that the availability of the complete short fiction in the excellent Library of America edition will, over time, help to redress this imbalance. Recent years have seen a renaissance of interest in what has come to be known as James’s “fourth phase,” the late period of non-fictional prose including the 1903 biography William Wetmore Story and His Friends, the critical prefaces, The American Scene, and the three volumes of autobiography.21 The Complete Letters of Henry James, co-edited by Greg Zacharias and Pierre Walker, which will make available for the first time an authoritative edition of James’s astonishingly rich and prolific epistolary output, promises to be an important event in literary history.22 In methodological terms, we can expect a continuing proliferation of critical work in a wide range of theoretical modes. Arguably, a longstanding and defining strength of James criticism has been its combination of theoretical self-awareness with an unstinting attention to matters of language and form. Far from manifesting a nostalgia for New Critical practices, rhetorical or so-called deconstructive work on James has proven prophetic, for “close reading” is currently making a significant comeback in literary studies, in part under the aegis of James studies. The 2004 conference “Henry James and New Formalisms,” organized by Eric Savoy and myself, revealed a renewed and growing theoretical interest in close reading, formalism, and their complex imbrications, especially in relation to deconstruction and to what Savoy terms “queer formalism.” Indeed, the current revival of formalism is inseparable from queer theory, whose affiliations with psychoanalysis and deconstruction make it a particularly rich area for the investigation of sexual and textual narrativities, rhetorics, and poetics. Recent work by Ellis Hanson, Kevin Ohi, and Savoy exemplifies variant modes of queer formalism that inform, and are informed by, deconstruction’s insights into the non-self identity of textuality. For such critics, the queerness of James’s writing inheres less in the overt representations of sexualities than in the registers of style and rhetoric. As Hanson explains: In the past decade, queer theory, the deconstruction of sexual rhetoric, has revolutionized the field simply by conceiving sexuality as a story we tell about ourselves, a story that changes with every telling, that is written as much by the audience as by the ostensible author, and that figures the very incoherence, artificiality, and slipperiness of language itself.23

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The unpacking of this insight will be a project of James criticism for some time to come, even as we can expect a continuing efflorescence of feminist, cultural materialist, New Historicist, phenomenological, psychoanalytic, gender studies, and narratological work on James. At the present time, therefore, I can only draw the circle within which the future relations of James criticism shall happily appear to close.

notes 1. Henry James, Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers, Vol. 1 (Library of America. New York, N.Y.: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1984) 1196–204, 1196 (abbreviated hereafter as LCEL). See also French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition. Literary Criticism. Vol. 2.; William Veeder and Susan M. Griffin’s The Art of Criticism: Henry James on the Theory and the Practice of Fiction, which collects a range of James’s most important essays and critical prefaces and provides excellent notes and commentary. 2. On James’s impressionism, see Rowe Theorectical Dimensions 189–217. Major phenomenological studies of James include Armstrong, Cameron, Griffin, Hocks, and Meissner. 3. Virginia Woolf, unpublished essay quoted by Fogel (ed.) xiii–xviii, xiv. 4. James E. Miller terms it “perhaps the most popular and surely the most influential brief statement of fictional theory ever made” (27). 5. Henry James, The Art of the Novel, ed. R.P. Blackmur (1934; repr. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1984) 115; cited hereafter as AN. On James’s Coleridgean heritage, see Fogel Romantic Imagination. 6. See: Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life. 7. See Saussure; Derrida, Margins of Philosophy. 8. See also Armstrong, “Reading James’s Prefaces and Reading James”; Carroll; Holland. 9. See the invaluable collection of essays edited by David McWhirter, Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship. 10. On point of view, see Rawlings in this collection. 11. On James’s exclusions from the New York Edition, see Banta, “The Excluded Seven: Practice of Omission, Aesthetics of Refusal.” 12. See also Rowe, “Henry James and Critical Theory,” which approaches “critical theory” in the sense of the Frankfurt School. Readers wishing to trace James criticism in more detail should consult American Literary Scholarship, the annual review of scholarship in the field that devotes a full chapter in each volume to James studies. 13. Brooks cites James as “the first novelist in the distinctively American line of our day,” but finds him to have privileged stylistic “difficulty” over “life,” resulting in the “decomposition” of his “sense of human values” (121, 123, 122). For Parrington, James was a “self-deceived romantic” who “fled” the “vulgarities of the Gilded Age” and withdrew from “the external world of action” into an “inner world of questioning” (128, 129). 14. On James’s revisions, see also: Horne; Rivkin, “Doctoring the Text: Henry James and Revision.”

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15. On globalization, see Rowe in this volume. 16. See, for example, Blair; Gert Buelens, Henry James and the “Alien”: In Possession of the American Scene; Haviland. 17. See Beidler’s entertaining “chronological medley” of critical commentaries on this last question in “A Critical History of The Turn of the Screw” 205–10. 18. See, for example, Banta, Henry James and the Occult; Beidler, Ghosts, Demons, and Henry James: “The Turn of the Screw” at the Turn of the Century. 19. See, for example: Lukacher; Lustig; Rowe, The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James. 20. See Beidler’s “A Critical History of The Turn of the Screw” for a fuller account of this and other dimensions of the voluminous archive on The Turn of the Screw. 21. See David McWhirter, “‘A provision full of responsibilities’: Senses of the Past in Henry James’s Fourth Phase.” 22. See the essay by Walker and Zacharias in this volume. 23. Ellis Hanson (Letter), PMLA 15 (2000) 2071–2.

abbreviations AN—Henry James, The Art of the Novel. Ed. R. P. Blackmur. 1934; repr. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1984. LCEL—Henry James, Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers. Literary Criticism. Vol. 1. Library of America. New York, N.Y.: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1984.

works cited Anesko, Michael. Ed. Letters, Fictions, Lives: Henry James and William Dean Howells. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Armstrong, Paul. The Phenomenology of Henry James. Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP, 1983. ——. “Reading James’s Prefaces and Reading James.” Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship. Ed. David McWhirter. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995: 125–37. Banta, Martha. “The Excluded Seven: Practice of Omission, Aesthetics of Refusal.” Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship. Ed. David McWhirter. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995: 240–60. ——. Henry James and the Occult. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1972. Beach, Joseph Warren. The Method of Henry James. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1918. Beidler, Peter G. Ghosts, Demons, and Henry James: “The Turn of the Screw” at the Turn of the Century. Columbia: Missouri UP, 1989. ——. “A Critical History of The Turn of the Screw.” The Turn of the Screw. Ed. Peter G. Beidler. Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004: 205–10. Blackmur, R. P. “Henry James.” Literary History of the United States. Ed. Robert E. Spiller et. al. 4th ed. New York and London: Macmillan, 1974: 1039–64. Blair, Sara. Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1996.

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Booth, Wayne C. “‘He began to read to our hushed little circle’: Are We Blessed or Cursed by Our Life with The Turn of the Screw?” Henry James. The Turn of the Screw. Ed. Peter Beidler. 2nd ed. Boston and New York: Bedford and St. Martin’s Press, 2004: 239–53. ——. The Rhetoric of Fiction. 1961. 2nd ed. Chicago and London: Chicago UP, 1983. Brooks, Van Wyck. “Two Phases of Henry James.” F. W. Dupee. Ed. The Question of Henry James. New York: Henry Holt, 1945: 120–127. Bruhm, Steven and Natasha Hurley. Eds. Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children. Minneapolis and London: Minnesota UP, 2004. Buelens, Gert. Ed. Enacting History in Henry James: Narrative, Power, and Ethics. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1999. ——. Henry James and the “Alien”: In Possession of the American Scene. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002. Burke, Kenneth. “Rhetoric—Old and New.” New Rhetorics. Ed. Martin Steinmann, Jr. New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1967: 59–76. Cameron, Sharon. Thinking in Henry James. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1989. Cargill, Oscar. “The Turn of the Screw and Alice James.” PMLA 78 (1963): 238–49. Carroll, David. The Subject in Question: The Languages of Theory and the Strategies of Fiction. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1982. Daugherty, Sarah B. “James as Critic and as Self-Critic.” A Companion to Henry James Studies. Ed. Daniel Mark Fogel. Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 1993: 25–37. Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago and London: Chicago UP, 1981. ——. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1982. Dupee, F. W. Ed. The Question of Henry James. New York: Henry Holt, 1945. Edel, Leon. Ed. Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1965. Eliot, T. S. “On Henry James.” The Question of Henry James. Ed. F. W. Dupee. New York: Henry Holt, 1945: 108–19. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Conduct of Life. Essays and Lectures. Ed. Joel Porte. New York: Library of America, 1983: 937–1112. Esch, Deborah. “A Jamesian About-Face: Notes on ‘The Jolly Corner.’” ELH 50 (1983): 587–603. ——. “Understanding Allegories: Reading The Portrait of A Lady.” Henry James’s The Portrait Of a Lady. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1987: 131–53. Felman, Shoshana. “Turning the Screw of Interpretation.” Writing and Madness: Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985: 141–247. Fogel, Daniel Mark. Ed. A Companion to Henry James Studies. Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 1993. ——. Henry James and the Structure of the Romantic Imagination. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1981. Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. 1927; repr. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1954. Freedman, Jonathan. Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990.

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Freundlieb, Dieter. “Explaining Interpretation: The Case of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw.” Poetics Today 5 (1984): 79–95. Geismar, Maxwell. Henry James and the Jacobites. New York: Hill and Wang, 1962. Graham, Wendy. Henry James’s Thwarted Love. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. Griffin, Susan M. The Historical Eye: The Texture of the Visual in Late James. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1991. Hanson, Ellis. “Screwing with Children.” GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 9 (2003): 367–91. ——. [Untitled.] PMLA 15 (2000): 2071–2. Haralson, Eric. Henry James and Queer Modernity. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 2003. Haviland, Beverly. Henry James’s Last Romance: Making Sense of the Past and the American Scene. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1997. Heilman, Robert. “The Turn of the Screw as Poem.” University of Kansas City Review 14 (1948): 277–89. Hocks, Richard A. Henry James and Pragmatistic Thought: A Study of the Relationship between the Philosophy of William James and the Literary Art of Henry James. Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP, 1974. Holland, Laurence B. The Expense of Vision: Essays on the Craft of Henry James. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1964. Horne, Philip. Henry James and Revision: The New York Edition. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1990. James, Henry. The Art of the Novel. R. P. Blackmur. Ed. 1934; repr. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1984. ——. Hawthorne. The English Men of Letters Series. London: Macmillan & Co., 1879. ——. Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers. New York: Library of America, 1984. ——. Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition. New York: Library of America, 1984. ——. The Turn of the Screw. Ed. Peter Beidler. 2nd. ed. Boston and New York: Bedford and St. Martin’s Press, 2004. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981. Kenton, Edna. “Henry James to the Ruminant Reader: The Turn of the Screw.” The Arts 4 (1924): 13–24. Leavis, F. R. The Great Tradition. 1948; repr. New York: New York UP, 1963. Leitch, Thomas M. “The Prefaces.” A Companion to Henry James Studies. Ed. Daniel Mark Fogel. Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 1993: 55–71. Lubbock, Percy. The Craft of Fiction. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1921. Lukacher, Ned. Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986. Lustig, T. J. Henry James and the Ghostly. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1994. McWhirter, David. Ed. Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995.

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——. “‘A provision full of responsibilities’: Senses of the Past in Henry James’s Fourth Phase.” Enacting History in Henry James: Narrative, Power, and Ethics. Ed. Gert Buelens. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1999: 148–65. Matheson, Neill. “Talking Horrors: James, Euphemism, and the Specter of Wilde.” American Literature 71 (1999): 709–50. Matthiessen, F. O. Henry James: The Major Phase. New York: Oxford UP, 1963. Meissner, Collin. Henry James and the Language of Experience. New York: Cambridge UP, 1999. Miller, J. Hillis. “The Figure in the Carpet.” Poetics Today 1 (1980): 107–18. ——. The Ethics of Reading. New York: Columbia UP, 1987. ——. Versions of Pygmalion. Cambridge and London: Harvard UP, 1990. Miller, James E. Ed. Theory of Fiction: Henry James. Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 1962. Moon, Michael. “Disseminating Whitman.” South Atlantic Quarterly 99 (1989): 247–65. Ohi, Kevin.“Narrating the Child’s Queerness in What Maisie Knew.” Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley. Eds. Minneapolis and London: Minnesota Press UP, 2004: 81–106. Parker, Hershel. “Deconstructing The Art of the Novel and Liberating James’s Prefaces.” Henry James Review 14 (1993): 284–307. Parrington, Vernon Louis. “Henry James and the Nostalgia of Culture.” F. W. Dupee. Ed. The Question of Henry James. New York: Henry Holt, 1945: 128–30. Poirier, Richard. Preface. Laurence B. Holland. The Expense of Vision: Essays on the Craft of Henry James. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1964. Repr. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982: vii–viii. Pound, Ezra. “A Brief Note.” Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Leon Edel. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1965: 27–30. Przybylowicz, Donna. Desire and Repression: The Dialectic of Self and Other in the Late Works of Henry James. Alabama: Alabama UP, 1986. Renner, Stanley. “‘Red hair, very red, close-curling’: Sexual Hysteria, Physiognomical Bogeymen, and the ‘Ghosts’ in The Turn of the Screw.” Henry James: The Turn of the Screw. Ed. Peter G. Beidler. Boston: Bedford Books, 1995: 223–41. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. The Concept of Ambiguity: The Example of Henry James. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1977. Rivkin, Julie. “Doctoring the Text: Henry James and Revision.” David McWhirter. Ed. Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995: 142–63. ——. False Positions: The Representational Logics of Henry James’s Fiction. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996. Rowe, John Carlos. “Henry James and Critical Theory.” A Companion to Henry James Studies. Ed. Daniel Mark Fogel. Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 1993: 73–93. ——. The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James. Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1984. Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Trans. Wade Baskin. New York, Toronto, and London: McGraw Hill, 1959. Savoy, Eric. “‘In the Cage’ and the Queer Effects of Gay History.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 28 (1995): 284–307. ——. “The Jamesian Thing.” Henry James Review 22 (2001): 268–77. ——. “The Queer Subject of ‘The Jolly Corner.’” Henry James Review 20 (1999): 1–21.

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——. “Theory a Tergo in The Turn of the Screw.” Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley. Eds. Minneapolis and London: Minnesota UP, 2004: 245–75. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: California UP, 1990. Seltzer, Mark. Henry James and the Art of Power. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984. Teahan, Sheila. The Rhetorical Logic of Henry James. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1995. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic. Trans. Richard Howard. Cleveland: Case Western Reserve UP, 1973. ——. “The Secret of Prose.” The Poetics of Prose. Trans. Richard Howard. Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1977: 143–78. ——. The Poetics of Prose. Trans. Richard Howard. Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1977. Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination. 1950. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1953. Veeder, William and Susan M. Griffin. Eds. The Art of Criticism: Henry James on the Theory and Practice of Fiction. Chicago and London: Chicago UP, 1986. Warren, Jonathan. “Ricordo, Gift, Golden Bowl.” Henry James Review 25 (2004): 267–75. ——. “‘A Sort of Meaning’: Handling the Name and Figuring Genealogy in The Wings of the Dove.” Henry James Review 23 (2002): 103–35. Wellek, René. “Henry James’s Literary Theory and Criticism.” American Literature 30 (1958): 298–321. Wilson, Edmund. “The Ambiguity of Henry James.” The Triple Thinkers. New York: Oxford UP, 1948: 88–132.

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peter rawlings “There is scarcely a problem in the philosophy of criticism,” Herbert Read declared in 1929, “which the work of Henry James does not raise” (206), and this essay is concerned with one of the most vexatious: retrospective constructions of his theory of the “point of view.”1 The historical roots of the concept are in Plato’s distinction between diegesis (or authorial discourse) and mimesis, the “imitated speech of a character” (Lanser 19–20). Whereas Plato appears to have expressed no preference for one over the other, Aristotle made a normative distinction between the two modes, praising Homer in his Poetics for speaking in his own person “as little as possible” (1972: 125). When pitched battles started to take place at the end of the nineteenth century about the extent to which novels should be dramatic in texture, it was Aristotle’s emphasis and prescriptive impulse that took dominion.2 One of the main objectives of Henry James’s “The Art of Fiction” (1884) is to champion the subordination of abstract, generalized, discussions of narrative to the widest possible freedom of practice. “The Art of Fiction” is in large measure a rebuttal of the English novelist and critic Walter Besant’s The Art of Fiction (1884), from where James initially took his title, and its insistence on the novel as an “Art” which is “governed and directed by general laws” (Besant 3). For Besant, the most important of these laws was that there should be a “conscious moral purpose” (24). But he also believed, in what was fast becoming one of the principal creeds of novel criticism towards the end of the nineteenth century, in the importance of “dramatic selection,” the “due subordination of description to dialogue,” 35

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2 narratives of theory and theories of narrative: point of view and centres of consciousness

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and on the extent to which the “novel is like a play” in that it should be divided into “scenes and acts” (20–1). Besant, like many subsequent critics writing in a similar paradigm, happily mixes self-serving descriptions of narrative method with normative pronouncements. Against such strictures, James asserts that “[t]here are bad novels and good novels,” but “that is the only distinction in which I see any meaning” (“The Art of Fiction” 55). He argues that “[a] novel is in its broadest definition a personal, a direct impression of life” (5). In “The Art of Fiction” the genre of the novel is identified at its best as vital, as analogous to the residually organic structure of all forms of life, and this has a significant bearing on James’s theories of fiction: I cannot imagine composition existing in a series of blocks . . . . 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. (54) What is significant here is the emphasis on the artificial nature of any boundaries between character and story, or plot, dialogue, description, and narration. For James, “[t]he rule” always “misleads”; “the best rule is the tact of the individual writer, which will adapt itself to the material as the material comes to him” (“Guy de Maupassant” 530–1).

narratives of theor y Notwithstanding his post-Romantic and neo-Kantian emphasis on a subject’s freedom to develop under self-generated and entity-specific laws, theorists and historians of narrative have persisted in detecting in, or imposing on, James a systematic theory of the “point of view” involving the primacy of “centres of consciousness” (a phrase he never used) and commitments to an attenuation of the narrative voice and authorial impersonality.3 The normative dimensions of Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction (1921), with its main focus on James, were seized on with alacrity by a large number of critics. The preoccupation in The Craft of Fiction, is with “the centre of vision” in fiction; Lubbock believed that he had a license in James to urge that the “point of view” should be shifted no more than is necessary (73–4) in the interests of allowing the “story so far as possible to speak for itself,” and “the people and the action to appear independently rather than to be described and explained” (150):

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Norman Friedman, in his canonical essay on point of view, taking his cue from Lubbock’s early study, argues that James was “obsessed by the problem of finding a ‘centre,’ a ‘focus’ for his stories,” and that he in large measure solved it by considering how the narrative vehicle could be limited by framing the action within the consciousness of one of the characters within the plot itself. (136–7) For Scholes and Kellogg, similarly, it is “James who insisted on submerging the narrator in a character called the ‘central intelligence’ in the belief that this was the most dramatic way of telling a story”; they go on to indict him for presiding over the “death of narrative art by a kind of artistic suicide” (270). James is seen as favoring “a single perspective over multiple perspectives,” and this is hardened into a rule he never constructed: the perspective should be “that of a character who is inside the frame of the action rather than a disembodied presence” (273). Wallace Martin, who overlooks novels such as The Bostonians or The Sacred Fount, confidently (yet quite mistakenly) announces that James’s narrators tell “the story but” do “not indulge in commentary or use of the pronoun ‘I’” (133). There is a brief glimpse of light in Martin Kreiswirth’s account, for he argues that any codification of James’s prefaces into “normative rules” is unacceptable; but the clouds return in that he continues to maintain that a point of view restricted to a central character was, for James, “the most effective method for keeping the narrative focus squarely upon the character’s consciousness” (422). Categorical formulations of the doctrine of the point of view proliferated as the New Critical emphasis on the autonomy of the text, and the irrelevance of any kind of context, took hold in Anglo-American criticism in the 1940s and 1950s. Typical of these is that of Caroline Gordon and Allen Tate, two prominent New Critics: We call it the method of the Central Intelligence after Henry James, who insisted that all the action of a novel should be evaluated by a single superior mind placed in the center of the main dramatic situation. (1950: 444)

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the story that is centred in somebody’s consciousness, passed through a fashioned and constituted mind—not passed straight into the book from the mind of the author . . . takes its place as a story dramatically pictured, and as a story, therefore, of stronger stuff than a simple undramatic report. (269–70)

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James has practically obliterated himself as narrator. His stories are not told; they are acted out as if on a stage. He does not tell you anything about his characters; he lets them reveal themselves to you by what they say and do. (1957: 124–5) Nothing in James authorizes the theories of point of view concocted in his name by Percy Lubbock in The Craft of Fiction (1921), and even more reductively by Joseph Warren Beach in The Method of Henry James (1918), and which continue to circulate in studies such as Adré Marshall’s 1998 The Turn of the Mind: Constituting Consciousness in Henry James.4 Even Dorrit Cohn (1978), in her groundbreaking study of narration and consciousness, in the midst of focusing on the extent to which James created “fictional minds with previously unparalleled depth and complexity” implies that this relates to his advocating “the removal of vociferous narrators from fiction” (26). The first contention of this essay, then, is that James neither offered, nor wanted to offer, any kind of consistent theory of narrative, and that he did not inaugurate the concepts of the “point of view” and “centres of consciousness” or make a consolidating intervention in their evolution. His random observations on “point of view” in the New York Edition prefaces cannot bear the weight of the theoretical edifices subsequently erected on them and are often at odds, in any event, with positions he adopted in other essays. The attribution to James of a prescriptive and proscriptive, rather than a descriptive, ad hoc, theory of narrative is fallacious: it is based on a flawed reading of the role of the theatre in the development of his narrative method and a comparative ignorance of critical views promulgated in the Atlantic Monthly and elsewhere long before the writing of the New York Edition prefaces. The second is that the locating of James in a discourse of narratology has distracted critics from the epistemological and scientific context of his prefaces, essays, and reviews. An exploration of this context, I believe, reveals that James restricted the point of view in his narratives, where he did, not least in order to explore the destructive consequences of such restrictions, however inescapable. Of particular relevance here will be Karl Pearson’s The Grammar of Science, published in 1892, William James’s emphasis on the point of view as a necessary and defining characteristic of the moral and physical universe, and aspects of Nietzsche’s perspectivism.5

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Even more emphatically, in a book bravely entitled How to Read a Novel, Gordon states that:

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Leon Edel believed that the latter half of the 1890s was a period of intense experimentation for James, following his disastrous engagement with the theatre, during which narrators became much less prominent in a fiction that tried to emulate the drama; and if The Awkward Age (1899) is one of the first steps in this journey, then The Ambassadors (1903) and The Wings of the Dove (1902) are close to its final destination.6 The connection between the theatre and James’s renovation of his fictional methods, for Edel (as for Lubbock and his followers), is in a concept of “dramatic narrative” whereby readers are exposed to one or more points of view, or angles of narrative refraction, rather than merely subjected to intrusive omnipotent and omniscient narration, and where “showing” is privileged over “telling” (Genette 1980: 163).7 A plethora of critics have been, and still are, held in Edel’s vice. Rama Kant Asthana has James “gradually” subduing “his narrative method,” like some wild beast, “to the dramatic” (40); and for Daniel Lerner, James’s “great contribution” to “the development of modern fiction is . . . the ‘dramatic novel,’” where “before the show begins, the author must get off the stage” (37). In 1897, at a time when he was supposedly experimenting with ways of eliminating narrators and writing play-like fiction, James wrote, however, that: “Dialogue,” as it is commonly called, is singularly suicidal from the moment it is not directly illustrative of something given us by another method, something constituted and presented . . . There is always at best the author’s voice to be kept out. It can be kept out for occasions, it can not be kept out always. The solution therefore is to leave it its function, for it has the supreme one. (“London Notes” 1404)8 Yet, in an endlessly oscillating process which defeats (or ought to) attempts at reductive schematizations, and using painting and poetry rather than drama as his trope, James can later insist that: Anything, in short, I now reflect, must have always seemed to me better—better for the process and effect of representation, my irrepressible ideal—than the mere muffled majesty of irresponsible “authorship” . . . the painter of the picture or the chanter of the ballad (whatever we may call him) can never be responsible enough.

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In this instance, responsibility entails tracking his “uncontrollable footsteps . . . toward the point of view that, within the compass, will give me more instead of least to answer for” (Preface to The Golden Bowl 1322–23). Whereas the concept of the point of view licenses here forms of expansion and a multiplication of perspectives consonant with an emphasis in the preface to The Reverberator on a “rotation of aspects” (1193) and, in the preface to The Wings of the Dove, on “successive centers” and “happy points of view” (1294), elsewhere in the preface, James becomes more costive, lingering over the severe economy that can result from a single point of view: there is no economy of treatment without an adopted, a related point of view . . . I understand no breaking-up of the register, no sacrifice of the recording consistency, that doesn’t rather scatter and weaken. (1297–80) At issue here is that tension between a centrifugal, dramatic, dynamic and a centripetal, painterly one, with highly disparate senses of the “point of view” in play.9 The Awkward Age (1899) is not part of a trajectory towards the dramatic heights of The Wings of the Dove (1902), or a model whose template James was henceforth to adapt and apply. It is a text, consonant with the organicist principles of “The Art of Fiction,” whose treatment is determined by its author’s conception of the specific subject in hand. Formal variety was a problem for his successors, but not for James. He rejects in this novel that “going behind,” to compass explanations and amplifications, to drag out odds and ends from the “mere” storyteller’s great propertyshop of aids to illusion. (Prefaces 1131) But he insists that “Kinds” are the very life of literature . . . . I myself have scarcely to plead the cause of “going behind,” which is right and beautiful and fruitful in its place and order. (Prefaces 1131) James’s generalizations about narrative, and especially those later made in his name, come under pressure from one of his central compositional tenets: the “sublime economy of art,” he argues in The Spoils of Poynton

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preface, can only be achieved if “the logic of the particular case” is respected (1139). Theories of dramatic fiction circulated long before the mid-1890s and these almost certainly formed part of the basis for James’s preoccupation with narrative perspective. A key figure in the dissemination of ideas of “dramatic” fiction in America in the 1870s was George Henry Lathrop (1851–1898). In two Atlantic Monthly essays, “The Novel and its Future” and “The Growth of the Novel” (both 1874), Lathrop anticipated a good many of James’s mature views on the organizing possibilities of “centres of consciousness.” Lathrop believed that in fiction “philosophical parentheses and the interspersed epigram fasten a clog on the dramatic movement.” The novelist “may fulfil to some extent the functions of a chorus; but he should be very cautious in the fulfilment” (“The Novel and its Future” 320). Fielding’s garrulous “chatting . . . withheld from him the possibility of grouping his keen observations firmly about some centre of steady and assimilative thought” (“Growth of the Novel” 318). For a “dramatic effect,” there had to be what he called a “resolute act of self-renunciation” on the part of the author rather than a visible intervention between “readers and characters” (“Growth of the Novel” 319). George Eliot’s Middlemarch is one target of attack: “all that can be said about the characters is said; but, after all, the result is not so good as if something had been withheld, for our imagination to reach after” (“Growth of the Novel” 320).10 Unlike post-Jamesian critics attempting to form a monolith out of James’s prefaces, Lathrop made a careful and flexible assessment of the issue of narrative intrusion and its potential for disabling the mobilization of points of view. He proposed that the “retiring attitude of the story-mover does not imply total invisibility . . . but only inofficiousness (“Growth of the Novel” 324). Lathrop’s “centre of steady and assimilative thought” is another formula for the phrase “point of view,” although not that phrase of course. The OED suggests that the concept came into use in connection with painting in the early eighteenth century. Interestingly, however, its first literary use is attributed to Selden Lincoln Whitcomb’s Study of a Novel, published in 1906 (and not as the OED has it, 1909); so Whitcomb’s literary appropriation of the phrase certainly pre-dates James’s in his final two prefaces (to The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl).11 Whitcomb’s likely source (not acknowledged in the OED) has been overlooked in many accounts of the evolution of narrative methods.12 Vernon Lee’s (whose real name was Violet Paget, and with whom James corresponded) The Handling of Words was appeared in 1923, but her ideas about point of view and narrative in what is possibly the first recruitment of the

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This supreme constructive question in the novel is exactly analogous to that question in painting; and in describing the choice by the painter of the point of view, I have described also that most subtle choice of the literary craftsman: choice of the point of view whence the personages and action of a novel are to be seen. (The Handling of Words 20) An examination of James’s criticism in conjunction with this material leads, then, to three unavoidable conclusions: James’s positions on narrative point of view are less substantial and sustained than his subsequent commentators have implied; they are far from schematic, or even susceptible to schematization; and they are derivative. W. J. Harvey is right to argue that James has been dogmatized; but he identifies an “insistence” in the criticism that I want to deny: “Henry James’s insistence on dramatic representation, point of view, elimination of the author . . . has undergone a subtle critical change into something like dogma. (14)13 Turning to the New York Edition prefaces themselves, and to theories of the point of view variably on offer there, I want to suggest that rather than narrative method as such, the more fundamental concern is with a writer’s responsibility to represent not experience merely, but the acts of experiencing that constitute experience. Firmly in the empirical tradition, James believes that there is no world beyond experience, that experience is the sole constituent of that world, and that a fiction of the world inseparable from the world of fiction is written by consciousness. For James, perspective is an affair of epistemology and morals to which his concern with the theory and technique of narrative points of view is entirely subordinate. Above all, his preoccupation is with the means by which forms of fictional representation, which may or may not involve an emphasis on the point of view, can excavate what he calls the “great extension, great beyond all others, of experience and consciousness” (Preface to Roderick Hudson 1060–1).14 James certainly stated that he had “never . . . embraced the logic of any superior process” to that of having “centres” (Prefaces 1297), but he had a much more flexible sense of what these amounted to than many of his treacherous disciples.

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concept for literature came in her essays “The Craft of Words” and “Of Writers and Readers” published, respectively, in 1894 and 1891 in the New Review:

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If Strether is the enigmatic, impressionistic and impressionable center of The Ambassadors, he functions very differently from a Maisie supplemented by a mediating voice whose role is far less neutral than it often is in later novels.15 Like Strether, Rowland Mallett is certainly the center of consciousness, however limited, in Roderick Hudson; yet Roderick Hudson is centralized by Rowland’s ocular and perceptual obsessions. In The Tragic Muse, Miriam Rooth is the objective, and not the subjective, center: we learn nothing of what she thinks directly; she is constructed as the focal point by the speculations of the other characters. Fleetingly, on the evidence of his preface, James even considered placing the inarticulate “things” themselves at the center of The Spoils of Poynton.16 James’s flexible and diverse conception of narrative method is clearly in evidence in his final essay on fiction, “The New Novel” (1914). “We take for granted,” he wrote, “a primary author,” a concept related to Wayne C. Booth’s implied author, “take him so much for granted that we forget him in proportion as he works upon us, and that he works upon us most in fact by making us forget him” (275).17 Yet James goes on to express his admiration for the kind of conspicuous storytelling he found in Conrad’s work. In such novels there is “a reciter, a definite responsible intervening first-person singular” (275). Behind that narrator, however, James also identifies “the omniscience, remaining indeed nameless, though constantly active, which sets Marlow’s omniscience in motion” (276). Far from condemning the overt storytelling involved, James revels in the “drama” between Marlow and this outer storyteller. As Ford Madox Ford argues in his 1935 essay “Techniques,” the nineteenth century bequeathed at least two traditions of narrative, and not just one. There is “Flaubert’s set who included the Goncourts, Turgenev, Gautier, Maupassant and, in a lesser degree, Zola and the young James—this last as disciple of the gentle Russian genius” (23).18 “Into that hothouse came Conrad,” Ford continues (25). His move, and Ford’s, was firmly in the direction of conspicuous narration: We evolved then a convention for the novel and one that I think still stands. The novel must be put into the mouth of a narrator—who must be limited by probability as to what he can know of the affair that he is adumbrating. Or it must be left to the official Author. (33) Conrad favored the former method. Yet James—after the three great novels (The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl) which deploy the method of voicing in the third-person the consciousness

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and experience of a focalizing character—is still able to endorse Conrad’s very different narrative strategies with considerable enthusiasm. One of the most recent, and comprehensive, books on point of view is Willie van Peer and Seymour Chatman’s collection of essays entitled New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective (2001). It proposes some striking revision of theories of the point of view. Sylvia Adamson’s exploration of “empathetic narrative,” the “grammar of Puritan consciousness” (86–7), and the relation between these and shifting methods for reporting consciousness is a welcome (and rare) forray into the arena of intellectual history, philosophy, and narrative in which Henry James is in great need of being situated. Elsewhere in the collection, the whole business of allocating to novels a controlling, single, perspective comes under scrutiny in the interests of the micro-analysis at the level of phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and beyond, of the vertiginous shifts in voice and focalization embedded in any text (van Peer and Chatman 7). There is also interesting work in the psycho-linguistic direction. One emphasis, for example, is on the extent to which “[f]ocalizations are interpretations and not essential features of texts” (Fludernik 104), these interpretations often extending only to those readers schooled in the necessary terminology and analytical skills. Traditional, and flawed, senses of James’s narrative method, would have to be radically revised if more of his fiction were to be subjected to this level of micro-analysis. Progressivist models, however (which often lurk in such collections), would not stand the test of such analyses; for they would reveal the complex and sophisticated reach of James’s far from static, or coherent, theories and practices.19

pragmatic refractions James may have made a distinctive contribution to narrative method in the domain of centers of consciousness, or what he called in his preface to The Wings of the Dove (in the nearest he came to such a phrase), “vessel[s] of sensibility,” but his preoccupation is not just with centering, but with perspective, or what has come to be known as perspectivism, in relation to consciousness.20 Within this context the neglected paradigm for James’s reflections on and adoptions of points of view is that of turn-ofthe-nineteenth century science and philosophy, a paradigm much more significant than New Critical and formalist appropriations of James’s criticism have been able or willing to acknowledge. Famously, perhaps notoriously, James observed in his preface to The Portrait of a Lady that “[t]he house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million,” and that

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In this extract, James’s emphasis is on the boundless array of perspectives available to individuals, on the different impressions each person develops of his or her world, and on the degree to which how we look at the world is a way of shaping it. This passage is inflected by turn-of-the-nineteenthcentury assaults on ontological positions whatever their determinations, and by a wide range of phenomenological and anti-positivist discursive maneuvers. For James, what we call knowledge can only be a function of how we look at our experience, and how we look at the looking of others. He constructs limited centers of consciousness not only as an acknowledgement of this, but as the very means of dramatizing the processes involved. Limited vision, and the consequences for characters who fail to recognize their limitations, is one of the great themes of James’s novels of course. It is inseparable as a theme from the narrative methods he adopted, and from his theories of consciousness and experience. Our engagement in James’s The American, for example, is not only with the tangle of the plot, but also with the tangled thinking of Newman as the center of consciousness. We are pretty well restricted, James tells us in the preface to The Ambassadors, to Strether’s “sense of . . . things”; and we come to “know them,” but through his more or less groping knowledge of them, “since his very gropings would figure among his most interesting motions” (1313). Sartre’s account of his own methods—in What is Literature?—could also serve as an account of James’s: “We had to present creatures whose reality would be the tangled and contradictory tissue of each one’s evaluation of all the other characters—himself included—and the evaluation by all the others of himself” (quoted in Ehrlich 148). There are clear affinities between James’s preface to The Portrait of a Lady, some of the ideas of the late nineteenth-century teacher and popularizer of science Karl Pearson, Henry Adams (who took the title of one of his chapters in The Education of Henry Adams from Pearson’s book), and Nietzsche’s The Joyful Wisdom (1882) and The Genealogy of Morals (1887): It is we, we who think and feel, that actually and unceasingly make something which does not exist: the whole eternally increasing world of valuations, colours, weights, perspectives, gradations, affirmations,

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at each of them stands a figure with a pair of eyes, or at least with a field-glass, which forms, again and again, for observation, a unique instrument, insuring to the person making use of it an impression distinct from every other . . . . [These] aperture[s] . . . are . . . as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher. (1075)21

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“There is only seeing from a perspective,” Nietzsche continues in The Genealogy of Morals, “only a knowing from a perspective” (152–3). This structure of thought has a clear impact on William James, who uses “point of view” much more frequently and systematically than his brother. Point of view, perspective, spectacle, and representation are at least as important to William James’s philosophy as they are to Henry’s meditations on narrative, and both exist within the same climate of ideas. In his A Pluralistic Universe (1909), William James sees the world of experience, the “world experienced,” and the “field of consciousness” as identical with a “body” which is “the storm centre, the origin of coordinates”: “everything circles round it, and is felt from its point of view”; this world “comes at all times with our body at its centre, centre of vision, centre of action, centre of interest” (803n). But “a pluralistic, restless universe,” he states in The Will to Believe (1897), is one “in which no single point of view can ever take in the whole scene” (589). “Goodness, badness, and obligation,” he continues, “must be realized somewhere in order really to exist,” and “their only habitat can be a mind which feels them”; “beyond the facts of” the individual’s “own subjectivity there is nothing moral in the world” (600). As the aptly entitled “On a Certain Blindness” (1896) has it:23 neither the whole truth, nor the whole of good, is revealed to any one single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands. (860) Karl Pearson, writes in a similar vein in his 1892 The Grammar of Science: The universe is a variable quantity, which depends upon the keenness and structures of our organs of sense, and upon the fineness of our powers and instruments of observation . . . . the universe is largely the construction of each individual mind. (18) The “real world lies for us in constructs and not in shadowy things-inthemselves” (68); “it is meaningless,” and “exists only when formulated by man” (73). Sartre, again, is relevant: “Since we were situated the only novels we could dream of were novels of situation . . . . we had to make the technique of the novel shift from Newtonian mechanics to generalized

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and negations . . . . We only have created the world which is of any account to men! (Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom 234–6)22

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relativity” (What is Literature; quoted in Ehrlich 148). Pragmatism, rather than a generalized relativity, however, is the destination of the James brothers, and Richard A. Hocks supplies a useful definition of pragmatism in this context: “Pragmatism is an attitude at odds with assuming knowledge from concepts apart from their unfolding consequence in sensory and perceptual life” (60). Henry and William James would have had no difficulty in endorsing what Monika Fludernik has to say about focalization and texts, and in extending it to experience in general: “[f]ocalizations are interpretations and not essential features of texts” (104). I would argue that it is essential to emphasize the ocular, visual, and optical dimensions of the phrase point of view and to retrieve the strong conspiracies between the phrase and concepts such as perspective, aspect, and focus. If Nünning is right to emphasize that “the itinerary of the metaphor of perspective” is one of a “progress from optics to philosophy,” my interest is partly in taking the itinerary backwards rather than forwards (208). For this reason, I believe that there is nothing to be gained from routine poststructuralist denunciations of the visual baggage carried by the phrase point of view.24 Acutely germane here is Martin Jay’s observation that after, so to speak, poststructuralism, the “figural is resisting subsumption under the rubric of discursivity” (3). Thomas Willis (a seventeenth-century physiologist), Locke, Leibniz, Newton, Hume, Berkeley, and Adam Smith should be in the cast list for a production of the aetiology of point of view as a phrase on which physiology and philosophy, as well as optical science and narratology, and the visual, perceptual and mental, converge. Perspective and point of view are commensurable given that one of the original denotations of “perspective” is any optical instrument (such as a spy-glass or telescope) “for looking through or viewing objects” (OED). Originally, “perspective” was used for the lens, as well as for the optical devices associated with lenses.25 With advances in geometry and lens theory in the early seventeenth century, it became necessary to find a word for the point at which rays of light meet or are refracted through such lenses. In 1604, Johannes Kepler took the word “focus” from Latin to denote the “burning point of a lens or mirror.” In Latin, focus refers to the hearth, or the fireplace, as the central point (in houses, of course, with holes in the roof rather than flues and chimneys) around which people gather. James’s novels, not least The Ambassadors, metaphorize the restricted perspectives vaunted in some of the prefaces in ways that draw on this derivation of “focus” as the word moves along a line whose coordinates are the concrete and the abstract, or the literal and the figurative. Perspectives often function in James as destructive burning

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points in ways that offer a pragmatic critique of the will, or the residues of Romantic egotism, thereby retrieving the concrete meaning of “focus” and combining it with its abstract, epistemological, reaches. Characters, in James, are frequently constituted mainly by their own limited consciousnesses into those storm centers, or origins of “co-ordinates,” which, for William James, we all embody (A Pluralistic Universe 803n). In his The Education of Henry Adams, Adams describes “the pleasure” in reading James of “seeing the lights of his burning glass turned on alternate sides of the same figure” (869) in a way that suggests that he was more than alert to the etymologies and resonances of words like focus and perspective. In reality—despite the forms of pluralism he attempts to introduce into his conversations with Sally Pocock, and in the face of his announcing to Jim that “[t]he case is more complex than it looks from Woollett”— Strether spends the novel confined by his own perspective and under the illusion that pluralism, or multiple perspectives, can somehow be achieved mono-focally.26 Adam Smith’s concept of sympathy, which is rarely available to self-absorbed centers, is what Strether lacks. Strether’s consciousness has a Puritan, rather than a Cartesian, syntax. Whereas for Descartes, as Sylvia Adamson has persuasively argued, “the defining role for the self is as subject of an act of consciousness,” the “grammar of Puritan consciousness has a different specification”: the verb of consciousness is typically transitive and the self is simultaneously its subject and object so that the Puritan experience of self takes the form described by the Baptist Jane Turner as “self-examination, self-evaluating, self-judging, self-humbling” [Choice Experiences (1653) 185]. For Adamson, Smith’s “sympathetic imagination . . . offered a way out of the moral and epistemological limitations of ego-centred consciousness” (84–5); for Monika Fludernik, and for James, it is the principal route into the social: “the attribution of consciousnes . . . is by definition anthropomorphic” (Fludernik 112). I would argue that where James restricts the point of view of his centers of consciousness, he does so entirely to explore the viability of this kind of exit from the problem. As Peter de Bolla has it: if all members of society acted solely upon the information they derive as individuals from their own experience, then the social would collapse . . . . Smith comes up with a solution to this problem through his appeal to the imaginative imputation of what another might feel, based on the evidence of our own experience. This, the doctrine of sympathy . . . governs a just and ethically correct society. (74)27

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Strether’s point of view is akin to the deceptive, single-angle, paintings known as anamorphoses, or perspectives, in the Renaissance (the most famous of which is Holbein’s The Ambassadors). The OED defines an anamorphosis as “a distorted projection or drawing of anything, so made that when viewed from a particular point . . . it appears regular or properly proportioned.” This is the application of “perspective” in Richard II which, I would argue, James alludes to in the Kensington Gardens scene in What Maisie Knew. Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows, Which shows like grief itself, but it is not so; For sorrow’s eye, glazed with blinding tears, Divides one thing entire to many objects, Like perspectives, which rightly gaz’d upon Show nothing but confusion—eye’d awry Distinguish form . . . . (II ii 14–20)28 What Maisie Knew, as its title implies, is James’s most important intervention in the realms of epistemology and phenomenology. From the outset, Maisie struggles to arrive at “imaginative imputation[s]” of what “others might feel” (de Bolla 74). She eventually discovers and recovers the yarns of the tapestries of fiction which constitute her world as exclusively as they do ours by exercising her powers of connection and misconnection (which amount to the same thing) as “one on whom nothing is lost” (“The Art of Fiction” 53). When Maisie first encounters the Captain from only one, highly deceptive perspective, that of her own need to forge a link between him and her mother, she sees him through the mist of her tears, the “blinding tears” of Richard II; this is succeeded by her “fully seeing” after a revealing conversation with her mother at Folkestone. This full seeing is an epiphany of a kind, a reverse epiphany, a moment in which Maisie penetrates through to the “supersensible” world located by both William James and Pearson, and Kant before them. To see fully is to locate chaos, such a vision being more perilous than the liberating errors or fictions available to imaginative individuals who have discerned that “Chaos” is the “law of nature” whereas “Order” is the “dream of man” (The Education of Henry Adams 1132). By the time Maisie reaches Boulogne at the end of What Maisie Knew, she understands that “appearance” and “illusion” are the “necessary” presuppositions of “art as well as of life” (Vaihinger 343)29 and that “it isn’t knowledge,” but a vigilant “ignorance that—as we’ve been beautifully told—is bliss” (James, “The Tree of Knowledge” 224). But at Folkestone

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in the meantime, as the novel takes on apocalyptic dimensions, she begins to grasp the extent of her egregious misunderstanding, earlier in Kensington Gardens, of the relationship between her mother and a Captain now “the biggest cad in all London.” Imposed upon Maisie by a narrator who also silences her is a grammar of the sublime which collapses into incoherence: There rose in her a fear, a pain, a vision ominous, precocious, of what it might mean for her mother’s fate to have forfeited such a loyalty as that. There was literally an instant in which Maisie fully saw— saw madness and desolation, saw ruin and darkness and death. “I’ve thought of him often since, and I hoped it was with him—with him—” Here, in her emotion, it failed her, the breath of her filial hope. (What Maisie Knew 187) Teresa Brennan is relevant here: “Kant . . . said [in The Critique of Judgement] that we observe the world through imposed categories most of the time. But sometimes, for some reason, the categories are suspended. When they are, we have an experience of the ‘supersensible,’ a perception that is not confined to a personal standpoint. This other perspective is receptive, but it is not passive” (223). Neither the brand of partial seeing initially on offer nor this full seeing result in anything other than deception, pain, and misery. Yet Maisie’s movement from Kensington Gardens to Folkestone allows her to develop, however woefully, forms (or attempts at them) of imaginative and artistic control ultimately denied to Strether. Maisie, indeed, is in a strong position to reflect on Ruth Ronen’s observation that “[i]t is the perspective-dependency of worlds that detain us from opposing fiction to reality” (175). Early in the novel, in a way to which Maisie can attest by the end, Mrs. Wix is described as taking “refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth” (33). At a meta-fictional level, what Maisie learns partly at Mrs. Wix’s knee is that literature is “the only place where the construction of world-models as such becomes thematic” (Siegfried J. Schmidt; quoted in Nünning 209). Kensington Gardens is likened to the “Forest of Arden” as part of a romance in which Sir Claude has adopted for Maisie and himself the roles of “banished duke” and the “artless country wrench” (115). The journey from Kensington Gardens to Folkestone is towards the “madness and desolation . . . ruin and darkness and death”), the ocular and experiential tragedy of King Lear, as a powerful correlative of Maisie’s dysfunctional, obscene, family.30 In Boulogne, there is a tenuous recovery, a return

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to protective patterns and consoling fictions. This journey entails two major paradigm shifts: from the apparent (and it is merely apparent, in my view) passivity of Locke’s account of consciousness to the activity of Kant’s The Critique of Judgement, and from Kant to the perspectivism and anti-positivism of Pearson, William James, Nietzsche, and others. Pithy and detaining is Sylvia Adamson’s tracking of what she sees as the “ideological shift . . . from the Puritan valorization of experiential memory to the Romantic valorization of imaginative sympathy” (90). If James steps back into a world so-configured in The Ambassadors, the existential imperatives of What Maisie Knew propel him into a much more turbulent future. Strether, “our belated man of the world” (Preface to The Ambassadors 1311), is caught in the post-Romantic sense of consciousness as isolating, and ego-driven; for Maisie, however, as for William James, experience is constituted not only by perspective, but perspectives on perspectives as the Latin derivation of “conscience,” what we know together (con-scientia), is brought back into social and ethical play. Before the Romantic period, “group consciousness” is a tautology, and “individual consciousness” is an oxymoron.31 Alan Friedman believes that among the “epistemological consequences” of James’s deployment of a central consciousness in The Ambassadors is a commitment to “relativity theory” (416–17). It is more productive, and relevant, however, to think in terms of pluralism or pragmatism. In his “Afterword” to the second edition of The Rhetoric of Fiction, in ways which take us back to James’s preface to The Portrait of a Lady, Wayne C. Booth illustrates what he means by “pluralism” like this: questions we choose to ask of, say, any novel “work like our choices of optical instruments, each camera or microscope or telescope uncovering what other instruments conceal and obscuring what other instruments bring into focus” (405).32 All views are valid; but all are partial. Mobility and pluralism are symbiotic, and their common enemy is the limited perspective of centres of consciousness. If Maisie could actually have attended science lectures at the University of London, she might well have encountered Karl Pearson announcing, although not loudly enough for Strether, that “what we term consciousness is largely, if not wholly, due to [our] stock of shared impressions” (18). “Everything that had happened when she was really little,” the narrator tells us of Maisie, “was dormant” (26); by the time she is in Boulogne, as Henry Adams expressed it when writing of the 1890s and beyond, the world “was no longer simple and could not express itself simply” (1010). It is not only that Maisie discovers modes of arrangement essential to art, but that she mobilizes a sense of perspective crucial to the moral sense. When Sir Claude and Mrs. Beale

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are on the brink of casting off Mrs. Wix, Maisie has “the vision of what it was to shut out from such a perspective so appealing a participant. . . . ‘Why after all should we have to choose between you? Why shouldn’t we be four?’ she finally demanded” (188). Restricting the point of view to Strether, then, might be exemplary from a narratological point of view, but it is a disaster for him. Whereas the New York prefaces appear to offer an endorsement of such a restriction, the fiction itself demonstrates its penalties. As James has it in his “Guy de Maupassant,” “the work is often so much more intelligent than the doctrine” (244), and “[t]here is many a creator of living figures whose friends . . . will do well to pray for him when he sallies forth into the dim wilderness of theory” (243).

notes 1. The definition of point of view in the OED, which is serviceable enough, has two main elements: it is “the position from which everything is viewed or seen, or from which a picture is taken; also, the position or aspect from in which anything is seen or regarded.” Willie van Peer and Seymour Chatman offer much the same definition: “perspective,” which they see as interchangeable with point of view, “refers to the spatiotemporal coordinates of an agent or observer; figuratively, it signifies the norms, attitudes, and values held by such an agent or observer” (5). The following are among the major twentieth-century interventions in the theory of point of view: Lubbock; Norman Friedman; Booth; Chatman, Story and Discourse; Rimmon-Kenan; Stanzel; Bal; Toolan. 2. A sharp sense of this debate is reconstructed in Graham. 3. Relevant here is Kant’s account of genius: “genius . . . is a talent for producing that for which no definite rule can be given” (168). Compare James, Kant, and Coleridge: “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 229). 4. Beach, for example, constructs a “bird’s-eye view of the English novel from Fielding to Ford” the central feature of which is “the disappearance of the author . . . a great outstanding feature of technique since the time of Henry James” (14). 5. For an account of Nietzsche on perspectivism that runs counter to mine, see Leiter. 6. See Edel, Henry James: The Treacherous Years, 1895–1901. 7. This facile distinction between “showing” and “telling” is mercilessly attacked, of course, throughout Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction. For a fuller discussion of these issues, see Rawlings, American Theorists of the Novel. 8. For James, absent authors were present (and perhaps even more powerfully so) by virtue of their efforts at concealment: “M. de Maupassant is remarkably objective and impersonal, but he would go far if he were to entertain the belief

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9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

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that he has kept himself out of his books. They speak of him eloquently” (“Guy de Maupassant” 532). See Ward for an admirable treatment of this tension. Compare James on reading: “In every novel the work is divided between the writer and the reader; but the writer makes the reader very much as he makes his characters . . . . When he makes him well, that is, makes him interested, then the reader does quite half the labor” (“The Novels of George Eliot” 922). But in a way that parallels the more or less simultaneous development of a New Criticism and a Formalism that were nevertheless blind to each other, once Franz Stanzel’s work became available in English, English and American critics could see that Otto Ludwig and Friedrich Spielhagen were developing and prescribing in the 1890s theories of scenic presentation contingent on restricted points of view. See Stanzel 22–3. Whitcombe proposes a sophisticated four-part taxonomy of “point of view” involving the narrator, time, space, and character (66–7). Genette acknowledges in his Narrative Discourse Revisited that the traditional framework of narratological history in which James is situated is dubious. But he restricts his re-configuring of this framework only to the phrase “point of view” itself, implying that James can be located in other words in the exhaustively viewed painting whose representation I am challenging (44–5). James strikingly defined “moral consciousness” as “stirred intelligence” in his New York prefaces (1907–9: 1095). Sergio Perosa is quite wrong, on the evidence of the preface to What Maisie Knew alone, to assert that James’s “limited point of view” results in the “author” being “transposed tactically into one of his characters” (126). Lost in Perosa’s account are the delicious ironies and careful distances James achieved in the tensions throughout his fiction between voice and perspective. “The real centre . . . would have been . . . the Things . . . . [but] they were not directly articulate” (Preface, The Spoils of Poynton 1144–5). “We form our sense of the implied author from everything said and done in the text, and from the structure of the novel and its overall arrangement. The narrator is only one element in our compound of the implied author. The norms of the narrator may differ from those of the characters, and those of the implied author” (Rawlings, American Theorists of the Novel 64). “Flaubert,” Ford adds, “received Turgenev and his young American friend in his dressing-gown, opening his front door himself, a thing that, till the end of his life, Mr. James regarded as supremely shocking” (24). De Jong, for instance, writes of “the gradual development of figural narration, both in quantity, complexity, and refinement” (76). See Lansky. Compare John Locke: “For, methinks, the Understanding is not much unlike a closet wholly shut from light, with only some little openings left, to let in external visible Resemblances, or Ideas of things, without” (162–3). If Locke is James’s architect, the house seems to function quite differently. Locke’s self appears to be the passive receiver of the light; whereas James’s consciousness is somehow the animator of dead walls. This reading does no more than merely confirm our post-Romantic expectations of what ought to be the incongruities

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22.

23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31.

32.

between Locke and James. It entirely overlooks the fact that if for James, each “pair of eyes” is a “unique instrument” resulting in different impressions, for Locke: “every thing does not hit alike upon every Man’s imagination. We have our Understandings no less different than our Palates” (8). He later adds, in a resonantly enigmatic statement, that “[s]ome Eyes want Spectacles to see things clearly and distinctly; but let not those who use them therefore say, no body can see clearly without them . . . . Everyone knows what best fits his own Sight. But let him not thence conclude all in the dark” (678). Since Levy’s complete edition, The Gay Science (after Walter Kaufmann) has become the accepted title. I prefer Horace B. Samuel’s translation of this passage in Levy to Kaufmann’s. For the equivalent passage in Kaufmann, see 241–2. The title of James’s essay trades, of course, on paradoxes familiar since classical times relating to the perceptions of the blind and the blindness of the sighted. See Goldhill. In Narrative Discourse, for example Genette balks at the “naively visual character” of phrases such as point of view (1980: 163–4); in Narrative Discourse Revisited, he regrets his deployment of “focalization” because it is a “purely visual . . . formulation” (64). See Guillén. See Pippin for a relevant discussion of James and the role of intersubjectivity in the process of estimating moral responsibility. The relevant Adam Smith is The Theory of Moral Sentiments. I am drawing on Guillén here. Hans Vaihinger (1852–1933) taught at the University of Halle from 1884 to 1906; his work forms a bridge, of a kind, between Kant and pragmatism. Many of his ideas were anticipated by Bentham in his Theory of Fictions (1814–32; but widely neglected until Ogden compiled the material in 1932); the confluence of Vaihinger’s ideas with American pragmatism in The Philosophy of “As If” (1911), however, has resulted in his work having a more powerful and wideranging impact than Bentham’s. “O, that way madness lies” is uttered by Lear (III iv 21) when he finds himself, Maisie-like, unhoused and disconnected. For Maisie, her encounter with the Captain in Kensington Gardens resembles the chaos-delivering potential James saw in all scenes construed as of supreme importance: “Don’t play any play for the sake of one ‘great scene,’” he wrote to the actress Elizabeth Robins, “that way madness lies, and destruction, and death” (Letter to Elizabeth Robins, 25 June 1891: 39). In keeping with this distinctively American brand of thinking, Charles Sanders Peirce believed that the social was imperative for logic and truth: “Good logical inferences cannot rest on selfish, limited, or individual interests. To be logical is to be unselfish, to submit to the findings of others, to embrace the good of the whole . . . . he argued . . . that truth itself was but one species of the good, and thus one aspect of a general theory of ethics” (Conkin 215). Compare Hocks: “What is preeminently ‘Jamesian’ in this matter of pluralism is that for him variety and difference do not merely constitute his tolerance and lip service. They are close to an élan vital for him” (45).

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LCEL—Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers. Literary Criticism. Vol. 1. Library of America. New York, N.Y.: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1984. LCFW—French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition. Literary Criticism. Vol. 2. Library of America. New York, N.Y.: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1984.

abbreviations: william james WJ1—William James. Writings, 1878–1899. Library of America. New York, N.Y.: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1992. WJ2—William James. Writings, 1902–1910. Library of America. New York, N.Y.: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1987.

works cited Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. 1907. Novels, Mont Saint Michel, The Education. New York, N.Y.: Literary Classics of the United States, 1983: 715–1192. Adamson, Sylvia. “The Rise and Fall of Empathetic Narrative: A Historical Perspective on Perspective.” New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective. Eds. Willie van Peer and Seymour Chatman. New York: State University of New York Press, 2001: 83–99. Aristotle. Poetics. Ancient Literary Criticism: The Principal Texts in New Translations. D. A. Russell and M. Winterbottom. Eds. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972: 85–131. Asthana, Rama Kant. Henry James: A Study in the Aesthetics of the Novel. New Dehli: Associated Publishing House, 1980. Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Trans. Christine van Boheemen. Toronto: Toronto UP, 1985. Beach, Joseph Warren. The Method of Henry James (1918). Rev. ed. New Haven: Yale UP, 1954. Besant, Walter. The Art of Fiction. Boston: Cupples, Upham and Company, 1884. Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. 1961. Rev. ed. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1983. Brennan, Teresa. “‘The Contexts of Vision’ from a Specific Standpoint.” Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight. Eds. Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay. New York and London: Routledge, 1996: 217–30. Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1978. Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Coleridge’s Lectures and Notes on Shakespere and Other English Poets (1811–18), ed. T. Ashe. London: G. Bell and Sons, Ltd., 1914. Conkin, Paul K. Puritans and Pragmatists: Eight American Thinkers. New York and Toronto: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1968.

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abbreviations: henr y james

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de Bolla, Peter. “The Visibility of Visuality.” Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight. Eds. Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay. New York and London: Routledge, 1996: 63–81. De Jong, Irene J. F. “The Origins of Figural Narration in Antiquity.” New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective. Eds. Willie van Peer and Seymour Chatman. New York: State University of New York Press, 2001: 67–81. Edel, Leon. Henry James: The Treacherous Years, 1895–1901. 1969. New York: Avon Books, 1978. Ehrlich, Susan. Existential Thought and Existential Technique. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1970. Fludernik, Monika. “The Establishment of Internal Focalization in Odd Pronominal Contexts.” New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective. Eds. Willie van Peer and Seymour Chatman. New York: State University of New York Press, 2001: 101–13. Ford, Ford Madox. “Techniques.” The Southern Review 1 (1935): 20–35. Friedman, Alan. “The Novel.” The Twentieth-Century Mind: History, Ideas, and Literature in Britain. 3 vols. Eds. C. B. Cox and A. E. Dyson. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1972: 1: 414–46. Friedman, Norman. Form and Meaning in Fiction. Athens, Georgia: Georgia UP, 1975. Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin, Ithaca and New York: Cornell UP, 1980. ——. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca and New York: Cornell UP, 1988. Goldhill, Simon. “Refracting Classical Vision: Changing Cultures of Viewing.” Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight. Eds. Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay. New York and London: Routledge, 1996: 15–28. Gordon, Caroline. How to Read a Novel, New York: Viking Press, 1957. ——, and Allen Tate. Eds. The House of Fiction: An Anthology of the Short Story, 2nd ed. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950. Graham, Kenneth. English Criticism of the Novel, 1865–1900. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965. Guillén, Claudio. “On the Concept and Metaphor of Perspective” (1966). Literature as System: Essays Towards the Theory of Literary History. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971: 283–374. Harvey, W. J. The Art of George Eliot. London: Chatto and Windus, 1961. Hocks, Richard A. Henry James and Pragmatistic Thought: A Study in the Relationship between the Philosophy of William James and the Literary Art of Henry James. Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP, 1974. James, Henry. The Ambassadors. 1903. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973. ——. “The Art of Fiction.” 1884. LCEL 44–65. ——. “Guy de Maupassant.” 1888. LCFW 521–49. ——. Letter to Elizabeth Robins. 25 June 1891. Theatre and Friendship: Some Henry James Letters. London: Jonathan Cape, 1932. ——. “London Notes.” 1897. LCEL 1387–413. ——. “The New Novel.” Notes on Novelists. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1914: 249–87. ——. “The Novels of George Eliot.” 1866. LCEL 912–33.

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——. Prefaces. The New York Edition of the Works of Henry James. 1907–09. LCFW 1035–41. ——. “The Tree of Knowledge.” 1900. Complete Stories. 5 vols. Library of America. New York, N. Y.: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1996–1999. 4: 220–34. ——. What Maisie Knew. 1897. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966. James, William. “On a Certain Blindness.” c.1896. WJ1: 841–60. ——. A Pluralistic Universe. Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy. 1909. WJ2: 625–819. ——. The Will to Believe. WJ1: 445–704. Jay, Martin, “Vision in Context: Reflections and Refractions.” Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight. Eds. Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay. New York and London, 1996: 3–12. Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgement (1790), trans. James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952. Kreiswirth, Martin. “Henry James.” The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Eds. Michael Groden and Martin Kreisworth. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994: 419–23. Lanser, Susan Sniader. The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1981. Lansky, Melvin R. “Perspectives on Perspectivism.” Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 6 (1999): 179–80. Lathrop, G. P. “Growth of the Novel” (1874). Americans on Fiction. 3 vols. Ed. Peter Rawlings. London: Pickering and Chatto Publishers, 2002: 2: 314–30. ——. “The Novel and its Future” (1874). Americans on Fiction. 3 vols. Ed. Peter Rawlings. London: Pickering and Chatto Publishers, 2002: 2: 331–45. Lee, Vernon (Violet Paget). The Handling of Words and Other Studies in Literary Psychology. 1923. Ed. David Seed. Lewiston; Lampeter: E. Mellen Press, 1992. Leiter, Brian. “Perspectivism in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals.” Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche’s “Genealogy of Morals.” Ed. Richard Schacht. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: California UP, 1994: 334–57. Lerner, Daniel. “The Influence of Turgenev on Henry James.” Slavonic and East European Review 20 (1941): 28–54. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. 1690. Ed. Peter Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975. Lubbock, Percy. The Craft of Fiction. London: Cape, 1921. Marshall, Adré. The Turn of the Mind: Constituting Consciousness in Henry James, London: Associated UPes, 1998. Martin, Wallace. Recent Theories of Narrative. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974. ——. The Genealogy of Morals (1887). Trans. Horace B. Samuel. Ed. Oscar Levy. Edinburgh and London: T. N. Foulis, 1910, vol. 13. ——. The Joyful Wisdom (1882). Trans. Thomas Common. The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Ed. Oscar Levy. Edinburgh and London: T. N. Foulis, 1910, vol. 10. Nünning, Ansgar. “On the Perspective Structure of Narrative Texts: Steps Towards a Constructional Narratology.” New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective. Eds. Willie van Peer and Seymour Chatman. New York: State University of New York Press, 2001: 207–23.

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Pearson, Karl. The Grammar of Science. 1892. London: Dent, 1937. Perosa, Sergio. American Theories of the Novel, 1793–1903. New York: Gotham Library, 1983. Pippin, Robert B. Henry James and Modern Moral Life. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Rawlings, Peter. American Theorists of the Novel: Henry James, Lionel Trilling, and Wayne C. Booth. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Read, Herbert. The Sense of Glory: Essays in Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1929. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. New Accents. New York and London: Methuen, 1983. Ronen, Ruth. Possible World in Literary Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Scholes, Robert Edward and Robert Kellogg. The Nature of Narrative. London: Oxford UP, 1966. Shakespeare, William. King Lear. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997: 1297–354. ——. King Richard II. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997: 842–83. Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. 1759. Ed. Knud Haakonssen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Stanzel, F. K. A Theory of Narrative. Trans. Charlotte Goedsche. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. Toolan, Michael. Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction. London: Routledge, 1988. Vaihinger, Hans. The Philosophy of “As if”: A System for the Theoretical and Religious Fictions of Mankind. 1911. Trans. C. K. Ogden. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 1935. Van Peer, Willie and Seymour Chatman. Eds. Introduction. New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective. New York: State University of New York Press, 2001: 1–17. Ward, J. A. The Search for Form: Studies in the Structure of James’s Fiction. Chapel Hill, N.C.: North Carolina UP, 1967. Whitcomb, Selden L. The Study of the Novel. London: D. C. Heath & Company, 1906.

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julie rivkin Psychoanalytic critics are drawn to Henry James, and how could they not be? The genius of “consciousness” is also—and necessarily—the genius of the unconscious (if such a paradox makes sense). James’s haunted figures all evidence the way in which the mind is doubled, and the more extensive the charting of its surface, that Jamesian method of using “reflectors,” the more one’s attention might be drawn to the influence of unrecorded depths. Moreover, it is hard to find a preoccupation of psychoanalysis that is not also a preoccupation of James and of his critics. Narrative, reading, representation, knowledge, secrecy, the uncanny, gender, sexuality, repression, the family, loss, identification, desire, transference—the list of psychoanalytic topics in James studies is not easily exhausted. Given the extent of this list, and of the psychoanalytic criticism of James, I cannot attempt a comprehensive summary here. Instead, what I offer, in the first part of this essay, is an examination of some striking moments in the psychoanalytic criticism of James, moments when critics come to new understandings of what the psychoanalytic project might be. What follows, in the second part, is my own intervention, a reading of The Ambassadors and The Wings of the Dove that responds to the current work in gender and queer theory on the dynamics of identification and desire. The psychoanalytic critics who make guest appearances in this first section, then, are Edmund Wilson, Shoshana Felman, John Carlos Rowe, Dennis Foster, Kaja Silverman, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Michael Moon, and Eric Savoy. The sequence might be described as the move from a traditional Freudian criticism, through various kinds of Lacanianism, including that of Slavoj Žižek, and into contemporary work 59

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in queer theory and psychoanalysis. Of course, in restricting myself to these critics, I leave out all too many. The elephant in the closet might be Leon Edel, whose five volume biography of James makes its claim on the writer’s life in the idiom of mid-twentieth-century psychoanalysis.1 But the list goes on, and this essay certainly owes a debt to the work of Leo Bersani, Peter Brooks, Wendy Graham, Marcia Ian, David McWhirter, Donna Przybylowicz, William Veeder, and Susan Winnett among others.2

james and the psychoanalytic line The prevailing narrative of psychoanalytic criticism and Henry James has a well-known commencement: psychoanalytic criticism came to Henry James with the publication of Edmund Wilson’s “The Ambiguity of Henry James” in 1934.3 Wilson’s controversial thesis took up James’s ghost story The Turn of the Screw and gave it a psychoanalytic turn: “The theory is, then, that the governess who is made to tell the story is a neurotic case of sex repression, and that the ghosts are not real ghosts but hallucinations of the governess” (88). The critical controversy that ensued was a substantial one, but as much as Wilson is registered in that debate as the one who argued for hallucination over haunting, the psyche over the supernatural, a re-reading of his essay reveals a different emphasis. Psychoanalysis plays, as it turns out, a rather small role in “The Ambiguity of Henry James,” as, for that matter, does The Turn of the Screw. Instead, Wilson’s use of a rather modest psychoanalytic paradigm is put to the service of his real interest in how James depicts a changing social and historical scene. Wilson admires a kind of Balzacian4 James, and the psychoanalytic thesis of this essay is really only the means by which he can arrive at a comprehensible social type for categorizing the story’s protagonist—“the thwarted Anglo-Saxon spinster”: [T]he story is primarily intended as a characterization of the governess: her somber and guilty visions and the way she behaves about them seem to present, from the moment we examine them from the obverse side of her narrative, an accurate and distressing picture of the poor country parson’s daughter, with her English middle-class class-consciousness, her inability to admit to herself her natural sex impulses and the relentless English “authority” which enable her to put over on inferiors even purposes which are totally deluded and not at all in the other people’s best interests. (94–5)

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This diagnosis is psychoanalytic only in passing; what interests Wilson has far more to do with understanding that “English middle-class classconsciousness” than with detailing the workings of repression and its effects. Or rather, to put it differently, his is a criticism that sees psychoanalytic categories in social terms. In charting shifts in the representation of the social scene over the course of James’s oeuvre, Wilson also takes the measure of James’s deviation from what a contemporary critic would call the heteronormative. We might begin just by noting the operative assumptions about “normal” gender: not only is there the casually patronizing identification of the “thwarted Anglo-Saxon spinster,” but there is a similar set of doubts about masculinity in James: “James’s men are not precisely neurotic; but they are the masculine counterparts of his women. They have a way of missing out on emotional experience, either through timidity or prudence or through heroic renunciation” (96). Commenting on the fiction of the late 1890s, Wilson seems puzzled—yet pleased—by the presence of “moral values” in the context of such anomalous social types: “Yet in these queer and neurotic stories (some of them, of course—The Turn of the Screw and What Maisie Knew—among James’s masterpieces) moral values begin to reassert themselves” (113). “Queer and neurotic”: the phrase jumps out for a contemporary reader. In what sense does Wilson find James’s work “queer”? The word reappears in his account of the later phase, “[a]nd now sex does appear in his work—even becoming a kind of obsession—in a queer and left-handed way” (Wilson 109). “Queer and left-handed” echoes “queer and neurotic”—and yet the effect of Wilson’s euphemistic metaphor does as much to obscure as to reveal his meaning. The reiteration of the word “queer” feels almost symptomatic of a knowledge that does not quite know itself, as if Wilson’s reading suffers from its own repression. Shoshana Felman’s “Turning the Screw of Interpretation” offers a Lacanian response to Wilson’s Freudian reading. Published in 1977 in a special issue of Yale French Studies devoted to “French Freud”—The Question of Reading: Otherwise—her essay shares (but really dominates) the stage with pieces by other Lacanian critics engaged in developing a new poststructuralist psychoanalytic literary criticism. Dismayed by the reductiveness of what she considers a vulgar Freudianism—“It’s all about sex”—Felman sees her task as raising the very question of what would constitute a psychoanalytic interpretation. She rejects what she describes as a Hegelian master–slave model5 in the usual pairing of psychoanalysis and literature—psychoanalytic theory is the master and it dominates and explains the literary text—and argues instead for a mutually informing

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relation between the two discourses. The literary text “knows” as much as the psychoanalytic one; after all, concepts central to psychoanalysis—the Oedipus complex, for example—find their source in literary works.6 For Felman, what the literary text “knows” most centrally is that reading is an act of transference. The reading of letters—an activity that occurs both within the tale and in the history of its reception—is the transferential relation par excellence, and the psychoanalytic critic, like both the analyst in the therapeutic session and the reader in the tale, does not master the text so much as get caught in an unconscious reaction, thereby becoming the unwitting performer of a reading effect. Felman’s interest in these reading effects leads her to the tale’s critics, and she discovers that readers of the tale resemble readers within the tale; indeed, they are found, with an uncanny regularity, to repeat the main lexical motifs of the tale. The tale thus generates a chain of readers, all of whom enact a desire for comprehension that never leads to an unveiling of the truth. Such unconscious repetition is evidence of Felman’s Lacanian theory of reading: although the reader might seek a “truth” behind the text, a signified behind the signifier, she will only be able to follow the substitution of signifiers. Felman cites James to give further authority to this rejection of reading as the unveiling of a signified: “The story won’t tell,” she quotes from Douglas to affirm the congruence of a Lacanian reading, “not in any literal, vulgar way” (106). The tale’s signifiers or letters—both alphabetical and epistolary—are therefore like its ghosts; they make appearances and are transmitted between characters, but they cannot be read. It is in their transmission that they have effects. The reader who attempts to master the tale with psychoanalytic certainty— Felman’s Wilson—becomes like the governess he diagnoses, a reader who projects the ghosts and madness he reads in others. Psychoanalytic literary criticism offers, then, not a discourse of mastery, one that finds a hidden truth behind the letters (a repressed Anglo-Saxon spinster), but instead a recognition of how readers will unconsciously be moved by the tale’s own effects. John Carlos Rowe’s psychoanalytic chapter in The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James (1984), entitled “Undecidability in The Turn of the Screw,” presents itself in part as a supplement to Felman’s project. His particular contribution is to bring class and gender back into this study of how repression operates. Rowe reads the uncle’s interdiction against all communication as akin to the bar of repression. The effect of figuring repression as issuing from the Master is to make visible the patriarchal and class-based nature of the Symbolic law that induces the production of ghostly signifiers. Interestingly, then, one might even

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say he retrieves for psychoanalysis the concern with the social that fascinates Wilson—although in a vocabulary of the 1980s rather than the 1930s, one no longer populated by repressed spinsters and queer and left-handed men. Lacanian criticism enters a new decade and acquires new dimensions in Dennis Foster’s Žižek-influenced Sublime Enjoyment: On the Perverse Motive in American Literature (1997). The particular amalgam of psychoanalysis and Marxism in Slavoj Žižek enables Foster’s study of how pleasure works in the social formation of turn-of-the-century American capitalism. Reading “The Aspern Papers” and The Ambassadors, Foster draws attention to something peculiar about desire in James’s fiction. Noting that many readers find “there is a problem with what James’s characters want, particularly when they want neither love nor money” (68), Foster argues that the pattern of their desire reveals a more general dissatisfaction with the socially normalized objects of desire. Because the “symbolic satisfactions—love, work, success—[fail] to make us happy, and [we refuse] to accept that failure”, we turn to what Foster calls “perverse” desires, and “respond ultimately to situations that evoke older more primary drives and their attendant emotions”. James’s fiction reveals that other (perverse or sublime) psychic economy with great clarity. One term for it is the Lacanian “sinthome,” in which there is a “short-circuiting [of] the satisfaction normally experienced in the attainment of a goal and [it] instead suffuses the aim, the pathway to the goal, with enjoyment” (83). Such a psychic economy underwrites the activity of consumption, that new pleasure offered by turn-of-thenineteenth-century capitalism, and Foster draws on the concept to make sense of Chad’s promised career of advertising in The Ambassadors, and its relation to Strether’s own desires: “Advertising, by convincing us that our own needs are real, provides the alibi for the enjoyment we derive from the simple act of consumption. We know, but we never act on this cynical knowledge, for to live with such knowledge is to abandon the fantasy that we will find the object of desire, that we will ever know what we want” (87–8). The problematic nature of desire’s paths and objects also looms as the central one in another ongoing psychoanalytic project in James criticism. Psychoanalysis plays an essential if vexed role in the work of gender and queer theory, particularly in the writings of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Kaja Silverman, Judith Butler, Michael Moon, and Eric Savoy. The publication of two works in 1990—Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet and Butler’s Gender Trouble—might be said to mark the path ahead in this area for the next decade and more. Feminist theory had been pressing its critique

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of psychoanalysis in the prior decade, questioning the Oedipal scenario as a basis for narrative and a paradigm for the formation of gender. But Butler’s work trained attention on a Freudian text that had not been quite such a focus before—“Mourning and Melancholia”—and on a new way of viewing the constitution of heteronormative subjects. Alas, one might say, queer theory (like feminist theory) must be a psychoanalytic project: in Sedgwick’s formulations: “psychoanalysis, profoundly as it has been shaped by homophobic and hetereosexist assumptions and histories, has nevertheless not become dispensable as an interpretive tool for any project involving sexual representation” (Tendencies 73–4). Sedgwick expresses this regret in a response to Kaja Silverman’s reading of James, a reading which ends up reinforcing the prejudices it is designed to combat. Silverman’s project in Male Subjectivity at the Margins locates itself in the same territory as that explored by Sedgwick, but in situating certain male subjectivities “at the margins,” it keeps a quite traditional Oedipus scenario at the center. Silverman traces what she calls James’s “authorial fantasmatic”; that is, “an unconscious fantasy or group of related fantasies which underlies a subject’s dreams, symptoms, repetitive behavior, and daydreams” (161). In tracing that fantasmatic in James, she follows his compositional practice of “going behind” a given character, and reads what she sees as its significance: “James’s ‘vision of the behind,’” as Peter Brooks would say, opens decisively onto the primal scene, and accommodates desires and identifications which are in every respect antipathetic not just to his preferred self-image, but to “conventional masculinity” (157). In addition, the fact that this typical perspective remains “emphatically spectatorial” marks it as “the point of entry for an alien and traumatic sexuality” (157). In Silverman’s reading, the Jamesian fantasmic is typified by the climactic scene in The Ambassadors, which has the very features of the Freudian primal scene. Again and again Silverman finds this fantasmic re-enacted in James’s fiction, with her title “too early, too late” signifying the range of temporalities that situate the Jamesian spectator at the margin of sexual participation. For Silverman, “[t]hat scene opens on to the negative as well as the positive Oedipus, and it may at times be said to superimpose one of those triangles on top of the other” (172). There are “two desires which the Jamesian fantasmatic sustains—the desire to be sodomized by the ‘father’ while occupying the place of the ‘mother,’ and the desire to sodomize him while he is penetrating the ‘mother’ (173). Silverman concludes: “The ‘author’ bears so little resemblance to what is popularly thought of as the ‘Master’ that

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I can only think of that Jacobite specter as a compensatory construction of the author ‘outside’ the text” (180). The “mastering” tone of this analysis, the sense of having caught the classic author in a compromisingly perverse and infantile position, is dismayingly evident particularly in this final passage. But what enables that tone is the unquestioning adoption of the Freudian terms, terms that invariably work to demean the “marginalized” male sexualities that the author is presumably attempting to valorize. Commenting on this essay, Sedgwick points out both that “the understanding of James’s literary production relies on a severely reductive, indeed a rather insulting model of repression and the unconscious” and that “its explorations of gay possibility occur exclusively within a framework (that of the ‘primal scene’ and of the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ Oedipal complex) whose structuration already, tacitly installs the procreative monogamous heterosexual couple as the origin, telos, and norm of sexuality as a whole” (Sedgwick, Tendencies 74). Moreover, Sedgwick also observes that “the transferential relations surrounding the analyst/critic—indeed, that any relations surrounding that figure—remain rigidly unexamined there” (74). Like Felman responding to Wilson, Sedgwick responds to Silverman with her recognition of how the psychoanalytic critic is herself engaged in a transferential relation with the author in question. But where Felman attempts to replace Wilson’s psychoanalytic criticism with a practice truer to Freud (via Lacan), Sedgwick works with the understanding that the Freudian framework is part of the problem. Queer theory, then, (and in this it resembles feminist theory) needs to re-vision psychoanalytic criticism and come to comprehend psychosexual development without “the procreative monogamous heterosexual couple as the origin, telos, and norm of sexuality as a whole” (Sedgwick 74). While the 1980s feminist intervention in psychoanalytic James studies focuses primarily on narrative and draws most directly on “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” the queer intervention focuses on identification and desire as they figure in the formation of identity.7 The theorist who has written in the most sustained way on this topic is Judith Butler, and in everything from Gender Trouble to The Psychic Life of Power she works on the complex processes of subject formation. How is the subject formed in subjection? Butler asks in The Psychic Life of Power, and her focus on the “how” in this reformulation of a Hegelian–Althusserian–Foucauldian question emphasizes the psychoanalytic dimension of her project.8 The Freud text most crucial to this project is “Mourning and Melancholia,” and because so much of the work on this topic draws on

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An object-choice, an attachment of the libido to a particular person, had at one time existed; then, owing to a real slight or disappointment coming this loved person, the object-relationship was shattered . . . But the free libido was not displaced on to another object; it was withdrawn into the ego. There, however, it was not employed in any unspecified way, but served to establish an identification of the ego with the abandoned object. Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, and the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency, as though it were an object, the forsaken object. (Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” 248–9) In mourning, the libido is eventually displaced onto another object, and that displacement constitutes closure to the mourning process; in melancholia, however, the “lost” object is instead incorporated into the self. “The narcissistic identification with the object then becomes a substitute for the erotic cathexis9 . . . . This substitution of identification for object-love is an important mechanism in the narcissistic affections” (Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” 249). Loss is critical to this process that converts desire into identification; the person who ceases to be an object of desire becomes instead an object for identification. But if, in the case of melancholia, identification with the object follows from, and is a substitute for, object-love, or desire, this sequence actually reverses the order of identification and desire in accounts of development Freud provides in other works. “We have elsewhere shown that identification is a preliminary stage of object-choice, that it is the first way—and one that is expressed in an ambivalent fashion—in which the ego picks out an object. The ego wants to incorporate this object into itself, and, in accordance with the oral or cannibalistic phase of libidinal development in which it is, it wants to do so by devouring it” (249–50). The regressive dimension of identification is evidenced in the way Freud sees it as incorporative, linked to “the oral or cannibalistic phase of libidinal development.” In this account, then, identification can either precede or follow “object-love”; whatever the sequence, however, the two cathexes cannot co-exist. Or, as Judith Butler puts it in her paraphrase of this theory, “any intense emotional attachment divides into either wanting to have or wanting to be that someone, but never both at once” (“Imitation” 726).

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this essay, I cite what I believe to be the most relevant passage on the workings of melancholia:

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But why not? Butler’s own work on this topic raises just this question, even as she points out that a theory of their mutual exclusivity “serves a heterosexual matrix” (“Imitation” 726). Keeping identification and desire distinct serves to order gender and sexuality; allowing that they might coincide makes for gender crossings and sexual re-orientations. In pursuing this question about other possible pyschic permutations of desire and identification, Butler turns to the work of psychoanalytic theorists Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and Ruth Leys. For [them] . . . identification and, in particular, identificatory mimeticism, precedes “identity” and constitutes identity as that which is fundamentally “other to itself” . . . . This theory of primary mimeticism differs from Freud’s account of melancholic incorporation. In Freud’s view, which I continue to find useful, incorporation—a kind of psychic miming—is a response to, and refusal of, loss. Gender as the site of such psychic mimesis is thus constituted by the variously gendered Others who have been loved and lost, where the loss is suspended through a melancholic and imaginary incorporation (and preservation) of those Others into the psyche. Over and against this account of psychic mimesis by way of incorporation and melancholy, the theory of primary mimeticism argues an ever stronger position in favor of the non-self identity of the psychic subject. Mimeticism is not motivated by a drama of loss and wishful recovery, but appears to precede and constitute desire (and motivation) itself, in this sense; mimeticism would be prior to the possibility of loss and the disappointments of love. (“Imitation” 726–7) Butler’s account emphasizes that whatever the order of desire and identification, the self is formed out of others, and the relationship to those others is one of mimesis. The two psychoanalytic accounts that Butler considers here have both been important for recent James critics working in the area of psychoanalytic queer theory. For Michael Moon, the theory of primary mimeticism is the basis for his work on James, while for Eric Savoy, Freud’s theory of melancholic identification, particularly as incorporated into Butler’s work on melancholy gender (in The Psychic Life of Power), is crucial to his reading of identity formation. Locating the origins of primary mimeticism in René Girard’s “influential critique of the object-theory of desire—that it is not the putative object of desire but mimesis that is primary in the formation of desire” (Moon 15)—Moon cites BorchJacobsen on the effects of such a theory for the orientation of desire:

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“[D]esire is not oriented by pleasure, it is (dis)oriented by mimesis” (Moon 15). Moon comments: “If in an important sense no desire is our own—that is, originates with us; if desire is indeed primarily induced by imitation, mimed and ventriloquized, then it is impossible to maintain our ordinary ‘orienting’ notions of which desires we are at home with and which ones we are not” (16). In Moon’s argument, mimeticism—and its disorienting effects—operates both within James’s fiction and in the legacies that his work has left behind, the queer modernist cultural tradition that Moon traces in A Small Boy and Others.10 Eric Savoy, by contrast, finds in “Mourning and Melancholia” a paradigm for the workings of identification. In a formulation that follows the logic of Butler’s argument in “Melancholy Gender,” a chapter in The Psychic Life of Power, he reveals a melancholic structure to the assumption of identity in James’s “The Jolly Corner.” That tale exposes “the melancholia that attaches to any exclusive sexual identity—for the subject mourns what he has renounced in order to establish a coherent identity” (9). In Savoy’s formulation, Spencer’s repressed heteronormative desire, long forsworn, returns in the psychopathology of melancholia to unbind a gay “identity” that turns out to have been contingent on geographical choices and expatriation. Yet that unbinding can bring no consolation of alternative coherence, for it confronts and is embodied in a spectral “other” who, tormented by a homosexual tendency that is perhaps unfulfilled, perhaps furtive, can only remain other to himself. (Savoy 10) That these two different theories of identification have worked so persuasively in the interpretation of James’s texts supports Butler’s claim that it may be harder to separate or sequence desire and identification than either Freud or Borch-Jakobsen argue. In the reading that follows, I work with Ambassadors and The Wings of the Dove, and my project is to sketch out the different ways in which desire and identification intertwine.

the ambassadors and the wings of the dove In an attempt to calm an uneasy Lambert Strether about the prospect of paying a call upon the daunting Madame de Vionnet, Chad Newsome of The Ambassadors remarks reassuringly, “[S]he won’t do anything worse to you than make you like her” (James 21: 238).11 Like her, indeed. This apparently innocent promise opens up, in its very ambiguity, the complex

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relations between identification and desire. The possibility that Strether might not only “like” but also become “like” Madame de Vionnet is, in fact, invited by Strether’s earlier use of the same phrase. In his famous exchange with little Bilham in Gloriani’s garden, Strether indicates his own preferred identification: “‘Oh Chad!’—it was that rare youth he should have enjoyed being ‘like’” (21: 220). Strether’s relations to these two discreet lovers hinge on the same ambiguous term, thereby creating a structural symmetry that only exacerbates the semantic ambiguity. Is it through his identification with Chad that he experiences a desire for Marie de Vionnet, or is it the converse? Does desire proceed or follow from identification? Noting for a moment the way the homograph “like” can make a heterosexual model of mediated desire indistinguishable from a homosexual one, we might note the sexual disorientation that follows from this term’s conflation of identification and desire.12 If we really cannot tell whom Strether wants to be and whom he wants to have—much less which psychic process gives rise to the other—we are in a world in which different narratives and identities are possible. Such is the reading I propose of The Ambassadors, and the use of the term “like”—and its conflated meanings—I take to mesh with a psychic space that the novel opens up, a space of psychic possibility. That psychic space gets called “Paris,” and “[i]n the light of Paris one sees what things resemble” (21: 207). Morever, I see this space as comic, akin to the forest in Shakepeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. With one modification: Strether’s Lysander is as subject to desiring Demeter as he is Helena or Hermia. And just as in Midsummer Night’s Dream, the disorientation is specular: whatever next crosses one’s sight is a potential object for desire or identification. Anything one sees, anything that passes before one, induces this disorientation: in Strether’s words, it “put[s] a price . . . on pauses” in Paris (21: 96), all for the changes they might bring about. In Gloriani’s garden, in so short a pause as the utterance of a phrase, Strether shifts from Gloriani to Chad as the one he would like to be like. Paris is figured as visually produced disorientation; “It twinkled and trembled and melted together, and what seemed all surface one moment seemed all depth the next” (21: 89). Given this emphasis on the visual, it is not surprising that the word which carries such conceptual freight is one that has to do with appearances, likenesses, resemblances. My linking of this psychic space with Paris is confirmed by the way that telltale word “like” gets used in the novel. Appearing with striking frequency in both of its senses, the word carries a valence that directly follows the contours of the international theme.13 Those affiliated with Paris adopt the term for their most consequential statements, while those

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affiliated with New England are as emphatic in their refusal. Typical is Madame de Vionnet’s dependence on the slight phrase in expressing her large hopes for Strether’s ambassadorial mission and his communications with Mrs. Newsome: “‘Tell her,’ she just slightly quavered, ‘you like us’” (21: 253). By contrast, there is this characteristic response from Sarah Pocock, whose very use of the term, held off in chary quotation marks, rejects the whole vocabulary of likings and likenesses: “Ah it isn’t I who ‘like,’ dear Mr. Strether, anything to do with the matter!” (22: 101). The heated center of activity is Strether, and his objects of desire and identification shift in charged fashion between Chad and Madame de Vionnet. In this space in which likings and likenesses might not be discernible from one another, all kinds of orientations and disorientations are possible. Strether’s tendency, as if in response to the word as homograph, is to conflate the two. For example, in Book 11, when Strether thinks of how he likes Madame de Vionnet and hopes that she likes him, he moves immediately to the topic of how alike they are: “[I]t was quite as if, had they sooner known how much they really had in common, there were quantities of comparatively dull matters they might have skipped” (22: 251). Similarly, Strether sees the intimacy of the lovers as a form of identification: he fathoms “deep identities between [Chad and Madame de Vionnet]” (22: 225), taking as particular evidence Chad’s statement, “Well, if they hate my good friend, that comes to the same thing [as hating me]” (22: 224). Intimacy is, in Strether’s apprehension of it—and to re-word his own definitional statement—like identification; wanting to have and wanting to be someone are hard to tell apart. Can this conflation be said to enact a pattern of primary mimeticism? Or does the difficulty of distinguishing objects of desire from objects of identification make an order of derivation hard to determine? The emphasis on mirroring, first apparent from Strether’s literal encounter with his own mirror image in the opening chapter and later expanded into Strether’s perception of likenesses everywhere, certainly foregrounds the primacy of mimeticism. Moreover, the novel’s central triangle is the very geometry of mediated desire. Yet it is also possible to read a desire that seems to precede identification, a desire experienced as disorientation and that gives way to identification: I am speaking now of Strether’s first meeting with Chad. From Chad’s earliest appearance in the novel, Strether finds himself stirred beyond any degree of composure. 14 Strether’s emotions of embarrassment and of bedazzlement suggest a sexual crush; the man who sits next to him leaves him wordless, shamed, excited, disoriented. It is interesting that Strether treats the disruptive effect of Chad’s presence

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as a rupture in Chad, the “sharp rupture of identity” (21: 137), this perception that Chad is not Chad. However, the threatened rupture might more properly be assigned to Strether, and the way in which Strether’s perception of Chad so quickly becomes our perception of Strether suggests the identificatory relation between the two men. Chad’s question, “Do I strike you as improved?” (21: 148), draws attention both to the forceful quality of the impression Chad makes and also to the bond of identity between the two men. That is, not only does Chad’s identity depend on Strether’s impression of him, but Strether’s identity depends on how he sees Chad. The curious effect is that desire and identification again begin to mingle, even when the relation initially seems to occur in the register of desire. If Strether’s initial desire for Chad modulates easily into an identification with him, that identification does not preclude his simultaneous identification with the women who, like him, also desire Chad. Strether sees Chad’s attractiveness mirrored and confirmed in the responses of the women who surround him. “He saw him in a flash as the young man marked out by women” (21: 153). And Strether becomes quite noticeably the guardian of various women’s feelings about Chad—from those of Jeanne de Vionnet and Mamie Pocock to, of course, those of Madame de Vionnet herself. Strether realizes that Jeanne agrees to be married more out of her feelings for Chad than her feelings for her fiancé; Mamie seems able to get over her feelings for Chad when she realizes the extent to which he has been affected by another woman. Strether is made strangely intimate with all of these feelings about Chad; the following passage, for example, signals how much confidence he shares with Chad’s women. Mamie “[knows] that poor little Jeanne doesn’t know what’s the matter with her” (22: 155), and “[i]t was as near as they came to saying that she was probably in love with Chad” (22: 155). Most of all there is Madame de Vionnet, whose feelings for Chad become the basis for Strether’s deepest commitment. Yet as much as Strether finds himself “like” Madame de Vionnet in the very way he is drawn by Chad, the conflation of desire and identification may explain why Chad does not remain an object of either cathexis in the novel’s final book. For Strether, the shock of the river scene might be the antidote to the shock of the earlier scene in the theatre; its effect is a termination of that psychic state I have been calling Paris. When Strether no longer wishes to be like Chad, he no longer desires him; in Chad’s last appearance in the novel, the young man comes across as nothing short of repellent. What Strether does not distance himself from, however, is Madame de Vionnet’s desire; in this book, Strether finally comes to a full

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reckoning of what it means that “she won’t do anything worse to [him] than make [him] like her.” If the overlapping significances of the word “like” convey the intertwining relationship between identification and desire in The Ambassadors, a different version of that pattern makes itself visible in The Wings of the Dove.15 As in The Ambassadors, the word is ubiquitous, but with a difference. That is, although Milly is widely “liked” in London and “likes” so many of those she meets, those likings are generally separated from likenesses. For example, the relationship between Kate Croy and Merton Densher is defined and motivated by the observation that they are unlike one another, that their “tie” exists “under the protection of the famous law of contraries” (19: 50): Any deep harmony that might eventually govern them would not be the result of their having much in common—having anything but their affection; and would really find its explanation in some sense, on the part of each, of being poor where the other was rich. (19: 50) What Kate finds valuable, what the economy of this novel endorses, is a “precious unlikeness” in Merton Densher (19: 50). An ever firmer refusal of identification is there in Kate Croy’s response to Milly Theale: one wouldn’t want to be like her; she is not a subject for envy, in spite of her enormous resources. Kate Croy experiences “a latent impression that Mildred Theale was not, after all, a person to changes places, to change even chances with . . . . rich as Milly was, one probably would n’t—which was singular—ever hate her for it” (19: 176). This response so directly contrasts with Strether’s response to Chad as to be even more striking. But if Kate does not want to be like Milly and values Densher for his “precious unlikeness,” it is not that the language of likeness is absent from the novel. Indeed, the scene in which Strether shares with little Bilham his changing fantasies about “whom he would like to be like” corresponds, although by difference as much as by similarity, with the scene in which others tell Milly just what she is like. However, this resonant likeness is not with a person but with an object. Lord Mark and Kate converge in this recognition: Lord Mark begins, “Have you seen the picture in the house, the beautiful one that’s so like you?” Kate Croy brings in others to reinforce the recognition, remarking, “The likeness is so great” (19: 217, 223). Milly’s response to Lord Mark questions the likeness with her citational treatment of the word: “I’ve been through rooms and I’ve seen pictures. But if I’m ‘like’ anything so beautiful as most of them seem to me—!” (19: 217). Milly’s suspended sentence leaves the

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resemblance conditional. But to be seen by others as like something—a Bronzino portrait, a dove—is entirely different from the psychic process of identification. In fact, when others tell Milly what she is like (a portrait, a dove) or act as if they “like” her (Densher’s performance of devotion) the effect is actually to seal her off from psychic cathexes of any kind. Registering the fatality that she carries, no one wants to be or have Milly. In spite of her wealth, she occasions no envy, envy in the deep sense of wanting to be another. This might be another way of speaking her diagnosis: what is the matter with Milly is her imperviousness to the identification and desire of others, otherwise felt as the isolation that surrounds her dying. But Milly’s dying is also her living, and despite these resistances to her, she does exercise influence. James offers one of the most notable metaphors for her effect on others in the novel’s preface: “Our young friend’s existence would create rather, all around her, very much that whirlpool movement of the waters produced by the sinking of a big vessel or the failure of a great business; when we figure to ourselves the strong narrowing eddies, the immense force of suction, the general engulfment that, for any neighbouring object, makes immersion inevitable” (19: x). Engulfment and immersion: no one can remain psychically “watertight” in the face of such force; the metaphors lead into the realms of psychic overlap especially evident in Freud’s theory of melancholic incorporation. Kate’s recognition—“Her memory’s your love. You want no other”— signals the new way in which desire and identification work in the novel’s final book (20: 405). It is a process I want to trace out in two passages. The first of them registers one effect of Densher’s grief: it makes him a stranger to himself: 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. (20: 342–3) Densher’s reflection on his own experience frames it as a fictive one, a scene depicted on “the page of a book.” Distanced by this frame, the figure he witnesses is “far off and in a relation inconceivable.” Standing

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outside himself, he is able to recognize what this other seeks to do: the “young man” is attempting to hold on to “something immense” that he is “painfully” afraid to lose. At the time of his immersion in this experience, Densher was only “dimly conscious” of what this “immense” thing that he feared losing might be; moreover, just as he lacked knowledge of the cathected object, he lacked a recognition that the person experiencing this fear of loss was himself. Only “outside, afterwards,” does Densher recognize that the person having this experience has his own face. And with that recovery of self comes a reassurance against loss: the sentence that follows the passage quoted above is this one: “He had known then at the same time what the young man had been conscious of, and he was to measure after that, day by day, how little he had lost” (20: 343). Restoration of the object seems to follow from restoration of the self. But Densher’s self-recognition only comes by his being a spectator to himself; after all, if “it was his own face that Densher had known,” he still stands outside himself. In other words, James’s version of mourning has a melancholic turn: it emphasizes a reflexive dimension to the narcissism induced by loss, a register of how the ego loses and regains both itself and its lost object. I emphasize this dimension because it differs from Freud’s account of mourning and also makes mourning closer to melancholy; that is, Freud claims that the mourning subject finds the world deprived of value, while the melancholic finds the ego and the world diminished. Another passage makes even clearer the melancholic nature of this mourning, its narcissism, its revelation of the way in which the self is constituted out of lost objects. This other scene presents Densher’s response to the burned letter. His reflection begins with a diffuse sense of loss, an awareness “of how, while the days melted, something rare went with them” (20: 395). The diffuse sense of loss is then specified as “a thought” that he claims as “all his own,” and that possessive marks the beginning of a process whereby the lost object becomes incorporated into the self (20: 395). Here is the passage: 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. But so it was before him—in his dread of who else might see it. Then he took to himself at such hours, in other words, that he should never, never know what had been in Milly’s letter . . . . The part of it missed for ever was the turn she would have given her act. (20: 396)

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This turn had possibilities that, somehow, by wondering about them, his imagination had extraordinarily filled out and refined. It had made of them a revelation the loss of which was like the sight of a precious pearl cast before his eyes—his pledge given not to save it—into the fathomless sea, or rather even it was like the sacrifice of something sentient and throbbing, something that, for the spiritual ear, might have been audible as a faint far wail. This was the sound he cherished when alone in the stillness of his rooms. (20: 396) The process by which the pearl is formed might serve to illustrate the psychic process of melancholic incorporation. That the pearl might need to be sacrificed again draws attention to the iterative nature of the process; its repetition in other figures will be part of how the ego refuses loss by maintaining the lost object within the self. How much difference is there between a passage like this one, in which the ego makes itself out of a lost object, and those in The Ambassadors in which the ego inhabits the psychic space of unclearly discriminated desire and identification? One way to express the difference is to distinguish between tragic and comic modes in James, modes which differently foreground either loss or possibility. Ultimately, one may not be able to settle, any more than Butler does, the priority and derivation of identification and desire in James. A clear effect of their unsettling, though—an effect particularly clear in The Ambassadors—is the unmaking of any singular heteronormative model for identity formation. I finish, then, with a focus on psychoanalytic criticism and its powers of social critique. Such a focus might take us back to the project with which psychoanalytic James criticism began, Edmund Wilson’s famed “Ambiguity.” That is, Wilson’s work draws on psychoanalysis to locate James’s characters in relation to accepted social norms of sexuality, gender, and class. For contemporary critics, though, psychoanalysis might have less to say about the “diagnosis” of individual characters in relation to those norms, and more to say about how those norms are produced and how they might be subject to critique. What Butler, Sedgwick, and others have done in the area of gender and sexuality, other theorists are doing in the areas of race, class, and nation. Projects like Anne Cheng’s The Melancholy of Race and Paul Gilroy’s Postcolonial Melancholia suggest the ways in which psychoanalytic concepts can be employed to further our understanding of the workings of race and domination. That such

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At just the point when the loss becomes sharp again, this process of psychic incorporation makes it possible to refuse the loss:

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theoretical projects might have a bearing on James criticism is indisputable; indeed, just as psychoanalysis has been so important for queer theory, it will undoubtedly find new uses as postcolonial and global James studies unfold. The prognosis for Henry James and psychoanalytic criticism is a hopeful one, then; as compelling as the last seventy years of psychoanalytic James criticism have been, there is clearly much work ahead.

notes 1. See Edel, Leon. Henry James, vol. I: The Untried Years, 1843–1870; vol. II: The Conquest of London, 1870–1881; vol. III: The Middle Years, 1882–1895; vol. IV: The Treacherous Years: 1895–1901; vol, V: The Master, 1901–1916. 2. See, for example, Leo Bersani’s “The Jamesian Lie” in A Future for Astyanax, Peter Brooks’ Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, Wendy Graham’s Henry James’s Thwarted Love, Marcia Ian’s Remembering the Phallic Mother, David McWhirter’s Desire and Love in Henry James, Donna Przybylowicz’s The Dialectic of Self and Other in the Late Works of Henry James, William Veeder’s “The Portrait of a Lack” in New Essays on “The Portrait of a Lady,” and Susan Winnett’s “Coming Unstrung: Women, Men, Narrative and Principles of Pleasure.” 3. The original version of his essay was published in Hound and Horn in 1934. I am working with the later expanded version of the essay, though, the one included in The Triple Thinkers (1938). 4. By “Balzacian,” I have in mind here a writer interested in social realism, one who can portray a broad social canvas and at the same time attend to minutely observed social detail. 5. The relevant Hegel is a well-known section from The Phenomenology of Mind, in which the philospher discusses what he calls the relationship between “Lordship and Bondage,” often rendered as Master and Slave. 6. Françoise Meltzer makes this observation in “Unconscious” in Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin’s Critical Terms for Literary Study. 7. For example, this project of revising the psychosexual narrative of development is where my own psychoanalytic work on James begins. Initially, I focused on a feminist revision of the oedipal narrative, working with What Maisie Knew. Thinking about narrative in oedipal terms was centrally the project of Peter Brooks, whose masterplot theory of narrative linked the structure of the family to that of narrative. My own work on Maisie read the novel’s depiction of divorce and adultery as replicated in the narrative structure, such that the novel’s failure to identify a proper third person to serve as guardian to Maisie was akin to the novel’s own failure to sustain a proper third person narration. Maisie’s development, then, rather than following a Freudian teleological model by arriving at a proper destination of heteronormative femininity, instead is released into an indeterminacy of possibilities that escape narrative mastery. The novel’s narrative irony, occasioned and used to represent the divorce plot, in other words, works to undo anything like an oedipal masterplot of psychosexual development. See “The Proper Third Person: Undoing the Oedipal Plot in What Maisie Knew” in my False Positions. For another compelling feminist critique of Brooks’ masterplot, see Susan Winnett’s “Coming Unstrung: Women, Men, Narrative and Principles of Pleasure.”

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8. Here is Butler’s formulation in The Psychic Life of Power: “‘Subjection’ signifies the process of becoming subordinated by power as well as the process of becoming a subject. Whether by interpellation, in Althusser’s sense, or by discursive productivity, in Foucault’s, the subject is initiated through a primary submission to power” (2). Butler goes on to point out that the link between power and subject-formation goes back to Hegel: “the question of subjection, of how the subject is formed in subordination, preoccupies the section of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit that traces the slave’s approach to freedom and his disappointing fall into ‘the unhappy consciousness’” (3). Butler’s question, then, is “What is the psychic form that power takes?” (2), and thus her turn to Freud. 9. The term “cathexis” refers to “the libidinal energy invested in some idea or person or object; ‘Freud thought of cathexis as a psychic analog of an electrical charge’” (WordNet ® 2.0.) . 10. For a further consideration of James’s relation to a queer modernist tradition, see Haralson. 11. This section of the essay builds on and is adapted from a paper I presented at the conference Henry James Today at the University of Paris, June 2002. The paper was subsequently published under the title “She won’t do anything worse to you than make you like her: Identification, Desire and the Light of Paris in The Ambassadors.” The edition of The Ambassadors used here is The Novels and Tales of Henry James. (The Ambassadors is volumes 21 and 22.) 12. Lee Edelman’s work on the homograph in Homographesis hovers in the background of the argument “By exposing the non-coincidence of what appears to be the same, the homograph, like writing, confounds the security of the distinction between sameness and difference, gesturing in the process toward the fictional status of logic’s foundational gesture. In fact, while homosexuality derives both its name and its cultural identity from the ostensible sameness extending between the subject and object of desire, homographesis would suggest an inevitable exchange of meanings in the prefixes ‘homo’ and ‘hetero’” (Edelman 13–14). Edelman’s account suggests why the homograph “like” is a particularly appropriate medium for conveying this instability of desire and identification. 13. The “international theme” is a commonplace in James criticism, and it designates the American-European cultural encounter in all its permutations. 14. Other readers attentive to Strether’s feelings for Chad have worked with the scene of Chad’s arrival in the theatre; I know, for example, that Mark Mitchell and David Leavitt, editors of the anthology Pages Passed from Hand to Hand: The Hidden Tradition of Homosexual Literature in English from 1748 to 1914, introduce their selection from Henry James with a focus on just this scene because they find its homoeroticism so explicit and so compelling. 15. The edition of The Wings of the Dove used here is The Novels and Tales of Henry James. Wings is volumes 19 and 20 of that edition.

works cited Bersani, Leo. A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.

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Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. ——. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. ——. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997. Cheng, Anne Anlin. The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief. New York: Oxford UP, 2002. Edel, Leon. Henry James, Vol I: The Untried Years, 1843–1870; Vol. II: The Conquest of London, 1870–1881; Vol. III: The Middle Years, 1882–1895; Vol. IV: The Treacherous Years, 1895–1901; Vol. V: The Master, 1901–1916. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1953–72. Edelman, Lee. Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory. New York: Routledge, 1994. Felman, Shoshana. “Turning the Screw of Interpretation.” Literature and Psychanalysis. The Question of Reading: Otherwise. Ed. Shoshana Felman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982: 94–207. Foster, Dennis A. Sublime Enjoyment: On the Perverse Motive in American Literature. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 1997. Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. James Strachey. Vol. XIV (1914–16). London: The Hogarth Press, 1957. Gilroy, Paul. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia UP, 2005. Graham, Wendy. Henry James’s Thwarted Love. Stanford, CA.: Stanford UP, 1999. Haralson, Eric. Henry James and Queer Modernity. Cambridge UP, 2003. Hegel, Georg. The Phenomenology of Mind. Trans. and Ed. J. B. Baillie. New York: Humanities Press, 1964. Ian, Marcia. Remembering the Phallic Mother. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1993. James, Henry. The Novels and Tales of Henry James, 24 vols. New York: Scribner’s, 1907–09. McWhirter, David. Desire and Love in Henry James. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Meltzer, Françoise. “Unconscious.” Critical Terms for Literary Study. 2nd ed. Eds. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1995: 147–62. Mitchell, Mark and David Leavitt. Eds. Pages Passed from Hand to Hand: The Hidden Tradition of Homosexual Literature in English from 1784 to 1914, Boston: Houghton, 1997. Moon, Michael. A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiation in American Culture. Durham and London: Duke UP, 1998. Przybylowicz, Donna. Desire and Repression: The Dialectic of Self and Other in the Works of Henry James. Alabama: Alabama UP, 1986. Rivkin, Julie. False Positions: The Representational Logics of Henry James’s Fiction. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996. ——. “She won’t do anything worse to you than make you like her: Identification, Desire, and the Light of Paris in The Ambassadors.” Igitur 4 (2003): 87–96.

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Rowe, John Carlos. The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James. Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1984. ——. The Other Henry James. Durham and London: Duke UP, 1998. Savoy, Eric. “The Queer Subject of ‘The Jolly Corner.’” Henry James Review 20 (1999): 1–21. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic.” The Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: California UP, 1990. ——. “Is the Rectum Straight? Identification and Identity in The Wings of the Dove.” Tendencies. Durham: Duke UP, 1993: 73–103. ——. “Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity: Henry Jame’s The Art of the Novel.” Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2003: 35–65. ——. Tendencies. Durham: Duke UP, 1993: 73–103. Silverman, Kaja. Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. Veeder, William. “The Portrait of a Lack.” New Essays on “The Portrait of a Lady.” Ed. Joel Porte. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985: 95–111. Wilson, Edmund. The Triple Thinkers. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1938. Rpt. New York: Oxford UP, 1963. Winnett, Susan. “Coming Unstrung: Women, Men, Narrative and Principles of Pleasure.” PMLA 105 (1990): 505–18. WordNet ® 2.0 © 2003 Princeton University. Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York: Verso, 1989.

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priscilla l. walton While I was researching this essay, I came across a comment made by Sharon O’Brien, the feminist biographer of Willa Cather, which served to crystallize some of the concerns that have engendered my approach in what follows. In her Preface to Cather’s The Song of the Lark, O’Brien recalls: “When I was reading The Song of the Lark primarily from a feminist perspective . . . I was impressed by the respect and consideration Cather showed for Indian culture in the novel . . . . Now I find Cather’s, and Thea’s, treatment of the Indian woman and their pottery problematic” (xvi). Reading this, I was struck by O’Brien’s candor, and also by her initial assumption that feminist criticism excluded racial analysis. Certainly, O’Brien was not alone in this oversight, and the numerous scholars, who have argued for the centrality of race to feminism, forced the approach to (try to) come to terms with its white focus. Whether this short-sightedness has been overcome may be debatable, but it did lead me to ponder other issues that feminism had ignored or elided in its efforts to foreground the plight of women. Let me first stress that what follows is not another “post-feminist” diatribe, taking to task feminist critics, who, at the time, were no more guilty of critical gaps than other scholars. Rather, it is an effort to coalesce some of the problems in feminist research, and to try to produce a more inclusive form of scholarship. Undoubtedly, feminist critiques of Henry James have been guilty of racial erasures, and I cite my own book, The Disruption of the Feminine in Henry James, as an example; however, to give credit where it is due, race has not been ignored in James studies. Sara Blair, Robert Levine, and Caroline Levander, among others, have produced rich analyses of the racial dimensions of James’s texts, and have offered 80

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insightful commentary on the movements of race and race conflict in the author’s writings. Yet, spurred on by a student’s comment that my reading of The Turn of the Screw (which I thought had concentrated on gender dynamics in general) ignored queer theory, I feel prompted to address a seeming disparity that has arisen between feminism and queer theory, a disparity that is especially troublesome, since the two branches of study owe so much to each other. Have feminism, queer theory, sexuality studies, and gay history parted ways? And if so, why? Historically, feminism, largely taking its impetus from the breakthroughs in race studies, began by focusing on patriarchy, women, and their fictive constructions. Shortly after (in a larger sense), gay and queer theorists commenced their work on same-sex relations and sexual dynamics. These critical strands owe much to each other, but seem to have forgotten their mutual indebtedness—at least in some contemporary work. Of course, it goes without saying that critics cannot include every aspect and issue in their work; nevertheless, I am struck by how little the two schools of research draw on each other, and such a division compels me, in this discussion of James, to analyze the split, as well as the potential of a combined critique. Robert K. Martin notes, building upon the work of Millicent Bell: Those feminists who helped to revive interest in Wharton were wary of offering the possibility for reasserting a unidirectional influence from the strong James to the weak Wharton . . . . To pursue Bell’s argument, one needs both a more complex feminism that can allow Wharton to engage with James as an equal as well as a revised view of influence, in which a subtle concept of response and rewriting can replace the kind of one-way street of powerful writers and weak readers proposed by Harold Bloom. (56) Martin (pace Bell) is quite justified in his call for a more complex feminism (perhaps especially in the case of Wharton), and, at the same time, offers insights into why some feminist scholars have avoided explorations of female and male authors for fear of falling into the same trap that marginalized women writers originally. But this observation, while astute, does not explain why feminists have ignored same-sex readings in favor of constructions of (heterosexual) femininity. Nor, from a different perspective, does it illuminate why feminism has gotten lost in maculinist studies. Certainly, for all her professions of being a feminist critic who focuses on male homosociality (see Between Men), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick pays

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Watch and Ward may be a heterosexual romance, but it is almost exclusively concerned with masculinity, which results in (to say the least) a distorted view of eros. Heterosexuality in this novel proved to be a very solipsistic institution. Critics have claimed that Nora is the first of James’s many self-reliant heroines, yet her main importance in the narrative seems to be less her independent autonomy than her function in relation to Roger. (264) From yet another perspective, critics like Philip Horne, in their indifference to (and even hostility towards) the concerns of queer theory, may well offer motivation to scholars of same-sexuality to concentrate solely on a single gender. Horne writes of his methodological misgiving about perhaps the most impressive, certainly the most influential of “Queer” readers of James . . . . Critics confronted by these [textual] abysses have tended to divide into the bravely or foolishly literal guessers, diving in after condoms or “homoerotic sexual adventures” or “love”; and more resignedly or elaborately sophisticated refrainers who remain peering down from the brink, trying to find a meaning for the fact of ambiguity without dissolving it. (79) Hence, from women as male appendages (Henke) to queer theorists as “condom-divers” (Horne), it is not difficult to see why feminism and queer theory have parted ways—each critical school attempting to defend its turf, so to speak; yet both, in so doing, often miss out on the potential interconnectedness of their work. John Fletcher points to Terry Castle’s writings as an effort to pull together queer and feminist readings (53), not to mention her emphasis on lesbian constructions (another area often ignored in both feminism and queer theory); still, there are few efforts to bridge the two (or more) areas of scholarship.1 One of these efforts can be located in Gert Buelens’s “Henry James’s Oblique Possession: Plottings of Desire and Mastery in The American Scene,” which offers an intriguing attempt to coalesce the divergent critical strands. Buelens begins by quoting Robert Martin and George Piggford’s assessment of gay studies: “While the theory of sexuality and

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scant attention to women’s concerns in her readings of James. Neither does Richard Henke (at least in “The Embarrassment of Melodrama: Masculinity in the Early James”) demonstrate much concern for feminist issues in his analysis of Henry James’s first novel, his 1871 Watch and Ward (which he later disowned):

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At the heart of these queer readings there is an erotic relationship between same-sex subjects, no matter whether this relationship is thought to be frank and obvious or subtle and displaced. In the present essay I set myself the task of articulating a queer perspective on James’s work outside such a relationship—indeed outside any necessary relation between two subjects. By studying The American Scene, Buelens traces “an account of sexual identity in which the assertion of one’s own self-possession takes place in the very act of submitting to the erotic power of another force— whether that force be non-human . . . or human . . . . I call this complex psychosexual mechanism ‘oblique possession’” (301). Buelens is more concerned with the separation in queer theory between gay and lesbian studies, yet I would add feminism to his formulation, since it should also be reincorporated into the fold of gender studies. Indeed, I would like to apply Buelens’s theory of “oblique possession” to test whether the psychosexual dynamic of which he speaks functions in practice (in relation to character-driven novels); or, alternatively, whether, in divorcing a dynamic from “bodies that matter,” such an approach negates the political impetus of both feminism and queer theory. In Buelens’s terms, “oblique possession” involves a distinction between the mastery of one subject over another, in favor of a jouissance “derived from a moment of erotic tension that is more holistically, more scenically conceived”. More specifically, in the first instance, pleasure is derived from submission to another, where, in the second, the subject’s desire is fired by a commanding presence that is successfully resisted. But the sense of control that the subject derives from the event does not depend on any literal reduction of the former master to cowering submissiveness. Rather the erstwhile victim goes on to enjoy an indirect triumph. This oblique triumph rests on the participation of both master and slave (if such terms are then still appropriate) in an overbearing scene of desire that exacts the grateful surrender of all those it encompasses. (301)

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desire in the 1990s has become almost uncontestedly queer, the studies have remained largely lesbian and gay” (Buelens 300). Agreeing with this observation, Buelens outlines the split and goes on to suggest an alternative:

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For Buelens, this “oblique” moment is queer, for it “thrives on a disruption of the very dichotomies of sexuality and identity that queer theory has been concerned to question” (301). In this moment, then, jouissance melts the differences between master/slave, homosexual and heterosexual. Such a process applies to gender studies, in general, since, if there is a disruption in the differences between master/slave and homosexual/ heterosexual, surely such a disruption also breaks the binaries on which patriarchy rests? Buelens suggests that it does, in that “[s]urrender and mastery . . . can be thought as little apart in James as those other incarnations of a ‘subject/object dichotomy’ like masculinity and femininity, homosexuality and heterosexuality”; and he cites Judith Butler to this effect (Buelens 309). As a result: Social relationships here are not just an occasion for the knowing self to negotiate a knowable other, but have to be regarded as “practices of signification” in which self-identification is a dynamic process, in which the nature of self and other is continuously reconfigured, to such an extent that these terms lose most of the value they might be thought to possess separately. (309–10; and Buelens again cites Butler) To support his argument, Buelens points to the final kiss in The Portrait of a Lady as an instance where Isabel’s initial surrender to Goodwood actually motivates her to follow her own path (21). In turn, Densher’s acquiescence to Milly’s memory in The Wings of the Dove frees him from Kate. As aforesaid, Buelens illustrates his contentions most fully in relation to The American Scene; however, I should like to turn to an early novel, Washington Square, to determine whether his hypothesis has the potential to bring together the divergent strands of gender studies. Washington Square is difficult to perceive as a “queer” novel, since it is quite “straight” in its narrative structure. Nevertheless, because the text primarily focuses on the “securing/capture” of Catherine, it seems an obvious venue for the application of Buelens’s theory. Indeed, given his critical distinction between mastery/surrender and oblique possession, Washington Square certainly provides a clear example of the former, and, I would argue, offers a provocative instance of the latter. Dr. Sloper’s treatment of his daughter, as well as instances of Morris Townsend’s conduct towards Catherine, dramatize the sadomasochistic process whereby “one person’s mastery is explicitly asserted over against the other’s slavery—no matter how temporarily, playfully, and reversibly” (Buelens 301). Even so, at times, Morris and Catherine’s relationship offers an exemplification of oblique possession, as, concomitantly, it

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may also effect a critique of this state as a point of self-agency—that is, in all the examples Buelens cites (and as Washington Square, too, suggests), the agent in question presumably chooses solitude. In terms of mastery/surrender, Catherine’s existence with her father rests on that very premise. Dr. Sloper’s character embodies a virtual study of psychological sadism: bereft of his wife as a result of his daughter’s birth, Dr. Sloper is disappointed in Catherine: There was nothing, of course, to be ashamed of; but this was not enough for the good Doctor, who was a proud man, and would have enjoyed being able to think of his daughter as an unusual girl. There would have been a fitness in her being pretty and graceful, intelligent and distinguished—for her mother had been the most charming woman of her little day—and as regards her father, of course he knew his own value. He had moments of irritation at having produced a commonplace child. (8) While Dr. Sloper does not believe Catherine to be unmarriageable, he views her as “absolutely unattractive . . . . Catherine is neither pretty nor lively” (29). In one passage, the doctor’s response to an unexpected litter of kittens (“Be so good as to see that they are all drowned” [35]), is a reaction that is all too often equally applicable to his daughter. Catherine is rather like a kitten being toyed with by an old cat. Her relationship with Morris, especially, provides Dr. Sloper with a new means of torment: It must be deucedly pleasant for a plain, inanimate girl like that to have a beautiful young fellow come and sit down beside her, and whisper to her that he is her slave—if that is what this one whispers. No wonder she likes it, and that she thinks me a cruel tyrant; which of course she does, though she is afraid—she hasn’t the animation necessary—to admit it to herself. Poor old Catherine! (39) Deciding, before he even meets Morris, that the young man can only be interested in Catherine’s money, the good doctor proclaims: “The position of husband of a weak-minded woman with a large fortune would suit him to perfection!” (38). When he does meet Morris, he rejoices in his correct estimation of Catherine’s suitor: “He is not what I call a gentleman; he has not the soul of one. He is extremely insinuating; but it’s a vulgar nature, I saw through it in a minute. He is altogether too familiar . . . I hate familiarity. He is a plausible coxcomb” (33).

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Perhaps most insidiously, Dr. Sloper views Catherine’s fate as a sort of game with which he can amuse himself: “He was not in the least in a state of tension or of vigilance with regard to Catherine’s prospects . . . he went so far as to promise himself some entertainment from the little drama” (30). Bending Catherine to his will is the point of the game, and Dr. Sloper has no doubt that he will win: “She will do as I have bidden her,” said the Doctor; and he made the further reflection that his daughter was not a woman of great spirit. I know not whether he had hoped for a little more resistance for the sake of a little more entertainment; but he said to himself, as he had said before, that though it might have its momentary alarms, paternity was, after all, not an exciting vocation” (66). His misplaced confidence in his daughter’s filial obedience turns rapidly from astonishment to scorn and mockery when Catherine refuses to comply with his wishes and give up Morris: “‘Of course; you can wait till I die, if you like . . . . Your engagement will have one very delightful effect upon you; it will make you extremely impatient for that event’” (82). But Dr. Sloper begins to look upon Catherine’s obstinacy as another twist in the game, and he takes heart. If he is upset at his first mistaken assessment of his daughter’s character, he soon rallies and her fate becomes, for him, a form of entertainment: The Doctor took several turns round his study, with his hands in his pockets, and a thin sparkle, possibly of irritation, but partly also of something like humor in his eye. “By Jove,” he said to himself, “I believe she will stick—I believe she will stick!” And this idea of Catherine “sticking” appeared to have a comical side, and to offer a prospect of entertainment. He determined, as he said to himself, to see it out. (84) This vision of Catherine’s love affair as a cerebral challenge and a game resurfaces when Dr. Sloper discusses Morris with his sister, and likens Catherine’s future to an intellectual exercise: “‘Shall a geometrical proposition relent? I am not so superficial’” (93). He then goes on to outline the more intriguing aspects of what he perceives as an experiment: [“]The two things are extremely mixed up, and the mixture is extremely odd. It will produce some third element, and that’s what I’m waiting to see. I wait with suspense—with positive excitement; and this is a

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Even Catherine’s entreaties—“‘Oh Father,’ she broke out, ‘don’t you care, even if you do feel so?’”—cannot break her father’s anticipation of “the game,” and he summarily dismisses her pleas: “‘Not a button. Once you marry, it’s quite the same to me when, or where, or why you do it; and if you think to compound for your folly by hoisting your fly in this way, you may spare yourself the trouble’” (99). In a move designed to win the game, Dr. Sloper asks Catherine to accompany him to Europe, hoping that that she will forget her lover after the six-month trip. But his assessment of his daughter’s abilities remains unchanged: “She is about as intelligent as the bundle of shawls,” the Doctor said, her main superiority being that, while the bundle of shawls sometimes got lost, or tumbled out of the carriage, Catherine was always at her post, and had a firm and ample seat. (105) Of course, the European trip does not deter Catherine, and she continues to resist her father’s plans for her. Dr. Sloper’s reaction to her faith in her lover takes the shape of an assessment of her worth: “A year ago, you were perhaps a little limited—a little rustic; but now you have seen everything, and appreciated everything, and you will be a most entertaining companion. We have fattened the sheep for him before he kills it” (109). Catherine, however, is far from sheep-like, and her steadfast faith in Morris, a steadfastness her father had always doubted she possessed, now simply irritates him: “‘She would touch me if she didn’t irritate me . . . . At first I had a good deal of a certain genial curiosity about it; I wanted to see if she really would stick. But, good Lord, one’s curiosity is satisfied! I see she is capable of it, and now she can let go’” (120). When Morris leaves New York, Dr. Sloper is pleased—not because he has won Catherine back, but because, in his estimation, it proves him right: “‘It seems to make you very happy that your daughter’s affections have been trifled with.’ ‘It does,’ said the Doctor; ‘for I had foretold it! It’s a great pleasure to be in the right’” (136). On one level, he has “won” the game, yet Catherine refuses to give him any satisfaction in his victory. She hides from him her devastation and, in so doing, deprives him of much of his pleasure:

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sort of emotion that I didn’t suppose Catherine would ever provide for me. I am really very much obliged to her.” (93)

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The Doctor was both puzzled and disappointed [at Morris’s departure], but he solved his perplexity by saying to himself that his daughter simply misrepresented—justifiably, if one would, but nevertheless, misrepresented—the facts; and he eased off his disappointment, which was that of a man losing a chance for a little triumph that he had rather counted on. (144) Catherine has found a weapon against her father, and his lack of knowledge of what has transpired serves as his ultimate penalty: it was his punishment that he never knew—his punishment, I mean, for the abuse of sarcasm in his relations with his daughter” (145). Still, not content to let matters rest, Dr. Sloper tries to control his daughter from the grave: “[‘]Promise me not to marry Morris Townsend after I am gone . . . . I am altering my will’” (150–1). She refuses, and he exacts the only revenge left to him by “reducing Catherine’s share to a fifth of what he had first bequeathed her,” since “never having spent more than a fraction of her income from this source; so that her fortune is already more than sufficient to attract those scrupulous adventurers whom she has given me reason to believe that she persists in regarding as an interesting class” (152). As Buelens predicts, and not surprisingly, Catherine’s response to her father’s sado-masochistic treatment is hardly inspiring of agency; but, then, neither is it a rebellious response to tyranny. Initially, Catherine feels sorry for Dr. Sloper: “she pitied him for the sorrow she had brought upon him. She held up her head and busied her hands, and went about her daily occupations” (98). Despite his rejection of her engagement, and his refusal to believe that she, herself, can attract a beau, she remains devoted to her father. Throughout her courtship with Morris, she is deeply sorry she has caused him pain: “Her father’s displeasure had cost the girl, as we know, a great deal of deep-welling sorrow—sorrow of the purest and most generous kind, without a touch of resentment or rancor” (101). Yet, even Catherine has her limits, and her loyalty is sorely taxed, when, during her European trip, Dr. Sloper attempts to frighten her into submission: “‘I am very angry . . . . Should you like to be left in such a place as this, to starve?’” (107). The bleak Alpine locale in which he chooses to issue his threat does indeed terrify his daughter: “She wondered what he meant—whether he wished to frighten her. If he did, the place was well chosen: this hard melancholy dell, abandoned by the summer light, made her feel her loneliness. She looked around her, and her heart grew cold” (107). It also makes her realize, as she later confides to Morris, that her father does not love her:

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“He is not very fond of me.” [“]You can tell when a person feels that way. I wouldn’t accuse him if he hadn’t made me feel that way. I don’t accuse him; I just tell you that’s how it is. He can’t help it; we can’t govern our affections . . . . Of course it isn’t my fault; but neither is it his fault. All I mean is, it’s true; and it’s a stronger reason for his never being reconciled than simply his dislike for you.” (117) While Catherine does care “passionately” about her father’s lack of feelings for her, the only change it produces in her is a firm resolve: “[‘]I will never ask him for anything again, or expect anything from him. It would not be natural now[’]” (118). Having made this decision, Catherine goes on much as before, continuing to be a dutiful daughter. When Dr. Sloper tries to entrap her into a promise not to marry Morris after his death, however, his efforts produce an unexpected effect: All her feelings were merged in the sense that he was trying to treat her as he had treated her years before. She had suffered from it then; and now all her experience, all her acquired tranquility and rigidity protested. She had been so humble in her youth that she could now afford to have a little pride, and there was something in this request, and in her father’s thinking himself so free as to make it, that seemed an injury to her dignity. Poor Catherine’s dignity was not aggressive; it never sat in state; but if you pushed far enough you could find it. Her father had pushed very far. (151) It is this final push that hardens Catherine toward her father, and her stubbornness makes her happy: “She knew herself that she was obstinate, and it gave her a certain joy” (151). Even her disinheritance fails to ruffle her newfound calm: “‘Oh no . . . I like it very much. Only I wish it had been expressed a little differently!” (152). Yet, Catherine’s calm reads more like an inability to be hurt, since it would seem to indicate that she has lost the ability to care. It is less her father and his sado-masochistic treatment of his daughter, than Morris’s betrayal that brings Catherine to this state. She, who has survived the cruelty of Dr. Sloper with aplomb, cannot bear it when, after Morris’s initial courtship of her (to which I shall turn shortly), her lover begins to treat her in a fashion not unlike her father’s. Upon her return from Europe, and for the first time, Morris’s words to Catherine indicate an interest in the “game,” with which Dr. Sloper is obsessed: “‘You see, the idea sticks in my crop. I don’t like to be beaten’” (116).

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Catherine reasons: “‘How are you beaten if we marry?’” (116); but Morris brushes her logic aside: “‘with me it is different. I have staked my pride on proving to your father that he is wrong’” (116). Because he cannot win, Morris decides: “‘I must give her up! . . . I certainly say it distinctly enough—brutally and vulgarly enough’” (124). Yet it is Catherine, who has gambled everything, who is the ultimate loser: “‘Morris, I have given up everything’” (132). Although her former lover promises: “‘You shall have everything back’” (132), she has lost the one thing she desires. Unfortunately, it is from Mrs. Penniman that Catherine discerns Morris’s plans, and discovers that Mrs. Penniman has been a party to his feelings, rather than his fiancée: “Ah well . . . if he hasn’t told you” (138). After his departure from New York, Morris favors Catherine with a letter, finally advising her of his decision: he would never again interpose between her generous heart and her brilliant prospects and filial duties . . . . The letter was beautifully written, and Catherine, who kept it for many years after this, was able, when her sense of the bitterness of its meaning and the hollowness of its tone had grown less acute, to admire the grace of its expression. (142–3) After Dr. Sloper’s death, and Catherine’s disinheritance, Morris does return. Attempting to persuade his former fiancée that his plan was merely to grant her time with her father, he appeals to her sympathies: “[‘]You had your quiet life with your father—which was just what I could not make up my mind to rob you of’” (161). He dismisses her wretched final days with Dr. Sloper with a quick: “‘There are worse fates than that!’” (161), and is still unaware of the damage he has inflicted on the object of his “affections” (or perhaps, he just prefers not to know). When Catherine summarily dismisses him, he informs Aunt Penniman: “‘She doesn’t care a button for me—with her confounded dry little manner’” (162), and rejects Mrs. Penniman’s entreaties to try again with a curse: “‘Come back? Damnation!’” (162). The sorrow Catherine suffers at the hands of Morris is subtly handled by the narrator. Initially, she trusts implicitly in her lover, and later is oblivious of his resolve to leave her. As the narrator informs readers: “She had no airs and no arts; she never attempted to disguise her expectancy. She was waiting on his good pleasure, and would wait modestly and patiently; his hanging back at this supreme time might appear strange, but of course he must have a good reason for it” (128). But this innocent

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It was almost the last outbreak of passion of her life; at least, she never indulged in another that the world knew anything about. But this one was long and terrible; she flung herself on the sofa and gave herself up to her grief. She hardly knew what had happened; ostensibly she had only had a difference with her lover, as other girls had had before, and the thing was not only not a rupture, but she was under no obligation to regard it even as a menace. Nevertheless, she felt a wound, even if he had not dealt it; it seemed to her that a mask had suddenly fallen from his face. He had wished to get away from her; he had been angry and cruel, and said strange things, with strange looks. She was smothered and stunned; she buried her head in the cushions, sobbing and talking to herself. (132) Still not quite believing that this is the end, Catherine cannot yet give up on Morris. While she knows intellectually that he has left her, Catherine continues to hope to prove herself wrong. As she looks out the window, yearning for a sight of her lover, her eyes, instead, fall on the familiar figure of her father: “When it had grown dark, Catherine went to the window and looked out; she stood there for half an hour, on the mere chance that he would come up the steps. At last she turned away, for she saw her father come in” (133). Accepting, finally, the reality of her broken engagement, and comprehending that Morris truly has gone from her life: Catherine . . . sat up half the night, as if she still expected to hear Morris Townsend ring at the door. On the morrow this expectation was less unreasonable; but it was not gratified by the reappearance of the young man. Neither had he written; there was not a word of explanation or reassurance. Fortunately for Catherine, she could take refuge from her excitement, which had now become intense in her determination that her father should see nothing of it. (135) The narrator alludes to Catherine’s heartbreak, but does not dramatize it for readers. It is her unusual behavior that indicates the depths of her sorrow. After an angry outburst with Mrs. Penniman, in which Catherine claims that her “[‘]plans have not changed!’” (138), she finds an unexpected relief in her uncharacteristic anger, for the “outbreak of anger and the sense of wrong gave her, while they lasted, the satisfaction

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faith in Morris proves to be her undoing, as the narrator, rather than Catherine, obliquely informs readers:

palgrave advances in henry james studies

that comes from all assertion of force; they hurried her along, and there is always a sort of pleasure in cleaving the air” (140). When Catherine finally receives Morris’s letter, she abandons hope, but her resolve to hide her feelings carries her through her bereavement: “for a long time after she received it, all she had to help her was the determination, daily more rigid, to make no appeal to the compassion of her father” (143). Her heartbreak is absolute, and she is cut to the core: “Nothing could ever undo the wrong or cure the pain that Morris had inflicted on her, and nothing could ever make her feel toward her father as she had in her younger years. There was something dead in her life, and her duty was to try and fill the void” (148–9). Catherine does manage to fill the void by keeping herself busy. She takes on volunteer work, contributes to charities, and generally makes herself useful to others. When Morris returns, so does the pain: “I can’t forget—I don’t forget . . . . You treated me too badly, I felt it very much; I felt it for years.” And then she went on, with her wish to show him that he must not come to her this way, “I can’t begin again—I can’t take it up. Everything is dead and buried. It was too serious; it made a great change in my life.” (161) But she has buried her love for him along with her father, and now, for her, Morris “was the man who had been everything, and yet this person was nothing. How long ago it was—how old she had grown—how much she had lived! She had lived on something that was connected with him, and she had consumed it in doing so” (159). After having shown him the door, Catherine returns to what has become her life: “Catherine, meanwhile, in the parlor, picking up her morsel of fancy-work, had seated herself with it again—for life, as it were” (162). Given this conclusion, Washington Square hardly seems an auspicious venue for the application of “oblique possession.” Yet, despite the outcome of her love affair (and her life), I would argue that there are moments in the novel when Catherine’s surrender to Morris effects demonstrations of self-possession and agency. And, if this very bleak tale of suppressed happiness and servility can support Buelens’s assertions (even in part), then it bodes well for the implementation of his theoretical constructs in other works. At the beginning of the text, Catherine is a naïve girl, overwhelmed by the attractive Morris. When he first speaks to her, she “had never heard any one—especially any young man—talk just like that. It was the way a young man might talk in a novel; or, better still, in a play,

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on the stage” (15–16). She is also in awe of her father, so much so that she contends: “‘I never contradict him’” (32). A model of the perfect submissive daughter, seemingly her raison d’être is to surrender herself to others’ wills. Her love for Morris assumes the form of acquiescence to his desires, conforming to the master/slave pattern of which Buelens speaks: “If she had been told she was in love, she would have been a good deal surprised; for she had an idea that love was an eager and exacting passion, and her own heart was filled in these days with the impulse of self-effacement and sacrifice” (34). When, shortly after, Morris reveals his love for her, Catherine is so discombobulated, she cannot think clearly: As I have tried to explain, she was not eager and exacting; she took what was given her from day to day; and if the delightful custom of her lover’s visits, which yielded her a happiness in which confidence and timidity were strangely blended, had suddenly come to an end, she would not only not have spoken of herself as one of the forsaken, but she would not have thought of herself as one of the disappointed. After Morris had kissed her, the last time he was with her, as a ripe assurance of his devotion, she begged him to go away, to leave her alone, to let her think . . . . But Catherine’s meditations had lacked certain coherence. She felt his kisses on her lips and on her cheeks for a long time afterward; the sensation was rather an obstacle than an aid to reflection. (45) Catherine’s problems, as well as the beginning of her self possession, stem from her desire to please everyone. Since she cannot please her father by marrying Morris, she is faced with a quandary, which ultimately leads to a confrontation with her initial “master.” The idea of challenging Dr. Sloper with a decision he dislikes confounds Catherine, and, like a subordinate, she cowers from facing him: She put off deciding and choosing; before the vision of a conflict with her father she dropped her eyes and sat motionless, holding her breath and waiting. It made her heart beat; it was intensely painful. When Morris kissed her and said these things—that also made her heart beat; but this was worse, and it frightened her. (45) But Catherine finds strength in her love for Morris, and it allows her to consider disobeying her father’s wishes: “It pleased Catherine to think

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that she could be brave for his sake, and in her satisfaction she even gave a little smile” (45). In the face of Dr. Sloper’s disapproval, Catherine attempts to win his approbation by becoming an ideal daughter, which for her, means embracing servility. Unlike her earlier performance, however, this time there is a split in her consciousness: it had become vivid to her that there was a great excitement in trying to be a good daughter. She had an entirely new feeling, which may be described as a state of expectant suspense about her own actions. She watched herself as she would have watched another person, and wondered what she would do. It was as if this other person, who was both herself and not herself, had suddenly sprung into being, inspiring her with a natural curiosity as to the performance of untested functions. (66–7) Her split subjectivity, or the division between herself and “this other person,” proves to be the beginning of Catherine’s rebellion against Dr. Sloper, and, concomitantly, the beginning of her self-possession. First, she believes her ability to submit will become a means of reconciling her conflicting desires to please: she could at least be good, and if she were only good enough, Heaven would invent some way of reconciling all things—the dignity of her father’s errors and the sweetness of her own confidence, the strict performance of her filial duties, and the enjoyment of Morris Townsend’s affection. (68) But submission does not win over her father, and she starts to rebel against her former master. As her resolve strengthens, Catherine finds the courage to disobey Dr. Sloper, despite her continuing belief in his good judgment: “She had an immense respect for her father, and she felt that to displease him would be a misdemeanor analogous to an act of profanity in a great temple: but her purpose had slowly ripened, and she believed that her prayers had purified it of his violence” (79). When Dr. Sloper still refuses to consider her request to marry Morris, Catherine’s determination hardens, and she repudiates the claims he has upon her: The poor girl had an admirable sense of honor, and from the moment she had brought herself to the point of violating her father’s wish, it

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seemed to her that she had no right to enjoy his protection. It was on her conscience that she ought to live under his roof only so long as she conformed to his wisdom . . . . She could not give up the young man, so she must leave the home; and the sooner the object of her preference offered her another, the sooner her situation would lose its awkward twist. (97) Even her father notices her newfound resolve: “it seemed even more than worthy of a young woman who had revealed the quality of unaggressive obstinacy” (100). Ultimately, Catherine’s inability to please both her father and her lover lead her to abandon one for the other. This is not a moment of “oblique possession” in Buelens’s terms, though, since she turns from one master to another. Catherine chooses Morris, to whom she surrenders herself fully, believing that she has fulfilled her debt to her father: for the first time, after he had dismissed with such contemptuous brevity her apology for being a charge upon him, there was a spark of anger in her grief. She had felt his contempt; it had scorched her; that speech about her bad taste had made her ears burn for three days. During this period she was less considerate; she had an idea—a rather vague one, but it was agreeable to her sense of injury—that now she was absolved from penance, and might do what she chose. (101) Catherine, now, “deemed herself absolved” (105) from her filial duties, and tells Aunt Penniman: “‘I am braver than I was. You asked me if I had changed; I have changed in that way’” (113). The timid Mrs. Penniman is taken aback by the change in Catherine and in Catherine’s newfound authority: [“]Nothing is changed—nothing but my feeling about father. I don’t mind nearly so much now. I have been as good as I could, but he doesn’t care. Now I don’t care either. I don’t know whether I have grown bad; perhaps I have. But I don’t care for that. I have come home to be married—that’s all I know . . . .” This was a more authoritative speech that she had ever heard on her niece’s lips, and Mrs. Penniman was proportionately startled. She was, indeed, a little awe-struck, and the force of the girl’s emotion and resolution left her nothing to reply. (114–15)

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While Mrs. Penniman declares Catherine to be “very stupid” (127) in her continued belief in Morris’s commitment to her, she also acknowledges that “Catherine, in growing older, had become a person to be reckoned with” (153). Importantly, it is actually the formerly submissive Catherine who (inadvertently) provides Morris with an ultimatum as to their future. Her trust in her lover, which facilitates her rejection of Dr. Sloper, reinforces her strength and bravery—to the extent that she is able to state, unreservedly, that she will marry Morris, but she will never ask her father for money: “Please don’t Morris; please don’t . . . . We must ask no favors of him— we must ask nothing more. He won’t relent, and nothing good will come of it . . . . I feel separated from my father . . . . It is a great thing to be separated like that from your father, when you have worshipped him before. It has made me very unhappy . . . . Then I made up my mind . . . . We must be very happy together, and we must not seem to depend upon his forgiveness. And Morris, Morris, you must never despite me.” (117–18) While, in another text, such a resolve might appear insignificant, for Catherine to confront Morris, even if she does not realize what is at stake, is remarkable, and is the point at which, I would argue, “oblique possession” occurs. In surrendering herself to Morris, she frees herself— from Morris’s demands upon her and from those of her father. Like Isabel, who yields to Goodwood’s kiss, only to leave for Rome, Catherine acquiesces to Morris, but with the proviso that he marry her as she is, in a fashion similar to Densher in The Wings of the Dove. Unfortunately, Catherine has chosen the wrong man and the wrong strategy, since Morris will not marry her without money. But his refusal of her, on her terms, occurs later, and Catherine’s (misplaced) faith in her lover does not detract from her ability, here, to take a stand. Although there is little jouissance, as Buelens argues there should be in such a moment, thus mitigating Catherine’s situation as a paradigm of oblique possession, she does find self-possession, which in this cowering young girl, is by no means insignificant. Moreover, her newfound agency allows Catherine to continue to disobey her father, for she refuses to submit to his insistence that she not marry Morris after his death, even though she has no plans to do so. She may end with her embroidery and Aunt Penniman as companions, yet she has made a choice and acts as an agent; she is no longer an object of parental control or of a marriage proposal.

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Hence, while Catherine’s situation does not provide a fully-developed example of oblique possession, since there is no triumph resting “on the participation of both master and slave . . . . in an overbearing scene of desire that exacts the grateful surrender of those it encompasses” (301), it is still queer in its disruption of gender norms: “she mingled freely in the usual gayeties of the town, and she became at last an inevitable figure at all respectable entertainments. She was greatly liked, and as time went on she grew to be a sort of kindly maiden-aunt to the younger portion of society” (149). Catherine’s life, by the conclusion of the novel, ruptures “dichotomies of sexuality and identity” (Buelens 301), in that she chooses to live alone, and derives some pleasure from being her own master. By the same token, and from a heterosexual perspective, Isabel’s jouissance (The Portrait of a Lady) results in an uncertain future; and Densher loses Kate in The Wings of the Dove, even if he gains a cherished memory of Milly. In a homosocial context, Roderick (in Roderick Hudson) dies, leaving Rowland alone; and Verena abandons Olive for Basil Ransom in The Bostonians. Washington Square, in its mitigated dramatization of oblique possession, highlights a potential problem with Buelens’s theory, since it does not result in a grateful surrender of all parties, nor is that surrender borne out in the other novels cited. Nonetheless, in the context of these works and the times in which they were written, self-possession for women is itself a major disruption of social codes; and male desire, closeted as it must be at this time, cannot be achieved in any prominent fashion. This does not imply that it never can be, but that it cannot be at this time, especially in the hands of an author like James. Perhaps The Golden Bowl, wherein Maggie exerts a powerful agency and earns back her husband (if she loses her father and exiles Charlotte), offers a more positive (and less celibate) conclusion, or from a non-heterosexual stance, one must turn to the works of later authors for oblique possession to play itself out. In this novel, Catherine’s triumph, however small, is still an achievement, and while it does not culminate in a final scene wherein Catherine and Morris share “an overbearing scene of desire that exacts the grateful surrender of all those it encompasses” (Buelens 3), it does enable Catherine to refuse her lover in the conclusion, and to lead a life, which, while devoid of jouissance, is still a life of her own. Catherine’s oblique (self-) possession of herself offers her a choice, even if it is a choice her lover cannot accept. Indeed, to make such a choice, for this woman, who began life with one urgent motivation, consisting of her “deepest desire . . . to please” Dr. Sloper, and a conception of happiness comprising the knowledge “that she had succeeded in pleasing him” (7),

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is a major accomplishment, and an accomplishment that might escape notice were it not for the theoretical lens provided by Buelens’s theory. If Catherine ends with her “fancy-work,” that embroidery can now be read metaphorically, for somehow, despite the odds, Catherine has managed to stitch together a life of her own. As I have demonstrated here, Buelens’s theory is useful from a feminist perspective, but there is little about this novel that is obviously “queer.” How, then, does oblique possession bring together feminism and queer theory? At the beginning of his article, Buelens states that he chooses The American Scene as a test site for his argument, precisely because “the very absence of meaningful encounters between human beings in this travelogue makes it possible to concentrate on what is queer about James’s carnal knowing without immediately establishing the link to a possible homosexual identification—or disavowal” (302). Moreover, the critic notes that he is in search of an eroticism that “actively transgresses the dichotomies of (sexual) identity that queer theory has been foremost in challenging” (302). Since, “‘oblique’ is a possible synonym of ‘queer’” (303), Buelens broadens the scope of queerness—as critics like Judith Butler have urged, and thus allowing for situations like Catherine’s to fall under its umbrella.2 Certainly Catherine’s self-possession, which stems from her erotic attraction to and ostensibly shared desire with Morris, is oblique. Even so, while contexts are of the utmost importance, in that Catherine’s position, much like Isabel and Goodwood’s situation, differs markedly from Rowland and Roderick’s or from Olive and Verena’s, each of these instances do disrupt and transgress gender norms, and if that is the central question of queer theory, as Buelens and others argue it is, then feminism too shares this concern. Consequently, to concentrate on the disruptions, which vary critically in divergent contexts, is to bridge the gulf between feminist concerns and those of queer theory. And, in so doing, oblique possession offers a useful paradigm for pulling together the commonalities of these theoretical approaches, as, contingently, it generates a demand for respecting their critical differences. This is certainly one way in which James criticism might productively develop.

notes 1. Even so, for sophisticated analyses of James from a queer perspective, see: Stevens; Haralson; Person. 2. See Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.”

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Bell, Millicent. The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. ——. Edith Wharton and Henry James: The Story of Their Friendship. New York: George Braziller, 1965. ——. Ed. Hawthorne and the Real: Bicentennial Essays. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2005. ——. New Essays on Hawthorne’s Major Tales. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. Blair, Sara. Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1996. Buelens, Gert. “Henry James’s Oblique Possession: Plottings of Desire and Mastery in The American Scene.” PMLA. 1116 (2001): 300–13. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993. ——. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Fletcher, John. “The Haunted Closet: Henry James’s Queer Spectrality.” Textual Practice. 14 (2000): 53–80. Haralson, Eric. Henry James and Queer Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Henke, Richard. “The Embarrassment of Melodrama: Masculinity in the Early James.” Novel. 28 (1995): 257–83. Horne, Philip. “Henry James: The Master and the ‘Queer Affair’ of ‘The Pupil.’” Critical Quarterly 37 (1995): 75–92. James, Henry. Washington Square. 1881. New York: Bantam, 1965. Levander, Caroline, “‘Much Less a Book Than a State of Vision’: The Visibility of Race in Henry James.” Henry James Review 23 (2002): 265–72. Levine, Robert. “Road to Africa: Frederick Douglass’s Rome.” Roman Holidays: American Writers and Artists in Nineteenth-Century Italy. Eds. Robert K. Martin and Leland S. Person. Iowa City: Iowa UP, 2002: 226–46. Martin, Robert K. “Age of Innocence: Edith Wharton, Henry James, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.” Henry James Review 21 (2000): 56–62. O’Brien, Sharon. “Introduction.” The Song of the Lark. New York: Signet, 1991: v–xviii. Person, Jr., Leland S. Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP, 2003. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1985. Stevens, Hugh. Henry James and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. Walton, Priscilla L. The Disruption of the Feminine in Henry James. Toronto and London: Toronto UP, 1992.

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eric savoy Henry James formally became a gay writer in 1991 when he was “outed,” if you will, by Edmund White, the editor of The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction. The publisher’s timing was exactly right: Faber capitalized on the growth of a coherent and self-identified gay readership—and on the rise of academic gay studies, which required anthologies for its proliferating courses—and found its ideal editor in Edmund White who, at the peak of his career as a gay novelist and critic, possessed the cultural authority to establish a definitive gay canon. From the perspective of the James critical industry, it was nothing short of momentous that White decided to begin his chronological unfolding of gay fiction with James’s story “The Pupil,” which he chose, perhaps, because it appeared exactly a century before White’s exercise in canonical legitimation. (Literary historiography likes to organize itself in terms of centuries, a temporal measure on which it can impose a certain teleological order.) Readers who expected a story about homosexuality were frankly puzzled by White’s choice of “The Pupil” for their initiation; by the light of late twentieth-century categories of identity, there are no “homosexuals”—according to our current understanding of this identity-category—in James’s fiction. Disgruntled students, echoing Gertrude Stein, complained “there’s no there there.” What is there in “The Pupil”?—a narrative of the relationship between a tutor named Pemberton and the eponymous pupil, Morgan Moreen, whose impoverished family cannot pay the tutor and so, instead, in some obscure way offers up the boy himself—can be described as a pedophilic attachment that remains, in erotic terms, potential but unrealized. An attentive reading of the tale will generate highly vexed questions: Is the relationship unrealized in the story, or in its narrative? Why does 100

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the telling of the story seem to come unglued from what might have happened in the story? And finally, where in the text can the reader locate evidence—either solid or spectral—for a pederastic plot, or at least the presence of something that we might recognize as homoerotic desire? To take the measure of these inevitable questions is to comprehend the distance between the certainties of gay literary culture and the fascinating uncertainties of what began to be called—coincidentally, around 1992— Queer Theory.1 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick observes in Tendencies, her book of the following year, that the concept of “sexual identity” is supposed to organize a wide range of experiential and cultural differences into “a seamless and univocal whole.” But it doesn’t. “Queer,” she speculates, “can refer to the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically” (8). If this is true of personal histories, it is also a helpful approach to literary texts that came out in historical periods that precluded their “coming out”—like those of Henry James, written around the turn of the twentieth century when “the homosexual” was emerging, precipitously in Anglo-American culture, as a criminal and altogether monstrous deviation, as an abject impossibility. “Queer,” then, cannot denote “gay,” which remains a crucially self-affirmative political nomination. At the same time, however, while “queer” may be said to exceed the coherences of “gay”—messily, to be sure—it necessarily retains its essential origin in sexual nonconformity, in the realm of the perverse and the defiantly non-normative. In our own time, as Sedgwick observes, “‘queer’ seems to hinge . . . radically and explicitly on a person’s undertaking particular, performative acts of experimental self-perception and filiation” (9). This stands as an accurate profile of the critical profession, too; our collective affiliation as Queer Theorists, and the work we produce under its avowals, is “performative” in the sense that our speech acts make a material difference in the re-valuation of gay, and proto-gay, cultural history. For Queer Jamesians—and here I return to the vexations of “The Pupil”—our explicit self-constitution as academic subjects turns upon an investment in the entirely implicit and oblique affiliations that characterize our common “subject,” the discursive world of Henry James. In taking up the questions I posed about the baffling qualities of “The Pupil”—that is, the apparent gap between what the story promises and what the narrative occludes or suspends—I offer, by way of beginning, a brief, initiatory object lesson in queer reading. James aligns his point of view with that of the tutor, Pemberton, who has occasion to wonder

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what his pupil, Morgan, might “know” about—what?—let’s call it X. It is typical of James’s narrative method, of course, to refuse access to Morgan’s consciousness; it is also typical, though in more complex ways, to refuse to specify in Pemberton’s narrated monologues what X might signify. Could it be Morgan’s awareness of his ridiculous family? of the nature of Pemberton’s interest in him—an “interest” of which Pemberton himself remains, in narrative terms, unconscious? of the desires experienced by the adolescent body? of the potential erotic dimension of friendship? Such questions admit no direct answer, and yet it is impossible to read the tale in any meaningful way without essaying their address. The value of X will accrue, in the reader’s experience, in fits and starts. Consider the following passage, remarkable—even for James—for its figurative sophistication and connotative richness: When [Pemberton] tried to figure to himself the morning twilight of childhood, so as to deal with it safely, he perceived that it was never fixed, never arrested, that ignorance, at the instant one touched it, was already flushing faintly into knowledge, that there was nothing that at a given moment you could say a clever child didn’t know. It seemed to him that he both knew too much to imagine Morgan’s simplicity and too little to disembroil his tangle. (437) The point, generally, of this passage is to locate desire and its attendant knowledge in time, so as to demarcate the boundaries of what one can “safely” know. But such specification is impossible: there is no “time” apart from the vicissitudes of the temporal, and therefore, human relationality is limited by the fact that there is no arbitrary distinction to be made between “ignorance” and “knowledge,” which in any case do not stand in binary relation to each other. To compound Pemberton’s problem, at this moment he suffers from a fairly typical mode of Jamesian embarrassment, by which I mean the odd conflation of “too much” and “too little”; clearly, he has come too far to imagine that Morgan doesn’t know X, but not far enough to resolve or to actualize X. A certain tension arises, then, between Pemberton—who remains suspended, perpetually, between excess and insufficiency—and the changes ushered in by the temporal. So far, my analysis is a fairly straightforward deconstruction of what I would call the temporality of epistemology, the collapse of ostensibly binarized categories into each other, which gives rise to the suspension of knowledge, if not of “knowingness.” My reading takes a more pointedly queer turn when I scrutinize the slipperiness of James’s metaphor—his tropic economy—which figures

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the problem of knowingness in rather more ontological terms. Morgan’s passage from childhood to adolescence is figured (“safely”[!]) as “the morning twilight” that is never still, never “arrested”: James anchors the metaphor in relation to the ostensible referent by claiming that “ignorance, at the instant one touched it, was already flushing faintly into knowledge.” Most intriguing is the fact that James embeds other, much more volatile and suggestive, metaphors into the overarching trajectory of his figure and syntax: it requires a re-reading, with different emphases, which amounts to a double reading. I shall open up this other semantic register by shifting the emphasis: “ignorance, at the instant one touched it, was already flushing faintly into knowledge.” The faint flush concludes the work of the dominant metaphor, that signifying of “morning twilight” or the “dawn” of an access to knowledge. But it smuggles into its tropic economy the distinctly somatic flush, or blush, of a body that registers, by this affect, its movement from innocence to experience. Moreover, this blush—of shame? of pleasure? of both?—is prompted by its syntactic relation to the prior, and determining, “touch” of the innocent by the hand of experience. At this point, metaphor itself opens up into other, far less stable tropes: both personification, as the dawn becomes a blushing body that is touched by the touching hand, and of course synecdoche, as the adult hand and the pre-adolescent body become attached to Pemberton and to Morgan respectively. If, as I have said, an explictly queer critical agenda operates in relation to an essentially implicit Jamesian discourse, then queer work on James can proceed only by a species of close reading that I have described elsewhere as “queer formalism.”2 The point of such analysis is to locate an ephemeral—but nonetheless specifiable—homosexual “subject” on the far side of James’s thematics, in the nuanced unfolding of volatile trope in complexly crafted syntax. I understand James’s figurative language as volatile because here, as elsewhere, the representative contract of such tropes as metaphor is violated in ways that are entirely uncanny: they begin in one register, but slip or slide into another which, like synecdoche or prosopopeia, operates under a rather different protocol of signification. To track Queer James, then, is to attend closely to the residue of his figurative language, the imagistic suggestiveness of his lexicon; what endures as fundamentally queer in such discourse is its inexorable movement toward that twilight zone of signification called connotation. Clearly, there is no easy distinction to be made between a proto-homosexual thematic in James’s writing and his queer strategies of narrative “gesturing” to what remains, finally, merely potential, merely suggestive. And, from the point of view of critical practice, there is no way

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of separating a deconstructive mode of analysis from a queer receptivity that finds riches in what might seem to be rather a thin textual residue. Finally the queer reader, like Pemberton, is left with the cold comfort that “there was nothing that a given moment you could say a clever child didn’t know.” By the queer calculus of James’s double negatives, “nothing” means nothing less than “everything”—but everything, as Jamesian characters are wont to say, early and late, is nothing. As a strategy of the closet, such chiasmus might speak to Pemberton’s desire to contemplate such matters “safely”; as a queer syntax of inversion, the sheer congruity of “everything” and “nothing” (in particular) marks also both the deconstructive impulse inherent in queer theory, and the fundamental queerness of deconstruction itself. James’s metaphorical framing of uncertain recognition and impossible knowledge in the temporal matrix of “morning twilight” might serve to explain, by analogy, the challenges of Queer Theory as an analytical field method. Hence the title of this essay. In French, the figurative expression “entre chien et loup” denotes, literally, twilight. But like Shakespeare’s “the twilight of such day / As after sunset fadeth in the west /Which by and by black night doth take away” (Sonnet 73), the French idiom invokes beautifully a particularly liminal temporality, between “sunset fadeth” and “black night,” between the time of the dog and the time of the wolf, when the perceptive faculties are most awakened and, paradoxically, most fallible. Zoologically, of course, dogs are closely related to wolves, but under certain conditions, the one might be confused with the other; also, as the time of haunting, the phrase connotes the appearance of something more menacing, more replete with symbolic significance, that is neither one nor the other. It is the time of day to be on one’s guard, to entertain the speculations that arise from appearance, but to distrust them. In what follows, I shall situate Queer James in various ways “entre chien et loup”: as perhaps the most important, and the most instructive, writer in the Anglo-American gay canon, but whose qualifications as a gay writer are present only in complex and indirect ways, who requires us to approach those qualifications obliquely and, it must be said, with a certain amount of qualification. To begin, then: what did I mean when I claimed, in my opening sentence, that James “formally” became a gay writer in 1991? What evolving tendencies in Jamesian scholarship and life-writing made possible his “coming out”? Every generation of readers and critics has produced its account of the “real” Henry James. Although the emphasis upon James’s “difficulty” has been constant, successive schools have articulated James’s value

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according to the prevailing model of literature’s uses for broad cultural understanding. Therefore, it is not surprising that the American New Critics took up what F. O. Matthiessen called “The Religion of Consciousness” in his pioneering study of 1944, Henry James: The Major Phase. Matthiessen’s metaphor encapsulates the critical ideology of his time, which approached high literary art like James’s as the secular sacred, particularly when, as in the big novels from The Portrait of a Lady onward, James dramatizes the fine discriminations of consciousness as it moves toward some grand moral enlightenment. The New Critics established the academic protocols by which James continued for a long time to be read: as the transitional writer between realism and incipient modernism, James’s experiments with narrative form are requisite to a grasp of literary history, just as “form” itself is subservient to his characters’ education about the treachery of the world. Recently, the legacy of the New Critical version of Henry James has been discerned and dismissed as so much outmoded cultural baggage, if not oppressively toxic residue, that prevents a “true” understanding of James’s cultural import. Ross Posnock complains, with justification, that “a cramped aura of sanctity has grown up around what might be called James’s cultural presence”; if the term “aura” suggests a “sacrosanct inviolability, [then] the Jamesian aura diminishes the novelist by repressing some of the deepest impulses of his art and life” (The Trial of Curiosity 81). If it now seems beyond question that New Critical work consciously or unconsciously invented a “safe” Henry James—an icon of Anglo-American artistic fastidiousness with a tragic vision of human experience—in order to sustain the academic privileges of the white, upper-middle-class, heteronormative academic class, and the nostalgic yearnings of that class, it is also true that the recent, emphatic rejection of anything “like” New Critical approaches has resulted in a certain impoverishment of the discipline. For the desire to resuscitate an “unrepressed” Henry James has entailed a pervasive suspicion of formalism—of careful, sustained attention to James’s strange compositional methods—which continues to be stigmatized as part of the false Jamesian “aura.” Deconstruction, too, has fallen upon hard times, as it came to be regarded as an extension of formalism’s false consciousness, as merely belletristic, as opposed to the more solid realities embraced by the New Historicism and by political criticism generally.3 During the 1990s, then, the liberationist agenda required that criticism shed its repression and account for a recognizably gay Henry James.4 If James proved to be a recalcitrant subject for such narratives, shying away from the full monty that such revisionism desired and demanded, such work proceeded by repressing in turn the inordinate formalist demands

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that James makes upon the reader—his very “difficulty,” in short. There exists no clearly congruent relation between gay James and queer James; often, the one seems fully articulable only at the expense of the other. Often—but not invariably, as I shall demonstrate. One way of understanding the vexed relations between the gay and the queer projects—ostensibly those of similarity and overlap, but practically marked by opposition and a certain hostility—is to trace the genealogy of the split in the evolution of literary theory more generally. At stake here is the distinctly different way in which gay studies and queer theory conceptualize the erotic as an object of literary scrutiny. The former understands the homoerotic as essential to the author’s self-identification (or, in the earlier historical field, characteristic of the author’s observable affiliation and desire), which plays itself out demonstrably in the author’s work. Queer theory is suspicious of such coherent linkages between the life and the work, and tends to locate the erotic in the discursive field of writing, in its performative effects, or—particularly, again, in the pre-liberationist historical field—in the often murky register of sexual themes, as opposed to a clear and easily ascertainable sexual referent. This distinction, which has been played out for some time in gay and queer critical practices respectively, was largely determined by the divergence in French theory between the historiographical theory of Michel Foucault and the ludic, language-centered, proto-deconstructive model of textual economy that was associated with Roland Barthes. Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, particularly the enormously influential first volume, La Volonté de Savoir of 1978, argues that the nineteenth century’s regulation of sexuality accrued power through the proliferation of knowledge about non-normative sexualities, which gradually stabilized as “identities” only in the ensuing century. Through what he calls “an incorporation of perversions and a new specification of individuals,” the broad cultural model of homosexuality shifted from being merely “a category of forbidden acts” to being embodied in “a personage,” with a distinctive “past, a case history, and a morphology.” In brief, while “the sodomite had been a temporary aberration, the homosexual was now a species” (42–3). From a queer point of view, such a “species” is a too-convenient, overly coherent theoretical construct. While Foucault’s evolutionary model of the broad taxonomies of sexuality is indisputable, it is marked by its own problematic volonté—that of the grand, sweeping, historiographical gesture, teleological in its scope. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick points out, in a move that is a foundational departure for her own exploration of the precisely incoherent register of (homo)sexuality, while

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recent gay male historiography, influenced by Foucault, has been especially good at unpacking and interpreting those parts of the nineteenth-century systems of classification that clustered most closely around what current taxonomies construe as “the homosexual,” the Foucauldian template is not particularly adept at “unpacking” more complex literary discourses. In narratives of, for example, the late-Victorian bachelor—a cultural site of anxiety, indeterminacy, and a certain “homosexual panic,” which she conceptualizes as “the treacherous middle stretch” of the homosocial continuum—“a different and less distinctly sexualized range of categories needs to be opened up” (Epistemology of the Closet 187–8). In practice, much of Sedgwick’s work was to render problematic the very category of “category,” to dispel its easy certainties and comfortable recognizability. The broad effect of her theoretical modeling and cultural analysis has been to trouble the generic consistency of “gay,” to transform “queer” from an adjective into a critically-performative verb that engages less with historical taxonomies and wide-sweeping discourses than with narrative problems, occlusions, and impossibilities. However, there is more to be said about the reach of Foucauldian historiography into the Jamesian field, particularly its method of opening up the terrain of biography for a gay-affirmative account of the cross-currents in which Henry James found himself. If Foucault’s mapping of sexual history gave visibility to, and legitimated, the social construction of the homosexual in the course of the nineteenth century, it also privileged the illumination of the subject’s verifiable context and the study of extra-literary discourses. In the case of literary figures like Henry James, this new historiography—which lucidly situated “the author” within the formative influences of discursive sexual regulation—prompted revisionist criticism, historical work, and biography that understood its project rather differently from old-fashioned accounts of the author’s exceptional mission or creative genius.5 Instead, the new scholarship reasoned, the value of text was its embeddedness in, and responsiveness to, the prevailing currents of cultural context: if a New Critical or formalist model of textuality was subordinated to the emphasis upon context, it was because there was really no division to be made between literature as a historical artifact and “history” more broadly conceived, in Foucault’s terms, as the regulatory (or contestatory) power located in period-specific knowledge, itself deployed and embodied in discourse. The contribution of such reconstructive historiography to a

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sharpened understanding of the pressures upon the homosexual writer at the fin de siècle is enormous. For example, it is now possible to grasp quite clearly how—and more importantly, why—James responded in such an anxious and unsympathetic manner to Oscar Wilde’s public disgrace. Although Ed Cohen’s Talk on the Wilde Side: Toward a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities (1993) says nothing about James’s reaction to the sensational trials in the mid1890s, his analysis of the media’s reporting of the courtroom proceedings opens up real possibilities for a fuller critical and historical account of James’s habitual discretions and evasions. Because journalists labored under the inderdiction of obscenity, they had to negotiate the limits of social acceptability and yet communicate the sexual implications that made the trial newsworthy and marketable: thus “the newspapers necessarily developed a compensatory set of signifying practices to invoke the unprintable signifier without naming it directly,” with the result that “the journalistic text constructed a complex web . . . that endlessly deferred specifying the unnamed and unnameable accusations while explicitly denoting them as an absent site of signification that made their stories meaningful” (144). Cohen reconstructs the historical discursive field under the sign of James—not only implicitly, in ways that are recognizable as the Jamesian narrative situation par excellence, and which led to a re-reading of James’s late 1890s fictions in a new register—but also literally. For Cohen takes his epigraph for this section of his research from The Ambassadors: “That was the consequence of their being too bad to be talked about, and was the accompaniment, by the same token, of a deep conception of their badness” (126). In erasing the boundaries of generic difference between fictional and journalistic text, Cohen returns James’s habitual speech acts and modes of discourse to the matrix of history in extraordinarily useful ways. The same can be said of Wendy Graham’s more diverse lines of historical reconstruction in Henry James’s Thwarted Love (1999). Seeking nothing less than to provide “the richest account, up to the present, of the cultural conditions that produced Henry James” (7), Graham situates the author and his works within “the discursive frameworks that emerged and matured within his epoch” (2). She demonstrates persuasively that James’s dominant traits—which she defines as effeminacy, celibacy, sublimation of eros, and a nervous distress characteristic of a fear of “degeneracy”— ought to be understood “as exemplary of nineteenth-century sexuality rather than as idiosyncratic” (4). In a wide-ranging survey that charts the influence of contemporary discourses of “dissipation” on Roderick Hudson, of “degeneration” and/as feminism in The Bostonians, and “sexual

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dissidence” in The Princess Casamassima, Graham repeatedly aligns her exemplary historicism with an antihomophobic, author-centered, gaystudies project, which depends upon two axioms. First, “James’s curiosity about sexual matters was seemingly insatiable” (27): James wrote very little that was not, directly or indirectly, shaped by the prevailing debates on the right channeling of libidinal energy in his time. Secondly, his perspective on these debates was, for all the diversity of his narrative points of view and shifting sexual politics, conclusively determined by his self-awareness in relation to his historical context: “James’s abstention from full genital contact did not deprive him of a homosexual identity” (28). In claiming and celebrating the richness of this proto-gay identity, Graham goes much farther in assimilating Henry James into Gay Studies than any other critic. Her clarity, historiographical deftness, and political firmness are bracing and instructive. If one seeks a full account of the complexities of “gay identity” in the late nineteenth century, Graham’s is the most comprehensive. At the end of the day, however, it would seem that all gay-affirmative historical reconstruction is dominated by what I would call the biographical imperative: that is, the overarching project of establishing a coherent argument for what Graham calls James’s “homosexual identity.”6 Whether this is an asset or a limitation—or, perhaps more accurately, an inevitable tendency of all author-centered literary criticism—depends upon one’s political agenda and particular scholarly orientation, and the way in which the latter unfolds in the light of the former. In the case of Henry James, the impulse toward biographical revision arises from two circumstances that have long influenced his reception. First, one cannot overestimate the attraction of the historical personage of the celibate writer: like Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, and Proust, James prompts a high degree of speculation about the impulses and desires that are not so much concealed by celibacy as rendered precisely as something to be looked into. If it is axiomatic that the hidden and the repressed will return, in one way or another, then sexuality—fulfilled or blighted, as the case may be—endures stubbornly as the proper pot of gold at the end of the biographical rainbow, as what our culture understands as the site of explanatory plenitude. Secondly, if ever a writer’s life were in dire need of salvaging and re-telling, that life would be Henry James’s. For most of the second half of the twentieth century, the indispensable and authoritative construction of “Henry James” was Leon Edel’s massive five-volume biography, published between 1953 and 1972. Rarely have individual scholars been able to retain exclusive access to archival material for so long and consequently, by a kind of vested right, to determine so

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thoroughly the questions and issues that shaped the expanding critical industry. So influential was Leon Edel that a profile of him published by The New Yorker in 1971 was entitled “Chairman of the Board.” Edel was a champion of the new “psychological biography” that was in vogue at mid-century, and his life of James was narrated under a strong thesis: that Henry’s life was explicable in light of his lifelong competition with his brother, William. In Edel’s version, the matter of James’s complicated sexuality—when not foreclosed or pre-empted entirely—was treated as a self-subverting heterosexuality. Just as James lived most of his life in Europe as a resident alien (in order to purchase some distance between himself and his bossy brother), he remained fundamentally “alienated” from (hetero)sexuality in order to devote himself to artistic production. To maintain this pose required more than a few biographical fictions. Edel does much, for instance, to mythologize the attractions of Minnie Temple, the original American Girl, from whose premature death James never quite recovered, and who haunts his mature fictions. This is not to say that Edel lies; rather, one might argue that his purported “psychological biography” doesn’t grasp the difference between desire and identification: for who can read, say, The Portrait of a Lady and fail to understand that James’s identificatory investment in Isabel Archer is one of being rather than having? To put this another way, Edel can approach James’s effeminacy only in the rigid matrix of failed heterosexuality, whereas a queer recognition—even a narrowly author-centered one—might grasp James’s investment in iconic female characters in more imaginatively suggestive ways. However, rather than accuse Edel of a rather simple and volitional homophobia, as some critics have recently done, it is important to situate Edel historically: my own researches have uncovered the negotations he sustained with the James family, beginning in the late 1930s, by which he obtained access to the archival material in return for a tacit promise not to reveal anything embarrassing. Edel—like the James family, who worried about their royalties; and like his generation of critics—was shaped by a virulently homophobic literary culture. Such forgiveness, however, should not be over-hasty. Edel’s singlevolume condensation of the biography, published in 1985, offered a few compensations for the repressive matrix of his earlier work that, by this point, had earned some criticism. While Edel acknowledged the strangely passionate but highly avuncular nature of James’s relations, late in life, with younger men, his protracted failure to understand James’s sexuality as constitutive of his art—or as anything other than a weird and slightly unpleasant aberration to be explained away into nothingness— stubbornly endured. Although one should not judge a book by its cover,

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one might form reasonable conclusions about biographical bias if one enters the book by its back passage—the indexical fundament, as it were. The scant evidence of James’s homoerotically-charged relationships takes its place in a bizarre schema. Under the broad heading of “James, Henry” are five strangely incongruent categories: Dictation, Illness, Psychosexual problems, Travels, and Works of. Under “Psychosexual problems,” one finds the following sub-categories: Fantasies (there’s much here about Minnie Temple); Homoeroticism (comprised mostly of James’s shocked response to other homosexuals); and, predictably, Sexual diffidence (with reference chiefly to James’s bachelor life and fear of sex). Clearly, Leon Edel was determined to stick by his earlier, largely pathologizing biographical account of Henry James; ultimately, his decision to consign the entirety of James’s sexuality to the diagnostic category of “psychosexual problems” remains profoundly disturbing for all of James’s readers, and offensive to an antihomophobic political agenda. A considerably more nuanced account of sexual James appeared in Fred Kaplan’s Henry James: The Imagination of Genius (1992). Profiting from the advances in British gay historiography that had been made subsequent to Edel’s biography—chiefly, I would say, the work of Jeffrey Weeks7—Kaplan situates James deftly in what he terms the “sexually volatile world” (299) of the fin de siècle. James, he suggests, with a high degree of caution, had “a dim sense of his own homoeroticism” as early as his Paris sojourn of the 1870s; however, “his position, his personality, his background, and his culture gave him every incentive to repress” (300), to render indirect and idealized, his susceptibility to male beauty. Intuiting, correctly, that the only reliable documentary evidence of James’s proclivities is the surviving correspondence with his friends Edmund Gosse and John Addington Symonds—men who were, in different degrees, far more comfortable with homosexuality—Kaplan reconstructs, dexterously and concisely, the parameters of the Jamesian closet. Writing to Symonds in 1884, ostensibly about their several publications on travel in Italy and Italian art, James suggests, sympathetically, that “the victims of a common passion should sometimes exchange a look” (quoted in Kaplan 302). The referent of the “common passion” is of course ambiguous, and as such, is typically Jamesian: and it is precisely here that we can take the measure of the difference between men like Symonds and Oscar Wilde, whose secret sexual lives were, as Kaplan suggests, “their real lives” (301), and James himself, who gave nothing away in his effort to balance lateVictorian respectability with homosexual consciousness. In response to an incorrigible showboat like Oscar Wilde—whose offense was not his homosexuality per se, but rather the excessive vulgarity of his cultural

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ascendancy and the public squalor of his downfall—James, Kaplan concludes, “did not think of himself as homosexual” (301). Kaplan’s biography strikes me as a judicious treatment of James’s sexuality, because his grasp of James’s discretion—a very different thing from silence—is broadly congruent with the contemporaneous model of the closet as an intra-subjective, epistemological conundrum, advanced in theoretical terms by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. In sharp contrast to Edel, Kaplan installs James’s sexuality at the center of his life and work; the subject emerges as vexed and ambiguous, as rich and suggestive, rather than as a pathological problem and a source of embarrassment. But the political pressures of the time, it would seem in retrospect, required a full revision of Edel’s narrative and a “new” Henry James that gay men might count, confidently, among our forebears. Throwing biographical caution to the winds, Sheldon M. Novick’s Henry James: The Young Master (1996) obtains a recognizably “gay” James at the expense, and usually against the will, of the obscure accounts and recollections that James committed to paper. Novick himself would be impatient with such an analysis: James, he might argue, has been the victim of the repressive violence characteristic of a homophobic academy. However, as engaging as Novick’s narrative is, it is characterized overall by a certain interpretive obtuseness—a disdain for the elaborate circumlocution that James employed everywhere to preclude easy knowing, that is in fact textual James—which is its own kind of violence. From the outset, Novick refuses the prevailing contract of representing James by either repression or mystification; instead, he chooses to ground his position in the usual and the common-sensical rather than the exceptional. He takes “for granted that Henry James underwent the ordinary experiences of life: that he separated himself from his enveloping family, that he fell in love with the wrong people, that his first sexual encounters were intense but not entirely happy” (xii). Arguably, Novick’s preface is as revealing, and as troubling, as Edel’s index: he is right to claim that prior biographies “have hewn closely to . . . a Freudian view of ‘homosexuality’ as a kind of failure” (xiii), but if what follows is an antidote to the prevailing “open secret” (xiii) of James’s homosexuality, its interpretive leaps are staggering. Relying upon an intriguing mise-en-scène, Novick claims that, in the spring of 1865 “in a rooming house in Cambridge and in his own shuttered bedroom Ashburton Place, Harry performed his first acts of love.” Although this might strike the reader as something out of a Balzac novel, Novick proceeds with his evidence: a journal entry that James made in 1905, in California, during his tour of America. James writes, in the full glow of nostalgia, “How can I speak of Cambridge at all . . . .

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The point for me (for fatal, for impossible, expansion) is that I knew there, had there . . . l’initiation première (the divine, the unique), there and in Ashburton Place . . . . Ah, the ‘epoch-making’ weeks of the spring of 1865!” (Notebooks 319). Whatever else might have occurred in the spring of 1865—the end of the Civil War, the return of James’s brothers from the war, James’s decision to abandon the study of law and devote himself to literature—fails to register as possible referents for James’s teasing macaronic. Perhaps Novick thinks that wherever there’s French, there must also be sex—in which case, he must find sex everywhere in James’s lifelong, campy francophilia. In any event, “l’initiation première”—which sounds like the title of a porn flick, perhaps by Jean-Claude Cadinot— can have but one meaning: “it was his first initiation, the premier, the ‘prime’ . . . . In a secret act, in a private place, his long passivity had ended” (109). Novick explains the singularly sexual referent of “prime” by tracing its recurrence in The Wings of the Dove, wherein Merton Densher returns to the room where he had had sex with Kate Croy, in “this prime afterglow” (quoted in Novick 109) of sexual fulfillment. Elsewhere, to his credit, Novick is considerably more circumspect: he brings forward clear epistolary proof that James shared a room, and perhaps a bed, with Oliver Wendall Holmes, Jr., recently returned from the War, but cannot resist turning this into an erotic triangle among James, Holmes, and the ubiquitous Minnie Temple. But this dilatory business of James’s “initiation première” demands closer scrutiny, for it contains the key to Novick’s biographical method and its political goals. Despite the sharply revisionist swerve of Novick’s life of James, his conception of the biographical imperative—and indeed his approach to the genre of biography as narrative emplotment—is identical to Edel’s. For both install in the life of their subject a version of the primal scene. I refer not immediately to the classic Freudian primal scene—the repressed, traumatic, juvenile memory that is reconstructed speculatively in analysis, as in the case history of the Wolf Man—but rather to a structural component (or more accurately, a scenic function) that is a foundational principle of conventional biography. Because its function is to lend coherence to a particular narrative trajectory, or to a credible version of the subject’s life, the specific content of such an initiatory scene need have only a more or less sustainable connection, however attenuated, to the recoverable experience of the subject. If the primal scene is reconstructed as a point of narrative arrival, its hermeneutic function requires that it be imagined as a point of the subject’s departure: it is projected as a moment of “real experience” that yields the secrets of the subject’s consistency as a narratable subject. The primal scene, then, is the moment of explanatory

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plenitude. As Peter Brooks observes, “the specification of origins is of the utmost importance in any etiological explanation: . . . . the authority of narrative derives from its capacity to speak of origins in relation to endpoints” (275–6). Beginning his biographical project in the Freudian 1950s, Edel deploys the primal scene as a point of narrative departure: James, late in life, records a nightmare of being pursued by a mysterious antagonist in the Louvre; in the Galerie d’Apollon, he turns the tables on his pursuer and banishes him. For Edel, everything follows from an interpretation of the dream: James routs the haunting presence of his brother, William, by devoting himself to the art of fiction, just as he later preserves the domain of his art from the threat of heterosexual entanglement. In Novick’s revision, his highly speculative interpretation of James’s “initiation première” performs a similar function—for the reconstructed scene of homosexual experience determines the rather different narrative in which it is embedded—but in both biographical “case histories,” the narrative function of the primal scene cannot fail to strike the reader as contingent, as an “original determination” that is overdetermined. Edel produces an account of failed heterosexuality; Novick argues for James’s triumphant homosexuality. Only the “content” is different. My point is that the conventional biographical project on Henry James in the second half of the twentieth century—whether repressive or resolutely antihomophobic in its orientation—has generally failed to provide persuasive accounts of the writer’s private life. Much of this has to do with the absence of solid archival evidence, which has rendered James’s life, like much of his fiction, recessive and recalcitrant. Like Tita Bordereau in his 1888 tale, “The Aspern Papers” (who consigned the archive of Jeffrey Aspern, a famous American writer, to the flames rather than have it fall into the hands of a career-building biographer), James made a point, late in life, of destroying all documents that might provide future generations with a glimpse of himself “at home.” Given James’s celebrity status, many of his letters were preserved, but even the most revelatory—those he wrote to young men in his old age, and gathered by Susan E. Gunter and Steven H. Jobe in a collection entitled Dearly Beloved Friends—retain a certain ambiguity and characteristic circumlocution. As the editors warn, “the prevailing tenor . . . is warmly adhesive, to resurrect by way of Whitman a phrenological term sufficiently broad to encompass the varieties of James’s same-sex affections and attractions. But that is not to say that the letters are uniformly or unvaryingly passionate or erotic in tone or content” (xi). Preserving and circulating such an archive, I would argue, may well be a more lasting contribution to academic work than

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generating yet another biography which could hardly avoid invoking the same pattern of secrecy and its recovery, the biographical imperatives that I have attempted to explain. This is not to say that James’s life should not continue to be written. However, it seems to me that in the rare instances in which “biography” has succeeded, it has done so by calling into question, and by “queering,” the conventions of the genre, and by abandoning the totalizing imperatives of biographical narrative. Michael Moon’s A Small Boy and Others: Imitiation and Initiation in American Culture from Henry James to Andy Warhol (1998) takes for granted the biographical limitation which less innovative writers have attempted to circumvent: James, he concedes, “has inevitably been something of a disappointment to some gay readers hoping to find in his work signs of a liberatory sexual program” (31). Although Moon retains the explanatory potential of an initiatory primal scene, his method is to situate James alongside other, and rather unlikely, queer compatriots, whose lives demonstrate a roughly congruent dedication to perverse artistic “style.” In order to grasp the subtlety of James’s homoeroticism, he suggests, we need to align its manifestation alongside that of nineteenthcentury aesthetes like Pater, who located eroticism precisely as a potential, not in the here-and-now, but rather in the evocative male beauty “of other times and places.” If such desire must be understood as oblique in its circulation, as “a kind of foundational anachronism,” it reveals at the same time “a no less foundational homoeroticism” (31). Accordingly, Moon revisits James’s “initiation” in the Louvre’s Galerie d’Apollon—not as the source of oedipal nightmare, as it was for Edel, but rather as a preliminary and formative encounter with classic French painting, which Moon explains persuasively as “the rhetorical field in which [James’s] own sense of style emerged” (32). Like Novick, Moon bases his version of an “initation première” upon James’s own writing—in this case, a passage from his autobiography, A Small Boy and Others, the title of which Moon adopts for his book in his own act of trans-historical, homosocial affiliation—but to far greater effect. “In those beginnings I felt myself most happily cross that bridge over to Style, constituted by the wondrous Galérie d’Apollon, drawn out for me as a long but assured initiation” (quoted in Moon 45), James writes. Such “Style,” Moon demonstrates, was not simply the grand manner of David or Géricault, but rather an odd compound of “pleasure and danger imaginarily enacted in relation to both the outer surfaces and the inner depths of bodies” (45); the matrix of pleasure and danger, observable surface and hidden depth, is of course James’s adult métier. As I did at the outset of this essay, Moon locates “initiation” in Morgan Moreen’s dilemma in

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“The Pupil”—but whereas I attempted to initiate my reader into the complexities of Jamesian discourse and its inexhaustibly queer analytic potential, he concludes simply, and with greater eloquence than I could muster, that these uncanny children “seemed to know their most painful lessons almost before they learned them . . . . we have much to learn from these child-figures when they return to haunt us with their uncommon knowledge of the ‘perverse’ energies that impel desire” (30). To be sure, Michael Moon’s account of “initiation” installs, for narrative purposes, its own primal scene. But unlike the more conventional biographical examples that I traced earlier, he teases out the implications of James’s writing, solicits them with a degree of tenderness and sympathy, that is quite unlike the biographical—or indeed, any—“imperative.” To put it another way, via Roland Barthes, Moon’s invocation of James’s childhood is writerly rather than readerly: impelled by a stylistic pleasure rather than by a tendentious hermeneutic, it elaborates the primal scene, responding to cues rather than to clues, to illuminate one dimension of James’s engagement with stylistic homoerotics, rather than to totalize, or to reduce, that complexity. Like Michael Moon’s book, the title of Colm Tóibín’s The Master appropriates that of an earlier work in a manner that, once again, hovers between resonance and dissonance. The concluding volumes of Leon Edel’s biography are The Treacherous Years, which covers the second half of the 1890s, and The Master, which narrates the remainder of James’s life to his death in 1916. While Tóibín renominates the late 1890s as James’s period of Mastery—for his account brings James from his theatrical failures of mid-decade to the onset of his “major phase” of novel-writing around 1900—he, like Edel, attempts to rethink the parameters of “mastery” invoked in James’s 1888 tale, “The Lesson of the Master,” which was contemporaneous with “The Pupil.” Edel and Tóibín share an external superstructure of events in books that are fascinating to read as parallel narratives: both chronicle the traumatic failure of James’s play, Guy Domville; the compensatory success of such fictions as The Turn of the Screw; James’s move to Lamb House on the southern coast of England; his complex attraction to the sculptor, Hendrick Andersen, who turned out to be rather a bore; and his relations with friends and family. But while Edel’s narrative confines itself largely to external events and is driven by its overarching thesis of James’s fraternal competition, Tóibín’s writing presents itself as a “fiction” that draws richly upon the Jamesian archive. The point of this queerly hybrid bio-fiction, or fictio-criticism, is to articulate the particular modes and functions of James’s closet, and to reconstruct the inner life within that closet that emerged in his work.

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Consequently, he earns both the privilege of speculation and the artistic license to align the narrator’s point of view with “Henry’s.” The result is, in several senses of the word, absorbing. Oddly, like the Governess in The Turn of the Screw upon seeing the ghost of Peter Quint, the lifelong reader of James (or this one, at any rate) experiences a certain uncanny recognition as Tóibín’s personage comes into focus: “He remained but a few seconds—long enough to convince me that he also saw and recognized; but it was as if I had been looking at him for years and had known him always” (42). John Updike—who is irritated by the textures of “blankness and silence” that coalesce around a character who “does not face or act upon his homosexuality” (100)—argues that Tóibín’s James “less experiences these [biographical] facts than haunts them, with a luminous blur of a face” (101). This is not entirely inaccurate, but Updike—hardly a Jamesian—misses the point that my comparison of Tóibín’s reader to the Governess attempts to illuminate: given the long history of repression that has dominated the writing of James’s life, the return of the repressed cannot be other than uncanny, in the form of a personage whose closet is visible precisely as a closet in fits and starts. In the vicinity of the closet, a totalizing biographical narrative is impossible: expository writing, or the modes of realism, requires the supplement of a certain poetics of “haunting.” Also, the “luminous blur” that Updike describes occurs less in the novel’s mode of characterization than in its strange—ironic, transgressive, liminal—situation between the genres of fiction and biography. And it is precisely that queer situation that enables Tóibín’s account—like Michael Moon’s—to succeed, in persuasive terms, where other and more conventional modes of life-writing have failed. It is also in its very “haunting” quality, so unpalatable to Updike, that The Master seems most resonant with James’s own fiction. The Henry James who appears at the outset of The Master is, like Michael Moon’s, always already a francophile. While Moon’s James crossed the bridge to artistic “Style” in the primal scene of the Louvre, Tóibín’s James retains the lessons of self-mastery taught in the salons of Paris. Tóibín approaches the atmosphere of Jamesian discretion, in which everything indicible is subtly communicated, with a simple clarity that avoids reductiveness: He liked knowing secrets, because not to know them was to miss almost everything. He himself learned never to disclose anything, and never even to acknowledge the moment when some new information was imparted, to act as though a mere pleasantry had been exchanged. The men and women in the salons of literary Paris moved like players in

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In Paris, as Miss Barrace observes in The Ambassadors, “such debts are tacit.” Not surprisingly, then, the novel begins with James receiving a visit from an old friend, the Princess Oblisky; she alludes to a mutual friend, Paul Joukowsky, whose letters James had, tellingly, burned. Tóibín will later reconstruct a scene in which James remembers lingering outside Joukowsky’s rooms, not daring to enter; but for the moment, his discretion—his “attempt to be earnest, hesitant and polite”—does not fool “women like her who watched his full mouth and the glance of his eyes and instantly understood it all. They said, of course, nothing” (7). In one of the novel’s final scenes, William James reproaches Henry (with words that are drawn from a surviving letter) with the claim that “I have to read innumerable sentences you now write twice over to see what they could possibly mean” (316). In between these two temporal and narrative poles, Tóibín unfolds a narrative that connects the lifelong habits of discretion to a literary oeuvre that masters the forms of complexity—by which I mean circumlocution, queer indirection, the non-coincidence of narrative with “story”—that was James’s assault upon the impercipient. And in so doing, he makes clear and present—for the first time in the “biographical” project—the embeddedness of James’s particular “gay” life and the queer, non-normative, eccentric qualities of his writing. When I began work on this essay, I intended to discriminate between gay and queer work on Henry James in the following way: while gay approaches—necessarily author-centered and subject to the biographical imperative—were bent on recognizing a homosexual Henry James for the purposes of gay canon-construction, queer work was more engaged with textual complexity, with the incoherence of the gay subject, and above all, with really reading James’s texts. Now, as I reach the end of this essay, I am far less certain about the plausibility of that argument. Like all formal oppositions, it reduces the significance of its key terms, and thus invites a certain deconstruction, if not indeed a chiastic inversion. This essay begins with my own demonstration of how a queer reading of “The Pupil” might proceed: it is a formal, even traditional, analytic practice that understands “queer” as signifying the close reading of complex, highly connotative discourse in the field of incoherent sexuality. Closely aligned with deconstruction, it avoids the deconstruction’s excessive aporia by claiming a broad register of semantics, while continuing to suspend the question of the referential. But in truth, such a queer critical practice arises from a recognition that something is “up” in James’s language,

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a game of knowing and not knowing, pretense and disguise. He had learned everything from them. (5)

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something that requires elaboration. The high points in the reconstruction of gay James—the work of Michael Moon’s and Colm Tóibín—are not remotely invested in the conventional academic practices of close reading; Moon’s book is an example of gay cultural studies, while Tóibín’s dissolves the generic boundaries between biography and fiction. As such, they approach the question of the literary—and literary history—in ways that are perverse, ironic, and “queer.” Let me, then, revise my own attempt at critical revision: there is clearly a broad spectrum of innovative work that requires to be read as queer—as “queering” the received accounts of Henry James’s life and work, and the life in the work—ranging from the conventional modes of academic criticism to various modes of life-writing that attract a wider readership, and which therefore may be said to promote a complex James far more effectively than the critical industry itself. And just as “queer” cannot, and should not, denote one particular mode of writing, there is no arbitrary distinction to be made between gay histories and queer modes of reconstructing that history, be it of lives or texts. In this light, the specific protocols of “reading” and “recognition,” and their mutual interlinearity, had best remain an open question, not subject to institutional prescription or any other form of regulatory specification. It might be instructive, by way of conclusion, to stand back from both the broad “culture wars” of the early 1990s—which raised the question of who really “owned” Henry James—and the more recent internecine squabbles between gay and queer accounts of James’s enduring importance. Why do the advances in Jamesian work, scholarly and more popular, turn so earnestly upon the vexed relation between a closeted “gay” life and a differently closeted “queer” textual performativity? The answer might lie in the astonishing truth claims that our culture invests in “sex”—a term that, since the days of Foucault, cannot appear without its inverted commas. For, as Foucault writes, “it is through sex—an imaginary point determined by the deployment of sexuality—that each individual has to pass in order to have access to his own intelligibility.” Hence, he concludes, “the importance we ascribe to it, the reverential fear with which we surround it, the care we take to know it” (155–6, my emphasis). If “sex” is indeed an “imaginary point”—if, that is, there is no sex that is accessible outside the epistemological matrix of sexuality—then “sexual” James, whether biographical or textual, must remain an imperative whose object continually recedes. It compels reconstruction even as it continually escapes its reaches, and as such, it remains a function of the theoretical Imaginary. Ultimately, “the care we take to know it” leads us—frustratingly, but oh, with such a power

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of engagement—to a point of recognition beyond reading, a recognition that is as much about ourselves as it is about textual James. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick said, at the 1991 meeting of the English Institute, that her use of the word “queer” seemed to be “hovering uneasily between meaning ‘unaccountable’ and meaning ‘homosexual’” (English Inside and Out 131). It continues to hover in the space between historical identity and textual incoherence, the register and the referent—entre chien et loup— where “sex” re-presents itself as it recedes into history.

notes 1. The difference between literary “gay studies” and what came to be called “queer theory” in the early 1990s was signaled and demonstrated by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) and consolidated by her subsequent book, Epistemology of the Closet (1990). Whereas gay studies concerned itself with the explicit representation of homosexual desire (the work of Robert K. Martin is exemplary of this pioneering field, particularly his readings of Whitman and Melville in, respectively, The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry, 1979, and Hero, Captain, and Stranger, 1986), queer theory, influenced by deconstruction and by Foucault’s mapping of the broad institutional regulation of sexuality, took up what might be called the traces of sexual deviance embedded in complex narratives. Sedgwick’s work was revolutionary because it provided both a theoretical matrix and a clear analytics for exploring the non-explicit “tendency” of homoerotic possibility to make itself felt, albeit in a discursive register suspended between thematic “presence” and “absence.” Arguing that “homosexual panic” disciplines and coerces Western masculinity materially as a crisis of subject-formation (that is, the subject worries that he may be, or may be perceived as, homosexual), Sedgwick locates narrative homosexual possibility as a function of “quasinominative, quasi-obliterative” (Epistemology of the Closet 203) discursive structures. Homosexual panic, then, is productive of both the “explicitly thematized sexual anaesthesia” (Epistemology of the Closet 194) of the fin-desiècle bachelor narrative and a concomitant regime of the closet. In her analysis of James’s 1903 story “The Beast in the Jungle”—a critical intervention that changed irrevocably the course of Jamesian criticism—Sedgwick argues that “the secret of having a secret functions, in [John] Marcher’s life, precisely as the closet. It is not a closet in which there is a homosexual man, for Marcher is not a homosexual man. Instead, it is the closet of, simply, the homosexual secret—the closet of imagining a homosexual secret. Yet it is unmistakable that Marcher lives as one who is in the closet” (Epistemology of the Closet 205). Sedgwick’s modeling of a liminal homosexuality in James’s fiction was exhilarating and original not only because it provided a means of reconfiguring the traditional critical interest in Jamesian reticence and silence, but also because it grasped that the closet is, for pre-liberation literary history, less a logistical strategy of self-concealment than an epistemological conundrum. The work of Sedgwick and her followers was perceived as a scandalous affront to literary high culture in the American press of the 1990s: a good example of conservative reaction is

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Lee Siegel’s “The Gay Science” in The New Republic (1998). Jamesian scholars, too, have sometimes been critical of Sedgwick’s logic: see Horne. 2. I have discussed and demonstrated the protocols of Queer Formalism in three essays: “Restraining Order” (2003), “Theory a tergo in The Turn of the Screw” (2004), and “The Jamesian Turn: A Primer on Queer Formalism” (2005). My brief analysis here of the figurative turns of “The Pupil” is intended to ground the queer project in a return to the traditional methodology of American literary criticism and to rescue it simultaneously from purely political questions of “identity” and from mere polemics. I approach Queer Formalist practice as a mode of what Sedgwick has recently called “reparative reading,” which she understands as an antidote to the “paranoid reading” characteristic of “strong theory.” As an example of the reparative, she offers “the devalued and near obsolescent New Critical skill of imaginative close reading” (Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity 145). I offer it, too, as a corrective to Philip Horne’s argument that the “awkwardness in the story, rooted in the peculiar history and moral traditions of the James family, might in turn account . . . for the sense of a missing ‘objective correlative,’ in Eve Sedgwick’s term a ‘residue’—giving a cue to the psychoanalytic procedures of ‘Queer Theory’ and their unearthing of psychosexually loaded repressions and ‘homosexual panic’” (133). Horne instructively reads the critics who have read “The Pupil”—arguing against the queer interpretations of Sedgwick, Michael Moon, Helen Hoy, and Fred Kaplan—but ventures no reading of his own that goes beyond conjectures about characters’ motivations. This may be a function of a general (though hardly universal) British indifference to the micropractices of analysis that are more prevalent in America, where New Criticism and Deconstruction flourished; in any case, his conclusion—that “questions of literary interpretation can only [sic] be answered by evidence and argument, not by votes or polls” (129)—seems miscalculated. Hugh Stevens takes issue with Horne, noting that “The Pupil” is an odd choice for Horne “to demonstrate the hypothetical nonsense of queer readings of James” (“The Resistance to Queory” 259) and arguing, cogently, that “Resistance to queer readings might be ‘displaced symptoms’ of a ‘resistance’ inherent in the readings themselves. Namely, resistance to the queer enterprise repeats aspects of that enterprise, but deploys them as objections rather than as methodological questions important within the enterprise itself. The ambiguity of same-sex meanings in James’s fiction might be used to discredit queer readings, whereas the readings themselves show that ambiguity is frequently an inevitable part of literary depictions of same-sex desire and that historical contextualization can help us see how such ambiguities can signal same-sex desires for the ‘initiated’ reader” (“The Resistance to Queory” 256). 3. There is no better articulation of James’s complex textual economy, its deconstructive resonance avant la lettre, than Sheila Teahan’s in her book, The Rhetorical Logic of Henry James (1995). “James’s narrative system,” she argues, “entails a systematic interference between the suasive and figurative dimensions of rhetoric: between its avowed function as organizing center and the unaccountable consequences of the figures it mobilizes, between its mimetic and performative, its reflecting and projecting, capacities” (9). Transformative in its linking of deconstruction to pscyhoanalysis is Shoshana Felman’s “Turning the Screw of Interpretation” (1980). The best and most influential New Historical work on Henry James, Ross Posnock’s: The Trial of Curiosity (1991), is a classic;

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but excellent too is his essay, “Affirming the Alien: The Pragmatist Pluralism of The American Scene” (1998). In the latter, Posnock traces James’s “skepticism of identity logic” and its ultimate conceiving of American citizenship at the cusp of the new century as “radically miscegenated, hybrid, against which notions of American ‘simplicity’ or of authentic Americanism become quixotic at best, antidemocratic and intolerant at worst” (232). With specific reference to the representation of gender and sexuality in James, Wendy Graham’s Henry James’s Thwarted Love (1999) is an excellent account of how the contours of meaning in James’s life and art were determined by nineteenth-century constructions of the sexual subject that infiltrated every domain of cultural production. Her chapter on The Bostonians offers a fresh and acute reading of the novel in the context of the emergence of a “not-yet-articulated female homosexuality” (150). Beyond Jamesian criticism, the major recent work of the New Historicism in Queer Studies is David M. Halperin’s How to Do the History of Homosexuality (2002); his introduction, “In Defense of Historicism,” with its critiques of the strong theory of Sedgwick and Foucault, is particularly engaging for Jamesians. Finally, according to Julie Rivkin in False Positions: The Representational Logics of Henry James’s Fiction (1996), the “language school of deconstruction” has been installed (by its detractors as well as by its exponents) in a “false opposition between deconstruction and cultural/historicist criticism, or even between ‘theory’ and ‘history’” (5). Rivkin stresses instead “the formal character of the social” and “the social character of the formal” (7). 4. Both “recognizable” and “gay” are of course relative and unstable terms; their variance is a function of who is doing the looking and what he or she is looking for. As always, “looking” and “the visible” are vexed, and vexing, problems in the Jamesian field. Nonetheless, clear agendas for the mapping of Jamesian sexualities have emerged. On the far end of the “gay” spectrum, and under the influence of the biographer Sheldon M. Novick (who insists that a refusal to recognize a coherent Jamesian homosexuality amounts to critical homophobia), John R. Bradley offers succinct, if simplistic, homosexual readings of Jamesian characters and situations in both Henry James’s Permanent Adolescence (2000) and an edited collection of brief essays, Henry James and Homo-Erotic Desire (1999). Novick’s revisionism met with sharp critique from Millicent Bell in the TLS (1996); Novick’s riposte argues that “Bell [is] looking for evidence about matters that are not really in dispute . . . .She acts as if she were defence counsel for Henry James, insisting that every particular of an indictment of sexual misconduct be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, and darkly hinting at the prosectuor’s malfeasance” (17). On the queerer end of the spectrum, the complexity of homo- and other “sexual” historical contexts is explored by: Stevens, Henry James and Sexuality; Haralson; and Person. 5. According to Roland Barthes, the fetish of “the author” arises from our broad cultural imperative to construct myths of origin: while “the Author . . . is always conceived as the past of his own book,” in reality, “he is not the subject of which his book would be the predicate” (52). In Barthes’ pithy phrase, “the work is held in the hand, the text is held in language” (57). While common sense tells us that the regime of the author is hardly superceded (my essay, and the book which the reader holds in his or her hands at this moment, are the rock of the real), it is broadly true that the isolation of the author—within, say, a purely literary historiography—has lost academic credibility. But our actual practices

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are full of paradox. In the Queer field, for example, both textual analysis and historical con-textualization return, explicitly or implicitly to the “author”—a construct understood now as both the subject of cultural determination and the agent of representational economy. In short, the question of the author’s sexuality—as a sort of biographical contour, or one narrative possibility that emerges, however indistinctly, from the historical record—is never irrelevant. But the “author” invoked by classic Jamesian criticism—by, say, F. O. Matthiessen in Henry James: The Major Phase (1944)—is a radically different creature from the presence unfolded in, say, the opening chapter of Wendy Graham’s Henry James’s Thwarted Love. The former is a canonical ghost that haunts the margins of “story” while the latter evolves in the cross-currents of the discourses of sexual pathology of the mid nineteenth century. The queerness of our own queer moment is such that it is now possible to read Matthiessen’s book as an allegory of his own closet—that is, to recontextualize under the queer lens the history of the discipline. It would seem, really, that relations stop nowhere. 6. For a re-threading of the biographical screw, see Peter Rawlings’ Henry James and the Abuse of the Past. 7. See in particular Sexuality and its Discontents: Meanings, Myths and Modern Sexualities (1985) and Against Nature: Essays on History, Sexuality and Identity (1991). Weeks’s impressive synthesis of the historical record, and his demonstration of the imperative to re-think sexuality beyond the “presentist” claims of essentialized sexual identities, has been as influential in the historical field as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s work in the field of textual analysis and literary criticism.

works cited Barthes, Roland. The Rustle of Language (1984). Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1986. Bell, Millicent. “The Divine, the Unique.” TLS, 6 December 1996, 3–4. Bradley, John R. Ed. Henry James and Homo-Erotic Desire. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. ——. Henry James’s Permanent Adolescence. London: Palgrave, 2000. Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984. Cohen, Ed. Talk on the Wilde Side: Toward a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities. New York: Routledge, 1993. Edel, Leon. Henry James: A Life. New York: Harper & Row, 1985. ——. Henry James: The Master, 1901–1916. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1972. ——. Henry James: The Treacherous Years, 1895–1901. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1969. Felman, Shoshana. “Turning the Screw of Interpretation.” Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise. Ed. Shoshana Felman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980: 94–207. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Random House, 1978. Graham, Wendy. Henry James’s Thwarted Love. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. Gunter, Susan E., and Steven H. Jobe. Eds. Dearly Beloved Friends: Henry James’s Letters to Younger Men. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 2001.

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Halperin, David M. How to Do the History of Homosexuality. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2002. Haralson, Eric. Henry James and Queer Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Hellman, Geoffrey T. “Chairman of the Board: Leon Edel.” The New Yorker, 13 March 1971, 43–86. Horne, Philip. “The Master and the ‘Queer Affair’ of ‘The Pupil.’” Henry James: The Shorter Fiction: Reassessments. Ed. N. H. Reeve. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997. Hoy, Helen. “Homosexual Duplicity in Henry James’s ‘The Pupil.’” Henry James Review 14 (1993): 34–42. James, Henry. “The Aspern Papers” (1888). The Complete Tales of Henry James. Vol. 6. Ed. Leon Edel. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1963. ——. Dearly Beloved Friends: Henry James’s Letters to Younger Men. Eds. Susan E. Gunter and Steven H. Jobe. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 2001. ——. The Notebooks of Henry James. Ed. F. O. Matthiessen. New York: Oxford UP, 1947. ——. “The Pupil” (1891). The Complete Tales of Henry James. Vol. 7. Ed. Leon Edel. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1963. ——. “The Turn of the Screw” (1898), in The Complete Tales of Henry James, Vol. 10, ed. Leon Edel. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1964. Kaplan. Fred. Henry James: The Imagination of Genius. New York: William Morrow, 1992. Martin, Robert K. Hero, Captain, and Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique, and Literary Form in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville. Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP, 1986. ——. The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry. Austin: Texas UP, 1979. Matthiessen, F. O. Henry James: The Major Phase. New York: Oxford UP, 1944. Moon, Michael. A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiation in American Culture from Henry James to Andy Warhol. Durham: Duke UP, 1998. Novick, Sheldon M. Henry James: The Young Master. New York: Random House, 1996. ——. “Henry James’s Life and Work,” TLS, 20 December 1996, 17. Person, Leland S. Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP, 2003. Posnock, Ross. “Affirming the Alien: The Pragmatist Pluralism of The American Scene.” The Cambridge Companion to Henry James. Ed. Jonathan Freedman. Cambridge UP, 1998: 224–46. ——. The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. Rawlings, Peter. Henry James and the Abuse of the Past. Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke and New York, 2005. Rivkin, Julie. False Positions: The Representational Logics of Henry James’s Fiction. Stanford UP, 1996. Savoy, Eric. “The Jamesian Turn: A Primer on Queer Formalism.” Approaches to Teaching Henry James’s “Daisy Miller” and “The Turn of the Screw.” Ed. Kimberly C. Reed and Peter G. Beidler. New York: MLA, 2005: 132–42. ——. “Restraining Order,” English Studies in Canada 29 (2003), 77–84.

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——. “Theory a tergo in The Turn of the Screw,” in Curiouser: on the Queerness of Children, ed. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2004: 245–76. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1985. ——. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: California UP, 1990. ——. “Socratic Raptures, Socratic Ruptures: Notes Toward Queer Performativity.” English Inside and Out: The Places of Literary Criticism: Essays from the English Institute. Ed. Susan Gubar and Jonathan Kamholtz. New York: Routledge, 1993: 122–36. ——. Tendencies. Durham: Duke UP, 1993. ——. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2003. Siegel, Lee. “The Gay Science: Queer Theory, Literature, and the Sexualization of Everything,” New Republic, 8 November 1998, 30–42. Stevens, Hugh. Henry James and Sexuality. Cambridge UP, 1998. ——. “The Resistance to Queory: John Addington Symonds and ‘The Real Right Thing.’” Henry James Review 20 (1999): 255–64. Teahan, Sheila. The Rhetorical Logic of Henry James. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State UP, 1995. Tóibín, Colm. The Master. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2004. Updike, John. “Silent Master.” The New Yorker, 28 June 2004, 98–101. Vendler, Helen. The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997. Weeks, Jeffrey. Against Nature: Essays on History, Sexuality and Identity. London: Rivers Oram Press, 1991. ——. Sexuality and its Discontents: Meanings, Myths and Modern Sexualities. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985. White, Edmund. Ed. The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction. London: Faber and Faber, 1991.

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kevin ohi Style—the foreign language within language . . . Deleuze, “He Stuttered” (113)

The tale of belatedness and equivocal aesthetic recompense offered by The Ambassadors has often served to reinforce a current in James studies that—more or less explicitly and to vastly different effects—understands James’s style in biographical terms: its opacities or seeming evasions point to the way the man himself diffused, postponed, avoided, sublimated, obscured, or more or less missed, “life.” The novel is particularly available to such readings because of Strether’s strikingly rigorous—and, for many critics, frustrating—renunciation, which has often been read in terms of a failure to be adequate to his experience: the “exemplar of the life of the senses,” Strether, Richard Blackmur argued, is “not finally up to that life” (49–50), a diagnosis that is often extended to the author who created that temporizing American pilgrim. F. W. Dupee suggested that if James “drew on Howells for Strether’s sentiments, he drew far more on himself” (33); F. O. Matthiessen wrote that the “passive rather than active scope” of Strether’s desire “is one of the most striking consequences of James’s own peculiar conditioning” as he describes it in Notes of a Son and Brother and A Small Boy and Others (27). Strether, according to Matthiessen, speaks for James as well (28), and “neither Strether nor his creator,” he argued, “escape[s] a certain soft fussiness” (39). Arnold Bennett’s claim that James knew a lot about “cultured” people but very little “about life in general,” that his “fastidiousness” led him to “[repudiate] life,” is echoed by more subtle readers.1 In The Uses of Obscurity, Allon White argues that James’s style allows him to evade sex, the vulgarity of which distressed him; Geismar’s immoderate condemnation of James’s suspicion of passion, his fear of women and sex, finds a more sophisticated rationale in White’s 126

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reading.2 A similar, and similarly reductive, understanding of how a writer’s life shapes his fiction animates Colm Tóibín’s recent novel The Master, where—among many similar moments—Strether’s gaze from the street at Little Bilham on Chad’s balcony is rewritten as James’s own longing vigil, under the windows of Paul Zhurkovski. In the logic of substitution or obfuscation that, for such readings, links an opaque style to missed experience, “life” stands in—implicitly or explicitly—for direct representation, for the mimetic capturing of experience. The vexing of mimetic representation in James’s style is thereby made a (mimetic) representation of a “missed” life, which is in turn understood in psychological terms of repression, inhibition, or, more simply, loneliness. The equating of “life” and this model of representation is perhaps more troubling than the idea—troubling enough—that James is to be pitied for failing to make the most of his life.3 In other terms, however one might object to the implicit portrayal of James’s life in terms of a lack and evasion sufficient to occasion various refinements of critical pity, more crucially, perhaps, the compensations of this pathos allow critics to avoid confronting the disorienting effects of James’s style and to avoid the complications of the anti-mimetic understanding of representation it embodies.4 I would therefore follow critics such as Julie Rivkin, Mary Cross, and Shelia Teahan, who suggest that the novel’s plot be understood in relation to the linguistic practices of James’s text. More crucial than renunciation, Rivkin (“The Logic of Delegation in The Ambassadors”) suggests, is the logic of “ambassadorship” and delegation, which she links to Derrida’s concept of the supplement; Teahan, arguing that the novel “both thematizes and exemplifies the problematic of deviation . . . a problematic that must be understood not as the result of artistic failure or unrealized intention, but as a phenomenon internal to narrative itself” (98), explores a deviation internal to Strether’s function as “center of consciousness”; and Cross suggests that the novel is a “story of signifiers,” that the text itself shows Strether’s search for names in a way that parallels the typical sentence structure in the text (100). The emphasis falls in different ways in these readings. To my mind, Teahan’s emphasis on “deviation” is more compelling than Cross’s on “unity,”5 and several other readers have brought out the disruptive effects of James’s style. One thinks, for instance, of Ruth Bernard Yeazell’s suggestion that metaphor’s power to becomes an object of perception and to affect the action of the plot points to the (self-consciously) linguistic character of reality in James. “Indeed at their most characteristic,” she writes, “James’s metaphors provoke a feeling of arbitrariness and extravagance, a sense of an uncomfortable break in the organic

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connection of things, that can be deeply disturbing” in part because they are governed by conceptual logics rather than by sense perception (40, 41). The “disturbing” effect she registers here—which she later calls “epistemological vertigo” (71)—resonates with aspects of Leo Bersani’s writings on late James.6 He writes, for instance, of the “displacement of dramatic pressure from novelistic event to the verbal surfaces of narrative” (“The Jamesian Lie” 143), a move toward meta-narrative that troubles, among other things, the possibility of thinking of James’s texts in representational terms. His examination of point of view in Wings of the Dove has similar implications. He notes, for instance, that images follow their own internal logic, centering not on character but on the narrative voice, thus eschewing consistent or realistic representation of the particular character from whose consciousness they ostensibly derive (“The Narrator as Center in The Wings of the Dove” 135). The blurring of the line between character and narrator makes problematic the representation of a character’s consciousness, an implication that Sharon Cameron picks up in her argument for the necessity of rethinking in non-psychological terms our understanding of James’s model of consciousness. In my view—in terms indebted to, but theoretically divergent from, Cameron’s—Strether’s relation to “life” is most interestingly a linguistic, and not a psychological, question. The narrative of The Ambassadors—and the critical tradition on the text—raises the question of the linguistic representation of a life, including James’s own, which brings into view, among other things, ways in which the recent resurgence of critical interest in that life—however salutary and illuminating in many respects—may serve to contain or repress the more challenging aspects of his style.7 Read in these terms, the narrative of The Ambassadors offers a reflection on the theory of novelistic representation that James outlines as early as 1884 in “The Art of Fiction” and that he rearticulates in “The Future of the Novel” of 1899 and in The New York Edition prefaces, among other places.8 In the broadest strokes, James disrupts the possibility of conceiving of novelistic language in mimetic terms; his late style—not only its famous density and obscurity of reference, but also its characteristic disorientations of intelligibility, from its sudden alternations of tone and voice to its mixing of linguistic registers in favored tropes such as syllepsis or zeugma to its unevenly ironized and ironizing narrative perspectives—puts into practice this anti-mimetic theory.9 Lambert Strether’s experience of belatedness might therefore be read as a further refinement of this theory, and, in its variously ambivalent depiction of the experience of a life within it, as a meditation on the difficulties

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has had a life by no means wasted, but not happily concentrated; and rather makes on himself the impression of having come in for many of the drawbacks, even perhaps for the little of the discredit, of an incoherent existence, without, unfortunately, any of the accompanying entertainment or “fun.” He feels tired, in other words, without having a great deal to show for it; disenchanted without having known any great enchantments, enchanters, or, above all, enchantresses; and . . . is vaguely haunted by the feeling of what he has missed, though this is a quantity, and a quality, that he would be rather at a loss to name.10 Strether has somehow missed out on what the novel might initially seem to imply was unmediated experience: Strether, “burdened” with “the oddity of a double consciousness” (Ambassadors 2), subject to “uncontrolled perceptions” (34) and “to an amount of experience out of all proportion to his adventures” (160), exposed by “his poor old trick of quiet inwardness” (349) has missed out on the opportunity to experience “life”—a failure, as Maria Gostrey diagnoses it, “to enjoy” (11), to catch the “fun” or “entertainment” James notes in the “Project.” “He was,” the novel tells us, “for ever missing things through his general genius for missing them, while others were for ever picking them up through a contrary bent. And it was others who looked abstemious and he who looked greedy; it was he somehow who finally paid, and it was others who mainly partook” (337). At all these moments, however, the stress is placed not on a missed, unmediated experience but on a missed experience of mediation. Strether looks greedy when he is in fact abstemious: the emphasis is perhaps less on missing out without “credit” than on a misrepresentation. In the passage from the “Project,” the missed quantity is less experience than its representation—having “a great deal to show” for one’s loss. Strether’s predicament is an “impression” he “makes on himself,” and the missed “enchantresses” seem less to unveil a yearned-for content for his loss than to mark the last of a series of refused reifications or nominalizations, the failure-to-appear of the various nouns that might have bodied forth his disenchantment. Whatever Strether has missed, it is related in some essential way to a sense of belatedness. The novel’s “essence,” James remarks in the preface

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of sustaining the insights of that theory—of living up, as it were, to James’s style. The premise of The Ambassadors is therefore not, perhaps, as simple as it might initially appear. Lambert Strether, James writes in the novel’s “Project,”

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It’s not too late for you, on any side, and you don’t strike me as in danger of missing the train . . . . All the same don’t forget that you’re young—blessedly young; be glad of it on the contrary and live up to it. Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what have you had? (152–3)11 Strether’s lesson demands a paradoxical displacement of perspective: for youth not to “forget” that it is young, it must see itself from the perspective of its loss, from the perspective of age—a feat achieved, perhaps, only by Dorian Gray, whom James may well have had in mind, along with William Dean Howells and the advice, according to the Notebooks, he gave Jonathan Sturges in Whistler’s Paris garden. Thus Strether’s garden exhortation presents an impossible lesson: it’s as if the train had fairly waited at the station for me without my having had the gumption to know it was there. Now I hear its faint receding whistle miles and miles down the line. What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that . . . . The affair—I mean the affair of life—couldn’t, no doubt, have been different for me; for it’s at best a tin mould, either fluted and embossed, with ornamental excrescences, or else smooth and dreadfully plain, into which, a helpless jelly, one’s consciousness is poured—so that one “takes” the form, as the great cook says, and is more or less compactly held by it; one lives in fine as one can. Still, one has the illusion of freedom; therefore don’t be, like me, without the memory of that illusion . . . . Don’t make my mistake. For it was a mistake. Live! (153–4) The repetition of mistake underlines the lesson—“gives the measure,” the preface tells us, “of the signal warning he feels attached to his case” (xxx)—and seems to present an alternative: either “live” your life or miss it. Yet the “mistake” is not to know that “what one loses, one loses”; the realization about which one is not to make an error boils down to a tautological definition of loss. Strether’s figure of a mold, moreover, throws into question what his “mistake” might have been; it is not a lost

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(xxxi), is the scene in Gloriani’s garden: “There were some things that had to come in time if they were to come at all. If they didn’t come in time they were lost for ever. It was the general sense of them that had overwhelmed him with its long slow rush.” This general sense inspires Strether’s famous speech to Little Bilham:

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freedom that is to be regretted but the lost “memory” of an “illusion” of freedom.12 In short, his mistake was not to be able to remember having made a mistake about that illusion (not to have behaved or thought then in a way that would have allowed him the later memory of a mistake). The helpless jelly cannot choose its mold, and Strether’s lesson demystifies as an illusion the very freedom it simultaneously asks Little Bilham to embody. He seems to regret missing the train less in the sense of failing to board it than in the sense of failing to know that it was there and that it had left without him. To live might thus be less to be on the train than to realize that one should regret having missed it, and to find oneself, perhaps, no longer at a loss to name what one has lost. The “life” that “our belated man of the world” (xxxvii) thinks he has missed is defined as the vicarious appreciation of Chad and Madame de Vionnet: “I never had the benefit [of youth] at the proper time—which comes to saying that I never had the thing itself. . . . Though they’re young enough, my pair, I don’t say they’re . . . their own absolutely prime adolescence; for that has nothing to do with it. The point is that they’re mine. Yes, they’re my youth; since somehow at the right time nothing else ever was” (240–1). Youth here is constitutively vicarious; one “is not,” one does not have, one’s own youth. One “is” someone else’s youth. Chad and Madame de Vionnet “are” Strether’s youth because “life” for him is appreciating Chad’s improvement. That “case,” he remarks, “was first and foremost a miracle almost monstrous. It was the alteration of the entire man . . . . All one’s energy goes to facing it, to tracking it. One wants, confound it . . . to enjoy anything so rare. Call it then life . . . call it poor dear old life simply that springs the surprise” (118). A vicarious structure that constitutes an aesthetic and erotic pleasure, it also makes Chad’s “difference” a “sharp rupture of identity”: Strether “had faced every contingency but that Chad should not be Chad . . . You could deal with a man as himself—you couldn’t deal with him as somebody else” (96).13 While Strether admires Chad most for “knowing how to live,” knowing how to live is precisely not to achieve an unmediated relation to experience. Chad knows how to live because he delegates his life. Initially put in terms of his power to absorb the lives of others, this knowledge indicates a more unsettlingly vicarious relation: “he ‘put out’ his excitement, or whatever other emotion the matter involved, as he put out his washing” (355–6). (“It was quite for Strether himself in short to feel a personal analogy with the laundress bringing home the triumphs of the mangle” [356].) Chad truly lives because he delegates to others the experience of his life.

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belatedness and style

palgrave advances in henry james studies

If Strether’s regret is that he is not Chad and that he did not, when he was Chad’s age, live as Chad does (“I know,” he says to Little Bilham, “. . . whom I should enjoy being like!” [155]), Chad’s improvement is a “rupture of identity,” a ceasing to be simply Chad, and a leaving to others the task of “being” him. In slightly different terms, if to “live” is to appreciate Chad, then to “live” cannot mean to “be” him: to appreciate Chad requires the perspective of one who has failed to be him. By truly living, Chad becomes the singular figure among those characters who are not irredeemably obtuse who misses his experience, who proves, in the end, disappointingly inadequate to his own life. If the lovers are, Strether says, his “life,” the vicariousness that prevents an unmediated access to life defines what it means for him to have a life; “living,” or what the preface calls “reparation” (xxx), cannot overcome that vicariousness because it is defined by it. The aesthetic and erotic spectacle of Chad suggests that to “live” is not to achieve an unmediated experience but to realize that one has missed it. The example of Chad thus leads one to reconsider the role of belatedness in the novel. Belatedness is both the obstacle to life and the condition necessary for it: the regret for the life one missed is, paradoxically, the life one missed. Strether’s epiphany as he waits for Chad in his empty apartment is thus both a realization of loss and a recovery of a missed life: He felt, strangely, as sad as if he had come for some wrong, and yet as excited as if he had come for some freedom. But the freedom was what was most in the place and the hour; it was the freedom that most brought him round again to the youth of his own that he had long ago missed. He could have explained little enough to-day either why he had missed it or why, after years and years, he should care that he had; the main truth of the actual appeal of everything was none the less that everything represented the substance of his loss, put it within reach, within touch, made it, to a degree it had never been, an affair of the senses. That was what it became for him at this singular time, the youth he had long ago missed—a queer concrete presence, full of mystery, yet full of reality, which he could handle, taste, smell, the deep breathing of which he could positively hear . . . . The image was before him when he at last became aware that Chad was behind. (354–5) Strether’s language seems to describe a tryst—he is “as sad as if he had come for some wrong, and yet as excited as if he had come for some freedom.” That freedom shifts from a “freedom” he might take to “freedom” in general—and to Chad’s freedom, which brings Strether

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to his own missed youth. A moving evocation of loss, the passage also presents this epiphanic moment as a culmination in a process of aesthetic education: Strether can finally perceive his loss—it is put “within reach, within touch,” his youth made a “queer concrete presence . . . which he could handle, taste, smell”—loss and vanished time are made matter for direct perception. At last, perhaps, he is not “at a loss to name” what he has lost (“Project” 375); notably, though, the novel does not at this moment name it. The perception of the fact of loss (and not of any loss in particular) forms the paradoxical content of Strether’s aesthetic education. The experience of perceiving loss appears in the same register as the pleasure the text details of perceiving Chad, its central aesthetic object. Pedagogical relations in the novel are also erotic ones; to educate a man is—for Madame de Vionnet as for Maria Gostrey—to deck “him out for others” (240), and to experience these pedagogical relations of desire is also to experience betrayal. The betrayal may be structural to the aesthetic value that Strether finds in his experience of belatedness. The aesthetic and erotic contemplation of belatedness also adumbrates an experience of sexual exclusion; the Chads of the world are, by their nature, always marked for someone else. (How can the Chads fail to betray? Whose loyalty, after all, can truly be adequate to the investments and desires of those who form one?) This sense of sexual exclusion ends up putting the narrative of aesthetic recompense to the test, which is explicitly what is at stake in Strether’s accidental encounter with Chad and Madame de Vionnet in rural France. The incident evokes Strether’s aesthetic education of belatedness as he remembers a painting he saw long ago in Boston: It had been the only adventure of his life in connexion with the purchase of a work of art. The adventure, it will be perceived, was modest; but the memory, beyond all reason and by some accident of association, was sweet. The little Lambinet abode with him as the picture he would have bought—the particular production that had made him for the moment overstep the modesty of nature. (380–1) Evoking the language describing Strether’s relation to Chad—“I know . . . whom I should enjoy being like!” (155)—Strether does not want to see the painting again; the possession is more perfect for his not having bought it. His trip to the countryside offers him the chance to recover the lost day in the paradoxical mode of his belatedness:

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belatedness and style

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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-coloured sanctum, the specialgreen vision, the ridiculous price, the poplars, the willows, the rushes, the river, the sunny silvery sky, the shady woody horizon. (380) This “restoration to nature” is not a naïve return to a source more “real” than the painting itself. To return to the ostensible “reference” of the painting, the “natural” elements in the French countryside of which it is made up, is, for Strether, simultaneously, to recover the lost day of its contemplated, unrealized purchase: his list of those elements amalgamates the natural scene, the painting, and the remembered Bostonian day. It does so, moreover, in terms that explicitly foreground their linguistic mediation, the lovely alliterative sonority of the evoked loss. In this sense, the Lambinet scene in the country represents a similar logic as that of Strether’s sense in Chad’s empty apartment of a scene that represents “the substance of his loss, put[s] it within reach, within touch, [makes] it, to a degree it had never been, an affair of the senses” (354). This paradoxical recovery is evoked in the first part of this chapter in the language of fullness and repletion, of walking into the painting itself. The oblong gilt frame disposed its enclosing lines; the poplars and willows, the reeds and river . . . 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. Moreover he was freely walking about in it. 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-coloured wall. (381–2). The world conforms to a vision of aesthetic plentitude, “falls into a composition,” and its enclosing lines mark a bounded whole. “Not a single one of his observations but somehow fell into a place in it; not a breath of the cooler evening that wasn’t somehow a syllable of the text.” The world becomes a painting, a sky of “silver and turquoise and varnish,” and to bore through the representation to reality would be to reach, at last, the “maroon-coloured wall.” The seamless fit between

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text and world writes a lesson of simple existence: “The text was simply, when condensed, that in these places such things were” (386–7). That epiphany’s echo of the repeated copula linking world and painting— “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”—makes this moment of repletion also a moment of elegy, its seamless recovery evoking its vanishing: “it was . . . it was . . . it was . . . it was . . . it was.” At the moment of this asserted recovery, in the paradoxical repletion achieved through the making tangible of loss, Strether perceives Chad and Madame de Vionnet and thus undeniable evidence of their sexual relation. The lovers unveil a lack, an “emptiness” that—retrospectively— punctures the language of completion and satiety: the valley on the further side was all copper-green level and glazed pearly sky, a sky hatched across with screens of trimmed trees, which looked flat, like espaliers; and though the rest of the village straggled away in the near quarter the view had an emptiness that made one of the boats suggestive. (388) The same language of composition that made for repletion now makes for a sudden flatness of view that troubles the plentitude of the picture, reveals it as picture.14 The unexpected “straggling” of its elements disrupts the harmony of the composition, and the prior fullness of the day is discovered in retrospect to have been lacking: “it was suddenly as if these figures, or something like them, had been wanted in the picture, had been wanted more or less all day, and had now drifted into sight, with the slow current, on purpose to fill up the measure” (388). As the moment when Strether discovers his exclusion from his friends’ erotic relation, it ought to mark the culmination of his education in the novel, a final turn of the screw achieving the exclusion dictated by his logic of “life.” That is, the sight of Madame de Vionnet and Chad might, like Chad’s apartment, represent the substance of his loss, put within touch the sense that it is too late, make manifest the logic of vicariousness, consummate the paradoxical realization of Strether’s belatedness. The moment, however, is more unsettling. This compensatory logic of “reparation”—the painting celebrated because one did not buy it—is troubled by the unveiling of deceit (“He kept making of it that there had been simply a lie in the charming affair” [393]); the moment in the country simultaneously marks the culmination of the logic of loss we have

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belatedness and style

palgrave advances in henry james studies

been pursuing and threatens to unravel the fabric of its compensations. One of the novel’s most moving moments occurs as Strether realizes that Madame de Vionnet is terrified of losing her lover: “she was as much as ever the finest and subtlest creature, the happiest apparition, it had been given him, in all his years, to meet; and yet he could see her there as vulgarly troubled, in very truth, as a maidservant crying for her young man” (409).15 Put in question is nothing short of the transformation on which the novel rests: She had made him better, she had made him best, she had made him anything one would; but it came to our friend with supreme queerness that he was none the less only Chad . . . . The work, however admirable, was nevertheless of the strict human order, and in short it was marvelous that the companion of mere earthly joys, of comforts, aberrations (however one classed them) within the common experience, should be so transcendently prized. (408) Evoking Strether’s earlier sense that he “had faced every contingency but that Chad should not be Chad,” his perception of Madame de Vionnet’s tears throws into question the principle of aesthetic transformation that has underwritten Strether’s actions, disrupts his original epiphany of Chad’s “sharp rupture of identity” (96)—the very epiphany fueling Strether’s own expansion of consciousness, the aesthetic education which leaves him to find himself beautifully, irrevocably altered when he alteration finds. The consequences are serious: if the transformation is an illusion, if Strether has been “silly,” then the Pococks were right. And the Pococks are one of the great representatives of stupidity in the English and American novel—in them, James captures the inert, oblivious, disconcertingly insinuating power of stupidity as a force of pure negation, the power to negate one’s most treasured, most exquisite perceptions simply by refusing to countenance the existence of complexity in the world. If the Pococks win, the consolation he has constructed may be a delusion; to learn the lesson of Strether’s belatedness may be scarce consolation for the loss it recompenses. Compensation, however, may be the wrong register in which to think of aesthetic transformation. Early on, Strether’s guilt over his son’s death is expressed in the same terms as the belatedness he finds in France: he “might have kept his little boy, his little dull boy, who had died at school of a rapid diptheria, if he had not in those years so insanely given himself to merely missing the mother.” This

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was doubtless but the secret habit of sorrow, which had slowly given way to time; yet 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. Had ever a man, he had finally fallen into the way of asking himself, lost so much and even done so much for so little? (59) This passage is moving, not only because the eroticism of the moment— the possibility for that “sharp ache” at the sight of some “fair young man” to shade from parental regret to thwarted identification to desire— arises, partly, through its not being able to register for Strether. It is also moving—and jarring—because the “opportunity lost” renders the loss of his son as the sort of potentially lucrative business venture that Chad gives up to stay in France; the lack of a vocabulary to signal the difference movingly figures the frangibility of the novel’s compensatory logic. Strether’s question (“had ever a man . . . lost so much . . . for so little?”) raises the discomfiting question of what it would mean to compensate a loss, to lose something or someone “for” something else. Like the moment when Madame de Vionnet disconcertingly weeps, this evocation of loss raises the question of whether aesthetic formations should be thought in compensatory terms at all. Put another way, the scenes on the river and with Madame de Vionnet interrupt the possibility of a compensatory logic of representation. Chad’s empty apartment and the Lambinet countryside offer the lures of a representable loss, of having, as the “Project” puts it, “a great deal to show for it,” or of being able to name what has been missed, to lose something “for” something else. The scene on the river is thus also presented as a rupturing of representation. The incident, which seems dictated by psychological and aesthetic logics, defies the expectations of realism; what is termed “the general invraisemblance of the occasion” (391) punctures the novel’s verisimilitude even as it marks its most powerful incident. His enthusiasm for the Lambinet painting is said, we recall, to lead Strether “for a moment to overstep the modesty of nature” (381); the quotation from Hamlet links the scene’s departure from verisimilitude—“o’erstep not the modesty of nature,” Hamlet exhorts the players (III, ii, 19)—to the “living,” the (“modest”) “adventure” Strether had in relation to art, suggests that it consists, in part, in a rupture of mimesis. Frustrating the possibility of naming or compensating loss, the novel disarticulates the possibility of conceiving of it in mimetic terms. I take this to be one reason for the novel’s cryptic specification of Chad’s opportunity in Woollett; staying in France, he turns down a

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belatedness and style

palgrave advances in henry james studies

job in advertising (263), and his disturbing reference at the end of the novel to it as an “art” of at least theoretical interest leads a scandalized Strether to gape as if Chad were dancing a “fancy step” on the pavement. The refusal of advertising’s regime, which exchanges representation for compensation or profit, might be one explanation for Strether’s refusal to stay with Maria Gostrey at the novel’s close.16 His only logic, he says, is “not, out of the whole affair, to have got anything for myself” (438). If this is an ethical claim, it is not one, I think, of personal or sexual renunciation. For James’s preface makes this logic that of the novel itself: Maria, he writes, “is the reader’s friend much rather . . . and she acts in that capacity, and really in that capacity alone . . . She is an enrolled, a direct, aid to lucidity.” She, like Waymarsh, belongs “less to my subject than to my treatment of it” (xliii). Her “false position” (xxxv) as a narrative device posing as a character who therefore excites strange effects of sympathy parallels Strether’s own false position in relation to Woollett and Mrs. Newsome; Strether’s adventure, too, might thus be read primarily in relation to the narration itself.17 Whatever pathos is generated by the novel’s close, James thus seems to suggest, is related less to the pathos of a lost woman, less even to the dynamics of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has called homosexual panic, however resonant her reading of “The Beast in the Jungle” would be for The Ambassadors, than with the rigors of dispensing with such aids to lucidity, representability.18 Such might be the substance of Strether’s loss: the final lesson of his belatedness deprives him of representing his loss as a loss, as a substance. In a novel whose erotic and aesthetic pleasure is often that of gazing on Chad (“handsomer than he had ever promised” [104], looking “so well that one could scarce speak to him straight” [113])—of sensing his new “smoothness” (“for that he was smooth was as marked as in the taste of a sauce or in the rub of a hand”), of appreciating his having been “put in a firm mould and turned successfully out” (107)—this baffling of the representation of loss brings out the potential queerness of Lambert Strether’s belatedness and the erotics of exclusion it adumbrates. I would therefore insist that, as moving as the novel can be, Strether’s predicament is not sad, that the exorbitant forms of critical investment the text inspires are not to be explained by an identification with the futility of reading. Strether’s midnight vigil after he discovers the lovers in rural France evokes the disillusionment, even loneliness, that might attend an experience of punctured absorption, a reader’s discovery of irremediable separation from a beloved text. Thus to discover a broken spell, a distance analogous to that of a demystified Strether’s from Chad and Madame de Vionnet—even, like Strether, to wonder after

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an experience of rapture, if one has not been made rather a dupe—is also to discover one’s prior absorption. Leavis’s claim that he wasn’t “in the least tempted” to “identify himself with Strether” thus seems to attest, above all, to his immunity to this text, which he called a “feeble piece of word-spinning” (34–5). Leavis notwithstanding, the power to exact various forms of critical identification seems to turn on the text’s intuition that belatedness is both the obstacle to the “lived” life and its condition of possibility. Belatedness is a recurrent—perhaps simply the primary—figure in the text. “It wasn’t until after he had spoken,” we read in the first chapter, “that he became aware of how much there had been in him of response” (3), and such patterns are not limited to Strether. Chad’s miraculous Parisian transformation makes visible a discontinuity of narrative expectations; “handsomer than he had ever promised” (104), he, too, is to be appreciated in retrospect. His change, foundational for the novel’s principle of aesthetic development, cannot coincide with its representation. It is therefore scarcely surprising that Maimie—“bridal with never a bridegroom to support it” (311)—finds herself too late “for the miracle” of Chad’s transformation (326), and even the Pococks arrive to discover of their effort to turn Chad into Jim that “it’s too late” (290). Thus, it is striking that the realization of Strether’s we noted earlier (“I know—if we talk of that—whom I should enjoy being like!”) comes to point to Chad only after the fact. Strether initially indicates Gloriani and only afterward understands his own declaration: “It was the click of a spring—he saw the truth. He had by this time also met Chad’s look; there was more of it in that; and the truth accordingly, so far as Bilham’s inquiry was concerned, had thrust in the answer. ‘Oh, Chad!’— it was that rare youth he should have enjoyed being ‘like’” (155). Consciousness seems to lag behind even its own utterances. That Strether never had the benefit of youth “at the proper time” (240) thus signals less an avoidable mischance or failure of courage or occasion for pathos than a temporal disjunction, a marker of the ways that consciousness in late James is curiously, and productively, out of synch with itself. More than a thematic concern, and more than a peculiarity of Strether’s psychology, belatedness marks the very structure of realization and consciousness in The Ambassadors. That structure marks other late James texts in similar ways. One thinks of the injunction to live offered Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove (the question it raises of life missed or possessed), or of the structure of realization and illumination in The Golden Bowl. For gay readers, The Ambassadors might be especially powerful because of the way that the novel’s discontinuities of consciousness resonate with the experience of the closet, which makes such a discontinuity (not confined, of course,

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to gay readers, but unavoidable for those who have not cultivated a Pocock-like obliviousness to it) the principle of one’s development. The novel’s discontinuities of consciousness—in the novel as its fundamental narrative of aesthetic development as discontinuity and in its depiction of the ruptured spell of an absorption like that of reading that thereby makes inevitable a reader’s confrontation with cognitive discontinuity— resonates with the closet less because of a thematic concern with repressed sexual possibility than because of the way it makes manifest how the disjunction of the closet’s before and after punctuates a queer narrative of aesthetic education. The subject of coming out might thus take the paradoxical “form” of discontinuity rather than embodying a telos triumphantly unveiled: James’s text allows us to see a potential—within the closet’s own tendencies toward identity-consolidation—for a narrative more thrillingly marked with contingency. In these terms, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s dazzling reading of the New York Edition prefaces is compelling, among many other reasons, because it offers a way of thinking about the temporality of realization in The Ambassadors in what she might call “reparative” terms—in this instance, a way of considering James’s relation to this text (and his critical investments in that relation) without generating effects of pathos or pity or condescension.19 Her argument suggests that belatedness is the temporality of Jamesian revision; to arrive too late at the life one ought to have had transforms that life into the exquisite spell of reading and (re)writing. Shame, in Sedgwick’s account—as an affect that is put in play and made textually productive—allows one to think “fondly” about one’s own prior unknowing or deluded self, to contemplate that past without repudiating it. In the model she takes from Silvan Tomkins, shame emerges from a disrupted circuit of attention, a sudden withdrawal of recognition or response—that of a maternal figure, or, she suggests, of an audience or a reader (Tomkins 135; see also Basch cited in Sedgwick, Touching Feeling 35–6). Rereading James’s experiences with Guy Domville and the New York Edition, Sedgwick links that threat of withdrawn recognition—which might, after all, be the very condition of absorption—to his own possibly fragile attention to a younger, less knowing self. That self, in turn, is made the object not of repudiation, nor of elimination through subsequent ego consolidation, but of love, and shame becomes something other than debilitating. If the “queer performativity” Sedgwick finds in the prefaces suggests the possibility of imagining a new, productive relation to the self one was prior to coming out—and I take one implication of her argument to be that; until the abjection of prior unknowingness ceases to attend the triumphalism of

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coming out and the identity it unveils, queer politics cannot love queer youth, cannot, to this extent, avoid collaboration with homophobic imperatives to punish all signs of queer incipience—it also suggests the possibility of a new relation to Lambert Strether and to the (sexual) life of the author he is often seen to embody. Such a possibility is suggested by James’s own autobiographical writings. As Ross Posnock points out, James’s understanding of his belated arrival after William “blurs his identity with the shadow of otherness.” Belatedness, he writes, “defines James and his principal passion” (173). Paired with The Ambassadors and the shadow of the author’s life that falls on readings of the text, this unusual autobiography might be read in terms of the anti-mimetic rigors of James’s style. The fracturing of point of view, often at the moment that a narrating “I” begins to take shape; the recurrent description of the genesis of that consciousness in terms of a “split,” enacted, in the largest strokes, by the ceding, from the outset of A Small Boy and Others, of the autobiographical “I” to William James, for whom the text is offered as a “memorial”; the texts’ recurrent emphasis on the productive power of “waste” and loss, which links James’s unconventional childhood and his father’s sometimes incoherent experiments in education to anti-mimetic theories of representation, to a gain in consciousness that cannot be simply accounted for and an experience that therefore defies any simple rendering; to curious patterns of ventriloquism (of landscapes, buildings, scenes, and lost selves) that—as Cameron has pointed out in her reading of The American Scene—exteriorize consciousness, projecting James’s voice on to the world at large but also thereby rendering incoherent the containing of that consciousness in a singular “I”; the blurring of narrative temporalities that unsettlingly make it difficult to distinguish the narrating from the remembered “I,” marking the disappearance of the “I” whose Bildung is to be narrated by this autobiography into the disorientations of James’s style: all these suggest ways that the dauntingly opaque, inverted, luxuriantly overstuffed syntax of James’s memoirs articulates a relation between James’s late style and the representation of a life. It is to these terms—the effect of style on a project of representation—that I would look to understand the biographical investments of criticism of The Ambassadors, and the “reparative,” which is to say the queer, potential of Lambert Strether’s belatedness.

notes Earlier versions of this essay were presented at Boston College and at the 2003 Narrative Conference at the University of California, Berkeley. Thanks to the BC

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Graduate Student Association for inviting me to speak at their colloquium, and to both audiences for their comments. Thanks also to Henry Russell Bergstein, Andrew H. Miller, Daniel Heller-Roazen, and Rob Odom. 1. Bennett continues: “He was a man without a country. He never married. He never, so far as is commonly known, had a love-affair worthy of the name. And I would bet a fiver that he never went into a public-house and had a pint of beer—or even a half a pint. He was naïve, innocent, and ignorant of fundamental things to the last” (28–9). 2. Noting that Strether is unable “to play the man’s part in the scene of sexuality,” Elizabeth Dalton reads Strether’s suggestion that he had “dressed” the possibility of sex “in vagueness, as a little girl might have dressed her doll” (396) as an image for James’s style: “The image of the girl with her doll may even reveal something about the impulse behind the style of the novel, that difficult late style that also dresses possibility in vagueness” (467). 3. It is worth noting that—in readings of James, as in readings of Pater, Dickinson, Hopkins, Woolf, and others—this assumption is, more often than not, homophobic, or shares with homophobia the inability to register the possibility of happy modes of being outside procreative heterosexuality. One instance among many is Arnold Bennett’s use of “he never married” to mean “he never lived” (28–9). 4. For earlier considerations of James’s style, see: Chatman; Watt. 5. Cross offers insightful descriptions of the syntax of The Ambassadors. As my essay will make clear, however, I depart from the conclusions to which her analyses lead her. She writes, for example, of James’s efforts “to totalise the discourse and bring about . . . unity”: “In the face of a language that works always already against his quest, James devised a hermetic system of signs which could speak only of themselves, ‘motivated’ to serve the text and to erect the arbitrary fictional orders that would stem the tide of contingency and trace threatening to dissolve them in difference . . . . James mobilised a style that could accommodate and exploit the oppositions words mount against determinancy, a play of difference whose infinite movement he yet struggled to contain” (194). 6. I take this summary of Yeazell from my “The novel is older, and so are the young.” 7. Sheldon Novick’s Henry James: The Young Master, Fred Kaplan’s Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, Lyndall Gordon’s A Private Life of Henry James, and Colm Tóibín’s The Master, along with recent collections of James’s letters—Susan Gunter and Steven Jobe’s Dearly Beloved Friends, Rosella Zorzi’s Beloved Boy, and the ongoing project of editors Pierre Walker and Gregory Zacharias to issue his complete letters (see Walker and Zacharias’s essay in this volume)—all suggest a resurgence of interest, for vastly different critical projects, in James’s life. On the controversy surrounding Novick’s speculations about James’s sex life, see the Slate articles by Edel, Kaplan, and Novick. For a brilliant reading of style—partly in relation to the sorts of investments that frame my reading here—see Miller. For readings of sexuality in James that emerge from consideration of aspects of his style, see Matheson, Ohi, Savoy, and Sedgwick. For an important reading of the biographical—particularly of the infamous “obscure hurt” and the Civil War—in relation to the textual use James made of them (“an abuse of the past that has become an art of fiction” [67]), see

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9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

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Peter Rawlings, Henry James and the Abuse of the Past. “Whether James was either unable or unwilling to take up arms is less significant,” he writes, “than the use to which he put his negative experience of the Civil War in terms of the discourse of fiction-compelling obscurity it enabled” (xi–xii). I spell out this reading of “The Art of Fiction” and “The Future of the Novel” in “‘The novel is older and so are the young.’” On the prefaces, see Sedgwick, “Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity,” as well, as, more generally, David McWhirter’s collection. Zeugma or “double governance” (Lanham 160) is “a figure by which a single word is made to refer to two or more words in the sentence; esp. when properly applying in sense to only one of them, or applying to them in different senses” (OED). The discordance of grammatical construction—of masculine and feminine or singular and plural forms, for instance—that is more properly syllepsis can also, as zeugma, name a collocation of literal and figurative registers: Pope’s nymph staining “her honor or her new brocade” (Lanham) or Alanis Morissette’s lover holding “my hand and the door for me.” I offer an extended reading of these tropes in relation to The Golden Bowl—a novel that suggests that incest and adultery be read less as thematic preoccupations than as instances of these tropes—and of its thoroughgoing mixing of literal and figurative registers in “The Golden Bowl and Queer Style,” a chapter in “On the Queerness of Style: Henry James and the Erotics of Style” (in progress). “Project for a Novel by Henry James,” The Notebooks of Henry James, 375. Beyond critical preoccupations with it in accounts of The Ambassadors in particular, the thematics of missed experience articulated at this moment might simply define a major mode of James criticism tout court, biographical and otherwise, homophobic and anti-homophobic alike. Rivkin also notes that the promised freedom is explicitly an illusion (“The Logic of Delegation in The Ambassadors” 822). The change is thus an interpretative one that the novel connects to a form of sexual normativity. Europe demands finer distinctions—and thus accommodates a wider array of “types.” The difference between “Europe” and Woollett in the novel is, among other things, in the variety of types: “Those before him and around him were not as the types of Woollett, where, for that matter, it had begun to seem to him that there must only have been the male and the female” (36). My reading of the discovery of lack and deceit in this scene is indebted to Ellmann. Knoepflmacher points out the echoes of Antony and Cleopatra in this scene with Madame de Vionnet and draws out some implications of the novel’s use of Cleopatra. This language, we note, returns in the preface, where James writes of the “advertised vulgarity” of setting a novel about aesthetic awakenings in Paris (xxxviii). On “false positions” more generally, see Rivkin, False Positions. On “homosexual panic,” see Sedgwick, “The Beast in the Closet.” See also Between Men, 83–96. On “reparative reading,” see Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading.”

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Basch, Michael Franz. “The Concept of Affect: A Re-Examination.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 24 (1976): 759–77. Bennett, Arnold. The Savour of Life. New York: Doubleday, 1928. Bersani, Leo. “The Jamesian Lie.” A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature. Boston: Little, Brown. 128–55. ——. “The Narrator as Center in The Wings of the Dove.” Modern Fiction Studies 6 (1960): 131–43. Blackmur, Richard P. The Lion and the Honeycomb: Essays in Solicitude and Critique. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1955. Cameron, Sharon. Thinking in Henry James. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1989. Chatman, Seymour. The Later Style of Henry James. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1972. Cross, Mary. Henry James: The Contingencies of Style. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. Dalton, Elizabeth. “Recognition and Renunciation in The Ambassadors.” Partisan Review 59, vol. 3 (Summer 1992): 457–68. Deleuze, Gilles. Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1997. Dupee, F. W. Henry James: His Life and Writings. Garden City, NY: William Morrow, 1956. Edel, Leon. “Oh Henry: What Henry James Didn’t Do With Oliver Wendell Holmes (Or Anyone Else).” Slate 12 Dec 1996. Online. 2 Dec 2002. <www.slate.com/ id/3124/>. ——. “Henry James’s Love Life.” Slate 21 Dec 1996. Online. 2 Dec 2002. <www. slate.com/id/3633/entry/23772/>. Ellmann, Maud. “‘The Intimate Difference’: Power and Representation in The Ambassadors.” Henry James: Fiction as History. Ed. Ian F. A. Bell. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1984: 98–113. Geismar, Maxwell. Henry James and the Jacobites. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1963. Gordon, Lyndall. A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art. New York: Norton, 1999. Gunter, Susan E. and Steven H. Jobe. Eds. Dearly Beloved Friends: Henry James’s Letters to Younger Men. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 1991. James, Henry. The Ambassadors. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985. Text of The New York Edition. ——. The Notebooks of Henry James. Ed. F. O. Mattheissen and Kenneth B. Murdock. New York: Oxford UP, 1947. ——. A Small Boy and Others. Chappaqua, NY: Turtle Point Press, 2001. Kaplan, Fred. Henry James: The Imagination of Genius. New York: Morrow, 1992. ——. “Henry James’s Love Life.” Slate 7 Jan 1997. Online. 2 Dec 2002. <www.slate. com/id/3633/entry/23774/>. ——. “Henry James’s Love Life.” Slate 18 Jan 1997. Online. 2 Dec 2002. <www. slate.com/id/3633/entry/23776/>. ——. “Henry James’s Love Life.” Slate 30 Jan 1997. Online. 2 Dec 2002. <www. slate.com/id/3633/entry/23778>. Knoepflmacher, U. C. “‘O Rare for Strether!’ Antony and Cleopatra and The Ambassadors.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 19 (1964–65): 333–44.

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Lanham, Richard A. A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Leavis, F. R. The Common Pursuit. London: Chatto & Windus, 1952. Matheson, Neill. “Talking Horrors: James, Euphemism, and the Specter of Wilde.” American Literature 71, vol. 4 (1999): 709–50. Matthiessen, F. O. Henry James: The Major Phase. London: Oxford UP, 1944. McWhirter, David. Ed. Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995. Miller, D. A. Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003. Novick, Sheldon M. “Henry James’s Love Life.” Slate 19 Dec 1996. Online. 2 Dec 2002. <www.slate.com/id/3633/entry/23771/>. ——. “Henry James’s Love Life.” Slate 31 Dec 1996. Online. 2 Dec 2002. <www. slate.com/id/3633/entry/23773/>. ——. “Henry James’s Love Life.” Slate 13 Jan 1997. Online. 2 Dec 2002. <www. slate.com/id/3633/entry/23775/>. ——. “Henry James’s Love Life.” Slate 23 Jan 1997. Online. 2 Dec 2002. <www. slate.com/id/3633/entry/23777/>. ——. Henry James: The Young Master. New York: Random House, 1996. Ohi, Kevin. “Narrating the Child’s Queerness in What Maisie Knew.” Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children. Ed. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2004: 81–106. ——. “‘The novel is older, and so are the young’: On the Queerness of Style.” Henry James Review (forthcoming). Posnock, Ross. The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991. Rawlings, Peter. Henry James and the Abuse of the Past. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Rivkin, Julie. False Positions: The Representational Logics of Henry James’s Fiction. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996. ——. “The Logic of Delegation in The Ambassadors.” PMLA 101 (October 1986): 819–31. Savoy, Eric. “Embarrassments: Figure in the Closet.” Henry James Review 20: 3 (Fall 1999): 227–36. ——. “Theory a Tergo in The Turn of the Screw.” Curiouser. 245–75. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic.” Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: California UP, 1990: 182–212. ——. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1985. ——. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You.” Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke UP, 2003: 123–51. ——. “Is the Rectum Straight?: Identification and Identity in The Wings of the Dove.” Tendencies. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993: 73–103. ——. “Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel.” Touching Feeling. 35–65. Stone, Albert E. Jr. Ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Ambassadors. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969.

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Teahan, Sheila. The Rhetorical Logic of Henry James. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1995. Tóibín, Colm. The Master. New York: Scribner, 2004. Tomkins, Silvan. Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995. Watt, Ian. “The First Paragraph of The Ambassadors.” Essays in Criticism 10 (1960): 250–74. White, Allon. The Uses of Obscurity: The Fiction of Early Modernism. London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1981. Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. Language and Knowledge in the Late Novels of Henry James. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Zorzi, Rosella, et al. Eds. Beloved Boy: Letters to Hendrik C. Andersen, 1899–1915. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2004.

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clair hughes Jane Campion’s 1996 film version of Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady, appeared almost exactly a century after James’s play, Guy Domville: Campion’s film, while controversial, was a succès d’estime; Guy Domville, however, was one of literature’s noisier failures (Edel 2: 151). There have been several successful James films since Campion’s, which suggests surprising popularity for a “difficult” author and failed dramatist. Discussing James’s movies, Susan Griffin wondered if this was because we are now “running out of Jane Austen” (316), but in fact, as Alan Nadel writes, James on film is nothing new: “cinema is Jamesian—James is cinematic” (1998: 196). Sara Koch’s comprehensive filmography starts as early as 1933, and the entry on The Turn of the Screw alone runs to two pages. Henry James, William Veeder declares “was popular—it has happened after his death” (264). It has to be said, however, that James’s plays remain largely unperformed. Are the plays really so bad and the films of the novels so good? Certainly there are good films of the novels. One has only to think of the different, excellent qualities to be found in Bogdanovich’s Daisy Miller, Clayton’s The Innocents, Wyler’s The Heiress, Campion’s Portrait of a Lady, Iain Softley’s Wings of the Dove, the Merchant-Ivory Golden Bowl, and François Truffaut’s La Chambre Verte. Faithfulness to the text is one of the most commonly used criteria for judging these films among readers of James: but faithfulness can include many things, and I am interested here in why James on screen should be so impressive—so much more impressive than James’s own attempts in the theatre—and in offering a survey of and guide to some of the relevant secondary material. Film-makers are of course not simply putting James on celluloid. Whether they like it or not, they are interpreting James. They have always to concretize images and dramatic scenes from the abstract descriptions of 147

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fiction. And because film-making is a collaborative art, films are endlessly drawn to conventional representations, particularly, as we shall see, when costuming their actors. There are limitations to any film version of a novel, and many of them will only be apparent as the clichés of representation in any one period change. But it would be fair to say that the best of the films have been excellent readings of James’s novels; they have given a kind of admiring critique that throws light on aspects readers might ignore. In this way, they operate partly as critical commentaries on the fiction, and can be read as supplements to and extensions of debates about the texts. Theatre, it must be said, is rarely the inspiration for good film-making. Alfred Hitchcock, in his interviews with François Truffaut, deplored the advent of “talkies” because it brought theatre directors into film, who “had no interest in visualising stories but simply wanted to reproduce them on celluloid” (Truffaut 296). Image was central to Hitchcock, not plot or dialogue; and we see in James’s prefaces how often he traces the sources of his stories to images. Through his playwriting experience James felt he had found his “scenic method”: he drew, he explained, “a number of small rounds . . . about a central object . . . [which] represented so many distinct lamps . . . the function of each of which would be to light with all due intensity one of its aspects” (SLC 528). In the Truffaut interviews, Hitchcock, too, stressed how important it was as director first to “draw the décor, make the montage” (Truffaut 287). The scenic method, the intensification, was, however, what James took from the theatre, not what he brought to it. For James theatre was a lifelong interest, and his recollections of childhood are alive with anecdotes of plays and pantomimes—theatre was important to him. Sheldon Novick’s highly significant, revisionary essay, “Henry James on Stage,” points out that these theatrical memories are for James nostalgic pleasures, not the sources of a literary career, or at the bottom of his painful relation with the stage, as Leon Edel’s psychoanalytic approach to James’s work would have us believe. James’s interest in the theatre as critic and then novelist is different: it is in performance technique and discipline. His first theatre criticism, from Paris in 1872, notes the way the ingénue, in a play by Musset, “listening at evening in the park to the passionate whisperings of the hero, drops her arms half awkwardly along her sides in fascinated self-surrender” (EAD 38). It is the image that counts, the implications of gesture and movement. “It is an incident,” James wrote in “The Art of Fiction” of 1884, “for a woman to stand up with her hand resting on a table and look out at you in a certain way . . . it is an expression of character” (SLC 197).

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We should start off, then, by considering what actually happened to James in the theatre of his time. Although the dramatization in 1891 of his early novel The American is considered James’s first venture into the theatre, he had in fact been writing plays from the start. In 1882 he dramatized Daisy Miller, his successful novella of 1878, which had caused enough stir on both sides of the Atlantic for Daisy to become a byword even for those who hadn’t read the story. James had seen how profitable dramatized best-sellers were: why not Daisy? He started negotiations with New York’s Madison Square Theatre, but all ended acrimoniously and James returned to London, filled with a “deep and unspeakable disgust” with “managers, actors and . . . the conditions of production on our unhappy stage” (CP 118)—London managers were, however, equally discouraging. James’s “disgust” shaped later events. It would be pleasing to find the manager of Madison Square Theatre guilty of bad judgment—but in truth, had it been anyone else, James might reasonably have sued the author of the play for damages. There is little profit in dwelling on its full awfulness, but in his stage version Daisy recovers from her fever and marries Winterbourne, Eugenio is a pantomime villain (all hissed asides), and a blackmailing rival for Winterbourne’s affections, Mme. de Katkoff, is melted into repentance by Daisy’s sweet innocence: in short, the delicate ambiguities of James’s tale are crushed by the combined weight of the formulaic French well-made play and the crude moralizing of Victorian melodrama.1 The stage directions are inordinately long, and reproduce verbatim the novella’s description of Daisy’s dress—a topic to which I shall return. Despite discouragement, James persevered with playwriting. Novick suggests that in the late 1880s James was more than usually worried about money (3). His recent novels had done badly and he now also had responsibility for his invalid sister, Alice. James was dismissive of the London theatre, but it was fashionable and profitable. And his first theatrical venture in 1891—a stage-version of The American—was reasonably wellreceived (Novick 5). It opened in the provinces, and then moved to London for two months; a decent if not very commercial run. Apart from an alternative happy-ending, written to keep the play going for a few more months, James did less violence to the novel than to Daisy. Unusually, he insisted on supervising the costumes but seems to have had a lapse in taste over Christopher Newman’s coat, whose violent colors and huge buttons occasioned some mirth (CP 180).2 James was always more appreciative of the French than of the AngloSaxon theatre, admiring its “fixed dimensions” and “grave and rigid laws”

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(CP 34); its actors and playwrights were a cultural force, he felt, and its critics wrote as if “the theatre were the only thing in this frivolous world that is worth seriously talking about” (SA 69). Compared to the anarchic conditions of the London stage with its crudely sensational spectacles, its formulaic “problem plays,” and the over-upholstered Shakespeare productions of Henry Irving, the French theatre seemed admirably serious in its devotion to a classical tradition. Miriam Rooth’s training in this tradition, in The Tragic Muse of 1890, is shown as being as hard and demanding as a religious vocation. In the French theatre, as Allan Wade observes, James “had found a standard which was to serve him consistently” (SA xiii). This acceptance of established laws contrasts with his own experiments with form and resistance to prescription: he did not (could not) follow the theatrical culture he most admired. Written in 1893, James intended Guy Domville as a serious treatment of a theme found in his fiction—the conflict between vocation and family duty. Set in an eighteenth-century country house, the play afforded attractive opportunities for costume and décor and was put into production by George Alexander at London’s fashionable St. James’s Theatre. Act I was well-received: the protagonists’ unawareness of their love for one another establishes dramatic tension, as Guy tries to persuade the heroine to accept the proposal of his friend. In then changing location, introducing a second set of characters with little relation to the first, and turning the serious Guy Domville into a tipsy dandy, James dissipated the tensions of Act I. Alexander had insisted on cuts to the play’s central section to comply with the exigencies of London’s train-timetables, but even so, in privileging plot and argument over dramatic tension and image, James lost his audience. The last straw was apparently Mrs. Domville’s ludicrous hat in the florid and over-blown style of the 1780s. James had taken a personal interest in the costuming of The American, so probably had a hand here. A photograph of the actress shows a hat of 1780, which does nothing for her rather heavy face, unwisely makes no concession to current modes and, frankly, would in any period look simply awful. Thereafter, the evening degenerated towards its humiliating conclusion: James, too nervous to attend, arrived only for the last act; Alexander unforgivably drew him on stage, to derisive cat-calls, from which James understandably fled. He was clearly upset at the response to his most serious and ambitious writing for the theatre, but the rowdyism did not recur, and the play ran for six weeks. Reviews were mixed, and some accounts of the evening—George Bernard Shaw’s, for example—indicate that the play was appreciated by more respectable sections of the audience (Edel 2: 159; Novick 6). But The Illustrated and Sporting News had to

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conclude that “it is a piece which, save in its idyllic first act, and in a single emotional scene in its third, has none of the quality demanded for practical success upon the stage” (661). Novick argues convincingly that James was by no means traumatized by the experience, but freed by failure, retired from London to Sussex, and, capitalizing on his playwriting experience “began the series of masterpieces on which his modern reputation is based.” Readers, Novick remarks, “will notice that this account is at odds with a more familiar version” (7); that is, Edel’s elaborate retelling of H. G. Wells’s malicious version of events. Edel’s account is recycled in two recent novels about James–Colm Tóibín’s The Master (2004) and David Lodge’s Author, Author (2004)—where it comes over, according to a reviewer, as “the worst moment in his life”; but James’s own responses provide a more reliable insight into his relations with theatre (Brookner 45). After Alice’s death in 1892, money was not such a pressing problem, and Edmund Gosse records visiting James the morning after the opening night and finding him vibrating “with a sense of release” (Novick 7). Even Edel, in his collected edition of James’s letters, notes that no one would know from these that “James was deeply depressed after his failure in the theatre” (CP 479; Novick 8). Indeed, James then spent a cheerful weekend at the Archbishop of Canterbury’s country house. Novick regrets the lost dramatist in James, but conclusively dispatches the image of a morbidly sensitive James, quivering in retirement in Sussex, writing about poor hurt children. In fact, James continued to write for the theatre: after Guy Domville, The High Bid had a modest success in 1908, and again in the 1970s in London, as an oddly entertaining vehicle for Eartha Kitt. In common with most of his plays, the first act was promising, the middle wordy, the end foreseeable. The plays are then not complete failures, not entirely worthless. Only, as Richard Salmon points out, “if James refused to sever his links with the mass market, equally he wished to maintain his distance from it” (76). It is this “distance” that is problematic: consciously “lowering” himself to cater to a popular taste he despised, his writing lost motive force, his voice, any urgency. James’s disdain, though not explicit, is alienating—the plays are not actor-friendly—and his wish to raise the tone of contemporary drama produced static, long-winded dialogue, whose subject matter seems remote beside that of Shaw, for example. Loyalty to aspects of the popular French tradition dates his plays beside the structural experiments of Ibsen or Strindberg, and the stage directions—attempts to make actors Jamesian “centres of consciousness”—

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usurp the autonomy of both actor and director, and betray frustration at his inability to control all aspects of performance.3 James’s compulsion to direct the gaze of his audience lies at the heart of his problems with the theatre, and explains his relief at returning to the art of fiction. A key difference between stage and screen is highlighted in considering James within these contexts. Everything on stage is present to the eye of an audience: individuals choose where to look, what to overlook. Film, however, shares with fiction the ability to control the gaze and the world it presents, unlike that of the stage, is incomplete and limitlessly suggestive. James’s “house of fiction”4—his metaphor for the novelist’s art—describes exactly such a combination of authorial control and readerly freedom: an infinite number of windows look onto a chosen scene, some see black, some see white but the image, the fragment viewed, is the same. Like the chains of modifying clauses in late Jamesian fiction, filmic images constantly modify preceding images. The good film, like the good novel, directs the reader/spectator’s gaze onto successive fragments that are then reassembled within the individual perception. Film and novel techniques depend, as Alan Nadel says, in his admirably clear essay on James and cinematic convention, “on a psychology of perception that exploits the tension between infinite possibility and necessarily partial representation” (1998: 281). Hitchcock, looking back to the silent cinema of Méliès and Lumière, said that the problem with French movies now (1966) is that they are photographs of people talking, which might well stand as a description of Act II of a James play. Peter Bogdanovich, when interviewed on his film version of Daisy Miller, spoke of the story as “very sketchy,” like “a very good treatment for a movie.” He claimed that though “the thing that interests me least is what James saw in it”; he had been faithful to the story “on the surface.” “I want the film to be beautiful,” he said, and also to be a suspense-movie: “One has the feeling something terrible is going to happen” (Dawson 83, 84, 89). Bogdanovich, if controversial, still listened to the Lesson of a Master—Hitchcock—and saw in Winterbourne’s confusion over Daisy a parallel to James Stewart’s “paralyzed state at the end of Vertigo” (Raw 2). With this view of the text, Daisy’s image leaps into fresh life, raises new issues: James’s “lamps” around her are realigned to take into account postwar attitudes to women as well as sexist responses to 1970s feminism. Daisy’s ambiguity echoes Vertigo’s double heroine, as, seductive but coolly elusive, she draws the detective hero to the abyss—which is also her own. It is as well to launch a consideration of the films with Bogdanovich, because his Daisy Miller has become for many an example of the intelligent

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interpretation of a Jamesian text (McCormack; Bordwell). Once we begin to look at the detail we notice that it has used James, shifting the novella to the conventions of suspense cinema, but inventively picking up details from James’s text to do so. James’s play, Daisy Miller, had demonized Eugenio. Bogdanovich chose for Eugenio an actor who resembled Barry Brown’s Winterbourne. Winterbourne’s obsession with Daisy thus takes on a menacing edge, and an ambiguity that in the novel is confined to Daisy. Both men are saturnine, and, when seen together in identical dark, stiff outfits—historically correct but suggestively funereal—they seem dangerous. The camera frequently pauses on their brooding faces as they watch Daisy: they stalk her, as James Stewart stalked Kim Novak, to possess the “real” Daisy. There is a case for laying Daisy’s death at the door of the men who compete to control her, Winterbourne, Eugenio, and Giovanelli—but at Winterbourne’s in particular. Randolph’s popgun, pointed at him, in an invented scene, makes this point, as does his final glance of hatred. Character, dialogue, and action in Bogdanovich’s film all circle about the figure of Daisy. James, in the novella, was beginning to develop his concept of a “centre of consciousness”—and Daisy is seen mainly through Winterbourne’s eyes, we never “go behind” her.5 To convey Winterbourne’s internalized commentary, Bogdanovich establishes play between what the camera behind Winterbourne sees him seeing, how it then sees Daisy, and then returns to Winterbourne’s reaction. Daisy’s first entrance is signaled by his expression of surprise—or of delight. Panning onto a distant figure in white, we watch as Daisy moves into focus, a vision of pure pleasure. She is in “white muslin, with a hundred frills and flounces, and knots of pale-colored ribbon [and] in her hand [is] a large parasol with a deep border of embroidery” (DM 11). James described the dress first in 1877 in a review of a painting by James Tissot; then in his tale, then the play; the dress appears in three other Tissot paintings—a remarkable career for one dress (Hughes 16–17). Bogdanovich creates a replica of Tissot’s white and yellow dress, and Daisy’s subsequent outfits retain these pastel and white tones. The camera’s enchantment with Daisy’s graceful back-view, as she “draw[s] her muslin furbelows over the gravel,” is not only a close registration of the text, but deepens its meaning for viewers, for her back view, though it conceals, also tantalizingly draws us towards her. “Was she simply a pretty girl from New York State?” (DM 29, 23)—or what is she?—thus becomes the puzzle at the center of both novel and film; and Bogdanovich has used the implications of dress, as James did, to suggest answers, question prejudices, and create ambiguities. Daisy’s dresses are elaborate,

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extravagant, and seductive but, as Mrs. Costello says, in perfect taste. White is traditionally worn by the chaste jeune fille. Bogdanovich subverts this cliché by giving the movie’s only pure white dress to a prostitute who catches Winterbourne’s eye as he watches Daisy in the Pincio Gardens. Our last glimpse of Daisy is in the darkness of the Coliseum, her head covered in white lace—a bridal veil, shroud, or sacricifial robe? White lace returns to produce one of the film’s last, most powerful images: Winterbourne opens the glass door to Daisy’s hotel and we are just able to see him at the reception desk, through the door’s white lace curtain, which suddenly, by a trick of light, turns black. For a film that is fast, full of music and of Daisy’s incessant chatter, the moment freezes into silence. We know Daisy is dead. There was no lace in James’s story, but lace has provided an image that works perfectly in cinematic terms. Daisy in 1878 was controversial, but not as controversial as the reception of Bogdanovich’s movie: it virtually finished his career. Peggy McCormack, in her entertaining essay, believes that his very public affair with his star, Cybill Shepherd, is partly to blame for the hostile response, but “old-fashioned 1970s sexism” (41) played its role too. Shepherd’s fresh, undaunted approach to the role, her grace in a series of fiercely constricting dresses, is even now unmatched. As Bogdanovich said, “it’s rather marvellous to have a costume-piece in which nobody behaves as though he’s in a costume picture” (Dawson 84). Bogdanovich’s costume decisions reflect a close, undeferential reading: he is historically accurate, but his effects seduce and disturb, like Daisy herself. Dress, as I have argued elsewhere, is important in James’s novels.6 Catherine Sloper’s red dress is where everything starts in James’s Washington Square. William Wyler’s black and white screen version of the novel, The Heiress, is, however, a 1940s film noir, its title focusing on a single female figure—reflecting unease with women’s changing status, post-World War II. The dark interiors, steeply-angled staircases, open windows and closing doors of the genre are a feature of The Heiress and accord with the melodramatic aspects of James’s novel. The film’s opening sequences are of the dress and its effect is convincingly rendered in surface-shine and ornament; surprisingly it is Agnieska Holland’s 1997 film of Washington Square that fails at this point. To some degree this is simply because she has not read the novel closely enough. Despite being a riot of color and enjoying a huge costume-budget, Holland’s film puts Catherine into a purple and yellow horror, inconsistent with the novel’s description of her “lively” (not bad) taste in dress, and at odds with the film’s subsequent dresses, which are actually rather becoming. Dress matters: it has “deep roots in the passions” (Bowen 112).

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It is to some extent odd that Washington Square should be popular on screen at all: the simplicity of the plot and the intensely scenic dialogue do lend themselves to dramatization but, as Julie Rivkin says, in her discriminating analysis of the two films, “we don’t have much of a girl to watch here . . . it’s not just that she’s plain . . . the extreme privacy of her drama is its signature” (149). If Catherine’s perceptions are sealed off from other characters, how can the film communicate her experience, and her recognition of bad faith? To articulate Catherine’s perception of events, Wyler, with the writers Ruth and Augustus Goetz, turned James’s narrative into a revenge-plot: her knowledge of what her father and lover have done is made bitingly clear by the way she finally torments and punishes them for their treatment of her. As Jerry Carlson rightly says, this involves “an abrupt reversal of character” (96) in mid-film, and denies the moral growth central to the presentation of Catherine in the novel: in the film version she is, on the contrary, corrupted. Hollywood, with a good deal of money at stake, rarely bites the bullet when it comes to providing a homely heroine, especially one who is overweight: “she is so large,” Mrs Almond says of Catherine, “and she dresses so richly [men] are afraid of her. She looks as if she had been married already” (WS 60). Wyler’s and Holland’s films both introduce portraits of Catherine’s dead mother; Wyler even invents dialogue where Catherine eagerly points out that the red of her dress was her mother’s favorite color. In the novel the red dress is worn again to please Morris, but both films ignore this. The improbability of someone as beautiful as Morris being in love with a big, silent over-dressed girl is implied in James’s text; but this is quite simply something that Hollywood cannot do: neither film can escape the usual imperatives of tiny waists and pretty faces. The red dress of the novel implies not only maturity but vulgarity, even sexuality, though Catherine does not understand this. At the end, James gives Catherine the white dress that she now knows she should have worn at the start. Wyler read this change, and has the maid admire the white Parisian finery of Olivia de Havilland’s Catherine—exquisite for the last reel—but what his alterations lose is the bitter irony in Catherine’s wearing white now. In the novel, it is summer, when white is appropriate as well as correct dress for unmarried girls; but it is also a color worn in later stages of mourning. Catherine is a virgin in the autumn of life, with deaths behind her, and only embroidery ahead. The dress is ironic, and Catherine, now an authority “on all moral and social matters” (WS 204) knows what she is saying. But there is no one to hear, and as Rivkin observes, the “potent figure of a woman who simply endures” (168),

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unheard and unrewarded, is too sadistic even for Hollywood. Palliatives had to be invented. I would agree with Peter Swaab that The Heiress’s success may owe something “to the boldness with which it reworks the original” (57); although the absence of a Jamesian dimension of moral self-realization is difficult to overlook. Rivkin, also preferring the older version, deplores Holland’s demonization of Sloper, which loses the complexity of James’s portrait of a father who is so wrongly right. Holland’s consequent prettification of Morris is, as Rivkin remarks, a modish 1990s nod to the New (feminized) Man. Her central point that neither film communicates the painful privacy of Catherine’s drama, substituting revenge in one case and ersatz maternity in the other, is an important one. Holland’s Catherine is not vengeful; but making her journey the discovery of her “inner child,” rewarded by a roomful of warbling, needy toddlers, will not do either. When observing Christina Light, Roderick Hudson (the eponymous hero of James’s second novel) speculates about “beautiful watched girls,” and the most watched of James’s girls are perhaps Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, and Milly Theale and Kate Croy in The Wings of the Dove. The Portrait of a Lady marks an advance in James’s deployment of his “centres of consciousness”: Isabel Archer’s growing understanding of what she sees and how she is seen is the plot. Jane Campion’s film of the novel re-inscribes this obsessive “girl-watching” in cinematic terms, from the first line-up of pretty girls in the fashions of the 1970s and 1980s, to the final image of Isabel framed in a doorway.7 Ian Softley’s Wings of the Dove re-creates the triangular “gaze” of the two girls observing each other, and observing and being observed by Merton Densher. Commentators have focused on the feminist and erotic emphases of these movies; Diane Sadoff in particular has accused the films of indulging the “suspect pleasures” of middlebrow, art-house audiences, its “sadomasochistic desires” and taste for “celebrity sex” (263, 273). This vision of rows of humanities professors in dirty raincoats, furtively pleasuring themselves, is surely unduly harsh? But the films do represent attempts—on the part of Softley, at least—to appeal to a wider audience. The movies may reflect the sexual tastes and anxieties of the millennially pessimistic 1990s, but similar preoccupations are also at the core of James’s texts. Among other things, the two novels have in common the easilyoverlooked fact that the three central women are described as wearing black or white. Campion’s mise-en-scène, however, of Brunelleschi’s liquorice-striped Duomo, of the black-and-white geometry of pavements—and, of course, of Isabel Archer’s costumes—suggests that she has noted these oppositions and given her a starting point, as the

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gothic light-and-dark contrasts of the novel are foregrounded. James’s novel is a “portrait” at a time when images of elegant, upwardly-mobile women dominated the Anglo-American art scene, and controversies over women’s rights had sharpened. Campion recasts these debates to reflect late twentieth-century worries over the failing institutions of marriage and family, but also to highlight the fact that, as Nancy Bentley says, “the observation of a beautiful woman is a central preoccupation of the celluloid world” (127). Isabel’s clothes first conform to her social and economic circumstances; she enters both novel and film in simple mourning black: as she acquires money and thus independence, her choices reflect how she sees herself and wants to be seen. James in his fiction is always economical if precise with dress: he “zooms” in on certain details and invests them with significance: frills, fans and ribbons, for example, operate as fashion items and as symbols in the reading of Daisy. We know only that Isabel’s dress is black, but the color has social, national and personal significance: she is in mourning, she is a New Englander, and she resists attempts to define her in terms of appearance. Campion scrupulously records Isabel’s transition to a later stage of mourning—white touched with black—at her fateful meeting with Osmond in the catacombs, where powerful Hitchcockian (even Truffauldian) use is made of a series of dizzying circular shots, set off by the vertiginous whirl of Isabel’s black and white parasol.8 The dress’s white material is covered in a fine web of black embroidery, which, as well as recalling a Renaissance fashion for black-thread work, also casts a decorative net over her. All this is communicated in visual terms in Campion’s movie. Her creation of a rich, dark portrait, with a woman trapped in gorgeously ornate costumes at its center, is a brilliantly visual—if also selective— reading of the text. It trades on our ambiguous attitudes to the Victorian woman: we deplore her powerless servitude, but we luxuriate in images of the trappings that cushion her. Part of the attraction of such films is their “heritage” element. Directors, however historically accurate, cannot, of course, avoid eventual anachronism: details are crystallized at the time the movie is made and will take on the “look” of that time. The clothes of Cybill Shepherd’s Daisy, for example, are more broad-shouldered than is now fashionable (and therefore not quite right to us), and her hairstyle is unmistakably 1974. The silhouette of Nicole Kidman’s Isabel is narrower, and more outrageously trained and bustled than was actually the case in 1876. She has the fussy black lines of a Victorian engraving, as well as the pinched anorexic modes of the 1990s. Michael Anesko’s remark, à propos of the film’s masochistic feminism, that “getting into

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this film is like getting into a corset” (179), is enjoyable and also to the point. Campion is not merely accurate, she uses the fact that audiences see more than readers to add detail, like embroidery, and to tighten the noose round Isabel, as her clothes narrow further and further. No reading of this kind is final or exhaustive; but it may be nonetheless perceptive. Isabel’s free stride, at the start of the movie, in a simple black dress is in violent contrast to her later failure to escape Osmond, when he brings her crashing to the marble floor by treading on her elaborate train. This raises the question, though, of how far Campion’s translation of psychological into physical injury is justified, when in the text, in Chapter 42, Isabel quite specifically clears Osmond of violence. Anesko rightly regrets the film’s failure to find an equivalent to James’s famous Chapter 42: Isabel’s midnight vigil, when she takes the measure of her imprisoning marriage. But as the camera, like a small anxious dog, tracks her frantically through blue-lit rooms, corridors, staircases, doorways, observing her dark crippling dresses and bloated hairstyles, it registers her mounting distress and the escalation of Osmond’s emotional and psychological bullying. We might, through these successive images, see a re-creation of Isabel’s dawning sense of herself, backed up against a prison wall, as the creation and tool of a monster. In a discussion of recent James movies between Cynthia Ozick, Susan Griffin, Eleanor Wachtel and Sheldon Novick, Wachtel thought The Wings of the Dove was “the most fun.” Griffin, wondering why this was so, decided it was the “great clothes . . . I think that was the key, the clothes” (Ozick 319). Clothes are more obviously center stage in Softley’s film, than in Campion’s Portrait of a Lady, but he also jettisoned most of James’s dress references as radically as he jettisoned his text. I would agree with Ruth Yeazell, however, that “Softley’s Wings of the Dove is both a powerful film and a visual tribute to the late James that finds its own language for some of the deepest tensions in the novel” (87). Campion sacrificed a good deal of James in her film, but her reading added valuable insights. Has anything been gained in Softley’s film when so much has been lost? The film announces its date, 1910, at the start, freeing Softley to use very different social, cultural and visual backgrounds from those of the 1902 novel. Milly’s relentlessly black garb in the novel corresponds to a fin-de-siècle mood, but it is also a reflection of her Americanness: in contrast to a relaxation of rules governing mourning in Britain, American mourning dress around 1900 actually increased. An entire family lies dead behind Milly in New York. There is no end to her mourning as there is no end to her wealth, one being the result of the other. Milly’s black in

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the novel is described as incongruous and unfashionable: to some she is “the awfully rich young American who was so queer to behold”; to herself she is an “odd-looking girl from New York, duskily draped, sable-plumed” (WD 1: 208, 249). Milly appears in white only at her Venetian party at the end. Kate enters the novel in black and appears thereafter in white or light colors until Milly’s habitual black dress is transferred to her in Merton Densher’s mind: a metaphoric but damaging switch. But as Virginia Woolf said, “[o]n or about December 1910 human character changed” (quoted in Bradbury 15). She was referring, rather dramatically, to the Post-Impressionist Exhibition of that year, which had been preceded, in 1909, by the first season of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, both of which had seismic effects on the British cultural scene. And in 1904 fashion took a startling new direction with Paul Poiret’s Confucius Coat—a lacquer-red, uncorseted, vertical sweep. One can see that, aesthetically speaking, 1902 has not got a lot going for it. If James’s late style can be seen as part of the Modernist project, and the novel’s imagery a network of extended, highly mannered metaphors, then Softley’s decision to place the film within a European, “Symboliste,” milieu is culturally justified. Besides, monochrome heroines are not much of a box-office draw. Instead, Kate and Milly are dressed in a sequence of gorgeous outfits, Fauvist in coloring, and Ballets Russes or Poiret in style. James’s central visual reference, a dark Mannerist portrait by Bronzino, becomes a pair of golden, erotic paintings by Klimt. James’s Milly, in front of the Bronzino sees “death, death, death”; Softley’s Milly in front of Klimt sees sex, sex, and money. Softley has all the same noted James’s black/white contrasts. At Aunt Maud’s dinner-party Kate wears black, Milly white; this reverses the novel’s colors. As the camera cuts from one girl to the other, the scene becomes an act of identification, rivalry, and attraction between the two: “a visual shorthand” as Yeazell, in her perceptive analysis puts it, “for the structure of substitution and replacement which the plot as a whole will operate” (90). The identification and latent rivalry between the women is played up in the similar blue outfits they wear throughout: Kate in a darker blue, often touched with black, or with fur,9 Milly in paler, “Liberty” styles. Milly does wear white for her final “party,” which is a Venetian carnival, but the impact is lost as she has been wearing similarly light dresses all along. What Softley loses altogether is Milly’s Americanness and, crucially, her inescapable association with death: like her wealth, it is part of her. Paradoxically, by ignoring the black and white contrasts, he over-simplifies his protagonists, losing much of the novel’s ambiguity.

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Softley’s Milly, freed from her sinister coloring and history, becomes a pure Victorian innocent, in love and too guileless to see Kate and Merton’s relationship. But James’s Milly is one of the novel’s trio of schemers, and the one who ultimately triumphs. Softley softens, so to speak, Densher, tricking him out with socialist ideas and crumpled tweeds, and letting him off the hook of complicity with Kate in their plot against Milly. Dale Bauer, worrying about Jamesian “cultural capital”, feels that as a consequence “the film hates Kate” (248), though the novel does not. The film isolates Kate as the prime instigator of evil, playing Helena BonhamCarter against her status as the heroine of 1990s costume-drama; but she has a vulnerability that retains something of James’s ambiguity. On Merton’s return to London, however, she appears at his door, black from head to toe, a menacing contrast to Milly, dying in Venice in an exquisite white Fortuny frock. Milly’s image here sentimentalizes her farewell to Densher in the novel, where she is “in the dress she always wears” (WD 2: 328): her resumption of black is a recognition of his betrayal, her loss of hope that had been embodied in the white dress worn for him. Softley’s last image of Kate is, on the other hand, his most compelling and his saddest: the camera dwells coldly on her blue-lit thigh, in an ironic echo of Klimt’s golden nude, as she strips off her black clothes for Densher and then focuses on their miserable failure to make love in surroundings dismally dingy after the luxury which we/they have lately enjoyed. Softley has lost much of the novel’s moral ambivalence in privileging its sexual implications, but he has used the medium of the film to add an ironic, even Jamesian note, of his own. And he has indulged us cinematically in the world, the flesh if not the devil. The viewpoint in James’s The Wings of the Dove shifts from one character to another (at the conclusion of both film and novel it is almost Milly’s), but the narrative of James’s most frequently filmed work, The Turn of the Screw, has the governess as its slant and filter.10 Film happily takes to multiple perspectives—Kurosawa’s Rashomon, for example—but without a voice-over a first person film narrative is tricky: there is always a camera between image and audience. But Jack Clayton’s version of The Turn of the Screw, The Innocents, exploits this difficulty to achieve the level of indeterminacy James aims for in his text. Clayton’s film, like other interpretations of the novella, omits the story’s prologue, in which James spreads confusion over the status of the governess’s manuscript; this unease with the story’s medium is transferred to the governess’s (Miss Giddens) voice that accompanies the film’s opening titles. Is this a flashback or forward? Are the woman’s praying hands and voice a plea to us, and is she therefore “editing” her narrative, as Anthony Mazella suggests

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(30)? From the start we are made uncertain of the data we are given and of the images we encounter. Are they the governess’s subjective reality or is the camera another “eye,” undercutting what she sees and implying alternative realities? By leaving the edges of the screen dark, Clayton exploits film’s ability to suggest things just out of sight. The circularity of the novella is reiterated by repeating the opening image at the film’s conclusion; this leads us to speculate, as the novel does, on the fate of Miss Giddens, as well as to ponder over who is telling the story. Clayton retains James’s ambiguity over the ghosts’ existence first by fragmenting or blurring sightings of them, but most effectively, by making the governess’s reaction to what she sees his focus. Kerr’s magnificent portrayal of a mind on the edge creates a dizzying see-saw for the audience between hostility and sympathy, revulsion and admiration, that is still disturbing. A recent internet essay by Lawrence Raw interestingly puts the film in its early 1960s context, showing how Deborah Kerr, at the height of her fame as Hollywood’s cut-glass English Lady, was forced on Clayton as his star. Raw doesn’t say if Clayton was happy with this, but one wonders whether a forty-year old grande dame, fresh from singing her way through The King and I as a cheerily wholesome governess, was what he had in mind for the role of a nervous, eighteen year old vicar’s daughter. Whether it was Clayton’s talent as director, Kerr’s as performer, or an unusual perceptiveness on the part of the studio, the result was not only a triumph, but as Raw makes clear, the collaboration between director and actress produced a film which questioned those very stereotypes promoted by Hollywood in the 1950s, and which the British cinema of the 1960s was beginning to undermine. James’s first-person narrative never reveals what the governess wears, and one wonders if some arrangement had been made with the makers of The King and I to re-cycle Kerr’s costumes. Clayton (or Kerr) was obviously undeterred by the likely limitations of a governess’s wardrobe; and setting the film in the 1860s, rather than James’s 1840s, gives Miss Giddens the benefit of crinolines at their biggest. However, since everything in the film is conveyed in heightened or exaggerated terms—the beauty of the children, the size of the house, bird and insect sounds, and so on—these over-the-top dresses, with their strangulating collars and corsets, only add to the sense of a situation and individual on the edge. Discussion of the film often focuses on Quint and the governess, but if we pay attention to the way the light pretty stuffs of Miss Giddens’s earlier outfits dull and darken in the film, then by the time we see her with Flora in the gazebo, she has become Miss Jessel, in stark black. What are we then to suppose will be Miss Giddens’s fate? In the novella, the governess’s view

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of Jessel grows more sympathetic, describing her finally “in her black dress, her haggard beauty and unutterable woe” as a “terrible, miserable woman” (TS 220–1). It is this image of Jessel from the text that Clayton uses three times: first in the opening titles, then with Flora in the gazebo, finally at the death of Miles. We are “possessed,” as Mazella argues “to return again and again to the intractable mystery that is ‘The Turn of the Screw’” (31). Violence may be implied in James’s fiction, but it lies out of sight. In recent filming of classics, however, preliminary bloodbaths seem de rigueur: the opening shots in Holland’s Washington Square and Merchant-Ivory’s Golden Bowl are not as gory as those of Kenneth Branagh’s Frankenstein, but they are not squeamish either. The Merchant-Ivory team had been adapting James’s novels for film since the 1970s, but their decision to introduce their opulent version of The Golden Bowl, in 2000, with murder and mayhem suggests nervousness about the saleability of their earlier, more decorous house-style. The scene of a Renaissance duke’s revenge on a wife and son caught in flagrante delicto, looks like a crude bid for boxoffice popularity (thus repeating one of James’s mistakes in the theatre) and makes a banal parallel between rapacious and revenging Medicis and their American twentieth-century counterparts. James does in fact make American ruthlessness and rapacity central to his novel, but as Wendy Graham says, the film “has not done justice to the novel’s reality principle, to its . . . protest against American omnipotence and acquisitiveness” (306). Loading the film with art works beyond the dreams of avarice is not the answer: Adam Verver’s taste, as James makes plain, has limitations that are personal as well as aesthetic. Agents, such as Bernard Berenson, were only too eager to act for collectors like Verver, who only cared “that a work of art of price should ‘look like’ the master to whom it might be deceitfully attributed” (GB 1: 147). Graham detects a surliness to Nick Nolte’s performance as Verver that conveys something of the novel’s ambivalence towards Adam, but the Verver pair in the film are nevertheless, as the scenarist, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala said in her interview with Philip Horne, “all goodness” (quoted in Graham 310). Merchant-Ivory’s simplification involves greater damage to James’s text than does Softley’s to Wings of the Dove. James describes Verver as a small, impotent, balding forty-seven year old, who wears the same suit, waistcoat and tie every day of his life—a very different image from Nick Nolte’s ruggedly handsome, seventy year old Santa Claus. To cast Uma Thurman as Charlotte Stant is as bad as casting John Malkovich as Osmond: the audience is forewarned. Santa Claus may suffer but will win. To anyone who saw Gayle Hunnicut’s enchanting Charlotte in

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James Cellan Jones’s 1972 B.B.C. version, the coarseness of Thurman’s writhing vamp is dispiriting. Jeremy Northam’s Italianate Amerigo suffers her hysterical clawing with the stoicism of a head-waiter whose tail-coat is on fire. A weakness of the 1972 production had been a low-key Maggie Verver. Kate Beckinsale’s Maggie in the Merchant-Ivory film suggests that below her bubbly sweetness there is an intelligence that Charlotte overlooks. Dressing Maggie in a succession of pretty pink, white and cream outfits, however, and Charlotte in greys, blacks, flame red, acid green and gold is (to put it kindly) clichéd, and works against Beckinsale’s interpretation. It ignores Maggie’s admiration in the novel for Charlotte’s perfect taste, her regret that she herself never gets such things right, and the fact that she is as ruthless a manipulator as her father. The effect of all this period finery, accurately 1904 to the last button, is as dull as the overstuffed Victorian stage of Henry Irving that James so detested. While the costuming of Softley’s Wings seems almost too gorgeous to be true, there is a postmodernist mockery about it, an element of the carnivalesque that makes it attractive; “fun,” in fact. There is neither fun nor much James in this version of The Golden Bowl: as Wendy Graham suggests, the Merchant-Ivory team does not “transcend the trappings of costume drama” (319). Graham’s is an astringent and perceptive critique of the film, as well as an illuminating commentary on the novel itself. There is perhaps more of James’s text in François Truffaut’s La Chambre Verte than in many of the films discussed here, although the film and the story on which it is mainly based, “The Altar of the Dead,” differ in most material aspects. Set in France in the years after World War I, Davenne (Truffaut) exists for and in his memories of the dead. But memories are treacherous. Remembering the dead is an act of piety, but it may also deny the present: “[m]ost necessary ’tis that we forget.”11 When Davenne says to Cecilia that he recalls in detail the moment they met, he actually gets the detail wrong; but Cecilia is able to share the memory because what he brings to life is the emotion of the moment. Davenne, however, fails to recognize the relevance of this to his obsessive mourning of his wife, whose morbid mementoes he worships in the locked Green Room. As he expands into his candle-lit chapel he creates a shrine to all his dead. Moving across the photographs on Davenne’s altar—where we spot Henry James, Proust, and Eisenstein—Truffaut draws attention to his own project: his homage to his medium and its masters. But the film also focuses on the dangers of this piety. Like Hitchcock, Truffaut distrusted the influence of “essentially literary men” (Van Leer 85) on the cinema. Like James, and like Hitchcock, he seeks images, or what he

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terms “privileged moments” (quoted in Horne 36). In “The Altar of the Dead,” the figure of a solitary, obsessed man against “mountains of fire” and “fields of light” (AD 15, 52), watched by a yearning woman, are the privileged moments that Truffaut mines from James’s text: Symboliste images, poignant with past and imminent loss. But as Matthew Jordan observes, in his superb and moving essay on the film, Truffaut also asks how we can “locate the line between necessary remembrance and excessive fixation, between a healthy piety that honours the past and a pathological inability to mourn that poisons the present” (77). David Van Leer considers La Chambre Verte “more militaristic” (87) than the original story. Rather than worrying overmuch about the original story we might, as Jacques Rivette suggests, look at James’s texts “diagonally, taking up their themes, but never literally” (quoted in Horne 35). James’s “fields” become, in Truffaut’s script, “forests,” as the camera tracks slowly down endless lines of crosses, each hung with a grey helmet—unlit memorials to the dead. Truffaut, as Jordan says, links Davenne’s personal loss “to a collective trauma, France’s loss of a generation . . . it speaks of memory stemming from a shared experience” (77). These losses must be mourned, forgiven and survived; the past must not paralyze the present. Truffaut’s frozen mask and dead voice in the film are heavy with unshed tears, a contrast to the gentle weeping of Cecilia for her dead, and at last for Davenne. The final Pietà of Cecilia, bent over the body of Davenne reverberates with images of women in James’s fiction: redemptive like Alice Staverton of “The Jolly Corner,” grieving in “The Altar of the Dead,” or ambiguous in “The Turn of the Screw.” I have been using dress as a way of comparing images in film and text, but, set within such different contexts, questions of costume are less pertinent between “The Altar of the Dead” and La Chambre Verte. Truffaut’s use of dress, however, like James’s, is economical and calculated. Against the faded sepia and black of interiors and of Davenne himself, Cecilia, luminous in silver grey draws the eye, like a candle. Uniquely among the clothes I have discussed, her appearance is timeless, she looks right now, in 1925, and in 1978 (the date of the film): there is nothing that locks her into or out of the past. No film can reproduce the experience of reading James’s fiction; what directors seek is some means, whether by reproduction, alteration or reinvention, to find visual equivalents for their reading of a text. A film director, Truffaut commented, “doesn’t tell anything, he shows.” “Exactly,” replied Hitchcock; the essential thing, he said, is to move your audience: “emotion is born from the way one tells a story” (Truffaut 287). Truffaut, out of images drawn from James, re-creates in La Chambre Verte,

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an autonomous work, faithful to the original story’s emotional content, faithful to his obsession with James, but free from backward-looking piety. This might be considered the Jamesian film in the very radicalism of its reworking of a text. The success of any film adaptation is obviously never conclusive, but a matter for continuing discussion. To adopt James’s “scenic method,” one could say that these films are lamps illuminating each work: their function being “to light with all due intensity one of its aspects.”12 Had Hitchcock ever adapted a James text there would be a pleasing Jamesian circularity to this essay. He didn’t, but in a tribute to Hitchcock, Truffaut (remembering James?) reflected that Hitchcock’s approach to film “was not a question of reproducing life, but of intensifying it” (296). The rotund figure of Henry James might almost be glimpsed flitting across the background of Vertigo.

notes 1. For a discussion of the story and play as intertexts, see Rawlings, “Henry James’s Daisy Miller: A Destructive Realization.” 2. If one were to take the Edel approach one might see this as a consequence of the awful “button” incident with Thackeray, who, on a visit to the James family, laughed at Henry’s copiously-buttoned jacket, saying that in England he would be known as “Buttons.” James was deeply mortified. See Hughes 3. 3. See Rawlings, “The Failure of Henry James’s Guy Domville.” 4. See the preface to The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James, French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces, New York: Library of America, 1984: 1075. 5. See the preface to The Awkward Age (LCFW 1120–37). 6. Henry James and the Art of Dress. 7. The Henry James Review 18 (1997) contains a lively set of responses to Campion’s film. Nancy Bentley, for example, contributes an essay on the nineteenth-century’s and Hollywood’s “Girl-watching.” 8. The spinning parasol comes straight out of the title-shots of Hitchcock’s Vertigo. 9. Softley may have picked up from the novel Milly’s sense of Kate as a panther, prowling around herself as a dove. 10. On “slant” and “filter,” see Chatman. 11. Hamlet III ii. 12. See the preface to The Awkward Age (LCFW 1130).

abbreviations: henr y james AD—The Altar of the Dead and Other Tales. New York: Scribner’s, 1937. CP—The Complete Plays of Henry James. Ed. Leon Edel. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1949. DM—Daisy Miller and An International Episode. New York: Harper Bros., 1892.

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EAD—Essays on Art and Drama. Ed. Peter Rawlings. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996. GB—The Golden Bowl. New Jersey: Augustus Kelley, 1971. LCFW—French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition. Literary Criticism. Vol. 2. Library of America. New York, N.Y.: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1984. SA—The Scenic Art: Notes on Acting and the Drama. Ed. Allan Wade. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1948. SLC—Selected Literary Criticism. Ed. Roger Gard. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987. TS—The Aspern Papers and The Turn of the Screw. Ed. Anthony Curtis. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986. WD—Wings of the Dove. New Jersey: Augustus Kelley, 1976. WS—Washington Square. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.

films discussed La Chambre Verte, (France), Francois Truffaut, Les Films du Carosse, 1978. Daisy Miller, (U.S.), Peter Bogdanovich, Paramount, 1974. The Golden Bowl, (U.K.; TV), James Cellan Jones, 1973. The Golden Bowl, (U.S.), James Ivory, Merchant Ivory Productions, 2000. The Heiress, (U.S.), William Wyler, Paramount, 1949. The Innocents, (U.K.), Jack Clayton, Twentieth Century Fox, 1961. The Portrait of a Lady, (U.S./U.K.), Jane Campion, Grammercy Pictures, 1996. Washington Square, (U.S.), Agnieska Holland, Walt Disney, 1997. The Wings of the Dove, (U.S./U.K.), Iain Softley, 1997.

other works cited Anesko, Michael. “The Consciousness on the Cutting-room Floor.” Henry James on Stage and Screen. Ed. John Bradley. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2000: 177–89. Bauer, Dale. “Content or Costume.” Henry James Goes to the Movies. Ed. Susan Griffin. Lexington: Kentucky UP, 2002: 240–53. Bentley, Nancy. “Conscious Observation: Jane Campion’s ‘Portrait of a Lady.’” Henry James Goes to the Movies. Ed. Susan Griffin. Lexington: Kentucky UP, 2002: 127–46. Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1989. Bowen, Elizabeth. “Dress.” Collected Impressions. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1950. Bradbury, Malcolm. “Virginia Woolf.” The Modern World: Ten Great Writers. Penguin Books, Ringwood, Victoria, 1989: 270–86. Brookner, Anita. “Rising Far Above Failure.” The Spectator. 11 September 2004: 45. Carlson, Jerry. “‘Washington Square’ and ‘The Heiress’: Comparing Artistic Forms.” The Classic American Novel and The Movies. Eds. G. Peary and R. Shatzkin. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1997: 95–104.

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Chatman, Seymour. “Characters and Narrators: Filter, Center, Slant, and Interestfocus.” Poetics Today 7 (1986): 189–204. Dawson, Jan. “An Interview with Peter Bogdanovich.” The Classic American Novel and The Movies. Eds. G. Peary and R. Shatzkin. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1997: 83–9. Edel, Leon. The Life of Henry James. 2 vols. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. Graham, Wendy. “The Rift in the Loot.” Henry James Goes to the Movies. Ed. Susan Griffin. Lexington: Kentucky UP, 2002: 305–32. Griffin, Susan M. Ed. Henry James Goes to the Movies. Lexington: Kentucky UP, 2002. Horne, Philip. “Henry James and Varieties of Cinematic Experience.” Henry James on Stage and Screen. Ed. John Bradley. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000: 35–55. Hughes, Clair. Henry James and the Art of Dress. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Illustrated and Sporting News. London, 12 January 1895: 661–2. Jordan, Matthew. “Mourning, Nostalgia, and Melancholia: Unlocking the Secrets of Truffaut’s The Green Room.” Henry James Goes to the Movies. Ed. Susan Griffin. Lexington: Kentucky UP, 2002: 76–98. Koch, Sarah. “A James Filmography.” Henry James Goes to the Movies. Ed. Susan Griffin. Lexington: Kentucky UP, 2002: 335–57. Lodge, David. Author, Author: A Novel. London: Secker and Warburg, 2004. McCormack, Peggy. “Reexamining Bogdanovich’s Daisy Miller.” Henry James Goes to the Movies. Ed. Susan Griffin. Lexington: Kentucky UP, 2002: 34–59. Mazella, Anthony. “‘The Story . . . Held Us’: ‘The Turn of the Screw’ from Henry James to Jack Clayton.” Henry James Goes to the Movies. Ed. Susan Griffin. Lexington: Kentucky UP, 2002: 11–33. Nadel, Alan. “Ambassadors from an Imaginary ‘Elsewhere.’” Henry James Review 19 (1998): 279–84. ——. “Ambassadors from an Imaginary ‘Elsewhere.’” Henry James Goes to the Movies. Ed. Susan Griffin. Lexington: Kentucky UP, 2002: 193–209. Novick, Sheldon. “Henry James on Stage.” Henry James on Stage and Screen. Ed. John Bradley. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000: 1–22. Ozick, Cynthia, Sheldon Novick, and Susan Griffin. “Henry James: A Discussion.” Interview with Eleanor Wachtel. Henry James Review 19 (1998): 317–27. Raw, Lawrence. “Observing Femininity.” The Henry James E-Journal 4. 2003. <www2. newpaltz.edu/~hathawar/ejourn4.htm>. ——. “Hollywoodizing Henry James: Jack Clayton’s The Innocents.” Henry James Review 25 (2004): 97–109. Rawlings, Peter. “The Failure of Henry James’s Guy Domville.” Kyushu American Literature (Japan) 40 (1999): 1–14 . ——. “Henry James’s Daisy Miller: A Destructive Realization.” Kyushu American Literature (Japan) 39 (1998): 13–24. Rivkin, Julie. “Prospects of Entertainment.” Henry James Goes to the Movies. Ed. Susan Griffin. Lexington: Kentucky UP, 2002: 147–69. Sadoff, Dianne. “Hallucinations of Intimacy.” Henry James Goes to the Movies. Ed. Susan Griffin. Lexington: Kentucky UP, 2002: 254–78. Salmon, Richard. Henry James and the Culture of Publicity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.

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Swaab, Peter. “The End of Embroidery.” Henry James on Stage and Screen. Ed. John Bradley. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000: 56–71. Tóibín, Colm. The Master. New York: Scribner, 2004. Truffaut, François. Hitchcock/Truffaut Interviews: Edition Definitif. Paris: Editions Ramsay, 1983. Van Leer, David. “Frank and Jim Go Boating: Henry James and the French New Wave.” Henry James on Stage and Screen. Ed. John Bradley. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000: 84–102. Veeder, William. Henry James: The Lesson of the Master. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1975. Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. “Sex, Lies and Motion Pictures.” Henry James Review 25 (2004): 87–96.

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victoria coulson The Portrait of a Lady is possessed by an estate agent’s imaginaire. Isabel is alternately enticed—and appalled—by an impressive portfolio of real estate possibilities: these range from the ruthlessly American (Lilian’s “wedge of brown stone violently driven into Fifty-third Street” (30)) to the bloodlessly expatriate (Mrs. Luce’s “well-cushioned little corner” of Paris, “reproduc[ing] with wondrous truth . . . the domestic tone of her native Baltimore” (212)); and from the effortlessly conventional (Winchester Square, “a large, dull mansion . . . shrouded in silence and brown holland” (138)) to the strenuously recherché (“an ancient castle in the mountains of Tuscany, the residence of a noble family of that country, whose acquaintance . . . seemed to Isabel, in the light of certain photographs of their immense crenellated dwelling which [Madame Merle] was able to show her, a precious privilege” (313)). Isabel is seeking her proper home, yet house after house fails to enchant her, and as the novel builds itself up around her restlessness we sense that it will be a mighty structure indeed that can, as the preface to the novel envisions the work of the authorial imagination, “place” this “figure”; “detain,” “preserve,” “protect” and “enjoy” her (AN 47). Isabel’s ambivalence about enclosure—“she had a fixed determination to regard the world as a place of . . . free expansion” (PL 51)—protects her from the owner-occupiers who welcome her inside; from Lord Warburton, for example, whose first words to Isabel assert that his own house is “very good,” indeed “rather better” than Ralph’s (19). “To see you under my roof,” Warburton confesses, “would be a great satisfaction” (479); but Isabel is instead ensnared by Osmond, whose studied performance of self-sufficiency, as at the Thursday salons “to which [he] . . . held for the sake not so much of inviting people as of not 169

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8 prisons, palaces, and the architecture of the imagination

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inviting them,” proves irresistible to her own radical uncertainties about the lure of significant form (494). This essay is about the meaning of architecture, and the architecture of meaning, in Henry James. This is a much-surveyed area of James’s work, a locus classicus for criticism. Architecture in James has founded a many-storeyed critical edifice, built on a consensus about the ubiquity of architecture in his fiction and non-fiction alike. A central feature of this critical tradition is the association of fictional buildings with fiction-asbuilding, a link made explicit throughout James’s own literary criticism and theory, perhaps most extensively in the New York Edition prefaces (and recognized most recently in the title of David McWhirter’s collection of essays: Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship). In comments exemplary of the field, Janet Wolf Bowen explains the symbolic force of houses in James: “[b]etter than any other cultural artifact, the building embraces the tensions and tenants of a culture” (4), while Meir Sternberg repolishes the foundation-stone of multiple critics’ approach to James’s theory of literature: “much of [James’s] critical vocabulary (including ‘composition’) is derived from the spatial arts” (789). Everyone, it seems, has been here before; the critic setting out to re-view James’s most compelling literary structures finds herself on well-trodden paths along which she must jostle as with the crowds of mass tourism for a sight of the celebrated monuments. However, the critics thronging the Jamesian via sacra do not confine themselves to a single route: one of the diversions of this critical literature is the multiplicity of offered tracks through and around James’s buildings, and the idiosyncratic lingerings that distinguish each expository tour. We have all visited the prison, the theatre, the Palazzo Roccanera, and the pagoda, but Mark Seltzer leads us into the nursery of the Principino (“a scene of power . . . in which systematic consideration takes the form of a policing action” (75)), while Hugh Stevens introduces us to the Galerie d’Apollon as a “play[ing-]out [of] the spatial dynamics of ‘the closet’” (134). Stevens also leads a memorable tour around “The Jolly Corner,” with its “series of anal openings and passages,” including its “ample back staircase” which “is also figured as a water-closet, and as an underground community” (138–9). Architecture is a richly creative metaphor for James and for his critics, licensing even the most rococo of conceits, as when R. W. Short, in an otherwise sober article of 1953, remarks of James’s images that they “create meaning without delimiting it, meaning that grows with the action and becomes the action. Without their clouds,” he adds, “we should not know the tabernacle to be there” (945).

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James’s work can itself be understood as a critical remodeling of the building tradition of both nineteenth-century literature and architectural theory. The proliferation of significant buildings in James’s narrative imagination sets his work within a social and industrial context of “a typological explosion” of building types between 1750 and 1850 (Markus xix). More specifically, James’s work engages with a foundational idea of nineteenthcentury architectural theory: that in contrast to the frozen regularity of classical design, Gothic buildings were creaturely, sympathetic, and able to shape the emotions and judgments of their inhabitants. As Philippa Tristram comments, “Victorian writers on architecture are apt to complain that (male) Palladian style dominates the occupants; they recommend the (female) Gothic, because it supposedly accommodates itself to the needs of those within it” (239). We may see this architectural scheme inflecting a wide range of Victorian fictions, as, for example, in Jane Eyre’s agonistic experiences of Gothic forms, which incite vivid self-awareness, and on the other hand, classical forms which tranquilize and suffocate the self. The real threat to Jane lies not in the exciting outrages of Gateshead, Lowood, and the irresistibly uncouth Rochester, but in the frigidity of classical religion, embodied in Miss Temple, for example, whose “serenity” “precluded deviation into the ardent, the excited, the eager” (72–3), in Blanche’s “august yet harmonious lineaments, [and] Grecian neck and bust” (161), and by the missionary St. John Rivers, with his “pure” “Greek face,” his “straight, classic nose,” and “Athenian mouth and chin” (345). James’s The Europeans participates in this literary-architectural tradition, in particular by critically remodeling Austen’s Mansfield Park. In Austen’s novel, Fanny Price comes to live with her rich relations in whose house (a veritable machine à souffrir) she will be instructed, exploited, chastized, and frozen, through which régime Mansfield forms her as its ideal inmate.1 But the neoclassical edifice is invaded by a dangerously attractive brother and sister, who insinuate into Mansfield’s architectural stability a seductive performance of pleasure, sexuality, and change. Austen’s novel and the house whose name it shares are homologous structures, disciplinary architectures working to expel the threat of the mobile, mutable Crawfords. In contrast, The Europeans protests against the criminalization of the Crawfords, siting itself within the boundaries of Austen’s text but reconstructing her literary architecture in a characteristically nineteenth-century “gothicization” of a pre-existing Palladian building. Thus, though Eugenia’s plottings may come to nothing, Felix succeeds as Gertrude’s fortunate fall and

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neoclassical or gothic: discipline and opportunity

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joyously bears her away to the complex entertainments of Europe; even the defeated cleric, James’s Edmund Bertram, wins a bride who marries him not in duty but in hitherto unavowable desire. James refutes Mansfield’s tragic opposition of pleasure and order through the figure of the Wentworths’ two houses. The Wentworths inhabit a gentle version of American Palladian: a “large square house,” built circa 1770, “and adorned along the front, at intervals, with flat wooden pilasters, painted white. These pilasters appeared to support a kind of classic pediment” (46–7). The “big, unguarded home,” “lighter inside than . . . out” and well-supplied with books, “[n]one of them . . . forbidden,” is a playful critique of the kindly Puritans who, foreseeing that the Baroness “wants privacy and pleasure together,” install Eugenia in their “other” house (51, 54, 51, 73). “I am sure she will make it pretty,” remarks Gertrude, to the consternation of the mild Wentworth patriarch. “It will be very interesting. It will be a place to go to. It will be a foreign house” (74). The “foreign” house is a place of interiors, veiled apertures and recondite spaces, rooms-within-rooms, hints, secrets, and suggestions—a structure of the self that confuses the Wentworths’ notions of architectural propriety. Emblematic of this is Eugenia’s facility with “festoons,” her textile challenge to the rectitude of the house. The Baroness had brought with her to the New World a copious provision of the element of costume; and the two Miss Wentworths . . . were somewhat bewildered by the obtrusive distribution of her wardrobe. There were India shawls suspended, curtain-wise, in the parlour door, and curious fabrics, corresponding to Gertrude’s metaphysical vision of an opera-cloak, tumbled about in the sitting-places . . . . “I have been making myself a little comfortable,” said the Baroness, much to the confusion of Charlotte, who had been on the point of proposing to come and help her put her superfluous draperies away. (79) While Austen’s Mrs. Norris was condemned for the curtain that would transform Mansfield into a theatre, James relishes Eugenia’s fabrications, her expertise at veiling and blurring the edges of the factual. To borrow Felix’s contrast between American and European conceptions of life, Eugenia’s “Gothic” dwelling is an architecture of “opportunity” rather than “discipline” (93); it’s a machine more for enjoying than for suffering; and above all—highlighting James’s pre-eminent term for aesthetic value—this house is “interesting” (74). Where Fanny Price worried lest the theatrical performance prove “almost too interesting” (Austen 187),

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James’s Gertrude is encouraged to embrace the transformation of domestic place into theatrical space: “[w]hat is life, indeed, without curtains?” (E 79). Through the seduction of the Palladian by this “Gothic” sensibility, James’s novel reverses, and refuses, the terms of Mansfield, re-imagining “pleasure,” “privacy,” and “amusement” as positive ethical values. As Felix suggests, “[i]t is sometimes very moral to change” (E 186). For nineteenth-century theorists, Gothic architecture offered a mode of design and inhabitation that broke down the polarized relationships of dominance and submission engineered by neoclassical architecture. This is not to say that Victorian Gothic abjured the exercise of power; on the contrary, church-builders chose the Gothic because its vividly engaged aesthetic mode drew the churchgoer into a potent drama of anguish and investment. As Hersey remarks, “The [Gothic] church building is the agent by which the worshiper gains joy and freedom through metaphorical crucifixion” (70); it is a “penitential appliance” (68) that reaches out into the subjective structures of its inhabitants, enacting a transformational encounter between buildings and selves. At first sight, James sketches a rather sunny view of his Gothic structures. There is the “early Jacobean” Poynton (“a provocation, an inspiration” (SP 11)); Medley, with its “queer peep-holes and all manner of odd gables” (PC 260); Bly, with its Gothic revival battlements; and of course the “early Tudor” Gardencourt, and Lockleigh, which appears to Isabel “as a castle in a legend” (78). These seem lovely buildings, near-visionary elaborations of the home as both sheltering place and enabling space; and they reflect that strain in James’s literary criticism, exemplified by “The Art of Fiction,” which adumbrates an almost utopian conception of the artistic process as an experience “of an immense increase—a kind of revelation—of freedom” (HF 38). This James celebrates the impossibility of closed structures, contesting Besant’s aesthetic proscriptions with the assertion that “the measure of reality is very difficult to fix”: “[h]umanity is immense, and reality has a myriad forms” (31). Indeed, “[a]rt derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions,” “liv[ing]” rather “upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints” (36, 24). At the heart of James’s essay is a claim for the ethical value of art which would be revisited in his famous rebuttal of Wells’s attack: “[i]t is art that makes life, makes interest” (letter to H. G. Wells, 10 July 1915; Henry James: Selected Letters 431). “The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel,” James proposes, “is that it be interesting” (HF 29): and the discussion of what results from this artistic commitment invokes a proliferation of characteristic Jamesian terms for good art, and

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the qualities that it promotes: “innumerable . . . various . . . particular . . . different . . . personal . . . direct . . . intensity . . . freedom . . . curious . . . charming . . . pleasures” (29). This is an imagination of the imagination that conceives of aesthetic and subjective structure as a relational play of collaborative discovery. In an image that recalls Eugenia’s redefinition of her architectural environment with drapes and festoons—and that reworks the traditional opposition of architecture and weaving, of men’s monumentalism and women’s contingency—James proposes that “[e]xperience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue” (31). “[N]ever limited” and “never complete,” experience is transfigured from an idée fixe to an active receptivity. Protected within the architecture of consciousness, the tissue of experience is ever unfinished; it is open to more, and different, impressions as it reaches out into the future and towards other selves. Art, James suggests, is a liberating reconciliation of structure and its others, a harmony of place and space, of permanence and provisionality, which springs from, and promotes, an open-ended engagement with the world. Some of the most attractive recent work on James has highlighted the “utopian potential” (Freedman 12) of his fictional project, emphasizing the emotional and the political possibilities of his writing. John Carlos Rowe characterizes James’s “literary pragmatism” as “distinguished by a consistent openness to ideas—one might say to an understanding of thinking itself as an open system” (1); this “openness” has been explored by other critics in the context of sexual and gender relations. In her Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure (2002), Tessa Hadley writes of James’s “erotically polymorphic” imagination (13) and “[his] freedom from ‘definitional frames’ of hetero- and homosexuality” (1–2). In a similarly optimistic vein, Jonathan Freedman suggests that James’s fiction perceives the “tragic . . . entanglements of human intimacy” as open to transformation by virtue of their frailty: “And that remaking, for James, is the utopian point of the exercise—one that projects the making of social value through and well beyond the nineteenth-century nuclear family . . . and hence foreshadows new possibilities of relation whose lineaments we are only now beginning to discover” (6–7). Yet this utopian strain in James’s thinking—by way of its associated idealization of Gothic forms—has also come under sustained attack. In an essay of 2004, Peter Rawlings argues that the appeal of the “picturesque” for James has “at [its] troubled centre” the “value of roughness and

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complexity” (172)—which is certainly what we are being offered in the “weather-fretted” surfaces of Medley, Gardencourt, and Lockleigh (PL 78). But while this blurring of boundaries seems to figure for Isabel and Hyacinth the possibility of intersubjective communion—as if nothing more, or less, links structures and subjects than the happy accident of elective affinity—for Rawlings the propensity for “[d]ecay, deformity, and ruin of all kinds” implies a solipsistic vision which roves the battered landscape hoping to indulge the “perverse sensations and homoerotic desires” of the spectator (177, 184). James “seeks to discover and orchestrate a realm of miscegenation where he can locate not a moral conscience or indeed any objects or subjects for principled consideration, but a site for encountering ethical dubieties and transgressive desires” (178). From this perspective, Gardencourt and Lockleigh would suggest not a taste for sympathetic proximities but a discreetly sadomasochistic sensibility: these are lovely houses because they have been battered. At Lockleigh, “the watery sunshine rested on the walls in blurred and desultory gleams, washing them, as it were, in places tenderly chosen, where the ache of antiquity was keenest”; while the beauty of Gardencourt inheres in its “complexion[,] of which time and the weather had played all sorts of pictorial tricks, only, however, to improve and refine it” (PL 78, 6). Both houses have been punitively modernized, “disfigured in the eighteenth century,” their “best points [losing] their purity” (6, 78). This is an aesthetic of suffering whose redemptive character depends on what Donna Przybylowicz, in her analysis of James’s late fictions, has termed the “egotistical and self-enclosed” “aestheticism of the [Jamesian] protagonist” (2). The “freedom” of this epistemological mode, in Przybylowicz’s view, is inextricable from the protagonist’s illusion of “superiority,” for which the environment is a subordinate reflector, “a realm of Imaginary specularity” (2, 4). Furthermore, the relationships between buildings deconstruct the ideal opposition of Gothic and Palladian. Ignored by Eaton Square, Charlotte and Amerigo make free of Portland Place, until this “other” house, too, asserts itself as a “grey, gaunt” structure for discipline (GB 545); the official alienation of Bly from the master’s Harley Street house only ever encourages the Governess’s fantasies of proximity; and most notoriously of all, Gardencourt itself returns Isabel to the Palazzo Roccanera, as if betraying a fatal complicity between the most sympathetic and the most authoritarian of architectures. The haven, the refuge, the asylum confesses itself a true utopia, a nowhere, and stands revealed instead as the acceptable face of the prison.

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[Isabel] had taken all the first steps in the purest confidence [. . . .] But when . . . [Osmond] had led her into the mansion of his own habitation, then, then she had seen where she really was . . . . It was the house of darkness, the house of dumbness, the house of suffocation. (PL 424, 429) The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million . . .every one of which has been pierced . . . in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will . . . . 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. But they have this mark of their own that at each of them stands a figure with a pair of eyes, or at least with a field-glass, which forms, again and again, for observation, a unique instrument, insuring to the person making use of it an impression distinct from every other . . . . The spreading field, the human scene, is the “choice of subject”; the pierced aperture, either broad and balconied or slit-like and low-browed, is the “literary form”; but they are, singly or together, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher—without, in other words, the consciousness of the artist. (AN 46) Isabel rejects the solicitations of the Gothic for what reveals itself as the Palladian at its most absolute, finding herself imprisoned in the Palazzo Roccanera—and entrapped, it may be argued, more conclusively in its dark prefatory doubles, the various enclosures imaged in the preface as the constraining structures of the novelist’s imagination. The House of Fiction is the archetype of these imprisoning places, overshadowing the image of the artistic consciousness as a chamber protecting a cobweb: it is a nightmare of punitive individuation, a model of harsh polarities in which each “posted presence,” separated irremediably from every other, figures both as sentinel and as victim of a solitary confinement. Equipped with the technology of a remorseless surveillance, the artist is reduced to a pair of eyes in a “dead wall”; he can communicate neither with other watchers, nor with the objects of his gaze, the impossibility of community ensured by the spatial hierarchy splitting viewer from viewed. There is literally no place for a reader—unless, just as an uncanny homology identifies the subjects with the objects of supervision, so the reader may be understood as equally imprisoned within the disciplinary

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circuits of the text, oscillating between agent and victim of the novel’s panoptical power.2 “[T]he unusual intensity of the [Portrait] Preface’s regulatory impulses,” to borrow Sara Blair’s phrase (66), highlights an affinity between Osmond’s house of darkness and James’s House of Fiction which is enough to incite the Foucauldian in us all; as Blair notes, the preface’s figuring of the author as “a wary dealer” who keeps his female subjects under lock and key in the “heterogeneous back-shop of the mind” (AN 47) “ironically equates [James] . . . with his most notorious collector, Gilbert Osmond” (68). The preface, Blair argues, “advertises the construction of the Portrait . . . as an edifice for incarcerating its heroine” (68). The walls must come down; and the ringleader in the assault on the Jamesian Bastille is Mark Seltzer, whose pioneering Foucauldian critique (which appeared so aptly in 1984) has influenced decades of critical response to Henry James’s architectural fictions. [B]oth the content and the techniques of representation in James’s works express a complicity and rigorous continuity with the larger social regimes of mastery and control that traverse these works. I want to suggest that art and power are not opposed in the Jamesian text but radically entangled. There is, to adapt James’s phrase, a “criminal continuity” between the techniques of representation that the novelist devises and the technologies of power that his fiction ostensibly censors and disavows . . . . [T]he art of the novel is an art of power. (13–14) Many critics who have linked “the incarcerative reality of [Isabel’s] marriage” (Smith 583) with the overarching structure of James’s novel have inflected their critique to explicitly feminist purpose. Stephanie A. Smith argues that Isabel’s walling-up by Osmond is an “architectural imprisoning of a heroine” which “finds a curious echo in James’s 1907 Preface” (587). In Smith’s view, Osmond’s concern with controlling Pansy’s sexuality implies envious fear of female reproductive power—which, Smith argues, is paralleled by James’s determination “to establish who has the cultural right both to create and endow a girl with value, that ‘who’ being the painter of The Portrait of a Lady, the Master” himself (the Master Builder, we might say) (605). Blair makes a comparable argument about James’s tendency to usurp and exploit feminine modes of creativity. “[A]sk[ing] what difference it makes that James chooses to imagine his literary authority in a figure of domestic architecture,” Blair argues that the House of Fiction emblematizes James’s access to the cultural space of women’s writing (60); James exploits a location at once disparaged and

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permitted as a separate sphere for the feminized activity of art. Blair’s critique contributes to a tradition of famously hostile readings in the past two decades by critics who have condemned various aspects of James’s on- and off-page dealings with women, of which the most influential remains Alfred Habegger’s Henry James and the “Woman Business” (1989). Habegger focuses on “Henry James’s appropriation, masterly and distorting, of American women’s fiction” (4), and while he may suggest that the focus of his attention will be “the interaction between [James] and a whole insurgent culture of female writers,” this quickly degrades to “chronicl[ing] the long war that was fought . . . between him and the women” (15; my emphases), and builds to the assertion that “James’s fiction embodies a covert act of force directed against women” (230). Certainly The Portrait of a Lady, with its disturbing antechamber of a preface, manifests an endemic—and fertile—Jamesian anxiety about the allure, for architect and client alike, of the house of fiction. In this respect James’s work may be viewed as an early Modernist interrogation of order itself, meditating on architecture and its discontents well in advance of those theorists who have more recently figured as the architectural profession’s avant-garde. In an uncompromising article of 1929, called simply “Architecture,” Georges Bataille argued that “it is only the ideal soul of society, that which has the authority to command and prohibit, that is expressed in architectural compositions . . . . The taking of the Bastille is symbolic of . . . the animosity of the people against the monuments that are their real masters” (quoted in Hollier 47). Bataille’s critique, as Denis Hollier remarks, “derives from an ostentatious, spectacular architecture, an architecture to be seen,” in contrast to Foucault’s book on prisons, Discipline and Punish, which analyzes the archetypal building as “an architecture that sees, observes, and spies, a vigilant architecture” (Hollier x). James’s imagination of disciplinary forms comprehends this range of technique: Adam Verver in The Golden Bowl, for example, is both the ultimate turnkey, hovering behind Charlotte as she conducts a party of visitors around Fawns like “the person employed to see that, after the invading wave was spent, the cabinets were all locked and the symmetries all restored” (GB 495), and an evangelist for the “palace of art” whose function is chiefly monumental: “civilization condensed, concrete, consummate,” “a monument to the religion he wished to propagate” (125, 124, 125). Indeed, James’s analysis of buildings as killing machines—Mrs. Touchett seems to pride herself on the fatal efficacy of the Palazzo Crescentini “in which three people have been murdered” (PL 28)—elides the distinction between (Foucauldian) prisons and (Bataillesque) monuments: the Portrait preface discusses the

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“raising . . . of a superstructure” around the “importance” of a heroine (AN 51, 49), invoking, among other examples from literary history, Cleopatra, who, we recall, withdrew into her “monument” to die. An exchange between Maggie Verver and her husband-to-be similarly conflates carceral and memorializing places: “[Y]ou shall not be buried, my dear, till you’re dead. Unless indeed you call it buried to go to American City.” “Before I pronounce,” returns her fiancé, gamely, “I should like to see my tomb” (GB 36–7). “Is prison then a generic name designating all architectural production?” (Hollier x). To the radically disaffected of today’s architectural profession, it seems so. As Aaron Betsky writes, “to build is to create inside and outside. Just by the act of differentiation and coordination involved with any act of construction, you will produce an object that will be owned and that will reproduce existing social relations”: thus “[a]ll architecture [may be perceived as] an act of violence” (190). There is something of this repudiatory sublime in Isabel’s recognition of the determinants of her tragedy: 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. (PL 560) Critics who have focused on the architecture of James’s texts have tended to concur with this suspicion of significant form: well before Seltzer’s analysis of the Jamesian text as a disciplinary mechanism, J. A. Ward had characterized “James’s idea of coherence” as “more severe than that of other novelists . . . . James’s embarrassment over his “misplaced middles”, a failure in proportion caused by excessive preparation, follows from his conviction that coherence is necessarily symmetrical” (6–7), while Ellen Eve Frank considered that “Pater, Hopkins, and Proust each prefer the Gothic to other styles, while James prefers the Palladian” (257). Yet to condemn James’s fictional architecture wholesale requires that we overlook the stealthy pathologization of symmetrical forms in texts such as The Portrait of a Lady and The Golden Bowl: “[I]n Ralph [connoisseurship] was an anomaly, a kind of humorous excrescence, whereas in Mr Osmond it was the keynote, and everything was in harmony with it” (PL 262). Securing a conviction against James’s “art of power” may entail mistaking the persistence of the Palladian for a preference for the Palladian.

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As Adrian Poole remarks, “James’s imagination was roused by questions of power, its sources and nature, and he made them one of his own great subjects” (1). James’s texts repeatedly stage the arrival of the guest at the “castle of enchantment” (SF 77), exploring the possible consequences of her submission to the master or mistress who smilingly leads her inside. Balzac, for example, features in James’s vision as the insane genius of a “radiating and ramifying” literary locus, a Mad King Ludwig whose structural extravagance creates a Gothic pile of ever-increasing complexity on the scale of the Winchester Mystery House or even of Beckford’s Fonthill Abbey. “The relations of parts to each other are at moments multiplied almost to madness”—yet this “is at the same time just why they give us the measure of his hallucination, make up the greatness of his intellectual adventure” (“The Lesson of Balzac,” HF 72). “[T]hreading the labyrinth of the Comédie Humaine” requires close attention, and more again “to keep our author himself in view”: But if we can muster it . . . we thus walk with him in the great glazed gallery of his thought; the long, lighted and pictured ambulatory where the endless series of windows, on one side, hangs over his revolutionized, ravaged, yet partly restored and reinstated garden of France, and where, on the other, the figures and the portraits we fancy stepping down to meet him climb back into their frames, larger and smaller, and take up position and expression as he desired they shall look out and compose. (74) The “labyrinth” leads us into the light, “the great glazed gallery” poised between the garden outside and the portraits within, between “endless” views of the exterior and the rich “figures” of the artist’s inner vision. Balzac’s art is a good seduction, exemplifying an art “whose highest bid”—as James writes in the preface to The Golden Bowl —“is addressed to the imagination, to the spiritual and the aesthetic vision”; “the mind [is] led captive by charm and a spell, an incalculable art” (AN 346). But many of James’s texts imply a gloomier view of the enchanted castle. The Governess in The Turn of the Screw describes her own induction to Bly, “led . . . on” by a charming “little conductress” who “danced . . . round corners and pattered down passages”: “I had the view of a castle of romance inhabited by a rosy sprite . . . . Wasn’t it just a story-book over which I had fallen a-doze and a-dream?” (TS 127). Bly seems to offer the Governess a new space of possibility, making room for the pleasures of the fictional, the improvisational: “I learnt . . . to be amused, and even amusing, and not to think for the morrow. It was the first time . . . that I

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had known space and air and freedom” (133–4). But this labyrinth—“a trap . . . to my imagination”—leads into ever darker reaches (134); and as the Governess’s new capacity for imaginative transformation seems merely to imprison her in a reiterative literary trope (“a mystery of Udolpho” (138)), and it becomes impossible for the reader to distinguish between “literal” and “symbolic” structures in James’s text, we may begin to fear that art may play us false, exploiting what the preface to The American calls “the beautiful circuit and subterfuge of our thought and our desire” merely to “beguile the reader’s suspicion of his being shut up, transform it for him into a positive illusion of the largest liberty” (AN 32, 39). The darkest intimation of the carceral imaginary in James appears not in the more ostentatious prisons, but rather in Isabel’s reading room in Albany. The Albany house is an essentially neoclassical structure, and Isabel prefers to read in the neglected “office” with its redundant door to the street “secured by bolts” and its windows papered over. Yet we cannot blame the architecture for Isabel’s sequestration: “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—a place which became to the child’s imagination, according to its different moods, a region of delight or of terror” (PL 25). This imaginative flirtation with the prison is dangerous in direct proportion to Isabel’s inability to recognize it as such: it is precisely Isabel’s belief that “[h]er imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out of the window. She was not accustomed indeed to keep it behind bolts” that will lead her captive to Osmond (32), whose proposal she experiences as “the slipping of a fine bolt—backward, forward, she couldn’t have said which” (310). It is not in the Palazzo Roccanera but inside her own mind that Isabel is most fatally in the cage:3 “the cage”—as Maggie Verver learns—“was the deluded condition” (GB 454). As Osmond “suspects,” her “very complicated lock” is her “intellect” itself; as James laments in a related preface, Isabel’s “imagination” is “positively the deepest depth of her imbroglio” (PL 258; AN 70).4 The Jamesian analysis of the imagination as our first and last prison attains its most baroque elaboration in the pavilions of Medley’s walled garden in The Princess Casamassima. Hyacinth imagines as “a vision of true happiness” being “locked into” “the treasure-house of Medley” (PC 264). Figuring the reader as desirous habitué of just such a literary dreamscape, Hyacinth experiences Medley as a fantasy space, “peopled with recognitions: he had been dreaming all his life of just such a place and such objects” (262). As Mark McGurl shows, there is a potent contiguity, even continuity, of theatrical and novelistic space in The

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Princess Casamassima: the primal scene of McGurl’s reading is the box at the theatre in which Hyacinth encounters the Princess, a radiant personification of the aristocracy, on the night of his first experience of the theatre itself. McGurl’s is another deeply skeptical response to the political geometry of Jamesian art: reading Hyacinth’s visit to Medley as “a parable of the intrusion of the mass reader into the spaces of culture,” McGurl proposes that we understand the planned inaccessibility of late Jamesian texts in particular, and of early modernism in general, as a strategy of enhanced class exclusion (72). The private spaces of class privilege had been denatured by the inrush of emulous mass readers, so élites began to “relocate the space of privilege from the inside to the outside of fiction, such that privilege is now expressed in the failure to . . . inhabit, what is now conceived to be the prison house of social representation” (72). Resistant to this suggestive analysis, however, are those self-reflexive elements of James’s novel highlighting the pervasive presence of fantasy, and its ultimate powerlessness to do more than grant a temporary stay in the great good place.5 Even as the text revels in its imaginative mobility, finessing its representations of prison and palace alike, social and aesthetic forms undergo comprehensive de-authentication. Poor hapless Hyacinth may be infallibly dazzled by the Princess, but to the reader she will always look like an arriviste: we knew her when she was nothing but a beautiful girl with a déclassé Italian father and a mother with her eye on the main chance.6 Medley is outfitted with the standard complement of “secret stairway,” “musicians’ gallery,” “tapestried room” and “haunted chamber,” sought-after period features displayed by the Princess to her gaping visitor—as by the novel to the reader—with a frictionless promptitude emphasizing the text’s self-conscious conventionality (PC 269). The Princess Casamassima is all too demonstratively aware of itself as literary pastiche: Medley is a satirical desiring machine and apparatus for frustration in the style of Dickens’s Satis House (in his Great Expectations), with Christina Light reprising the role of Estella. In this light we might wonder if the rapid degradation of Bly from welcoming vision to paranoid nightmare owes something to its imitative architecture: Bly is not Gothic, but Gothick Revival. Tessa Hadley finds a cognate anxiety about the overripe pleasures of reiteration in The Turn of the Screw, in which James is “probing . . . at that old story which had been told and retold countless times by and to and about women in English fiction in the nineteenth century: the governess-master story of which Jane Eyre is both source and supreme manifestation” (47).7 The Governess and Hyacinth may dream until they die, but they will never secure the Master-Mistress of the castle. Far from

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[At] either end [of the terrace] was a curious pavilion, in the manner of a tea-house, which crowned the scene in an old-world sense and offered rest and privacy, a refuge from sun or shower. One of these pavilions was an asylum for gardeners’ tools and superfluous flower pots; the other was covered inside with a queer chinese paper representing ever so many times over a group of people with faces like blind kittens, groups who drank tea while they sat on the floor. It also contained a straddling inlaid cabinet in which cups and saucers showed valuably through doors of greenish glass, together with a carved coconut and a pair of outlandish idols. On a shelf over a sofa which was not very comfortable, though it had cushions of faded tapestry that resembled samplers, stood a row of novels out of date and out of print—novels that one couldn’t have found any more and that were only there. On the chimney-piece was a bowl of dried roseleaves mixed with some aromatic spice, and the whole place suggested a certain dampness. (PC 271) As elsewhere in James, two buildings assert their identity in counterpoise— tools versus novels, labor versus leisure—but the opposition fails: both are places of redundancy and relegation, “asylums” for “superfluous” things. The “queer chinese paper,” “carved coconut,” and “pair of outlandish idols” are very far from home, art objects dislocated irremediably from their origins, bleached of their value as trophies of empire and languishing forgotten in this defunct miniaturization of a Great Exhibition. The pavilions are styled “in the manner of a tea-house,” the wallpaper “represent[s] ever so many times over” figures drinking tea “while they sat on the floor” (as if they have tried and rejected the sofa, “which was not very comfortable”), and nested inside is a second enclosure, a “straddling inlaid cabinet” containing cups and saucers: this is an imaginative structure evacuated of meaning yet trapped in an endless repetition of representational forms, a mise-en-scène degraded to mise-enabîme.8 All these signs can do is point to other signs; every useless thing gives off the look of something else. The cushions “resembl[e]” samplers, that nostalgic textile lexicon of childlike forms long since superseded by the embroiderer’s written representation. Yet grown-up literacy seems equally futile in the “row of novels out of date and out of print—novels that one couldn’t have found any more and that were only there.” Out

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promoting a politically regressive fantasy of class mobility, these texts imply that the familiar architecture of fiction is haunted by a disavowed vacancy at the heart of literary representation.

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beyond architecture? But if every house turns out to be a prison; if significant form is just another name for repression; and if even the imagination must confess itself our cage, what—or, rather, where—is the alternative? The recurrent figure of homelessness in James is the “inordinate” woman, the perpetual guest, who, like Madame Merle, is “welcome wherever she goes,” but, as Merle says of all women, “has no natural place anywhere” (PL 245, 176, 196). When we first meet Charlotte, she seems to be living out of two trunks, only one of which Fanny allows her to bring from the hotel; in a comparable dodge, Fleda “ ha[s] lately . . . spent a year in a studio,” and now, wandering “the flat suburb” of her despair, feels “like a lonely fly crawling over a dusty chart” (SP 12, 104). “[E]xtraordinarily alone” (GB 54), these women emanate a certain dark glamor, traversing thresholds and continents seemingly at will, but they become increasingly travelsoiled as their hosts’ envious pity for their mobility modulates into a suspicion of their motives. (Motive force threatens architectural fixity.) It is charming that Charlotte should arrive so promptly for Amerigo’s nuptial hour; but there is no denying Mrs. Assingham’s mordant recognition that “[a] handsome, clever, odd girl staying with one is always a complication” (GB 56). Homeless women intensify James’s preoccupation with the conflict between place and space, between architecture and its others. Similarly, The Portrait of a Lady’s commitment to building is always in tension with its attraction to water: ubiquitous architectural metaphor is challenged by omnipresent seas, lakes, pools and streams in the narrative imagination. Madame Merle—“too perfectly the social animal” (PL 192)—“hates” the sea, although she was born in a navy-yard (174), while Isabel’s fascination with water matches that of the novel as a whole. Edward Rosier “remember[s] perfectly the walk at Neufchâtel, when [Isabel] would persist in going so near the edge” of the forbidden lake (214). Osmond’s Palladian houses rear themselves up in the bright dry spaces of Italy, whereas Gardencourt overlooks the river and Lockleigh “ris[es] from a broad, still moat” (78). Wateriness eludes the confinements of landlocked form, of the pent-up self; so, in a novel in which “the elation of liberty and

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of style, out of time, these books reiterate the exhausted involution of the pavilion, recalling the eighteenth-century novels exhumed by the Governess at Bly: books shut up, and books in which to shut oneself up to think; books as captives, and books as little prisons, inhabited by deluded readers with “faces like blind kittens” (PC 271).

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the pain of exclusion [are] indistinguishably mingled” (24), the appeal of the moated castle is its formal compromise between water and building, its architectural meditation on fixity (prison or protection?) and fluidity (dissolution or liberation?). “I adore a moat,” Isabel tells Warburton (110): she will not marry him, but he poses less threat (and less promise) than does Goodwood, whose ultimate embrace is akin to drowning. In The Portrait of a Lady, the only character not assigned a home of his own is Goodwood. Perversely, Osmond cultivates the “perpendicular Bostonian” (494) and feigns regret that Isabel had not accepted his offer of marriage. It would have been an excellent thing, like living under some tall belfry which would strike all the hours . . . . He declared he liked to talk with the great Goodwood; it wasn’t easy at first, you had to climb up an interminable steep staircase, up to the top of the tower; but when you got there you had a big view . . . . Gilbert said to Isabel that he was very original; he was as strong and of as good a style as an English portmanteau,—he had plenty of straps and buckles which would never wear out, and a capital patent lock. (495) Osmond is a villain, not a fool: his metaphor’s slippage from belfry to tower to portmanteau symptomatizes the difficulties of imagining life liberated from form; of imagining anything outside the architecture of the imagination. A belfry is innocent of living rooms; yet it embodies institutional authority, “strik[ing] all the hours,” articulating time, if not space. More promising is the image of a tower: less habitation than viewing-platform, point of vantage rather than place of rest. Yet it is also the house refined to its essence as a watchtower. “[T]hat’s the great thing,” as Isabel mused in an early moment of blind prescience; “that’s the extreme good fortune: to be in a better position for appreciating people than they are for appreciating you” (190). Does a tall tower promise unbounded freedom or limitless control? And then there’s the portmanteau, with its indefatigable “straps and buckles” and “capital patent lock.” A portmanteau implies freedom of movement, but as Osmond’s ambivalent metaphors suggest, luggage is also a variety of enclosure akin to more grandiose architectural structures: the portmanteau swallows other objects, uprooting and transporting them. This should concern Isabel, given her tendency to imagine herself a precious object locked in a cabinet of treasures. Luggage is an anxious subject in James, as is the scene of packing in advance of a domestic removal: there is acute pathos in the spectacle of radically dispossessed

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women performing miracles of management as great dislocations impend. In a pantomimic travesty of power, Charlotte “preside[s] in force” over “the great upheaval at Fawns,” with its “porters, packers, and hammerers” (GB 517), her only chance to see Amerigo that she is “obliged to come up to Eaton Square, whence so many of her personal possessions were in course of removal” (520). Was she more or less free when she possessed just two trunks? Now she and “her” possessions are to be “ship[ped]”to the colonies: in Maggie’s vision, “removed, transported, doomed” (483). Another magnificent packer is Mrs. Gereth, whose mistiming of the strategic denudation of Ricks exiles herself and Fleda from Poynton forever. Yet despite the limitations of place, a radical abrogation of social forms is not imaginable; if her house is repossessed, a woman clings to her luggage. In the homeless years ahead, Fleda will need the “admirable dressing bag . . . given her by her friend” (SP 39). James’s critique of the architecture of the imagination makes space for some uncanny affinities between the work of Jamesian scholars and that of contemporary writers on architecture. Those readers of James for whom the palace of art is only ever the façade of the prison find their architectural counterparts in the utopians of avant-garde design who have come to see all built structures as an art of power; instead, such architects abjure construction and “propose spaces that are ‘free’ or ‘open’ and can only exist in dreams themselves” (Betsky 190). In contrast, architectural critics influenced by psychoanalytic accounts of subjectivity as psychic structure are deconstructing the notion that the inhabitant pre-exists her home, “abandon[ing],” as Beatriz Colomina puts it, “the traditional thought of architecture as object, a bounded entity addressed by an independent subject” (viii). In their focus on the constitutive relationship between architecture and the self, these critics echo Jamesians such as Susan Griffin in her assertion that “for James, character is fictional structure” (4). Elizabeth Grosz’s recent discussion of “the representation of space” as “a correlate of one’s ability to locate oneself as [a] point of origin” reads like a theoretical restatement of The Portrait of a Lady: “the subject can take up a position only by being able to situate its body in a position in space, a position from which it relates to other objects. This anchoring of subjectivity in its body is the condition of a coherent identity, and, moreover, the condition under which the subject has a perspective on the world, becomes a source of perceptions, a point from which vision emanates” (38, 37). The oblivion tasted in Goodwood’s embrace would stand for Grosz’s version of insanity: “the psychotic is unable to locate himself or herself where he or she should be” (37). As

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if they were travelers in the Jamesian imagination—instead of pioneers on the border between psychoanalysis and architectural criticism—Mark Wigley suggests that “identity theory is necessarily spatial theory” (388), and Mark Cousins points out that “analysis can speak of the differential ‘scenes’ in which the subject and object are caught up, in a way which avoids repeating the questions ‘what is the object?’ and ‘when is the object?’ Where, the great topographical question, is not aimed at the object as such, but at the scene, which inscribes the places of what is installed” (111). This is closely akin to Gert Buelens’s recent exploration of James’s Galerie d’Apollon as a textual space in which “not only do the slots in the libidinal economy turn out to be readily exchangeable, [but moreover] the centrality of subject-object relations gives way to a veritable spatialization of desire” (302). Writers on architecture and literature alike are only now beginning to engage with the spatial self constructed and explored by James’s architectural imagination. [Isabel] would keep the gate ajar and open a parley; she would certainly not allow number three to come in. [Ralph] expressed this view, somewhat after this fashion, to his mother, who looked at him as if he had been dancing a jig . . . . “I don’t think I know what you mean,” she said; “you use too many figures of speech; I could never understand allegories. The two words in the language I most respect are Yes and No.” (PL 274–5) This classic scene of Jamesian reflexivity highlights the place of architecture as the possibility of thinking. In a novel at once sited on, and dislocated by, its architectural imagination—a novel in which ambivalence is ubiquitous, the true everyplace—the opposition of allegories and understanding, of metaphors and meanings, of houses and their inhabitants, will not hold. The ideal dichotomy of “Yes and No”—of space versus place—is the fantasy deconstructed by James’s textual architecture; because these absolutes of consent and refusal will not hold we all need architecture to think with. Without these “figures” there could be no “speech”; without these buildings, there could be no thinking. (In James, there can be no thinking outside the box.) Even as the “perfect palace of thought” (SF 183) adumbrates the contours of the prison, the aesthetic project remains in process, not, as we might wish, “never limited,” but certainly “never complete,” opening out onto multiplied vistas even as it closes in around the wary tenant. Thus if James’s architectural imagination seems an unlikely topos for “advances”

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prisons, palaces, and the architecture of the imagination

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in James criticism, we might reflect that James’s critics revisit his literary buildings much as the New York prefaces review the architectural scenes in which James’s fictions found their first forms: like the prefaces, critics site themselves on the contested territory between tradition and reconstruction, “cultivating a sense of the past” while seizing the opportunity to “improvise with extreme freedom” (Preface to “The Aspern Papers,” AN 165, 172). The final New York preface meditates on exactly this drama of authority and resistance, “this process of re-dreaming,” and celebrates “the interest of the watched renewal [as] livelier than that of the accepted repetition” (AN 345). And James unsettles this final block of his imposing theoretical edifice with the suggestion that the architecture of the text, by spanning past and present, writer and reader, self and other, makes closure neither desirable nor possible. “[I]f [the artist] is always doing he can scarce, by his own measure, ever have done” (AN 348).

notes 1. Modernist architect Le Corbusier described the house as a “machine à habiter”— a machine for living, or “House-Machine” (227). Austen constructs Mansfield Park, and the novel whose name it shares, as machines à souffrir—mechanisms designed to provoke and display Fanny Price’s suffering. 2. For Foucault’s influential analysis of Bentham’s “Panopticon,” a design for a prison based on total visual mastery, see Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 3. James’s 1898 novella In the Cage concerns a young woman employed within a telegraphist’s “cage” whose confined and meager existence is made bearable by her vicarious interest in her wealthy customers’ lives. Her imagination both palliates and symptomatizes her own deprivation. 4. James adverts briefly to Isabel in his New York Edition preface to The Princess Casamassima. 5. James’s 1900 story “The Great Good Place” elaborates the fantasy of a great tranquil peopled institution, something between a monastery and an asylum, to which are transported by sheer force of desire gentlemen exhausted by the depredations of modern life. 6. For Christina’s earlier appearance in James’s fiction, see his second novel Roderick Hudson. 7. In the light of the architectural tradition of nineteenth-century English fiction, we might consider Fanny Price—repeatedly associated with the Bertrams’ governess Miss Lee, as well as with the Ecclesford governess through the role of Cottager’s wife—as a source for Jane Eyre. 8. “Mise-en-scène” refers to the stage-setting of a play or the visual elements of a film; it implies the significatory value of visible objects. “Mise-en-abîme” refers to a story-within-a-story, a symbolic structure in which each representational element gives way to another without reaching a final point of referential stability.

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AN—The Art of the Novel E—The Europeans GB—The Golden Bowl HF—The House of Fiction PC—The Princess Casamassima PL—The Portrait of a Lady SF—The Sacred Fount SP—The Spoils of Poynton TS—The Turn of the Screw

works cited Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park. Ed. Tony Tanner. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. Betsky, Aaron. Building Sex: Men, Women, Architecture, and the Construction of Sexuality. New York: William Morrow, 1995. Blair, Sara. “In the House of Fiction: Henry James and the Engendering of Literary Mastery.” Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship. Ed. David McWhirter. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995: 58–73. Bowen, Janet Wolf. “Architectural Envy: ‘A Figure is Nothing Without a Setting’ in Henry James’s The Bostonians.” New England Quarterly 65 (1992): 3–23. Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Ed. Margaret Smith. Intro. Sally Shuttleworth. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Buelens, Gert. “Henry James’s Oblique Possession: Plottings of Desire and Mastery in The American Scene.” PMLA 116 (2001): 300–13. Colomina, Beatriz. Introduction. Sexuality and Space. Princeton Papers on Architecture. Ed. Beatriz Colomina. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992: vii–xi. Cousins, Mark. “Where?” Desiring Practices: Architecture, Gender and the Interdisciplinary. Eds. Katerina Ruedi, Sarah Wigglesworth, and Duncan McCorquodale. London: Black Dog, 1996: 107–14. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Allen Lane, 1977. Frank, Ellen Eve. Literary Architecture: Essays Toward a Tradition. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: California UP, 1979. Freedman, Jonathan L. “Introduction: The Moment of Henry James.” The Cambridge Companion to Henry James. Ed. Jonathan Freedman. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998: 1–20. Griffin, Susan M. The Historical Eye: The Texture of the Visual in Late James. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1991. Grosz, Elizabeth. Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. Foreword by Peter Eisenman. Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 2001. Habegger, Alfred. Henry James and the “Woman Business.” Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Hadley, Tessa. Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.

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abbreviations: henr y james

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Hersey, George L. High Victorian Gothic: A Study in Associationism. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1972. Hollier, Denis. Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille. Trans. Betsy Wing. Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 1989. James, Henry. “The Art of Fiction.” The House of Fiction: Essays on the Novel by Henry James. Ed. Leon Edel. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957: 23–45. ——. The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces. Introduction. Richard Blackmur. New York: Scribners, 1962. ——. The Europeans. London: Penguin Classics, 1985. ——. “The Future of the Novel.” The House of Fiction: Essays on the Novel by Henry James. Ed. Leon Edel. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957: 48–59. ——. The Golden Bowl. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981. ——. “The Great Good Place.” The Complete Tales of Henry James. Ed Leon Edel. Vol. 11. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1964: 13–42. ——. Henry James: Selected Letters. Ed. Leon Edel. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Belknap, Harvard UP, 1987. ——. In the Cage. Intro. Libby Purves. London: Hesperus, 2002. ——. “The Lesson of Balzac.” The House of Fiction: Essays on the Novel by Henry James. Ed. Leon Edel. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957: 60–85. ——. The Portrait of a Lady. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967. ——. The Princess Casamassima. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978. ——. Roderick Hudson. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986. ——. The Sacred Fount. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1994. ——. The Spoils of Poynton. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971. ——. The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories. Ed. T. J. Lustig. The World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. Le Corbusier. Towards a New Architecture. Trans. with Introduction. Frederick Etchells. New York: Dover, 1986. McGurl, Mark. “Social Geometries: Taking Place in Henry James.” Representations 68 (1999): 59–83. McWhirter, David. Ed. Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995. Markus, Thomas A. Buildings and Power: Freedom and Control in the Origin of Modern Building Types. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Poole, Adrian. Henry James. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991. Przybylowicz, Donna. Desire and Repression: The Dialectic of Self and Other in the Late Works of Henry James. Alabama: Alabama UP, 1986. Rawlings, Peter. “Grotesque Encounters in the Travel Writing of Henry James.” Yearbook of English Studies. Ed. Nicola Bradbury. 34 (2004): Nineteenth-Century Travel Writing. Guest Ed. David Seed. 34 (2004): 171–85. Rowe, John Carlos. The Other Henry James. Durham and London: Duke UP, 1998. Seltzer, Mark. Henry James and the Art of Power. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1984. Short, R. W. “Henry James’s World of Images.” PMLA 68 (1953): 943–60. Smith, Stephanie A. “The Delicate Organisms and Theoretic Tricks of Henry James.” American Literature 62 (1990): 583–605. Sternberg, Meir. “Spatiotemporal Art and the Other Henry James: The Case of The Tragic Muse.” Poetics Today 5 (1984): 775–830.

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Stevens, Hugh. Henry James and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. Tristram, Philippa. Living Space in Fact and Fiction. London and New York: Routledge, 1989. Ward, J. A. The Search for Form: Studies in the Structure of James’s Fiction. Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP, 1967. Wigley, Mark. “Untitled: The Housing of Gender.” Sexuality and Space. Princeton Papers on Architecture. Ed. Beatriz Colomina. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992: 327–89.

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prisons, palaces, and the architecture of the imagination

gert buelens and celia aijmer Henry James was not a writer of historical novels, yet the past is often intensely present in his works. As Virginia Woolf noted in her review of his memoirs, James’s “natural atmosphere and his most abiding mood” is the “mellow light which swims over the past,” and “the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that time” (“Old Order” 168). The shadows of the past playing against the backdrop of ancient cities and faded drawing-rooms indeed contribute to the mood in James’s writing. But in James the passage of time also raises philosophical questions related to history: What is history? How is knowledge of history possible, and what is its meaning? These, then, are among the questions we shall explore, in addition to surveying a range of some of the most significant critical material in this area. This essay reiterates the title of James’s posthumously published The Sense of the Past (1917), and will partly take its critical impetus from the historical themes that are elaborated there. The novel’s American protagonist Ralph Pendrel is the author of “An Essay in Aid of the Reading of History” (42), seeking emotional relief in the past to amend the present. However, the novel finally delivers a dire warning about the dangers of living too much in the past as the historiographer’s literal transportation to the 1820s turns out to be a disappointing experience. The sense of the past, the meaning and interpretation of history and the historical consciousness are central concerns to this unfinished novel, but any reader of James recognizes how historical motifs and settings fuel the plots, lay the ground for moral dilemmas, and set the atmospheric tone. From this perspective, themes related to history are rich in meaning and have wide implications for how we understand James’s art. For 192

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instance, to investigate the significance of the past, of historical events and of historical settings in James’s works, allows us to approach such critical issues as James’s relation to the novel as a genre, to epistemology, psychology, rhetoric, experience, questions of authority, and his theory of fiction. Importantly, to excavate the meaning of history in James is also to begin to uncover the place of history in critical writings about James. The extended canon of James criticism coincides time-wise with a century primarily dedicated to ideas associated with modernism or postmodernism, in which few concepts have been more debated and contested than the idea of history and its value.1 Consequently, when observing how previous critics have read James in relation to history we simultaneously record the slumps and upsurges of a troubled concept. In order to establish the nature of James’s historicism, we therefore need to ask several questions: How do historical themes relate to interpretative strategies in James’s fiction? What is the status of historical knowledge in his works? Finally, what are the philosophical and ideological underpinnings of the critical conceptions of history in James studies? The ambition of this essay is not to deliver conclusive answers to these wide-ranging questions, but rather to map out some possible routes of investigation for the scholar or student interested in James’s senses of the past. Some themes that will be touched on are the relationship between rhetoric, narrative technique and chronology in James’s fiction, the concept of experience as a category that links memory, history and autobiography, the ghost story that connects historical themes with metafictional perspectives on the acts of reading and writing, and life within mortal time. These issues, however disparate, address many of James’s responses to the past. However, they have primarily been selected to show how formal and historical concerns are interwoven in James’s writings and how the gap between formalist and historicist readings of James can and indeed must be bridged.

the tone of the historian The relationship between literature and history is a recurrent topic in James’s critical essays. Importantly, the primary focus in these texts is on issues of authority and narrative voice rather than on chronology, causal relations, or temporally determined facts. The authority James attributes to historical narrative is associated with his recognition of the historian as a master interpreter of culture and individual lives in the face of time. Both the historian and novelist should attempt to establish

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the sense of the past: history and historical criticism

palgrave advances in henry james studies

meaning which relies less on facts or chronology than on tone, sensibility and impression. From this perspective, the changing status of history as a discipline provides an important background for the sense of the past in James’s fiction (see Langhorne, Longenbach). Writing at the end of the nineteenth century, James was a witness to the decline of Victorian historicism. A dominant discipline in the nineteenth century, history had been seen as process, progress and a precondition of the present, fixing each human firmly in a larger social and historical context. The modern reaction against the pre-eminence attributed to historical explanations led to a crisis that, as it concerned the nature of historical understanding, was both ontological and epistemological.2 The power of the past in the present was questioned and the status of historical knowledge seemed uncertain when the meaning of the past could not be definitely ascertained through the empirical methods of positivist materialism, but only approached through personal interpretation. Being a discipline under strain, history was certainly in need of the kind of interpretative manual produced by the character Ralph Pendrel in James’s The Sense of the Past. Initially, the subjective nature of knowledge about the past did not seem to trouble James. Instead, in “The Art of Fiction” (1884), he took advantage of what could be seen as a weakness in the historian’s trade to elevate the position of the novelist: “To represent and illustrate the past, the actions of men, is the task of either writer, and the only difference that I can see is, in proportion as he succeeds, to the honour of the novelist, consisting as it does in his having more difficulty in collecting his evidence, which is so far from being purely literary” (47).3 James stresses that the struggle to account for the truth is common to both novelist and historian, even to the extent that “the novel is history” (46). Still, to render the truth is not equivalent to holding a mirror before the world. What is particularly notable in this context is that James emphasizes the narrative status of each field, as history is described in terms of representation and illustration. The advantage of the novel is its capacity to render “a direct impression of life” (50), but it is nevertheless bound to be a representation of reality, highly colored by the novelist’s skill and sensibility. Under these circumstances, it is not the epistemological status of history that James is after, but rather the authority to “speak with assurance, with the tone of the historian” (46). The novelist should not concede to “making believe” and should not flaunt an “attitude of apology” (46). The authority of the historian stands in proportion to his skill in the selection, representation and illustration of real life. According to James, “reality has a myriad forms” and “[e]xperience is never limited” (52). This

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means that although experience is essential for the creation of the “air of reality,” it consists mainly of the synecdochic “power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it” (53). Neither novelist, nor historian, is obliged to have personal experience of an event in actual time to hold the authority to recount it. As James suggests, experience is less associated with first-hand empirical knowledge than with a capacity of the mind: “it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind” (52). The authority of the historian does not rely on his access to the past “as it really was,” but rather on his inner sensibility to a given, cultural fragment from the past. Experience is paradoxically seen as a synchronic practice of sensibility rather than as a familiarity with phenomena as they develop over time. Sharing a capacity for responsiveness, the novelist and the historian are designated as master interpreters of the myriad forms of reality; it is the effort to understand the past in the present that is particular to both. James’s short novel Washington Square (1880) is a good example of a text that secures authority to fiction precisely by drawing attention to problems of interpretation and representation, and by undermining the conventional historical narrative based on chronology and factual evidence.4 In one scene, Morris Townsend, on a visit to Doctor Sloper, notices a rather odd ornament: a “long narrow mirror” which has “at its base a little gilded bracket covered by a thin slab of white marble, supporting in its turn a backgammon board folded together in the shape of two volumes, two shining folios inscribed in letters of greenish gilt, History of England” (55). Jolly has observed that the description of this object is “an exercise in reflexive irony, which destabilizes the idea of the novel as history.” The mirror reflects “an image of the novel itself which, like James’s other works of this period, is presented as history. But the History of England is a fake, a toy, a playful attempt to pass off as serious and educational something frivolous which, as a game, involves an element of the arbitrary.” As she further notes, Washington Square was also presented to the public in two volumes and consequently “the game masquerading as a two-volume history in the Slopers’ drawingroom creates for the reader an instant of arrest, in which the idea of the historical nature of the narrative is momentarily subverted.” While Jolly recognizes the self-reflexivity of this mirror history, she contends that

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the novel ultimately resumes its “apparently inevitable chronicle of the triumph of circumstances over plots” (44). In Jolly’s reading, the destabilizing of historical meaning in Washington Square is only temporary, as the narrator retains the “moral and epistemological authority of history” (44). Indeed, the narrator retains a firm hold on the events in the novel while the story often moves backwards and forwards in time. However, despite the narrative’s frequent mention of weekdays, times, and the number of years that have passed, it fails to give the reader a reliable chronological overview. In Bell’s words, time “is not only elided in Washington Square but operates as a distinct temporal confusion whereby, despite its overwhelming ‘realistic’ specificity, its chronology competes within itself for historical place and emerges as an explicitly unstable resource for finding one’s bearings” (Henry James and the Past 34). Impressions are as important as facts, and the amount of time gone by is as much a measure of the characters’ persistence or obstinacy as a consistent historical account. Washington Square is certainly a social history, but it is hard to determine the moral and epistemological authority of its narrator, whose confident tone is sometimes disconcertingly similar to the ironically treated authoritarian voice of Doctor Sloper. The doctor is a physiognomist, who endeavors to pin down inner character on the basis of outward appearances. In a similar gesture, the narrative offers us a detailed account of Catherine Sloper’s physiognomy and often spectacular attire.5 Still, the novel does not end in reconciliation between inner and outer: in the end, as in the beginning, Catherine’s thoughts and feelings are as elusive as ever. Nor is the ending conclusive in moral terms, or in its view of the clash between old and new cultures. Thus, the matter of authority in relation to historical narrative is by no means resolved, and a study of history in James could well begin with a rhetorical analysis of chronology, narration, and the authoritative tone of the historian.

histor y, autobiography and memor y If accounts of events in the past are dependent on the sensibility of the historian, it follows that the historical shifts to the psychological, and that the concrete message is hard to distinguish from a subjective representation. James’s autobiographical writings are particularly interesting in this context as, in a sense, this genre with its focus on memory and experience comes to represent the exemplary historical document.6 One of the most interesting aspects of the autobiographies is that they reveal

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James’s awareness of the interrelation between personal history and more grandiose, epochal or public historical events. For example, in A Small Boy and Others the triumph of the 1848 revolution in Paris resulting in Louis-Philippe’s flight to England is evoked through young Henry’s memory of how this spectacular news was delivered to his father. The moment is commemorated as James’s “positive initiation into History” (33). The flight of a king was sure to trigger the imagination of a five year old boy and to increase the allure of Europe, but the news of the political developments in France also served to bring back a very early childhood impression of the Place Vendôme in Paris, thus sweeping the reader back to a more distant phase of James’s infancy. In this manner history is linked to a personal understanding of the passing of time, manifested in memory and narrative identity—biography or autobiography. It is important to see, however, that the new emphasis on the psychological or personal does not automatically carry with it a reduction of the significance of history as a social or political category. What interests James is rather the complex interweaving of actions in the present moment, the intricate turns of memory, and a past that inevitably conditions us. How social and political categories that frame human lives interact or clash with personal desires that stretch and move both forwards and backwards in time, wandering emotions, and familiar or domestic circumstances is one of James’s major themes, for example in The Princess Casamassima, where the novel’s protagonist Hyacinth Robinson, who has “the French Revolution at his fingers’ ends” (161), is torn between his commitment to radical politics and an awakened desire for art and beauty. To build fiction around the conflict between an individual and society is to respect the nineteenth-century realist tradition. Yet, in his distrust of grand narrative historical discourses, James develops a view of history that is pragmatic and is linked to an aesthetics of impression, perception, memory and experience in the present (see Hocks). In James’s autobiographies, for example, the reader is not invited to take a step back and see the past anew, as if especially meaningful events in the past were unraveled chronologically and in full scale on a screen before us. Instead one might say that the autobiographies document the very act of excavating the past, including reminiscences of seemingly unimportant details, visual impressions, and fleeting meetings, “directly interesting to the subject-victim only,” as James confesses in A Small Boy and Others (105). The attempt to render identity through the rear mirror is, significantly, posited as a writing exercise—an insistent exploration of and reflection

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on the limitations and openings in the project of writing the self through time. The fluidity of the boundaries between memory, biography, and history is also evident in many of James’s fictional works. Again, Washington Square is a good example: the boundaries of fictional illusion are overstepped as the narrator fleetingly addresses the personal concerns of the novel’s author. In the same passage where the narrator informs us that the area around Washington Square had “the look of having had something of a social history,” the reader catches a glimpse of James’s own past in the neighborhood where he took his “first walks” and noticed the “strange odour of the ailanthus-trees” in the square (14–15). In Washington Square James reflects on his own sense of memory. However, as Bell contends, rather than presenting a nostalgic glance back at forlorn days, the novel proposes a “retrospective history” on behalf of James’s “contemporary situation” in the 1870s (Henry James and the Past 18). History is a vivid part of the present, which resonates with personal associations and echoes of memories. Crucial, too, are the interconnections that link the city as a historical document, the onrush of modernity, the openness of the self, knowledge, and representation, not just in this early work, but also in The Ambassadors (1903), The Wings of the Dove (1902), and the travelogue The American Scene (1907), where the modern urban landscape of New York strikingly engenders new forms of experience and representation. Indeed, as Posnock has pointed out in his groundbreaking The Trial of Curiosity, in “describing his New York experiences, James devises a mode of representation that mimes urban phenomenology—the onrush of stimuli that makes the mind vibrate with associations” (165). The textual logic down to the very sentences of The American Scene mimics the “vagaries and improvisations” of James’s “flâneries” (165). The text’s disposition is part of its meaning, as its meanderings document “unsuspected continuities” between “forms of representation, particularly architectural and social” (160). In contrast to critics in the Marxist strain who have situated James’s “privileged consciousness” in a position “absent from concrete history” (Eagleton 141), Posnock stresses the continuity between the individual consciousness and material or economic conditions. In his reading, James historicizes the category of experience; and it is precisely because he “conceives of individualism, identity, and consciousness as historical categories” that the individual subject is “open to change and revision in a nonpossessive direction” (83). The fluidity and openness of the self is itself inscribed in a historical moment, a point that has been

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usefully extended by Haviland to other late Jamesian texts, yet qualified in Buelens’s rhetorical reading (Henry James and the “Aliens”). One of the most relevant historical contexts for analyzing the openness and mutability of the modern self in James is American consumer culture as it developed at the turn of the previous century. As Agnew has shown, in an essay that continues to set the agenda in this area of exploration, James’s oeuvre offers us “an example of the lived density and historicity of consumer culture” (84). Agnew’s analysis is particularly pertinent for opening a dual perspective on the consumer as a historically and culturally embedded subject. For example, Lambert Strether in James’s The Ambassadors will discover the link between consumption and breaking with the past, and becomes a dedicated consumer as the novel progresses. However, when the self is renewable in each moment, and the past is seen as an exchangeable constituent of the present, history is easily reduced to a commodity—a bitter experience for someone like Prince Amerigo in The Golden Bowl, who is regarded as “an object of price,” a “morceau de musée,” in the collection of the Ververs (11). By contrast, James’s pragmatic view of history is hardly “ornamental,” addressing the passing of time rather as a fundamental aspect of existence.

the body in time One way of thinking about James and the passage of time is to study his characters as corporeal beings who face woes and joys in the limited time span that is a human life. Time defines and dictates the limits of experience, and whereas the imagination leaps freely across unlimited stretches of land, crosses boundaries, and enters the realm of art and history, Jamesian characters are ultimately firmly positioned in historical time and space, and inhabit gendered bodies liable to suffer affliction by illness, lost love or death. In James, moral and spiritual awareness is often attained when the understanding of time changes from something that is external, mechanical and perfunctory to an inner experience controlled by biological processes of the body. Relatively little has been said about James’s fictional characters as corporeal beings, perhaps because characterizations of James such as Conrad’s description of him as an “historian of fine consciences” (19), or Woolf’s account of his characters as “distinguished ghosts,” equipped with “thoughts and emotions,” but not alive (“Henry James’s Latest Novel” 23), have remained influential. Meissner’s analysis of the significance of experience, for instance, focuses on hermeneutics and the formation of knowledge rather than on how experience in James is connected

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with sexuality, illness, ageing, and death. Even while recognizing the extent to which experience in James is “something one lives through or suffers,” Meissner thinks of this process primarily in terms of a dialectical movement between “bewilderment and enlightenment” (2), thus staying within a frame of reference that has been well established by the earlier phenomenological work of Armstrong and Williams. The mind and the imagination register the passing of time, knowledge grows with experience, and James’s characters take pleasure in developing their historical consciousness. However, it is often the body that finally links them with the inevitable passing of time. Thus, at the beginning of The Ambassadors, Strether feels light and his imagination springs up to Chad’s balcony and the casually posed artist Little Bilham (69). In telling contrast, towards the end of the novel, the ambassador, lamenting the infirmities of old age, struggles up the stairs to Chad’s apartment (336). In this scene, James presents experience as embodied. Further, just as the passing of time leaves marks on the human body as well as on the human mind, knowledge is not idealistically detached from historical “situatedness,” or from the scars, sufferings, emotions and desires that are a part of the engendered. Griffin emphasizes that James’s characters are “seeing bodies,” and that an examination of perception in James cannot bypass “verbal, aural, and tactile” dimensions (4, 6). Situated knowledge is partial and locatable in time, space and individual desire rather than transcendent. Hence, the favored outlook in The Ambassadors is not Little Bilham’s bird’s-eye overview from above but the partial and limited perspectives that our place in history affords us. The Jamesian emphasis on position and point of view shifts the understanding of the past as static to history as an event or performance in the present, governed by action and desire. This insight is central to J. Hillis Miller’s analysis of The Aspern Papers, in which he argues that the text is about the impossibility of knowing the historical past (199).7 The Aspern Papers is a story told in the first person, and the narrator is a historian-critic who believes he can possess the past by gaining access to certain papers related to the object of his vigorous admiration, the poet Jeffrey Aspern. Of particular interest in this context is Miller’s suggestion that the narrator is insensible to the true historical event and knowledge that is of a “blind bodily material kind” (203). Indeed, to the narrator, the long-dead Aspern seems more alive than his two hostesses, and it is even suggested that he is “violating a tomb” in his attempt to lay hands on the treasured papers (99). Ironically, to attain a full picture of times past and to uncover the truth, he is oblivious of the desires, actions, and symbols that shape the present circumstances and that form a bridge to the past,

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even as his “right to dig up the past” is questioned by his hostess, who suggests that the discoveries made by historians are “mostly lies” (69). Like “The Aspern Papers,” “The Beast in the Jungle” is a story about stasis and the lack of life in terms of action or event, and both stories pose questions about the nature of knowledge in relation to love and time. Waiting insistently for a metaphorical “beast” to spring upon him, John Marcher is a man possessed by the preconception that fate has destined him for an encounter of extravagant proportion that will “suddenly break out” in his life: “possibly destroying all further consciousness, possibly annihilating me; possibly, on the other hand, only altering everything, striking at the root of all my world and leaving me to the consequences, however they shape themselves” (283). Waiting for the unutterable, he dedicates his life to marking time. The idealist Marcher is only interested in the reality of his relationship to May Bartram, the companion with whom he shares his secret, to the extent that she validates his idea that he has been set apart for an extraordinary fate. Facts about time and chronology are abundant in “The Beast in the Jungle.” The reader is informed of the month and time of day of the main two characters’ meetings, the time that passes between the meetings, and their age. May could even be said to represent Marcher’s own attempt to give his life a chronological, narrative contour structured around a buildup, climax, and denouement. It is on first meeting her at the Weatherend mansion that he starts spinning a linear narrative thread as she affects him “as the sequel of something of which he had lost the beginning” (278), and she will even provide the beginning as she fills in the gaps of his past, and locates the origin of their relationship. What May begins to do here is to set the parameters for placing Marcher’s life in the narrative of a romantic tale, as she suggests that what he expects to have such a dramatic impact on his life must be love. A common reading of the story is that Marcher is too egotistic to respond to May, and consequently the moral of the tale is that the hero should have responded to reality rather than his lofty dreams of being selected for an uncommon destiny. Disagreeing in their assessment whether he awakens to reality or remains in his state of self-sufficiency, critics still tend to judge Marcher for failing to see his opportunity in life (see Buelens, “In Possession” 17–19). Rightly pointing out that to demand of someone that they “should have desired” is “nonsensical as a moral judgement” (198), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues that a male homosexual thematics is “present as a—as a very particular, historicized—thematics of absence, and specifically of the absence of speech” (201). In this analysis, Marcher’s failure consists of not acknowledging the kind of love that dare not speak its name. It

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is, however, important to see that whether we choose to read this as a homosexual story or not, “The Beast in the Jungle” on a narrative level functions as a denial of the conventional romance plot as it develops over time through an exposition, rising action, climax, denouement and final stabilization. Instead, Marcher’s insight that he has not “learned it within” is not brought to him through a gradual build-up on the “wings of experience,” but rather it has “brushed him, jostled him, upset him, with the disrespect of chance, the insolence of an accident” (311). Progression through time is disrupted and Marcher’s attempt to see his life as a narrative fails as by the end he has “before him in sharper incision than ever the open page of his story” (311). Meaning has not been accumulated over time, and even at the end of the story Marcher turns away from the beast that allegedly represents his self-recognition. If there is any retroactive acknowledgment or recognition of feelings, we still find that textual love has sacrificed sexual love as belonging to the present moment.

ghosts: histor y as nightmare Ghosts move beyond generic rules, and as Adrian Poole has observed, James is drawn to the paranormal because it “raises questions about boundaries” (142). The ghosts represent the continuity of life beyond death, but also separation and loss, as the past makes a nightmarish return to haunt the protagonists with a sense of bereavement and a taste of their own mortality. Specters may evoke cherished memories but they also materialize what has been buried and forgotten. However, it is not the difference between the polarities life and death, or between presence and absence that primarily attracts James, but rather how they intersect, overlap, and create a liminal terrain between them. What is particularly notable is the way specters seem to represent both the transcendence of the limitations of history and the irreducible otherness of the past. As such, they are central to the Jamesian conception of identity over time, and to his view of the relation between art, life and time. Ghosts and life beyond death are intimately associated with conceptions of art, history, and memory. Hannah Arendt, for example, has argued that the writing of history was originally a way of securing immortality for futile human works and deeds. The task of both poet and historiographer was therefore to bring mortal man closer to the immortal divinity. The “human capacity to achieve this was remembrance, Mnemosyne, who therefore was regarded as the mother of all the other muses” (43). However, the disillusionment with historical narrative in James, as in

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other modernist writers, challenged the conception of the muse of history as a protector of everlasting value. Ghostly presences of the past do not inspire James’s characters with thoughts about eternal values or immortality; rather, they stir a vivid sense of life and ultimately lead protagonists to make a new commitment to the present. In the New York Edition prefaces, for instance, James takes a “ghostly interest” in the writer he once was, and in revising his works he found himself breathing on “the dead reasons of things” and reviving what lay “buried . . . in the texture of the work” (Preface to Roderick Hudson 1045). James repeatedly glances backwards to the place and time that saw the birth of his fiction, but it is not nostalgia that he presents to the reader. Distrusting historical narrative to procure the immortal and eternal, James displayed a modern dedication to the present as the moment when the historical vivid is produced, as he emphasizes his own role as a “master-builder” of his fiction and the synchronic autonomy of his works (Preface to The Spoils of Poynton 1141). The image of the man of imagination reviving his own self is also found throughout James’s fiction. For example, T. J. Lustig has suggested that the ghost tale “The Jolly Corner” (1902) can be read as a “New York fictional advertisement for the New York Edition” (227). In this story, Spencer Brydon chases the phantom of his own past, the business-oriented man he would have become had he remained in his native America. He wishes to encounter the ghost of his other self in the hope of transcending differences shaped by historical circumstances, psychological frames, and economic ideology. Lustig contends that James in the early years of the twentieth century asked himself if he was “all and only an artist, or did he, like Brydon, have another latent self?” (226). In “The Jolly Corner,” the “paths come full circuit, the selves rejoin each other in preparation for the projected twenty-three volumes of the New York Edition” (227). In Lustig’s reading, even though James “sustains tension,” he nevertheless accomplishes “fusion” between art and economy, or realism and romance, as he “symbolically embraces the shade of Balzac and also of Hawthorne” (227). Yet it should be stressed that the encounter with the self that Brydon could have been is a nightmarish experience and it is doubtful that the returning expatriate is reconciled with his alternative past. Like Ralph Pendrel, who after his time-travel to the 1820s emerges “from all trouble [. . .] supreme master and controller” as he “reconnects on the spot” to the circumstances around him (347), Brydon regains consciousness after the gruesome encounter only to discover that it is the “sense of what he had come back to”; that is “the great thing” to him (336).

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The ghostly doppelgänger manifests the liberation of life from the bonds of time and space. However, stories about the deliverance from a singular existence tend to be dark in tone. Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, for example, is a moral tale about the inherent dangers of obliterating the difference between self and art. The Sense of the Past, James’s own version of the story about a portrait come to life, also recounts the unfortunate and finally untenable results of reversing ageless art with time-bound life. The supernatural in each of these works initially works to transcend the difference between life and art in terms of freedom from the constraints of time. However, the ghostly transcendence of history does not redeem either in Oscar Wilde’s novel, or in James. Only when the past is confronted as other does the present retain its full meaning. Similarly, the New York Edition prefaces bear witness to James’s reluctance to reconcile historical and synchronic outlooks on art. James repeatedly delivers historical explanations for the origin of his fiction as he recounts the specific time and environment in which each work was begun. Still, the foundation of his fiction is given as synchronic and primarily dependent on technical aspects of form and composition. Although the two modes co-exist, there is no reconciliation between the historic and synchronic, between personal and impersonal perspectives on art, or between the self that is inescapably bound to the historical moment of personal creation and the text’s ghostly life of its own. The theme of ghosts is also central to the process of reading. Proust wrote that a “book is a large cemetery where most of the names on the graves have faded and become illegible” (Le Temps retrouvé 482).8 From this perspective, reading is an act of resurrection. But the characters are not restored to life or to their origin; they are doomed to a spectral existence hovering between the temporal moment of the creation of the text and the present in which they are reanimated. Similarly, T. S. Eliot commends James’s mode of characterization for its eerie capacity to fit characters into the general scheme that is the work of art: The focus is a situation, a relation, an atmosphere, to which the characters play tribute, but being allowed to give only what the writer wants. The real hero, in any of James’s stories, is a social entity of which men and women are constituents . . . . It is in the chemistry of these subtle substances, these curious precipitates and explosive gases which are suddenly formed by the contact of mind with mind, that James is unequalled. Compared with James’s, other novelists’ characters seem to be only accidentally in the same book. Naturally there is something terrible, as disconcerting as a quicksand, in this discovery, though it

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The passage suggests that the uncanny aspect of a text is a consequence of its metaphysically ambiguous status. The characters seemingly have a life of their own, but they are simultaneously merely phantasmal apparitions in the atmospheric blend that James has concocted. Miller draws our attention to the passage in the preface to The Golden Bowl where James “speaks of the novelist’s power as the ability to raise ghosts, to give the reader hallucinatory visions of the characters and actions he calls forth by force of the word” (“How to Be” 275). The reader is enticed into haunted regions as he or she inevitably approaches the text as something which is both present and distant, which is animated yet has no life of its own. Under these circumstances, chronology is unsettled as the present has no precedence over the past. As Derrida has observed, the effect of the spectral is to undo the opposition between past and present, “or even this dialectic, between actual, effective presence and its other” (40). Emblematic of the limits of definition and interpretation, the logic of haunting is “larger and more powerful” than an ontology that relies on the distinction of “to be or not to be” (10). Wolfreys has further clarified the relationship between the phantasmal and the reader, commenting on our tendency to think of the author as still speaking to us, and of ourselves as readers who have no role: However, what reading does in effect is to bear witness to the existence of something other, which is neither “read into” the text nor of the text itself in any simple fashion. The question of the text therefore, like the question of spectres, reconfigures the question of the limit between the living and the dead, which everywhere, in every textual encounter, presents itself. It is not that the text is haunted by its author, or simply by the historical moment of its production. Rather, it is the text itself which haunts and which is haunted by the traces which come together in this structure we call textual, which is phantomatic or phantasmic in nature while, paradoxically, having an undeniably real or material effect, if not presence. (xiii) The Turn of the Screw provides a particularly interesting example of this spectral logic of the textual.9 The story has a Chinese box structure that frames numerous writers and readers throughout the text, and presents

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only becomes absolutely dominant in such stories as The Turn of the Screw. It is partly foretold in Hawthorne, but James takes it much farther. And it makes the reader, as well as the personae, uneasily the victim of a merciless clairvoyance. (856)

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both writing and reading as acts of bearing witness to the spectral. The narrative framework of the tale reveals that the text is essentially about telling and listening to stories, reading, and the circulation of manuscripts, as a number of guests are gathered to listen to ghost stories and to experience a “common thrill” (8). In the novella, the gentleman who employs the governess comes across as an author figure who determines the lives of its main characters and decides on the romantic setting of the story. In keeping with the role of the author, he then withdraws on the condition that he should never be troubled, “never, never” (12).10 Only in her dreams does the young governess meet her handsome employer again, and she fantasizes that he will fully recognize her. Coincidentally, it is when she is wrapped up in one of her daydreams that she first has a vision of a ghost, and her experience is compared to the acts of reading and writing: “So I saw him as I see the letters I form on this page” (32). The appearance of ghosts is associated with the lack of a stable chronology in the story. It is virtually impossible to place the events in a reliable time scheme, as James “systematically blanks out beginnings and endings” in the story (Lustig 121). The text does not provide a reliable origin, instead it features a “swarm of surrogates and replacements” (Lustig 126), abounding as it does with intertextual references, which unsettle the distinction between writing and reading. For example, the governess is described as an eager consumer of eighteenth-century literature, and it is typically while she is reading that she is prone to witness the supernatural phenomena that are the subject of her text. The reliability of the governess is perhaps of less importance than the fact that her instability testifies to the indeterminate, uncanny aspects of the acts of reading and writing. Her failure to procure stable meaning is transplanted onto our own reading of the text as we are uncertain about the sanity of the governess and inevitably begin to forge our own interpretation of the story.

art versus histor y The relationship between a formalist aesthetics and the historical moment has always been a central concern in James criticism. When Beach in 1954 commended James’s “mechanics” of fiction, he hastily added that the term was not intended to be “suggestive of the machine age” (xiv). The elevation of fiction as a kind of mechanics that asserts the autonomy and universality of the artefact, and the pre-eminence of language, disposition, and style over time-bound reality have been regarded as familiar characteristics of the formalist and New Critical approaches that dominated James studies for the major part of the last century.11

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More recent readings have all but abolished the image of James as a writer whose main concern is to guard an elitist version of autonomous art from intrusions of historical actualities. Though diverging in their assessment of James’s political progressiveness, accounts inspired by cultural studies or New Historicism have acknowledged James’s interest in history, mainly as it reflects his engagement in social issues of his time (see for instance Blair, Warren). History, meaning time-bound cultural embeddedness, thereby becomes a politically charged concept. Departing from the critical conception of James as an aesthete elitist, an “other” (to borrow John Carlos Rowe’s expression) Henry James has emerged as “a conflicted writer who struggled with changing attitudes toward gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity in his own times” (Rowe, The Other Henry James xii). Responding to James as a social critic, Rowe even deems it possible to view him as a “precursor of our postmodern condition” (The Other Henry James 195). The problem with this assessment is that it relies on the common assumption that modernist art suppresses its historical referent.12 As McWhirter suggests, however, the positioning of a historically aware James in a postmodern camp needs to be qualified in view of our growing awareness of modernism as a period in which writers took highly divergent paths in their responsiveness to modernity and history (177); James was deeply involved in this process (see also DeKoven), and his relation to “his modernist interlocutors” may be more aptly described as one of “dialogue,” as Haralson maintains (19). Moreover, readings of James inspired by the New Historicism tend to focus on history as context; relatively little has yet been said about James’s own senses of the past.13 The turn to phenomenology and impressionism in James’s analysis of history has been seen primarily as a one-way route inwards. But to analyze changing understandings of perception provides a fruitful way both of historicizing themes in James’s fiction and of contextualizing his aesthetics. Rather than positing James in flight from historical forces into particularity and subjectivity, such a model opens to a dialectical relation between modernist forms and historical context.14 The significance James attributes to fiction as a craft is directly linked to his interest in history. This essay has emphasized how James’s senses of the past are realized textually. As we have seen, James displaces chronology and makes the past repeat itself as a phantasmal force in his fiction. The status of a present resounding with different modes of repetitions from the past contributes significantly to the shape of James’s texts as the analysis of time and consciousness is materialized as narrative order, frequency and duration. In this way, formalism departs from elegiac nostalgia, collective

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memory, and history as grand narrative. This is a temporally specific theory of art; not one that is somehow beyond history.

1. Five books, in particular, focus on James and history: Bell, Henry James and the Past: Readings into Time, Bell, Washington Square: Styles of Money, Buelens, Enacting History in Henry James: Narrative, Power, and Ethics, Jolly, and Rawlings, Henry James and the Abuse of the Past. 2. Collingwood is still an essential point of departure on all this. 3. For a rather different take on this, see Rawlings Henry James and the Abuse of the Past (1–10). 4. See Bell, Washington Square for some interesting insights into this novel and history. 5. See Hughes on James and dress. 6. James’s contemporary, the German philosopher Dilthey, stressed the relevance of the genre of autobiography as a way of “approach[ing] the roots of all historical comprehension.” In autobiography, “lived experience” lays the basis for refection and understanding, thus giving life to “the bloodless shadows of the past” (222). See also Kern 45. On James and autobiography, see Follini in this collection. 7. Rawlings contests Miller’s reading in Henry James and the Abuse of the Past 20–3. 8. The French original reads: “un livre est un grand cimetière où sur la plupart des tombes on ne peut plus lire les noms effacés.” 9. The novella was written shortly before James embarked on The Sense of the Past, which was to remain unfinished at his death. 10. For one of the most powerful readings of The Turn of the Screw see Rowe, The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James. See also Kappeler. 11. See Teahan in this collection. 12. Berman, for example, has argued that modernism arose as a “movement striving to relinquish the historical stream of time” (76). Childs suggests that writers “such as Joyce turned against forms of historical understanding, seeing greater meaning in the individual than in society” (32). 13. With the increased attention that James’s fourth phase has been receiving, his sense of the past is coming in for more sustained examination too. See for instance Rawlings, who places “James’s work within a modern discourse of time and space, especially as inflected by . . . post-Kantian notions of time” (“Grammars of Time in Late James” 276), and Miller, who scrutinises the spectral, “‘quasi-Turn-of-Screw,’” quality of the Jamesian past (“The ‘QuasiTurn-of-Screw Effect’”; Miller’s quotation is from James’s notes for The Sense of the Past, 294). 14. As Graham puts it, “The aspects of Henry James’s novels that constitute his importance as a social critic have little to do with his subjects and less to do with his stories of feminists and revolutionaries. Not the James who tells the tale, but the James who exposes his ‘telling’ difficulties is most concerned with the world outside the text” (41).

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Agnew, Jean-Christophe. “The Consuming Vision of Henry James.” The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980. Eds. Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears. New York: Pantheon, 1983: 65–100. Arendt, Hannah. “The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern.” Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Viking, 1961: 41–90. Armstrong, Paul B. The Challenge of Bewilderment: Understanding and Representation in James, Conrad, and Ford. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1987. ——. The Phenomenology of Henry James. Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP, 1983. Beach, Joseph Warren. The Method of Henry James. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: Saifer, 1954. Bell, Ian F. A. Henry James and the Past: Readings into Time. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1991. ——. Washington Square: Styles of Money. Twayne’s Masterwork Studies. New York: Twayne, 1993. Berman, Art. Preface to Modernism. Urbana: Illinois UP, 1994. Blair, Sara. Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation. New York: Cambridge UP, 1996. Buelens, Gert. Ed. Enacting History in Henry James: Narrative, Power, and Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. ——. Henry James and the “Aliens”: In Possession of the American Scene. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002. ——. “In Possession of a Secret: Rhythms of Mastery and Surrender in ‘The Beast in the Jungle’.” Henry James Review 19 (1998): 17–35. Childs, Peter. Modernism. London: Routledge, 2000. Collingwood, R. G. The Idea of History. 1946. Oxford: Clarendon, 1956. Conrad, Joseph. “Henry James: An Appreciation.” Notes on Life and Letters. Ed. J. H. Stape. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004: 15–20. DeKoven, Marianne. “Gender, History and Modernism in The Turn of the Screw.” The Turn of the Screw and What Maisie Knew. Ed. Neil Cornwell and Maggie Malone. New Casebooks. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998: 142–63. Derrida, Jacques. Spectres of Marx: The State of Debt, The Work of Mourning, and The New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994. Dilthey, Wilhelm. The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences. Vol. 3 of Selected Works. Eds. Rudolph A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2002. Eagleton, Terry. Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory. London: Verso, 1998. Eliot, T. S. “Henry James.” The Shock of Recognition. Ed. Edmund Wilson. 2nd ed. London: Allen, 1956: 854–65. Graham, Wendy. “A Narrative History of Class Consciousness.” Boundary 2 (1986–87): 41–68. Griffin, Susan M. The Historical Eye: The Texture of the Visual in Late James. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1991. Haralson, Eric. Henry James and Queer Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Haviland, Beverly. Henry James’s Last Romance: Making Sense of the Past and the American Scene. New York: Cambridge UP, 1997.

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works cited

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Hocks, Richard A. Henry James and Pragmatistic Thought: A Study in the Relationship between the Philosophy of William James and the Literary Art of Henry James. Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP, 1974. Hughes, Clair. Henry James and the Art of Dress. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. James, Henry. The Ambassadors. Ed. S. P. Rosenbaum. New York: Norton, 1994. ——. “The Art of Fiction.” Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers. Ed. Leon Edel. New York: Library of America, 1984. ——. The Aspern Papers and Other Stories. Comp. S. Gorley Putt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. ——. “The Beast in the Jungle.” Tales of Henry James. Ed. Christof Wegelin. New York: Norton, 1984. ——. The Golden Bowl. 1904. London: Macmillan, 1934. ——. “The Jolly Corner.” Tales of Henry James. Ed. Christof Wegelin. New York: Norton, 1984. ——. The Princess Casamassima. Ed. Derek Brewer. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986. ——. “Roderick Hudson” [Preface to the New York Edition]. Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, the Prefaces to the New York Edition. Ed. Leon Edel. New York: Library of America, 1984: 1039–52. ——. The Sense of the Past. New York: Scribner’s, 1917. ——. “A Small Boy and Others.” Autobiography. Ed. Frederick W. Dupee. New York: Criterion, 1956. ——. “The Spoils of Poynton, A London life, The Chaperon” [Preface to the New York Edition]. Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, the Prefaces to the New York Edition. Ed. Leon Edel. New York: Library of America, 1984: 1138–55. ——. “The Turn of the Screw.” The Two Magics: The Turn of the Screw; Covering End. London: Heinemann, 1891. ——. Washington Square. London: Macmillan, 1883. Jolly, Roslyn. Henry James: History, Narrative, Fiction. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993. Kappeler, Susanne. Writing and Reading in Henry James. Foreword by Tony Tanner. London: Macmillan, 1980. Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983. Langhorne, Richard. “Historiography.” The Twentieth-Century Mind: History, Ideas, and Literature in Britain. Vol. 1. London: Oxford UP, 1972: 100–12. Longenbach, James. Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of the Past. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987. Lustig, T. J. Henry James and the Ghostly. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. McWhirter, David. “Henry James, (Post)Modernist?” The Henry James Review 25 (2004): 168–94. Meissner, Colin. Henry James and the Language of Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Miller, J. Hillis. “History, Narrative, and Responsibility: Speech Acts in ‘The Aspern Papers’.” Enacting History in Henry James: Narrative, Power, and Ethics. Ed. Gert Buelens. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997: 193–210.

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——. “How to Be ‘in Tune with the Right’ in The Golden Bowl.” Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory. Eds. Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack. Charlottesville: Virginia UP, 2001: 271–85. ——. “The ‘Quasi-Turn-of-Screw Effect’: How to Raise a Ghost with Words.” Conference: theoryanalysis: Henry James and New Formalisms. Université de Montréal. 14 May 2004. Poole, Adrian. Henry James. New York: St. Martin’s, 1991. Posnock, Ross. The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. Proust, Marcel. Le Temps retrouvé. Vol. 4 of Á la recherche du temps perdu. Paris: Gallimard, 1989. Rawlings, Peter. “Grammars of Time in Late James.” Modern Language Review 98 (2003): 273–84. ——. Henry James and the Abuse of the Past. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Rowe, John Carlos. The Other Henry James. Durham: Duke UP, 1998. ——. The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James. London: Methuen, 1985. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: California UP, 1990. Warren, Kenneth W. Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1993. Williams, Merle A. Henry James and the Philosophical Novel: Being and Seeing. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. Wolfreys, Julian. Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2002. Woolf, Virginia. “Mr Henry James’s Latest Novel.” The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 1. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. London: Hogarth, 1986: 22–4. ——. “The Old Order.” The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 2. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. London: Hogarth, 1987: 167–76.

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the sense of the past: history and historical criticism

tamara l. follini If autobiography, as has often been claimed, is dependent on the self’s awareness of temporal orders, and the operations of retrospect and expectation, then many of James’s protagonists reveal immense aptitude for the genre.1 Episodes that dramatize the intensification of an individual’s grasp of his or her life history are repeatedly presented as occurring simultaneously with a heightened awareness of the passage of time. Such moments, usually consequent on new configurations in accustomed circumstances, and sometimes likened to a fall from innocence, depict a suspicion similar to that which James described in relation to the most momentous event in his own cultural history: an apprehension of “the world being a more complicated place than it had hitherto seemed, the future more treacherous, success more difficult” (LC 1: 428). Thus, Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, after the visit of her aunt that will reshape her life, closes her eyes as, “with her sense that the note of change had been struck, [there] came gradually a host of images of the things she was leaving behind her. The years and hours of her life came back to her, and for a long time, in a stillness broken only by the ticking of the big bronze clock, she passed them in review” (1: 42). Even young Maisie (What Maisie Knew), occupying, as her tale opens, that stage of childhood in which “the present alone was vivid,” once alert to the fact “that everything had been changed on her account” in the legal arrangements of her capricious parents, discovers “a collection of images and echoes to which meanings were attachable” (11–12). And while relatively inexperienced characters undergo initiation into time by 212

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contemplating the past, those more accomplished in temporal acrobatics anticipate uncertain futures by actions that perpetuate desire. Charlotte Stant (The Golden Bowl), on the eve of the Prince’s marriage, performs a verbal “ricordo” that reanimates their former life and attempts to instill an indelible event into the flux of time. As she declares of her act of “giving herself away,” which aspires to fuse past, present and future, “What I want is that it shall always be with you—so that you’ll never be able quite to get rid of it—that I did” (1: 97). James himself repeatedly questioned his own understanding amidst chronology’s obscurities and cruelties, and kept careful watch of shortening or lengthening vistas, the access to or deprivation of creative feeling, imposed by life’s stages. Retrospectively imputing an order to this process, he announced in an 1873 letter that his capacity for travelogue would be limited by the fact that the “keen love and observation of the picturesque is ebbing away from me as I grow older,” in the same breath as he measured the limitations of personal volition against a potentially discontinuous future: “[m]ysterious and incontrollable . . . is the growth of one’s mind” (HJL 1: 385). And if it was characteristic of James to meditate on the past when still youthful, it was just as typical for him to consider the way experiences would resonate in the future. An 1869 effusion of “how beautiful a thing this month in Italy has been” not only induces impassioned remembrance—“how my brain swarms with pictures and my bosom aches with memories”—but also creates curiosity about “how this enchanted fortnight will strike me, in memory eleven years hence” (HJL 1: 142). Ten years later, in the 1879 tale “The Diary of a Man of Fifty,” those memories served to create the melancholy perspective of a bachelor returning to Florence after a long interval; there he relives the sensations of a youthful love affair with such intensity as to dissolve momentarily the devastations of temporality and mortality: “I closed my eyes and listened; I could almost hear the rustle of her dress on the gravel. Why do we make such an ado about death?” (454–5). James’s scrutiny of the interrelations of time, personal narrative and knowledge, which these examples register, provide one indication of why he engaged so frequently with autobiographical forms. This essay addresses several of the prominent aspects of this work, both in light of issues that have dominated theories of autobiography and concerns that have been most urgent in James scholarship. For any reader or critic interested in this dimension of James’s enterprise, he offers multiple examples of autobiographical intrigue: in his extravagant nightly composition of letters, each of whose thresholds marks a temporal relation, in his travelogues and his biographies, Hawthorne (1979) and William Wetmore Story and His

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Friends (1903), attentive to the freedoms and restraints of historical time, in the Prefaces (1907–09) and The American Scene (1907), renewing the self through re-encounters with text and place, and finally, in those most generically identifiable autobiographical works, A Small Boy and Others (1913), Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), and The Middle Years (1917). But the fact that many of the preoccupations of these texts—eloquent of a temperament engaged simultaneously with intensely consulting and intensely resisting the ferocity of linearity—are also present in James’s earlier writings, suggests a number of issues in regard to how they may be situated within the spectrum of his career, and the assumptions present in the way in which we do position them. To what degree do they represent, especially in their habit of return and re-interpretation, the culmination of a lifetime’s obsessions, heightened by the process of ageing; to what degree do they signal a distinct phase of creative energy, and are the fruit of that process by which, as James remarked, “the acceptance” of age had rejuvenated him (LL 2: 235)? Should the critic treat them as highly experimental texts, signaling new departures within the arena of modernism, especially in their orientations to temporality and narrative? Or, in their concerns with continuity, and imaginative challenges to mortality, should they be perceived as equally, or sometimes opposingly, engaged with renewing and revising the nineteenth-century periods of sensibility they frequently re-inhabit? What are the continuities and discontinuities, in their frequent intertextual dialogues, between the multiple intellectual, social, and artistic interests they separately explore and the diverse selfperformances they each enact? Such questions admit no easy resolution. The critical attention paid to these works, especially over the last two decades, has established their centrality in the James canon through identifying their richly intricate enactments of the autobiographical subject and the subject of autobiography. Yet some commentary has contributed to this process more through critical or imaginative failure than through an appreciation of the challenges this writing poses. James’s delight in the genre may have been due to the scope it afforded him for authorial play of a highly serious kind, the game of “‘pull devil, pull tailor’” which matched the “cunning of the inquirer” against the wits of the “pale forewarned victim”, the artist (LC 2: 743). One might thus be wary of positioning these works as ones in which James abandoned or mitigated his dedication to an all-encompassing artistic commitment. Addressing his reading of The Tempest, an essay deserving further attention, especially for its illumination of issues surrounding James’s autobiographical practice, Neil Chilton has stressed that James’s

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puzzlement concerning the play’s “relation to Shakespeare’s silence is the unspoken, and perhaps for James unspeakable, if not . . . wholly unimaginable, possibility” that the poet’s imaginative powers “simply ceased to be of importance in the life of the man” (225). The Tempest essay cautions us in regard to the connections, in James’s autobiographical writings, among his qualities of creativity, mind and behavior, and reminds us to be unremittingly aware that the line or relation between the personal and aesthetic spheres of existence would always solicit James’s intense scrutiny. To the extent that these texts claim distinct social, personal and historical contexts, and were produced by specific modes of publication with specific audiences in mind, they evade a general grouping, and contest and confound any one generic boundary. The following discussion is therefore centered on A Small Boy and Others, Notes of a Son and Brother, and The Middle Years, and on critical negotiations with these texts. This is not to deny that efforts to move freely among these works have not proved highly useful,2 but to hope that issues raised here, regarding temporality, referentiality and ethics, may also have a bearing on texts whose complex critical histories disallow extended discussion. It is also to recognize the especially slippery nature of the writing at hand. As James Olney has observed in a useful overview of the difficulties this genre poses for its critics, autobiography “like the life it mirrors, refuses to stay still long enough for the genre critic to fit it out with the necessary rules, laws, contracts, and pacts” (Autobiography 24–5).3 Any critical approach to these works ought thus to formulate the logic of its own inclusions or omissions, always alert to how the narratives we create for literary careers tend easily, as David McWhirter has recently commented, to be “ideologically overdetermined constructs.” Surveying various formulations of James’s late career from early dismissive judgments to the canonization of the “major phase” and the subsequent destabilizing, reanimating work of critics such as John Carlos Rowe and Ross Posnock, McWhirter embraces the latter’s view of James as “perpetually provisional.” He notes with useful skepticism, however, that even in our designation of James’s late career as the “fourth phase”—that period within which many of these autobiographical texts fall—we should be cautious in the suppositions behind the terminology itself and “wary of any attempt to impose a totalizing, conclusive narrative on James’s post-Golden Bowl work” (“‘A passion full of responsibilities’” 148–9). McWhirter’s argument is a notable defense of James’s preoccupation with the past as constituting acts of civic, ethical and personal responsibility, and as evidencing his abundant revisionary energy “for establishing

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multiple, often contradictory lines of connection, relation, and responsiveness” (152) to his personal and cultural history. As a protest against readings which treated such concerns as unexamined nostalgia or as James’s effort to create an unassailable narrative of his career, McWhirter participates in the critical movement, gathering momentum over the last two decades, which has broken the aura of isolated, austere mastery that previously had hung about his late works, and returned them to the company of their social, sexual, political and historic contexts, or what Rowe has succinctly termed James’s intense “sociability” (xxiv).4 Yet it is worth noting that similar efforts, although less attuned to James’s own deconstructions of mastery and enactments of authorial vulnerability, generated some of the most significant early criticism on the autobiographies following their 1956 reissue under the editorship of Frederick W. Dupee. In her judicious 1993 review of readings of these works, Carol Holly noted that an achievement of Robert Sayre’s chapter on the autobiographies in The Examined Self (1964) was its exploration of how they gave “form and meaning to modern American life” (Holly, “Autobiographies” 433), and his advocacy of the valuable social commentary they contained—material he believed would be neglected in limiting formalist readings.5 William Hoffa, in 1969, also situated them within a modern context, defining them as “celebratory and affirmative far more than reminiscential and nostalgic” (283), and arguing that James’s texts dramatized the act of telling and particularly his own “consciousness of the past as it lived in the present” (282). In this emphasis, Hoffa anticipated movements in autobiographical theory, gathering force at this period, which radically shifted the perception of autobiographical writing from one which viewed it as an unmediated transmission of the writer’s past to that which beheld it as evidence of a subject’s strenuous engagement with the present.6 In keeping with that perspective, which operated alongside the elevation of autobiography to a literary art, and an increased recognition of its imaginative or fictional elements, the first wave of criticism to focus directly on these works tended to situate them amidst early twentiethcentury experimental texts. Dupee compared them to works by Joyce, Proust and Yeats, a suggestion taken up by Hoffa, who argued that they could be read as “a kind of ‘poetic drama’ depicting an altered consciousness in a largely non-temporal, non-spatial world” (291), and who also compared James’s methods to Proust. Adeline Tintner did the same, in 1977: “A Small Boy reveals a very definite form which follows that of the novel as it was at the same time appearing in . . . Joyce and Proust” (244). Such associations privileged the function of memory, narrative

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indirection, and acutely self-conscious self-representation, which James shared with high modernists, while aligning the autobiographies with his late fiction. Yet they may also betray an anxiety that less obviously experimental company would not prove as persuasive in generating interest in James’s autobiographical obsessions. It is notable that these same critics often distanced the autobiographies from nineteenth-century precedents or influence, a sign, perhaps, of the vestiges of an ahistorical formalism that diminished that period’s aesthetic sophistication. Dupee, for example, made an intriguing aside concerning the strong resemblance between the autobiographies and Hawthorne’s “The Custom House,” but did not pursue it (xiv). Millicent Bell, also stressing their novelistic elements, in a 1982 essay, distinguished James’s autobiographical writings from romantic and post-romantic autobiography, maintaining that they did not feature the “identity crisis” characteristic of the works of Wordsworth or Mill, or even Henry James Sr., and seeing few signs of the “oedipal rebellion” which Mill’s Autobiography enshrined (Henry James 471). Even McWhirter, while addressing another of James’s major autobiographical ventures, the prefaces to the New York Edition, appears uneasy about the taint of the nineteenth-century. His introduction to Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship broadly declares that the Edition “like all of James’s later work, eschews any claim to the kind of cultural and moral authority manifested in his nineteenthcentury predecessors, who assumed, more or less comfortably, the mantle of the Victorian sage” (12). This may itself be too comfortable. Having re-evaluated James’s notions of mastery, it is certainly time to do the same for his predecessors, as well as reconsidering the dynamic inconsistencies in his relation to them. This is especially urgent in view of the fact that a significant aspect of James’s revisionary energies were engaged in exemplary reassessments of their provocations: in his lecture on Balzac while touring America in 1904–05, in his return to figures such as George Sand, Flaubert, Zola and Stevenson for the essays in Notes on Novelists (1914), in the direct and indirect allusions to writers such as George Eliot, Dickens, Whitman, and Hawthorne which pervade the autobiographical volumes. If these works do indeed include multiple “senses of the past” as well as “senses of the present,” any approach to them might reflect on the manner in which James may be participating, at different moments or sometimes simultaneously, with the teleology of nineteenth-century forms of narrative and life-writing amidst which his imagination was formed, and with ideas of memory, selfhood and autobiographical discourse evident in those early twentieth-century works which cluster around his own.

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While theories advanced by Carol Holly, for example, in Intensely Family (1995)—which makes use of contemporary issues in family psychology—could be extended through current work being done within life-writing studies in body image and identity, especially in relation to illness, they could also be placed alongside crises within a familial milieu evident in nineteenth-century biographical and autobiographical forms.7 Such works may also tell us more about James’s particular forms of reticence than many of those by twentieth-century practitioners. Similarly, while Posnock and McWhirter have shown the immense usefulness of the philosophical theories of Theodor Adorno and Paul Ricoeur as a way of formulating new perspectives on James’s notions of the self, such explanations may not sufficiently account for James’s renewed appreciation of how his predecessors had posed questions about the interplay of autonomy and mutuality in personal experience as well as the nature and origin of meaning for the individual in social history. One way of reading A Small Boy and Others, for example, as I have elsewhere suggested (“Improvising the Past”, 13–15) may be as a validation of a perspective that suffuses the whole of Middlemarch: “souls live on in perpetual echoes, and to all fine expression there goes somewhere an originating activity, if it be only that of an interpreter” (156). Following from issues regarding the appropriate placement of these works within constructions of James’s career, and the historical periods in which his imagination takes shape and is active, is the issue of chronology itself. Although the autobiographical volumes broadly follow an obvious chronological progression, their play with temporal sequences and resistance to strict linearity indicate different possibilities for interpreting the psychological arrangement of identity they enact. Many critics, Tony Tanner and Andrew Taylor, for example, even while mitigating the significance of chronology, concur in positing a highly subtle commerce between past and present temporal periods and states of mind in these texts, one reflective of James’s notions of history, the shaping desires of memory, and what Taylor terms the “freed self” (60). Yet different models of the experiential relation of time and knowledge have been called into play. Peter Rawlings, considering temporality in The American Scene, has evoked “post-Kantian notions of time as a subjective category” to explore James’s appropriation of twentieth-century America (275), while Michael Moon has recently addressed the “uncanny temporalities” in A Small Boy and Others through reference to Freud’s concept of Nachträglichkeit (5). The latter approach evokes autobiographical theorists, such as John Sturrock, who have questioned the degree to which chronological order is a natural representation for experience. Sturrock has accentuated “the

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power of association, of bringing into the light mnemonic instead of temporal contiguities” as a way of illuminating “our permanent psychic organization” (59). By contrast, Paul John Eakin has espoused a “phenomenological correlation between the temporal structure of autobiography and . . . the essential narrativity of human experience” (“Narrative” 35). Eakin proposed that James was “led to contemplate repressed passages of inner history precisely as the result of [his] attempt to render chronology as accurately as possible” (“Narrative” 36) based on a conviction that the relation between narrative and chronology is an undeniable structure of reference in autobiography. His latest work reaffirms this belief, citing recent neurological and psychological studies as further evidence to support how narrative chronology constitutes “an integral part of a primary mode of identity experience, that of the extended self, the self in time” (How Our Lives 137).8 Such investigations also anticipate how the ongoing intersections of literary criticism and cognitive science may allow further configurations of these concerns. Yet perhaps temporal progression is a condition more likely to affect a character than a novelist, or the biographical self more than the creative one, a distinction that James frequently entertained: “we shall never touch the Man directly in the Artist” (LC 1: 1220). One intriguing locus of his relation to temporality is the tantalizing opening of The Middle Years (a work, albeit incomplete, too often slighted), which enacts liberation from the very chronological confines the ending of Notes of a Son and Brother had acknowledged. If James’s re-confrontation with Minnie Temple’s death caused him to concede conclusion, in the acknowledgment that he and William “felt it together as the end of [their] youth,” the opening sentence of The Middle Years immediately rushes to qualify “that emphasis”: Everything depends in such a view on what one means by one’s youth—so shifting a consciousness is this, and so related at the same time to many different matters. We are never old, that is we never cease easily to be young, for all life at the same time: youth is an army . . . on a considerably reluctant march into the enemy’s country, the country of the general lost freshness . . . . Or under another figure it is a book in several volumes . . . with a volume here and there closing, as something in the clap of its covers may assure us, while another remains either completely agape or kept open by a fond finger thrust in between the leaves. (547)

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The passage may be read in a number of ways: as an anticipation of T. S. Eliot’s belief, advanced in regard to Yeats, that “a man who is capable of experience finds himself in a different world in every decade of his life; as he sees it with different eyes, the material of his art is continually renewed” (“Yeats” 301); or as what Charles Feidelson, contemplating James’s sense of temporality, described as “the genetic power of ‘romantic’ over-reaching . . . which will conclude with the power of the ‘real’ to subsume it once more” (111). Simultaneously, this image of youth as akin to a triple-decker novel, while fascinatingly reanimating a Victorian textual form, connects James’s activity to the very issues of referentiality which have preoccupied contemporary theorists of autobiography: Philippe Lejeune, Elizabeth Bruss, Paul John Eakin, and Jonathan Loesberg among them. Is the self an entity that can be defined by linguistic expression, or is it invariably obscured by fissures between psychological experience and linguistic formulation? Does a heightened awareness of the autobiographical act as a linguistic and textual process inevitably yield a self which must be understood in those same terms? These issues circulate in another crucial cite of autobiographical reflection and shifting analytic perspectives, the preface to The Portrait of a Lady. Questioning how he had arrived at a vivid image of Isabel Archer while yet uncertain of the circumstances in which he would place her, James famously responded: “One could answer such a question beautifully, doubtless, if one could do so subtle, if not so monstrous, a thing as to write the history of the growth of one’s imagination” (LC 2: 1076). In what may be as much a moment of rhetorical flourish as authentic hypothesis, James was perhaps marking the limits of his willingness to participate in self-revelation. Yet the speculation is also pressured by how, in the “dusky, crowded, heterogeneous back-shop of the mind” (LC 2: 1076), subjects may present themselves to a writer for reasons almost untraceable as causal sequences, or how an imprecise or unintelligible relation between inner life and outward events complicates notions of what one’s “history” may be, and unsettles attempts to determine where, it might be said, the “self” most truly resides. James’s shuddering “monstrous” may also register the form’s challenge to a writer’s expressive power, and the potentially transgressive nature of such power at its most accomplished. Transgressive, that is, in terms of the inherent fictionalization or textualization of the self in autobiography and the consequent destabilization—potentially as queasily disturbing as richly creative—of boundaries that may occur, boundaries between fact and memory, past and present realities, one’s histories and one’s fictions.

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James’s critics and autobiographical theorists have been debating the transgressive nature of the genre, especially in terms of how it complicates referentiality, for a long time. Yet while the poststructuralist critique of the concept of the self and the referential quality of language followed closely on the heels of a critical reappraisal of autobiography as a dominantly imaginative or fictional art, recent criticism of James’s work—and this is consistent with broader movements of criticism in the genre—has resisted the fullest implications of theory’s demolition of reference as illusory. Indeed, as Eakin has reflected, “a curious fact of literary history” is “that at the end of the 1970s, just as critics like Michael Sprinker and Paul de Man were announcing the death of the self” and the end of the genre, other critics, Roland Barthes among them, were moving toward more conventional views of the subject, and many practitioners began to refigure the genre: not with naïve notions of its referential transparency, but by strongly opposing any too confident deconstruction of autobiography’s value, substance, and intricacies (Touching 22).9 Surveying the field in 1992, Eakin noticed that an intriguing characteristic of autobiographers and their readers had been their desire “to defend the existence of a generic boundary between autobiography and fiction” and a loyalty to reference despite awareness of its precariousness. He ascribed this to “a kind of existential imperative, a will to believe,” at the heart of the genre: “The presumption of truth-value is experientially essential; it is what makes autobiography matter to autobiographers and their readers” (Touching 30). Some such belief, which renders a complete adherence to fictionalization the easy option, may also account for the jittery terms by which James anticipated autobiographical writing: deeming it “difficult and unprecedented and perilous” (LL 2: 207), “extremely special, experimental and as yet occult” (HJL 4: 592). In any event, this imperative certainly seems active in the critical reappraisal of these works, as well as James’s prefaces and biographies, over the last two decades, and a major contribution to that reconfiguration has been the work of Eakin himself. Reading James’s autobiographies as a genre critic, Eakin highlights the changing temporalities of James’s prose while concentrating on his “insistent and obtrusive dramatization of the processes of composition” as evidence of “some imperative drama of consciousness going forward in the present” (Fictions 57). Attentive to James’s confessions concerning the “far from ‘showy’ . . . the thin tatter dragged in thus as an affair of record” (NSB 422), sensitive to the problematic of reference in terms of the disjunctions between verifiable historical actuality and the autobiographer’s experiential reality, “the inner truth that had left no trace,” Eakin sees James’s discourse as operating simultane-

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ously in a “double frame of reference, physical and psychological” (Fictions 108), especially in its preoccupation with illness and the “obscure hurt.” The “obscure hurt” is also very much the point of departure and return for Rawlings’ Henry James and the Abuse of the Past, while Carol Holly’s study, like Eakin’s, considers relations between illness and the therapeutic value of autobiography, but widens its referential arena by proposing that James’s imaginative history necessitates an understanding of his relationships with individual family members. Hence, her argument develops psychological speculations about family dynamics. Unlike Eakin’s work, however, which tends to be cautiously complimentary about James’s courageous re-entry into past trauma and confusion, Holly’s reading of “the paternal legacy of vocational conflict and internalized shame” (Intensely 10), the politics of illness and disability in the James family, pictures an author protective of family secrets and myths and gripped by shared forms of physical and psychological weakness. The value of Eakin and Holly’s approaches rests in their intense concentration on the psychological implications of James’s autobiographical process; this is also their limitation. Eakin’s argument, while immensely subtle and tactful, by concentrating on those episodes wherein James displays a heightened self-awareness, and shaped by a conviction that James was interested in other matters and lives only as they related to his own (Fictions 88), significantly minimizes the social and historical contents of the book, or what Carolyn Steedman, positing an autobiographer’s desire to have their work treated as history, refers to as “a community of cognition” (50). While Holly, in emphasizing James’s autobiographical activity in the terms of neuroses, as a ground “for playing out the narcissistic and self-serving role he had learned within his original family” (Intensely 46) although valuable in demystifying James as author, comes perilously close to turning an act of critical rectification into distorting exaggeration. Both critics, it seems to me, limit the possible motivations for this work: perhaps because they conceive of its author’s identity in more unified, traditionally defined forms, and hear its voice in a somewhat monotone register. Subsequent arguments, particularly those advanced by Ross Posnock and Andrew Taylor, as well as those produced by Eakin himself within autobiography studies, have challenged such a conception of identity, perceiving James’s enactment of relatedness in more flexible, expansive terms. Posnock’s opposition to the notion of a “unified stability” (177) in James’s autobiographical representation is not particularly original in its underlying conception; earlier scholars, such as Thomas Cooley, were also attentive to the abandonment of unitary conceptions of the self

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in late nineteenth-century American autobiography. Yet his vigorous development of Eakin’s skepticism about any purely negative account of the relation between James and his brother William, and his questioning of personal crises or embarrassment in the works “all too literally as merely neurotic symptoms” (179), provocatively accentuates the heterodox, deliberately estranging and volatile nature of James’s self-representation, and persuasively argues for a figure whose “seminal portrayal of mimetic behaviour” (168) involves a critique of the behavioral values of American individualism. In this emphasis, his argument closely follows a theory central to autobiographical studies at this time: that the subject frequently censures or repudiates the dominant culture he or she inhabits while yet revealing or internalizing its effects.10 Posnock’s James, however, is a buoyant, utterly modern self, operating in a dialectical detachment from and involvement with his surrounding culture, a self compensated for its periods of alienation by an exhilarating creativity and receptivity to external stimuli. Yet while his reading situates the full operation of these energies within James’s fourth phase, a bias reflected in his segregation of James’s career into slightly rigid stages (188), Taylor opens this heterodox self directly to the legacy of Henry James Sr., arguing that his complexly inspiring “irreverence towards conventional modes of authority and identity” (27) fed James’s “commitment to openness and to the infinitely revisable self” (59). Taylor’s understanding of the rich inconsistencies in Emerson’s position, and their possible effect on James, also restores a figure too superficially treated in Posnock’s more modernist orientations. Yet taken together, the work of both critics, by elucidating the historical referents conditioning James’s reactions, establishes the manner in which, even for a self defined against a dominant culture, that culture still shadows the autobiographical enterprise and significantly qualifies the degree to which it may be supposed an imaginative adventure. These positions may also be associated, in autobiography studies, with the relinquishment of a notion of identity deriving from the Christianhumanist tradition, and the embrace of a more relational model, or what Jessica Benjamin has called (after William James) “intersubjectivity,” which maintains that an “individual grows in and through the relationship to other subjects” (19–20). Susanna Egan, addressing encounters in which a biographical enterprise generates autobiography, cites Benjamin’s term while noting the emergence of this concept in response to the challenge of deconstructive and feminist reconsiderations of autobiographical identity, observing that the individual has been “forced into reappearance by interacting with another” (9). She also calls attention to critics such as Nancy Miller, who has argued that the other “provides

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the map of the self” (14), and Eakin, “the first person of autobiography is truly plural in its origins and subsequent formations” (Eakin, How Our Lives 43), both of whom have been concerned to assert that the concept is as applicable to masculine as it is to feminine identity.11 The suggestions of this theoretical shift, particularly for James’s epistolary and biographical performances as well as the autobiographies, are especially provocative. They open up for closer analysis not only James’s representation of major figures, but the significances he attaches to the immense cast of A Small Boy and Others, a company of Dickensian, or George Eliotlike proportions. Such a reorientation would position these individuals neither as peripheral to his “story”—which becomes thus expanded into new social and cultural territories—nor as having an interest solely in regard to his own sensibility, but as persons in a rotating independence from and intimacy with James’s own developing self, and the historical eras to which they and James himself bear witness. Such explorations would benefit, however, from conceiving of these works less in terms of internal patterns or formalist designs, qualities perhaps over-imposed on them by attempts to decipher a sometimes elusive autobiographer, and more in regard to their mimetic convolutions, digressions and spontaneous excursions. If a “community of cognition” (Steedman 50) in terms of a shared historical consciousness, was vital to James when writing in this mode, then he may have abandoned formalist emphases, to a degree still not wholly accepted, for the valorization of an oppositional mode of perception and presentation: “[i]n proportion . . . as we see life without rearrangement do we feel that we are touching the truth” (LC 1: 58). And such a tack in turn would require that we risk referentiality more boldly. As Ruth Bernard Yeazell remarks, when reviewing William Goetz’s 1986 book on James’s autobiographical writings, “there is something frustrating” in the anxious avoidance “of seeming to believe too naively in the possibility of representation” (302). One critic who has negotiated these borderlines is Michael Moon, whose work responds with its own boldness to what he terms “the daring and risky weirdness, dramatic uncanniness, erotic offcentredeness, and unapologetic perversity” in James’s writing (4). Expanding notions of the imitative quality of James’s work as well as its performative capacity, Moon’s argument is valuable for its theoretical speculations regarding linguistic and visual representation as well as its departure from the familiar episodes so often discussed in critical appraisals of these volumes. He takes attention elsewhere: to James’s artistic initiation amidst the male-homoerotic paintings associated with the French Revolution and First Empire, which he details through reflecting on James’s childhood

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visits to the Louvre. By so doing, Moon supplies us with another possible configuration of James’s artistic personality while also opening perspectives into the cultural codes of the societies of his childhood, so that the autobiographies become texts offering, if not strict documentation of a period, then its reflection in an absorbent self. They also become the locus for what Sheila Teahan has called “intertextual conversation” (249). In an appreciation of William Wetmore Story as another rich site for dramas “at once familial, intertextual, and historical,” Teahan reveals how James’s meditations on matters of representation are synecdochically figured through discussions of Story’s sculpture and simultaneously involve him in an ambivalent interaction with Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun. My own most recent work has also considered the imitative self and its dialogues with other artists in terms of James’s autobiographical engagement with Dickens (“James, Dickens, and the Indirections of Influence”). Contesting the Bloomian model by which James’s reaction to Dickens has usually been treated, my reading regards the autobiographies’ triptych of scenes involving Dickens as constituting a notion of influence dependent for its articulation on the autobiographical form; it also proposes that the larger implications of these densely suggestive scenes only become visible by tracing elaborate intertextual connections, or what James’s essay on “The Tempest” defined as a reliance on “indirectness, which may contain possibilities” (LC 1: 1220). “The Tempest” essay invites a tactic of critical indirectness and validates biographical fervor, but not without reckoning forms of trespass they may involve. Predicting the cunning necessary for “Criticism of the future,” James stakes his hopes on how, before the “figured tapestry, the long arras that hides [Shakespeare],” success may depend on “the finer weapon, the sharper point, the stronger arm, the more extended lunge” (LC 1: 1220). His allusion to the duplicitous atmospheres of “Hamlet,” in which the roles of betrayer and betrayed are forever in flux, evokes the emotionally charged and potentially treacherous nature of our critical curiosities and disallows any complacency about them. It recognizes that efforts to uncover the biographical subject often rest on personal motivations and that searches for the individual behind an artistic representation risk turning objective enquiry and natural inquisitiveness into injurious instruments which may do as much to maim one’s quarry as to illuminate it. James was intensely alert to the ethical issues surrounding biography and autobiography in his period, and his participation in these genres repeatedly debates the relation between public and private realms, the proprieties of revelation and concealment, the boundaries between

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one’s own truth and that of other persons, which such forms of writing involve. Yet commentary on these works, whilst evaluating his autobiographical conduct, has sometimes slighted his complex negotiations of this territory. Autobiography being by definition an explanation of the self, or the relations between one individual and others, is also by consequence a work of self-justification; it makes judgments and seeks, to some extent, corroboration on the part of the reader. It asks for particular forms of sympathy or communality, often to ease the writer’s suffering or isolation, and to describe it as “the creation not accounting of a life” (Meissner 482) diminishes the complex ethical challenge it poses to readers and writers alike. Yet if the form is usually shaped by acute personal urgencies, it is rarely fully confessional or able wholly to transcend the interplay between restraint and disclosure that permeates all human interaction. Correspondingly, the appropriation of it is seldom completely disassociated from a curiosity whose desire is to grasp the concealments of another. No wonder that the reading of such work is as highly charged as its writing. Speculating on the emotional and phenomenological aspects of our autobiographical engagements, James Olney declared the self discovered therein to be “almost as much the reader’s as the author’s” creation. Aware that such an inventive process is ethically seldom neutral, however, he went on shrewdly to ask, “[w]hich of us does not know,” while “offering a presumably literary judgment” on a given work, that we are also offering judgment on a subject’s moral character (Autobiography 24). Commentary on James’s autobiographical works has frequently participated in such judgments, yet often with the critic’s expectations of the genre unexamined or undefined. A long-time grievance, voiced often in complacently disapproving tones, declares James to be assuming self-affirming sovereignty over his materials and an egotistical command of his own story and those of the family members or “others” his text incorporates. This is particularly noticeable on the part of several of James’s biographers, who have depended heavily on these works for their own constructions of James’s life history while speaking about them in dubious terms. Leon Edel, for example, in the 1985 revised reissue of his biography, steadfastly ignored the anonymity of self-reference in A Small Boy and Others, as well as the modesty of Notes of a Son and Brother, and confidently asserted how such titles “reflect Henry’s need to put himself into the forefront” (17). Although he conceded these volumes to be “works of rare autobiography in [James’s] most original vein,” he calmly pronounced the compositional process of Notes of a Son and Brother to be one in which, “[i]n reality . . . James, in accordance with

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the imperious impulses of his ego, was taking possession of the family scene” (673). Fred Kaplan likewise sees James as appropriating quasidivine authority in service to “mythic” representation, and unhesitatingly reasons that because the work was founded on a need to triumph over illness, “[i]nevitably, all other actors in the drama . . . were secondary” and James became “both bearer and firstborn, father and brother, the giver and maker of life to them all” (542). Such statements are highly questionable, not least in their neglect of the possible correspondences between the activity of both of these biographers and that of their subject. It is worth remembering that many early readings of these works, especially Notes of a Son and Brother, did not perceive them as commandingly egotistical but as dominantly, and piously biographical. A 1915 article in The Yale Review, for instance, expressed gratitude for at last having some account of the lives of Henry James Sr and William James, and praised the book for supplying readers, especially in regard to William, with “our great reward” (Crothers 415) in his portrait. After these works were unavailable for a number of years, the diminution of James as biographer, and, in consequence, a great deal of their social, historic and familial content, was further enforced by the suppression of their titles at their 1956 reissue. When Dupee argued that James had “a deeper debt to discharge, a more complex relationship to describe” than that of familial relations, one having to do with “a very different commonwealth of the mind” (ix), he seemed keen to dispel any notion that these were inconsequential family memoirs. Yet his totalizing title, ironically anything but the “least misleading” (x), violated the rich dynamics between autobiographical and biographical roles that James’s originals had evoked while imposing on their author something of that imperious mastery to which later critics objected. As Posnock has noted, while arguing for James’s conception of a boundary between persons “less as a barrier and more as a locus of response and exchange” (170), because James’s history is so fused with others any clear “distinction between autobiography and biography is made problematic from the start” (171). The labyrinthine motivations of these works, as well as current theoretical speculations regarding autobiography’s relational aspects, offer strong inducements for the restoration and recognition of their original titles. If we accept a definition of the self as relational, however, or at least as existing in tension with earlier conceptions of a more autonomous individuality, it follows that our notions of the ethical conduct of any form of life-writing must also be re-evaluated, in consequence of how revelation about our own lives will inevitably involve disclosures about those of our intimates. As Eakin has observed: “[e]thical determinations

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become more complex . . . if we conceptualize identity as relational . . . for such a model makes it more difficult to demarcate the boundaries of the self upon which a privacy-based ethics of the person can be founded” (How Our Lives 160). Although Eakin centers his discussion among contemporary works his remarks identify issues to which earlier auto/biographers were highly sensible.12 Certainly Christopher Ricks, defending Victorian biography, would have it so. Decrying the notion “that all we do is impose ourselves” in writing auto/biographically to be a heretical half-truth, Ricks cites the relational delicacies involved in Hallam Tennyson’s memoir of his father to declare that it “proves to be the Victorian writers . . . not the modern ones, who have the surer sense of the ultimate unknowability even of the best-attended-to biographical subject” (191). Ricks’s commentary carefully delineates the pieties that animate these biographies, and a range of discriminations relating to privacy, biographical reticence, the self and others, to which many investigations of James’s work fail to respond—a failure which may reflect less James’s distance from these communities of feeling than a poverty in our own range of emotional response. A significant early exception, however, was the work of Jane Tompkins, whose 1973 article, “The Redemption of Time in Notes of a Son and Brother,” saw its narrator as taking on a Flaubertian intangibility, “ubiquitous but elusive,” assigning the “important roles . . . to others” and “defined primarily in terms of an extraordinary faculty of appreciation that puts him in sympathetic touch with the ‘otherness’ of those around him” (681–2). Perceiving the work in strongly religious terms, Tompkins interpreted James’s relation to his subjects as a conscious strategy to deflect “harsh enquiry” and critique in accordance with mystical desires, and called to mind a quality that T. S. Eliot, in 1924, had described as James’s particular type of romanticism: “the imperative insistence of an ideal which tormented him . . . . the vision of an ideal society” (“A Prediction” 29). Among critics who have aligned themselves with Tompkins’s imaginative generosity, Tanner has emphasized the respect and relish James accords the mystery of otherness (Scenes 107) and “the passive mode in which the retrospective James inclines to depict himself” (Henry James and the Art of Nonfiction 83). Tanner sees as crucial James’s distinction between envy and imaginative curiosity, describing the former as that which “generates the toxic lust to possess, make-over, appropriate,” while the latter incorporates the impulses to “[w]onder at, yearningly admire, gratefully appreciate.” He concludes “this is almost the whole of James’s ethics,” and has no difficulty with James’s treatment of family figures, reading his depiction of Minnie Temple as predominately an expression

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of gratitude (Nonfiction 77). Andrew Taylor, whose work is indebted to Tanner and Eakin, validates James’s distortion of fact by conceiving of how it “might allow for a more accurate depiction of the experiential aspect of a subject’s life” (44). He understands James’s justification of his revisions to family correspondence (in his 13–15 November 1913 letter to Henry James III), as a “curious transference of authorial control” to William, and evidence of “a mode of representation in which aspects that retain a straightforward significance outside the world of the text are simultaneously held within the text in an alternative, parallel pattern of meaning” (45). Yet a number of critics will have nothing to do with such appreciations. Holly, questioning Tompkins’s notion of James’s “posture of selfeffacement,” concludes accusatorily that it is “just that . . . a pretense, a pose” (Intensely 160), and collapses all James’s motivations to onedimensional self-serving egotism: “behind his compliant façade there exists another, more demanding self who meets his own needs and protects others for the sake of protecting himself” (161). Alfred Habegger and Michael Millgate have also been vociferously antagonistic. Habegger, in his 1986 discussion of James’s use of the Temple correspondence, denounced his practice in mildly hysterical tones as that of a “nervous and resourceful wizard” and asserted that James’s excessiveness required an end to the “strange immunity” he has enjoyed “from any searching inquiry into his veracity” (167). Millgate envisioned the range of James’s autobiographical activities as a massive effort to control his posthumous reputation and pronounced his handling of the family letters, in a fashion “even more cavalierly than those early texts of his own,” as proof that James was “in certain crucial respects a monster of egotistical voracity” (93), his revisions “fully reflective of the characteristic imperiousness of his irresistibly expansive imagination” (96). The problem with such judgments is that the basis on which they are made are only hazily identified and scarcely questioned. Should a public figure surrender all posthumous management of his or her reputation? Do such opinions operate with a belief that full disclosure is desirable as well as possible? Sissela Bok, in her work on the ethics of secrecy, has not only investigated how secrecy is inherent in all human interaction, but also why it is essential, using several terms crucial to James’s own terminology, notably “tact” and “discretion.” She upholds the necessity of “an acquired capacity to navigate in and between the worlds of personal and shared experience, coping with the moral questions of what is fair or unfair, truthful or deceptive, helpful or harmful” (41). As the ethics of secrecy so defined might be said to constitute a substantial dimension

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of the psychological and moral interests of James’s fiction it must at least be granted that debates about his autobiographical behavior, if pursued in isolation from his fictional dramas, may too easily judge James as careless of or oblivious to the implications of actions he elsewhere evaluated intensely. Such issues also highlight the degree to which, while engaged with autobiographical writing, our own procedures as critics cannot escape scrutiny. When Millgate, who claims full archival knowledge of James’s 15–18 November 1913 letter, describes it as his “less than repentant confession” (96), he makes no mention of those sections wherein James admitted that his revisionary activity had been in part “a morbid anxiety,” “a desperation of nervousness in the whole connection,” and acknowledged his nephew’s right to be offended.13 Even critics who have explored James’s revisions with great delicacy shy away from these passages, as well as those in which James retrospectively condemned his actions, somberly admitting himself “perfectly willing” to have the effect of his revisions “pronounced a mistake . . . practically an aberration,” and that his “emotion and imagination . . . misled and betrayed” him (HJL 4: 803–4). McWhirter, for example, whose finely nuanced case for the deeply ethical nature of James’s fourth phase writings is sensitive to the “deepest resonances of that metaphorics of touching and retouching” (“‘A provision full of responsibilities’” 160) by which the issue of revision is inflected, gives special attention to the emotions of solicitude, care, and passion that reverberate in James’s explanations of his activity. My own arguments have also defended the revisions as a type of spiritual conversation, an ongoing exchange with family members in terms of a Tennysonian notion of letters as “‘silent-speaking words’” or voices that reanimate crucial episodes of his fiction.14 Yet such explanations might be revisited within larger frames of ethical reference. As McWhirter notices, James “frequently constructs his moral dramas around the choice a character makes in response to the words given in a letter or document” (155), and it is worth remembering, in regard to the tortuous moral intricacies of The Wings of the Dove, that what Densher misses is not a general knowledge of what Milly said—“the intention announced in it he should but too probably know”—but “the turn she would have given her act” (2: 396), the precise words in which she would have represented her actions (Wood 27). These debates have profoundly to do with our own relation to exactitude as well as our belief in whether, as James maintained, “to ‘put’ things is very exactly and responsibly and interminably to do them” (LC 2: 1340). In this way, his revision of family letters may be associated

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with arguments concerning the implications of his intricate mature style throughout his later works. As regards the autobiographical writings, much discussion has centered on the degree to which James’s depictions of his participation in public and private events are characterized by evasion and self-deception, or whether attenuated confessional convolutions manifest the difficulty of self-confrontation and reentry into past trauma. Millicent Bell, extending an early essay in which she had observed his preference for “a language of circumlocution and implication,” compares his work to Conrad’s A Personal Record, and wonders if the “partial, evasive self-disclosure” of both writers reveals “a need to deny responsibility for the way life had turned out,” questioning whether “[t]he unavowable is one explanation for elliptic form” (“James and Conrad” 85–6). James Cox, likewise attending to what he perceives as the aestheticizing “process of qualification” of James’s stylistic behavior, contends that James “places consciousness prior to action to such an extent that . . . [it] becomes the action” (7), and perceives him as overly engaged in a suspect strategy of retreat and avoidance.15 Yet certainty and directness can equally be forms of deception. In his measured reading of James’s relation to the Civil War, another focus for debate, Eakin is persuasive about the way James’s “blurring, vagueness, and circumlocution” evidence not his “manipulations of fact but rather . . . a genuine testimony to the involuntary confusion of his earlier self” (Fictions 104). Even this scrupulous reader, however, concludes his discussion by affirming that despite James’s misgivings about “‘spiritual snatching,’ it has to be said that the imperial imagination of the autobiographer, operating on a truly Napoleonic scale, knew no such constraint.” And Eakin continues: “the autobiographer made himself by imaginative decree a member of the elect company of the experienced, those who have ‘the strange property or privilege’ of ‘looking through us or straight over us at something they partake of together but that we mayn’t pretend to know’” (125). Yet why is Eakin so confident in insisting “it has to be said” that James’s imagination is operating on an imperialistic scale in this passage? He is quoting from a passage in Notes of a Son and Brother that describes Civil War combatants, and which he had cited earlier in full. These phrases are preceded by James’s assertion that the soldiers’ attitude is one of “quite blandly ignoring us” and are followed by a further emphasis of the men’s distinction: “We walk thus, I think, rather ruefully before them—those of us at least who didn’t at the time share more happily their risk” (384). Whatever intimacy James may have sometimes wished to create between the national and his own personal history, he seems intent in this passage on keeping before his reader not so much the

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reach of his imagination as its inescapably finite limitation. This passage may enact, therefore, what J. Hillis Miller defined, discussing James’s notion of historical knowledge, as his witness of a form of cognition of “that blind bodily material kind that cannot be narrated,” and which can only be appropriated through direct participation and the immediacy of physical experience (203). In an essay haunted by the reticence of artistic works, by the way they may keep certain forms of knowledge to themselves, Michael Wood proposes that The Wings of the Dove—and the question bears directly on James’s autobiographical writing—“rattles not our morals but our sense of their reasonableness, and that is why we are in such a fix when we try to talk about the book” (34). As a result, Wood suggests, when we attempt to translate our perceptions about such a work into words, or to define the complex experience it describes by established moral categories, we must do so “remembering the subtlety we have just betrayed”—a position which is “not moral relativism but a form of patience, a way of looking the world’s complexity in the face” (36). The convoluted stylistic modes of A Small Boy and Others, Notes of a Son and Brother, and The Middle Years, and their intricate elaborations of experience may at times place them outside the communities of cognition and understanding they appear to seek, from one perspective at least. Yet they may also testify to an enactment of patience similar to that which Wood elucidates, a patience that resists the impositions of form while repeatedly risking self-exposure to the past, to complex forms of relatedness and to the contradictory impulses of auto/ biographical identities. If such risks define James’s vulnerability in these works, and sometimes land him in false or compromised positions, they also organize questions for his readers regarding our own susceptibilities and resistances, and the capaciousness or narrowness of our own critical and ethical understandings. Critics might take heart, however, from James’s conjecture in The Middle Years that “any act of acquisition” may be “fallacious if unaccompanied by that tag of the price paid in personal discomfort” and that such unease is “the downright consecration of knowledge” (560). We might also grant ourselves the liberated responsibility James himself claimed for critical practice when, in “The Lesson of Balzac,” he performed his belief in the appropriateness of continual revisitations of writers who offer us an “intensity of educative practice” (LC 2: 117). Allowing ourselves the provisionality that James claimed, even while we accept the limited satisfactions such an activity can achieve, we may be better able to pursue the truth of each of our readings of these works and perceive the fallibilities of them all.

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1. Georges Gusdorf, whose “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography” (1956) is a seminal essay regarding the genre, declares: “Autobiography becomes possible only under certain metaphysical preconditions . . . humanity must have emerged from the mythic framework of traditional teachings and must have entered into the perilous domain of history. The man who takes the trouble to tell of himself knows that the present differs from the past and that it will not be repeated in the future” (30). Other useful starting points for discussions of chronology and autobiographical narrative are: Lejeune, “The Order of Narrative in Sartre’s Les Mots”; Eakin, “Autobiography and the Structures of Experience”; a number of critics have also drawn on the work of Ricoeur. 2. See, for example, McWhirter’s article, discussed below, or Teahan’s intertextual approach to William Wetmore Story and His Friends in “My Sculptor/My Self: A Story of Reading.” 3. Egan gives a succinct account of why the term “autobiography” has been problematic for theorists; particularly suggestive is the notion of autobiography as an “out-law” genre responsive to the writer’s need to legitimize unrecognized forms of selfhood (13–14). 4. Two particularly hostile readings of James’s late works and autobiographical procedures, singled out by McWhirter, are those by Joel Porte and Michael Millgate. Readers wishing to understand more of the critical movement which rescued James’s reputation in the 1940s, but which also encouraged a formalist method tending to remove his narrative techniques from social, political or historical concerns should start with Matthiessen. For other criticism of the decade that contributed to the aura of “mastery” see, for example: Leavis, Bewley, and Crews. 5. Holly discusses Sayre’s contribution to critical debate on James’s autobiographies in “The Autobiographies: A History of Readings”; her article provides an immensely useful review of criticism of these works from their early reviews through to the 1980s. 6. Two significant precedents for Hoffa’s work were Pascal and Sayre. Pascal’s book, which devotes a chapter to James, was among the most significant works of this period to orientate autobiography as a creative act, one better understood as a revelation of the writer’s present than as an uncomplicated telling of his or her past. Sayre strengthened this position; he argued that James’s process of recollection was intimate with his desire to regain his imaginative strength and creativity, thus privileging James’s personal concerns at the time of his writing. For a good summary of the turn in autobiography studies “from bios to autos—from the life to the self,” and the movement away from naïve assumptions about autobiographical objectivity to emphasis on the philosophical, psychological and literary aspects of the creative narrator, see James Olney’s “Autobiography and the Cultural Moment: A Thematical, Historical and Bibliographical Introduction,” in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney. This volume collects several of the major autobiographical critics of this period whose work records the sophisticated directions study of the genre assumed in the 1970s.

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notes

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7. Much of the current interest in body image and identity in autobiography studies, and the opposition to the notion that the self is constituted primarily through language, has drawn on work by writers in a variety of disciplines, notably Julia Kristeva, Oliver Sacks, Paul Ricoeur, and Elaine Scarry. This area of interest also constitutes a significant dimension in the field of women’s autobiography to which important contributions have been made by critics such as Shirley Neuman, Sidonie Smith, and Elizabeth Grosz; see also, Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories (1–42). 8. Eakin, who cites Sturrock in “Narrative and Chronology” (33), expands his argument in Touching the World, although his earlier essay provides a usefully succinct statement of his ideas. My debt to Eakin’s work, which has aided my own navigations in the sprawling field of autobiography studies, is apparent throughout. 9. For de Man and Sprinker’s challenges to the status of autobiography see: “Autobiography as De-facement,” and “Fictions of the Self: The End of Autobiography.” Eakin identifies, as the text around which arguments concerning referentiality have clustered, Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975) which he discusses at length, along with contemporary debates about changing notions of subjectivity, in Touching the World, 3–53. See also: Jay; Brée; Lejeune, “The Autobiographical Pact.” Loesberg also offers a helpful account of the deconstruction of reference in autobiography. Such work might usefully be contrasted to the relatively untroubled stance adopted in a significant work of early autobiography studies, Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography, discussed above. 10. Posnock’s argument draws substantially on the work of Theodor Adorno. In the field of autobiography this idea has been integral to movements away from an established canon of American autobiography to the inclusion and study of marginalized social groups and individuals, especially in the life-writing of Native and black Americans and women. For a representative selection of essays investigating the relation between self and culture in these autobiographical categories see American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Paul John Eakin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). Eakin’s chapter, “Self and Culture in Autobiography: Models of Identity and the Limits of Language” in Touching the World, 71–137, is also useful for an overview of critical contributions to this subject. 11. In autobiography studies this theoretical shift is also commonly referred to as a departure from the so called “Gusdorf” model, which emphasized an autonomous, highly individualistic and unique notion of the self; for this seminal argument, see Gusdorf. 12. Eakin’s discussion of the legal history of privacy, dating from the late nineteenth century, and the concept of individuality on which forensic judgments have been based, is also illuminating for the differences between James and his nephew regarding the revision of family letters: see How Our Lives, 162–8. Also valuable for discussion of ethical issues in autobiography are: Couser; Eakin, ed., The Ethics of Life Writing. 13. bMS Am 1094.1406, Houghton Library, Harvard. 14. “Henry James and the Spaces of ‘Silent-Speaking’ Words.” 15. Cox also takes issue with James’s treatment of Whitman in NSB, finding “an alarming treachery in James’s vision of himself as the forerunner of

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works by henr y james “The Diary of a Man of Fifty.” Henry James: Complete Stories. Vol. 2. New York: Library of America: 1999: 453–84. The Golden Bowl. 1904. 2 vols. New York: Scribner’s, 1909. Henry James: Autobiography. Ed. Frederick W. Dupee. New York: Criterion, 1956. HJL—Henry James: Letters. Ed. Leon Edel. 4 vols. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1974–84. LL—The Letters of Henry James. Ed. Percy Lubbock. 2 vols. New York: Scribner’s, 1920. LC—Literary Criticism. Ed. Leon Edel. 2 vols. New York: Library of America, 1984. The Middle Years. 1917. Dupee 547–99. NSB—Notes of a Son and Brother. 1914. Dupee 239–544. The Portrait of a Lady. 1881. 2 vols. New York: Scribner’s, 1908. A Small Boy and Others. 1913. Dupee 3–236. What Maisie Knew. 1897. New York: Scribner’s, 1908. The Wings of the Dove. 1902. New York: Scribner’s, 1908.

other works cited Barthes, Roland. Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes. Paris: Seuil, 1975. Bell, Millicent. “Henry James and the Fiction of Autobiography.” The Southern Review 18 (1982): 463–79. ——. “James and Conrad: The Fictions of Autobiography.” Conrad, James and Other Relations. Eds. Keith Carabine, Owen Knowles, with Paul B. Armstrong. Conrad: Eastern and Western Perspectives 6. Boulder: Social Science Monographs; Lublin: Maria Curie-Skłodowska U.; New York: distributed by Columbia UP, 1998: 81–96. Benjamin, Jessica. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. New York: Pantheon, 1988. Bewley, Marius. The Complex Fate: Hawthorne, Henry James, and Some Other American Writers. London: Chatto and Windus, 1952. Bok, Sissela. Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation. New York: Pantheon, 1982. Brée, Germaine. Narcissus Absconditus: The Problematic Art of Autobiography in Contemporary France. Oxford: Clarendon, 1978. Bruss, Elizabeth W. Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Situation of a Literary Genre. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976. Chilton, Neil. “Conceptions of a Beautiful Crisis: Henry James’s Reading of The Tempest.” Henry James Review 26 (2005): 218–28.

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the poet he calls ‘dear old Walt’’’ and arguing that James’s self-interest did not allow him to recognize Whitman’s achievement (21–2). In another example of contrasting positions, Posnock reads this episode as James’s vivid dramatization of “his unexpressed kinship” with Whitman even while he distinguishes their “differing kinds of intimacy” with the Civil War soldiers (190). See also Rawlings on Whitman, James, and the Civil War.

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Cooley, Thomas. Educated Lives: The Rise of Modern Autobiography in America. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1976. Couser, G. Thomas. Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004. Cox, James M. “The Memoirs of Henry James: Self-Interest as Autobiography.” Southern Review 22 (1986): 231–51. Rpt. in Olney, Studies 3–23. Crews, Frederick. The Tragedy of Manners: Moral Drama in the Later Novels of Henry James. New Haven: Yale UP, 1957. Crothers, Samuel McChord. Rev. of Notes of a Son and Brother, by Henry James. Yale Review 4 (1915): 414–15. de Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-facement.” MLN 94 (1979): 919–30. Dupee, Frederick W. Introduction. Henry James: Autobiography. Ed. Frederick W. Dupee. New York: Criterion, 1956: vii–xiv. Eakin, Paul John. Ed. American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect. Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1991. ——. “Autobiography and the Structures of Experience.” Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992: 181–229. ——. Ed. The Ethics of Life Writing. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004. ——. Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985. ——. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999. ——. “Narrative and Chronology as Structures of Reference and the New Model Autobiographer.” Olney Studies 32–41. ——. “Self and Culture in Autobiography: Models of Identity and the Limits of Language.” Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992: 71–137. ——. Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. Edel, Leon. Henry James: A Life. New York: Harper, 1985. Egan, Susanna. Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography. Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP, 1999. Eliot, George. Middlemarch. 1872. London: Chatto, 1978. Eliot, T. S. “A Prediction in Regard to Three English Authors: Henry James, J.G. Frazer, F.H. Bradley.” Vanity Fair 21 (1924): 29, 98. ——. “Yeats” (1940), On Poetry and Poets. London: Faber, 1957: 295–308. Feidelson, Charles. “Henry James, History, and ‘Story’.” Omnium Gatherum: Essays for Richard Ellmann. Eds. Susan Dick, Declan Kiberdi, Dougald McMillan, Joseph Ronsley. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1989: 104–21. Follini, Tamara. “James, Dickens, and the Indirections of Influence.” Henry James Review 25 (2004): 228–38. ——. “Improvising the Past in A Small Boy and Others.” Time and Narrative. Millennium ed. Yearbook of English Studies. 30 (2000): 106–23. ——. “Henry James and the Spaces of ‘Silent-Speaking Words.’” Henry James Society, Inc. ALA 2003 Papers. . Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. Gusdorf, Georges. “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography.” Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1956: 28–48.

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Habegger, Alfred. “Henry James’s Rewriting of Minnie Temple’s Letters.” American Literature 58 (1986): 159–80. Hoffa, William. “The Final Preface: Henry James’s Autobiography.” Sewanee Review 87 (1969): 277–93. Holly, Carol. “The Autobiographies: A History of Readings.” A Companion to Henry James Studies. Ed. Daniel Mark Fogel. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993: 427–46. ——. Intensely Family: The Inheritance of Family Shame and the Autobiographies of Henry James. Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1995. Jay, Paul. Being in the Text: Self-Representation from Wordsworth to Roland Barthes. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984. Kaplan, Fred. Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, a Biography. New York: Morrow, 1992. Leavis, F. R. The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad. London: Chatto and Windus, 1948. Lejeune, Phillipe. “The Autobiographical Pact” (1973). On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1989: 3–30. ——. “The Order of Narrative in Sartre’s Le Mots.” On Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1989: 70–107. Loesberg, Jonathan. “Autobiography as Genre, Act of Consciousness, Text.” Prose Studies 4 (1981): 169–85. McWhirter, David. Ed. Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995. ——. “‘A provision full of responsibilities’: Senses of the Past in Henry James’s Fourth Phase.” Enacting History in Henry James: Narrative, Power, and Ethics. Ed. Gert Buelens. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997: 148–65. Matthiessen, F. O. Henry James: The Major Phase. New York: Oxford UP, 1944. Meissner, Collin. “Recovery and Revelation: The Experience of Self-Exposure in James’s Autobiography.” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 29 (1996): 473–93. Miller, J. Hillis. “History, Narrative, and Responsibility: Speech Acts in ‘The Aspern Papers.’” Enacting History in Henry James: Narrative, Power, and Ethics. Ed. Gert Buelens. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997: 193–210. Miller, Nancy. “Facts, Pacts, Acts.” Profession (1992): 10–14. Millgate, Michael. Testamentary Acts: Browning, Tennyson, James, Hardy. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992. Moon, Michael. A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiation from Henry James to Andy Warhol. Durham: Duke UP, 1998. Olney, James. “Autobiography and the Cultural Moment: A Thematic, Historical, and Bibliographical Introduction.” Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980: 3–27. ——. Ed. Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980. ——. Ed. Studies in Autobiography. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. Pascal, Roy. Design and Truth in Autobiography. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1960. Porte, Joel. “Santayana’s Masquerade.” Raritan 7 (1987): 129–42.

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Posnock, Ross. The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. Rawlings, Peter. Henry James and the Abuse of the Past. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Ricks, Christopher. Essays in Appreciation. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative. 3 vols. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1984–88. Rowe, John Carlos. Foreword. Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship. Ed. David McWhirter. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995: xxiii–xxvi. Sayre, Robert. The Examined Self: Benjamin Franklin, Henry Adams, Henry James. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1964. Smith, Sidonie. Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993. Sprinker, Michael. “Fictions of the Self: The End of Autobiography.” Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980: 321–42. Steedman, Carolyn. Past Tenses: Essays on Writing, Autobiography and History. London: Rivers Oram, 1992. Sturrock, John. “The New Model Autobiographer.” New Literary History 9 (1977): 51–63. Tanner, Tony. Henry James and the Art of Nonfiction. Athens: Georgia UP, 1995. ——. Scenes of Nature, Signs of Men. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. Taylor, Andrew. Henry James and the Father Question. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Teahan, Sheila. “My Sculptor/My Self: A Story of Reading.” Henry James Review 23 (2002): 246–54. Tintner, Adeline R. “Autobiography as Fiction: ‘The Usurping Consciousness’ as Hero of James’s Memoirs.” Twentieth-Century Literature 23 (May 1977): 239–60. Tompkins, Jane. “The Redemption of Time in Notes of a Son and Brother.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 14 (Winter 1973): 681–90. Wood, Michael. Literature and the Taste of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. Rev. of Henry James and the Darkest Abyss of Romance, by William R. Goetz. New England Quarterly 60 (June 1987): 299–302.

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pierre a. walker and greg w. zacharias In the late 1980s and early 1990s scholars began to enjoy more access than ever before to Henry James’s letters.1 As a result, two significant principles about Henry James’s letters became clear: 1) that about 75 percent of James’s nearly 10,500 extant letters had not been published; and 2) that the editors of the published letters, as a result of their editing methods, routinely omitted two classes of information from the original letters. In fact, the first principle was a consequence of the second. The first class of omitted information consists of whole letters and thus the information about James’s life contained within them.2 The second class includes meaningful details of James’s style and language that were present as James drafted his own letters but were omitted from the edited letter texts as a result of the editorial method itself. Among these details are the material or graphic features of the letter artifacts that reveal some of James’s habits as a writer and thinker as he wrote his letters. Thus we have designed The Complete Letters of Henry James to overcome these omissions. Two concepts were most important in our design. First, we included the complete sweep of James’s extant letters. Second, we used plain-text editing to refocus attention on the elements of the original documents themselves, not what we imagined James had wanted to write but did not. A complete and inclusive edition of Henry James’s letters will provide readers with a faithful and full representation of all the letters, enabling readers to use our edited texts much as they would the original documents. This inclusive edition also marks an advance over the original documents by merit of the editing, which makes James’s own sometimes difficult hand legible in transcription and provides the benefits of annotation, when a reader should want those benefits. Thus the complete edition provides readers with edited versions of James’s letters and, unless 239

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11 editing the complete letters of henry james

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they prefer to see the documents themselves, with a reliable version of James’s letters without having to travel to some 130 archives and private collections to read the nearly 10,500 extant letters. Such an edition offers an opportunity for readers to understand more of James’s way of thinking and living than readers could do in a selective edition. More, a high level of detail in textual and informational notes adds to the detail editors could provide for readers who might be interested in using them. The omission of the many meaningful details of James’s style and language in previous publications of James‘s letters results from the fact that editors have always edited them as clear-text documents. Consistent with the dominant ideology in twentieth-century Anglo-American editing,3 clear-text treats the manuscript letter as though James wrote it as a print-ready text intended for publication and not as the private letter that it is. Clear-text editing thus produces a version of the letters that made their reading easy, and aimed to represent the editor’s judgment of James’s “final intention.”4 That approach to editing the letters accounts in large part for the particular loss of information we noted above. To make for easy reading and to show an editor’s understanding of James’s final intention, editors often silently corrected James’s errors, corrections, turns of mind, and slips of spelling and punctuation, leaving no signal in the letter text or in a textual note indicating a particular change. Such changes have ramifications in relation to the original document. If, for example, a misspelling error were actually deliberate in order to make a joke or pun that depended on the misspelling, such correction would obscure James’s humor. It seems now that James regularly used spellings to represent American pronunciations: “sich knowing” for “such knowing” (to T. S. Perry, 27 March [1868]), “leeter” for “letter” (to T. S. Perry, 18 April 1864), “’tother” for “the other”—a contraction which he used regularly (e.g. to Lizzie Boott, 11 February [1876])—and “take ’em easy” (to Mary Walsh James, [27 May 1873]) are examples of this particular use of colloquial language. James’s purpose in using such spellings was evidently to show his correspondent his familiarity with colloquialisms and his willingness to use them as part of his rhetorical repertoire, which editorial corrections obscure. Interestingly, at the same time he disowns the expressions through the parody, he deploys them as campy borrowings that identify, select, and reinforce a community of acquaintances. To acknowledge James’s use of language in this way is to begin to understand how these elements work as linguistic tools to build and maintain relationships. When clear-text editors supplied paragraph indentations, for example, where long dashes existed in the originals, they made reading easier,

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but they gave readers an erroneous sense of James’s letter writing style. James rarely used paragraph indentations in the body of his letters, but many editors seeking to make the reading of the edited letter easier, interpreted some of James’s dashes to mean “new paragraph here” (which was the purpose of some, but not all, of the long dashes).5 Editors altered phrases and left out postscripts, changing the meaning of a particular letter or omitting significant information. For instance, Edel omitted James’s postscript to his 13, 16, [17] October [1869] letter to his mother (1: 153): “I have just read Ste. Beuve’s death. I have lost my best friend.” One would think it were important to know that James felt this way about Sainte-Beuve’s death. Some editions did not include James’s own sketches or drawings as elements of the edited letter text, depriving readers of those editions of a way to understand not only James’s drawing skill as a cartoonist, but also his sense of humor and willingness to poke fun at himself.6 An exception to the general exclusion of James’s drawings are Henry’s letters to William James in the first three volumes of Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley’s The Correspondence of William James. In nearly every case, the sequence and status of James’s corrections, cancellations, and insertions—all of which display his mind in action and are elements of the letters themselves—were omitted from the edited text (see Zacharias). As in Percy Lubbock’s Letters of Henry James, the editorial rationale and method altered the letters more sharply to show in the edited letters the best public face of Henry James rather than to offer readers an edition that represented more faithfully the letter artifacts themselves. Both Lubbock and Edel published altered letters. Unlike Edel’s silent omissions, however, Lubbock indicated cuts with ellipses.7 But whatever the changes and consequent losses of information, most emendations were generally consistent with contemporary standards of Anglo-American editing. Because that standard approach privileged the editor’s understanding of an author’s meaning and what is appropriate for readers over representing faithfully the letter as artifact, clear-text editing was not often challenged. How clear-text became such an authoritative approach to editing letters is worth outlining. Because of commercial and institutional pressures to edit letters for general readers rather than specialists, ease of reading and pleasing the audience have been important considerations in the editing and representation of letters, in decisions about funding and authorizing seals, and in the status, prestige, and longevity of a project.8 Standards of authority and authorization helped shape the editing and thus the representation of the letters. W. W. Greg’s seminal “The Rationale of Copy-Text”

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was important in defining and formalizing some of the standards that privileged the editor’s judgment and reader’s convenience over a more literal, reliable representation of the artifact’s meaningful details. From our point of view, those standards resulted in a loss of meaning in the edited texts in relation to the manuscripts and typescripts. At the same time, historical circumstances, including the institutionalized standards necessary for the funding of some editions, supplemented first Greg’s and then Fredson Bowers’s skills as editors to establish the clear-text approach to editing letters, which, consistent with the Greg/Bowers approach to editing literary texts, placed premiums on the editor’s judgment of an author’s final intention and on the readability of the edited letter text (Bowers; Greg). Referring to World War II-era stereotypes of Germans, and in the wake of German editing practice that he described as “mechanical,” Greg argued in “The Rationale of Copy-Text” (1949/1950) that “[a] critical edition does not seem to me a suitable place in which to record the graphic peculiarities of particular texts, and in this respect the copy-text is only one among others. These, however, are all matters within the discretion of the editor: I am concerned to uphold his liberty of judgement” (30). Bowers reiterated Greg’s point on the “liberty of judgement” in the face of charges that Greg’s own method did not allow adequately for the application of an editor’s learning and judgment. Bowers wrote: “What we come down to in the end is the conclusion . . . . that Greg’s interest in the accidentals of a text was minimal compared to his concern for the free exercise of editorial judgment in respect to substantives” (“Greg’s ‘Rationale’” 144). Although Greg and Bowers developed the rationale for the editing of literary material (plays, novels, poems, and the like), the method proved so influential that it was adopted by many of those editing historical documents (letters, journals, and the like) as well. The authority and prestige invested in the theory and practice, in combination with the public denunciations, such as Lewis Mumford’s “Emerson Behind Barbed Wire,” of a rationale that attended more closely to the artifact itself and less closely to an author’s supposed final intention, resulted in dominance of the clear-text approach to editing historical documents as well as literary texts. Regardless of the loss of meaning the clear-text approach tolerated in the editing and representation of personal papers, it gained prestige as the preferred strategy for important funding and authorizing agencies, such as the Center for Editions of American Authors (CEAA). As MaryJo Kline writes, “Greg’s techniques, translated for use with the writings of American authors, were implemented in the CEAA’s standards for

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editions” (9). At one point in its existence, however, the CEAA not only issued an “approved edition seal for volumes that met its standards; it also allocated funds from the U. S. federal government’s National Endowment for the Humanities in support of scholarly editions of American authors” (Tanselle, “Editing” 5–6). Not only did the clear-text approach to editing have institutional backing—and, one presumes from Mumford, was the way many readers preferred to read published versions of private correspondence—it had financial backing as well. The most familiar publication of a selection of James’s letters, Edel’s four-volume Henry James Letters, exemplifies the editing practice favored by Bowers and Greg, though at least Edel discloses his aim to turn the emphasis of the edition from what Henry James intended to write to what Edel’s James would have wanted readers to see. Thus how the letters would eventually be read constituted a central concern in both the editing and selection of letters to be edited. Edel’s selection of letters for his edition (only 1,069 out of roughly 10,500), depended on his sense of what readers should consider important, everything else being categorized as “the mere twaddle of graciousness” (1: xxxii). Yet the naming of excluded letters as “mere twaddle” deflects readers from considering fully Edel’s role in the process of selection. Edel was intensely aware of his edition in terms of its readers as a “portrait of James” (1: xv). Thus Edel stressed not only what was written in the original letter, but, perhaps more, how readers ought to read what was in the original letter. As Edel wrote to his editor, “[g]iven the small sale of letters generally I would like to see the Jwmes [sic] letters available in readable form, almost as if they were novels by him” (letter to Wilcox).9 In emphasizing readability and sales, Edel’s edition is fundamentally consistent with Greg’s and Bowers’s authorization of the editor and editorial decision-making concerning the status of textual evidence. Aside from errors in editing, Edel’s attention to his readers concerned him more than attention to the material details of James’s writing. (See Gale; Horne, “Editing of Henry James’s Letters”; Moore, “Epistolary James”; Richards.) The first class of omitted information—the lack of an inclusive edition of all known letters, notes, and telegrams by James—is the other problem that The Complete Letters of Henry James addresses. The rationale for selected letters editions corresponds with that for clear-text and “final intention” editions. That is, they all rely fundamentally on the editor’s judgment of what readers should consider important. Some earlier editors of literary letters conceived their role as intellectual gatekeepers who should control access to information. They selected what their audience should and should not know, and thus shaped a representation of the letters’ author.

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Publishers too shaped what was and was not offered to readers. In the case of Henry James’s letters, the James family held an interest in preserving a certain public image of their ancestor, which Lubbock and Edel protected (Henry James Letters 1: xxx–xxxii; Walker). We, on the other hand, believe that our duty is “to be as complete as possible,” as James wrote in another context (“Art of Fiction” 408). Klaus Hurlebusch marks the importance of the original documents rather than the editor’s judgment of an author’s intention: “The path of cognition and interpretation should not unidirectionally lead away from the manuscripts to the edition. It should by apt means of representation also lead back to them (the editorial circle). The goal should be the unrestricted understanding of the manuscripts, and not merely of their textual substrate” (64). So by being as complete as possible, by striving for a way to represent James’s letters that will enable an “unrestricted understanding” of the manuscripts, we enable the opportunity for study of any aspect of the letters. An inclusive edition of the letters would enrich by its range and detail our understanding of James’s life and the lives of his correspondents, his use of language, and his importance to our cultural legacy. To be most useful, the parts, volumes, and edition must be inclusive because one cannot anticipate what biographical or historical detail or stylistic idiosyncrasy contained in a single letter may be of value to a given reader. Just as ideas of what is and is not important have changed over the past thirty years since the publication of Edel’s edition, so will they continue to change. Thus as the interests of scholars change, a letter to someone judged unimportant at one point in time may at another be read as a letter to someone important. This is clearly demonstrated by the attention in recent years by editors publishing selections of James’s letters to Hendrik Andersen (Zorzi, Gunter and Jobe), Jocelyn Persse, and Hugh Walpole (Gunter and Jobe), an interest which is clearly part of the increased scholarly attention toward the end of the twentieth century in James and sexuality. Susan E. Gunter’s edition of James’s letters to Alice Howe Gibbens (Mrs. William) James, Mary Cadwalader Jones, Fanny Prothero, and Lady Wolseley and Marysa Demoor and Monty Chisholm’s edition of James’s letters to novelist Lucy Clifford show that there is much to be learned about the importance of James’s relationships with various women. While editing and publishing James’s letters to his sister-in-law, Gunter realized how significant a role Alice Gibbens James played in the evolution of the novelist’s relationship with his older brother, and this will constitute an important element of the biography of Mrs. James that Gunter is now writing. All of these portions of James’s correspondence

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were at one time deemed less significant than those portions that had been published. Individual letters, no matter how short or apparently unimportant, can be of significance to particular researchers. A note making an appointment may be useful to a biographer of a James correspondent by articulating the whereabouts of that correspondent at a given time. Of James’s three known letters to Francis Parkman, for instance, Edel published two, one from 18 July [1881] (Henry James Letters 2: 357–8), the other of 24 August [1884] (3: 48–9). But James’s earliest surviving letter to Parkman, of 8 August [1880], has never been published. In this letter, as in the one of 18 July [1881], James writes about Parkman’s temporary, honorary membership in the Reform Club. This letter is of interest for a number of possible reasons: it is the earliest extant letter by James to Parkman, and thus shows that the two writers knew each other that early, which is potentially significant for biographers of either writer. It shows that they already knew each other before James wrote this letter (James writes: “You have, as I told you, nothing to do”—the “as I told you” implying that they had already communicated) and therefore leaves open to further research the degree of their intimacy and the nature of their making acquaintance. The letter also reveals something of James’s controlling nature: “when your month approaches its close,” James tells his correspondent, if Parkman wishes to extend his temporary membership at the Reform Club, he must “write a note to the Secretary, in the third person, saying that Mr. Francis Parkman will be obliged to the Committee for an ^another[^] month’s extension of his honorary membership.” James practically dictates Parkman’s letter to the Secretary, much as later in life he would instruct Alvin Coburn in great detail about what to photograph for the New York Edition frontispieces, or would give visitors detailed instructions about which trains to take to Rye.10 James’s undated letter to Lady Wolseley, which Edel did not use because, he wrote to its owner, James Tamulis, “it is one of hundreds of charming politenesses, put on paper by James,” is another example. James did write hundreds of short notes accepting or declining invitations, and a number of these are, at least for now, undated. As a result, their potential role in determining who was or was not at a particular party or event on a particular day is limited. The letter to Lady Wolseley dated only “Friday” is a case in point. Lady Wolseley had invited James to dinner, and he replied (in the letter’s first sentence) that he “should have been delighted–but am grieved–unspeakably–to say that I am solemnly engaged!” Given his strategy for selecting letters for his edition, Edel did not think this letter useful. But it may be useful to someone interested in Lady Wolseley, in

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Yes–I should–for the pleasure of dining with you have gladly gone in alone, unhonoured + unheeded by glittering predecessors–twenty yards behind them all. But I won’t add to ^increase[^] the possible irritation of an incommoded hostess; + only add that I am always–at a year’s notice, or at half an hour’s–very faithfully yours What the nature of this flirting is, what the degree of James’s and Lady Wolseley’s friendship may have been, are not for us editors to say, but clearly this short letter reveals something of James’s personality and of the terms of their relationship. James’s unpublished 21 March 1897 letter to four year old George Grenville Hunter holds no literary value, so to speak. But James’s kindness in this letter to his young relative shows a great deal about James himself.11 In a letter of about 300 words, James describes his pleasure in receiving a picture his young cousin had drawn of a boat race and wishes the rest of the family well. Referring to an upcoming visit to the Hunters, James concludes the letter by saying: “Look out of the window at me when I come, for I am very shy when I pay a visit, + it makes me happy to think there may be a very brave little boy to take me by the hand. Wait till I come.” Those who know only Henry James the clichéd Master will perhaps be astounded at such a conclusion to a letter. The James who professes himself “very shy when I pay a visit” and relieved to know that “a very brave little boy” would take him “by the hand” is not the man who visited aristocrats, captains of industry and their wives, Prime Ministers and diplomats, and American, British, and European writers and artists. This letter reveals a glimpse of one of the many sides of Henry James, many of which only begin to become apparent when one has access to all his surviving letters. An edition of James’s letters should be complete for the sake of accuracy. Publishing any edition of James’s letters, whether a selection or a complete collection, is like putting together parts of a jigsaw puzzle: the more pieces of the puzzle one has, the clearer the resulting picture of their author and his circumstances. The editors of a complete edition of James’s letters are less likely to make mistakes in deciphering James’s scrawling handwriting, less likely to misdate letters, and less likely to provide erroneous information in the explanatory notes. This is clear

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James’s relations with Wolseley and other women, or in James’s curious way in this letter (as in others) of flirting with Lady Wolseley, even as he refuses her invitation. We catch this flirting in the second and last sentences of the letter:

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from just a few of the inadvertent errors previous editors of James’s letters have made. For instance, in his version of James’s 31 August 1869 letter to Alice James, Edel has James planning to travel “into Italy by the great Italvio Pass” (Henry James Letters 1: 129), a mountain pass that doesn’t exist. What James actually wrote was “Stelvio Pass.” Edel’s error, while partly the result of failing to consult an atlas, is also the result of not having worked chronologically at editing James’s letters, of not seeing completely that particular part of the overall puzzle. Had he started with the first surviving letters and worked more systematically through to the later ones, he would have been more aware of the many specific ways in which James’s handwriting evolved over the years. As a result, he would have realized that in early 1873 James began to change the way he wrote an upper-case I. Had Edel been more aware of this, he would have realized that the first letter of the word, “Stelvio,” that he construed as “Italvio” could not possibly, in 1869, be an I, and in fact could only be an uppercase S, and therefore he might not have misread the name of the pass. Editors of selections of James’s letters do not have at hand, as they work on any one letter or group of letters, the fuller context that working on all of James’s extant letters provides. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the problem of dating James’s many undated or partially dated letters. Such letters need to be dated on the basis of internal and external evidence, and the most useful source of external evidence is all of James’s other letters. For instance, James’s two extant letters to Henry W. Longfellow are dated only “Wednesday a.m.” and “Thursday a.m.,” both from Cambridge; there are no further internal clues to the dates of composition of these letters. Edel, who published both letters (1: 467–8), did not attempt to date them, but he placed them between letters of 13 October 1874 and 13 January [1875], implying that they were written in late 1874. In one letter James excuses himself from attending a dinner at Longfellow’s, in the other James lends Longfellow some books by Turgenev; as a result, it is clear that James wrote them while both men were residing in Cambridge, for instance during James’s last lengthy period of Cambridge residence, following his return from his 1872–74 trip to Europe and prior to spending the winter and spring of 1875 in New York. But an examination of the handwriting shows that James wrote the letters before he altered how he wrote upper-case I in early 1873, which means that both letters had to have been written prior to May 1872, when James departed for Europe. The letter about Turgenev’s books refers to the French translation, Nouvelles Moscovites, which appeared in 1869; therefore that letter has to have been written between May

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1870 and May 1872, while James was in Cambridge between trips to Europe. The other letter would have to have been written during the same period or during James’s first period of Cambridge residency: late 1866 to February 1869. It is all too easy to assume that James discussed Turgenev with Longfellow and lent him the Russian’s books subsequent to the publication in the April 1874 North American Review of James’s “Review of Frühlingsfluthen.” But our redating of the letter about the loan of the books is one additional piece of evidence that interest in Turgenev in the Jameses’ Cambridge circle existed several years earlier: William James praised Nouvelles Moscovites in his 1 November 1869 letter to Henry (1: 120), and Longfellow’s only known journal and epistolary mentions of Turgenev occur in 1871 and 1872.12 James’s interest in Turgenev was certainly enhanced considerably by writing the 1874 review-article and then even more by making his acquaintance in Paris in 1875–76, but the letters suggest that the seed of that interest had been planted while James lived in Cambridge between May 1870 and May 1872. Working systematically with all of James’s letters makes it easier to transcribe and identify correctly obscure proper names. This is the case with Jessie Taylor Laussot (1829–1905), whom William and Henry James saw in Florence in 1873 and 1874, and whom James mentions in three of his letters from that period. As a result of not editing and publishing all three of these letters, and therefore not realizing who the person was to whom James alluded, Edel construed James’s handwriting to refer to a “Mme. Laussal” in his 10 December [1873] letter to Lizzie Boott (1: 416), and to “Mme. Lannsot” in the 3 May [1874] letter to William (1: 416). Skrupskelis and Berkeley copy Edel’s reading of “Lannsot” in the letter to William but add a note saying that they cannot identify the woman and that because of James’s “always difficult hand,” their reading may be mistaken (1: 232, 234 n. 3). Because of how easily various individual characters can resemble each other in James’s handwriting, these particular misreadings are understandable. However, it is the third, unpublished letter, of 7, 8 April [1874] to Lizzie Boott, that gives the crucial clue, for here James wrote: “I have seen a good deal of Hillebrand + Mme Laussot.” Karl Hillebrand (1829–1884) was the German writer whose 1873 Frankreich und die Franzosen in der zweiten häfte der XIX Jahrhunderts “stirred” William James “up a good deal in early April 1873” (1: 194). Hillebrand was part of the same Florence expatriate community that the Bootts knew, with whom Henry and William socialized in 1873 and 1874, and that included a number of people mentioned in the Jameses’ letters of this period, including Jessie Laussot and “her mother” (10

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December [1873] to Lizzie Boott), “Mrs. Taylor” (3 May [1874] to William). Hillebrand and Laussot later married; Henry mentions her, now as “Mme H . . . . deafer than ever,” and “old Mrs. Taylor, the mother,” in his 9 May 1880 letter from Florence to William (see William James 1: 324). This example, like so many,13 shows how, with as many pieces of the puzzle as possible at their disposal, editors of a complete letters edition have a much better chance of identifying proper names, and in this instance therefore, of providing readers with a more accurate picture of the social circle in which James moved, and thus a more accurate picture of James himself than could be represented from a selective edition. Because of the big picture that work on all of James’s letters provides, it is also easier for editors to avoid mistakes in their informational notes to published letters. Letters, Fictions, Lives: Henry James and William Dean Howells glosses James’s mention in his 22 June [1873] letter from Berne to Howells of “the Fire” as a reference to the Great Boston Fire of 9 November 1872 (Anesko, ed. 84 n. 9). But the editor couldn’t have known, without examining all of James’s letters from 1872–73, that James wrote home frequently in November 1872 asking for information about the November Fire (but not to Howells), that in June 1873 he learned about another Boston fire, that of 30 May 1873, and wrote about it to his parents on the same day he wrote Howells, after having also mentioned it in his letter to his brother William four days earlier. By the same token, had the editor of Dear Munificent Friends known James’s 13 and 18 October 1908 letters to William’s youngest son, Aleck, which are on deposit at Creighton University, “the Smiths” in James’s 20 February 1909 letter to Alice H. James would not have been misidentified (Gunter, ed. 71 n. 81) as the drunken house servants James had had to fire in 1901 (see Kaplan 462) but would have been correctly identified as the tutor with whom Aleck was living in Oxford and who was supposed to prepare him to take the university’s entrance exam. These errors may seem only the excusable accidents they are to experts on James, but to the new student or to the non-specialist looking for primary information they can be misleading; whatever the reason for them, a systematic editing and publishing of all of James’s available letters should make them easier to avoid. Selectivity, therefore, leads inevitably to more errors. But clear-text editing is in and of itself overly selective, for according to the rationale of clear-text editing, editors do not reproduce many meaningful details of manuscripts—our second class of information routinely omitted from published versions of James’s letters. At the root of the problem is a fundamental difference in editors’ attitudes toward manuscripts. Cleartext editors treat manuscript letters as if they were documents more or less

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analogous to the clean copy an author would send to the printer. These editors make transformations to the manuscript text similar to those that an editor would be expected to make when editing a manuscript intended for print, such as regularizing style, grammar, format, and spelling and setting underlined manuscript text in italics. A letter differs, however, from a literary text such as a poem or novel written for print publication in the way that it should be read and understood in the sense that there is no “final or published text other than the one with the writer sealed in an envelope and put into the mail” (Tanselle, “Editorial Problem” 204). Tanselle recognized the problem when he noted that “clear text may often be inappropriate when the material to be edited is a working document of a private nature” (“Editorial Apparatus” 46). Tanselle’s “Editing of Historical Documents” marks an important moment in the editing of letters because it began to shift the theorizing of editing letters from the convenience of readers to the accurate representation of the artifact. The following comment is typical: “the editor’s goal is to reproduce in print as many of the characteristics of the document as he can. The goal is not, in other words, to reproduce a critical text, except to the extent that judgment is involved in determining precisely what is in the manuscript” (“Editing” 51). Central to Tanselle’s theorizing of the editing of historical documents are principles that encourage editors to attend to material elements of the original so that the edited text functions as a reliable witness to the meaning of the original, rather than as a model of what an editor conceives the author intended. In order to reproduce in the edited text meaningful characteristics of the original letter, the graphic details of the letter text itself are important to consider. It is at this point, perhaps, that the editing of historical documents such as letters departs most sharply from the same approaches to editing literary texts.14 Tanselle’s point that “the posting of a letter is equivalent to the publication of a literary work, for each activity serves as the means by which a particular kind of communication is directed to its audience,” was particularly important to the editorial rationale of The Complete Letters of Henry James (“Editorial Problem” 204). We understood that Henry James indicated his preference for a “definitive” letter as soon as he sealed an envelope and sent a letter through the mail. “Drafts” and “revisions” in the form of authorial changes (cancellations, insertions, corrections, for example), on the other hand, may be contained in a single letter text rather than in a series of separate drafts. Editing with attention to the meaningful details of the artifact permits readers of the edited text to gain a more immediate apprehension of the original document

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than reading a clear-text version. Editing with attention to representing meaningful details of the original letter provides insight to the writer’s compositional habits and offers evidence of an author’s thinking at the moment of composition. Working from Tanselle’s remark that “‘There can be no characteristic . . . that may not have some bearing on the determination of the text,” C. Dierdre Phelps makes the point that an editor’s awareness of details for physical form and the circumstances leading to changes in them is requisite for considering their interrelation, and sometimes identity, with textual changes (65). Such precision is what we found lacking in other editions of James’s letters: not only precision in terms of the representation of the original letter, but in the representation of the range of extant letters themselves. The consequent loss of meaningful information on the clear-text page left us searching for another approach to editing James’s letters that would be reliable in terms of the original documents—that preserves the meaning of the writing in them—but would not, at the same time, sacrifice readability. Tanselle’s work in theorizing the editing of historical documents was important for us because it offered the basis for addressing problems we encountered in existing editions of the letters and for representing the original letters so that they could function for readers as reliable substitutes for the originals. So with the opening of access to James’s letters and the consequent knowledge of what had not been represented in the edited letters—and thus what about James had been absent from the published record—it became clear that we needed another way to think about editing Henry James’s letters. Using Tanselle’s work as a starting point, we found a practical method in Mark Twain’s Letters (Hirst) and that project’s plain-text approach, which supplied a model for our own document-centered and, consequently, more authorcentered edition. The plain-text approach to editing and representing the letter texts typographically provides on the edited text page more detail from the original documents than clear-text editing. At the same time, plaintext does not attempt to render a facsimile of the letter text. Instead, through the plain-text method, we represent meaningful details of the text of the historical document. By using commonly understood editorial symbols in combination with a record of emendations and other textual notes, we provide the reader with a highly reliable and readable edition. By including in the edited text cancellations, insertions, and other changes seen in the manuscripts and typescripts and by representing these manuscript details with similar ones in the typography, plain-text editing enables users to read the edited letters nearly as they would the

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editing the complete letters of henry james

palgrave advances in henry james studies

originals, without having to reconstruct them by way of an apparatus or specially-memorized editing marks or by having to decipher James’s handwriting. By representing textual details of the letter rather than the letter writer’s supposed final intentions only, plain-text editing enables readers to see when and where in a letter James changed his mind or altered an emphasis. Another aim of our plain-text approach is historical. Like Hans Zeller’s in his edition of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer’s poems, ours is to serve “primarily the purpose of interpreting a manuscript [that is, of constituting the text] and secondarily it renders possible a certain control by means of descriptive information” (Hurlebusch 73). Editing documents from this point of view rationalizes the representation of graphic traces of an author’s decisions concerning meaning through the inclusion on the edited page of cancellations, insertions, corrections, and the like. We find this approach useful because we understand James’s letters as documents possessing a status as historical records. They record James’s method of composition as well as his mind at the point of composition. To the degree that we represent that original document literally, we enable readers to make decisions about meaning for themselves, rather than having to rely solely on the editor’s understanding of meaning. In short, the approach allows readers freer consideration than ever before not only of the meaningful details of James’s own letters, but, importantly, from those details, of the “man of letters himself as writer (écrivant) and not, in book-readerly terms, as an author (écrivain)” (Hurlebusch 76; Eggert). We hope that readers of The Complete Letters of Henry James will experience something of the moment of composition, which only a careful examination of the manuscript itself can offer fully. Our position on this aspect of the editorial rationale is based on Tanselle’s critique of modernization and his argument that editors of historical documents should preserve a writer’s deletions and, by extension, other meaningful features of the holograph in a scholarly edition, for then “the editor allows the reader to have the same experience as the original reader of the historical document” (“Editing of Historical Documents” 50–1). In our own work, we see no reason to alter features of what James wrote and a letter’s recipient read, for we consider that they are meaningful. In “Recent Editorial Discussion and the Central Questions of Editing,” Tanselle elaborated the concept by arguing that: Readers are not normally prevented from understanding a text by oddities and inconsistencies of punctuation and spelling, and when these irregularities are characteristic of the author what is the point of

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Kline concurs: “Unnecessary emendations will make the editorial text of any letter useless as evidence either of what its author wrote or of what its addressee read . . . . Any policy of emendation for letters adopted later should be as conservative as their method of inscription allows” (123). James’s clear-text editors’ handling of underlining, and especially multiple underlining, in manuscripts is a case in point. Clear-text editors have nearly always converted underlined manuscript text to printed italics, following the tradition of handling manuscripts intended for typesetting, an outcome for which, of course, private letters were not intended. This transformation, as problematic as it is already, is complicated considerably by the fact that writers of private manuscript letters—James included—use not just single but also, for example, double, triple, quadruple, even quintuple underlining in order to indicate various degrees of emphasis. Clear-text editors may convert the original document’s single, double, triple, quadruple and quintuple underlining into italics. But that strategy erases the obvious and instantly recognizable differences between single and multiple underlining in the manuscript. Or they represent the types of underlining with typographic equivalences that are established by convention, but may be foreign for many readers, which also erases obvious and easily recognizable differences. For instance, single underlining may be printed in italics, double underlining in small block capitals, triple underlining in italicized small block capitals. Both solutions are, however, arbitrary and counter-intuitive (especially the second) for those unfamiliar with the conventions, whereas rendering single and multiple underlining simply as such makes the particular expression of the original text self-evident. Such a strategy preserves both meaning and readability. In James’s case, the problem of the handling of underlining is further compounded by James’s practice of sometimes double- or tripleunderlining the initial letter of a word in order to make clear that it is upper-case. James’s upper- and lower-casing are often ambiguous, but for some reason, starting in the early 1870s, he occasionally gave an unequivocal indication that an initial letter was upper case by double- or triple-underlining it. He sometimes also indicated the opposite by using a diagonal slash to make clear that the initial letter of a word was lower case. For instance, James wrote to William on 8 January 1873 from Rome about visiting “the Villa Wolkonski.” Edel’s (1: 322) and Skrupskelis and

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altering them? It is hard to see why editors think they are accomplishing anything by straightening out the details of spelling and punctuation in a letter or journal simply for the sake of tidying it up. (58)

palgrave advances in henry james studies

Berkeley’s editions (1: 185) give no indication that James triple underlined the W of Wolkonski. As a result readers do not know that James had to make it clear in this way to William that he was capitalizing Wolkonski, perhaps because of prior complaints about his handwriting, perhaps because he wanted to emphasize a pronunciation of the name, or perhaps because James, by this point in his career, had so mastered proofreading marks that he would include them as a matter of course in his private letters. There is no satisfactory way to render this handwritten practice of James’s other than by representing it as it appears in the manuscript, which our plain-text edition will do. Handling it any other way—by ignoring it, as the clear-text editors did, or by using italics—leads to confusion or to omission of this revealing habit. In his personal letters James apparently composed as he wrote and rarely if ever copied out and mailed a clean copy; we know this from the relatively high proportion of cancellations and insertions in his handwritten text (his business letters have far fewer and may have been composed in drafts). Our plain-text edition of James’s complete letters will indicate all these textual changes, with the canceled text appearing as crossed-out struck through material, interlinear insertions indicated with surrounding ^carets[^] or [^]bracketed carets[^], and intralineal insertions indicated in the textual notes. As a result, The Complete Letters of Henry James will provide a glimpse of James in the act of composition, rather than an editorially polished product from James’s act of composition. That glimpse represents both letter and author. In many instances, the fits and starts of James’s compositional act will suggest interesting avenues of biographical investigation. For instance, writing to William, from Italy near the end of his 1869–70 European trip, James described his meeting with a group of relatives and fellowtravelers that included Henry Wyckoff, James’s second cousin, whom James apparently did not hold in high esteem. In that long letter to William begun in Rome on 27 December 1869 and completed in Florence on New Year’s Day 1870, James explained some of the difficulties the traveling group had been experiencing: The three ladies apparently found my presence a useful distraction from the unbroken scrutiny of each other’s characters. I think they are a little bit tired of each other + owing partly to the presence of Henry ^an insane[^] + partly to the absence of a sane, gentleman among them, have not introduced a foreign element into thier circumstances to the degree they would have liked.

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This letter has been published in Edel’s (1: 179–86) and Skrupskelis and Berkeley’s editions (1: 133–40). These editions silently corrected James’s misspelled “thier” and do not show the crossed out “Henry” and that “an insane” is inserted. In a unique departure, however, from his practice of limiting this sort of editorial intrusion, Edel does provide a footnote that explains that “HJ wrote the name Henry, crossed it out, and substituted the words ‘an insane.’ The reference is to his cousin Henry, who was in the ladies’ party” (1: 186 n. 3). Skrupskelis and Berkeley also provide a footnote, consisting of a cross-reference to Edel’s note (1: 140 n. 6). These notes are curious: why, of all of James’s deletions, substitutions, and insertions, does this one deserve a special footnote?15 The problem with such a note is that it determines readers’ responses to a single change of James’s but not to others—and without providing reasons for doing so. It implies that this particular change of James’s merits special attention, while others do not. In The Complete Letters of Henry James, however, readers will read this particular textual change much as William James, the letter’s actual intended reader, did, which is to say as one of many such changes that James made in his letters. Our readers will experience James’s change to his text in the closest approximation possible in print to the change as it appears in the original manuscript, and without recourse to footnotes or endnotes. Furthermore, our readers will also notice what Edel’s and Skrupskelis and Berkeley’s readers cannot know, and only readers of the manuscript itself can otherwise know, which is that when James crossed out “Henry,” he crossed it out twice, suggesting a particular degree of emphasis in his deletion of the name. Most importantly, though, our readers will have before them, at one glance (as opposed to having to turn the page for Edel’s or Skrupskelis and Berkeley’s footnote), all they need to know to begin to speculate about why James decided not to name Henry Wyckoff but rather to label him “an insane.” The fact is that there are thousands of such cancellations and substitutions in James’s letters, and many, depending on the reader, carry at least as much significance. One such instance, which we discussed in detail in our 1998 article, “James’s Hand and Gosse’s Tail,” stands as an example for all. On 25 June 1894 James wrote from Venice to Edmund Gosse and referred to his planned return to England and to Gosse’s forthcoming trip to the continent. In the published version of this letter in Rayburn S. Moore’s clear-text edition of the selected letters to Gosse, James wrote: “I leave this place July 1st & return to England by the 25th. I hope this will be in time to put a little salt on your tail before you fly away. No offence meant—it is the way we talk to a singing-bird, as Torwald Ibsen would say” (112). But what James actually began to write in the second

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editing the complete letters of henry james

palgrave advances in henry james studies

sentence of this passage was: “I hope this will be in time to put my hand,” and then he stopped, crossed out “hand” (but not “my”), wrote “a little” above the canceled “hand,” and completed the sentence. In The Complete Letters of Henry James, the sentence will read: “I hope this will be in time to put my hand ^a little[^] salt on your tail before you fly away.” Given the deletion and substitution here, the apparent ambiguity of both James’s and Gosse’s sexualities, and James’s passionate 9 June [1884] epistolary exchange with Gosse about the “innermost cause of [John Addington Symonds’s] discomfort” (Selected Letters of Henry James to Edmund Gosse 32), one cannot help but wonder whether James’s mind, as he wrote, was running ahead to an image of placing his hand on Gosse’s “tail (of course he may have been thinking of placing his hand elsewhere and substituted not only “a little salt” for “hand” on the page but also “your tail” for however else he planned to complete the sentence). Whatever the case, publishing the letter without James’s changes in it deprives readers of the text that Gosse read and closes the door on several avenues of speculation: where did James intend to place his hand? To what extent did he want Gosse to notice the textual change (why isn’t “my” deleted; why did James not obscure “hand” with more ink)? Is the passage a kind of camp flirtation? And what have Ibsen and Nora and Torwald Helmer of A Doll’s House to do with it? All of these questions (and no doubt more) arise as a result of this one little textual change. Thus we believe that James scholarship is not served by selected editions of James letters but only by a complete edition; we also believe fundamentally that editors should not presume to know what the universe of readers thinks and ought to know. Such decisions must be left to readers themselves in order to provide them with “‘free Choice’ to read or not to read, to see or not to see, and to construct or not to construct,” as D. C. Greetham has written (244). We also believe that a complete edition of James’s letters will not only represent meaningful details of letters with more precision and completeness than ever before, but will also supplement an understanding and support further study of James himself. Readers of The Complete Letters of Henry James will discover many opportunities to exercise their “‘free Choice,’” much to delight in, much to speculate about, and many avenues of research to pursue about James and the world in which he lived.

notes 1. See Walker, “Leon Edel”; Hellman. 2. To date, some 70 percent of James’s extant letters are neither edited nor published.

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3. Most editions of Henry James letters use the clear-text approach to editing. This approach varies in its editors’ willingness to correct elements of the text of the original document. Some editors, such as Lubbock and Edel, correct every element that departs from convention. Others, such as Skrupskelis and Berkeley, allow misspellings and punctuation errors to remain. None, however, includes cancellations or insertions in the edited text. See Anesko, ed., Benson, Berry, Le Bris, Demoor and Chisholm, Gunter, ed., Gunter and Jobe, eds., Harlow, Hasler, Horne, ed., Monteiro, Moore, Powers, Robins, Smith, and Zorzi, as well as James, “A Most Unholy Trade.” 4. Shillingsburg traces the fundamental tensions in the current state of editing in the United States and western Europe. 5. Some of those editors who chose to so style James’s letters include Philip Horne (Life in Letters), George Monteiro (Henry James and John Hay), and Rayburn S. Moore (Gosse; Macmillan). Leon Edel (Henry James Letters) sometimes follows James and sometimes supplies new paragraph indentations. Monteiro (Henry James and Henry Adams) sometimes adds paragraph separations where James’s manuscript does not contain even a long dash. 6. For example, see Edel, Henry James Letters 1: 36, 37, 51, 284–5. 7. Ellipses were common in early-twentieth-century editions of letters or of life and letters volumes, such as Sara Norton and M. A. DeWolfe Howe’s 1913 two-volume Letters of Charles Eliot Norton. In editions like this and Lubbock’s The Letters of Henry James, editors considered that among their duties was to present the most important or representative passages from the subject’s correspondence and to indicate these ellipses. An additional reason for the ellipses was to omit mention of living or recently deceased people which editors deemed inappropriate for publication. James’s own manuscripts at the Houghton Library at Harvard are marked up in blue or purple pencil, we believe by William James’s son Henry, apparently as part of an aborted plan for this kind of selective publication. To give Lubbock his due, he does provide more truth in advertising than Edel: the complete title of Lubbock’s edition is: The Letters of Henry James Selected and Edited by Percy Lubbock. One has to read through almost all of Edel’s introduction in order to learn that his Henry James Letters, while trumpeted by Edel as “the first to draw upon the full epistolarium,” in fact “constitutes only a part of the entire corpus,” Edel’s thinking being “that in the age of photo-duplication we no longer need total publication” (1: xxii, xxxii). See also Anesko, “‘God Knows.’” 8. Lewis Mumford’s “Emerson Behind Barbed Wire” represents this position well. Mumford argued that readability ought to be an editor’s first concern. His article marks a turning-point away from a way of editing historical documents that privileged accuracy and reliability and to that which privileged readability. 9. Edel involved himself closely in the design of both his biography of Henry James and his edition of James’s letters. His main concern was line length and how it would affect “reader-comfort, which I hold a paramount necessity given the character of the text . . . . And then I think the footnotes are too large and intrusive. Many people simply don’t read them. I would like small footnotes; you save space, and the footnote readers are accustomed to smallness . . . . I am afraid that you are saddled with a very meddlesome editor: but I long ago discovered that authors and editors should be vocal about the clothing their children will wear. I have seen such bad taste and so much ‘house production’

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editing the complete letters of henry james

10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

palgrave advances in henry james studies as to rob the text of all distinction. I even succeeded in making Lippincott do a special job on the five-volumes of my life of HJ—and I think they are handsome volumes” (Letter to E. T. Wilcox). See Nadel (“Visual Culture” 90, 102, 105; “Henry James, Alvin Langdon Coburn”), James (“Letter to Robert Herrick,” Henry James Letters 4: 201; Dearly Beloved Friends 25). Hunter was the youngest child of James’s first cousin, Elly Temple, Minnie Temple’s younger sister. Longfellow’s journal entries of 5, 6 May 1871 and 15 January 1872, and his 26 June 1871 letter to William Ralston and 21 January 1872 letter to James T. Fields (Letters 5: 433, 496) mention Turgenev. Other editions, lacking a more complete range of letters, for instance, include the following dating errors. James’s letter dated only “Tuesday” to William Dean Howells written from 36 Irving Place, New York City, where James only lived in the spring and early summer of 1875 (which we now know thanks to Steven H. Jobe and Susan E. Gunter’s A Calendar of the Letters of Henry James), is assigned a date in Letters, Fictions, Lives: Henry James and William Dean Howells of [3 January 1882] (Anesko, Letters 219–20). The dating error leads to a transcription error, with “the notice of T. S. in the Atlantic,” referring to Transatlantic Sketches, being given as “the notice of T. P. in the Atlantic,” referring to The Portrait of a Lady (219). James’s charming undated letter to Lilla Cabot (future wife of his close friend, Thomas Sergeant Perry) is dated “[May 1865?]” in Henry James: A Life in Letters (Horne, ed. 6–7). However, James wrote the letter while Cabot was visiting her aunt, Anna Lowell, who was the Jameses’ next-door neighbor on Quincy Street in Cambridge, and while Cabot’s second and third oldest brothers were attending Harvard, which not only means James would have written the letter after the Jameses moved to Quincy Street at the end of 1866 but in fact wrote it in 1870 or 1871, while her brothers were at Harvard and James was not in Europe. Tanselle does follow Greg/Bowers in his recognition of the importance of the editor’s “critical intelligence and fund of historical detail” (“Editing” 44) as fundamental in the production of a text that constitutes “an advance in knowledge over the mere existence of the document itself (“Editing” 44). Skrupskelis and Berkeley also list the deletion of “Henry” and insertion of “an insane” in the relatively comprehensive list of all such changes they provide in the textual apparatus at the end of their volume (1: 429).

works cited Anesko, Michael. “‘God Knows They Are Impossible’: James’s Letters and Their Editors.” Henry James Review 18 (1997): 140–8. ——. Ed. Letters, Fictions, Lives: Henry James and William Dean Howells. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Benson, E. F. Ed. Henry James: Letters to A. C. Benson and Auguste Monod. New York: Scribner’s, 1930. Berry, Walter. Ed. Letters of Henry James to Walter Berry. Paris: Black Sun, 1928. Bowers, Fredson. “Greg’s ‘Rationale of Copy-Text’ Revisited.” Studies in Bibliography 31 (1978): 90–161.

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——. “Transcription of Manuscripts: The Record of Variants.” Studies in Bibliography 29 (1976): 212–64. Demoor, Marysa, and Monty Chisholm. Eds. “Bravest of women and finest of friends”: Henry James’s Letters to Lucy Clifford. English Literary Studies Monograph Series 80. Victoria: Victoria UP, 1999. Edel, Leon. Letter to Mrs. E. T. Wilcox. 7 October 1972. Edel Archive. McLennan Library, McGill University. Montreal. ——. Letter to James Tamulis. 15 August 1979. Private Collection of James Tamulis. ——. Ed. Henry James Letters. 4 vols. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1974–84. ——, and Gordon N. Ray. Eds. Henry James and H. G. Wells. London: Hart-Davis, 1959. Eggert, Paul. “Document and Text: The ‘Life’ of the Literary Work and the Capacities of Editing.” Text 7 (1994): 1–24. Gale, Robert L. Review of Henry James Letters. Vol. 1, 1843–1875. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 30 (1975): 221–4. Greg, W. W. “The Rationale of Copy-Text.” Studies in Bibliography 3 (1950–51): 19–36. Greetham, D. C. Theories of the Text. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. Gunter, Susan E. A Vocation for Jameses: Becoming Alice Howe Gibbens James. Forthcoming. ——. Ed. Dear Munificent Friends: Henry James’s Letters to Four Women. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 1999. ——. and Steven H. Jobe. Eds. Dearly Beloved Friends: Henry James’s Letters to Younger Men. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 2001. Harlow, Virginia. Thomas Sergeant Perry: And Letters to Perry From William, Henry, and Garth Wilkinson James. Durham: Duke UP, 1950. Hasler, Jorg. Switzerland in the Life and Work of Henry James, The Clare Benedict Collection of Letters from Henry James. Cooper Monographs on English and American Language and Literature 10. Berne: Francke, 1966. Hellman, Geoffrey T. “Chairman of the Board.” New Yorker 13 March 1971: 43–86. Hillebrand, Karl. Frankreich und die Franzosen in der zweiten häfte der XIX Jahrhunderts. Berlin: Oppenheim, 1873. Hirst, Robert H. “Guide to Editorial Practice.” Mark Twain’s Letters, Vol. 3: 1869. Eds. Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, and Dahlia Armon. Berkeley: California UP, 1992: 551–78. Horne, Philip. “The Editing of Henry James’s Letters.” Cambridge Quarterly 15 (1986): 126–41. ——. Ed. Henry James: A Life in Letters. London: Allen Lane, 1999. ——. “Pardon My Delay”: Letters from Henry James to Bruce Richmond. Tunbridge Wells: Foundling, 1994. Hurlebusch, Klaus. “Understanding the Author’s Compositional Method: Prolegomenon to a Hermeneutics of Genetic Writing.” Text 13 (2000): 55–101. James, Henry. “The Art of Fiction.” Partial Portraits. London: Macmillan, 1888: 375–408. ——. Dearly Beloved Friends: Henry James’s Letters to Younger Men. Ed. Susan E. Gunter and Steven H. Jobe. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 2001.

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——. Henry James Letters. Ed. Leon Edel. 4 vols. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1974–84. ——. Letter to Alexander R. James. 13 October 1908. Special Collections, Creighton University Library. Omaha. ——. Letter to Alexander R. James. 18 October 1908. Special Collections, Creighton University Library. Omaha. ——. Letter to Alice James. 31 August 1869. bMS Am 1094 (1558). Houghton Library, Harvard University. Cambridge. ——. Letter to Edmund Gosse. 25 June 1894. Berg Collection of English and American Literature. New York Public Library. ——. Letter to Elizabeth Boott. 10 December [1873]. bMS Am 1094 (510). Houghton Library, Harvard University. Cambridge. ——. Letter to Elizabeth Boott. 11 February [1876]. bMS Am 1094 (524). Houghton Library, Harvard University. Cambridge. ——. Letters to Francis Parkman. 8 August [1880], 18 July [1881], 24 August [1884]. Parkman Papers. Massachusetts Historical Society. Boston. ——. Letter to George Grenville Hunter. 21 March 1897. Typed copy, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Washington. ——. Letter to Lilla Cabot. [late May 1870 or 1871]. Colby College Library. Waterville. ——. Letter to Mary Walsh James. 13, 16, [17] October [1869]. bMS Am 1094 (1764). Houghton Library, Harvard University. Cambridge. ——. Letter to Mary Walsh James. [27 May 1873]. bMS Am 1094 (1807). Houghton Library, Harvard University. Cambridge. ——. Letter to Mary Walsh James and Henry James, Sr. 22 June [1873]. bMS Am 1094 (1808). Houghton Library, Harvard University. Cambridge. ——. Letter to Robert Herrick. 14 July 1905. Box I, folder 16, Robert Herrick Papers. University of Chicago Library. ——. Letter to Thomas Sargeant Perry. 18 April 1864. Microfilm 215–01–1 (T. S. Perry Collection: Letters, 1859–1882 May 22). Duke University. Durham. ——. Letter to Thomas Sargeant Perry. 27 March [1868]. Colby College Library. Waterville. ——. Letter to Lady Wolseley. No date. Private Collection of James Tamulis. ——. Letter to William Dean Howells. 22 June [1873]. bMS Am 1784 (253), folder 1. Houghton Library, Harvard University. Cambridge. ——. Letter to William Dean Howells. Tuesday [June 1875]. bMS Am 1784 (253), folder 2. Houghton Library, Harvard University. Cambridge. ——. Letter to William James. 3 May [1874]. bMS Am 1094 (1960). Houghton Library, Harvard University. Cambridge. ——. Letter to William James. 8 January 1873. bMS Am 1094 (1949). Houghton Library, Harvard University. Cambridge. ——. Letter to William James. 18 June 1873. bMS Am 1094 (1953). Houghton Library, Harvard University. Cambridge. ——. Letter to William James. 27, 28 December 1869, 1 January 1870. bMS Am 1094 (1941). Houghton Library, Harvard University. Cambridge. ——. “A Most Unholy Trade”: Being Letters on the Drama by Henry James. N. p., 1923.

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——. “Review of Frühlingsfluthen, Ein König Lear des Dorfes, Zwei Novellen.” Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition. New York: Library of America, 1984: 968–99. ——. Selected Letters of Henry James to Edmund Gosse, 1882–1915. Ed. Rayburn Moore. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1988. James, William. The Correspondence of William James: William and Henry. Ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley. 12 vols. Charlottesville: Virginia UP, 1992–2004. Jobe, Steven H., and Susan E. Gunter. A Calendar of the Letters of Henry James and A Biographical Register of Henry James’s Correspondents. 1999. Nebraska UP. University of Nebraska, Lincoln. 25 August 2004. . Kaplan, Fred. Henry James: The Imagination of Genius. New York: Morrow, 1992. Kline, Mary-Jo. A Guide to Documentary Editing. 2nd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998. Le Bris, Michel. Ed. Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson: Une Amitié Littéraire. Correspondances et Textes. Trans. Malika Durif. Lagrasse: Verdier, 1987. Longfellow, Ralph Waldo. Journal for 1870–73. MS Am 1340 (213). Houghton Library, Harvard University. Cambridge. ——. The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Ed. Andrew R. Hilen. 6 vols. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1967–82. Lubbock, Percy. Ed. The Letters of Henry James. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1920. Meyer, Conrad Ferdinand. Gedichte: Bericht des Herausgebers, Apparat zu den Abteilungen I und II. Vol. II. Sämtiliche Werke, Historical-Critical Edition. Ed. Hans Zeller and Alfred Zäch. Bern: Benteli, 1964. Monteiro, George. Ed. The Correspondence of Henry James and Henry Adams, 1877–1914. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1992. ——. Ed. Henry James and John Hay: The Record of a Friendship. Providence: Brown UP, 1965. Moore, Rayburn S. “The Epistolary James.” Sewanee Review 83 (1975): 703–7. ——. Ed. The Correspondence of Henry James and the House of Macmillan, 1877–1914. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1993. ——. Ed. Selected Letters of Henry James to Edmund Gosse, 1882–1915. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1988. Mumford, Lewis. “Emerson Behind Barbed Wire.” New York Review of Books 18 January 1968: 3–5. Nadel, Ira B. “Henry James, Alvin Langdon Coburn, and the New York Edition: A Chronology.” Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship. Ed. David McWhirter. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995: 274–7. ——. “Visual Culture: The Photo Frontispieces to the New York Edition.” Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship. Ed. David McWhirter. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995: 90–108. Norton, Charles Eliot. Letters of Charles Eliot Norton. Ed. Sara Norton and M. A. DeWolfe Howe. 2 vols. Boston: Houghton, 1913. Phelps, C. Dierdre. “The Edition as Art Form in Textual and Interpretive Criticism.” Text 7 (1994): 61–75. Powers, Lyall H. Ed. Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters, 1900–1915. New York: Scribner’s, 1990. Richards, Bernard. “Amateurism.” Essays in Criticism 31 (1981): 61–8.

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editing the complete letters of henry james

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Robins, Elizabeth. Ed. Theatre and Friendship: Some Henry James Letters. New York: Putnam’s, 1932. Shillingsburg, Peter. “Editing Determinate Material Texts.” Text 12 (1999): 59–71. Skrupskelis, Ignas K., and Elizabeth M. Berkeley. Eds. The Correspondence of William James. 12 vols. Charlottesville: Virginia UP, 1992–2004. Smith, Janet Adam. Ed. Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson: A Record of Friendship and Criticism. London: Hart-Davis, 1948. Tanselle, G. Thomas. “The Editing of Historical Documents.” Studies in Bibliography 31 (1978): 1–56. ——. “Some Principles for Editorial Apparatus.” Studies in Bibliography 25 (1972): 41–88. ——. “The Editorial Problem of Final Intention.” Studies in Bibliography 29 (1976): 167–211. ——. “Recent Editorial Discussion and the Central Questions of Editing.” Studies in Bibliography 34 (1981): 23–65. Turgenev, Ivan. Nouvelles Moscovites. Paris: Hetzel, 1869. Walker, Pierre A. “Leon Edel and the ‘Policing’ of the Henry James Letters.” Henry James Review 21 (2000): 279–89. ——, and Greg W. Zacharias. “James’s Hand and Gosse’s Tail: Henry James’s Letters and the Status of Evidence.” Henry James Review 19 (1998): 72–9. Zacharias, Greg W. “Materiality, Reproduction, Lost Meaning, and Henry James’s Letters.” Henry James Review 21 (2000): 222–33. Zorzi, Rosella Mamoli. Ed. Amato ragazzo: Lettere a Hendrik C. Andersen 1899–1915. Elena di Majo, postface. Bilingual edition. Venice: Marsilio, 2000. Reissued in English only, Beloved Boy: Letters to Hendrik C. Andersen, 1899–1915. Millicent Bell, introd. Charlottesville: Virginia UP, 2004.

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collin meissner The “career of art” has again and again been deprecated and denounced, on the lips of anxiety and authority, as a departure from the career of business, of industry, and respectability, the so called regular life . . . (Henry James, Notes of a Son and Brother, 1914)

To the good American many subjects are sacred . . . , business is sacred. (George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States, 1920)

In that furrow, your personality becomes a mere selling device. Friendships become contacts. The urge to improve deteriorates to mere acquisitiveness. Money becomes the measure of accomplishment . . . The language of commerce obliterates the vocabulary of morality. The imagination becomes professionalized . . . (David Brooks, On Paradise Drive, 2004)

In an essay he wrote for the Nation in 1878, shortly after completing his novel The American, Henry James offered the following answer to what had become a pressing question about the position of Americans abroad: “Americans in Europe are outsiders . . . . We are not only out of the European circle politically and geographically; we are out of it socially, and for excellent reasons.” He then goes on to say Americans “are the only great people of the civilized world that is a pure democracy, and we are the only great people that is exclusively commercial” (“Americans Abroad” 787). In offering his insights by way of the Nation, James threw himself into a public conversation about the American political and mercantile identity, a theme which underlies his writings from beginning to the end of his career. James’s remark was not casual, and the debate 263

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was national, public, and often intense, and carried on amidst a culture which was undergoing rapid change. “In the decades following the Civil War,” William Leach has pointed out in Land of Desire, his study of consumer capitalism, “American capitalism began to produce a distinct culture, unconnected to traditional family or community values, to religion in any conventional sense, or to political democracy. It was a secular business and market-orientated culture, with the exchange and circulation of money and goods at the foundation of its aesthetic life and its moral sensibility” (3). Years later, after three decades of living abroad, James returned again to this question of what exactly does it mean to be American, especially in terms of politics, culture, and money. Only this time around he approached the question as an outsider looking at America from within, a position which had become somewhat problematic for a James who had excited some degree of resentment among Americans at large and had been branded publically by Theodore Roosevelt as an “undersized man of letters” so “Europeanized” that he had indeed become “nothing at all” (“True Americanism” 171). James’s rebuttal, in part, came in the form of a scathing cultural critique published as The American Scene in 1907. American culture, in his opinion, was governed by a postulate of gain. Democracy, he accuses, had become conflated with greed, “consecrated by . . . the commercial at any cost,” and the citizenry caught up in “the wash of gold.” James concluded that not only had success but identity itself had become understood, in America, exclusively in terms of “active pecuniary gain” (AS 236).1 What James articulated as a symbiotic relationship between democracy and commercialism in his 1878 reflections had given way to something which far exceeded even a parasitism: the commercial had so completely overtaken the democratic that James felt he was no longer looking at the same nation, or at the least no longer understood the nation he was looking at. When one bookends James’s reflections from his Nation piece and his cultural lament in The American Scene the picture of a massive embezzlement emerges. For James, the promise of America had given way to a mercantilism in which the very notions of “freedom” and “democracy,” of “individual” and “community,” really no longer fit the landscape of fact.2 Leaving aside any other considerations about the value of James, his attention to the manipulative dynamics of material pursuit and personal relations, and the consequences of such dynamics on individual freedom, is a strong argument for the continuing study of his work. Nothing could be simpler to answer than the question of what role “money” plays in James’s fiction: an all-embracing one; and the purpose

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of this essay is to examine aspects of this role within the context of critical approaches to money, art, and commerce in his work. Critics have long noted James’s seemingly ubiquitous attention to money’s manipulative force. Viewpoints vary from one extreme to the other: for some, James was a genteel aesthete who lived off an inheritance and as a result understood nothing of the real material challenges of modern life; for others, his fixation with men of business such as Christopher Newman and Adam Verver betrays a latent interest in getting into the corporate game, but also a fear of its intensity and immediacy.3 Whatever the view, there is a general consensus summed up by Jan Dietrichson that James continually brings to light what money can mean in human lives, demonstrating how the presence of it is needed to attain what seemed to him life’s real goal, the enlargement of consciousness and enrichment of the imagination, while, if human selfishness and predatory greed come into play, the possession of it may become an insuperable obstacle in the path of the idealistic person seeking to reach this goal. (73) Alasdair MacIntyre, speaking largely of James’s late works, has remarked that within his fiction “James is concerned with rich aesthetes whose interest is to fend off the kind of boredom that is so characteristic of modern leisure by contriving behaviour in others that will be responsive to their wishes, that will feed their sated appetites” (24). If MacIntyre strays a little, Peggy McCormack is nearer the mark when she claims that “all Jamesian fictions operate as exchange economies,” and that “verisimilitude” is “defined” there “by the almighty dollar” which relentlessly “determines the necessities and consequences of character’s lives” (13, 32). Isabel Archer comes to mind, but so do most of James’s major characters. In a convincing essay on “The Consuming Vision of Henry James,” Jean-Christophe Agnew makes a compelling argument linking James’s aesthetic to the emerging dominance of consumer culture in the United States. Agnew shows convincingly how James’s “‘consuming vision’ as such appears first as an ambiguous but often sinister theme in his early work, reemerges as a disruptive force within the writing of his middle years, only to end as the constitutive power of his last complete novel” (84). According to Agnew, one can trace a trajectory through James’s fiction, a line which dramatizes and critiques the rise and embedding of consumerism in American culture. James’s prose, Agnew claims, reveals in its density the author’s “complicity in the commodity vision” which defines the work of his later years. In

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other words, what Agnew suggests is that the James who begins as a critic or analyst of (American) consumer culture becomes someone who completely internalizes the dynamics of that culture and deploys them thematically, structurally, and aesthetically in his own fiction. Using The Golden Bowl as an example of James’s structural use of the “commodity vision,” Agnew draws the following conclusion: The distinctive density and detachment of The Golden Bowl reveal the extent of James’s immersion in the novel’s projected commodity world. The density is itself the outcome of a consuming vision’s merciless power to detach not only itself, but its objects: alienating them quite literally from their conventional associations and context and accumulating them as resources, as capital. The market metaphors that so infuse the later writings are more than mere conceits or occasional tropes. They define the very medium—the fluid medium or solvent—in which the characters and their relations dissolve. For it is not just that the characters feel themselves “invested with attributes.” The reader is made to feel the same sensation by means of a language that transforms active verbs into passive participles and participles, in turn, into nouns. In place of human actors engaging one another in a material environment, James substitutes their properties or characteristics—fully materialized, fully animated, and fully prepared to take on a life of their own. (97) Market metaphors also serve as the “the fluid medium or solvent” of James’s autobiographical recollections. And in these texts, “money,” its sheer presentness in America, surfaces again and again as one of the principal measures by which James interprets his personal and creative life (Agnew 97).4 Looking about him as a young man, James could not but notice how the “cardinal features of [American] culture were acquisition and consumption as the means of achieving happiness,” that “money value [was] the predominant measure of all value in society” (Leach 3). The over-determining force of this theme is also evident in his autobiographical writings.5 Even when he looks back with fondness at childhood experiences he feels compelled to articulate them in terms of money—of making, of acquiring, of spending money. “The fruit of golden youth is all and always golden,” James reminisces in his Notes of a Son and Brother, “it touches to gold what it gathers.” The process of recollection becomes very much a process of accounting, of going back over a ledger of experiences which James then tries to bring to balance as a sum total, including accumulated interests, that equal “Henry James”: “Do I speak

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of it [my experiences] as a thumping sum but to show it in the small change, the handful of separate copper and silver coin, the scattered occasions reduced to their individual cash value, that, spread upon the table as a treasure of reminiscence, might excite derision?” (Autobiography 482). Well, in a sense, yes. As a boy, as a man, as an aspiring artist, and as the Master, James felt the sting of money’s power and understood its coercive force for the individual and for the society as a whole. I have suggested the above remark can be read as veiled self-deprecation on James’s part, but it might more directly serve as James’s own description of his New York Edition project.6 By any measure of his practical lived experience as an artist, James felt distinctly marginalized from his culture as much by natural disposition on the one hand (as critics have long agreed), but forced also, on the other, into the muted and sidelined position of observer by a culture which for the most part wanted nothing to do with any kind of examination that did not result in quick material gain. One of the most compelling readings of how James negotiated the tensions between identity and desire and the pressure to conform in American culture is made by Eric Haralson in his Henry James and Queer Modernity. For James, Haralson explains, the struggle to articulate modern manhood—apart from the normative script of a fixed national identity, a vulgarizing, homogenizing career in business and commerce, a middle-class philistinism and puritanical asceticism in the reception of beauty, and crucially, a mature life of heterosexual performance as suitor, spouse, physical partner, and paterfamilias—resulted in his valorizing the character of the disaffiliated aesthete. (3) James’s autobiographical writings return time and again to his own sense of the uphill battle he was forced to wage in order to find a sense of place or belonging in America—a battle he eventually abandoned, at least geographically. “I remember well,” he writes in his Notes of a Son and Brother, “how when we were all young together we had, under pressure of the American ideal in that matter [being in business], then so rigid, felt it tasteless and even humiliating that the head of our little family was not in business.” Yet James felt little choice in the matter: What we were to do instead was just to be something, something unconnected with specific doing, something free and uncommitted, something finer in short than being that, whatever it was, might consist of. The ‘career of art’ has again and again been deprecated

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In her “Men, Women, and the American Way,” Martha Banta argues that “[g]rowing up in the 1840s and 1850s, James learned early that being demonstrably ‘masculine’ in America was mainly associated with the making of money” (23). As Banta notes, Theodore Roosevelt’s “True Americanism” address offers a good sense of the kind of public pressure James generally felt growing up as a young man, and felt more pointedly as a practicing artist who dared to criticize his country’s pecuniary zeal.7 “The man who becomes Europeanized,” Roosevelt asserts, of James particularly, the man who loses his power of doing good work on this side of the water, and who loses his love for his native land, is not a traitor; but he is a silly and undesirable citizen . . . Nothing will more quickly or more surely disqualify a man from doing good work in the world than the acquirement of that flaccid habit of mind which its possessors style cosmopolitanism . . . Thus it is with the undersized man of letters who flees his country because he, with his delicate, effeminate sensitiveness, finds the conditions of life on this side of the water crude and raw; in other words, because he finds that he cannot play a man’s part among men, and so goes where he will be sheltered from the winds that harden stouter souls. This emigrée may write graceful and pretty verses, essays, novels; but he will never do work to compare with that of his brother, who is strong enough to stand on his own feet, and do his work as an American.8 (169) Strikingly not alone in this kind of critique, Roosevelt was joined in his attack against Henry James by as unlikely an ally as James’s brother William. In The Principles of Psychology (1890), sounding resolutely like Roosevelt, William speaks of the “dreamer,” and “sentimentalist,” two terms he had applied to Henry, as being someone without practical value: “There is no more contemptible type of character,” he writes, “than the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly concrete deed” (129). While the facile ridicule of James in Roosevelt’s speech deserves to some extent the charity of our silence, William’s comments raise serious questions about the obstacles James had to overcome. And whatever

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and denounced, on the lips of anxiety and authority, as a departure from the career of business, of industry, and respectability, the so called regular life. (Autobiography 268)

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impediments James felt as a young man, when he made his return visit to America in 1904, the commercial or mercantile atmosphere of his country had undergone a monumental change, intensifying yet further. James responded, not as a “sentimentalist and dreamer” but as social critic and incisive cultural intellectual in The American Scene. The end of James’s last completed work of fiction, the short story “A Round of Visits” (1910), is a good example of the shape James’s critique of mercantile culture took and the urgency of his attention. Here, James gives voice not just to the dividend of horrors America’s commercial culture was producing, but to the ultimate human consequences paid when business pursuits become the only measure of worth. As the story accelerates towards its denouement, the protagonist Mark Monteith unexpectedly comes to understand the true cost of business in the moments leading up to his friend’s suicide. Monteith has been making the rounds, so to speak, not so much searching for answers to the situation of his plundered “fortune” but in search of a sympathetic ear, a human being with whom he can share his burden. Much to his frustration, the two women to whom he turns for solace offer nothing but jaded laughter at the banality of it all. “Manners,” he finds, were absent, “[t]hey didn’t matter there—nobody’s did” (902). Monteith’s failures to connect leave him bewildered. He has been psychologically broken, as Richard Lyons has summed up in an incisive account of the story, through “the loss of a sense of a human community occasioned by the betrayal of his hopes for sympathy in his visits to his friends” (206). But this is not quite right, or not quite as severe an insight as James intends. The loss of community, or the sense of being exiled from or an exile within a community, is disconcerting, even destabilizing for Monteith, and James wants his readers to feel a sense of shame on his behalf. However, more than the sense of loss and betrayal, James foregrounds the virtual incapacity for human connection, as though what used to make human beings acknowledge, recognize, and respond to needs in others has been erased from the collective consciousness. This distinction between Monteith’s sense of loss and the deeper sociological causes is a crucial one. James’s oeuvre is shot through with solipsistic, even cannibalistic characters, individuals who draw their energy from others but offer little in return. Anyone familiar with The Portrait of a Lady would quickly think of Gilbert Osmond as one of the most recognizable of characters of this type. Indeed, one could say that this is how James characterizes Europe. But in “A Round of Visits,” Mrs. Folliot and her circle have become something less than human not because they do not care, but because they cannot. And why they cannot has, in James’s dismayed assessment, everything to do with the coercive

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effects of business interests in every aspect of an American culture which he lamented had been willingly “consecrated by . . . the commercial at any cost” (AS 77). In his introduction to a recent collection of The New York Stories of Henry James, Colm Tóibín has commented that “James’s writings about New York disclose, more than anything, an anger quite unlike any other anger in James, at what has been lost to him, what has been done, in the name of commerce and material progress, to a place he once knew” (x). It seems to me that any assessment of the roles of money in James’s fiction, or of how his fiction registers the effects of American culture’s excessive devotion to mercantilism or consumerism must take into greater account the New York stories James composed following his 1904 visit to the United States. From The American Scene on, one can argue as Ross Posnock has, that James’s critique of American mercantile culture foregrounds his commitment to being an agent of change for whom “civic and aesthetic responsibility are deeply entwined” characteristics of patriotic duty (Posnock 255). To this extent, the future of this kind of critical examination should follow the path already opened by several recent works. Ross Posnock’s Trial of Curiosity is a good start. Posnock situates James in a broad cultural and cross-disciplinary arena and reveals a writer who never strayed from civic and cultural analysis. In a compelling reading of The American Scene, Posnock argues that James’s “return to America became an occasion to conduct an empirical inquiry into what it meant to be a responsible citizen” (254). Other significant examinations of Henry James in this kind of paradigm include Richard Salmon’s Henry James and the Culture of Publicity, Leland Person’s Henry James and the Suspense of Maculinity, Eric Haralson’s Henry James and Queer Modernity, Robert Pippin’s Henry James and Modern Moral Life, and Peter Rawlings’s Henry James and the Abuse of the Past. Salmon, for instance, directs James criticism into fertile territory when he shows why “The American Scene deserves to be read not as a nostalgic lament for the disappearance of ‘privacy’ within the environment of urban modernity, but as a sustained and serious engagement with the characteristic condition of democratic public life” (183). Speaking of the later fiction, primarily of The Ambassadors, Salmon reaches a conclusion which could serve as a starting-point for an examination of almost all of James’s late stories. In these works, Salmon argues, “it is already possible to witness the process by which the world of advertising is offered to consciousness as the horizon of the new social totality.” He then goes on to say that the “form of the commodity spectacle is inscribed both within the projected world of James’s fiction and in the projection itself, saturating even the spaces from which it is signally excluded” (177).

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Approaching this issue of democratic life and “the new social totality” from the sense of the individual subject’s response to changing cultural pressures, Robert Pippin offers this insight: “Inside the social world James creates,” he argued, “one has no other choice but to try to make sense of what one is doing. A life plan cannot . . . have the point, implications, and claims on one that it does, just by being the kind of life it is, by playing a role within a fixed social order” (172). Nowhere is this process more evident than in the final New York stories, demanding as they do a rigorous analysis of James which moves beyond aesthetic readings. These texts offer a powerful critique of commercial America; so narrative distance in James’s late work cannot be equated with political or cultural indifference, or with Olympian detachment. In “A Round of Visits,” for example, Mrs. Folliot, Mrs. Ash, and Phil Bloodgood, among others, join a cast of characters from James’s late fiction who collectively voice what James referred to as the new “American postulate,” that of Active pecuniary gain only—that of one’s making the condition so triumphantly pay that the prices, the manners, the other inconveniences, take their place as a friction it is comparatively easy to salve, wounds directly treatable with the wash of gold. What prevails, what sets the tune, is the American scale of gain, more magnificent than any other, and the fact that the whole assumption, the whole theory of life, is that of the individual’s participation in it, that of his being more or less punctually and more or less effectually “squared.” To make so much money that you won’t, that you don’t “mind,” don’t mind anything—that is absolutely, I think, the main American formula. (AS 236–7) James’s last works take issue with this postulate of commerce out of an urgent concern that commerce’s invisible hand was no longer just at work behind the scenes, but had a firm grip (to pursue a lurid metaphor) around America’s throat. A resulting consequence, James believed, was that America was suffering from an absence of community, or, rather, that America had somehow generated a culture which was characterized by the incapacity of human beings to connect in any but the most banal or most brutal of ways. As an artist, James understood the need to bring these insights to his audience’s attention. “A Round of Visits,” however, pushes the audience even further, holding before it an inescapable recognition of its own complicity with the forces which have both aborted the notion of human community and effectively pulled the trigger of the

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gun which sends the bullet through Newton Winch’s head. For James, Newton Winch’s suicide is nothing less than murder. For James, that murder was inevitable. For James, that murder could not be erased by “the wash of gold.” As I suggested at the outset of this essay, upon returning to America in 1904 James was shocked at the impression of “an entire nation squandering a tremendous opportunity by cashing in its potential for the immediacy of gain” (“What Ghosts” 243).9 In Edel’s words, James’s return to America, particularly to New York, was brutalizing. Hoping to find a culture actualizing the promise he saw apparent as a young man, he was confronted instead by a way of life “founded on violence, plunder, loot, commerce,” and a country whose “monuments were built neither for beauty, nor for glory, but for obsolescence” (324). From this impression, James concluded that America had mortgaged the opportunity to develop a “living cultural heritage” for “the figure on a cheque presented in demand for cash,” to borrow from another late story, “The Jolly Corner” (711). To this extent America had become the embodiment of what James’s contemporary Georg Simmel called a money-culture, a culture in which the divide between the objective and subjective sides of an individual is complete and where communities are governed solely by the discourse of capital, and human relations are reduced to a cash-nexus exchange. Simmel’s analysis of money and its effects on people and culture offers a particularly valuable way of looking at how James examined the negative effects of money and commercialism in his fiction. Throughout The Philosophy of Money, Simmel examines the physical and psychological consequences the individual experiences in a capitalist society, what he calls “the effect of the money economy on the human inner world” (70–1). This includes the alienation of self from others, a constantly expanding distance between means and ends, which inevitably is measured by a concentration on the self and its means at the expense of the other and community—distant ends which come to be understood as at best secondary and more often irrelevant to the individual’s ambitions. In commenting on Simmel’s analysis, and in language easily applicable to James’s own examination of the consequences for the individual and community of the brash capitalism he witnessed during his stay, Jerry Muller has summed up Simmel’s position as follows: “People in such an economy have a tendency to get caught up in the pursuit of means, in the acquisition of money and the perfection of techniques. While devoting themselves to accumulation and the perfection of techniques, they tend to lose sight of ultimate purposes” (251). For both James and

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Simmel then, the immediate returns of a money-culture are registered in the violent foregrounding of apersonal and amoral modes of being. Money has been moved away from its role at the center of commerce and, perhaps, civic interaction, and become an end itself. The inevitable sterility of this kind of culture, at least from the point of view of Jamesian aesthetics, cannot but gainsay even the most modest appeals for an attention to the civilizing value of art and the positive effects these qualities might have on the individual human being. In words which could be drawn from the liner notes to a volume containing James’s late New York stories, Simmel explains how “[m]oney has provided us with the sole possibility for uniting people while excluding everything personal and specific” from life itself (345). One of the most interesting recent studies examining the role of money in James is Robert Pippin’s Henry James and Modern Moral Life. It argues that the struggle for personal ownership or independence, or even individual determination, is the central thesis of James’s work. For Pippin, everything in James comes down to the strangely inter-animating relationship between freedom and money, with “freedom” being almost fully dependent on money. As Pippin explains, if the “minimal or negative condition of liberty is the power to avoid (relatively) subjection to the will of others, then what makes that possible in this society is capital. But that answer is also rather drastically hedged, since James realizes that the conditions for achieving such a necessary starting point distort and shadow what it makes possible” (174). Now to some extent this is well-traveled critical ground and does not, as Pippin admits “amount to a profound answer on James’s part” (175). But it is only where James begins. It is true, Pippin argues, “that money makes possible what James is really interested in, and that James often rushes quickly to that topic: the cultivation of a kind of understanding, imagination, taste, awareness, felt life, that amounts to the fullest achievement of freedom and so the achievement of what amounts to the modern highest good.” However, the “freedom at issue does not involve the exercise of will, the absence of constraints, or the satisfactions of interests and desires” which the mere acquisition of capital can easily assuage. Rather, Pippin argues, the kind of freedom Strether achieves in The Ambassadors is the target for which James aims. “Strether’s liberation,” Pippin suggests, “involves an expanse of understanding, and so, finally in his life, a greater capacity both to take account of others better, and just thereby, to be himself” (175). For James then it was increasingly impossible to speak of freedom when freedom itself had been so completely sold and the individual “more or less effectually ‘squared’ in the deal.” Once again Simmel’s more direct

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explanation is helpful in coming to an understanding of James’s position. Pure exchange economies, which is what James believed America had become, rely, according to Simmel, exclusively on money to “tie being and owning together,” since “ownership” provides an “opportunity for the Ego to find its expression in objects.” Looking at the modern metropolis as a specific type of culture, Simmel comes to a conclusion which is startling in its similarity to James’s own reactions to New York, particularly what he came to refer to as the anonymity and consumerism of the “hotel world.” A comparison between the two underscores how fully James was aware of, and commented directly upon, the alienating atmosphere of American mercantile culture. James’s description of the hotel world in The American Scene is duplicated and becomes, “the very medium or solvent,” to borrow from Agnew’s comments on The Golden Bowl, “in which the characters and their relations dissolve” in “A Round of Visits.” The “meaning and value of the distinctions between things, and therewith of the things themselves, are experienced as meaningless,” Simmel argues. “They appear . . . in a homogeneous, flat and gray color with no one of them worthy of being preferred to another. This psychic mood is the correct subjective reflection of a complete money economy to the extent that money takes the place of all the manifoldness of things and expresses all qualitative distinctions between them in the distinction of ‘how much.’” To the extent that money, with its colorlessness and its indifferent quality, can become a common denominator of all values it becomes the frightful leveler—it hollows out the core of things, the peculiarities, their specific values and their uniqueness and incomparability in a way which is beyond repair. They all float with the same specific gravity in the constantly moving stream of money. They all rest on the same level and “are distinguished only by their amounts” (“Metropolis” 330). This is exactly how James describes Monteith’s reaction to the social scene in “The Pocahontas,” his “great gaudy” hotel: Everything, as he passed through the place, went on—all the offices of life, the whole bustle of the market, and withal, surprisingly, scarce less than that of the nursery and the playground; the whole sprawl in especial of the great gregarious fireside: it was a complete social scene in itself, on which types might figure and passion rage and plots thicken and dramas develop, without reference to any other sphere, or perhaps to anything at all outside. (“Round of Visits” 899). In such a context then, where everything is reduced to superficiality or spectacle and defined by a price tag, to speak of freedom, at least

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of the sort James had in mind, became immensely complicated. To turn to a well known example from James’s fiction, we can recall Isabel Archer’s apprehensions at the responsibilities conferred by her having unexpectedly inherited a large fortune. Freedom, as we have seen, is the one thing she never gains. In the case of “A Round of Visits,” when Monteith moves from person to person in search of an individual who might just acknowledge his pain, let alone extend to him the comforts of empathy, he comes up empty each time because “sympathy” and “empathy” require provisions for self-worth, civic responsibility, and subjective freedom which have been, as Simmel suggests, leveled and rendered meaningless in a money culture. This is what James lamented when he decried the American aim “[t]o make so much money that you won’t, that you don’t ‘mind,’ don’t mind anything” (AS 237). Stories such as “A Round of Visits,” the “The Jolly Corner,” or “Crapy Cornelia” become, then, the fictional embodiments, or the fictional twins of the impressions James documented in The American Scene. In fact, with these late stories the line between fact and fiction is so completely blurred that one would be hard pressed to say where the one ends and the other begins. Understood in terms of Jamesian aesthetics, or in terms reflecting James’s theory of art, the elision of difference between the “restless analyst” of The American Scene and the protagonists from the late New York stories elevates the living quality of James’s art just as it heightens and actualizes the intensity of his public horror at a nation corrupted through a devotion to crass materialism (AS 11). As Larzer Ziff has recently argued in his Return Passages, James turned an altogether different eye on America with The American Scene. He saw a country devoted “to the systematic elimination of whatever is not new rather than the nurturing of continuity, so that a sense of the past—of tradition, shared manners, inherited values—is ruthlessly obstructed.” As a result, America was, in James’s opinion, “less complete than ever” and had “made a shambles of those vestiges of its past needed to anchor a society in danger of being dashed into fragments” (268, 281). James brought that same vision to his fiction and presented characters like Spencer Brydon, White-Mason, and Mark Monteith who, like James, were aghast by the disturbing vision of an entire society “dancing,” to use James’s words, “all consciously, on the thin crust of a volcano” (AS 589). A consideration of money, or of the effects of mercantilism, in James’s fiction, needs to go beyond his canonical major phase works by focusing on the late New York stories and the urgent energy and bleak vision of his fourth phase writing in general.10 In this context, “A Round of Visits” makes a serious charge against its audience: Newton Winch’s suicide

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is, at one level, the reader’s act of murder. While American (consumer) culture itself is on trial in this story, so too are its individual participants. If Simmel is correct that a money-culture divests humanity of its essence, the need for personal struggle James continually advocates takes on even greater significance. In works like “A Round of Visits,” “The Jolly Corner,” and “Crapy Cornelia,” James returns again and again to the consequences for individuals who surrender the ownership of their lives by allowing money, or the pursuit of money, to become the sole measure of success. In remarking on James’s unfinished novel The Ivory Tower, Jan Dietrichson establishes a theme that extends to much of James’s fiction beyond 1904 or so. These works “reveal how money when misapplied, when made by a huge society the prime object to be pursued, is apt to make the individuals living in that society suffer in their personal lives as well as jeopardize the stability of the framework of accepted moral values without which no society can adequately function” (95). For James it was not so much that America had become a world in which aesthetic values or sympathies, or even recognitions, had been cut adrift, but that it had evolved into a place where the corrosive effects of mercantile culture had virtually extinguished the notion of “humanity” itself. James speaks directly of this dehumanizing process, or at least of how he sees American consumerism as producing distinctly other kinds of being, when he discusses the “drummers,” a kind of traveling sales agent he encounters on a train to Savannah. For James, drummers, by their very existence, challenged what he believed were generally accepted notions of humanity. What “specific process of any sort, was it possible to impute to them,” he wonders. “How, when people were like that, did any one trust any one enough to go on, or keep the peace with any one enough to survive” (AS 704).11 The tragic conclusion to “A Round of Visits” is James’s sharpened and final point. What Monteith discovers in a moment of horror-stricken recognition is how far beyond the stabilizing values of humanity and empathy American culture had drifted, and why: He inexpressibly understood, and nothing in life had ever been so strange and dreadful to him as his thus helping himself by a longer and straighter stretch, as it were, to the monstrous sense of his friend’s “education.” It had been, in its immeasurable action, the education of business, of which the fruits were all around them. Yet prodigious was the interest, for prodigious truly— it seemed to loom before Mark— must have been the system. (922)

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The consequence of that “immeasurable action” is measured by Newton Winch’s death. For James, Newton Winch’s moral integrity has been so destroyed by the effects of a culture devoted to commerce that his only option is to commit suicide. It is not without horror, certainly some irony, that James believed Newton Winch’s sole opportunity to rage against his situation and to wrest some measure of freedom lay in this self-extinction. James, though, is anything but silent here. He speaks volubly about the extent to which the conditions of freedom rest on an understanding that “freedom” itself, as Pippin eloquently states, “cannot be achieved alone, that the achievement of free subjectivity requires a certain sort of social relation among subjects, and that this relation of mutuality and reciprocity is highly sensitive to social arrangements” (172–3). Understanding of this sort, Pippin suggests, is understanding of a moral nature, and it depends on our willingness not only to open ourselves to others, but to accept the limitations of self-determination. While Winch’s suicide was hardly the answer James advocated, it was the conclusion he saw. In other words, while James depicts self-exposure as dangerous, he sees the absence of such exposure as even more perilous. When Monteith replies to the officer who remarks that he “might have prevented it [the suicide]” with “I really think I must practically have caused it,” he becomes a scapegoat figure who takes on the “sins” of his culture (923–4). But what the story also foregrounds is that in acting selflessly toward Winch—in feeling empathy for Phil Bloodgood’s predicament, in not getting mired by blaming others, and in distinctly not reducing human actions to quantifiable valuations and human beings to commodities—Monteith exerts positive human energy. Monteith’s exposure is projected as the priceless, or non-quantifiable reward for living communally. How one manages this degree of exposure in a world where all boundaries have dissolved and beliefs become undependable, and how one comes to terms with the consequences of personal judgment in a world where control over what constitutes either “personal” or “judgment” has been increasingly overwritten by the larger narrative of capital, is one of the controlling preoccupations of James’s final stories; hence their contemporary significance. Unfortunately, James attained neither the wide readership he hoped for nor the one he warranted, and the messages of the New York stories have gone largely unheeded. Even so, James remained committed to his belief in the “high and helpful, and, as it were, civic use of the imagination” through art (FW 1230). His final and unfinished work of fiction, the novel The Ivory Tower affords, even in its incomplete state, James’s most bleak

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and depressing image of a culture consumed by a lust for money. Here the deification of the banknote, with its motto “In God We Trust,” becomes absolutely self-referential—the god is the note itself. The text’s biblical overtones are unmistakable and absolutely secularized, and its narrative filled with some of the most unprincipled characters in James’s canon, most of whom are quite literally dying or ready to kill for their God. The dying Abel Gaw, for example, whose ravenous zeal for the physicality of money, its sheer presentness, eclipses even the most modest human connections; and he is described by his daughter as “perch[ed] like a ruffled hawk, motionless but for his single tremor, with his beak, which had pecked so many hearts out, visibly sharper than ever, yet only his talons nervous; not that he at last cared a straw, really, but that he was incapable of thought save in sublimities of arithmetic” (IT 6). In Gaw, the corrosive effect of capital is absolute. The individual has been desiccated, erased, eclipsed, rendered extinct. All that remains is the banknote, his daughter sagely explains: That’s what we mean . . . when we talk of [money]—for of what else but money do we ever talk? He’s dying, at any rate . . . of his having wished to have more to do with it on that sort of scale [twenty millions]. Having to do with it consists, you know, of the things you do for it— which are mostly very awful; and there are all kinds of consequences that they eventually have. You pay by these consequences for what you have done, and my father has been for a long time paying . . . . The effect has been to dry up his life . . . . There’s nothing at last left for him to pay with. (IT 141) As the last image from a canon of such remarkable range and breadth, this hollowed out and grimacing shell is truly terrifying. It foreshadows that sense of total cultural collapse which James was, at the end of his life, to see World War I as typifying: The war has used up words; they have weakened, they have deteriorated like motor car tires; they have, like millions of other things, been more overstrained and knocked about and voided of the happy semblance during the last six months than in all the long ages before, and we are now confronted with a depreciation of all our terms, or, otherwise speaking, with a loss of expression through increase of limpness, that may well make us wonder what ghosts will be left to walk. (144)

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1. In her “Men, Women, and the American Way” Martha Banta says the following: “As James assessed the ruinous effects of unleashed ‘pecuniary power’ that marred the face of every urban center he visited in 1904 and 1905, he concluded that money was lord and master in America; he was appalled by the stupidity by which it was made and the stupidity of how it was spent” (20). (Throughout, references to The American Scene will be abbreviated as AS.) 2. Leach notes how “after 1885, in the wake of the rapid industrializing of the country, the idea of democracy, like the idea of the new and the idea of paradise, began to change radically” (5). 3. Those who speak of James as the genteel aesthete include Brooks, Beard, Parrington, Geismar, and Habegger. James studies underwent a radical reorientation in terms of the author’s examination of cultural mores and his use of history, initiated in the main by John Carlos Rowe, whose book The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James (1984), has done more than perhaps any other study to focus attention on “the theoretical potential” of James (xii). Peter Rawling’s recent Henry James and the Abuse of the Past projects James as an author who held a “deep skepticism” not only “about the possibility, or desirability, of historical knowledge,” but one who reveals over the course of his career a “growing suspicion of discourse, whatever the object realm” (26). Other important studies of James in the broad spectrum I mention would include Armstrong, Posnock, Salmon, Haralson, and Pippin. Pippin’s Henry James and Modern Moral Life constructs a careful, comprehensive, and compelling argument for the moral consequences of modernism as they register themselves in the lived experiences of James’s characters. 4. Even the most casual glance at his personal correspondence, or at the biographies by Leon Edel and Fred Kaplan, makes apparent the constant ledger-like approach James felt he must take toward his writing and his life. Time and again one comes across entries documenting how much this or that travel sketch, review, story, or serial will bring, or how far he could make a certain sum stretch. The point here is that the monetary aspect of James’s “scribbling” was never far from the motives for his literary creation. 5. See for instance his early remarks on business in A Small Boy and Others, where he explains that as a young man not “to have been launched in business of a rigorous sort was to be exposed,” or that his “consciousness was positively disfurnished, as that of young Americans went, of the actualities of ‘business’ in a world of business” (30, 35). Martha Banta shows the gendered angle of this argument. “Growing up in the 1840s and 1850s,” Banta explains, “James learned early that being demonstrably ‘masculine’ in America was mainly associated with the making of money” (23). 6. We know that James entered the New York Edition project with the intention that it would do double duty as a creative and, perhaps more importantly, financial capstone to his career. As a financial venture, the New York Edition was a monumental flop prompting Edith Wharton to secrete money into James’s account in an effort to try and mask its sales failure. See McWhirter. 7. Look for example at the long-standing influence of canonical critics of James such as Van Wyck Brooks and Maxwell Geismar, the latter concluding that

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9.

10.

11.

palgrave advances in henry james studies James “knew nothing at all about the life of his time; or the barest minimum that a writer can know—and he cared less” (7). James was a continued source of criticism for Roosevelt. Almost thirty years after his “True American” essay Roosevelt again seems to have James in mind when he addressed an audience at the Sorbonne in 1910. Here, perhaps again thinking of James—whose late stories and American Scene had created something of a cultural stir—Roosevelt argued that “Let the man of learning, the man of leisure, beware of that queer and cheap temptation to pose to himself and to others as a cynic . . . . It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly . . . who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat. Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into fastidiouness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world” (“Citizenship” 509–10). In writing about James in 1925 Van Wyck Brooks called forth Roosevelt’s attack in charging James with elitism, being the “grandson of a millionaire” he was “a whole generation removed from the odors of the shop” (441). And in 1982 Habegger, as though paraphrasing Roosevelt’s “True Americanism,” explained that “one of the basic givens in Henry James’s life was a deep and humiliating anguish at his failure ever to become a proper man” (267). David McWhirter makes a similar point about James’s frustration with his homeland, suggesting that “James quarrels with America not because it has changed from what he knew—no ‘tough reactionary’, he ‘accept[s the] ravage’ [Collected Travel Writings, 1–734]—but because America has failed to take its own experimental, provisional identity seriously enough. America, in James’s sense, is not faithful to its own promise” (“‘A provision full of responsibilities’” 158). James’s canonical major phase is generally understood to consist of the three major novels published at the opening of the twentieth century— The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl. Matthiessen argues that James’s career reached its peak “in the intricate and fascinating designs” of these final works (xv). Critics have taken issue with Matthiessen’s suggestion that these novels should serve as a capstone to James’s oeuvre and have argued for the evidence of a fourth phase. Citing a body of recent criticism, McWhirter argues that James’s post major phase work (beginning with The American Scene) reveals an intense and focused “revisionary energy” in which the author continuously explores his own sense of self and how that self is both embedded in and can be freed from the constraints of the past (“‘A provision full of responsibilities’” 152). For an excellent discussion of how James’s novels depict the “symptomatic” consequences which attend to “the advanced stages of a capitalist economy in which the only use human beings have for one another is as commodities” see McCormack (3).

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AS—The American Scene. Henry James. Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America. Ed. Richard Howard. New York: Library of America, 1993: 351–736. FW—French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition. Literary Criticism. Vol. 2. Library of America. New York, N.Y.: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1984. IT—The Ivory Tower. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922.

works cited Agnew, Jean Christophe. “The Consuming Vision of Henry James.” The Culture of Consumption. Eds. Richard Fox and Jackson Lears. New York: Pantheon, 1983: 67–100. Armstrong, Paul. The Phenomenology of Henry James. Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP, 1983. Banta, Martha. “Men, Women, and the American Way.” The Cambridge Companion to Henry James. Ed. Jonathan Freedman. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998: 21–39. Beard, Charles Austin. The Rise of American Civilization. [S. I.]: Cape, 1927. Brooks, David. On Paradise Drive. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004. Brooks, Van Wyck. The Pilgrimage of Henry James. New York: Dutton, 1925. Dietrichson, Jan. The American Novel of the Gilded Age. New York: Humanities Press, 1969. Edel, Leon. The Master. New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1972. Geismar, Maxwell. Henry James and the Jacobites. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965. Habegger, Alfred. Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Haralson, Eric. Henry James and Queer Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge, UP: 2003. James, Henry. “Americans Abroad.” 1878. Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America: English Hours, The American Scene, Other Travels. Library of America. New York, N.Y.: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1993: 786–92. ——. The American Scene. Henry James. Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America. Ed. Richard Howard. New York: Library of America, 1993: 351–736. ——. Autobiography. Ed. F. W. Dupee. New York: Criterion, 1956. ——. The Ivory Tower. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922. ——. “The Jolly Corner.” Complete Stories: 1898–1910. Eds. John Hollander et al. New York: Library of America, 1996: 697–731. ——. Letters. Ed. Leon Edel. 4 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1974–84. ——. “A Round of Visits.” Complete Stories: 1898–1910. Eds. John Hollander et al. New York: Library of America, 1996: 896–924. James, William. The Principles of Psychology. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983. Leach, William. Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. Lyons, Richard. “Ironies of Loss in The Finer Grain.” Henry James Review 11 (1990): 202–12.

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abbreviations: henr y james

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MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. Second Edition. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame UP, 1984. Matthiessen, F. O. Henry James: The Major Phase. New York: Oxford UP, 1944. McCormack, Peggy. The Rule of Money: Gender, Class, and Exchange Economics in the Fiction of Henry James. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1990. McWhirter, David. Ed. Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995. ——. “‘A provision full of responsibilities’: Senses of the Past in Henry James’s Fourth Phase.” Enacting History in Henry James. Narrative, Power, and Ethics. Ed. Gert Beulens. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997: 148–65. Meissner, Collin. “‘What Ghosts will be left to walk’: Mercantile Culture and the Language of Art.” Henry James Review 21 (2000): 242–52. Muller, Jerry. The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought. New York: Knopf, 2002. Parrington, V. L. Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920. 3 vols. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1927–30. Person, Leland S. Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP, 2003. Pippin, Robert. Henry James and Modern Moral Life. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Posnock, Ross. The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. Rawlings, Peter. Henry James and the Abuse of the Past. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Roosevelt, Theodore. “Citizenship in a Republic.” The Works of Theodore Roosevelt. Vol. 14. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926: 506–29. ——. “True Americanism.” Theodore Roosevelt: An American Mind. Ed. Mario R. DiNunzio. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994: 165–72. Rowe, John Carlos. The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James. Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1984. Salmon, Richard. Henry James and the Culture of Publicity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” Rprt. Social Sciences III and Selected Readings. Vol 1. 14th Edition Chicago: Chicago UP, 1948: 324–39. ——. The Philosophy of Money. 2nd Edition. Ed. David Frisby. Trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby. New York: Routledge, 1990. Tóibín, Colm. “Preface.” The New York Stories of Henry James. Ed. Colm Tóibín. New York: New York Review of Books Classics, 2005. Ziff, Larzer. Return Passages. Great American Travel Writing: 1780–1910. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000.

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john carlos rowe The revival of interest in Henry James’s writings in the 1990s and into the new century has attracted considerable comment from scholars and public intellectuals. Feature films based on The Portrait of a Lady, Washington Square, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl have been accompanied by the republication of virtually all of Henry James’s writings, including minor novels, such as The Outcry, and such nonfiction as his travel writings and literary criticism. One reasonable explanation is that Henry James so exemplifies high culture at the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries that the revival of interest in his work must suggest some return to the sophisticated aesthetic values of a more cultivated age. In our era of overnight celebrities, video-game and computer obsessions, television news sound bytes, sitcom humor, and standup one-liners, the difficulty of Henry James’s prose may present a refreshing alternative to the superficiality of postmodern culture. Indeed, this renewed interest in James may be extended to some of his most important modernist heirs, including James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and T. S. Eliot, each of whom explicitly acknowledged Henry James’s formative influence (Rowe, “For Mature Audiences” 190–1). Yet such an explanation can only be partial, because it implies that Henry James and many other moderns hold interest for us because they represent a neo-conservative, even politically reactionary, desire to invoke the aesthetic values of an earlier period, when culture had substance and literary celebrity was built upon enduring traditions. The legend of Henry James as the master of the modern novel certainly reinforces this idea, and virtually every reader of Henry James can testify to that literary authority by recalling his or her first encounter with his daunting prose style. In 1913, John Singer Sargent painted the famous portrait of Henry James today displayed in the National Gallery in London. The portrait had been 283

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commissioned by James’s friends in celebration of the author’s seventieth birthday, and it was publicly exhibited in Sargent’s studio and then in the Spring Exhibition of the Royal Academy (Edel 490). Yet in “May 1914 . . . a militant suffragette broke the glass protecting his portrait” drew “a meat cleaver concealed under her coat . . . [and] made three long slashes in the painting” (Kaplan 551). Mrs. Mary Wood knew nothing about Henry James’s writings, but claimed to be protesting the disparity in value between portraits by men, especially famous artists like Sargent, and women: “A woman painter, she said, would not have received anywhere near” the £700 at which Sargent’s portrait was valued (Edel 490). This bizarre attack on James’s image may not have been targeted at Henry James or his writings, but it is reasonable to conclude that Mrs. Wood was also attracted to the imposing authority Sargent rendered in James’s head and vested torso. As an icon, James’s portrait must have seemed the exemplification of upper-class patriarchy in Georgian England. Yet behind that familiar façade of the Master, whose intricate style and deft manipulation of the formal properties of the modern novel have often frustrated readers, Henry James was a figure of enormous contradictions and personal self-doubts. An admirer of eighteenth-century architecture and cultural styles, he was one of the great avant-garde experimentalists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Prone to mock new technologies like the automobile, telegraph, and typewriter, he invariably included references to the most modern conveniences in his writings and used many of them on a daily basis. Anxious about changing attitudes toward women’s rights and their growing visibility in the public sphere, James nonetheless produced literature that still deserves its reputation as supportive of feminist issues, especially as far as the complexity and sophistication of his women characters are concerned. Few writers of his generation can compete with his extraordinarily nuanced accounts of what it meant and felt to be a woman in many different social contexts in England and America. Contemptuous of more outspoken and politically radical artists, like the Decadents and Symbolists, James published in The Yellow Book and seems often to be competing with the extremity of such writers as Oscar Wilde, John Addington Symonds, and Algernon Charles Swinburne. James was sexually ambivalent in his private life and reluctant to identify with the affirmative homosexuality of Wilde and Symonds; yet he addresses positively homosexual themes throughout his career (Rowe, Other Henry James 27–37). Finally, James is celebrated as one of the great American authors, whose works persistently explore the contact zone between U.S. and European cultures, but James was made a British subject by King George V in 1915 and wrote often in apparent

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support of British cultural and at times political superiority over other nations, including the U.S. (Edel 531). These problems and contradictions in Henry James’s life and work have made him a topic of the greatest interest to scholars. He ranks with William Shakespeare, James Joyce, and William Faulkner as one of the most frequently discussed authors. Yet for these same reasons, he is often baffling and daunting to students and other readers unfamiliar with his works. Some of these difficulties can be attributed to Henry James’s very difficult prose style, which grew more complex and involuted as he matured as a writer and late in his career experimented with modernist techniques of narration, especially in the three novels of his so-called “Major Phase”: The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). Although well known as an important literary realist, especially in his novels and stories from The Portrait of a Lady (1881) to What Maisie Knew (1897) and The Awkward Age (1899), he was also profoundly influenced by his romantic predecessors, particularly Nathaniel Hawthorne, and began his literary career writing modern versions of such familiar romantic plots as star-crossed lovers (Daisy Miller [1878]) and the hero resisting implacable destiny (The American [1877]). Throughout his career, James relied on romantic themes and motifs, even formal characteristics of the nineteenth-century romance, in numerous ghost stories and tales of the supernatural, including such celebrated works as The Turn of the Screw (1898), “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903), and “The Jolly Corner” (1908). The famous “difficulty” of Henry James’s work is thus not solely a consequence of his avant-garde use of different points of view, stream-of-consciousness narration, and deliberately disjointed fictional temporality; it is also a consequence of the great variety of literary forms and genres he employed in a long career during which he published twenty-two novels and novellas in his lifetime (with two others, The Sense of the Past [1917] and The Ivory Tower [1917], published posthumously), 112 short stories, three volumes of autobiography, five volumes of travel writings (including his social criticism of America in The American Scene [1907]), several volumes of literary criticism (including Hawthorne [1879]), and countless book reviews, journalism, and uncollected essays on a wide range of artistic and literary topics. Social, economic, political, and cultural changes in James’s lifetime have also contributed to the difficulty of his works for today’s reader. His father, Henry James, Sr., was a member of the New England Transcendentalists and the author of numerous philosophical writings, many deeply influenced by Immanuel Swedenborg. Henry James grew up in the world of the American romantics, such as Emerson, Fuller, and

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Thoreau, a number of whom were deeply suspicious of modernization and insistently American in their commitments. Yet the James family traveled widely, taking up residence in various European cities during James’s youth and adolescence, so that he was imbued with European cultural values. By 1875, James was a permanent resident of Europe; when he returned to the United States for a lecture tour in 1904–05, recording his impressions in The American Scene, it was not unlike Spencer Brydon’s “strangely belated return,” full of “unattenuated surprises” in “The Jolly Corner” (JC 435). For many scholars, Henry James found Europe attractive for its long cultural history, perhaps even its repudiation of the modernity so relentlessly represented by U.S. commercialism in the post-Civil War era. By the same token, Europe was changing dramatically, as James himself recorded in his foreign correspondence from Paris for the New York Tribune between 1875 and 1876 (collected posthumously in Parisian Sketches [1957]), in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War (1871–72) and at the beginning of a new European geopolitical map (Rowe, At Emerson’s Tomb 190–1). Drawn to the historical density of European culture, raised in a family deeply influenced by the values of the late Enlightenment and the early nineteenth-century romantics, Henry James also had to adapt to an increasingly international and cosmopolitan culture. More than any writer of his generation, James attempted to respond to social and political transformations that often baffled and confused him, and thus his amazing literary output is characterized by numerous formal as well as intellectual changes. Previous scholars have often addressed the variety of James’s career by strictly periodizing it into the “early” romantic writings, deeply influenced by New England Transcendentalism, his “middle” period of committed psychological realism, and a “late” (or Major Phase) devoted to modernist experiments in the novel today considered fundamental to Anglo-American literary modernism. Contemporary scholars have continued this work by extending James’s career to include a “fourth phase,” as it is sometimes called, in which such later works as his cultural criticism in The American Scene and his posthumously published novels, The Ivory Tower and The Sense of the Past, as well as such previously neglected works as The Outcry (1911), are treated as indications of James’s response to the new phase of global modernization that would appear markedly with the outbreak of World War I. There are many advantages to dividing James’s career into manageable and describable periods, especially for the reader daunted by the complexity and volume of his literary career. On the other hand, this scholarly desire for order may unintentionally falsify what makes Henry James so compelling to us today in

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the twenty-first century: his personal ambivalence, intellectual changes, and even contradictions anticipate our own continuing problems with a modernization process that is now thoroughly global and by most accounts postmodern. Reconsidering Henry James from the perspective of our new century and understanding how he struggled with his own new century, we can find some common concerns that run consistently through his career, especially with regard to the United States as a global power and to the well-educated citizen as inevitably cosmopolitan.

why should i read henr y james? In the general context of James’s notorious difficulty, then, I propose to answer the question asked by most readers who are not specialists: “Why should I read Henry James?” Many scholars answer this question directly by demonstrating that Henry James is among the best novelists of his time, arguing that his aesthetic values are much needed in our culturally superficial era. I wish to take seriously the image I have portrayed above of Henry James as often contradictory, sometimes confused, and yet always intelligent and curious about the modern world that changed dramatically in his lifetime. How Henry James responded to the modernization process, even when he was thoroughly baffled by it, provides an analogy with how we might understand our often confusing circumstances at the beginning of the twenty-first century. I do not mean to argue that James’s modern and our postmodern eras are the same; I do mean to show that these two eras are intimately connected and that by reading Henry James carefully we can better understand that crucial history. In these respects, then, Henry James still has relevance for us today. There are, then, three equally important ways of discussing Henry James and modernity. First, James’s responses to the modernization process anticipate many of our concerns with the one-way globalization practiced by first-world nations and transnational corporations and the concomitant reconfiguration of second- and third-world economies as they are made to serve this process in increasingly inequitable ways. Second, James was a witness to and participant in the early stages of today’s globalization, wherein second-stage modernization, characterized by Taylorism and Fordism, developed together with the consolidation of the British Empire in its growing competition with lesser European imperial powers and the emergence of the United States and Japan as colonial forces, if not outright imperial powers. Third, James has become a typical commodity of postmodern cultural capital, and the very process through which he has been commodified as a status symbol (high culture)

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or social critic (feminist, gay, Marxist) is an interesting example of how culture contributes to a system of values tied to the global circulation, rather than consumption, of its products. All three of these approaches are related if we take the longer view of globalization as a process of modernization traceable to the European desire to “discover” new lands. In short, the discussion of globalization begins properly with the European effort to conquer and then colonize the Western Hemisphere and the long cultural history through which this violent origin for modernity has been rationalized (Rowe, New American Studies, xx). James traces many modern problems back to the conquest and colonization of the Americas. Christopher Newman’s name in The American has prompted a great variety of critically ingenious interpretations, but at a basic level James links Columbus’s given name, Christianity’s complicity in Eurocolonialism, and the Enlightenment’s dream of the “new man” merely to remind us of a history we repeat precisely because we won’t remember its horrors. The irony of Newman’s pioneering journey east to France, rather than to the West, also reminds us that the feverish desire to escape the old, dark, sinful Europe generally ends up repressing our responsibility for it. Newman acts out that European colonial destiny in the U.S. before heading for France, so the irony turns out to be illusory and the serious argument remains. As he takes that “immortal historical hack” to wreak vengeance on some Wall-Street competitor who has done him a business injury and as he builds a fortune in those vaguely described entrepreneurial ventures in washtubs and railroads in the equally sketchy Midwest and San Francisco, Newman announces to the reader that the legacy of Eurocolonialism is not only alive and well in his New World, but it is morphing into a new, potentially even more poisonous version in the figure of the cosmopolitan capitalist (A 30; Rowe, New American Studies 179–84). Even though he is thoroughly American, Christopher Newman (The American) displays a capacity for colonial conquest, at least at the imaginary and psychological levels, that Henry James quite consistently analyzes and criticizes throughout his long literary career. Prince Amerigo in The Golden Bowl appears long after Christopher Newman and has a radically different lineage. Adam Verver is Newman’s equivalent and even namesake (if we equate “Adam” with “Newman”) in this novel, and the Prince’s mushy moral sense is modeled on the Victorian type of the shabby Italian aristocrat, who would appear to have little in common with the robust, innocent, albeit deluded Yankee, Christopher Newman. But the Prince’s vaguely identified, perhaps apocryphal, ancestor Amerigo Vespucci is the early explorer who truly conquers America, because his

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name is adopted. Mapping America, it would seem, has more lasting value than mere physical discovery, because for James it refers to the cultural appropriation he so often criticizes as neocolonial even as he owns his part in it. In The Golden Bowl, there are numerous connotations of Prince Amerigo’s historical name, but the simple meaning is that the Italian culture James and his readers so love is implicated in the more violent history of colonization. W. E. B. Du Bois puts this matter much more bluntly in “Africa and the Slave Trade” (1915): “Such is the story of the Rape of Ethiopia—a sordid, pitiful, cruel tale. Raphael painted, Luther preached, Corneille wrote, and Milton sung; and through it all, for four hundred years, the dark captives wound to the sea amid the bleaching bones of the dead. . . . for four hundred years America was strewn with the living and dying millions of a transplanted race” (Du Bois 637). James is by no means as explicitly political as Du Bois, but his ambivalent love for Italy throughout his life is explained in part because the “ruins” so loved by his Victorian predecessors seem to warn James of the new American empire and its tendency to repeat the mistakes of previous empires. Thus James’s famous international theme frequently enacts the new U.S. will-to-power in the polite drawing rooms, public gardens, galleries, and artists’ workshops of American expatriates in Italy, where they have traveled to study how to recapture the glory that was Rome and forget just what horrors are inscribed dimly on those pillars and capitals in the Forum and the Coliseum. In Daisy Miller, Rome is not just a cultivated setting for the psychological drama between Daisy and Winterbourne; James also uses it as a landscape of the soul for both of these Americans. For Winterbourne, Rome represents social rot, which is probably tangled up with his contempt for Catholics, loose morals, and the city’s poor public hygiene in the late nineteenth century. Legitimate tourist concerns to be sure, especially for the Protestant expatriate visiting from Geneva by way of Salem, but they happen to be disturbingly similar to the anxieties of so many U.S. travelers in the tropics of South America and Africa to this day. On the other hand, Daisy seems to thrive in this unhealthy moral climate, however briefly. Her sexuality hardly seems threatening in the era of Internet pornography and the global sex trade, but for Winterbourne it represents the transgression of proper social boundaries, notably those regulating class and gender. Daisy does not behave as a lady should, and Winterbourne first notices this impropriety when she fraternizes with people from the working class. Although she apparently does not remember Byron’s “The Prisoner of Chillon” and its democratic sentiments, she wants to travel to Chillon by steamer to be with other

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people (whereas Winterbourne wants to take a private carriage and does so on their return). When Winterbourne meets her in the lobby of the hotel in Vevey for the trip to Chillon, James describes it as a public place where “the couriers, the servants, the foreign tourists were lounging about and staring. It wasn’t the place he would have chosen for a tryst, but she had placidly appointed it” (DM 158). Winterbourne’s “stiff,” Calvinistic individualism is elitist, whereas Daisy’s openness and social gregariousness have a democratic aura. We are reminded, then, of a certain linkage between the feminine, the crowd and mob, democratic freedom, and how they provoked ruling-class anxieties in the nineteenth century. In the early days of the U.S. republic, these anxieties about the democratic mob were often projected onto specific groups, ranging from the traveling “Illuminati” to the dreaded “Free Masons,” radical French intellectuals (a persistent anxiety, it seems, in the United States), and “Indians” (Rowe, Literary Culture 38–9). In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, these anxieties included women, homosexuals, immigrants, free African-Americans, and Mexicans. Daisy’s identification with some sort of populist solidarity, albeit left undeveloped in Daisy Miller, suggests one way James imagined how groups differently marginalized in different eras might take a historically long view that would allow them to build effective coalitions. But the serious global consequences of Daisy Miller are that the political issues in 1878 are increasingly transnational, given not only the imperial expansion of nations but also the mobility of its ruling citizens and the peoples who work for them. Future political causes, James seems to hint in Daisy Miller, will involve more global consciousness, which of course he is happy to provide as the guiding spirit of a critical cosmopolitanism. Daisy appears to be a somewhat tamer fictional version of Louisa Lander, the American woman sculptor in Rome chastised by William Wetmore Story (head of that fussy clan of American expatriate artists in Rome) for posing in the nude and living out of wedlock with an Italian (Rowe, New American Studies 86–8). James’s ambivalent account in William Wetmore Story and His Friends (1903) of the American colony in Rome criticizes its members for cultural colonialism and indicts himself for enjoying so thoroughly their cultivation. Story reading “so richly and forcibly” from his neoclassical drama, Nero, a chapter from “the more ‘lurid’ Roman past,” seems almost comical in James’s account, were it not for James’s fond memories of Fanny Kemble, to whom Story dedicated Nero, in that intimate audience, “whose admirable face was less at play than when it accompanied her admirable voice” (WWS 2: 254–5). Thus as the moral leader of this little American colony abroad thunders warnings about

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ancient Roman despotism and decadence, the young James of the 1870s dreamily fantasizes about the alluring Anglo-American actress. The scene might have been lifted directly from Daisy Miller. James hopes to avoid the fate of those American expatriates Madame Merle dismisses in her own self-condemnation: “We’re mere parasites, crawling over the surface; we haven’t our feet in the soil” (PL 3: 280). She does not escape this criticism, but James claims to do so insofar as he refuses to worship either European cultural history or American futurity, but sees them instead as parts of the same cultural history. On the one hand, the American abroad may fetishize European culture, as Osmond does with his careful copies of old Roman coins and Adam Verver does with his purchases of European art for his museum in American City. On the other hand, the future of artistic success and innovation may well end up serving a new imperium, either British or American. Maud Lowder wields her power over the social relations in The Wings of the Dove as an explicit “Britannia,” the allegorical figure of British authority. In The Tragic Muse (1890), Peter Sherringham wants to marry the actress, Miriam Rooth, and adapt her theatrical talents to the social role of the diplomat’s wife in some “little hot hole in Central America,” where the Foreign Office is posting him. His plan is on the face of it ridiculous, but James makes the more serious point that the new influence of art will be global in scope and political in its effects. Even in those passages where he admires Miriam’s international reputation (and cosmopolitan identity), James expresses anxiety about unbounded powers of the imagination, once they are unmoored from their representative locale, whether it be the “New England charm” of his cultural fathers or his adopted England. James is as dazzled and confused as Peter Sherringham by Miriam’s performance of Constance in Shakespeare’s King John: “Miriam was a beautiful actual fictive impossible young woman of a past age, an undiscoverable country, who spoke in blank verse and overflowed with metaphor, who was exalted and heroic beyond all human convenience and who yet was irresistibly real and related to one’s own affairs” (TM 8: 327).

imperialism and transnationalism Edward Said has demonstrated how the novel genre’s contribution to nationalism is always entangled with the reliance of nations on foreign wealth, labor, and culture. In Jane Austen’s British romance, Mansfield Park, Sir Thomas Bertram’s plantations in Antigua provide the borders of the fictional gardens (Said 85). Austen and Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre used the Caribbean contexts of slavery and feudalism primarily

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as factual backgrounds rather than for purposes of political critique, requiring Said and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1962) respectively for us to understand the ideological consequences of these famous lovestories, but James consistently implicates culture in the work of imperial expansion and domination. Said observes that “Henry James’s Ralph Touchett in Portrait of a Lady travels in Algeria and Egypt,” but James uses such scenic details for far more critical purposes than such contemporaries as Kipling, Haggard, and Arthur Conan Doyle imagined the East (Said 63). How else are we to understand John Marcher’s Orientalized “beast” (“The Beast in the Jungle”), that “tiger” he avoids even in “the depths of Asia,” where he spends “himself on scenes of romantic interest, of superlative sanctity” (BJ 199)? To be sure, James could be charmed by the lure of the exoticized “Orient,” as he confesses in his introduction to Pierre Loti’s Impressions, even identifying it with the lure of forbidden sexuality: “Loti’s East is, throughout, of all Easts the most beguiling, though, for the most part—unless perhaps in the case of Au Maroc, where he appears to have been peculiarly initiated—it seldom ceases to be the usual, accessible East . . . of the English and American swarm” (Loti 17). Yet even in such moments, he seems to understand how the exotic and ordinary are two sides of the same imperial coin. James paid relatively little attention to the peoples and societies beyond the Euroamerican center of his modern era; but within this territory, he understood the consequences of cultural imperialism. The colonial imagination is at the heart of the immorality of the narrator of The Aspern Papers (1888), that “publishing scoundrel” who betrays human affection for letters made valuable simply by their celebrity association with the American Byron, and more so for their hint of his scandalous relationship with Juliana Bordereau so many years earlier. The Aspern Papers is full of references to more obvious conquerors with whom the narrator is compared in mock-heroic mode: Admiral Nelson at Trafalgar, Napoleon at Austerlitz, the treasonous condottiere Bartolommeo Colleoni (sculpted by Verrocchio and Leopardi), and the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (AP 6: 138). In love with Italy and its cultivated history, James also knows that his affection for it can also become a kind of sickness, a passion to possess the past that destroys its charm and value. Jane Campion’s film of The Portrait of a Lady brilliantly captures the nineteenth-century woman’s experience of alienation and fragmentation in the morcellized fragments—giants hands, ancient heads, broken trunks—of the human body that litter her Roman cityscapes (Rowe, “Mature” 197–201). She learned this technique from James himself, who uses it effectively in early stories like “Adina” and “The Last of the Valerii,” as well as in Roderick

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Hudson (1875) and Portrait of a Lady, to suggest the more general economy of commodification and fetishism characteristic of modernity’s misuses of the past (Rowe, Other Henry James 49–54). James’s celebrated historical consciousness thus takes the long view of the history in which nation states have emerged and claimed discrete and competitive authorities only by ignoring their common origins and motives. To be sure, James’s complex sense of history also has its high-cultural aura; to understand the interconnectedness of different communities in their mutually entangled histories gives you special authority, even prestige. Story reading aloud from his Nero is mildly comic, because he seems unaware of how he himself is repeating that past, albeit on the much smaller stage of the American artists’ community in Rome. The fragments of the past are symptomatic of our failure to read history, and James is always providing the hints to help us fill in the details. One should not visit Chillon, as Daisy and Winterbourne do, without reading Byron’s “The Prisoner of Chillon” and understanding this shrine to the medieval Swiss peasant revolts as also one of the romantics’ “origins” for subsequent democratic revolutions in America and France. The ligaments of history are also the points of contact between different nations and cultures, exemplified in James’s own passionate cosmopolitanism, as his copious travel writings and literary criticism from French Poets and Novelists (1878) to Italian Hours (1909) and The American Scene attest. Henry James achieved the modernist cosmopolitan ideal, albeit in the manner of the high-cultural standard set by Matthew Arnold. The most provincial settings in Henry James often turn out, weirdly, to be the most transnational. What could be more deliberately regional than the country house of Bly (The Turn of the Screw) and the isolation of Miles and Flora with the Governess, Mrs. Grose, and those specters, Peter Quint and Miss Jessel? But it is the death of the Uncle’s parents in India, with its evocation of British imperial power and foreign service, that forces him reluctantly to take charge of Miles and Flora after they are orphaned by his “military” brother’s untimely death (TS 153). And the Irish background of Peter Quint—that red hair seems to clinch it— suggests that the children are haunted by far more than the sexually illicit. An aura of the political legacy of British imperialism shimmers along the boundaries of this contested property (Rowe, Theoretical Dimensions 132–5). James knew well enough how the English countryside, however charmingly rural, still hid the secrets of a violent past in which theft, murder, invasion, and brigandry structured its landscape. Winchelsea, Rye, and other English coastal towns formed the center of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century smuggling trade, as James

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points out in English Hours: “These communities appear to have had, in their long decline, little industry but their clandestine traffic with other coasts, in the course of which they quite mastered the art of going . . . ‘one better’ than the officers of the revenue” (EH 281). The growth of the metropolitan center of London as the contact zone linking the British Empire with the countryside is a subject of considerable interest to James. Filled with the spoils of ancient imperial power, country houses like Lord Mark’s Matcham (The Wings of the Dove) imitate the architecture of the Romans and the art collections of the Quattrocento princes. Bronzino’s Lucrezia Panciatichi provides Milly’s mirror-stage in Wings of the Dove in a double sense: Lucrezia is “dead, dead, dead,” not only because James (and Milly) find Bronzino’s Mannerism to be stiff and stylized, not only because Milly sees in the painting her own biological and psychological destiny. The Renaissance aristocracy represented by Bronzino has been replaced by American power and wealth, so that Milly’s comment, now filtered through James, may be said to apply to Lord Mark as well (Rowe, Henry Adams and Henry James 185–90). Desperate for an American match, the British aristocracy is rapidly moving in the direction of its Italian and Spanish predecessors. Gardencourt in The Portrait of a Lady is owned by Americans, as are an increasing number of the valuable paintings and cultural artifacts of the European past. Metropolitan London is ineluctably transformed by the diasporas of the peoples colonized by the British. The “brown lady” in What Maisie Knew first appears at one of those bazaars that became tourist attractions for Victorians curious about the peoples and places of the Empire. The “American countess” suggests some new, unrecognized aristocracy: a future ruling class. James is not entirely comfortable with her “darkness” or with Miriam Rooth’s “Jewishness” (The Tragic Muse) even if he renders both so ambiguous as to make any decisive judgment of African-American or Jewish identity impossible (Rowe, Other Henry James 143–50). James is ambivalent about the new “mob” composed of peoples not only from different classes but from communities traditionally ignored by the historical consciousness he himself favors. Like Hegel, James treats Africa as having “no historical part” in world history, “no movement or development to exhibit,” and thus awaiting only the “civilizing” influences of Europe and the United States (Hegel 99). To be sure, such a view is very much part of the imperial imaginary in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and James cannot be absolved of his part in such modernism no matter how hard some critics have tried to do so. When James addresses women undergraduates at Bryn Mawr in “The Question of Our Speech” (1905), and appeals to

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immigrants in the Bowery in The American Scene, his moral view supports adaptation to Euroamerican civilization. For the young graduates as much as for the immigrants, learning to use English in all its cultivated subtlety is their best opportunity for democratic equality (Rowe, Other Henry James 31–6). In many respects, James endorses the assimilationist positions prevalent at the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries, but there is a certain residuum that complements more precisely his advocacy of a historical consciousness that depends more on the uses of the past than on its commodification. Women and immigrants will change English, James argues, and as long as such change occurs within certain acceptable parameters, then it is one of the positive consequences of modernization. Language thrives on such changes, as James the technical innovator and modern experimenter knows so well. Of course, English remains the primary language, and James seems in this regard to anticipate the monolingualism of E. D. Hirsch, Jr.’s Cultural Literacy, if not the more strident politics of the “English-Only” movement of Ron Unz, S. I. Hayakawa, and others in California in the 1980s. Monolingualists usually fall into their own contradictions, as James does in his frequent use of Italian and French phrases to adapt English to his special cosmopolitanism. Indeed, the best English seems polyglot, inflected with the spirit of Italian conversazione and the rhetorical subtlety of French points des repères (“reference points”), a phrase Henry James uses in his Prefaces (1907–09) to the New York Edition to refer simultaneously to the protagonist and the different points-of-view through which she is so often represented. Like American culture broadened and enriched by its many different cultural sources, English is itself truer to its essence only insofar as it draws on other languages. Living elsewhere is sometimes just parasitic tourism, sometimes mindless worship of the past, occasionally an emancipatory experience of your own freedom. In part, these rare moments of liberation are the consequence of alienation, such as James’s feminine protagonists experience from the outset of their fictional journeys. When it accomplishes magical transformations, such alienation depends on the character’s recognition of the social constructedness of all human values and relations—a radical relativism that allows the character a moment of vision outside her conventional role. When Milly Theale walks through London following her visit to Dr. Luke Strett, she wanders into strange neighborhoods only to identify with the prostitutes of London and New York (WD 20: 248). This surreal episode foreshadows, of course, how she will be commodified and dehumanized by Kate and Merton, but it also indicates how her

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existential predicament enables her to step outside class, race, and nation to achieve a sympathetic identification with other victimized people. Such literary moments, infrequent as they are in James’s fiction, anticipate the transnational political and cultural coalitions often imagined today as alternatives to one-way, corporate globalization. Of course, the cosmopolitanism endorsed by Henry James is best exemplified in his own life, and it has a certain Americanness to it, even when James is at his most European. For James, the ideal American is precisely the modern cosmopolitan who is always on the verge of turning into an Osmond or Adam Verver and yet strives to maintain his or her balance as interested in other cultural influences, being willing to incorporate them into work or life in ways that change both. It is an American exceptionalism, even though it is also epitomized by a wide variety of characters who are decidedly not American, such as Gabriel Nash and Miriam Rooth in The Tragic Muse, Maisie Farange in What Maisie Knew, Maria Gostrey in The Ambassadors, Fleda Vetch in “The Spoils of Poynton” (1897), Mr. Drake in In the Cage (1898), and May Bartram in “The Beast in the Jungle.” All of these characters are variants on such tragic heroes as Christopher Newman, Daisy Miller, Isabel Archer, Lambert Strether, Maggie Verver, and Milly Theale, who fail to connect their American identities with their international destinies. Returning to the United States in 1904–05, James would be impressed by how “American civilization . . . had begun to spread itself thick and pile itself high . . . in proportion as [Europe] had taken to writing itself plain” (AS 366). James represents in The American Scene the shift in global power from Europe to America, both with respect to political and cultural economies. Even as he criticizes American cultural deficiencies and capitalist excesses, James still takes pride in the growing centrality of the American as the type of the cosmopolitan, as the Italian had been in the Quattrocento and the Englishman in the Victorian era. From The Tragic Muse (1890) on, James’s writings seem to identify such cosmopolitanism not only with understanding different cultures’ achievements but also with a certain latitude in regard to social, sexual, and personal identities. The sexually ambivalent Gabriel Nash, James’s fictional caricature of Oscar Wilde, is by no means an unequivocal hero in The Tragic Muse, but by the end he can become Nick Dormer’s “muse” and be saved by James as a ghostly, symbolic figure of the confused possibilities of sexual and aesthetic freedom (Rowe, Other Henry James 96–8). In many respects, James identifies with the marginalized, especially by the modernization process, although he takes relatively little account of how peoples of color were displaced by Euroamerican colonialism.

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Miriam Rooth’s ambivalent Jewish background recalls the popular identification of cosmopolitanism with Jewishness in the late nineteenth century, but James appears to transform such anti-semitism—the myth of the wandering, displaced Jew—by dramatizing Miriam’s success on the English stage. By the end of the novel, Gabriel Nash can imagine Miriam as a global figure, who will brighten “up the world for a great many people” and bring “the ideal nearer to them,” working as an aesthetic counter-force to the exploitative globalization of British imperialism (TM 8: 198). In general, James follows the logic of Freudian sublimation by incorporating minority and marginal social identities into an aesthetic cosmopolitanism which epitomizes his own authorial position and disguises any more personal identification with gay men, lesbians, straight women, Jews, immigrants, peoples of color, prostitutes, and children. In many respects, these very groups are consequences of the modernization process which James criticizes and fears throughout his career. The legal demonization of homosexuality with the British Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, the rise of anti-semitism in the late nineteenth century, growing fears of the “New Woman,” riots in the U.S. against minority and immigrant competition in the labor force, and the rapid growth in the same period of what today we recognize as the global “sex industry,” are social phenomena traceable directly to urbanization, the accelerated movement of peoples and goods across national borders (especially imperialism’s multidirectional traffic), growing disparities in the distribution of wealth, and the cheapening of labor. “The future belongs to crowds,” Don DeLillo writes in Mao II (1991), and Henry James anticipates how this postmodern consequence would develop out of the ideological construction of the mob from women, sexual “deviants,” Jews, and other immigrants and displaced persons (DeLillo 16). It would require little imagination on the part of European fascists in Germany, Italy, and Spain to add Communists, gypsies, and avant-garde artists to their definition of the “masses.” Miriam Rooth’s artistic destiny does not lead unequivocally to the triumph of the ideal over the commercial drive for new products and new markets James elsewhere condemns. The imagination and aesthetic sensibility of James’s most humane characters are always subject to commodification, threatened on all sides by traders in psychic and monetary currency. From the members of the audience, like Peter Sherringham, who see in Miriam’s roles something to be desired and possessed, to art collectors like Christopher Newman and Adam Verver, who try to buy imagination and taste, James’s characters foreshadow the postmodern

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economy in which the uniqueness and originality of art command astounding prices even as its true value is neglected. In his last novel, The Outcry (1911), James returns to the subject of an American businessman, Bender Breckenridge (modeled after J. P. Morgan), trying to buy pieces of the British cultural heritage. Critical as ever of our “priggish, precious modernity,” as the art historian Hugh Crimble puts it, James nonetheless reminds his readers that the phenomenon of “people . . . trafficking all round” is by no means an exclusively modern or even American phenomenon (O 37, 34). Lady Grace points out that British “art-wealth came in—save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!—mainly by purchase too . . . . We ourselves largely took it away from somewhere, didn’t we? We didn’t grow it all” (O 35). Of course, those “awkward Elgin Marbles” were stolen, and most of the British purchases were onesided, imperial bargains. From the neoclassical architecture of London’s government buildings to the far-flung outposts of the remotest colonies, imperial Britain borrowed, stole, or bought other cultures’ aesthetic traditions to bolster its own authority. Henry James understood America to be following this lead and refining even further the extent to which the aesthetic aura might be used to disguise its conquering will.

conclusion Today the cosmopolitan ideal Henry James typified in his person and work has been extensively commodified by the academic and mass media veneration of his genius. Along with William Shakespeare and James Joyce, Henry James contributes regularly to an aesthetic ideology that is integral to a postmodern economy intent upon the production and circulation of representations ranging from artistic styles to computer programs. In our culture of simulation and hyper-reality, Henry James is at once a valuable product and a nostalgic token of an earlier period, in which art survived on the margins of a more material economy governed by physical labor, tangible commodities, and identifiable markets. In our contemporary world, celebrity voices and bodies are legally protected intellectual properties, website names command high prices, and webpage design is an alternative career for struggling artists. In the global economy, there is “no there there,” as Gertrude Stein complained of Oakland, but an increasingly homogenized “everywhere” of malls, multiplex theaters, and ceaseless traffic. Throughout his long career, Henry James resisted the incipient commercialization of the aesthetic process, insisted upon the intangible, spiritual values of art, and damned the confusion of

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culture and economics. He would not be at home in our postmodern, commodified, globalized world, but he helps us understand it.

A—The American. The Novels and Tales of Henry James. Vol. 2. New York: Scribner’s, 1907. AP—The Aspern Papers. The Novels and Tales of Henry James. Vol. 8. New York: Scribner’s, 1909. AS—The American Scene. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1968. BJ—“The Beast in the Jungle.” The Novels and Tales of Henry James. Vol. 17. New York: Scribner’s, 1909. DM—“Daisy Miller.” The Novels and Tales of Henry James. Vol. 18. New York: Scribner’s, 1909. EH—English Hours. London: William Heinemann, 1905. JC—“The Jolly Corner.” The Novels and Tales of Henry James. Vol. 17. New York: Scribner’s, 1909. O—The Outcry. New York: New York Review of Books, 2002. PL—The Portrait of a Lady. The Novels and Tales of Henry James. Vols. 3–4. New York: Scribner’s, 1908. TM—The Tragic Muse. The Novels and Tales of Henry James. Vols. 7–8. New York: Scribner’s, 1908. TS—The Turn of the Screw. The Novels and Tales of Henry James. Vol. 12. New York: Scribner’s, 1909. WD—The Wings of the Dove. The Novels and Tales of Henry James. Vols. 19–20. New York: Scribner’s, 1909. WWS—William Wetmore Story and His Friends: From Letters, Diaries, and Recollections. 2 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903.

works cited De Lillo, Don. Mao II. New York: Penguin Books, 1991. Du Bois, W. E. B. The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader. Ed. Eric J. Sundquist. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. Edel, Leon. Henry James. The Master: 1901–1916. Vol. 5. The Life of Henry James. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1972. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Philosophy of History. Trans. J. Sibree. New York: Dover, 1956. Hirsch, E. D., Jr. Cultural Literacy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. James, Henry. Parisian Sketches: Letters to the “New York Tribune”: 1875–1876. Eds. Leon Edel and Ilse Dusoir Lind. New York: New York UP, 1957. Kaplan, Fred. Henry James: The Imagination of Genius. A Biography. New York: William Morrow and Co., Inc., 1992. Loti, Pierre. Impressions. Intro. Henry James. Westminster: Archibald Constable and Co., 1898. Rowe, John Carlos. At Emerson’s Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1997.

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——. Henry Adams and Henry James: The Emergence of a Modern Consciousness. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1976. ——. Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. ——. “For Mature Audiences: Sex, Gender and Recent Film Adaptations of Henry James’s Fiction.” Henry James on Stage and Screen. Ed. John R. Bradley. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000. 190–211. ——. The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James. Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1984. ——. The New American Studies. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2002. ——. The Other Henry James. Durham: Duke UP, 1998. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Random House, 1993.

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Adams, Henry, 1, 22, 45, 48, 49, 51, 257n Adamson, Sylvia, 44, 48, 51 Adorno, Theodor, 218, 248n Agnew, Jean-Christophe, 199, 265–6, 274 Aijmer, Celia, 7 Alexander, George, 150 Althusser, Louis, 65 America, 1–2, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, 17, 20, 27, 41, 112–13, 126, 141, 158–9, 162, 169, 172, 178, 179, 192, 198–9, 203, 216, 217, 218, 223, 234n, 246, 263–82, 284, 285–6, 288–99 Andersen, Hendrik, 116, 244 Anesko, Michael, 16, 157–8, 249, 257n, 258n architecture, 6, 169–91 Aurelius, Marcus, 292 Arendt, Hannah, 202 Aristotle, 21, 35 Armstrong, Paul B., 29n, 200, 279n see also phenomenology Arnold, Matthew, 11, 13–14, 293, 307 Asthana, Rama Kant, 39 Austen, Jane, 6, 12, 22, 147, 171–2, 188n, 291–2, 294 autobiographies, 7–8, 212–38 see also biographies, Edel Balzac, Honoré de, xi, 2, 13, 20, 60, 76n, 112, 180, 203, 217, 218 Banta, Martha, 29n, 30n, 268, 279n Barthes, Roland, 106, 116, 122n, 221, 234n Basch, Michael Franz, 140 Bataille, Georges, 178 Bauer, Dale, 160

Beach, Joseph Warren, 20, 38, 52n, 206 Beckett, Samuel, 1, 13 Beckford, William, 180 Beckinsale, Kate, 163 Beidler, Peter, 25 belatedness, 5–6, 126–46 Bell, Ian F.A., 196, 198, 208n Bell, Millicent, 81, 122n, 217, 231 Benjamin, Jessica, 223 Bennett, Arnold, 126, 142n Benson, Edward White, Archbishop of Canterbury, 25 Bentley, Nancy, 157 Berkeley, George, 47 Bersani, Leo, 60, 76n, 128 Besant, Walter, 14–15, 35–6, 173 Betsky, Aaron, 179, 186 biography, 5, 28, 7–8, 100–25, 212–38 see also autobiographies, Edel Blackmur, R.P., 16, 20–1, 22, 24, 29n, 30n, 126 Blair, Sara, 80, 177–8, 207 Bloom, Harold, 225 Bogdanovich, Peter, 147, 152–4 Bok, Sissela, 229 Bolla, Peter de, 48, 49 Bonham-Carter, Helena, 160 Booth, Wayne C., 22, 25, 43, 51, 52n Boott, Lizzie, 240, 248, 249 Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel, 67–8 Bordwell, David, 153 Bowen, Elizabeth, 154 Bowen, Janet Wolf, 170 Bowers, Fredson, 242–3, 258n Bradbury, Malcolm, 159 Brennan, Teresa, 50 Brontë, Charlotte, 6, 291–2 Bronzino, Agnolo, 73, 159, 294 Brookner, Anita, 151

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Brooks, David, 60, 64, 76n, 114, 263 Brooks, Van Wyck, 8, 14, 20, 21, 22–3, 29n, 279n, 280n Brown, Barry, 153 Browning, Robert, xi, 13 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 156 Bruss, Elizabeth, 220 Buelens, Gert, 4–5, 7, 24, 30n, 82–5, 88, 92–8, 187, 199, 201, 208n Butler, Judith, 4, 59, 63–4, 65, 66–8, 75, 77n, 84, 98 Byron, George Gordon, 6th Baron, 289–90, 292, 293

DeKoven, Marianne, 207 Deleuze, Gille, 126 DeLillo, Don, 297 Demoor, Marysa, 244 Derrida, Jacques, 16, 24, 29n, 127, 205 Descartes, René, 48 Diaghilev, Sergei, 159 Dickens, Charles, 20, 82, 217, 224, 225 Dickinson, Emily, 109, 142n Dietrichson, Jan, 265, 276 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, 292 Du Bois, W.E.B., 289 Dupee, F.W., 126, 216, 217, 227

Cameron, Sheila, 29n, 128, 141 Campion, Jane, 147, 156–8, 292 Carlson, Jerry, 155 Castle, Terry, 82 Cather, Willa, 80 centres of consciousness, 4, 35–58 see also, point of view, phenomenology, James (William) Chatman, Seymour, 5, 44, 52n, 142n, 165n Cheng, Anne, 75 Chilton, Neil, 214–15 Chisholm, Monty, 244 Clayton, Jack, 147, 160–2 close reading, 3 clothes, 6, 147–68, 213 Coburn, Alvin, 245, 258n Cohen, Ed, 108 Cohn Dorrit, 38 Colleoni, Bartolommeo, 292 Colomina, Beatriz, 186 Conrad, Joseph, 22, 43–4, 199, 231 Cooley, Thomas, 222–3 Corneille, Pierre, 289 Coulson, Victoria, 6 Cousins, Mark, 187 Cox, James, 231, 234–5n critical theory, 11–34, 35–58 Cross, Mary, 6, 127, 142n Crothers, Samuel McChord, 227 cultural capital, 1

Eakin, Paul John, 219, 220, 221–3, 224, 227–8, 229, 231, 233n, 234n Edel, Leon, 3, 6, 8, 39, 56n, 60, 76n, 109–16, 142n, 147, 148, 150–1, 165n, 226–7, 241, 243–4, 245, 247, 248, 253, 255, 256n, 257n, 272, 279n, 284, 285 see also autobiographies, biographies Egan, Susanna, 223–4, 247n Eggert, Paul, 252 Ehrlich, Susan, 45, 47 Eisenstein, Sergei Mikhailovich, 163 Eliot, George, xi, 2, 13, 22, 41, 53n, 217, 220, 224 Eliot, T.S., 18, 20, 22, 204–5, 220, 228, 283 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 15, 29n, 223, 242, 257n, 285 Esch, Deborah, 24 experience, 5–6, 15, 17, 19, 20, 42, 44–5, 48–52, 61, 63, 69, 70, 72, 73, 74, 89, 102–3, 105, 112, 113, 114, 117, 126–7, 128–9, 131, 132, 133, 136, 138–9, 139–40, 140, 141, 143n, 148, 151, 164, 173–4, 182, 192–3, 194–5, 196–200, 202, 203, 206, 208n, 212–13, 218–19, 220, 229, 231–2, 266–7, 274, 279n, 292, 295

Daugherty, Sarah B., 13 David, Jacques-Louis, 115 Dawson, Jan, 152, 154 de Man, 24, 221, 234, 234n

Faulkner, William, 85 Felman, Shoshana, 4, 26, 27, 45, 59, 61–2, 65, 121n feminism, 80–99 Fiedelson, Charles, 220

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Fielding, Henry, 41, 52n film, 6, 11–34 Flaubert, Gustave, xi, xii, 2, 13, 43, 53n, 217, 228 Fletcher, John, 82 Fludernik, Monika, 44, 47, 48 Follini, Tamara L., 7–8, 208n, 225, 230 Ford, Ford Madox, 43, 52n, 53n Forster, E.M., 20 Fortuny, Mariano, 160 Foster, Dennis, 4, 59, 63 Foucault, Michel, 23, 65, 77n, 106–7, 119, 120n, 122n, 177, 178, 198n Frank, Ellen Eve, 179 Freedman, Jonathan, 24, 174 Freud, Sigmund, 26, 59, 61, 64–8, 73, 74, 76n, 77n, 112, 113–14, 218, 297 Freundlieb, Dieter, 27 Friedman, Alan, 51 Friedman, Norman, 37 Fuller, Maragaret, 299 Gale, Robert L., 243 Gautier, Théophile, 43 gay studies, 5, 100–25 see also gender, homophobia, homosexuality, Geismar, Maxwell, 23, 126, 279n gender, 3, 4, 61–8, 80–99 see also gay studies, homophobia, homosexuality, queer theory Genette, Gérard, 39, 53n, 54n George V, King of England, 284 Géricault, Theodore, 15 ghosts, 7, 25, 26, 60, 62, 117, 123n, 161, 193, 199, 202–6, 278, 286, 296 see also James (Henry), writings of, The Turn of the Screw Gilroy, Paul, 75 Girard, René, 67 globalization, 8–10, 283–300 Goetz, Ruth and Augustus, 155 Goetz, William, 224 Goncourt, Edmond de, 43 Goncourt, Jules de, 43 Gordon, Caroline, 37–8 Gosse, Edmund, 111, 151, 255–6, 257n

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Graham, Wendy, 24, 52n, 60, 76n, 108–9, 122n, 123n, 162, 163, 208n Greetham, D.C., 256 Greg, W.W., 241–4 Griffin, Susan M., 29n, 147, 158, 186, 200 Grosz, Elizabeth, 186, 234n Gunter, Susan E., 114, 142n, 244, 249, 257n, 258n Habegger, Alfred, 178, 229, 279n, 280n Hadley, Tessa, 174, 182 Haggard, Sir Henry Rider, 292 Hanson, Ellis, 28, 40n Haralson, Eric, 27, 77n, 98n, 122n, 207, 267, 270, 279n Harvey, W.J., 42 Haviland, Olivia de, 155 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1, 13, 203, 205, 213, 217, 225, 285 Hayakawa, S.I., 295 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 61, 65, 76n, 77n, 294 Heilman, Robert, 26 Henke, Richard, 82 Hersey, George L., 173 Hillebrand, Karl, 248–9 Hirsch, Jr., E.D., 295 history, 7, 192–211 Hitchcock, Alfred, 148, 152, 157, 163–5 Hocks, Richard A., 19, 29n, 47, 54n, 197 see also pragmatism Hoffa, William, 216, 233n Holbein, Hans, 49 Holland, Agnieska, 154, 155, 156, 162 Holland, Laurence B., 22, 29n Hollier, Denis, 178–9 Holly, Carol, 216, 218, 222, 229, 234n Holmes, Jr., Oliver Wendell, 113 Homer, 35 homophobia, 64, 112, 114, 141, 109–11, 122n, 142n, 143n see also homosexuality, gender, Horne, queer theory

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homosexuality, 5, 68–9, 77n, 84, 98, 100–25, 138, 143n, 174, 201–2, 284, 290, 297 see also gender, homophobia, queer theory Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 179 Horne, Philip, 29n, 82, 121n, 162, 164, 243, 257n, 258n see also homophobia Howells, William Dean, x, 16, 126, 130, 249, 258n Hughes, Clair, 6, 8, 153, 165n, 208n Hume, David, 47 Hunnicut, Gayle, 162–3 Hunter, George Grenville, 246, 258n Hurlesbusch, Klaus, 244, 252 Ian, Marcia, 60 Ibsen, Henrik, xii, 151, 255, 256 imagination, 6, 41, 48, 53–4n, 75, 169–91, 199–200, 203, 217, 218, 220, 229, 230, 231–2, 265, 273, 277, 291, 292, 297–8 influences on Henry James, 2 Irving, Henry, 150, 163 Ivory, James and Merchant, 147, 162–3 James, Aleck, 249 James, Alice, 26, 149, 247, 244, 249 James, Henry America, and, 1–2, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, 17, 20, 27, 41, 112–13, 126, 141, 158–9, 162, 169, 172, 178,179, 192, 198–9, 203, 216, 217, 218, 223, 234n, 246, 263–82, 284, 285–6, 288–99 architecture and, 6, 169–91 autobiographies and, 28, 7–8, 212–38 belatedness and, 5–6, 126–46 biography and, 5, 28, 7–8, 100–25, 212–38 centres of consciousness on, 4, 35–58 close reading and, 3 clothes and, 6, 147–68, 213 critical theory and, 11–34, 35–58 cultural capital and, 1

experience and, 5–6, 15, 17, 19, 20, 42, 44–5, 48–52, 61, 63, 69, 70, 72, 73, 74, 89, 102–3, 105, 112, 113, 114, 117, 126–7, 128–9, 131, 132, 133, 136, 138–9, 139–40, 140, 141, 143n, 148, 151, 164, 173–4, 182, 192–3, 194–5, 196–200, 202, 203, 206, 208n, 212–13, 218–19, 220, 229, 231–2, 266–7, 274, 279n, 292, 295 feminism and, 80–99 film and, 6, 11–34 gay studies and, 5, 100–25 gender and, 3, 4, 61–8, 80–99 ghosts and, 7, 25, 26, 60, 62, 117, 123n, 161, 193, 199, 202–6, 278, 286, 296 globalization and, 8–10, 283–300 history and, 7, 192–211 homophobia and, 64, 109–11, 112, 114, 122n, 141, 142n, 143n homosexuality and, 5, 68–9, 77n, 84, 98, 100–25, 138, 143n, 174, 201–2, 284, 290, 297 imagination and, 6, 41, 48, 53–4n, 75, 169–91, 199–200, 203, 217, 218, 220, 229, 230, 231–2, 265, 273, 277, 291, 292, 297–8 Kant and, 3, 12, 36, 49, 50, 51, 218, 208n, 52n, 54n language and, 5, 16, 28, 48, 103–4, 118–19, 128–9, 132, 133, 134–5, 141, 142n, 143n, 187, 206, 231, 234n, 239, 240, 244, 295 letters and, 8, 239–62 Lionel Trilling and, 2 money and, 8–9, 263–82 morality and, 2, 14–15, 21, 22, 23, 35, 38, 42, 45–6, 48, 51–2, 53n, 54n, 61, 105, 121n, 149, 155, 156, 160, 173, 175, 192, 196, 199, 201, 204, 217, 226, 232, 264, 273, 288, 289, 290, 292, 229–30, 276–7, 294–5 narrative theory and, 35–58 New Criticism and, 2–3 new formalism and, 4–5 New York Edition and, xiii, 1, 4, 13, 15, 16, 16, 17–18, 19, 20–1, 38,

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42, 128, 140, 170, 203, 204, 217, 245, 267, 295, 188n, 279n organicism and, 2, 3–4, 15, 19, 20–1, 22, 36, 40, 52n, 127–8 perspectivism and, 44–52 phenomenology and, 3, 4, 11, 13, 49, 198, 207 point of view and, 3–4, 16, 18, 22, 23, 29n, 35–58, 101–2, 117, 128, 141, 200 politics and, 23–4, 283–300 pragmatism and, 44–52, 174, 197, 199 psychoanalytic criticism and, 4, 59–79 queer theory and, 5, 5–6, 28–9, 60–1, 100–25 silence and, 50, 112, 117, 154, 169, 120–1n, 214–15 stage and, 6, 11–34 theories of fiction on, 2 writings of, “Altar of the Dead, The,” 63–5; Ambassadors, The, xiii, 4, 5–6, 12, 20, 21, 25, 39, 43–5, 47–52, 59, 63, 64, 68–72, 77n, 108, 118, 126–46, 198, 199, 200, 270, 273, 280n, 285, 296; American Scene, The, xiii, 1, 4, 21, 24, 28, 30n, 82–4, 98, 122n, 141, 198, 214, 218, 264–5, 269, 270, 274–5, 279n, 280n, 285, 286, 293, 295, 296; American, The, xi, xiii, 17, 45, 149, 150, 263, 285, 288–9; “Art of Fiction, The,” xi, 2, 3, 6, 7, 10, 14–16, 35–6, 40, 49, 128, 143n, 148, 173, 194–5, 244; Art of the Novel, The (Blackmur), 16, 20–1; “Aspern Papers, The,” 7, 27, 63, 114, 188, 200–1, 292; Awkward Age, The, xiii, 22, 39, 41, 165n, 285; “Beast in the Jungle, The,” 7, 27, 120–1n, 138, 201–2, 285, 292, 296; Bostonians, The, xi, 23, 25, 37, 97, 108, 122n; Confidence, xi; “Crapy Cornelia,” 275, 276; Daisy Miller, xi, 147, 149, 152–4, 165n, 285, 289–91, 296; “Diary of a Man of Fifty, The”, 213; English Hours, xiii, 293–4; Essays

305 in London and Elsewhere, xiii, 2, 13; Europeans, The, xi, 171–3; “Figure in the Carpet, The”, 27; French Poets and Novelists, xi, 2, 13, 293; “Function of Criticism at the Present Time, The”, 13; “Future of the Novel, The”, 14, 128, 143n; Golden Bowl, The, xiii, 6, 15, 21, 25, 39–40, 41, 43, 97, 139, 143n, 144n, 147, 162, 163, 175, 178–9, 180, 181, 184, 186, 199, 205, 213, 215, 266, 274, 280n, 283, 285, 288–9; “Great Good Place, The”, 27, 188n; “Guy de Maupassant”, 2, 36, 52, 52–3n; Guy Domville, xiii, 2, 116, 140, 147, 150–1; Hawthorne, xi, 1, 213, 285; Henry James: Autobiography (Dupee), 215, 226, 267–8; In the Cage, xiii, 188n, 296; Italian Hours, xiii, 294; Ivory Tower, The, xiii, 21, 276–8, 286; “Jolly Corner, The”, 7, 27, 68, 170, 164, 184, 203–4, 272, 275, 276, 285–6; “Lesson of Balzac, The”, 180, 232; “Lesson of the Master, The”, 116; Little Tour in France, A, xi; “London Notes”, 39; Middle Years, The, xiii, 212–38; “New Novel, The”, xiii, 43; “Next Time, The”, 27; Notes of a Son and Brother, xiii, 126, 212–38, 263, 266–8; Notes on Novelists, xiii, 2, 23, 217; Other House, The, xiii; Outcry, The, xiii, 283, 286, 298; Partial Portraits, xi, 2, 13; “Passionate Pilgrim, A”, xi; Picture and Text, xiii, 2; Portrait of a Lady, The, xi, 6, 12–13, 18, 22, 44–5, 51, 84, 97, 105, 110, 147, 156–8, 169–70, 177–81, 184–8, 212, 220, 258n, 269, 283, 285, 292–3, 294; Portraits of Places, xi; Prefaces to the New York Edition, xiii, 1, 4, 6, 12, 13, 15, 16–21, 22, 25, 28, 29n, 38, 40–1, 42–4, 45, 47, 51, 52, 53n, 73, 128, 129–30, 132, 138, 140, 143n, 148, 165n, 169, 170, 176–9, 181, 188, 188n, 203, 204, 205, 214, 217,

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220, 221, 295; “Present Literary Situation in France, The,” 14; Princess Casamassima, The, xi, 23, 25, 108–9, 173, 181–3, 184, 188n, 197; “Pupil, The,” 5, 100–4, 121n; Reverberator, The, xi, 40; Roderick Hudson, xi, 12, 17–19, 42, 43, 97, 108–9, 156, 188n; “Round of Visits, A,” 269– 82; Sacred Fount, The, xiii, 25, 37, 180, 187; “Science of Criticism, The,” 12, 14; Sense of the Past, The, xiii, 7, 192, 194, 204, 209n, 286; Small Boy and Others, A, xiii, 68, 115, 126, 141, 197, 212–38; Spoils of Poynton, The, xiii, 40–1, 43, 53n, 174, 184, 186, 203, 296; “Tempest, Introduction to The”, 214–5, 225; “Tragedy of Errors, A”, x; Tragic Muse, The, xiii, 25, 43, 150, 291, 294, 296; Transatlantic Sketches, xi, 258n; “Tree of Knowledge, The”, 49; Turn of the Screw, The, xiii, 3, 12, 25–7, 30n, 60–3, 81, 116, 117, 121n, 147, 160–2, 164, 180–1, 182–3, 205–6, 208n, 285, 294; Two Magics, The, xiii; Washington Square, xi, 4–5, 7, 84–98, 154–6, 162, 195–6, 198, 283; Watch and Ward, x, 11, 18, 82; What Maisie Knew, xiii, 4, 12, 18, 43, 49–52, 53n, 54n, 61, 76n, 212, 285, 294, 296; William Wetmore Story and His Friends, xiii, 28, 213–14, 225, 233n, 290–1; Wings of the Dove, The, xiii, 4, 6, 21, 25, 39, 40, 41, 43, 44, 59, 68–75, 84, 96, 97, 113, 128, 139, 147, 156, 158–60, 162, 177, 198, 230, 232, 280n, 283, 285,291, 294 James, Mary Walsh, 240 James, Mrs. William (Alice James), 244 James, Sr., Henry, x, 217, 223, 227, 285 James, William, 38, 46–9, 51, 110, 118, 141, 223, 227, 241, 248–9, 255, 257n, 260n see also pragmatism Jameson, Fredric, 23 Jay, Martin, 47

Jobe, Steven H., 114, 142n, 244, 257n, 258n Jolly, Roslyn, 195–6, 208n Jones, James Cellan, 162–3 Jones, Mary Cadwalader, 244 Jordan, Matthew, 164 Joukowsky, Paul, 118 Joyce, James, 13, 208n, 216, 283, 285, 298 Kant, Immanuel, 3, 12, 36, 49, 50, 51, 52n, 54n, 208n, 218 Kaplan, Fred, 3, 111–12, 121, 142n, 227, 249, 279n, 284 Kellogg, Robert, 37 Kemble, Fanny, 290 Kenton, Edna, 26 Kepler, Johannes, 47 Kerr, Deborah, 161 Kidman, Nicole, 157 Kipling, Rudyard, 292 Kitt, Eartha, 151 Klimt, Gustav, 159 Kline, Mary-Jo, 242–3, 253 Koch, Sara, 147 Kreiswirth, Martin, 37 Kurosawa, Akira, 160 Lacan, Jacques, 23, 26, 59–63, 65 Lambinet, E.C., 134–7 Lander, Louisa, 290 Langhorne, Richard, 194 language, 5, 16, 28, 48, 103–4, 118–19, 128–9, 132, 133, 134–5, 141, 142n, 143n, 187, 206, 231, 234n, 239, 240, 244, 295 Lathrop, G.P., 4, 41 Laussot, Jessie Taylor, 248–9 Lawrence, D.H., 22 Leach, William, 264, 266, 279n Leavis, F.R., 21–2, 139, 233n Lee, Vernon (Violet Paget), 41–2 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 47 Leitch, Thomas M., 16 Lejeune, Phillipe, 220, 233n, 234n Lerner, Daniel, 39 letters, 8, 239–62 Levander, Caroline, 80 Levine, Robert, 80 Leys, Ruth, 67

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Locke, John, 3–4n, 47, 51 Lodge, David, 151 Loesberg, Jonathan, 220, 234n Longenbach, James, 194 Longfellow, Henry W., 247–8, 258n Loti, Pierre, 292 Louis-Philippe, King of the French, 197 Lubbock, Percy, 20, 36–8, 39, 42n, 241, 244, 257n Lumière, August and Louis, 152 Lustig, T.J., 30n, 203, 204 Luther, Martin, 289 Lyons, Richard, 269 MacIntyre, Alisdair, 265 Malkovich, John, 162 Markus, Thomas A., 171 Marshall, Adré, 38 Martin, Robert K., 81, 82 Martin, Wallace, 37 Marx, Karl, 23, 24, 63, 198, 288 masculinities, 3 Matheson, Neill, 27, 142n Matthiessen, F.O., xii, 4, 6, 20, 21–2, 105, 123n, 126, 233n, 280n Maupassant, Guy de, xi, 2, 36, 43, 66, 52–3n Mazella, Anthony, 160–1 McCormack, Peggy, 153, 265, 280n McGurl, Mark, 181–2 McWhirter, David, 20, 29n, 30n, 60, 76n, 143n, 170, 207, 215–16, 217, 218, 230, 233n, 279n, 280n Meissner, Collin, 8–9, 29n, 199–200, 226 Mélès, Georg, 152 Meredith, George, xi Meyer, Conrad Ferdinand, 252 Mill, John Stuart, 217 Miller, J. Hillis, 24, 200–1, 205, 208n, 232 Miller, Nancy, 223–4 Millgate, Michael, 229 Milton, John, 289 money, 8–9, 263–82 Moon, Michael, 4, 27, 59, 63, 67–8, 115–17, 119, 121, 218, 224–5 Moore, Rayburn S., 243, 255, 257n morality, 2, 14–15, 21, 22, 23, 35, 38, 42, 45–6, 48, 51–2, 53n, 54n,

307

61, 105, 121n, 149, 155, 156, 160, 173, 175, 192, 196, 199, 201, 204, 217, 226, 232, 264, 273, 288, 289, 290, 292, 229–30, 276–7, 294–5 Morgan, J.P., 298 Muller, Jerry, 272 Mumford, Lewis, 242, 257n Musset, Alfred de, 148 Nadel, Alan, 147, 152, 258n Napoleon I (Napoleon Bonaparte), 292 narrative theory, 35–58 Nelson, Horatio, Viscount, 292 New Criticism, 2–3 new formalism, 4–5 New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James, xiii, 1, 4, 13, 15, 16, 16, 17–18, 19, 20–1, 38, 42, 128, 140, 170, 203, 204, 217, 245, 267, 295, 188n, 279n Newton, Sir Isaac, 47 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 38, 45–6, 51, 52n Northam, Jeremy, 163 Novak, Kim, 153 Novick, Sheldon, 3, 112–14, 115, 122n, 142n, 148, 149, 150–1, 158 Nünning, Ansgar, 47 Oblisky, Princess, 118 O’Brien, Sharon, 80 Ohi, Kevin, 3, 4, 5–6, 28, 142n organicism, 2, 3–4, 15, 19, 20–1, 22, 36, 40, 52n, 127–8 Ozick, Cynthia, 158 Parker, Hershel, 19 Parkman, Francis, 245 Parrington, Vernon L., 20–3, 29n, 279n Pater, Walter, 115, 142n, 179 Pearson, Karl, 38, 45, 46, 49, 51 Peer, Willie van, 44, 52n Perosa, Sergio, 53n Perry, Thomas Sergeant, 240, 258n perspectivism, 44–52 Persse, Jocelyn, 244 Phelps, C. Dierdre, 251

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phenomenology, 3, 4, 11, 13, 49, 198, 207 see also Armstrong Piggford, George, 82 Pippin, Robert, 68n, 270–1, 273, 277, 279n Plato, 35 point of view, 3–4, 16, 18, 22, 23, 29n, 35–58, 101–2, 117, 128, 141, 200 see also centres of consciousness, phenomenology, pragmatism Poiret, Paul, 159 Poirier, Richard, 22 politics, 23–4, 283–300 Poole, Adrian, 180, 202 Posnock, Ross, 105, 121–2n, 141, 198, 215, 218, 222–3, 227, 234–5n, 270, 293n, Pound, Ezra, 20, 24 pragmatism, 44–52, 174, 197, 199 see also centres of consciousness, phenomoneology, point of view, James (William) Prothero, Fanny, 244 Proust, Marcel109, 163, 179, 204, 216 Przybylowicz, Donna, 23, 60, 76n, 175 psychoanalytic criticism, 4, 59–79 queer theory, 5, 5–6, 28–9, 60–1, 100–25 Radcliffe, Ann, 181 Rahv, Philip, 2 Raphael (Santi Raffaele), 289 Raw, Lawrence, 152, 161 Rawlings, Peter, 3, 29n, 52n, 53n, 123n, 142–3n, 165n, 174–5, 208n, 218, 222, 235n, 270 Read, Herbert, 35 Rhys, Jean, 292 Richards, Bernard, 243 Ricks, Christopher, 228 Ricoeur, Paul, 218, 233n, 234n, 244n Rivette, Jacques, 164 Rivkin, Julie, 4, 6, 24, 29n, 122n, 127, 143n, 155, 156 Ronen, Ruth, 50 Roosevelt, Theodore, 264, 268, 280n Rowe, John Carlos, 3, 4, 14, 8–10, 17, 23–4, 45, 59, 62–3, 174, 193, 207,

208n, 215, 216, 279n, 283, 284, 286, 288, 290, 292, 293, 294, 295, 296 Sadoff, Diane, 156 Said, Edward, 291–2 Saint-Beuve, Charles Augustin, 241 Salmon, Richard, 151, 270–1, 279n Sand, George, 217 Santayana, George, 263 Sargent, John Singer, xii, 283–4 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 45, 46, 233n Savoy, Eric, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 27, 28, 45, 59, 67, 68, 142n Sayre, Roberts, 216, 234n Schmidt, Siegfried J., 50 Scholes, Robert Edward, 37 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 4, 6, 27, 59, 63, 64, 65, 75, 81, 101, 106, 107, 112, 120, 134n, 120, 121n, 122n, 123n, 138, 140, 142n, 143n, 201–2 Seltzer, Mark, 23, 170, 177, 179 Senior, Nassau W., 11 Shakespeare, William, 1, 49, 104, 150, 215, 225, 285, 291, 298 Shaw, George Bernard, 150, 151 Shepherd, Cybill, 154, 157 Short, R.W., 170 silence, 50, 112, 117, 154, 169, 120–1n, 214–15 Silverman, Kaja, 4–5, 59, 63 Simmel, Georg, 8, 272–6 Skrupskelis, Ignas K. and Elizabeth M. Berkeley, 241, 248, 253–4 Smith, Adam, 47 Smith, Stephanie A., 177 Softley, Iain, 147, 156, 158–62 Sprinker, Michael, 221, 234n Steedman, Carolyn, 222, 224 Stein, Gertrude, 100, 283, 298 Sternberg, Meir, 170 Stevens, Hugh, 121n, 170 Stevenson, Robert Louis, xi, 217 Stewart, James, 153 Story, William Wetmore, 225, 233n, 290, 293 Strindberg, August, 151 Sturges, Jonathan, 130 Sturrock, John, 218–19, 234n

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Swaab, Peter, 156 Swedenborg, Immanuel, 285 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 284 Symonds, John Addington, 111, 256, 284 Tamulis, James, 245 Tanner, Tony, 218, 228–9, 242, 243 Tanselle, G. Thomas, 243, 250–1, 252–3, 258n Tate, Allen, 37 Taylor, Andrew, 218, 222, 223, 229 Taylor, Mrs., 249 Teahan, Sheila, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 121n, 127, 208n, 225, 233n Temple, Minnie, 110, 111, 113, 219, 228–9, 258n Tennyson, Alfred, 1st Baron Tennyson, xi, 228, 230 theatre, 6, 11–34 theories of fiction, 2 Thoreau, Henry David, 286 Thruman, Uma , 162–3 Tintner, Adeline, 216 Tissot, James, 153 Todorov, Tzvetan, 3, 23, 36 Tóibín, Colm, 3, 116–17, 118, 119, 127, 142n, 151, 270 Tolstoy, Count Leo Nikolaevich, 20 Tomkins, Silvan, 140 Tompkins, Jane, 228, 229 Trilling, Lionel, 2, 23 Tristram, Philippa, 171 Trollope, Anthony, 13 Truffaut, François, 147–8, 157, 163–5 Turgenev, Ivan, xi, 13, 43, 53n, 247, 248, 258n Unz, Ron, 295 Updike, John, 117 Vaihinger, Hans, 49 Van Leer, David, 164 Veeder, William, 29, 60, 76n, 147 Wachtel, Eleanor, 158

309

Wade, Allan, 150 Walker, Pierre A., 8, 28, 30n, 142n, 244, 256n Walpole, Hugh, 244 Walton, Priscilla L., 4, 80 Ward, J.A., 53n, 179 Warren, Jonathan, 24 Wellek, Réne, 21, 22 Wells, H.G., 151, 173–4 Whistler, James Abbot McNeill, 130 Whitcomb, Selden Lincoln, 41 White, Allon, 126–7 White, Edmund, 5, 100 Whitman, Walt, 114, 120n, 217, 234–5n Wigley, Mark, 187 Wilcox, E.T., 243, 257–8n Wilde, Oscar, 27, 108, 111–12, 204, 284, 296 Williams, Merle A., 200 Willis, Thomas, 47 Wilson, Edmund, 4, 26, 45, 59, 60–3, 65, 75 Winnett, Susan, 60, 76n Wolfreys, Julian, 205 Wolseley, Lady, 244, 245–6 Wood, Michael, 230, 232 Wood, Mrs. Mary, 284 Woolf, Virginia, 13, 29n, 109, 142n, 159, 192, 199 Wordsworth, William, 217 Wyckoff, Henry, 254–5 Wyler, William, 147, 154, 155 Yeats, W.B., 216, 220 Yeazell, Ruth Bernard, 127–8, 142n, 158, 159, 224 Zacharias, Greg W., 8, 28, 30n, 142n, 241 Zeller, Hans, 252 Zhurkovski, Paul, 127 Ziff, Larzer, 275 Žižek, Slavok, 59, 63 Zola, Émile, xi, 43, 217 Zorzi, Rosella Mamoli, 142n, 244, 257n

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