Our Henry James in Fiction, Film, and Popular Culture 9781032286808, 9781032286815, 9781003297987

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Our Henry James in Fiction, Film, and Popular Culture

Our Henry James in Fiction, Film, and Popular Culture addresses the interesting revival of Henry James’s works in Anglo-American film adaptations and contemporary fiction from the 1960s to the present. James’s fiction is generally considered difficult and part of high culture, more appropriate for classroom study than popular appreciation. However, this volume focuses on the adaptation of his novels into films, challenging us to understand James’s popular reputation today on both sides of the Atlantic. The book offers two explanations for his persistent influence: James’s literary ambiguity and his reliance on popular culture. “Part I: His Times” considers James’s reliance on sentimental literature and theatrical melodrama in Daisy Miller, Guy Domville, The Awkward Age, and several of his lesserknown short stories. “Part II: Our Times” focuses on how James’s considerations of changing gender roles and sexual identities have influenced Hollywood representations of emancipated women in Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, among others. Recent fiction by authors including James Baldwin and Leslie Marmon Silko also treat Jamesian notions of gender and sexuality while considering his part in contemporary debates about globalization and cosmopolitanism. Both a study of James’s works and a broad range of contemporary film and fiction, Our Henry James in Fiction, Film, and Popular Culture demonstrates the continuing relevance of Henry James to our multimedia, interdisciplinary, globalized culture. John Carlos Rowe (B.A., Johns Hopkins; Ph.D., SUNY, Buffalo) is USC Associates’ Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He is the author of nine books, 200 essays and reviews, and editor or co-editor of eleven books. Three of his authored books have focused on Henry James: Henry Adams and Henry James: The Emergence of a Modern Consciousness (1976), The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James (1984), and The Other Henry James (1998). He is a past President of the Henry James Society (2011–2012).

Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature

T. S. Eliot’s Ariel Poems Making Sense of the Times Anna Budziak Katherine Mansfield International Approaches Edited by Janka Kascakova, Gerri Kimber and Władysław Witalisz Polish Literature and Genocide Arkadiusz Morawiec Uncertainty and Undecidability in Twentieth-Century Literature and Literary Theory Mette Leonard Høeg Postmodern, Marxist, and Christian Historical Novels Hope and the Burdens of History Lynne W. Hinojosa Our Henry James in Fiction, Film and Popular Culture John Carlos Rowe Agatha Christie and New Directions in Reading Detective Fiction Narratology and Detective Criticism Alistair Rolls Exile as a Continuum in Joseph Conrad’s Fiction Living in Translation Ludmilla Voitkovska For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Studies-in-Twentieth-Century-Literature/book-series/RSTLC

Our Henry James in Fiction, Film, and Popular Culture

John Carlos Rowe

First published 2023 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 John Carlos Rowe The right of John Carlos Rowe to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-1-032-28680-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-28681-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-29798-7 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003297987 Typeset in Sabon by Taylor & Francis Books

For my mother, Gloria MacConaghy Rowe (1914–2004): “She had a fixed determination to regard the world as a place of brightness” (The Portrait of a Lady)

Contents

List of figures Preface Introduction: Our Henry James

ix x 1

PART I

His Times

25

1 Henry James and the Form of Sentiment

27

2 Romantic Sentimentalism in Henry James’s Daisy Miller: A Study (1878)

47

3 From Melodrama to Soap Opera: The Awkward Age (1899) of Popular Culture

63

4 Henry James, Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, and T. S. Eliot: Some Versions of Modernism

91

PART II

Our Times

111

5 Caged Heat: Feminist Rebellion in Henry James’s In the Cage and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window

113

6 Daisy and Frederick and Polly and Peter and Cybill and Hugh and Dorothy and Paul: Daisy Miller in Hollywood

130

7 For Mature Audiences: Sex and Gender in Film Adaptations of James’s Fiction

148

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Contents

8 What Would James Do?: Transnationalism in Recent Literary Adaptations of Henry James

183

Epilogue: My Henry James

211

Bibliography Index

220 228

Figures

2.1 Maria Louisa Lander, Virginia Dare (1859) The Elizabethan Gardens, Manteo Island 2.2 Maria Louisa Lander, Bust of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1858) Concord Public Library 5.1 Grace Kelly as Lisa Fremont, the epitome of feminine beauty 5.2 Jeff’s phallic telephoto lens 5.3 Lisa looking for evidence in Thorwald’s apartment 5.4 Lisa ostensibly preparing for a life of adventurous travel 7.1 Gustav Klimt, Danäe (1907) 7.2 John Singer Sargent, Repose (1911)

56 56 121 122 122 125 171 175

Preface

I have been writing professionally about Henry James for more than fifty years, beginning with my doctoral dissertation on Henry Adams and Henry James, which I began in the fall of 1970. My interests in other authors and issues sometimes have taken me away from James, but he has always been an undercurrent, gaining intensity at key moments in my career, for reasons I cannot always explain. The specialization by a scholar in a single author has waned, thanks in large part to the broadening of literature and the humanities to encompass far more issues than the narrow canons of knowledge in which I was educated. In the first thirty-five years of my career at two different universities, I never taught a course devoted exclusively to Henry James. There were simply too many other and more important curricular demands in my areas of specialization of nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. literature. The situation was no different at the University of Southern California, where I began to teach in 2004, but sometime around 2010 our English Department developed special two-unit courses that seemed to me suited for intensive study of single authors. Although these courses were invented to address the needs of transfer students and graduating seniors for additional credits, faculty were encouraged to imagine topics and formats for such courses significantly different from our regular courses. My department had no course devoted to a single author, except for Shakespeare, and in my six years of teaching at USC I had come to the conclusion that our undergraduates would benefit from reading a selection of works by an influential author, like Henry James, Mark Twain, or Toni Morrison. I designed and taught two courses in this new format, “Our Henry James” and “Mark Twain’s Humor.” My guiding principle in both courses was to teach them as tutorials, similar to what I imagined worked in this format at Oxford and Cambridge in England. I knew little of this British method, except what I had read in novels and occasionally heard from colleagues at conferences, but my fantasy was pedagogically sound. Such a course would have small enrollment, encouraged by USC’s two-unit format, and I would encourage first responses to the material by the students. My tasks would be to control the professor’s

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insistent need to offer “correct” interpretations and yet find a way to offer crucial historical and biographical information without lecturing. I hoped these courses would educate both my students and me, encouraging them to become more active in our work together and me to be less controlling of the classroom. The format and materials for both classes worked quite well, and I enjoyed listening to what students found interesting and irrelevant in James and Twain. Each time I taught the two-unit course on Henry James, I asked my students to help me with my book project, “Our Henry James.” Why is James still of interest and to whom? Although we considered how scholarship and teaching have contributed to the popularity of James’s works since his death, we agreed early in our discussions that these factors did not play a large role. Shakespeare’s works are taught and performed on a regular basis in high schools and universities. James’s works are taught primarily at the college level. American students are taught early that Shakespeare represents the pinnacle of English drama and style; his influence extends from high to popular culture. Shakespeare festivals throughout the U.S. and the U.K. keep public attention focused on his works as touchstones of Anglophone culture. The same conditions do not apply to the revival of interest in James in the 1990s. Although we had neither the time nor the means to do quantitative studies of audiences and their demographics, my students and I could use ourselves as test cases. To this end, I asked the students to adopt two different roles as they read and viewed James. First, they should read him and view adaptations of his works as upper-division English majors with competency in Anglo-American literary traditions. Second, they should consider his works and adaptations from the perspective of a reader with relatively little knowledge of him and the cultural heritage with which he is associated. We drew many conclusions about the current interest in James’s works, and two of them stand out as the most frequently mentioned. First, James exemplifies a high-cultural standard of taste, refinement, and education for which people today are nostalgic, in part because the ideal, often identifiable with cosmopolitanism, seems to be waning. On the one hand, this view expresses the conventional notion that James persists because of the aestheticist and high-cultural values he represents in his works. On the other hand, such a conclusion seems rather odd in the globalized contexts in which most of us live and work. We might have concluded that James’s cosmopolitanism looks old and provincial when contrasted with that of contemporary writers in English like Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Junot Díaz. It is worth noting that students did not consider James’s focus on upper-class social psychology to be part of his continuing interest. The lives of the rich and famous hardly played in the students’ considerations, in part because James’s representations of wealth and celebrity seemed so distant from our contemporary versions. For example, we sampled several online historical currency converters to get an average value today of £ 9,000,000 for the Touchetts’ bequest of £70,000 to Isabel in The Portrait of a

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Lady. Even when taking into account the different purchasing power of such a pre-tax fortune, students considered it a relatively modest sum to support Isabel’s circulation in high society in several European cities. An annual return on this fortune of 5 percent would yield a substantial £400,000 income, but that would hardly be sufficient to allow Isabel, Osmond, and Pansy to live the expensive lives described in the novel. Parties in Italian palazzos are expensive, the students were quick to remind me! As to celebrity, Lord Warburton’s role as a reform-minded member of Parliament inspired few contemporary equivalents for the students, in part because his hereditary position in the House of Lords as a member of the landed aristocracy seemed so foreign to them. Whereas the wealthy capitalists in James—Christopher Newman, Daniel Touchett, Adam Verver—seem modelled after American entrepreneurs like J. P. Morgan, John Jacob Astor, and Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, all of whom aspired to British aristocratic cultivation, contemporary British entrepreneurs, like Sir Richard Branson, seem to follow the American leads of Donald Trump, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos. Of course, the historical shift from British to U.S. imperial and economic authority interested the students, in part because James addresses just the moment in which this transformation began. But most of us agreed that these macrohistorical issues would have little appeal to a broader audience. The most compelling reason for James’s continuing popularity was his ambiguity. Many students praised James’s ability to raise complex questions about social behavior and then require the reader to choose the best answer. None of these students was committed to a poststructuralist theory of the undecidability inherent to language, as I had been in some of my previous work on James. The students merely recognized James’s Socratic method and appreciated the ways it both empowered and exposed them as readers. Is Daisy Miller a coquette or social radical? Choose the former, and you may reveal your sexist tendencies. Choose the latter, and you may expose yourself as a hopeless liberal. In both cases, however, the reader’s conclusion is what matters, not the author’s didactic conclusion. For some students, however, James’s ambiguity was a ruse either to cover his own inability to conclude his story or to distract us from the poor options he made available. In the final analysis, what does it matter if we choose that Isabel stays with Osmond, runs off with Goodwood, or marries Lord Warburton? However different these male characters may be from one another, they still represent patriarchal authority. Isabel, Pansy, even Henrietta Stackpole are still their captives, angels in the house with little freedom. Students applied both of these conclusions about James’s inconclusiveness to recent adaptations of his work. Peter Bogdanovich can turn Daisy into a naïve chatterbox, because anti-feminism is a possible interpretation of James’s representation of the American Girl. Jane Campion can transform Isabel into a modern, independent woman, because James encourages such an interpretation, only to return readers at the end to the gloomy prospects for women in any marriage. Scott McGehee and David Siegel can borrow

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James’s Maisie Farange and the basics of the plot in What Maisie Knew (1897) for their 2013 film, because James leaves Maisie suspended between alternatives and in the middle of the English Channel on her concluding return to England and a foggy future. We can tell other stories that better fit our contemporary circumstances, because James did not provide conclusive endings. Henry James thus encourages such misreadings and adaptations, not just because we want to finish his works but because we want the authority of a strong predecessor, a “Master” of the novel, to authorize our own views of gender, sexuality, divorce, fortune, fame. I am grateful to these students for their intelligence and candor, as well as their willingness to help me complete this book. My work with them has led me to a rather odd conclusion for a scholar who has spent much of his life celebrating James’s genius. James does not always rely on ambiguity as a strategic device to encourage the reader; he is often inconclusive because he does not know how to end his story. Of course, we might agree that this indecisiveness—“Well, there we are!”—is very much an aspect of everyday life—“It is what it is!” James’s indecision may well be a crucial part of his enduring, albeit changing, reputation, suggesting a more general proposition that the classic literary text and the canonical author speak not so much to enduring universals but to social and cultural problems we still have not resolved. I will not generalize here about other, very complex writers, like Shakespeare and Faulkner and Joyce, but my work with those students suggests that Henry James’s enduring reputation has something to do with our inability to overcome the gender and sexual hierarchies, the class divisions, and the racial stereotypes of nineteenth-century America and England. In this regard, then, Henry James is not so much a “Master” as a writer who addressed social issues of key importance to his times that continue to trouble our own times. This conclusion may well mean that in time Henry James will no longer be popular, his works condemned to the dust-heap of history, but that in the meantime we have something to learn from his own anxious struggles to understand the social problems of his times. I am grateful to my colleagues in the Henry James Society, whose annual conventions around the world have provided a network to share ideas about James’s work and its continuing influence. In particular, I want to thank Daniel Mark Fogel, founding editor of The Henry James Review, and his successor, Susan M. Griffin, both of whom have contributed to all my work on James. Susan read an early version of the manuscript while vacationing in Paris—my Jamesian hero! Peter Walker shared his own research and knowledge of James whenever I asked, especially about James, opera, and Wagner. Nan Z. Da reawakened my interest in this manuscript with a timely, generous email. J. Gerald Kennedy has always supported my work and kept my brain working. Our good friends, Molly and Steve Mailloux, inspire us with their examples, and Molly spurred me ahead to complete this book when she expressed her dislike of James. I hope this book will change her mind! My thanks to Caroline Kessler, who helped copyedit an early

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version of the manuscript while she was an undergraduate. To my wife, Kristin, and our three sons, Sean, Kevin, and Mark, their spouses Katherine, Karen, and Angela, and our four wonderful grandchildren, Fiona Gloria, Anton Carlos, Leben Donald, and Ava Kristin Michele, I can only say I am a fortunate person. I love you all. My mother is remembered in my dedication; she first introduced me to Henry James’s writings when I was a teenager and gave me Fred Dupee’s Henry James: His Life and Writings (1951), a prized if tattered possession. I am grateful to Oxford University Press for permission to reprint a substantially revised version in Chapter 5 of “Caged Heat: Feminist Rebellion in In the Cage and Rear Window,” which first appeared in The Men Who Knew Too Much, eds. Susan M. Griffin and Alan Nadel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 174–188, as well as to Palgrave Macmillan for permission to reprint in Chapter 7 a much expanded version of “For Mature Audiences: Sex, Gender and Recent Film Adaptations of Henry James’s Fiction,” which first appeared in Henry James on Stage and Screen, ed. John R. Bradley (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 190–211. Early versions of the chapters in this book were given as talks: Chapter 4 at the Los Angeles Ring Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art on April 15, 2010, Würzburg University (Germany) on June 2, 2014, and “The Real Thing” Henry James Convention at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland on July 18, 2014; Chapter 6 at the American Literature Association Convention (San Francisco) on May 25, 2018; Chapter 7 at Lüdwig Maximilians University, Munich, February 2, 2000 and Department of Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz, June 5, 2000; Chapter 8 at the Modern Language Association Convention (Seattle), June 8, 2012.

Introduction Our Henry James

I loathed Henry James and counted myself boorish until I read the opinion of his best friend, Edith Wharton, who pronounced him unreadable. – David Mamet, “Charles Dickens Makes Me Want to Throw Up,” Wall Street Journal (7/21/2017)

I have spent my professional life writing about Henry James, but I am still baffled by his continuing popularity. His works are difficult, not just in the later, proto-modernist novels of the Major Phase, but in his early and middle periods, as well. His emphasis on social and personal problems specific to the upper-middle and aristocratic classes seems dated, even too narrow for the late Victorian and Edwardian audiences for which he wrote. His preference for high culture and trivialization of popular culture are linked with his nostalgia for earlier, more refined periods and his typical condemnation of the modern age and many of its technological innovations. His novels are too long and their plots generally too trivial to deserve our attention. And his conclusions are frustratingly ambiguous. Yet James persists, almost against our better judgments, for reasons that seem on the face of it superficial or at least unsatisfactory. In our postmodern era, we are nostalgic for the grace and charm of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century culture. We are Anglophiles and cannot get enough of British culture, even though we are aware that its authority has waned with the breakup of the Empire. We love to live vicariously in the world of the rich and famous, because we wish we were they. James’s writing is just, well, beautiful and his novels aesthetically pleasing. Who can deny the inherent value of such language, style, form? All of these claims are true, but even when taken together they do not quite explain James’s persistence in very different times and places. At least since the 1970s, British culture has turned nostalgia for the Empire into a lively and profitable commercial model, especially with such television series as Downton Abbey and Indian Summers or the The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel films. Having become a British citizen and surrendered his U.S. citizenship in 1915, Henry James qualifies for such imperial nostalgia, but his American background and central themes in his fiction seem eccentric to this British culture DOI: 10.4324/9781003297987-1

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Introduction

industry. Anglophilia has a long history and was an especially guilty pleasure of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Americans, but the diversification of the U.S. in the aftermath of the 1965 Immigration Reform Act certainly means that fewer Americans find England to be “our old home,” as Hawthorne termed it in one of his non-fiction books.1 As to our fascination with the lives of the rich and famous, Americans certainly have their own long list of celebrities to follow from the Astors, Vanderbilts, and Rockefellers in James’s time to the Kardashians, Trumps, and Gateses of our era. Certainly the judgment of inherent aesthetic value is the most pervasive and troubling. Henry James’s fiction is rarely given to splendid visionary moments or soaring rhetoric unqualified by his usual irony and ambiguity. Shakespeare is often quoted, perhaps because his characteristic iambic pentameter, appropriate to the Elizabethan stage, has a rhythmic quality that lends itself to memory. Alexander Pope is also memorable and often quoted, thanks to his use of the heroic couplet. But James’s long, meandering sentences in the novels of the Major Phase, even the sentimental, often melodramatic prose of his early novels, do not lend themselves either to memory or recitation. His reputation as an aesthetic master certainly dates to Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction (1921), in which Lubbock draws centrally on James’s prefaces to the New York Edition for Lubbock’s definition of what constitutes a great novel.2 Michael Anesko has shown how Lubbock almost single-handedly created James’s posthumous reputation.3 A member of the British aristocracy, close friend of James, and fiction reviewer for the London Times Literary Supplement, Lubbock worked hard to win the James family’s approval and then “edited James’s unfinished manuscripts …; … compiled the two-volume edition of James’s letters…; and oversaw the publication of Macmillan’s thirtyfive volume edition of The Novels and Stories of Henry James (1921–1923) …” (Anesko, 73). In The Craft of Fiction, Lubbock celebrates James’s scenic and dramatic methods, as well as his perspectivism.4 Lubbock treats a wide variety of novels from Austen and Dickens to Tolstoy, James, and Forster; most of them are judged by the criteria for good fiction established by James in his Prefaces. Lubbock’s book had a wide circulation, went through numerous reprintings in the modern period, and is often considered “the official textbook of the Modernist aesthetics of indirection.”5 As Anesko concludes, The Craft of 1

2 3 4 5

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Our Old Home: A Series of English Sketches (Boston: Ticknor Fields, 1863). On nineteenth-century U.S. Anglophilia, see Elisa Tamarkin, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (London: Jonathan Cape, 1921). Michael Anesko, Monopolizing the Master: Henry James and the Politics of Modern Literary Scholarship (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2012), p. 73. Further references in the text as: Anesko. Ibid., pp. 143, 159, 199. Susana Onega and José Angel García Landa, “Introduction,” Narratology: An Introduction, eds. Susana Onega and José Angel García Landa (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 20.

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Fiction was Lubbock’s “own high-modernist critical treatise, which redacted – and made elegantly persuasive – the compositional principles James had (more discursively) articulated in the Prefaces to the New York Edition” (Anesko, 73). Although The Craft of Fiction confirms James’s reputation as a modernist, it is curious, even perverse, literary criticism that pays more attention to how a novel should be written than to how a good novel should be understood by its readers. Influential as Lubbock’s book was on modernist writers and AngloAmerican New Criticism, its aesthetic values belong to a past generation. Although Lubbock’s idealization of Jamesian aestheticism belongs to an older modernist tradition, there is a new aestheticism that often draws on James’s dedication to style, concern with formal beauty, and rejection of literary didacticism. Elaine Scarry’s critical study On Beauty and Being Just (2002) and novels like Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (2004) and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005) indicate a trend in the early years of the twenty-first century to reclaim the social and moral purposes of aestheticism.6 Colm Tóibín’s The Master (2004) is another good example of this approach, and it uses James as a classic writer notable for his universal values, especially where good literature is concerned.7 The new aestheticism represented by these contemporary thinkers is not, however, a reactionary appeal to modernist aestheticism. Instead, these theorists of beauty and fiction seem intent on reconciling aesthetic, social, ethical, and even historical functions. All of these conventional claims about James’s lingering reputation revolve around his status as a classic writer, such as that of Shakespeare, Joyce, or Faulkner, who touches on the universals of human experience. However bound Shakespeare was to Elizabethan England, Faulkner to the racially divided South, Joyce to subjugated Ireland, and Henry James to transatlantic AngloAmerican cultures of the fin-de-siècle, each of them teaches us something enduring about humanity. For all his entanglements in British monarchy, Lear speaks to us as a father, whose troubled relations with his daughters have been experienced by many parents. Sutpen’s ruthless ambitions in Absalom, Absalom! (1936) are tied inextricably to the sins of Southern slavery, but his passionate desire to overcome his humiliating childhood and affirm his self-reliant authority in the world are common human motives. Leopold Bloom’s Jewish and Irish backgrounds define him as doubly exiled, and his identity as an outsider can be shared by us all. Isabel Archer’s wish to control her own destiny amid the limitations placed on women in nineteenth-century America and Victorian England transcends the rituals of courtship, marriage, and child rearing to embrace the problems faced by every strong individual forced to compromise her ideals by accepting social responsibilities. 6 7

Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Zadie Smith, On Beauty (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2005); Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty (London: Picador, 2004). Colm Tóibín, The Master (New York: Scribner, 2004). Further references in the text as: M. See Chapter 8 for a fuller interpretation of the novel.

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We have grown suspicious of such claims to universality, because they are so hard to prove, change historically (often in very dramatic ways), and have been used so often to overlook historically specific issues. As the debates concerning literary canons during the so-called culture wars of the late 1980s and 1990s demonstrated, canon formation and its relation to “non-canonical” works further complicate such claims to universality. In Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (1993), John Guillory elaborates these complexities, concluding: Insofar as the debate on the canon has tended to discredit aesthetic judgment, or to express a certain embarrassment with its metaphysical pretensions and its political biases, it has quite missed the point. The point is not to make judgment disappear but to reform the conditions of its practice.8 Although there are many possible ways to reform how we practice aesthetic judgment, I want to suggest that James’s continuing reputation relies on two aspects of his work relatively neglected in his scholarly reception: popular culture and literary ambiguity. Substantial work has been done on what James learned from popular culture, especially nineteenth-century popular literature, but most of that scholarship has focused on how James drew on popular models to create his own “personal style,” as William Veeder puts it, or to distinguish his feminine characters and situations from the political agendas of first-wave feminism, as Alfred Habegger has done.9 Veeder can write confidently: “For my purposes, Fanny Fern and E. D. E. N. Southworth are clearly popular, and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James are clearly not” (Veeder, 7). For Habegger, James’s conflicted responses to the women’s movement, motivated in part by his complex relationship with his father’s advocacy of free love and women’s rights, distances James from a popular literary tradition dominated by women authors and their characters and plots. In “Friction with the Market:” Henry James and the Profession of Authorship (1986), Michael Anesko has resituated James within the everyday struggle of the creative writer to manage publishers, contracts, reviewers, and readers as consumers.10 Yet it is neither the degree to which Henry James distanced himself from popular literature, as Veeder and Habegger have argued, or should be judged as a writer working within the commercial conditions of 8

John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 340. 9 William Veeder, Henry James – The Lessons of the Master: Popular Fiction and Personal Style in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), pp. 8–9; Alfred Habegger, Henry James and the “Woman Business” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 10. 10 Michael Anesko, “Friction with the Market:” Henry James and the Profession of Authorship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

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authorship James abhors in his writings, as Anesko argues, that describe the literary popularity that I find so striking in James’s continuing reputation. Richard Salmon more effectively locates James within the developing mass culture of his era in Henry James and the Culture of Publicity (1997), detailing James’s complex relationship with such crucial aspects of popular culture as journalism, theater, celebrity, and advertising. Employing Frankfurt School theories of mass culture, Salmon makes an effective case for James as a precursor to the cultural criticism advocated by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1972), especially the extent to which publicity depends on a “self-referential system of cultural codes” competitive with many aesthetic functions.11 One of the motives of Adorno’s revolutionary method in Negative Dialectics (1966) is to recognize the social and political value of the aesthetic function to defamiliarize conventional meanings. For Adorno, great art works to distance itself from the quotidian or the overtly popular, in order to enable us to recognize the horizons of the lived realities we accept uncritically. Adorno has often been criticized for defending high cultural work by identifying its critical function as what distinguishes it from popular culture. Salmon more effectively identifies the tensions in James’s work between his own desire to criticize popular culture and the degree to which his work depends on such popularity, both in terms of his aesthetic models and the audiences he courted in the many different genres in which he published. In “Henry James, Popular Culture, and Cultural Theory,” Salmon concisely expresses the problem of popular culture he finds central to James’s work: James may not have longed for the true reconciliation of cultural division which forms the negatively realized utopian dimension of Adorno’s critical theory, but, experientially, in his conflicting aspirations towards both popular and artistic acclaim, he realized the existing conditions of its (im)possibility.12 Salmon’s interpretation of this “(im)possibility” of James reconciling his aspirations for “both popular and artistic acclaim” focuses exclusively on James’s era, in which the notions of popularity, celebrity, and publicity were assuming recognizably modern features. In our own times, these cultural spheres have become immensely more complicated and central to our understanding of social and personal identities. Although we cannot claim a straight path from James’s era’s culture of publicity and our own, there are certain parallelisms, even structural resemblances that suggest the value of extending Salmon’s arguments to our contemporary receptions of Henry 11 Richard Salmon, Henry James and the Culture of Publicity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 139. 12 Salmon, “Henry James, Popular Culture, and Cultural Theory,” The Henry James Review 19:3 (Fall 1998), 217.

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James as a figure of both popular and high-cultural reputation. Put another way, Henry James is a celebrity today in ways that might surprise him, but are very compatible with how his works represent the relationship of literature to social reality. What Salmon’s work teaches us is that the status of Henry James as a popular or high-cultural writer is far less important than how “Henry James” circulates as a commodity in these related cultural registers. One of the aims of Our Henry James in Fiction, Film, and Popular Culture is to track this circulation in his own and our times. James wrote a great deal of popular fiction, even if he typically condemns the popular literature of his era. Peter Brooks has shown the powerful influence of theatrical melodrama on both Balzac and James, each of whom relies on a “melodramatic imagination” that cannot be separated from popular cultural work.13 Roderick Hudson, The American, and Daisy Miller are not just influenced by popular character types and melodramatic, even gothic, situations; all three of these early works are popular works, less on the basis of their popularity with readers than as a consequence of their dominant uses of popular literary themes. Scholars have often treated these early works in terms of their “romantic” qualities and the influence of Hawthorne, dodging the question of whether or not both authors wrote popular works. James’s short stories also confirm his reputation as a writer of popular literature. The scholarly emphasis on works such as “The Jolly Corner,” “The Beast in the Jungle,” and “The Altar of the Dead” as profoundly philosophical works often causes us to forget pot-boilers such as “Adina,” “Collaboration,” and “The Velvet Glove.” James’s works lend themselves to popular adaptations, then, in part because those works rely on techniques drawn from popular culture in ways we have not adequately recognized. Literary ambiguity is the other aspect of James’s works that helps explain their continuing popularity. In his canonization as a modernist by both the Anglo-American New Critics and subsequent post-structuralist scholars, James exemplifies the inherent irony of the modernist avant-garde and the inevitable relativism of all meaning elaborated by deconstruction.14 Both approaches to James are valid: James does rely on structural ironies that would become hallmarks of literary modernism, and James plays with the inherent undecidability of language, especially highly rhetorical literary language. Yet James is radically ambiguous in other ways that both contribute to his notorious difficulty and his relation to popular culture. James is often indecisive regarding social, political, and economic changes and how individuals ought to respond to them. Sometimes profoundly conservative in response to new technologies, political 13 Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), pp. 1–24. 14 Cleanth Brooks, “Irony as a Principle of Structure” (1949), in Hazard Adams, ed., Critical Theory since Plato, rev. ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991), pp. 968–974. John Carlos Rowe, Through the Custom-House: Nineteenth-Century American Fiction and Modern Theory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 168–189.

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crises, and changing social demographics, James retreats to older values and bemoans progressive changes. On the other hand, he can be very critical of the lingering effects of traditional values and conventional meanings. Readers have long been confused by the moral lessons to be drawn from his writings, even as they respect his warnings to avoid the moral didacticism of popular literature.15 I think that James is often in doubt about how to respond to new social, political, and economic conditions, preferring to satirize the worst excesses of traditional values and new ideas, rather than offering us settled perspectives. In these respects, James lends himself both to differing interpretations and to a wide range of adaptations. James’s genius is to have identified such problems as critical; his continuing popularity often relies on his ambiguity with respect to how such changes ought to be judged. My own approach in this book is to treat centrally how historical and social changes suggest commonalities from one era to another primarily in terms of unresolved social problems, rather than shared universals. James made his literary reputation by treating interpersonal relations between Europeans and Americans in his celebrated international theme. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European and U.S. societies hardly resolved the conflicts that arose from greater commercial, cultural, and personal exchanges. In fact, James represents most of these international relations in ways that are ultimately inconclusive. Writing during the period of mass European immigration to the U.S., James also confronted considerable changes in what had initially appeared to him as the class-specific issues facing individuals with the economic means and social standing to enjoy a cosmopolitan lifestyle. In his own responses to immigrants in the Bowery in The American Scene (1907), James certainly betrays the ethnocentrism and even racial prejudices that indicate his inability to adapt to changing international conditions.16 When compared with our contemporary debates over immigration, undocumented workers, and the socio-economic consequences of globalization, James’s attitudes may seem out-of-date and irrelevant, yet the very unresolved status of immigration in U.S. culture allows his international theme to resonate in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. We can conclude that his cosmopolitan behavior in response to such conditions, at once condescending to and yet extremely interested in different cultures, is another example of how his ambivalence can give him continuing relevance. Today’s new cosmopolitanism has many different kinds and hardly resembles the late-Victorian cosmopolitanism exemplified by James, but the concept itself still remains controversial and difficult to judge ethically.17 In short, persistent social, political, or economic 15 Henry James, “The Art of Fiction” (1884), in The Future of the Novel, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Random House, 1956), pp. 24–25, in which James contests Walter Besant’s claim that a good novel requires “moral purpose.” 16 Henry James, The American Scene (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1907), pp. 187–201. Further references in the text as: AS. 17 Consider the differences between Kwame Anthony Appiah’s liberal theory in Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton,

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problems may cause us to look to the past for answers or at least for precedents. In many cases, such quests inform the continuing interest in James’s fiction, both because his work is often ambiguous about how to resolve these problems and such literary indecision reminds us of an ongoing issue. James’s consideration of changing social attitudes toward gender and sexuality is an even better example of this historical process. Socially constructed gender roles and sexual behaviors are inherently unstable and subject to frequent changes, especially when political activism challenges prevailing conventions for gender hierarchies and sexual taboos. From his earliest to last works, James’s oeuvre is distinguished by its varied treatment of such issues, frequently thematizing specific social and political changes without drawing particular moral conclusions. From Daisy Miller to The Golden Bowl, James offers his readers strong feminine characters who seem to draw on the politics of the women’s rights and suffrage movements. Yet his strongest feminine characters, such as Isabel Archer and Maggie Verver, are involved in domestic plots revolving around marriage and social manners. Feminine characters in the public sphere of work and political activism, such as Henrietta Stackpole, Miss Birdseye, and Olive Chancellor, are routinely satirized for their failure to recognize their feminine responsibilities to family life. Even so, James hardly represents marriage and the family in favorable terms. It is hard to find a happy marriage in James’s writings, and children are abused more often than loved by their parents. The situation is equally problematic when we consider James’s treatment of same-sex relations, which scholarship of the past thirty years has shown to be quite pervasive, if semiotically unstable, in his works. In early stories, like “A Light Man” (1869) and “Adina” (1874), James plays with same-sex relations as possible alternatives to heteronormativity. Even Daisy Miller, although by no means explicitly homoerotic, suggests potential affiliations between Lord Byron and Daisy that suggest a sort of rhetorical cross-dressing and gender switching. Yet by the time he writes such mid-career works as The Bostonians (1886), The Tragic Muse (1890), and The Turn of the Screw (1898), James seems to demonize the same-sex relations of Olive Chancellor and Verena Tarrant, the Wilde-like qualities of Gabriel Nash, and the hinted pederasty of Peter Quint with Miles. Sometimes pitting homosexual and lesbian relations against each other, as he does in “The Middle Years” (1893), and at other times confusing homosexuality with child abuse, as he does in “The Author of ‘Beltraffio’” (1884) and “The Pupil” (1891), as well as in The Turn of the Screw, James seems uncertain how to judge gender roles and sexual identities of all sorts in the changing social landscape of Victorian and Edwardian England. 2006) and the leftist positions of Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins in their coedited collection, Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

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Such indecisiveness is not quite the literary or linguistic ambiguity some James scholars have considered his hallmark, but it has great interest for scholars of cultural and social history.18 Understanding how a cultivated and insightful writer responded to the dramatic changes in gender and sexual conventions helps us comprehend social change in a period that included the demonization of same-sex relations with the Anti-Sodomy laws in England and their legal precedent in the conviction of Oscar Wilde. From this historicist perspective, Henry James is not a queer writer or pioneer of later feminist or LGBTQ+ political activism. Yet if James is not a forerunner or precursor of second- and third-wave feminist and queer political movements, then why do his works continue to be adapted to other media, reprinted, and read today? One answer is that James plays with the possibilities of gender and sexuality in ways that appear progressive and yet in many instances turn out to be quite conservative. If the conclusions of most of his biographers are correct that James did not engage in same-sex relations and yet was homosexual, then his closeted sexual identity would seem to match his highly guarded and ambivalent treatments of same-sex relations in his fiction. In many respects, James exemplifies what I termed elsewhere “aesthetic dissent,” whereby the “rigorous reflection on the processes of thought and representation constitutes in itself a critique of social reality.”19 I consider “aesthetic dissent” to be a particular legacy of the romantic idealist tradition, of which James is an important heir, and that informs the pragmatist tradition that his brother William James founded and with which Henry James has often been associated.20 I think we need to pay much more attention to James’s social conventionality, insofar as he simply plays with progressive gender and sexual politics in his era without changing substantially the social structures limiting these new attitudes. Isabel does return to Osmond, Pansy, and Rome, rather than breaking free of this gothic family. Little Miles is indeed “dispossessed” at the end of The Turn of the Screw, either frightened to death by his crazy governess or just succumbing to the terrible memory of his violation by Peter Quint and/or Miss Jessel. At the end of The Bostonians, Verena Tarrant is carried away melodramatically by Basil Ransom to some Southern hell, but James seems to suggest it might be better than her Boston friendship with Olive Chancellor. Whatever we may wish for the troubled relationship between Prince Amerigo and Maggie Verver 18 The critical claim that James used ambiguity strategically dates at least to Edmund Wilson’s “The Ambiguity of Henry James,” first published in Hound and Horn (1934), 385–406, then revised and included in Wilson’s The Triple Thinkers: Twelve Essays on Literary Subjects (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1938). 19 John Carlos Rowe, At Emerson’s Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 1. 20 Richard A. Hocks, 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: University of North Carolina Press, 1974).

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at the end of The Golden Bowl, Maggie has indeed saved their marriage by sending her friend Charlotte and her father Adam back to American City, perhaps to live out their own deeply troubled relationship. In this view, James’s fiction permits us to imagine alternatives to social reality, but then returns us to its comfortable conventionality. Hardly propaganda, such imaginative experience might resemble Bakhtin’s “carnivalesque,” in which emancipatory possibilities are entertained primarily to keep readers under control and minimize the prospects of genuine social or political revolutions.21 Hence James may be less prophetic of future social problems, such as immigration and women’s and gay rights’ movements, than work to maintain the status quo and keep alive such social problems by diverting readers from their remediation. Such a conclusion places us as ordinary and professional readers in a difficult relationship to James’s complex and diverse oeuvre. In celebrating his genius and role as Master, we may perpetuate his normalizing function, which some have termed an “aesthetic ideology” that employs culture to minimize social and political change.22 The broader ideological questions are particularly relevant when we consider how often James invokes his own literary and aesthetic authority to solve social and political problems. Daisy Miller never quite rises to the possibilities of social revolution that James identifies with Lord Byron and other English romantics. The journalist Henrietta Stackpole in The Portrait of a Lady, the orator Verena Tarrant in The Bostonians, the book-binder Hyacinth Robinson in The Princess Casamassima, the actress Miriam Rooth in The Tragic Muse, the telegraphist in In the Cage, the romance-reading Governess in The Turn of the Screw, the bequest-writing Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove, the editor of a literary journal Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors, the marriage-arranging Maggie Verver in The Golden Bowl all fail to live up to their tacit role model: the restless analyst, insightful observer, and inspired artist Henry James himself, who is alone able to represent the complex social problems in which they are all enmeshed. I find it interesting that these characters all work, albeit not as members of the proletariat, by virtue of some activity involving language or literature. In some odd sense, then, Percy Lubbock was right in The Craft of Fiction that we read James primarily to learn how to write as he did, not so much to become successful novelists or judges of their work, as Lubbock intended, but rather to cope with a modern world that is increasingly structured in the manner of fiction. This view of society as narrative is shared by Mark Twain and Henry James, contemporary authors who are otherwise vastly different in terms of their backgrounds, interests, and styles. Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, Jim, the Duke and Dauphin, David Wilson, Hank Morgan, Colonel Sellers, the 21 Mikhail Bahktin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 132–137. 22 Martin Jay, “‘The Aesthetic Ideology’ as Ideology; Or, What Does It Mean to Aestheticize Politics?” Cultural Critique 21:1 (Spring 1992), 41–61.

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Mysterious Stranger, and most of Twain’s other notable characters are storytellers like their creator, whose purposes range from honest communication to deception. Colm Tóibín contends that James’s fiction depends on “pure style, where style itself … was a sort of high morality” (ANN, 24). As readers, we should learn how to tell a good story and how to interpret stories, because the world turns on such fictions. In these respects, Twain and James both participated in the early stages of aesthetic modernism and anticipated the postmodern cultural turn, reminding us that no social reality can be separated from its representation. The metafictional aspect of James is certainly one of his appeals to postmodern audiences, but it also has a tendency to trivialize specific social and political issues. Everything is socially constructed and hence subject to change. Why bother to march or change the laws when tomorrow the very social conventions governing our lives will be exposed as lies? There is an existentialist bias in James, which he shares with Twain, that tends to universalize human problems and render social transformations quixotic. Even though James’s metaliterary dimension may be his main claim to foresee our contemporary, digital world, it may also be part of a deeply conservative, retrograde impulse to reduce everything to fiction, all facts to “fake news.” As far as Donald Trump seems from the cultural sophistication and cosmopolitanism of Henry James, distant as James might be from Trump’s populist political base, they may be strange bedfellows, both of whom understand well enough how to manipulate the fictions of social reality.23 This book addresses what persists and how it is changed in the work of a single exemplary author whose complex body of work continues to draw contemporary audiences to his original and adapted texts. My purpose is less celebratory than critical in the sense of seeking what lies behind the apparent “genius” of a distinguished writer. Far more interesting to us should be the social issues that continue to demand either “aesthetic dissent” or genuine political changes. Does James encourage us to face these continuing problems, even identifying prospectively how they might gain complexity or variation in a future he could only dimly anticipate? Or does James instead provide us with aesthetic placebos, fake catharses that may reassure us that people have always struggled to understand each other, that no one ever can have enough money, that art is indeed a way out, that all families are unhappy, that hell is truly other people? Or are we imagining a James who never existed but instead serves our purposes in ways he could never have anticipated, a phantasmatic Henry James who has little to do with his own era and everything to do with our own contemporary needs? More than fifty years ago, Maxwell Geismar indicted the invention of another Henry James in Henry James and the Jacobites (1963).24 His target 23 See John Carlos Rowe, “The Reader Writes Back: Social Media and the Novel,” Novel 50.3 (Fall 2017), 452–464, for a fuller development of this idea. 24 Maxwell Geismar, Henry James and the Jacobites (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1963). Further references in the text as: Geismar.

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was principally the rise of Anglo-American New Criticism and its formalist aesthetic values, which Geismar judged one means of “ex-radical critics in the 1940’s and 1950’s … to block-out and ‘reconstruct’ … their own now ‘subversive’ ties or connections” (Geismar, 441). As “the pure artist,” James was just the thing for the new criticism with its own stress on method which also negated, or obliterated, the historical and the human elements alike in the “pure” work of art. Just the thing too, this aristocratic AngloAmerican artist – with his elaborate rationalizations … with his nonpolitical (well, royalist), non-social, non-economic and non-historical sense of “history” … (441) Blaming primarily scholars and some public intellectuals, Geismar was more concerned with the Cold-War atmosphere of the U.S.: Just like James, the United States of the 1950’s was rooted in a fabricated fantasy life of its own “leisure class” existence; while also, just as in the Jamesian temperament and achievement, this narrow and rigid “vision” of itself had obvious overtones of anxiety, fear or hysteria. (442) Geismar’s social criticism of James’s appeal is reductive and speaks only to one aspect of U.S. social life in the Cold War. The continuing interest and periodic revivals of James in our own era do not so much confirm Geismar’s analysis as indicate that scholars may have had less influence than popular culture. Once imagined as an immensely powerful academic method that transformed or reflected social values, Anglo-American New Criticism is now considered less influential, albeit still symptomatic. Geismar admits that the Henry James imagined in the 1950s was a fabrication, so the question remains for us how and why Henry James has been reinvented. Following Geismar, I might argue that those Cold War social values are still integral to our contemporary era. Yet departing from him, I prefer to argue that his caricature of Henry James hardly begins to represent the complexity of James in his times and for our times. My critical intention differs from Geismar’s in my broader concern with how and why we construct major authors, “masters” of their traditions, prophetic “geniuses” who forecast the future in which we are reading them. My purpose is not to demystify them, reduce them to their reality, but instead focus on how and why they are kept alive. “Our Henry James,” then, does not describe a simple mode of affiliation whereby a distinct group constitutes itself by claiming the author as his fans, enemies, critics, or adaptors. “Our” remains a heterogeneous set of groups, each distinguishable by scholarly, cultural, or commercial interests, but also overlapping with these other concerns that are more difficult to articulate.

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“Our Henry James” is best described as a horizon of interpretation that encompasses the various “Jameses” who continue to circulate in postmodern culture. To be sure, such a horizon ought to include the entire range of nonAnglo-American interests in James from the Henry James Society of Korea to his popularity in postwar Japan and among the writers of the Latin American Boom. Although I recognize the importance of James’s international influence, my focus in the following chapters is neither on that influence nor on the adaptation of his works in different media by film-makers, composers, and visual artists around the world. The two parts of this book are not designed to suggest a progression from James’s “times” to “our times,” much less to be comprehensive in terms of their contents. I have looked for certain points of intersection that enable us to understand better what aspects of the Victorian era continue to shape our own times from roughly 1950 to the present. There are close associations between nineteenth-century popular literary modes such as theatrical melodrama and the sentimental romance with twentieth-century soap operas and new forms of sentimentalism. Yet there are important differences as well, especially when we consider the social, economic, and political conditions dividing these eras. James’s Daisy Miller draws very obviously on the feminine protagonists of the dime-novel, whereas Peter Bogdanovich’s Daisy Miller is more a work of art-house cinema than of popular culture. Yet both works are deeply invested in popular conceptions of changing gender roles in ways distinct to their own eras. The different parts of this book are thus designed to offer a certain distorted mirroring of each other, rather than to suggest a progressive development or “modernization.” We can recognize the lingering elements of theatrical melodrama in more recent soap operas, for example, primarily because both genres are attempting to regulate social problems that threaten conventional values. My last point is perhaps my best explanation of the theory of popular culture employed throughout this book. I am not interested in a definitive formal definition of what constitutes a work as belonging to popular, middlebrow, or high culture. We should remember that the nineteenth-century novel generally occupied a borderland between popular and high culture. Its celebrated practitioners from Austen to James struggled to justify the seriousness of their subjects and techniques. The popular cultural function is thus best understood as a modality in which a representational system regulates social changes in ways that achieve a certain popular recognition and even approval. This function often serves to reinstate existing social conventions or at least adapt them in ways that permit the stabilization of the existing social order. Any communicative act can do such work, including those that we identify by way of their avant-garde forms and techniques as part of “high culture.” The chief criteria for popular culture, then, has to be acceptability and consensus. I begin with some of the crucial social and political issues in James’s own time that motivated his work. “Part I: His Times” considers how James responded to the romantic heritage in which he was educated and to which

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his father contributed, as well as the cosmopolitanism that developed at the height of Western nationalism. Beginning in Chapter 1 with the sentimental tradition that James frequently trivialized, following Hawthorne’s stereotype of the “damn’d mob of scribbling women” who wrote sentimental romances, I suggest that James’s indebtedness to melodrama and sentimentalism has been insufficiently studied. All of James’s protagonists draw on sentiment and affective power, which has been neglected by modern critics intent on demonstrating James’s contributions to the philosophical novel and literary realism. In many respects, the continuing interest in his works in the public sphere has much to do with how he transformed the domestic romance into literary realism. As Peter Brooks has argued, Balzac and James used theatrical melodrama as a central device to help legitimate their novels, often rendering psychological processes in the rhetoric of adventure and risk: “The terms of reference in the adventure story are modified; yet they remain the terms of reference: moral consciousness must be an adventure, its recognition must be the stuff of heightened drama” (Brooks, 7). Not only does James allude to a wide range of sentimental romances, many of his plots turn on melodramatic situations typical of nineteenth-century drama and popular fiction. In addition, James’s sentimentalism reminds us that it is not simply a feminine mode. Classic male writers from Hawthorne and Melville to James and Twain relied on sentimentalism and melodrama even while they were condemning these popular modes. In Chapter 2, I offer a close reading of Daisy Miller in terms of its rich network of allusions to the English romantics and their views of ancient Rome. As James’s most popular romance from his early period, Daisy Miller demonstrates his complex use of romantic and sentimental conventions. Although the romantic sources in James’s novella have often been noted, no scholar has interpreted this romantic legacy in terms of the specific moral imperatives of the story for Americans. Embedded in the ancient and recent past, Daisy Miller is also a prophecy about the dangers and promises of the U.S. as an imperial power. Often read as a simple and early version of James’s international theme, the novella is much more aesthetically and morally complex when understood in terms of its direct citations and allusions to the romantics and popular culture, including James’s inclusion in the novella of familiar tourist sites in Geneva and Rome. In many respects, Daisy Miller is an early example of the “destination novel.” Theater is the center of Victorian popular culture. Insofar as James “failed” as a playwright, especially between 1890 and 1895 when he made a sustained effort to write and produce successful plays for the Victorian stage, then James also failed in popular culture. In Chapter 3, I interpret The Awkward Age as a serious adaptation of theatrical melodrama to the novel. Previous scholars have discussed how James’s effort to write the novel primarily in dialogue employs this dramatic mode, but most conclude that James employs such theatrical devices as dialogue and stage settings to represent the complex philosophical and social issues explored in all of his

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novels. In effect, The Awkward Age responds to the trauma James experienced with the much-discussed failure of his play Guy Domville by appropriating the elements of popular theatricality that James never mastered. Just as previous scholars have viewed James’s response to the sentimental romance as his employment of its devices and rhetoric in the interests of his aestheticist and philosophical purposes, similar arguments have been offered about the “inspiration” he drew for his fiction from his failure on the popular stage. My argument is that The Awkward Age not only draws directly on the devices of Victorian melodrama, especially the domestic drama, but it anticipates the soap opera on the radio in the 1930s and 1940s and television in the 1950s and 1960s. James’s vision of late Victorian high society in The Awkward Age is profoundly cynical, exceeding even his satire of class distinctions in What Maisie Knew (1897). Maisie Farange at least ends her fictional trials with a dawning awareness of how she will have to find her own way as distinct from the corrupt lives her parents and their friends have led in the novel. Traveling between France and England, suspended in the middle of the English Channel, Maisie has some chance at a different future, a break with the social climbing and desperate economic needs of her parents’ generation. In contrast, Nanda Brookenham is traded back and forth by her mother, the elegant but destitute Mrs. Brook, her hopeless lover Vanderbank, the nostalgic and wealthy Longdon, and a full cast of morally bankrupt characters. What has so often been considered the sophisticated conversation in Mrs. Brook’s London drawing room turns out to be thinly disguised romantic banter barely disguising the illicit sexual desires of the characters. Their sexual needs are so entangled with economic motives as to be indistinguishable, producing rhetorical ambiguities and confusions that produce new social crises. In fact, these conflicts are never addressed, much less resolved, so that each crisis of romantic engagement produces additional problems, much in the manner of the soap opera’s open-ended plot. Based primarily on the need to generate new episodes, this plot depends on repeating fundamental flaws in specific characters and of course systemic problems in the social structure. Nanda is in love with the older, dashing, and impecunious Van, and her mother must steer him away from her daughter because Mrs. Brook is also in love with him. Mrs. Brook and Van literally trade Nanda to Mr. Longdon, who sees in her the ghost of his former love, her maternal grandmother, on terms that Nanda might become Longdon’s heir. Exiled at the end of the novel to Longdon’s country estate, renouncing Van and romantic love, Nanda becomes a prisoner of a social and class system that is fundamentally broken. Like fascinated listeners and viewers of modern soap operas, we read obsessively about a dazzling, even intellectually intriguing, social world whose only purpose is to maintain its illusion. Indeed, many scholars have been drawn into this deceptive world, mistaking the elegance and eloquence of the conversations among Mrs. Brook, Van, Mitchy, Longdon, and Nanda as the height of social sophistication. Yet like the subsequent soap opera, The Awkward Age thinly

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disguises illicit sexual desires and economic greed in the urbane dialogue of its witty company. Looking back to the influence of Victorian melodrama on James’s fiction and forward to the popular devices of soap operas on radio and television, Chapter 3 offers one of several bridges from James’s times to our own. The sophistication of Mrs. Brook’s social circle simulates the cosmopolitanism of the era. With their references to scandalous French novels, their frequent citations of French and Italian cultures, even the marriage of Mr. Brookenham’s cousin Jane, the Duchess, to an Italian Duke, all the characters perform a certain worldliness that ought to include tolerance for different cultural and social values. In fact, the characters in The Awkward Age are profoundly parochial, their closed social world restricted to the happy few able to follow their rules and serve their interests. In Chapter 4, I turn directly to the issue of modern cosmopolitanism. Focusing on James’s criticism of Richard Wagner, I contrast James’s skepticism with T. S. Eliot’s subsequent veneration of the composer and the German mythic aura of his Ring cycle. Once again, I locate James within popular culture, both in terms of how Wagner was received and James’s short stories which allude to the composer. In contrast, Eliot’s The Waste Land belongs to high culture, due to its aesthetic complexity and thematization of popular culture as a symptom of modern corruption. James personally disliked Wagner, probably because of Wagner’s advocacy of free love and his Bohemian lifestyle. Richard Wagner figures centrally in three short stories by James, “Adina” (1874), “Collaboration” (1892) and “The Velvet Glove” (1909), all of which have been neglected by James scholars. “Adina” belongs to the international theme of Americans in Europe James employed in so much of his fiction in the 1870s and 1880s. The romantic plot that pits American and Italian suitors in competition for the love of an American woman in Italy, anticipates Daisy Miller and yet lacks the moral complications of the later and more popular work. “Collaboration” and “The Velvet Glove” revolve around the conventional plots of the stories of artists and writers that James wrote with some frequency in the 1890s and early years of the twentieth century, reflecting the metafictional interests of the Decadents. In aesthetic terms, the stories tell us little new about James’s international theme, his idealization of the fine arts, and the sacrifices made by serious lovers and artists. The three stories are what the French would term feuilletons, light sketches primarily for entertainment and typical of many of James’s more than 100 short stories. Even in these stories, however, James refers to contemporary issues and aesthetic debates that tell us a good deal about his views of changing attitudes to international relations. James’s references to Wagner and the conflict of the Franco-Prussian War suggest a modernist politics, which warns readers against the dangers of extreme nationalism. Although there is no evidence James read Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Case of Wagner and Nietzsche contra Wagner, the two pamphlets Nietzsche published in 1888 to express how he

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had changed his mind about the German composer, James echoes Nietzsche’s general sentiments.25 For both writers, Wagner’s growing commitment to German nationalism, his anti-French sentiments, and the overt Christian themes of his later work Parsifal are warnings of the excesses of nationalism in an era of globalization. T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, both of whom considered James an important influence, are celebrated for their cultural cosmopolitanism. Both Eliot’s The Waste Land and Pound’s Cantos draw on many different cultures and languages. Yet The Waste Land is finally a poem about reviving British cultural and political ideals, and the poem is deeply xenophobic, especially regarding non-European peoples. Pound’s Cantos are structured around strong political leaders, whom Pound terms “thrones,” who rule with the sort of authority that Pound himself hopes to emulate. Pound was also profoundly nationalist, albeit in that oddly global sense that the fascist leader imagines world domination.26 In these contexts, then, James’s warning about excessive nationalism and his advocacy of transnational cultural work provide some contrast between him and his modernist successors. It was modernists like Eliot, Pound, and Stein whose veneration of Henry James contributed to his literary canonization by the Anglo-American New Critics. In this chapter, I suggest that such a Henry James is a restrictive construction, a fantasy of the high modernists that does not fit his changing conceptions of cosmopolitanism. Chapter 4 thus provides a convenient transition from James’s era to the avant-garde modernism with which he is so often associated in the works of his Major Phase. “Part II: Our Times” continues this discussion of Henry James as modernist, but now in the context of modern filmmaking. Instead of beginning with the film adaptations of James’s works, I consider in Chapter 5 how two major modernists, Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock, serve popular cultural ends in In the Cage (1898) and Rear Window (1954). Hitchcock’s film is central to his oeuvre, an unmistakable instance of his genius as a director, master of the detective mode, and subtle commentator on contemporary social changes. Less celebrated but certainly similar in its treatment of late-nineteenth-century gender issues, In the Cage shares a number of remarkable similarities with Hitchcock’s film. In their self-reflexive aspects, both works are notably modernist. In their treatment of women in the workplace, both make changing gender, class, and work relations central to their narratives. By trivializing patriarchal and masculine power, both works appear to empower their feminine protagonists, at the very least offering women potential for greater agency in the public sphere. Because 25 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner: A Musician’s Problem (1888), in The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms, 3rd edition, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici (Edinburgh: T. N. Foulis, 1911). 26 For a more developed interpretation of Eliot and Pound in these contexts, see: John Carlos Rowe, The New American Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), pp. 113–134.

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there is no direct influence of James’s text on Hitchcock’s film, the argument in this chapter revolves around the idea that high-cultural works often serve ideologically to restore social stability in periods of crisis. In this regard, they share the work of popular culture to reaffirm, often by revising, social conventions. Because high-cultural works generally operate by means of more sophisticated techniques and aesthetic forms than popular cultural texts, high culture may be even more insidious in terms of its political consequences. In Chapter 6, I consider Peter Bogdanovich’s cinematic adaptation of Daisy Miller (1974) and the director’s troubled relationship with women, especially Cybill Shepherd, who played Jacy Farrow in The Last Picture Show (1971) and Daisy in Daisy Miller, and Dorothy Stratten, who played Dolores Martin in They All Laughed (1981). Bogdanovich’s interpretation of Daisy Miller seems merely to play with the feminist issues in James’s novella in order to reaffirm patriarchal values, and They All Laughed substitutes sexual liberation in the place of genuine feminine empowerment. In these general terms, the films do not seem to differ greatly from James’s own equivocation regarding women’s rights. Yet in light of what Teresa Carpenter terms Bogdanovich’s “puerile preference for ingenues” in both his stars and his partners, Daisy Miller and They All Laughed represent a profound sexism at the historical moment when second-wave feminism was making considerable legal and political gains.27 The curious involvement of Henry James’s work in a Hollywood scandal enables us to consider how James’s continuing influence does not always follow the conventional paths of high-cultural work. Is it possible that there is a motive in James’s text or even his thinking about gender that could lead from the sexual politics of Cybill Shepherd’s cinematic roles as a liberated woman in the 1970s to the violence suffered by Dorothy Stratten in Hollywood in the 1980s? Once again, James’s role in popular culture encourages us to think about his works and reputation outside the usual mythology of the Master. In Chapter 7, I consider how a variety of film adaptations of James’s works in the late 1990s facilitated popular arguments about gender and sexuality in the contested public discourse of that era. Looking back at two earlier film adaptations of James’s The Turn of the Screw, Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961) and Michael Winner’s prequel to the novella, The Nightcomers (1971), I argue that these films anticipate these debates just as second-wave feminism became prominent. In the decade separating these two films, both the studio system and the Motion Picture Association of America’s system of censorship changed dramatically. The film adaptations of James’s fiction made in the late 1990s appeared when second-wave feminism was challenged by third-wave feminists and under assault by postfeminists, and their directors found Henry James to be a useful author to 27 Teresa Carpenter, “Death of a Playmate,” Village Voice: The Weekly Newspaper of New York, 25:45 (November 5–11, 1980), 1, 12–14, 16–17.

Introduction

19

stage such contemporary debates. The cinematic interpretations of James’s works in Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady (1996), Agniezska Holland’s Washington Square (1997), and Iain Softley’s The Wings of the Dove (1997) range from Campion’s updating of James to Holland’s progressive interpretation of his work and Softley’s sentimentalizing of James’s sexual themes. Ismail Merchant and James Ivory’s The Golden Bowl (2001) applies the sexual debates of the previous film adaptations to the crisis of national identity. Just as global political crises such as 9/11 revive nationalism, so their film identifies sexual dysfunction with the weakening of national bonds. Charlotte has been seduced by the Italian Prince Amerigo, just as her husband Adam Verver has been attracted to the British cultural heritage. Neither American belongs in Europe; they must return home to save their marriage and identities. Adam’s daughter Maggie has married Prince Amerigo and had his child, hence she ought to adapt to his European social sphere. Fidelity to one’s family is nationalist and patriarchal, heralding conservative challenges to progressive sexual politics and transnational agendas in the twenty-first century. This chapter concludes with a consideration of Scott McGehee’s and David Siegel’s What Maisie Knew (2013), whose film script was completed in the mid-1990s, in the same period as the other films discussed in this chapter were made. As a film released more than fifteen years after the others discussed in this chapter, What Maisie Knew indicates the continuing popular interest in James’s literary representations of sex, gender, and the family. Despite dramatic changes in sexual mores and civil rights since the Victorian era, James’s works continue to provide models, however updated, for how we should understand sexual identity and conduct. James is remarkably explicit about sexuality in his works, despite the highly repressive ideology of late Victorian and Edwardian societies. Although he represents a wide variety of sexual relations – heterosexual, homosocial, homosexual and lesbian, even transgender – he does so in ways that render virtually all sexual relations as unhappy. The biographical reading of Henry James as a closeted homosexual might offer one explanation of the discontent virtually all of his characters experience in their sexual relations. As a modernist, James anticipates Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Samuel Beckett in his judgment of sexuality as an animal, rather than rational, characteristic of human behavior. Like Eliot and Pound, James advocates cultural, rather than sexual, reproduction as the best means of social change. In James, children are represented with a great deal of compassion, but primarily because they are rarely treated by adults with much care or seriousness. Queer readings of Henry James have made us aware of James’s consideration of a wide range of sexualities and required us to take seriously his own sexual orientation. But James was not a queer writer, even if that term has to be applied anachronistically to the homosexual artists and activists of the fin de siècle. He disliked Oscar Wilde and Richard Wagner and worried

20

Introduction

about the sexual openness of acquaintances like John Addington Symonds. Worthy to be considered a member of the Decadents, especially for his writings in the 1890s, James was always cautious about non-normative sexualities and never imagined anything like a LGBTQ+ revolution against heteronormativity. It is just James’s anxiety about sexuality that ought to make him relevant to us today. The sexually repressive 1890s and the sexual freedom of the twenty-first century appear to be utterly at odds, but in truth they are two sides of the same coin. Despite the legalization of gay marriage, homophobia continues to shape public discourse and policy. With a wide range of new laws protecting women and LGBTQ+ people from discrimination in the workplace and violence in public and private, we live in a society rocked repeatedly by sexual scandals. From the sexual abuse and its cover up by the clergy of the Catholic Church to date rape and other sexual violence on college campuses, it is clear that for all our sexual freedom we have not come to terms in satisfactory ways with appropriate sexual conduct. In Chapter 8, I turn to James’s continuing influence on literature, especially the novel. Although there are many contemporary novels that exhibit James’s influence, I focus on four U.S. novels that exemplify the problems facing literary heirs of the James legacy: Cynthia Ozick’s Foreign Bodies (2010), Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (2010), and Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer (1979) and Exit Ghost (2007), the first and last novels in Roth’s series about the novelist Nathan Zuckerman. I frame these four novels by recognized American realists with three novels by writers who acknowledge James’s influence and yet identify some of his failures to engage race, ethnicity, and sexuality. Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes treats centrally the subordination of indigenous peoples to the Euroamerican modernity that colonized them, even drawing on James’s sister Alice as a model for her liberal character Hattie. The absence of indigenous people from James’s works is rendered especially notable in Silko’s novel, even though elsewhere she can praise James for what she understands as his openness to such criticism. In a similar fashion, the Irish writer Colm Tóibín recovers James’s Irish heritage, so often trivialized by James himself, to render James a curious ally in the political struggle for Irish independence in Tóibín’s novel The Master. Even more compellingly, James Baldwin incorporates allusions to James in his novel Another Country in ways that suggest Baldwin is writing a new novel of manners about the conflicted relations of race and sexuality in postwar America. Beginning and ending Chapter 8 with indigenous, Irish, and African-American responses to the legacy of Henry James, I highlight the problems facing writers attempting to continue the Jamesian tradition. Beginning her career as a respected scholar of Henry James, Ozick’s fiction has always drawn on his work, albeit never as explicitly as in Foreign Bodies, a novel that rewrites The Ambassadors in terms of the World War II tragedies of displaced persons and the Holocaust that James could not

Introduction

21

have foreseen. On the face of it, Ozick’s informed adaptation of James appears to insist that if we use James’s influence it should be to address new social problems. In this regard, Ozick impresses me as an adaptor like Jane Campion interested in bringing James’s sensitivity to social complexities to bear on issues he never addressed. Of course, James does discuss Flemish and other refugees he had visited in England during World War I, but he certainly did not foresee Nazi terrorism and the Holocaust.28 James’s psychological realism and its focus on the social problems and petty ills of the privileged seems ill-suited to address the genocide of the Holocaust and the large-scale suffering of wartime refugees. Why, then, use The Ambassadors as a model for these more challenging social and political crises? In effect, Ozick writes an adaptation of a James novel in Foreign Bodies that announces the inadvisability today of writing the James novel. Yet the James novel persists in works by writers like Philip Roth and Jonathan Franzen who have dedicated careers to represent the changing values and ills of the middle class. In defense of the bourgeois values on which the novel depends, both writers dangerously court the neoliberalism that disguises conservative social values in progressive rhetoric. Roth’s fictional alter ego Nathan Zuckerman is heir to what F. R. Leavis termed the Great Tradition, in which Henry James plays a crucial role. Zuckerman’s relationship with his influential predecessor I. M. Lonoff recalls James’s indebtedness to Hawthorne, albeit in the post-Holocaust and Jewish-American contexts so important in Roth’s fiction. Franzen’s characters struggle with the collapse of the nuclear family, the economic erosion of the middle class, and unpredictable patterns of immigration that transform the U.S. Great ideas and art remain transcendent possibilities for Roth, even as they are threatened by political correctness and the insanity of everyday reality. For Franzen, art is not as redemptive or utopian as the family ties that still can be rescued from the collapse of civil society. For Roth and Franzen, James is not so much a direct inspiration as the master of the novel form, capable of sustaining the fragile web of interpersonal relations and social conventions that allow society to function. In their tacit reading of James, Roth and Franzen focus on the middle class, which is surrounded by an incoherent, at times bestial working class and a meretricious, self-interested upper class. Yet this is hardly James’s representation of a rising bourgeoisie, which in his works imitates the aristocracy in hopes of stealing its power. Despite his cultural elitism, James displays a genuine compassion for the working class, especially when expanded to include Mrs. Bread in The American, the Governess and Mrs. Grose in The Turn of the Screw, and the telegraphist and her fiancé Mudge in In the Cage. Rarely does James defend middle-class values, even if he often advocates for democratic equality. Unlike Roth and Franzen, James was writing 28 See Henry James, “Refugees in Chelsea,” Within the Rim and Other Essays, 1914–1915 (London: W. Collins Sons, 1918), pp. 39–62.

22

Introduction

in a period of a rising middle class, not the bourgeois values firmly established in such post-World War II myths as the American Dream and the nuclear family. In short, Roth and Franzen attempt to prop up the bourgeois novel by invoking a ghostly predecessor they invent rather than discover in Henry James. Ozick, Franzen, and Roth also assume that James is an American author. Ozick’s criticism of him in Foreign Bodies depends on her suggestion that his cosmopolitanism is an elitist posture that knows little of the refugee’s experience as an alien, displaced person. Franzen and Roth treat James as writing for a secure American middle class, which by the late twentieth century is not only much diminished but finds its values shattered by global events. For all three writers, James is a predecessor they struggle to overcome, much in the manner of Bloom’s anxiety of influence. Yet the Irish writer Colm Tóibín takes very different inspiration from James in The Master (2004). For Tóibín, James is not American, British, or even Irish, despite his grandfather’s birth in County Cavan, Ireland; instead, James is essentially foreign, an outsider, whose status is characteristic of his authorial role and hence his genius. Far more interesting than the somewhat conventional uses of James as a literary influence by Ozick, Franzen, and Roth, Tóibín’s James nevertheless ends up defending the universal qualities of the great writer, whose ideas, form, and style enable him to transcend any specific nation and time. I conclude Chapter 8 with a consideration of James Baldwin’s prophetic critique of American Exceptionalism in Another Country (1962), which represents the African-American experience in the racist, sexist, and homophobic U.S. as requiring another country to achieve its true expression. Beginning with Baldwin’s curious choice of his epigraph from Henry James, there are several other explicit references to James in a novel about the racial and sexual divisions in post-World War II America. Baldwin adapts James’s discussion of American “innocence” as a provincialism and ignorance regarding the profound racism and sexism in America. However much Baldwin admires James’s talent as a modernist predecessor, he also recognizes what James left out of his class-specific accounts of America. Another Country offers a stunning critique of the “liberal imagination,” as Lionel Trilling termed it, and its claims to “color-blindness.”29 The African-American characters in the novel struggle to live and work with whites who deny their reality and substitute fantastic versions of black identity and heritage. Whether they are “digging” the jazz scene in Harlem or dating African Americans, liberal whites in the novel rarely acknowledge their own racial stereotypes while repeatedly affirming the mythology of black “uplift.” The African-American characters struggle to find their own identities and humanity in this foreign country, sometimes failing utterly to find their 29 Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays in Literature and Society (New York: The Viking Press, 1950).

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23

proper balance and in extremes driven to madness and suicide. In certain perverse ways, Baldwin’s African-American characters have to learn to become cosmopolitans in their own country, albeit in ways radically different from the worldliness James exemplified and drew the praise of Pound, Eliot, and Stein. African Americans in Baldwin’s novel live in two worlds, finding themselves at home in neither, exemplifying W. E. B. Du Bois’s “double consciousness.”30 A tacit critique of Henry James’s identity as the (white) Master and his subordination of ethnicity to universal humanity, Baldwin’s novel is also an impressive alternative to the limited social realism of the Jamesian novel. What so attracts Ozick, Franzen, Roth, and Toíbín to Henry James is often what repels Baldwin, but in his struggle with this white literary heritage Baldwin manages to sketch the utopian possibility of “another” America in which love is a measure of our ability to recognize and care for others. It would be easy enough to conclude that such contemporary self-fashioning is just what characterizes most adaptations of and allusions to Henry James or any other classic writer. Yet cultural relativism begs the question of why so many artists in different media today choose Henry James as their strong predecessor. “Our Henry James” should not be mistaken for “Everyone’s Henry James” or “Anyone’s Henry James,” but rather as a descriptive term for the variety of interpretive communities that use Henry James as a focal point to pursue their own interests and agendas. Feminist and queer activism, cultural conservativism, bourgeois neoliberalism, and aestheticism all find aspects of James worth sustaining and perpetuating. It is not that some are misinterpreting James while others have uncovered the secret truth of his works, but that James lends himself to this diversity of interpretations. Frank Kermode views such diversity of readings as distinctive of the modern “classic,” whose strategic ambiguity empowers the reader’s interests rather than the author’s singular intention. For Kermode, this is the sign of great and enduring art: By this route, we reach the modern classic, which offers itself only to readings which are encouraged by its failure to give a definitive account of itself. Unlike the old classic, which was expected to provide answers, this one poses a virtually infinite set of questions.31 Kermode describes the modern classic as a literary work designed to sustain our interest in its subject and form in part by inviting active interpretations. These aesthetic qualities justify the modern classic’s status as integral to high culture. For me, the issues that continue to appeal to us in an artistic 30 W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), pp. 5–6. 31 Frank Kermode, The Classic: Literary Images of Permanence and Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 114.

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work from an earlier period indicate continuing social, economic, political, and personal questions we have not answered. As I suggest in the following chapters, these questions can be found in popular works as well as serious, high-cultural works. Because James wrote both popular and serious fiction, each mode influencing the other, he provides us with a wide range of examples of troublesome problems still requiring our interest and attention. “Our Henry James” is symptomatic of these profound, often repressed aspects of our social world, which have a specific historicity we still need to confront.

Part I

His Times

1

Henry James and the Form of Sentiment

And from this I precisely deduce my moral; which is to the effect that, since our only way, in general, of knowing that we have had too much of anything is by feeling that too much; so, by the same token, when we don’t feel the excess … how do we know that the measure not recorded, the notch not reached, does represent adequacy or satiety? The mere feeling helps us for certain degrees of congestion, but for exact science, that is for the criticism of “fine” art, we want the notation. The notation, however, is what we lack, and the verdict of mere feeling is liable to fluctuate. —Henry James, “Preface,” The Awkward Age, New York Edition (1908)1

Henry James’s troubled relationship with nineteenth-century literary sentimentalism has often been noted, but sentiment and affect are not central to interpretations of his writings. The neglect of feeling in James scholarship is odd, because the melodramatic qualities of his fiction certainly are important reasons his works have appealed to modern librettists and filmmakers. James’s complex, involuted style may not seem adaptable to the formulae of the melodrama, but his plots certainly do. Star-crossed lovers? Take your pick: Daisy and Winterbourne; Isabel and Osmond; Milly and Merton; Maggie and the Prince; Mme. de Vionnet and Chad. Snow White and the Wicked Witch? Isabel and Mme. Merle; the Governess and Miss Jessel; Milly and Kate; Maggie and Charlotte. The Prince and the Pauper? Newman and the Bellegardes; Ralph and Isabel; the Princess and Hyacinth; Milly and Kate; Adam and the Prince; Mrs. Newsome and Strether. Weird sex, such as threesomes, even foursomes, some with hints of incest? Maisie and her mother and Sir Claude and Mrs. Wix; Nanda and her mother and Vanderbank and Old Longdon; the Governess and Miles and Peter Quint; Merton and Milly and Kate; Adam and Maggie and the Prince and Charlotte. Based on ethical problems made unavoidable by certain class, gender, and sexual differences, James’s plots often reinforce stereotypes even as exceptions to such rules pass dangerously across their boundaries. 1

Henry James, “Preface,” The Awkward Age, vol. 9, New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James, 26 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908), pp. xxiii–xxiv.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003297987-2

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His Times

Often celebrated for their iconoclastic individualism, few of James’s heroic characters succeed. Tantalized by such rebellions, we accept their systemic failures and the concluding affirmation of unjustified economic, political, and social inequalities. The characters’ struggles are sentimental; their failures are melodramatic. Because their situations are typical, we feel both for them and with them. So why has so much James scholarship focused on cognitive and philosophical problems, often at the expense of sentiment, feeling, and affect? Of course, one reason is that James was a central figure in the legitimation of Anglo-American New Criticism, so that the claims by New Critics like John Crowe Ransom and Cleanth Brooks to the special cognitive function of literature transformed Jamesian melodrama into philosophy. Another reason is that James worked to distinguish himself from the sentimental writers of his era, despite their heavy influence on his writings, largely by claiming a high-cultural authority that rendered many of his popular sources obscure by way of his stylistic complexities. In Henry James and the “Woman Business”, Alfred Habegger analyzes the biographical and aesthetic ways Henry James responded to nineteenth-century women’s rights and the cultural politics of domestic and sentimental literature.2 Habegger’s cultural history is essential to any understanding of James’s relationship to sentimentalism, but it has the odd consequence of affirming James’s effort to distance himself from women writers and their popular literary works. Habegger demonstrates James’s deep reservations about women’s political equality and the value of their cultural work, but in doing so Habegger shows how James realized his ambition to transcend their populism while borrowing freely women writers’ plots, characters, and affective mode. The formalists’ veneration of Henry James also depoliticized his writings, further distancing him from many writers of sentimental fiction. Nineteenthcentury abolition and the women’s right movement linked politics and sentiment in ways that powerfully transformed culture’s role in U.S. social movements. The famous anecdote about President Lincoln greeting Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1863 as “the little lady who made this big war,” illustrates the degree to which Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) was understood in its own time as a vital political force.3 Of course, all literature is political at some level, even if only because literature is representative of social, political, economic, and personal conditions. Even if literature simply “represents” the “best that has been spoken and written,” as Matthew Arnold put it, then it does cultural work that is deeply political. The avowedly apolitical effort to separate “form” from political relevance depends on a political theory of the independence of culture from ideological control. James himself certainly 2 3

Alfred Habegger, Henry James and the “Woman Business” (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). President Abraham Lincoln, as quoted in Ann Douglas, “Introduction,” Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ed. with intro. Ann Douglas (New York: Viking Press, 1981), p. 19.

Henry James and the Form of Sentiment

29

contributed to this idea, so it is not surprising that the formalists of the 1940s and 1950s were drawn to his writings. As I shall argue, it is just this formalization of sentiment both as characters’ “feelings” and the form of melodrama that enabled Henry James to draw significantly from the conventions of domestic and sentimental romances while remaining aloof from their populism. Nathaniel Hawthorne complained resentfully about the “damn’d mob of scribbling women” whose popularity and influence greatly exceeded his own.4 James is Hawthorne’s most important literary heir, in part thanks to James’s own self-conscious efforts to construct his reputation in relationship to Hawthorne.5 James would continue this habit of male complaint about women writers and artists, even though James built his literary reputation in large part on his use of sentimental conventions to attract women readers.6 The nineteenth-century cult of domesticity, the myth of the “angel in the house,” and the bourgeois commitment to “separate spheres” for men in public and women in private affairs did not fully regulate the political influence of sentiment and feeling identified with women, whom Ralph Waldo Emerson termed “the civilizers of mankind.”7 Thanks both to religion and literature, feeling and sentiment wandered across these boundaries, influencing men as much as women and shaping many literary modes. Prior to the important cultural recovery work of second-wave feminists in the 1960s and 1970s, scholars often treated sentimental literature as part of mass culture, which relied on prevailing social conventions. Sentimental and domestic romances, the plantation romance, melodrama in theater, and socalled “graveyard” verse addressed a wide range of nineteenth-century social problems: slavery, women’s rights, alcoholism, conflict with Native Americans, infant mortality, crises of religious faith in the face of scientific progress, and urbanization. Yet for many scholars, these mass cultural forms addressed such problems only to rationalize them within the framework of existing social 4 5

6

7

Nathaniel Hawthorne to William Ticknor, January 1855, as quoted in Caroline Ticknor, Hawthorne and His Publisher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1913), p. 141. I have developed this legacy in The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), pp. 30–57; The Other Henry James (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 38–57; and The New American Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), pp. 83–112. On James’s criticism of Fuller, see John Carlos Rowe, The Other Henry James (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 38–55; on his trivialization of the American sculptor Harriet Hosmer and other women artists, see John Carlos Rowe, The New American Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), pp. 83–112; on James’s adaptation of sentimental conventions, see William Veeder, Henry James—The Lessons of the Master: Popular Fiction and Personal Style in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975) and Virginia C. Fowler, Henry James’s American Girl: The Embroidery on the Canvas (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984). Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Woman” (1855), in Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, ed. John Carlos Rowe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2003), p. 247.

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His Times

values. Many “plantation romances,” like John Pendleton Kennedy’s sketches of rural life in Virginia Swallow Barn; or, A Sojourn in the Old Dominion (1832), reinforced myths of happy slaves, the extended “family” on the plantation, the nobility of the Southern gentleman, and the charm of the Southern belle.8 John Augustus Stone’s Metamora, or the Last of the Wampanoags (1829) is a romantic tragedy about the English defeat of King Philip (or Chief Metamora) in King Philip’s War (1675–1676). Although Stone’s play represents the English as unscrupulous and unjust, it also heralds the promise of the U.S. nation and the “inevitable” disappearance of Native Americans.9 By far the most important producers of sentimental literature in the nineteenth century were women authors. In The Feminization of American Culture (1977), Ann Douglas argues that the cult of sentimentalism to which many women writers and intellectuals contributed helped maintain women’s status as second-class citizens in nineteenth-century America.10 This ideological work is even more remarkable for Douglas, because it was done at a time in which social and political conditions for women were changing dramatically. Sentimental literature thus discouraged progressive movements, including women’s rights and Abolition.11 Although Douglas’s thesis has been challenged by many scholars, it still has considerable validity for a wide range of sentimental works by women writers following politically conservative agendas. Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850) charts Ellen Montgomery’s drudgery working as a virtual servant for her aunt in upstate New York, offering her redemption only through Presbyterianism and her engagement to the aspiring minister John Humphreys. Transported almost magically from her Aunt Fortune Emerson’s infernal farm in New York to her aristocratic relatives’ Edinburgh mansion at the end of the novel, the fourteen-year-old Ellen is a willing convert both to Scottish Presbyterianism and spiritual love.12 Warner’s political conservativism is certainly complex, because her advocacy of “New School” Presbyterianism belongs to a forgotten chapter in nineteenth-century American Christianity, but her values include staunch patriotism, a missionary zeal to spread her faith, and a defense of the prevailing gender hierarchies of patriarchal America.13 Written in the midst of heated public debates over slavery, The Wide, Wide World makes no mention of slavery or abolition. Although 8 9 10 11 12 13

John Pendleton Kennedy, Swallow Barn; or, A Sojourn in the Old Dominion (Philadelphia: Carey and Lea, 1832). John Augustus Stone, Metamora, or the Last of the Wampanoags: An Indian Tragedy in Five Acts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941). Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), p. 75. Ibid., p. 101. Susan Warner, The Wide, Wide World (1850; New York: Feminist Press, 1987), p. 277. John Carlos Rowe, “Religious Transnationalism in the American Renaissance: Susan Warner’s Wide, Wide World,” ESQ 49:1–3, 47–49.

Henry James and the Form of Sentiment

31

brief references are made to “Indians,” they are treated by the characters as part of a past era. Warner, who along with her sister tutored military cadets at West Point, advocates social activism only through her Church, defending help for others only insofar as it is accompanied by their conversion. One of Douglas’s strongest critics is Jane Tompkins, who in Sensational Designs (1985) argues that we have treated reductively sentimental literature, because of its close identification with women writers.14 Rereading Harriet Beecher Stowe’s and Susan Warner’s sentimental romances in response to the male canonical authors Charles Brockden Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and James Fenimore Cooper, Tompkins accomplishes two important tasks. First, she shows us how profoundly sentimental those canonical male writers are; second, she makes a strong case that Stowe and Warner were more self-conscious regarding the political and social purposes of their works than Brown, Hawthorne, and Cooper.15 What Tompkins terms “the Other American Renaissance” refers to the enormous body of sentimental literature, much of it written by women, we need to reread in order to understand its socially critical and reformist purposes.16 Tompkins interprets sentimental romances in order to show how domestic privacy often shapes public policy, affective experience informs rational understanding, and religious belief structures everyday life and social attitudes. Such an interpretive approach is obviously feminist, insofar as it breaks down gendered divisions crucial to nineteenth-century American patriarchy. To the degree that sentimental literature can be shown to do such work, then it does indeed anticipate second-wave feminist demands for the recognition of women’s domestic labor, equal pay and equal opportunities in the workplace, civil rights broadened to include control over one’s own body, and a host of related political issues we identify today with the activism of 1960s’ feminism, the fight for the Equal Rights’ Amendment, and such organizations as the National Organization of Women. Henry James occupies an oddly peripheral position in Sensational Designs, both because Tompkins’ previous work focused on James and because James is so obviously a threshold figure for understanding sentimentalism’s influence on both popular and high-cultural writing, as well as literature by women and men.17 James figures for Tompkins primarily as one of the realists, along with W. D. Howells, who constructed Nathaniel Hawthorne as the strong predecessor for their own literary movement, sharply divorced from the methods and goals of women’s sentimental literature. Although Tompkins recognizes the deep indebtedness of Hawthorne to sentimentalism, she interprets James less as another male heir to this 14 Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. ix–xix. 15 Ibid., pp. 122–186. 16 Ibid., p. 147. 17 Jane Tompkins, ed., Twentieth-Century Interpretations of “The Turn of the Screw,” and Other Tales (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1971).

32

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tradition than as a key figure in Hawthorne’s transformation into a highcultural literary “genius.” It might be argued that Hawthorne and James do not fit Tompkins’ sentimental tradition, because they are both politically conservative and thus at odds with the progressive goals Tompkins finds typical of nineteenth-century sentimental literature. Yet as I suggested earlier, the case for Warner as a social activist must be understood within the politics of her Presbyterianism, which was deeply conservative and committed to missionary projects that contributed to Euroamerican imperialism. Read in conjunction with its exact contemporary, The Wide, Wide World, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) sounds many of the same religious notes, even if his Protestant orthodoxy differs from Warner’s in ways recognizable primarily by specialists. Yet the broad strokes suggest a deep compatibility of religious and aesthetic feeling between the two writers. Ellen Montgomery and Hester Prynne are both antinomian figures who discover faith through their own direct experiences. Both demonstrate the sort of pride that enables a pattern of felix culpa, on which the recognition of God’s grace depends. Both sublimate potential rebellion into religious passion, exemplified in their care for another person. For Hester, such care (caritas) is displayed in her relationship with her child, Pearl, and her lover, Arthur Dimmesdale; for Ellen, it is well represented in her devotion to her fiancé, the minister John Humphreys, but also her care for the dying Irish-Catholic child John Dolan. Such sentiments structure characters and organize plots everywhere in Henry James’s “realist” fiction, which scholars have long recognized misnames James’s principal literary mode. Is it possible to read The Portrait of a Lady without thinking of James’s modernization of The Scarlet Letter? Can we comprehend the significance of Goodwood’s “lightning kiss” at the end of the novel without recalling how religious sentimentalism shapes Hester and Dimmesdale’s passionate encounter in chapter eighteen, “A Flood of Sunshine,” in The Scarlet Letter?18 Of course, James is very much a secular writer with little interest in religion beyond its social purposes, but his revision of Hawthorne’s religious sentimentalism in The Portrait of a Lady establishes an important continuity between Puritanism and the Protestant ethos of the U.S. civil religion in the nineteenth century. Tompkins’ reinterpretation of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin as an aesthetic effort to contribute to the politics of abolition also has little to do with Hawthorne and James, undoubtedly because both canonical male authors had been rendered apolitical by modern formalists. Tompkins reminds us that nineteenth-century women’s rights’ activists were among the most vigorous abolitionists, identifying their own situation with the more extreme plight of African-American slaves. Frederick Douglass moved to Rochester, 18 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, eds. Seymour Gross, Sculley Bradley, Richmond Croom Beatty, and E. Hudson Long, 3rd edition (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1988), pp. 135–140.

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New York to establish his abolitionist newspaper The North Star, at least in part because he knew he would be welcomed by the strong women’s rights’ activists and abolitionists in that city.19 Indeed, Douglass’s journalism in The North Star often deals with women’s rights, a cause he supported as vigorously as Abolition.20 Since the publication of Sensational Designs, much attention has been paid to Hawthorne’s and James’s attitudes toward women’s rights, abolition, and race, largely underscoring their political conservativism. Stowe’s feminine characters in Uncle Tom’s Cabin are the primary critics of and activists against slavery, but it is by no means clear that Stowe herself was a nineteenth-century women’s rights’ activist. Ann Douglas contends that “Stowe was not a declared feminist, although the link between antislavery and the women’s movement was a vital one.”21 Tompkins contends that Stowe’s romance consistently advocates maternal domesticity, culminating in the fictional portrait of the Quaker abolitionist, Rachel Halliday, as the figure of “God in human form,” the “millenarian counterpart of little Eva,” whose sacrificial death has often been understood as Christ-like.22 Both Douglas and Tompkins agree, however, that Stowe’s feminine characters are inspired by their feelings for others and compelled to action by a sympathy often lacking in the male characters. The source of this anti-slavery sensibility is Christian faith, which in its proper form finds every sort of subjection abhorrent, except our devotion to a compassionate God. Stowe may stress the power of religious sensibility in her feminine characters, but there are numerous male characters who share their passion. Remembered primarily for his docility, Uncle Tom is himself “a sort of patriarch in religious matters, in the neighborhood,” whose morality is conveyed to others by his work “as a sort of minister among them” and who “especially excelled” in “prayer.”23 Uncle Tom is effective in bringing together the African-American community, forbidden in many Southern states to assemble even for religious services after Nat Turner’s Southampton Rebellion in 1831.24 Anti-slavery “feeling,” like Christian compassion for our fellow man, is not restricted by Stowe to women, but it derives from understanding that exceeds impersonal “reasoning.” As Senator John Bird’s wife, Mary, tells him in her effort to convince him of the sins of slavery: 19 William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1991), pp. 148, 266. 20 John Carlos Rowe, At Emerson’s Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 114–115. 21 Ann Douglas, “Introduction,” Uncle Tom’s Cabin, p. 13. 22 Tompkins, Sensational Designs, p. 142. 23 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, p. 79. Further references in the text as UTC. 24 Rowe, At Emerson’s Tomb, p. 135.

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His Times “I hate reasoning, John,—especially reasoning on such subjects. There’s a way you political folks have of coming round and round a plain right thing; and you don’t believe in it yourselves, when it comes to practice. I know you well enough, John. You don’t believe it’s right any more than I do; and you wouldn’t do it any sooner than I.” (UTC, 145)

Although Mary claims to have learned these lessons from reading the Bible, where she learns she “must feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and comfort the desolate,” it is not only faith to which she appeals in her arguments with her husband but also practical reason as opposed to the abstractions and sophistry Southern slave owners used to rationalize slavery (UTC, 144). In 1853, Stowe published A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, providing documentary evidence in support of her fictional representations of the horrors suffered by African Americans under slavery.25 Stowe wanted to show that the fantasy of slavery belonged less to her sentimental romance than to the elaborate rationalizations by which Southern slave owners continued to justify their inhuman practices. Answering critics who had accused her of exaggerating African-American living conditions under slavery, she also provided the materials for a new novel, Dred; A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, which she published in 1856. Neglected until recently by scholars, Dred offers an important variation on nineteenth-century sentimental romances, especially those we identify with women authors. The hero of the narrative is the runaway slave, Dred, who organizes a maroon community in the Great Dismal Swamp and plans a rebellion against slavery. Physically large and powerful, Dred is dedicated to a “rigid austerity [in] his life” and displays a “profound contempt” for “all animal comforts.”26 Like Nat Turner, Dred speaks in the millenarian and apocalyptic tones of the Bible. In fact, his prophetic speech and witnessing are “drawn verbatim or almost verbatim from the Bible.”27 But his visionary qualities are not used to represent him as a mad revolutionary; he exemplifies Christian charity and obeys the very “natural laws” advocated by American Transcendentalists as well as anti-slavery legal theorists. Dred is a sentimental hero who also embodies the ethical vision and “higher laws” of the anti-slavery movement. Arguably the first African-American hero in white American literature, Dred teaches us how nineteenth-century sentimentalism crossed established gender and racial boundaries.28 25 Thomas F. Gossett, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and American Culture (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1985), p. 285. 26 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dred; A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, 2 vols. (Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Co., 1856), vol. 2, p. 274. Further references in the text as: D. 27 Mary Kemp Davis, Nat Turner before the Bar of Judgment: Fictional Treatments of the Southampton Slave Insurrection (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), p. 118. 28 John Carlos Rowe, “Stowe’s Rainbow Sign: Violence and Community in Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856),” Arizona Quarterly 58:1 (Spring 2002), p. 48.

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Not only has the close identification of “sentiment” with the politics of women’s liberation caused us to ignore its significance across gender lines, it has also caused us to neglect the different uses of sentiment by women from different classes, regions, and ethnicities. In the 1970s, women of color, especially those associated with the Black Arts Movement, challenged white feminist sentimentalism as representative of only one segment of women’s culture: that of white, middle-class women with the leisure and privilege to indulge sentimental fantasies. Working women, especially of color, felt excluded from such a “culture of sentiment.” The rediscovery and republication in the 1970s of important literary works by nineteenth-century women of color, such as Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) and Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859), were motivated in part by the scholarly desire for a more diverse representation of women’s experiences. Hazel Carby, Valerie Smith, and other scholars argue that Jacobs relied on the sentimental tradition in her fictional characterization of Linda Brent, in order to draw on the sympathies of white, Northern, middle-class women and redirect those feelings to the cause of Abolition.29 Harriet Wilson takes a different approach, criticizing directly Northern white women for their own contributions to slavery and racism, as the complete title of her narrative suggests: Our Nig, or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black in a Two-Story White House, Showing that Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There.30 Stripping away the Northern Abolitionist’s sentimental illusions about their philanthropy regarding Southern slaves, Wilson also rejects the idea there are “natural” bonds linking white women with their African-American sisters. Just as some anti-slavery advocates insisted that Southern slavery survived thanks to Northern patronage of its economic products, so Wilson argued that slavery persisted in part due to the deep-seated racism of even the most “liberal” white Northerners. Conventional sentimental romances often deal with women threatened with sexual victimization, only to be saved from such harassment by loving partners offering marriage, respectability, and social status. In Jacobs’ narrative, the African-American slave Linda Brent must repeatedly fend off the sexual advances of her master, Dr. Flint. Although the reader might expect his wife to be Linda’s savior, Mrs. Flint’s jealousy of Linda drives her to violent behavior toward her servant. Caught between an evil master and jealous mistress, Linda attempts to escape by allowing another white man, Mr. Sands, to impregnate her. The rhetoric Jacobs employs to represent Linda’s traumatic choice of Sands over Flint is superficially sentimental, but her circumstances hardly belong to the style or genre: 29 Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the AfroAmerican Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) and Valerie Smith, Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987). 30 Harriet E. Wilson, Our Nig, or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black in a TwoStory White House, Showing that Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There (Boston: G. C. Rand and Avery, 1859).

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His Times “Of a man who was not my master I could ask to have my children well supported; and in this case, I felt confident I should obtain the boon. I also felt quite sure that they would be made free… . I know I did wrong. No one can feel it more sensibly than I do. The painful and humiliating memory will haunt me to my dying day. Still, in looking back, calmly, on the events of my life, I feel that the slave woman ought not to be judged by the same standard as others.”31

Linda Brent’s decision does not prevent Dr. Flint from continuing to harass her, and she must pretend to become a fugitive slave while remaining in hiding in her grandmother’s house so she can remain close to her children. Her terrible situation goes far beyond the melodramas faced by most other protagonists in nineteenth-century sentimental romances. Threatened every day with rape by Dr. Flint and physical violence from his wife, she “surrenders” to Mr. Sands, only to discover that her benefactor does not free their children and that her diabolical master continues to pursue her. Even in this terrible situation, the young Linda Brent feels guilty, having violated codes of white, middle-class feminine conduct, but her sense of humiliation only underscores how profoundly inappropriate such values are for an African-American woman under the domination of Southern slavery. At the very end of Incidents, Linda and her children find some tenuous stability in the North, but unlike other heroines of sentimental romances Linda chooses not to marry, preferring the modest control she can exercise as a single mother over her small family. Employing effectively the rhetoric of sentimentalism, Harriet Jacobs reminds her readers that different standards must apply to African-American women faced with regular rape by their white masters and the hostility of their vindictive white mistresses. Crossing the gender lines in African-American literature of the period, we can interpret Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) as another influential revision of sentimental conventions. Witnessing his Aunt Hester whipped by her jealous overseer, experiencing his white mistress Sophia Auld changed by slavery from compassionate woman to tyrannical mistress, and recalling the suffering of his mother under slavery, the young Douglass draws much of his anti-slavery passion from his sympathetic identification with women. Sentimentality also informs crucial episodes in his abolitionist education. His fight with Covey is justly celebrated as the moment in which the slave recognizes he can and should rebel against tyranny, but the fight itself can be understood as “the turning-point in my career as a slave” only if we interpret it sentimentally.32 31 Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 55–56. Further references in the text as: I. 32 Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, ed. Houston A. Baker, Jr. (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 103. Further references in the text as: N.

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In strictly historical terms, any such physical conflict between an individual slave and his master would have likely resulted in the brutal punishment, if not death, of the slave. Douglass explains that “Mr. Covey enjoyed the most unbounded reputation for being a first-rate overseer and negro-breaker,” so had Covey “sent me—a boy about sixteen years old—to the public whipping post, his reputation would have been lost; so, to save his reputation, he suffered me to go unpunished” (N, 114). Douglass’s explanation of how he escaped punishment is improbable; the risk of the master allowing a rebellious slave to go unpunished was far greater than any loss of “reputation.” But Douglass offers this symbolic rebellion to invoke the passion for resistance among other African Americans. In a crucial symbolic action in the Narrative, Douglass rebels rhetorically—that is, sentimentally—when he knows that individual resistance would most likely have led to death. If we reconsider literature’s symbolic actions as appealing to emotions and depending on affective identifications with others, then perhaps all literature is “sentimental.” Of course, literature also relies on cognitive and rational processes, including the mere act of literacy itself, which may well be fundamental to the most elementary acts of thought. Beyond this broad speculation about literature, we might also argue that the prevailing romantic idealist tenor of much nineteenth-century American literature contributed to its particular reliance on sentimentalism, sensibility, and other extra-rational modes of understanding. Although profoundly indebted to Enlightenment philosophy, especially the tradition culminating in Immanuel Kant’s monumental analysis of human reason, American Transcendentalism gives priority to a wide range of affective and emotional modes of understanding. Henry David Thoreau’s “Higher Laws” subordinate scientific knowledge to poetic intuition, in which the wholeness of Nature can be perceived.33 In Emerson’s metaphysical hierarchy, “Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts. Nature is the symbol of spirit.”34 Poets and their “genius” are thus needed to apprehend this spiritual ecology, and the resulting visionary experience is often manifestly sentimental, even gothic, as in Emerson’s famous conception of himself as a “transparent eyeball” in Nature (1836): Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.35

33 Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods (New York: Library of America, 1985), p. 495. 34 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, in Selected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, p. 33. 35 Ibid., p. 26.

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Such visionary moments in Emerson and Thoreau have rarely, if ever, been described as “sentimental,” in part because these writers took such pains to distinguish their ideas from those of their feminine contemporaries, especially popular writers like Stowe, Warner, and Lydia Maria Child. In “Woman” (1855), Emerson identifies “civilization” with “the power of good women,” but he does so primarily to trivialize their cultural contributions as: “Society, conversation, decorum, flowers, dances, colors, forms.”36 Emerson does not include serious literature and art in this list, reserving their special genius for men, but the proximity of his own vocation with the “oracular” powers of women suggests how profoundly anxious nineteenthcentury American males were regarding the growing cultural and political power of women. Artists like Emerson, Hawthorne, and James tried to distance themselves from feminine sentimentalism, because they feared it was inferior to reason. Yet the prevailing romantic idealism we identify with Emerson, Thoreau, and such romantic ironists as Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville was based on the assumption that the rational philosophy inherited from the Enlightenment was flawed by its neglect of “sensibility.” In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Mary Wollstonecraft argued convincingly that women should be “more rationally educated” and that “reason” itself should be expanded to include intuition and the imagination as integral faculties of “ratiocination.”37 Emerson and Hawthorne’s versions of romantic idealism were thus very much in keeping with arguments offered by women’s rights activists, many of whom identified themselves with the progressive politics of international romanticism. In practice, however, Emerson and Hawthorne adopted meliorist positions, acknowledging women’s rights primarily in abstract terms but resisting appeals for specific political and social changes, such as those made by the first national women’s congress held at Seneca Falls, New York in 1848. In Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), Hester Prynne is explicitly modeled on the historical figure Anne Hutchinson (1591–1643), the so-called “Antinomian” religious radical who was banished from the Bay Colony by Governor Winthrop in 1638 for her advocacy of the individual’s direct intuition of God’s grace. In the seventeenth-century Puritan theocracy of Massachusetts, Hutchinson’s religious views profoundly threatened the authority of the ministry and thus of religious-based government. Hawthorne identifies Hester with Hutchinson, but reminds us that as a mother Hester has avoided Hutchinson’s more public destiny: Yet, had little Pearl never come to her from the spiritual world, it might have been far otherwise. Then, she might have come down to us in history, hand in hand with Anne Hutchinson, as the foundress of a 36 Emerson, “Woman,” in Selected Works, pp. 247, 248. 37 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in Critical Theory since Plato, rev. ed., ed. Hazard Adams (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), pp. 397, 395.

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religious sect … . She might, and not improbably would, have suffered death from the stern tribunals of the period, for attempting to undermine the foundations of the Puritan establishment. But, in the education of her child, the mother’s enthusiasm of thought had something to wreak itself upon.38 Women may be justified in calling for social and political changes, Hawthorne suggests, but they should reconsider the social importance of their traditional work as mothers: Indeed, the same dark question often arose in her mind, with reference to the whole race of womanhood. Was existence worth accepting, even to the happiest among them? … As a first step, the whole system of society is to be torn down, and built up anew. Then, the very nature of the opposite sex, or its long hereditary habit, which has become like nature, is to be essentially modified, before woman can be allowed to assume what seems a fair and suitable position. (SL, 159) Granting Hester a revolutionary perspective, Hawthorne makes her work seem so impossible, even unnatural, as to be beyond her powers: “A woman never overcomes these problems by any exercise of thought. They are not to be solved, or only in one way. If her heart chance to come uppermost, they vanish” (159). Lapsing back into motherhood and sentiment, Hester ultimately rejects the public sphere Anne Hutchinson did in fact enter and concludes by living vicariously through her daughter, Pearl, and her public service as a nurse. Of course, there were other American Transcendentalists who considered its romantic philosophy to be essentially committed to women’s rights and the universal human rights invoked by abolitionists. Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) missed the Seneca Falls Convention only because she was in Europe reporting on the populist revolutions transforming its political map, but her Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) is a major testament to the ways sensibility might enlarge reason as women assumed more central roles in culture, politics, and society. A committed political activist often parodied by male Transcendentalist colleagues, such as Emerson and Hawthorne, and their heirs, including Henry James, Fuller visited women prisoners in Sing Sing Penitentiary (1844), conducted progressive classes for women in Boston (which she termed “conversations”), and participated with her husband Marchese Giovanni Angelo Ossoli in the republican revolution against the French and the Papacy during the 1848 Italian Risorgimento.39 Displaying 38 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1962), p. 158. Further references in the text as: SL. 39 John Carlos Rowe, “Introduction,” Selected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, pp. 13–16.

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Fuller’s extensive knowledge of literary and political history and her fluency in several languages (Greek, Latin, German, French, and Italian), Woman in the Nineteenth Century stresses the need for women’s education and Wollstonecraft’s ideal of reason. William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft are for Fuller partners in a marriage notable for its “intellectual companionship” (340) and thus the “sign of a new era,” which indicates an “aspiration of soul, of energy of mind, seeking clearness and freedom” (344). To be sure, their equality is based more on shared intellectual commitments than sexual partnership, so that “the champion of the Rights of Woman found, in Godwin, one who would plead that cause like a brother,” echoing a prevalent romantic notion that the ideal relationship between men and women was that of brother and sister.40 Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century is a scholarly work, relying at times excessively on Latinate prose and multilingual allusions, in order to demonstrate that an educated woman can indeed compete successfully with her male contemporaries. Yet the reason to which Fuller appeals is broadened to include religious forms of knowledge, the non-European epistemologies of Native Americans and other non-Western peoples, and mythic “truth.” Fuller develops in Woman in the Nineteenth Century a body of female archetypes upon which women can draw imaginatively … in hopes of reclaiming for women the sense of power that Christian culture has largely denied them. Would you rather be a powerful and even terrifying goddess—Isis, Demeter, Minerva, Artemis, Cybele? Or a meek and Christian wife …?41 In turns advocating direct legal and political reforms, supplemented by changes occasioned more subtly by formal education and private study, Fuller adapted romantic idealist philosophy to the causes of women’s rights, abolition, and other populist movements around the world. Reintegrating reason and feeling, mind and emotions, she succeeded in separating these two aspects of our understanding from prevailing gender stereotypes. In these respects, she went beyond Wollstonecraft’s calls for the rational education of women to appeal for the re-education of men as well. Nineteenth-century male artists and intellectuals were not simply reinforcing sexist stereotypes; they were also responding complexly to their marginalization by the progressive, materialist ideology of Jacksonian America. Hawthorne’s resentment of women writers was undoubtedly driven in part 40 Prominent in Hegel’s writings, this “brother–sister” relationship also reinforced conventions of familial hierarchies, in which the male child usually assumed a leadership role in the public sphere. See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (1899; New York: Dover, 1956), p. 161. 41 Barbara L. Packer, “The Transcendentalists,” The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 2: Prose Writing, 1820–1865, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 534.

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by his inability to make a decent living as a writer. Industrialization and urbanization in the first half of the nineteenth century helped expand the markets and audiences for cultural productions, but they also created new hierarchies in which cultural work was perceived as inconsequential, frivolous, even feminine. Homosexuality may not have become a legal category in Europe and the U.S. until after the passage of Henry Labouchère’s Criminal Law Amendment Act in England in 1885, but masculine anxieties regarding the instability of male and female identities and values were very evident in the first half of nineteenth-century America.42 Today we read the scene of Dr. Roger Chillingworth hovering demonically over the sleeping Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter as charged with homoerotic significance, as well as melodramatic sentiment (SL, 132–133). For the mid-nineteenth-century reader, the scene must have represented the struggle between religion and science for social authority. Tossed between her secret lover, Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, and her husband, Dr. Roger Chillingworth, Hester Prynne exemplifies not only feminine subjection in patriarchal America but also the crisis of masculine agency. Hawthorne struggles as an imaginative author to claim some perspective on the problems besetting these men of faith and science. In a similar vein, Emerson claims in “The Poet” (1844) that the poet perceives higher truths than the scientist or religious visionary and that “poets are thus liberating gods.”43 Their claims, shared by many other American romantics, appear exaggerated in nineteenth-century middle-class America, leaving us with a sense of their delusions of grandeur amid other, more powerful forces. The ambivalent situation of many male intellectuals may help explain why they would deny their reliance on the sentimentalism, melodrama, and sensibility central to nineteenth-century women’s cultural work. Even today, scholars are reluctant to acknowledge the depth of masculine sentimentalism in canonical American literature. Yet Edgar Allan Poe’s gothic fiction is incomprehensible apart from sentimental culture. His celebrated character C. Auguste Dupin, master of “ratiocination” and forerunner of the modern detective, is not really a man of science but a canny interpreter of human psychology and thus of irrational impulses and feelings. Herman Melville’s fiction turns repeatedly on close personal relations—Tommo and Toby in Typee (1846), Ishmael and Queequeg in Moby-Dick (1851), Pierre and his half-sister Isabel in Pierre (1852)—that substitute friendship and love as higher social ties than those established by religious orthodoxy, scientific fact, and business pragmatism. As the previous examples suggest, Melville’s characters’ close personal relations are usually homosocial, understandably given his attention to the masculine communities of sea-farers, and they suggest significant parallels with the sentimentalism more traditionally 42 Scott Derrick, Monumental Anxieties: Homoerotic Desire and Feminine Influence in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), pp. 35–65. 43 Emerson, “The Poet,” Selected Works, p. 201.

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identified with women’s popular romances. As I have already suggested, Hawthorne’s fiction is thoroughly sentimental, competing with women romancers by creating feminine heroines whose fates depend on star-crossed love: Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter (1850), Phoebe Pyncheon in The House of the Seven Gables (1851), the tragic Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance (1852), Miriam and her masculine double, Donatello, in The Marble Faun (1860). African-American and other ethnic minorities in nineteenth-century America often drew upon white feminine sentimentalism to attract audiences and thereby appeal for social reforms. As I have already suggested, they often changed sentimental literary conventions, even as they acknowledged their sources. John Rollin Ridge’s (Yellow Bird’s) popular novel The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta (1854) criticizes the persecution of Mexicans and other ethnic minorities in California following the Mexican–American War. The novel is sensational, playing upon popular fears of bandits and the general anarchy in California in transition from Mexican to U.S. rule, and it draws on stereotypes of cruel highwaymen, voluptuous Mexican women, abject Chinese, and victimized white women. It also draws quite explicitly on Transcendentalist conventions, as in the poem included in the novel, “Mount Shasta, Seen from a Distance.”44 Like Frederick Douglass, many nineteenthcentury African-American male writers relied on melodrama, often rooted in solid fact, to expose the evils of slavery, especially the exploitation of AfricanAmerican women. William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter (1853) culminates with the tragic mulatta Clotel praying to God as she leaps from a bridge over the Potomac to escape slave hunters: “Thus died Clotel, the daughter of Thomas Jefferson, a president of the United States; a man distinguished as the author of the Declaration of Independence, and one of the first statesmen of that country.”45 How, then, do we explain the studious effort of white, middle-class male writers to distance themselves from the politically influential and aesthetically successful conventions of literary sentimentalism? In addition, how do we explain scholarly traditions that have long accepted the distinction made by such male writers of their work from that of their feminine and minority contemporaries? The answer lies not simply in the defensive sexism of many white, middle-class authors, although this factor cannot be ignored. It is compounded by the strategic avoidance of direct political commitments by many of these writers, who have long been identified with a liberal tradition in which “serious” art is assumed to transcend particular social and political interests. In the late nineteenth century, various forms of aestheticism emerged that would culminate in the avant-garde literary and visual experiments we identify today 44 John Rollin Ridge (Yellow Bird), The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955), pp. 23–25. 45 William Wells Brown, Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States, ed. Robert S. Levine (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000), p. 207.

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with cultural modernism. In Germany, Friedrich Nietzsche claimed in “Truth and Falsity in the Ultramoral Sense” (1873) that “reason” is an illusion intended primarily for the “preservation of the individual” and that the “chief power” of the human intellect is “this art of dissimulation,” or lying.46 In England, Oscar Wilde argued in “The Decay of Lying” (1889) that only the artist recognizes the inherent fictionality of all experience and thus the relativity of virtually every political cause.47 Also in England, the American author Henry James would argue less radically than Nietzsche and Wilde but in a similar vein that “The Art of Fiction” (1884) should not be concerned with the moral and political didacticism of the romance but with simulating “the illusion of reality.”48 Strongly influenced by Emerson and Hawthorne, among other Transcendentalists who were friends of his father, Henry James, Sr. (himself a minor Transcendentalist), James responds critically to the appeal by his contemporary Walter Besant in “Fiction as One of the Fine Arts” (1883) for a return to moral didacticism and historically credible realism in literature. Yet in his defense of the novel’s “organic” evocation of lived experience and the complex process of “consciousness” through which we apprehend social relations and the world in general, James ends up defending the aesthetic form of the novel as itself a moral education in what it means to be human. The modern psychological novel we today trace back to Henry James as its first and arguably most sophisticated author is distinguished by its capacity to produce an “air of reality” generally unavailable in everyday experience, marked by “the dazzle and confusion of reality” (AF, 14). The novel should not, then, refer directly or “realistically” to some outside world, as James contends Besant argues, but the literary narrative should initiate a process that gives us the “feeling” and “impression” of life: Experience 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. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative—much more when it happens to be that of a man of genius—it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of life into revelations. (AF, 12) James’s description of the successful novel draws obviously on key romantic assumptions and hinges on literature’s ability to represent formally the 46 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Truth and Falsity in the Ultramoral Sense,” in Critical Theory since Plato, p. 634. 47 Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” in Critical Theory since Plato, p. 658. 48 Henry James, “The Art of Fiction,” was first published in Longman’s Magazine (September 1884), collected in Partial Portraits (London: Macmillan and Co., 1888). Citations from The Future of the Novel: Essays on the Art of Fiction, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Vintage Books, 1956), p. 14. Further references in the text as: AF.

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“immense sensibility” of experience, which ordinarily is unlimited and thus difficult to grasp in its significance. James’s claims for “consciousness” appear subordinate to “feeling” or “sensibility,” and the novel he proposes seems thus to be the structural equivalent of sentimental conventions: characters as types, plots as emblematic, fictional action as symbolic, and moral persuasion based on the complete process of aesthetic immersion and identification. Henry James’s fiction is thoroughly sentimental when viewed in these terms, but by formalizing “sentiment” as the entire aesthetic process he managed to displace it from mere sentimental characters and conventional plots into the “organicism” of the reader’s response. In the formalization of sentiment, modern male writers often drew upon sentimental traditions and the political efficacy of literary identification while avoiding what they feared was the conventionality of the sentimental romance. James’s early novels, properly defined as romances, are difficult to distinguish from sentimental romances. The American (1877) and Daisy Miller (1878), James’s first successful novels, are thoroughly sentimental, as suggested by the dark murder plot Christopher Newman imagines he has uncovered in the history of the Bellegarde family and Daisy’s conveniently tragic death from “Roman Fever” as the symbolic expression of her exclusion from high society for her improprieties and indiscretions. James’s later, modernist novels from the so-called “Major Phase” are sentimental in their own rights: dying of an unspecified heart problem, Milly Theale is betrayed by her two best friends, Kate Croy and Merton Densher, fortune hunters enjoying a secret love affair in The Wings of the Dove (1902); Lambert Strether reveals the secret love affair between the young Chad Newsome and an older French woman Madame de Vionnet in The Ambassadors (1903); Maggie Verver and her father, Adam, are similarly duped by their respective spouses, Prince Amerigo and Charlotte Stant, who make passionately adulterous (and symbolically incestuous love) in a Gloucester hotel in The Golden Bowl (1904). What I term the “formalization of sentiment” may have many different rhetorical appearances, all of them serving the purpose of distancing a specific cultural work from its popular influences. In the case of James’s works, the distinction relies crucially on the sentimental object of reference. In the sentimental romance, our emotions are bound primarily to characters with whom we identify (or are alienated from) and with plot circumstances that precipitate the crises of such characters’ experiences. We are encouraged to empathize with protagonists, whose concluding fates are important for the resolution of our emotional process. In many cases, such conclusions are critical for the moral and political messages of the sentimental romance. For example, in Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World, Ellen Montgomery’s suffering is overcome in her discovery of her wealthy relatives in Edinburgh, the center for the “New Presbyterianism” that Ellen represents and hence the material location for her spiritual truth. Ascending the class and economic hierarchy as she realizes her spiritual destiny to marry the aspiring minister John Humphreys, Ellen achieves adulthood just as readers recognize the

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importance of all the different parts of her secular and spiritual education. Ellen Montgomery’s achieved identity is thus cathartic for the reader. In contrast, James’s Daisy Miller and her suitor Frederick Winterbourne play with the reader’s emotions without resolving those affective experiences in conclusive ways. Daisy’s tragic death does not provide an explicit message to resolve the reader’s confused emotions regarding her conduct. Similarly, we do not know exactly how to evaluate Winterbourne’s conduct. Such moral, political, and emotional ambiguity is James’s hallmark and often what distinguishes his works from the popular romances of his era. Yet there is a conclusion in almost every one of James’s narratives that reroutes our affective cathexes from the characters to the author and the work. As I detail in the next chapter, Daisy fails to realize the rich English romantic literary heritage that surrounds her in Switzerland and Italy. Winterbourne may refer to Byron’s poetry at the Castle of Chillon, even recite lines from Byron’s Manfred while visiting the Colosseum, but Winterbourne is clearly neither the poet Byron nor one of his literary heroes. Henry James, of course, reconnects us with this literary heritage. The formalization of sentiment describes the aesthetic process whereby the emotions prompted by the characters and their situations (the plot) are transferred to the author and work. One could say that this is case in every literary work, because the characters and their circumstances are merely effects of the overall act of imagination in which they appear. Yet in the particulars of a literary work’s conclusion, what matters is the reader’s final experience, the “takeaway” in the popular idiom. In the vast majority of sentimental romances, the conclusion involves the reader’s ethical judgment of the protagonist. In James, this ethical judgment focuses not on the character but the work itself, thereby becoming an aesthetic judgment. Daisy Miller abandons the moral problem of Daisy Miller as a young woman who is utterly naïve or boldly flirtatious in favor of her rendering as a narrative that successfully represents this problem. In so doing, James transfers our feelings for Daisy from the imaginative character to the author himself. James knows more than his characters, which of course is an absurd claim, because his characters are self-evident extensions of himself. Yet in shattering the illusion of the character’s (and the plot’s) independent existence, James affirms his ability to emulate the predicaments of characters who represent modern social problems. Henry James is, of course, an important commentator on the social and political changes in America and Europe during the period of modernization, but his formalization of sentiment helped bury his social criticism behind an elaborate aesthetic facade. Some professional critics might protest that James’s aesthetics, politics and moral instruction are seamlessly integrated, but the ordinary reader is generally lost in James’s complex plots, intricate prose and subtle interpersonal relations. James’s literary formalism encouraged the disarticulation of “high art” from the popular art of the nineteenth-century sentimental romance, and it did so in part by stripping the novel of overt political messages and moral imperatives. In these respects, Henry James continued the

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work of many of his Transcendentalist predecessors, who struggled to distinguish their romantic ideas and values from those of their feminine and minority contemporaries. Literary and cultural history is a complex process, not an exact science, so my generalizations about the departure of serious literature (and perhaps philosophy, too) from the mainstream of nineteenth-century popular literature, decisively sentimental across gender and class boundaries, are subject to numerous qualifications, even objections. I should also stress that the sentimental romance hardly fits any single political and moral category in the long and changing nineteenth century. Susan Warner’s evangelical Presbyterianism is as at home with the conventions of sentimentalism as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s vigorous Abolitionism. Such diversity helps explain why Anne Douglas and Jane Tompkins are both right about the cultural work of the sentimental romance. Yet it is fair to conclude that literary sentimentalism primarily understands its cultural work as part of a larger social process, whether that be Warner’s “New School” church or Stowe’s Anti-Slavery Society. The self-contained modern novel disavows larger social affiliations and identifications, often disingenuously hiding its author (with all of his or her prejudices and virtues) behind its formal properties. The aesthetic monument of the modern American novel, preserved and polished in our curricula for teaching American literature, has followed too closely the defensive self-interest of some nineteenth-century male writers and prevented us from recognizing the broad influence of sentimental literature in the cultural, political, and social work of nineteenth-century America. Just how responsible is Henry James, the author, for this aesthetic ideology? Insofar as he worked in the tradition of the American Romantics, including such fellow travelers as Hawthorne and Melville, to distinguish their ideals from popular politics, then James contributed importantly to the split between literary “feeling” and “thinking,” between culture’s ability to move us, sometimes to action, and its capacity for reflection and “self-knowledge.” Yet James’s aesthetic ambitions are trivial by themselves and powerful only within the genealogy from romantic to modern literature that is sustained as much by scholarship and literary pedagogy as it is by specific works and authors. Finally, my purpose in detailing this cultural history is not primarily to ascribe blame, but instead to understand how such an odd consequence is possible that a writer as demonstrably sentimental and melodramatic as Henry James could ever be interpreted as a realist. Such alchemy is perhaps a fitting subject of this first effort to comprehend the identity of “our Henry James.”

2

Romantic Sentimentalism in Henry James’s Daisy Miller: A Study (1878)

Who, then, was Cestius, And what is he to me?—… In beckoning pilgrim feet With marble finger high To where, by shadowy wall and history-haunted street, Those matchless singers lie … —Thomas Hardy, “Rome: At the Pyramid of Cestius near the Graves of Shelley and Keats” (1887)1

Henry James’s Daisy Miller: A Study (1878) is an interesting case study of romantic sentimentalism in the post-Civil War period. Of all James’s works, it is the most obviously sentimental; as an early work in his career, it is profoundly indebted to the Anglo-American romantics. It is also one of James’s most popular works, not only when measured by its success with readers but by its accessibility. Critics have usually treated it as a simple tale. Daisy is drawn from the popular stereotype of the “American Girl,” and her death from malaria is borrowed from dime novels and stage melodramas. Daisy Miller has been taught in countless introductions to American literature and its ethical dilemmas pondered by generations of college students. It is a sort of cultural bonbon, tossed down for its bittersweet taste, before students move on to more serious fare. Although it antedates what today we term the “destination novel,” in which specific tourist sites are included to promote an area, Daisy Miller does indeed advertise the attractions of both Lake Geneva and Rome. In certain ways, the novella is a virtual guidebook to its locales, offering historical lessons relevant to the nineteenth-century traveler. For all its overt simplicity of style, character, and plot, Daisy Miller is one of James’s most allusive works, especially to the English romantics who haunt its pages and scenes. It is, then, a good work to investigate some of the claims in Chapter 1 regarding James’s formalization of sentiment and to anticipate discussions in Chapter 3 of James’s uses of melodrama and in Chapter 4 his political criticism of nationalism. 1

Thomas Hardy, The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1976), pp. 104–105.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003297987-3

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Insofar as Daisy Miller draws on popular conventions of the “American Girl” and the “international theme,” the novella has also been considered one of James’s less sophisticated works.2 On several levels, the moral lesson of the novella seems obvious. A young American woman innocent of European customs and lacking proper parental supervision goes about socially and publicly with Italian men judged inappropriate for a woman of her class. When warned of her improper behavior, she openly rejects such good advice and ends up exposing herself to the dangers of nineteenth-century Rome, including malaria or “Roman fever.” Although the moral responsibility for her premature death can be shared by everyone in the novella, the moral of the story seems profoundly conventional. Young women in foreign places ought to heed the advice of the more mature members of their class and country. As in so many other works by James, the protagonist is a mere occasion around which James organizes the moral “ado,” in which subordinate characters reveal their ethical qualities in the ways they relate to the protagonist. With its Roman setting and frequent references to classical culture, Daisy Miller follows primarily the Anglo-American romantics’ contention that classical Rome failed to develop a comprehensive democracy and thus lapsed into fatal despotism. Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788) had a profound influence on nineteenth-century views of ancient Rome, especially during the several neoclassical revivals in sculpture and architecture during the century on both sides of the Atlantic. James’s interest in ancient Rome was motivated in large part by his sense that in the post-Civil War period America was an emerging global power. Although not overtly critical of U.S. expansionist projects, James nonetheless stresses the need for a democratic imperium, which would recall the mistakes of ancient Roman despots and affirm the democratic aspirations of the new American nation. The conventional reading of Daisy Miller has stressed how the ironically named Frederick Forsyth Winterbourne fails Daisy by confusing his sexual desire for her with his obligation to the expatriate American community’s social values.3 So much has been written about Winterbourne’s hypocrisy judging Daisy a little American flirt and yet enjoying her attentions that his 2 3

Virginia C. Fowler, Henry James’s American Girl: The Embroidery on the Canvas (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), p. 38. When Winterbourne asks Daisy to introduce him to her mother, she answers: “‘Oh my—I can’t say all that!’” Henry James, Daisy Miller, in Daisy Miller, Pandora, The Patagonia, and Other Tales, vol. 18, New York Edition of The Novels and Tales of Henry James, 26 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909), p. 31. Further references in the text as: DM. Much has been made of his surname and its association with personal coldness, moral rigor, and even Swiss winters. James adds the middle name, Forsyth, in the New York Edition. Besides the alliteration of “Frederick Forsyth,” which makes his given names a mouthful to enunciate, “Forsyth” suggests a homophone on “for sooth” and “foresight.” James suggests ironically that this young man has neither truth nor foresight.

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moral responsibility in the novella has virtually obliterated Daisy’s identity. Most critical interpretations turn her into the mere occasion for Winterbourne’s education or miseducation, depending on how we evaluate his actions. Yet Winterbourne is far more conventional than Daisy, who judges him from the beginning as “‘solemn … as if you were taking me to a prayer meeting or a funeral’” (DM, 41) and by the end to have “‘no more “give” than a ramrod’” (DM, 83).4 Uneducated and unsophisticated as she is surely intended to appear, Daisy has an uncanny ability to express in newly meaningful ways the rich history that surrounds her in Switzerland and later in Rome. For all his studies in Geneva, Winterbourne rarely connects with the Europe where he has lived for so long. Daisy is also exceptionally aware of how others view her, often taking pleasure in shocking their conventional values; what many of the other characters assume is naïve coquetry is often designed iconoclasm. James associates Daisy’s rebellious character with the English romantics for whom the Swiss and Roman settings in the novella have particular significance. To be sure, this American Girl can hardly be expected to have read a line of the great English romantics, so her connection to them appears at once James’s sly addition as the literate author and a certain affinity she shares with them primarily by way of her “character.” Her associations with the English romantics are also the means of linking her much more directly to the classical sites, such as the Roman Colosseum, which she seems to visit merely as tourist destinations. Read back through her connection with the romantics, Daisy’s Rome is full of classical grandeur and both the promise and risks for the modern empires emulating the classical model. Although the romantic allusions in Daisy Miller have often been noted, Daisy has rarely been associated with them, except to note her ignorance of their significance.5 The knowledgeable reader or Winterbourne is presumed to understand James’s references and their moral meanings, thereby deepening the conventional ignorance or cultural illiteracy of Daisy. But in her character, Daisy embodies far more romantic features than Winterbourne, even if it can be argued that she fails to develop or successfully deploy these qualities. If there is a failure of education in the novella, then, it is Daisy’s inability to realize the romantic idealization of democracy, its revolutionary 4

5

James is even more explicitly sexual in Daisy’s reference to Winterbourne’s “stiffness” in the 1878 edition, Daisy Miller: A Study. Part I, The Cornhill Magazine (June 1878), pp. 678–698 and Daisy Miller: A Study. Part II, The Cornhill Magazine (July 1878), pp. 44–67: “‘But I noticed you were as stiff as an umbrella the first time I saw you’” (II, 62). Winterbourne replies, “‘You will find I am not so stiff as several others,’ said Winterbourne smiling” (62). Further references in the text as: James, 1878. Jeffrey Meyers, “‘Daisy Miller’ and the Romantic Poets.” Henry James Review 28:1 (Winter 2007), 94–100, discusses briefly James’s associations of Daisy with the English romantics, but Meyers concludes that these references serve primarily to render her “apparently superficial and transparent character … ambiguous” (98).

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spirit, its hatred of tyranny, and its fierce individualism. For the English romantics, these values were also identified with a commitment to political and personal liberty, which included advocacy of open sexuality, often at odds with conventional mores. Daisy is explicitly identified with Byron, whose reputation as political rebel and sexual adventurer were part of his Victorian legend. James alludes to The Prisoner of Chillon (1816) and Manfred: A Dramatic Poem (1817) in Daisy Miller, poems by Byron that suit the novella’s scenes at the Castle of Chillon and the Roman Colosseum. Like Daisy, Byron dies of a fever, albeit in Missolonghi, Greece, rather than in Rome, and Byron and Daisy are both involved in rebellions, even if Daisy’s rebellion against social mores in Rome hardly compares with Byron’s support for the Greek revolution against the Ottoman Empire. Byron’s romantic protagonists in both poems are, of course, men, and the different struggles they represent seem to have little to do with a young woman’s rebellion against the conventions of courtship and male–female social relations so central to James’s novella. In the conventional reading of the story, then, these Byronic allusions are not only ironic when linked with Daisy but they express a certain bathos or mock-heroic quality. Daisy is so far from Byron or his historical subject, the Genevan Prelate François Bonnivard in The Prisoner of Chillon, and his poetic hero, Manfred, as to cause the knowledgeable reader to laugh out loud. Indeed, these allusions appear to resolve the long-standing dispute among critics regarding James’s attitudes toward women’s rights in this novella. Daisy falls so far short of Byron, Bonnivard, and Manfred as to lead the reader to conclude that James is an outright sexist, teasing us with a “rebel” whose cause trivializes the very idea of women’s rights. Winterbourne recites lines from Manfred while walking at night in the Colosseum, just moments before he spies the unchaperoned Daisy strolling there with Giovanelli. James does not give us the actual lines, writing instead that “as he stood there he began to murmur Byron’s famous lines out of ‘Manfred’ …” (DM, 85). There is only one place in Byron’s poem where Manfred mentions the Roman Colosseum: in his monologue opening Act III, scene iv, as he contemplates the wonder of Nature from the interior of his alpine castle’s tower: I do remember me, that in my youth, When I was wandering, – upon such a night I stood within the Colosseum’s wall, ’Midst the chief relics of almighty Rome; …6 Manfred himself wonders at his mental wandering, but the romantic conventions are clear enough. The “rolling Moon” shines “upon / All this”: 6

George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Poetical Works of Byron (London: Oxford University Press, 1945). Further references in the text as: Byron, 1945.

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The gladiators’ bloody Circus stands A noble wreck in ruinous perfection, While Caesar’s chambers, and the Augustan halls, Grovel on earth in indistinct decay. (Manfred, III, iv, 27–30; Byron, 1945, 405) The moon represents not only eternal nature but also the imagination, and it reminds Manfred of his dead lover, Astarte, who appears and is named for the first time in Act II, scene iv, at the Hall of Arimanes, recalled from the dead by the spirit Nemesis (Byron, 1945, 399–401). Astarte is the Canaanite goddess of sexuality and fertility, as well as war.7 Derived from the Babylonian Akkadian and Semitic Ishtar, Astarte was associated with the Evening Star, Venus, and thus considered a counterpart of the Greek Aphrodite and Roman Venus.8 Her association with war also gives her a strong affiliation with death. In Byron’s Manfred, the hero’s beloved, Astarte, has died in some “bloody” conflict for which Manfred feels responsible, although it was not her blood he has “shed” (Byron, 1945, 395). Called forth by Nemesis with permission from the Lord of the Underworld, Arimanes, Astarte brings together several different pre-Christian references in addition to her own Middle Eastern lineage. Nemesis, the daughter of Night, is the Greek goddess of indignation and retribution, who “punishes hubris” and “guards against excess.”9 Arimanes is Ahriman, the Zoroastrian God of Darkness and the Underworld, who engages in the mythic struggle with Ahura Mazda, the God of Light. Winterbourne’s identification with the hero of Byron’s “metaphysical drama” seems profoundly ironic, because Winterbourne is on the verge of chastising Daisy for her impropriety of touring a classical ruin at night with an Italian male, presumed to be a fortune hunter. Byron wrote the poem during his tour of the Bernese Alps after leaving England amid the scandal involving the failure of his marriage to Annabella Millbanke, who accused Byron of having an incestuous relationship with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. The poem has long been considered autobiographical, Manfred’s unspecified sin a veiled confession of Byron’s incestuous relationship. The Faustian overtones in the poem suggest Byron’s elaborate rationalization of his love affair as that of a man whose sexuality exceeds conventional boundaries.10 Manfred’s refusal of the 7 Susan Ackerman. “Astarte.” The Oxford Guide to Peoples and Places of the Bible, eds. Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 23. 8 Karel Van der Toorn, Bob Becking, Pieter Willem Van der Horst, eds., Dictionary of Demons and Deities in the Bible, 2nd rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1999), 109–110. 9 John Roberts, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of the Classical World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Online. 10 Peter L. Thorslev, Jr., The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962), pp. 165–167.

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redemption offered him repeatedly by religious figures in the poem, like the Abbot, also sounds much like Byron’s own anti-Christian sentiments. Byron’s hybrid pantheon of divinities in Manfred suggests the poet’s own enlightened syncretism.11 As a magus, Manfred both invokes these supernatural powers and yet cannot fully control them. Manfred’s embrace of death in what appears his willful suicide aligns him with metaphysical rebellion, certainly a far cry from Winterbourne’s end in the novella when he returns to his “studies” in Geneva and his interests in “a very clever foreign lady” (DM, 94). Manfred’s mysterious sin and Byron’s scandalous relationship work far better in reference to Daisy than Winterbourne. James’s identification of Daisy with Manfred may be ironic, but her defiance of social and sexual mores resembles that of both Byron and his poetic protagonist. Refusing the social redemption offered by Mrs. Costello and Mrs. Walker, Daisy insists on risking death for the sake of the liberty to associate with whomever she pleases. Like Manfred, Daisy in the Colosseum does not imagine herself a religious martyr, but in fact a rebel against that very idea. Her individual liberty speaks from the old site of Christian martyrdom, where a cross had been installed to memorialize religious suffering, but her revolt is clearly secular and social.12 Like Byron and Manfred, Daisy makes a Faustian pact not so much with the devil but with life itself: better to die following your own principles than to live a slave to others’ ideas. In this context, Giovanelli’s companionship becomes a mere convenience, hardly evidence of her licentiousness, and a reminder of the American expatriates’ stereotypes of Italian males as fortune-hunters. Giovanelli is, after all, a cavalieri avoccato, or a trained lawyer in the Roman civil service. His professional status and education ought to be equivalents to most of those in the American expatriate community, even if his economic means are inferior to the Americans’ fortunes. James ironically connects the courtship and tourism of his expatriates in Switzerland and Rome with grander historical and cultural events. Winterbourne is no match for Byron’s Manfred, and Daisy neither Manfred nor his dead lover, Astarte. The novella’s expatriates in Geneva and Rome have little in common with Percy Shelley, Mary Godwin, Lord Byron, Claire Clairmont, and Dr. John Polidori, who spent that legendary summer of 1816 in the vicinity of Geneva, producing such famous works as Shelley’s “Mont Blanc,” Mary Godwin Shelley’s Frankenstein, Lord Byron’s Prisoner of 11 Byron famously declaimed against the Church of England in one of his speeches in the House of Lords, commenting on how the Church discriminated against people of different faiths. He himself was strongly drawn to Islam, although he was probably an atheist at heart, like his close friend Shelley (Dallas, 1824, 679). 12 Pope Benedict XIV (1740–1758) sanctified the Colosseum and erected Stations of the Cross within it. These memorials to Christian persecution by the Romans lasted until 1874, when a large bronze cross was placed at the center of the amphitheater (Litfin 2007, 44). The actual martyrdom of Christians in the Colosseum is disputed by historians, only one documented case of martyrdom in the Colosseum existing.

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Chillon, and Polidori’s “Vampyre.” The late nineteenth-century Americans may follow the same path as the English romantics took from Switzerland to Rome, but the Americans seem largely ignorant of their celebrated predecessors. Yet these same English romantics were followed to Italy by lesser-known Americans with strong commitments to their romantic ideals and neoclassical styles and values. Daisy Miller has often been compared with the historical Margaret Fuller, who covered the Italian republican revolution for the New York Tribune, met Giovanni Ossoli, a supporter of Giuseppe Mazzini and Italian independence, and gave birth to their son during the siege of Rome in 1848.14 Like his father’s generation, especially Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry James, Jr. satirized Margaret Fuller as a women’s rights activist and global political activist who typified all they held in contempt about “liberated” women.15 Educated by her father at home and able to read Latin and Greek by the age of five, Fuller’s prose is Latinate in style and richly allusive to classical myths. Fuller wanted to demonstrate her competency in the learning that was typical of male education in the first half of the nineteenth century.16 James would refer snidely to the “Margaret-ghost” in his memories of the American expatriate group of sculptors in his biography of William Wetmore Story, son of Associate Justice Joseph Story (1811–1845) of the U.S. Supreme Court. By the “Margaret-ghost” he meant the liberal spirit of political reform that still influenced that community long after her death in a shipwreck off Fire Island in 1850.17 Although by no means uniformly liberal in their political views, the American artists and writers drawn to Rome and Florence in the 1840s were committed to abolition and in qualified ways to women’s rights. They were heirs to the transcendentalist legacy and considered their comfortable circumstances in Italy a version of the utopian communities like Brook Farm and Fruitlands that had made the Transcendentalists famous. Following such European sculptors as Antonio Canova (1757–1822) and Bertel Thorvaldsen (1789–1839) to Florence and Rome, these American artists were committed to neoclassical ideals in art and life. One reason the Story family finally convinced a reluctant Henry James to write William Wetmore Story and His Friends (1903) was that James had known most 13

13 In our own era, Ivan Passer’s film Haunted Summer (1988) mythologizes this summer of romantic productivity and sexual abandon. 14 John Carlos Rowe, ed., Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller: Selected Works (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2003), p. 15. See also Sarah A. Wadsworth, “Innocence Abroad: Henry James and the Reinvention of the American Woman Abroad,” Henry James Review 22(2001): 107–127. 15 John Carlos Rowe, The Other Henry James (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 38–40. 16 Rowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, 12. 17 Henry James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends: From Letters, Diaries, and Recollections, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903), vol. I, 127. Further references in the text as: WWS.

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members of that community in his residence in Florence and Rome from 1872 to 1874.18 Their neoclassical interests were integrally tied to their conception of the United States as a new Roman empire, but committed this time to the ideals of democratic equality. Horatio Greenough’s George Washington (1841) represented the general and first president as a Roman emperor, dressed in a toga, raising his right hand to point to divine justice and extending the sheathed sword of peace in this left. Criticized as Greenough was for imagining Washington as a pagan tyrant, the sculpture had nonetheless been commissioned by the U.S. Congress to celebrate the centennial of Washington’s birth. Hiram Powers’ The Greek Slave (1843) used classical sculptural ideals of feminine beauty to indict both Greek despotism but also the international slave trade. Widely viewed as an allegory of abolition as well as Greek nationalism, The Greek Slave was draped to cover its exquisite nudity in the Boston Athenaeum and exemplified a daring new advocacy of the divinity of the human body that drew upon classical sculpture’s naked human forms. The bare breasts of Story’s brooding Libyan Sibyl (1861) and the elegant drapery of Harriet Hosmer’s Zenobia in Chains (1859) invoke a classical tradition of representing human bodies in eternal, divine forms. The erotics of sculptures like Benjamin Paul Akers’ The Dead Pearl Diver (1859) and Harriet Hosmer’s Beatrice Cenci (1856) were justified by their classical poses.19 The American women sculptors who joined the expatriate community in Rome are particularly notable, because they include some of the most important women artists of the nineteenth century. Harriet Hosmer (1830– 1908) had a long, successful career, which included commissions for major public sculptures around the world. By no means a women’s rights activist, Hosmer was supportive of other women artists, especially in the expatriate community of Rome. In William Wetmore Story and His Friends, James refers dismissively to the “white marmorean flock” of women sculptors, and his sexist remark probably captures well some of the patronizing attitudes Story and his circle felt toward these women (WWS, I, 257). One woman sculptor in particular, Maria Louisa Lander (1826–1923) was specifically censured by the social circle informally run by William Wetmore Story. Rumored to be living out of wedlock with an Italian man and to have posed nude as a model for other artists, Lander was invited to Story’s house and subjected to an intervention. At the end of the discussion with other 18 In his letter to his sister, Alice James, of February 10, 1873, James notes how he had “dined at the Storys, in the company with the Wisters, … and the extraordinary little person known as Hattie Hosmer.” Henry James Letters, ed. Leon Edel, vol. 1, 1843–1875, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 339. Although James’s diminutive “little person” is a fair reference to Hosmer’s short stature, it is also in keeping with his patronizing comments about the American women sculptors and artists in Rome. 19 John Carlos Rowe, The New American Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 87–96.

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Americans, Story suggested that Lander present herself to the U.S. Consul in Rome and apologize for her conduct. Lander refused and persisted in her defiance for as long as she remained in Italy.20 Lander’s sculptures as well as her lifestyle had been daring, albeit not as scandalous as Byron’s amorous affairs. Her most famous sculpture is the monumental figure of Virginia Dare (1859), today visible on Manteo Island, North Carolina, to memorialize the first English child born in the Americas. Highly stylized, bare-breasted, clothed from the waist down in a skirt adapted from Pamunkey dress, the adult Virginia Dare stares into the middle distance, proud of her identity and gender. Neoclassical in style, the sculpture combines conventions of the “noble savage” with Lander’s interpretation of Dare’s enlightenment bearing and gaze. Perhaps equally famous for the scandal surrounding it is Lander’s Bust of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1858), completed during the Hawthornes’ residency in Italy and showing the author in the manner of classical sculptures of political and cultural leaders, staring off into the middle distance, matching Virginia Dare’s gaze. The bust is somewhat unusual for the relatively long extension of the upper chest to just above the nipples, revealing the curve of the pectoral muscles. The “nudity” of Hawthorne’s upper chest posed a problem for Hawthorne and his wife, Sophia, who upon viewing the finished sculpture were shocked by its “exposure.” Having commissioned the bust, they paid for it but refused to take delivery of it, perhaps responding to the perceived pressure from the expatriate community that had so recently censured Lander.21 These historical threads suggest an intriguing pattern in James’s Daisy Miller, especially if we read Daisy as more than simply the occasion around which the “ado” of the other characters represent themselves but as a complex figure in her own right. Byron’s Manfred, his spiritual lover, Astarte, Margaret Fuller whose “Margaret-ghost” still haunts, the “white marmorean flock” of women neoclassical sculptors in Rome, the scandal of Louisa Lander’s lifestyle and artistic works all suggest James’s profound anxiety about women’s rights activism and its multiple connotations for the future of American society and culture. Tracking down these allusions tells the same dreary story: like William Wetmore Story, James was terrified by liberated women and exaggerated out of all bounds the consequences of their activism. Like his most influential precursor, Hawthorne, about whom James would publish a critical study in the English Men of Letters series one year after the publication of Daisy Miller, James responded to women’s rights activists with exaggerated dread and foreboding. There is another interpretation that by no means diminishes James’s conservative reaction to women’s rights, but which may have larger 20 T. Walter Herbert, Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making of the Middle-Class Family (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 231. 21 Robert L. Gale, A Nathaniel Hawthorne Encyclopedia (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1991), pp. 272–273.

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Figure 2.1 Maria Louisa Lander, Virginia Dare (1859) The Elizabethan Gardens, Manteo Island

Figure 2.2 Maria Louisa Lander, Bust of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1858) Concord Public Library

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macropolitical significance. In the decade after Daisy Miller, James would publish The Bostonians (1885–1886) and The Aspern Papers (1888), both of which make strong cases for the failure of such progressive women as Olive Chancellor and Verena Tarrant and such dependent women as Juliana and Tina Bordereau, who live in the shadow of a great male poet. In all of these works, James judges his feminine characters’ rebellions as inadequate, insufficiently radical, hardly comparable to the Byronic daring of Manfred or James’s American version, Jeffrey Aspern.22 The relationship between gender and these classical Italian settings has no rational basis, but it works by strange association or contamination: progressive women seem thereby warned by James with signs of ancient Rome’s or Renaissance Venice’s “failure.” These historically rich settings create an atmosphere of moral decadence, which by the 1880s was a popular cliché. For more than a century, genre paintings of modern Europeans wandering through classical ruins offered modern warnings of the evanescence of political power and human life. Pastoral works often included in their iconography death’s omnipresence—“et in Arcadio ego”—and representations of the historical past did similar cultural work. Although these conventions are particularly prevalent in eighteenth-century European neoclassicism, they continue to play an important part in romanticism. They are indeed important aspects of romantic sentimentalism. James’s snide comment about the women neoclassical sculptors as a “white marmorean flock” may suggest that he viewed their work as deeply derivative, mere copies of classical models or even worse copies of the male copiers. Hosmer’s sculptures are exquisite, technically and formally brilliant nineteenth-century versions of classical sources, but in style and neoclassical intent they differ little from William Wetmore Story’s sculptures. Whatever political content their sculptures may have had for viewers, both of them minimized such political connotations, usually invoking instead the universals of beauty and truth. To be sure, a contemporary like Margaret Fuller had insisted on a venerable heritage of powerful women, both in myth and history, to advocate for women’s rightful places in the public sphere. Elizabeth Ellet’s Women Artists in All Ages and Countries (1859) follows Fuller’s lead and includes a chapter on Maria Louisa Lander. But for many of their male contemporaries, the best many of these women sculptors in Rome were able to do was to contribute to cultural trends already well underway.23 What, then, might James have expected a truly revolutionary woman to have done? And in what sense might such rebellion have warranted his praise, perhaps even been a worthy equivalent of Byron’s genius, rather than his scandalous sexual misadventures? In many respects, this question 22 John Carlos Rowe, The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 85–118. 23 Elizabeth Fries Ellet, Women Artists in All Ages and Countries (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1859).

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expresses well the problem Daisy and her popular archetype, “the American Girl,” posed for Henry James. Winterbourne meets Giovanelli at Daisy’s funeral “in the little Protestant cemetery, by an angle of the wall of imperial Rome, beneath the cypresses and the thick spring- flowers” (DM, 91). As John Lyon notes in his modern edition of Daisy Miller, Testaccio Cemetery lies “at the foot of the Pyramid of Caius Cestius, south of the Aventine, … the first cemetery granted by the popes for non-Catholic Italians and foreigners… [and] is the burial place of Keats and Shelley.”24 James anticipates the rhetorical mastery of his later works with this lapidary reference to the English romantics, classical Rome, and European Christendom. With the funereal cypresses countered by the seasonal rebirth of flowers, James establishes a scene of mourning that also points beyond the “ruins” of history. Nine years later during his own tour of Rome, Thomas Hardy would compose the poem quoted in my epigraph, reminding British tourists how ancient Rome’s monuments had become landmarks for the greater achievements of British culture and empire. How does Daisy deserve such a celebrated location, unless we assume James’s selection of this venerable cemetery typically integrates his irony into a credible conclusion? Her burial in Testaccio reminds us of the principal reason a young American Protestant would have been unlikely to consider marriage to an Italian Catholic. The site is also a key to what she ought to have done, had she followed her romantic predecessors, just as Henry James himself was attempting to do in this early work. James’s spare reference to the cemetery nevertheless invokes Shelley’s famous elegy for Keats, “Adonaïs” (1821), especially stanzas 49–50, in which Shelley celebrates British cultural greatness amid the ruins of ancient Rome: Go thou to Rome, – at once the Paradise, The grave, the city, and the wilderness; And where its wrecks like shattered mountains rise, And flowering weeds, and fragrant copses dress The bones of Desolation’s nakedness Pass, till the spirit of the spot shall lead Thy footsteps to a slope of green access Where, like an infant’s smile, over the dead A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread; …25 Daisy can hardly claim to be a version of Shelley’s romantic resurrection of his dead friend, Keats, and the cultural heritage both poets helped Britain 24 Henry James, Selected Tales, ed. John Lyon (London: Penguin Books, 2001), p. 583, n. 60. 25 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Adonaïs,” in Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, second ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), stanza xlix, lines 433–441, p. 442.

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revive from the ruins of Rome. James does not permit her to do anything other than mildly disturb the proprieties of American expatriate society. Yet there are hints in the text that Daisy’s promise is neither the sexual and political revolution proposed by nineteenth-century women’s rights activists nor the aesthetic revolution of the Anglo-American romantics. James suggests instead a more broadly conceived democratic revolution that might begin with the provincialism of the expatriate communities in Geneva and Rome, but would match the broader nationalist movements throughout nineteenth-century Europe, inspired in part by the American Revolution. When Winterbourne first meets Daisy at the grand hotel in Vevey, on the shores of Lake Geneva, she displays an extraordinary interest in people outside her own class. She tells Winterbourne that she first learned of his Aunt Costello from her chambermaid (DM, 28), insists that they take the train or the steamer to the Castle of Chillon in order to be with other people, and meets him for their excursion in the hotel lobby, where “the couriers, the servants, the foreign tourists were lounging about and staring” (39). When understood as Daisy’s democratic interest in people of all backgrounds, then her familiarity with Eugenio, the family’s personal guide, seems less sexual than political.26 While touring the Castle, Daisy shows little interest in its history, despite Winterbourne’s effort to tell her “something of the story of the unhappy Bonnivard” (DM, 42). “The history of Bonnivard had evidently, as they say, gone into one ear and out of the other” (42), but it is not Daisy’s knowledge of history that matters but her interest in Winterbourne, “asking her young man sudden questions about himself, his family, his previous history, his tastes, his habits, his designs, and for supplying information on corresponding points in her own situation” (42). Winterbourne assumes, of course, that Daisy’s bold interest is sexual, rather than social, setting the stage for James’s brilliant representation of how Winterbourne’s sexual desire and jealousy prevent him from recognizing Daisy’s “own tastes, habits, and designs” (42). At the end of the narrative, Mrs. Miller conveys Daisy’s final message to Winterbourne: “‘And then she told me to ask if you remembered the time you went up to that castle in Switzerland’” (DM, 91). In his final meeting with his aunt Mrs. Costello, back again at Vevey, Winterbourne interprets the meaning of this message: “‘She sent me a message before her death which I didn’t understand at the time. But I’ve understood it since. She would have appreciated one’s esteem’” (93). Mrs. Costello concludes too quickly “‘that she would have reciprocated one’s affection,’” 26 James refers to Eugenio as the Millers’ “courier,” a term that in the 1870s would mean literally a paid servant or guide, but the connotations of a diplomatic aide and military spy are also carried by the term. James would play with such diplomatic meanings at great length in his later novel The Ambassadors (1903), in which Lambert Strether’s errand to bring Mrs. Newsome’s son Chad home from Paris is treated in the extended metaphor of a diplomatic mission.

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but Winterbourne’s refusal to answer her directly indicates that there is another, more profound meaning (93). That unspoken meaning seems to stress the message of individual liberty and political equality Daisy attempted to communicate to Winterbourne in their early encounters in Switzerland. These sentiments seem quite similar to conventional romantic ideas in Shelley’s “Ode to Liberty” (1820), with its epigraph from Byron, and to the emancipatory rhetoric of Byron’s The Prisoner of Chillon.27 And of course the biographical facts of Shelley, Keats, and Byron living in Switzerland and Italy in the last years of their lives, choosing both Swiss and classical Roman subjects to represent their own modern democratic aspirations, must have influenced James’s selection of these two settings for the novella. The history of François Bonnivard’s imprisonment in the Castle of Chillon for his rebellion against Charles III, Duke of Savoy, is interpreted by Byron as an early example of the democratic revolutions that would reshape late eighteenth-century Europe. Although a Catholic prelate, Bonnivard was a herald of the Protestant Reformation, since Geneva would become Calvin’s refuge in 1533 when he fled religious persecution in France. Winterbourne tells her about Bonnivard as they tour the castle, but he has apparently forgotten how the Calvinism of the region is associated with their common Protestant American backgrounds. Daisy may know nothing about Bonnivard, but her behavior suggests someone intensely interested in other people and democratic practices. When Winterbourne finally answers his aunt Costello in the final scene of the novel, it is simply to conclude: “‘You were right in that remark that you made last summer. I was booked to make a mistake. I’ve lived too long in foreign parts’” (DM, 93). The usual interpretation is that Winterbourne has learned from his failed efforts to discipline Daisy according to the conventions of American expatriate society. If Daisy is viewed as an exemplar of U.S. democratic values, then Winterbourne confesses his ignorance, not his new wisdom. He has forgotten what it means to live on an equal basis with other people, has accepted the class hierarchies of Europe, and has failed to respect Daisy as an individual. Such respect is what Winterbourne may understand in his own chosen word, “esteem,” rather than Mrs. Costello’s assumption that for a young man interested in a young woman, “esteem” must mean “affection.” James’s decision to begin and conclude the dramatic action of Daisy Miller in Vevey on the shores of Lake Geneva is only explained in part by Switzerland’s historical connection with the English romantics. Switzerland was admired in the nineteenth century for its democratic history and its ability to manage polylingual and multicultural communities, including cantons dominated by Catholic and Protestant majorities. With a venerable 27 Shelley’s epigraph, “‘Yet, Freedom, yet, thy banner, torn but flying, / Streams like a thunder-storm against the wind,’” comes from Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–1818), Canto IV, stanza 98, ll. 1–2 (Byron, 1945, 240).

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history of independence dating back to 1291, Switzerland was occupied by France during the French Revolution and only regained its independence with the defeat of Napoleon I. In the aftermath of the European revolutions of 1847–1848, which largely spared Switzerland, the country drafted a new federal constitution modeled primarily on the U.S. Constitution. Modern Switzerland thus poses a political contrast with ancient Rome. Whereas nineteenth-century Rome represented the failure of the Roman Empire, thanks to its persecution of minorities, such as Christians, and its inability to manage its conquered territories, Switzerland adapted to modern conditions, avoiding much of the violent turmoil of the transition from monarchy to nationalism. As a young man, Henry James had spent 1859–1860 studying at the Institute Rochette in Geneva and hiking the Swiss Alps in the summer of 1869.28 James thus had some familiarity with modern Swiss democratic life. Switzerland also attracted the historian Edward Gibbon, who was sent to Lausanne by his father shortly after the young Gibbon converted to Catholicism. His father put his son in the care of Daniel Pavillard, the Reformed Pastor of Lausanne, and under threat of disinheritance the younger Gibbon reconverted to Protestantism on Christmas Day, 1754.29 Gibbon’s religious experience in Switzerland, his friendship with Jacques Georges Deyverdun, and his frustrated romance with Suzanne Curchod led to his lifetime attachment to Lausanne, where he would complete the sixth and final volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788). James makes no reference to Gibbon or his influential history of the Roman Empire, but like the English romantics coming after him Gibbon would find Switzerland a site of religious and cultural tolerance, as well as a moderate haven amid the violence of the French Revolution and a stark contrast with the tyranny of ancient Rome. All of these threads cannot be woven fully into a new Daisy Miller. As a young, unworldly woman from a wealthy Schenecdaty, New York family, she hardly matches the revolutionary poetics and practices of such English romantics as Byron and Shelley. As a tourist who dashes through such venerable sites as the Castle of Chillon, the Roman Colosseum, and the Vatican, she cannot match the English poets and historians who would meditate on the future of Great Britain as measured against the historical struggles of early Christians and Protestant reformers. As a blundering socialite in expatriate American communities in Switzerland and Rome, she hardly measures up to the women’s rights activism of Margaret Fuller reporting on the Italian Revolution and the defiant Maria Louisa Lander facing down her American critics in Rome. Insofar as she epitomizes the 28 Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius. A Biography (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1992), 41. 29 John Murray, ed., The Autobiographies of Edward Gibbon (London: John Murray, 1897), p. 137.

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popular stereotype of “the American Girl,” Daisy Miller still represents what Henry James considered the superficiality of much women’s rights activism in the late nineteenth century. To the extent that Henry James himself identifies with his venerable predecessors, he does so primarily with Lord Byron, Shelley, Keats, Bonnivard, and Gibbon, all men who have achieved the greatness to which James himself aspired. Yet in a final sense, Daisy Miller in all of her ordinariness exceeds what Henry James imagined he could control and discipline, much as she escapes the “romance” Winterbourne fantasized he might possess in her. When considered in terms of her melodramatic death and the romantic aura of ancient Rome’s decline and fall, Daisy is a sentimental character. Even when understood as an ironic protagonist, she is constructed from parts borrowed from the sentimental romance. Insofar as Daisy Miller expresses James’s own radical departure from the classical world and his endorsement of democratic modernity, she ended up defining his career and haunting his imagination. James wants to give Daisy what today is termed a “make-over,” transforming her from his initial parody of the “American Girl” to a serious feminine protagonist, capable of the artistic and political achievements of his romantic predecessors. Yet even as he links Daisy with historical women, such as Mary Godwin Shelley, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Hosmer, and Maria Louisa Lander, he cannot help but patronize them all. His defensiveness is evident in his appropriation of Daisy’s promise for himself and his art. James’s anxiety of influence, now both political and aesthetic, finds its perverse realization in those feminine characters who have made James such an enduring author, with Daisy as their prototype.

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From Melodrama to Soap Opera The Awkward Age (1899) of Popular Culture

“Talk, talk, talk. That’s all you can do.” —The Parrot in Raymond Queneau, Zazie dans le Métro (1960)

Thirty-one years before the first soap opera, Painted Dreams, aired on WGN (Chicago) radio on October 20, 1930, Henry James’s The Awkward Age adapted theatrical melodrama to the novel of manners in ways that anticipate the soap opera.1 Nearly half a century ago, Peter Brooks recognized the central role of melodrama in James’s literary realism in The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (1976).2 For Brooks, The Awkward Age is James’s “most finished play-as-novel, … bringing to culmination all his studies in the dramatic form,” written not long after James’s decision to abandon his ambitions as a playwright (Brooks, 164). The conventional wisdom is that James attempted to write a novel in which dialogue would be the dominant mode, simulating theatricality with just the barest descriptive language and primarily domestic settings. For Brooks, James’s reliance on melodrama is integral to “a modern aesthetic … to make the ‘real’ and the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘private life’ interesting through heightened dramatic utterance and gesture that lay bare the true stakes” (Brooks, 12). In Brooks’ interpretation, melodrama intensifies individual experience, especially that of the bourgeois subject, lending it the aura of high drama James would borrow from his romantic predecessors. Brooks relies centrally on such French romantic dramatists as Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas, père, to define theatrical melodrama’s characteristics: “the indulgence of strong emotionalism; moral polarization and schematization; extreme states of being, situations, actions; overt villainy, persecution of the good, clarification of the cosmic moral sense of everyday gestures” (Brooks, 11–12). Although Brooks does not address 1 2

Jim Cox, Historical Dictionary of American Radio Soap Operas, vol. 3, Historical Dictionaries of Literature and the Arts, ed. John Woronoff, 5 vols. (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2005), p. xv. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003297987-4

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melodrama as popular culture, these characteristics could be applied readily to twentieth-century soap operas on radio and television. Brooks’ thesis about Balzac and James is that literary realism drew upon the established conventions of theatrical melodrama in order to render significant everyday life, deepening our potential responses to experience by intensifying our perceptions and self-consciousness. In effect, Brooks’ melodramatic imagination links popular culture with the philosophical novel, complicating the latter’s conventional association with high culture. In my view, Brooks’ argument about melodrama has important consequences for our understanding of James’s relationship to popular culture. In many of the cases where scholarly readers find James offering philosophical representations of character and social circumstances, we can point to James employing melodramatic techniques, many learned from his reviewing and eventual composition of nineteenth-century theatrical productions. As his most overtly “dramatic” novel, The Awkward Age is a good test case for my thesis that melodrama and philosophical content are more closely aligned in James’s fiction than previously acknowledged. My choice of The Awkward Age as James’s most theatrical novel might be challenged by advocates of The Tragic Muse (1890) or The Bostonians (1886), each of which thematizes theatrical performance and public oratory in ways closely tied to nineteenth-century popular culture. Neither novel, however, takes its formal cues from theater, at least not to the extent The Awkward Age does. The Tragic Muse focuses on theater and Miriam Rooth’s performances on the English stage of highcultural works by Shakespeare and others. The form of the novel is not primarily dramatic. As I argue in The Other Henry James, James’s use of the French actress Rachel as a historical model for Miriam Rooth connects The Tragic Muse with popular culture, but the prevailing interest in the novel in the sacredness of the aesthetic vocation is conventional in James’s writing.3 James acknowledges that Miriam Rooth’s talent as an actress (and character) might transcend the negative stereotypes of theatrical women in Victorian culture, but his typical distinction between “high art” and popular entertainment remains. Published four years earlier than The Tragic Muse, The Bostonians emphasizes the split between high and low arts, representing Verena Tarrant as ventriloquizing others’ messages, such as her father’s or Olive Chancellor’s political oratory. Ambivalent as Verena’s “salvation” is by Basil Ransom in his concluding abduction of her, James seems certain enough that Verena must be rescued from a life of imitation, the fatal flaw of popular culture. Both novels distance their own medium from the arts thematized in them – painting and stage drama in The Tragic Muse and political oratory in The Bostonians. Each novel employs its form and style to enable James to judge the other arts, often in very patronizing ways. 3

Rowe, The Other Henry James (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 81–83.

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The Awkward Age is very different in all of these respects, marking a change in James’s thinking about the “social arts” all of his novels represent. Mrs. Brookenham’s drawing room is explicitly theatrical; James’s experiment in composing a novel primarily out of dialogue only reinforces this formal adaptation of the play to imaginative prose. Although organized into ten books with a total of thirty-eight chapters, these divisions are modelled explicitly after dramatic acts and scenes, as James notes in his “Preface” to the New York Edition of the novel.4 The novel seems longer than its 414 pages in the William Heinemann first edition of 1899 because there is very little narrative development and James’s scenic method gives the impression of unending repetition.5 James’s formal theatricality in the novel involves much more than his adaptation of what he had learned writing plays from 1890 to 1895. He represents in this novel a view of London society as primarily theatrical, in which the process of socialization depends crucially on learning stage-craft, employing effective dialogue, and demonstrating a capability for sustaining a particular role (or roles) for a lifetime. The theatricality of The Awkward Age matches quite well a Victorian “domestic drama” in the Victorian classification of the types of melodrama often used to advertise specific plays. Domestic dramas stressed themes of marriage, family problems (alcoholism, poverty, sibling rivalry), and urban alienation. Generally focusing on working-class and middle-class communities and often produced in alternative theaters, domestic dramas aimed for a concluding resolution of a central problem. Lacking the exciting events of other melodramas, domestic dramas substituted audience involvement through dialogue that included foreshadowings and comedy, especially witty repartee. The class conflict in The Awkward Age does not fit the profile of the Victorian domestic drama, but there are good reasons to believe James was attempting to adapt this popular form to the changing class relations of the upper and middle classes in the late nineteenth century. Guy Domville (1893) is an example of this adaptation, in which the eponymous tutor in the play attempts to work out the romantic relationships of his employer, the wealthy widow Mrs. Peverel, with the neighboring squire, Frank Humber, and Guy Domville’s cousin, Mary Brasier, with the naval lieutenant George Round.6 Initially planning to enter the Catholic priesthood, Guy changes course after learning from the villainous Lord Devenish that he is the last in his family line and heir to his uncle’s estate. Lord Devenish urges Guy to 4 5 6

“Preface,” The Awkward Age, vol. 9, New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James, 26 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908), p. xvii. Henry James, The Awkward Age (London: William Heinemann, 1899). References in the text as: AA. Henry James, Guy Domville, in The Complete Plays of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 484–516. Further references in the text as: CP.

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renounce his religious vocation, marry his cousin, Mary Brasier, and continue the family line. In fact, Mary Brasier is the illegitimate daughter of Lord Devenish and Guy Domville’s aunt, Mrs. Domville. The financially compromised Lord Devenish and Mrs. Domville have a bargain, which is that once Guy has married Mary, Lord Devenish and Mrs. Domville will marry as well (CP, 497). Lord Devenish’s plan will save him from his creditors and establish their daughter’s legitimacy as the wife of the wealthy heir, Guy Domville. Set in the English countryside in 1780, full of the problems of marriage, inheritance, and social class faced by both the wealthy gentry and the titled aristocracy, Guy Domville recalls Restoration comedies and Henry Fielding’s and Jane Austen’s novels. Discovering Lord Devenish’s scheme, Guy renounces his engagement to Mary Brasier and helps her elope with her true love, George Round. Returning to Mrs. Peverel’s estate, Porches, Guy urges her to accept the marriage proposal of her neighbor, Frank Humber, while fending off efforts by Lord Devenish either to convince Guy to renew his engagement to Mary Brasier or, even more desperately, to propose to Mrs. Peverel. In either case, Lord Devenish would marry the widow Mrs. Domville, giving him the necessary connection to the Domville family name and fortune to rescue his finances. Once Guy Domville “marries” the Catholic Church, of course, the family fortune goes with him. Mrs. Peverel is in love with Guy Domville, both for his personal charms and his fondness for her son, Geordie, whom Guy has tutored. In fact, Guy does not quite settle the matter of Mrs. Peverel’s marriage to Frank Humber, who says at the end of the play: “‘She loves you, Guy!’” (CP, 516). One of the often noted flaws in the play is that James contaminates Mrs. Peverel’s love for Guy by allowing Lord Devenish to meddle in the potential match. Once Guy recognizes Lord Devenish has so interfered, there seems little chance of repairing this romantic possibility. Guy Domville is so entangled with the gallery’s boos hurled at the stage on the disastrous first night of its performance, January 5, 1895, as to be largely ignored as a dramatic text.7 Edel attributes the failure of the play both to James’s theatrical mistakes and to the poor acting of Sir George Alexander, who played Guy Domville (and produced the play), Emily Saker, struggling in her elaborate eighteenth-century costume in the role of Mrs. Domville, and W. G. Elliott who as Lord Devenish plays with little subtlety the villain of melodrama (Edel: 4, 76–77). The intriguing central issue of the play is Guy Domville’s renunciation of romantic relations, a decision initially tied to his Catholic vocation for the priesthood, briefly suspended on the appeal made by Lord Devenish to his family’s venerable legacy, and renewed once Guy discovers the deceptive nature of the secular world. Perhaps James chose Guy Domville’s Catholicism as a convenience to justify the 7

Leon Edel, Henry James: The Treacherous Years: 1895–1901, vol. 4, The Life of Henry James, 5 vols. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1969), pp. 72–80.

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protagonist’s celibacy, but it is certainly an odd choice to make in a play written for a Victorian audience. Guy’s Catholicism is formulaic in the play, and it seems much more likely that James wanted to explore the general notion of renunciation as a response to romantic entanglements and conventional marriage themes than religion itself. Guy uses an odd variation – “renouncement” – in his final scene with Mrs. Peverel, hinting that he may truly be in love with her: “‘We talked of heroism here – when we talked of renouncement,” to which Mrs. Peverel replies: “‘But the hour came when against renouncement – I lifted my feeble voice’” (516). “Renunciation” and “renouncement” are synonyms, but the latter has a legal definition specifying the act itself, as in the “renouncement date” on which a particular legal act occurs. Because one can legally renounce one’s responsibility to execute or administer an estate, then the legal point at which responsibility ceases is the “renouncement date.” James judges it important to underscore Guy Domville’s final renunciation of his family’s estate, of his romantic interest in Mrs. Peverel and Mary Brasier, and of the world’s deceptiveness in matters of love as a legal matter, rather than simply the usual priestly renunciation of secular affairs. After all, why should the audience be interested in a life-denying priest happily rearranging star-crossed lovers, exposing a marriage fraud, and then heading into the embrace of his true love, the Mother Church?8 What is interesting about the organizing theme, even the moral lesson of renunciation in Guy Domville, is its applicability to The Awkward Age. Because James switches his attention from a handsome young tutor with a Catholic vocation to the usual cast of upper-middle-class and aristocratic socialites, even the most dedicated James scholars have missed this connection and its relevance to the novel. Above all, Guy Domville’s renouncement of his estate and his earthly love is inherently melodramatic, serving a stereotype of the priestly abnegation of the world. There is simply no motivation in the play for the protagonist’s decision beyond his training for the priesthood – of which we are told virtually nothing – and his destination in France, where he will serve a Catholic church and monarchy on the verge of republican revolution. In The Awkward Age renunciation is far more subtly integrated into a narrative about British social and personal corruption for which there is no apparent remedy. Even renunciation itself becomes a mode of psychological control, rather than an escape from this world. Fernanda Brookenham is the character whose renunciation organizes the melodramatic plot of The Awkward Age. At the end of the novel, she renounces her love for Vanderbank, quits London, and goes to live with Mr. Longdon at his country estate, Beccles. The circumstances are, of course, far more complicated. Between eighteen and twenty-one years old during the action of the novel, Nanda is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Edward Brookenham. She closely resembles her maternal grandmother, Lady Julia, whom 8

James does in fact use this rhetoric in the play, especially Act I (CP, 490).

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the wealthy Mr. Longdon courted unsuccessfully in his youth. Still in love with the memory of Julia, Longdon takes an interest in Nanda as she prepares to enter society. Nanda is in love with Vanderbank, a member of Mrs. Brook’s informal salon at the Brookenham’s London home on Buckingham Crescent. Longdon’s interest in Nanda’s future includes offering Vanderbank (“Van”) a substantial dowry, if he will marry Nanda. Mrs. Brook is, however, also romantically interested in Van. Edward Brookenham shows little interest in his wife, a lack of sympathy she reciprocates. The causes for their marital alienation are never adequately explained, since she is both clever and beautiful, but hints are given that their marriage was arranged by their families. The thirty-four- to thirty-seven-year-old Vanderbank is a civil servant without hereditary wealth. He holds a government position as Deputy Chairman of the General Audit, and he claims to work hard and live modestly (AA, 4). His interest in Mrs. Brook is certainly romantic and intellectual, but tempered by her marital state and his own tendency to play the field. Why he frequents Mrs. Brook’s drawing room other than to engage in flirtatious talk with her is unclear for this London playboy, but one reason does appear to be his growing infatuation with her daughter, Nanda. This development might seem inevitable, given the focus in the conversations at Buckingham Crescent on the courtship and marriage of Nanda and her friends, Aggie and Tishy. Despite a long tradition in the scholarship on this novel that Mrs. Brook holds a brilliant salon, much in the manner of the blue-stocking women of the English and French enlightenment, the actual conversations revolve around the present circumstances and imagined futures of these three young women. Although peppered with French phrases and literature, the “beautiful talk” is not deeply philosophical. The characters’ dialogue seems very similar to that of the twentieth-century soap opera, full of the bathos of who might marry whom and who among the married is cheating on her husband or his wife. The witty repartee of the characters also resembles that of Oscar Wilde’s successful plays, including An Ideal Husband (1895), which debuted the same night as Guy Domville, and was a great theatrical success. As a stereotype of melodrama, Longdon fills the bill of the kind, old gentleman, who uses his fortune to help the next generation. In his seventies, Longdon is too old to pose a sexual threat, but he has the wisdom of age and takes vicarious satisfaction in the next generation’s success. Exemplifying the older values of an age forgotten by modern Londoners, Longdon represents the established values of the landed gentry, a dedication to learning and tradition, and nostalgia for these waning values. In many respects, Longdon is a melodramatic deus ex machina who arrives with wills, bequests, and gifts. Even his name, never shortened in the manner of the modern nicknames used by others – Van, Brook, Mitchy, Tishy, Nanda, Aggie – suggests sobriety and importance. The name “Longdon” seems to be some variant on the capital city’s name “London,” even if James could not

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have had the benefit of Richard Coates’s recent explanation of the name’s etymology from “loondonijon,” an early Brittonic word referring to a fastflowing, unfordable river, such as the Thames.9 In many respects, Longdon represents James’s nostalgia for an old order prior to the modern competition between a waning aristocracy and rising middle class. Although positioned carefully within the wealthy bourgeoisie – Longdon does not have a title, he endorses the traditional values of the landed gentry. In his romantic aspirations to marry Lady Julia, he was a social climber, even if strict distinctions between aristocrats and wealthy bourgeoisie no longer apply with such strictness. He maintains his country estate, Beccles, for the sake of the family name, in keeping with the model of hereditary title, wealth, and privilege. When his sister loses her husband and child, Longdon “‘offered her in the country, a home, for her trouble was greater than any trouble of mine’” (AA, 22). He epitomizes the sacrifice so often identified with noble characters in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English novel. His long residence with his sister is a bittersweet consolation for his own loss of Lady Julia: “‘We were very sorry for each other, and it somehow suited us. But she died two years ago’” (22). Longdon criticizes Mrs. Brook and Van’s modern set for being “‘too clever: that’s what’s the matter with you all!’” (AA, 25). Van suspects that what Longdon means is that they speak “‘too freely,’” as in “‘too outrageously,’” but Longdon’s final judgment is quite a bit stronger: “‘I think I was rather frightened’” by their fast talk (27). Set up as a critic of the loose morality of the modern London world, Longdon is presented from the beginning of the novel as Nanda’s savior and protector, playing much the same role as he did for his widowed and childless sister. Indeed, by the end of the Victorian era, the idea of a desexualized relationship between men and women was conventionally figured as that of “brother and sister.”10 Declaring himself “‘old-fashioned” and “‘not a man of the world,’” Longdon appears to provide the traditional ethical perspective missing from the closed world of Buckingham Crescent and its “clever” conversation. James concludes his introduction of Longdon: “He might almost have been a priest, if priests, as it occurred to Vanderbank, were ever such dandies” (3). James’s judgment is curiously compounded with Van’s own, suggesting that perhaps Van, rather than James, views Longdon as “almost … a priest.” The comparison emphasizes Longdon’s moral function in the novel, but it 9 Richard Coates, “A New Explanation of the Name of London,” Transactions of the Philological Society 96:2 (1998), 203–229. Even if “London” is not implied in Longdon’s name, then the combination of “long” and “don” suggest an aura of what has lasted a long time and hence should have some authority, dignity, or title. 10 The idea is well expressed by Hegel, The Philosophy of History, p. 161. Hegel is by no means the source of this romantic convention, but conveys effectively the stereotype, repeated by Wordsworth, Margaret Fuller, Emerson, and many other international romantics.

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also reminds us of the odd priestly vocation of Guy Domville in the play on which The Awkward Age draws heavily, if obliquely. Van is scandalized by the specific bargain Mr. Longdon proposes to him: that if he marries Nanda, then Longdon will bestow upon her a significant dowry. Yet this is not the reason Van fails to propose to Nanda, whom he understands clearly is both too young for him and the daughter of the woman who loves him. Meretricious as Longdon’s offer is, Van considers it seriously, rejecting it only because he is not really in love with Nanda and probably in love with her mother, but reluctant to pursue an adulterous relationship. In keeping with the patriarchal conventions of Victorian society, Van treats Nanda as a surrogate daughter, frequently referring to her as “child” and “my dear,” hinting to the reader that Mrs. Brook and he are the psychological parents of Nanda, especially since Edward Brookenham seems to have taken little interest in his daughter. Indeed, there are times while reading the novel when one is taken with the impression that Nanda is Mrs. Brook’s and Van’s illegitimate daughter, recalling once again the secret in Guy Domville of Mary Brasier as the illegitimate daughter of Guy’s aunt, Mrs. Domville, and the villain, Lord Devenish. The numbers do not quite add up in this respect, because at the beginning of the novel Vanderbank is thirty-four, Mrs. Brook forty-one, and Nanda eighteen years old, but the impression of such an improper set of relations lingers.11 James’s interest appears to be in the psychological depth of the relationship between Mrs. Brook and Van, established to a large degree by their discussions of what might happen to Nanda and her friends. Hence the troubling confusion of Van’s roles as paternal advisor to and suitor of Nanda. Add to this potentially poisonous mix the fact that had Mr. Longdon married Lady Julia, Longdon might have been Mrs. Brook’s father, as she herself points out: “‘He might have been my own father!” (AA, 139). Van counters this genealogical possibility by adding one of his own, noting that Lady Julia “‘came later,’” after Longdon had courted Van’s widowed mother: “‘Mine, after my father’s death, had refused him. But you see he might have been my stepfather’” (AA, 138). To be sure, there is neither literal incest involved in the relationship between Mrs. Brook and Van nor any literal child abuse in Van’s flirtation with Nanda, but the family entanglements in this closed society are potentially “monstrous,” to use one of the frequently employed words in the novel. Van shares Longdon’s bargain with Mrs. Brook, who hopes that such a dowry might further the interest of their friend Mitchy (Mr. Mitchett) in Nanda, even though Mitchy has inherited fabulous wealth from his tradesman father, a humble boot-maker who expands his business into an 11 It is not impossible, of course, especially since Mr. Longdon had romantic interests in both Lady Julia, Mrs. Brook’s mother, and Vanderbank’s mother, hinting that Van and Mrs. Brook might have met each other in connection with Longdon’s company.

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industrial shoe factory. Mitchy does indeed love Nanda, but she convinces him to marry instead her friend Aggie (Agnesina). Yet even as Mrs. Brook and Van play their assumed parental roles in these courtship rituals, Mrs. Brook is clearly jealous of the attention her daughter has received from Longdon and tacitly from Van. As she complains of Longdon’s interest in Nanda: “‘If his line is to love the mothers why on earth doesn’t he love me? I’m in all conscience enough of one’” (AA, 139). Yet Longdon is certainly not in love with mothers, but with youth, whether it be Nanda as the resurrected Lady Julia or Vanderbank himself as Longdon’s fantasized alter ego, even the object of his sexual desire.12 What Michael Trask has termed the “heterosexualized reading” of The Awkward Age has certainly occluded the ways James plays with erotic relations that extend from the physical, sexual body to the language through which we represent ourselves, including the “monstrous” talk to which the characters happily refer and the “monstrous” quality of the novel itself to which James refers in his New York Edition Preface.13 These erotic qualities are also typical of the twentieth-century soap opera. Sexual suggestiveness is often conveyed through illicit genealogical relations with hints of incest, rape, bondage, and any of the myriad modes of sexual expression that may be demonized and/or criminalized in a particular time and place. Days of Our Lives first aired on NBC television on November 8, 1965 and on December 17, 2020 aired its 14,000th episode, making it one of the longest-running scripted television programs in history.14 The script writer William Bell combined popular hospital and family serials on television by creating a family of doctors in the Hortons. Bell also created an upper-middle-class aura for this soap opera, departing from the typical middle-class, suburban values of previous shows. Annie Gilbert writes that Salem, Illinois “is a cut above your average soap opera town. People are wealthier and a touch more sophisticated. Instead of congregating around the kitchen table or in someone’s living room, Salem folks often gather at Doug’s Place (the local hotspot) to gossip, romance, dance, and drink … martinis.”15 The fictional lives of the Brady and Horton families are punctuated by crises, most of which involve the sexual, financial, and psychological problems of the various characters. 12 Michael Trask, “Getting into It with James: Substitution and Erotic Reversal in The Awkward Age,” American Literature 69:1 (March 1997), 105–138, offers a rich account of the homoeroticism, especially the “anal economies” (188), in the novel, confirming how in this novel James incorporates homoerotic rhetoric and relations as part of his own biographical working out of his sexual identity. 13 Ibid., 123. James, “Preface,” The Awkward Age, vol. 9, The Novels and Tales of Henry James (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908), p. vi. 14 See the NBC website on Days of Our Lives: https://www.nbc.com/days-o f-our-lives/about (accessed 10/10/2021). 15 Annie Gilbert, All My Afternoons: The Heart and Soul of the TV Soap Opera (New York: A & W Visual Library, 1979), p. 110. Further references in the text as: Gilbert.

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One of the longest-running story-lines of Days of Our Lives involved Julie Banning’s (Susan Seaforth) six-year romance with Doug Williams (Bill Hayes), an unemployed nightclub singer who shows up in Salem looking for opportunities to open his own club. Julie is the granddaughter of Alice and Tom Horton and is married to Scott Banning. Bored with her husband, Scott, Julie begins a romance with Doug. Julie’s mother, Addie (Patricia Barry), concerned about the consequences of her daughter’s infidelity, also begins a relationship with Doug, who finds the widow Addie a better prospect for the financial backing he needs. Marrying Doug and buying him “Doug’s Place,” Addie thinks she has saved her daughter from ruining her marriage. But shortly after the marriage of Doug and Addie, Scott Banning is killed in an accident. Julie becomes a young widow as Doug appears to fall in love with Addie, who develops leukemia while pregnant with their first child. Recovering from her cancer, Addie is killed saving her baby daughter from a speeding car. Still interested in Doug, Julie has married Bob Anderson, complicating a possible romance with Doug (Gilbert, 111–112). The consequences, of course, escalate accordingly, providing many subsequent subplots and complications. I have selected as an example not only one of the most famous and longrunning storylines from Days of Our Lives, but also one that has some remarkable resemblances with the plot of The Awkward Age. There is, of course, no evidence that William Bell was recalling James’s novel, but the coincidence of the relationships and their complications are intended to suggest how well suited James’s novel of manners, especially in the theatrical mode of The Awkward Age, is to the twentieth-century soap opera. Like the romantic triangle of Julie, Doug, and Addie, the romantic interests of both Mrs. Brook and her daughter Nanda in Vanderbank are intended to produce the complications that facilitate a novel of more than four hundred pages. With the exception of characters moving from Buckingham Crescent to Longdon’s Beccles and Mitchy’s rented country estate, Mertle, or occasional scenes set in different London residences, such as Van’s cramped, upper-floor apartment in chapters one and two, there is no action. Conversation replaces action, characters are “moved” primarily in emotional, occasionally intellectual, and always rhetorical terms. Above all, the witty repartee of James’s novel and the twentieth-century soap opera takes the place of dramatic action. Focusing primarily on the problems of the middle- and upper-middleclasses, soap operas like Days of Our Lives rely on scandalous events, secrets and lies, and unpredictable characters to sustain long-term audience interest. Developed out of radio soap operas, which relied heavily on dialogue as a consequence of the medium, television soap operas employ largely domestic settings familiar to viewers. These settings also keep production costs low, as does the limited number of actors used repeatedly over the long run of successful soap operas. As Gilbert puts it: “Due to limitations of time and money, soap stories generally take place indoors on a limited

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number of sets. This means that soap characters tend to talk about what they did rather than actually do it” (Gilbert, 14). Crucial to the soap opera’s success is a slowly developing story-line, many lasting as long as the key actors remain with the program. Viewers are less interested in a conclusion to a story-line, despite the tendency of producers to advertise their soap operas by promoting heavily the end of a particular plot, than they are in its continuation and variation. Gilbert argues that soap operas “spell out lessons … and … provide a guide to living,” but this claim is difficult to defend (Gilbert, 13). Although appearing to offer ethical guidance, most soap operas rarely reach definitive conclusions to the moral difficulties represented. The consequences of the characters’ actions are also less determined by situational ethics than the demands of the story-line. The question of whether or not a new complication will result in further episodes of the story-line is more important than the prevailing wisdom regarding social behavior at the time. Gilbert suggests that the soap opera offers answers to such audience questions as: “What will happen … if I’m too greedy? If I run away from home? If I divorce my husband?” (Gilbert, 13). All of these questions arise in the story-line involving Julie, Doug, and Addie, but the answers are hardly helpful. Doug shows up in Salem as a mysterious stranger, greedy for someone to fund his nightclub, and benefits from the deaths of Julie’s and Addie’s husbands. Doug gets his nightclub, enjoys the romantic attentions of the daughter and her mother, and is certainly not punished for his entrepreneurial spirit. Although there is no question that soap operas promote themselves as offering moral guidance, more often they exploit the perceived immoralities of the time in which they are produced in order to develop their stories. The relationship of Julie, Doug, and Addie goes beyond just the typical complications of the romantic triangle by raising questions about the taboo of incest without quite crossing the genealogical or biological line. After Doug marries Addie, he is of course Julie’s step-father, so the lingering romantic interest she has in him has an aura of immorality. Julie and Addie struggle with their mutual passion for Doug, but existential crises intervene to prevent marital and legal conflicts. Addie’s accidental death also eliminates her as an obstacle to Doug and Julie’s romance. The sort of advice the viewer might gather from these events rarely applies to everyday life, even if the pretense of realism haunts the soap opera. Although it is possible such a resolution might occur in real life, it is not very probable that your mother might die to clear the way to her handsome husband. Soap operas are also reluctant to offer clear conclusions, whether dramatic or moral in their significance. Unlike narratives such as novels or television police procedurals, for example, in which some sort of definitive conclusion is tied to the argument of the specific work, soap operas generally rely on strategic ambiguity. The ethics are also not especially informed or informative. In the case of this story-line, there is little consideration, however superficial, of what the current public discourse might be regarding incestuous desires or so-called “December–January” relationships.

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In many respects, the dialogue in The Awkward Age anticipates this model, generating discourse that does more to reproduce itself than to resolve problems. A large amount of the cultivated conversation between Mrs. Brook and Van, for example, is simply coded love-making, flirtatious conversation intended to maintain their personal bond without ever giving away their infidelity, even to each other. Of course, the fact that for so much of the novel Van spends an inordinate amount of his free time in the drawing room of Buckingham Crescent is not lost on anyone, not even Edward Brookenham. Everyone knows why Van is there. Nevertheless, no one even wonders why this amorous relationship does not proceed further, even though divorce had been legal in England since the passage of the Matrimonial Causes Act in 1857. Everyone knows that for all her modest economic circumstances, Mrs. Brook can hardly leave her husband Edward. Like Vanderbank, Edward is a civil servant with a modest income, albeit in a somewhat more elevated position – Edward is in charge of “Rivers and Lakes.” Mrs. Brook would be stepping down even further economically were she to get a divorce and marry Van. Edward earns ₤1200 per year and has “‘lots of allowances and boats and things,’” as Van tells Longdon in the first chapter, and that Edward “‘got it last year,’” possibly through his wife’s influence (AA, 6). ₤1200 is a reasonable salary for a middle-class couple on which to live comfortably and raise a family in late nineteenthcentury London, but not enough to support the lavish lifestyles of the British upper classes in 1898.16 The fact that Edward has only recently been appointed to this post and that it may have required his wife’s influence, perhaps even part of her dowry, explains their considerably straitened financial circumstances in the novel. Mrs. Brook’s divorce would jeopardize Nanda’s marital opportunities, which do not include a possible marriage to Vanderbank, who must himself look for a marriage to someone with significant financial means. Perhaps Van rejects Longdon’s offer of a dowry for the sake of his independence, both personal and financial, refusing the leisure-class ideas of living on family income. Why, then, does Van spend time with people for whom such ideas of entitlement are crucial to their lives? Perhaps Van objects less to the idea of a dowry or inheritance than he does to its offer from someone he barely knows, thereby cheapening all the ideas of marriage and property on which his class has depended for generations. If so, why does he continue to associate with Longdon, much less share Longdon’s offer of a dowry with Mrs. Brook? Perhaps Van is repelled by the idea of 16 In the Penguin Classics edition of The Awkward Age, ed. Ronald Blythe (London: Penguin, 1987), p. 314, n. 8, Vanderbank’s salary is valued at the “purchasing power of … approximately ₤50,000” at 1986 prices. According to the CPI Inflation Calculator (https://www.in2013dollars.com/uk/inflation/1899) the purchasing power of ₤1200 in 1899 would be ₤158,175.13 in 2021. Not exactly one of those “high tech salaries,” as people like to say, but certainly a significant amount.

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marrying a young woman who is barely half his age and the daughter of his close friend. Why, then, doesn’t he abandon immediately Buckingham Crescent, where he cannot help but find himself in Nanda’s company? Is Vanderbank a member of that new, emerging class in England, forerunner of the professional managerial class of our own age, who desires to make his own fortune and break away from the narrow family ties of the older class system? Perhaps the title refers to Van’s and his generation’s “awkward age,” in which they strive to break away from the past but cannot find the personal or financial strength to do so. I offer these rhetorical questions and their partial answers to suggest how the narrative situation in The Awkward Age anticipates the complications of the twentieth-century soap opera. The fact that we cannot answer easily such questions in the novel anticipates the strategic ambiguity of the soap opera’s moral dilemmas. J. Hillis Miller’s Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James (2005) argues that literature teaches us proper “conduct” by educating us about how our behavior is enacted in our speech.17 A sustained reflection on both how we use language as well as how our words make us, Literature as Conduct puns on the trivial morality of the conduct book, insisting that great literature is concerned with the “conduct of life,” a phrase used by James in Miller’s epigraph and stressed by Miller as a possible reference to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “high-minded book” The Conduct of Life (1860) (Miller, 1). In these contexts, the Jamesian novel is a far cry from the reductive moralizing of the conduct book, Victorian melodrama, or today’s soap opera. Yet the uses and abuses of language in The Awkward Age resemble closely the ceaseless conversation about interpersonal problems that we associate with the soap opera and broader popular culture. What Heidegger termed “idle talk” (das Gerede) is nowhere better illustrated than in the “clever” talk of these socialites: “Idle talk is the possibility of understanding everything without any previous appropriation of the matter.”18 Heidegger interprets “idle talk” in its broadest philosophical significance as the “talk” that distracts us from the reality of death and the significance of time, as well as our ontological relationship to both death and time. For Miller, the challenge to the reader of The Awkward Age is to distinguish between the deceptive talk in the novel and the more serious task of using language to express ourselves and relations to others in the performance of community. Miller connects this semiotic work to the social construction and historical transformation of community (Miller, 90–101). Literature enables us to “imagine” community, Miller argues, invoking Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the 17 I take responsibility for this brief and reductive summary of the main argument in J. Hillis Miller, Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), pp. 1–11. Further references in the text as: Miller. 18 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time: A Translation of “Sein und Zeit”, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1969), p. 169.

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Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983).19 Insofar as the novel is the cultural medium closely aligned with the national form, Miller’s claims about how the “conduct” of literature shapes the social conduct of the nation that produces and consumes it makes a good deal of sense. Miller’s argument about The Awkward Age depends centrally on Henry James deconstructing the superficial and immoral upper-class society of latenineteenth-century London in the interests of an alternative community created in and through the novel itself. As I have argued earlier in this book, James becomes more than just an author of social manners, but the creator of an alternative world to the failed community we find represented in such works as Daisy Miller. In this utopian, literary world, social conventionality is replaced by a genuine social bond, sustained and renewed in our behaviors and their linguistic expression. Sermons, conduct books, and popular melodrama are discarded as unnecessary and replaced by the individual’s own speech acts through which character is revealed and finally judged by others as worthy of social recognition. Class membership, religion, racial or ethnic affiliation, inherited wealth, and the like have nothing to do with how we express ourselves and are seen by others, even if all of these marks of social identification can never be entirely transcended. Miller’s philosophical ambitions are too great for The Awkward Age to bear. Rather than transcend the “idle talk” or “clever” conversation of Buckingham Crescent, the novel actually legitimates this rhetorical mode of producing a community. James does not condone this world, but his adaptation of its dramatic style and form reinforce its dialogical method. In strictly formal terms, James has created a trap for himself as the author, because he has so few opportunities to narrate – that is, step outside the dramatic action – to editorialize. Although there are several solutions to this problem in the history of drama, including the use of a chorus to provide moral perspective, James does not avail himself of these remedies. Instead, we are given more than four hundred pages of dialogue in which we can penetrate the “clever” meanings only by understanding the grammar and rhetoric of the upper-class society that produces them. By then, of course, we are caught in a hermeneutic circle from which it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to extricate ourselves. We have been, very much like Nanda, indoctrinated in that society’s values, even when we are convinced we have not been so persuaded. There are two climactic events in the novel, both set in domestic spaces and enacted in their speech-acts, rather than occurring in any overt physical confrontation. In the first event, Mrs. Brook confronts Mr. Longdon at a dinner party at Tishy Grendon’s estate, demanding that he give Nanda back to her family:

19 Miller, 90; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso Books, 1991).

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Mrs. Brook turned again to Mr. Longdon. “I haven’t explained to you what I meant just now. We want Nanda.” Mr. Longdon stared. “At home again?” “In her little old nook. You must give her back.” “Do you mean altogether?” “Ah, that will be for you in a manner to arrange.” (AA, 317) By this time, Nanda has spent two months at Longdon’s country estate, Beccles, presumably so that Longdon can bring about Vanderbank’s proposal and settle on Nanda the dowry that will make the marriage possible. Although the exact amount of this dowry is never specified, albeit much discussed, Mitchy and others put it at “half the interest” on Longdon’s investments.20 Three weeks into Nanda’s visit, Longdon knows quite well that Van is not going to propose, in part because Longdon has attempted to buy his affection. Reminding Van of how commodified courtship and marriage are among the upper classes, Longdon’s offer has helped make up Van’s mind. Nevertheless, Nanda has remained at Beccles in Longdon’s distant hope that Van on second thought might return to propose to her and learn the exact amount of Longdon’s generosity. James also leads the reader to suspect that Nanda has remained at Beccles because of Longdon’s continuing interest in her and the Brookenhams’ hopes he might settle something on her or legally adopt her. Through all of these events, Nanda appears to be a commodity in a perverse financial transaction. Nanda’s mother seems intent on preventing her daughter from repeating the mistakes of Aggie and Tishy, Nanda’s friends who marry for money, end up miserable, and begin scandalous flirtations or extramarital affairs. When she demands that Longdon “give” Nanda “back,” she seems dedicated to restore family values and abandon her own participation in the marital deal Longdon has proposed. In fact, her confrontation with Longdon and her demand are both cleverly staged to precipitate some sort of action on Longdon’s part: “‘Why, my dear man, haven’t I told you that ever since Mertle I’ve made out your hand? What on earth for other people can your action look like but an adoption?’” (AA, 306). Mrs. Brook’s challenge is also a suggestion, hinting that a solution to the problem might well be Longdon’s formal or informal adoption of Nanda.21 20 Typically, wealthy Victorians invested their disposable income in “the Funds,” which were government backed bonds, similar to today’s U.S. Treasury Bonds, which paid a stable and regular 3 percent per annum. Even if Longdon legally adopted Nanda, she might not be heir of his landed assets, those belonging to the closest male family member, who might be a nephew or a cousin. 21 Edel, The Treacherous Years, pp. 258–259, suggests that Nanda and Longdon’s relationship recalls that of Nora Lambert and Roger Lawrence in James’s Watch and Ward (Boston: Osgood and Co., 1878), first published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1871, in which the twenty-nine-year-old Lawrence becomes twelveyear-old Nora Lambert’s legal guardian with the ambition to marry her when she comes of age. Edel considers James’s fascination with the January–December

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Mrs. Brook’s understanding of what has caused these marital problems focuses more on the moral corruption of young women than on the systemic immorality of marrying women for money and social position. Young women must be kept innocent in order for them to appeal to the most suitable husband, but such women are thus left ignorant of the realities of marriage and sexuality. Putting the problem this bluntly violates all the rules of Mrs. Brook’s salon in Buckingham Crescent, but it does seem to be what lies behind an enormous amount of their “beautiful” conversation. Such talk itself can easily turn “monstrous,” when it involves the problems facing innocent young women pursued by men not simply for marriage and reproduction but to satisfy their sexual desires. Conducted primarily through the “clever” conversation of these London sophisticates, the very words they employ can be corrupting to the young women they are helping to enter their social world. The obsessive concern of the adults that young women not be corrupted by their exposure to immoral talk is dramatized in the novel by a misplaced French novel with presumably scandalous contents. Van first lends the novel to Mrs. Brook, who carelessly leaves it in her drawing room, where Nanda picks it up. Nanda then lends it to Tishy Grendon, but only after writing “Vanderbank” on the cover, perhaps as a nominal reminder to return it to him or more likely as a note to Tishy Grendon that Van reads such troubling material. Nanda brings the book to the party at Tishy’s, and it becomes the object of a flirtatious game of hide-and-seek between Tishy and Lord Petherton behind the scenes of the confrontation between Mrs. Brook and Mr. Longdon. As it turns out, Tishy has hidden the novel from Petherton by sitting on it, effectively putting its scandalous language in direct contact with her sexual parts. Like the risqué scenes in many Restoration comedies, this play between Tishy and Petherton culminates the adult concern about the corrupting influences of popular literature of the “French” sort. In fact, the climactic event of the party at Tishy Grendon’s occurs simultaneously with Mrs. Brook’s confrontation with Mr. Longdon, so when he announces “‘Good-night!’” to end Chapter 30 (and Book VIII) the formal departure is tinged with more significant finality, as in “Good Lord, has Nanda been exposed to this trash?” In the exchange between Nanda and her Mother, each asks the other if she has “read” the book. Never quite answering the question, Mrs. Brook listens to Nanda confess: “‘Yes, mamma’” (AA, 330). Yet the scandal of reading a scandalous novel is rendered a joke by James, because the actual events and conversation at the party are so deeply immoral. Vanderbank himself acknowledges that the French novel itself is “‘no worse than anything else,’” suggesting that what they have been doing in their efforts to manipulate Mr. Longdon are equivalent, if not worse, than the language of the novel in question. This relationship to be autobiographical without considering James’s own same-sex desire.

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metafictional moment is one of those typical situations in James, in which the author calls attention to his own complicity with the fictional situation. The usual conclusion is that James takes the high-cultural road, whereas in this instance he gestures toward the behavioral and discursive immorality of his characters as far more damaging than the fancies of some French popular novelist.22 Neither Tishy secreting the novel under her skirts nor Nanda’s confession she has indeed read the book comes close to the immorality of what Nanda’s mother and her friends are negotiating with Longdon. Mrs. Brook begins her rhetorical assault on Mr. Longdon with her daring question, “‘Why do you hate me so?’” (AA, 309). Although it appears to be one of the few direct statements in the novel, Mrs. Brook’s question is staged to elicit a response from Longdon, presumably one that will provide some sort of support for Nanda and whomever she marries. Longdon hates the world that Mrs. Brook represents and hence has taken Nanda to protect her from that world. Yet in Chapter 23, Mrs. Brook not only urges Nanda to accept Longdon’s invitation for an extended stay at Beccles, but presses Nanda to leave immediately with Longdon, as if not to miss her chance: “‘Well, it will do for the beginning of it that you’ll please go down with him’” (AA, 251). In the next chapter (Chapter 24), Vanderbank makes it clear that Longdon will want to keep Nanda with him in the country; Van even urges Nanda to accompany Longdon to London, where “‘he wouldn’t be at all the same thing without you’” (258). Just as the Duchess (Edward Brookenham’s cousin, the widow of an Italian Duke) stresses the theatricality of Mrs. Brook’s confrontation with Longdon at the dinner party in Chapter 28, so Mrs. Brook and Van treat Nanda’s extended visit to Longdon as part of their play. The purpose of such theatricality is clear enough: the longer Nanda remains with Longdon, the more committed he will be to some material arrangement. His offer of a dowry for Nanda if Vanderbank proposes is just the beginning of the possibilities they envision, and their mutual plotting draws them even closer together. This claim may seem undercut by the fact that the salon at Buckingham breaks up after the events at Tishy Grendon’s dinner party. “Book IX: Vanderbank” opens three months after the party. In the opening chapter, Vanderbank explains to Mrs. Brook his understanding of the group’s “smash,” which Mrs. Brook 22 In his Preface to the New York Edition of the novel, James spends a good deal of time discussing the French popular writer “Gyp” as a model for The Awkward Age. In Literature as Conduct, Miller glosses “Gyp as the pseudonym of a nineteenth- and twentieth-century French writer … Sibylle Gabrielle Marie Antoinette Riqueti de Mirabeau, Comtesse de Martel de Janville (1849–1932)” and the author of “many novels, plays, and other works” (107), many of which were judged in “James’s time” to be “scandalously indecent and immoral,” especially for their treatment of young women’s knowledge of sexual matters before their adulthood (108).

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The simplest explanation is what Mrs. Brook offers a few pages later in answer to Van’s question: “‘[W]hat I don’t make out, you see, is precisely what you’ve since gained by it,’” to which Mrs. Brook answers rhetorically: “‘You mean she only hates me the more?’” (338). Forced by her mother to return home, Nanda becomes even more powerfully attracted to Mr. Longdon, not only as a parental figure who represents ostensible normality and stability, both lacking at Buckingham Crescent, but also as a potential “match,” whether he adopts Nanda or marries her. Van offers this speculation at the end of the chapter: “‘You scarce suppose, I imagine, that she has come to like him ‘for himself?’” but it is clearly one possibility of Mrs. Brook’s confrontational actions at Tishy Grendon’s dinner party (AA, 340). The “smash” she has created has also left her alone with Vanderbank, co-conspirator from the beginning in the plot to transfer Longdon’s wealth from Vanderbank and Nanda’s marriage to some other relationship. Mitchy has taken his straying wife, Aggie, to the Mediterranean – “‘Corfu, Malta, Cyprus – I don’t know where,’” Mrs. Brook breezily says – but Aggie’s penniless and aristocratic lover, Lord Petherton, has followed them there, “‘spending Mitchy’s money, “larking,” he called it’” (335). For the three months intervening, Mrs. Brook has played at the role of the abused Mother, insisting on the return of her child, thereby pushing that very child closer to Longdon as surrogate father/mother/lover in a relationship as perverse as any haunting the rest of this London circle. Nanda does return to Buckingham Crescent, and with the predictable consequence that Longdon follows her to London to win her acceptance of his proposal that she take a long trip with him and then live permanently with him at Beccles. In terms of the dramatic action, Nanda’s mother’s demand is successful both in forcing Nanda to return home and in prompting Longdon to take action. “Book X: Nanda” is composed of only four chapters (35–38), in which Nanda comes of age by announcing her decision: she renounces her love for Vanderbank (35–36), promises to help Mitchy “fix” his marriage to her friend, the errant Aggie (37), and agrees to go away with Longdon forever (38). The material and legal terms of her relationship with Longdon remain vague, but she is determined “never to marry.” The typical Jamesian ambiguity of the ending makes the final word of the novel, “to-morrow,” uttered by Longdon, who is repeating Nanda, seem to declare a new day, a future as yet to be determined. Of course, just such futurity is what the soap opera also offers, promising new romantic complications within the same formal framework.

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When Nanda renounces Van she also declares that her mother is in love with him, saying out loud what everyone else knows very well. For good reason, scores of critics have read Chapters 35–36 as the culmination of Nanda’s self-consciousness, the end of her “awkward age,” her accession to adult responsibility, and her renunciation not only of Van but of marriage itself. By the close of this chapter, Nanda’s decision to accept Longdon’s invitation to take an extended vacation with him and return to live permanently at his country estate, Beccles, is unshakeable. The twenty-one-year-old woman and the septuagenarian man will live together as an odd couple repudiating the corruptions of the urban world. Their relationship is not quite father and daughter, not quite January–December lovers, but something far more perverse and for all that intriguing to the reader. The setting of these final four chapters is symbolically interesting. After returning from Beccles, Nanda has moved into and redecorated her former “school-room,” upstairs at Buckingham Crescent. She has invited her three visitors – Van, Mitchy, and Longdon – in a succession of one-hour visits, stretching from Van’s 4:30–5:30 appointment to Longdon’s 6:30–7:30 spot (AA, 372–389). As Mitchy notes during his visit, “‘You do squeeze us in,’” as if she is a ruler or judge holding court or a tutor giving lessons (391). Although she has converted the old school-room to “a room of her own” – other critics are fond of invoking this proleptic anticipation of Virginia Woolf’s famous long essay of that title published in 1929 – she has to compete with other teachers in this space. While waiting for Van, she rearranges her knickknacks and “rather marked wealth of books,” as well as attending to the “flowers on the little tables” that “bloomed with a consciousness” established by the rest of the room’s ambience (372). As it turns out, the flowers and books are gifts from Longdon, sent from his country estate, so he is quite literally teaching her how to be a proper lady, as well as taking over the domestic space of Buckingham Crescent. Van, of course, would be her other tutor, insofar as he has spent so much of the novel teaching her directly about the perils of adulthood and indirectly guiding her mother in Nanda’s upbringing. The purpose of these four chapters is for Nanda to teach these adult males what and how she has decided to live as a lady, ostensibly without marrying even while living in an odd limbo with Mr. Longdon. What Nanda teaches these men is just what they want to know and have in fact been trying to teach her all along. Nanda insists that Van should continue to see her mother, declaring “‘I believe she’s in love with you” and “‘that father … wouldn’t mind, as he says, a tuppenny rap,’” reminding Van that her mother is “‘so fearfully young’” as still to need male attention (AA, 384). To be sure, this is just the sort of precocious knowledge about the intimate affairs of this social set that Mrs. Brook, Van, and Mitchy have been determined from the outset to prevent Nanda from gaining. Yet here Nanda is at the moment of her adulthood blurting out the truth to Van, announcing effectively that both she and her mother are in love with him.

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Under the circumstances, the “bargain” Van has made with Mrs. Brook and tacitly with Mr. Longdon that Nanda should receive her dowry, not to marry Van but rather to be Mr. Longdon’s companion is no longer necessary to protect Van and Mrs. Brook’s illicit affair. Everyone knows or at least should know, because so many of the other characters have said as much in the preceding pages, including the Duchess, Edward Brookenham, even Mrs. Brook herself. Still living in her parents’ house, Nanda is on the verge of striking out on her own in the manner so typical of those Jamesian heroines who echo the Miltonic lines that “all the world was before” them, perhaps forgetting the context of the biblical Fall Milton invokes. Nanda’s fall is not only into such knowledge as reveals the moral corruption of the class into which she is entering but also that of her protector, the venerable paterfamilias Mr. Longdon. Because at the end of the novel, near the termination of all the idle talk, what Longdon tells Nanda is “‘what you call talking – never saying a word,’” reveals that Longdon is hardly as “old-fashioned” as he appears in the first chapter. Nanda tells him that Van is “‘more old-fashioned than you,’” and Longdon agrees: “‘Much more,’ said Mr. Longdon with a queer face” (AA, 413, 414). Nanda means literally that Van is old-fashioned, because he won’t propose to her, even with the promise of Longdon’s dowry, because Van does not love her. He loves her mother. Longdon is more modern than Van, because he accepts the new “bargain,” in which Nanda will accept his protection and the security of his wealth while making clear to him that she still loves Van. Longdon accepts the deal she offers, even the suggestion that Van might visit them at Beccles, because Longdon has become the thoroughly modern father, rich uncle, lover, even pedophile. These are the qualities that give him the “queer face,” not the inclination to a queer desire for Vanderbank that Michael Trask has interpreted. After all, as Trask points out, the novel “thwarts homosexual identity by refusing to name its ‘truth.’”23 What is so queer in this modern society is what James judges to be utterly perverse: love and passion that rarely result in marriage or long-term relationships. To be sure, such love and passion might well include same-sex love, criminalized so recently in James’s world, but I do not think this topic is what interests James in The Awkward Age.24 He is instead obsessed with how the history of interpersonal relations in England have been corrupted by money, property, and the legal arrangements necessary to maintain the ruling-class system, especially as that hierarchy has changed in response to industrialization and urbanization. Even with the arrival of middle-class economic and social authority, little has changed. People are still subordinated to property. Longdon is neither Nanda’s savior nor a voice of 23 Trask, “Getting into It with James,” p. 116. 24 I certainly recognize the importance of same-sex desire and relationships in James’s writings, as I argued some time ago in The Other Henry James (1998).

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moral rectitude from a fantastic British past of stable values; Longdon is the incarnation of the evil that casts its long shadow over Victorian society. Longdon’s melodramatic villainy has a good deal to do with his desire to use Nanda as a surrogate for his lost Lady Julia, Nanda’s maternal grandmother. Although he insists frequently that there is a striking resemblance between the two, others who knew Lady Julia deny their similarities. Longdon’s obsessive fantasy has more to do with his despair at losing Lady Julia than with any reality of sexual desire, social standing, or inheritance that Nanda represents to him. Without heirs, Longdon faces the practical problem of who will inherit Beccles (and the investments that support it) when he dies. Keeping his estate in a “family” based on his fantasy of what might have been had he married Lady Julia – a “Nanda” might then have been his grand-daughter – might seem neurotic, but it certainly does not justify my suggestion that Longdon is among other things a pedophile. For one thing, Nanda is no longer a “child” by the legal definition of consent established by the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, which had raised the legal age of consent from thirteen to sixteen.25 At the end of the novel, Nanda is twenty-one years old. Not only is Nanda entitled to consent to travel with Longdon, she would be legally permitted to marry him, odd but not unique as such a January–December relationship appears to be in the society represented in the novel. Pedophilia, however, is not just the narrow definition of physical sexual relations with under-age children. Pedophilia is one category of “paraphilia,” the “preference for unusual sexual practices.” In The Awkward Age, all sexual practices are “sex-talk,” rather than physical practices. As Foucault points out in The History of Sexuality: “Rather than massive censorship, beginning with the verbal proprieties imposed by the Age of Reason, what was involved was a regulated and polymorphous incitement to discourse.”26 The main concern of the adults in the novel is to protect young people from undue or improper influence of such “sex-talk” before those young people are ready for it. Just where that boundary lies, especially for young women old enough to be courted and preparing for marriage, is one of the critical questions in the novel. For Dorothea Krook, this problem is the “‘social’ theme” of the novel: [T]he consequences of an interesting flaw in the social arrangements of English upper class society in James’s day, namely, the absence of any established method … for dealing with the phenomenon of the awkward age – that is, of the “coming out” of young girls into society. The awkwardness is created by the fact that they are at once old enough to be admitted into the drawing-room to take their place in their parents’ 25 The same law that criminalized homosexuality in the United Kingdom. 26 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 34.

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Krook goes on to elaborate solutions to the problem offered in different nations. In France, the “female young … are firmly and securely kept in a convent until they have reached the awkward age; and since this happens also to be the marriageable age, they are then ‘by arrangement’ married off with the utmost expedition” (137). The American “solution” is “equally simple and effective,” according to Krook: “there is no ‘good talk’ in the drawing-rooms of Boston and New York, therefore no problem of the awkward age” (137). Leaving aside Krook’s classification of national methods for dealing with “the awkward age,” we can easily conclude that “sex” in the novel is directly related to “talk,” in keeping with Foucault’s interpretation of a modern “Western tradition that links sex, through the confessional, to truth and knowledge, eventually to a scientia sexualis,” as James Kincaid has concluded about the importance of “sex-talk” in Victorian society.28 Much as her mother, Van, Mitchy, and Longdon wish to protect Nanda from what Longdon terms the “frightening” conversations at Buckingham Crescent, Nanda has learned how to read their meanings. Such knowledge would argue for her maturity, no matter what the legal age of consent, but there is a strange problem in what Nanda has learned in the course of the novel. Her decision to leave London society and live quietly with Longdon is her renunciation of a world she understands to be utterly corrupt. Yet in making her decision, Nanda distinguishes between Longdon and her mother’s set, when it is Longdon who is as morally suspect as any of the members of Mrs. Brook’s circle. Were it not for his obsession with Nanda as the living embodiment of her maternal grandmother, Lady Julia, Longdon might replace Edward Brookenham, the father who is rarely present in the novel. In more age-appropriate terms, of course, Longdon might serve as her surrogate grandfather, offering potentially wise advice to counter the frivolity of the modern set he finds so troubling in contemporary London. Yet in the course of the novel, Longdon offers virtually no such advice to Nanda, treating her instead as a fetish for his lost love, simply adding to the sexual vagrancy of Buckingham Crescent. In her climactic departure from this London world, her presumed moment of self-consciousness and self-possession, Nanda speaks in ways that sound remarkably like her mother and Van. Nanda tells Mitchy that her mother will handle his difficulties with his wife, “Little Aggie,” who has been unfaithful to 27 Dorothea Krook, The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), pp. 135–136. Further references in the text as: Krook. 28 James R. Kincaid, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 139.

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him. Nanda was instrumental in arranging that marriage, in part to fend off Mitchy’s interest in proposing to her. In her final meeting with Mitchy, she assures him: “‘I shan’t abandon you’” (399) and repeats in quick succession: “‘Will you leave it all to me?’” (400). Her rhetorical question echoes her mother’s reassurance when Nanda worries that Longdon has confused her with her grandmother, Lady Julia: “‘You leave all that to me’” (AA, 248). Her promise to Mitchy also declares that her renunciation of London is less complete than expected or promised, as well as her presumed break with her mother. In the final chapter, Longdon insists on the terms of their bargain, which is less the explicit (and vulgar) dowry offered to Vanderbank than her renunciation of London society: “‘You understand clearly, I take it, that this time it’s never again to leave me – or to be left’” (AA, 412). Yet when Longdon had declared a few pages earlier that “‘It would be easier for me … if you didn’t, my poor child, so wonderfully love him,” Nanda bursts into tears, sobbing “in a passion as sharp and brief as the flurry of a wild thing for an instant uncaged,” vehemently denying such love: “‘Ah, but I don’t – please believe me when I assure you I don’t’” (410–411). Although Nanda’s mother never has such an emotional outburst, Mrs. Brook has indeed deflected repeatedly suggestions that she is in love with Vanderbank, only to reinforce the reader’s conviction that she is. Nanda’s verbal denial is of course repudiated by her uncontrollable tears, and we know as decisively as Longdon that Van will always be with them on their travels and at the country estate of Beccles. In accepting their agreement, Nanda insists: “‘I’ll come if you’ll take me as I am – which is, more than I’ve ever done before’” (409). Her own demand suggests that there really is no renunciation involved. It appears she is still in love with Van, even if she sends him back to her mother. She promises Mitchy she will still manage his difficult relationship with his errant wife and her good friend, Aggie. What, in fact, does Nanda renounce or sacrifice at the end of The Awkward Age? Above all, by agreeing to go with Longdon, she consents to yet another one of the many relationships in this corrupt society that is arranged by matters of wealth and property, not personal passion or individual choice. Insofar as she chooses Longdon, she does so only to prevent further disruption of the adult world she is about to enter. Aggie and Tishy Grendon’s rebellions at least threaten the existing order, even if in the end they merely confirm the power others wield over them. Even more importantly, Longdon has virtually no moral authority at the end of the novel. His meretricious proposals to Van and then to Nanda declare him as corrupt a figure in this social world as anyone else. His appeal to a venerable and ethical past is yet another part of the “clever” rationalizations of the rest of this society. Longdon’s effort to refigure Nanda as her grandmother reminds us that the perversity of this world has a long tradition, whose grip will be harder to break than many moderns imagine. If Longdon begins as “priestly” in appearance, he concludes as a devil, who lures Nanda into an exile that permits the social corruption she was

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supposed to overcome. Much more a revival of Lord Devinish than Guy Domville from James’s play, Longdon merely poses as a simple country gentleman scandalized by London’s modern society. Quite the contrary, Longdon plays a role that enables him against all odds to win the melodrama’s heroine, albeit in such ironic ways as to horrify the attentive reader. That long trip on which they will embark “tomorrow” is a conventional wedding journey, but without the legal guarantee of marriage, and the promise of Nanda becoming Longdon’s heir is simply another part of their clever conversation.29 Is all of this “sex-talk” the equivalent of hot, passionate sexual intercourse? Do Van and Mrs. Brook collapse naked in the guest room while Edward Brookenham tends to his “Rivers and Lakes,” rather than to his own “Brook”? Will Longdon ravish Nanda in some dark German Kurort, where no one recognizes them and his intentions are finally quite clear, as Humbert would rape Lolita in Nabokov’s bizarre “thriller” sixty-five years later, a continent away from London? James knew how to represent sexual intercourse in even the deeply censored late Victorian era, as readers know when Merton Densher invites Kate Croy to his rooms in Venice in The Wings of the Dove and when Prince Amerigo and Charlotte Stant renew their relationship upstairs in that Gloucester hotel in The Golden Bowl. It is not that James is above imagining such sexual horrors as adultery (Van and Mrs. Brook) or pedophilia (Longdon and Nanda). Rather, James wants us to understand how “sex-talk” itself is a sort of infidelity, a possible corruption of children and adolescents. Can Nanda, then, consent to “go” with Longdon and realize his fantasy of a dead, past love and a distant British social order? Not according to the terms James gives us at the end of The Awkward Age, because twenty-one or eighty Nanda has still not achieved the self-awareness on which adult consent is based. It is childish of her to try to protect her mother by sending her lover Van back to her. It is childish of her to tell Mitchy that if he just leaves it all to her (and her mother) that his wife and her friend Aggie will grow faithful to him. It is childish of her to believe that in going with Longdon that she is renouncing this world of which he and she are such integral parts. 29 Edel’s biographical reading of Longdon as a version of the aging Henry James, who had recently retreated from London to Rye, has been influential: “[I]n removing Nanda from her mother’s drawing room, Mr. Longdon can now do what Henry James had done all his life—harbor within his house, the house of the novelist’s inner world, the spirit of a young adult female, worldly-wise and curious, possessing a treasure of unassailable virginity and innocence … able to yield to the masculine … side of James an ever-fresh and exquisite vision of feminine youth and innocence” (Edel IV: 259). Like most novelists, James transformed himself into many of his characters, but Longdon’s lack of imagination and self-awareness, especially about his relationship with Nanda, seem to argue against James’s close identification with him.

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The critics have not seen the conclusion in this way, but generally taken Nanda’s renunciation as self-affirming, a statement of her independence. Here is J. Hillis Miller in Literature as Conduct: Nothing is left at the end but for Mr. Longdon to rescue Nanda from the infected air of London and take her to his house in the country. There she will live, forever unmarried, as his beloved companion. Their relation is nothing if not sexually pure, though there are touching kisses and caresses between them. It is a classic James ending: a definitive act of renunciation, with nothing much but increased knowledge and a sense of personal integrity as reward. (Miller, 137) A paragraph earlier, Miller needs to fudge a bit Longdon’s relationship to Nanda, insisting that he “at first loves Nanda because she reincarnates for him her grandmother and then gradually comes to love her for herself,” a transformation for which there is no evidence in the text (Miller, 137). For the majority of the novel, Longdon barely speaks to Nanda, dealing with her primarily through Mrs. Brook, Van, Mitchy, and the other adults. In their final meeting in the last chapter, Longdon even admits as much. When Nanda questions Longdon’s understanding of Van’s motives in coming to visit her, presumably to accept her renunciation of him, she concludes: “‘You’ve admitted as much [that he doesn’t understand Vanderbank’s motives] when we’ve talked – ’” (AA, 412). Longdon now complains, “‘Oh, but when have we talked?’” reminding them both that their relationship, if one could term it such, has been mediated by all of the other characters. “‘When haven’t we?’” Nanda replies, meaning that everyone has been talking about them throughout the novel (413). William F. Hall has gone so far as to suggest that the salon at Buckingham Crescent is a model of the good society: “This particular society has a code of behavior that is as clearly articulated as it is admirable, … a code based on an ideal of society that informs James’s fiction from The Tragic Muse onwards.”30 According to Hall, such a society includes wit, intelligence, independence, sincerity, and “disinterested cultivation of awareness” (Hall, 36). Hall’s conclusion is perhaps the oddest of many strange readings of Mrs. Brook’s corrupt social circle, primarily for Hall’s attribution of “awareness” to characters who endlessly work to avoid self-knowledge. Van cannot acknowledge his love for an older, married woman, Mrs. Brook. Mitchy cannot face the infidelity of his wife, Aggie, the “Agnesina” trained in a Catholic convent to the strictest moral code. Nanda cannot accept the fact that her parents are using her as a bargaining chip to improve their social and economic station. Mr. Longdon cannot face the reality that his own generation taught the “clever” set he so despises the immorality of the arranged marriage. 30 William F. Hall, “James’s Conception of Society in The Awkward Age,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 23:1 (June 1968), 36. Further references in the text as: Hall.

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Even if we do entertain the idea that Longdon has “fallen in love” with Nanda, not her grandmother, it is difficult to accept Miller’s contention that “their relation is nothing if not sexually pure” (Miller, 137). Longdon and Nanda do in fact touch and kiss, and the two definitive acts in the final chapter are Longdon kissing Nanda and Nanda kissing Longdon: He raised his hands and took her face, which he drew so close to his own that, as she gently let him, he could kiss her with solemnity on the forehead. “Come!” he then very firmly said – quite indeed as if it were a question of their moving on the spot (AA, 413) It is a solemn kiss, whose possible meaning might include a grandfatherly kiss, but it is accompanied by an imperative, a command that she come to live with him, which instead of rejecting as yet another invasion of her person – Longdon is not her grandfather or father – Nanda accepts with a double surrender. As he draws her face to his with his hands, “she gently let him,” and then reciprocates his kiss, as if they are concluding a bargain, which indeed they are: “It [the command and the kiss] literally made her smile, which, with a certain compunction, she immediately corrected by doing for him in the pressure of her lips to his cheek what he had just done for herself” (AA, 413). It is unnecessary to emphasize the eroticism of this exchange, as well as its duplication of the sexual perversity of the “clever” talk at Buckingham Crescent that so “frightens” the “priestly” Longdon at the beginning of the novel. James keeps the consecration of their agreement just this side of an outright sexual act, and the critics have helped him censor this weird scene of a septuagenarian seducing a twenty-one-year-old with a lot of nonsense about “renunciation” and “personal integrity” (Miller, 137). It is not really a “classic James ending,” even if Miller concludes his chapter on The Awkward Age by insisting Nanda joins “many other Jamesian heroines” who “triumph over those around them to whom they seem subservient,” including Isabel Archer, Maisie Farange, Catherine Sloper, Kate Croy, and Maggie Verver (Miller, 150). In Miller’s terms, Nanda is the “heroine” of melodrama who triumphs over villainy, avoids the dishonor of seduction, and turns abjection into self-affirmation. In his treatment of many of the feminine heroes in his list, Miller similarly celebrates what we ought to recognize as the positive resolution of nineteenth-century melodrama. Yet if James definitely wrote such a melodrama in the struggles of Guy Domville to overcome the corruptions of this world for the purity and goodness of the next, the author of The Awkward Age locates the melodrama totally within the social psychology of the British ruling classes from the Enlightenment to modernity. Having thoroughly commodified marriage and the family, rendering even “love” a function of the legal transmission of wealth and power, the British upper classes rely on romantic stories to cover their tracks and lend an aura of humanity to what are otherwise strictly business exchanges.

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Henry James criticizes this economic, social, and cultural system in most of his novels, even though he also benefits from the lavish settings, elegant townhomes, grand country estates, and other signs of wealth where his dramas are enacted. I have little doubt that he understands how the modernity of Mrs. Brook and the traditionalism of Mr. Longdon are closely allied, despite their mutual protestations that they hate what the other represents. Yet for all of his self-awareness, James seems baffled by what to do to overcome the social problems posed by his little history of the British class system. As he writes in his Preface to the New York Edition of The Awkward Age: “As I look about, I see my experience paved: an experience to which nothing is wanting save, I confess, some grasp of its final lesson.”31 Perhaps a bit like Mrs. Brook herself, James is a brilliant analyst, but a poor reformer. I argued at the beginning of this chapter that one of the formal reasons for the failure of Guy Domville is its own ambiguity, best exemplified by the concluding word, “‘Wait!’” (CP, 516). Mrs. Peverel speaks this word nominally in response to Frank Humber’s line: “‘Mrs. Peverel! – I shall hope!’” (516). He is repeating his long-standing hope that Mrs. Peverel will accept his marriage proposal, but Mrs. Peverel’s word is equally addressed to the departing Guy Domville with whom she is in love. Standing at the door, Guy is on the threshold between secular and sacred love – “‘The Church takes me!’” – while Humber teeters on the indecision of Mrs. Peverel as she makes her final appeal to Guy. In the play, Frank Humber is a steady, boring yeoman farmer, whereas Domville is handsome, intelligent, and dashing. The audience certainly ought to expect Guy to dash back into the room, sweep Mrs. Peverel off her feet, and gently urge Frank out the same door. In The Awkward Age, the final word is “tomorrow,” a word repeated as a sort of chorus heralding the future lives of Longdon and Nanda. The first edition even prints “‘to-morrow’” as the novel’s final word, spoken by Longdon, and a variant on the “tomorrow” of the other utterances, possibly indicating a sort of pledge, as in “to tomorrow, then” or “à bientôt” expressing a hope that their agreement will hold. Neither Nanda nor Longdon knows for certain, and of course the novel ends, leaving us in apparent suspense. Such an ending on the stage might have yielded a similarly fatal violation of the rules of melodrama as what “‘Wait!’” accomplishes in Guy Domville. Guy Domville is certainly a melodrama, whose conventions James manipulates to avoid identification with this popular genre. The play fails in large part because it does not meet the expectations of the audience, especially in the gallery, of a melodrama. Although we will never know exactly what the booing members of the audience wanted, it is reasonable to assume that James’s endorsement of Guy Domville’s life-denying, Catholic asceticism played some part in their outrage. James incorporates this same motif of renunciation into The Awkward Age, but this time without its objectionable religious connotations. Nanda renounces the corrupt world of Buckingham 31 “Preface,” The Awkward Age, New York Edition, p. vii.

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Crescent, but she perversely reproduces its basic immorality in her final actions. Rather than repudiating this modern London world, Nanda follows its teachings, carrying them with her to Beccles and her life, whatever that may be, with Longdon. In these respects, The Awkward Age departs from melodrama by refusing its conventional morality and tidy conclusions. In so doing, the novel may mark a certain historical limitation to melodrama’s ability to address the complexities and ambiguities of modern social life. In many respects, The Awkward Age is a soap opera well in advance of the twentieth-century genre, not so much “invented” by Henry James as emerging from the novel of social manners he had mastered over his long career. Like the soap opera, there really can be no end to the ongoing drama of ruling-class lives, short of overt revolution. Such openness in the soap opera encourages us to tune in for the next episode, reassured that if we missed an episode or two the repetitions in the story-line will bring us up to speed.32 Similarly, in James’s novel of manners we come to expect new developments, relationships shattered, often by melodramatic secrets revealed, but also that the basic logic of the social order will reassert itself. Terrible as the lives of the rich and famous are, they continue to dazzle us and lure our attention – our envy, hatred, and desire.

32 The Awkward Age was serialized in Harper’s Weekly from October 1898 to January 1899 before being published in book form in 1899 (Edel, IV: 199). It is also one of the novels that James dictated and hence “grew” beyond the scope of what he had originally proposed to Harper’s as a “little book.” In his “Introduction” to the Penguin Books edition of The Awkward Age, ed. Ronald Blythe (London: Penguin Books, 1987), Blythe refers to James’s “reckless joys of dictation” in composing the novel, which I would link to new media’s capacities to produce the sort of open-ended stories we find in James’s Major Phase and much later in the television serial, including the soap opera.

4

Henry James, Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, and T. S. Eliot Some Versions of Modernism

Frisch weht der Wind Der Heimat zu Mein Irisch Kind, Wo weilest du? Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, I, verses 5–8.

In July 2011, the Israel Chamber Orchestra’s performance of Richard Wagner’s “Siegfried Idyll” was repeatedly interrupted by protestors, reminding the audience of Wagner’s anti-Semitism and of the unofficial ban on playing his music in Israel, a cultural taboo that dates back to Kristallnacht. In May 2013, Burkhardt Kosminski opened his production of Tannhäuser at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf, in which the Holocaust-themed version staged the heroic lead, Tannhäuser, as a Nazi war criminal, with scenes set in concentration camps, and a gas chamber on stage. The production was canceled after a single performance, especially after several members of the opening-night audience had to be treated for medical conditions related to the production.1 In his own time, Richard Wagner (1813–1883) was a flashpoint for many controversies, ranging from criticism of how his music contributed to what Nietzsche termed the “disease” of nihilism, as well as more specific criticism of Wagner’s anti-Semitism.2 Wagner was celebrated after his death by the Nazis for his contributions to the German Völklisch and related nationalist movements, as well as for his anti-Semitism. Yet in the 1890s, Wagner was venerated by the English Decadents for his advocacy of “free love,” especially homosexuality. Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley in particular found in Wagner’s music a complement to their own aesthetic and personal iconoclasm.3 1 2 3

“German Nazi-Themed Opera Cancelled after Deluge of Complaints,” The Guardian (May 9, 2013) (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/may/09/ german-nazi-opera-cancelled-wagner-tannhauser) Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner: A Musician’s Problem (1888), in The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms, 3rd edition, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici (Edinburgh: T. N. Foulis, 1911). Emma Sutton, Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s: The Imperfect Wagnerites (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003297987-5

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It is fair to say that James did not like Wagner’s operas, although we have no evidence of his personal likes or dislikes until 1876, when his correspondence refers critically to his friend Paul Zhukovsky’s enthusiasm for Wagner and in particular the Ring. Zhukovsky was a Russian émigré to Paris and the son of the Russian poet and translator Vasily Zhukovsky (1783–1852). Fred Kaplan suggests that after Ivan Turgenev introduced James to Zhukovsky (“Joukowsky” in James’s spelling) in April 1876, James “briefly fell in love,” but of course evidence of James’s love affairs with men or women has been notoriously difficult to find (Kaplan, 171). Zhukovsky’s passion for Wagner’s operas was so great that he moved to Bayreuth and worked as a set painter for the Ring, later moving to Naples with Wagner, where James once again saw Zhukovsky (Kaplan, 223–224). James’s friendship with Zhukovsky has long been considered the basis for James’s criticism of Wagner. The simplest explanation seems to be that James was jealous of the charismatic Wagner, whose appeal to Zhukovsky was both aesthetic and personal. Another explanation is that James’s own closeted behavior made him criticize what Kaplan terms “the openly homosexual and adulterous activities in the Wagner entourage” (Kaplan, 223). Indeed, James’s negative reaction to Oscar Wilde in the same period seems to follow this pattern. Annoyed both by Wilde’s avant-garde aesthetics and his relative openness about his same-sex identity, James frequently criticized him for his aestheticist bluster while avoiding any direct statement about his sexuality. As Wendy Graham has pointed out, this was a dangerous era for gay males and most communication about same-sex relations was coded.4 Much of the sexual coding among the English Decadents was done in their cultural works, and fiction was one of the best media for sending double meanings to the initiated and to the general reader. In James’s The Tragic Muse, the character Gabriel Nash is a thinly fictionalized version of Oscar Wilde, but Nash’s brand of avant-garde daring barely hints at same-sex identity. Having aestheticized Wilde, James can control him in the figure of Nash, who plays his part in the novel only to vanish at the end as a convenient deus ex machina, rather than a genuine threat to the heterosexual desires of the main characters.5 I have termed James’s mode of coding same-sex desire in his fiction, especially in the 1880s and 1890s, as a “textual preference,” in which homosexual desire is represented as a desexualized longing for aesthetic transcendence.6 James’s appropriations and transformations of Wilde tell us a great deal about James’s own deeply repressed homosexual desire as a purified aestheticist ideal. I think this process describes quite accurately the ways James fictionalized Richard Wagner in his fiction from this period, controlling the charismatic 4 5 6

Wendy Graham, Henry James’s Thwarted Love (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 31–33. John Carlos Rowe, The Other Henry James (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 98. Rowe, The Other Henry James, 101–119.

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Wagner in terms of the aestheticist ideals James found both appealing and personally secure. Unlike writers of romans à clefs who use this genre to satirize their enemies, James generally romanticizes his antagonists, especially those who more publicly display his own secret yearnings. This process of fictionalization describes well what James does with the homosexual apologist John Addington Symonds in James’s “The Author of ‘Beltraffio.’” There is something both charming and insidious in James’s method of fictionalization. He appeals to his readers by rendering real people he dislikes as better versions of themselves, tempered by James’s own apparent generosity. In doing so, James makes his caricatures more appealing than their models, thereby casting their lives in the shadows of his fiction. James’s earliest reference to Wagner’s operas is also the most questionable in terms of James’s personal knowledge of Wagnerian works. Set in Rome, James’s 1874 short story “Adina” tells the story of how the cynical and very modern American Sam Scrope tricks a young Italian peasant, Angelo Beati, out of a priceless Roman intaglio Angelo has unearthed in the Roman campagna, which Angelo believes to be the priceless gem “Julius Caesar had worn … in his crown.”7 Out of revenge, Angelo woos and marries Scrope’s fiancée, the innocent American Adina Waddington, and the defeated and disgusted Scrope tosses the tainted intaglio into the Tiber. Narrated by Scrope’s unnamed friend, the story follows a familiar romantic triangle with some Gothic effects James borrows from Nathaniel Hawthorne and a mythic quest for cursed treasure that seems likely indebted to Wagner’s Das Rheingold, first performed in Munich’s National Theater on September 22, 1869, and Die Walküre, first performed in Munich’s National Theater on June 26, 1870, the two operas in the four-opera Ring cycle James could have known while writing “Adina.” Pierre Walker points to several allusions in James’s “Adina” to Wagner’s Ring cycle, even though the operatic cycle was not staged until 1876 at Bayreuth, two years after James’s story was published. Yet Walker points out that Wagner’s cycle had been published in 1863, more than a decade before the publication of “Adina,” so it is possible James was familiar with the entire cycle by the time he wrote “Adina.”8 An opera lover who often alluded to the art in his fiction, James borrows the young woman’s name “Adina” from Gaetano Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore, the romantic opera in which Adina (the soprano) is the wealthy owner of a country estate, where she falls in love with the young peasant Nemorino (the tenor), who buys the cheap red wine sold by Dulcamara (the bass) as an “elixir of 7 8

Henry James, “Adina,” The Tales of Henry James, vol. 2 (1970–1874), ed. Maqbool Aziz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 353. Pierre Walker, “‘Adina’: Henry James’s Roman Allegory of Power and the Representation of the Foreign,” Henry James Review 21:1 (Winter 2000), 16–20. The complete Ring cycle was not performed in London until 1882, by the impresario Alfred Schulz-Curtius, directed by Anton Seidl. See The New Kobbé’s Complete Opera Book, ed. and rev. The Earl of Harewood (New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1976), p. 253.

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love.”9 If James is alluding to Donizetti and Wagner’s operas, he combines two very different musical productions in “Adina,” but the serious moral of his story seems to refer more to Wagner than Donizetti. Once cleaned and researched by Scrope, James’s mythic intaglio turns out not to represent Julius Caesar, but the Emperor Tiberius (b. 42 BCE, d. 37 CE; r. 14–37 CE), the reigning Roman emperor when Christ was crucified (“Adina,” 357). Scrope concludes that this symbol of Roman imperial power (“‘totius orbis imperator’” [357]) was indeed worn by Tiberius Caesar, not in a crown but as “‘the agraffe of the imperial purple,’” “‘near the shoulder, framed in chiseled gold, circled about with pearls as big as plums, clasping together the two sides of his gold-stiffened purple’” (357). The “cursed ring” in Wagner’s Ring is of course just this sort of mythic fetish, serving to represent both Siegmund’s and then Siegfried’s divine authority, as well as Siegmund’s obligation to the Rhine daughters and Siegfried’s vexed relationship to Brünnhilde. In Wagner’s opera, the magic “ring” is the eponymous symbol in an origin story of the modern German nation, grafted from Norse and Scandinavian myths. When Wagner’s ring is restored to the Rhine daughters, it can be equated with the German Land itself. James’s allusions to Wagner in “Adina” offer a tacit criticism of the composer, to which James will return in two subsequent stories. Rather than celebrating Wagner’s genius, James demystifies the signs of mythic power that play such central roles in Wagner’s operas. In “Adina,” Scrope proposes to give the large intaglio to his fiancée, Adina Waddington, as a symbol of their engagement, even as the narrator objects that it could be worn “‘but one way … as a massive medallion depending from a necklace,’” and even so worn could only properly be displayed by “‘a splendid, dusky beauty, with the brow of a Roman Empress, and the shoulders of an antique statue’” (361). The narrator rejects it is an appropriate jewel for Scope’s fiancée: “‘If I were to see it hung round Miss Waddington’s white neck, I should feel as if it were pulling her down to the ground, and giving her mysterious pain’” (361). Adina herself rejects the intaglio as a wedding gift, particularly because it represents for her the paganism of Tiberius: “He says that I must wear it one of these days as a medallion … . But I shall not. The stone is beautiful, but I should feel most uncomfortable in carrying the Emperor Tiberius so near my heart. Wasn’t he one of the bad Emperors?—one of the worst? It is almost a pollution to have a thing that he looked at and touched coming to one in such direct descent.” (“Adina,” 367) The narrator agrees: “‘This seemed a very becoming state of mind in a blonde angel of New England origin’” (367). Indeed, Scrope’s insistence that 9

Gaetano Donizetti, L’Elisir d’Amore, in The New Kobbé’s Complete Opera Book, pp. 443–446.

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she accept this pagan symbol alienates her, as does her suspicion that Scrope has cheated Angelo, and in the end she breaks their engagement to marry Angelo. James stresses the irony that the American Scrope’s obsession with Roman tyranny and his own victory over Angelo Beati have in fact strengthened her affection for and eventual marriage to the Catholic Italian. Leaving aside for the moment the differences of religion and nationality, James stresses every man’s capacity for tyranny. In James, the narrator witnesses Scrope toss the symbol of pagan power into the Tiber, as if Scrope acknowledges in his own small crime a version of the pride that led to the Fall of Rome. Tacitly criticizing the Americans who invaded Italy in the last half of the nineteenth century to collect and commodify classical civilization, often to bolster American ambitions to imperial power, James counsels more humane, compassionate, even Christian values for the modern American who understands the injustice and absolutism of older regimes. The would-be tyrant Scrope abandons his powerful talisman, drowning it in the manner Shakespeare’s Prospero casts his magic wand into the ocean at the end of The Tempest, one of James’s favorite plays by Shakespeare.10 James’s allusions to Wagner thus hint at the dangers of artistic powers that might serve antidemocratic impulses to seize power, control others, and rule by appeal to divine right. In “Adina,” James does not explicitly blame Wagner’s operas for contributing to political tyranny, but James does suggest that good civic conduct begins with mutual interpersonal relations. Magical rings, legendary imperial jewels, and other symbols of power should be of little consequence in the political and personal affairs of men and women. In all of his allusions to Wagner, however, James treats the composer in terms of his aesthetic achievements, rather than according to James’s own personal dislike of him. Nine years after Wagner’s death in 1883, James would again allude significantly to Wagner’s works in his 1892 short story “Collaboration.” James alludes to Richard Wagner through the charismatic German composer Herman Heidenmauer, who collaborates with the French poet Félix Vendemer by using the poet’s verses for the libretto of his new opera. Even as their friends and in particular Vendemer’s future mother-in-law condemn this odd alliance between a German and Frenchman, their working relationship grows stronger. Resisting the silly patriotism of their respective compatriots, some of whom have fresh memories of national rivalries in the Franco-Prussian War, Heidenmauer and Vendemer forge ahead, refusing “‘To profane our golden air with the hideous invention of patriotism,” as Vendemer tells the narrator.11 Of course, Vendemer is not merely a fictional representation of the Russian Zhukovsky, even though the Russian émigré did meet James in Paris 10 Henry James, “The Tempest” (1907), in Henry James: Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Morris Shapira (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), pp. 343–357. 11 Henry James, “Collaboration,” The Complete Tales of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel, 12 vols. Vol. 8 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1963), p. 425. Further references in the text as: C.

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and spent the majority of his life there. And Heidenmauer is not based exclusively on Richard Wagner, although his enthusiasm for representing musically poetic verse resembles closely Wagner’s characteristic method. Given James’s long residence in and love of Paris, his character Vendemer draws on the author’s own passion for the city. Heidenmauer also draws on James’s own cosmopolitan character; both have contempt for those who judge art in terms of its nationalist purposes. James’s fictional scenario includes a relationship between Heidenmauer and Vendemer that is so close as finally to drive away Vendemer’s fiancée, who is forced to break off her engagement by her patriotic mother, Marie de Brindes. Whether we view the male characters’ friendship as homosocial or homosexual, it reflects James’s own response to his sexuality. James’s narrator, a self-proclaimed painter of “bad pictures,” whose great art seems to be the salon he hosts in his studio, admits to be “rather in love” with Madame de Brindes, even though he is “considerably younger” (C, 407, 414). He characterizes her as a Frenchwoman distinguished by “her loyalty to the national idea,” “a dévote to a form of worship … which the women of her race seem to me to have in the question much more than the men” (414). It is not just the Germanness of Vendemer’s friend of which Madame de Brindes disapproves, but Heidenmauer’s love of “the English poets, and the French, and the Italian, and the Spanish, and the Russian—he is a wonderful representative of the Germanism which consists in the negation of intellectual frontiers” (410). The narrator alludes to German idealism here, including Kant’s condemnation of the nation-state and Hegel’s conception of nationalism as merely a stage in the unfolding of universal Reason. Noting Heidenmauer’s fondness for the English as yet another reason for Marie de Brindes’ disapproval of him, the narrator suggests that her French patriotism is not exclusively directed against his German “savagery,” as she terms it, but virtually anything that is not French. James represents Heidenmauer as a German composer who plays “Wagner and then Wagner again—a great deal of Wagner” (C, 422). Like Wagner, Heidenmauer is cosmopolitan, speaks French, albeit with the hint of a German accent (and thus corruption of the lingua franca), and repeatedly affirms the transnational and transcendent power of art. In one telling exchange between the German composer and French poet, they urge each other further in their perverse celebration of how they will be condemned for their collaboration. Heidenmauer proposes the project to Vendemer by asking: “‘Will you do it with me? Will you work with me? We shall make something great!’” “‘Ah, you don’t know what you ask!” Vendemer replies. But Heidenmauer does know: “‘It will be bad for me in my country; I shall suffer for it. They won’t like it— they’ll abuse me for it.’” “‘They’ll hate my libretto so?’” Heidenmauer already knows how both national audiences will respond: “‘Yes, your libretto—they’ll say it’s immoral and horrible. And they’ll say I’m immoral and horrible for having worked with you … . You’ll injure my career. Oh yes, I shall suffer!’ he joyously, exultingly cried” (422–423).

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The scene is charged with erotic double-meanings, especially when they refer to their collaboration as “terrible,” “monstrous,” and the entire bargain as a Faustian pact. Through all their banter and their claims of doom, they mutually affirm the “golden ideal” that “in art there are no countries” as well as their mutual love for each other’s work. When the composer and the poet announce to the painter that they will leave his studio to “dine together” and work out the details of their collaboration, Heidenmauer consoles the narrator, “‘Then we will come back here to finish—your studio is so good for music,” but Vendemer comments oddly, “‘There are some things it isn’t good for,’” as if suggesting to the painter that three is a crowd (C, 423). In short, the suggestion that these two artists are “ruining” their careers by collaborating across national cultural boundaries seems also a pretext to mask a profound sexual relationship.12 One reason for Madame de Brindes’ horror at her prospective son-in-law’s relationship with a German is her suggestion that her husband, M. de Brindes, was killed in the Franco-Prussian War. The narrator is tempted to say, “‘What has that to do with it?’” presumably since the war is by the action of the story a nearly forgotten historical event. Far more important is the way in which Madame de Brindes’ first reaction to Heidenmauer as an intolerable German friend for her daughter’s fiancé soon turns into the mother’s deep homophobia and the suggestion that her daughter Paule will be drawn into a perverse ménage à trois. “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” Samuel Johnson famously quipped.13 James’s “Collaboration” seems to combine aestheticist cosmopolitanism, homosexual passion, and anti-nationalism in a “monstrous collaboration” (429). Every reference to “monstrosity” and “horror,” however, is met with avant-garde joy and exultation by the two artists, leading eventually to conversions of the narrator and even Vendemer’s fiancée Paule to their view. Although Madame de Brindes insists her daughter break off her relationship with Vendemer, it is finally the poet who renounces his engagement in order to affirm “the truth” of his artistic passion: “Men give up their love for advantages every day, but they rarely give it up for such discomforts” (430). At the end of the story, it is not really Vendemer who suffers or longs for the beautiful woman he has lost, but Paule de Brindes whom the narrator witnesses in a private moment

12 Their surnames have sexual connotations. “Heidenmauer” is an agglutination of “Heide,” “meadow,” and “Mauer,” “wall,” suggesting a boundary to be transgressed to reach the feminized space of the meadow. “Vendemer” suggests a combination of “sale” or “to sell,” “à vendre,” with “mer,” “sea,” again suggesting a bond between the feminized “oceanic” and “meadow.” Their given names might be combined to comment on their friendship: Félix Vendemer is “happy” to have such a “brother” as Herman Heidenmauer. 13 Samuel Johnson as quoted in James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, 3 vols. (London: Henry Baldwin for Charles Dilly, 1791), vol. 1, p. 253.

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By “without notes,” the narrator means Paule has memorized a composition of Heidenmauer’s “she never heard him play but that once,” suggesting some magical transfer of aesthetic passion from the composer to the young woman. In the negative interpretation, she has been diabolically possessed by a German composer, representative of the nation her father died fighting in the FrancoPrussian War. In a generous reading, she has been inspired, albeit taken over by the genius’s spirit. “Don’t say art isn’t mighty!” the narrator concludes (431). In “Collaboration,” the homoerotic subtext is integrated with James’s cosmopolitanism and aestheticism. Madame de Brindes actually has little to fear from Heidenmauer, either as her son-in-law’s close friend or as a competitor for her daughter’s affections. Heidenmauer, Vendemer, and Paule de Brindes constitute an aesthetic community that crosses national, gender, sexual, and personal boundaries. To be sure, the substitutions of homosexuality, aestheticism, and cosmopolitanism permit James not only to mask personal behaviors and social ideas that are not universally popular, but they also enable him to provide narrative developments that change characters’ minds, as James hoped to change his readers’ attitudes. “Collaboration” was published only four years after Friedrich Nietzsche’s two pamphlets critical of Richard Wagner, The Case of Wagner: A Musician’s Problem (1888) and Nietzsche contra Wagner (1888), in which Nietzsche repudiates his earlier admiration for Wagner.14 In Nietzsche contra Wagner, Nietzsche actually uses passages from his earlier writings to demonstrate that he had criticized Wagner throughout his career. In fact, Nietzsche changed his mind about Wagner, who in his later years turned to Christian themes, repudiated his youthful commitments to free love in favor of asceticism, reaffirmed his anti-Semitism, and increasingly advocated for German national identity. Whereas Wagner’s Siegfried is for Nietzsche a “revolutionary,” intent on the emancipation of women and whose relation to Brünnhilde is “free love,” Wagner’s later operatic hero Parsifal represents for Nietzsche chastity, asceticism, and Christian orthodoxy (CW, 23, 25). Nietzsche’s objections to Wagner’s anti-Semitism were reinforced by subsequent critics, who especially focused on the late opera Parsifal (1877/1882), although there are numerous scholars who continue to defend it against such charges.15 14 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms, 3rd ed., trans. Anthony M. Ludovici (Edinburgh: T. N. Foulis, 1911). Further references in the text by individual title: CW or NW. 15 Paul Lawrence Rose, Wagner: Race and Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 158–169, provides a good summary of the opposing views.

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Nietzsche’s objections to Wagner’s Christian motifs in Parsifal—Parsifal as knight-errant in his quest for the Holy Grail, the holy Spear, and the wound that will not heal—revolve around what Nietzsche understands as Wagner’s Catholicism. As Nietzsche writes in Nietzsche contra Wagner: We must not let ourselves be misled concerning this state of things, by the fact that at this very moment we are living in a reaction, in the heart itself of a reaction. The age of international wars, of ultramontane martyrdom, in fact the whole interlude-character which typifies the present condition of Europe, may indeed help an art like Wagner’s to sudden glory, without, however, in the least ensuring its future prosperity. The Germans themselves have no future … . (NW, 64–5) Nietzsche’s views need to be contextualized in the geopolitics of Europe after the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) and the struggles by Ultramontanists to reaffirm Catholic political authority in post-Revolutionary France and the emerging German nation. Considering Wagner’s strong Christian themes in Parsifal to be a betrayal of an anti-religious position they both had once shared, Nietzsche judges Wagner’s return to Christian values to be politically and culturally reactionary. Given the medieval donnée of Wagner’s Parsifal, Nietzsche’s argument is convincing, even if his fear of a strong Catholic revival of old institutions like the Holy Roman Empire was not entirely justified. Throughout his career, Wagner was known for his growing commitments to German nationalism and his strong anti-French sentiments. Nietzsche criticizes Wagner for misunderstanding French culture, his influence on it, and its strong romantic appeal: And as to Richard Wagner, it is obvious, even glaringly obvious, that Paris is the very soil for him, the more French music adapts itself to the needs of l’âme moderne, the more Wagnerian it will become … . To everybody familiar with the movement of European culture, this fact, however, is certain, that French romanticism and Richard Wagner are most intimately related. (CW, 69) Contrasting pre-national, Catholic Ultamontanists with the progressive, modern cosmopolitanism he finds in contemporary French culture infused with the earlier, revolutionary spirit of Wagner, Nietzsche identifies his objection to later Wagner as his profound conservativism, religious cant, and German nationalism. James makes no explicit reference to Wagner’s Ring, Parsifal, or any other specific work in “Collaboration,” and Heidenmauer is not explicitly Richard Wagner. Nevertheless, the explicit moral of the story is that some

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cultural rapprochement of the French and Germans might heal the wounds of their political conflict in the Franco-Prussian War. James stages such transnational diplomacy by way of a generational shift from Mme. de Brindes and her insuperable hatred of the Germans to her daughter, Paule, Heidenmauer, and Vendemer, all of whom seem committed to l’âme moderne to which Nietzsche refers. Although James makes no mention of Ultramontanists in “Collaboration,” he had commented negatively on this reactionary movement in France in both his earlier non-fiction and The American.16 There is no evidence that James was familiar with Nietzsche’s criticism of Wagner, but James seems to share Nietzsche’s view that Wagner’s virtues have more to do with what Nietzsche termed the “Good European” than with the national culture of either the Germans or the French.17 Stephen Donadio defines Nietzsche’s “good European,” introduced in Human, All-Too-Human (1878), as “something very much like ‘the cosmopolitan,’ as opposed to ‘provincial’ or ‘parochial’” (Donadio, 85). Not only do James’s characters Heidenmauer and Vendemer live up to this ideal, but their collaborative cultural work seems to help realize such a pan-European ideal. James’s other overt reference to Wagner occurs in “The Velvet Glove” (1909), a short story set in Paris that revolves around a successful young American writer, John Berridge, lured into a plot by a “Princess” to help promote her new novel, The Velvet Glove. Dazzled by titled aristocrats more than he is by artistic celebrities, Berridge is an easy target for the “young Lord” who first approaches him with the idea of writing a “‘logrolling preface’” to the Princess’s new book.18 James’s story is a charming, albeit trivial, parody of the fickleness of human desire, how aristocrats long to be artists while the artists yearn for titles and estates, and modern celebrity culture. As in “Collaboration,” Wagner signifies sublime, transcendent art, but less for the historical Wagner’s musical genius than for a more generalized idea of aesthetic accomplishment. At a party hosted by Gloriani, the master sculptor who also appears in Roderick Hudson and The Ambassadors, a tenor accompanied by a pianist performs a series of arias that galvanize the party goers, holding them “rapt” “under the sway of the divine voice” (V, 239). The tenor’s performance follows immediately Berridge’s meeting with the young Lord, whom he struggles to identify from a previous encounter and whom he inordinately admires, even desires:

16 John Carlos Rowe, At Emerson’s Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 187–188. 17 Stephen Donadio, Nietzsche, Henry James, and the Artistic Will (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 85. It is worth noting that Donadio mentions Wagner only in passing in his book on Nietzsche and Henry James. 18 Henry James, “The Velvet Glove,” The Complete Tales of Henry James, 12 vols., ed. Leon Edel, vol. 12 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1964), p. 259. Further references in the text as: V.

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He had seen him before, this splendid and sympathetic person—whose flattering appeal was by no means all that made him sympathetic; he had met him, had noted, had wondered about him, had in fact imaginatively, intellectually, so to speak, quite yearned over him … (235–236) Just before the tenor sings, Berridge decides that remembering where he had previously met the young Lord is irrelevant. “One placed young gods and goddesses only when one placed them on Olympus,” because Berridge assumes “they were of Olympian race, and that they glimmered for one, at best, through their silver cloud, like the visiting apparitions in an epic” (238). In fact it is just these Olympian heights with their “silver clouds” that will be evoked by the tenor’s performance, which is clearly based on arias from an unidentified opera: “It was better, in this way, than the opera … the composition sung might be Wagnerian, but no Tristram, no Iseult, no Parsifal and no Kundry of them all could ever show” (V, 239). James is thinking of Wagner’s operas Tristan und Iseult (1859/1865) and Parisfal, apparently picking operas from early and late in Wagner’s career to suggest primarily the Wagnerian mood. Of course, both operas are represented by their romantic leads, providing atmosphere for the amorous plot James is elaborating in the story. James quickly dismisses what he terms the “cheap Teutonic tinsel” of Wagnerian opera in favor of what he metaphorizes as “a hand mailed in silver” (239). In an elaborate play of metaphors from the “silver clouds” to the silver mail of an armored hand to the bathos of “Teutonic tinsel,” James is in fact performing what he judges to be his protagonist’s true genius: the aesthetic consciousness that enables Berridge to represent successfully his world. Witnessing how the tenor holds his audience by the power of his voice, Berridge pays less attention to the “divine voice” than to the audience: “Several young women … looked charming in the rapt attitude; while even the men, mostly standing and grouped, ‘composed,’ in their stillness” and to “the range of the eyes, without sound or motion, while all the rest of consciousness was held down as by a hand mailed in silver” (V, 239). The scene is for Berridge “better, in this way, than the opera,” because he “had thus the power of seeing his dear contemporaries of either sex … just continuously and inscrutably sit to it” (239). Alluding to Wagner’s use of magic and myth in his operas, James claims that “the whole thing together” made “an enchantment amid which he had in truth, at a given moment, ceased to distinguish parts” (239). In this visionary moment, the Princess appears, a “belated lady,” whom Berridge quite naturally but incorrectly confuses with the sublimity of his aesthetic experience: “For Berridge, once more, if the scenic show before him so melted into the music, here precisely might have been the heroine herself advancing to the footlights at her cue” (240).

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Of course, James and the reader know that Berridge has mistaken this beautiful, aristocratic woman for his own imaginative experience. She is a phantom of his mind; he is in love truly with his own consciousness, just as he has been enchanted by what he imagines he sees in the “young Lord.” The Lord and Princess are, of course, a romantic couple, although James keeps the exact status of their “betrothal” ambiguous, so that Berridge can complicate their relationship by showering them both with his affection. As in “Collaboration,” much of the wit in the story turns on Berridge’s anxiety that he is making one of the lovers jealous amid the confusion of heterosexual and homosexual attractions. Neither the Lord nor his Princess is concerned about the other’s fidelity, because both are intent only on securing the celebrity endorsement of Berridge for the woman’s popular novel. Stressing the young Lord’s “seigneurie,” James indirectly tells us that Berridge is dealing with French nobility, perhaps explaining the hint of licentiousness in their relations with the somewhat strait-laced American. The class divisions are also so strict separating two French aristocrats from the American author as to be virtually unbreachable, so that the reader is as aware as the young Lord that the Princess could never fall in love with this American. Flirtatiously luring Berridge away from the party, the Princess drives him around Paris in her chauffeured car in an effort to seduce him into writing the Preface. The episode has led previous critics to conclude that the Princess is based on Edith Wharton, who had similarly introduced Henry James to the motor car.19 But this Princess is not significantly based on Edith Wharton, because she is clearly not American. Exactly what her nationality may be remains vague in the story, because she says at one point that Berridge may not know that her pen name is “‘Amy Evans,’” author of the startlingly bad The Top of the Tree (a portion of which James obligingly includes), and that she writes “‘in English—which I love, I assure you, as much as you can yourself do’” (V, 251). She has approached Berridge in hopes she might reach “‘your American millions’” (251). Earlier Berridge had wondered at her title, “the Princess of what?” (243), but her jewels, chauffeured car, footman, even her slightly unidiomatic phrasing, suggest she is a French aristocrat who writes in English. “The Velvet Glove” affirms aesthetic ideals similar to those in “Collaboration,” posing them as far preferable to the status symbols of “faded gold” and “magnificent pearls” worn by the Princess. Berridge’s celebrated novel, recently dramatized in Paris and elsewhere to some acclaim, is entitled The Heart of Gold, and that secret source is certainly the literary imagination. Of course, the title of the story and of the Princess’s bad novel refer to an old expression for ruling firmly 19 Jean Frantz Blackall, “Henry and Edith: ‘The Velvet Glove’ as an ‘In’ Joke,” Henry James Review 7:1 (Fall 1985), 21–25. The Princess’s bad novel The Top of the Tree is James’s contemporary reference to and ironic allusion to Edith Wharton’s social reform novel The Fruit of the Tree (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1907).

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but with the appearance of diplomacy. Arthur Lévy in his biography of Napoleon’s personal life wrote in 1893: “The Emperor used to say that the French had to be ruled with an iron fist in a velvet glove.”20 The old saying also refers to the sort of deceptive game the young Lord and the Princess play with Berridge. The metaphor itself suggests a pun on sexual intercourse, which may be applied to many forms of sexual pleasure. In “The Velvet Glove,” James alludes to Wagner as an artistic genius, whose work is capable of provoking sublime, visionary experience that can also delude us. The brevity of James’s reference along with his anti-German aside about “Teutonic tinsel” suggest criticism of Wagner, but James nevertheless uses his music and mythic characters to make a serious point about the power of art to provide transcendent experience, as well as possibly to distinguish the sensuous appeal of music from the analytic powers of literature. Like “Collaboration,” the story has an overtly transnational dimension, focusing on Franco-American cultural differences while mixing in a touch of the Germanic Wagner. Less explicitly than in “Collaboration,” James seems to advocate for the cosmopolitan aspirations of a great artist and his work. The Princess’s novel is finally trivial not only because she is so obsessed with her aristocratic pretensions but also because of her need to promote commercially her work. Although never explained by James, Wagner’s “Teutonic tinsel” seems to imply the composer’s reliance on old Norse, Scandinavian, and Arthurian myths to fabricate German nationalism. If the American author John Berridge is to overcome these limitations, then he should aspire to the transnational ideals of Heidenmauer and Vendemer in “Collaboration.” As in “Collaboration,” the aesthetic ideal in “The Velvet Glove” seems to complement Nietzsche’s idea of the “good European,” even if in James such an idea now seems equally applicable to the “good American,” who like James exemplifies modern cosmopolitanism. James’s tacit advice to the young American novelist in “The Velvet Glove” differs little from what he would offer throughout his career by way of such diverse characters as Daisy Miller, Christopher Newman, Isabel Archer, and Milly Theale: respect European history and culture, but learn to exceed its prejudices of class, religion, and aesthetic taste. James’s literary appropriation of Wagner and his music is even more intriguing when compared with T. S. Eliot’s better-known references to Wagner in his celebrated The Waste Land (1922). The Waste Land is organized around a synthesis of various mythic quests, notably Christ’s Passion and the related Arthurian Grail quest. Franco Moretti considers Eliot’s “mythic method” central not just to modernist literature but the modern world system.21 Eliot himself makes clear that his use of myth draws on the 20 Arthur Lévy, Napoléon intimé (Paris: E. Plon, Nourrit et Cie., 1893), p. 103. The expression also refers to a young wine of excellent promise. 21 Franco Moretti, Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez (London: Verso, 1997), pp. 224–225. Eliot first developed the “mythic method” in his essay, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” The Dial (1923).

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syncretic mythography codified in Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough and popularized in such works as Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, the latter work an explicit source for Eliot’s poem.22 The work of syncretic mythographers from the Enlightenment to modernity is usually understood as fundamentally transnational, insofar as their purposes were to understand archetypal similarities among the world’s different myths and religions. Seeking cultural universals, such as the fertility rituals and stories of seasonal regeneration stressed by Jessie Weston, syncretic mythographers seem to work beyond the boundaries of modern nation states either by stressing prenational legacies or interpreting modern nations’ uses of these traditions. Yet as Hugh Kenner observes: “Wagner, more than Frazer or Miss Weston, presides over the introduction into The Waste Land of the Grail motif.”23 T. S. Eliot’s “mythic method” certainly seems at first glance to match these global, transnational intentions. Beginning with the epigraph from Petronius in Latin quoting the Cumaean Sibyl’s complaint in Greek, the Italian dedication to Ezra Pound, then opening with the Anglican burial rites and concluding with citations from the Sanskrit Upanishads, The Waste Land has been interpreted as a prime example of modern cosmopolitanism and cultural comparatism.24 Eliot’s expatriate status in England as an American raised in St. Louis and educated at Harvard only emphasizes this transnational aspect. Quoting Wagner’s Tristan and Iseult in German in the opening section, “The Burial of the Dead,” transposing the Ring’s Rhine daughters to the Thames and quoting Paul Verlaine’s “Parsifal” (1886) in the third section, “The Fire Sermon,” Eliot specifically uses Wagner for transnational ends. Of course, the main influence of Wagner’s operas on The Waste Land is the structural organization of the poem in terms of the Grail Quest, which is the central motif of Wagner’s last opera, Parsifal. Eliot’s fond memories of his 1911 visit to Munich are a bit odd in a poem published in England only three years after the end of World War I, but these sentiments are often rationalized by Eliot’s aesthetic cosmopolitanism. His nostalgia for King Ludwig II’s Bavaria seems complemented by his quotation in German from Wagner’s Tristan and Iseult, an opera based after all on the English colonization of Ireland. Taken together, Mad Ludwig of Bavaria and British imperialism suggest a tacit criticism of 22 Sir James Georges Frazer, The Golden Bough (London: Penguin, 1996); Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Eliot uses the term “mythic method,” which he attributes to William Butler Yeats, in his review of James Joyce’s Ulysses, “‘Ulysses,’ Order, and Myth,” first published in The Dial in 1923, collected in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), p. 175. 23 Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., 1959), p. 170. 24 See, for example, Michael North, The Political Aesthetics of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 174; Jean-Michel Rabaté, “Tradition and T. S. Eliot,” The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot, ed. David Moody (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 103.

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25

national excess. Ludwig II bankrupts his principality. British colonialism in Ireland was certainly recognized after the Easter Rebellion of 1916 to be a legacy of political unrest. Eliot’s adaptation in “A Game of Chess” (II of The Waste Land) of Ovid’s retelling of King Tereus of Thrace’s misrule in Metamorphoses (VI), focusing especially on his rape of his sister-in-law Philomel and betrayal of his wife Procne, is just one example of how the allusions in The Waste Land convey Eliot’s ideas about proper and improper political leadership. Of course, in these contexts Eliot might well be stressing Wagner’s own mythic method, rather than the German nationalism with which he is commonly identified. Eliot’s allusions to Ludwig II, Wagner, and the ancient King Tereus seem to work as monitory tales in preparation for Eliot’s celebration of Elizabethan England in “The Fire Sermon” (part III of The Waste Land). Allusions to Wagner play a crucial role in this section of the poem. Eliot imports the Rhine daughters from the Ring to sing along the Thames. The modern English river is polluted, as is the surrounding city of London, which is corrupted by the cheap sexual relations of the Irishman Sweeney with Mrs. Porter and the typist with the young man “carbuncular.” Recalling how the classical Philomel is magically transformed from the brutalized victim of her brother-in-law Tereus into the nightingale singing her message of his abuse, Eliot’s Thames maidens sing us back to Elizabeth I’s successful rule of Renaissance England, whose rich culture provides the most frequent allusions in the poem. Indeed, the leitmotif in this section is their song “Weialala leia / Wallala leialala,” which sounds homophonically like Wagner’s “Valhalla,” that home of the ancient gods destroyed at the end of Götterdämmerung, the fourth opera in the Ring cycle.26 Eliot represents the song of Philomel transformed into a nightingale in “A Game of Chess” as “‘Jug Jug’ to dirty ears” (WL, 74, line 103), but the poet’s goal is clearly to redeem the ugly song of Philomel violation with his own aesthetic beauty. The mellifluous sound of the Rhine/ Thames maidens’ song appears to be the beginning of this new poetic transcendence in part III, “The Fire Sermon.” That promise of a new poetic era is suggested by Eliot’s quotation from Verlaine’s “Parsifal”: “Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole!” (WL, 79, 202), just before Eliot echoes “Jug Jug” from “A Game of Chess”: Twit twit twit Jug jug jug jug jug jug So rudely forced. Tereu (WL, 79, 203–206) 25 See Herbert Kunst, Wagner, the King, and “The Waste Land” (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1967). 26 T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, Collected Poems: 1909–1935 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1958), p. 82 (lines 277–278). Further references to The Waste Land in the text as WL.

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Philomel’s inarticulable complaint of her rape now begins to emerge as melodic, if not yet comprehensible poetry. Verlaine’s poetry prefaces this metamorphosis, as if to remind the educated reader that poetic transcendence can emerge from the ruins of the modern waste land. Verlaine is simply quoting in French “the joyous chorus of boys who sing from the cupola of Monsalvat, the Fisher King’s castle, when the Grail has been recovered at the triumphal end of” Wagner’s opera Parsifal.27 Patricia Sloane interprets the different quotations and allusions to Wagner in The Waste Land as heralding the cultural revival that Eliot promises will redeem us from the wasteland condition (Sloane, 45). For Sloane, Eliot’s first quotation from Wagner, which are the lines from Tristan und Isolde quoted in German in part I, “The Burial of the Dead,” and used as the epigraph to this chapter, point ahead in Eliot’s poetic journey from modern ruin to renewal. Sung by a young seaman from the masthead following the prelude in Wagner’s opera, then repeated as a refrain at the beginning of the second scene, Wagner’s lyrics concerning a fresh breeze that will facilitate the homeward voyage seem echoed by Eliot’s Thames maidens, who point the reader both to modern ruin and yet recall the Elizabethan Age, as well as Verlaine’s French version of Wagner’s youth celebrating the return of the Holy Grail in Parsifal. Eliot’s Valhalla is the English Renaissance, when the “Virgin Queen” Elizabeth I provided the political contexts that enabled the arts to flourish and helped consolidate the state. “The Fire Sermon” introduces Elizabeth I floating down the Thames on her royal barge, reminding the reader of how her reign consolidated England as a naval power, mythologized in its defeat of the Spanish Armada. She is accompanied by “Leicester,” Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester (1531–1558), with whom she was said to have been in love but whom she rejected for the sake of her authority as Queen of England (WL, 82, l. 279).28 In corrupt modern London, a voice speaks a few lines later to recall: “‘Richmond and Kew / Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees / Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe’” (WL, 83, ll. 293–295). It is not entirely clear whether Eliot is referring to one of Elizabeth’s rumored sexual experiences or to another instance of modern licentiousness, but Eliot’s own version of the Buddha’s “Fire Sermon” and Augustine’s account of transcending the sins of the flesh in his Confessions suggest that strong political rule requires the sublimation of sexual desire as well as the transcendence of mere commercialism. Wagner drew on Arthurian legends, such as the Grail Quest, to provide a cultural foundation for German nationalism. In a similar fashion, Eliot uses 27 Patricia Sloane, “Richard Wagner’s Arthurian Sources, Jessie L. Weston, and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land,” Arthuriana 11:1 (Spring 2001), 30. Further references in the text as: Sloane. 28 Eliot’s source for the rumors about Elizabeth and Leicester is likely James Anthony Froude’s History of England (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1893), p. 381.

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his references to Wagner to affirm English nationalism. His cultural ambitions in these respects do not seem very distant from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s revival of the old Arthurian legends in his Idylls of the King (1859–1885). Tennyson, Wagner, and Eliot all draw on legends without specific roots in their respective nations, but each understands that such stories could in fact be grafted to the purposes of nationalism. Eliot’s borrowings from Buddhist, Hindu, German, French, Irish, Greek, Roman, and many other cultural heritages work to reaffirm British imperial culture at the historical moment of its decline. More overtly than Eliot, Wagner affirmed German nationalism and considered many of his works to provide foundational myths for a fantastic “Teutonic race.” As Paul Lawrence Rose has argued, Wagner’s early reputation as a revolutionary is compatible with such nationalism, because: “Wagner believed … in a peculiarly German form of revolution in which the sacred German race was to blaze a path to freedom.”29 Wagner’s mythopoeia is compatible with Eliot’s later “mythic method,” and both demonstrate how easily such stories draw upon foreign sources but in the interests of narrowly defined states, which would police their physical and social borders in increasingly violent and exclusionary ways in the twentieth century. Both Wagner and Eliot were cosmopolitans in their personal and professional lives, but each worked to incorporate global cultures into a distinct national ethos. Henry James’s literary references to Wagner work toward a different goal than Eliot’s allusions. James uses Wagner to formulate James’s own cosmopolitan ideas, stripping from Wagner the “Teutonic tinsel” and affirming his popularity across national boundaries. Although James knew intimately that Wagner worked with an international group of musicians, librettists, and set designers, James tacitly criticizes Wagner for being too German in the cultural aims of his aesthetic work. In this regard, James agrees with Nietzsche’s more explicit criticism of Wagner, even if James was probably unaware of Nietzsche’s late writings on the composer. Despite the great differences between Nietzsche’s philosophy and James’s aesthetics, both figures “suggest that … these two ostensibly alien figures provide us with a way of grasping … the complex and often contradictory cultural phenomenon we have come to identify as modernism” (Donadio, 8). The same conclusion might be drawn regarding the relationship between Wagner’s music and Eliot’s poetics, but their similarities point toward a different modernism. Both Wagner and Eliot advocate strong political leadership and condemn racial impurity even as they endorse cultural hybridity. Their respective uses of classical, Norse, Old French, modern European, and other cultural heritages work more by way of appropriation than by virtue of recognizing differences and working toward the kind of mutuality that James celebrates in “Collaboration.” In The Poetics of Fascism: Ezra Pound, 29 Paul Lawrence Rose, Wagner: Race and Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 2.

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T. S. Eliot, Paul de Man, Paul Morrison interprets the aesthetic aspects in Pound and Eliot’s poetry that justify his judgment of them as proto-fascist writers.30 In Pound’s case, such aesthetic inclinations led to his political support and radio broadcasts for Mussolini, as well as his eventual trial for treason in the U.S. Morrison argues that in Eliot’s case his fascist tendencies were redirected into his “attempts to revive for the modern world the premodern, precapitalist experience of the primacy of the theological, the properly collective energies of an older dispensation” (Morrison, 10). Henry James’s criticism of Wagner in “Adina,” “Collaboration,” and “The Velvet Glove” does not tackle such large problems as incipient fascism and the cultural uses of myth to support ultra-nationalism in the fin de siècle. By the same token, his literary treatment of Wagner is not personal. He understands the powerful appeal of Wagner’s operas and recognizes emotional responses might easily take the place of ideas. Insofar as he competes with Wagner, James does so in these stories in terms of different notions of cosmopolitanism. Magical rings or imperial jewels from past empires may well be deceptive talismans for modern political powers and interpersonal relations. “Adina” warns readers to separate the melodrama of opera and romantic literature from the complex realities of everyday life. The national types on which many cultural works rely do not fit James’s characters. The American Sam Scrope turns out to be potentially as greedy, jealous, and vindictive as an ancient Roman ruler, whereas Angelo Beati is neither a simple Italian peasant nor an Italian gigolo. Adina Waddington may appear outwardly to be a frail and pale Protestant, unwilling to wear the imperial jewel, but her love for the Catholic Angelo is strong and enduring. Whereas Wagner’s Ring cycle directs us to the past for spurious legends to bolster our present actions, James buries the priceless Roman intaglio in the Tiber and calls for better stories to represent our modern, transnational circumstances. In “Collaboration” and “The Velvet Glove,” James touches lightly on the popular debates surrounding Wagner’s influence in the years following his death in 1883. The German composer Heidenmauer’s enthusiastic collaboration with the French poet Vendemer draws on the enthusiasm of French Symbolists for Wagner, as Paul Verlaine’s “Parsifal” exemplifies. James’s very plot indicates that transnational, multimedia cultural work might help heal political wounds between nations, such as those remaining from the Franco-Prussian War. Even the homoerotic subtext of the story hints at how art might offer a better sublimation of sexual desire than the erotics of warfare. “The Velvet Glove” has much less to tell us about James’s attitudes toward Wagner than “Adina” and “Collaboration,” except for its telling reference to Wagner’s “cheap Teutonic tinsel” (VG, 239). James suggests that the tenor’s performance of a few Wagnerian arias may help the 30 Paul Morrison, The Poetics of Fascism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Paul de Man (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 10.

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audience avoid the elaborate theatricality of Wagner’s operas, hence celebrating the beauty of his music while dispensing with his mythology. Even so, the power of Wagner’s music tricks the American author Berridge into viewing the Princess as a sublime Kundry, confusing art and reality. Once again, James appears to warn his readers about the tendency of Wagnerian opera— and perhaps all powerful music—to substitute rapture for knowledge, reinforcing James’s own commitments to psychological realism in the medium of literary language. In this latter regard, James may betray his competition with Wagner, but it is hardly mere jealousy of Wagner’s charismatic hold on James’s friend Paul Zhukovsky. James understands the cultural power of Wagnerian opera, especially as it plays upon its audience’s emotions. I do not want to exaggerate the importance of James’s use of Wagner in three stories largely forgotten by scholars. The allusions to Wagner can easily be taken as atmospheric, bare touches to contribute to a scene or mood. Yet the very popular quality of these stories speaks also to the ways James insinuated himself into popular cultural debates, threading more serious issues, such as Nietzsche addresses in his pamphlets critical of Wagner, into stories properly understood as entertainments, rather than profound literary works. The immense difference separating these three stories from Eliot’s The Waste Land is also suggestive, because James’s more nuanced judgment of Wagner in his casual references to his music underscores Eliot’s uncritical acceptance of Wagner’s genius. It seems incredible that Eliot could have invoked positively the faded glory of Ludwig II’s Bavaria in an English poem written immediately after World War I. Equally surprising is Eliot’s appropriation of Wagnerian themes and archetypes—the Fisher King, the Grail Quest, Christ’s Resurrection—in a poem dedicated to the renewal of the Elizabethan Age and the British culture it once sustained. It is no exaggeration to write that for all his criticism of the modern age Eliot offers no negative judgment of Wagner, instead drawing on Wagner’s genius as centrally as he does on St. Augustine’s Christian devotion to inspire his poem. Great art need not always be politically correct, especially as we judge in retrospect such literary monuments as The Waste Land. Yet there is something disturbing about Eliot’s dramatic claims to transcend the wasteland condition when we measure such aims in terms of the poet’s unwillingness to engage recent debates on key issues. Wagner’s reputation after his death in 1883 may be the least of these big ideas, especially when we consider Eliot’s revival of Christian values as a response to secular humanist values he treats so reductively: commercialism, sex, war, cultural illiteracy. Isn’t the Victorian era notable for the struggles between ascendant science and tottering religion? Eliot’s appeal for a return to Christian values seems almost comical at the end of an age marked by such fierce debates. In a similar sense, Eliot’s complex weave of different allusions and quotations seems nearly inseparable from the cultural work done in the Victorian era to legitimate British imperialism. With his repeated trivialization of popular culture—“O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag”—Eliot justifies the

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complexity of his poetry by appealing only to the sophisticated, polylingual reader (WL, p. 75, l. 128). In his curious remembrance “In Memory of Henry James” (1918), Eliot claims infamously that James “had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.”31 Yet at the end of that paragraph, Eliot concludes: “He is the most intelligent man of his generation” (111). Eliot seems to recognize in James’s unique intelligence an ability to think in literary terms that distinguishes all of his writings, judging James as a writer of “merciless clairvoyance” (110). Eliot’s purpose is to establish his own descent from James, whom Eliot claims “being everywhere a foreigner was probably an assistance to his native wit” (111). Even so, Eliot emphasizes James’s American qualities, probably to stress Eliot’s successful transcendence of them: “James is positively a continuator of the New England genius” (112). Put another way, Eliot’s Henry James is an expatriate, whereas Eliot aspires to the cosmopolitanism exemplified by the cultural diversity of The Waste Land. Yet these three popular stories by James put the matter of worldliness in somewhat different terms. To be sure, Eliot is not very American in The Waste Land; he is decidedly too English and not cosmopolitan at all. James struggles in these three stories with what it means in three different decades to do cultural work across geopolitical borders, to be genuinely “a foreigner everywhere” (Eliot, 111). The simplicity of the forms he employs in these three stories betrays the complexity of his respective considerations of how the American might best learn from the classical past, Franco-German cultural alliances might overcome political enmities, and social status and cultural capital need to be reconsidered in a global age. James does not settle these important issues, but he poses them as questions for his readers, both in his own times and our own.

31 T. S. Eliot, “In Memory of Henry James,” first published in The Dial (January 1918), collected as “On Henry James” [1918], in The Question of Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Frederick W. Dupee (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1945), p. 110.

Part II

Our Times

5

Caged Heat Feminist Rebellion in Henry James’s In the Cage and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window

Any woman, like any movie, will do to fulfill man’s “need.” —Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (2005)

In the classic women’s prison film Caged Heat (1974), imprisoned women embody the repressive state-apparatus that constructs all women as subalterns to a colonial system of gender, class, and racial hierarchies. Fighting their feminine guards and each other, in the process exposing titillating body parts, these criminalized women act out the systemic violence that defines them while offering the elusive promise of feminine emancipation. Were they to succeed, then the entire patriarchal system would have to be overturned, so their cinematic rebellion must be recontained by erotic voyeurism. The pleasure masculine viewers take from Caged Heat exemplifies Laura Mulvey’s famous reading of film narrative in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), in which she argues that feminine characters erotically fetishize the viewer’s own anxieties regarding political impotence and thereby help reassert masculine authority.1 Projecting their profound inadequacies onto the screen, masculine viewers find feminine characters sublimating their problems, rather than providing any effective catharsis. Like other members of the Screen group of the mid-1970s, Mulvey interpreted cinema’s technical innovations as adapted to patriarchal processes of psychological socialization. In particular, Mulvey judges what she terms the “narcissistic scopophilia” of cinematic viewing to reinforce subject-formation that depends on its response to the castration complex (Mulvey, 7). From Sigmund Freud to Jacques Lacan, subject-formation was interpreted as an inherently phallocentric process, in which masculine fear of castration was overcome by the gendering of women as other, lacking the phallus, and thereby representing the unconscious fears of masculine impotence. From the scantily clad feminine prisoners in Caged Heat to the allure of the celebrity actor, both on and off the screen, cinematic femininity performs 1

Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16:3 (1975), 6–18. Further references in the text as: Mulvey.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003297987-6

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masculine desire not simply by promising sexual satisfaction but more profoundly confirming patriarchal power to reproduce social reality. Thus second-wave feminists like Mulvey argued that mere demystification of cinematic imagery, such as criticism of the pornographic exploitation of women in Caged Heat, would do nothing to overcome systemic sexism in modern Western societies. Advertising for Caged Heat promised that “white hot desires” could melt “cold prison steel,” but the feminine prisoners direct their “riot and revenge” at the feminine warden (Barbara Steele), effectively leaving patriarchal power intact.2 Second-wave feminists developed similar arguments about the representation of feminine gender in print narratives. Judith Fetterley’s The Resisting Reader (1978), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), and Nina Auerbach’s The Woman and the Demon (1982) are three influential examples of feminist scholarship that interpreted the ways Anglo-American literature constructed feminine characters as subaltern in order to reaffirm threatened masculinity. None of these scholars judges imaginative fiction to be inherently patriarchal, but all assume the adaptability of literature to the conventions of the dominant ideology. For these analysts, feminine illness, madness, physical or ethical weakness are symptomatic of masculine insecurities, which are especially notable in times when women organize for greater political, civil, and economic rights. Whereas in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Mulvey judges masculine desire to be integral to the cinematic apparatus, most secondwave feminists offered counter-narratives to literary patriarchy. Fetterley suggests that by resisting the literary imperatives that construct an “implied reader” in Irving, Hawthorne, Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, James, and Mailer, the feminist reader can challenge not simply masculine literature but the patriarchal order itself. Thus in James’s The Bostonians, the resisting reader turns from James’s intended protagonist, Basil Ransom, to the relationship between Verena Tarrant and Olive Chancellor overtly satirized by James, but carrying the “latent” “revolutionary message,” “whether [James] knew it or not,” of “the central elements of radical feminism.”3 Gilbert and Gubar would follow their critical treatment of Anglo-American patriarchy with No Man’s Land, in which they construct an alternative tradition of women’s literature, which becomes more visible once patriarchal assumptions of literary value have been challenged.4 These issues may seem to belong to the bygone era of second-wave feminism, when patriarchy could be treated in a monologic way and feminism 2 3 4

Caged Heat, dir. and writ. Jonathan Demme, prods. Samuel W. Gelfman, Evelyn Purcell, Roger Corman (New World Pictures, 1974). (http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Caged_Heat) Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. 152. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).

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was understood as a unified political and cultural movement. Third-wave feminisms, gay studies, and queer theories have complicated these questions, in part by challenging the effectiveness of the kinds of resistance proposed by Fetterley. Is it as easy as she suggests to change our conventions of reading or must the text already carry within itself that tendency, as Fetterley herself hints in her interpretation of the radical feminist subtext of The Bostonians? If so, are such inclinations present in every text produced within the ideological dominion of patriarchy or are certain texts more unstable than others and thus more likely to challenge both their own aesthetic and the broader social conventions on which they rely? Does it follow, as Gilbert and Gubar appear to argue in No Man’s Land, that such critical texts tend to be produced primarily by women or can such instabilities be equally, in some cases more instructive, when produced as a consequence of masculine anxieties about changing social reality, especially as it affects conventional gender roles? We are still interested in these questions, in part because we do not yet know how to answer them. The persistence of these issues helps explain our fascination with masculine artists, like Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock, who built substantial reputations on their subtle representations of memorable feminine characters and abused femininity in general. François Truffaut helped establish Hitchcock’s fame by interpreting him as an auteur with a coherent cinematic oeuvre.5 James initiates the sort of cultural modernism, distinguished both by its attention to the growing social and political importance of women, which I think Hitchcock concludes. Together with Chapter 4, this chapter interprets James as a modernist, not just a pre- or proto-modernist. James’s two short stories “Collaboration” and “The Velvet Glove” in Chapter 4 hardly qualify as examples of avant-garde modernism, but James’s responses to Wagner place him in cultural conversation with T. S. Eliot’s view of the composer in The Waste Land, published only thirteen years after “The Velvet Glove.” The broader issues in Chapter 4 are how cultural work contributes to nationalism, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism; these topics belong to James’s times and our own. In this chapter, we have entered fully the cultural modernism and wider modernization process that dates roughly from James’s In the Cage (1898) to Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). In their concern with other media, their self-consciousness about the problem of communication, and their focus on working women, both works belong to the modernist era that continues to inform our postmodern and global situation. 5

François Truffaut, with the collaboration of Helen G. Scott, Hitchcock (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967). In his own subsequent directorial work and in his famous interviews with Hitchcock included in Hitchcock (1967), Truffaut helped establish French New Wave Cinema, which relied on the central control of the director as auteur.

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Both author and director employ exceptionally self-conscious techniques, ranging from the invariable presence of the narratorial “I” in James and the signature appearance of Hitchcock in each of his films to their respective tendencies to thematize literary and cinematic production as central to their plots. What is remarkable about James’s and Hitchcock’s works, albeit hardly unique to them, is their interest in and sympathy for their feminine characters, as well as their tendency to represent their putative masculine protagonists as lacking the usual qualities of manliness. In the final analysis, however, neither Henry James nor Alfred Hitchcock quite surrenders his own semiotic authority to his empowered feminine characters, subordinating even the most successful of them to the specific talents and techniques commanded by the novelist and the film director. Hitchcock was certainly not joking when he recommended that actors be “treated as cattle,” presumably to be herded by the director, and many anecdotes from his long career support the idea that successful film-making depends on the director’s manipulation of his cast.6 Henry James always understood his characters as figments of his commanding imagination, verifying its power and thus his genius. Finally, James’s and Hitchcock’s feminine characters cannot be distinguished from their authors’ very ambivalent relations with traditional masculinity. Whether or not Henry James was actively gay in his personal life, he indisputably challenges traditional gender roles in most of his fiction. Often known for his ribald wit, even sexist jokes, on the set and in his personal life, Hitchcock repeatedly satirizes conventional masculinity and represents many of his masculine characters as regressive and infantile, less interested in heterosexual romance than in repressed Oedipal fantasies. In his personal life, Hitchcock was deeply divided about his own relations to women. In his biography of Hitchcock, Donald Spoto observes that Hitchcock was “fascinated with the techniques of conventional and unconventional sex,” yet “he recoiled from physical and emotional intimacy like a child before a dark and frightening forest, retreating instead into a private world of fantasies, which were exposed in his films and sometimes in impolite conversations.”7 As James does so often in his fiction, Hitchcock seems to split personal qualities into masculine and feminine characters in his films, projecting his regressive traits as masculine and his desired qualities as feminine. James and Hitchcock focus on trapped, even imprisoned, women who seem at first to exemplify the fetishistic qualities analyzed by Mulvey, but who struggle dramatically to replace their commodified bodies with their own abilities to act and choose—that is, with subjective agency. In short, James and Hitchcock undo the systemic logics of patriarchy working 6 7

Charlotte Chandler, It’s Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock—A Personal Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005), pp. 25–26. Donald Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1983), pp. 328–329.

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through print literature and cinema by enabling their feminine characters to talk back, allowing them to embody not just masculine desire but their own psychic and cognitive complexities. In so doing, these characters help expose the processes of patriarchal voyeurism, subverting it in the interests of different incorporations. A wide range of works by James and Hitchcock meet these very loose criteria, so my particular selection of James’s In the Cage (1898) and Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) are neither exceptional nor unique cases. Each text does foreground explicitly feminine commodification and masculine voyeurism, relating both to broader processes of technological innovation and economic modernization. Both James’s and Hitchcock’s characteristic self-reflexivity implicates print literature and cinema, respectively, in these new technological and thus economic means of social production, offering particularly astute, albeit historically limited, interpretations of the social construction of gender, sexuality, and agency. The unnamed telegraphist in James’s In the Cage, patronizingly dubbed “our young lady” throughout the novella, seems to epitomize femininity imprisoned by the social, economic, and even scopic conventions of late Victorian patriarchy (C, 372).8 Working every day at her post “in framed and wired confinement” in the corner of Cocker’s Grocery, she is compared to “a guinea-pig or a magpie,” with the added aggravation of the sexual harassment she must endure by the masculine counter-clerks. In fact, she is engaged to one of the former clerks at Cocker’s, Mr. Mudge, whose unromantic name matches his matrimonial pragmatism to combine incomes, move to suburban Chalk Farm, and save three shillings per week on rent. Trapped in her working-class situation, literally caged in her everyday labor, figuratively imprisoned by her personal circumstances caring for an alcoholic mother and her future with Mudge, the telegraphist seems to be Henry James’s negative response to the emancipatory promise of women in the workplace. Her position as telegraphist places her at the center of new technologies of social communication, offering her the possibility of power equivalent to James’s own. James was deeply anxious about the rise of new media competitive with more traditional literature, and he often linked new media with the growing power of women. Journalism, of course, was one of his favorite targets, as were photography and advertising. Generally, James focuses on the form and content of the new media, but he also understood that their technologies granted their practitioners special knowledge equivalent to the novelist’s insight into his craft. In the Cage plays with the idea that the person who understands the new technologies of communication may well have access to powers even greater than the literary author’s command of 8

Henry James, In the Cage, vol. 11, The Novels and Tales of Henry James, New York Edition, 26 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908), p. 372. Further references in the text as: IC. I am indebted to Patrick O’Donnell, who stresses James’s use of “our young lady” in the novella in “James’s Birdcage/ Hitchcock’s Birds,” “Seeing James Seeing,” ed. Lynda Zwinger, Special issue of Arizona Quarterly 62:3 (Autumn 2006), p. 50.

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style, rhetoric, and form. In the case of telegraphy, which had been developed to speed and encrypt military secrets, James had selected a particularly appropriate technology, albeit one that was more than sixty years old by 1898.9 Yet the telegraphist seems to waste her opportunity by using access to secrets of the aristocracy to fantasize some impossible class mobility. Imagining herself in love with the callous Captain Everard and able to compete for his affections with high-society women, like Lady Bradeen, “our young lady” appears only to expose her naiveté about the power of her personal charms and her command of the social capital of telegraphy. Internalizing the romantic lives of the aristocracy, she interpellates her own status as servant to their higher purposes, acting out their melodramatic affairs and thereby granting them importance. With the potential to publicize the secret corruption and triviality of the ruling class, the telegraphist instead celebrates their fashionable lives, anticipating the later cult of celebrity through which cinema, sports, and other late-modern spectacles would advertise themselves.10 In Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Lisa Fremont’s (Grace Kelly’s) situation resembles the telegraphist’s, even if Lisa appears to have more in common with Lady Bradeen and her social circle. As a fashion model, Lisa Fremont is little more than a mannequin displaying the current fashions that help legitimate the ruling class. Lisa’s elegant commodification finds its unconscious representation in the body of Anna Thorwald (Irene Winston), the invalid who is murdered, dismembered, buried, and drowned by her husband, Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr). More obviously, Lisa’s desirable body finds its double in the ballerina, Miss Torso (Georgine Darcy), who dances in her underwear, entertains only men in her apartment, and unwittingly provides the protagonist, L. B. “Jeff” Jeffries (James Stewart), with voyeuristic titillation. Confined to a wheelchair and his Greenwich Village apartment with a broken leg, the photojournalist Jeffries is surrounded by feminine characters who exemplify the prevailing stereotypes of women in the Cold War U.S.: the sardonic nurse, Stella (Thelma Ritter); Miss Lonelyhearts (Judith Evelyn), who will eventually connect with the songwriter (Ross Bagdasarian); the sculptor with her hearing aid (Jesslyn Fax); the newlywed woman (Havis Davenport) initially consumed by sexual desire then reduced to nagging her husband (Rand Harper). All of these characters reinforce the conventional assumption that U.S. women are subordinate to men. The invalid Mrs. Thorwald epitomizes feminine helplessness and dependency, and her healthier avatars embody and enact masculine desire, itself a perverse élan vital. 9 The actual date for the “invention” of the telegraph is notoriously difficult to pinpoint, but Samuel F. B. Morse’s experiments in the mid-1830s culminated in successful demonstrations of the long-distance transmission of messages by 1837. See Carleton Mabee, The American Leonardo: A Life of Samuel F. B. Morse (New York: Octagon Books, 1969). 10 John Carlos Rowe, The Other Henry James (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 155–180.

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In the Cage and Rear Window thus invite interpretations based on Laura Mulvey’s thesis. Feminized through the very spectatorial dynamics of the novella and the film, either by being forced to follow the telegraphist’s partial understanding of her aristocratic customers or by even more explicitly witnessing through Jeffries’ telephoto lens their doubles in a series of commodified women, viewers can work out their anxieties regarding gender and sexuality in their different historical moments. At the end of the nineteenth century, James’s novella offers the possible empowerment of working women and the working class in general by their access to new technologies of communication, only to reassure the patriarchal, bourgeois Victorian audience that most workers will misuse this opportunity. Hitchcock’s film entertains the social impact of the increased numbers of women in the wartime workforce by giving Lisa Fremont a career in modeling and the courage to investigate the suspicious disappearance of Mrs. Thorwald. Yet the middle-class U.S. gender hierarchies are restored neatly in the film, because Lisa follows the directions of her lover, Jeff Jeffries, aiming to please him in the interests of marriage. Arrested by the police for breaking and entering Thorwald’s apartment, Lisa is bailed out by Stella, Jeff’s nurse, using all of Jeff’s available cash. When she is assaulted by Lars Thorwald who surprises her in his apartment, she still can gesture with her hands behind her back to Jeff that she has indeed found Mrs. Thorwald’s missing wedding ring. Displaying it on her own hand, Lisa delivers a clear message to her reluctant fiancé. In The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory, Tania Modleski begins by challenging Mulvey’s thesis.11 Aligning her own work with third-wave feminists, like Linda Williams, Modleski wants to know what happens when a “woman” is “allowed to look for herself,” thereby escaping the fetishism of the cinematic image or what we might term the broader processes of feminine reification. Although Mulvey does not refer directly to Marxian notions of reification, the fetishistic use of the feminine in film to represent masculine anxieties lends itself well to the general notion of capitalist reification. In the classic analysis by Georg Lukács, the alienation of the manufactured object begins in the system of capitalist production, such as the Fordist assembly line, wherein the actual cooperation of workers is fragmented into the repetitive tasks of isolated individuals. The finished product is further alienated from workers by a market system that transforms it into a mysteriously independent object of desire, now embellished by advertising, so that the worker yearns for an object he himself actually produced.12

11 Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1989), pp. 13–15. 12 Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972), pp. 83–109.

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In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin interprets film production and acting itself as further elaborations of capitalism’s perverse magic. Unlike the stage actor, the film “actor’s work” is “split … into a series of mountable episodes,” which can be completed “in a sequence of separate shootings which may take hours at the studio” and combined with scenes “shot weeks later when outdoor scenes are taken.”13 Even though the production of a film is inescapably the collaboration of many workers, the actor in particular experiences the fragmentation of his or her labor in relationship to the final film. The actor’s relationship to his own labor reflects that of the industrial worker; both discover the final “product” is alien to them: “While facing the camera [the actor] knows that ultimately he will face the public, the consumers who constitute the market” (231). Benjamin offers, however, an interesting distinction between the film actor and the ordinary worker, suggesting that the cultural work of film exceeds considerably the processes of reification in industrial production: “This market, where he offers not only his labor but also his whole self, his heart and soul, is beyond his reach. During the shooting he has as little contact with it as any article made in a factory” (231). In particular, Benjamin notes how the “cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the ‘spell of the personality,’ the phony spell of a commodity” (231). Previously understood as a mysteriously desirable and yet elusive object, the commodity form is animated in film, given the “heart and soul” the actor surrenders to the directorial narrative. Such appropriation extends even to the actor’s personal life beyond his labor, so that the “spell of personality,” subordinated to help market the film and the actor’s career, is equivalent to the “phony spell of a commodity.” Jeff Jeffries tells the insurance nurse, Stella, that he cannot marry Lisa, because she is “too perfect,” seeming to confirm Mulvey’s thesis that the cinematic feminine is unreal, a projection of masculine desire. Of course, Lisa’s perfection is difficult to separate from Grace Kelly’s well-established reputation for sophisticated beauty. Modleski argues that Lisa’s perfection shows how she exceeds Jeff’s need for a woman who is inferior to him and thus in need of his phallic supplementarity to provide marriage, children, the nuclear and patriarchal family. Modleski argues that the murder plot of the film allegorizes patriarchal desire to project its own castration anxiety onto woman, now reduced to the dismembered parts of Anna Thorwald. But she disputes the logical conclusion of Mulvey’s thesis that Rear Window is concerned primarily with “re-membering … the woman according to the little boy’s fantasy that the female is no different from himself” (Modleski, 76). For Modleski, the film’s concluding representation of Jeffries “sleeping 13 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 230. Further references in the text as: Benjamin.

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like a baby” in his wheelchair, now with two broken legs, offers us the thin veneer of a patriarchal psychonarrative, easily dismissed by socially active and independent women. Warning us not to confuse Jeffries’ voyeurism with Hitchcock’s film-making, Modleski points out that what Jeffries views in the rear windows of his neighbors’ apartments is infantile wish-fulfillment or “day-dreaming,” whereas Hitchcock uses the cinematic frame to provide a more adult account of gender relations (Modleski, 143). Jeffries learned his skills as a photojournalist during World War II. In the background of Lisa displaying a beautiful gown in his apartment, the viewer can see framed on the wall wartime photos taken by Jeff (see Figure 5.1). In contrast, Lisa poses with a child’s maple chair on her right and a framed photograph of a child on the table to her left (see Figure 5.1).14 Yet Jeff’s abilities to survive a war hardly protect him against everyday urban violence. Much as he relies on his phallic telephoto lens to invade his neighbors’ privacy, his scopic, psychic, and physical powers are extremely limited. 1950s’ U.S. culture certainly infantilizes women, but it is Jeff Jeffries in Hitchcock’s film who is the real baby, not Lisa Fremont. After Lisa is arrested for breaking and entering and while Stella has gone to bail her out, Thorwald forces his way into Jeffries’ apartment, turning the tables on his adversary. Jeffries’ famous metacinematic defense of momentarily blinding Thorwald with successive flashes from his camera is finally ineffective; Thorwald rushes Jeffries and violently forces him out the apartment’s window. His fall broken by the police, his injured body cradled by Lisa and Stella, Jeffries is symbolically castrated once again and ends the film by underscoring his own identification with the invalid, Anna Thorwald, as well as the infantilized women of that era. For all his technological skills, Jeffries displays little more power than that curious little dog Thorwald kills when it begins to dig in the garden where he has buried parts of his wife.

Figure 5.1 Grace Kelly as Lisa Fremont, the epitome of feminine beauty 14 Insofar as the child’s chair and the framed photo of a child are part of the furnishings of Jeff Jeffries’ apartment, the viewer may also conclude that they refer to him, not Lisa, whose beauty in this particular scene merely highlights them. By contrast, her body partially blocks the wartime photojournalism on the wall, as if displacing his scopic authority.

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Figure 5.2 Jeff’s phallic telephoto lens

Figure 5.3 Lisa looking for evidence in Thorwald’s apartment

The real talents of detection belong to Lisa, who concludes that Anna Thorwald would never have left her purse or wedding ring at home while traveling to visit her relatives. Even as Jeffries imagines he is “directing” Lisa as she looks for evidence in Thorwald’s apartment, viewers are encouraged by the real director, Hitchcock, to see Lisa as the capable investigator. In his effort to save Lisa, Jeffries calls the police, causing her to be arrested by a more powerful masculine force; when Lisa and Stella “save” Jeffries, they succeed with the help of the police. Whereas L. B. “Jeff” Jeffries’ very name suggests either corporate anonymity—L. B.—or the attenuated identity of someone with the same given and surnames—Jeff Jeffries, Lisa Fremont’s surname evokes psychic and sexual “freedom” and the militarism of her namesake, John Charles Frémont (1813–1890), Western explorer and U.S. claimant of California during the Mexican–American War. Stella’s Latin name, “star,” connects her ironically with the Hollywood system of theatrical celebrity to which the plain-spoken character does not belong, but hints at her moral success in caring for Jeffries, saving Lisa, helping solve the mystery, and contributing to their romantic union. Indeed, their antagonist’s mythic name, Thorwald (Thor’s Wood or Wilderness), demands more aggressive defenses than are possible with Jeff’s flash-bulbs and telephoto lens.

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Yet just what constitutes Lisa Fremont’s power to defeat Thorwald, presumably protecting the neighbors from his violence, is somewhat more difficult to define. Lisa is an able interpreter of visual evidence—the dead little dog, Anna Thorwald’s purse and wedding ring—and of the psychic realities behind such signs, especially masculine sexual desire’s entanglement with the human will-to-power. Lisa is assisted, of course, by Stella, who nurses both Jeffries’ body and his roving gaze. Stella’s initial common sense and regular admonitions of Jeffries’ voyeurism soon give way to participation in the detective work, facilitating Lisa’s role in the solution. Stella is often identified with the Law—both the psychic law regulating sexual relations and the more practical law of the police—and thus the figure of mediation between Jeffries and Lisa as well as between the audience and the viewers within the film. Judith Roof considers Stella a double both for Jeffries and Lisa, thus suggesting a transgendered character, despite the fact that Stella is married.15 By playing a feminine sidekick to Lisa, Stella enhances Lisa’s agency in the film, enabling the two of them to take over the conventional roles of the masculine detective and his assistant (Holmes and Watson, for example). Spending long hours in Jeffries’ darkened apartment, Stella becomes Lisa’s alter ego, even as Stella’s growing participation in Jeffries’ voyeurism identifies her with him. What Roof terms Stella’s “central secondariness” reinforces the instability of conventional gender roles in the film, allowing feminine stereotypes—Stella, the nurse; Lisa, the fashion model—to assume masculine powers (Roof, 98). Feminist interpreters of Rear Window who have challenged Mulvey’s thesis often stress the bisexuality of masculine and feminine characters as Hitchcock’s suggestion that we are free to view from different gender positions, as Lisa, Stella, and Jeffries do in the course of the film (Modleski, 143). Judith Roof argues that the ways in which the cinematic apparatus encourages “viewers [to] pleasurably cross-identify” may not be indicative of cultural instabilities in traditional gender roles but in fact work to regulate those roles (Roof, 90). The female viewer may identify with Jeffries, as Stella appears to do, primarily to control her desire for agency and independence. Men are, after all, powerless, childish, and in need of care; in these respects, men share many of the qualities feminine viewers are ideologically urged to find in themselves. Such viewers’ identifications with Jeffries are thus against their own interests, insofar as they mitigate the power of patriarchy. To be sure, Jeffries is rendered curiously defenseless, vulnerable, celibate, and infantile in Rear Window, qualities reinforced by Stella and Lisa, whose complementary actions may perversely prompt cross-identifications by male viewers. Yet far from these possibilities offering structural changes in conventional gender roles, they work instead merely to distract us from the real source of authority in the film. With its overdetermination of metacinematic devices—it is nothing if not a film about viewing – Rear Window locates authority in those who can command the 15 Judith Roof, All about Thelma and Eve: Sidekicks and Third Wheels (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), p. 98.

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representational system. Lisa and Stella work for Alfred Hitchcock, who substitutes another reality for the appearances of the quotidian lives first revealed to us in Jeffries’ neighbors’ apartments. Hitchcock, not Doyle, is the real law in this film, much as Dupin, not the Prefect of Police, represents the poetic law in Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” In a similar manner, we can interpret James’s framing of the telegraphist’s romantic fantasies about Captain Everard as conventional elements drawn from late Victorian popular romances of the sort she herself reads in her spare time. Like Lisa Fremont and Stella, the telegraphist acts out a patriarchal narrative, in which she appears to confirm her subordinate status both to the upper class and its reliance on masculine rule. Even though she works to make possible communication within the ruling order, she serves merely instrumental purposes while being captivated by the romance of such communication. Jill Galvan argues that the telegraphist “thinks herself akin—in dignity and character, if not income and lifestyle—to the aristocratic set who frequent Cocker’s grocery.”16 The telegraphist’s view is “for the most part fictive and illusive,” a fantasy that helps her forget her dreary prospects taking care of her alcoholic mother and marrying the tedious Mr. Mudge (Galvan, 302). Readers are thus reassured that the upwardly mobile working class, especially women entering the new service industries of communications as secretaries, telephone operators, and telegraphists, will do little to destabilize the existing class and gender hierarchies. Yet the telegraphist’s fantasies about Captain Everard and Lady Bradeen transcend the “ha’penny romances” she reads to enter everyday reality. When she completes for Everard the numeric code about which he is so concerned—“He fairly glared … . ‘Seven nine four –’ ‘Nine, six, one’—she obligingly completed the number” (IC, 484), she can turn to the young male clerks in Cocker’s Grocery and conclude triumphantly, “‘If it’s wrong it’s all right,’” by which oxymoron we readers are intended to understand that if there is a mistake in the code, then Everard has not betrayed his involvement in one of his many illicit liaisons. For the telegraphist to be able to play this game at all means she has begun to interpret, not simply transmit, the messages of the upper class. In this regard, she is acting out of character, as Lisa Fremont does in Rear Window, so much so that when the telegraphist escapes from her cage to meet Captain Everard in Regent’s Park, declaring somewhat uncertainly that “‘Yes, I know,’” she certainly surprises, puzzles, and probably even scares Captain Everard with the threat of knowledge that exceeds her usual circuits of communication (IC, 437). At the end of Rear Window, Lisa Fremont is shown caring for Jeff Jeffries, who sleeps peacefully in his chair with his two broken legs as she prepares for a life of adventurous travel with him by reading Beyond the High Himalayas. 16 Jill Galvan, “Class Ghosting ‘In the Cage,’” The Henry James Review 22:3 (Fall 2001), 299.

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Figure 5.4 Lisa ostensibly preparing for a life of adventurous travel

Nevertheless, as the film ends, she casts aside this text and picks up Harper’s Bazaar to suggest that Jeff’s cosmopolitanism will be satisfied by her alluring, high-fashion role. Mothering this infantile adult, Lisa can humor his romantic fantasies, only to guarantee with her dress and body that his desire will be more than engaged at home. Similarly, the telegraphist serves as a surrogate mother to a wide range of characters, including her own alcoholic mother, Mr. Mudge, Captain Everard, and the male clerks at Cocker’s. Like Lisa, the telegraphist does not understand maternity as strictly biological; the last thing either appears to desire is actual pregnancy. Biological motherhood would ruin Lisa’s career as a fashion model, just as it would conclude the telegraphist’s career at Cocker’s Grocery. Both simulate maternity, transforming their masculine counterparts into the children for whom they care, thus reminding their audiences the degree to which motherhood depends on nurture over nature. The conventional feminine functions of the telegraphist and Lisa Fremont as lovers, wives, and mothers are complemented by their working relations with other women. The widowed Mrs. Jordan invites the telegraphist to join her business of providing flower arrangements to wealthy clients (IC, 371). Lisa not only works with the insurance nurse, Stella, to solve the crime and care for Jeff, but she is clearly identified with the ballerina, “Miss Torso,” both of whom are commodified by the masculine gaze and thus understand the patriarchal logic of Anna Thorwald’s murder and dismemberment. Having entered the labor force and public sphere, these working women retain many of their domestic powers while refunctioning them to aid, rather than contradict, their new agency in the modern world. To be sure, each feminine character is unable to overcome the deep sexual exploitation of her respective culture. Mrs. Jordan wants the telegraphist to take over the “bachelor’s accounts,” using her youth and charm to build the business; Stella, Lisa, and Miss Torso work at jobs— nursing, modeling, dancing—open to women in postwar America. Nevertheless, the feminine protagonists in In the Cage and Rear Window ultimately claim their identities through the command of the prevailing system of communication and representation. The telegraphist may be “wrong about everything” in her reading of the intricate affairs of her

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aristocratic clients and foolishly imagine she can engage Captain Everard’s affections, but the telegraph’s capacity to publicize the secret lives of the ruling class offers the possibility of gender and class transformations. For Henry James, of course, whoever commands the system of communication also controls social and economic power, which is part of his prophetic understanding of Western modernity.17 For Alfred Hitchcock more than half a century later, the dominant media of representation are film and television, rather than print, but social power still depends on the interpretation and manipulation of cultural semiotics. Indeed, Hitchcock carefully negotiates a transitional era, in which print literacy continues to shape our understanding of visual signs. Jeffries is a “photojournalist,” and Lisa reads illustrated travel books and magazines. Above all, James and Hitchcock make us see events from the position of characters conventionally rendered invisible as human subjects (O’Donnell, 60). Whether she attracts the masculine gaze of the clerks at work or the casual glances of her clients sending telegrams, the telegraphist is thoroughly commodified in the Victorian social economy. As a fashion model, Lisa Fremont plays with just such scopic desire, offering herself as mannequin on which others’ designs can be marketed. Positioning us inside the telegraphist’s cage and often inside her head, even when she is wrong, James makes us assume not only her position but that of the novelist, whose success depends on his ability to imagine another’s reality. Similarly, Hitchcock uses Jeffries’ incapacity to empower both Stella and Lisa; when Lisa “looks back,” gesturing at Jeffries’ from Thorwald’s apartment, we cannot miss her effort to subvert the conventional voyeurism of the masculine gaze. Of course, the telegraphist and Lisa Fremont do everything according to the direction of their authors, James and Hitchcock, so that their feminist achievements as well as their fatal limitations lead us finally to these two canny masters of their media. James’s ambivalent attitudes toward women’s and working-class rights qualify our conclusions about the symbolic emancipation of women in In the Cage. For James, the real command of representation does not belong to the instrumentality of new technologies, but to authors who can adapt new media to address venerable questions about the human predicament. Similarly, Hitchcock merely plays with emancipated femininity, using it to expose the childishness and brutality of most men while reserving for himself transcendent knowledge of human nature. Neither the author nor the auteur radicalizes the social system of Western representation, in which individual subjectivity is measured by one’s capacity to represent his or her relation to the larger world of signs. In this situation, the common donnée of the Jamesian novel and Hitchcock film, characters can never overcome the literary form or cinematic frame. James and Hitchcock exemplify a practice that is most likely a general 17 Ralf Norrman, “The Intercepted Telegraph Plot in Henry James’ In the Cage,” Notes and Queries 24 (October 1977): new series, 425.

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consequence of what Foucault terms “the author function” in modernity.18 Although Foucault does not specifically address the tacit gender hierarchy of the modern “author function,” Continental feminists like Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous explicitly identify the patriarchal, “phallogocentric” qualities of such authority. Henry James replaces Captain Everard in the telegraphist’s affections and Alfred Hitchcock finally controls Lisa Fremont. If these were the only expenses for such visions of empowered femininity, then we might be willing to grant these authors their powers, even mastery. But the history of modernity from the Jamesian novel to film and television is filled with this logic of substitution, whereby new social challenges and threats to the existing ideology are acted out for the sake of conventional catharses. James’s feminine characters never quite reach his level of knowledge, even though James urges actual women to try, as he does in his Commencement Address to the graduating women at Bryn Mawr College in 1905: Imitating, yes; I commend to you, earnestly and without reserve, as the first result and concomitant of observation, the imitation of formed and finished utterance, wherever, among all the discords and deficiencies, that music steals upon your ear. The more you listen to it the more you will love it—the more you will wonder that you could ever have lived without it.19 Yet what he urges upon these young graduates is not avant-garde breaks with traditional means of expression, but studied practice to imitate the “music” of “formed and finished utterance.” As if she is following Henry James’s advice to these women graduates, Lisa Fremont solves the mystery in Rear Window, only to normalize social relations culminating in her marriage to Jeffries. Her authority finally derives from the position of the Mother, capable of managing the neuroses of such infantile men as Jeffries, even Thorwald himself. In his biography of Hitchcock, Spoto concludes that the “confusion of mother-love and erotic love” so often thematized in Hitchcock’s films—Spellbound and Psycho are the most obvious examples—reflects Hitchcock’s personal guilt regarding his mother, his asexual relations with his wife, Alma, and his erotic fantasies regarding his beautiful leading ladies (Spoto, 291). My purpose here is not to offer a psycho-biographical reading of Hitchcock’s feminine characters, much less an interpretation based on Oedipal desire, but instead to suggest that Hitchcock’s great appeal in the post-World War II era may have had something to do with the ways he imaginatively negotiated personal 18 Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 148. 19 Henry James, “The Question of Our Speech,” in The Question of Our Speech and The Lesson of Balzac (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1905), p. 50. Further references in the text as: Q.

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anxieties regarding women that are reflected in broader cultural concerns about changing gender roles. Rear Window appeared in 1954 while the popular television shows The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show (1950–1958) and “I Love Lucy” (1951–1957) starred two of the most talented female comics in U.S. history, Gracie Allen and Lucille Ball. They were followed by such popular sitcoms starring women as ABC’s Bewitched (1964–1972) and NBC’s I Dream of Jeannie (1965–1970), in which Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery) and Jeannie (Barbara Eden) display magical powers that transcend the wit of their predecessors. In all cases, however, these feminine protagonists reaffirm conventions of feminine domesticity while helping to legitimate the technical wizardry of television itself, that medium which allows Samantha to cause people to disappear with a wrinkle of her nose and Jeannie to grant her “master’s” (Larry Hagman’s) wishes without his knowledge.20 Playing to feminine audiences with more time to entertain themselves than their wartime predecessors, U.S. television from the 1950s to 1970s empowers feminine characters by having them act out television’s own bid for cultural and economic power.21 Between 1950 and 1970, feminine characters on popular television speak back to their husbands, claim satiric and magical powers that exceed their domestic confinement, and in many other respects anticipate the more politically directed second-wave feminism we identify with the National Organization of Women and the fight for such legislation as the Equal Rights Amendment. Yet we now recognize that the rebellions of Gracie and Lucy, Samantha and Jeannie focused on the fragile, often infantile bourgeois male, instead of on the invisible power informing the new technology of television and the broader apparatus of the post-industrial economy. Henry James easily replaces Captain Everard in our affections, just as Hitchcock makes quick work of Jeffries as he sweeps Grace Kelly off her feet. Yet these great modern masters merely paved the way for their successors at NBC, ABC, Madison Avenue, and NASA, where the “magic” of new media, advertising, and the military-industrial complex would ventriloquize their feminine agents. In short, Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock helped effect a transition from modern to postmodern conditions, adjusting along the way gender roles and notions of subjective agency without radically transforming them. Within the ideological constraints of late-Victorian England and Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee’s hearings of the 1950s, Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock respectively challenged patriarchal authority and entertained the possibility of feminine agency. Yet insofar as In the Cage and Rear Window enabled subsequent stories of 20 John Carlos Rowe, The New American Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 160–166. 21 Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 50.

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feminine identity to be framed within the existing British and U.S. ideologies, they deferred real social change by offering phantasmatic revolutions. James and Hitchcock are unquestionably high-cultural authors of the novel and film, respectively, as evidenced by the substantial scholarship their complex works have motivated. Yet the consequences of their play with changing gender roles and class identities are very similar to what popular culture does with its key issues. Few readers and viewers would confuse these two sophisticated works with the B-movie Caged Heat, with which I began this chapter, but the entertainment value of all three seems disturbingly equivalent.

6

Daisy and Frederick and Polly and Peter and Cybill and Hugh and Dorothy and Paul Daisy Miller in Hollywood

Astronauts landing on Venus encounter dangerous creatures and almost meet some sexy Venusian women who like to sun-bathe in hip-hugging skin-tight pants and seashell brassieres.1 —Summary of Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968), directed by Derek Thomas (Peter Bogdanovich)

I hope that my unexpected epigraph will seize the reader’s attention just long enough to reconsider another one of Peter Bogdanovich’s films: Daisy Miller of 1974. How was it possible that a culturally sophisticated film writer turned director could have conceived, cast, and directed a film that interprets so naively Henry James’s Daisy Miller as a manifesto for male chauvinism and sexism? Of course, part of the answer is in my epigraph. Bogdanovich did not want to be credited with his part directing the sci-fi potboiler produced by Roger Corman, but he did what Corman wanted: added shots of scantily clad, blonde women to a Russian sci-fi film so that Corman could sell it to Hollywood.2 In his directorial debut, Bogdanovich cast Mamie Van Doren as Moana, Mary Marr as Verba, and Margot Hartman as Mayaway, arguing that such “South Seas movie names … seemed right” and that “I thought everyone should be blonde on Venus.”3 Six years before his film adaptation of Daisy Miller, Bogdanovich offers readers and viewers clear evidence of his ineluctable sexism. So why revisit Bogdanovich’s adaptation of James’s ethically and aesthetically complex novella? Even if it appears nearly a century after the publication of the novella, the film’s one-sided interpretation is just one more instance of how reductive Hollywood can be in its treatment of classic literature. The camera angles, set designs, period costumes, and other superficial details of many Hollywood adaptations may be beautiful, formally perfect, but the 1 2 3

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063790/ Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women, directed by Derek Thomas (Peter Bogdanovich) (The Filmgroup of Roger Corman Productions, 1968). Digby Diehl, “Q & A with Peter Bogdanovich,” Los Angeles Times (April 2, 1972), E34, 36.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003297987-7

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writers, directors, and producers often have little idea about the complexity of the original work. At least, this is the conclusion drawn frequently by literary scholars about many adaptations of classic literature into film. The adaptation is a flagrant “misinterpretation,” which misses the crucial point of the literary work, often by simplifying its complexity. Sometimes this claim has to do with differences in medium. As a predominantly visual medium, a film cannot capture the rhetorical subtlety of literary language. Add to this claim the relative brevity of a film, especially its script, relative to the length of most novels. Yet just what constitutes a “misinterpretation”? The judgment presumes a correct interpretation, which of course the professional scholar is usually willing to provide. In the 1970s and 1980s, Harold Bloom would define great literature as working through the strategic “misprision” or misreading of its predecessors, thereby locating the work in a tradition that would legitimate it.4 His iconoclastic contention was that all literature is the misinterpretation of other cultural works, and it is our task to figure out just what the purpose of such misreading might be. Bloom is always careful to demonstrate that there is some motivation in an earlier work to be misread in a particular fashion by a subsequent work. What then is the germ in Henry James’s Daisy Miller that motivates Bogdanovich’s odd misinterpretation? What elements exist in James’s novella to enable Bogdanovich’s cinematic interpretation nearly a century later? At a very elementary level, I might be asking how the director came to choose this literary property, but I want to make clear from the outset that the material circumstances surrounding such a choice are less interesting than how Bogdanovich developed the literary material into a film. In short, this chapter contributes to the topic of “Our Henry James” by asking what it means to be a bad reader of Henry James. If we want to understand the persistent interest in a classic writer like Henry James, then we have to take into account the propensity of such a writer’s work for misinterpretation. Rather than correcting Bogdanovich’s misreading by returning to the complexity of James’s novella, I want to accept the fact that this film follows a coherent interpretation of the literary work. The misreadings of Shakespeare’s plays and poetry have filled a large library, and we often take such interpretations as indices of their historical moments. I intend to do the same with Bogdanovich’s treatment of Henry James in the 1970s, but I want that critical moment in women’s rights to resonate historically backwards to take into account Henry James himself and his odd, even perverse, understanding of women’s rights in the 1870s. I do not intend to re-open the interesting question of how scholars establish standards of competency to evaluate different interpretations of 4

Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 83–105, is probably the best example of this approach, but it informs both Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973) and Kabbalah and Criticism (New York: Seabury Press, 1975).

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literary works. From E. D. Hirsch to Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish, theories of hermeneutic competency have shaped many professional approaches to literature.5 But my interest in and hence justification for a second chapter on Daisy Miller lies in the function of misinterpretation in its own time and its relation to the time in which the original work was produced. Do misinterpretations, especially in adaptations, damage the credibility of the original work or like Barnum’s famous claim that “any publicity is good publicity” does the mere revival of a classic work, no matter how bad the new version, help maintain its relevance? Equally important and yet rarely asked is whether or not the original literary work may have prompted its misinterpretation, not just in the self-conscious ways suggested by Harold Bloom but in a manner that might have been undetected by the original author and unacknowledged by the misinterpreter? To be sure, this question suggests a “hermeneutics of suspicion” in which a bad interpretation might reveal a conspiratorial relationship between the classic literary text and its dreadful remake.6 By maintaining the discrete historical compartments in which we usually classify the classic text and its adaptation, we may well be missing some fascinating connections among works, authors, and their respective times. This chapter develops further my consideration of James’s connections with popular culture. As I noted in Chapter 2, Daisy Miller is James’s most popular work, not just in terms of its appeal to many readers but in its use of melodrama and sentimentality, key features of nineteenth-century popular literature. Until his spectacular fall from grace in Hollywood following the murder of Dorothy Stratten, Peter Bogdanovich was celebrated as a director of serious Hollywood films, albeit many of them considered classics of comedy. Nevertheless, much of Bogdanovich’s success is attributable to his clever use of popular conventions, even his self-conscious manipulation of those devices in such popular works as What’s Up, Doc? and Paper Moon. No one would evaluate Bogdanovich’s Daisy Miller as popular in either senses I have mentioned above, but when interpreted in the contexts of Bogdanovich’s other films in the 1970s, his adaptation of James’s novella betrays the strong influences and political purposes of popular culture.

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E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967); Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974); Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980). Paul Ricouer, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay in Interpretation [1952] (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 33. Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 31, contends that “Ricoeur came up with the term [‘the hermeneutics of suspicion’] … while reflecting on the trajectory of his own work.” See also her discussion of various scholarly debates regarding the origin of the phrase in Ricoeur’s work, p. 199, n. 33.

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Appearing after such hits as The Last Picture Show (1971), What’s Up, Doc? (1972), and Paper Moon (1973), Daisy Miller (1974) is often cited as the beginning of the end for Bogdanovich, who didn’t have another hit until Mask (1985) and relatively few after that. Daisy Miller was panned by critics as a vehicle for Bogdanovich’s partner, Cybill Shepherd, for whom he divorced his first wife, Polly Platt, in 1971 and with whom Bogdanovich lived until 1978. Bogdanovich’s personal and cinematic failures are particularly notable in 1974, six years after the National Organization of Women had initiated their “equal rights agenda” (the ERA), including a number of programs and political platforms still with us (Equal Pay for Equal Work, for example). Why would the talented former model Cybill Shepherd find her role as Bogdanovich’s Daisy Miller to be appealing? And, of course, why would Cybill Shepherd find Peter Bogdanovich himself appealing, in consideration of his apparent selection of this classic literary vehicle as a means to express his own contempt for liberated women? To be sure, some of these questions about Hollywood celebrities will have to remain rhetorical, because I am finally not interested in the motivations of Cybill Shepherd, but instead Bogdanovich’s interpretation of Daisy Miller as a “post-feminist” text. In the film, Cybill Shepherd plays the typical “American Girl” of the 1870s, reinforcing the conventional interpretation of Daisy as an innocent who is victimized by a cruel society, which is notable for being governed by women. Talkative and relatively unaware of others around her, self-interested and coquettish to that end, Bogdanovich’s Daisy exemplifies the sort of American feminine stereotype that second-wave feminism criticized as sexist. To be sure, once Daisy recognizes that she is being snubbed— probably at the time of Mrs. Walker’s first tea party in Rome—she begins to manipulate others, specifically to call attention to their narrow-minded, conventional ways of behaving. Daisy performs this social criticism in the film in three different ways. First, the more explicitly others judge her, the more directly she rebels, doing exactly what her judges condemn. In this regard, she seems to reaffirm a certain aura of perversity, rebelling simply for the sake of rebellion. Second, Daisy manipulates others, especially men like Giovanelli and Winterbourne, in order to exercise a power that otherwise is unavailable to her in the drawing rooms of the Costellos and Walkers. Her coquetry in effect shifts her anger against Mrs. Costello and Mrs. Walker—the authorities in this woman-governed, drawing-room society—to men, who are thus victimized. In so doing, Bogdanovich reinforces the idea that Daisy’s coquetry is merely an extension of what respectable women do in high society, leaving us with the strong impression that this is a story critical of feminism and of women in general. Daisy exposes the unconscious of characters like Mrs. Costello and Mrs. Walker, who require the conventions of social morality to constrain their otherwise autocratic, even dictatorial authority. Third, Daisy retreats into her innocence—in this case, a form of deliberate ignorance—in order to deflect censure and follow her own willful desires. Bogdanovich

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effectively reinforces the popular stereotype of women as children, infantilizing adult women and doing so by way of Daisy Miller, whose age represents the threshold between adolescence and adulthood. Indeed, Randolph Miller is the only true child, at least by age, in both the novella and the film. Although he exhibits precocious knowledge in the novella, often for comic effects, Randolph is by no means some secret conduit for James’s wisdom regarding the complex ethical questions raised by Daisy’s conduct. In the novella, Winterbourne encounters Randolph for the last time in Mrs. Miller’s salon in their Roman hotel, where “the all-efficient Randolph” is entertaining “two or three charitable friends” who had “preceded” Winterbourne in their visit to the “alarmingly ill” Daisy (DM, 90). Randolph’s efficiency seems to be based on his conviction that his sister’s illness is the result of “‘going round at night that way, you bet,’” a practice Randolph insists is not followed in America (90). James’s curious use of the adjective “all-efficient” seems both to mock Randolph for his certainty about the cause of his sister’s illness and its Yankee tone. Randolph is the perfect little American. Yet Randolph is merely confirming what Winterbourne has told Daisy and Giovanelli in the Colosseum only a few pages earlier: “‘I’m afraid … you’ll not think a bad attack of Roman fever very quaint. This is the way people catch it’” (87). Randolph and Winterbourne both censure Daisy for going out at night, especially unchaperoned with another man. In Bogdanovich’s adaptation, Randolph, played by Larry McMurtry’s son James, shuns Winterbourne at Daisy’s funeral, even though in James’s text Randolph plays no part in the funeral. Bogdanovich suggests that Randolph knows what Winterbourne has done, as if the male child and the adult share a special insight about a man’s responsibility to a woman. In effect, Bogdanovich expands Randolph’s role to help this character remind Winterbourne that he has failed to protect Daisy from her own worst intentions and social exile by other women. Randolph’s reproach is palpable: You have failed in your duties as the patriarch and thus permitted Daisy’s condemnation, rebellion, illness, and death. In the novella, Winterbourne encounters only Giovanelli at Daisy’s funeral, who confesses “with a pale convulsion” that: “‘She was the most beautiful young lady I ever saw, and the most amiable.’ To which he added in a moment: ‘Also—naturally!—the most innocent’” (DM, 92). This confrontation between Giovanelli with his “whiter face” and “pious,” “candid confidence” serves James well to demonstrate the apparent victory of the expatriate American, Winterbourne, over the luckless Italian: “‘If she had lived I should have got nothing. She never would have married me’” (92). Bogdanovich’s rescripting of the scene to include the reproachful, insightful Randolph suggests not so much a contest between two suitors but instead the reaffirmation of the important masculine role of the American patriarch, which Winterbourne has failed dismally to realize. In the absence of Daisy’s father, Winterbourne ought to take responsibility for Daisy. My concern has little to do with Bogdanovich’s infidelity to James’s text. Many of the most interesting cinematic adaptations of James have also

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wandered far from his script. What intrigues me about Bogdanovich’s changes is how they are imaginable in the first place, once we bracket out Bogdanovich’s self-interest. James’s Daisy Miller does lend itself to a patriarchal reading, even when Daisy is considered in terms of all the historical hints James offers as to her revolutionary potential. In Chapter 2, I detail how James weaves into the novella a broad range of references to the English romantic poets, especially Lord Byron, and nineteenth-century neoclassical sculptors, including women like Maria Louisa Lander, to offer Daisy some potential power beyond the petty expatriate Americans in Geneva and Rome. Although important women artists are included in this allusive network—Lander, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Hosmer, and Mary Godwin Shelley—James overdetermines the male figures, in particular Lord Byron, whose poems The Prisoner of Chillon and Manfred are cited by Winterbourne. The prevailing impression at the end of James’s novella is that Daisy might have changed society in some profound way had she been more like a man.7 Indeed, there is a fascinating rhetorical play in the novella that switches gender roles between Winterbourne and Daisy, so that in her final defiance of him at the Colosseum and even in the regret he feels after her death, Daisy exercises a phallic power that Winterbourne never displays. Bogdanovich strips Daisy of any such power; his Daisy is naïve even to think that coquettish behavior can overcome patriarchal authority. Winterbourne must learn to become a man by exercising such power and protecting the women in his social world. Bogdanovich’s Daisy Miller is the perfect ingénue, whose social inexperience and moral innocence cry out for parental care. Of course, Daisy’s mother betrays a similar lack of social knowledge and formal education, and the absence of Daisy’s father from the dramatic action encourages readers to look for a surrogate adult mentor. There is nothing very surprising in Bogdanovich’s interpretation of the novella when we compare it with the prevailing scholarly interpretations in the 1970s, most of which focused on Winterbourne’s role as Daisy’s teacher and suitor. What is odd is Bogdanovich’s decision to cast his own partner, Cybill Shepherd, in such a one-dimensional role, especially in the midst of second-wave feminist political and social changes. In her debut acting role in Bogdanovich’s biggest box-office and critical success, The Last Picture Show (1971), Shepherd plays the role of Jacy Farrow, the promiscuous high school beauty of the dying Texas town Anarene. Bogdanovich had first spotted the professional model Shepherd on the cover of Glamour magazine in 1970. With virtually no acting experience and uninterested in an acting career (she wanted to finish college first), Shepherd was nonetheless attracted to the role and the script.8 Although 7 8

James made a similar case that each of the other women, with the possible exception of Mary Shelley, failed to achieve greatness in her field when compared with male peers. See John Carlos Rowe, The New American Studies, pp. 83–112. Laurent Bouzereau, The Last Picture Show: A Look Back (Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment, 1999).

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Cloris Leachman won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in her role as Ruth Popper and Ben Johnson won for the Best Supporting Actor as Sam the Lion, Shepherd steals the show as a charismatic teen beauty who begins the film as sexually innocent, but rapidly learns to use her sexuality as her primary means of escaping the dead-end world of rural Texas in 1951–1952. Jacy Farrow is a mid-twentieth-century version of Daisy Miller, at least as Daisy was interpreted for generations as the epitome of the “American Girl.” A student of the French “New Wave,” with its distinctive emphasis on metacinematic devices, Bogdanovich succeeded with The Last Picture Show in part by employing techniques that foregrounded film-making itself. From the title to the plot device of the closing of the town’s only movie theater to the self-promoting performances of the characters to enliven their otherwise boring lives, the film emphasizes the fictionality of modern life. Shot in black and white both to comment on the drabness of Anarene, Texas and call attention to the cinematic apparatus, The Last Picture Show turns its auteur-director into one of the key actors. Indeed, one of Bogdanovich’s signature techniques in several films would be to cast a character with at least some of the director’s familiar features, such as the oversize glasses worn first by Ryan O’Neal as Dr. Howard Bannister in What’s Up, Doc? (1972) and then by John Ritter as Charles Lundgren in his romantic role with Dorothy Stratten in the comedy They All Laughed (1981). Recalling Alfred Hitchcock’s device of casting himself in a small part in each of his Hollywood films, Bogdanovich goes beyond Hitchcock to suggest not only that he controls the film’s action, but that each film plays out part of his own life story. In fact, Bogdanovich had urged Orson Welles to direct Daisy Miller, so that Bogdanovich himself could play Winterbourne. Welles rejected the idea, although Welles most likely suggested James’s novella to Bogdanovich as a good basis for a film.9 In They All Laughed, Bogdanovich casts himself in the small part of a disc jockey in one of the nightclub scenes, as well as Polly Platt’s and his two young daughters, Antonia (thirteen at the time of filming) as Stefania Russo and Alexandra “Sashy” (ten at the time) as Georgina Russo, the daughters of John Russo (Ben Gazzara). In a very weird way, They All Laughed was a family affair for Bogdanovich. In “Re-examining Bogdanovich’s Daisy Miller,” Peggy McCormack lays the blame for the film’s failure on Bogdanovich’s casting of Cybill Shepherd in the title role, arguing that many critics insisted the model had little acting experience and failed to convey the subtlety of James’s Daisy. In addition, Bogdanovich’s insistence on flaunting his personal relationship with Shepherd, insisting that they were not getting married, had confused their celebrity lives and the film. Bogdanovich claimed that “‘on re-reading the book, it seemed to me that Henry James had Cybill in mind when he wrote it,’” 9

John Gallagher, “Between Action and Cut: Peter Bogdanovich,” in Peter Tonguette, ed., Peter Bogdanovich: Interviews (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2015), p. 116.

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reinforcing popular criticism that the film was simply a vehicle for Bogdanovich’s current partner.10 McCormack argues that part of the problem of casting Shepherd as Daisy also involves Shepherd’s recent role as Jacy Farrow in The Last Picture Show. Viewers could not help finding in Shepherd’s Daisy aspects of the sexually open and psychologically manipulative character of Jacy Farrow, overdetermining one of the familiar interpretations of Daisy Miller as a coquette (McCormack, 36). McCormack discusses the institutional contexts in which Bogdanovich’s film was produced: “The film was financed and produced by the Directors’ Company, a short-lived triumvirate of Bogdanovich, William Friedkin, and Francis Ford Coppola,” all of whom had “agreed to a ceiling of $3 million for each picture they would make,” which would allow “each director … [to] choose his own pictures and have complete control over every aspect of the film’s production” (McCormack, 36–37). McCormack notes that Friedkin objected both to the casting of Cybill Shepherd as Daisy, “convinced that Shepherd ‘had no discernible acting ability whatsoever’” and to a film like Daisy Miller, “not likely to garner huge profits because of its literary subject matter” (37). Both the special arrangements among the directors of the Directors’ Company and Friedkin’s criticism of Bogdanovich’s choice of Daisy Miller and Cybill Shepherd as its star seem to McCormack to place the responsibility for the critical failure of the film squarely on Bogdanovich. Committed to his own auteur-style role as director in practice and in his public role, Bogdanovich certainly reinforces this idea that Daisy Miller is his film and Cybill Shepherd his star as well as partner. Nevertheless, McCormack interprets Bogdanovich’s film as a successful adaptation, confirmed by her experience teaching the novella and the film. Laying the blame for the film’s commercial and artistic failure on the criticism popular film critics levelled at Bogdanovich for his arrogance, McCormack attempts to separate the film’s aesthetic merits from what she considers the unfair, largely ad hominem criticism of Bogdanovich in the negative reviews of the film: Examining the fierce contemporary reaction against Bogdanovich’s fine film, primarily as a response to his ill-conceived decision to cast his mistress in the role of a virgin, is an intriguing study in the powerful consequences of publicly dismissing social norms. (McCormack, 55) In effect, McCormack finds fault with Bogdanovich’s critics, concluding that the film “succeeds as both a beautifully realized companion piece to the novella and an excellent film, entirely on its own merits” (55). Although 10 Bogdanovich as quoted in Peggy McCormack, “Re-examining Bogdanovich’s Daisy Miller,” Henry James Goes to the Movies, ed. Susan Griffin (Louisville: University Press of Kentucky, 2002), 34.

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written in 1999, McCormack’s essay limits Bogdanovich’s problems as a director and celebrity to his adaptation of Daisy Miller and does not include the director’s spectacular personal and professional failures after that film. Listing Bogdanovich’s films released after Daisy Miller, McCormack merely notes their mixed commercial and artistic success, quoting “the 1997 film dictionary” to conclude that “Bogdanovich’s career ‘has continued but not prospered’” (46). Nowhere does she mention the scandal in 1981 surrounding the murder of Dorothy Stratten, the star of Bogdanovich’s ill-fated comedy They All Laughed, by her estranged husband, Paul Snider, whose jealous rage was driven in part by the director’s romantic affair with her.11 Much as we might wish to spare James any association with Bogdanovich’s sordid career in the 1970s and early 1980s, I think there is good reason to connect the famously reticent author and the celebrity director. Henry James would argue in his essay on Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1907) that the metapoetics of Shakespeare’s play seems to bring his audience “nearer to meeting and touching the man,” who is in his other works “so effectually locked up and imprisoned in the artist that we but hover at the base of thick walls for a sense of him.”12 James is writing in a highly metaphoric way about how deeply entangled the great artist is with our desire to know more about the person who has produced such work. Teasing his own readers, James makes clear at last that we should not really desire to know the biographical man but detect the identity of the artist working within and through the form and style of a great literary work: We shall never touch the Man directly in the Artist. We stake our hopes thus on indirectness, which may contain possibilities; … The figured tapestry, the long arras that hides him, is always there, with its immensity of surface and its proportionate underside. May it not then be but a question, for the fullness of time, of the finer weapon, the sharper point, the stronger arm, the more extended lunge? (357) Of course, James is playing whimsically on the famous scene in which Hamlet plunges his poniard into Polonius, hiding behind a tapestry, suggesting that our own desire to know Shakespeare as a person is likely to destroy his art, that “figured tapestry.” Bogdanovich is far cruder in his own display of himself as director through his characters. Jacy Farrow’s sexual liberation in The Last Picture 11 McCormack, pp. 57–58, note 8, even suggests that with They All Laughed Bogdanovich was working to “reinvent” himself as a serious director, ignoring facts, well known by 1999, that his connection with Snider’s murder of Dorothy Stratten and Snider’s suicide had effectively destroyed the film-maker’s Hollywood career and reputation. 12 Henry James, “The Tempest,” in Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Morris Shapira (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 347.

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Show is not just a representation of the empowerment of second-wave feminists in the late 1960s and early 1970s; it is used by Bogdanovich to demonstrate his own control, even exploitation of his actors. By the time he cast Daisy Miller, Bogdanovich had left his wife, Polly Platt, who had played a major role in turning McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show into a film script, and begun a romantic relationship with Cybill Shepherd. Yet this relationship would be relatively short-lived when Bogdanovich met in 1980 the Canadian Dorothy Stratten, Playmate of the Year for 1980, and cast by Bogdanovich in his romantic comedy They All Laughed (1981).13 Touted by Quentin Tarantino as “a masterpiece” and by Variety as “Peter Bogdanovich’s best film … gorgeous fun,” They All Laughed is by any rational standard a preposterous male fantasy in the midst of the changing sexual politics of the late 1970s and early 1980s. New York City’s Odyssey Detective Agency is hired by two husbands suspicious of their wives’ infidelity. John Russo (Ben Gazzara) is assigned to follow Angela Niotes (Audrey Hepburn), a Greek millionaire’s wife; his colleague, Charles Rutledge (John Ritter) trails Dolores Martin (Dorothy Stratten), the coquettish wife of an abusive husband. Both detectives fall madly in love with the women and end up confirming the husbands’ suspicions, only to cover them up in the film’s resolution. Although Angela returns to her husband, in part to raise their young son, and Dolores agrees to marry Charles once her divorce from her husband is final, the plot of the film makes clear that both women have fallen in love with these two detectives for their charms and their interests in the women. There are several subplots, one of which reveals that the owner of the Odyssey Detective Agency has been involved in a long-time extramarital affair with the Agency’s secretary, apparently drawing on the tiresome comedy of sexual relations between the boss and his secretary in romantic comedies like The Apartment (1960). In another subplot, the sexy cab driver Deborah Wilson, nicknamed Sam (Patti Hansen), dresses in men’s clothing and works a man’s job (at least in 1981), but manages to convey her sexual liberation by trying to seduce John Russo whenever she picks him up in her cab. In his review of the film on its release in 1981, Vincent Canby concluded that “as a comedy, as moviemaking, as a financial investment, They All Laughed is an immodest disaster.”14 Canby goes on to note that “the film is dedicated to Miss Stratten, a one-time playmate of the year, whose career was abruptly terminated after the film’s completion, when her estranged husband murdered her and then committed suicide” (Canby, 6). Like Dr. Howard Bannister (Ryan O’Neal) in What’s Up, Doc? (1972), Charles Rutledge wears Bogdanovich’s signature large glasses. Bannister’s love interest, Judy Maxwell (Barbara Streisand), and Rutledge’s Dolores Martin 13 The Last Picture Show: A Look Back. 14 Vincent Canby, “Movie Review of They All Laughed,” New York Times (November 20, 1981), 6.

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(Dorothy Stratten) clearly qualify as ingenues as flirtatious and coquettish as Jacy Farrow and Daisy Miller. What Canby does not mention is that Bogdanovich’s affair with Dorothy Stratten was one factor in her estranged husband Paul Snider’s murder of her and his suicide. This news had just been revealed in Gabrielle Beaumont’s The Death of a Centerfold: The Dorothy Stratten Story, the MGM Production Television biopic that aired on NBC on November 1, 1981. In his review of Beaumont’s film in the Washington Post, Tom Zito observes that Beaumont fails to explore effectively the masculine fantasies that produced Stratten’s brief celebrity and early death.15 Paul Snider first discovered Dorothy Stratten, but he would be outmaneuvered by Playboy’s Hugh Hefner who crafted her into a sexual commodity as Playmate of the Year, and then by Bogdanovich who cast her in his comedy They All Laughed. Dorothy Stratten’s career represents an intriguing backlash of masculinist values after more than a decade of feminist challenges to patriarchy and pornography. In her Pulitzer Prize winning story “Death of a Playmate” (1980), Teresa Carpenter does understand much of the social psychological complexity in Stratten’s celebrity and violent death.16 Brilliantly analyzing Bogdanovich’s “puerile preference for ingenues” as central to a melodrama in which powerful men imagined they could capitalize on women’s sexual liberation, Carpenter observes how influential men in Stratten’s life only pretended to acknowledge her talents as a self-reliant woman (14). Playing upon her independence to satisfy their own financial and sexual interests, Snider, Hefner, and Bogdanovich (among others) used her to compensate for their own professional and personal inadequacies. After plucking her from a Vancouver Dairy Queen, Snider entered her in Playboy’s Playmate of the Year competitions in hopes of finally making the big score that had always eluded him. Her success led Snider, a small-time drug dealer and pimp, to believe she would support them both, with Snider as her manager and husband, following their marriage in Las Vegas on June 1, 1979 (13). Snider’s crude machismo and exploitation offended Hefner and the Playboy Organization’s businessmen, who imagined their uses of women to be more sophisticated. But Stratten herself quickly recognized that the women “who serviced Hefner’s stellar guests” at the Playboy Mansion were simply “‘whores’” (16). As distant as the grifter Snider and Hollywood’s Hefner seemed to be, both shared the desire to legitimate themselves through a beautiful and talented woman. For Hefner, it was the dream of finally turning one of his models into a movie star, responding to the Hollywood community that considered him an interloper. As Carpenter puts it: “There 15 Tom Zito, “Shallow but Effective ‘Death of a Centerfold,’” Washington Post (October 31, 1981). 16 Teresa Carpenter, “Death of a Playmate,” Village Voice: The Weekly Newspaper of New York, 25:45 (November 5–11, 1980), 1, 12–14, 16–17. Bob Fosse bought the film rights to Carpenter’s feature story, developing it into a script for his film Star 80 (Warner Brothers, 1983), produced by the Ladd Company.

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is something poignant about Hefner, master of an empire built on inanimate nudes, but unable to coax these lustrous forms to life on film” (14). Casting himself as a father-figure to Stratten, even renaming her from the cumbersome “Hoogstraten” to “Stratten,” Hefner insisted that they did not have a sexual relationship (13). When Stratten asked Hefner for advice about her upcoming marriage to Snider in 1979, Hefner “‘said to her that he had a “pimp-like quality” about him’” (14). Hefner worked to keep Snider away from Stratten and the Playboy Mansion’s parties, as well as cutting him out of the negotiations for her fledgling TV and film acting career. Carpenter makes it clear that Hefner was in an uneven competition with Paul Snider to control Dorothy Stratten. For all her analyses of the motivations of Snider and Hefner to exploit and commodify Stratten, Carpenter spends little time considering the changing sexual politics of the late 1970s and early 1980s. No one would argue, of course, that Paul Snider would have considered the broader political debates about gender and sexuality in the period; he was simply an opportunist. But Hefner had tried to reinvent both Playboy magazine and his entire empire as a testament to women’s liberation. Holding the line on “tasteful” photographs of “beautiful” women in the magazine against the perceived vulgarity of Bob Guccione’s Penthouse and Larry Flynt’s Hustler, Hefner claimed in his books, op-eds, and on his television shows, Playboy’s Penthouse (1959–1960) and Playboy after Dark (1961–1963), that he was committed to the sexual revolution he considered integral to women’s liberation. To be sure, Hefner’s support of various political issues has by no means been consistently liberal, much less aligned specifically with women’s rights. His eccentric advocacy of sexual and gender politics seems primarily to be self-serving and exploitative, promoting and rationalizing an empire built on the commodification of women’s bodies. Peter Bogdanovich was partying with Stratten’s agent, David Wilder, at the Playboy Mansion in January 1980, “when the director first considered Stratten” for a major role in his comedy They All Laughed: “‘Jesus Christ,’ the 41-year-old Bogdanovich is supposed to have said. ‘She’s perfect for the girl … . I don’t want her for her tits and ass. I want someone who can act’” (Carpenter, 14). Shortly after shooting of the film began in New York, Bogdanovich and Stratten began an affair, which Carpenter says was notable for its “amazing secrecy,” presumably to avoid the “publicity that might result from a liaison with a 20-year-old woman married to a hustler” (14). The secrecy might also be attributed to the fact that his young daughters, Antonia and Alexandra (“Sashy”), from his marriage to Polly Platt were cast in the film and on the set. As their affair developed, Bogdanovich expanded Stratten’s role in the film, which in the initial script had been a mere foil to the main relationship between Audrey Hepburn’s Angela Niotes and Ben Gazzara’s John Russo. With few lines, Stratten’s character, Dolores, is represented as “a shimmering seraph, a vision of perfection clad perennially in white,” accounting for John Ritter’s character, Charles, proposing to her

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after having watched her from afar in his role as detective, voyeuristically desiring her, and having exchanged only “a few perfunctory conversations” with her (14). Charles’s sudden infatuation with Dolores is rendered comic, and it is clearly intended to provide a counterpart to the more complex adult relationship between the older, divorced John Russo (Ben Gazzara) and Angela Niotes (Audrey Hepburn). Whereas the film ends with the prospective marriage of Charles and Dolores, John and Angela part in a bittersweet acknowledgment of the inappropriateness of their relationship. The youthful love affair is fantasy; the older relationship is realistic. Yet in both relationships, the men seem incapable of achieving a mature relationship with another person. Charles falls in love with his fantasy; John leaves Angela only to return to his sexy banter with Sam, the cab driver, and his old routines of “dating and mating with teenyboppers” (14). In the costuming of John Ritter with Bogdanovich’s signature oversized glasses, Charles’s silly moonstruck responses to the beautiful Dolores seem an unmistakable representation of the director’s own “puerile preference for ingenues” in both his films and his personal life. In Carpenter’s graphic recreation of the murder–suicide scene, she notes that both Dorothy Stratten and Paul Snider were naked. Snider had shot her in the face with the 12-gauge shotgun and then sexually assaulted her, his necrophilia confirming his insane commodification of her, as well as his need to humiliate her even in death (Carpenter, 17). Bogdanovich “took the family Hoogstraten in tow” as they flew from Vancouver to Hollywood, and after Stratten’s burial “at Westwood Memorial Park, the same cemetery … where Marilyn Monroe is buried” took them to his Bel-Air home “for rest and refreshments,” where “it was all quiet and discreet” (Carpenter, 17). Yet shortly after They All Laughed was released, a film in which Bogdanovich had placed high hopes for a directorial comeback, he bought all the prints and stopped the screening of the film. So what is the broader political narrative that might take us back to the initial question about Henry James’s Daisy Miller and its adaptation to film by a major Hollywood director? It would be easy enough to conclude this version of the story as Teresa Carpenter ends her story about the tragic murder of Dorothy Stratten: In the end Dorothy Stratten was less memorable for herself than for the yearnings she evoked: in Snider a lust for the score; in Hefner a longing for a star; in Bogdanovich a desire for the eternal ingénue. She was a catalyst for a cycle of ambitions which revealed its players less wicked, perhaps, than pathetic. (Carpenter, 17) For Carpenter, who has of course no interest in Henry James or older ingenues like Daisy Miller, this is a story of Hollywood corruption,

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permitting her to feel even pity for Paul Snider: “It was all too big for him. In that Elysium of dreams and deals, he had reached the limits of his class. His sin, his unforgivable sin, was being small-time” (17). Nevertheless, that conclusion is not really the interesting story, because Paul Snider is after all just as much an effect as Hugh Hefner and Peter Bogdanovich. Carpenter’s story is about Hollywood as the city of dreams and fantasies, but long before Hollywood existed there was male desire and the cultural work that complicates and hence legitimates it. How many Victorian novels revolve around the marriage plot, in which the woman is represented primarily as the object of masculine desire and her ability to produce an heir who will reproduce patriarchy? How few of Henry James’s fictional works depart from this central drama, even when we take into account James’s rebellious women and his own homosexuality? The cultural genealogy from James’s “American Girl,” whose characterization enabled his early success, to the murdered Canadian starlet Dorothy Stratten, is not particularly complex or even wayward. It follows the logic of gender hierarchies fundamental to modern Euroamerican societies; the violence in both James’s novella and Hollywood in the 1980s is produced by crises that threaten this social order. James’s Daisy Miller challenges the customary subordination of women to patriarchy by exposing the illegitimacy of masculine authority. Winterbourne is not only a hypocrite who desires Daisy sexually even as he criticizes her for her coquetry, but he fails to regulate her behavior. When he tries to do so, he ends up following the orders of Mrs. Walker and Mrs. Costello, reminding us that he is not really a self-reliant man in charge of his social world. James represents this particular moment as a historical crisis, in which rebellious women struggling to assert their rights over their own private and public lives use their feminine charms to reject the social order. Tacitly chiding them for a rebellion that can never succeed because it operates only according to the internal logic of patriarchy, James affirms his own literary authority, bolstered by that of such romantic predecessors as Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and Mary Shelley. If Daisy had been more like James and his literary forebears, then she might have shattered the closed circle of patriarchal authority, including its circulation through women, including Daisy herself. Flaunting social conventions by going publicly unchaperoned with Giovanelli, she is punished seemingly by nature itself for having violated what appears to be a universal truth. While she is contracting Roman Fever (malaria) in the Colosseum in the company of Giovanelli, Winterbourne is reciting lines of Lord Byron’s dramatic poem Manfred, in which a dead lover is brought back to life within the lines of the poem. In her effort to free herself from social constraints and the naturalization of her subordinate status, Daisy produces a crisis that can be compared to the dramatic shift from Roman paganism to Christianity of which the Roman Colosseum is a reminder. Both scapegoated and choosing her own sacrifice as the Christian martyrs did, Daisy foregrounds a social crisis only James proposes to transcend.

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In a parallel sense, Dorothy Hoogstraten repudiates her initial willingness to be made into a celebrity by others, insisting that she be respected for her own beauty and talent. Rejecting her husband and self-appointed manager Paul Snider, she falls under the influences of Hugh Hefner and Peter Bogdanovich. All of these relationships are both personal and professional, even if we grant the unlikely possibility that Hefner did not have sex with her. Acting as her surrogate father, especially by renaming her “Stratten,” he entangles the personal and the professional. As Teresa Carpenter makes clear, Stratten’s conflict with Paul Snider was not just the result of their personal break-up and impending divorce; it was also the consequence of him being excluded from her career’s earning power (Carpenter, 14). Shifting her assets to “Stratten Enterprises,” she intentionally alienated Snider from her economic value. Peter Bogdanovich vastly enhanced her material value and future earning power by casting her in a feature film along with such established stars as Audrey Hepburn and Ben Gazzara. Yet by costuming John Ritter to be a surrogate of Bogdanovich himself, the director makes the claim that Dorothy Stratten’s success is inextricably tied to his directorial achievement, legitimizing their personal relationship in an utterly meretricious manner. Just as James tacitly tells Daisy (and the reader) that to be a successful rebel she should be more like the writer Henry James, so Bogdanovich tells Dorothy Stratten to be more like him. In their relations with men, Daisy and Dorothy undergo little or no change, because each continues to be treated by different men as an object of male desire. This conclusion applies as much to the novelist Henry James as to the film director Peter Bogdanovich. These narratives of projection seem to exemplify what Laura Mulvey argued so famously in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), discussed at greater length in Chapter 5. We might expand Mulvey’s thesis here to include the Euroamerican novel as well as film, insofar as reading literature and watching film depend on a parallel “narcissistic scopophilia,” wherein the viewing subject is compensating for its anguished sense of impotence, its experience of castration (Mulvey, 6). Mulvey’s thesis has been challenged by many theorists and feminists, because it appears to universalize the viewing experience and renders the cinematic apparatus ineluctably patriarchal. I am less interested in defending Mulvey’s universal claims about cinema than in using her argument to mark a critical moment in U.S. gender and sexual relations in the 1970s and early 1980s, which potentially reaches back at least as far as nineteenth-century culture. Her thesis invites counter-examples of filmmaking that refuse such “narcissistic scopophilia,” including work by feminist filmmakers that might prove her wrong in particular instances. Nevertheless, her thesis seems to represent quite precisely the ways in which Paul Snider, Hugh Hefner, and Peter Bogdanovich used Dorothy Stratten to project their own desire for a score, a star, a surrogate. Catharine MacKinnon’s feminist scholarship in the same period broadened Mulvey’s cultural thesis to include the socio-economic dimension. In

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Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination (1979), MacKinnon argued that sexual harassment of women in the workplace was not simply a crime committed by individuals, but systemic to the capitalist economy.17 As a legal scholar, MacKinnon was interested in how specific incidents of harassment could be construed collectively as “sex discrimination,” comparable to claims of racial discrimination successfully argued by Civil Rights activists. Once again, her arguments seem to lend themselves quite well to the institutional questions raised by the Dorothy Stratten case. Carpenter notes how quickly both Hefner (and Playboy Enterprises) and Bogdanovich worked to distance themselves from Paul Snider’s violence (Carpenter, 17). Hefner was right to characterize Snider as a deranged, small-time loser, but Snider merely acted out violently what Playboy Enterprises and Bogdanovich’s film company had also been doing. Dorothy Stratten was a commodity for them all, and her “acting” as both a Playmate in nude photo shoots and a dreamy love interest in They All Laughed had been principally for Hefner’s and Bogdanovich’s profits. Carpenter points out that when Stratten offered half of her assets to the financially desperate Snider, she could only manage to give him $7500 (17). When interpreted through contemporary feminist critiques of structural sexism in the 1970s and 1980s, Hefner and Bogdanovich appear to be capitalizing on so-called “sexual liberation,” exploiting Dorothy Stratten’s physical beauty and talents as model and actor to serve their own masculine interests. She would be Hefner’s and Bogdanovich’s “star,” differing only in degree from Snider’s similar exploitation of her. All of them, then, were “pimp-like,” to recall Hefner’s characterization of Snider. In the changing gender and sexual politics of the 1970s in which their respective commodification of Dorothy Stratten appears self-evidently sexist, then their violent struggles for her body makes grotesque sense. By the end of Daisy Miller, we have nearly forgotten the economic motives of her various suitors, including Winterbourne, but James reminds us when Giovanelli tells Winterbourne in the graveyard that “‘I should have got nothing’” (DM, 92) and that on his return to Geneva Winterbourne is “‘studying’ hard—an intimation that he’s much interested in a very clever foreign lady” (94). Both claims confuse sex and money, as James so often does, until we realize that in patriarchy they are one and the same. As it turned out, it was too late when Snider murdered Dorothy Stratten for Playboy to recall its December issue, which “features Stratten as one of the ‘Sex Stars of 1980.’ At the end of 12 pages of the biggest draws in show business—Bo Derek, Brooke Shields, etc.—she appears topless, one breast draped with a gossamer scarf” (Carpenter, 17). The issue had been printed; Playboy let it be distributed. It was not just Paul Snider who attempted to destroy the beauty he could no longer control. Hefner lost control of her to Bogdanovich, and the 17 Catharine A. MacKinnon, Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 1–7.

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director could never do more with his actress-lovers than commodify them as flirtatious adolescents. It is certainly Daisy’s identity as yet another “ingénue,” like Jacy Farrow in The Last Picture Show, that must have appealed so powerfully to Bogdanovich. Jacy, Daisy, and Dolores are repetitions of the same psychological compulsion that betrays Bogdanovich’s deep repression of the fact he could not relate to women, except insofar as they were subordinate and dependent “girls,” love objects testifying to his profound sexual inadequacies. Bogdanovich’s personal problems should not really concern us, except insofar as the director played his part in the terrible narrative that would end with Paul Snider pulling the trigger of that 12-gauge shotgun. What still matters is that audiences celebrate Bogdanovich’s films, including a comedy as poorly conceived and produced as They All Laughed.18 In a curious way, Peggy McCormack may be right that Bogdanovich’s adaptation of Daisy Miller is a “beautifully realized companion piece to the novella,” despite the negative criticism of Cybill Shepherd in the film’s lead (McCormack, 55). The film realizes one destiny of the masculine desire for the physical, psychological, legal, and cultural possession of women, culminating in the appropriation even of women’s rebellion against patriarchy. After all, the success of Cybill Shepherd’s role as Jacy Farrow in The Last Picture Show relies on her representation of a particular version of the “American Girl” finding her independence in a sexual revolution most people knew had no political future. In a similar sense, Dorothy Stratten emerges as a film star precisely to reproduce the very qualities that feminism would condemn: a powerful sexual appeal that existed only in adolescent male fantasies, rather than in real life. So does this genealogy of sexist violence enacted first in mere fiction and then in real life lead us to the inevitable conclusion that Henry James was as profoundly anti-feminist as Paul Snider, Hugh Hefner, and Peter Bogdanovich? Certainly James’s imagination of a character cannot be treated in the same category as the desires of Snider, Hefner, and Bogdanovich to control the real Dorothy Stratten. Their desires combined sex and power, and it is reasonable to conclude that James had little interest in the erotic appeal of the “American Girl,” even if he competed with the cultural and political powers increasingly represented by women in his times. Yet in at least one sense there is a potential for such masculine commodification of women in James’s literary representation of Daisy, and there is the possibility of violence promised by a social crisis profound enough to threaten the characters’ identities. To be sure, James wants us to understand that the violence that kills Daisy Miller is systemic to the closed social order that has produced it. There is also a radical ambiguity in James’s story: Daisy is a victim, to be sure, but she is also responsible for her own end. How we read this 18 Twenty-five years later, Bogdanovich released the “25th Anniversary Director’s Edition” on DVD on HBO Video, presumably content that enough time had passed since Stratten’s murder for his work to be viewed favorably.

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conclusion permits certain behaviors and reinforces certain prejudices. I have argued throughout this book that James invites such different, adaptive versions in part because of his strategic ambiguity, forcing different readers to take responsibility for the conclusions they draw. Yet such radical ambiguity, when it is considered a self-conscious and career-long strategy, cannot be said to absolve the author from his own obligations. An author’s coy “Find out for yourself!” may also involve yet another cliché with its own truth: “Seek and ye shall find.” I recognize, of course, that the grisly story I have told, leading us from the little Protestant Graveyard where Daisy is buried to the blood-spattered West Hollywood bedroom where Dorothy Hoogstraten was murdered, tells my own story of a perverse curiosity connecting otherwise disparate genres, events, places, and above all, people. Yet by linking Henry James’s Daisy Miller to Peter Bogdanovich’s They All Laughed and Paul Snider’s violence, we do indeed make James both relevant and popular again, if only to expose the enduring, profoundly repressed unconscious of masculine sexual desire.

7

For Mature Audiences Sex and Gender in Film Adaptations of James’s Fiction

Aren’t we actually sick of sex, of difference, of emancipation, of culture? —Jean Baudrillard, “The Final Solution: Cloning beyond the Human and the Inhuman”1

High culture seems to have made a comeback. Poked and prodded, derided and dismissed by cultural studies, the masterpieces and geniuses of the Euroamerican tradition are fighting back, claiming that they, like Eliot’s Tiresias, “have foresuffered all” and “foretold the rest.”2 Read these texts aright and they will anticipate, even solve, many of our most troubling questions about class conflicts, changing gender relations, racial divisions, and sexual differences. Undecided about gays and transgender people in the military? Reread your Twelfth Night, especially the duel between Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Cesario/Olivia in Act III and Sir Andrew and her brother Sebastian in Act IV. Nagging concerns that racism hasn’t been overcome? No worries, Othello tells you racial divisions have been with us for a very long time. Class conflict in late modernity troubling you? Look no further than the first decade of the twentieth century to Howard’s End, where the battered Bast will rivet your attention on the problem. Confused about feminisms – first, second, third waves or Anglo, American, Continental versions? It’s all sorted out well in advance in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. Review your underlining, check your class notes, or better yet – stream the movie. What does the mass media fascination with literary classics of the past three decades signify? Of course, there is nothing new about film adaptations of important literature. From the beginning of the film industry, the classics have helped legitimate the medium, lending it an aura of respectability, tradition, and intellectual complexity. Many film studies programs in colleges and universities began with the study of film adaptations of literary 1 2

Jean Baudrillard, The Vital Illusion, ed. Julia Witwer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 15. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, in The Waste Land and Other Poems, p. 38.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003297987-8

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works, even if this approach has been widely and successfully criticized for its neglect of film’s unique techniques and inherent differences from print. Nevertheless, the “novel-into-film” approaches so prevalent in U.S. universities in the 1960s and 1970s borrowed from the English Department’s cultural capital, including its teaching resources, to mount programs otherwise viewed skeptically by administrators. The classics so revered by today’s film industry are deeply indebted to previous sources, often themselves literary classics. Henry James in particular is subtly and voluminously allusive, not only to literature but to the visual arts and historical texts as well.3 So it is possible to fold the recent film adaptations of Shakespeare, Austen, James, and others into a general theory of cultural adaptation and reproduction, but the very truth and utility of the usual genealogies, often modeled after Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and complicated by Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, might also distract us from the specific ideological work done by the film adaptations of classics from the late 1990s to the present. Difficult as it is to generalize about films by different directors, writers, producers, and performers, we might still identify certain ideological forces informing films that to varying degrees overtly conform to or challenge just these ideological conventions. I want to look closely, then, at the intersection of ideology, high culture, and contemporary film in five recent adaptations of James’s Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, and What Maisie Knew. I want to focus primarily on the sexual ideology overtly challenged and in at least some cases subtly reinstated in these films, often thanks to the historical and cultural aura attached to their literary models. Whatever their differences in form, content, even specific market-targets, these five films represent James’s fictional works as so sexually charged, even organized, as to force their viewers to address an issue that until recently James’s subtlest interpreters have relatively neglected. It is tempting to attribute the foregrounding of parental, sexual, marital, and reproductive problems in these films to simple causes. Dianne Sadoff argues that Softley’s The Wings of the Dove depends on sex as a cinematic ingredient that “helped launch the art-film as a marketing niche in the 1970s and is now essential for box office success.”4 Although too specialized in their scope and audience to be considered cultural influences, critical studies of Henry James by gay scholars and queer theorists, like Michael Moon and Eve Sedgwick, have provoked some cultural commentators to complain that U.S. society is so obsessed with sex as to read everything, including great literature, in terms of it. Thus Lee Siegel 3 4

As Adeline Tintner demonstrates in her various studies of his sources, such as The Book World of Henry James: Appropriations of the Classics (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1987). Dianne F. Sadoff, “‘Intimate Disarray’: The Henry James Movies,” The Henry James Review 19:3 (Fall, 1998), 294.

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argues that our contemporary “sexualization of everything” has transformed the relatively peripheral treatment of sex in Henry James’s fiction into an obsessive fascination, destroying our appreciation of “literature” and contributing to our acceptance of the mass-media cult of sex and violence.5 The focus on family, sexuality, and gender in these recent film adaptations also suggests that these apparent “art-films” work to connect popular and high culture. Siegel’s complaint about the obsession with sex in contemporary America is symptomatic of widespread anxiety about changing attitudes to the family, sexuality, and gender. Past works by canonical writers may be used to allay such concerns, either by universalizing such questions or by using these past masters to provide comfortable answers. The boundary separating serious literature from popular culture may not be as strict as we think when it comes to social anxieties about such fundamental questions as sex. Siegel’s complaint may disguise another problem: we may have sexualized everything, because we do not know how to confront the social dimensions of sexual identity and conduct. Previous film adaptations of James’s fiction often treat the Victorian gender relations in utterly conventional ways, confirming James’s popular reputation as prudish about sexuality. William Wyler’s The Heiress (1949) is typical in this regard, even if Wyler updates Washington Square by stressing Catherine Sloper’s (Olivia de Havilland) power to humiliate Morris Townsend (Montgomery Clift) in ways more appropriate to the growing social authority of post-World War II women. Nevertheless, Wyler’s heiress still remains confined to the domestic sphere, dependent on a patriarchal hierarchy in which feminine sexuality is reproductive or chaste.6 For all the sexual violence discussed in Chapter 6, Peter Bogdanovich’s Daisy Miller is deeply conservative in its sexual politics. Whatever sexual rebellion Cybill Shepherd brings from her role as Jacy Farrow in The Last Picture Show to Daisy Miller, it is a troublesome feminine quality that calls for masculine regulation. Hugh Hefner and Bogdanovich endorse such attitudes toward women in the Hollywood of the 1970s as they capitalize on the sexual revolution of the period. The sexual complexities we find in the films of the 1990s are anticipated in Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961), a remarkable adaptation of The Turn of the Screw released well before second-wave feminism would challenge the political economy of sex and gender divisions in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Film, television, and operatic adaptations of The Turn of the Screw by far outnumber any of James’s other works. In “A Henry James Filmography,” which includes adaptations up to 2002, J. Sarah Koch counts eight television productions, six films, Benjamin Britten’s opera, and two 5 6

Lee J. Siegel, “The Gay Science: Queer Theory, Literature, and the Sexualization of Everything,” New Republic 9 (Nov. 1998), 30. The Heiress, dir. William Wyler, writ. Ruth and Augustus Goetz, based on their play taken from James’s Washington Square (Paramount Pictures, 1949).

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films based on the opera. Since 2002, there have been other notable adaptations, including Mike Flanagan’s nine-episode mini-series The Haunting of Bly Manor on Netflix and Floria Sigismondi’s film The Turning (2020).8 Before turning to the 1990s’ adaptations of James’s fiction as vehicles for debates of late twentieth-century sexuality and gender roles, I want to consider how James’s The Turn of the Screw played a key role in these cultural discussions well before the 1990s. For the purposes of this brief prologue, I want to focus on Clayton’s The Innocents (1961) and Michael Winner’s prequel to the novella, The Nightcomers (1971). The decade separating these two films is also a period in which dramatic changes occur in both the women’s rights movement and the representation of gender and sexuality in popular culture. Until 1964 and the legal conflicts surrounding Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker, films were controlled by the Production Code enforced by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). The MPAA sought to censor The Pawnbroker for its display of nudity and a brief scene of sexual intercourse, but the producers released the film in New York without the MPAA certification, then appealed the MPAA decision and received an “exception.”9 By the time Jack Valenti became President of MPAA in 1966, it was clear that the old Production Code rules were unenforceable, especially with the rise of independent production companies and social changes connected with the civil rights, women’s rights, and anti-war movements. Films like Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show were considered important departures from the old Hollywood morality and exemplary of more socially relevant treatments of changing sexual behaviors and identities.10 Jack Clayton’s The Innocents is remarkably direct about the sexual connotations of haunting and other supernatural phenomena, whether or not we conclude they are real or imagined. Clayton was adapting William Archibald’s play The Innocents, and had hired Archibald to write the screenplay.11 Archibald’s play focuses on supernatural events, treating the “ghosts” of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel as legitimate. They may haunt Bly 7

J. Sarah Koch, “A Henry James Filmography,” Henry James Goes to the Movies, ed. Susan M. Griffin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 351–354. 8 The Haunting of Bly Manor, dir. and writ. Mike Flanagan, part of Flanagan’s “Haunting” anthology (Netflix, 2020), nine episodes beginning October 9, 2020. The Turning, dir. Floria Sigismondi, writ. Carey W. Hayes and Chad Hayes (Universal Pictures, 2020). 9 Leonard J. Leff, “Hollywood and the Holocaust: Remembering The Pawnbroker,” American Jewish History 84:4 (1996), 353–376. 10 Vassiliki Malouchou, “A Century in Exhibition—The 1960s: The Collapse of the Studio System,” Box Office Pro (August 12, 2020): https://www.boxofficepro. com/a-century-in-exhibition-the-1960s-the-collapse-of-the-studio-system/ (accessed 11/3/2021) 11 Neil Sinyard, Jack Clayton (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1989), p. 84; Archibald’s The Innocents premiered at the Playhouse Theater on Broadway in New York on 2/1/1950 and ran until 6/3/1950; William Archibald, The Innocents (New York: Coward McCann, 1950). 7

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and its inhabitants with the memory of their illicit relationship, but the threat they pose to Miles and Flora has much more to do with spectral possession than sexual corruption. Clayton was displeased with Archibald’s screenplay and hired Truman Capote to emphasize the psychology of the governess, Miss Giddens’ (Deborah Kerr), which was Clayton’s real interest in making the film. In her floor-length hoop skirts and high-necked bodices, Miss Giddens hardly risks MPAA censorship. Yet Clayton’s and Capote’s treatment of Miss Giddens’ psychological instability and sexual fantasies anticipate subsequent cinematic representations of contemporary sexual issues in James’s fiction. Capote stresses both how Miss Giddens’ repressed sexuality distorts her perceptions of everyday reality and her demonization of alternative sexual identities. These fantasies are quite subtly represented in the film. In her meeting with the Uncle in London, Miss Giddens is shown in extreme closeup as the Uncle approaches, asking her “‘give me your hand’” as part of her “‘promise’” to him that she will assume supreme authority for the children and the estate. She blushes visibly and lifts her face toward him, as if this agreement is somehow amorous, as in a marriage proposal. Flora sleeps in the same room as Miss Giddens, and we share Flora’s experience of the governess moaning in her sleep. Although her dreams are by no means selfevidently erotic and often prompted by her experiences of the supernatural, they suggest a close link between the spectral and the sexual in dream-work. David Hogan argues: “As women became increasingly vocal about social inequities, filmmakers reasoned that audiences would be receptive to horror films that focused on women caught in situations more overtly sexual than any genre had explored in the past.”12 In the final confrontation between Miss Giddens and Miles (Martin Stephens), after Mrs. Grose (Megs Jenkins) has taken Flora (Pamela Franklin) away from Bly, Miles concludes that he was expelled from school “‘because I’m different’” (Innocents). Miles never makes this statement in James’s novella or in Archibald’s play, and it seems likely Capote added it to the script to underscore the possibility of Miles’s homosexuality.13 Although there is considerable discussion in the film that Peter Quint (Peter Wyngarde) and Miss Jessel (Clytie 12 David J. Hogan, Dark Romance: Sexuality in the Horror Film (Jefferson: McFarland and Company, 1986), p. 19. 13 Christopher Frayling, The Innocents, BFI Film Classics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 78, quotes director Jack Clayton: “‘Truman virtually wrote the entire script.’” Frayling qualifies slightly this claim: “In interview, [Clayton] always maintained that the script was 90 percent Capote,” before describing in some detail Clayton’s efforts to “secure sole screenwriting credit for Capote, but the “[Arbitration Committee of the Writers Guild of America] upheld their decision to award joint credit with William Archibald on the grounds that he was the creator of the original stage play …” (78). Frayling concludes: “from the evidence of the first draft screenplay and Capote’s notebook rewrites, the proportions would seem to be nearer 60:40 in Capote’s favour, rather than 90:10” (78). Further references in the text as: Frayling.

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Jessop) “corrupted” the children, the sexual references are primarily to Quint and Jessel’s heterosexual relationship as illicit, because it is out of wedlock, crosses class boundaries, is known publicly, and may have been witnessed by the children. At one point during the hide-and-seek game with the children, Miss Giddens ascends the stairs with the ghostly voice-over of Miss Jessel moaning, presumably to Peter Quint: “I want your arms. I want your lips” (Innocents). At the costume party, an imaginary birthday party for Flora declared by the governess, Flora says she has borrowed Miss Giddens’ pincushion to deck herself out as a fantasy princess, and Miles wears a crown and a sparkling robe as he recites a poem, which is an elegy for his dead “lord,” whom the poetic I invites to “Enter,” “Leaving the marks of his grave on my floor.”14 Ellis Hanson contends that Miles is performing “in queenly drag,” although it is by no means clear that his costume is intended to represent a woman; it could just as well be his fantasy of what a young prince might wear.15 Nevertheless, the homoeroticism of the poem is unmistakable when recited by Miles: “‘Where shall I go when my lord is away? / Whom shall I love when the moon is arisen? / Gone is my lord and the grave is his prison’” (Mazzella, 19). The devotion of the speaker in the poem seems to echo Mrs. Grose’s memory of Miles’s devotion to Peter Quint: “‘The poor little boy worshipped Quint. It made me sick seeing Miles trotting after him like a little dog’” (Innocents). Wearing a crown as he does, of course, Miles could just as well be reciting his elegiac lines for his dead father, even his absent uncle, but the intent of the lines uttered by Miles seems to underscore his same-sex desire. In the profoundly homophobic Cold War era, Miles’s “difference” might well represent “perversion,” but there is no evidence that it has been initiated or exploited by Peter Quint, whose sexual desire and its accompanying violence seem directed exclusively toward Miss Jessel. If anything, Miles’s devotion to Quint would most likely motivate his imitation of Quint’s heterosexual conduct. Capote’s indication that Miles is sexually “different” indicts those members of the audience who conclude that it must have been caused by Quint and Jessel’s “corruption” of Miles. In James’s novella, Miles is sent down from school because he “‘said things,’” and the governess concludes they must be sexually inappropriate and precocious words Miles has picked up from Peter Quint. In the film, Miles says that he also “‘hurt things’” and “‘spoke in the dark,’” hints that he might have engaged in sexually inappropriate relations with other schoolboys at night. Of course, if we leap to the conclusion that a schoolboy at an all-male boarding school might be expelled for a same-sex adolescent sexual relationship, then we 14 Anthony J. Mazzella, “‘The Story … Held Us’: ‘The Turn of the Screw’ from Henry James to Jack Clayton,” Henry James Goes to the Movies, p. 19. 15 Ellis Hanson, “Screwing with Children in Henry James,” GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 9:3 (2003), 379. Further references in the text as: Hanson.

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must ignore utterly the realities of nineteenth-century British boarding schools, where such activities were common. Capote’s hints that Miles is “different,” not because he has been corrupted by Peter Quint, but simply because that he is not heterosexual, would today attract comment regarding the sexual politics of the film, but there is virtually no commentary in this regard on Clayton’s The Innocents. We know how persecuted LGBTQ+ people were in the Cold War era, and we ought to understand the need for a certain subterfuge in a film released in 1961. The social circumstances in 1898 were even more repressive. Oscar Wilde’s highly publicized trials and conviction in 1895 were recent events. Sentenced to two years at hard labor, Wilde was released in May 1897, only a year before the novella’s publication. Wilde was convicted not only for violating the Anti-Sodomy Act of the Laboucherre Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act, but for corrupting adolescents, giving credibility to the popular Victorian prejudice that homosexuals were often predatory pedophiles.16 In Chapter 4, I discuss James’s dislike of Wilde’s, Wagner’s, and John Addington Symonds’ public advocacy of homosexuality, in keeping with James’s own conviction that one’s sexual identity should be a private matter. Yet in terms of James’s representation of same-sex relations in his fiction from the 1860s to the end of his life, he displays an understanding and sympathy that are distinctly contrary to Victorian homophobia.17 The “‘red hair’” of the “‘man’” “wearing no hat,” who appears on the tower to the governess in James’s novella has often been identified as James’s fictionalized version of the Irish Oscar Wilde.18 One of the venerable controversies about this first apparition is that the governess has no way of knowing that Peter Quint had red hair. Indeed, in the governess’s first description of him, she makes no reference to “red hair,” but when describing his appearance to Mrs. Grose, “quickly added stroke to stroke. ‘He has red hair, very red, close-curling, and a pale face, … and little rather queer whiskers that are as red as his hair’” (TS, 190). The customary explanation of how she could identify Peter Quint’s hair color prior to Mrs. Grose’s exclamation “‘Quint!’” is that James expects us to understand this attribution as a Victorian stereotype of the valet as Irish (TS, 191). In short, the governess projects her own xenophobic fantasy of the sexually threatening Irish servant in her early experiences of the estate. Yet the conclusion 16 H. Montgomery Hyde, The Trials of Oscar Wilde (New York: Dover Publications, 1973). 17 This argument is best represented by my book, The Other Henry James (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), passim. 18 Henry James, The Turn of the Screw, in The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw, The Liar, The Two Faces, vol. 12, The New York Edition, 26 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909), p. 177. Further references in the text as: TS. For Oscar Wilde and The Turn of the Screw, see Neill Matheson, “Talking Horrors: James, Euphemism, and the Specter of Wilde,” American Literature 71:4 (December 1999), 709–750.

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we ought to draw from James’s representation of an Irish stereotype as the governess’s English prejudice suggests a more systematic reading of Peter Quint’s association with Oscar Wilde as yet another phantom of the heteronormative governess. Not only must Peter Quint be bisexual, if he is having a sexual relationship with Miss Jessel and attempting to seduce Miles, but such characteristics must also be associated not just with Oscar Wilde but with Irish men. In short, James creates another one of those familiar traps in the novella whereby the reader’s desperate desire to make sense of events exposes the reader’s prejudices, often of the most contradictory sort. In the psychological reading of the governess, her conflation of homosexuality, sexual licentiousness, pedophilia, Irish masculinity, and the working class makes utter hash of any of these particular marks of identity. In short, one of the cruel but finally educational purposes of James’s novella is to show us how easily we defend a particular idea of social reality by demonizing countless other legitimate modes of being. Ellis Hanson concludes that both James’s novella and Clayton’s The Innocents focus on queer sexuality, rather than specific instances of illicit heterosexuality, pedophilia, homosexuality, and sadomasochism: “I say queerness instead of homosexuality or pedophilia since virtually every scandalous sexual desire in the film … figures the same purpose of figuring ambiguity” (Hanson, 381). Recalling James Kincaid’s Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture, Hanson notes: “There is something truly revolutionary about a happy queer kid” (Hanson, 377). Hardly central to the celebrated reputation of Clayton’s The Innocents, the queer reading of the film makes considerable sense both in terms of Capote’s role as one of the screenwriters and the film’s fidelity to the modern interpretation of Jamesian ambiguity. Hanson’s conception of queerness as semiotic as well as sexual offers a tacit critique of Miss Giddens’ insistence on answers in the film. The Nightcomers (1971) represents sexuality far more graphically than The Innocents, and thereby anticipates the open treatment and visualization of sex in the films of the 1990s. Yet in many respects, The Nightcomers is finally more conservative in its sexual politics than The Innocents, again anticipating the regulatory treatment of sex we find in many of the subsequent adaptations of James’s fiction. Michael Winner’s film debuted at the Venice Film Festival on August 30, 1971 and was released for general distribution in 1972.19 Starring Marlon Brando as Peter Quint and Stephanie Beacham as Miss Jessel, the film is a prequel to The Turn of the Screw, imagining what happened at Bly Manor before the arrival of the new governess (Anna Palk), who appears at the end of the film. The love affair of Quint and Jessel is a sadomasochistic relationship that Miles (Christopher Ellis) and Flora (Verna Harvey) observe voyeuristically and then emulate in their own play, which includes imitating the bondage (ligottage) they have 19 The Nightcomers, dir. Michael Winner, writ. Michael Hastings (AVCO Embassy Pictures, 1971).

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witnessed and verges on incestuous sex. As Jessel’s and Quint’s relationship deteriorates, verbal and physical abuse replaces their sensuous sadomasochism. The children also imitate this violence. Miles sabotages Miss Jessel’s boat and precipitates her drowning; he kills Quint with target arrows, which he removes from Quint’s body before rolling him into a water-filled ditch. As if punning on Clayton’s title, The Innocents, Winner and Hastings turn Miles and Flora into murderers, the real sources of the horror greeting the new governess at Bly. The explicit sexual scenes and themes of The Nightcomers are the result of the fight to overturn the Production Code in the mid-1960s.20 When Quint first slips into Miss Jessel’s bedroom, awakening her by pulling down her nightgown, squeezing her breast and roughly stroking her nipple, viewers recognize the explicit visualization of sexuality as typical of many films in the 1970s. In Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972), Marlon Brando would create an even greater sensation for his role as Paul, the widowed American hotelier whose erotic relationship with Jeanne (Maria Schneider) ends with her murder of him.21 In both films, Brando’s smoldering sexuality is tinged with latent violence, which in Last Tango in Paris begins with Paul sodomizing Jeanne and concludes with her shooting him in her Paris apartment. In The Nightcomers, the sexual relationship of Quint and Jessel is not merely sadomasochistic but also identified with Quint’s advocacy of the inextricable relation between Eros and Thanatos. From the beginning of the film, Quint teaches the children about the ties of life and death, both in the natural world of the estate and among its human inhabitants. Both Jessel and Quint reject the platitudes of religion, but Quint makes a point of sharing his atheism with the children. Whereas the Master of the Estate (Harry Andrews) and Mrs. Grose (Thora Hird) do not think the children should know of their parents’ deaths, Quint confirms Miles’ and Flora’s suspicions. When asked by the children where the dead go, Quint bluntly says, “‘Nowhere,’” whereas Miss Jessel answers with the conventional “heaven” or “hell.” The sexually explicit films of the late 1960s and early 1970s are notable for what might be termed their guilty consciences, because viewers’ access to previously censored representations of nudity and sexuality are tinged with violence and psychological anxiety. Paul Mazursky’s comedy Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice (1969) is a good example, in which the eponymous couples’ efforts at partner-swapping on a weekend trip to Las Vegas ends in dismal failure and reaffirmation of their original marital bonds.22 It is the cost of the new sexual freedom that is most often stressed in films that at 20 Mark Harris, Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the New Hollywood (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), pp. 173–176. 21 Last Tango in Paris, dir. Bernardo Bertolucci, writ. Bernardo Bertolucci and Franco Arcalli (United Artists, 1972). 22 Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, dir. Paul Mazursky, writ. Paul Mazursky and Larry Tucker (Columbia Pictures, 1969).

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once appeal to viewers’ sexual desires and yet work to regulate this new freedom. The sexual openness of Quint and Jessel must be kept hidden from the very conventional and deeply religious Mrs. Grose, even if Quint makes no effort to keep his own philosophy from the children. A rural existentialist, Quint finds death a natural part of life, which accords well with his absurdist view of the world. Quint understands pain and pleasure as integral, inseparable parts of life. Yet in his relations with Miles and Flora, he is typically tender and parental, regaling them with stories that convey his own view of human absurdity while protecting them from the brutality of the adult world. In a curious way, The Nightcomers is finally a film that restores family values, despite its endorsement of free love, even sadomasochism. Quint and Jessel are surrogate parents to Miles and Flora, showing them affection and care but failing to offer the children an enduring relationship. It is not the sexual openness of Quint and Jessel that troubles the children, even though it causes Mrs. Grose to exile Quint from the manor. The children are also not troubled by Quint’s existentialist outlook. Miles smiles approvingly when Quint tells him that death is simply a part of life and “‘that’s all there is to it.’” Miles seems reassured by the naturalness of the relationship between Eros and Thanatos as inseparable drives. Yet Quint and Jessel fail to sustain their adult responsibilities to the children, threatening to leave Miles and Flora just as their biological parents left them to travel to “India and Africa.” Given his repudiation of such social fictions as religion and class, Quint is still insulted by and yet obedient to Mrs. Grose’s expulsion of him from the house. When Miss Jessel attempts to end their relationship by patronizing Quint, reminding him of his inferior class, he flies into a rage and beats her brutally. What the children witness is domestic abuse, confusing them about the “love” they insist to the end that Quint and Jessel share and inconsistently have shown these orphans. Neither Quint nor Jessel has enjoyed a stable relationship with their own respective parents, suggesting that they are unprepared to take full responsibility for Miles and Flora and yet explaining the sympathy they do show the children. As the church bells toll in the distance, Quint reminds Miles and Flora that they are ringing for the burial of the children’s parents. Quint urges them to go to church before realizing that the children are not supposed to attend the burials. Quint instead tells them the story about the last time he saw his own father, a con-man trying to sell an old, ailing horse as a healthy, valuable thoroughbred. When the father’s trick is exposed, the villagers strip him of his clothes, throw him in the river, and he runs away never to be seen again. I have been abandoned, too, Quint seems to be telling the children, and I know how you must feel. It is an extraordinary moment of compassion, in which Quint also seems to be telling the children that biological parents are not always reliable. In the comic way Quint tells the story with the three of them gathered in the stable among the straw, he consoles the children while giving them comfort in his own humble world.

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In a similar fashion, Margaret Jessel tells Flora that her own father was a “‘kind, modest man,’” whom her mother loved dearly, but that he was not her biological father (The Nightcomers). Miss Jessel claims that her mother so loved the stepfather that when he died her mother committed suicide, linking love and death directly. Like Quint and the children, Margaret Jessel is an orphan, which should give all four them a special family bond, especially in light of Quint’s existentialist values. Yet because Quint and Jessel have still not resolved their own family problems, they seem unprepared for the responsibilities of parenting. Miles and Flora are by no means horrified by the open sexuality they witness between Quint and Jessel, but they are terrified by the possibility that they will be abandoned yet again. The sins of both parents are certainly visited upon these children, who turn the lessons they have learned from Quint and Jessel against these surrogate parents for their failures to care for them. In the existentialist temper of the film, Quint and Jessel ought to make conscious choices to be the ethical parents of Miles and Flora, without regard for the legalities involved. Because there is no absolute value in Quint’s (and the film’s) view, then these adults ought to take responsibility for the children. Of course, the children misunderstand what Quint means when he says the dead go “nowhere.” Once Miles and Flora learn that Quint has been exiled from the manor and that Miss Jessel is also leaving, the children plot their murders as the best way of holding onto their surrogate parents. In a wonderfully ironic way, Winner and Hastings have answered the question of possession in both James’s novella and Clayton’s The Innocents: Peter Quint and Miss Jessel have been “possessed” by the children and remain at Bly as literal or imagined phantoms. As far as children are concerned, parents only exist as such when they are present, and hence The Nightcomers condemns Quint and Miss Jessel less for their sexual openness than for their threatened absence. Michael Winner rationalized the commercial disappointment of The Nightcomers by contending that “it was only the sex and violence that made it profitable.”23 Winner’s glib conclusion that the film is primarily memorable for its sex and violence ignores the larger part it played in the sexually liberated films of the 1970s: sexual freedom brings new social responsibilities, however tedious and conventional that message sounds today. Mike Nichols’ Carnal Knowledge (1971) was released the same year that The Nightcomers premiered and by the same film company, AVCO Embassy, and it was far more successful at the box office and enduring in the popular imagination.24 The story of Sandy (Art Garfunkel) and Jonathan Fuerst (Jack Nicholson) adjusting their lives to the changing sexual 23 Jim Watters, “‘I Just Want to Be Normally Insane’: Brando,” The New York Times (September 21, 1975), xi. 24 Carnal Knowledge, dir. Mike Nichols, writ. Jules Feiffer (AVCO Embassy Pictures, 1971). In return for its $5 million investment, the film made $12,351,000 in box office and rental receipts.

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behaviors, gender roles, and social identities of America from the late 1940s to the early 1970s differs dramatically from Winner’s and Hastings’ prequel to The Turn of the Screw. Yet the message of both films is oddly the same, with today something of a dated, self-evident moral: free love is not as great as you imagine; above all, it entails new responsibilities for which you are unprepared. Be careful what you wish for! The growing sexual openness of films in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s hence did not necessarily represent uncritically more flexible gender roles and sexual identities in the period of expanded civil rights and women’s rights. Often enough popular films merely played with these social changes in order to reinstate conventional family values, even in some cases reaffirming aggressively patriarchal authority. The hints of sexual “difference” in Clayton’s The Innocents is so entangled with the Gothic effects as to make any clear judgment about lesbian or gay sexuality quite difficult to make, bold as it was for Clayton and Capote to make such an effort in the early 1960s. Film adaptations of James’s fiction in the 1990s have much greater freedom both to visually represent sexual identity and changing gender roles, thanks to the precedents discussed above and to the popularization of these issues in the wake of the socalled “culture wars” of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The films of the 1990s represent the social significance of changing gender roles and sexual identities with much greater centrality than earlier versions. What remains noteworthy is the number of Jamesian adaptations in a relatively short period of time, as well as the diversity of works by James chosen for adaptation. Different as Agnieszka Holland’s Washington Square, Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady, Iain Softley’s The Wings of the Dove, Merchant–Ivory’s The Golden Bowl, and McGehee and Siegel’s What Maisie Knew are from each other, they collectively sexualize their cinematic versions of James’s fictions in ways significantly different from previous film adaptations, including most art-films based on James’s or comparable authors’ literary texts.25 In particular, these films depart radically from the Merchant–Ivory productions of The Europeans (1979) and The Bostonians (1984). Indeed, even the Merchant–Ivory adaptation of The Golden Bowl (2001) seems to differ significantly from their earlier productions of films based on James’s fiction, as if influenced by the other film adaptations produced in the late 1990s.26 Merchant–Ivory’s version of The Europeans, based on Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s script, treats James’s literary text with exaggerated reverence and nearly pedantic fidelity to details of the original.27 They represent 25 Washington Square, dir. Agnieszka Holland, writ. Carol Doyle (Hollywood Pictures/Caravan Pictures, 1997); The Portrait of a Lady, dir. Jane Campion, writ. Laura Jones (Gramercy Pictures, 1996); The Wings of the Dove, dir. Iain Softley, writ. Hossein Amini (Miramax, 1997). 26 The Golden Bowl, dir. James Ivory, writ. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (Merchant Ivory, 2001). 27 The Europeans, dir. James Ivory, writ. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (Merchant Ivory, 1979). The same reverence for a literary classic characterizes Martin Scorsese’s lugubrious version of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence.

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another time and world, in which everything occurs in slow motion and the slightest events are rich with significance. In the Puritan household of the Wentworths, caution and patience are the watchwords and emotional control is tacitly urged; the film is faithful to this New England aura, so that the viewer is filled with a certain nostalgia for the quieter, simpler, and morally clearer era in which the minimal plot ticks away as reliably as a regulator’s pendulum. Merchant, Ivory, and Jhabvala make no bones about it: the Wentworths and Actons are our Puritan origins from whose moral heights modern Americans have fallen. Passion and sexuality are acknowledged in Merchant–Ivory’s The Europeans, but only to be subject to the conventional nineteenth-century controls of friendship, marriage, and the family. Unable to express her passionate love for Felix Young (Tim Woodward), Gertrude Wentworth (Lisa Eichhorn) dashes upstairs to her room, throws herself face down on her bed, and mildly screams in a manner politely inaudible to the rest of the household. To be sure, the film incorporates James’s comic parody of the austere and laconic New Englanders whose lives he would describe elsewhere as “achromatic” and “without particular intensifications,” but the film represents the comic aspects of such blandness with Jamesian affection and nostalgia.28 When they are finally brought together by Felix’s match-making, Charlotte Wentworth (Nancy New) and Reverend Brand (Norman Snow) are represented in the film happily walking the fields together as they practice his Sunday sermon. In the course of all this healthy sublimation, threatening sexuality, deviousness, European aristocratic pretension, and arranged marriages can be conveniently purged in the charming but nonetheless final expulsion of Felix’s sister, Baroness Eugenia-Camilla-Delores Young Münster of Silberstadt-Schreckenstein (Lee Remick), whose charming flirtation with Robert Acton (Robin Ellis) and Clifford Wentworth (Tim Choate) helps remind the bachelors in this community of the proper boundaries for sexuality and passion. The more recent film adaptations treat sexuality in James’s fiction as deformed and distorted by repression, which reflects social failures that each film differently interprets as governed by patriarchy (Holland’s Washington Square), marriage and compulsive heterosexuality (Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady), modern class differences (Softley’s The Wings of the Dove), father and daughter relations (Merchant–Ivory’s The Golden Bowl), and dual career families (McGehee and Siegel’s What Maisie Knew). Each film also problematizes what the viewer understands as the historically specific society criticized, unlike Merchant–Ivory’s The Europeans, which tidily distinguishes between the moral, colorless community of nineteenth-century New England and the over-stimulated, narcissistic, and immoral America of the late 1970s. Campion’s Portrait employs deliberate anachronisms, like the prologue of women’s voices “describing their ideas about love and desire” followed by the cinematic portraits of women “‘watch[ing] themselves being 28 Henry James, “Emerson,” Partial Portraits (London: Macmillan, 1888), p. 8.

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looked at,’” to push the late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries into uneasy contact.29 Campion’s metacinematic devices and moments are sufficiently regular to alienate viewers from nostalgic identification with characters, locales, and the historical period, in order to keep our attention focused on what persists from the past in our present circumstances. Holland is less overtly Brechtian, but Washington Square relies on the collision of two strategically different nineteenth- and twentieth-century stereotypes of feminine identity. The nineteenth-century “angel in the house” is problematically represented by the submissive, sexually repressed, and timid Catherine Sloper (Jennifer Jason Leigh) as she struggles to negotiate between two fathers – the tyrannical Dr. Austin Sloper (Albert Finney) and the manipulative suitor Morris Townsend (Ben Chaplin) – with the conventional help of her surrogate mother Aunt Lavinia Penniman (Maggie Smith). In the final scenes in the day-care center she has established in her father’s parlor – site both of Dr. Sloper’s authority and Morris Townsend’s sexual desire, Catherine is transformed into an independent woman of the late twentieth century. Softley does more than simply push the dramatic action of James’s The Wings of the Dove (1902) forward several years to 1910 for more overt signs of modernization, such as motorcars and women smoking, but also to bring the cinematic action closer to the beginning of the Great War. Although the London Underground dates from 1863, the opening scene of the film is set there to link Kate Croy’s (Helena Bonham Carter) deviousness with modernization, the New Woman, and the vague threat of an awakening proletariat. Kate’s fantasy of public sex with Merton Densher (Linus Roache) in the Underground’s lifts – “Stand Clear of the Doors” warning the viewer away from such perversity – will eventually be realized in Venice, when she seals her cinematic bargain with Densher – “Show me how you love,” Densher begs – by leaning against the wall of a Venetian alley and having sex with him standing up. Softley’s London, crowded with honking taxis and towering double-deckers, closely resembles Eliot’s London in The Waste Land (1922), including the vulgarity of the masses that Eliot would consistently satirize in terms of degraded sexuality, such as that of Lil and Albert in “A Game of Chess” and the typist and “young man carbuncular” in “The Fire Sermon.”30 In Softley’s film, our contemporary society of technological devices, commercial demands, and moral expediencies collides with the more graceful, but vanishing, Edwardian culture that is staged in the elegant interiors of Maud Manningham’s London house and Lord Mark’s country estate, Matcham. The rapid alternation of opening scenes from Kate’s fantasy of the Underground to Maud (Charlotte Rampling) craning over Kate at her dressing-table, maid dutifully standing at attention in the back of the room, 29 Nancy Bentley, “‘Conscious Observation of a Lovely Woman’: Jane Campion’s Portrait in Film,” The Henry James Review 18:2 (Spring 1997), 175. 30 Eliot, The Waste Land, pp. 34–36, 37–39.

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and from Maud’s elegant party to Merton and his friends debating labor and class issues at the local pub establishes an atmosphere of different social realities in conflict, which in a general way describes the tone of James’s novels after 1890, including The Wings of the Dove. Softley appears to criticize both an older aristocratic culture and the vulgarity of modern society. Maud Manningham is not quite represented as the massive “Britannia” at her account books as she is in the novel, but she is certainly identified with the selfishness and commercialism of the ruling bourgeoisie. Lord Mark (Alex Jennings) is rendered far more decadent in the film than in James’s novel. Drunkenly stumbling about his country estate, fondling Kate while she sleeps, and giving the impressionable Kate ideas about how to exploit Milly (Alison Elliott), Lord Mark is a caricature of aristocratic failings James more subtly satirizes in his fiction. Although Softley offers us an apparently difficult choice between the old world of decaying cultivation and the brave new world of machines and machinations, the choice is actually far easier to make than it first appears. Displacing the waning aristocracy and the grasping upper-middle class, Milly is cinematically constructed to combine youth, beauty, and innocence in a modern American version of elegance, manners, and moral propriety. The film unconsciously Americanizes European culture in a gesture that repeats the cultural colonialism of wealthy Americans that Henry James himself often sharply criticized.31 Softley shoots Venice through the lens of John Singer Sargent’s portraits both of British society women and of his Venetian cityscapes, apparently to mark the threshold of modernity in the film’s dramatic action.32 It is a decidedly American Milly Theale who takes possession of Venice and makes it the elegant stage for her morality play, but this Milly comes to exemplify all the high-cultural values and aestheticism of the European aristocracy now purified of its sins. Alan Nadel aptly criticizes the film for its “self-deluding enchantment with” Milly as “the representative of everything America has to offer.”33 After all, didn’t American ingenuity and capital save Venice from physical ruin in the twentieth century? Merchant–Ivory’s The Golden Bowl more explicitly Americanizes modernity than Softley does in The Wings of the Dove, even though both films draw on James’s international theme to make their points about modernization. In the film The Golden Bowl, England is traditional and America 31 Priscilla L. Walton, “Jane and James Go to the Movies: Post-Colonial Portraits of a Lady,” The Henry James Review 18:2 (Spring, 1997), p. 187. 32 Compare, for example, Sargent’s paintings Venetian Bead-Stringers (1880–1882), Venetian Water Carriers (1882), A Venetian Interior (1882), and A Venetian Doorway (1900) with the scenes of everyday life in Venice Softley uses in the film. For reproductions of these paintings by Sargent, see Carter Ratcliff, John Singer Sargent (New York: Abbeville Press, 1982), pp. 60, 72, 26, 183, respectively. 33 Alan Nadel, “Ambassadors from an Imaginary ‘Elsewhere’: Cinematic Convention and the Jamesian Sensibility,” The Henry James Review 19:3 (Fall, 1998), 283.

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progressive. London townhouses and country estates dominate the visual field in the film’s English settings, whereas America is a nightmare of gritty miners, steamships, and urban snapshots, all shot in grainy black-and-white documentary footage. Personal and sexual problems in the film seem inextricably tied to characters’ national origins: Adam Verver (Nick Nolte) and Charlotte (Uma Thurman) must return to America; Prince Amerigo (Jeremy Northam) belongs in Europe and hence his American wife, Maggie Verver (Kate Beckinsale), is obliged to remain with him, if only to provide him with moral guidance. The rearranged marriages at the end of the film seem almost to suggest the casta paintings of the Spanish colonial period, in which the characteristics of mixed marriages were emblematically represented. The national “purity” of the American will be perpetuated by Adam and his young American wife, Charlotte, whereas the “mixed” marriage of the American woman, Maggie, and her Italian husband, Amerigo, will be legitimated by their child, the Principino. I do not mean to suggest that the film adaptation of The Golden Bowl provides any overt critique of U.S. imperialism; instead it tacitly endorses American expansionism on the personal, familial, and macropolitical levels. Maggie and Charlotte are used as what we might term “shifters” in the cinematic Golden Bowl, both sorting out the problems of patriarchal rule and defining proper domains: America for Adam; Europe for Amerigo. In McGehee and Siegel’s What Maisie Knew (2013), America is the triumphant power, but on the edge of moral decay tied to its rapid rise to global authority. Beale Farange (Steve Coogan) is a British art dealer living in New York, the international center for all things cultural, and his eventual departure for London suggests exile rather than a return to the old metropolitan center of imperial power. Susanna (Julianne Moore), mother of Maisie (April Onate) and aging rock star, exemplifies American decadence in her on-the-road lifestyle and on-the-fly sexual relationships. The film seems to anticipate the Trump campaign’s slogan of “Make America Great Again” by reconstituting the loving, nuclear family with Maisie’s governess (and Beale’s subsequent wife) Margo (Joanna Vanderham) and the aptly named Lincoln (Alexander Skarsgård), the roadie and bartender who marries then separates from Susanna. Behind all the partner-swapping melodrama, McGehee and Siegel’s What Maisie Knew uses New York City as more than just a contemporary setting; the city is the locus of a symbolic national revival as Americans recover from the destruction and social psychological damage of 9/11. Central Park is lush, urban apartments light and airy, bars hip and chic, and the streets alive with exciting activity. All five films work out their various conflicts principally through the representation of feminine identity, and their respective ideals of a proper woman dictate how bodies and sexualities are employed in these films. Given the overt theatricalization of sexuality and the substitution of the sensuous body for Jamesian psychological interiority in these films, my contention that

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feminine identity is the ideological issue requires some clarification.34 All five films move toward moral conclusions about how women ought to act and thus appear socially, now that it is commonly agreed (or so the different films argue) that older definitions of feminine identity primarily in terms of sexual reproduction are no longer socially or economically viable. It is interesting to observe an evolution of such feminist ideas in the short history of these films from 1996 to 2013. In a mere seventeen years, the arguments of the films proceed from the second-wave feminist rejection of maternity as a woman’s principal role to the modified maternal and domestic roles of Maggie and Charlotte in Merchant–Ivory’s The Golden Bowl and the socially constructed “family” in McGehee and Siegel’s What Maisie Knew. Such a development is by no means evidence of collaboration among the directors and scriptwriters of the different films, but a symptom of rapidly changing social values in American popular culture. Holland turns the cheerful bourgeois home of Dr. Sloper’s sister, Mrs. Elizabeth Almond (Judith Ivey), from the viable option it is in James’s novella to an impossible alternative for Catherine Sloper, already traumatized by her mother’s death in giving birth to her and the looming Law-that-is-name-of-theFather enforced variously by her actual father, Dr. Austin Sloper, and suitor, Morris Townsend. As Sadoff points out, Holland details in the film’s opening sequence “the perfect Victoriana of furniture and decor” of the house before turning “up, up, and up several flights of stairs, into a bedroom, across a mirror, and up a woman’s bloody body to picture death by childbirth.”35 For the rest of the film, bourgeois respectability and order are repeatedly associated with barely suppressed physical violence: behind the order of the house, there is always the aura of Dr. Sloper in his operating theater, spattered with blood and surrounded by human body parts. Holland rather neatly breaks the repetition-compulsion of patriarchal repression by merely accepting the exile of Townsend and the death of Dr. Sloper as the same, perhaps emphatically doubled, an expulsion of masculine authority. Dr. Sloper’s house becomes a home only by virtue of a cinematically unrepresented transformation of Catherine. Left alone by both father and suitor, Catherine makes explicit the economics of feminine domesticity by filling the parlor with the children of working women, so 34 A common criticism of all three films is that they fail to represent the complex interior world of James’s characters. Some critics blame this on the directors, as Karen Michele Chandler does in “Agency and Social Constraint in Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady,” The Henry James Review 18:2 (Spring, 1997), 193, when she criticizes Campion for advertising, rather than dramatizing, Isabel’s desire to make her own decisions and discoveries. Virginia Wright Wexman, “The Portrait of a Body,” The Henry James Review 18:2 (Spring, 1997), 184, focuses on the inherent differences between the novel and film as media: “Unlike novels, movies are customarily viewed in dark theaters where larger-than-life images create a dream-like experience that favors stories of high emotions, especially erotic ones.” 35 Sadoff, “The Henry James Movies,” 294.

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that she can remake the house of her powerlessness into a place of nurture for other children, at least some of whom have been as deprived of love as she. In response to the child’s face that yearns for her attention in the closing sequence of the film, Catherine smiles wryly for the first time. Holland allows her viewers to have it all – a family without the husband/father; children without the risks of childbirth; work and income without leaving home. Holland’s conclusion is certainly far more satisfying than James’s condemnation of Catherine to a life sentence of fancy stitchery, but it is meant clearly to be wish-fulfilling and compensatory for the viewer, who knows well enough how unrealistic such resolutions of contemporary feminine conflicts must be. In a similar fashion, Holland simplifies the social, sexual, and interpersonal problems by following an outdated Freudian family romance. Holland does shift our attention from masculine struggle to the feminine mediator so neglected in Freud’s Oedipal triangle, but her social criticism is as inapplicable to James’s Victorian dramas as it is to the dizzying social and personal factors informing our postmodern identities. Although Campion’s argument differs significantly from the simple progressive politics of Holland’s film, her Isabel (Nicole Kidman) is also surrounded by examples of failed marriage and the associated troubles of their offspring, ranging from the orphaned Isabel to the separated Touchetts (John Gielgud and Shelley Winters) and their dying son Ralph (Martin Donovan), to Osmond (John Malkovich), Merle (Barbara Hershey), and Pansy (Valentina Cervi). Literally locked out of Gardencourt in the final scene, even as she flees Goodwood’s possessive sexuality, Campion’s Isabel is left in a liminal, suspended position, but there is no ambiguity about how the film has responded to Victorian conventions of femininity based on marriage and the family. Similarly, Softley’s The Wings of the Dove focuses on the breakdown of the patriarchal family: Lionel Croy (Michael Gambon) is addicted to opium, Lord Mark to alcohol, and Merton Densher without the means to marry. Of course, James is the novelist of broken families and homes, but much of his emplotment of these unhappy families takes on more contemporary meanings in films that depend upon the conflict or confusion of two fins-dessiècles. At the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century, James could still imagine the family might be repaired and that the growing rates of divorce in England and America might be reversed, rather than divorce become the normative result of marriage. What Sadoff writes about Campion’s Portrait has a certain applicability to the Holland, Softley, Merchant–Ivory, and McGehee and Siegel’s films as well: “The social anxiety about the failure of marriage and the family as institutions that is generated by the statistics of divorce mobilizes the transportability of the nineteenth-century novel into film.”36 The cultural anxiety represented in these films exceeds considerably just worry about divorce rates and related social problems. If the 36 Sadoff, “The Henry James Movies,” 292.

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postmodern family is irretrievably broken, then how do we regulate and direct sexual desire? For all the flagrant, hip sexual display in these films, especially Campion’s and Softley’s, the viewer gets the sense of an overpowering anxiety about uncontrolled, unsublimated sexuality. These films seem to ask, often against their directors’ intentions: “What is sex for in an age of overpopulation and global want, AIDS and a host of other sexually transmitted diseases, and under the shadow of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis?” Once unmoored from the family, procreation, mothering and nurture, sexual desire becomes a dangerous sublime that threatens social coherence and reason itself. Campion’s Portrait addresses this contemporary problem in liberal progressive terms, focusing on the sadomasochism that results from the profoundly repressive practices of the bourgeois family. Gender hierarchies within such families instruct children at home in the ways of the wider capitalist world, preparing them for the class inequities from which they will benefit or suffer. Karen Chandler points out that the strong man in chains entertaining the crowd outside Pratt’s Hotel appears “just before” Isabel’s meeting with Caspar Goodwood inside the hotel, when he “pens her in and touches her face without her permission.”37 The constraint and repression women experience every day within the family and often teach their children also structure social and economic relations outside the family. For Campion, the only way to break this pathological cycle of sexual desire (fetishism) and violence (sadomasochism) is by means of love and care dissociated from phallic sexuality. Thus Campion often represents relations between women as alternatives to the systems of sexual and economic domination in bourgeois society. Isabel’s first meeting with Madame Merle in the music room of Gardencourt, where Serena is playing Schubert, crosses two of Campion’s favorite media for expressing alternative love – the piano and the erotic touch, either masturbatory or between two people without ulterior designs on each other. Campion stages this meeting shortly after Isabel’s fantasy of being kissed and fondled by Goodwood and Warburton (Richard Grant) while Ralph watches. Her dream dissolves with Goodwood seizing Warburton by his lapels, as if to underscore the phallic aggression of Isabel’s reverie. In the next scene, Ralph taps an overturned glass that traps an insect while pitying “Poor Mr. Goodwood.” Thus the scenes of new friendship between Serena and Isabel suggest freedom from such sexual bondage, even as they are erotically charged: Madame Merle and Isabel walking in the rain; Madame Merle sitting close to Isabel on a wing chair; Isabel kissing Madame Merle in thanks for the gift of her watercolor. This promise of an alternative, non-phallic expression of sexuality is quickly undercut in the subsequent scene, as Osmond aggressively fondles Serena just after she has proposed he meet Isabel, and the plot will turn this early amorous play 37 Chandler, “Agency and Social Constraint in Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady,” 192.

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between the two women into further proof of Serena’s duplicity. Phallic sexuality determines, entraps, and finally fetishizes its victims, both men and women. Osmond is represented in unrelieved pain and suffering, as much a victim of his perverse desires as Madame Merle, Pansy, Isabel, and Ned Rosier (Christian Bale). Campion relies on shots through grates, railings, balustrades, and windows to reinforce Ralph’s warning to Isabel, “‘You’re going to be put into a cage,’” and to stress how difficult it is to escape a nearly totalizing system of sexual aggression and submission. Campion films Isabel’s tourism in the Middle East as merely a variation on the sexual colonization of her body and psyche already underway in England and Italy. Posing as a veiled Muslim woman, Isabel ultimately reveals herself as a naked body scopically presented for voyeuristic consumption and audibly surrounded by Osmond’s repeated voice-over, “I’m absolutely in love with you” – another “‘territory’ to be mapped and conquered.”38 As Nancy Bentley points out, Campion transforms this “crude home movie” into a short “history of film,” a medium long complicit with the dominant culture in framing and controlling feminine identity, often by “presenting female desire as troubled, fraught, even pathological.”39 It is thus not so much Victorian sexual repression that Campion criticizes in her film as the underlying phallic sexuality that Victorian culture was unable to control. Proper feminine identity must be sought in alternatives to this phallocentrism, but Campion is unwilling to endorse a radical lesbianfeminist position. After all, Campion’s reputation since The Piano has depended on her ability to make art-films that reach middlebrow as well as highbrow audiences. Her Portrait was not a box-office success, but its expensive, celebrity cast and large production budget suggest ambitions to reach a wide audience that would have argued against a politically controversial alternative to heterosexual normativity.40 In The Piano (1993), Campion took the risk of dramatizing feminine disempowerment in patriarchal societies in a scene of violent and nearly literal castration when Ada’s husband, Stewart (Sam Neill), ferociously punishes her adultery by chopping off her finger.41 Criticizing patriarchy and its Freudian rationalization in the castration-complex, Campion suggests an aesthetic alternative in The Piano: the lovingly fabricated prosthetic finger becomes the bond between Ada 38 Walton, “Jane and James Go to the Movies: Post-Colonial Portraits of a Lady,” The Henry James Review 18:2 (Spring, 1997), 189. 39 Bentley, “‘Conscious Observation of a Lovely Woman’: Jane Campion’s Portrait in Film,” 177. 40 Sadoff, “‘Intimate Disarray’: The Henry James Movies,” 286, distinguishes between the success of Softley’s The Wings of the Dove and the relative failures of Campion’s Portrait and Holland’s Washington Square in the effort to cross over “from art-house to mainstream distribution,” but it seems clear from the advance publicity, celebrity casting, and expensive production budgets that all three films were intended to make this crossover. 41 The Piano, dir. and writ. Jane Campion (Entertainment/CIBY 2000, 1993).

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(Holly Hunter) and Daines (Harvey Keitel), especially as it enables Ada to play again the music that brought them together. The piano, perhaps more precisely their music, is Ada and Daines’ real child, not Ada’s daughter, Flora (Anna Paquin). The alternative to phallocentrism in Campion’s Portrait, however, is neither so dramatic nor simple. Campion toys with James’s own suggestion that Isabel will return to Rome not for the sake of her marriage, but to help Pansy, but she seems reluctant to make this her primary symbolic resolution of the problem of sexuality. As Pansy’s savior, Isabel becomes her surrogate mother and thus a representative of family values. Exaggerating James’s treatment of Isabel’s loss of her own child, Campion represents her mournfully playing with a plaster cast of the child’s hand, linking the dead child with the morcellized feminine body so often allegorized in the classical marbles littering the Italian settings of the film.42 When on the eve of her departure from Rome, Campion’s Isabel visits Pansy in the convent, she can only ask of Pansy, “Will you go away with me right now?” Whereas James has few problems hinting that Isabel might find a future for herself by returning to Rome and helping Pansy marry Ned Rosier, against Osmond’s wishes, Campion seems to view such an alternative as merely a repetition of the same old cycle. Campion’s Rosier is even more a double for abject women in her film than he is in James’s novel, as Campion makes eminently clear in the scene at the Colosseum when Rosier plaintively calls for Pansy while barred from reaching her by yet another cast-iron grating; Rosier has been put “into a cage” as decisively as Isabel and Pansy. But selling his bibelots and beseeching Isabel for her help still does not extricate Campion’s Rosier from normative sexual desire; despite his overt differences from men like Osmond, Lord Warburton, and Caspar Goodwood, Ned is still a man driven by phallic desire. For Campion, Ralph Touchett is not such a man, and she inflates and simplifies his role in James’s novel to work out both her critique of phallocentrism and offer a symbolic alternative. Although Ralph’s illness is clearly consumption from the beginning to the end of the film, Campion plays with the historical context of the novel to suggest that Ralph embodies the late nineteenth-century decadent or aesthete, bringing to mind such figures of the aesthetic and sexual avant-garde as Lytton Strachey, Oscar Wilde, and John Addington Symonds. Ralph’s “love” for Isabel is from the beginning “impossible,” as he tells his father, not simply because he is dying, but because he loves people differently, which carries with it from the very beginning the suggestion of homosexuality. Campion encourages viewers to understand Ralph’s relationship to Isabel as conventional, desexualized “friendship” – “You’ve been my best friend,” Isabel tells Ralph in Rome – before shocking them with the scene in which Isabel climbs into Ralph’s 42 Dale M. Bauer, “Jane Campion’s Symbolic Portrait,” The Henry James Review 18:2 (Spring, 1997), 195.

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sickbed for her most passionate and sexually explicit performance in the entire film. Friendship of the sort Campion links with Isabel’s affection for Gardencourt’s dogs vanishes as we witness a dramatization of the contemporary passion AIDS victims’ lovers and relatives often express for them, frequently in just such final circumstances. Kissing and caressing Ralph’s hand, rubbing it against her face in allusion to Goodwood’s unsolicited touching of her face earlier at Pratt’s Hotel, declaring her love to Ralph with her head next to his on the pillow, Isabel proceeds to stroke his chest, kiss him fully on the lips, and make love to him passionately, yet without intercourse. It is a tour-de-force scene, which not only provides a symbolic resolution to Campion’s argument but also helps destigmatize AIDS by linking it with other historical pandemics, such as tuberculosis, and by rendering heroic the gay male’s suffering.43 Indeed, it is a scene of unutterable suffering, registered most visibly in the pain on Isabel’s face as she kisses the dying Ralph, and it is the pain not only of mourning but also of recovered agency as she recalls how much other sexual and interpersonal relations have cost her. It is also, however, a scene in which the medical, legal, and social crisis of AIDS and the demonization of gays are exploited and colonized to work out a feminist problem and to avoid more politically dangerous lesbian-feminist alternatives. Borrowing the customary Jamesian rhetoric of feminine sacrifice, Campion makes the gay male perform the symbolic work of cultural sacrifice for the sake of feminine catharsis. The relative box-office success of Softley’s The Wings of the Dove is more understandable when we contrast its political unconscious with Campion’s argument in Portrait. Whether we understand her Ralph as sexually ambivalent aesthete, sick heir to capitalist rule, or gay male, he challenges contemporary representations of masculinity in ways linked with changing ideas of feminine identity. These alternatives and changes are represented as dangers in Softley’s film, even though it acknowledges the passing of feminine identity based on marriage, the family, and reproduction. The problem in his film is how to control and rechannel sexual desire, which otherwise contributes to a general modern tendency toward disorder. Softley’s alternative is an aestheticized and feminized asceticism, which in its early twentieth-century trappings is still recognizable as a version of late twentiethcentury appeals for a new celibacy, both in response to the threats of AIDS 43 Alan Nadel, “The Search for Cinematic Identity and a Good Man: Jane Campion’s Appropriation of James’s Portrait,” The Henry James Review 18:2 (Spring, 1997), 182, compares Campion’s Portrait with Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). One of the connections Nadel does not mention is the way both films are influenced by cultural anxieties regarding AIDS. Coppola’s close-ups of blood, even microscopic shots of blood’s circulation, go far beyond the conventions of the vampire novel and film to encompass anxieties that link and confuse the theft of our blood by vampires and the contamination of our blood by diseases, like HIV/AIDS.

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and other sexually transmitted diseases and to the presumed “moral breakdown” of the sexual liberation of the 1960s and 1970s. Milly’s task in the film is to instruct and discipline Merton while purging the force of the threatening New Woman, Kate, who is associated with our worst modern tendencies. From her opening fantasy of sex with Merton in the Underground, Kate is identified explicitly with pornography. Sex in an elevator is a standard pornographic convention, as is sex on the billiard table. Wearing her silk wrap with the peacock-feather design to Maud’s party, Kate lures Merton up the staircase with its blue tiles to the billiard room. The styles in this scene are Art Nouveau with a decadent, Orientalist aura that foreshadows the scene of a semi-comatose Lionel Croy in a London opium den. Jealous of the kiss Merton has given his companion and anticipating her later jealousy of Milly, Kate kisses him erotically and possessively commands: “I want you to go back and kiss her with that mouth. You came with her.” Even this cinematically added dialogue is derived from pornographic films, in which figures in ménages à trois swap kisses and bodily fluids. In between these two scenes, Kate follows Milly into a bookshop, finds her reading Tennyson, and drags her into the males’ only section, where Kate shows her an explicitly pornographic illustration in a Victorian book.44 When Kate introduces Milly to Merton in the National Gallery, she draws the two of them to Gustav Klimt’s nude, Danäe (1907), and then leaves them to contemplate it. Modern art, it seems, has been degraded by Kate’s lewd intention to match her lover and her friend. From the very outset, Kate is linked indissolubly with pornography.45 Klimt’s Danäe is not only a useful example for Softley of aesthetic modernism’s scandalous eroticism, but its mythic subject also puns on the plot of James’s novel. Zeus ravishes Danäe by metamorphosing into a shower of gold, which impregnates her with Perseus. Of course, it is Milly’s gold that Kate imagines will make Kate and Merton able to marry, so it would appear that Kate is the allegorical equivalent of Danäe, ravished 44 The illustration represents a ménage à trois, composed of two women and a male, who appears to be performing cunnilingus on one woman while the other receives her kisses, thereby anticipating Softley’s identification of Kate with lesbian sexuality. Indeed, the scene in the bookshop serves as a prologue to their weekend at Matcham, where Kate and Milly will share the same bed. 45 Just before Milly runs into Kate and Merton in the gallery – Softley shifts the scene from the National Gallery to the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens – Milly looks adoringly at another Klimt, the even more famous The Kiss, which is far less erotic than the sexually explicit Danäe. With several other paintings by Klimt in the background of the gallery, Softley makes it appear as if the three are attending an exhibition of Klimt’s works. Softley’s Klimts take the place of James’s Bronzino portrait of Lucrezia Panciatichi, which Lord Mark shows Milly at Matcham and she declares, “Dead, dead, dead.” This is yet another instance of how Softley attempts to modernize James’s novel. I am grateful to Sarah Koch for identifying Klimt’s Danäe, Angela Richardson for identifying the Serpentine Gallery, and the James Family Listserv for putting me in touch with such generous scholars.

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willingly by Milly’s fortune. In Softley’s film, the Medusa-slaying Perseus will be born of this perverse relationship in the form of Merton, but then renewed and purified by Milly’s love. Merton will thus work out Softley’s plot by rejecting Kate, this modern Medusa, and returning to Venice. Yet the corruption Kate represents is not simply the immorality of sexual desire confused with material interests, honest love entangled with the deviousness demanded by the economic realities of the age. From the beginning, Kate is also identified with new technologies, the working class, and progressive politics. Milly is rarely identified with modern urbanism; she appears more frequently in the rich Edwardian interiors of London or splendor of Venetian palazzi that belong to the sheltered ruling class. When we do see Milly in the city, she is either coming from Sir Luke Strett’s office, where Kate spies her from the top of a double-decker and pursues her into the bookshop, or her face and upper torso are viewed fragmentarily through Sir Luke Strett’s primitive “radiological” equipment, as she is the victim of this “mad scientist.”47 In Softley’s film, Milly has the modern disease of cancer, rather than James’s more romantic and vaguely specified heart trouble. Kate is the real embodiment of modern cancer, and she follows the symbolic logic that Klaus Theweleit has analyzed so well in his critical reading of early twentieth-century cultural anxieties that link women, the masses, and modernization.48 46

Figure 7.1 Gustav Klimt, Danäe (1907) 46 In Klimt’s painting of Danäe, she is depicted “seemingly underwater, thighs drawn up. Gold and silver seminal flow rising between her legs. Very erotic … . The eroticism is highly intentional: the red hair, etc. [of the nude figure]. The small black rectangle [in the midst of the gold and silver flow] is Klimt’s reduction of maleness to an abstract symbol.” From the Klimt website: http://helios. oit.unc.edu/wm/paint/auth/klimt 47 Alan Nadel, “Ambassadors from an Imaginary ‘Elsewhere’,” 284. 48 Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, 2 vols., trans. Stephen Conway (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), vol. 1, p. 79.

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In the local pub, Merton is distracted from his political debate with his friends – “The upper class isn’t going to change of its own accord” – when Kate appears; “You can’t just leave in the middle of an argument,” one of his male companions complains. When Kate meets him at his desk in the newspaper office, Merton describes the story he is writing about the doctor, recently elected to the Royal College of Surgeons, who sews up the hymens of prostitutes, especially young girls, so that they can pose as simulated virgins, increasing their sexual capital. Moreover, her father Lionel Croy is associated with the drug culture that Softley identifies as one of the evils of uncontrolled urbanization and modernization. By no means politically progressive herself, Kate is nonetheless associated with workers, prostitutes, and the masses in general, emphasizing the potential disorder they threaten. Her social ambitions do not so much contradict her association with the masses as represent their envy and desire as the secret motives of their rebellion. In James’s novel, Milly identifies with the working class, specifically with prostitutes, in her walk around London following her visit to Sir Luke Strett.49 When she ends up in Regent’s Park in James’s novel, Milly wonders how her own misery relates to the suffering she has witnessed in her walk, but Softley represents Milly in Regent’s Park watching a group of children playing soccer. When they look at her, she comments, “Wonderful!” but threatening rain causes them to run, as if away from her, rather than replying. The children and family Milly cannot have are nostalgic reminders of lost feminine identity, corrupted by characters, like Kate, whose dysfunctional family is the standard for the contemporary viewer. In such a modern world, what is the use of love? Although Softley had available in Susan Shepherd Stringham (Elizabeth McGovern) a character from the novel capable of unsexual love, he uses her principally as Maud judges her: “Milly’s servant.” Susie’s relation to Milly in James’s novel is complex, at times subtly erotic, and reinforces Milly’s brief identification of her suffering with the exploitation of the working class. But Softley is too intent on focusing modern corruption in terms of deviant sexuality than to grant Susie any positive agency in his film. Kate’s initial identification with pornography and prostitution quickly swerves in the direction of lesbian “unnaturalness.” When Lord Mark drunkenly awakens Kate in her bed at Matcham, his leering eyes matched by his vampirish teeth, she seems infected with his aristocratic deviltry. Indeed, his suggestions about Milly’s illness lead Kate directly to Milly’s bed, where Kate re-enacts Lord Mark’s violation of her privacy. Kate is, however, a better liar, complaining to Milly, “It’s freezing in my room … . These wretched aristocrats can’t even heat their houses.” Kate’s scorn for the aristocracy hides her envy and ambition, but her lies contaminate what otherwise would be her innocent cuddle with Milly, their heads posed in Pre-Raphaelite manner. 49 Henry James, The Wings of the Dove, vol. 19, The New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1909), pp. 247–260. See my discussion of this episode in the novel in The Other Henry James, pp. 23–25.

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In Venice, Softley draws on clichés about Italian sexual openness to render explicit the threat a modern, meretricious woman, like Kate, poses to social order. Even before Merton arrives, Kate asks Milly about her grand palazzo, “Is this all yours?” and Milly replies democratically, “It’s all ours.” The lurid ménage à trois Kate jealously suggests to Merton in the billiard room here takes form as Kate tries to maneuver Merton and Milly into a romantic relationship. Softley offers us several long shots of the three of them not quite constituting a group, notably during their picnic on the steps of the Church of Santa Maria della Salute, as Milly photographs Kate and Merton, and on their romantic ride in the two gondolas, as Kate reaches across the gunwales to Milly and Merton, crying out, “Milly, Milly. Come closer!”50 Kate’s duplicity turns even conventional scenes of feminine bonding, such as when Milly does Kate’s hair and Kate reciprocates by doing Milly’s lipstick, into betrayals of friendship. Softley’s symbolic composition of this threesome as perverse and unnatural takes center stage at the Carnival, when Milly and Kate emerge from their gondola arm-in-arm. Milly is dressed in the golden gown and mantilla of a Spanish hidalga, and Kate, with full moustache, is wearing the toreador’s suit-of-lights. Milly and Kate recall Carmen and Escamillo outside the bullring in the final act of Bizet’s Carmen (1875), but the opera is now strangely perverted by Kate’s transvestism and the setting in Venice, rather than Seville. Following them, Densher is disguised as a picador and Susie as duenna in her black silks. Milly wears her Venetian bauta, but Kate carries her mask, as if to say that she is not really disguised. While Milly and Merton dance and romantically kiss, Kate watches, but now without her moustache. Dropping two masks, then, Kate declares herself in fact the unnatural bisexual who wishes to possess sexually and psychologically both Milly and Merton. Once again, her jealousy overcomes her, however, and she literally drags Merton away from the piazza, significantly losing Milly and Susie in the thronged masses, to complete her sexual bargain with him. With its evocation of Casanova’s and Byron’s sexual exploits in Venice, its hint of opera and foreign cultures, the Carnival is another instance of Softley’s anxious representation of the masses. In a back alley, as if behind or beneath the throngs of people in democratic celebration, Kate and Merton seal their pact by having sexual intercourse against a scabrous city wall. More passionate than he will ever be in any of his other romantic encounters with Kate or Milly in the film, Merton seems particularly excited to be making love to a transvestite, whose suit-of-lights reflects narcissistically Merton’s own image and gender. In the novel, Kate and Merton’s 50 When Milly photographs Kate and Merton, it is one of the rare moments in the film she is associated with technology, the other being the scene at Sir Luke Strett’s. Although Milly might be using the camera to get “proof” of Kate and Merton’s love for each other, she may also be imitating modern Kate, confirming that up to this point Kate has successfully corrupted both Merton and Milly.

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bargain is sealed by her agreement she will come to his rooms if he will court Milly. In Softley’s film, illicit sexuality, the public sphere, transvestism, bisexuality, and homosexuality are deliberately confused. The morning after, Kate appears to Milly still wearing her toreador’s costume, but now in explicit déshabillé – the tie undone, the blouse open and wrinkled – as if the clothes she has slept in are also expressions of her loose morals. In addition, Kate lies thoroughly, consistently, but unconvincingly as she answers Milly’s questions about her relationship with Densher. After Kate leaves Venice, Milly begins to “save” Merton, and she does so first by trivializing his progressive politics as a journalist. When Merton proposes to tear down St. Mark’s to build houses for the poor, she simply dismisses such an idea as a joke. Softley’s camera agrees, transforming the dark, sinister alleyways, interiors, and the turbulent throngs in the piazzas into lovely tourist compositions of Venice, familiar to the late twentiethcentury tourist. Soon enough, under Milly’s gentle influence, Merton happily confesses, “I don’t believe in any of the things I write about. I lack passion. I lack conviction,” so that she may grandly claim, “I believe in you.” What Softley’s Milly “believes” in Merton has nothing to do with his politics; it is instead a new dedication to an individualism that is also vaguely identifiable with the beautiful and the spiritual. Milly herself exemplifies this ideal; she is a beautiful mystery, a work of art, to be contemplated but never used, consumed, or penetrated. Softley introduces an undeveloped religious thematic not only to foreshadow her death and pick up the scriptural motif of the title, but also to offer an elusive alternative to the sexual perversions and moral corruptions of the modern age. Her ascents are now clearly metaphors for this transcendental inclination, and in her nearly superhuman scamper up the scaffolding in the Church of Santa Maria della Salute she is leading Merton toward a higher calling. When they kiss passionately behind the restorers’ curtains, we see just the edge of the fresco behind them, with its angels pointing the way to the several other angels that now litter the Venetian scenery. Milly’s identification in the film with this particular Venetian church is not simply an ironic commentary on her illness, but further confirmation that Milly will redeem the modern world from its plague as effectively as the Virgin delivered Venice from its seventeenth-century plague.51 The passion between Milly and Merton is decidedly erotic, especially in the Church, because it is meant to counter the vulgarity of Kate and Merton’s public coupling and the more general obscenity of their relationship. Before Milly and Merton kiss in church, she has already tested him and knows he accepts her rules of sexual guilt and ascetic aspiration. Dramatically revising 51 Santa Maria della Salute also houses in the sacristy Tintoretto’s Marriage Feast of Cana, a painting of considerable significance in James’s novel. What Milly and Merton view on the scaffolding, however, is more likely one of Titian’s allegorical frescoes on the ceiling of the Church, all of which were based on biblical themes and which he painted from 1543 to 1544.

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James’s novel, Softley has Milly offer to go to Merton’s rooms. Charmingly drunk and playfully aggressive, she plays both Lord Mark and Kate; when she arrives at Merton’s hotel door, she offers to go inside with him. Fully interpellated as her acolyte, Merton insists, “I don’t want you to.” A man in contemporary film refusing sex? This certainly is a triumph for Milly, who from this moment on teaches and disciplines Merton regarding the dangers of unsublimated sexual desire. Merton’s mournful contrition – “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry” – as he kneels on the hard marble floor and buries his head in her breasts is yet another element in Softley’s aesthetic composition of Milly as one of those luminous figures of femininity in John Singer Sargent’s idealized portraits. Combining Sargent’s alluring Lady Agnew (c. 1892–1893), The Wyndham Sisters (1899), and Sargent’s revision of Edouard Manet’s Repose (c. 1869– 1972) in his own more languorous Repose (1911), Softley’s composition of Milly on the long divan with the wall molding serving as the frame of her portrait locates the worshipful and contrite Densher as a devotee of the arts, the cult of beauty, and their tacit ethical dimension.52 Milly comes to represent a new aristocracy, spiritually and aesthetically uplifted, committed to the ideals of self-reliant individualism and untouched by the masses, vulgar sexuality, or the sins of the past. It is a strange conclusion for an English director to draw, because Milly’s aristocracy is so obviously American. In their final encounter, Kate and Densher have sexual intercourse as a painful duty that assures their separation. Kate tries to take the lead by walking into his London bedroom, stripping methodically, undressing Densher, and getting on top of him. They are simply pale ghosts going through the motions, like Casanova with his mechanical doll, and the fleetingly visible family portrait on the wall of Densher’s bedroom seems to mock their unproductive tryst. Densher has been “cured” and, of course,

Figure 7.2 John Singer Sargent, Repose (1911)

52 Carter Ratcliff, John Singer Sargent, pp. 161–163, 172–173, 220–221.

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“saved” from the dangerous allure of politics, the New Woman, perverse sexuality, grasping commercialism, and urban anarchy. His return to Venice is just short of a religious conversion and vows of celibacy, and Milly’s control of his sexual desire looms as powerfully as the Catholic Church’s older taboos against unproductive intercourse. Holland’s Washington Square offers a reasonably practical answer to contemporary culture’s questions about feminine identity now that marriage, family, and reproduction are no longer its defining characteristics. The moral lesson that women’s careers have already begun to take the place of their domestic responsibilities within the nuclear family is sentimentalized a bit by making Catherine a worker in the child-care industry, but the message works effectively without much mystification. Campion’s Portrait leaves Isabel in a liminal state, unable to repeat the sadomasochism of patriarchal social relations and unwilling to embrace same-sex relationships as genuine alternatives. Isabel’s erotic care for the dying Ralph remains sacrificial, much in the spirit of James’s customary treatment of his feminine protagonists as full of useless knowledge. Softley’s The Wings of the Dove reacts in fear to opportunities for women in the workplace, the family, and interpersonal relations, recycling modernist anxieties regarding the anarchic feminine to graft nineteenth-century conventions of femininity as aesthetic and spiritual with the neo-individualism of the present moment. What these films tell us about Henry James is far less important than what they teach us about how inadequately we have come to terms with the politics of gender and sexuality at the end of the modernity Henry James helped inaugurate. In a 1999 op-ed in Time, Pico Iyer applauded contemporary adaptations of the literary classics on stage and screen as evidence that we are “dumbing up,” rather than “dumbing down,” in the popular idiom of that period.53 Iyer’s phrase is unintentionally expressive of how popular and high cultures interact in these film adaptations of James’s novels. Unquestionably, these are “art-films,” whose relative economic failures suggest they have missed the contemporary Zeitgeist. Nevertheless, these films are symptomatic of cultural anxieties in the late twentieth century that they attempt to address at the most basic level. However sophisticated in their cinematography and choice of “difficult” literary material, these films are as popular as television crime and police dramas in the same period in their engagement of public fears. In my view, these turn-of-the-century film adaptations of James’s fiction are reminders that when it comes to our understanding of how progressive changes in gender roles and sexual identities are being ideologically refunctioned, we are getting dumb and dumber. Film adaptations of James’s works since then confirm my argument. Whereas James’s works express great anxiety about the social consequences of women’s rights, such writings also represent conventional marital, gender, and sexual relations, especially of the bourgeoisie, as unnatural and sustained only by the most powerful 53 Pico Iyer, “In Fact, We’re Dumbing Up,” Time 153:20 (May 24, 1999), 100.

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repressive social conventions. There are no happy marriages in Henry James and only the briefest moments of sexual joy. Women’s relationships are equally bleak, whether they are charged with eroticism as in The Bostonians or the nostalgia for lost loves as in The Aspern Papers and The Spoils of Poynton. In these respects, James is a modernist who judges the sexuality driving so many interpersonal relations to be a terrifying, uncontrollable force. Instead, he generally chooses art and culture as sublimations of sexual reproduction into more enduring forms of social renewal. Merchant–Ivory’s The Golden Bowl (2001) transforms Henry James into a thoroughly American author. Ignoring James’s career-long criticism of American capitalism, the film represents Adam Verver (Nick Nolte), “America’s first billionaire,” as a proponent of democratic pluralism. His museum in American City will bring “beauty” to the masses, especially those immigrant workers in his coal mines who labor “twelve hours per day, seven days a week.” In Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s script, Verver’s European analogues are Holbein’s macho Henry VIII and Amerigo’s ancestral line of murderous, incestuous aristocrats, but Adam Verver is clearly a redeemed version of such leaders. In Merchant–Ivory’s “home movies,” Charlotte is saved by Adam as both surrogate father and husband, thanks to the immigrant voyage she will take to America to discover her own democratic roots. As she embraces Adam in their final scene at Fawns, Charlotte discovers true love, as her clutch at Adam’s shoulder suggests, just as Amerigo finds his own deep love for Maggie and their child in London. James’s international ironies are tidily resolved within conventional national boundaries. As heir to the imperial “white man’s burden,” the U.S. also inherits from Great Britain the stability of the heteronormative family. Merchant–Ivory’s film adaptation resolves all of the sexual weirdness of James’s novel, parceling out family responsibilities to the adulterers, Amerigo and Charlotte, who will be managed ably by their partners, Maggie and Adam. There is no hint of an incestuous relationship between Adam and his daughter Maggie in the film, whereas the novel begs the reader to imagine horrors, if only of the psychological sort, in which father and daughter act out a plot as nefarious as something from the notorious family history of the Cencis. In one sense, James Ivory and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala do little to change the script from their earlier adaptation of The Europeans (1979). Once again, dangerous sexuality seems to be associated with Europe; compulsive heterosexuality is reinstated happily at the end of both films. Nevertheless, the sexual games imported by the Europeans are comic, covers for economic interests in the earlier film, whereas in The Golden Bowl adultery and the betrayal of friendship threaten not only specific family relations but national representation. Maggie’s marriage into the Italian aristocracy threatens to import ancient moral corruption; Charlotte’s liaison with Amerigo risks the stability of her American marriage to Adam Verver. Power and wealth can corrupt, the film-makers suggest, so one must be cautious in wielding them. James suggests otherwise that wealth and power inevitably damage

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interpersonal and social relations; there is no redemption. The comedy of their film The Europeans turns into the melodrama of their adaptation of The Golden Bowl, once again suggesting how these films work through the popular registers of social and cultural anxieties. Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady (1996) and Holland’s Washington Square (1997) give the lie to such national melodrama, reminding us in the former case of the close relationship between the colonization of the bourgeois American woman’s body and more overt forms of Euroamerican colonization active around the globe from James’s era to our own. Campion makes this equation explicit in Isabel’s home movie of her “little tour” of the Middle East, and it plays as well in the opening scene in Holland’s film, in which Dr. Sloper’s operating theater is a bloody abattoir littered with the maternal corpse. Campion and Holland both call for revolutions of gender and sexual relations, which must take place across geopolitical boundaries and can succeed only by way of transnational coalitions among peoples similarly oppressed, however different their circumstances. Following strong reviews and awards at the Toronto Film Festival in 2012, Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s What Maisie Knew was released by Millennium Entertainment in 2013.54 The script by Carroll Cartwright and Nancy Doyne had been in development since 1995, so this cinematic adaptation dates from the period of Campion’s Portrait, Softley’s Wings, Holland’s Washington Square, and Merchant–Ivory’s The Golden Bowl. The film’s production and release in the second decade of the twenty-first century indicates the continuing interest in adaptations of James’s texts, in this case a work with apparent relevance to the ongoing debates regarding parental responsibilities in divorces. The scriptwriters’ decision to shift the action from the novel’s London to the film’s New York City clearly indicates that they are interested in the shift from the British to American centuries. Indeed, it is the Americanization of James’s very British plot, as well as the updating of the characters’ sources of income and social relations, that is intended to hold the viewer’s interest.55 When James’s What Maisie Knew was published in 1897, the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 in England and Wales had been in effect for four decades. Although this law enabled married couples to file for divorce in civil, rather than ecclesiastical court (as was the case prior to its passage), it favored male plaintiffs. The Act did reduce dramatically the costs of divorce previously involved in suits to the ecclesiastical courts. Prior to 1857, divorce in England and Wales had been largely an aristocratic privilege. James’s interest in the divorce of Beale and Ida

54 What Maisie Knew, directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, written by Carroll Cartwright and Nancy Doyne (Millennium Entertainment, 2013). 55 Despite favorable reviews, the film did little to hold viewers’ interest. Made for a budget of $5,000,000, it earned only $2,700,000 at the box office.

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Farange is not its novelty, but rather the social possibilities and problems divorce has made possible, especially for the bourgeoisie.56 In James’s novel, the divorced parents have joint custody of their adolescent daughter Maisie, who lives for six months each year with each parent (WMK, 4). By contrast, the six-year-old Maisie (Onate Aprile) in the film is shared in a more contemporary joint custody arrangement, in which she divides her time on a weekly basis with her mother Susanna (Julianne Moore) and father Beale (Steve Coogan). In the novel and the film, Maisie is supposed to be confused by her parents’ new personal relationships and her constantly changing living conditions. In the novel, Beale Farange hires a governess, Miss Overmore, to take care of Maisie, only to fall in love with the governess and marry her. Ida Farange, desperately in need of income, marries her suitor, Sir Claude. These two new marriages begin to fall apart as Sir Claude and Miss Overmore, now Mrs. Farange, begin a relationship. In the film, Miss Overmore is replaced by Beale’s governess and subsequent wife Margo (Joanna Vanderham) and Sir Claude by Lincoln (Alexander Skarsgård), who marries Susanna. The film carefully parallels the novel’s four adult partners, in order to follow the novel’s romantic complications and their impact on young Maisie. In the novel, none of the adults shows much interest in Maisie, which is the typical situation for James’s children, whether they are raised in a stable or broken family. In the film, Beale and Susanna use Maisie to focus their anger at each other, but Margo and Lincoln develop sympathies for the child that will lead to their own interpersonal bonds and eventual love. The romantic subplot between Margo and Lincoln eventually triumphs over the four dysfunctional marriages as well as Susanna and Beale’s bad parenting. Susanna, an aging rock star, will eventually acknowledge that Maisie is better off with Margo and Lincoln, tacitly accepting Lincoln’s earlier claim that their marriage is over. Beale, an international art dealer, will make a half-hearted effort to kidnap Maisie and take her with him to live permanently in London, only to give her up to Margo and Lincoln as Beale travels alone to England. The film ends with Margo, Lincoln, and Maisie idyllically vacationing at Margo’s brother’s beach house on Long Island, recalling the final scenes in the novel when Sir Claude, Mrs. Farange, Maisie, and Mrs. Wix, the new governess, try to chart a new course during their holiday in Boulogne. At the end of the novel, given the choice between the surrogate parents, Sir Claude or Mrs. Wix, Maisie is left in the middle of crossing the English Channel, meant by James to stand for all the unpredictability of Maisie’s present and future. In the film’s conclusion, Maisie is caught in a freeze-frame as she rushes down the dock to a moored boat, on which the audience knows she 56 William Randolph Cornish, Sir George Norman Clark, and Geoffrey de Norman Clark, Law and Society in England: 1750–1950 (London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1989), pp. 382–398.

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anticipates a happy excursion with her new surrogate parents, Margo and Lincoln, who have discovered each other through their mutual love for her. Sentimental and melodramatic, the film suggests that heterosexual love and stable family life are both still possible in contemporary America. Although this family is not biologically natural, its surrogation makes it even more admirable and desirable. Good parents are socially constructed, exemplified by their actions toward their children, whether the latter are biologically related to them or not. Adults who care for children as well as for each other still do exist in America, the film tells us, even when we witness broken families, as well neglected and abused children, every day. In order to make this case, however, the scriptwriters and directors of the film turn Maisie into an utterly dependent child, incapable of understanding any of the sexual dynamics playing out in the adult foursome in which she is a decidedly fifth wheel. James’s and the film’s Maisie are both six years old at the beginning, but James’s character grows and develops into adolescence by the end of the novel. In the film, Maisie is still a six-year-old at the end, undisturbed by the stirrings of sexual desire. The film is thus not really about children and their confused perceptions of adult sexual relations and parenting; the film is about adults and their responsibilities to children and hence the adults’ moral obligations for social reproduction. James’s novel is by no means as simple, sentimental, or moral as the film. While Sir Claude and Mrs. Farange are entering into a new, arguably adulterous relationship, both Maisie and Mrs. Wix are falling in love with Sir Claude, Maisie’s stepfather and Mrs. Wix’s employer. In the film, Lincoln reverts to child-like behavior under the influence of six-year-old Maisie, and the two of them charmingly horse around in Central Park, in an urban apartment, or at the Long Island beach house. But in the novel, “Sir Claude’s intimate relationship with Maisie often verges on the erotic, especially as Maisie grows older.”57 In Boulogne, Maisie even proposes to Sir Claude that they run away together to Paris. Stressed as he is by his complicated adult relationships, he briefly considers it before recognizing the perversity of such an idea. James’s donnée is that of an adolescent who is dimly aware of her own sexuality and required to understand adult sexual relations that bear on her very survival. Structured as a narrative of education, James’s What Maisie Knew is protomodern in its radical ironization of any proper education. Maisie learns only the lies and fictions perpetrated by her parents and their surrogates to cover their romantic philandering and economic meretriciousness. It is not clear at the end of the novel what Maisie might do with such knowledge, although she might well employ it to beat her parents and their partners at their own game. Just how she might overturn this vicious circle of social climbing, economic greed, and sexual lust for the sake of something better is left radically ambiguous at the end. Maisie may well have a moral future, but it is utterly unclear how she might have acquired the knowledge to pursue it. 57 Rowe, The Other Henry James, 132.

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Alone in the middle of the English Channel, Maisie might have already found part of the answer in solitariness, a radical rejection of social and sexual relations, and a celibacy her author knew well. Two years later in The Awkward Age, James suggests that such renunciation of the world is an impossibility. Perhaps women in the Catholic Middle Ages entered convents for such purposes, but this option seems a romantic fantasy in James’s modern world. As I argue in Chapter 3, Nanda Brookenham renounces nothing at all, reproducing instead the corrupt values of the London world the other characters are so intent she avoid. It is unclear whether or not James had grown more skeptical of the possibilities available to modern young women between 1897 and 1899, but in both cases the futures available to Maisie and Nanda are relatively bleak. Of course, James had no illusions that a young woman like Maisie Farange would imitate his ascetic life and aesthetic profession. What interests him is the degree to which marital relations, even with possibility of divorce, remain perverse, unnatural, and prone to excesses that damage everyone. There is no redemption in James’s What Maisie Knew, no vacation from sexual desire and human selfishness, and little recourse to a child’s innocence. In James’s modern world, there is no innocence that is not at the same time a profound, dangerous ignorance of the terror that surrounds you, threatening at any minute to drown you in its depths. The range of contemporary sexual politics exhibited in these five films is quite broad. Holland and Campion clearly represent contemporary feminist political views, which are explicitly liberal and progressive. Softley, Merchant–Ivory, and McGehee and Siegel are conservative, if not always in a strictly political sense, but definitely in the ethical messages they convey about the risks posed by the economic, social, and psychological consequences of changing gender roles and sexual identities. All of the directors of these films, however, appear to find in Henry James’s works support for their ideas. In part, James’s status as a canonical author permits these contemporary uses. By virtue of his central consideration of gender and sexuality, James can be misinterpreted without much concern for his original meaning. Such misreadings seem foregrounded in Holland and Campion’s films, both of which tacitly reproach James for not carrying his feminine characters’ revolutions far enough. The other three films suggest a different pattern of misreading, in which the respective directors and scriptwriters seem to find in James’s indecision the opportunity to overdetermine one of the possibilities within James’s work. In Softley’s The Wings of the Dove, Milly is aestheticized and spiritualized far beyond James’s representation of her in the novel, and the otherwise normal sexual desires of Kate and Merton are transformed in the film into symptoms of modern corruption. In a similar fashion, Merchant– Ivory’s The Golden Bowl avoids James’s ironic creation of two couples caught in close family relations and threatened by sexual desire. Sorting out the relations among Adam, Maggie, Charlotte, and Amerigo—with the

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Principino forgotten in the middle—the film-makers capture only one part of James’s melodrama and hence lose the real story. This little era of cinematic adaptations of James’s texts, arguably some of his most difficult, seems perfectly capped with the happy ending of McGehee and Siegel’s What Maisie Knew. Withheld as a possibility in James’s novel, the nuclear family in the final scenes of the film speaks primarily to our terrible nostalgia for what never existed in the first place. I argued in Chapter 6 that James may well have initiated a genealogy that led from Daisy’s feminine triviality to the violent commodification of Dorothy Stratten in Hollywood. Tenuous though the link might be, it is also quite possible that Bogdanovich’s Daisy Miller had some influence on subsequent film makers, if only urging them to do a better job of adapting James’s works not only to the screen but to contemporary political issues. Clayton’s The Innocents also had a powerful influence on subsequent adaptations, if only by stressing how Jamesian ambiguity permits the sorts of modernizations I have discussed above. Clayton’s and Capote’s coded insertion of sexual “difference” into The Innocents has been less influential, insofar as same-sex relations in the films of the 1990s have largely focused on lesbians, rather than gays, much less “queer” children. Nevertheless, the more convincing argument about the screen adaptations of James’s works released in the past thirty years is that they exploit James’s doubts about gender and sexuality, filling in his gaps, and resolving his ironies. James makes his works available for these subsequent interpretations by calling special attention to changing gender, sexual, and familial relations in the early modern era. What we might term James’s cultural mobility has as much to do with his own indecision regarding gender and sexuality as it does with our own inabilities to assess the social consequences of changes initiated in the Victorian era.

8

What Would James Do? Transnationalism in Recent Literary Adaptations of Henry James

He had failed, he realized, to take the measure of the great flat foot of the public, and he now had to face the melancholy fact that nothing he did would ever be popular or generally appreciated. —Colm Tóibín, The Master, A Novel (2004), p. 19

When in 1993 I attended the conference organized by Daniel Mark Fogel, then editor of The Henry James Review, to celebrate the sesquicentennial of Henry James’s birth in 1843, I predicted at the conference’s concluding roundtable discussion that students’ interests in Henry James would decline over the next few decades. My prediction has been confirmed, I think, by the curricula in English and Comparative Literature at most major universities around the world. James’s writings are still taught, of course, but they hardly occupy the same central positions as those of William Shakespeare and James Joyce. Yet if we consider popular culture, especially films based on his novels and James’s influence on contemporary Anglo-American fiction, then Henry James is flourishing in our postmodern condition. This renewed attention to Henry James’s writings, among the most difficult realist and modernist works of the fin de siècle, has surprised many James scholars, especially when his influence on film is considered. The numerous adaptations of his fiction to film in the 1990s led to a shock of recognition, in which many James scholars turned with new interest to James’s contributions to visual studies and culture.1 The previous three chapters in Part II: Our Times have focused on several aspects of James’s influence on and associations with film, but his most obvious connection with our times is displayed in contemporary literature. Colm Tóibin’s The Master (2004) and his nonfiction All a Novelist Needs (2010) are powerful and eloquent reminders that James continues to inform 1

Henry James Goes to the Movies, edited by Susan M. Griffin (Louisville: University of Kentucky Press, 1998), Henry James on Stage and Screen, edited by John R. Bradley (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), and The Men Who Knew Too Much: Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock, co-edited by Susan M. Griffin and Alan Nadel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) are three important examples of the new work done in the area of Henry James and film.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003297987-9

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the novel and our critical traditions. That influence seems to me especially evident in recent Irish and English literature. Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (2004), Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005), and John Banville’s Mrs. Osmond (2017) are good examples of how James’s aesthetic values continue to be debated and employed by creative writers and scholars. Even a sampling of the novels published in the last three decades displaying James’s influence would be a vast project, beyond the scope of this book. What I propose instead is to consider some different kinds of imitation and adaptation, in order to consider the diversity of James’s influence and especially his continuing presence in popular culture. In the U.S., Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes (1999) draws on the Edwardian cultural atmosphere, itself often termed the “Jamesian aura,” to emphasize the contradictions between the overtly liberal values of that culture and its complicity with the imperialism that made it possible.2 In the novel, the Native American young woman, Indigo, from the Sand Lizard people on the Arizona–California border, is introduced to Euroamerican culture in Boston, New York, London, and Rome by her white protector, the scholar Hattie Palmer. Silko writes that she based Hattie on Alice James and Margaret Fuller, “though initially Hattie wasn’t as strong as Fuller nor was she as conflicted or ill as Alice James.”3 Hattie’s husband, Edward Palmer, a botanist who is arrested after attempting to steal Citron tree cuttings in Corsica, is named for “an actual plant collector and botanist who worked in the Southwest United States in the late nineteenth century” (Silko, “Delight,” 210). In the novel, he shares many qualities with James’s Gilbert Osmond, including dishonesty and mistreatment of women. Silko admits that only in retrospect did she “realize … how much I owe Henry James for these characters” (210). Silko recalls that her “delight and appreciation for Henry James came first as a reader and undergraduate at the University of New Mexico” (Silko, “Delight,” 205). Yet her college education undoubtedly contributes to her ambivalence about Henry James, whose reputation as a high-cultural author played a part in the Euroamerican curriculum Silko studied at the University of New Mexico. In Gardens in the Dunes, James’s cultural and aesthetic values complement the late nineteenth-century progressivism of Hattie Palmer. Hattie tries to “save” Indigo from destruction by Euroamerican society. Yet in her efforts to assimilate Indigo to white society, Hattie discovers the inherent violence of Western values. Reversing the conventional Bildungsroman, Silko has Hattie learn from the indigenous woman she is hoping to educate. By the end, Indigo is Hattie’s teacher, not just of the difference between Euroamerican and indigenous societies, but about how the different communities might productively interact. 2 3

Leslie Marmon Silko, Gardens in the Dunes (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999). Silko, “Delight: An Appreciation of Henry James,” Henry James Review 33:3 (Fall 2012), 210.

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Silko works to open the space of the traditional novel for indigenous stories, including the sacred tales of the Sand Lizard people of the Southwest. In this regard, she acknowledges generously her “considerable debt to Henry James, not only for the portraits of Americans abroad or wandering in gardens but also because he created narrative space in American literature for characters like my Sand Lizard girls” (Silko, “Delight,” 212). Just what Silko means in this context requires interpretation. Henry James does not figure in Silko’s literary imagination as knowledgeable or even sympathetic to indigenous experience, but because James insisted “that narrative point of view is essential to the meaning of the story” he enables stories told from other perspectives, including those he cannot imagine (Silko, “Delight,” 212). Although she does not say so, Silko tacitly acknowledges James’s emphasis on the social construction of Euroamerican communities. Imperial expansion and domination do not rely for James on the ethical or cognitive superiority of the conquerors, but simply their access to greater power. Add to this Jamesian influence, his development of feminine protagonists who experience the limitations of a deeply patriarchal society and fight in various ways to resist or escape its bonds. Silko’s love–hate relationship with Henry James should be considered one of the important characteristics of our continuing fascination with his writings.4 Writing his major works when the U.S. inherited the imperial “burden” from Great Britain, James tried to warn Americans of future dangers even as he continued to benefit from his privileged status as a transatlantic cosmopolitan. Indigo travels with Hattie around the world, gaining new perspective on the destructive power of Western expansion in the Eastern U.S., Europe, and Brazil before returning to her native Southwest to witness the violent effects of such globalization on her homeland. James’s cosmopolitanism is certainly part of the problem, rather than the solution, for Silko, but his different cultural experiences at least open the Euroamerican narrative to other stories. As a Laguna Pueblo writer, Silko works from a different transnational perspective than James’s modern cosmopolitanism. As her novels, Almanac of the Dead and Gardens in the Dunes argue, indigenous people draw strength from prenational and post-national affiliations that highlight the short, brutal history of modern nation-states.5 For some of these reasons, then, we ought to be more attentive to James’s continuing relevance for U.S. writers, especially in the past three decades, when the US state has assumed its neoimperial role with far less ambivalence than it did in the past. President William McKinley could speak defensively of Americans as “reluctant imperialists” in the Spanish–American (1898) and subsequent Philippine–American (1899–1902) wars, but President George W. Bush 4

5

In her keynote address at John Cabot University in Rome at the 2011 Henry James Society Conference, Silko was far more ambivalent about Henry James than in “Delight: An Appreciation of Henry James,” which is based on her lecture and published the following year in The Henry James Review. Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991).

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considered American imperialism a civic virtue during our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in the response to al-Qaeda’s attacks on 9/11. President Obama’s effort to “lead from behind” in foreign relations was designed to scale back American Exceptionalism and respect global diversity. The phrase was quoted derisively by presidential candidate Trump, who campaigned on a new, aggressive American nationalism. As President, Trump stressed an “America first” foreign policy that recalls the one-sided and often disastrous U.S. foreign policies of the past. With her critique of U.S. settler colonialism and its complicity with British and other European imperialist policies of the late nineteenth century, Silko views Henry James as an ambivalent ally in the task of challenging American Exceptionalism and its imperial policies. With some of these issues in mind, I want to look at recent adaptations of, allusions to, and influences of Henry James’s writings, with specific attention to how James has helped shape a transnational imaginary both within and outside contemporary U.S. fiction. In what follows, I consider Jamesian influences on Cynthia Ozick’s Foreign Bodies and Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, both published in 2010, and the allusions to Henry James in Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer (1979) and Exit Ghost (2007). Three of these novels were written and published in the wake of 9/11, the Second Gulf War, and our invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, so they are unavoidably concerned with the global role of the U.S. state. In what follows, I want to stress that I am less interested in judging the aesthetic quality of these works in their uses of Henry James. Instead, I want to consider James’s influence on the broader issue of how cultural works imagine national and transnational affiliations. Turning from exclusively U.S. authors, I consider Colm Tóibín’s homage to James in The Master (2004). As an Irish and gay writer, Tóibín considers James’s own Irish heritage and closeted homosexuality as crucial factors in James’s cosmopolitanism. Rather than treating Henry James as primarily an American, Tóibín represents his transnationalism as James’s strongest influence on Tóibín. Like Silko, Tóibín understands James as working both within and outside Anglo-American cultures, and it is just James’s status as an outsider and foreigner that enable both Silko and Tóibín to draw on James’s writings as resources rather than as products of the Western imperialism they both criticize and wish to overcome. Yet Tóibín’s and Silko’s admiration of James’s role as an expatriate, cosmopolitan modern fails to address the odd neglect in his writings of the racial and sexual differences so central to modern and contemporary personal lives, as well as to the imperial imagination. In the final section of this chapter, I look back to James Baldwin’s Another Country (1962), in which Baldwin lovingly invokes James while reminding us of how little James engaged the entanglement of racism and sexism in the history of U.S. colonialism at home and abroad. In my chapter on Roth in Afterlives of Modernism (2011), “Neoliberalism and the U.S. Literary Canon: The Example of Philip Roth,” I argue that

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Roth consistently identifies liberal individualism with an American identity that can only assimilate cultural differences and is incapable of engaging other modes of social organization and personal existence.6 Although I do not discuss either The Ghost Writer or Exit Ghost in that chapter, both novels provide a clear defense of this American ideology, especially in their respective allusions to Henry James. Newsweek’s 1979 review of The Ghost Writer notes how Roth introduces “James’ themes” of “master and disciple, young America confronting old Europe, ambiguous ancestry, art as a dubious balm for the wounds of life” and “now Roth has made them his as well.”7 In Roth’s The Ghost Writer (1979), Nathan Zuckerman is a young, aspiring writer who has wangled an invitation from E. I. Lonoff to visit the reclusive author at his mountain home in the Berkshires. Zuckerman first encounters Henry James in one of the typed quotations pinned to the bulletin board in Lonoff’s study: “‘We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.’”8 The yearning acolyte Zuckerman treats this passage from James’s story “The Middle Years” as a sacred text that might reveal Lonoff’s genius to him, as well as create the master–disciple bond that could take the place of Zuckerman’s troubled relations with his biological father. The chapter in which Nathan discovers James’s short story is full of references to world literature, as we might expect from the young writer’s encounter with Lonoff, who seems an imaginative hybrid of J. D. Salinger and Isaac Bashevis Singer. The chapter “Nathan Daedalus” includes rapid-fire references to Shakespeare, Chopin, Byron, Kafka, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Anne Frank, and Henry James. The chapter title parodies Joyce’s focus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man on the young artist Stephen Daedalus’ obsession with world literature. Roth’s passionate pilgrim, Nathan Zuckerman, is, of course, in love with art and sex, neither of which can be easily separated from the other, and he masturbates vigorously to his fantasy both of sleeping on the daybed in Lonoff’s study and the murmurs he hears in the room above him emanating from Lonoff and his attractive student, Amy Bellette. To counter his postmasturbatory “sense of utter shabbiness,” Zuckerman takes from the shelf a book containing James’s “The Middle Years” and proceeds to summarize the story for the reader (GW, 113). But the conclusion of his paraphrase, interspersed with direct quotations, is met with the sound of a “woman … crying” upstairs, and adding the book containing “The Middle Years” to a stack on Lonoff’s desk, Zuckerman presses his ear to the ceiling to gather a fugitive account of their illicit affair in the very house where Lonoff’s allsuffering wife Hope has just served them all dinner (117). 6 7 8

John Carlos Rowe, Afterlives of Modernism: Liberalism, Transnationalism, and Political Critique (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2011), p. 191. Further references in the text as: AM. Peter S. Prescott, “The Ghost Writer,” Newsweek 94 (9/10/1979), 72. Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), p. 77. Further references in the text as: GW.

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Amy Bellette is a young woman who believes she is the surviving Anne Frank, who escaped the Nazis and made her orphaned way to America, where she witnesses her own life story on stage in the dramatization of The Diary of Anne Frank. Lonoff’s compulsive love for Amy in The Ghost Writer doubles Zuckerman’s obsession with Lonoff, complicated by Zuckerman’s blind desire for Amy Bellette herself. To be sure, James’s “The Middle Years” deals with the sexual complications of life and art in ways that make Roth’s appear quite tame, insofar as Dr. Hugh’s passion for the artist Dencombe competes with that of the Countess for Dencombe, stirring all the characters into a typically comic situation of crossed genders and sexual desires that James contends only art can sort out.9 Roth makes no overt connection between the homosocial and the homosexual themes in “The Middle Years” with the Lonoff–Zuckerman–Bellette triangle, stressing instead that the sort of unnatural family romance that motivates Zuckerman’s literary career will ultimately emasculate Lonoff and prompt Zuckerman to pursue a series of inadequate feminine substitutes for the lost object of his desire, Amy Bellette. Of course, Zuckerman’s relationship with Lonoff is not only Oedipal in Harold Bloom’s sense of the anxiety of influence shaping literary genealogies, but it is also profoundly homosocial. Eve Sedgwick’s work on English literature stresses the homosexual panic structuring homosocial relations, so we cannot exclude homoerotic desire, much distorted and displaced, in Zuckerman’s relationship with Lonoff.10 To be sure, the very name “Lonoff” suggests onanistic satisfaction, which is by no means exclusively homosexual but certainly homoerotic. Zuckerman’s passionate desire for Amy Bellette is also homoerotic, if we consider that “she” is in fact a fiction in Lonoff’s literary life, if not explicitly his literary writings. Such a reading of homosexual sublimation through artistic experience is certainly intended by Roth, but for that very reason displaces any overt treatment of gay politics in The Ghost Writer. Indeed, post-Stonewall gay rights activism is virtually absent from Roth’s writings in this period, even though heterosexual sodomy often seems the sine qua non of both sexual deviance and satisfaction in his fiction, playing a central role in The Human Stain (2000), Sabbath’s Theater (2005), and The Humbling (2009). Roth’s sexual confusion seems quaintly nostalgic, a throwback to the bad old days of Norman Mailer’s An American Dream (1964), with its anti-German sentiments represented in Rojack’s sodomy of Jutta, and Roth’s own Portnoy’s Complaint (1967), a virtual primer on sexual “deviance.”11 9

John Carlos Rowe, The Other Henry James (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 101–119 10 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), especially her reading of James’s “The Beast in the Jungle,” pp. 182–212. 11 Norman Mailer, An American Dream (New York: Dial Press, 1964); Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint (New York: Random House, 1967).

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Roth’s version of the Jamesian plot thickens in the last of the Zuckerman novels (there are nine altogether), Exit Ghost (2007), when Zuckerman is embroiled in the efforts of the meretricious Kliman to extract from the aged and fatally ill Amy Bellette the last of Lonoff’s manuscripts: an unfinished novel. The metaliterary plot of Exit Ghost turns crucially on Roth’s adaptation of James’s The Aspern Papers (1888), in which the snooping editor attempts to ingratiate himself with the two spinsters, Juliana and Tina Bordereau, in hopes of acquiring the posthumous papers of the American romantic poet Jeffrey Aspern, Juliana’s lover and possibly Miss Tina’s father, in James’s own adaptation of Byron’s amorous misadventures and literary celebrity. Yet whereas The Ghost Writer quotes and paraphrases James at length, Exit Ghost makes only one explicit reference to James, a dismissive one explaining how little Zuckerman knows of the aristocratic backgrounds of his friend George Plimpton: “My familiarity with their world was limited to the fiction I’d read by Henry James and Edith Wharton … at the University of Chicago, books I’d been taught to admire but had for me as little bearing on American life as Pilgrim’s Progress or Paradise Lost.”12 Yet Exit Ghost, even if it did not turn centrally on Roth’s adaptation of the plot from The Aspern Papers, continues the family romance of Lonoff–Bellette–Zuckerman that has such explicit Jamesian origins in The Ghost Writer. Why, then, does Zuckerman so readily dismiss Henry James and Edith Wharton as European in his one explicit reference to James in The Ghost Writer? The answer seems to be that Roth identifies the plots and characters of their novels of manners with the lingering pretensions of European aristocracy, whether or not their characters and settings are American or European. Dencombe and Dr. Hugh, as well as the Countess and her companion, are wealthy and British, but the focus of “The Middle Years” for Roth is art, not society. Art democratizes, Roth argues, and it does so by moving us all in the American direction that Lonoff initiates and Zuckerman completes in Roth’s imaginative country. The Ghost Writer is dedicated to Milan Kundera, the Czech writer Roth introduced to Anglo-American audiences and championed, along with other dissident Eastern European writers, during the late years of the Cold War. For Roth, their art represented not so much specific political issues as the strivings of the individual to resolve the existential contradictions of everyday life. Roth makes this point about the international significance of classic American literature in a sustained exchange in The Professor of Desire (1977) between the visiting American professor David Alan Kepesh and his Czech guide Professor Soska, a literary scholar who has lost his university post under Soviet rule. Soska’s explanation of why he continues to translate Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick into Czech, despite several other serviceable 12 Philip Roth, Exit Ghost (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), p. 243. Further references in the text as: EG.

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versions of the American novel in that language, is designed to remind us how U.S. culture defends the natural right to individualism.13 It is just this struggle by the individual that is best achieved within U.S. democracy or a reasonable facsimile of it in other global sites. Nathan Zuckerman considers Henry James and Edith Wharton the authors of books he had to be “taught to like” in college, but Roth knows that their deep aesthetic senses are at root American, no matter how European both James and Wharton became in their own lives. Cynthia Ozick’s rewriting of James’s The Ambassadors in Foreign Bodies offers another interpretation of James’s continuing significance in the postmodern era. Ozick began her career as a scholar of James, earning her M.A. in English from Ohio State University with a dissertation on Henry James.14 Choosing to write her own fiction instead of pursuing an academic career, Ozick is strongly and self-consciously influenced by James. Readers familiar with her career should not be surprised by this rewriting of James’s famous novel of the Major Phase from the perspective of a woman teacher in the New York City public school system. Ozick’s own writings in recent years have been increasingly neo-conservative, especially in her vigorous defense of Israel in its controversial policies toward the Palestinians.15 Given James’s anti-Semitism, his influence on Ozick’s writing seems curious, as Adam Kirsch points out in his review of Foreign Bodies: Ozick may be the last in the illustrious line of writers whose complicated engagement with James helped to define not just American Jewish fiction, but the American conception of modernism itself. For the stark, often noted irony is that it was precisely the children and grandchildren of … immigrant Jews, … who did most to secure James’s place at the center of the modernist canon.16 Indeed, Kirsch’s comment about the James’s odd influence on American Jewish fiction applies as well to what we have seen in Philip Roth’s work as in Ozick’s fiction. Perhaps for some of these reasons, Foreign Bodies treats critically James’s The Ambassadors as a novel of transatlantic manners.17 Set in 1952 in New York, Los Angeles, and Paris, Ozick’s novel stresses the great social changes 13 Philip Roth, The Professor of Desire (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), pp. 160–161. Further references in the text as: PD. 14 See Cynthia Ozick, What Henry James Knew and Other Essays on Writers (New York: Random House, 1993). 15 See Ozick, “All the World Wants the Jews Dead,” Esquire (November 1974), 103–107, 207–210, which was reprinted as an eight-page pamphlet, All the World Wants the Jews Dead (New York: American Jewish Congress, 1974). 16 Adam Kirsch, “Beyond Idolatry,” review of Foreign Bodies, New Republic (March 24, 2011). 17 Cynthia Ozick, Foreign Bodies (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010).

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of the first half of the twentieth century, suggesting the relative triviality of the social problems James addressed in his novel. Whereas James’s Lambert Strether struggles with his diplomatic mission from Mrs. Newsome to bring home her son, Chad, who has strayed into a liaison with an older, widowed French woman, Madame de Vionnet, Ozick tells her story from the perspective of Bea Nightingale, a middle-aged New York City school teacher whose estranged brother, Marvin, a Los Angeles businessman, enlists her to bring home his son, Julian. What Bea discovers in Paris is that Julian has married Lili, the Romanian Jewish survivor of a concentration camp where her family perished, including her child and husband. Lili shows up in Paris at the end of the war as a “Displaced Person,” working in a center dedicated to relocating other war refugees. Ozick draws on both the Holocaust and feminism to transform James’s comedy of manners in The Ambassadors into a melodrama about the impact of globalization on Americans. Unlike Madame de Vionnet, Lili is a tragic figure who draws on her own traumatic experiences to help others. Unlike Chad Newsome, Julian falls in love less with Lili as a person than with the historical drama and hope she represents. When Julian’s sister, Iris, joins Bea in Paris in the effort to bring Julian home to his domineering father, Iris is also transformed by her European experience. The characters who experience postwar Europe in Ozick’s version of James’s “international theme” are changed by their knowledge. Those characters who remain stubbornly insulated in America, like the father Marvin and his wife Margaret, are destroyed by their provincialism. Julian’s and Iris’s mother Margaret has been committed to a mental institution by Marvin and eventually will be killed crossing a freeway in her confused effort to escape and help her son. Defeated by his wife’s insanity, death, and his son’s repudiation of him, Marvin ends a broken man taken care of by his daughter, Iris, who now recognizes the emptiness of his world of money and power. Foreign Bodies is a didactic book, written almost formulaically in Ozick’s adaptation of James’s themes to more modern, global circumstances. Ozick’s style does not compare favorably with the comic hilarity of Roth’s fable of the sex- and text-obsessed Nathan Zuckerman. But intellectually Ozick’s novel identifies the historical point at which James’s cosmopolitanism failed to achieve a genuinely global vision. Anti-Semitism and other forms of xenophobia were certainly evident in James’s late Victorian and Edwardian culture, and James lived long enough to witness and write about the refugee crises of World War I. “Foreign bodies” are just those that Roth’s characters assume must become “American,” rather than disturbing conventional American ideals with new knowledge, much as the medical term “foreign bodies” refers to alien pathogens that can infect our biological systems. Ozick urges Americans to learn from global history and assume their political, moral, and personal responsibilities for such crises as the Holocaust and the wartime displacement of people. At the end of Foreign Bodies, Bea’s nephew Julian does learn from Lili and her suffering what the

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Holocaust means for all of us. Turning to the Judaism his father has abandoned, Julian plans to study theology. Even Bea’s ex-husband finally completes the classical symphony he began as a young man, but abandoned to write scores for Hollywood movies. Europe and Judaism change everyone in the novel, most of them for the better. At the end of James’s The Ambassadors, readers are baffled by what Strether or any of the other characters may have learned from their little tours in France. Ozick’s lessons are clear, albeit sentimental. Whatever our American heritages, we remain strongly influenced by European politics and culture, for better and for worse. Of course, Ozick’s message remains definitively American in its appeal. With the exception of the Romanian-Jewish Lili, all of the characters are Americans and the moral imperatives of the novel seem directed to American readers. Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom was published in the same year as Ozick’s Foreign Bodies, but appears to have nothing to do with Henry James, except for Franzen’s usual focus on the consequences of the collapse of the middleclass American family and its related values.18 After all, the rise and fall of the bourgeoisie are the central subjects of James’s fiction, and Franzen often impresses me as a self-conscious heir of the Jamesian tradition. By the time he wrote Freedom, Franzen was well known for his critique of postmodern technology and social values, as well as his contempt for the neoimperial American state, which he termed “nearly a rogue state,” and his nostalgia for the novel and the values of print culture.19 Despite the extremity of his social satire and fictional techniques in his novels—The Twenty-Seventh City (1988) and The Corrections (2002) preceded Freedom—Franzen lives up to what Michiko Kakutani writes in the New York Times Book Review of Freedom: “a kind of nineteenth-century realist concerned with the public and private lives of his characters.”20 Freedom is a rambling postmodern satire of bourgeois liberalism in America, in which the illusion of American freedom produces both personal suffering at home and unimaginable terror in the rest of the world. The reverse migration of Patty and Walter Berglund from their comfortable, environmentally conscious lives in urban St. Paul, Minnesota to the halls of power in Washington, D. C. and environmental destruction on a massive scale in West Virginia is matched by the collapse of their relationship and family. Their callow son Joey moves in with their St. Paul neighbor’s daughter Connie, while both are still in high school, and tries his hand while a student at the University of Virginia selling defective spare parts for supply trucks shipped to contractors in Iraq in the Second Gulf War. Although he eventually gives away his profits in this venture to settle down with Connie 18 Jonathan Franzen, Freedom: A Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010). Further references in the text as: F. 19 Sarfraz Manzoor, Alex Healey, and Michael Tait, “Jonathan Franzen: ‘America is almost a rogue state,’” Guardian (London) (10/25/2010). 20 Michiko Kakutani, “Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom Follows Family’s Quest,” New York Times (August 15, 2010), C1.

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in a sustainable coffee business, Joey flip-flops in life in ways that epitomize American freedom gone crazy, heir to what Philip Roth terms “the American berserk” in American Pastoral (1997).21 Joey’s father, Walter, an environmentally sensitive lawyer, gets used by a megacorporation interested in the extreme type of strip mining that removes mountain tops, pushing them into valleys and destroying habitat and riparian paths. While serving as the public relations man for this corporation, which promises to replace its natural devastation with a “bird sanctuary,” Walter works with Lalitha, the South Asian American aide with whom he has a brief affair. Their personal relationship is cut short when Lalitha dies in a suspicious car accident on the West Virginia mountain in question, shortly after she and Walter have decided to expose the coal mining corporation’s anti-environmental practices. There is more to the plot of Freedom than I can summarize here, but the essence of Franzen’s attack on the breakdown of stable middle-class values as a consequence of U.S. imperialism abroad and in its ongoing war with nature at home should be clear from these fragments. The novel hardly sounds Jamesian, except in its focus on how the rise of the bourgeoisie has led to the decline of the so-called American Century. There is virtually no allusion to Henry James in the novel, except in a very brief, but pertinent exchange between Walter and Lalitha as the two sit in their rental car and consider the consequences of their brief love affair. “Well, there we are,” Walter says to Lalitha as they try to figure out how to cope with their unexpected relationship that connects Walter’s Midwestern background and Lalitha’s South Asian immigrant heritage. The words echo, of course, Lambert Strether’s last words to Maria Gostrey (and the reader) at the end of The Ambassadors: “Then there we are!” (The Ambassadors, II, 327). It can be argued that the phrase “there we are” is hardly the literary property of Henry James. As a mere phatic that fills that gap of meaning, it belongs simply to the English language, as much as “Hullo?” does to the telephone era. Nevertheless, I am convinced that Franzen is indeed alluding to the critical ending of James’s novel in ways that force James and the “realist” tradition to confront American postmodernity. Strether’s “there we are” identifies the missed connection with which The Ambassadors concludes and no amount of wish-fulfillment can overcome. Not quite as self-deluded as James’s John Marcher in “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903), Strether nonetheless admits he will never rise to the occasion Maria Gostrey presents to him in that moment (and May Server offers Marcher so many times). What Strether and Marcher miss is erotic love and personal connection with other human beings who very much resemble them in terms of ethnicity, class, and social affiliations. Franzen’s Walter misses the connection with the South Asian American woman who represents the other worlds America continues to exploit at home and abroad. To be sure, Lalitha is ambitious, 21 Philip Roth, American Pastoral (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1997), p. 1.

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professional, and as ideologically deluded as Walter, but her role in the novel is to break the cycle of what is finally the tedious decline of white middle-class Americans, like the Berglunds and their friends. Lalitha’s death is sacrificial, both in the plot’s suggestion of a corporate conspiracy to eliminate its critics and in Franzen’s inability to carry out his cosmopolitan, transnational vision. Patty and Walter get back together at the end of the novel, just as Joey and Connie end up married and working in an environmentally friendly business. Franzen displays his contempt for all of these characters, who are tossed about by the rapidly changing fashions of postmodern, first-world nations, but who actually have very little “freedom” as a consequence. Their determined lives recall those of James’s most tortured souls, who awaken from one delusion only to be swallowed quickly by another. Strether pretends to go back to “a great difference” when he has in fact nothing to which to return in America (The Ambassadors, II, 325). Strether does not come close to the immorality of Kate Croy and Merton Densher in The Wings of the Dove, who must work hard to hide from themselves how they have betrayed their best friend, Milly Theale. At the furthest extreme, James’s governess in The Turn of the Screw must believe passionately in the reality of the ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, unless she wishes to accept her role in frightening young Miles to death. A minor sinner, Strether still shares with these characters a typically Jamesian self-delusion. Franzen’s irony in all of his novels is also profoundly Jamesian. Although his training at Swarthmore was in German literature and his references to predecessors focus more on near contemporaries, like Philip Roth, he is nonetheless working out the fateful logic of the middle-class novel of manners that James borrowed from his Victorian contemporaries. Franzen recognizes, as James must have, that the global contexts for personal responsibility and social relations cannot be ignored, and Franzen clearly organizes Freedom in terms of the intersection of domestic and foreign relations. But in the end Franzen follows Roth by collapsing these problems into American issues and themes, so that Lalitha can be sacrificed and Joey can renounce the $900,000 he earns as an arms dealer and thus be saved, both morally and physically. Both fictional actions continue to resonate in the fates of Franzen’s characters, but they are unresolved, leaving his readers with a similar sense of disconnection, of being as Strether opined simply “there” in some fantastic place where “we” cannot really exist any longer. Roth, Ozick, and Franzen struggle to find some way to reconcile American values with an increasingly diverse global world. In Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies (2010), Paul Jay addresses directly how transnational issues have transformed traditional American literary studies, requiring us not only to consider new concepts and theories but a wide range of literature published in the U.S. that deals with peoples and cultures outside its borders. Acknowledging the material conditions of one-way globalization, Jay advocates a “culturalist” perspective he shares with many creative writers that enables him to “write back” and thus

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challenge the dominance of first-world, especially U.S., goods and values in the new global order.22 In so doing, Jay argues that the culturalist approach transforms America, requiring us to recognize our ties with South Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America. What Jay terms his post-post-colonial studies approach remains Anglophone, but the works he interprets by Vikram Chandra, Kiran Desai, Junot Díaz, Zakes Mda, Arundhati Roy, and Zadie Smith take us far from the old, familiar U.S. and British centers of the English world. Colm Tóibín’s The Master (2004) is in many respects the perfect rejoinder to Ozick, Franzen, and Roth, as well as a critical commentary on James’s influence on the new global novel. Tóibín writes in English but draws centrally on his identity as an Irish author who grew up poor in rural Ireland still in the grip of British colonialism. In these contexts, Henry James seems an odd choice as the central character in Tóibín’s novel, insofar as James disavowed his own Irish heritage, often relying on Irish stereotypes in his fiction, and endorsed a cosmopolitanism closely identified with Victorian British values. Yet Tóibín makes clear in both The Master and his nonfiction work All a Novelist Needs that Henry James is an outsider. It is just this identity as foreign with which Tóibín identifies as an Irishman, a novelist, and gay. As an American, closeted homosexual, middle-class author writing primarily about the wealthy, and perhaps even as simply a novelist who views society from the outside, Henry James exemplifies for Tóibín the ideal of the modern author. Commenting on the focus of The Master on the years from 1895 to 1899, Tóibín observes: The importance of the five years I chose is not that Henry James had a failure in the theater, or not that he moved to Rye, or not that he wrote “The Turn of the Screw,” or not that he began to dictate his fiction, although all of these things are of interest and can be dramatized. The importance of the years 1895–1900 is that Henry James was building up the images and figures that would constitute the three masterpieces he was gathering all his strength to write … .”23 For Tóibín successful literature transforms through the imagination painful human experiences into shared knowledge, often by way of sympathy between the author and reader. It is this sort of emotional connection Tóibín attempts to establish with Henry James in The Master, in part by “anchoring” his “images and phrases in those of James, by riffing on them, referring to them, stealing them” (Tóibín, ANN, 35). Much of the language and many of the situations in The Master are drawn from James’s fiction 22 Paul Jay, Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), pp. 53–73. Further references in the text as: Jay. 23 Colm Tóibín, All a Novelist Needs: Colm Tóibín on Henry James, ed. Susan M. Griffin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), p. 36. Further references in the text as: ANN.

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and life, but often in ways connected specifically to Tóibín’s own life as a writer. The Master begins with the failure of James’s Guy Domville on the London stage in January 1895.24 Recalling how James attended Oscar Wilde’s hit An Ideal Husband on the opening night of Guy Domville, and how Wilde’s next theatrical success, The Importance of Being Earnest, would replace James’s play after the latter closed early, Tóibín represents faithfully James’s despair regarding his turn to theater and his envy of Wilde’s personal bravura and theatrical success. For the James scholar, chapter one of The Master reads nearly as a biographical account, except for Tóibín’s scrupulous attention to James’s psychological responses to these mid-life traumas. In All a Novelist Needs, Tóibín explains how his own experience of being shortlisted and then failing to win the Booker Prize for his novel The Blackwater Lightship informed his treatment in The Master of James’s failure in the theater: I wrote that section without realizing that the Booker experience was still raw, still preying on my mind. I do not know whether the many accounts of that evening in London in January 1895 … or my own experience in London a few months before mattered more to me as I composed the first chapter of my novel. (Tóibín, M, 31) A similar entanglement of James’s biography and Tóibín’s personal experience informs chapter two of The Master, in which James’s visit to Ireland in March 1895 is imagined by Tóibín. The situation of James accepting invitations from both Lord Houghton, the new Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and Lord Wolseley, the Commander-in-Chief of the British forces in Ireland, seems closely tied to Irish politics. Leon Edel devotes only six pages to James’s uncomfortable visit to these aristocratic officials of British colonial rule in Ireland at a time of considerable anti-colonial unrest, but Edel does note how the Irish aristocracy boycotted Lord Houghton’s social events at Dublin Castle and Lord Wolseley was under considerable pressure to manage what James termed a country “distraught with social hatreds.”25 Tóibín connects James’s visit to Ireland with the failure of his play: “He needed to leave London, but he did not think he could bear to be alone anywhere” (Tóibín, M, 21). Tóibín haunts James’s time in Ireland with two ghosts: James’s Cavan County grandfather William James and James’s homosexuality. His servant during James’s visit at Lord Wolseley’s is Hammond, a character Tóibín acknowledges inventing, whose unsubtle hints of a sexual liaison with James seem to be encouraged by Lady Wolseley (Tóibín, ANN, 33). At dinners during James’s stay with the Wolseleys, 24 Colm Tóibín, The Master (New York: Scribner, 2004), pp. 1–18. Further references in the text as: M. 25 Henry James, Henry James Letters: 1895–1916, vol. 4, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 8.

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Mr. Webster, a British Member of Parliament who appears to be in a relationship with Lady Wolseley, twits James on his Irish background: “‘What was the name of that place, Lady Wolseley? Bailieborough, that’s right, Bailieborough in County Cavan. It is where you will find the seat of the James family’” (Tóibín, M, 35). Although Mr. Webster intends this declaration of James’s Irish origins to be a kind of “outing” of him, much as Lady Wolseley appears to assign Hammond to James’s service in hopes of sparking a homosexual relationship and scandal, Tóibín includes such details as means of connecting his own status as an Irish novelist with James’s identity as an outsider. Although James was clearly uncomfortable with his position as a guest in Dublin Castle and Lord Wolseley’s Royal Hospital, he did not comment on the anti-colonial dissent in Ireland four years after the death of Charles Stuart Parnell. Tóibín does not misrepresent the biographical James in these respects, but he does connect James’s unacknowledged same-sex desire and his Irish family heritage with James’s identity as an outsider, who employed literature to transform alienating experiences into moments of aesthetic communication. Hardly a post-colonial writer, Henry James nevertheless can inspire Colm Tóibín by offering a role model for turning defeat and humiliation into literary sympathy and compassion. Ozick, Franzen, and Roth treat Henry James as a key American predecessor, whose influence matters as long as we understand him to be speaking to and about the American experience. Tóibín does not ignore James’s American heritage, but he stresses James’s overall foreignness, even to his own American past. In another exchange during dinner with the Wolseleys, Mr. Webster tries again to provoke Henry James on his true loyalties: “‘If there were a war between Great Britain and the United States, Mr. James, where would your loyalty lie?’” to which James responds, “‘My loyalty would lie in making peace between them’” (Tóibín, M, 31). Webster insists, “‘And what if that should fail?’” But in this case, Lady Wolseley interrupts: “‘Mr. James would find out which side France was on and he would join that side’” (31). The banter suggests on one level the animus some members of the British elite harbor against James, who often does have “‘the most horrible things to say about’” the British (31), but for Tóibín it also anticipates James’s final cosmopolitanism and surrender of his U.S. citizenship in 1915. For Tóibín, Henry James represents the sort of global writer for whom national origin and affiliation are less important than the transnational audiences to whom he appeals. Tóibín’s representation of James’s influence is endearing, especially to James scholars, because he transforms James’s anxieties, doubts, and personal failures into resources for his art. Tóibín’s title All a Novelist Needs refers to James’s theory of the germ for his stories as a mere hint to be elaborated imaginatively by the author: “All a novelist needs, nothing exact or precise, no character to be based on an actual person, but a configuration, something distant that can be mulled over, … shadowy relations that the

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writer can begin to put substance on” (Tóibín, ANN, 111). Of course, the book’s title also refers to Henry James as the only influence a contemporary novelist really needs to write good fiction. Tóibín’s praise risks testifying once again to James’s genius, much as Percy Lubbock does in The Craft of Fiction. Yet Tóibín means something else than Lubbock’s fatuous praise; Tóibín suggests that James’s faults, struggles, and failures motivated his creativity. James’s ability to transform the difficulties of his own lived experiences through the work of the imagination is what any writer needs to succeed. Nowhere does Tóibín represent this idea better than in his treatment of James’s “sexual almostness” (Tóibín, ANN, 33). Rather than interpret James’s sexual ambivalence as neurotic, as Tóibín contends Lyndall Gordon does in A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art (1998), Tóibín understands James’s same-sex desire and general sexual reticence to be part of the overall Victorian anxiety regarding sexuality.26 Certainly the celebrated trials of Oscar Wilde, which figure centrally in chapter four of The Master, made same-sex desire legally dangerous, but Tóibín goes beyond this familiar understanding of James’s closeted sexuality to suggest that virtually all sexual desire in James’s time was publicly risky. Tóibín’s invention of the Irish corporal, Hammond, who serves as James’s servant in Ireland, his invocation of James’s passion for Paul Joukowsky, his imagined scene of Oliver Wendell Holmes and James nervously sharing a bed, and James’s midlife interest in the sculptor Hendrik Andersen all stress the “sexual almostness” of James’s publicly celibate life. Yet in representing how James, Jr.’s 1857 walk with his father on the beach at Boulogne was interrupted by what appears to have been the father’s sexual fantasy about a young woman on the shore, Tóibín suggests how powerful both sexual desire and its repression were in the Victorian era. Today we have tidy categories of “homosocial” and “homosexual” desires, as well as “heteronormative” and LGBTQ+ sexual identities, but Tóibín suggests that James lived in a time when sexual desire was profoundly troubling to everyone and the borders among conventional gender and sexual categories would not hold. In showing us how James would transform that oddly perceived experience of the fourteen-year-old boy witnessing his father’s passion into a scene in What Maisie Knew (1897) more than forty years later, Tóibín explains how James navigated imaginatively not simply his personal sexual ambivalence but the sexual instabilities of the Victorian age (Tóibín, ANN, 33–36). 26 Lyndall Gordon, A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998). I don’t agree with Tóibín’s claim that Gordon treats James’s “genius as a form of neurosis arising from his homosexuality,” especially as evidenced by his literary representations of his cousin, Minny Temple, and contemporary author, Constance Fenimore Woolson (Tóibín, ANN, 32). Gordon is less interested in demonizing James’s homosexuality than in representing his psychologically complex relationship with his cousin, her early death, and his memory of her, as well as his often condescending attitudes toward women intellectuals, like Constance Fenimore Woolson.

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Ozick responds to James’s influence by establishing the historical limits of what he could know and hence represent, claiming to transcend him while acknowledging his recognition of new, modernist social conditions. As a James scholar herself, Ozick historicizes James and even gently reproaches him for failing to anticipate the horrors of the Holocaust and the ongoing refugee crises often forgotten in our enthusiasm for a new global order. Whether or not Jonathan Franzen’s repetition of James’s famous “there we are” is in fact an allusion to his influential predecessor, Franzen’s effort to write the bourgeois novel as the middle class collapses in the U.S. remains deeply indebted to the Jamesian literary project. Like Ozick, Franzen is quick to remind us how unrecognizable our postmodern, global situation would be to Henry James. For Philip Roth, Henry James is something of a literary nuisance, a canonical figure with whom students, professors, and aspiring writers must contend, but whose relevance to our contemporary social conditions seems at last absurd, even comical. Zuckerman’s “ghost writers” may be the dimly remembered Henry James read in college and I. E. Lonoff, but in fact James’s “The Middle Years” does not allow Zuckerman to mount the pedestal of literary greatness, merely get closer to the sexual antics of Lonoff and Amy Bellette in the room above. Using strategies typical of what Bloom long ago analyzed as the “anxiety of influence,” Ozick, Franzen, and Roth invoke the ghost of Henry James to kill him once again and assert their own literary authorities. In doing so, they stereotype James as Ozick’s late Victorian gentleman, Franzen’s conventional bourgeois writer, and Roth’s incorrigible aesthete. Without taking much notice of what they are doing, all three authors also treat the American Henry James, a phantom of their inventions for the sake of their own literary ambitions to write the first, the only “great American novel.” In contrast, Tóibín renders Henry James foreign and strange even to James himself. Tóibín does so in a manner that is biographically and critically accurate. Imagining James’s anxieties about his sexual desire in the dangerous era of the Anti-Sodomy Laws, recalling James’s Irish heritage, stressing James’s cosmopolitanism as an ineluctable part of his identity as an outsider, Tóibín identifies with James by way of their mutual struggles to adapt to changing global social conditions and employ their art to turn existential traumas into successful literary communication. In doing so, Tóibín channels Henry James, often borrowing exact phrases and situations from James in The Master. Yet if Tóibín allows Henry James to recirculate in our postmodern, global conditions in ways more faithful to the personal and aesthetic complexity of the Master than Ozick, Franzen, and Roth, Tóibín also represents a distinct critical limitation to recent literary adaptations of Henry James. Idealizing and often sentimentalizing the aesthetic transformation of experience, Tóibín also suggests that the imagination possesses a certain universality:

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There is undoubtedly much truth in Tóibín’s description of his literary method, but Tóibín is also stretching the connections between his own process and James’s for the sake of identifying with a writer he contends is “the supreme novelist.” Such close identification, repeated often in Tóibín’s critical accounts of how The Master is “a bridge between my experience and James’s work,” is neither better nor worse than Ozick, Franzen, and Roth’s allusions to James, but it is when Tóibín and James transcend their historical circumstances through the shared universality of literary representation that Tóibín reaches the critical limit I mentioned above. In these moments, James does indeed become Tóibín’s Master, “the supreme novelist,” who wrote at his best “a novel of pure style, where style itself, prose style, style of dress and manners and gesture, was a sort of high morality” (Tóibín, ANN, 24). Tóibín is referring in this passage to The Portrait of a Lady, the first novel by James he ever read, and it is clear that this is also something of an origin story for Tóibín, accounting for how his own work might respond to a cultural deficiency in Ireland: “These ideas of style were not current in Ireland at the time, and I found them deeply interesting and absorbing” (24). Tóibín specifies that he was nineteen at this time, which would have been the summer of 1974 (he was born in 1955), five years into “the Troubles” that began with the housing of British troops in Northern Ireland, and a year after the Republic of Ireland had joined the European Union (1973). It seems clear enough that Tóibín is referring to the divisive politics of Ireland in this period. Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady would be understandably a source of solace, perhaps even a bit of literary escapism, for a young Irishman during the summer after his junior year at University College Dublin from which he graduated in 1975. My criticism of Tóibín’s idealization of Henry James as in part a detour from politics, especially in Ireland, certainly can be countered by Tóibín’s well-deserved reputation as an advocate of minority and gay rights, as well as a descendant of a long line of Irish revolutionaries. Acknowledging that Henry James “in the great journey of his self-invention … managed to erase almost completely” his “Irish background, … making sure it would be a footnote to his much larger and more ambitious concerns,” Tóibín nevertheless venerates James as the “supreme novelist” capable of achieving a morality of style that could transform, even in some cases erase, local

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political and national concerns (Tóibín, ANN, 13). Tóibín identifies James’s ability to transcend his Irish past as a family heritage: “They were natives … of the James family. Their Irish background and indeed their American nationality had been subsumed into a curious and creative hybrid that produced two geniuses, Henry James and his brother William” (5). James Baldwin’s Another Country (1962) offers a different perspective on James as a precursor to recent U.S. fiction concerned with transnationalism and global Anglophone literature, including Tóibín’s work.27 Although published decades before the works discussed in this chapter, Another Country can be read as a critique of their limited understanding of the stakes of transnational literature in the second half of the twentieth century, especially the decolonial project Paul Jay outlines in Global Matters. I want to conclude this chapter, then, with the anachronistic gesture of offering Baldwin’s novel and James’s influence on Baldwin as responses to the five authors discussed in the previous pages. I hope my historical retrospect will be taken less as a quirky rhetorical decision than a recognition of how scholars have tended to ignore Baldwin’s profound influence on American letters, both in his role as author and critic. David Adams Leeming begins “An Interview with James Baldwin on Henry James” (1986) with the observation: “James Baldwin never made a secret of the importance of Henry James to his creative life.”28 Citing Charles Newman’s “The Lesson of the Master: Henry James and James Baldwin” (1966) and Lyall Powers’ “Henry James and James Baldwin: The Complex Figure” (1984), Leeming uses his own knowledge of Henry James to elicit Baldwin’s account of James’s importance in shaping his work and life.29 Leeming connects both James’s and Baldwin’s shared expatriatism with their criticism of “the failure of Americans to see through to ‘the reality of others’—the same failure that is apparent in America’s ‘race problem’…” (Leeming, 48). In both Leeming’s introductory comments and Baldwin’s responses in the interview, James’s own tendencies either to ignore postbellum racial divisions in the U.S. or at best conflate racial and class issues receive little notice. Neither Leeming nor Baldwin treat Henry James as a problematic writer when it comes to issues of race or class. Instead, James’s international theme and his focus on American “innocence” are adapted to the more contemporary racial divisions of post-World War II America. 27 James Baldwin, Another Country (New York: The Dial Press, 1962). References to Another Country (New York: Vintage Books, 1993) in the text as: AC. 28 David Adams Leeming, “An Interview with James Baldwin on Henry James,” Henry James Review 8:1 (Fall 1986), 47. While writing his doctoral dissertation, directed by Leon Edel, at New York University, Leeming was Baldwin’s personal assistant. Further references in the text as: Leeming. 29 Charles Newman, “The Lesson of the Master: Henry James and James Baldwin,” Yale Review 56 (1966): 45–59; Lyall H. Powers, “Henry James and James Baldwin: The Complex Figure,” Modern Fiction Studies 30 (1984), 651–667. Further references to Powers in the text as: Powers.

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When Baldwin does speak explicitly about race in America, he contends it is a problem primarily of “innocence,” by which he means white American provincialism. Recognizing how European immigrants to the U.S. had to become “white,” he insists that the American sin is a refusal to recognize others: Americans do not see me when they look at me—literally blood of their blood, created by them. The price they pay for living is to pretend that I’m not here, and the price they pay for that is not being able to see the world in which they live. (Leeming, 50) Of course, this theme of racial invisibility comes from Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and today sounds strange, if not anachronistic in its own right, when applied to the violence of racial division. In a similar sense, Baldwin’s “innocence” seems hardly adequate to engage the racism that today is central to our public debates. When Leeming asks Baldwin what he means by freedom, Baldwin replies: “I mean the end of innocence” (54). In these terms, then, Baldwin can certainly claim James as “the closest thing to a model I could find for the means to order and describe something that had happened to me in the distance—America” (56). Both Leeming’s questions and Baldwin’s answers utterly ignore the question of sexual identity for James and Baldwin. Yet Another Country is arguably Baldwin’s most overt treatment of homosexuality, bisexuality, and heterosexuality in his extensive oeuvre. Today it is still a scandalous novel, not simply because it so directly addresses the relationship of sexual desire to personal identity, social formation, and racial prejudices, but because it so profoundly connects ethnic diversity with sexual diversity, criticizing America for an utter failure to come to terms with both. Americans are indeed “innocents” in the negative sense we have come to associate with Henry James, because we have never figured out how our sexual drives and conscious choices are connected. Set in New York City and France, Another Country offers a devastating critique of liberal Americans’ ignorance of their own prejudices toward African Americans and gay men. The novel centers on the artistic community of the African-American drummer Rufus Scott and his sister Ida, a jazz singer, and their white friends: Eric, a gay white actor, Richard Silenski, a novelist who has just published his first novel, his wife Cass, and Vivaldo Moore, an Italian-American writer still struggling to complete his first novel. Recalling James’s stories of writers and artists, Baldwin represents the counter-cultural values of African-American and white artists who appear to have overcome the prevailing racism of postwar America. Rufus, Eric, and Vivaldo are bisexual men. Rufus has had sexual relationships with Eric and Vivaldo, but Rufus begins a stormy relationship with Leona, a white girl trying to escape her Southern roots in New York. After Rufus commits suicide, Vivaldo begins a relationship with Rufus’s sister Ida. After

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positively affirming his identity as a gay man in France, Eric returns to New York for a part in a Broadway play, only to fall into a relationship with Richard’s disaffected wife Cass. Apart from the heavy drinking, ceaseless smoking, and explicit sex scenes, the dramatic action of Another Country is primarily that of the Jamesian novel of manners, except that “social manners” now include the characters’ behaviors in response to the sexual and racial identities of others. At the outset, the characters seem extraordinarily liberal for the early 1960s, insisting on their racial tolerance and acceptance of different sexual behaviors. When Rufus begins his relationship with Leona, Vivaldo betrays no jealousy and does not reveal his previous sexual relationship with Rufus. In a similar manner, when Cass visits Eric in his apartment and proposes a sexual relationship, Eric tells her directly: “‘But I have a lover, too, Cass; a boy, a French boy, and he’s supposed to be coming to New York in a few weeks’” (AC, 288–289). Nevertheless, Eric and Cass fall into a sexual relationship that seems curiously at odds with Eric’s self-acknowledged identity as a gay man. Eric Jones grew up in a privileged white family in Alabama, where as a young man he initiated a dangerous relationship with Leroy, an African American who warns him of the dangers they both face in the racist South. Similarly, Leona grows up and marries into a white Southern community in which men rule, often brutally. Suspecting Leona of being unfaithful to him with African-American men, her husband divorces her, wins legal custody of their child, and drives her away. Fleeing the sexual and racial violence of the South, both Eric and Leona travel north to what appears to be a more liberal community. Eric and Rufus develop a sexual relationship, but one that Rufus uses to humiliate and dominate Eric, who eventually leaves Rufus, confused about their relationship and his future as an actor. Rufus then meets Leona, whom he treats in similarly brutal ways, rejecting her love as simply the misplaced sexual desire of white women for African-American men. Rufus’s psychological humiliation of Eric grows into actual physical abuse of Leona, whom Rufus beats until she is hospitalized. Her Southern relatives are contacted, Leona is spirited back to her hometown, and there she is institutionalized as clinically insane. Acknowledging that in his relationships with both Eric and Leona he has been acting out the self-hatred instilled in him by American racism, Rufus commits suicide by jumping off the George Washington Bridge. Baldwin makes clear that Rufus “got off at the station named for the bridge built to honor the father of his country,” who was also a Southern slave owner (AC, 87). Baldwin acknowledges James’s influence on Another Country in three explicit and several more general ways, most of which are identified and interpreted by Lyall Powers in “Henry James and James Baldwin: The Complex Fate” (1984). Powers acknowledges that the main difference between James and Baldwin is the latter’s consideration of race, but Powers still subordinates Baldwin to James’s prevailing theme of how identity and

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artistic expression are integrally related: “The international theme and the stories of artists thus develop the same theme of the problem of identity and self-reliance” (Powers, 655). Although Powers is writing primarily about James in this sentence, he extends the argument to Baldwin’s Another Country, identifying Baldwin with James’s use of his expatriatism to develop special artistic insights about modern America. Powers concludes that “Baldwin’s fiction illustrates that the fate is now even more complex if one is American, an artist, and black,” suggesting that Baldwin’s latemodern America has intensified, rather than transformed, James’s American scene (Powers, 667). I want to revisit Baldwin’s references to James in Another Country to pursue a different conclusion: that Baldwin’s invocation of Henry James in the novel, as well as elsewhere in Baldwin’s writings, is less that of a protégé following a master than Baldwin’s deconstruction of James’s “complex fate” to engage just what Henry James failed to represent: the deeply repressed racial and sexual divisions of America. Another Country begins with an epigraph attributed to Henry James: They strike one, above all, as giving no account of themselves in any terms already consecrated by human use; to this inarticulate state they probably form, collectively, the most unprecedented of monuments; abysmal the mystery of what they think, what they feel, what they want, what they suppose themselves to be saying. (AC, epigraph) Baldwin’s quotation comes from James’s Preface to the New York Edition of Lady Barbarina, The Siege of London, An International Episode, and Other Tales.30 At this point in his Preface, James is speaking generally about the role Americans played in his international theme, even as James acknowledges that this topic in his earlier works has been replaced by “a new scale of relations altogether, a state of things from which emphasised [sic] internationalism has either quite dropped or is well on its way to drop” (NYE: XIV, vi–vii). Baldwin does not seem interested in how his epigraph from James applies to the international theme of the novellas and stories included in this volume of the New York Edition, but primarily in James’s observation about how Americans pose the “unfathomable mystery” of who or what they are, even to themselves. “Americans” are in fact the antecedent of “they” in the epigraph, and James views them as if they are either uncivilized primitives studied by an ethnographer or “monuments” of a forgotten civilization unearthed by an archaeologist. In the same paragraph, James speaks of Americans as no more “English” than the ancient peoples registered in “the stony slabs of Nineveh” (xv). Nineveh is the biblical 30 Henry James, Lady Barbarina, The Siege of London, An International Episode, and Other Tales, vol. 14, The Novels and Tales of Henry James, New York Edition, 26 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908), p. xvi.

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touchstone for evil and a long litany of sins and thus a surprising referent for James’s characterization of the American, whose role in the stories included in this volume of the New York Edition is largely that of the innocent abroad. As Baldwin makes clear in his interview with David Alan Leeming, this American “innocence” is the studied ignorance that permits Americans to repress the deep racial and sexual divisions in the U.S. It is thus a remarkably appropriate beginning for Baldwin’s novel, whose subject is just how all of the characters—black and white, American and European, men and women, gay and straight—are damaged by their inabilities to recognize and deal with the consequences of these social differences. In the dramatic action of the novel itself, Henry James is cited two more times to remind the reader of his relevance. On their last night together on the French Riviera, Eric and Yves, his French lover, enter their bedroom: The script of the new play was on the plain wooden table …; on the table, too, were a few books, Yves’ copies of Blaise Cendrars and Jean Genet and Marcel Proust, Eric’s copies of An Actor Prepares and The Wings of the Dove and Native Son. Yves’ sketch pad was on the floor. (AC, 195) As mere props to establish the artistic interests of the lovers, the books associate Yves with French modernism and Eric with American modernism, but with the latter’s strange emphasis on the possible connections among a guide to acting, a novel of James’s Major Phase, and Richard Wright’s novel about racial division in modern America. Yves’ books link French modernism with the queer sexuality of Genet and Proust, as well as the internationalism of Cendrars, the Francophone Swiss novelist and poet whose first major work, the long poem Les Pâques à New York (Easter in New York) (1912), was written in and about New York.31 The incompatibility of Eric’s books are in sharp contrast with the coherence of the titles read by Yves. What exactly does Konstantin Stanislavski’s first volume in his famous trilogy on acting, An Actor Prepares (1936), have to do with The Wings of the Dove and Native Son? Eric repeatedly claims that he has found himself in Europe after his troubled youth in Alabama and his early adulthood in New York City. Eric’s self-discovery revolves around his recognition of his gay sexuality. Eric’s relationship with Leroy in Alabama risks both their lives, fills him with guilt and anxiety, and drives him to escape the South. Yet in New York City, his relationship with Rufus Scott is one of abjection, so Eric flees again, this time to Europe. In Europe, he meets Yves, a young working-class 31 Baldwin may also be referring to Cendrars’ recent death in 1961 and the publication of his final novel, Emmène-moi au bout du monde! (1956) (To the End of the World!, 1966), with its transnational title and subject.

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Frenchman whose mother collaborated with the Nazis during the Vichy Occupation. Surviving the war in this manner, she neglects her son, then continues her sexual promiscuity after the war. Yves openly calls her putáin, even though he himself becomes a gay sex worker in Paris. Baldwin describes Yves as “dark,” but Yves is not Afro-French, just from a workingclass background often associated historically with darker skin color. Eric affirms his own gay identity in his relationship with Yves, in which they both share personal stories of abuse by family members and other lovers. Eric may simply be reading Stanislavski in preparation for his Broadway role, but The Wings of the Dove and Native Son connect American “innocence” with the deeply repressed racial divisions of modern America. Baldwin suggests that the two novels may prepare him for his return to New York as well as Stanislavski’s more practical advice. Living and acting in postwar America, each American needs to face American provincialism about race and sexuality. In a similar sense, Baldwin tacitly argues that at least some of the avant-garde moderns on both sides of the Atlantic offered such arguments, rather than just stylistic and formal innovations in the arts. Baldwin uses Richard Wright’s Native Son as a touchstone for Baldwin’s own critique of American racism, more than a decade after Baldwin’s criticism of Wright’s novel in “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (1949).32 Baldwin’s indictment of Wright’s failure to develop complex characters in Bigger Thomas or Max, his activist attorney, in Native Son caused Wright to break off his friendship with Baldwin, who had benefited so much from Wright’s mentoring. Perhaps, then, Native Son shows up in Another Country as a graceful form of apology, a reconciliation with one of the leading figures of African-American literature. More likely, however, Native Son serves a similar purpose as The Wings of the Dove: Eric Jones is reading these works to go beyond them and assert his own identity much in the manner Baldwin wishes to do in Another Country. There is considerable evidence in the novel that Baldwin projects his own artistic and gay identity more onto the white Alabaman, Eric, rather than any of the African-American characters. Baldwin makes his third direct reference to Henry James as the ItalianAmerican Vivaldo Moore leaves an angry confrontation with his former girlfriend, the painter Jane, who taunts him about Vivaldo’s current girlfriend, Ida Scott, Rufus’s sister: “‘Vivaldo’s got a great chick … . if I was as liberal as … Vivaldo … I’d be with the biggest, blackest buck I could find!’” (AC, 289–299). Goading Vivaldo even further in front of her new, white boyfriend, whom she is also taunting, Jane says: “‘Maybe I should have gone with her brother … . Or were you going with him, too? Can’t ever tell about a liberal’” (299). Vivaldo quickly leaves, hoping “to leave before Jane precipitated a race riot,” and in his private rage wonders whether or not he 32 James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” Partisan Review XVI:6 (June 1949), 578–585.

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should “get drunk,” “get laid,” or simply “go home and work and throw everything else out of his mind, as Balzac had done and Proust and Joyce and James and Faulkner” (299). Connecting himself to this literary tradition stretching from proto-moderns like Balzac and James to Proust, Joyce, and Faulkner, he also qualifies their influence: “But perhaps they had never held in their minds the nameless things he held in his” (299–300). The “nameless things” Vivaldo is struggling to articulate are already there before him in his ex-girlfriend’s taunts about his attraction to African Americans and his homosexuality: racial and sexual differences are what this new generation of late-moderns—Vivaldo, Eric, and Baldwin himself – need to represent, in order for Americans to come to terms with their innocence about their racism and sexism. Powers cites several other Jamesian echoes in Another Country, especially Baldwin’s use of the phrase “heiress of all the ages,” which James had used to describe Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove, for both Cass Silenski and Ida Scott, connecting the white and African-American women characters to the spirit of Milly Theale (Powers, 652). Powers also draws connections between James’s ironic use of “love” in Maggie’s manipulation of others in The Golden Bowl to both Cass’s and Ida’s ambivalent expressions of “love” in Another Country. To be sure, there may be other Jamesian references in the novel, literary atmospherics, as it were, intended to encourage the reader to “be moved to consider what else in that novel suggests Jamesian influence … and what Baldwin might have in mind” (Powers, 653). Whereas Powers traces a traditional literary influence, certainly supported by Baldwin’s respect for James in the Leeming interview and Baldwin’s nonfiction prose, I contend that Baldwin is challenging James or, more directly, the Jamesian legacy in postwar America. Henry James was a great writer, but he never engaged directly the issues so central not only to America of the 1950s but to the whole of American history: the intertwined conflicts of race and sexuality, the unconscious of the country. Every character in Another Country is damaged by the American refusal to come to terms with its racist and sexist history. A nation of immigrants, America seems to Baldwin intent on overcoming its history of abjection and exclusion by enslaving and tyrannizing others, especially those Americans we ought to be embracing as brothers and sisters. Although Baldwin reserves his worst criticism for the very “liberals” Jane (and other characters) taunt, his social criticism goes far beyond political labels or affiliations. Straights, gays, women (straight and gay), and people of color are all guilty of violence toward each other and themselves. The diversity of Baldwin’s characters in Another Country goes considerably beyond the often class-bound characters in James’s novels. Inspired by James to create characters with complex personalities, Baldwin meets the challenge of creating each of the characters in Another Country as a “human being” and thus an answer to what Baldwin found objectionable in Wright’s Native Son: “The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread,

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power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and cannot be transcended.”33 The novel ends with Yves landing in New York, unsure whether or not Eric still loves him, enjoying the company of Americans on the transatlantic flight, all of whom seem very friendly: But now, on the ground, and in the light, hard and American, of sober second thought, it all seemed rather suspect … . he felt their movement away from him, decently but definitely, with nervous, and, as it were, backward smiles; they were making it clear that he could make no appeal to them, for they did not know who he was. (AC, 434) The end of the novel is followed by the location and date of its completion: “Istanbul, Dec. 10, 1961” (AC 436). Eddie Glaude, Jr., among others, writes about the happiness Baldwin found in Istanbul, a city foreign to him despite its proximity to his ancestral African origins, and a point of intersection among Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Glaude argues that Istanbul is where Baldwin came to recognize what he told a New York Times reporter on another occasion: “‘The tangible thing that happened to me—and to blacks in America—during that whole terrible time was the realization that our destinies are in our hands, black hands, and no one else’s.’”34 Baldwin’s concluding place and date suggest that the title of Another Country refers explicitly to Baldwin’s expatriatism, enacted in the spiritual and geographical journeys of Eric Jones to France, where Baldwin also famously discovered himself as a writer, gay, and black man. Baldwin invokes Henry James as a predecessor, also likely gay and certainly cosmopolitan, who had surrendered his U.S. citizenship for the sake not just of British citizenship during World War I but also to affirm his global affiliations. In my view, this interpretation is too simple and fails to recognize how Baldwin’s novel represents America as “another country” than it has imagined itself, as a democracy that is not democratic, as a “land of the free” that has kept so many of its inhabitants prisoners. Baldwin and Eric may discover themselves in “another country,” whether it is France or Turkey, but they are still Americans intent on returning to tell the true story of how America has failed its promises. Perhaps Eric will do this work on the Broadway stage or in Hollywood films or simply in his continuing love for Yves, the Frenchman with whom he shares so much, including foreignness. Baldwin did it by extending Jamesian modernism to include the relationship between racism and sexism it had hitherto failed to address. 33 Ibid., 585. 34 Baldwin, as quoted in Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own (New York: Crown Books, 2020), p. 125.

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Henry James certainly foresaw much of what would become avantgarde modernism, contributing to it with his three great novels of the Major Phase. He understood as well the anxiety of influence informing Ozick, Franzen, and Roth’s effort to break free of his ghostly presence; he had done much the same in response to Hawthorne’s influence on his early works, as evident in his Nathaniel Hawthorne (1879). He certainly would have identified with Tóibín’s aesthetic ideology, in which the transumption of personal memories and historical particulars give the craft of fiction a claim to special knowledge. As a transnational, cosmopolitan modernist who surrendered his U.S. citizenship in 1915 to become a British subject in support of the war effort, James lived precariously on the borders of the post-national world we are today just beginning to understand. In that respect, James anticipates Baldwin’s efforts to discover himself outside U.S. borders in order to write insightful studies of what lies within the nation. Roth, Ozick, and Franzen suggest how Henry James continues to influence contemporary writers, but in their different ways they all represent a familiar anxiety of influence. James is canonical, because each of these authors feels compelled to respond to him. Their collective responses to James’s legacy are more sophisticated versions of what I recognize in my students’ often resigned response to James on the syllabus. “Do we have to read him?” is usually followed by their own answer, “I guess so!” The works of Leslie Marmon Silko and Colm Tóibín indicate a different direction for James’s influence, less tied to clichés about his “mastery” and to his rootedness in the American literary tradition. Viewing James’s cosmopolitanism from the pre-national perspective of the indigenous subject, Silko recognizes the limitations of James’s internal critique of Anglo-American society. Whether treated as an American or English writer—or even both—James remains for Silko a writer who cannot transcend the limits of national knowledge. By marking this limit, Silko also opens her readers to indigenous experience and knowledge, going beyond James and his contemporaries to recognize communities they never understood and from which she is descended. Like Silko’s character Hattie Palmer in Gardens in the Dunes, Silko’s Henry James recognizes his cultural entrapment, even if he does little to escape it. In a similar fashion, Colm Tóibín recovers James’s Irish heritage through an imaginative identification that enables Tóibín to offer James an affiliation that James himself so often disavowed. At first, it is hard to accept Tóibín’s representation of Henry James as Irish, foreign, and gay—as an outsider—when we think of how often James mocks the Irish in his fiction. Yet Tóibín’s identification of James’s Irish heritage with Tóibín’s own is like a psychiatrist enabling his patient to encounter a profound repression. In these respects, then, Silko and Tóibín offer us a new transnational mode of the anxiety of influence, wielded less by the heirs of a strong predecessor and more as the redemption of a ghost from the past.

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James Baldwin makes no effort to correct or revise Henry James. In his interview with Leeming, Baldwin makes no reference to James’s much-debated denigration of European immigrants, Jews, and African Americans. Baldwin also makes no reference to James’s closeted and anxious homosexuality. Instead, Baldwin takes James for who he was in his own times: a writer who struggled with an American provincialism that threatened its democratic and global aspirations. Baldwin does not need to criticize Henry James, because Baldwin is the sort of transformative writer who understands the fundamental horizons of the times in which writers live and work. Baldwin also understands that the work of the strong successor is not criticism, literary or social, but new creation. Puzzling over Baldwin’s odd quotation from James as the epigraph to Another Country, stumbling into that table with Eric’s copy of The Wings of the Dove and Wright’s Native Son in France, and recognizing Vivaldo Moore’s recommitment to serious literature as the legacy of James accomplishes Baldwin’s literary ambition: neither to exorcise or follow his predecessor, but much rather to help him find his way home.

Epilogue My Henry James

“Our Henry James” begins and ends with “My Henry James.” Just as José Martí imagined the Panamerican ideal of “nuestra Ameríca” as an elaboration of his own conception, so this book at some level develops my own interests in Henry James. Here the similarity with Martí ends, in the sense that he was addressing the macropolitical need for Latin American unity—a much larger project than expressed in this book about a single author—in an appeal that called for solidarity among many different activists.1 I do not find most of the recent adaptations of James’s work agree with my own interpretations. In this sense, “Our Henry James” refers primarily to the disparity of approaches to his work in the last five decades. Martí’s appeal was utopian, an effort to build a coalition. My interpretation of James’s contemporary popularity is both critical of and surprised by it. Popular culture since Peter Bogdanovich’s Daisy Miller has tended to render Henry James in caricature, rather than the rich complexity and anxiety his oeuvre deserves. Yet the popularization of James’s works has revealed James’s profound reliance on popular genres, motifs, and culture. If I were a traditional scholar focused on James’s universality, then my interest in the second part of this book would be to correct such errors, perhaps even condemn the failure of late-modern culture to appreciate James’s sophistication and genius. Instead, I am interested in how James’s writings have lent themselves to different interpretations in their adaptations and influences. How James has been used, even misinterpreted, tells us a good deal about our present moment, as well as about the unresolved social and human problems in James’s era. It is tempting to think of James’s times as isomorphic with our own. His late-Victorian, early-modern period was transitional, a fin-de-siècle, especially in retrospect; our late-modern, postmodern era from 1970 to 2020 is similarly transitional, not simply in terms of changing centuries but more significantly in the vast social, economic, technological, cultural, and personal changes that have occurred. Nevertheless, whomever we imagine ourselves to be, we are 1

José Martí, “Our America” (1891), Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Esther Allen (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), p. 293.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003297987-10

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not living in the same world as Henry James did. Despite the apparent continuity between nineteenth-century women’s rights and second- and third- (even fourth-) wave feminisms, same-sex relations in the late nineteenth century and LGBTQ+ activism today, British imperialism and U.S. neoimperialism, and proto-modernism and postmodernism, a vast gulf separates “his times” from “our times.” Everyone still has much to learn from his subtle considerations of how social life was transformed by women’s struggles for greater civil and personal rights. James also understands how the economies of first-world nations, principally Great Britain and the U.S., changed from agricultural to industrial bases and from rural to urban societies. New economies motivated changes in the dominant classes from the landed aristocracy in Great Britain to the wealthy bourgeoisie, relying less on land ownership and management than on the control of transportation, communications, cultural work, and the financial markets that fuel these sectors. James understands that the new economic and technological forces depended on the development of new sources of raw materials and new markets, hence driving expansionist projects by the most productive nations. James recognizes how such global factors changed nations with diverse immigration that brought the colonies to metropolitan centers, like London and New York. James also knew how other media, especially photography, were changing the social dominance of print. Experimenting with photographic complements to his work in his inclusion of Alvin Langdon Coburn’s images in the New York Edition, as well as writing extensively about the visual and plastic arts, James addresses the development of multiple, competing media.2 Yet all of these social, economic, and cultural phenomena are integral to the history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. James is exceptionally attentive and responsive in his fiction and nonfiction to contemporary changes, but he was not particularly prophetic. In fact, he is often confused or deliberately ambiguous about the social consequences of new technologies, economic forces, colonial projects, immigration, and new media. Although his characteristic ambiguity has been celebrated as a strategy to empower his readers, it also expresses his uncertainty in key instances. In The Turn of the Screw, James carefully manipulates the possible sources for the haunted circumstances at Bly. Although he wrote numerous ghost stories, he certainly did not believe in supernatural phenomena, except as they are imagined and experienced. In other works, however, especially those dealing with changing social circumstances, he concludes key episodes and entire works inconclusively because he cannot foresee what might follow the narrative he has created. The Portrait of a Lady ends with such indecision. Isabel can hardly continue to live with her abusive husband Gilbert Osmond, but she cannot easily seek a divorce from her Catholic 2

David McWhirter, ed., Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 1–22.

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marriage without risking a scandal over her stepdaughter’s illegitimacy that would injure everyone involved. Casper Goodwood’s “lightning kiss” of Isabel and Henrietta Stackpole’s advice to him that “‘just you wait’” suggest another future for Isabel, even if her eventual divorce from Osmond and marriage to Goodwood would still leave her trapped in a patriarchal family (The Portrait of a Lady, II, 436, 437). In this case, James seems to wonder aloud what happens to upper-middle-class women in such circumstances as Isabel’s, and he does not offer us very good options. John Banville’s Mrs. Osmond (2017) devotes nearly 400 pages to a sequel motivated by James’s inconclusive conclusion.3 Similarly, Lambert Strether’s indecision when faced with Maria Gostrey’s offer of love at the end of The Ambassadors seems a consequence of Strether’s characteristic equivocation. Is he a closeted homosexual whose planned marriage to Mrs. Newsome would have been merely one of convenience? Is he really in love with Madame de Vionnet, or at least his fantasy of what she represents, but incapable of competing with his younger rival, Chad? Is he a confirmed bachelor, much like James himself, unwilling to share his life with anyone else, late in life? Whatever the case, Strether’s concluding “‘Then, there we are!’” speaks as much to James’s indecision as to his character’s (The Ambassadors, II, 327). Then there are those dead young women in James’s works, whose futures he seems incapable of imagining. Daisy Miller is rebellious, potentially in the manner of a great poetic iconoclast, like Byron or Keats. Milly Theale is transcendent and triumphant in understanding the absurd conventionality of high society in London and such British cultural colonies as Venice, but she can only operate from beyond the grave, even plotting before she dies actions in her after-life. Milly lives only as a ghost, even a zombie produced by the absurd situations facing modern women. Then there is Margaret Fuller, that “Margaret-ghost,” as James terms her in William Wetmore Story and His Friends (I, 127). James considers her early, accidental death in a shipwreck off Fire Island, New York as nearly inevitable, the fated destiny of a brilliant woman who burned too brightly and hence could not endure. What might these imagined and historical women have done, James seems to opine, had they followed their male models? Of course, the short, unhappy lives of these three women are used by James to encourage his readers to imagine alternative futures, but James hardly details what they might have done in his other writings. Even Miriam Rooth’s success acting on the British stage in The Tragic Muse is subordinate to Shakespeare’s plays and tacitly to James’s own creative work. In James’s works that conclude decisively, unambiguously, his doubts remain about how social changes, especially in regard to gender and sexuality, ought to be judged. At the end of Washington Square, Catherine Sloper becomes a determined, even bitter, single woman, “a spinster” in the idiom, not the independent woman directing a day-care center that Holland 3

John Banville, Mrs. Osmond (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017).

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offers us in her film or even the vindictive heiress Wyler represents in his eponymous film. Verena Tarrant is swept off the stage by that Southern gentleman (and slave owner) Basil Ransom, saved from the ventriloquism of her career as an orator for women’s rights, as well as from the secret embraces of Olive Chancellor. Tina Aspern burns all of Jeffrey Aspern’s letters at the end of The Aspern Papers, but only after the narrator, that “publishing scoundrel,” has spurned her and both characters are left alone with their memories of the great American poet. Hyacinth Robinson commits suicide at the end of The Princess Casamassima, rather than carry out the anarchist plot to assassinate the Duke, but Christina Light’s mourning suggests that little has changed in her aristocratic circles and that the anarchism of “The Sun and Moon” group is a doomed revolutionary practice. James also treats same-sex relations with ambiguity that is not always self-evidently strategic and sometimes indulges Victorian stereotypes, even outright homophobia. Although James carefully attributes the tragic outcome in “The Author of ‘Beltraffio’” (1884) to Mark Ambient’s wife, it seems clear enough that their dysfunctional marriage has a good deal to do with their son Dolcino’s death. Mrs. Ambient does withhold Dolcino’s medicine from the ill seven-year-old, but James based the story on John Addington Symonds’ relationship with his wife.4 What the fictional wife finds objectionable, even immoral, in her husband’s novels seems clearly Symonds’ open advocacy of “Greek love.” Although it is possible that James is condemning the unnatural consequences of homosexuality closeted in heterosexual marriage, it is far more likely he is suggesting the unhealthy consequences for children of a same-sex parent. Today when same-sex marriage and parenting are legal in the U.S., as well as many other societies, the suggestion of LGBTQ+ relations as “corrupting” children has been thoroughly refuted. James not only entertains the idea in “The Author of ‘Beltraffio,’” “The Pupil,” and The Turn of the Screw, but he leaves the question unanswered. It is extremely easy to read all of these works as indictments of how same-sex relationships might influence more conventional practices of marriage, the family, and child rearing. Even if we conclude that James’s own orientation was for his own sex, he might well have been advocating “separate spheres” for gays and heterosexuals. Even if we accept that James is condemning the corrupting influences not of same-sex desire but of the Victorian repression of sexual differences, then we cannot help but notice how often such sexual repression is performed by feminine characters, like Mrs. Walker and Mrs. Costello, Olive Chancellor, Mrs. Ambient, and the Governess. In The Tragic Muse (1890), James’s Gabriel Nash has long been recognized as modelled on Oscar Wilde, but Nash’s close relationship with Nick Dormer does not seem to diminish the latter’s heterosexual desire. James suggests that aesthetic sublimation may reroute same-sex desires, as if he is 4

Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers, eds., The Complete Notebooks of Henry James (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 25–26.

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following the Victorian logic of sexual repression. In “The Middle Years,” the passionate relationship of Dr. Hugh with the author Dencombe is a version of such aesthetic sublimation. What I have termed James’s “textual preference” as a substitute for same-sex identity often enables James to sidestep the difficult social and legal questions of his era.5 To be sure, the legal and social consequences of the Wilde trials made the public advocacy of homosexual relations in James’s era a dangerous proposition. Yet not all of James’s criticism of same-sex relationships can be attributed to his subtle coding of his texts. A good deal of his fictional representations of homosexuality entertain the possibility of its unnaturalness and perverse consequences. Few of James’s representations of same-sex relations would survive the scrutiny of subsequent studies of LGBTQ+ social and personal relations, so we should not imagine that James endures today because he addressed adequately the issues of homosexuality in his own time. In this regard, he appeals to us because he left open issues about the socialization of sexual differences that he himself could not answer. Once again, his willingness to entertain such questions should not always be treated as part of his strategic ambiguity, but often as an instance of his own doubt and confusion. James’s equivocations thus allow for subsequent interpreters like Jane Campion and Peter Bogdanovich to come to such drastically different conclusions about sexuality. Campion’s tour-de-force scene of Isabel passionately kissing the pale, dying Ralph Touchett transforms James’s suggestion that Ralph might be homosexual and tubercular into her criticism of our phobias regarding HIV/AIDS and her offer of love that exceeds sexual desire, even the fear of “infection.” In an utterly contrary manner, Bogdanovich can interpret James’s Daisy Miller as prototype for the frivolous, promiscuous “liberated” woman of the 1970s. James’s anxiety regarding sexuality, especially same-sex relations, is beautifully countered by James Baldwin in his fiction, which includes some of the most passionate same-sex relations in American literature. When Eric Jones and his French lover, Yves, have their first sexual experience on a trip to Chartres in Another Country,6 Baldwin locates them in a hotel in the shadow of the great cathedral: The trees and the tables and chairs and water were lit by the moon. Yves locked their door behind them and Eric walked to the window and looked at the sky, at the mighty towers. He heard the murmur of the water and then Yves called his name. He turned. Yves stood on the other side of the room, between the two beds, naked. (221–222) 5 6

John Carlos Rowe, The Other Henry James (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 101–119. James Baldwin, Another Country (New York: The Dial Press, 1962).

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As it has all day and now in this passionate night, “the cathedral was watching them” and “the cathedral was lighted” (221). As if sanctioning their relationship, blessing their spirituality, the monumental cathedral seems sentient, even if its protection is contrary to the Catholic Church’s narrow morality. Baldwin’s joyful same-sex experience goes far beyond what James ever offers his reader. My Henry James is the troubled, anxious, sometimes duplicitous author and person, who continued nevertheless to interpret the changing world around him. In The American Scene, James referred to himself as the “restless analyst,” a term I have always considered appropriate for this relentless struggle to respond to social, economic, and personal differences (AS, 23). James went through at least four major transformations of his forms and styles in his long career. Influenced early by the romanticism of his father’s generation, he wrote sentimental romances until he found his own mode in the psychological realism of The Portrait of a Lady. A decade later, James changed his style and form once again, elaborating a realism in works like The Tragic Muse and The Turn of the Screw that stressed the social, rather than individual, construction of reality. Influenced by his plays, many of his novels and stories in the 1890s depend on the performative quality of the individual making certain social affiliations and taking responsibility for such choices. In the novels of the Major Phase, James’s fiction is not just avant-garde in its representation of competing claims to the same social reality, but innovative for recognizing the social restrictions on what can be thought and imagined. In The Wings of the Dove, Milly Theale, Merton Densher, and Kate Croy compete for the social meaning of love and its relevance to wealth and power. In The Ambassadors, Lambert Strether, Mrs. Newsome, the Pococks, and Maria Gostrey similarly struggle over different conceptions of love, power, and social respectability. In The Golden Bowl, Amerigo, Maggie, Adam, and Charlotte also offer differing interpretations of love, family, wealth, and sexuality. Yet all of these characters remain within the frame of an established, albeit fictive, social reality, each seemingly hopeless to change its basic contours. As a consequence, that world appears fantastic to all of the characters, overpowering each of them in very specific and usually tragic ways. The forms and styles of the novels of the Major Phase reflect the characters’ experiences of a delusional world in which each character’s understanding is repeatedly undercut by another’s perceptions. There is no essential ground and everything is in constant flux, as if the participants were fish swimming in some bizarre aquarium. Through these four major modalities in his literary career, James moves from individual protagonists capable of changing themselves by recognizing their own delusions to characters who are more social effects than free agents, trapped more often than not by social illusions and manipulation by others.7 7

I include in this fourth major shift in James’s forms and styles the so-called “fourth phase” of his work, which scholars have used to distinguish his works

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Such changes in literary characters follow the cultural shift from the liberal individualism we identify with romanticism to the more restrictive social determinism we identify with literary naturalism and early modernism.8 This cultural transformation also reflects the broader social, political, and economic changes that are still underway in our contemporary world. Because the novel depends on character and narrative, it tends to reinforce residual elements of the liberal individualism challenged by new technologies, social formations, and aesthetic forms. Today novelists like Jonathan Franzen and Philip Roth succeed in large part by addressing the slow disappearance of the values of liberal individualism once so prized by Anglo-American cultures. Much of that liberal aura permeates modernist culture as well; in the past fifty years we have been working through a liberal affect that refuses to disappear.9 In these respects, then, “Our Henry James” does function as a kind of cultural nostalgia, not so different from the British effort to capitalize on its Victorian legacies. On the other hand, James’s refusal to answer the key questions of his day about gender, sexuality, class, race, and imperialism while insistently raising these issues for his readers encourages us to reconsider his writings as we grapple with similarly unanswered questions. For some readers, James’s openness expresses a strategic ambiguity, a proto-deconstructive refusal to resolve issues that must be addressed by careful, insightful, and finally personal interpretations.10 From this perspective, James is politically radical and socially prophetic of how problems will continue to be addressed. For me, such ambiguity speaks most often to James’s own doubts about how such important questions might be resolved socially, lending his works to adaptations and reinterpretations, some of which stray far from his intended meanings and historically specific contexts. When understood in this after the novels of the Major Phase. These works include The American Scene, the two unfinished novels, The Sense of the Past and The Ivory Tower, as well as the late novel The Outcry, James’s Prefaces and selections for the New York Edition, the essays in Within the Rim, and several short stories published between 1904 and his death in 1916 or posthumously. Not all of these works fit my characterization of James’s fourth major shift in his aesthetics, but many of the literary works do. I have always considered the designation of James’s “fourth phase” to be simply a catchall category with little aesthetic, theoretical, or political value. 8 Georg Lukács, “The Ideology of Modernism,” in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. John and Necke Mander (London: Merlin Press, 1962), provides an important, yet neglected, interpretation of the relationship between literary naturalism and avant-garde modernism. Rarely connected with literary naturalism, except in some discussions of The Princess Casamassima, James is an excellent illustration of Lukács’ observation of the integral relationship of naturalism and modernism. 9 See John Carlos Rowe, Afterlives of Modernism: Liberalism, Transnationalism, and Political Critique (Hanover: University Presses of New England, 2010). 10 J. Hillis Miller, Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005).

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manner, James is politically meliorist, rather than self-consciously pluralist. In this regard, I think James teaches us a good deal about the qualities of cultural work we have previously judged to be canonical, universal, and produced by genius. Shakespeare waffles on monarchy and the general role of state power in Elizabethan England. Austen satirizes relentlessly courtship and marriage among the privileged in British society, and she does so in ways that urge her readers to yearn for true love and marital bliss. Joyce equivocates on the merits of political or cultural revolution in the quest for Irish independence, opting instead for his imaginative mythologies. Faulkner condemns the destructive effects of slavery while celebrating as melodrama the Old South’s heritage of racial division. All of these canonical writers to whom our culture returns in old and new media are examples of aesthetic dissent, critiques performed entirely within the frameworks of established social conventions and unlikely ever to revolutionize the adaptive ideologies to which they subscribe. These are some of the aspects of Henry James’s writings that contribute to his survival in our own times. James has been popularized, even though he is by no means a popular writer. I began this book by arguing that we need to pay more attention to the popular influences on James as well as his own contributions to nineteenth-century popular literature. To these ends, I have returned twice to Daisy Miller as a work that epitomizes the curious combination of high-cultural complexity and popular stereotypes that operates more subtly in all of James’s fiction. In Chapter 1, I analyze James’s “formalization of sentiment” as the process through which he would transform the conventions of literary sentimentalism into the structure of the work itself, transferring the affective identifications of readers with certain characters and situations to the aesthetic process itself. James was so successful in this transformation as to hide his own sentimental affiliations, in part because the reader’s experience is directed less to specific characters or outcomes and more at the achieved literary effect: James’s house of fiction. In truth, we do not weep for Daisy Miller or even mourn Winterbourne’s loss; we are supposed to identify with the author’s wisdom and achievement. Yet in The Awkward Age, James seems to have missed the “lesson” of his novels of social manners, as he himself confesses in his Preface to the New York Edition of the novel. The internal problems of the upper classes are brilliantly analyzed by James but somehow elude easy solution. Evidence of this dilemma is visible in the conduct of middle-class aspirants to power who so often end up replicating the very aristocratic problems they worked hard to overcome. Once the bourgeoisie commands the economic power of the aristocracy, they emulate the social and cultural authority of their competitors, ending up converted to the old order. Although James predicted that just such class problems would infect the “classless” American, he hardly anticipated how far the American “one-percenters” have outstripped their titled British predecessors. Is it possible to distinguish James’s social satire in The Awkward Age from our fascinated obsession with the

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“cleverness” of its characters? Are we not similarly scandalized by and yet secretly obsessed with our soap-opera characters and their real-life equivalents, those celebrities whose trivial lives we condemn and yet whose stories continue to enthrall us? Henry James’s odd relationship to popular literature may not have succeeded in making him popular as a best-selling author, but it certainly lends him a special fascination with author and auteur directors interested in affirming a similarly powerful authority over their materials. Alfred Hitchcock is famous for just such directorial qualities, as I argue in Chapter 5. In Chapter 6, I contend that Peter Bogdanovich wrecked his Hollywood career by confusing such professional and personal bids for authority in films from The Last Picture Show to They All Laughed. These examples suggest that there is a more flexible relationship between high and popular cultures, not simply because each may draw on the other for materials, but because the most sophisticated and complex cultural work may rely on the manipulation of feeling in ways often disguised as aesthetic or philosophical. I hope my conclusions regarding James’s contributions to popular literature will be understood as working in both directions: to understand James as a more popular writer, and to understand popular literature as contributing more centrally to high culture. I do not mean to conclude this book on what appears to be a bleak, even dismissive note. Instead, I want to ask my readers, most of whom are students and teachers, a fundamental question about why we work so hard to maintain such “classic” writers, not just in our classrooms and disciplinary practices but in popular culture as well. What purpose does the classic serve, if it is not to maintain for a bit longer a dead language that few people any longer speak? What do the classics in our current society tell us about our own values, both those waning, such as liberal individualism, and those on the rise, like the postmodern subject capable of occupying many different roles and social positions? These are the questions that should trouble us as we watch a new film based on a James novel, read a sequel, like Mrs. Osmond, or just hear the echoes of James’s famously difficult prose. Ghosts haunt until we listen to their messages.

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Index

Note: Page numbers appearing in italics refer to figures. abolitionism 32–36, 47, 54 “Adina” (James) 6, 8, 16, 93–95, 108–9 Adorno, Theodor 5 advertising 5, 117 “aesthetic dissent” 9, 11, 218 Afghanistan 186 African-American literature 20, 22–23, 30, 32–37, 42–43, 203–10; see also specific author or title Afterlives of Modernism (Rowe) 186–87 Akers, Benjamin Paul 54 All a Novelist Needs (Tóibín) 183–84, 195, 197–98, 200 Almanac of the Dead (Silko) 185 “Altar of the Dead, The” (James) 6 Ambassadors, The (James) 10; ambiguity in 213; avant-garde aspects 216; “Collaboration” and 100; “formalization of sentiment” and 44; Franzen and 193–94; Ozick’s adaptation of 20–21; use of metaphor in 59n26 ambiguity 212–15; as cause of misreadings 131–32; as device xii–xiii, 4, 6–7, 9n18, 23, 45, 155, 182, 217–18; failure of 89; radical 146–47; in soap operas 73, 75; see also under specific title or film American, The (James) 6, 21, 44, 100 American Dream 22 American Dream, An (Mailer) 188 American Exceptionalism 22–23, 186 American expansionism 48, 163, 185–86, 193, 212 “American Girl” archetype 47, 48, 58, 62, 133, 136, 143, 146 American Jewish fiction 190–92 American Pastoral (Roth) 193

American Scene, The (James) 7, 216 American Transcendentalism 37–38, 39, 43, 46 Anderson, Benedict 75–76 Anesko, Michael 2–3, 4 Anglo-American New Criticism 3, 6, 12, 17, 28 Another Country (Baldwin) 20, 22–23, 186, 201–9, 210, 215–16 Anxiety of Influence, The (Bloom) 149 Archibald, William 151–52 Arnold, Matthew 28 art films 13, 149–50, 159, 167, 176 Arthurian legend 106–7 Aspern Papers, The (James) 57, 177, 189, 214 Auerbach, Nina 114 Austen, Jane 218 “Author of ‘Beltraffio,’ The” (James) 8, 93, 214 avant-garde modernism: ambiguity and 6–7; Baldwin and 206; literary naturalism and 217n8; popular culture and 13; transition to 17, 42–53, 115, 127, 208–9, 216; Wilde and 92, 168 Awkward Age, The (James) 14–16, 63–90; ambiguity in 15, 80, 90; climactic events in 76–80; as compared to earlier works 65; critiques of 87–88; editions 27, 65, 71, 74n16, 79n22, 89, 90n32, 218–19; a “heterosexualized reading” of 71; moral lesson of renunciation in 66–68, 81, 84, 85, 87, 88, 89–90, 181; organization of 63–64, 65, 80; preface to 27, 65, 71, 79n22, 89, 218–19;

Index resemblances to Days of Our Lives (soap opera) 71–74; serialization of 90n32; symbolism in 81–82; theatricality of 65; themes 65–69, 75, 82–84, 88–89; use of language and “conduct of life” in 75–80 Bakhtin, Mikhail 10 Baldwin, James 20, 22–23, 186, 201–9, 210, 215–16 Balzac, Honoré 6, 14, 64, 207 Banville, John 184, 213 Beardsley, Aubrey 91 “Beast in the Jungle, The” (James) 6, 193 Beatrice Cenci (Hosmer) 54 Beaumont, Gabrielle 140 Beckett, Samuel 19 Benjamin, Walter 120 Bertolucci, Bernardo 156 Besant, Walter 43 Bewitched (TV) 128 Black Arts Movement 35 Blackwater Lightship (Tóibín) 196 Blithedale Romance, The (Hawthorne) 42 Bloom, Harold 131, 132, 149, 188, 199 Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice (film) 156–57 Bogdanovich, Peter: as auteur 136, 137, 219; Cybill Shepherd and 18, 133, 135; Dorothy Stratten and 132, 138, 139–47; Last Picture Show, The (film) 133, 135–36, 137, 138–39, 146, 150, 151, 219; legacy of 132, 219; marriage of 133, 136, 139, 141; Mask (film) 133; Paper Moon (film) 132, 133; relationship with women 18; techniques of 132, 136, 138–39; They All Laughed (film) 18, 138, 139, 219; What’s Up Doc (film) 132, 133, 136, 139; see also Daisy Miller (film) Bonnivard, François 50, 59, 60, 62 Bostonians, The (James) 8, 9, 10, 57, 64, 114–15, 159, 177 Bram Stoker’s Dracula (film) 169n43 Brooks, Cleanth 28 Brooks, Peter 6, 14, 63–64 Brown, Charles Brockden 31 Brown, William Wells 42 Bush, George W. 185–86 Bust of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Lander) 55, 56 Byron, Lord: Daisy Miller (James) and 8, 10, 45, 50–53, 55, 57–58, 60, 61, 62, 135, 143, 213; Exit Ghost (Roth) and

229

189; Manfred 50–52, 55, 135, 143; Prisoner of Chillon 50, 52–53, 60, 135 Caged Heat (film) 113–14 Campion, Jane 19; see also specific film Canby, Vincent 139, 140 Canova, Antonio 53 Cantos (Pound) 17 capitalism 119–20, 145, 166, 177 Capote, Truman 152–54, 155, 159, 182 Carby, Hazel 35 Carmen (Bizet) 173 Carnal Knowledge (film) 158–59 Carpenter, Teresa 18, 140–41, 142–43, 144 Cartwright, Carroll 178 Case of Wagner, The (Nietzsche) 16–17, 98 castration complex 113–14, 120, 144, 167–68 celebrity culture xi–xii, 2, 5–6, 100, 113–14, 118, 133, 136–37, 138, 219 Cendrars, Blaise 205 censorship 18, 83, 86, 88, 151, 152, 156 Chandler, Karen Michele 164n34, 166 Chandra, Vikram 195 Child, Lydia Maria 38 Child-Loving (Kincaid) 155 Christian motifs 98–99, 103, 109 Cixous, Hélène 127 Clairmont, Claire 52–53 classic literature: canon formation and 4; mass media fascination with 130–32, 143, 144, 148–50, 176–77, 219; teaching x–xiii, 46, 75, 149, 219 Clayton, Jack 18; see also Innocents, The (film) Clotel (Brown) 42 Coburn, Alvin Langdon 212 Cold War era 12, 153–54 “Collaboration” (James) 6, 16, 95–100, 102–3, 107, 108–9, 115 colonialism 105, 113, 162, 186, 195, 196, 197, 212 communication, power and 115, 117–20, 124, 125–26, 212 Conduct of Life, The (Emerson) 75 “conduct of life” 75–76 Cooper, James Fenimore 31 Coppola, Francis Ford 137, 169n43 Corman, Roger 130 Corrections, The (Franzen) 192 cosmopolitanism 96–110; African Americans and 23; Eliot and 104, 107; elitist nature of 22, 23; James’s xi,

230

Index

7–8, 16–17, 22, 97–98, 103, 107–8, 110, 185, 186, 191, 195, 197, 199, 209; modern 7–8, 16–17, 99, 104, 107, 110, 115, 185; nationalism and 14, 115; in Rear Window (film) 125; Trump-era 11; Wagner and 104 Craft of Fiction, The (Lubbock) 2–3, 10, 198 cult of domesticity 29 cultural modernism 43, 115 cultural work: English Decadents and 92; film industry and 18, 120, 143, 219; “formalization of sentiment” and 29, 44–46, 47, 218; function of 5, 18; industrialization and 41; manipulation and 219; nationalism and 17, 108, 109–10, 115, 186; popular culture vs. 5, 6; qualities of 218; transnationalism and 17, 212; women and 28, 41 Culture Capital (Guillory) 4 culture wars 4, 159 Daisy Miller (film) 18, 130–47; ambiguity and 215; art house vs. popular culture 13; casting of 133, 135–36, 136–37; critiques of 133, 136–38, 146, 182, 211; financing of 137; patriarchal reading of 18, 134–35, 143, 145, 146, 150; reductive nature of 130–31; sexuality in 150, 215; social criticism on 133–34 Daisy Miller (James) 8, 10, 14, 47–62; ambiguity in 45, 146–47, 213, 215; “American Girl” archetype 47, 48, 58, 62, 133, 136, 143, 146; as case study of sentimentalism 44, 45, 47; conventional readings of 48–49; dime novel melodrama and 13, 47; “formalization of sentiment” 44–46, 47, 218; location of 58–59, 60–61; misreadings of 131–32; as popular fiction 6; romantic allusions in 49–62; systemic violence in 146 Danäe (Klimt) 170–71 Das Rheingold (Wagner) 93 Days of Our Lives (soap opera) 71–72 Dead Pearl Diver, The (Akers) 54 Death of a Centerfold, The (Beaumont) 140 “Death of a Playmate” (Carpenter) 140 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The (Gibbon) 48, 61, 62 Demme, Jonathan see Caged Heat (film)

Desai, Kiran 195 “destination novel” 14, 47 Dialectic of Enlightenment, The (Adorno and Horkheimer) 5 Díaz, Junot 195 Die Walküre (Wagner) 93 domestic drama: characteristics of 8, 15, 65, 164–65; “cult of domesticity” 29; cultural politics of 28–30, 31; literary realism and 14; see also soap operas domestic power 125, 128, 176 Donadio, Stephen 100 “double consciousness” 23 Douglas, Ann 30, 33, 46 Douglass, Frederick 32–33, 36–37, 42 Doyne, Nancy 178 Dred (Stowe) 34 Du Bois, W. E. B. 23 Dumas, Alexandre 63 economic power 126, 144, 145, 212, 218 Edel, Leon 66, 77n21, 86n29, 196 Eliot, T.S. 16, 17, 19, 23, 103–10, 115, 149, 161 Ellet, Elizabeth 57 Ellison, Ralph 202 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 29, 37–38, 39, 41, 43, 53, 75 English Decadents 92 Enlightenment 37–38 Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) 31, 128, 133 ethnocentrism 7 Europeans (film) 159–60, 177, 178 “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (Baldwin) 206 Exit Ghost (Roth) 20, 21–22, 186–90, 191, 199, 209 fascism 17, 107–8 Faulkner, William 3, 207, 218 feminine agency 17–18, 116–17, 123, 125, 128–29 feminine commodification 116–17, 141, 145, 146, 182 feminine domesticity 8, 14, 29, 128, 164, 176 feminine identity 129, 161, 163–64, 167, 169–70, 176 feminist rebellion 113–29, 144–45; see also women’s rights movement Feminization of American Culture, The (Douglas) 30 Fetterley, Judith 113, 115

Index film industry 17–19, 148–82; adaptations of classical literature and 130–32, 143, 144, 148–50, 176–77, 219; art films 13, 149–50, 159, 167, 176; capitalism and 119–20; censorship 18, 151, 152, 156; feminist rebellion and 113–29, 144–45; ideological forces in 149–50; sexually explicit films 156–57; technical innovation and 113; see also celebrity culture; specific film Fish, Stanley 132 Flanagan, Mike 151 Flynt, Larry 141 Fogel, Daniel Mark 183 Foreign Bodies (Ozick) 20–21, 22, 23, 186, 190–92, 197, 199, 200, 209 Foucault, Michel 83, 84, 127 Frankfurt School 5 Franzen, Jonathan 20, 21–22, 23, 186, 192–95, 197, 199–200, 209, 217 Frayling, Christopher 152n13 Frazer, James George 104 Freedom (Franzen) 20, 21–22, 23, 186, 192–95, 197, 199–200, 209, 217 Freud, Sigmund 113 Friction with the Market (Anesko) 4 Friedkin, William 137 From Ritual to Romance (Weston) 104 Fuller, Margaret 39–40, 53, 55, 57, 61, 62, 135, 185 Galvan, Jill 124 Gardens in the Dunes (Silko) 20, 184–86, 209 gay studies 115, 149–50 Geismar, Maxwell 11–12 gender 148–82, 198, 213–14, 217; in African-American literature 36; classical allusions and 57; and use of sentimentalism 30–35, 41–44, 46; varied treatment of 8–10, 13, 17–19; women as other 113–14; see also feminine commodification; feminist rebellion; patriarchal power; sexuality; women’s rights movement gender hierarchies 8, 30, 119, 124, 127, 143, 166 Genet, Jean 205 George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, The (TV) 128 George Washington (Greenough) 54 Ghost Writer, The (Roth) 20, 21–22, 186–90, 191, 199, 209 Gibbon, Edward 48, 61, 62

231

Gilbert, Annie 71, 72–73 Gilbert, Sandra 114, 115 Glaude, Eddie S. Jr. 208 globalization 7–8, 185, 191, 194–95; see also cosmopolitanism; transnationalism Global Matters (Jay) 194–95, 201 Golden Bough, The (Frazer) 104 Golden Bowl, The (film) 19, 149, 159, 160, 162–64, 165–66, 177–78, 181–82 Golden Bowl, The (James) 10, 44, 86, 207, 216 Gordon, Lyndall 198 Götterdämmerung (Wagner) 105 Graham, Wendy 92 Greek Slave, The (Powers) 54 Greenough, Horatio 54 Gubar, Susan 114, 115 Guccione, Bob 141 Guillory, John 4 Gulf War 186 Guy Domville (James) 15, 65–67, 68, 70, 86, 88, 89–90, 196 Habegger, Alfred 4–5, 28 Hall, William F. 87 Hanson, Ellis 153, 155 Hardy, Thomas 58 Hastings, Michael 156, 158, 159 Haunting of Bly Manor, The (Netflix) 151 Hawthorne, Nathaniel: Anglophilia and 2; influence of on James 6, 29, 31–32, 33, 93, 209; Lander’s bust of 55, 56; sentimentalism and 2, 14, 38–39, 40–41, 42, 43, 46; on women writers 14, 29, 40–41 Hefner, Hugh 140–41, 142, 143, 144, 145–46, 150 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm 96 Heidegger, Martin 75 Heiress, The (film) 150 “Henry James and James Baldwin” (Powers) 201, 203–4 Henry James and the Culture of Publicity (Salmon) 5 Henry James and the Jacobites (Geidmar) 11–12 Henry James and the “Women Business” (Habegger) 28 “Henry James Filmography, A” (Koch) 150–51 Henry James’s New York Edition (McWhirter) 212 Henry James Society of Korea 13

232

Index

hermeneutic competency 132 high culture: characteristics of 13, 16, 18, 23–24, 129; critical function of 5; James’s preference for xi–xii, 1; literary formalism and 45–46; return of 148–49, 150, 176, 218, 219; sentimentalism and 31–32 Hirsch, E. D. 132 History of Sexuality, The (Foucault) 83 Hitchcock, Alfred: as an auteur 115, 126, 219; “the author function” and 126–27; legacy of 128–29; Psycho (film) 127; Rear Window (film) 17–18, 113–29, 121–22, 125; Spellbound (film) 127; techniques of 116, 121, 136; themes of 116–17, 123, 127–28; see also Rear Window (film) HIV/AIDS 169–70, 215 Hogan, David 152 Holland, Agniezska 19; see also Washington Square (film) Hollinghurst, Alan 3, 184 Holocaust 20–21, 91, 191–92, 199 homoeroticism 8, 41, 71n21, 98, 108, 153, 188 homosexuality: coding of 92–93, 97, 98, 108, 182, 213–16; Cold War era and 153–54; confusing of with child abuse 8; explicitness of 19; legal aspects 41, 154; masculine anxieties toward 41; qualities of “queer face” 82; queerness vs. 155 homosocial relations 19, 41–42, 96, 188, 198 Horkheimer, Max 5 Hosmer, Harriet 54, 57, 62, 135 House of the Seven Gables, The (Hawthorne) 42 Howells, W. D. 31 Hugo, Victor 63 Human, All-Too-Human (Nietzsche) 100 Human Stain, The (Roth) 188 Humbling, The (Roth) 188 Ideal Husband, An (Wilde) 68 “idle talk” 75, 76, 82 Idlylls of the King (Tennyson) 107 I Dream of Jeannie (TV) 128 I Love Lucy (TV) 128 Imagined Communities (Anderson) 75–76 immigration 2, 7, 10, 21, 190, 202, 207, 210, 212 imperialism 212; “burden” of 185–86; complicity with 184; middle class and

193; neoimperialism 192; nostalgia and xi, 1–2, 104–5, 192, 217; as subtext 14, 32, 58, 94, 95, 163 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Jacobs) 35–36 Indigenous peoples 20, 29–31, 40, 184–86, 209 industrialization 41, 82, 120, 128, 212; see also technology Innocents, The (film) 18, 150–55, 156, 158, 159, 182 “Interview with James Baldwin on Henry James, An” (Leeming) 201–2, 205, 207, 210 In the Cage (James) 10, 17, 21, 113–29 Invisible Man (Ellison) 202 Iraq 186 Irigaray, Luce 127 Irish Americans 20 irony, as device 2, 6, 194 Iser, Wolfgang 132 Ivory, James see Merchant-Ivory Productions; specific film Ivory Tower, The (James) 216–17n7 Iyer, Pico 176 Jacobs, Harriet 35–36 James, Alice 185 James, Henry: anti-Semitism of 190; “the author function” and 127; as a celebrity 6; conferences about 183; friendship with Zhukovsky 91–92; international influence 13; international theme of 1–2, 7, 14, 16, 48, 83–84, 116–17, 162–63, 187, 191, 201–2, 203–4; on knowing the artist 138; legacy of xii–xiii, 128–29, 211–19; love life of 92; metafictional aspects 11, 16, 79; misreadings of 131–32, 181–82; “our Henry James” as descriptive 12–13, 23–24, 46, 211–12, 217; phases of 1, 2, 17, 44, 90n32, 190, 205, 209, 216; as playwright 14–16; reinventing 12–13; sexual identity of 9–10, 19–20, 92–93, 143, 154, 198, 199, 202, 210; on a successful novel 43–44; in Switzerl and 61; “textual preference” of 92, 215; U.S. citizenship of 1–2 James, William 9 “Jamesian aura” 184 Japan 13 Jay, Paul 194–95, 201 Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer 159–60, 177

Index Johnson, Samuel 97 “Jolly Corner, The” (James) 6 journalism 5, 117 Joyce, James 3, 207, 218 Kakutani, Michiko 192 Kant, Immanuel 37, 96 Kaplan, Fred 92 Keats, John 58–59, 62 Kelly, Grace 120, 121–22, 125 Kennedy, John Pendleton 30 Kenner, Hugh 104 Kermode, Frank 23 Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, A (Stowe) 34 Kincaid, James R. 84, 155 Kirsch, Adam 190 Klimt, Gustav 170–71 Koch, J. Sarah 150–51 Krook, Dorothea 83–84 Kundera, Milan 189 Labouchère, Henry 41, 154 Lacan, Jacques 113 Lady Agnew (Sargent) 175 Lady Barbarina (James) 204–5 Lander, Maria Louisa 54–55, 56, 57, 61, 62, 135 language, proper “conduct” and 75–76 Last Picture Show, The (film) 18, 133, 135–36, 137, 138–39, 146, 150, 151, 219 Last Tango in Paris (film) 156 Latin American Boom 13 Leeming, David Adams 201–2, 205, 207, 210 leisure class 12 “Lesson of the Master, The” (Newman) 201 Lévy, Arthur 103 LGBTQ+ rights 9, 10, 20, 154, 188, 198, 200, 212, 214, 215 liberal individualism 187, 217, 219 Libyan Sibyl (Story) 54 Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta (Ridge) 42 “Light Man, A” (James) 8 Lincoln, Abraham 28 Line of Beauty, The (Hollinghurst) 3, 184 literary naturalism 217 literary realism 14, 63, 64 Literature as Conduct (Miller) 75–76, 87 Lubbock, Percy 2–3, 10, 198 Ludwig II (king) 104–5, 109 Lukács, Georg 119, 217n8 Lumet, Sidney 151

233

MacKinnon, Catherine 144–45 Madwoman in the Attic, The (Gilbert/ Gubar) 114 Mailer, Norman 188 male desire 118, 120, 123, 140, 143, 144, 146–47 male gaze 123, 125, 126 Mamet, David 1 Manfred (Byron) 50–52, 55, 135, 143 Marble Faun, The (Hawthorne) 42 marriage plot 3, 83–84, 143 Martí, José 211 Mask (film) 133 mass culture 5, 29–30, 148–50 Master, The (Tóibín) 3, 20, 22, 183–84, 186, 195–201, 209 Matrimonial Causes Act (1857) 74, 178–79 Mazursky, Paul 156–57 McCormack, Peggy 136–38, 146 McGehee, Scott 19; see also What Maisie Knew (film) McKinley, William 185 Mda, Zakes 195 melodrama: characteristics 15, 63–64, 65, 88; as device 14, 16, 27, 28, 29, 41, 42, 63–64, 88, 89, 132, 178, 191; gender and use of 41, 42, 140; limitations of 89–90; see also domestic drama; sentimentalism; soap operas Melodramatic Imagination (Brooks) 63 “melodramatic imagination” 6 Melville, Herman 14, 38, 41–42, 46 Merchant-Ivory Productions 19, 159, 160, 162–63; see also specific film metafiction 11 Metamora (Stone) 30 Mexican-American War 42 middle class: changing values of 21–22; collapse of 192–95, 199; domestic drama and 65, 71, 72; rise of 69, 82; sentimentalism and 42, 218–19 “Middle Years, The” (James) 8, 187–88, 189, 199, 215 Miller, J. Hillis 75–76, 87, 88 Moby-Dick (Melville) 41 Modernism 91–110, 182; American conception of 190; “the author function” in 127; cultural 43, 107–8, 115; early 11, 217; eroticism and 170–71; hallmarks of 6, 63, 176; Lubbock and 2–3, 10; social and economic power and 126; transition from 115, 128, 193–95, 199, 211–12; see

234

Index

also avant-garde modernism; postmodernism modernization 13, 115, 117–20, 125–26, 161–62, 171, 172, 212 Modleski, Tania 113, 119, 120–21 Moon, Michael 149–50 Moretti, Franco 103 Morrison, Paul 108 MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) 151 Mrs. Osmond (Banville) 184, 213 Mulvey, Laura 113–14, 116–17, 119–20, 123, 144 “Murders in the Rue Morgue, The” (Poe) 124 Nadel, Alan 162 “narcissistic scopophilia” 113, 144 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Douglass) 36–37 Nathaniel Hawthorne (James) 209 nationalism 19; in 19th-century Europe 59, 61; cosmopolitanism and 14, 115; cultural work and 17, 106–7, 108, 109–10, 115, 186; German 16–17, 91, 96–97, 98, 99–100, 103, 105, 106–7; modernist politics and 16–17; myth and 104, 106–7; sculpture and 54; social conduct and 75–76; see also transnationalism National Organization of Women (NOW) 128, 133 Native Americans 20, 29–31, 40, 184–86, 209 Native Son (Wright) 205, 206, 207–8, 210 Nature (Emerson) 37–38 Negative Dialectics (Adorno) 5 neoimperialism 192 Newman, Charles 201 new media, rise of 115, 117–20, 124, 125–26, 128, 212, 218 Nichols, Mike 158–59 Nietzsche, Friedrich 16–17, 43, 91, 98–100, 103, 107, 109 Nietzsche contra Wagner (Nietzsche) 16–17, 98, 99 Nightcomers, The (film) 18, 151, 155–59 9/11 186 No Man’s Land (Gilbert/Gubar) 114, 115 nostalgia xi, 1–2, 68–69, 104–5, 160, 192, 217 Obama, Barack 186 “Ode to Liberty” (Shelley) 60

On Beauty (Smith) 3, 184 On Beauty and Being Just (Scarry) 3 Ossoli, Giovanni 39, 53 Other Henry James, The (Rowe) 64, 82n24 Our Nig (Wilson) 35 Outcry, The (James) 216–17n7 Ovid 105 Ozick, Cynthia 20–21, 22, 23, 186, 190–92, 197, 199, 200, 209 Painted Dreams (soap opera) 63 Paper Moon (film) 133 Parsifal (Wagner) 17, 98–100, 101, 104, 105–6, 108 patriarchal power: in Daisy Miller (film) 18, 134–35, 143, 145, 146, 150; Dorothy Stratten and 140, 143, 145; feminist scholarship and 113–29, 144–45; in recent film adaptations 160; in sentimental literature 30, 31, 41; technology and 117–19; trivializing 17–18, 116–17 Pawnbroker, The (film) 151 pedophilia 8, 82, 83, 86, 154, 155 Penthouse (magazine) 141 photography 117, 212 Piano, The (film) 167–68 Pierre (Melville) 41 plantation romances 29–30 Platt, Polly 133, 136, 139, 141 Playboy (magazine) 140–41, 145 Playboy after Dark (TV) 141 Playboy’s Penthouse (TV) 141 Poe, Edgar Allan 38, 41, 124 “Poet, The” (Emerson) 41 Poetics of Fascism, The (Morrison) 107–8 Polidori, John 52–53 Pope, Alexander 2 popular culture: function of 13; James’s relationship with 1–13, 16, 18, 64, 109–10, 132, 184, 211, 218–19; scholarship on 4–7, 12 Portnoy’s Complaint (Roth) 188 Portrait of a Lady, The (film) 19; ambiguity in 165, 176, 212–13, 215; failure of 167n40; feminine identity and 163–64; psychological realism and 216; sexuality in 149, 159, 160–61, 165–69, 176, 178, 181, 215; transnational aspects 178 Portrait of a Lady, The (James) 10; ambiguity in 165, 176, 212–13, 215; Banville’s sequel to 184, 213, 219; and

Index Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter 32; as literary escapism 200; misreadings of 181; psychological realism in 216 postmodernism: metafictional aspects 11, 16, 79; nostalgia and 1–2; technology and 192; transition to 115, 128, 193–95, 199, 211–12 Pound, Ezra 17, 19, 23, 107–8 Powers, Hiram 54 Powers, Lyall 201, 203–4 Princess Casamassima, The (James) 10, 214, 217n8 Prisoner of Chillon, The (Byron) 50, 52–53, 60, 135 Private Life of Henry James, A (Gordon) 198 Production Code 151, 156 Professor of Desire, The (Roth) 189–90 Proust, Marcel 205, 207 Psycho (film) 127 psychological realism 21, 109, 216 publicity 5–6; see also celebrity culture “Pupil, The” (James) 8, 214 queerness, as term 155 racism 22–23, 148, 201–8, 217 Ransom, John Crowe 28 realism 14, 21, 43, 63, 64, 109, 216 Rear Window (film) 17–18, 113–29, 121–22, 125 “Re-examining Bogdanovich’s Daisy Miller” (McCormack) 136–38 reification 119–20 renunciation 66–68, 81, 84–85, 87, 88, 89–90, 181 Repose (Sargent) 175 Resisting Reader, The (Fetterley) 114 Ridge, John Rollin 42 Ring cycle (Wagner) 16–17, 91, 93–95, 99, 104, 105, 108 Roderick Hudson (James) 6, 100 romanticism 38, 57, 216 Roof, Judith 123 Rose, Paul Lawrence 107 Roth, Philip 20, 23, 186–90, 197, 199, 200, 209; the “American berserk” 193; liberal individualism and 186–87, 217; themes of 21–22, 194; see also specific title Rowe, John Carlos 64, 82n24, 186–87 Roy, Arundhati 195 Sabbath’s Theater (Roth) 188 Sadoff, Dianne 149, 165

235

Salmon, Richard 5–6 Sargent, John Singer 162, 175 Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne) 32, 38–39, 41, 42 Scarry, Elaine 3 sculpture 53–55, 56, 57, 135 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 149–50, 188 Seneca Falls Convention (1848) 38, 39 Sensational Designs (Tompkins) 31–33 Sense of the Past, The (James) 216–17n7 sentimentalism 13, 14, 27–46, 216; African-American literature and 34–38; American Transcendentalism and 37–38; “formalization of sentiment” 29, 44–46, 47, 218; gender and use of 30–35, 41–44, 46; scholarship on 27–31; soap operas and 13 sex discrimination 145 sexual harassment 35, 145 Sexual Harassment of Working Women (MacKinnon) 145 sexuality 148–82, 213–16; coding of 92–93, 97, 98, 108, 182, 213–16; consent and 83; explicitness of 19; gender position and 123; repression of 160–61, 167, 198, 199, 214–15; “sex talk” 83–84, 86; “sexualization of everything” 149–50; varied treatment of 8–10, 18–20; see also homosexuality; specific title or film Shakespeare, William 2, 3, 95, 138, 218 Shelley, Mary Godwin 52–53, 62, 135 Shelley, Percy 52–53, 58–59, 60, 61, 62 Shepherd, Cybill 18, 133, 135, 150 Siegel, David 19; see also What Maisie Knew (film) Sigismondi, Floria 151 Silko, Leslie Marmon 20, 184–85, 186, 209 Sloane, Patricia 106 Smith, Valerie 35 Smith, Zadie 3, 184 Snider, Paul 138–47 soap operas 15, 63–90; ambiguity in 73, 75; characteristics of 73; as “conduct of life” 75–76; radio 15, 63, 72; sentimentalism and 13; success of 73 social power 115, 117, 124, 125–26 Softley, Iain 19; see also Wings of the Dove, The (film) Spellbound (film) 127 Spoils of Poynton, The (James) 177 Spoto, Donald 116, 127 Stein, Gertrude 17, 23

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Index

Stone, John Augustus 30 Story, William Wetmore 53–55, 57 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 28, 31, 32–34, 38, 46 Strachey, Lytton 168 Stratten, Dorothy 18, 132, 138, 139–47, 182 Swallow Barn (Kennedy) 30 Symonds, John Addington 20, 93, 154, 168 Tarantino, Quentin 139 technology 117–20, 125–26, 161–62, 171, 212 television 1, 15, 128, 141, 150–51, 176; see also soap operas; specific show Tennyson, Alfred 107 Theweleit, Klaus 171 They All Laughed (film) 18, 136, 138, 139, 219 Thoreau, Henry David 37–38 Thorvaldsen, Bertel 53 Tóibín, Colm 3, 11, 20, 22, 23, 183–84, 186, 195–201, 209 Tompkins, Jane 31–33, 46 “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (Eliot) 149 Tragic Muse, The (James) 8, 10, 64, 87, 92, 213, 214–15, 216 transnationalism 17, 100, 103–4, 108–9, 115, 178, 183–210 Trask, Michael 71, 82 Trilling, Lionel 22, 23 Tristan und Iseult (Wagner) 101, 104–5, 106 Truffaut, François 115 Trump, Donald 11, 163, 186 Turgenev, Ivan 92 Turning, The (film) 151 Turn of the Screw, The (James): ambiguity in 212, 214; book adaptations of 18; film and television adaptations of 18, 150–59; psychological realism in 216; themes 8, 9, 10, 21, 155, 194 Twain, Mark 10–11, 14 Twenty-Seventh City, The (Franzen) 192 Typee (Melville) 41 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) 32–34 universality 4, 199–200, 211 Upanishads 104 Valenti, Jack 151 “Valhalla” (Wagner) 105 Veeder, William 4–5

“Velvet Glove, The” (James) 6, 16, 100–103, 108–9, 115 Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Wollstonecraft) 38 Virginia Dare (Lander) 55, 56 “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (Mulvey) 113–14, 144 Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (film) 130 Wagner, Richard 16–17, 19, 91–110, 154 Walker, Pierre 93 Warner, Susan 30–31, 32, 38, 44–45, 46 Washington Square (film) 19; ambiguity in 213–14; failure of 167n40; misreadings in 181; sexuality in 149, 150, 159, 160–61, 163–65, 176, 213–14; transnational nature 178 Waste Land, The (Eliot) 16, 17, 103–10, 115, 161 Watch and Ward (James) 77n21 Weston, Jessie L. 104 Wexman, Virginia Wright 164n34 Wharton, Edith 101, 189, 190 What Maisie Knew (film) 19, 149, 159, 163–64, 165–66, 178–81, 182 What Maisie Knew (James) 15, 178–79, 198 What’s Up Doc (film) 132, 133, 136, 139 Wide, Wide World, The (Warner) 30–31, 32, 44–45 Wilde, Oscar: “The Decay of Lying” 43; depictions of in James’s fiction 68, 92–93, 154–55, 168, 214–15; James’s dislike of 19–20, 92, 196; trials of 9, 154, 198, 215; Wagner’s music and 91 Wilder, David 141 Williams, Linda 119 William Wetmore Story and His Friends (James) 53–55, 213 Wilson, Edmund 9n18 Wilson, Harriet 35 Wings of the Dove, The (film) 19, 181; modernization in 161–62; sexuality in 149, 159, 160–62, 163–64, 165, 169–76; success of 167n40, 169 Wings of the Dove, The (James) 10, 194, 205, 206, 207, 210, 213; avant-garde aspects 216; misreadings of 181; sentimentalism in 44; “sex-talk” in 86 Winner, Michael 18, 151, 155–58, 159 Within the Rim (James) 216–17n7 Wollstonecraft, Mary 38, 40 “Woman” (Emerson) 38

Index Woman and the Demon, The (Auerbach) 114 Woman Who Knew Too Much, The (Modleski) 113, 119 women artists 53–55, 57 Women Artists in All Ages and Countries (Ellet) 57 women authors 4, 14, 29, 30–41 Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Fuller) 39–40 women’s rights movement: cult of domesticity 29; feminist rebellion 113–29, 144–45; first-wave feminism 4, 32–33, 38, 39–40, 50, 53, 55–57, 59, 61–62, 131, 143, 176–77, 212, 213–14; second-wave feminism 9, 18–19, 29, 31, 114–15, 128, 131, 133, 135, 139, 151, 159, 164, 212; sentimentalism in

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literature and 28–41; social attitudes and 8; third-wave feminism 9, 18–19, 115, 119, 212 working class: ambivalence toward 126; compassion for 21–22; “culture of sentiment” and 35; discrimination and 35, 145, 155; domestic drama and 65; empowerment of 117, 119, 124, 125 “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, The” (Benjamin) 120 Wright, Richard 205, 206, 207–8, 210 Wyler, William 150, 214 Wyndham Sisters, The (Sargent) 175 Zenobia (Hosmer) 54 Zhukovsky, Paul 91–92, 95–96, 109 Zito, Tom 140