The Disruption of the Feminine in Henry James 9781487574499

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THE DISRUPTION OF THE FEMININE IN HENRY JAMES

PRISCILLA L. WAL TON

The Disruption of the Feminine in Henry James

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 1992 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada Reprinted in 2018 ISBN

0-8020-5987-2

ISBN 978-1-4875-8575-4 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Walton, Priscilla L. The disruption of the feminine in Henry James Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN

0-8020-5987-2

James, Henry, 1843-1916 Criticism and interpretation. 2 . Women in literature. 1. Title.

1.

cg 1-095298- I

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Vll INTRODUCTION

Releasing the Screw of Interpretation 3 1

2 1/

The Realist/Referential Construct 13

Feminine Representation in Early Works 34

The Limits of Ideological Discourse in Roderick Hudson 34 Ideology and Subjectivity in The Portrait of a Lady 49

11 /

3 Manifestations of the Feminine Other in a Selection of James's Short Stories 65 4 The Ambassadors and Feminine Reading

101

5 The Wings of the Dove and Feminine Writing

120

6 The Golden Bowl and Feminine Revisions 141 CONCLUSION

Feminine Textuality 161 SELECTED LIST OF WORKS CONSUL TED INDEX

I

77

165

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to express my sincere thanks to Linda Hutcheon and Barrie Hayne, both of whom have patiently given me generous and invaluable criticism. They have also provided me with unfailing support and assurance throughout. I am grateful to Eric Domville, Deborah Esch, Robert Martin, and Anthony Percival for the time they have taken to read this study, and for their useful suggestions. I would also like to thank the University of Lethbridge Research Fund for the stipend that enabled me to complete this manuscript. There are many friends to whom I would like to express my gratitude for their unflagging support: Dorothy Bray, Connie Brim , Jane Drover, William and Julie Fitzgerald, Helen Hoy, Heather Jones, Shannon McLoughlin, Stephen Moyse, Martin Smith, Aruna Srivastava, and Annie Walton. A particular note of thanks goes to Robert DiNapoli and Alison Lee for their coffee, tea, and sympathy and for their attempts to decode my often scrambled and convoluted prose; each, always patiently, provided valuable input. Parts of Chapters 2 and 3 appeared in different forms as ' "There's no such thing as an isolated man or woman": Subjectivity in The Portrait of a Lady' (Connecticut Review 12:2) and ' "Everything ... might mean almost anything": Absence and Creativity in James's In the Cage' (North Dakota Quarterly 58:3). Chapter 6 appeared, again in different form, as ' "A Mistress of Shades": Maggie as Reviser in The Golden Bowl' in the Henry James Review. This book is dedicated to the memory of my grandfather, William

Vlll

Andrew Hallett, and my only regret is that he did not live to see its completion. I would also like to express my deepest gratitude and love to my parents and my grandmother, who have encouraged and helped me throughout all my academic endeavours.

THE DISRUPTION OF THE FEMININE IN HENRY JAMES

INTRODUCTION ~

Releasing the Screw of Interpretation

Any reader who is familiar with Henry James's writings will also be familiar with the ghost/madness controversy generated by The Turn of the Screw, which first appeared in 1898. Critics of the tale have bandied about these two diametrically opposed interpretations at least since 1934, when Edmund Wilson published his landmark article in Hound & Horn, an article he developed further in 1938 in The Triple Thinkers. Yet while literally volumes of criticism have been produced over the ensuing years, each attempting, definitively, to classify the tale as a chronicle of demonic possession, or conversely, as the diary of a madwoman, what has largely been ignored and what is perhaps at the root of the debate is that the story dramatizes the problematic nature of Realist interpretation. In so doing, The Turn of the Screw is paradigmatic of James's Realist narratives as a whole, and the questions to which it gives rise are the questions to which this study is addressed. The Turn of the Screw undercuts its own supposed Realist impetus when it generates indeterminacies and contradictions that disrupt Realist readings of it. Because it is a Realist work, the tale's conscious project should, according to Realist theory, involve the effort to reproduce, objectively and accurately, the 'reality' it reflects. Realism has traditionally been considered a referential mode that represents life mimetically, and serves as a window on the world. Realist theorists believe that this mode of writing presents a 'reality' that is knowable and explainable, that engenders, as the text works towards closure, a singular interpretation. But these theoretical assumptions are subverted by The Turn of the Screw, for its oft-noted multiplicity of meaning undercuts its own supposed singular construction.

4 The Disruption of the Feminine in Henry James Although the novella is, in its form and style, ostensibly Realist, it self-consciously critiques its own efforts to elucidate and to know. Interestingly, The Turn of the Screw portrays the problems one encounters in reading and rendering two non/entities: femininity and absence. The interconnection between femininity and absence is the focus of this study and is explored from a theoretical perspective in Chapter 1. By way of introduction to my argument, however, I would like to demonstrate the ways in which femininity and absence deconstruct the univocal impetus of and within The Turn of the Screw, which consists of two main endeavours to· decode and to explicate them. The text is divided into two parts: the prologue comprises the efforts of Douglas and the narrator to present the governess and the account she has written; the bulk of the tale consists of the governess's story. While the narrator and Douglas try to explain, to control, and to confine the meaning of the governess, the governess tries to place, to discern, and to elucidate the meaning of absence. However, both femininity and absence subvert their 'author's' intent and work against a Realist referential interpretation; their indeterminate and inconclusive nature generates a plurality of readings that cannot be unified and closed.' Although the governess is absent from the prologue, it revolves around her, and she assumes an absent presence within it. The prologue is the narrator's attempt to introduce her, to render her knowable to his readers, for he believes that language can explicate that which it depicts. He is a referential reader, and he shares similarities with traditional Realist critics in that he 'knows' that the meaning or Truth of the text will 'out.' The narrator's reading strategy is apparent when he insists that the story Douglas is about to present will disclose the governess's love interest. Yet Douglas responds, 'The story won't tell ... not in any literal, vulgar way'(18).2 More generally - as criticism has attested - the story, clearly, does not tell or reveal the 'secret' of the governess. Despite Douglas' insinuation that the governess's tale is unknowable, both he and the narrator try to elucidate it. However, its unknowability is suggested by the text itself when Douglas recital of the governess's tale must wait until he receives his written account from town, and his 1

2

While I have tried to refrain from citing critics of The Turn of the Screw in this preface, it should be noted that my reading is indebted to Shoshana Felman's article, 'Turning the Screw of Interpretation.' I refer to the 1898 edition of the tale, as reprinted in The Complete Tales of Henry James ed Leon Edel, vol 10 (1964).

Releasing the Screw 5 telling of the story is deferred 'till two nights later' ( 1 5). While this deferral, of course, creates further tension, it also self-reflexively mirrors the impenetrability of the governess's story, for it is, at first, physically inaccessible: The story's written. It's in a locked drawer - it has not been out for years' ( 16). But while the drawer which contains the governess's text is figuratively opened by Douglas, 3 the narrator and Douglas try to close it once again. The very existence of a prologue in The Turn of the Screw raises some interesting questions, for prologues or prefaces are provocative texts. On the one hand, they exist to pique the reader's interest, and on the other, they serve to direct the reader along the interpretive path that the author has chosen to follow (much like the one 'you' are reading). Critical writings, at least, require prologues or prefaces because their authors are attempting to prefigure the argument that will be presented in the bulk of their texts. In other words, prologues are strategic pieces, for in them, authors are trying to convince readers that the assertions they are making (or are about to make) are valid and worthy of their readers' attention. Generally, the nature of critical writings dictates the necessity of a prologue, but fictional writings do not, as a rule, call for the same sort of introduction. Why then does The Turn of the Screw require one? The narrator is the fictional 'author' of the tale presented as The Turn of the Screw, since he admits that what readers are reading is a story he has fictionally compiled: 'Let me say here distinctly, to have done with it, that this narrative, from an exact transcript of my own made much later, is what I shall presently give. Poor Douglas, before his death - when it was in sight - committed to me the manuscript that reached him on the third of these days' ( 1 g). The narrator's prologue is composed at a date after the events he relates, for Douglas, who is very much alive at the fireside scene, has given the narrator the story shortly before his death. This is important because it indicates that the narrator has already heard the governess's tale. Presumably what is in it has necessitated the writing of his prologue. He is adding it to 'aid' the reader in interpreting the tale that is to come. Further, the narrator's interpretive strategy comes into play here, for as a referential reader, he will be trying to draw attention to the singular Meaning of the governess's tale. He clearly feels that if he is to do so, he must provide her account with prefatorial remarks. This feeling could result from a belief that the governess's tale calls for male 3 The drawer, strictly speaking, is opened by Douglas' servant at his written request.

6 The Disruption of the Feminine in Henry James validation . The narrator might suspect that without his reinforcement, readers would not take her writings seriously. It could also result from an awareness of the difficulties femininity engenders for one who is trying to explicate it referentially. Femininity, particularly for a Victorian writer, is difficult to reduce to a singular interpretation; unlike masculinity, which has more definite connotations, it is slippery and difficult to hold in place. In general, femininity has a tendency to generate all kinds of different meanings, a situation I will discuss in Chapter 1. Here I will restrict my discussion to the feminine figure of the governess, for she engenders enough problems for one short preface to explore. Indeed, if one were concerned with presenting a governess as a trustworthy and straightforward character, 4 the problems her occupation effected for Victorian readers would be sufficient to require the addition of a prologue (particularly in light of the tale that is to come). The Victorians, according to Mary Poovey in Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Victorian England, had ambivalent responses toward governess figures . Indeed, Poovey argues that governess were both admired and deeply feared: 'That representations of the governess in the 1840s brought to her contemporaries' minds not just the middle-class ideal she was meant to reproduce, but the sexualized and often working-class women against whom she was expected to defend, reveals the mid-Victorian fear that the governess could not protect middle-class values because she could not be trusted to regulate her own sexuality. The lunatic's sexuality might have been ... contained ... but the prostitute's sexual aggression was undisguised; to introduce either such sexuality or such aggression into the middle-class home would have been tantamount to fomenting revolution' ( 131 ). Poovey's observation sheds some light on the narrator's decision to attempt to validate the governess's account. Her contention also draws attention to the problems that the narrator faces in trying to explain the governess referentially, for what is unsaid directs his narrative. In the prologue, the narrator is trying to establish the governess as 4 The narrator's predilection for interpreting the governess's narrative as a ghost story is made apparent in the novella. He structures his text so that it begins with a ghost story, a situation which leads readers to believe, by logical deduction, that what follows must also be a ghost story. Douglas entrusts his account to the narrator - which seems to indicate that they are like-minded - and the narrator is able to see "the beauty" of the governess's passion for the master. This would be a curious choice of words if he believed she were insane.

Releasing the Screw 7 a 'lady,' as opposed to a sexual being. Presumably, this is why much of the prologue is devoted to 'placing' her character. He is striving to dispel the negative (sexual) connotations to which her occupation gives rise. But in doing so, the narrator encounters difficulties, in that feminine sexuality has no singular presence in the Victorian worldview, a situation which will be examined in detail in Chapter 2. Because, for a Victorian, a 'lady' has no sexuality, the governess's sexuality, or her lack of sexuality, cannot be referentially articulated because it does not 'exist.' Therefore, to draw attention to it in order to stress its absence would in itself negate her status as a 'lady.' However, the absent presence of the governess's sexuality lurks beneath the surface of the narrator's discourse, and undercuts his referential belief that all can be elucidated and made known, since he cannot overtly address what he cannot say. Neither feminine sexuality nor its lack can be depicted in his writing, for it has no presence in his discourse and, as a result, cannot be made 'known' or controlled. Douglas shares the narrator's concerns and is involved in the same 'normalizing' endeavour. But he and the narrator are trying to combat an absent enemy, and that enemy is only made more apparent in their elision of it. The governess's sexuality bursts through their efforts to repress it, and its absence is present even in Douglas' description of her. He intimates that he has succumbed to her sexual charms when he discusses her manuscript: ' "[The manuscript] is in old faded ink and in the most beautiful hand." He hung fire again. "A woman's. She's been dead these twenty years. She sent me the pages in question before she died." They were all listening now, and of course there was somebody to be arch, or at any rate to draw the inference. But if he put the inference by without a smile it was also without irritation. "She was a most charming person, but she was ten years older than I. She was my sister's governess," he quietly said. "She was the most agreeable woman I've ever known in her position; she would have been worthy of any whatever. It was long ago, and this episode was long before" '(17). His listeners hear what is unsaid in this passage, for they decide that Douglas was in love with the governess: 'Well, if I don't know who she was in love with I know who he was' ( 18). In reaching this decision, the listeners are basing their interpretation on what is absent from Douglas' description, an absence that, as such, disrupts his attempt to confine it to the interpretation he desires. Douglas changes tactics at this point and tries to redirect the attention of his readers/listeners. Just as they have 'deduced' that he was in love with the governess, Douglas now asserts that the governess was

8 The Disruption of the Feminine in Henry James in love with the master: 'That came out - she couldn't tell her story without it coming out. I saw it, and she saw I saw it; but neither of us spoke of it' ( 17). What is absent is more important, in this prologue, than what is present within it, and it undercuts Douglas' effort to make the governess 'knowable.' He does not 'know' anything, since the governess's 'love,' as he indicates in the above passage, was never articulated (much like her sexuality); it was beyond the language of his textual conversation with her. But it is important to him that he convince his listeners that the governess's passion was socially acceptable. Hence, he asserts that because she was a 'fluttered, anxious girl out of a Hampshire vicarage' (i.e., respectable), she was overwhelmed by the master, who 'struck her, inevitably, as gallant and splendid ... She conceived him as rich, but as fearfully extravagant - saw him all in a glow of high fashion, of good looks, of expensive habits, of charming ways with women' (20). However, the meeting between the governess and the master is a kind of absence, since Douglas was not a party to it; he intimates what he believes the governess felt. If she informed Douglas of her feelings, this too is absent. The more Douglas tries to impose a meaning on the governess's behaviour, the more she eludes him, for the referential difficulties he encounters in attempting to explicate her actions are thrown into relief. In turn, the interpretation he is trying to deflect is also thrown into relief, for the listeners decide: 'The moral of which was of course the seduction exercised by the splendid young man. She succumbed to it' (22). But this line of reasoning must be circumvented, for if the listeners are correct and the governess does succumb to her passion, then she bears an alarming resemblance to Mary Poovey's governess, the figure who threatens the middle-class values that she is supposed to uphold because she cannot regulate her own sexuality. Douglas and the narrator quickly leap to their governess's defence and attempt to regulate her sexuality for her. They insist that hers was not a sexual passion, but a noble, if unrequited, love:' "She saw him only twice." "Yes, but that's just the beauty of her passion." A little to my surprise, on this, Douglas turned round to me. "It was the beauty of it. There were others," he went on, "who hadn't succumbed. He told her frankly all his difficulty - that for several applicants the conditions had been prohibitive. They were, somehow, simply afraid"' (22) . The governess's love must be passionless and socially acceptable because she forgoes her desire and accepts the care of the children; it leads her to assume respectable, motherly duties. At least, this is the interpretation

Releasing the Screw 9 Douglas and the narrator are trying to establish, as is apparent when one of the listeners asks, 'But was that all her reward?' and Douglas affirms that 'she never saw him again' (23). The referential problems one .encounters in trying to render the unknowable knowable are foregrounded in the prologue. Although theirs is a valiant effort, Douglas and the narrator fail in their attempt to confine the governess to a responsible, motherly role because her sexuality is only highlighted and made 'present' through their elision ofit. Feminine sexuality in particular, and femininity in general, cannot be referentially determined, for they effect a multiplicity of interpretations that cannot be controlled in a singular reading. This situation is also evident in the governess's account. She meets with difficulties similar to Douglas's and the narrator's when she tries to limit the absences she perceives in the 'text' of Bly. She too is involved in the process of referential reading, but where Douglas' and the narrator's textual additions seek to confine and control her, she is attempting to confine and control the absences she detects around her. At the same time, however, these absences actually inspire her text. The governess's authorial function begins shortly after she arrives at Bly, when the absences she perceives facilitate the fiction that she writes. This is apparent when she receives a letter from Miles's schoolmasters. Because the reason for Miles's dismissal is absent from the letter, its absence allows her to create her own interpretation. However, while this absence in fact generates a plurality of meanings, the governess insists on limiting the plurality to one: They go into no particulars. They simply express their regret that it should be impossible to keep him. That can have only one meaning' (29). She confines the meaning, and it is her interpretation that Miles is 'an injury to the others' (29) which sets in motion the dynamics of her/the story. Although absence allows her to create her text, she attempts to circumscribe ,that text to a singular interpretation. But the fiction that the governess fabricates, because it derives from absence, disrupts her (and others') referential readings, for it gives rise to more than one possible meaning. Interestingly, the text self-reflexively points to the governess's read- · ing and to her creative process in her first vision of Quint, for when she sees him on the tower, she notes, 'I saw him as I see the letters I form on this page' (37). Indeed, because Quint is dead, he constitutes an absence out of which the governess creates her story about him. She becomes the author of her own text, a text which she offers to her

10 The Disruption of the Feminine in Henry James

'reader,' Mrs Grose. But curiously, her reader is illiterate (28) and is thus unable to decipher it on her own. As a result, the governess tries to interpret it for her and to persuade her of its validity; however, her insistence upon her own interpretation is rather frightening: 'Lord, how I pressed her now! "So that you could see he knew what was between the two wretches?" "I don't know - I don't know!" the poor woman groaned' (65). Despite her attempts to limit language, the governess is aware of its plurality, as she indicates when she finds Flora hidden in the windowbay. She examines Flora's account of herself and recognizes its multiplicity: 'At that moment, in the state of my nerves, I absolutely believed she lied; and if I once more closed my eyes it was before the dazzle of the three or four possible ways in which I might take this up' (73). But again, she attempts to circumscribe the acknowledged plurality of Flora's explanation to one reading- her reading. The governess, like the narrator and Douglas before her, is trying to confine meaning; in her case, she is attempting to restrict the absences which she perceives in language to her own reading of them. In one of the more interesting scenes in the tale, the governess meets Miss Jessel in her room. She describes her encounter as follows: 'She had looked at me long enough to appear to say that her right to sit at my table was as good as mine to sit at hers. While these instants lasted indeed I had the extraordinary chill of a feeling that it was I who was the intruder. It was as a wild protest against it that, actually addressing her - "You terrible, miserable woman!" - I heard myself break into a sound that, by the open door, rang through the long passage and the empty house. She looked at me as if she heard me, but I had recovered myself and cleared the air. There was nothing in the room the next minute but the sunshine and a sense that I must stay' (97). However, when the governess and Mrs Grose discuss this scene later, Miss Jessel's absent response in the original incident is made into a presence by the governess: ' "Do you mean she spoke?" [asked Mrs Grose] "It came to that. I found her, on my return, in the schoolroom." "And what did she say?" ... "That she suffers the torments - !" ' (gg). Now in the original account, if Miss Jessel said anything, her words were omitted - as far as readers are aware, she said nothing. Yet out of this nothing the governess can create Miss Jessel's response. Absence may be the source of creation, but the governess persists in her restrictive Realist/referential approach, even though its inadequacy becomes apparent in the confrontation scene at the lake ( 114-16), in which Mrs Grose sees nothing. This scene functions, allegorically, as a Realist/referential critique, since what the governess has made 'clear'

Releasing the Screw

11

returns to its original indeterminate and inconclusive 'Other' state. The governess's attempt to clarify and fill in the absences she perceives leads to the multiplicity of the tale, and what is presented as her writing resists efforts to confine and limit it because her account derives from an interpretation of absence. As the tale demonstrates, one cannot restrict absences, absences which generate creativity, because they, much like Miss Jessel, decentre and defer singular interpretations. When Miles takes the letter that the governess has written to the master, the governess and Mrs Grose try to decipher the reason for Miles's dismissal from school. Intriguingly, they believe that he was expelled because he 'stole letters' ( 124). Miles's explanation also focuses on language, for he confesses that he 'said things' ( 135). Yet what he said, like the letter he stole, is absent from the text. Readers, both within the story and without, can never 'know ,' because the explanation is beyond the text, and hence, Miles's 'confession' is incomprehensible. The stolen letter can also be read on a figurative level, since what is stolen, absent, is, in a sense, the fixed signified which would anchor meaning. The story is filled with signifiers but lacks what Jacques Derrida calls 'the transcendental signified' (Of Grammatology 20) that would hold it in place. It is replete with gaps and absences which in turn engender its plurality and its indeterminacy. The governess reads and interprets, and .thus creates the ghosts (the absences) as if they were texts. But although her creative process arises from her efforts to fill in the absences she perceives, she persists in trying to confine them to a univocal interpretation. Indeed, her reading is shown to be suspect largely because she reads referentially and thus limits meaning. This tale, while it defers a singular interpretation, dramatizes the difficulties one encounters in trying to explicate femininity and absence. Because the governess creates from absence, her fiction cannot be definitively closed. Absence generates a multiplicity of meanings that undercut circumscription. The same is true of her absent presence in the prologue, in which she cannot be confined to Douglas' and the narrator's perception ofher. The novella demonstrates that interpretation is a limitless process, and the tale itself remains impenetrable and inconclusive. The similarities between femininity and absence arise from their mutual unknowability. Neither can be made known , for neither has a single presence within the narrative, and both elude the imposition of any final meaning. This is a situation which recurs throughoutJames's writings, and the connection between absence and femininity is the focus of this study. Realist theory ignores this connection because it

12

The Disruption of the Feminine in Henry James

cannot address it from within its critical confines. The Realist/referential doctrine ofknowability cannot acknowledge the unknowability that is engendered by absence and femininity in this novella. However, simply because femininity and absence cannot be 'known' does not 'mean' that they cannot be examined, and what an examination of them reveals is that their absent presences perform an important function within James's narratives. Indeed, femininity and absence become the texts' means of resisting the limitations that Realist reading has placed upon them.

CHAPTER ONE ~

The Realist/Referential Construct

The problems that The Turn of the Screw ·poses to a Realist reader are largely generated by efforts to explicate, and hence to limit, femininity and absence. The parallel movements in the tale, apparent in the narrator's and Douglas' attempts to confine the governess and in the governess's attempt to confine absence, suggest that the two processes are linked. I would suggest that the link between the two derives from the ways in which both femininity and absence work to subvert Realism's overt effort to depict 'life' referentially. Indeed, the 'presence' of femininity and absence foreground the absence of referential knowability and emphasize the inherent instability of language. Realism does not acknowledge this instability, although it slips in to Realist theorists' efforts to define the literary mode. The very texture of James's essays provides a case in point, for as he strives (particularly in his later years) for clarity and precision in conveying his literary views, his writing becomes increasingly obscure and diffuse. James's characteristic parenthetical approach to clarity results, conversely, in obscurity, a situation which perhaps implies that clarity in language is unattainable. It is difficult to derive fromjames's writings any clear understanding of what he means by the term 'Realism.' That he considers himself a Realist, in name at least, is apparent throughout his essays, but he never explicitly defines what he means by that appellation. In this, he is like many theorists of Realism, who also hesitate to offer a definition of the mode because of its amorphous nature. Often, summaries of Realism begin with their authors' admissions of the difficulties they have encountered in explicating the subject. Nonetheless, although

14 The Disruption of the Feminine in Henry James

Realism is a notoriously slippery concept, there are still certain conventions that have come to be accepted as characteristic of it. These are summarized by William W. Stowe in Balzac, James, and the Realistic Novel, when he suggests that texts deemed to be Realist are 'fictionalized narratives that set out systematically (i.e., consciously and intentionally) to represent the world as their readers see it, that describe and interpret social, political, and economic systems in the process of the representation, and that seek to establish themselves as complex literary systems our response to which resembles our response to the world' (xii). Stowe draws attention to Realism's mimetic efforts, stressing how the mode strives for a realistic representation oflife. Yet Charles Rosen and Henry Zerner point out in Romanticism and Realism that such a definition is too broad. They assert that 'Realist' has too often been confused with 'realistic,' and that nineteenth-century Realism 'was a very much more narrow affair' ( 139). As they suggest, Realism, as an artistic movement, began in France in the middle of the nineteenth century and manifested itself primarily in the visual arts and in literature. As an aesthetic doctrine, Realism dictated that any aspect of life was suitable for a novel, as is clear in Stendhal's famous Realist pronouncement that 'a novel is a mirror journeying down the high road. Sometimes it reflects to your view the azure blue of heaven, sometimes the mire in the puddles on the road below. And the man who carries the mirror in his pack will be accused by you of being immoral! His mirror reflects the mire, and you blame the mirror! Blame rather the high road on which the puddle lies, and still more the inspector of roads and highways who lets the water stand there and the puddles form' (366). Realism's subject matter was to be culled from banal, everyday scenes and situations, and the beauty of its artistic representation was to be found in its form. As Zerner and Rosen suggest, 'If contemporary life was to be represented with its banality, ugliness, and mediocrity undistorted, unromanticized, then the aesthetic interest had to be shifted from the objects represented to the means of representation' (149-50). The concept of form in a Realist aesthetic insisted upon accuracy of representation, which was to be effected through the ostensible removal of the author or the downplaying of the authorial voice. In addition, it required a logical and consistent plot and delighted in meticulous detail. Realism purports, therefore, to offer an objective and accurate representation oflife as it is, not as the author might wish it to be. However, in representing life accurately, Realism relies upon

The Realist/Referential Construct 15 a doctrine of what we might call 'knowability' (as discussed in the Introduction), since for the Realist, what is seen can be known, and what is known can be articulated and imparted to others through the medium of language. This reliance upon 'knowability' is integral to the Realist belief that literature contains an essential 'truth' about 'life,' and that the Realist novelist can present 'reality' in such an objective and detailed fashion that all readers will recognize the validity of their own - and the author's - vision. Initially, this seems like a straightforward enough mandate, but as James's essays indicate, Realism, even in its theoretical form, is much more contradictory and limiting than its theorists would allow, and the incoherences and convolutions of James's essays point to the rather more arbitrary and amorphous nature of the mode. In probably the most famous paragraph in all James's criticism, located in 'The Art of Fiction,' written in 1884, the author attempts to impart his Realist beliefs. He insists that the form is an attempt to mirror 'life' in art: I am far from intending ... to minimise the importance of exactness - of truth of detail. One can speak best from one's own taste, and I may therefore venture to say that the air of reality (solidity of specification) seems to me to be the supreme virtue of a novel the merit on which all its other merits (including that conscious moral purpose of which Mr. Besant speaks) helplessly and submissively depend. If it be not there they are all as nothing, and if these be there, they owe their effect to the success with which the author has produced the illusion of life. The cultivation of this success, the study of this exquisite process, form, to my taste, the beginning and the end of the art of the novelist. They are his inspiration, his despair, his reward, his torment, his delight. It is here in very truth that he competes with life; it is here that he competes with his brother the painter in his attempt to render the look of things, the look that conveys their meaning, to catch the colour, the relief, the expression, the surface, the substance of the human spectacle. (53)' This passage reveals James's most basic Realist preoccupations: he believes that the novel must produce the 'illusion of life' and suggest 1

AJI references to James's essays, unless otherwise indicated, are to Henry James: Literary Criticism , ed Leon Edel and Mark Wilson , 2 vols.

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The Disruption of the Feminine in Henry James

the variety of 'the human spectacle,' and that these are achieved, to some extent, through detail. The events related in a novel must appear to be 'real' events - in which case, presumably, they would impart the 'air of truth' because they would unfold logically, 'the way things happen.' Authorial intrusions are therefore anathema to James, since they detract from the 'air of reality' by reminding the reader that the related events are fictional. James is horrified with Anthony Trollope's 'suicidal' intrusions into his texts, and in 1883, 2 he complains of the earlier writer's 'little slaps of credulity': 'It is impossible to imagine what a novelist takes himself to be unless he regard himself as an historian and his narrative as a history. It is only as an historian that he has the smallest locus standi. As a narrator of fictitious events he is nowhere; to insert into his attempt a backbone oflogic, he must relate events that are assumed to be real' ( 1343). The 'illusion oflife' must be maintained at all costs, and readers are to be brought to believe that what they are reading is 'real' or like the 'real.' The art of conveying this 'illusion' lies in relating fiction as if it were history or a series of detailed facts. In 1879, James applauds Hawthorne because he 'rather supplements than contradicts history' (369), and he stresses in the Trollope essay that novelists must consider themselves historians. Yet in his 1873 review of Middlemarch (a work which he believes is a 'very splendid performance' and 'sets a limit ... to the development of the old-fashioned English novel' [965]), he draws a dividing line between novel and history when he observes that this book is, in its 'diffuseness,' 'too copious a dose of pure fiction. If we write novels so, how shall we write History?' (965-6). While 'diffuseness' is a quality more of form, perhaps, than 'life,' James seems to be suggesting that the scope of Middlemarch is too broad, and consequently, that its profuseness, or the extent of its detailed portrayal, bears too much resemblance to history. Therefore, it seems that while the novel must mimic history, if the historical likeness is carried too far, the novel encroaches onto history's ground. Since there is a tenyear gap between this review and the Trollope essay, it could be argued that the contradiction is the result of an authorial change of mind; 2

I am not treating James's essays in a chronological fashion primarily for reasons of clarity, since James returns to his conception of Realism throughout his career and expands upon different aspects at different times. However, as the Prefaces attest, the paradoxes within his Realist outline do not result merely from time or from change on James's part. The paradoxes, as well as the ambiguities which are evident in the essays, are frequently reiterated in various ways and various forms and thus apparently exist within James's theory itself.

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ho~ever, the contradiction is never acknowledged or addressed, and indeed, it is only one of a series of contradictions that permeates James's essays. For example, how must the novel be like history yet not be too much like history? The distinction between 'copiousness' and some implied norm of narrative is difficult to explain and, at least at first glance, seems to be an arbitrary and confusing discrimination. In later essays, James maintains his position that novels should affect the manner of history, and proceeds as though he had never placed a restriction on the extent to which they do so. What is suggested here, then, is the elastic nature of James's Realist criteria, which appear to be expandable and even contradictable. James elides the above contradiction, to some extent, through his insistence that an author must understand 'life' in order to portray it. Hence, a novel's lack of the right measure of history may be due to the author's insufficient understanding of the world. In a small essay entitled 'The Science of Criticism,' written in 1891, James explains that the quality of the writer's mind vivifies the work: 'art - the best kind, the only kind worth speaking of, is the kind that springs from the liveliest experience' (98-9). While this may appear to be an open and unlimited mandate, again it quickly narrows, for one must have knowledge only of a particular kind of 'life.' All 'realities' are not suitable fora novel, and a novel, for James, can be too 'realistic.' James's primary criticism of Zola, in 1880, is that he portrays too much of 'nature' and too little of 'life's' finer aspects: 'M. Zola holds to mean nothing and to prove nothing. Decency and indecency, morality and immorality, beauty and ugliness, are conceptions with which "naturalism" has nothing to do; in M. Zola's system these distinctions are void, these allusions are idle. The only business of naturalism is to be natural, and therefore, instead of saying of Nana that it contains a great deal of filth, we should simply say of it that it contains a great deal of nature' (866). James dislikes Zola for presenting 'foulness rather than fairness' (866) and pleads that 'realism should not be compromised. Nothing tends more to compromise it than to represent it as necessarily allied to the impure' (867). This would seem to be a rather anti-Realist statement, since most definitions of Realism purport to accept any form of 'life' as potential material for fiction. For James, however, 'taste' comes into play in selecting the writable 'reality,' and he berates Zola for his lack of it: 'The real has not a single shade more affinity with an unclean vessel than with a clean one, and M. Zola's system, carried to its utmost expression, can dispense as little with taste and tact as the floweriest mannerism of a less analytic age' (867-8).

18 The Disruption of the Feminine in Henry James The essay on Trollope, which James produced in 1865, constitutes a further convolution in his concept. In it, he applauds Trollope for his 'purpose ... of being true to common life' ( 13 13) - apparently Trollope's common life is superior to Zola's - but he adds a further stricture when he queries whether common life is the same as human nature, and is uncertain whether Trollope 'is equally true to nature; that is, whether in the midst of this multitude ofreal things, of uncompromisingly real circumstances, the persons put before us are equally real. Mr. Trollope has proposed to himself to describe those facts which are so close under every one's nose that no one notices them. Life is vulgar, but we know not how vulgar it is till we see it set down in his pages' ( 1313). James's reasoning here is intriguing, for he immediately associates 'common life' with vulgarity, an association which suggests that for him, only an aristocratic or genteel 'reality' is acceptably 'real.' In 1884, James returns to his idea that a writer must have a fine mind, and stresses that 'the deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer' ('Art' 64). The best novel, therefore, will display the right 'kind' of knowledge of 'life,' a kind which will enable it to present a 'tasteful' reflection of the 'real.' Trollope's and Zola's works apparently lack this quality, and their lack of taste muddies their picture. Indeed,James decides in 1903 that 'there is simply no limit, in fine, to the misfortune of being tasteless; it does not merely disfigure the surface and the fringe of your performance it eats back into the very heart and enfeebles the sources oflife. When you have no taste you have no discretion, which is the conscience of taste' ('Zola' 888). Zola, who 'to the common ... inordinately sacrifices' (891 ), renders a narrow picture of 'life,' for he depicts only 'the manners, the morals, the miseries - for it mainly comes to that - of a bourgeoisie grossly materialised' (889). The novel requires a larger or more tasteful- scope in order to reproduce a fully rounded 'reality.' Therefore, literature's subject cannot be anything drawn from 'life,' in so far as it cannot be too 'real' or too 'copious' or too 'vulgar,' but instead should expurgate 'life.' James is concerned with filtering and controlling the 'reality' that will be represented in fiction, and indeed, he goes so far as to suggest that the novelist must retain a 'cautious silence upon certain Subjects' ('Art' 63): In the English novel (by which of course I mean the American as well) more than in any other there is a traditional difference between that which people know and that which they agree to admit that they know, that which they see and that which they speak of, that which they feel to be a part of life and that which they allow to enter into literature. There is the great difference,

The Realist/Referential Construct 19 in short, between what they talk of in conversation and what they talk of in print' ('Art' 63). The 'reality' that writers 'allow' to enter into fiction is not necessarily the 'reality' they perceive. Art portrays, in fact, censored 'life,' since there is a difference between what is appropriate for a novel and what is not, that is, a difference 'between that which [we] know and that which we agree to admit [we] know.'Thisdifference may account for art's improving upon 'life,' for art allows us to leave out those parts of 'reality' we do not like to admit. However, if a novel must censor 'life,' it must be careful to censor it in the right way, and James criticizes de Maupassant, in 1888, for eliminating the wrong things from Une vie: 'It is almost an arrangement of the history of poor Mme. de Lamare to have left so many things out of it, for after all she is described in very few of the relations of life' (544). It would seem that what de Maupassant 'leaves out' is the 'reflective' side of his characters (54 7 ), and for James, that 'part which governs conduct and produces character' (547) should never be omitted, for the 'carnal side of man appears the most characteristic if you look at it a great deal; and you look at it a great deal if you do not look at the other, at the side by which he reacts against his weaknesses, his defeats' (548). James is always emphatic in his assertion that the novel has no 'conscious moral purpose' ('Art' 62). However, the moralism he disclaims is apparent in his disapproval of excessive treatments of 'man's carnal side' because he believes that any excess unbalances the picture of'life'; yet he never acknowledges that too much emphasis on 'man's' moral and spiritual side is equally excessive and leads to a similar unbalance. It should be noted that James's very specific and rather (at least to the modern mind) squeamish notions of the acceptably 'real' are individual to him and are not shared by all Realist theorists. What becomes clear in James's critiques of others' attempts at Realism is the intensely subjective nature of the 'life' that he finds novelistically suitable. This is curious, in that he seems to think he is being objective in his criticisms. If James has qualified what images of 'reality' can be incorporated into fiction and thus has limited the idea that a writer can choose a subject from 'life,' it is because he believes that certain 'realities' are too 'particular' (ironically, perhaps, like his own). He suggests that this problem can be resolved through the selection of a character who is representative and general, and so deserving of the treatment accorded him or her. In 1884, he notes that representative characters are superior, since 'they give one the impression of life itself, and not of an arrangement, a rechauffe oflife ... This is the great strength of his

20 The Disruption of the Feminine in Henry James [Turgenev's] own representations of character; they are so strangely, fascinatingly particular, and yet they are so recognisably general' ('Turgenev' 1023). James criticizes Dickens for making his characters too 'particular without being general' ( 1023), and he also dislikes Flaubert's subject in Madame Bovary. In a discussion of that novel, James applauds Flaubert for his novelistic skill and treatment (in this essay, produced in 1902, he calls Flaubert the 'novelist's novelist' [346] but notes that Flaubert's title character is not representative enough and so does not merit her position in the novel: 'Our complaint is that Emma Bovary, in spite of the nature of her consciousness and in spite of her reflecting so much that of her creator, is really too small an affair ... When I speak of the faith in Emma Bovary as proportionately wasted I reflect on M. Faguet's judgment that she is from the point of view of deep interest richly or at least roundedly representative. Representative of what? he makes us ask even while granting all the grounds of misery and tragedy involved. The plea for her is the plea made for all the figures that live without evaporation under the painter's hand - that they are not only particular persons but types of their kind, and as valid in one light as in the other' (326-7). James's masculinist bias is apparent here, since he never considers that Emma may be representative of bourgeois, romance-trained women. He does, however, continue to assess novels on the appropriateness of their subject matter and, in 1833, decides that Trollope has the right subject matter, for his texts reveal 'a complete appreciation of the usual' ( 1333) which enables him to paint people JUSt as they are' ( 1333). But Trollope differs from Flaubert, for while he can excite 'the impression of life' ( 1337), he is unable to treat it artistically because he 'has no visible, certainly no explicit care for the literary part of the business' ( 134 7). Clearly, there is a mysterious correlation between selection and taste, and treatment and form, which are all of equal importance in the composition of a Realist work. Fortunately, in 1899, even James admits that there is a 'secret' (110) involved in the combining of form and idea. He believes that the English novel has lacked form, and requires it to 'rekindle the fire' ('Future' 110) of literary interest. Form is of utmost importance to James, and he believes that a novel's form should evince an 'organic whole'; it should successfully treat its subject and reach a unified conclusion. However, closure is difficult to achieve if the novel is a mirror of'life' because in 'life,' 'really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so. He is in the perpetual predicament

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that the continuity of things is the whole matter, for him, of comedy and tragedy; that this continuity is never, by the space of an instant or an inch, broken, and that, to do anything at all, he has at once intensely to consult and intensely to ignore it' (Art 5). These lines of questioning emphasize the difference between art and 'life,' since art is framed and 'must close,' whereas 'life,' which it reflects, never ceases. The novel 'must end' and work toward a unified and logical 'completion,' but it must suggest a continuity if it is to effect the 'air of reality.' For James, the difficulty of confining the novelist's picture of 'life' is linked to the difficulty of suggesting its completeness: 'To give the image and the sense of certain things while still keeping them subordinate to his plan, keeping them in relation to matters more immediate and apparent, to give all the sense, in a word, without all the substance or all the surface, and so to summarise and foreshorten, so to make values both rich and sharp, that the mere procession of items and profiles is not only, for the occasion, superseded, but is, for essential quality, almost "compromised" - such a case of delicacy proposes itself at every turn to the painter of life who wishes both to treat his chosen subject and to confine his necessary picture' (Art 14; emphasis mine). The basic tension between treating and confining is stressed in this passage, which points to the constructed nature of the Realist picture. In an early essay on the novels of George Eliot, published in 1866, James acknowledges the problem of closure in Eliot's works, and he suggests that one way to mitigate the problem is to let the reader do 'quite half the labour' (922). He continues to allude to a 'secret' (922) in how to manage this: 'until it is found out, I think that the art of story-telling cannot be said to have approached perfection' (922) . Of course, the 'problem' in allowing a reader to contribute to the continuity of a Realist text is that the writer ostensibly loses control. 3 This 'solution' therefore works against both a unified meaning and closure because each reader will add to the text in a different way, depending on how he or she interprets it. Thus, the more freedom the reader is allowed, the more the 'problem' is intensified, for any acknowledgment that meaning resides (to any degree) in the reader supports the idea that texts cannot achieve closure. The essays cited are only a few of the many which focus on the 3 According to a post-structuralist theory of language, this is a control which is limited in the first place, since the ambiguities and contradictions within the language of any text cannot be finally resolved and will not be 'restricted to a single, harmonious and authoritative reading' (Belsey 104).

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The Disruption of the Feminine in Henry James

ways in which novelists C