Transforming Henry James [1 ed.] 9781443867887, 9781443846141

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Transforming Henry James

Transforming Henry James

Edited by

Anna De Biasio, Anna Despotopoulou, and Donatella Izzo

Transforming Henry James, Edited by Anna De Biasio, Anna Despotopoulou, and Donatella Izzo This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2013 by Anna De Biasio, Anna Despotopoulou, and Donatella Izzo and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4614-7, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4614-1

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix Abbreviations ............................................................................................. xi Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Transformations Anna De Biasio, Anna Despotopoulou, and Donatella Izzo Part I: Geographies of Memory and Belonging Chapter One ............................................................................................... 10 Young Henry James: The Outsider David McWhirter Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 24 The Aliens: Italians (and James) in Italy and America Martha Banta Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 40 Manic James: The Early Letters and Roderick Hudson Leland S. Person Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 54 Rome as Pure Experience: Henry’s and William’s Early Letters Susan Gunter Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 65 Rome Changing: James’s “Lugubrious Modern Capital” Rosella Mamoli Zorzi Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 77 Aftertastes of Ruin: Uncanny Sites of Memory in Henry James’s Paris J. Michelle Coghlan

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Part II: Literary Tourism Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 94 The Author’s House as Tourist Space Anna De Biasio Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 110 Traveling with(in) the Master: Tourist Rhetoric in Henry James’s Theory of Fiction Carlo Martinez Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 128 The Real Fiction: Tourism, Modern Italy, and a “Conscious and Cultivated Credulity” Tatiana Petrovich Njegosh Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 145 “Specimens Indeed of Human Greed”: The Museum of Popularity in “The Papers” Gianna Fusco Part III: Jamesian Friendship and Hospitality Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 164 Henry James: c’est nous; Jamesian Afterlives, Part 2 Julie Rivkin Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 179 “We Shall Never Be Again as We Were.” Friendship and Fiction in Henry James Collin Meissner Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 196 Transforming Hospitality and Friendship in Henry James: From “A London Life” to The Awkward Age Merle A. Williams

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Part IV: Jamesian Sexualities Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 212 Verena Tarrant, Basil Ransom, and Compulsory Heterosexuality in The Bostonians Pierre A. Walker Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 226 What Nanda Knew: A Truth not Universally Acknowledged in The Awkward Age Alan M. Nadel Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 242 “If You’ve Had Your Woman, I’ve Had . . . My Man”: May Bartram’s Ambivalence in “The Beast in the Jungle” Leslie Petty Chapter Seventeen ................................................................................... 256 Hysteric Subjects in The Wings of the Dove Beth S. Ash Chapter Eighteen ..................................................................................... 271 “The Dear Little Tobacconized Salon”: Henrietta Reubell as Queer Salonnière in Henry James’s Paris Paul Fisher Part V: Reframing James’s Social World Chapter Nineteen ..................................................................................... 288 The American’s Options and Futures Nan Z. Da Chapter Twenty ....................................................................................... 304 Class Ties in “The Pupil” Manuela Vastolo Chapter Twenty-One ............................................................................... 319 Value in James’s “Paste” (1899): Understanding James as a Microsociologist Maya Higashi Wakana

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Part VI: Jamesian Narrative and Textuality Chapter Twenty-Two............................................................................... 336 The Half-Life of Figures Sheila Teahan Chapter Twenty-Three............................................................................. 350 Disavowal and the Dialogic Late James Style Christine McBride Chapter Twenty-Four .............................................................................. 366 The Mystery of Character and Jamesian Antipsychology: Bersani, Cameron, Ohi Lee Mitchell Chapter Twenty-Five ............................................................................... 381 Textual Monuments / Crumbling Idols; or, What we never knew about Henry James (and never thought to ask) Michael Anesko Chapter Twenty-Six................................................................................. 401 “Extravagantly Colloquial”: James’s Oral Phase Melanie H. Ross Part VII: Visuality in/and Henry James Chapter Twenty-Seven ............................................................................ 418 Transformation and Anamorphosis: Aspects of James’s Late Artistic Vision in Relation to Holbein Alex Dougherty Chapter Twenty-Eight ............................................................................. 434 “Born but Once”: Photographic (Self-)Representations and the Sociocultural Investment of Singularity in Henry James’s “The Real Thing” and “The Private Life” Serena Fusco Contributors ............................................................................................. 451 Index ........................................................................................................ 457

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The essays collected in this volume were originally presented at the Fifth International Conference of the Henry James Society, Transforming Henry James, which was held in Rome, at the John Cabot University, from July 7 to July 10, 2011. In the course of four sunny summer days, over a hundred participants—including keynote speakers, speakers at plenary sessions, and panel participants—gathered in the name of Henry James, creating a collegial atmosphere that multiplied opportunities for vibrant conversations. Our first thanks go to all conference participants, for the intellectual energy and enthusiasm they brought to the event. Special thanks are due to Susan M. Griffin and David McWhirter for their individual contributions to the conception of the conference, the selection and grouping of papers, and the outlining of the program, and to Greg W. Zacharias for his relentless efforts and unfailing equanimity at every stage of the conference organization, for his advice during our work on this volume, and more generally, for being the heart and soul of the Henry James Society, and the pole star to which James scholars all over the world look for help and support. All the twenty-eight essays presented here are substantially enlarged and revised versions of the conference papers from which they originated, and all were selected through a peer-review process: we gratefully acknowledge the reviewers who offered their time and expertise to assess submissions and provide feedback on individual essays. Special thanks are due to the Fondazione Primoli and its President, professor Massimo Colesanti, for generously granting us permission to use the Roma. Henry James a Villa Borghese photograph, by G. Primoli, for the cover of the book. Earlier versions of chapters six and eighteen have appeared in The Henry James Review and are reprinted here by permission: Coghlan, J. Michelle. “Aftertastes of Ruin: Uncanny Sites of Memory in Henry James’s Paris.” Henry James Review 33:3 (2012), 239-246. © 2012 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Adapted and reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. Fisher, Paul. “‘Her Smoking Was the Least of Her Freedoms’: Henrietta Reubell, Miss Barrace, and the Queer Milieu of Henry James’s Paris.” Henry James Review 33:3 (2012), 247-254. © 2012. The Johns Hopkins

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University Press. Adapted and reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. Editing a volume is a painstaking task, and sharing it with efficient, cooperative, and humorous friends makes a world of difference. The editors of this book, therefore, cheerfully acknowledge one another for transforming a potentially thankless job into a personally and professionally rewarding experience. Finally, we wish to extend our collective thanks to our partners and families: we suspect them of nourishing a feeling that they had to bear with a lot during the time we spent working on this volume. Whether the suspicion—or the feeling—may be justified is, as Henry James’s Mrs Costello would say, “a question for the metaphysicians”; we, at any rate, deem it prudent to happily acknowledge their patience, subjective or objective as it may be—“and for this short life that is quite enough.”

ABBREVIATIONS

Works by Henry James AF AM AN AS CL CN CS CT DM HJL HT IH LC1 LC2

LHJ LiL NSBMY PC PL PRL RH RT SB TS WWS



“The Art of Fiction” The Ambassadors The Art of the Novel, ed. Richard P. Blackmur The American Scene The Complete Letters of Henry James, ed Pierre A. Walker and Greg Zacharias (volume number by date) The Complete Notebooks of Henry James Complete Stories, Library of America editions The Complete Tales of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel, 12 vols. “Daisy Miller” Henry James Letters, ed. Leon Edel, 4 vols. Hawthorne Italian Hours Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature; American Writers; English Writers, Library of America edition Literary Criticism. French Writers, Other European Writers, the Prefaces to the New York Edition, Library of America edition The Letters of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock, 2 vols. Henry James: A Life in Letters, ed. Philip Horne Notes of a Son and Brother and The Middle Years: A Critical Edition, ed. Peter Collister The Princess Casamassima The Portrait of a Lady “The Private Life” Roderick Hudson “The Real Thing” A Small Boy and Others Transatlantic Sketches William Wetmore Story and his Friends, 2 vols.

INTRODUCTION TRANSFORMATIONS ANNA DE BIASIO, ANNA DESPOTOPOULOU, AND DONATELLA IZZO

For twenty-first-century readers and critics, “Transforming Henry James” may well seem a daunting task. Few authors have been canonized so thoroughly and authoritatively during most of the twentieth century, and few have undergone so many critical reconceptualizations during the decades that have followed. An author whose work seems “naturally” liable to being translated in terms of any number of theoretical metalanguages, Henry James has been subjected to an amazing range of critical reconfigurations over the last few decades. It would seem, then, that there is hardly room for any further transformative acts. This volume undertakes to demonstrate that such is not the case. By gathering contributions from four continents and many different countries, we hope to make a convincing case for the ongoing productivity of James’s oeuvre when interrogated from new critical angles, and therefore for its enduring centrality to the concerns of literary and cultural studies. In its effort to reconnoitre the field in its emerging and even inchoate tendencies, this book certainly does not aim at offering an exhaustive, overall systematization of existing criticism; rather, it attempts a tentative inventory of some of its most exciting lines of development. In our view, “Transforming Henry James” works in both possible senses suggested by the gerund: with “Henry James” as simultaneously the object being transformed by ever-renewed critical interventions, and the subject performing the transformation, that is, operating as the occasion sparking new conceptualizations, or as the touchstone and test case for exploring the implications and heuristic potential of critical approaches grounded in diverse theoretical discourses. “Henry James,” here, is to be taken both as a synecdoche for his literary work and as an author figure. Indeed, the author’s comeback in

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recent James criticism is one of the most striking and pervasive phenomena documented in this volume. The notion of “author” in this case should not be understood as merely an author function, the disembodied product of textuality or the endlessly reconfigured bearer of a symbolic capital in the literary and the scholarly field; it should be taken literally, as pointing to a specific historical individual whose concrete activity in the literary world and whose biography have been recently the object both of literary representation and of increasingly astute scholarly attention. This renewed interest in biography has certainly been fostered by the ongoing publication of Henry James’s Complete Letters (edited by Pierre A. Walker and Greg W. Zacharias), which has made available to scholars a trove of new and fascinating information, but it also speaks to wider concerns. A tabooed presence in much New Critical, formalist, and post-structural criticism, the author’s biography has re-emerged in presentday literary studies not as the unquestioned “origin” of sanctioned meaning or the positivistic reservoir of factual proof capable of definitively anchoring interpretation, but rather as the locus where actual episodes and historically inflected cultural concerns, personal and professional stakes, outer and inner experiences, converge and become intelligible through rhetorical elaboration. Literary writing and the author’s biography—as both genesis and product of the author’s historically grounded subjectivity—thus stand in a complex relation of mutual construction and mutual elucidation to each other. Such a focus on James’s biography runs through many of the essays presented in this volume, regardless of their specific topic, and cuts across the individual rubrics under which contributions have been arranged, driving the diverse investigations of James’s life-long engagement with cities, places, and tourist sites, offering refractions of social and cultural history, intersecting with questions of textual philology, or enriching our understanding of textual and stylistic features of the author’s writings. This emphasis on the author is not refuted but rather complemented by the volume’s focus on broad textual and cultural issues, suggested through the rubrics around which each group of essays is clustered. Pointing to the main concerns or trajectories of the essays’ critical interventions, these rubrics also signal the complex interrelations of Henry James as author and of the works he authored with a web of social, cultural, aesthetic, and philosophical discourses, which his works represent, explore, and critique, and which can be in turn represented, explored, and critiqued by way of his works. Our first two parts exemplify a renewed consideration of place as a critical focus producing meaningful intersections of personal, cultural, and

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 literary dimensions. In the first group of essays, “Geographies of Memory and Belonging,” James’s sustained engagement with Europe, and more specifically with Rome and Paris, is re-read through his letters and essays as both an enabling moment in his individual self-definition and his literary production, and the problematic touchstone of the socially constructed quality of sites of memory, of national and cultural belonging or non-belonging, and of the challenges and limits of transnational reconfigurations of identity. Space, identity, and loss are the focal points around which the essays in the cluster gravitate, with a special stress on the role played by James’s voluntary delocalization to Europe in either articulating a modern sense of personal dispossession, essential to his artistic project, or distillating his particular narrative of an aesthetic life. As the place of choice that permits the consolidation of a life-long need of non belonging, counteracted by a simultaneous desire to be part of a national, social, and familial group (McWhirter), Europe affords James an understanding of himself as an outsider, mirrored in his observations about Italians both in Italy and in the United States, and accompanied by a sense of the irrecoverable losses involved in physical and cultural displacement (Banta). Rome, in particular, appears as a crucial stage for James’s early development: the newly published early letters allow Leland Person to reconstruct the correspondences between Roderick Hudson, in the eponymous novel, and the polarized feelings of visionary self-esteem and depressive self-distrust experienced by James during his Roman stay; they also offer Susan Gunter the ground for positing the influence exerted upon William’s later philosophy by Henry’s narrative of Rome as a pure, felt, continuous experience. Rome again takes center stage in Rosella Mamoli Zorzi’s analysis of the architectural destructions and reconstructions undergone by the city as the new capital of unified Italy, which James chose to ignore in his writings; while the long-lasting sense of urban destruction connected to the revolutionary history of Paris, as experienced by both James and his characters (Hyacinth Robinson, Lambert Strether), evidences an affective response to space as a site where multiple national and social histories and memories converge and which speaks through its absences just as much as it does with its presences (Coghlan). Part II, “Literary Tourism,” engages questions of place and cultural memory from a different, specific angle: the recently established field of tourism studies, a critical discourse which explores the cultural implications of tourism—a social practice fully blooming in James’s time, to which he repeatedly bore witness both in his life and in his work. The “tourist gaze,” which constructs the tourist as a consumer of cultural sites, opens up questions of media and commodity culture, on the one hand, and,

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on the other, of its imbrications with literature both at the level of rhetoric and theme, and as itself an object of consumption and a producer of consumer myths. By selecting a variety of case studies (from fiction, nonfiction, and biofiction) and perspectives, this group of essays explores a set of questions that are central to the theory of tourism, from the collection of consumable “signs” standing for the experience of the visited places, to the notion of “authenticity” as the unattainable goal of the modern traveler’s quest. A tourist himself and an author both repulsed by and attracted to the emerging phenomenon of the literary celebrity, James, in texts like “The Birthplace” and “The Papers,” is seen as vitally anticipating the tourist interest in the writers’ home that pervades today’s James bionovels and their semiotic codes (De Biasio), and satirically exploring the role of the press as pivotal in such a reconfiguration of literature as an exhibition of authors-as-tourist-attractions (G. Fusco). But, as other essays demonstrate, tourist discourse is also central to James’s own practices as a writer, as he either exploits its voyeuristic, keepsake lures in order to foster his notion of literature as art in the Prefaces to the New York Edition (Martinez) or uses his own tourist exposure to the complex reality of Italy to shape the idea of a relative, hybrid authenticity that informs his theory and practice of literature (Petrovich Njegosh). Julie Rivkin’s essay evocatively recapitulates the issues debated thus far, providing a conceptual bridge between questions of the author’s presence, place, and tourism and the questions addressed in Part III, “Jamesian Friendship and Hospitality.” In her reading of a famous scene in The Wings of the Dove as the stage of an interpellation of casual tourists into aesthetic experience, Rivkin connects that Jamesian moment to questions of hospitality as conceptualized by Jacques Derrida. Exploring the paradoxical quality of borders—of texts and critical communities no less than individuals and nations—and of the hospitality an author extends to readers, Rivkin offers a reading of James’s “The Birthplace” as an allegory of the critic-reader’s taking residence in the author’s house, a kind of hospitality that is always simultaneously an infringement and a creative dwelling. The two essays that follow also revolve around friendship and hospitality, conceptualizing them not from a thematic but from a philosophical point of view to shed new light on their operation in the Jamesian world: Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is the main authority invoked in Collin Meissner’s interpretation of the value and function of friendship and its productive interconnection with James’s narrative aesthetics in The Portrait of a Lady and The Ambassadors, while Derrida and Levinas inspire Merle Williams’s reading of the varieties—and failures—of friendship and hospitality, as ethical and social categories, in

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 “A London Life,” “The Chaperon,” and The Awkward Age. Once famously described by T. S. Eliot as “a mind so fine that no idea could violate it,” Henry James has been having an intense commerce with philosophical ideas for some time now, as witness the attention his work has attracted from philosophers as diverse as Slavoj Žižek and Martha Nussbaum. The essays grouped in this section offer a fine sampling of literary readings of James through a philosophical lens, a promising development in James criticism, in view of how germane James’s concerns prove to be with those of much contemporary philosophy. Late twentieth-century philosophy and social sciences also undergird the next two parts. Part IV, “Jamesian Sexualities,” capitalizes on recent reconceptualizations of gender, sexuality, and identity to offer new readings of well-known James texts in light of their unsettling of sex and gender normativity. Case studies range from The Bostonians, where close textual analysis shows the way in which stylistic devices such as free indirect discourse are systematically used to destabilize the absolute value of heterosexual marriage, which the novel’s ending upholds (Walker); to The Awkward Age, whose complex verbal and sexual negotiations create a system of commodified heterosexual exchange that Nanda evades, in Alan Nadel’s reading, by masterminding her own unmarriageability in order to preserve her closeted sexual orientation; to “The Beast in the Jungle,” where May Bartram’s life-long involvement in John Marcher’s wait for the “beast” is read as the result of an ambivalence about compulsory heterosexuality—a self-aware mask for her reluctance to participate in that order, rather than a selfless immolation to Marcher’s needs (Petty). While most of the essays in this section build on Eve Sedgwick as their implicit or explicit interlocutor, Beth Ash weaves a dialogue with Slavoj Žižek’s interpretation of Kate Croy as the true ethical actor in The Wings of the Dove, proposing instead that the novel’s ethic of sacrifice be read through the sexualized filter of hysteria, a denial of carnal love that is a flight from—rather than a critique of—the exploitative social and sexual relations portrayed in the novel. Questions of gender and sexuality also emerge in Paul Fisher’s exploration of James’s connection with Henrietta Reubell, The Ambassadors’ Miss Barrace, which proposes new insights into James’s literary transfiguration of episodes and figures belonging to his queer milieu. Part V, “Reframing James’s Social World,” multiplies the trajectories of critical investigation, expanding the focus from the social regulation of sexuality to a concern with the overall operation of society. The underlying logic of capitalist developments in his time is foregrounded in Nan Da’s analysis of the convergence between the future-oriented

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temporality of financial speculation and the narrative logics of The American. Manuela Vastolo’s Bourdieusian analysis of class in “The Pupil” minutely reconstructs the articulated operation of different types of capital in the nuanced social space of the story. In her reading of “Paste,” Maya Higashi Wakana adopts a microsociological approach to highlight the wider significance of the questions of value and authenticity raised in the story, whose import extends to the morality of daily interactions on the social stage. Engaging James’s work from a variety of innovative points of view, these essays show the productivity of their original approaches and, by implication, demonstrate James’s remarkably astute understanding of the complexities of the modern social world. The essays collected under the rubric “Jamesian Narrative and Textuality,” in Part VI, address traditional concerns of James scholars, such as character, style, and textual revision, from the vantage point of new critical and theoretical developments in James studies. These include the renewed interest in textual philology induced by current work on new James editions—here showcased in Michael Anesko’s brilliantly iconoclastic reconstruction of the Master’s practices as a professional author, reviser, and proof-reader—as well as the emergence of sophisticated deconstructive and anti-mimetic approaches to such narratological or stylistic elements as character and tropes. Seen as productive rather than reproductive, tropes deploy their agency in shaping the plot rather than illustrating it, as shown in Sheila Teahan’s reading of James’s early “The Story of a Year.” Stylistic analysis thus proves crucial to an understanding not just of verbal texture, but also of character, seen as an antipsychological construct existing on the surface of language rather than in an assumed ontological depth (Mitchell); such a recurrent trope of James’s late style as disavowal thus reveals an inherent dialogism, pointing to the intersubjective quality of subject formation and to the subject’s attempt to evade an internalized social law (McBride). Finally, Melanie Ross’s analysis of the complexities of James’s “oral phase,” weaving together his transition from writing to dictating with his relation to his mother by way of a reading of James’s essays on George Du Maurier, is exemplary of a whole new departure in James criticism, an attention to the intersections between the written and the oral/aural dimension in James’s prose. Long restricted to identification and interpretation of the author’s allusions to traditional paintings and artifacts in his work, the emphasis on James’s visual dimension now includes modern phenomena, such as the new medium of photography, exploring their social and cultural as well as their aesthetic implications. The essays in Part VII, “Visuality in/and

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 Henry James,” are representative of James’s combined interest in modernity and in the multifaceted domain of the visual. James’s fascination for Holbein’s use of the optical device of anamorphosis is reconnected with the larger transformations occurring in the visual urban culture of the late nineteenth century, especially as mirrored in the ethical tangles of The Ambassadors (Dougherty); while the socio-cultural investment in representation, in “The Real Thing” and “The Private Life,” is analyzed in terms of its semiotic reproduction of the conflation of private and public, of individual and collective identities operated by photography (S. Fusco). James believed that the creation of good fiction depended on a writer’s power to transform a glimpse into a picture, impressions into experience, the simplest surface into depth, and elusive substance into writing. Such transformative acts, he says in “The Art of Fiction” (1884), “can never [be] learn[ed] in any manual; it is the business of [the author’s] life” (195), but only if this author is responsive to the subtle “implications of things,” not just the things themselves (195). Similarly, the business of the good critic’s life, according to “The Science of Criticism” (1891), is an act of transformation, one that results from the melding of “second-hand” life (that encountered in the house of fiction) with first; “he deals with the experience of others, which he resolves into his own” (294). Like the author, the critic must have “perception at the pitch of passion and expression as embracing as the air” (293) in order to transmute the finer threads of fiction (mingled with his/her own experience) into critical discourse, in a way that does justice to both. James’s essay stipulates the respect that the critic must show for the author’s choice of subject, but at the same time it grants the true critic freedom to “lend himself” and “to project himself” to the object of criticism (293). From the encounter between author and critic who answer to James’s criteria, there can only emerge a relationship of mutual transformations—which is what we hope this volume may achieve.

Works Cited James, Henry. “The Art of Fiction.” The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism. Ed. Roger Gard. London: Penguin, 1987. 186-206. Print. —. “The Science of Criticism. ” The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism. Ed. Roger Gard. London: Penguin, 1987. 290-294. Print.

PART I: GEOGRAPHIES OF MEMORY AND BELONGING

 

CHAPTER ONE YOUNG HENRY JAMES: THE OUTSIDER DAVID MCWHIRTER

The title of this essay, not to mention its focus on Henry James’s early letters, signal something of a departure for a scholar who has, for many years, worked almost exclusively on old Henry James—the post-1895 James, that is, of the experimental, major and so-called “fourth” phases. With my center of intellectual gravity originally located in British modernism, it’s probably not surprising that the nineteenth-century American James has been more often than not peripheral to my vision. And yet the child is, after all, father to the man. The “Master” who spent several years late in life revisiting, rethinking, and revising his own youthful avatars for the New York Edition was also engaged in a sustained meditation on the pieties, natural and otherwise, that bind age to youth. As James himself remarked at the beginning of his autobiographical fragment The Middle Years, we are never old, that is we never cease easily to be young, for all life at the same time: youth is an army, the whole battalion of our faculties and our freshnesses, our passions and our illusions, on a considerably reluctant march into the enemy’s country, the country of the general lost freshness; and I think it throws out at least as many stragglers behind as skirmishers ahead—stragglers who often catch up belatedly with the main body, and even in many a case never catch up at all. (NSBMY 410)

Contemplating in 1914 events that occurred some forty-five years earlier, including the death of Minny Temple and his own first extended exposure as an adult to Europe, and to his beloved Italy, James recalls “agitations, explorations, initiations . . . which I should call fairly infantine . . . had they not still more left with me effects and possessions that even yet lend themselves to estimation.” As a late novel like The Wings of the Dove

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 testifies, the apparently closed “volume” of one’s youth—in this case, both Minny and Italy—may nonetheless remain “either completely agape or kept open by a fond finger thrust in between the leaves” (NSBMY 410). The immediate occasion for my turn to young Henry James, and more specifically here to the early letters, has been my immersion in editing Roderick Hudson for the Cambridge Complete Fiction of Henry James, a project for which The Complete Letters of Henry James, edited by Pierre Walker and Greg Zacharias, and now inclusive of James’s letters up through December 1877—a year after his permanent settlement in London—has proven invaluable. Zacharias also gets credit for provoking this paper in a more immediate sense, however, by way of his expressed opinion, over breakfast at a conference in Paris in October of 2010, that James’s intellectual frameworks were pretty much set by the time he was thirty. My first reaction, I confess, was something along the lines of “How could that be?” James, to me, is always and endlessly revisionary, always ready to rethink what he just thought, our essential modern novelist precisely because he was acutely, if anxiously, responsive not only to his era’s changing attitudes toward gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity, but also to changing conditions of literary production and reception, to the rise of consumerism and mass culture, and to the emergence of new technologies and media—responsive, that is, in the fullest sense to the material and historical conditions that in his time determined new, specifically modern forms of experience, desire, and subjectivity. Is the James who wrote What Maisie Knew or The Golden Bowl or “The Beast in the Jungle” really operating from the same intellectual assumptions as the author of Roderick Hudson? But a close reading of the early letters suggests that Zacharias is more right than wrong, and in more ways than one. In terms of ideas, of basic principles and positions, social, political and aesthetic, the James who went to school on Arnold, Ruskin, and Sainte-Beuve, who “risked” Mill and Pater, who positioned his own art in relation to the traditions of British and American romanticism, the English novel, the old masters, and the French realist works he devoured as a young man, is entirely recognizable to a student of the later James. Politically (though not excessively) conservative, discriminating but fairly conventional in matters of taste, not especially interested in, and more than a little hostile to, the religious dimensions of his father’s thinking—for a student of later James, there’s nothing especially surprising in the young Henry who emerges here. But James, as T. S. Eliot long ago recognized, was not fundamentally a man of ideas.1 In a well-known 1863 letter to his friend Thomas Sargeant Perry, a twenty-year old James argues in uncharacteristically strong,

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sustained, and philosophical terms that “prejudice is one of the worst evils which afflict humanity,” before going on to define prejudice as “a judgement formed on a subject upon data furnished, not by the subject, itself, but by the mind which regards it.” “These data,” James continues, are the fruits of the subtlest influences,—birth, education, association. Unless carefully watched they insinuate themselves into every opinion we form. They grow to be the substance of our very being. So far are they from being subjects of consciousness that they almost become vehicles thereof. . . . They are so intimately connected with every mental process, that they insidiously pervert our opinions, discolour and distort the objects of our vision. The opinion is consciously formed, perhaps; but not appreciatively, critically.2

James self-deprecatingly (and characteristically) invites Perry to “supply a query after every assertion and enclose the whole in a great parenthesis & interrogation point, or even scratch it all out” (CL 1855-72 1: 83). But his distrust of prejudice in its literal sense of pre-judgment—“this fatal obliquity of vision” (83), James calls it—is a note sounded frequently throughout the early letters, in his dislike, for example, of James Russell Lowell’s too many “opinions” (CL 1872-76 1: 144), or his objection, in his letters to Charles Norton, to forms of criticism dependent on moral or aesthetic principles, “precepts” and “preaching” rather than “the impression of an intelligent observer.” “I should be sorry,” he tells Norton, ever to write anything which mightn’t suggest a question of its being right or wrong, at points” (CL 1872-76 1: 251, 140).3 And indeed, what strikes me most forcefully about the James of these six volumes is how consistently he articulates and enacts his felt need to distance himself from those “subtlest influences” of birth, education, and association that underwrite prejudice and pre-judgment, which is to say from the familial, social, and national contexts to which he was in so many ways deeply attached, but which he also instinctively understood as an impediment to the pleasures and purposes of appreciation, the un-prejudiced “attitude of observation,” he most valued (CL 1855-72 2: 332). When James expresses his reservations about Lowell and Norton he is echoing his even earlier rebellion, recalled in Notes of a Son and Brother, against his father’s intellectual rigidities: “My father had terms, evidently strong, but in which I presumed to feel, with a shade of irritation, a certain narrowness of exclusion as to images otherwise—and oh, since it was a question of the pen, so multitudinously!—entertainable” (143). And when he writes to his father in 1872, predictably primed to lament the “changes” and “modernized air” of post-unification Rome but nonetheless insistent that

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 “It all promises me great pleasure, however, & I shan’t prejudge” (CL 1872-76 1: 163), he is foreshadowing Lambert Strether’s refusal to adhere to Woolett’s pre-conceptions—about Paris, and about the meaning and value of Chad and Madame de Vionnet’s “attachment.” Early and late, Henry James instinctively recognized and resisted “the vanity of the a priori test” (LC2 1122).4 The letter that opens the first volume of the Complete Letters, addressed to one Edgar Van Winkle, by a no-more-than twelve-year-old Henry James, reads as follows: “Dear Eddy. As I heard you were going to try to turn the club into a Theatre. And as I was asked w’ether I wanted to belong here is my answer. I would like very much to belong. Yours truly H James” (CL 1855-72 1: 3). But the James of the early letters is in truth persistently, deeply ambivalent about belonging—an ambivalence that is mixed up with, and sometimes, I think, obscured by, James’s gradual but steady movement towards his decision to live in Europe rather than America. In his letters back home written during his European sojourns of the late 1860s and 1870s—which constitute, it’s worth pointing out, the great bulk of his early epistolary output—James repeatedly describes himself as a “lonely & crabbed exile” (CL 1872-76 3: 165), “abjectly, fatally homesick” (CL 1855-72 1: 224), and complains about his “solitary single life” and “solitudinous” existence—especially, as he remarks to William, “the lonely feeding” (CL 1872-76 2: 152, 159). Writing from Geneva, he expresses his frustration with “the uncompromising, incomprehensible foreign-ness of things” that makes him “feel like the denizen of another planet” (CL 1855-72 2: 31). He bemoans what he described a few years later as “the mere surface-relation of the Western tourist to the soil he treads” (“At Isella” 614) 5 and “the apparent inaccessibility of the Natives” on the continent (CL 1855-72 2: 220). “I feel,” he writes, “very much like a traveller & desire extremely to feel less so” (CL 1872-76 3: 44); and in an 1873 letter to William he regrets, apropos of Paris, “never having a chance to exchange a word with a typical Frenchman. . . . [T]here grew to be something irritating at last in this perpetual humiliating sense of ungratified curiosity” (CL 1872-76 2: 178). Contemplating a summer in England, he notes that “the principle drawback I see to going there—to going anywhere in fact—is the possible—not to say probable dearth of society. . . . I get a strong feeling, while in England, of the degree to which to a lonely & unassisted man society must remain obstructed & closed” (CL 1855-72 2: 220). To Howells James writes, “what is the meaning of this destiny of desolate exile—this dreary necessity of having month after month to do without our friends for the sake of this arrogant old Europe which so little

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befriends us?” (CL 1872-76 1: 326). “I am a stranger in the land”; “I form no intimacies” (CL 1872-76 3: 75-6, 79). Yet, James, it seems clear, doth protest too much; what I in fact want to argue here is that young Henry James, for all his genuinely-felt homesickness, in some real sense wanted to be alone. He laments his “exile” to Howells even as he tries to get his parents to underwrite a few more months of it. Back home in Cambridge at the end of 1874, he tells his brother Bob that “home seems very pleasant, after the lonely, shiftless migratory life I have been leading these two years,” all the while plotting his return to his “migratory life” in Europe (CL 1872-76 2: 197). Longing for society, James also—and hilariously—avoids it: “Every one seems to be in Rome & I constantly pass in the street carriage loads of people I know. But I fix a stony stare on some merciful column or statue: for life is too short to go to see them all” (CL 1872-76 1: 228). If James, in other words, sometimes regrets his inability to “belong” in Europe—“I should like living here,” he writes from London in 1875, “if I belonged to a club & were in society” (CL 1872-76 3: 7)—part of Europe’s attraction for young Henry, an attraction that would soon land him in London once and for all, is that it’s a place where he doesn’t have to belong in the fullest senses of the word. There is, as who should say, “detachment in his zeal and curiosity in his indifference” (AM 18). To “go [to England] and be left wholly to my own resources” might be “dreary,” but it also “might be very pleasant” (CL 1855-72 2: 220). “Ungratified curiosity” about French society is part and parcel of the pleasures of Parisian flânerie: “the mere daily and hourly spectacle of human life in Paris,” James writes to William, “is greatly suggestive & remunerative” (CL 1872-76 1: 178). It is worth remarking, too, that young Henry’s epistolary outpourings to his family, while certainly a sign of his love and profound attachment, were also a product of the distance his travels necessarily imposed. As the absence of letters to family members in 1875, a year Henry spent back in America, testifies, one writes when one is far away. In the 1869 letter addressed to “My dearest Daddy,” where he complains of “the cheerlessness of solitude and the bitterness of exile,” James notes that the dusk has fallen upon my small and frigid apartment and I have lit my candle to warm my fingers—as I begin this letter to warm my thoughts. Happy Florence is going to dine en famille & to enjoy the delights of mutual conversation.—Well; so be it; it’s something to have a famille to write to if not to dine & converse with. (CL 1855-72 2: 157)

Perhaps all writing shares something of this ambivalence, the desire to belong always tangled up with the longing to be separate, the simultaneous

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 need to be a part of and apart from—a double gesture of intimacy and detachment. It won’t surprise readers of the early letters that the James who set out, late in life, to write a “Family Book,” and who described himself in a 1912 letter to his namesake nephew as “becoming, at every step of my process, more intensely ‘Family’ even than at the step before” (qtd. in Holly 3) 6 was also the James who would recall, in that same Family Book, his persistent childhood fantasy of being orphaned: Parentally bereft cousins were somehow more thrilling than parentally provided ones . . . I think my first childish conception of the enviable lot, formed amid these associations, was to be so little fathered or mothered, so little sunk in the short range, that the romance of life seemed to lie in some constant improvisation. . . . My first assured conception of true richness was that we [James and his siblings] should be sent separately off among cold or even cruel aliens in order to be there thrillingly homesick. Homesickness was a luxury I remember craving from the tenderest age—a luxury of which I was unnaturally, or at least prosaically, deprived. (SB 1516)7

James’s letters home consistently convey this mixture of emotions, akin to those experienced by the young Isabel Archer as she listens, in self-chosen exile, to “the hum of childish voices repeating the multiplication table” wafting from the across-the-street Albany school she has refused to attend—“an incident in which the elation of liberty and the pain of exclusion were indistinguishably mingled” (PL 32). 8 And the weird temporality of nineteenth-century transatlantic epistolary culture, where letters bounce around Europe for weeks in search of a peripatetic addressee, arriving in Rome just as he leaves for Paris or Bremen, indeed occasionally vanishing altogether, and where correspondence more often than not means writing a letter to someone who has written to you but whose letter you have yet to receive, itself often works to fracture the bonds of intimacy letter-writing is ostensibly meant to reinforce. “Dear Father,” begins an 1876 letter to Henry Sr.: I wrote to you—or at least to Alice, not many days since from the South— that is from Biarritz. Yesterday I arrived in Paris, hoping to find letters from home & was deeply grieved at having handed me, in response to my much-deferred longing, nothing but the circular of my wood-merchant of last winter. My last letter is still mother’s note of August 16th, enclosing Wm’s letter of distress from Saratoga. So that I don’t know the end of that episode—or of anything else. (CL 1872-76 3: 182)

Writing to one of his dearest friends, Grace Norton, in 1869, in response to

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a month-old letter from her, and noting that she will probably see him in the flesh before she receives the very letter he is composing, James jokes that “so many things have happened to both of us that you are probably no longer the person who wrote it nor I the creature to whom it was addressed” (CL 1855-72 2: 236). Five years later in another, less buoyant letter to Norton, Henry acknowledges not having wanted to answer her last, “sad” communication: “In fact, I’m not answering it now. But do we, in . . . writing, ever really answer each other? Each of us says his limited personal say out of the midst of his own circumstances, & the other one clips what satisfaction he can from it” (CL 1872-76 2: 114). In an 1872 letter to William, Henry acknowledged, partly in response to deepening family concerns about the second son’s growing detachment from America, that “I enjoy very much in a sort of chronic way which has every now & then a deeper throb, the sense of being in a denser civilization than our own. Life at home has the compensation that there you are a part of the civilization, such as it is, whereas here you are outside of it. It’s a choice of advantages” (CL 1872-76 1: 144-45). And an appreciation of the advantages of not belonging, of being “outside of it,” is, I would argue, crucial to James’s understanding of himself and his art, in youth and in maturity. James’s “Dear Eddy” letter (“I would like very much to belong”) needs to be read alongside his report, in an 1872 missive to Charles Norton, that Wendell Holmes, his brother William, and “various other long-headed youths have combined to form a metaphysical club, where they wrangle grimly & stick to the question. It gives me a headache merely to know of it.—I belong to no club myself . . .” (CL 1855-72 2: 438). And it’s worth remembering, in this connection, that James’s famous remark, in an 1867 letter to Perry, “that to be an American is an excellent preparation for culture” is premised on a conviction that “we are ahead of the European races in the fact that more than either of them we can deal freely”—without prejudice, one might say—“with forms of civilisation not our own”: To have no national stamp has hitherto been a defect & a drawback; but I think it not unlikely that American writers may yet indicate that a vast intellectual fusion and synthesis of the various national tendencies of the world is the condition of more important achievements than any we have seen. (CL 1855-72 1: 179-80)

America’s cultural value and promise, in other words, are products of its failure or reluctance to demand, as German or French national identities demand, the commitments, and consequent limitations, of belonging. In this sense, we might well reread James’s self-exile from his native land—

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 his rebellion against the limitations of belonging to or being “stamped” by American national culture—as itself a quintessentially American gesture, his own way of lighting out for the territory. To put this another way, if James instinctively resisted the defining “stamp” of American-ness, he also recognized in it elements that would prove an “excellent preparation” not only for “culture,” but for the cosmopolitan stance he was already busy assuming. As he would write in an 1878 essay, “Occasional Paris”: It is hard to say exactly what is the profit of comparing one race to another, and weighing in opposed groups the manners and customs of neighbouring countries; but it is certain that as we move about the world we constantly indulge in this exercise. This is especially the case if we happen to be infected with the baleful spirit of the cosmopolite—that uncomfortable consequence of seeing many lands and feeling at home in none. . . . Being a cosmopolite is an accident, but one must make the best of it. If you have lived about, as the phrase is, you have lost that sense of the absoluteness and the sanctity of the habits of your fellow-patriots which once made you so happy in the midst of them. You have seen that there are a great many patriae in the world, and that each of these is filled with excellent people for whom the local idiosyncrasies are the only thing that is not rather barbarous. There comes a time when one set of customs, wherever it may be found, grows to seem to you about as provincial as another; and then I suppose that it may be said of you that you have become a cosmopolite. (“Occasional Paris” 721)9

James would, of course, in the long run settle permanently in England; he would belong to several clubs; he would maintain close and deep ties to his family, and enjoy numerous, long-lasting, cherished friendships. But he would also keep his distance, adopting a cosmopolitan vision and an attitude of “cheerful, sociable solitude,” akin to Lambert Strether’s (AM 61), that are demonstrably under construction in the years documented by the early letters. There is, of course, one additional dimension to James’s reluctance to belong, especially in America, where the regime of compulsory heterosexuality and marriage, enforced by family and society alike, was undoubtedly strongly felt. The distance of Europe allowed James, at least initially, to feign compliance with but also stage a withdrawal from a sex/gender system he would ultimately renounce in favor of life abroad as “an artist and a bachelor” (CN 28). Of “Mme de Rabe, née Crawford, with whom nowadays one has to converse in French, as her husband knows no English,” he remarks that “I never wanted to marry her, surely, but I don’t care for her so much now that another man has done so” (CL 1872-76 2: 164-65). Mrs. Effie Lowell, we’re told, “is a ravishing woman & I came within an ace of falling wholesomely in love

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with her” (CL 1872-76 2: 170). To Alice he explains that “I must close—I am going to dine with Mrs. Strong—I believe all alone!—& ’tis 7 o’clock. Don’t think that I adore Mrs. S. or have velléités of flirtation with her: j’en suis à 1000 lieues” (CL 1872-76 3: 122). On hearing of Minny Temple’s death he writes (this time to William) that “my own personal relations with her were always of the happiest. Every one was supposed I believe to be in love with her: others may answer for themselves. I never was . . .” (CL 1855-72 2: 342). Some years later, the news of Perry’s marriage to Lila Cabot provokes the comment, in a letter to his parents, that “my memory of Miss Cabot has been somewhat dimmed by absence; but I don’t think I should have chosen her myself” (CL 1872-76 1: 323). As Millicent Bell shrewdly observes in her introduction to the 1872-76 letters volumes, James’s turn toward Europe is partly a reflection of the “widening separation from the circle of friends of which he and Minny had been a part, a severance from his own American generation whose members”— including brothers Robertson and Wilkie—“had begun to make marriages,” leaving him “outside their own privacies of sex and parenthood” (CL 1872-76 1: xxiv). Yet this outsider status was also clearly a choice. James’s mother, sensing her favorite son’s growing desire to slip the family, national, and hetero-normative knots, urges him, if he insists on living in Europe, to “take a wife”; he jokingly responds that “if you will provide the wife, the fortune, and the ‘inclination’ I will take them all” (CL 1872-76 2: 175). But James was grasping something essential about himself when he wrote, in a famous 1880 letter to Grace Norton, that he was “unlikely ever to marry. . . . One’s attitude toward marriage is a part—the most characteristic part, doubtless—of one’s general attitude toward life” (HJL 2: 314). If some dim acknowledgment or even, it may be, deliberate concealment of his own sexual identity is at play in this pronouncement, it is perhaps best understood as a clear articulation of the choices young Henry had been making all along, of the ground of distance, detachment, and non-belonging upon which he had steadily built the life he preferred, and which he also understood early on as foundational to his aesthetic. I want to be very clear here: I am not suggesting that James’s sexuality is the underlying cause of his life choices or loneliness, or that his outsider’s stance is merely a symptom of his (presumably) homosexual orientation, or even an effect of the inevitable guardedness of the closet. Rather, I read James’s ambivalence about socially dominant relational structures and institutions—the nuclear family; marriage; the couple—as one more example of his characteristic, never unequivocal, but ultimately positive resistance to the commitments and consequent limitations of

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 belonging, in his life and his art. Indeed, “commitment”—a term at times too easily privileged in our ethical, political, and psychological discourse—may be precisely what James was trying to avoid. It’s an avoidance for which he has frequently, and famously, been attacked, sometimes viciously. From Theodore Roosevelt, who drew a thinly-veiled portrait of the novelist as “the undersized man of letters, who flees his country because he . . . finds he cannot play a man’s part among men” (23); to Van Wyck Brooks, who denounced James’s fictions as “the fruits of an irresponsible imagination . . . a mind working in the void” (134); to Maxwell Geismar, whose James, “the self-made orphan of international culture,” fuses profound “ignorance” of America and an “infantilepubescent . . . thwarted sexuality” to produce an art that “floated in the high, pure, weightless outer space of pure esthetics and pure fairy tale” (411, 91, 436, 439)—an art, in other words, that is exiled not just from America, but from reality; to Alfred Habegger and beyond: James has been pilloried as an effete, deracinated expatriate whose refusals to commit, to his native land or to a wife, are understood to constitute an abdication of “adult” responsibilities, personal, social, political and aesthetic. 10 Even many sympathetic readers of James have implicitly suspected something negative in his outsider’s stance: aloofness and dilettantism; a not wholly admirable reticence or evasiveness; a penchant for deferral and circumvention; a failure to approach life frankly or directly or to understand mature relationships; an increasingly damaging detachment from his native soil or even from social reality itself—a reluctance, in short, to commit. But as I have been arguing, that reluctance to commit, to belong, might better be understood as a proactive commitment to open and unprejudiced vision, a deliberate strategy for resisting those “subtlest influences” of “birth, education, association” that underwrite a priori knowledge and judgment, and which thus limit the range of imaginable possibilities, sexual, relational, and otherwise. As Adam Phillips has remarked in his study of flirtation—which has, as he admits, “always had a bad press,” at best lacking in seriousness, at worst morally corrupt, “the saboteur of a cherished vocabulary of commitment” —we need to ask, “what does commitment leave out of the picture that we might want?” (xii, xvii, xviii). James, I would argue, is asking this question again and again throughout the early letters, instinctively foregoing the certain pleasures of belonging and risking a certain homelessness in order to be free to explore—flirtatiously, it may be—other ways of seeing and being and relating. Phillips notes that in flirtation “a space is being created in which aims or ends can we worked out; the assumed wish for the more or less

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obvious sexual combinations, or commitments, may be a way of preempting the elaboration of, making time for, less familiar possibilities” (xix). More broadly, the flirt’s characteristic mode of engaging reality, like the outsider’s, can, by deferring commitment, “make room” (Phillips xix)—room, that is, for other stories, other, sexual and non-sexual, relational patterns and vectors, other ways of thinking about what it means to be an American or a citizen of the world, other narratives of masculinity and femininity, or even of social relations as such. Author and journalist Max O’Rell’s concise 1883 definition of flirtation as “attention without intention” (2)—analogous to what Rebecca Walkowitz, speaking of Virginia Woolf’s strategies for “evading” the demands of dominant, patriotic wartime narratives, describes as Woolf’s productively “uncommitted styles of attention” (141)—adumbrates the strategic non-commitment so central to James’s life and writing. It should also remind us that James’s decision to stand “outside” was not the second best bed of a man who couldn’t belong or commit or “play a man’s part in the world” (Roosevelt 23) but a considered “choice of advantages” (CL 1872-76 1: 144-45), a commitment, as it were, to a way of living his life hospitable to his instinctive curiosity, and to that “purposiveness without purpose” Kant saw as the essence of art (Kant 46). In the preface he penned in 1908, a sixty-five year old James would remark that “the simplest account of the origin of The Princess Casamassima is, I think, that this fiction proceeded quite directly, during the first year of a long residence in London, from the habit and interest of walking the streets,” attentively exploring the city, open always to “the assault directly made” by it “upon an imagination quick to react,” to “possible stories” and “presentable figures” and “humming presences,” to “‘subjects’ and situations, character and history, the tragedy and comedy of life” accessible without prejudice to the one who does not belong. The mature novelist recognizes that this solitary flâneur, the young Henry James, who, to coin a necessarily awkward phrase, committed himself so noncommittally to London life once and for all at the end of 1876, was the model for his ambivalent protagonist Hyacinth Robinson (LC2 1086).11 “I had only to conceive his watching the same public show, the same innumerable appearances, I had watched myself, and of his watching very much as I had watched.” Linking Hyacinth’s marginal position to his own when he settled in England, James acknowledges the “difference” that, “for one’s self, all conveniently, there had been doors that opened”; but James, like Hyacinth, was also in some real but ultimately productive sense “condemned to see” the life he had made for himself “only from outside—in mere quickened consideration, mere wistfulness and envy and

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 despair” (LC2 1087). Eluding the demands—and the confining labels—of family, faith, society and nation, James’s liminality—the outsider status he willingly embraced—sustained an art of fiction that throughout his career depended on, and richly benefitted from, the pleasures and pains of not belonging.

Notes 1

In “In Memory of Henry James” (1918), Eliot described James as possessing a mind “so fine no idea could violate it,” while also noting his predecessor’s cosmopolitan “position of detachment” (1-2)—an insight that resonates with my own argument in this essay. ʹ The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1855-1872, vol. 1, 81-2. The Complete Letters 1855-1872 are hereafter cited parenthetically as CL 1855-72 followed by the volume number; the same procedure will be followed for The Complete Letters 1872-1876. 3 In an 1872 letter to his brother William, Henry remarks that “[t]he Nortons are excellent, but I feel less and less at home with them, owing to a high moral je ne sais quoi which passes quite above my head. I went with Charles the other day to the Louvre, where he made excellent criticisms but he takes art altogether too hard for me to follow him—if not in his likings, at least in his dislikes. I daily pray not to grow in discrimination & to be suffered to aim at superficial pleasure. Otherwise, I shudder to think of the state of my mind ten years hence” (CL 1872-76 1: 113). 4 Preface to The Awkward Age. 5 The story was originally published in 1871. 6 Letter of September 23-4. 7 Elsewhere in A Small Boy and Others James explains that he viewed his cousin Albert Wyckoff’s orphaned and sibling-less state as “a setting necessarily more delightful than our father’d and mother’d one” that carried with it “an air of possibilities that were none the less vivid for being quite indefinite” (104). 8 Isabel’s refusal to attend “the Dutch House in Albany” repeats James’s own childhood “retreat” from a school of the same name; see A Small Boy and Others 12. 9 This essay was originally published in The Galaxy, January 1878, titled “Paris Revisited”; it was revised for inclusion in Portraits of Places (1893) as “Occasional Paris.” 10 Habegger’s Henry James and the “Woman Business” essentially presents an updated version of the “expatriation and castration” thesis Eric Haralson has traced back to Brooks (Henry James and Queer Modernity 195-200). William Veeder, decidedly an admirer of the fiction, nonetheless reads James’s envy of the homeless, exiled orphan’s uncommitted freedom in similar terms as a “core fantasy” of “emasculation and lack” that “articulates what he enacted throughout his long life: no intimacies” (95, 101). 11 From the Preface to The Princess Casamassima. Just a year later, returning to

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Paris at the end of 1877 for the first time since settling in England, James would write that, although he has “every disposition to think better of the English race than of any other except my own,” and while “there have been moments when I have almost burned my ships behind me, and declared that, as it simplified matters greatly to pin one’s faith to a chosen people, I would henceforth cease to trouble my head about the lights and shades of the foreign character,” he is nonetheless “convinced that if I had taken this reckless engagement, I should have greatly regretted it. You may find a room very comfortable to sit in with the window open, and not like it at all when the window has been shut” (“Occasional Paris” 722).

Works Cited Bell, Millicent. “Introduction: The Passage to Europe.” The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1872-1876. Vol 1. Ed. Pierre A. Walker and Greg W. Zacharias. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2008. xv-lvii. Print. Brooks, Van Wyck. The Pilgrimage of Henry James. New York: Dutton, 1925. Eliot, T. S. “In Memory of Henry James.” Egoist 1.5 (1918): 1-2. Print Geismar, Maxwell. Henry James and the Jacobites. New York: Hill and Wang, 1965. Print. Habegger, Alfred. Henry James and the “Woman Business.” Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Print. Haralson, Eric. Henry James and Queer Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Print. Holly, Carol. Intensely Family: The Inheritance of Family Shame and the Autobiographies of Henry James. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1995. Print. James, Henry. The Ambassadors. Ed. S. P. Rosenbaum. New York: Norton, 1964. Print. —. “At Isella.” Complete Stories, 1864-74. New York: Library of America, 1999. 612-40. Print. —. The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1855-1872. 2 vols. Ed. Pierre A. Walker and Greg W. Zacharias. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2006. Print. —. The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1872-1876. 3 vols. Ed. Pierre A. Walker and Greg W. Zacharias. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2008-2011. Print. —. Complete Notebooks. Ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. Print. —. Letters, Volume II, 1875-1883. Ed. Leon Edel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1984. Print.

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 —. Literary Criticism. French Writers, Other European Writers, the Prefaces to the New York Edition. New York: The Library of America, 1984. Print. —. Notes of a Son and Brother and The Middle Years: A Critical Edition. Ed. Peter Collister. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2011. Print. —. “Occasional Paris.” Collected Travel Writings: The Continent: A Little Tour in France, Italian Hours, Other Travels. New York: Library of America, 1993. 721-34. Print. —. The Portrait of a Lady. Ed. Leon Edel. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963. Print. —. A Small Boy and Others: A Critical Edition. Ed. Peter Collister. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2011. Print. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgement. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. New York: Cosimo, 2007. Print. O’Rell, Max (Léon Paul Blouet). John Bull’s Womankind. London: Field and Tuer, 1884. Print. Phillips, Adam. On Flirtation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1994. Print. Roosevelt, Theodore. The Strenuous Life. Works of Theodore Roosevelt, Memorial Edition. Vol. 15. New York: Scribner’s, 1924. Print. Veeder, William. “The Portrait of a Lack.” New Essays on The Portrait of a Lady. Ed. Joel Porte. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. 95-121. Print. Walkowitz, Rebecca L. “Virginia Woolf’s Evasion: Critical Cosmopolitanism and British Modernism.” Bad Modernisms. Ed. Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz. Durham: Duke UP, 2006. 119-44. Print.

 

CHAPTER TWO THE ALIENS: ITALIANS (AND JAMES) IN ITALY AND AMERICA MARTHA BANTA

When wandering through foreign lands what label does a man of some intelligence and a reasonable amount of sensitivity assign to himself? Throughout the many essays by Henry James that make up the 1909 collection Italian Hours, James wears the scarlet letter A that marks him as the Alien. In “A Roman Holiday” of 1873, the “too self-conscious alien” gives himself over to “aimless flânerie” (IH 126, 133). 1 In “The Autumn in Florence” of 1874 he prefers staying away until after the “crush” of Americans have departed. Yet, even when the city is left to his “unmenaced possession,” he acknowledges his own susceptibility as a “taster at least of [its] charm” (IH 238-39).2 In “The Saint’s Afternoon” of 1901 he is compelled to add the qualifier “brooding” in order to insist he is no mere tourist (IH 306).3 It is important that he chastise himself whenever he fails to separate his enraptured responses to the delightfully “picturesque” qualities of Italy from the facts of its abysmal poverty. James’s many forays through Italy in the 1870s and ‘80s forced him to keep alert to where he, the visiting American, actually stood in relation to the life of the resident Italians. In 1878 he captured a scene in “Italy Revealed” that began to reveal the truths he had managed to elude for too long—a perception that came about once he entered into direct contact with what had previously been but a picturesque figure in the general scene.4 “A traveller is often moved to ask himself whether it has been worthwhile to leave his home—whatever his home may have been—only to encounter new forms of human suffering.” What does it mean if “travel is, as it were, to go to the play, to attend a spectacle”? Is there not “something heartless in stepping forth into foreign streets to feats on

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 ‘character’ when character consists simply of the slightly different costume in which labour and want present themselves?” It was “reflections” such as these that “were forced upon me as I strolled as through a twilight patched with colour and charged with stale smells; but after a time they ceased to bear me company” (IH 106). James attempts to shrug off unsettling thoughts by explaining them away: The reason of this, I think, is because—at least to foreign eyes—the sum of Italian misery is, on the whole, less than the sum of the Italian knowledge of life. . . . I know that this may possibly be great nonsense; that half the time we are acclaiming the fine quality of the Italian smile the creature so constituted for physiognomic radiance may be in a sullen frenzy of impatience and pain. Our observation in any foreign land is extremely superficial, and our remarks are happily not addressed to the inhabitants themselves, who would be sure to exclaim upon the impudence of the fancy-picture. (106)

However, James is about to experience what will take him beyond observations held at the level of the “extremely superficial.” It is on the day he visits “a very picturesque old city upon a mountain-top” (106). I stood in the shadow of the tall old gateway admiring the scene. . . . There was no one within sight but a young man who slowly trudged upward with his coat slung over his shoulder and his hat upon his ear in the manner of a cavalier in an opera. Like an operatic performer too he sang as he came; the spectacle, generally, was operatic, and as his vocal flourishes reached my ear I said to myself that in Italy accident was always romantic and that such a figure had been exactly what was wanted to set off the landscape (107).

This delightfully “romantic” figure chances to ask James if he has a match for his cigar. Soon they are walking and talking together. It might seem like little more than a companionable stroll. But the point of my anecdote is that he presently acknowledged himself a brooding young radical and communist, filled with hatred of the present Italian government, raging with discontent and crude political passion: He was an unhappy, underfed, unemployed young man, who took a hard, grim view of everything and was operatic only quite in spite of himself. This made it very absurd of me to have looked at him simply as a graceful ornament to the prospect, a harmonious figure in the middle distance. “Damn the prospect, damn the middle distance!” would have been all his philosophy. Yet but for the accident of my having gossiped with him I

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The Aliens: Italians (and James) in Italy and America should have made him do service, in memory, as an example of sensuous optimism! (107)

Note the key components of this encounter. That it had been “very absurd of me to have looked at him” is balanced against the fact of “my having gossiped with him” (emphasis added). Any charm James might have felt while engaged in solitary pleasure is undercut by the realization that if he ever lets his eye deny what he hears, he is no different from what he detests—the paltry American Tourist, the Alien in Italy. Had not James, in “Roman Rides,” found his senses touched “to a thrill” when crossing the Campagna? (IH 147). 5 He admits that taking “delight in the aspect of sentient ruin might appear a heartless pastime, and the pleasure, I confess, shows the note of perversity” (147). It was particularly perverse to enjoy “a double life” comprised of “the aesthetic and the ‘esoteric’” (140-41). Rome had “all the modern confusion of social pleasures and pains”; it placed “at your door the good and evil of it all.” Yet one could “be able in half an hour to gallop away and leave it a hundred miles, a hundred years, behind,” passing by “shaggy-legged shepherds leaning on their sticks in motionless brotherhood with the heaps of run” (140). It was a further perversion “to come back through one of the great gates and a couple of hours later find yourself in the ‘world,’ dressed, introduced, entertained, inquiring, talking about ‘Middlemarch’ to a young English lady or listening to Neapolitan songs from a gentleman in a very low-cut shirt” (140-41). James also savored moments on the Campagna where “a ragged shepherd, driving a meagre straggling flock” represented “a perfect type of pastoral, weather-beaten misery.” He was “precisely the shepherd for the foreground of a scratchy etching” (141). The area also had “primitive little taverns” where he enjoyed the look of “the contadini in their indigo jackets and goatskin breeches,” as well as “a rabble of infantile beggars at the door, pretty enough in their dusty rags, with their fine eyes and intense Italian smile” (143). It was enough to let him forget your private view of doing your individual best to make these people, whom you like so much, unlearn their old vices. Was Porta Pia bombarded three years ago that Peppino should still grow up to whine for a copper? But the Italian shells had no direct message for Peppino’s stomach—and you are going to a dinner-party at the villa. (143-44)

It was difficult for James to resist the pleasures granted to his Americanized, new-world eyes, however much he might strive to be a cosmopolitan acute to old-world meanings. It was crucial that the

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 encounters he had in Italy involve more than passing glances. Only then could he weigh the aesthetic power of beautiful visual lies against the truth of the brute realities of the country’s failed economy. Over time, James came to the realization that it was by acts of conversazione that he could avoid slipping into the dreaded role of the Alien in Italy. He never aspired to the level of profundity portrayed in paintings by Veneziano, Botticelli, and Bellini that grouped the saints and the Madonna in stunning moments of sacred conversazione. All he hoped for, as a mere mortal American, was good talk among new acquaintances met during precious Italian hours. But here is James, years later, returned to the country he had left behind twenty years before. Wherever he traveled across the American scene he faced “phenomena absolutely fresh” (AS 90). 6 Circumstances forced him to take on an unsettling series of roles to which he constantly refers throughout this book: “the brooding visitor,” “the restored absentee,” and “the restless analyst.” How else could he make a “mental adjustment” to America, the place that is now for him a foreign land? (90). Soon after James’s arrival in 1904, when visiting friends “on the Jersey shore,” James walked “through the grounds of a large new rural residence, where groups of diggers and ditchers were working”—Italians all (AS 90). Something is missing: What lapsed on the spot, was the element of communication with the workers . . . —that element which, in a European country, would have operated from side to side, as the play of mutual recognition, founded on old familiarities and heredities, and involving, for the moment, some impalpable exchange. (91)

The Italians were “of superlative southern types, and any impalpable exchange struck me as absent,” reduced “to mere unthinkability. It was as if contact were out of the question and the sterility of the passage between us recorded, with due dryness, in our staring silence. This impression . . . was a shock” when set in contrast to what James had been used to “on the other side of the world” (91). There the value of any rural excursion . . . had been, during the years, the easy sense, for the excursionist, of a social relation. . . . Had that not ever been, exactly, a part of the vague warmth, the intrinsic colour, of any honest man’s rural walk in his England or his Italy, his Germany or his France, and was not the effect of its so suddenly dropping out, in the land of universal brotherhood . . . rather a chill, straight-way, for the heart, and rather a puzzle, not less for the head? (91).7

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The Aliens: Italians (and James) in Italy and America

At this point James is “the restless analyst,” one who must deal with both heart and head when taking stock of these Italians, almost as newly arrived in the States as he is. James rejected membership in that special coterie of sociologists and statisticians. He was not trained in, and had not taste for, the gathering of data about the various immigrant groups flowing through “the terrible little Ellis Island” since the 1880s, the years he had taken leave of his birth-land (AS 66). Rather, he devotes himself to describing the inflictions upon his consciousness of the vast machine process by which immigrants were forced to become an “ingurgitation on the part of our body politic and social” (66). James’s position did not, and does not, keep experts from computing the following figures. Before 1880 only twenty-thousand Italians had moved through the city’s harbor. By 1900 two-hundred and twenty-thousand had arrived. By 1910 one million and nine-hundred thousand had descended into the New York area—largely landless contadini in flight from abject poverty in southern Italy.8 Over the years the tracking of patterns of upward mobility tabulated major distinctions between the social and economic status achieved by Italians and Jews. Italians were often illiterate peasants, reliant on unskilled “muscle” to gain a living wage and enough savings to return “home” from a land they viewed as a place of temporary exile. Jews knew they could never “go home” to a lost world of violent pogroms; they arrived with entrepreneurial skills and a reverence for education that helped move them along at a brisker pace. On his own, James found subjective confirmation for such distinctions. As he strolled through Central Park, midst “the polyglot Hebraic crowd,” he absorbed the scene where “the very common man, the very common woman and the very common child” were enjoying “their rise in the social scale” through “that serenity of assurance” that marks whomever expects to “move up” (132, 134). As a visiting alien to his native shores, James was often unsettled by what he observed, whether “the dense Italian neighbourhoods of the lower East Side” or the Jewish presence in Central Park “which showed the fruit of the foreign tree as shaken down there with a force that smothered everything else” (AS 90, 94). There were other moments, however, when he responded with pleasure. Engaged by the energy of the Yiddish theater in the Bowery and the local café scene, James was impressed by how finely they ran counter to the memories he held of the bitter turmoil of America’s Civil War that pitted brother against brother. His epiphany centered on the inevitable rough union in discord of the two groups of instincts, the fusion of the two camps by a queer, clumsy, wasteful social chemistry. Such at all events are the round-about processes of peaceful history, the

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 very history that succeeds, for our edification, in not consisting of battles and blood and tears. (149)

Certain groups, caught in the machinery of the assimilation process, were moving up in ways it was gratifying to witness. But why, James asked on another occasion, did the young man with “a dark-eyed ‘Latin’ look,” whom he encountered in the New Hampshire hills, rebuff his attempt to converse, declaring “I’m an Armenian . . . as if it were the most natural thing in the world for a wage-earning youth in the heart of New England to be”? Why did that young man not appear “to expect brotherhood”? (AS 91). Why was this “as little his seeming as it had been that of the [Italian] diggers on the Jersey shore?” (92). James was “haunted” by the fact that the new arrivals to the States acquired a strong sense of “settled possession,” while he and his Americanborn compatriots experienced “unsettled possession” (67). Struck by “all the difference, for us, between possession and dispossession,” he wondered about his own “American fate” (66-67). What if he became unable “to share the sanctity of his American consciousness, the intimacy of his American patriotism, with the inconceivable alien” (66)? Surely this would be the case if the pleasures of a true conversazione between the one and the other were lost. The American Scene always demands a close look. It offers a litany of all the lost things in James’s former world: familiar houses, neighborhoods, local manners, family ties, public buildings, city and country mores— losses that had accelerated while he was away. “Loss” for James meant being out of place—the plight affecting the alienated American types he met in his travels throughout his return visit. But for now, enough of The American Scene!—that ever provocative, endlessly controversial report set down by the sixty-year old “restless analyst” engrossed by the gains and losses on dull display across his native-land. I turn back to the essays from Italian Hours to see how this “self-conscious alien” responded to the lives led by Italians in Italy that shaped his later reactions to the fate of Italians in America. Being “civilized” is the prime possession of Italians on home ground, but what does “civilization” entail? On a trip “up and down the Sorrento promontory,” a friend told James to make note of the “regular elements” of “Dust, perspiration, illumination,” adding that “plenty of fireworks and plenty of talk—that’s all they ever want’” (“Saint’s Afternoon,” IH 308). Was that really all? Was James expected to abide by John Ruskin’s “little tracts,” written out of “personal ill-humour,” that glossed the word “civilization” as that which Italians formerly possessed but had long since lost, and that sternly cautioned visitors not to be amused by what they

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The Aliens: Italians (and James) in Italy and America

think they see? (“Italy Revisited,” IH 114). For the likes of Ruskin there was nothing to see in Florence: it “is now too ghastly and heartbreaking to any human soul that remembers the days of old’” (qtd. in IH 114). For Ruskin, “if you find it amusing . . . You can never see it” (qtd. in IH 116). James responds to Ruskin’s damning words with a kind of horror. Why else was he in Italy if not to enjoy what he sees? What he sees is art and “Art is the one corner of human life in which we may take our ease” (IH 117). “Art means an escape from . . . the need for apology and compromise” from those “connections” by which “our impulses are conditioned and embarrassed.” Art is “a garden of delight,” far removed from Ruskin’s “theological government” that opens up “the gulf between truth and error,” between “inequity and righteousness” (117). So James sets out to enjoy all he can see, armed with “a poor charmed flâneur’s quiet contemplation” (115). He had yet to learn that seeing alone would not suffice to reveal what it means for Italians to be “civilized.” Only after he grasped what this fluid term means to Italians on Italian soil, would he be able to fathom how this innate quality might be lost by a people dispossessed by their removal to America. At the same grim moment in 1861 that America’s Civil War commenced the struggle to enforce unity upon a divided nation, the clustered provinces and scattered city-states throughout the Italian peninsula were pulled together. By the time of James’s return to the States in 1904, he could witness the results of the victory seized by the Union armies. They were visible in the industrial, financial, and political power that defined America’s modern life, whether civilized or not. As for Italy in the aftermath of myriad military and political upheavals, James’s “A Roman Holiday” of 1873 views Rome’s Carnival as a farcical celebration placed in the hands of “innkeepers and Americans” (IH 124).9 For James national unity in Italy meant little more than the spectacle of diminished papal power and the business-like manner of petty kings. Despite James’s wish to dispense with Ruskin’s apocalyptic notions of decay, “Italy Revisited” contains occasions when he admits he must agree with certain aspects of an Italy in its state of flux from a distinguished past to its sometimes shoddy present. He is disturbed by “the contrast between the fecundity of the great artistic period and the vulgarity there of the genius of to-day.” The “observer of actual Italian life” confronts “thirdrate genre pictures and catchpenny statues.” “That the people who but three hundred years ago had the best taste in the world should now have the worst” may be a warning against the consequences of their removal to alien shores (IH 102).

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 As he strolls in “those encircling hills” above Florence, “on which the massive villas are mingled with vaporous olives,” James comes upon a “little votive lamp” near an “old-time Madonna” at a “wayside shrine.” It gives him pause: “The odour was that of petroleum; the votive taper was nourished with the essence of Pennsylvania. I confess that I burst out laughing, and a picturesque contadino, wending his way homeward in the dusk, stared at me as if I were an iconoclast” (IH 104). To James “the thing served as a symbol of the Italy of the future.” He must absorb the fact that there is now “a horse-car from the Porta del Popolo to the Ponte Molle, and the Tuscan shrines are fed with kerosene” (105). He acknowledges that Young Italy, preoccupied with its economical and political future, must be heartily tired of being admired for its eyelashes and its poise . . . and one doesn’t wonder that, if the youth has any spirit, he should at least begin to resent our insufferable aesthetic patronage. (103)

In “Italy Revisited,” James continues to combine sympathetic realization of the urgency for the new with concern over the odd position Italy holds in the latter years of the nineteenth century. In fact, the accomplished schism between the old order and the new is the promptest moral of a fresh visit to this ever-suggestive part of the world. The old has become more and more a museum, preserved and perpetrated in the midst of the new, but without any further relation to it. (IH 103)

The irony lies in the fact that the Italy “we sentimentalize and romance about was an ardently mercantile country.” It fits “a vision of the coming years. It represents to our satisfaction an Italy united and prosperous, but altogether scientific and commercial.” Whether that vision will come true is another matter. In the meantime the visiting alien must recall that Italy once “loved not its ledgers less, but its frescoes and altar-pieces more” (104). Thus James must continue to weigh the fact that he spent his Italian Hours in a country in the years before its people departed for a new land, where electric cars run along New York’s Broadway, and Rome added its own line of train-cars. Like it or not, “It is evidently destined to be; I see a new Italy in the future which in many important respects will equal, if not surpass, the most enterprising sections of our native land” (103). The question that haunted him was whether these changes might prove to be a gain that is also another loss. In The American Scene in 1904 James took a hard look at New York’s recent arrivals. All together they were so “visibly on the new, the lifted

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The Aliens: Italians (and James) in Italy and America

level” (AS 97). At this point, some twenty-five years after the on-the-spot report he offered of Italy in 1878, James launched an extended series of surmises regarding the losses that he, the Alien, suffers once Aliens from Italy take possession of their new home-land and America takes possession of them. Here, perhaps, was the nearest approach to a seizable step in the evolution of the incoming citizen, the stage of his no longer being for you—for any complacency of the romantic, or even verily of the fraternizing, sense in you—the foreigner of the quality, of the kind, that he might have been chez lui. Whatever he might see himself becoming he was never to see himself that again, any more than you were ever to see him. He became then, to my vision . . . a creature promptly despoiled of those “manners” which were the grace . . . by which one had best known and on opportunity, best liked him. He presents himself thus, most of all . . . —and not only in New York, but throughout the country—as wonderingly conscious that his manners of the other world, that everything you have there known and praised him for, have been a huge mistake. (97)

James sees the Alien go about his business, sees him “above all, for some odd reason, sit there in the street-car, and with a slow, brooding gravity, a dim calculation of bearing, which yet never takes a backward step, expand to the full measure of it” (97). As he ponders his memories of the Italians he has known abroad, he wonders “what has become of that element of the agreeable address in them which has, from far back, so enhanced for the stranger the interest and pleasure of a visit to their beautiful country. They shed it utterly” (98). Hurt by his own sense of loss, James spirals through a set of unanswerable questions regarding the sea-change that comes over a people who move from there to here. What does become of the various positive properties, on the part of a certain of the installed tribes, the good manners, say, among them, as to which the process of shedding and the fact of the eclipse come so promptly into play? It has taken long ages of history, in the other world, to produce them, and you ask yourself, with independent curiosity, if they may really be thus extinguished in an hour. And if they are not extinguished, into what pathless tracts of the native atmosphere do they provisionally, and so all undiscoverably, melt? Do they burrow underground to await their day again?—or in what strange secret places are they held in deposit and in trust? The “American” identity that has profited by their sacrifice has meanwhile acquired (in the happiest cases) all apparent confidence and consistency; but may not the doubt remain of whether the extinction of qualities ingrained in generations is to be taken for quite complete? Isn’t it conceivable that, for something like a final efflorescence, the business of

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 slow commingling and makings-over at last ended, they may rise again to the surface, affirming their vitality and value and playing their part? It would be for them, of course, in this event, to attest that they had been worth waiting so long for; but the speculation, at any rate, irresistibly forced upon us, is a sign of the interest in the American world of what I have called the “ethnic” outlook. (98-99)

James did not live to find out what became of the Italians who came to America. He himself would leave his homeland behind, never to discover fully what transformations were taking place within his own alienated self. But there had been those early essays in which he brooded over what it was like for Italians to be in Italy and for him to attempt contact with them during his Italian Hours. By and large, in the Italy James visited over the years, the peasants who would make up the preponderance of immigrants to the States did not come from Rome with its train-cars. Nor, as he noted in “The Grand Canal,” did they arrive from Venice where the vaporetti aided in “the ruin of the gondoliers” and “the palaces, whose foundations they undermine” (IH 48).10 Of course, if it were the case that Venetians ever headed the flow of new immigrants, they might easily adapt to Manhattan. Since the vaporetti “have robbed the Grand Canal of the supreme distinction of its tranquility, so on the other hand they have placed ‘rapid transit’ . . . in everybody’s reach,” giving all—“save indeed those who wouldn’t for the world”—the ability “to rush about Venice as furiously as people rush about New York” (48). So too, as he noted in “Italy Revisited,” those who come from Spezia are already familiar with “the look of monstrous, or more than far-western newness which distinguishes all the creations of the young Italian state” (IH 109). On the whole, however, as James was informed by an “apparently competent native” in “Siena Early and Late,” Italian immigrants leave a country that has failed to nurture its own middle class:11 The nobility, which is very numerous and very rich, is still . . . perfectly feudal and uplifted and separate. Morally and intellectually, behind the walls of its palaces, the fourteenth century, it’s thrilling to think, hasn’t ceased to hang on. There is no bourgeoisie to speak of; immediately after the aristocracy come the poor people, who are very poor indeed (IH 226).

In “The Saint’s Afternoon” of 1901, James dwells on the evening he spent in Sorrento. It made “the brooding tourist brood afresh” over what Italians do possess. It was a night when it was “all purple wine, all art and song, and nobody a grain the worse. It was fireworks and conversation . . . . It

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The Aliens: Italians (and James) in Italy and America

was civilization and amenity” (IH 313). As he sat among members of “the races politically feeble” and “talked with the contadini about antique sculpture,” James was “quickened to remember that we others, we of my own country, as a race politically not weak” had just “opened three hundred saloons in Manila” (313-14). This caustic comment of 1900 was prompted by the contempt James and his brother William felt toward America’s imperialistic expansion into the Philippines, but all along he had had much to say about the aggressive take-overs of Italian civilization by rapacious Americans and Europeans. It has often been remarked with disapproval that James applied the term “swarm” to describe the foreigners pouring into New York. However, note the use of this and similar terms strewn throughout the essays in Italian Hours: “swarms of tourists,” “herd of fellow gazers,” “barbarians,” “horde of savage Germans,” together with the throngs of Americans, the English, exiled kings, and other hapless visitors. His essays on Venice are filled with barbed references to the forebears of today’s day-trippers who share in the corruption of the locals—those whom he described in “Venice” as this “beautiful race that lives by the aid of its imagination” (IH 9).12 In “Italy Revisited” James records yet another form of dispossession as he wanders the hills above Florence. He enjoys “pausing at the open gates of villas and wondering at the height of cypresses and the depth of loggias,” and “for a week or so all this was delightful. The villas are innumerable, and if you’re an aching alien half the talk is about villas” (IH 112). They “all look as if they had stories—none in truth predominantly gay. Most of them are offered to rent (many of them for sale) at prices unnaturally low. . . . In imagination you hire three or four; you take possession and settle and stay,” even though “your sense of the fineness of the finest is of something very grave and stately” (112-13). There is “something quite tragic and sinister” about the villas for hire, since they have “outlived their original use.” “Their extraordinary largeness and massiveness are a satire on their present fate.” None had been built “simply to afford an economical winter residence to English and American families.” For “the sensitive stranger,” it was impossible not to “murmur to himself,” “Lovely, lovely, but it makes me ‘blue.’” Still, this same “sensitive stranger” will leave off looking at “the landscape from over one of the low parapets” and turn “away indoors to candles and dinner” (113). James’s “Siena Early and Late” suggests that Italians are in danger of losing their grips on “civilization,” despite efforts to sustain their value as a “preserved social specimen” (IH 226). “Italy Revisited” reminds him

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 that “if Italians at bottom despise the rest of mankind and regard them as barbarians, disinherited from the tradition of form,” it is this spiritual solitude, this conscious disconnection of the great works of architecture and sculpture that deposits a certain weight upon the heart; when we see a great tradition broken we feel something of the pain with which we hear a stifled cry. But [their] regret is one thing and resentment another. (IH 102, 113)

As attested in “The Autumn in Florence” and in “Venice,” James views Italians as retaining their “essential amiability,” delightfully good manners, and “a great desire to please” (IH 240, 19). In “Venice” and “The Saint’s Afternoon,” he reiterates that Italians, blessed by a language that is “articulate and vocal and personal,” excel in “the conversazione of the poor” (IH 19, 310). Again, when calling upon memories set down in “Venice,” James asserts that it “takes a great deal to make a successful American, but to make a happy Venetian takes only a handful of quick sensibility” (9). So why wouldn’t Italians, wherever they might be, continue to carry on the amiable intercourse common to their homeland? Unfortunately this is precisely what seems to be stripped away once they arrive on America’s Jersey Shore. James returns to his concerns over his own aptitude for converting the facts of poverty into a perverse form of personal delight. Nowhere is this danger more apparent than in his essay “Venice.” The city’s “misery . . . stands there for all the world to see; it is part of the spectacle—a throughgoing devotee of local colour might consistently say it is part of the pleasure.” Venetians lie in the sunshine; they dabble in the sea; they wear bright rags; they fall into attitudes and harmonies; they assist at an eternal conversazione. It is not easy to say that one would have them other than they are, and it certainly would make an immense difference should they be better fed (IH 9).

But wherever “the brooding tourist” goes, he is pulled toward his love of the natural scene. The section of “The Saint’s Afternoon and Others,” published for the first time in Italian Hours in 1909, details the occasion when James and a friend ventured south of Naples, down to Posillipo and the bay of Baiae. Lying in wait was “the atmosphere of that region—thick with the sense of history and the very taste of time”—a picture completed by the presence of “herdsmen, admirably congruous with the whole picture at every point, and never more so than in their manner of gaily

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taking up, as with bell-voices of golden bronze, the offered wayside greeting” (IH 319). James is touched to the core when he encounters the form his aesthetics most favors: the “unforgettable specimen of that general type— the image of one of those human figures on which our perception of the romantic so often pounces in Italy as on the genius of the scene personified.” It is difficult to shake loose from the lure of the physiognomic representatives, standing for it all, and with an animation, a complexion, an expression, a fineness and fullness of humanity that appear to have gathered it in and to sum it up, [that] becomes beautiful by the same simple process, very much, that makes the heir to a great capitalist rich. (IH 319)

Like Keats, James could take rapture in the static beauty of an “Attic shape!”—that beauty of abstraction found in the Grecian Urn where the “silent form” has the power to “tease us out of thoughts / As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!” In “Venice” James pauses to take in the sight of “the arching body of the gondolier lifted up against the sky” that “has a kind of nobleness which suggests an image on a Greek frieze” (IH 18). Basking in the sights that fill “The Saint’s Afternoon and Others,” he recalls the image of “a stalwart young gamekeeper, or perhaps substantial young farmer, who, well-appointed and blooming, had unslung his gun and, resting on it beside a hedge, just lived for us, in the rare felicity of his whole look” (IH 319). But James’s response (aesthetically erotic as well) to “the rare felicity” of the Italians grouped in this “Cold Pastoral” will only be justified if the “look” of one of these handsome young men is complimented by what he has to say; if his talk merges with the “language” of his artistic presence: He pointed, as it were, the lesson, giving the supreme right accent or final exquisite turn to the immense magnificent phrase; which from those moments on, and on and on, resembled doubtless nothing so much as a page written, by a consummate verbal economist and master of style, in the noblest of all tongues. Our splendid human plant by the wayside had flowered thus into style—and there wasn’t to be, all day, a lapse of eloquence, a wasted word or a cadence missed. (319)

Yet James remains open to a grave error if he evades the consequences of self-indulgence in “personal memories” and fails to pay “the old, the familiar tax on the luxury of loving Italy” (319-20). One cannot simply lie “at our ease in the bosom of the past” and think to get away unscathed (320).

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 From the earliest days of his travels around Italy James had been susceptible to the Claudian notes of Arcadia, particularly when they included specimens of male beauty. As recorded in “Roman Rides,” he came upon a spot on the Campagna where “veritably the oaten pipe must have stirred the windless air and the satyrs have laughed among the brookside reeds.” By one of those happy chances which keep observation in Italy always in her best humour a shepherd had thrown himself down under one of the trees in the very attitude of Meliboeus. He had been washing his feet, I suppose, in the neighbouring brook, and had found it pleasant afterwards to roll his short breeches well up on his thighs. Lying thus in the shade, on his elbow, with his naked legs stretched out on the turf and his soft peaked hat over his long hair crushed back like the veritable bonnet of Arcady, he was exactly the figure of the background of this happy valley. The poor fellow, lying there in rustic weariness and ignorance, little fancied that he was a symbol of old-world meaning to new-world eyes” (IH 150).13

The pervasive atmosphere James found in Italy made it difficult to deny “symbol” and “type” of the pastoral, cold or not. Yet he realized that there is a tax to be paid on “the luxury of loving Italy,” one that this “poor fellow” by the wayside was unable to pay. Might he not be one of the many who would elect to be dispossessed from their home-land in order to pay a new kind of fee for the hope of making it in America? James’s ingrained habit of balancing “on the one hand” against “on the other hand” is ever on view. He insists that the charge of indolence laid upon the Italian is one of the consequences of an impoverished society where a life of steady employment is rare. Yet he agrees that this same posture of indolence has value for the visiting alien. At times, in “Tuscan Cities,” he suggests that he, like the Ververs in The Golden Bowl who are free to lounge in the laps of the gods, is given to moments that exist outside mortal miseries and moral concerns, freed from ever having to pay out any kind of tax.14 As a wandering Alien, James enjoys “the luxury of loving Italy” without incurring dire penalties. But compare his ability to leave unscathed to the state of stasis inflicted upon “the lounging Pisani” who lie prostrate amongst “their poppy flowers,” fated to “resignation and oblivion” in a land where Pisa may be “an ideal place to wait for death” (IH 278). After indulging his own Italian Hours, “this self-conscious alien” is free to depart to other climes at his ease. This was not the case with those from vast areas of southern Italy blighted by disease-infected vineyards at the close of the nineteenth century. Peasants faced conditions like those

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the Irish had endured in the potato fields of Ireland. For centuries Italians had made go with “life,” but now they were disembarking in America. When James returned to his homeland in 1904, he felt betrayed at times by memories of by-gone pastoral scenes in Italy. They would not be replicated in New Jersey when he came upon Italians who were, in their own way, now “at home” in a new land, as he was not. To his dismay, they had become something other than that amiable race whose civilized conversazione he had enjoyed during his sojourns as an American abroad. Where along the Jersey shore might he now encounter the “splendid human plant by the wayside” he memorialized in “The Saint’s Afternoon,” an essay that read like “a page written by a consummate verbal economist and master of style,” but not by Italians themselves (IH 319). Wherever James went he knew he was himself an Alien. As he confessed in “Italy Revisited,” he knew it was imperative for him to know that he knew this, else he would be no more (whether in Italy or in America) than one of that “swarm” of irresponsible visitors, yet another “detested fellow-pilgrim,” the mere Tourist (110).

Notes 1

“A Roman Holiday,” originally published in Atlantic Monthly, 32 (June 1873), 111. 2 “The Autumn of Florence,” originally published in the Nation, 18 (January 1884), 6-7; reprinted in Transatlantic Sketches, 1875. 3 “The Saint’s Afternoon,” from Parts 1-5, first published in The May Book, in Aid of Charing Cross Hospital. Ed. Eliza Aria. London: Macmillan, 1901. 4 Italy Revisited,” originally published in the Atlantic Monthly as separate essays: “Italy Revisited,” 41 (April 1878), 437-44, and “Recent Florence,” 41 (May 1878), 586-93. The two essays were reprinted as one essay in Portraits of Places, 1883. 5 “Roman Rides,” originally published in the Atlantic Monthly, 32 (August 1873), 190-98; reprinted in Transatlantic Sketches, 1875; reprinted in Foreign Parts, 1883. 6 The American Scene, first published in January 1907 by Chapman and Hall in London and in February 1907 by Harper & Brothers in New York. 7 Let us not even think of James’s possible reactions to Snookie Polizzi who currently flourishes on the American TV reality show, “Jersey Shores.” 8 These figures and the following data are from Thomas Kessner’s The Golden Door, 14-17, 166-173. 9 James frequently spoke harshly about the influx of visitors who spear-headed their own ruthless occupation of Italy. In his essay “Venice,” he declared that the “barbarians are in full possession and you tremble for what they may do.” “Venice scarcely exists any more as a city at all.” She “exists only as a battered peep-show and bazaar. There was a horde of savage Germans encamped in the Piazza . . . .

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 The English and Americans came a little later. They came in good time, with a great many French” (12). “Venice” was originally published in Century Magazine, 25 (November 1882), 8-23. 10 “The Grand Canal,” originally published in Scribner’s Magazine, 12 (November 1892), 531-50. 11 “Siena Early and Late,” from the section originally published as “Siena” in the Atlantic Monthly, 33 (June 1874), 664-69; reprinted in Transatlantic Sketches, 1875. The second part was published for the first time in Italian Hours. 12 Roderick Hudson (1875) notes the pillage of Rome by the current breed of Goths on tour. The Wings of the Dove (1902; revised in 1907) records the season’s arrival of “the polyglot herd, cockneys of all climes, mainly German, mainly American, mainly English . . . everything but Italian, but Venetian” (359). 13 See The American Scene: “When you wander about in Arcadia you ask yourself as few questions as possible. That is Arcadia in fact, and questions drop, or at least get themselves deferred and shiftlessly shirked” (14). 14 “Tuscan Cities,” originally published in the Nation, 18 (May 21 1874), 329-30; reprinted in Transatlantic Sketches, 1875, where it was dated 1873.

Works Cited James, Henry. The American Scene. Ed. John F. Sears. New York: Penguin Classics, 1984. Print. —. Italian Hours. Ed. John Auchard. New York: Penguin Classics, 1992. Print. —. The Wings of the Dove. Ed. John Bayley. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1987. Print. Kessner, Thomas. The Golden Door. Italians and Jewish Immigrants in New York, 1880-1915. New York: Oxford UP, 1947. Print.

 

CHAPTER THREE MANIC JAMES: THE EARLY LETTERS AND RODERICK HUDSON LELAND S. PERSON

This essay originated at the confluence of several happy circumstances: my interest in Henry James’s early career, the publication so far of five volumes (James’s earliest letters) in the monumental Complete Letters of Henry James, edited by Pierre Walker and Greg Zacharias, and the summer 2011 James Conference in Rome, the setting of James’s first big novel, Roderick Hudson (1875). Paying tribute to the herculean work of Zacharias and Walker and hoping to put the scholarly utility of the complete letters to the test, I want to examine James’s Roman letters and his first Roman novel for what they reveal about his early effort to situate and define himself as an artist. James after all had written to Grace Norton, upon his first visit to Rome in November 1869, “My mind swarms with effects of all kinds—to be introduced into realistic novels yet unwritten” (CL 1855-72 1: 194). And at the other end of this probationary period (in May 1874), as he was negotiating with William Dean Howells over publication of Roderick Hudson in The Atlantic, he observed: “My story is to be on a theme I have had in my head a long time & once attempted to write something about. . . . I promise you some tall writing” (CL 1872-76 2: 156). Roderick Hudson, he seemed to recognize, even before he finished it, would be the first installment in a series of “realistic novels” Rome was inspiring him to write. Given these comments, we might expect to find inklings of Roderick Hudson all over James’s letters, but in fact he does not explicitly mention the novel in any of the letters he wrote between his first visit to Italy in 1869 and a March 9, 1874 letter to his parents, in which he broaches the subject of sending the nearly completed work to Howells. This is not to say that material for the novel does not lurk in James’s letters, as well as in his head. A prerequisite for writing Roderick Hudson was coming to terms with Rome and his imaginative relationship

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to it. His feelings about being in Rome, which tended to alternate manically between positive and negative poles, end up reflected in the novel, ultimately producing a manic plot that ends melodramatically with Roderick Hudson’s death. James’s experience as an American artist in Rome was obviously very different—an outcome he could not have known as he wrote the narrative—and the novel includes artists of various types, as if he were speculating about possibilities for himself. The early 1870s represented a crucial stage in James’s career—an incubation period in which he tested his abilities to observe and write. Could he really be a writer? Could he really be an expatriate American writer in Europe? What could he write, publish, and get paid for? Most importantly, could he be an important, successful writer like those other writers he most admired: Balzac, Flaubert, Turgenev, George Eliot? We think of James as The Master, but in this early context, we might better think of him as The Pupil. His brother William put the matter in stark terms in an April 1874 letter: It is a fork in the path of your life and upon your decision hangs your whole future. . . . This is your dilemma: The congeniality of europe on the one hand + the difficulty of making an entire living out of original writing, and its abnormality as a matter of mental hygiene, on the other hand;—the dreariness of american conditions of life + a mechanical routine occupation possibly to be obtained, which from day to day is done when ‘tis done, mixed up with the writing into which you distil your essence. (Skrupskelis and Berkeley 95)

William would go on to make the financial challenge even more explicit, noting that since Henry has “been away,” Alice has “received but $1800 for your writing.” “You see,” he concludes, “to live by the pen is what very few people can do unless they ‘prostitute’ themselves . . .” (Skrupskelis and Berkeley 95). For Leon Edel, who quotes the passage above, “William was saying that Henry could not support himself by his writing and would be wise to take a job when he came home—something Henry had long ago determined not to do” (162). James surely recognized the truth value of his brother’s assessment, but his early letters reveal a greater range of possibilities than the horns of the dilemma William describes. In addition to assessing and confirming a career choice in the early 1870s, James was deciding where he wanted to live and, as it would turn out in the short run, where he would set his first major novel. As he recalls the gestation of Roderick Hudson in his Preface to the New York Edition, he claims that “one fact about it indeed outlives all others; the fact that, as

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the loved Italy was the scene of my fiction—so much more loved than one has ever been able, even after fifty efforts, to say!—and as having had to leave it persisted as an inward ache, so there was soreness in still contriving, after a fashion, to hang about it and in prolonging, from month to month, the illusion of the golden air” (RH 38). The early letters reveal a more complex relation to Italy and Rome—a dance or flirtation of advance and retreat. As we observe the traveling James trying out his judgments of Europe, refining his tastes, fine-tuning his responses, we see him sampling various locations and finally trying to make a decision between Paris and Rome. In effect, as an expatriate American writer, he triangulates America and these two European cities. He distinguishes between Paris and Rome in much the same terms he uses to distinguish between Europe and America. Rome represents the ancient world and appears primitive, even barbaric, and thus reminds him of America. Paris is more modern, but in a refined, European way. “Every thing Italian & especially everything Roman, that is not a ruin, a landscape or a museum,” he writes to William, “has such a deadly provinciality & more than American dreariness, that in coming here with a mindful of Parisian memories, one seems to have turned one’s back on modern civilization” (CL 1872-76 1: 178). James kept returning to Rome, of course, even as he struggled to define its appeal: What I find Rome and am likely to find it, it is hard to say in few words. Much less simply & sensuously & satisfyingly picturesque than before, but on the whole immensely interesting. It is a strange jumble now of its old inalterable self and its new Italian assumptions—a most disturbing one for sentimentalists, such as generally all educated strangers are, here. (CL 1872-76 1: 179)

In this introspective passage, James plays the entrepreneur, and Rome provides a literary business incubator that will allow him to define and refine exactly what he can acquire in the way of literary capital: Generally, what one feels and inhales, naturally & easily, with every breath, is the importunate presence of tradition of every kind—the influence of an atmosphere electrically charged with historic intimations and whisperings. Practical profit from so huge an influence as this must disengage itself slowly, but I hope eventually to get much. (CL 1872-76 1: 179-80)

Even as he feels “acutely homesick for the high civilization of Paris” after one month in Rome, he finds himself “getting fond” of “the very barbarisms

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& miseries & uncleannesses of Rome,” and he feels tempted to let his hair grow “like a German religious painter” (CL 1872-76 1: 209). In defining his own educated sensibility, cutting himself out from the touristy herd, James defined himself against other Americans. He writes to his father that the “shoals of Amerierican [sic] fellow residents with their endless requisitions & unremunerative contact, are the dark side of life in Rome. They really abridge very much the sense of all that one comes for, & make one ask very often whether under such circumstances Rome pays.” He therefore vows that, if he returns to Rome “next winter,” he “shall break with them altogether” (CL 1872-76 1: 228). He continues in the same vein when he tells Grace Norton that his “entanglements with the American colony” are a “dark side to a brilliant picture,” and he carefully calculated the potential payoff of spending time and effort on cultivating their society. “It contains nothing novel, individual or picturesque enough,” he tells her, “to repay one for any great expenditure of time” (CL 1872-76 1: 233). In much the same way he would do in his book on Hawthorne (1879), he seems determined to feel superior to his provincial compatriots. 1 He will be the professional tourist with the taste and authority to contribute written reports of European sights to American periodicals. As for the Americans he finds in Rome: A “set of people less framed to provoke national self-complacency than the latter it would be hard to imagine. There is but one word to use in regard to them—vulgar, vulgar, vulgar.” Evidently, one word—even thrice-repeated—is not sufficient, for James goes on: Their ignorance—their stingy grudging defiant attitude towards everything European—their perpetual reference of all things to some American standard or precedent which exists only in their own unscrupulous windbags—& then our unhappy poverty of voice, of speech & and of physiognomy—these things glare at you hideously. (CL 1855-72 2: 14445)

Even though in a later letter to Jane Norton he confesses that “Rome has come to seem a sort of home to me & I have adopted it into my innermost heart” (CL 1872-76 1: 222), he immediately qualifies his judgment by condescendingly disparaging his compatriots: “I turned out to know a good many people here of whom I have inevitably seen a good deal— more at times than I want to. It doesn’t make very ‘middling’ American society any better to be disporting itself against a Roman background” (CL 1872-76 1: 222-23). Playing the snobbish travel sketcher, confident in his superior taste and judgment, James makes similar judgments of the American artists he

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encounters in Rome. His experience with the American art colony obviously provides raw material for characters in Roderick Hudson. His tart judgments are those of a young upstart, confident that he can outdo his elders. This commentary serves a mirroring purpose, as he implicitly refines his own self-image as an artist, reflected in the dark light of others. Nastily, he compares Harriet Hosmer to a “remarkably ugly little greyhaired boy,” and then, to add insult to injury, he cattily observes that he imagines she is at least “better” than her statues (CL 1872-76 1: 210-11). He tells Jane Norton, “in the confidence of well-tried friendship,” that Sarah Butler Wister’s “beautiful hair is the thing most to be praised about her” (CL 1872-76 1: 223). And he describes William Wetmore Story, surrounded in his studio by “an army of marble heroines,” as a “case of prosperous pretention,” whose popular success derives less from his great “cleverness” than from the “world’s good nature” (CL 1872-76 1: 251). He writes more subtly in the novel, preferring to damn with faint praise in terms that leave plenty of room for him to advance his own art. Of the young, pretty, and rich Augusta Blanchard, for example, the narrator observes that she does “backs very well, but she was a little weak in faces.” Flowers are her specialty, and even though her touch is a “little old-fashioned,” she painted them “with remarkable skill” (RH 119). James’s own “remarkable” skill at this early career stage may have had more in common with Augusta Blanchard’s than he cared to admit, but unlike the self-funded Blanchard, he depended upon his father’s generous letter of credit for his upkeep. James was writing, to be sure, and even making writing pay—if only just barely—but he still felt tethered to the family support system. As Andrew Lawson summarizes it, “The constant theme of James’s early fiction and letters is his need to absorb and store up impressions, so as to produce some tangible product, a return on his father’s investment, and a maximization of his limited financial resources” (182). In the financial understanding he had with Henry Sr., the money James earned from his writing went to his father, who kept it on account and supplemented it when necessary. As James succinctly explained the arrangement, “With what I have sent, am sending, & shall continue to send, (the cheques always to be sent to you) I think I shall not fail to keep you funded up to the point I draw on you” (CL 1872-76 1: 217-18). Even as he took it nearly for granted, James chafed at being so dependent upon his father for his financial comfort. The “long economical statement” he includes in his 17 February 1873 letter to his mother represents a very close accounting whose purpose is to forestall his father’s future criticism. James itemizes his weekly hotel bill (70 francs), for example, insisting that he can live in Rome for about half of what it would cost him in Boston. He

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also emphasizes that he gets what he pays for, as if to reassure his parents that he is not living luxuriously: “The restaurants are poor—very poor— but they are cheap.” He calibrates costs and benefits—the costs to his father, the benefits to himself—hoping to convince Henry Sr. that he, Henry Jr., represents a good investment as a writer. “I shall be able, I think I may claim, (especially as time goes on & I learn to produce with less waste of labor) to make comfortably a very comfortable subsistence here” (CL 1872-76 1: 218). The money question arises early in Roderick Hudson, when Roderick wonders, “What is the smallest sum per annum on which one can keep alive the sacred fire?” (RH 70). When he admits that he has the grand total of $300 at his disposal, Rowland points out that there are always ways of raising money, one of them being “having a friend with a good deal more than he wants and not being too proud to accept a part of it” (RH 71). Rowland’s willingness to subsidize Roderick’s art, apparently without strings attached, represented a better arrangement than James himself enjoyed. James may have been fulfilling a wish of his own in making Rowland’s sponsorship unconditional. If so, he recognizes the dangers of indulgence as the novel goes along, and Rowland finds it harder and harder to keep paying Roderick’s bills, especially when his protégé stops working. Roderick strikes a deal with Mr. Leavenworth, who for $5,000 commissions a sculpture of “Culture,” which Roderick creates but then disowns as an “abomination” he would rather “smash” than finish (RH 243). By the end of the novel, Roderick is “bankrupt” both creatively and financially (RH 320), even though Rowland insists that “everything” he has is “at his service” (RH 323). In contrast to James, who made sure his father’s investment in his art paid off, Roderick can only recognize that he has “squeezed” Rowland “dry” for very little artistic return (RH 323).2 Partly because James wanted and needed to make his writing pay, he initially thought mostly of small things—reviews and travel sketches and short fiction for literary magazines, all of which he could research, write, and publish at an almost assembly-line pace. He was very efficient. Escorting his sister Alice and Aunt Kate (Catherine Walsh) on a fivemonth tour of Europe in 1872, he capitalized on their itinerary by publishing a series of sketches for the Nation. From his visits to Rome he published five travel sketches—three in the Atlantic, one each in the Nation and the Galaxy. In this, he resembles Rowland Mallet, collecting impressions on his tours of Europe, or Sam Singleton, the American watercolorist who serves James as one counterpoint to Roderick Hudson. Whereas Singleton’s first paintings are “worthless daubs,” he improves his work considerably with “patient industry,” and by the time Rowland

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encounters him “his talent, though of a slender and delicate order, was now incontestable” (RH 118). James does not exactly disparage Singleton—Rowland buys several of his “small” watercolors—but the praise is faint. He is after all a “diminutive attenuated personage” and “so perfect an example of the little noiseless laborious artist whom chance, in the person of a moneyed patron, has never taken by the hand” (RH 118, 119). At the same time, Singleton is a remarkably efficient and productive artist. He profits from his visit to Italy in terms that James himself valued, especially when he was justifying his artistic plans to his father. Even though, when Rowland sees him in St. Peter’s, Singleton “pocketed his sketch-book with a guilty air, as if it cost his modesty a pang to be detected in his greedy culture of opportunity”; he leaves Italy with a “pocketful of money” (RH 315) and a “treasure” of some 900 sketches that, he feels confident, will “seem infinite” in Buffalo and thus enable him to “get on” as an artist (RH 316). Singleton seems ahead of James, who had told his parents just a few years earlier that he “had too little time to write, to lay up any great treasure to commence with” (CL 1872-76 1: 100). James had laid up some treasure, to be sure, and his productivity was increasing, if not as fast as his aspirations. In sending Singleton home to America and to Buffalo, perhaps James was trying to distance himself from a career outcome that, in 1875, still seemed possible. He was determined not to think of himself as a diminutive artist. Like Roderick, he still meant to “go in for big things” (RH 123), of which Roderick Hudson was the first. James had a lot riding on the novel’s success. The artist in Roderick Hudson who represents the best model for success is Gloriani, a figure of course whom James includes in later works, The Ambassadors (1903) and “The Velvet Glove” (1910). A fortyyear-old American sculptor who has lived in Paris and Rome for years, Gloriani has become commercially successful through fifteen years of “indefatigable exercise” and a “definite, practical scheme of art.” Like James at a slightly older age, at twenty-six Gloriani had “found himself obliged to make capital of his talent.” Now forty, he “knew at least what he meant,” and he pushes the boundaries between “beauty and ugliness,” so that people place his sculptures in a “very corrupt” and even a “positively indecent” school of art (RH 117). In obvious contrast to Sam Singleton and Augusta Blanchard, whose paintings are competent but limited in subject and scale, Gloriani embodies extravagance that recalls someone like Walt Whitman; “hideousness grimaces at you suddenly from out of the very bosom of loveliness, and beauty blooms before your eyes in the lap of vileness” (RH 118). Since Roderick Hudson also aspires to be a large, extravagant artist, Gloriani represents a model, even if his

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practicality runs counter to Roderick’s idealism and his “care only for perfect beauty” (RH 123). James obviously intends to place Roderick and his artistic potential in relief against the other two male artists. In the dinner party scene that Rowland hosts in chapter 6, after the two women (Augusta Blanchard and Madame Grandoni) leave, the men retire to Roderick’s studio, where they stand before his statue of Eve. Through Rowland’s eyes, James describes the “group” of male artists in almost allegorical terms: Roderick, bearing the lamp and glowing in its radiant circle, seemed the beautiful image of a genius which combined sincerity with power. Gloriani, with his head on one side, pulling his long moustache and looking keenly from half-closed eyes at the lighted marble, represented art with a worldly motive, skill unleavened by faith, the mere base maximum of cleverness. Poor little Singleton, on the other side, with his hands behind him, his head thrown back and his eyes following devoutly the course of Roderick’s explanations, might pass for an embodiment of aspiring candour afflicted with feebleness of wing. (RH 127-28)

These are confident judgments, placed along a spectrum designed to show Roderick to best advantage. “In all this,” Rowland concludes, “Roderick’s was certainly the beau rôle” (RH 128). 3 Among other things, this important scene illustrates how careful James was being in exploring and representing artistic possibilities—identities and roles—in his first “big” novel. We can only speculate to what extent James identified with Roderick Hudson or any other character in the novel. I suspect that in Mallet, Hudson, Gloriani, and Singleton he was projecting several possibilities for himself as a male artist at an obviously formative stage of his artistic career. For many readers, Mallet seems most Jamesian, but Roderick’s character, which rises to such idealistic heights and then falls just as far, surely embodied hopes and fears that haunted this early part of his career—the aspiration of brilliance, the specter of failure. Both Gloriani and Singleton, furthermore, enjoy considerable success—reputational and financial—through perseverance and consistent productivity of the sort James demonstrated in the sketches and tales he kept submitting to various periodicals. He knew that he must be diligent in writing and publishing, but he didn’t want to settle for such relative success. Roderick’s over-thetop, Southwest Humor-ish boast to Gloriani does not much exceed a few of James’s own boastful moments in his letters, as in his line to Howells promising some “tall writing.” And even as he recognized Roderick’s

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naiveté, he must have enjoyed and secretly identified with his impossible confidence in his creative power: “We stand like a race with shrunken muscles, staring helplessly at the weights our forefathers easily lifted. But I don’t hesitate to proclaim it—I mean to lift them again! I mean to go in for big things. . . . There was a sensation once common, I am sure, in the human breast—a kind of religious awe in the presence of a marble image newly created and expressing the human type in superhuman purity. When Phidias and Praxiteles had their statues of goddesses unveiled in the temples of the Aegean, don’t you suppose there was a passionate beating of hearts, a thrill of mysterious terror? I mean to bring it back: I mean to thrill the world again! I mean to produce a Juno that will make you tremble, a Venus that will make you grow faint.” (RH 123-24)

James certainly has moments of youthful enthusiasm that anticipate, even if they don’t quite match, Roderick’s larger-than-life self-confidence. In an October 1869 letter, for example, he virtually bursts at the seams as he tries to describe his first impression of Rome to his brother William: From midday to dusk I have been roaming the streets. . . . At last—for the 1st time—I live! It beats every thing: it leaves the Rome of your fancy— your education—nowhere. It makes Venice—Florence—Oxford— London—seem like little cities of paste-board. I went reeling & moaning thro’ the streets, in a fever of enjoyment. In the course of four or five hours I traversed almost the whole of Rome & got a glimpse of everything—the Forum the Coliseum (stupendissimo!) the Pantheon—the Capitol—St. Peter’s—the Column of Trajan—the Castle of St. Angelo—all the Piazzas & ruins & monuments. The effect is something indescribable. For the first time I know what the picturesque is. (CL 1855-72 2: 166)

In this passage James submits to what Bonney MacDonald calls a “Whitmanian stance of wonder before the world of Italian objects and visual impressions” (3), and his “fever of enjoyment” anticipates the “indigestion of impressions” Roderick experiences after three months in Rome (RH 103). “Well, the passion is blazing,” Roderick tells Rowland; “we have been piling on fuel handsomely.” “Surely I haven’t the same face. Haven’t I a different eye, a different expression, a different voice?” (RH 104). It takes Roderick the course of the novel to fall from this selfexalted perch. James tended to swing back and forth between emotional extremes. A week after gushing forth about his first impressions of Rome, he would claim that the “excitement of the 1st hours has passed away & I have recovered the healthy mental equilibrium of the sober practical

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tourist” (CL 1855-72 2: 171). As he tried to find and define himself as a writer, James only sometimes aimed so high. In his letters, as in the novel, he dances around the question of his artistic potential, alternately feeling his writerly oats and fearing himself to be a small-ish writer of sketches and fictions with uncomplicated subjects—wanting to be the precocious Roderick Hudson, “the sort of man one makes one’s hero of,” as Sam Singleton puts it (RH 316), but afraid that his talents are more those of Singleton himself. Taking in (“piling on fuel”) is not the same as putting out, nor is “the healthy equilibrium of the sober practical tourist” the best source of artistic productivity. Playing the tourist worked for the travel sketches James threw off, but fiction and especially a long novel required more sustained effort and greater imaginative energy. The creative turning point, at least in his own mind, comes in a well-known letter to his parents on September 9, 1872. The letter contains not one, but two epiphanies, as he announces his decision to remain in Europe in beatific terms, and expresses confidence that writing can be his profession. “My own desire to remain abroad has by this time taken very definite shape,” he tells them. “In fact, I feel as if my salvation, intellectually & literarilly [sic], depended upon it. I have had too little time to write, to lay up any great treasure to commence with; but I shall need but little to start with & shall be able to add to it fast enough for comfort” (CL 1872-76 1: 100-01). This is James the literary capitalist in the bull market of European experience. “My improvement is going on now at so very rapid a ratio that I feel an almost unbounded confidence in my powers to do & dare. In short, I am really well—am confident of being able to work quite enough to support myself in affluence” (CL 1872-76 1: 101). As noted, James would later reduce his aspirations from affluence to a “very comfortable subsistence,” but here he sounds like Roderick, who nominates himself as the advocate for American art and doesn’t see “why we shouldn’t produce the greatest works in the world.” “I declare,” he cries, “there’s a career for a man, and I have twenty minds to embrace it on the spot—to be the typical, original, national American artist!” (RH 70). James, too, struggled to define himself as an “original” (the word that William had used in his 1874 letter). Like so many tourists, he felt the pressure of belatedness—worrying that he could have nothing to feel or write that had not already been felt or written. In the presence of Michelangelo’s Moses (in San Pietro in Vincoli near the Collosseum), James returned to his “gushing” mode. He admitted to being “so tremendously impressed” with the sublimity of the sculpture that “on the spot my intellect gushed forth a torrent of wisdom & eloquence.” “This

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transcendent ‘something’ invested the Moses this morning with a more melting exalting power that I have ever perceived in a work of art. It was a great sensation—the greatest a work can give. I sat enthralled & fascinated by that serene Aristides at Naples: but I stood agitated this morng. by all the forces of my soul” (CL 1855-72 2: 238, 239). As he describes Roderick Hudson coming to terms with the same sculpture, he tones down the sculptor’s response in order to leave open the possibility that he might equal or even surpass the master. “The other day, when I was looking at Michael Angelo’s Moses,” Roderick tells Rowland, “I was seized with a kind of defiance—a reaction against all this mere passive enjoyment of grandeur. It was a rousing great success, certainly, that sat there before me, but somehow it was not an inscrutable mystery, and it seemed to me, not perhaps that I should some day do as well, but that at least I might!” (RH 104). If James himself did not feel quite the same confidence, he held fast to a high standard. Both William James and William Dean Howells had cautioned him to avoid “over-refinement” in his writing, and he feels some confidence that he can do so. At the same time, he resists (as if he needs to) any temptation to be a common writer. It would not be desirable to work off all of his refinement of style, he tells William, as he defines himself as someone “who must give up the ambition of ever being a freegoing & light-paced enough writer to please the multitude. The multitude, I am more & more convinced, has absolutely no taste—none at least that a thinking man is bound to defer to. To write for the few who have is doubtless to lose money—but I am not afraid of starving” (CL 1872-76 1: 114-15). Still arcing emotionally between the poles of confidence and near despair, he can follow this relatively confident statement with a much more fearful one: “I have a mortal horror of seeming to write thin—& if I ever feel my pen beginning to scratch, shall consider that my death-knell has rung” (CL 1872-76 1: 115). Such a characterization of his writing and his intended audience reinforces one popular view of James as a snobbish, elitist writer. He also seems to exude the sort of sophomoric selfconfidence that we encounter in Roderick Hudson, determined to write “tall” and create “big things,” even as he projects the specter of literary failure and death as a possibility that haunts him. As it turns out, of course, James is right about both the level of refinement he would practice for his career and the level of success he would enjoy. He would not make much money, but he wouldn’t starve. When James returned to America in 1881, he began a new notebook. The opening entry proves especially interesting in this context, for it shows him taking stock of his writerly situation much more confidently

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than he was able to do in the early letters. The entry also makes it clear that he thought of Roderick Hudson and the experiential run-up to its publication as a watershed moment in his career. First, he confirms his decision to live abroad in no uncertain terms. “My choice,” he reflected, “is the old world—my choice, my need, my life” (CN 214). He takes this opportunity to recall and record his European travels over the past decade, culminating in his decision to make London his home: I recall perfectly the maturing of my little plan to get abroad again and remain for years, during the summer of 1875; the summer the latter part of which I spent in Cambridge. It came to me there on my return from New York where I had been spending a bright, cold, unremunerative, uninteresting winter, finishing Roderick Hudson and writing for the Nation. (CN 214)

This particular notebook ends, however, with James back in Europe and reflecting upon his career as a writer, in terms that make him seem more like the Roderick Hudson who tells everyone he has “gone to the devil!” (RH 321) and calls himself “a failure” and a “second-rate, tenthrate” man (RH 322). “I have hours of unspeakable reaction against my smallness of production,” James confesses: my wretched habits of work—or of un-work; my levity, my vagueness of mind, my perpetual failure to focus my attention, to absorb myself, to look things in the face, to invent, to produce, in a word. I shall be 40 years old in April next: it’s a horrible fact! I believe however that I have learned how to work and that it is in moments of forced idleness, almost alone, that these melancholy reflections seize me. When I am really at work, I’m happy, I feel strong, I see many opportunities ahead. It is the only thing that makes life endurable. I must make some great efforts during the next few years, however, if I wish not to have been on the whole a failure. I shall have been a failure unless I do something great! (CN 232-33)

This entry, written in November 1882, neatly captures the manic quality we find in some of the early letters and encounter, writ large, in Roderick Hudson. This early phase of James’s career climaxed remarkably in 1875 with the publication of A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales (one of them being the Italian “Last of the Valerii”) and Transatlantic Sketches (which included the five previously published sketches from Rome). The year also saw publication of Roderick Hudson, serialized (for $1,200) in The Atlantic from January to December 1875 and published in book form in November. James had done an almost miraculous job of capitalizing on his experience and on his three preferred forms of writing: lots of small

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things making big things—and one big thing. Roderick Hudson had been the key—his first “long fiction with a ‘complicated’ subject” (RH 36). But he had hardly rested on his laurels. He had other Roman fictions in his future— and, from the vantage point of this 1882 notebook entry, in his immediate past. How could he ignore what he had just done? He had produced not only Roderick Hudson and the other two 1875 books, but also and most importantly “Daisy Miller,” his most popular work of fiction (published in 1878), and The Portrait of a Lady, certainly one of his great, big and tall novels, which appeared just the year before he could still worry, Roderick Hudson-like, that he would be a failure unless he did something “great!” during the next few years. Volumes like this one would surely confirm for James—albeit posthumously—that he did more than one “great!” thing.

Notes 1

Hawthorne serves James as the original American tourist against whom he eagerly defines his own more sophisticated difference. Having “led exclusively what one may call a village-life,” Hawthorne was “exquisitely and consistently provincial” (HT 147-48). His fault, in James’s view, was remaining an “outsider,” or “stranger,” a “mere spectator” who “lacks the final initiation into the manners and nature of a people” (152). James harshly judges Hawthorne’s lack of appreciation for Italian art, “for which his taste, naturally not keen, had never been cultivated” (160). This deficiency enables James to “think of him as the last specimen of the more primitive type of men of letters” (162). 2 James’s 4 May 1873 letter to his parents offers a representative example of his careful accounting and includes a table listing his income and expenses. “By this rough computation,” he assures them, “I shall by the time this reaches you (I trust) have made about $575 & drawn $640. I owe father therefore $65, about which he will have to wait for, from forthcoming things. . . . But it will take me some time yet to get ahead of my expenses (I mean throw things out whereof the payment shall come in like a revenue.) It will take 6 mos.—or more” (CL 1872-76 1: 280). 3 If James paints a conflicted portrait of Gloriani in Roderick Hudson, he refines the character noticeably in The Ambassadors, where a visit to the “celebrated sculptor” and his “queer old garden” in the Faubourg Saint-Germain in Paris represents a significant treat for Lambert Strether (AM 118). By this point in his career, Gloriani has earned a world-wide reputation for his sculpture; Strether has seen it “in the Luxembourg as well as, more reverently, later on, in the New York of the billionaires.” To Strether’s admiring eye, the “great artist” affects him as a “dazzling prodigy of type,” and as he reflects on his face-to-face meeting with Gloriani and on the “penetrating radiance” in which he was “held by the sculptor’s eyes,” he thinks of them as the “source of the deepest intellectual sounding to which he had ever been exposed” (120). Gloriani’s career in James’s fiction continues on the upswing in “The Velvet Glove,” where he is the “great Gloriani” and enjoys a “supreme artistic position” (736).

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Works Cited Edel, Leon. Henry James: A Life. New York: Harper & Row, 1985. Print. James, Henry. The Ambassadors. 2nd ed. Ed. S. P. Rosenbaum. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994. Print. —. The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1855-1872. 2 vols. Ed. Pierre A. Walker and Greg W. Zacharias. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 2006. Print. —. The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1872-1876. 3 vols. Ed. Pierre A. Walker and Greg W. Zacharias. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 2008-11. Print. —. The Complete Notebooks of Henry James. Ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. Print. —. Hawthorne. London: Macmillan, 1879. Print. —. Roderick Hudson. 1878. New York: Penguin, 1986. Print. —. “The Velvet Glove.” Complete Stories, 1898-1910. New York: Library of America, 1996. 732-59. Print. Lawson, Andrew. “‘Perpetual Capital’: Roderick Hudson, Aestheticism, and the Problem of Inheritance.” Henry James Review 32.2 (2011): 178-91. Print. MacDonald, Bonney. Henry James’s Italian Hours: Revelatory and Resistant Impressions. Ann Arbor and London: UMI Research Press, 1990. Print. Skrupskelis, Ignas K., and Elizabeth M. Berkeley, eds. William and Henry James: Selected Letters. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1997. Print.

 

CHAPTER FOUR ROME AS PURE EXPERIENCE: HENRY’S AND WILLIAM’S EARLY LETTERS SUSAN GUNTER

Both Henry James and William James visited Rome early in their careers, Henry first in 1869 and then William accompanied by Henry in 1873.1 Examining their letters from this period shows both brothers in the process of fashioning their life narratives. As a pair, they create personas that can be viewed as two sides of a split psyche, one an artist who embraced pluralism and rejected the myth of a unified self, the other still under the sway of scientific monism and the myth of the subject position derived from the Enlightenment. Even more, Henry’s responses to his Roman sojourns reveal that he anticipated William’s later philosophy of radical empiricism and pure experience. Henry, further advanced than William in understanding what he would become, articulated in his early letters the collapse of the mind-body split that William strove for decades to overcome. I hypothesize that William’s gradual turn toward his final radical embrace of pure experience and his acknowledgement of the impossibility of Western subjectivity began in Rome, as he observed his younger brother’s willingness to immerse himself in a stream of conscious experience in order to later mimic it in his fiction. The brothers’ respective initial reactions to Rome could not have differed more: Henry fell in love with the ancient city while William found himself horrified by both its past and its present. Several factors (and probably more) account for these differences. Henry was eager to leave America and the constraints of family life in Cambridge; he had also already decided upon his life’s vocation. During these early years he was teaching himself how to become a writer, through reading, writing, and traveling. He embraced new experiences for the value they added to his craft. While he was avowedly lonely during his travels, as he decided where he might live, he relished each encounter with a reality diametrically opposed to the one he had escaped. Though Henry was often

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 lonely when abroad, there is little sense in his letters from this period of profound mental instability or unhappiness. Instead, we detect a latent excitement and an eagerness to respond aesthetically to what he observed. He had rejected narratives of heterosexuality, futurity, a professional career, and family membership (except from afar); he was already firmly set on his life’s path, even though it must have appeared to him at the time as the road less traveled. In Rome, rather than imposing any pre-set constructs upon what he observed, he immersed himself in experience, hoping later to transpose his observations into aesthetic expressions. Henry was happy to lose himself in the city; William was terrified of that very same thing. When he first visited Italy, William had little of his younger brother’s confidence in a viable future. He was still recovering from a nearly-fatal episode of depression, marked by the supposedly fictional representation of a patient confined to a mental hospital, “a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day on one of the benches” (Simon 125). While Linda Simon offers the most complete account possible as to whether William James might have been a patient at the McLean Hospital, she stops short of claiming that he was actually hospitalized there (fn. 121-122). In any case his depression had been severe, and while he had begun teaching anatomy and physiology at Harvard the year before his visit to Rome, he did not feel well enough to resume his duties in the fall of 1873. During the years prior to his journey he had suffered from various physical ailments too, including poor eyesight, back pain, and chronic gastric problems. After convincing his family that he, also, merited travel funds (if Harry were clever enough to gain financial support, so could he), he set sail for Europe to try to solidify his mental and physical health. He clung to the notion of a self, as he struggled to articulate a philosophy that would serve him, and at that time he still adhered to a mind-body split that included scientific observation. He taught in the medical school, and later, when practicing behavioral psychology, posited a world where mental constructs could explain and act upon an observable reality. He believed in individual subjectivity separate from but dominant over an objective world, a stable rational selfhood that he himself had yet to reach. Before looking at what the brothers saw in Rome, it is important to note that first, they encountered a somewhat different city, and second, that Rome during this time was not what Americans trained in the classics anticipated. Henry first visited the city in 1869, the year before the Risorgimento took over the papal fiefdom and made Rome the secularized capital of the “new republic.” While still under French occupation, the city

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was controlled by the Vatican. When William came in the late fall of 1873, the city, however, had been taken and was no longer a theocratic stronghold. Though Pope Pius IX still controlled the Vatican and the Catholic Church, secular authority had replaced ecclesiastical authority. To legitimate its rule, the new national government had to absorb Rome: an independent papal enclave would threaten its authority. In 1870, the city had a population of 200,000, 92,000 of its citizens illiterate. The newspapers had changed, Catholics were forbidden to run for office, and the population had grown rapidly as people, many of them very poor, migrated there from other parts of Italy. At the time Rome had the highest number of prostitutes per capita, and 90 per 1,000 Romans died of typhoid fever annually. As a consequence, the Rome that William visited was different than the one Henry first saw. In the early 1870s, medieval historian Ferdinand Gregorovious announced, “Rome has completely lost its charm” (qtd. in Dumont 479). Educated nineteenth-century American tourists, well versed in the classics, loved the Roman ideals of the republic, “the city on the hill,” but most of them hated contemporary Italians. They had the shock of seeing antiquity become present-day squalor. Also, they thought they could learn from Rome’s fall, from the excesses Romans had practiced, a sort of morality lesson. While they loved Italian art, the Italy they saw outside the churches and museums was filthy (Cottler). Henry saw beyond that; initially, William did not. Henry’s delight at seeing Rome for the first time was virtually boundless. He had a visceral, physical response to the city; in 1904 William, in an essay titled “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?”, would claim that “pure experience” caused such a visceral response. For William, “pure experience” meant “that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything [mind and matter] is composed . . .” (“Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” 1142). According to William Lyons, the most that can be said of pure experience is that it exists “in time in a streaming dynamic manner. Everything else is a conceptual accretion, a metaphysical barnacle” (128-129). What we perceive physically and the conceptions we create are all part and parcel of the same “pure experience,” all made of identical building blocks. Today’s string theory operates under the same principles: all matter is created of loops. Mental operations are merely changes in energy states of these loops, just as our sensory perceptions occur as changes in energy states (Greene). Henry allowed his physical perceptions to dominate his 1869 Roman visit. He wrote to William on 30 October of that year. “I went reeling & moaning thro’ the streets, in a fever of enjoyment” (CL 1855-72 2: 166).

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 He experienced the city intuitively, not trying to impose his own logical structures upon it and realizing the inadequacy of language to convey his experiences. Of the Coliseum he noted the next month to sister Alice, “[I]t must be seen & felt” (CL 1855-72 2: 173). He registered the streaming data before him without trying to categorize it, noting with preciseness his response, a response that comes close to his brother’s early twentiethcentury philosophy of pure experience: “[M]y brain contains as yet but a confused mass of brilliant images which I devoutly trust will be reduced with time to some degree of harmony & logic: but as yet they are barely available for epistolary purposes,” he explained to Cambridge friend Grace Norton (CL 1855-72 2: 194). He confessed to Grace that he had offered up “at least a dozen good round Pagan prayers” at the Pantheon (CL 1855-72 2: 195). Like many Americans, he saw a Rome full of ghosts; he was fascinated by all the ruins and relics of this ancient civilization, he told his mother (CL 1855-72 2: 207-208). Again to his sister he exclaimed, “It [the Pantheon] makes you profoundly regret that you are not a pagan suckled in the creed outworn that produced it” (CL 1855-72 2: 174). He also loved the physicality of Rome when he drove out on to the Campagna, the landscape a conflation of past and present, he confessed to Grace Norton (CL 1855-72 2: 201). Like Walter Benjamin, he advocated immersion in experience as his “guiding imperative”; like Walt Whitman, he was open to the world (Posnock 22, 44). Henry James was fully aware that his consciousness of Rome was mediated by his own past experiences; here also, as seen in another letter to his sister, he anticipated his brother’s later views. “Wherever we go we carry with us this heavy burden of our personal consciousness & wherever we stop we open it out over our heads like a great baleful cotton ombrella [sic], to obstruct the prospect & obscure the light of heaven” (CL 1855-72 2: 126). An impossible subject in his own country, he felt at home here, reveling in Rome’s otherness but not alienated by it. All the while being conscious of being an observer immersed in what he observes, the fledgling writer was also already aware of how his “pure experience” might be transformed into fiction. He told Grace Norton that he planned to use this swarm of effects in future realistic novels (CL 185572 2: 194). He resolved to work hard, harder when he recalled how ignorant he was, he told Alice, to make an active response to the “History” he has observed in Rome (CL 1855-72 2: 172-173). His immersion in the whirlpool of “felt life” (a term he often used in his writing) contrasts with his older brother William’s attempts to rationalize reality. And Henry saw Rome’s history and present reality as one continuous scene; William James would later claim that continuity of experience, emphasizing

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transitions and not disjunctions, was one of the most important characteristics of radical empiricism. What of William’s first visit? He later noted in his massive Principles of Psychology, in the chapter titled “The Stream of Thought,” the experience of four men traveling to Europe and bringing home entirely different impressions, using, as he often did, metaphors involving artists. “Each has selected, out of the same mass of presented objects, those which suited his private interest and has made his experience thereby” (Principles I: 287). While Henry was happy to lose his Western Enlightenment self in the city and its environs, William became terrified of losing his tenuous grip on a self still struggling to recover from massive depression. Reading his early letters of 1873, we see a very different response from his brother’s. Though the city had changed since 1869, and the shock of the present was greater and more abhorrent, as a whole the historical Roman elements were essentially similar to the ones Henry had viewed in 1869. Henry’s happy immersion in the whirlpool of Rome contrasted with William’s attempts to rationalize what he saw about sights that frequently disturbed him. Still operating under teleological narratives inspired by his father, the older brother presents a moralizing response to this city in flux, falling back on a monist position in an attempt to categorize and thus control its unruly oppositions. His initial impulse was to flee this sensory overload and bury himself in his physiological texts, he confided in a letter to sister Alice (Correspondence IV: 458). He had only too recently climbed from crippling mental illness to dare risk losing himself in this welter of experience. Like his brother, he thought, he could articulate, at least in part, his reaction: “all this dead civilization,” he told Alice in November 1873, forced his consciousness open (as the knife opens the unwilling oyster, he claims) as it registered “raw and disconnected empirical materials” (Correspondence IV: 458). The difference was that while Henry took energy from his observations, William recoiled. Despite realizing that what he sees in Rome had no innate connections other than what he creates (those “transitions” he later lauded as an integral part of reality), he does find metanarratives that explain the experience his consciousness has registered, metanarratives of morality and religion. In direct contradiction to Henry, that would-be pagan, William, beats a safe retreat to Protestantism/Swedenborgianism. On the initial approach to Rome, the hill towns he views from the train windows engender a marked moral revulsion. He wrote to his father that “so wicked & venomous did they [the hill villages] look, huddled together and showing their teeth as it were to the world” that he longed for Henry Sr.’s morally conscious response of “certain hearty and picturesque expletives”

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 (Correspondence IV: 461-462), perhaps also a bid for his father’s approval. In another remark suggestive of the warring metanarratives he was in the process of sorting out, he sees these poverty-stricken Italian villages as illustrative of Social Darwinism: “[T]hey make one realize how man’s life is based historically on sheer force & will & fight, and how the inner ideal world only grows up inside & under the shelter of these brute tendencies” (Correspondence IV: 462). He found the Colosseum equally repellent: “Finally when we entered under the mighty coliseum wall and stood in its mysterious midst, with that cold sinister half moon and hardly a star in the deep blue sky—it was all so strange and I must say inhuman & horrible that it felt like a nightmare” (Correspondence IV: 462). Though claiming to be “anti-Christian” in that same letter, he confessed to finding relief in the black cross planted there. The scene may have represented an objective correlative for his own recent feared slide into madness. Disturbed by paganism, at first he finds St. Peter’s equally objectionable, calling it “a monument of human pride insolence, presumption,” and he identifies with Martin Luther, who saw “in Rome the incarnation of Satan” (Correspondence IV: 462). The Catholic Church had negated the Gospel it claimed to follow. Like his brother, William foregrounds his conscious response, writing to his father that his “moral way of taking things may seem very narrow minded” (Correspondence IV: 462). Nearly overwhelmed by the evidence of evil around him, however, he can only recoil and fall back upon a worn credo scarcely relatable to his recent embrace of scientism. He clings to the myth of a rational, moral self that could overcome and explain history’s tragic events. As Ross Posnock has noted, “he celebrated the sanctity of the individual in all his idiosyncrasy” (35). On his second visit to the Colosseum that same month, William moderated his response, writing to his brother Robertson that his grasp of history was more mutable now than his previous intellectual understanding of Rome’s ancient past had been.2 Though he still saw the Catholic Church as doomed, to Bob he proposed an Enlightenment notion of progress, supposing that new life would spring up on the ruins of the Catholic Church, just as the Church had improved upon “the Roman games of blood” (Correspondence IV: 466). Though he is repulsed by the Jewish ghetto, he had begun to find St. Peters and the Colosseum “favorable specimens of human capacity” and he liked the common people, he informed Catherine Havens, a friend he had met in Germany (Correspondence IV: 464). Rome, and seeing Henry see Rome, had changed him already: he rejected any single truth that purports to explain this reality. He wrote to Alice: “It’s the most idiotic thing to say on thing about either antiquity or civilization. Nothing is true unless with the

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admission that its opposite is also true” (Correspondence IV: 475). He did, however, still believe in the mind-body split in 1873, a split that, as Martin Jay claims, allows the physical world to be manipulated cognitively (261), a process that Henry James eschewed. The brothers’ visit to Rome was cut short when William contracted a mild case of malaria and they fled to the relative safety of Florence, where Henry became ill—“bilious.” Not long after William decamped abruptly, going first to Dresden, Germany, and then leaving Europe for home at the end of February 1874. His health had improved, and the next fall he returned to full-time teaching at Harvard, focusing first on anatomy and physiology and soon turning to behavioral psychology. While yet in Rome near the end of 1873, Henry wrote to his father commenting on his older brother’s initial revulsion at the sights and his subsequent acceptance of them, proclaiming in a joshing tone that William “enjoys all the mealancholy [sic] of antiquity under a constant protest, which pleases me as a symptom of growing optimism & elasticity in his own disposition” (CL 1872-76 2: 84). They exhibited diametrically opposed responses to their touring: William, as Ralph Barton Perry claimed, “looked behind the scenes for causes . . . [or] governing purposes” (46). Harry told his brother, when advocating that William come to Italy, that his own advice to himself was to “Get your impressions now; you may never have another chance; & use them afterward” (CL 1872-76 1: 292)— the message he had given himself once and now repeated for his older brother. Long before William stated that consciousness was breathing in his 1904 essay, “Does Consciousness Exist,” in January 1873 Henry wrote to William that he experienced Rome as a natural breathing process: “Generally, what one feels and inhales, naturally & easily, with every breath, is the importunate presence of tradition of every kind” (CL 187276 1: 179). Henry also anticipated William’s findings in the 1902 Varieties of Religious Experience, telling Charles Eliot Norton, in the spring before his brother visited Italy, that the persistence of religious passion in Rome, despite the difficulties it posed, is a sign that faith is an integral part of human nature (CL 1872-76 1: 252). Rather than experiencing a moral frisson at Catholicism, in Italian Hours he confesses that he had embraced it, regretting the “new” Rome after 1870 that lacked the pageantry and carnivalesque spirit (Henry James, “A Roman Holiday”). Calling William “my sternly scientific brother,” he wrote to Howells, in January 1874, that William had found Henry’s method of experiencing Rome “very bad” (CL 1872-76 2: 102). Ironically, this “badness” may have influenced William’s subsequent philosophy. A year before, in 1873 when fledgling writer Henry once again had totally immersed himself in the city, as he had in

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 1869, he had told Howells, “it all came rushing back, in a wondrous wave, and melted me into daily stupefaction” (CL 1872-76 2: 102). He rejected any totalizing discourses that would limit his ability to process the external world. Henry’s late fiction, in fact, represents consciousness as dissolution of the oppositions of self and reality, the overcoming of the mind-body split that William strove to achieve in his late philosophy. Again according to Posnock, “The border between inner and outer experience, like that of self and other, is continually blurred in James’s late works” (103). The very structure of that work represents the flux of reality, as James gives his readers few signposts to guide them in his imaginative worlds of experience. His solution to conceptualizing the flux that his brother hypothesized was to create his own aesthetic worlds that connect seemingly disparate parts of reality. He claimed in the Preface to Roderick Hudson that “relations stop nowhere,” but that it is the artist’s duty to try to arrange them in an aesthetically pleasing form: “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” (LC2 1041). In 1874 William wrote to Henry from Cambridge, Massachusetts, that he regretted not having enjoyed Rome more: “I also loathe myself for my divided interest in things while I was in Italy. I was too weak for my circumstances” (Correspondence I: 226). He registered and stored his brother’s response to the “pure experience,” of Rome, though. Any influence Henry may have had on William’s developing thought took decades to manifest. In Principles of Psychology, begun that same decade that he and Henry visited Rome together, though not published until 1890, William still held to a separate consciousness that could actively select items of interest to itself from a physical world. In the Preface he assumes three things: thoughts and feelings; a physical world in time and space; and thoughts and feelings that know this physical world. Later in this same volume he explains how the mind works upon reality. At this point in his career, he viewed mind and body as separate, the mind dominating a physical reality. “The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone” (Principles I: 288). William James assumes human volition and the ability to shape experience through acts of will. Henry, too, shaped his experiences through his creative acts, though in Rome he first allowed himself a total immersion in experience. In many ways the brothers anticipated and reflected on one another’s thought patterns in their late work: Henry’s fiction an aesthetic expression of William’s philosophy.

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By the early 1900s, William James had rejected the views of consciousness he stated in Principles, that the mind could act upon and control the world that it experienced, and had embraced instead a philosophy that rejected that mind-body split. In “Does Consciousness Exist?” he stated that thoughts are a physical occurrence, but “consciousness” is a fictional entity (1141). His sense of consciousness as explained in Essays in Radical Empiricism, a posthumously published work, postulated a vast field very like Einstein’s, a universe not bounded by linear time and space but by a deeper reality that could only be realized when the artificial center of a “self” was removed, according to Jonathan Bricklin (74). He had seen his brother’s absorption in Rome’s empirical world and ultimately arrived at a philosophical position where all sensory perceptions, all knowledge, all science existed within experience dependent on being known by human consciousness. According to Eugene Taylor, William James emphasized the immediacy of the perceiver: “Since objects depend on the immediate, hereand-now consciousness of the perceiver, objectivity, for James, is not the suppression of the subject, but the recognition that what we see is a seamless enterprise between the internal and the external” (Taylor xviii). Experience was a continuum, past merging with present. He saw “prime reality” not as an objective world outside of the self but as a stream of pure experiences that follow upon each other and become entangled in infinitely shifting and growing relationships (Bricklin 85). Though contemporary views on William’s theories of consciousness have been modified to include a self-guided development through processes of social representation, according to Valsiner, the conscious self still is not an isolated entity or subjectivity, “but a process of coordination of different dynamic components” (Valsiner 3). That a dynamic self can be structured through narrative, shaped by the discourses one experiences and continuous with experiential reality, is a belief that might have begun as William saw Henry see Rome.

Notes 1

My most important debt in this essay is to Pierre Walker and Greg Zacharias for editing The Complete Letters of Henry James. This herculean project has already given us five beautifully edited volumes, and without them, it would have been impossible for me to write this paper. Generations of scholars will bow down to them. For seminal ideas, I am indebted to Ross Posnock’s The Trial of Curiosity. 2 An interesting choice of words, as Darwin used the phrase “mutability of species,” and the theme of mutability was a commonplace of early philosophical and literary writing, referring to the inconstancy of human affairs as opposed to the heavenly or divine.

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 Works Cited Bricklin, Jonathan. “Consciousness Already There Waiting to Be Uncovered.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 17.11-12 (2010): 6292. Academic Search Premier. Web. 24 February 2012. Cottler, Susan. Personal Interview. 13 March 2011. Dumont, Dora. “The Nation As Seen From Below: Rome in 1870.” European Review of History 15.5 (2008): 479-496. Academic Search Premier. Web. 20 February 2011. Greene, Brian. The Elegant Universe. New York: Random House, 2000. Print. James, Henry. The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1855-1872. 2 vols. Ed. Pierre A. Walker and Greg W. Zacharias. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2006. Print. —. The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1872-1876. 2 Vols. Ed. Pierre A. Walker and Greg W. Zacharias. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2009. Print. —. Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, the Prefaces to the New York Edition. New York: The Library of America, 1984. Print. —. “A Roman Holiday.” Italian Hours. 1909. Project Gutenberg. Web. 8 February 2012. James, William. The Correspondence of William James. William and Henry. 1861-1884. Vol. I. Ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1992. Print. —. The Correspondence of William James. 1856-1877. Vol. IV. Ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1995. Print. —. “Does Consciousness Exist?” Writings 1902-1910. New York: The Library of America, 1987. 1141-1158. Print. —. Principles of Psychology. 2 vols. New York: Dover Publications, 1950. Print. Jay, Martin. Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme. Berkeley: U of California P, 2005. Print. Lyons, William. “The Great Apostasy? William James’s 1904 Denial of the Existence of Consciousness.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 17.9-10 (2010): 117-140. Academic Search Premier. Web. 9 March 2011. Perry, Ralph Barton. William James. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt UP, 1996. Print.

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Posnock, Ross. The Trial of Curiosity. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. Print. Simon, Linda. Genuine Reality: A Life of William James. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1998. Print. Taylor, Eugene. Introduction. Pure Experience: The Response to William James. Ed. Eugene Taylor and Robert H. Wozniak. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1996. ix-xxxii. Print. Valsiner, Jaan. “Consciousness as a Process: The Loneliness of William James to the Buzzing and Booming Voice of Contemporary Science.” Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science 42.1 (2008): 1-5. Academic Search Premier. Web. 20 March 2011.

 

CHAPTER FIVE ROME CHANGING: JAMES’S “LUGUBRIOUS MODERN CAPITAL” ROSELLA MAMOLI ZORZI

Henry James frequently visited Rome over a long period of time, from 1869 to 1907. On his second visit, in 1872-1873, he could start observing the radical changes Rome was undergoing and was to undergo: in 1871 Rome had become the new capital of united Italy, after Turin and Florence. The transferral of the capital from Florence to Rome was decided on February 3, 1871, and the actual change became effective on June 30, 1871 (Casciato 135). There were immediate plans to make Rome a real capital, to “guarantee the carrying out in vivo of the political design” (Caracciolo 199), which was at the basis of the choice of a new, significant capital. It was imperative that Rome become a modern city in every respect, notably also from the point of view of architecture and urban planning. New buildings were needed for the various “Ministeri” and offices; new housing for the people working in them (Bartolini 18); new quarters, new roads, new bridges. In the second half of the 19th century, moreover, “the extraordinary development of sciences” had evidenced the “non-random character of environmental pathologies”; the prevention of epidemics was now linked to “structural remedies, such as sewers, healthy housing and green spaces” (Zucconi 62). This was a particularly important issue for Rome, where the medieval narrow spaces—as picturesque as they might have been considered—were an important part of the city. Rome’s first draft of “piano regolatore” (city plan) by the architect Camporesi (Sica 465) was approved on November 28, 1871, and the following one, the first official one, “Roma moderna” (Piano Viviani, Sica 469), was approved in 1873. Only this second plan presented proposals of new roads cutting through the old city (Sica 469). However, neither became law and the new urban plan became a reality only in 1883:

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nevertheless, between 1873 and 1883 a massive transformation of the city was undertaken, with private investments and scandals. Just to give a few examples of the needs of the new capital, spaces were needed for the new “Ministeri,” which were temporarily placed in expropriated convents, waiting for buildings to be raised to house them. For instance, the Ministry of War was placed in the convent of Santi Apostoli, the Ministry of the Navy in the Convent of Sant’Agostino, and the Ministry of Finances in S. Andrea della Valle (Casciato 138-139). The huge “Ministero delle Finanze” was built on the newly named Via XX Settembre between 1872 and 1876 (Consoli, Pasquali 253), and the Palazzo delle Esposizioni was built between 1877 and 1883 on Via Nazionale. Another huge building, the Banca d’Italia (Palazzo Koch, also on Via Nazionale), was built between 1878 and 1894, while the department-store Bocconi (now La Rinascente) was built between 1881 and 1889, and the Palazzo di Giustizia between 1888 and 1911 (Pasquali 254, 253, 261). Other modernizations included the opening of new roads or the enlarging of old ones: among these the cutting of Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, entailing also the destruction of the Teatro del Pavone; the enlarging of the central part of Via del Corso and Via del Tritone; the cutting of Via Arenula; the opening of Via Cavour (Miano 275, 277); the opening of the Viale del Re (1883, now Viale Trastevere) in Trastevere, which entailed the destruction of whole areas (Piano regolatore of 1883); and the opening of the Via Nazionale, whose definitive plan was approved in 1876 (Sica 470). In terms of vast destruction of old city areas, one can mention the whole expanse which included Piazza Venezia and the Via dei Fori Imperiali, destroyed in order to make room for the enormous monument to King Vittorio Emanuele II, first king of Italy, the “Vittoriano” (decided upon by law on July 25, 1880), whose construction began in March 1885 (Casciato 152-153); the construction of the so called “Tiber Muraglioni,” started in 1875 (Casciato 154), entailing the destruction of picturesque Tiber banks, of the Torre degli Alberteschi, and of the Church of San Salvatore, in addition to the Teatro Tordinona, then called Apollo (destroyed in 1888); the destruction of the Villa Boncompagni-Ludovisi on the Pincio, sold in 1883-85 to the Società Generale Immobiliare, destroyed by 1887 together with its centuries-old “Horti Sallustiani” (Miano 279-281, Casciato 149, Ramieri 23-24). The medieval ghetto was in great part destroyed in 1885 (Sica 474). An amazing number of new bridges was planned. The new iron bridge at Ripetta, Ponte di Ripetta, was inaugurated on March 14, 1878 (Miano



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277). Ponte Umberto I opened in 1885, Ponte Garibaldi in 1888, Ponte Palatino and Ponte Regina Margherita were built between 1886 and 1891, Ponte Cavour between 1891 and 1896, and Ponte Vittorio Emanuele (project of 1886) opened in 1911. Among other projects were the changes to Piazza del Popolo (1878-79), with the tearing down of two medieval towers. One more, minor, but culturally highly significant issue of “modernization” was the uprooting of herbs and wild flowers from the crevices of the Colosseum, which took place around 1871 (Fiorini Mazzanti 31; Caneva 29), depriving many passionate pilgrims who visited the ruinous monument of the picturesque evoked by the wild flora. R. Deakin, in an 1873 book on the plants of the Colosseum, observed that many of the plants have been destroyed, from the restorations and alterations that have been made in the ruins; a circumstance that cannot but be lamented. To preserve a further falling of any portion is most desirable, but to carry the restorations, and the brushing and cleaning to the extent to which it has been subjected, is to destroy the impression and solitary lesson which so magnificent a ruin is calculated to make upon the mind. (vii; emphasis added)

The “impression” of the Colosseum, seen by James in 1869, still unshorn of its wild herbs and flowers, did work on the writer’s mind and imagination, furnishing him with the metaphor of the Alpine crag, which Roderick Hudson climbs in order to pick the blue flower for Christina Light, a metaphor that becomes tragically real at the end of the novel when the Alpine cliff is the cause of Roderick’s death. One, however, must also remember that many of the ongoing works brought to light new findings, such as Roman road pavings and villas; even the works of the “Muraglioni” brought out statues from the Tiber. On November 8, 1870, a decree of the king created the “Sovrintendenza per gli scavi,” which also aimed at preventing private owners from excavating and keeping the objects they had found—thanks to the provisional enactment of the Pacca decree of 1820, which lasted till 1909 (Ramieri 18, 19). According to the law, the Juno in “The Last of the Valerii” (1874) could not have been dug up and kept secret (even from the German archaeologist) and buried again, as the painter narrator seems to acknowledge when he says: “We were out of the modern world and had no business with modern scruples” (“The Last of the Valerii” 805). To summarize: a massive effort to modernize the city went on during James’s visits to Rome, from his second visit (1872-73), through to his



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third visit (1877), fourth visit (1881), fifth visit (1899), and final visit (1907). *** As mentioned above, James’s awareness of the changes going on in Rome can be traced back to his second visit of 1872-73. In a letter to his father on Christmas day 1872 this is very clear: I have therefore been here but a complete day; long enough, however, to recognize Rome—& its changes. These are numerous—almost painful; & consist not so much in special alterations as in a kind of modernized air in the streets, a multiplication of shops, carts, newspaper=stalls &c, & an obscuration of cardinals’ carriages and general picturesqueness. It all promises me great pleasure, however. . . . (CL 1872-76 1: 163; emphasis added)

The city is “much less simply & sensuously & satisfyingly picturesque than before, but on the whole immensely interesting” (179). In the 1878 essay, “Very Modern Rome,” after an abstract reference to the “despoilment and defilement” of Rome (755), James mentions some specific places. The railway station, started in 1864 (Miano 273), but enlarged by 1873 on the site of the destroyed Villa Peretti (La Greca 173-4), according to James was no longer “as mouldering a corner of Rome as any other,” rich in the picturesque, but now “as ugly, as vulgar, as effectually drained of local color, as the most enterprising of syndics can desire” (“Very Modern Rome” 755), a “third-rate imitation of the Boulevard Haussmann” represented by the Via Nazionale, the “cockneyfied” Pincian. For the sake of truth, one should remember that Haussmann1 was consulted about the new Rome, following minister Quintino Sella’s worries, and that Haussman’s idea was that old Rome should remain intact and that a new Rome should be built on Monte Mario, without defacing the old city (Sica 465) In the spring of 1880, during his brief stop in Rome on the way to Naples, James wrote to Grace Norton in partly-detailed terms, referring to the same changes, as well as to the new Ponte di Ripetta: Rome has much of the old charm, but it had not all of it. The air of the modern watering-place has invaded it to a very sensible degree, and the government are doing everything that the most diabolical ingenuity can suggest to destroy the dear old purely Roman quality. The enormous crowds, the new streets, the horse-cars (you might think yourself in Brattle Street!) the ruination of the Coliseum, the hideous iron-bridge over the



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Tiber, the wholesale desecration of the Pincio, etc., are all so many deathblows to the picturesque. Nevertheless, of a lovely spring day, the place is still capable of exciting an agreeable emotion, and I could easily make shift to spend the next two months here. (HJL II: 283; emphasis added)

More than ten years later, in William Wetmore Story and his Friends (1903), James registered what had happened between his first visit during the Oecumenical Council of 1869 and the following period. The city had become “the Rome of which the rough hand of history has so grievously deprived the merely modern pilgrim” (WWS 1: 93): The Oecumenical Council of 1869, whatever other high matters it settled or failed to settle, was the making at least of a perpetual many-coloured picture—the cast, rich canvas in which Italian unity was, as we may say, to punch a hole that has never been repaired. The hole to-day in Rome is bigger than almost anything else we see, and the main fortune of our predecessors in general was just in their unconsciousness of any blank space. The canvas was then crowded, the old-world presence intact. (WWS 1: 93-94; emphasis added)

James underlines the presence of the “hole,” the “blank space,” but also his predescessors’ felicitous “unconsciousness” of what would follow. Though James continues by underlining that the “saints, the processions, the cardinals, all the Catholic pomp, have retired from the foreground,” and have been replaced by “the gods of Greece and of Rome, the statues of the heroes, the fragments of the temples, the rutted slabs of the old pavements,” these additions do not seem enough to fill the “hole,” the “blank” space—the absence of the picturesque—evoked abundantly in the rest of the chapter (and of the book). James’s “consciousness” of the changes taking place in Rome was in fact immediate, as we have seen in his 1872 letter to his father. Moreover, we know that as early as in 1873 he was aware of another significant change taking place in the city, the emergence of new lay newspapers, e.g., La Capitale: Gazzetta di Roma (“profanely radical”), La Libertà, Il Fanfulla, in addition to the old papal newspapers, L’Osservatore Romano and La Voce della Verità (IH 123). James’s remarks, however, tend to be abstract, even in the 1880 essay, in spite of his explicit reference to a few places: “modernized air,” “despoilment and defilement,” the “desecration of the Pincio,” not to mention the 1903 text, indicating the “hole” and the “blank” in the rich canvas, or a letter of May 30, 1907, where he writes to his brother about “the abatements and changes and modernisms and vulgarities” of the city (HJL IV: 449). James avoids referring to specific sites or buildings: the



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reader has no indication of what causes the city’s “modernized air,” of what is meant by the “desecration of the Pincio” (1880), or by the “hole,” or the “blank” of 1903. If the reader does not know about the destruction of the Villa Ludovisi on the Pincio, where Christina meets Roderick for the first time in Roderick Hudson, a villa and a garden which James had visited and described in his 1873 essay, “The After-Season in Rome” (IH 171), he does not learn about it here; the hole or the blank space might signify anything, the destroyed Villa Ludovisi, the razed area of Piazza Venezia or that of the Trastevere. What James keeps looking for in Rome is, as is well-known, the “picturesque” of his first visit of 1869, when it was amply furnished by the Oecumenical Council and its participants; the picturesque of the Campagna romana of “Roman Rides” (1873); and that of every mouldering corner of the old city. His eye and his pen eschew the ugly modernizations—no mention of the new buildings ever appears—which are killing off the picturesque. Two quotations from the 1875 and the New York Edition (1907) of Roderick Hudson show James’s eye for and insistence on the cancellation of the picturesque: Rowland went very often to the Coliseum; he was never tired of inspecting that monument. (RH, 1875 202) Rowland went very often to the Coliseum; he had established with this monument and with its exuberance of ruin, in those days all untrimmed, a relation of the tenderest intimacy. (RH, 1907 191; emphasis added) There are accidents of ruggedness in the upper portions of the Coliseum which offer a very fair imitation of the mighty excrescences in the face of an Alpine cliff. In those days a multitude of delicate flowers and sprays of wild herbage had found a friendly soil in the hoary crevices, and they bloomed and nodded amid the antique masonry as naturally as if it were the boulders of a mountain. (RH 1875 203; emphasis added) There are accidents of ruggedness in the upper portions of the Coliseum which offer a very fair imitation of the large excrescences on some Alpine face. In those days a multitude of delicate flowers and sprays of wild herbage had found a friendly soil in the hoary crevices, and they bloomed and nodded as on the shoulders of a mountain. (RH, 1907 192; emphasis added)

The differences between the 1875 and the 1907 New York Edition are notable. In the later text there is an added sentence in the first quotation— “in those days all untrimmed”—and in the second quotation, in spite of



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some slight changes, the reference to the past (“In those days”) is present in both editions. As James himself wrote in the Preface to Roderick Hudson, the novel was “begun in Florence in the spring of 1874” (RH, NYE xliv); therefore it was written after James’s second visit to Rome (1872-73). As we have seen, among the efforts to renew the city, there was also the freeing of the Coliseum of its vegetation. This project, together with other excisions of the picturesque, excited a great deal of protest (Syrjamaa 135).2 This cleaning out of the Colosseum is what James hints at in Roderick Hudson (1875), using the same metaphors he had used in the July 1873 essay, “A Roman Holiday”: One of course never passes the Colosseum without paying it one’s respects—without going in under one of the hundred portals and crossing the long oval and sitting down a while, generally at the foot of the cross in the center >where Daisy Miller sat before midnight@. I always feel, as I do so, as if I were seated in the depths of some Alpine valley. The upper portions of the side towards the Esquiline look as remote and lonely as an Alpine ridge, and you raise your eyes to the rugged sky-line, drinking in the sun and silvered by the blue air, with much the same feeling with which you would take in a grey cliff on which an eagle might lodge. This roughly mountainous quality of the great ruin is its chief interest; beauty of detail has pretty well vanished, especially since the high-growing wildflowers have been plucked away by the new government, whose functionaries, surely, at certain points of their task, must have felt as if they shared the dreadful trade of those who gather samphire. (IH 129-130; emphasis added)3

This uprooting of “delicate flowers and sprays of wild herbage” is part of the cancellation of that very category of the “picturesque” which James was looking for and enjoying in Italy and in Rome, but also in France (A Little Tour in France bristles with references to the picturesque). In 1878 James returned to the subject in his essay “Very Modern Rome,” showing that he was aware he was not the only one to resent this cleaning out of the Colosseum: . . . there are other members of the contemplative colony whose sense of injury is both acute and constant, and for whom the retirement of the monks and cardinals, the removal of the wild shrubs from the crevices of the Colosseum and the Baths of Caracalla, the application of a coat of red paint to the halls of the Capitol, and two or three other revolutionary measures of equal moment, are so many chapters in a terrific impeachment of the House of Savoy . . . (755; emphasis added)



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James’s appreciation of Rome continues to be based on the “picturesque,” even if it tends to disappear, killed off by the new city; but Rome has enough in store to remain a “wondrous city.” One may wonder whether James’s love of the picturesque in Rome, as expressed in his letters and essays, differs from the representation and function of the city in his novels and stories, where Rome, as observed by Giorcelli back in 1968, is the place of death or suffering, as in Daisy Miller or The Portrait of a Lady. The difference is expressed by James himself, when he writes, after observing that some “mean, mouldering villas behind grass-grown courts have an indefinably sinister look,” that “their charm, for the maker-out of the stories in things is the way the golden air shows off their desolation” (IH 147; emphasis added). James is the maker-out of the stories in things, Roman or other, and in his fiction he uses the “desolation” more than “the golden air” of his own personal experience of the city. *** The question regarding James’s relationship with, and attitude towards, the modernity of Rome due to its new status as capital, is whether it was totally negative—as we have seen—or whether James acknowledged some positive factor. In spite of his resenting the diminishing presence of the picturesque, James in fact admitted to the opening up of a new future for Italy. In 1878 he recognized that the title of a picture by painter O’Gogstay in Thackeray’s novel The Newcomes (1855), “A Contadino dancing with a Trasteverina at the door of a Locanda, to the music of a Pifferaro,” indicated the way in which “the world has hitherto seen fit to represent young Italy” (IH 103). In spite of his love for the picturesque, he realized this was a cliché in the representation of Italy. He saw a future Italy, different from the traditional Italy which he loved: “I see a new Italy in the future which in many important respects will equal, if not surpass, the most enterprising sections of our native land” (IH 103); “an Italy united and prosperous, but altogether scientific and commercial” (104). However, in spite of his opening up to seeing a new future for Italy, Rome remained the “wondrous old Rome,” perhaps because “the local color of a drive on the Appian way” could always compensate for its changes. The modernity of Rome was not that of Paris, as he wrote to his father in 1873 (January 8): Every thing Italian & especially everything Roman, that is not a ruin, a landscape or a museum has such a deadly provinciality & more than American dreariness, that in coming here with a mindful of Parisian



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memories, one seems to have turned one’s back on modern civilization. (CL 1872-76 1: 178)

In the 1873 essay “Roman Rides,” James seems instead to appreciate the very modernity he otherwise ignores. In spite of the “dark side” of the picture presented by the high number of Americans whom James did see, Rome is described as a pleasant modern city: To dwell in a city which, much as you grumble at it, is after all very fairly a modern city; with crowds and shops and theatres and cafés and balls and receptions and dinner-parties, and all the modern confusion of social pleasures and pains. (IH 140; emphasis added)

And to be able to leave it behind and ride in the Campagna, seeing “the shaggy-legged shepherds leaning on their sticks in motionless brotherhood with the heaps of ruins” makes Rome as wondrous as ever (IH 140). The picturesque in fact returns (the shepherds and the ruins), but the social conveniences of a modern city seem to have some weight; modernity here is constituted by social, not architectural changes. James, therefore, does not seem to appreciate architectural changes, which, in his view, instead of sanitizing the mouldering quarters—as was the intention of the new government—only deprive the city of its picturesque character; he appreciates the social modern city, to a point. But above all, in his ever-lucid awareness of self, James recognizes that it is not only the city that has changed, but that he himself has too. This is what he writes to his sister in 1877, during his third Roman visit: “Rome is as yet very void of the herd of strangers, and abating the hideous cockneyfications that are going on, ought to be very delightful. But it has changed, and I have changed” (HJL 2: 141; emphasis added). Rome has changed James, as his letters to Hendrik Andersen show, allowing him a freer, erotic expression, which echoes that of his very first, so often quoted, 1869 impression of the city: “At last—for the 1st time—I live!” (CL 1855-72 2: 166). James’s enchantment with the city lasts to the end, in spite of its architectural and urban modernizations, because of the weight of history and the Borgia cup which seem to make Rome attractive as the city of death in the novels; because Rome was not a “colossal readymade city” as those planned by Hendrik Andersen (Beloved Boy 101).4 As late as 1909, James recaptures the sensuous enchantment of Rome (MacDonald 101), which seems to defeat the negative impressions of the cockneyfied city (Mamoli Zorzi 452): “An evening meal spread in the warm still darkness that made no candle flicker, on the wide high space of an old loggia that overhung, in one quarter, the great obelisked Square



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preceding one of the Gates, and in the other the Tiber and the far Trastevere” (IH 204). The aim here is to summon up an atmosphere of ease and peace, a realism of memory, one could say, which allows the citation of specific places. The old wondrous Rome survives through the years of James’s visits in his consciousness, and in his memory, defeating the “lugubrious” character of the new capital (CL 1872-76 1: 179).

Notes 1 In spite of Haussmann’s deplorable canceling of whole medieval areas to build the grand Paris boulevards, one must remember that his plans entailed “the reorganization of water pipes and other underground services, of traffic and its connection to the railway systems, the planning and designing of communal architectures such as general markets, schools, hospitals” (Zucconi 33). 2 A Roman artist, Ettore Roesler Franz, painted watercolors of “Roma sparita.” One can see them at the Museo di Roma in Trastevere. 3 “Halfe way downe / Hangs one that gathers samphire; dreadful trade!” (King Lear 4.6.55; IH 130. 4 “Cities are living organisms, that grow from within & by experience & piece by piece; they are not bought all hanging together, in any inspired studio anywhere whatsover, and to attempt to plank one down on its area prepared, as even just merely projected, for use is to—well, it’s to go forth into the deadly Desert & talk to the winds” (Beloved Boy 102). Andersen’s huge projects for ideal new cities can be better understood if one keeps in mind the plans for the renewal of Rome that were still going on at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Works Cited Bartolini, Francesco. “Condizioni di vita e identità sociali: nascita di una metropoli.” Storia di Roma dall’antichità ad oggi. Roma Capitale. Ed. Vittorio Viadotto. Bari: Laterza, 2002. 3-36. Print. Caneva, Giulia, ed. Amphiteatrum Naturae, Il Colosseo: Storia e ambiente letti attraverso la sua flora. Milano: Electa, 2004. Print. Casciato, Maristella. “Lo sviluppo urbano della città.” Storia di Roma dall’antichità ad oggi. Roma Capitale. Ed. Vittorio Viadotto. Bari: Laterza, 2002. 125-172. Print. Consoli, Gian Paolo, and Susanna Pasquali. “Roma; l’architettura della capitale.” Storia dell’architettura italiana. L’Ottocento. Ed. Amerigo Restucci. Milano: Electa, 2005. 230-271. Print. Deakin, Robert. Flora of the Colosseum of Rome; Illustrations and Descriptions of 420 Plants Spontaneously Growing upon the Ruins of the Colosseum of Rome. London: Groombridge & Sons, 1873. Print.



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Fiorini, Elisabetta. Florula. Roma: Atti dell’Accademia pontificia di scienze e arti, 1874. Print. Giorcelli, Cristina. Henry James e l’Italia. Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1968. Print. James, Henry. Beloved Boy. Letters to Hendrik C. Andersen 1899-1915. Ed. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi. Introd. Millicent Bell. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2004. Print. —. The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1855-1872. 2 vols. Eds. Pierre A. Walker and Greg W. Zacharias. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2006. Print. —. The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1872-1876. 3 vols. Eds. Pierre A Walker and Greg W. Zacharias. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2008. Print. —. “The Last of the Valerii.” Complete Stories 1864-1874. Ed. Jean Strouse. New York: The Library of America, 1999. 798-827. Print. —. Daisy Miller and Other Stories. Ed. Michael Swan. Harmondworth: Penguin, 1963. Print. —. Henry James Letters. 4 vols. Ed. Leon Edel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Print. —. Italian Hours. Ed. John Auchard. U Park, Penn.: The Pennsylvania UP, 1992. Print. —. The Portrait of a Lady. Ed. Robert D Bamberg. New York: Norton, 1975. Print. —. Roderick Hudson. 1875. London: Rupert Hart-Davis 1961. Print. —. Roderick Hudson. 1907. Ed. Tony Tanner. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. Print. —. “Very Modern Rome.” Collected Travel Writings. New York: The Library of America, 1993. 752-763. Print. —. William Wetmore Story and His Friends. 2 vols. London: Thames and Hudson, 1903. Print. La Greca, Orazio and Pierduilio Maravigna. “Le stazioni ferroviarie di Roma. 150 anni di spazialità funzionale.” Geostorie, 19.1-3 (JanuaryDecember 2011): 167-205. Print. MacDonald, Bonney. Henry James’s Italian Hours. Revelatory and Resistant Impressions. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1990. Print. Mamoli Zorzi, Rosella. “Henry James and Italy.” A Companion to Henry James. Ed. Greg W. Zacharias. Malden MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008. 434-455. Print. Miano, Giuseppe. “Roma: i piani urbanistici.” Storia dell’architettura italiana. L’Ottocento. Ed. Amerigo Restucci. Milano: Electa, 2005. 275-295. Print.



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Ramieri, Anna Maria. “L’archeologia in Roma capitale: le scoperte, i metodi e gli studi.” L’archeologia in Roma capitale tra sterro e scavo. Venezia: Marsilio, 1983-84. 18-29. Print. Sica, Paolo. VI: Gli sviluppi urbanistici nell’Italia unitaria. 4. Roma Capitale. Storia dell’urbanistica. L’Ottocento. Vol. 2. Bari: Laterza, 1977. 464-499. Print. Syrjamaa, Tania. Constructing Unity, Living in Diversity: A Roman Decade. Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Sciences and Letters, 2006. Print. Zucconi, Guido. La città dell’Ottocento. Bari: Laterza, 2001. Print.



 

CHAPTER SIX AFTERTASTES OF RUIN: UNCANNY SITES OF MEMORY IN HENRY JAMES’S PARIS J. MICHELLE COGHLAN

Not that an urban vista is quite the same as a loved face, but it isn’t quite different, either: the despoiled view was suddenly a toothless face, say, or suddenly preoccupied, or suddenly dead—to say nothing, even, of the historical implications surrounding that particular change of landscape. —Eve Sedgwick, on the post-9/1l skyline, in Touching Feeling

What would it mean not to see the spatial remainders of history, but rather to taste them? To smell buried pasts simmering below the otherwise glassy surface of a cityscape? And finally, to possess—and be possessed by—pasts that didn’t, in any real sense, belong to us? At least since what Bill Brown has termed its “literary-critical apotheosis” in the 1990s (178), The American Scene has been the privileged site to examine Henry James’s fascination with—and affective responses to—lost landmarks and instant ruins, landscapes of loss that have come, in turn, to stand in for modernity, American-style.1 But while Brown has suggested that “the most unnerving aspect of The American Scene is the volubility of its buildings” (177), I would add it is equally James’s response to them. For lost landmarks and the scars they leave behind register for James as tourist sights quite literally felt as much as seen (or, for that matter, heard). In the section entitled “The Lost Chord,” he writes, for example, of the disappearance of his Cambridge home: I had been present, by the oddest hazard, at the very last moments of the victim in whom I was most interested; the act of obliteration had been

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Aftertastes of Ruin: Uncanny Sites of Memory in Henry James’s Paris

 swift, and if I had often seen how swiftly history could be made I had doubtless never so felt that it could be unmade still faster. It was as if the bottom had fallen out of one’s own biography, and one plunged backward into space without meeting anything. (AS 229; emphasis added)

As urban historian Nick Yablon has recently suggested, James “feels these architectural losses so intensely and personally [that] they linger on his mental map of the metropolis as absent presences, phantom limbs representing a history ‘amputated’ from him” (260). James’s uncannily embodied experience of both space and memory—what I would term his curiously Jamesian “historic sense”—has thus most often been read as at once deeply personal and deeply national in scope, provoked by memory sites bound up simultaneously with James’s own past and his reading of America’s future. In what follows, I turn instead to Henry James’s Paris, and, in particular, the sights of and detours around the post-Commune ruins of Paris in his writings, to chart James’s transformative reading of space and uncanny connection to more broadly transnational sites of memory. 2 Examining Strether’s encounter with the “irremediable void” (AM 111), left by the cleared-away ruins of the Tuileries Palace in The Ambassadors, and Hyacinth’s ghostly tour of the barricades in The Princess Casamassima, in light of James’s curious formulation of the “aftertaste” of ruin in his 1872 letters and early sketches from Paris, I argue that James’s visits to—and meditations on—the “charred sites” and lost landmarks of Paris should be read not as a (re)turn of the picturesque, but rather as an intimate—indeed, synesthetic—indexing of “social space”— of space experienced, in Elizabeth Abel’s formulation from another context, as “a sphere of contestation and negotiation through which multiple histories are enacted and . . . produced” (17).3 But as we will see, the space of the Commune in Henry James’s Paris uncovers and restages another forgotten story: namely, the ways that the now-forgotten ruins of Paris, and the traces of the Commune they came to stand in for, continued to haunt the American experience of the City of Light throughout the Gilded Age. 4 In resituating James’s own fascination with Paris in ruin within the broader mass cultural archive of American returns to the scene of the Commune by way of pilgrimages to vanished landmarks and ruined buildings, I simultaneously aim to recover the way these spatial remainders came to function as unlikely sites of memory in Gilded Age American culture, sustained by an ongoing visual and discursive industry of memory.



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History’s Aftertaste The seventy-two day long Parisian revolution of 1871 and the week of fires and fighting that followed it made front-page headlines across the U.S. Paris’s newly charred landscape became, in turn, an instant tourist attraction. As historian Harvey A. Levenstein explains, “when the conservative troops finally fought their way into the city, [American] tourists followed hard on their heels, sniffing through the ruins” (140). For those who could not afford to make the trip, illustrated weeklies provided ample “bird’s eye” views of the damage and elegiac accounts of Paris’s injured buildings, even as stereopticon shows like “Paris Aflame” allowed New Yorkers to take virtual tours of the burning city (Katz 81-2). 5 American foreign correspondents and tourists alike found themselves drawn to write about the newly minted ruins, and most remarked on the unimaginable scale of the damage. An unsigned article in the June 16, 1871 NYT relates for example: “I own that before I came here I had expected to find the magnitude of the disaster had been exaggerated in the excitement of the moment. Having seen the ruins, it seems to me that no account I have read as yet has given any adequate idea of the extent to which Paris has suffered from fire” (2). For more than two decades, and long after most of the ruins had been cleared away, Americans continued to visit Paris’s lost landmarks, again and again lamenting, in expatriate writer Sarah B. Wister’s words, the “gashes and scars” left in its landscape and, with them, a trans-national loss that came to seem (or rather to feel) curiously personal (673). A writer for the New York Evangelist thus reports of his 1881 return to Paris after an eighteen-year absence: “Nothing saddens me more than to see the havoc wrought by the wild beasts of the Commune. . . . Every day, almost, I pass what were the Tuileries; now, except at the ends, a blackened mass of crumbling ruins; I look across the Seine and there are the marks of the same fiendish fingers” (1; emphasis added). But if in such accounts Paris’s wounded landscape and butchered buildings consistently displace the memory of some 25,000 Communards who were killed in its streets by French government troops between 21 May and 28 May 1871, James’s experience of the “aftertaste” of history registers the loss of beloved sites and the recent bloodshed in equal measure. In his 2008 essay, “Henry James, Cultural Critic,” Pierre A. Walker draws attention to the new accessibility of James’s early travel sketches and calls on us to more carefully attend to these oft-neglected, harder to categorize early works. Yet James Buzard’s influential 1993 PMLA piece, “A Continent of Pictures: Reflections on the ‘Europe’ of Nineteenth-



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 Century Tourists,” was an early exception to the trend towards privileging The American Scene to the exclusion of James’s earlier travel writings. In it, he shrewdly suggests the ways that the young James repeatedly invokes only to subtly undermine “the time honored-conventions of picturesqueness” (35) in these early sketches. Buzard ultimately argues, however, that “in the nearly four dozen essays collected in Transatlantic Sketches and Portraits of Places, ‘Europe’ hovers before the young James as a ‘poetic’ or ‘fairy precinct’ in which life, properly organized, tends toward a succession of lovely, poignant or sublime pictures” (36). The young James’s sightseeing tour of the “burnt-out ruins and barricades of the Commune” on his first day in Paris in June 1872 would seem, however, a singular interruption in this otherwise fairy precinct (Edel 63). 6 For unlike French contemporaries, Gautier and Edmond de Goncourt, who, in literary critic Daryl Lee’s phrase, see the “open ruins” of the Commune only in terms of “ruinist ideas from earlier in the century,” 7 James finds in Paris a landscape of loss at once more unassimilable and more modern, an already mediated space that nevertheless cannot be neatly mapped onto either a charming sketch or a “sublime picture.” For in Paris, James finds a ruined landscape that he does not so much see, as sense. In the 1872 sketch he titles “The Parisian Stage,” James details his most direct spatial encounter with (and escape from) the Commune and its ruins: I shall never forget a certain evening in early summer when, after a busy, dusty, weary day in the streets, staring at the charred ruins and finding in all things the vague aftertaste of gunpowder, I repaired to the Theatre Français to listen to Molière’s “Mariage Forcé” and Alfred de Musset’s “Il Ne Faut Jurer de Rein.” The entertainment seemed to my travel-tired brain what a perfumed bath is to one’s weary limbs, and I sat in a sort of languid ecstasy of contemplation and wonder—wonder that the tender flower of poetry and art should bloom again so bravely over blood-stained pavements and fresh-made graves. (TS 100; emphasis added)

On the face of it, the passage neatly anticipates readings of the “lesson” Hyacinth Robinson draws in The Princess Casamassima during his pleasure tour of Paris—the consolation, indeed, the triumph of art against the ruin of history, and James’s own languid ecstasy in, or perverse pleasure from, the scenes of devastation before him. But while the theater’s ministrations no doubt soothe James’s “travel-tired brain,” the passage suggests that his tour of the “charred ruins” have not, even in the theater, entirely escaped him. The spectacular visibility of the ruins is,



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however, synesthetically marked for James not as a sight (or even an afterimage) but rather as a taste—“the vague aftertaste of gunpowder”— that shadows the landscape. And James’s suggestive evocation of gunpowder, in turn, occasions not a lingering sense of its smell or sound— remainders of a figurative past presence—but rather of its aftertaste, as if the city is (and will be) shadowed by its presence, the “aftertaste” of ruin, even after the most outward signs of it—the ruins themselves—have been cleared away. Even more intriguingly, the bodies and bloodshed otherwise occluded by the ruinscape resurface in this moment, for even as the ruins lead James to turn away from “the vague aftertaste of gunpowder,” the art James enjoys on the Parisian stage itself is here constituted by—and cannot help but recall, if only so as to cover over—the blood on the Parisian pavements the theatergoer so readily seeks to forget. The “wounded” landscape thus awakens in James a palpable historical sense, or more precisely, a multi-sensory overload. Unlike the tourist-in-ruin who mourns only lost landmarks and mutilated buildings, James seems, in this uncanny aftertaste of memory, to actually re-embody (or reanimate) the bloody traces of the past. The significance of James’s brief recollection of the sensation of the Commune ruins is perhaps best underscored by their notable absence in his letters home from that same early summer day. In his June 28th missive to his parents, for example, James writes of his brief stop in Paris and tour of the city, emphasizing its unchanged quality: I find the place very delightful, too; surprisingly, so, for I had expected to receive all sorts of painful impressions and to feel the shadow of Bismark and the Commune lying on everything. But to the casual eye, there are no shadows anywhere, and Paris is still the perfection of brightness and neatness and form and taste. (CL 1855-72 1: 34; emphasis added)8

The letter is curious for what it leaves out, for the way that it so insistently claims that nothing, on the surface, has changed in the city, despite the ruins that were everywhere around him and everywhere being written home about. 9 It is tempting to read the young James’s omission of the visitable and visible past that is right in front of his nose as an instance of curious, even willful, oversight not unlike Strether’s failure in The Ambassadors to see what is most plainly staring him in the face. But before we take James to task for seeing only what he wants to see, or worse, for delighting in overlooking the blighted Paris all around him, it seems worth noting that James’s disavowal of the scars of history written on the surface of the landscape also oddly anticipates his impressions of the “charred ruins” he claims not to see. For the mere anticipation of the



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 sight of Paris in ruin already provokes in him a historic sense marked by sensory overload—a feeling that his body will become the surface upon which the memory will be written—indeed, tasted—the sight imagined to leave a “painful impression.”10 The specter of the Commune resurfaces far more pronouncedly in James’s September 22nd letter to his brother William, but here too he initially seems to overlook the ruin all around him. Unlike his fellow tourists, he laments that “Paris continues to be very pleasant, but doesn’t become interesting. You get tired of a place which you can call nothing but charmant” (HJL 300). Yet he goes on to write, “The want of comprehension of the real moral situation of France leaves one unsatisfied, too. Beneath all this neatness and coquetry, you seem to smell the Commune suppressed, but seething” (HJL 300). James thus seems to suggest that the history right under his nose is something he smells more than sees, and even more crucially that everyone else is overlooking what is right in front of them. In other words, in overlooking the ruins and instead “smelling” the Commune’s spectral presence below the surface, James not only senses that the revolution is not dead, but also anticipates that even when the visible remainders of 1871 have been cleared away, the revolution will continue to simmer below the surface of the landscape. The past, otherwise so completely obliterated, the bodies, otherwise so utterly forgotten, and the revolution, so thoroughly routed, nevertheless shadow the city, lurking beneath the surface, almost sensible. But what sort of subterranean “historic sense” is James here invoking? What sort of refusal to see that in turn becomes an injunction to smell what is right in front of you—to feel (or revisit) the impression of a past that refuses to die? To begin to tackle those questions we will turn to The Princess Casamassima’s topography of memory, or, more precisely, to James’s invocations of—and even more intriguingly, his detours around—the Commune in the spatial memory of the text. For the 1886 novel seems, on the face of it, James’s most explicit and most spectacular engagement with the memory of the Commune: its history is briefly recounted in the text, its memory is invoked by the novel’s radical underground, and its most visible remainder—the Communard refugee, Monsieur Poupin—plays no small a role in Hyacinth Robinson’s life. Yet even here the head-on engagement is marked by displacement and disavowal: the revolutionary scene is transplanted to London, and Poupin’s revolutionary credentials as a Communard are markedly re-routed through 1848. 11 Even more pointedly, it is also the text that would seem most assiduously to efface 1871 from the landscape of Paris during Hyacinth’s pleasure tour of the city.



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Not unlike James himself in 1872, Hyacinth travels to Paris in the early 1880s, and seems to find no scars in the built world, no painful impressions or reminders of either the Commune or the terrible reprisals that followed it, despite the earlier evocation of them in the novel and their ongoing presence in mass-cultural memory. James’s protagonist-tourist is dazzled instead by the crowds, the cafes, the shops and “the general magnificence of Paris on a perfect evening in June” (PC 379). And though Poupin provides him with contact information for fellow Communards, our “radical” bookbinder notably fails to pay them a visit. Hyacinth, by this point in the novel, has begun to show a change of heart, a falling away from revolutionary principles, and sees no reason to “pretend that he cared for what they cared for in the same way as they cared for it” (382). In short, Hyacinth goes to Paris and finds it simply “splendid” (380).12 But what interests me about this visit is not the way that falling in love with Paris seems so coterminous with falling away from radical politics, but rather what Hyacinth’s walks might suggest about James’s reading of history written in space. For while Mark Seltzer persuasively argues that The Princess Casamassima is “a novel about spectatorship, about seeing and being seen” (508), it is also a novel about what lies beneath and beyond the visible. Hyacinth is, for example, notably accompanied on his sightseeing tours of the city by “that vague yet vivid personage” (PC 381), his ghostly grandfather, a fallen ’48er: “the pair had now roamed together through all the museums and gardens, through the principal churches (the republican martyr was very good-natured about all of this), through the passages and arcades, up and down the great avenues” (381). 13 The “republican martyr” consents to the new Paris “good-naturedly”; there is no hint of “the ecstasy of the barricade” still lingering around him (380). But Hyacinth’s refusal to see the scars of 1871—to see anything but a “splendid Paris”—makes his visit to the site that isn’t there—the (no longer visible) barricades of 1848—all the more remarkable: “Wondering, repeatedly, where the barricade on which his grandfather fell had been erected, he at last satisfied himself (but I am unable to trace the process of the induction) that it had bristled across the Rue St. Honoré, very near to the church of Saint-Roch” (381). While the barricade that is not there functions here as a kind of tourist site, as part of the list that Hyacinth seems to cross off as he tours Paris, it also points, however fleetingly, to the possibility that two contents can occupy one space, a site where space—not unlike the barricade that bristles—can be felt as much as found. 14 Hyacinth’s trip to the missing barricades thus anticipates Strether’s visit to the Palace that is not there in The Ambassadors, even as it draws our attention to the irremediable voids in the landscape and the



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 layers that lie beneath them. Even more crucially, it begins to help us sense the spaces in which more than one history (one might even say more than one Paris) spectacularly collide.

Landmarks and Marked Absences Cynthia Ozick’s artful 2010 reworking of The Ambassadors is acclaimed for, among other things, its deft act of relocation, retaining its Parisian setting but offering us an altogether changed place. As Matthew Shaer puts it in his review for Book Forum: “Foreign Bodies . . . can be read as a kind of corrective, written with the benefit of hindsight: This is what war did to the Eden of The Ambassadors. Behold the shattered city” (2). While I do not want to equate the Gilded Age fixation with “Paris in ruin” with the lingering “fumes of the death camps” that Ozick recaptures in her portrait of Europe circa 1953, the prelapsarian image of Paris that Shaer invokes in relation to The Ambassadors altogether forgets the aftertaste of ruin—and uncanny sites of memory—haunting both James’s Paris and his 1903 novel. And the most salient reminder of that ruined Paris lay on the grounds of the Tuileries, the only remainders of 1871 that were left to stand for over a decade in their charred state. While their remains, or “the ghost of the palace that had died by fire” (as James describes it in The Tragic Muse [181]), had been cleared away long before Strether’s return to Paris in The Ambassadors, pilgrimages to this lost landmark and remembrances of the vanished palace continued to garner copy in a variety of American magazines into the 1890s.15 Strether encounters the Tuileries palace, or rather, the empty site where it once stood, on his second day in Paris while strolling with an “accidental air” (AM 111) through the city. His trip to the Tuileries is notably underscored by its own deferment, with the text leading us first “across the Tuileries and the River, [where he] indulged more than once . . . in a sudden pause before the book-stalls of the quay . . . ” (111), before seamlessly returning Strether back to the gardens. In proceeding analeptically past it before folding back into it, then, the narrative delays his moment of arrest before the space that was the palace much as Strether determinedly delays the pause that will bring him face to face with his letters. Yet that initial suspension of Strether’s visit to the Tuileries seems particularly unwarranted, for in the gardens, all would seem to be sweetness and light—the scene itself naturalized to the point of its becoming almost paradigmatic, its figures themselves predictable as the hands of a finely-wound “clock” (111). Indeed, the staging of this scene of well-ordered Frenchness—everything in its place as it were—is likened by



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Strether to a kind of restaurant or open-air museum: “The air had a taste as of something mixed with art, something that presented nature as a whitecapped master-chef” (111).16 Critics such as Roxana Pana-Oltean have found in this moment proof that Strether-as-tourist never encounters a Paris beyond that of the picturesque (181). 17 Yet such a reading of Paris as mute landscape is ultimately shattered by Strether’s encounter with Paris as social space, with sightseeing recast as rereading this charged site of historical memory. For as James’s readers would not have forgotten, all is not in its place, finely-tuned and finely-wrought. And it is the nothing that is palpably not there that painfully arrests our protagonist’s attention: The palace was gone, Strether remembered the palace; and when he gazed into the irremediable void of its site the historic sense in him might have been freely at play—the play under which in Paris indeed it so often winces like a touched nerve. He filled out the scene with dim symbols and scenes. (AM 111)

The palace is gone, and with characteristic narrative opacity, we are told nothing of where it went or how it got there. A tourist in ruins—but in ruins that are now no longer visible—Strether is transfixed by the “irremediable void,” forced to fill in the gap of the burned down palace with “dim symbols and scenes” of what was. To do so he relies not only on his own past—his own memories of seeing it previously as a sightseer—but also on that of the palace, a past that the text can dimly gesture to but wills not to explain. That the landmark’s absence is in turn marked by a wound that can never be alleviated is, however, pronounced—as is the way in which the memory, “the historic sense,” set in motion by the void is suggested to be itself a kind of violence; whereas the narrative is reluctant to speak affirmatively of what exactly Strether feels in the face of it, resorting to the hypothetical—“the historic sense in him might have been freely at play”—it nevertheless concludes that such a play of memory is palpable, as if the memory itself plays out directly on the body, “winc[ing] like a touched nerve” in the face of such a sight. And as Strether fills in the gap opened by the palace that is both present-inmemory and absent-in-fact, those “dim symbols and scenes” (111) with which he does so leave everything unsaid. Yet, the very onslaught of such scenes nonetheless summons that very history that remains otherwise opaque and unspoken. For as Hazel Hutchison points out, “The Ambassadors is all about vision, but it is the ability of vision to suggest or reveal something beyond the visible that is its strongest theme” (105).



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 Strether’s first tumble into this curiously visceral reading of Paris’s past is a particularly suggestive one, for the burned palace is a remarkably dense coded site of historical memory. Its remarked upon absence in the text cannot but recall the fires that leveled it, yet it is simultaneously these fires which come, metaleptically, to stand in for the Commune itself in transnational memory—revolution subsumed into its fiery aftermath. 18 Indeed, representations of the palace’s destruction would be repeatedly used to illustrate the “crimes of the Commune,” and in the politics of memory, the summary executions of Communards in the Tuileries would be buried beneath the weight of this lost landmark; the palace that is not there becoming the most salient of spatial signifiers. But if Paris and its past is here consumable, it is in turn all-consuming, its landscape increasingly insinuating itself onto his body. Strether’s walks are thus increasingly textured by sensory overload and by the constant hum of something that he can displace if not formally acknowledge. The crowd, the past, and the hum overtake him as readily as the smell of the violets which penetrate his nostrils, eventually putting such a premium on pauses that he is compelled to keep walking: “all voices had grown thicker and meant more things, they crowded in on him as he moved about—it was the way they sounded that wouldn’t let him be still” (AM 426). The hum of the city comes, however, to be transposed from the landscape onto the body of Sarah Pocock. The disquiet awakened in the Tuileries is thereby displaced, occulting not only the ghosts of the past but the relationship between Chad and Madame de Vionnet that Strether is increasingly unwilling to comprehend. At Chad’s grand final soiree, Strether is so struck by Sarah’s presence that he confides to Little Bilham that “the sound of Mrs. Pocock’s respiration drowns for me, I assure you, every other. It’s literally all I hear” (AM 400; emphasis added). The hum is thus isolated, in other words, from the rumble of the city and the vague murmur of its streets and revaluated as the sound of Sarah’s breathing. And even as her breathing swallows him, drowning out everything else, her presence plagues him so much that Strether in turn is assaulted by the sight of her much as he has earlier been assaulted by images, memories, and dull rumblings. Such a sight becomes then itself a kind of violent site of memory, with the landscape of her body given as “dressed in a splendour of crimson which affect[s] Strether as the sound of a fall through a skylight” (390). Under the hallucinatory effect of her fiery dress, then, Strether experiences full-blown synesthesia, with the sight of it curiously likened not to a visual experience at all, but rather to an intense sensation of sound. And the sound is itself a violent kind of rupture, one



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portending death or the onslaught of a dizzying, terrifying fall that once set in motion cannot be checked. That under the sway of Paris, sight for Strether becomes very literally experienced as sound—the crimson dress registered as the crash of a dizzying fall—is underscored—indeed, culminated—in Strether’s final encounter with Madame de Vionnet. She is perhaps the ultimate example of the unmarked landmark of the text. Her home provides Strether with a sense of access to “the ancient Paris that he was always looking for” (AM 235), and from “the cold chambers of the past” (363) the something that has haunted him throughout the novel finally crystallizes from a sight to a name: From beyond the court, beyond the corps logis forming the front—came, as if excited and exciting, the vague voice of Paris. Strether had all along been subject to sudden gusts of fancy in connexion with such matters as these—odd starts of the historic sense, suppositions and divinations with no warrant but their intensity. Thus and so, on the eve of the great recorded dates, the days and nights of revolution, the sounds had come in, the omens, the beginnings had broken out. They were the smell of revolution—the smell of the public temper—or perhaps simply the smell of blood. (AM 475; emphasis added)

What Strether hears echoing up from the court becomes in turn most readily figured as what he smells—the sound of thunder registering as the smell of blood, with the sight of blood itself displaced, free-floating, like the crimson of Sarah’s dress. Here, in other words, the intimation of blood does not take on the contours of a sound, with the color figured instead by its smell and by the very whiteness of Madame de Vionnet’s blouse—a whiteness that summons for Strether, albeit metonymically, the spectre of Madame Roland; “His hostess was dressed . . . in the simplest coolest white, of a character so old-fashioned . . . that Madame Roland must on the scaffold have worn something like it” (475). The text tries somewhat to contain the vague voice that thus haunts Strether by ascribing such “suppositions and divinations” to “the effect of thunder in the air, which had hung about all day” (AM 475). The effect of thunder is pronounced, however, for the blouse of Mme de Vionnet is itself said to be the attire of “thunderous times” (475). And it is her presence which speaks back to what the text has fallen most silent upon, her presence that summons most articulately the dim scenes and symbols that afflict Strether as he senses the irremediable wound in the Tuileries’ landscape.



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 Edwin Sill Fussell writes energetically of the scene, “the habitat of Marie de Vionnet . . . is French history according to Henry James, an American revenant abroad, French history consisting almost entirely of the Revolution and the First Empire” (194). Yet the thunderous times that she portends, while it reaches back to Madame Roland, no doubt marshals the spectre of revolution more generally. And while her interior of Sphinx’s heads and the far-off roar of cannons might audibly invoke for Strether the space of the First Empire, the reference is nevertheless layered—and altogether bound up—with the sign of that world’s spatial destruction in the Communards’ toppling of the Vendôme Column.19 What is awakened for Strether in the Tuileries is not 1789 but 1871, and the aftertaste of those thunderous times again finds him here. Perhaps it is not strange to find, in a novel itself marked by all that it does not wish to say about its primary narrative coup, that the Commune, while present, is never spoken of and indeed finds a name only in “the vague voice of Paris.” That it does so only after the relationship between Chad and Mme de Vionnet has been glimpsed by Strether seems only to underscore the way in which the weight of the city always shadows that plot. E. M. Forster famously argues of The Ambassadors that “Paris irradiates the book from end to end. It is an actor, though always disembodied. . . . and when we have finished the novel and allowed its incidents to blur that we may see the pattern plainer, it is Paris that gleams at the centre of the hour-glass shape” (155). To which we might add: the Paris that gleams back at us is one whose vague voice erupts from lost landmarks and speaks of blood in the streets as certainly as it murmurs the splendid hum of the Boulevard.

Notes 1

In “Notes of a Native Son,” Wendy Graham writes for example: “Not James’s nostalgia, but his consciousness of what social geographers call ‘emplacement’ (the spatial dimension of being) disrupts the inexorable master-narrative of progress extolled by Harbison, interpolating a vivid sense of milieu, locality, and personal history into the breach left by the wrecking ball” (252). 2 I am borrowing here but also departing from Pierre Nora’s formulation of “lieux de mémoire,” most particularly his notion of the memory site as purely selfreferential—cut off from history—and his implicit sense of the national boundaries that structure spatial memory.  3 Examining the “resistant features of space” charted by Henri Lefebvre and later by Marxist geographers, Abel suggests that these theorists viewed space as both a product and a producer of social relations, thus “redefining [it] as the dynamic medium through which history occurs, rather than the static backdrop to historical



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action” (17). See also Kristin Ross’s indispensible formulation in The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune and Andrew Merrifield’s discussion in Metromarxism: A Marxist Tale of the City. 4 In his recent biography of the James family, House of Wits, Paul Fisher writes that “[Henry James] avidly monitored the Prussian occupation of Paris during the autumn of 1870 by means of telegraphed reports in newspapers as if he himself were a cane-wielding bourgeois Parisian on the boulevard” (275). While James’ fascination with the Franco-Prussian war and the Commune that followed on its heels was actually far from exemplary—many Americans shared it—I find Fisher’s notion that James followed the events in Paris as if he were French particularly striking. That unlikely feeling of possession nicely points to the way the sensational (ostensibly international) news from Paris comes to seem deeply personal as well, but also to the way the Commune seems to jumble notions of the strictly national/transnational memory throughout the Gilded Age. 5 Paris’s ruins would figure in popular revivals of the panoramic spectacle “Paris by Night” in the 1870s, later cyclorama shows that toured the US into the 1880s, and even a Coney Island pyrotechnic show staged at Manhattan Beach in September 1891. 6 In The French Side of Henry James, Edwin Sill Fussell suggests that James accesses the ruined Tuileries by way of Zola’s 1892 novel, La Débâcle (187). Yet as both Edel’s and Fisher’s biographies of James point out, Henry and Alice toured the Louvre area extensively in 1872, “just to the west [of which], the charred stone shell of the Tuileries Palace stood starkly out” (Fisher 289). 7 Lee writes suggestively of the “open ruins” of the Commune: “If the ruin is an architectural object that disrupts the confines of architecture per se, if it undermines architecture’s attempt to divide and give measure to space, then the open ruin is one of its most synthetic models” (69; emphasis added). 8 Henry James, “To Henry James, Sr. and Mary Walsh James,” 28 June 1872. I am extremely grateful to Greg Zacharias at the Center for Henry James Studies for providing me with the transcriptions and facsimiles of the letters from James’s 1872 travels, and also for his thorough and helpful suggestions on the 1872 trip and James’s early Parisian writings. This letter was published for the first time in The Complete Letters of Henry James (2009).  9 See my discussion of Gautier and Rees in the HJR version of this article. 10 James’s choice of the term “impressions” implies, in my reading, both a surface on which an imprint can be made and the multiple layers and remainders palimpsestically inhabiting the same space. 11 Jeffory Clymer similarly suggests that “James’s terrorist ction is particularly fascinating because it enacts a remarkable series of displacements. Despite the fact that working-class deprivation and anger loom everywhere in the shadows of the plotline, James’s model of terrorist violence and revolution is against aristocratic rather than capitalist foes. Moreover, his terrorists are Russian, German, and French rather than the Irish and Irish Americans who were performing terrorist acts throughout London in the 1880s. And most notoriously, he arms his ill-fated terrorist, Hyacinth, with a small pistol rather than with dynamite, the bête noire of the 1880s” (72).



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Collin Meissner argues that the “splendid Paris” that Hyacinth finds is largely one of his own design, mediated by his ideas about and early reading on the city: “James shows how Hyacinth has displaced the real Europe and substituted in its place his fictive impression of what he sees” (66).  13 Graham reads the intriguing presence of Hyacinth’s grandfather as part of the larger subterranean queer politics of the novel: “Hyacinth’s imaginary encounter with his maternal grandfather, the French revolutionary ‘who had known the ecstasy of the barricade and had paid for it with his life,’ exemplifies the novel’s parallel discourse, in which the political forces proscribing nonreproductive sexuality and the psychic forces repressing homogenic desire mirror each other” (Thwarted Love 181). 14 Freud famously likens the unconscious and the subterranean strata of Rome’s history to one another, but ultimately suggests that “it is clearly pointless to spin out this fantasy any further: the result would be unimaginable, indeed absurd. If we wish to represent a historical sequence in spatial terms, we can do so only by juxtaposition in space, for the same space cannot accommodate two different things” (9). 15 Throughout the 1870s and into the 1890s, articles on the ruins of Paris—and the Tuileries ruins in particular—were featured in U.S. mass and middle-brow periodicals, prominent literary and political journals, humor magazines, and even children’s periodicals, among them: Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine, Harper’s Weekly, The Independent, Appleton’s Journal, Lippincott’s Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, The Century, Puck, and The Youth’s Companion. 16 See Pana-Oltean 191; her reading informs this museum idea. 17 Julie Wolkenstein similarly argues that despite the occasional specificity of place in the novel, the Paris on display in the novel is always more or less a product of Strether’s recollections or imagination: “Beyond this rather precise and peculiar topographical representation, Paris [in The Ambassadors] is mainly reduced to a kind of rumor” (424-5). 18 As Susan M. Griffin persuasively points out in The Historical Eye, Strether’s mode of visual perception is always akin to a metonymic slide, “saturated with associations, associations that are themselves not only visual but also verbal, aural and the like” (39). I would draw attention to the double metonymy at work here, with the palace pointing to the fires that come to stand in for the Commune, so that Strether’s unarticulated memory of the palace is itself inflected in the occulted signifier of which the empty space of the palace in turn speaks. 19 James famously suggested that catching sight of the 144 ft. Colonne Vendôme was his earliest memory, making Strether’s failure to spot it during his many walks in the streets adjacent to it all the more remarkable.

Works Cited Abel, Elizabeth. Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow. Berkeley: U of California P, 2010. Print.



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Brown, Bill. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. Print. Buzard, James. “A Continent of Pictures: Reflections on the ‘Europe’ of Nineteenth-Century Tourists.” PMLA 108 (1993): 30-44. JSTOR. Web. 1 June 2009. Clymer, Jeffory A. America’s Culture of Terrorism: Violence, Capitalism, and the Written Word. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2003. Print. Coghlan, J. Michelle. “Aftertastes of Ruin: Uncanny Sites of Memory in Henry James’s Paris.” Henry James Review 33.3 (2012): 239-46. Print. Edel, Leon. Henry James: The Conquest of London, 1870-1881. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1962. Print. Fisher, Paul. House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family. New York: Henry Holt, 2009. Print. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and its Discontents. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002. Print. Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. New York: Harcourt, 1927. Print. Fussell, Edwin Sill. The French Side of Henry James. New York: Columbia UP, 1990. Print. Graham, Wendy. Henry James’s Thwarted Love. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. Print. —. “Notes of a Native Son: Henry James’s New York.” American Literary History 21.2 (Summer 2009): 239-267. Project Muse. Web. 5 June 2009. Griffin, Susan M. The Historical Eye: The Texture of the Visual in Late James. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1991. Print. Hutchison, Hazel. Seeing and Believing: Henry James and the Spiritual World. London: Palgrave, 2006. Print. James, Henry. The Ambassadors. 1903. Ed. Adrian Poole. New York: Penguin, 2003. Print. —. The American Scene. Ed. Leon Edel. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1968. Print. —. The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1855-1872. Vol. 1. Ed. Pierre A. Walker and Greg W. Zacharias. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 2009. Print. —. Henry James: Letters. Vol. 1: 1843-1875. Ed. Leon Edel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1974. Print. —. The Princess Casamassima. 1886. Ed. Derek Brewer. New York: Penguin, 1987. Print. —. The Tragic Muse. 1890. Ed. Philip Horne. New York: Penguin, 1995. Print. —. Transatlantic Sketches. Boston: Osgood, 1875. Print.



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 Katz, Philip M. From Appomattox to Montmartre: Americans and the Paris Commune. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998. Print. Lee, Daryl. “Rimbaud’s Ruin of French Verse: Verse Spatiality and the Paris Commune Ruins.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 32. 1-2 (Fall-Winter 2003-04): 69-82. Project Muse. Web. 15 May 2009. Levenstein, Harvey A. Seductive Journey: American Tourists in France from Jefferson to the Jazz Age. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998. Print. Meissner, Collin. “The Princess Casamassima: ‘A Dirty Intellectual Fog.’” The Henry James Review 19.1 (Winter 1998): 53-71. Print. Merrifield, Andrew. Metromarxism: A Marxist Tale of the City. New York: Routledge, 2002. Print. Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7-24. JSTOR. Web. 15 May 2009. Pana-Oltean, Roxana. “‘The Extravagant Curve of the Globe’: Refractions of Europe in Henry James’s ‘An International Episode’ and The Ambassadors.” The Henry James Review 22 (2001): 180-199. Print. Priest, J. A., D.D. “Paris and France.” New York Evangelist 6 Jan. 1881: 1. Print. Ross, Kristin. The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988. Print. “The Ruins of Paris.” New York Times 16 Jun. 1871: 2. Print. Shaer, Matthew. Rev. of Foreign Bodies, by Cynthia Ozick. Book Forum, 28 October 2010. Web. 1 November 2011. Seltzer, Mark. “The Princess Casamassima: Realism and the Fantasy of Surveillance.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 35 (1981): 506-34. JSTOR. Web. 5 June 2009. Walker, Pierre A. “Henry James, Cultural Critic.” A Companion to Henry James. Ed. Greg W. Zacharias. Oxford: Blackwell/Wiley, 2008. 249260. Print. Wister, Sarah B. “Why Do We Like Paris?” Lippincott’s Magazine of Popular Literature and Science 23 (Jun. 1879): 665-77. Print. Wolkenstein, Julie. “Henry James in France.” A Companion to Henry James. Ed. Greg W. Zacharias. Oxford: Blackwell/Wiley, 2008. Print. Yablon, Nick. Untimely Ruins: An Archaeology of American Urban Modernity, 1819-1919. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009. Print.



 

PART II: LITERARY TOURISM



CHAPTER SEVEN THE AUTHOR’S HOUSE AS TOURIST SPACE ANNA DE BIASIO

Among the many variants of that key dimension of modernity that is tourism, literary tourism is an experience to which James was particularly sensitive, at once pungently critical and personally involved as a writer, traveler, and owner of a future public estate. As has been recently argued, he actively contributed to the “homes and haunts” genre, a mixture of travel writing, journalism, biography, and guidebook, which since the 1840s had created a discourse about the author’s home (Booth). His literary tales aptly dramatize how the latter was more and more viewed by people as an opportunity for a closer approach to someone previously known only through the abstract medium of his or her work, or, more trivially, for a peep into the real life of a celebrity. The vogue would pave the way, in the 1890s, to the foundation of sites like Carlyle’s housemuseum in Chelsea and organizations like the National Trust, which in turn would acquire the property of recognized places of public interest such as, thirty years after James’s death, his last residence, Lamb House in Rye. Here I wish to discuss three different types of writings related to the literary tourism theme, reflecting both James’s ambivalence towards it and, more in general, what have been variously recognized as the fertile contradictions of the tourist subject, simultaneously caught in a highly controlled and reifying structure of experience and yet liable to acts of breakout and subversion, through which desire, fantasy, and creativity may be channeled and articulated (Enzensberger, Barthes, MacCannell, Urry). Developing a threefold argument in which James is at first an observing subject and then a sought-after object of tourism, I will first focus on “The Birthplace,” James’s 1903 satirical story centered on the unnamed museum of Shakespeare in Stratford-on-Avon, then take into account the reports of two 2002 visits to Lamb House, respectively by Michiel Heyns and Colm Tóibín, to conclude with a look at Tóibín’s novel The Master (2004). The guiding image of my reading will be the author’s

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 house as an inherently paradoxical space, at the same time material and symbolic, intimate and public, encaged in the “tourist gaze” and yet open to being reshaped by the individual imagination; a space of long-standing fidelities but also, as I would like to argue, of creative betrayals.

A Cage of Illusions: “The Birthplace” (1903) Published four years before James’s essay on The Tempest, “The Birthplace” stages a middle-aged, impoverished though genteel couple, Morris and Isabel Gedge, who unexpectedly receive a job offer as guides of a “shrine,” the “early home of the supreme poet” (443). Excited about the new post, and deeply devoted to the author’s memory and his work, Morris Gedge takes to wandering about the house at night, first seeking personal communion with the writer’s mystic presence, then meticulously trying to separate, on behalf of the public of visitors, the scant known facts from the heap of legends accumulated about him. He soon discovers in disgust that the boorish visitors are only interested in their ready-made frauds. Threatened with dismissal as he is clearly “giv[ing] away the Show” (478)—that is, cutting the very branch he is sitting on—Gedge gives up his conscientious distinctions and starts performing imaginary stories about the author’s life in the house, becoming quite successful and even getting a pay rise. Duplicitous as any of James’s stories, “The Birthplace” has given rise to polarized readings, alternately emphasizing the protagonist’s fall into hypocrisy and even prostitution (Holleran and Booth), or his rise into a sort of artist figure and empowered critic (Ross, Izzo, Tanner). 1 More recently, the story has been interpreted as a reflection on the phenomenon of mass tourism, where the “birthplace”—the author’s celebrated “Chamber of Birth”—stands as the central tourist image, a sort of empty simulacrum whose authenticity effect is as much “staged” as it is yearned for by both the visitors and the main character (Martinez). Convinced of the centrality of this interpretive thread to the understanding of the story, I am interested in further pursuing some of the ironies interwoven in James’s representation of the tourist space and imagination. The narrative is apparently built upon a set of stark oppositions, exasperated by the rise of mass culture but ultimately traceable to the split between an authentic interiority and a false exteriority which shapes the topology of Western personhood (Barthes, Empire 85-87). On one side there is individuality, privacy, cultivation, power of the intellect, uprightness, masculine critical judgment; on the other side, gregariousness, commoditization, grossness, hypocrisy, women’s emotional incontinence.



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Firmly fastened on the second pole, tourists are a constant threat to Gedge’s self-identification with the mythology of interiority and its attached values, as his anxieties about his public role as custodian suggest: “He was splitting into halves . . . he who . . . had at least always been so entire and, in his way, so solid. One of the halves . . . was the keeper, the showman, the priest of the idol; the other piece was the poor unsuccessful honest man he had always been” (460). Gedge’s highbrow anti-tourist stance—itself of course a typical product of the tourist industry since its inception—goes hand in hand with sexist overtones about the stereotyped phrases of the “American ladies” (458) and women’s indifference to truth standards (“The morality of women was special . . . Isabel’s conception of her office was to cherish and enrich the legend” [462]). At the same time that it constructs the protagonist’s moral otherness from the public of visitors, however, the text also scatters a number of clues that abridge the gulf between them. The museum itself holds an uncertain status in this respect, being as familiar as a home—of both the author and his custodian—and exotic as a distant location (“the Mecca of the English-speaking race” [443]). Due to the rich diversity of the people it attracts, the place embarks Gedge on a sort of permanent tour around the world (“Types, classes, nationalities, manners, diversities of behavior . . . would pass before him and become for him, after a fashion, the experience of an untravelled man”), while the duty of professional hospitality daily performed by the couple affords them the sensation of a reinvigorating trip to faraway mountains (“They emerged even-winded and strong in the legs, as if they had had an Alpine holiday” [459]). There are other, less metaphorical trips that Gedge undertakes in the Birthplace. Determined to flush out the author’s presence and inebriated by the possibility of establishing an exclusive bond with him, soon after his arrival he engages in “nightly prowls” which turn him into a flâneur of the interiors, a vibrant and restless observer of the surroundings halfway between the dreamer and the detective: “More than once [he] rose in the small hours to move about, up and down, with his lamp, standing, sitting, listening, wondering, in the stillness, as to positively recover some echo, to surprise some secret, of the genius loci” (454). When his solitary walks extend to the exhibition rooms, where the (fake) relics and other materials are gathered, Gedge’s sight—the main but not exclusive function activated in the tourist practice—merges with other modes of appreciation, which involve the sphere of feeling and sensibility: Under the play of the shifted lamp and that of his own emotion, these things too recovered their advantage, ministered to the mystery, or at all events to the impression, seemed consciously to offer themselves as





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 personal to the poet. . . . It was not till months had passed that he found how little they had to tell him, and he was quite at ease with them when he knew they were by no means where his sensibility had first placed them. They were out of it as he; only, to do them justice, they had made him immensely feel. (455; emphasis added)

Already on his way to rejecting all “mimetic” approach to the birthplace, the protagonist will subsequently elaborate a critical vision of the author as enigma, self-effacing entity, and downright absence, according to a protomodernist notion of authorship coded in both religious and masculine terms (Izzo 101-103). The above-quoted passage, however, clarifies that Gedge’s initial response had been one based on the power of emotions and relationality (of himself with the artist, of the artist with the objects of his life), making him gravitate at once toward the tourist and the female domain: complicity with the latter is moreover strengthened by repeated textual references to his nervous excitability and proneness to tears. Be it interpreted as a triumph or a surrender, the character’s final conversion into an outstanding tourist guide should be read against such premises, particularly in relation to the question of his (self-) betrayal, a concept that in the story is as recurring as it is slippery. The first mention of the term occurs in connection with Gedge’s realizing the impossibility of making the public aware of the fine distinctions between the facts and shams of the House, as opposed to discussions with trustworthy friends (“You could only [talk things over] with friends, and then but in cases where you were sure the friends wouldn’t betray you” [463; emphasis added]). After privately meeting such kindred spirits in the persons of Mr. and Mrs. Hayes, and maintaining with them the non-existence of the author and the preposterousness of the House, Gedge starts worrying that the secret about this momentous encounter may be revealed by his newly emboldened skeptical approach with the tourists (“[The secret] was . . . scarcely successful in guarding itself from indirect betrayals” [474; emphasis added]). In fact, his overt skepticism functions as a sabotage of both his position and that of his wife (“She didn’t watch him, didn’t follow him about the house, at the public hours, to spy upon his treachery” [475; emphasis added]). The question therefore arises: who is betraying whom, or even, who is betraying what? The most blatant act of betrayal is perhaps the one Gedge eventually commits against his self-image as a man—gender connotation stressed— of moral and intellectual integrity. Under threat of dismissal, he resigns himself to telling flamboyant lies to an audience he formerly disparaged, thereby forgoing his righteousness, his modesty, the sophisticated notions he had elaborated about the author, and, first and foremost, his critical



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sense: “I strangled [my critical sense], poor thing, in the dark. If you go out and see, there must be blood” (479). Indirectly, he also wrongs the mass of tourists, who in such a way will be forever denied the opportunity to emerge from the depths of their delusions. And yet, by so stressing the theme of betrayal and multiplying its referents, the story not only stages a crucial complicity with the tourist logic, but also points to its possible rupture. According to James Hillman in Senex and Puer, betrayal has a positive outcome, in that it brings about a crisis that enables entrance into the “real” world of human conscience and responsibility. By betraying and being betrayed, individuals have a chance to abandon the edenic condition of primal trust typical of sacred and intimate relationships (significantly, both aspects are present in Gedge’s initial exchange with the author): the break with the paternal Logos allows their coming to terms with their own deceitful nature, integrating a new dimension to their self which includes the “female” values of life, sentiment and emotion. At a superficial level and from a utilitarian perspective, Gedge’s sacrifice of his critical sense does coincide with his assumption of responsibility as a husband and employee. At a deeper level, his choice to suspend disbelief and join the collective illusio about the author enables the reinstatement of those crucial images of otherness, the tourist and the female one, which had haunted him from the first. The stories he makes up for his ecstatic auditors are masterpieces of the “staged intimacy” that Dean MacCannell sees at the heart of the tourist search (MacCannell 99), at the same time that they reach out beyond it: We stand here, you see, in the old living-room. . . . Across the threshold He habitually passed; through those low windows, in childhood, He peered out into the world that He was to make so much happier by the gift to it of His genius; over the boards of this floor—that is over some of them, for we mustn’t be carried away!—his little feet often pattered; and the beams of this ceiling (we must really in some places take care of our heads!) he endeavoured, in boyish strife, to jump up and touch. It’s not often that in the early home of genius and renown the whole tenor of existence is laid so bare, not often that we are able to retrace, from point to point and from step to step, its connection with objects, with influences—to build it round again with the little solid facts out of which it sprang. (482)

The protocol and ritual of sightseeing is dutifully respected, with abundant use of the rhetoric of uniqueness and exceptionality that characterizes tourist marketing: Gedge gives visitors the pleasure they expect and have anticipated, connecting the already “marked” spaces with





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 a realistic account of the daily life of the infant genius. His creation of an intimate relationship with a renowned site, which gives outsiders the illusion of crossing a threshold into a foreign space, is indeed uncommonly suggestive. Building on sound historical knowledge, his fictitious description illuminates a domestic and childhood scene with what could be defined as a glance of motherly tenderness, complete with penetrating details about the habits and postures of the little occupant: “It is in this old chimney corner … that we see the inconceivable child gazing into the blaze of the old oaken logs and making out there pictures and stories, see Him conning, with curly bent head, His well-worn hornbook, or poring over some scrap of an ancient ballad . . .” (483).2 By infusing the tour with the power of his empathic imagination, Gedge may thus be seen to recover the aura of sensibility and care that had fueled his early pursuit of the author, finally freeing his fantasy of resurrecting the latter’s corporeal presence. Besides emulating that of a real author, Gedge’s “genius” (484) possibly resides at this special juncture: it simultaneously abides by and deviates from the codes of conventional tourist practice, replacing, or at least enriching, the mere consumption of the desired object with its emotional re-signification. Isn’t this in the last instance also the function of literary criticism, according to James, who in “The Science of Criticism” writes that one of the critic’s main tasks is “to feel and feel till he understands” (98)? In fact, despite his former melodramatic Macbethlike declarations, the “critical sense” doesn’t seem to have vanished altogether from Gedge’s endeavor in the Birthplace. Instead of merely feeding visitors false facts concerning the author’s life, Gedge stimulates their capacity for abstraction and metafictional awareness, by calling attention to the “connections” that can be established between “objects and influences” and the author’s “whole tenor of existence,” his diffused “presence” (483). In synthesis, his inspired performance liberates fragments of thought, imagination, and passion that escape control, exceeding the functions and goals of the tourist machine: hence Isabel Gedge’s fear that her husband may displease their employers by “dish[ing visitors] by too much romance as well as by too little” (484). In a story largely devoted to satirizing the custom of commodified literary tours, James opens up a space for tourism as an experience of individual differentiation, where the desiring gaze can roam with unpredictable effects. Chief among them is the emergence of a contiguity, if not a coalescence, of the make-believe operations proper to such statutorily different fields as fiction, criticism, and the relatively new although already inescapable experience of travel for the masses.



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Sightseeing in Lamb House (2002) Interestingly, “treason” and “betrayal” are the terms used by SouthAfrican writer Michiel Heyns to qualify the odd experience of running into his fellow novelist Colm Tóibín in the Lamb House Museum. The encounter took place in the summer of 2002, as the two authors were researching James’s life for their work-in-progress novels, both published a few years later. “The loyalty that James inspires”—writes Heyns after wistfully recalling the plethora of novels on James that were being written at the time, causing the initial rejection of his own—“leads all too many of those admirers to disregard the curse he pronounced upon all biographers and post-mortemers—‘a curse,’ he told his executor, ‘not less explicit than Shakespeare’s own on any such as try to move my bones.’” Locating the core drive of all these biofictions in the alluring absences constellating James’s life, as well as in his model of “modest mastery,” Heyns concludes that “these novels are also a treason: treason to the high Jamesian ideal of privacy, discretion, proportion”; in particular, the symbol itself of such an ideal, Lamb House, “James’s retreat from publicity and scandal, had become the site of betrayal.”3 The inherently ambiguous notion of betrayal, the very Jamesian hunt for the author in his own den, the telling association between James and Shakespeare, are all aspects of Heyns’s report that invite a comparison with the cluster of issues explored in “The Birthplace.” In fact, what Heyns regards as touchstones of James’s aspiration to total privacy reveal themselves in turn as rather ambivalent. In the 1914 letter to his nephew Harry, quoted by Heyns, James does forcefully state his “utter and absolute abhorrence of any attempted biography or the giving to the world by ‘the family,’ or by any person for whom [his] disapproval has any sanctity, of any part or parts of [his] private correspondence”; at the same time, though, he recognizes that his wish to thwart future exploiters is “but so imperfectly possible” (HJL 806), and this might have persuaded him to eventually erase the curse from his will. Likewise, there is no doubt that especially after the Oscar Wilde scandal and his failure in the theater, the move to Lamb House meant for James tranquility and seclusion, in accordance with his well-known representation of the author as a fugitive, impalpable being, at best secretly wrought into his work. In his letters he explicitly refers to “dear little L.H.” as a “lovely” and “blissfully quiet” place, to whose “more peaceful shades” he gratefully returns after occasional stays in the city; it is highly symbolic that the bonfire of his correspondence will take place in the back garden of “something [he] can call [his] own,” for which his “whole being





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 crie[d] out loud” (LiL 323, 479, 322). And yet, by choosing a historic and stately residence, with comfortable guest rooms and a magnificent garden, where no less than George I had been hosted once, James couldn’t but have in mind an official, representative site for the great author to die and be remembered by posterity. In 1897 he pictured Lamb House as “such a place as I may retire to with a certain shrunken decency and wither away…toward the tomb. It’s really good enough to be a kind of little becoming, high-doored, brass-knockered façade to one’s life” (HJL 59; emphasis added). Indeed, such serenely domestic funerary prospects, as well as the growing anxieties about public exploitation of his person and the many stories about obsessive intruders upon the writer’s privacy, altogether suggest James’s awareness of his inevitable falling prey to an emerging cult: that of the literary celebrity whose “real life” is publicly exposed within the walls of his home. In an increasingly voyeuristic society marked by a diminished sense of reality and by the expanding phenomenon of tourism, the writer and his private existence are bound to become a “sight” among others. In his own version of the episode at Lamb House, Colm Tóibín leaves out all guilty feelings about violating a protected space to focus on what in many ways appears as an uninhibited tourist experience. The very perceptive portrait of James he provides in the piece is conjured up after his performance of some characteristic rituals of tourism, like entrance into the inner areas of the visited place. As MacCannell argues, since the tourist space is organized upon the (illusory) opposition between a “front” and a “back region,” tourists are driven by the desire to penetrate the hidden life of the society they visit, in a perpetual search for higher levels of authenticity (MacCannell 91-107). After wandering through the downstairs rooms (and having become, with Heyns and the latter’s agent, a sight on his own, “marvel[led] at” by a small crowd of fellow tourists), Tóibín reports that the man who rents the House from the National Trust and has the upstairs rooms as his private quarters, having heard all this [that they were writing novels based on James’s life], invited us to view James’s old drawing room on the first floor, as a special privilege. These rooms, I saw, as did my two colleagues, are grander than the one upstairs; the view of the surrounding countryside was fascinating. (“The Haunting” 224; emphasis added)

Having gained access to an area normally closed to outsiders may generate rewarding sensations, but is not itself a guarantee that the area possesses a higher degree of “reality” or intimacy. What is presented to visitors as a “back stage” might be simply a staged back region, “totally



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set up in advance for touristic visitation” (as is most likely the case with the upstairs quarters of Lamb House): “Once tourists have entered the touristic space, there is no way out for them so long as they press their search for authenticity” (MacCannell 101, 106). What seems to me worth stressing here is that in order to seek inspiration for his novel, Tóibín interrogates the place precisely on the conditions provided by its belonging to the tourist realm, inscribing the cognitive and emotional experience he derives from it within the conceptual coordinates—and even the rhetoric—constitutive of this social practice. After describing his first impressions of the place (“the house itself is full of the atmosphere of James”), Tóibín fixes his attention on two objects displayed on the mantelpieces, respectively in the dining room and in the front reception room. The first one is a small bust of a count made by Hendrik Andersen, the Norwegian sculptor to whom James addressed letters that, as Tóibín reminds us, “are passionate about their friendship, disappointed about the young sculptor’s lack of response to him and withering about his overarching ambition”; the second object, which “took [Tóibín’s] breath away,” is a piece of needlework realized by the American novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson, James’s closest friend of the 1880s, who tragically committed suicide in 1894 for unknown reasons. It is possible that both items are located where James originally put them, in order to confer on them, as Tóibín suggests, the “pride of place” (“The Haunting” 223-224; emphasis added). And yet their being part and parcel of the exhibition space sets them apart and enhances their value in the visitors’ eyes, demanding that they be viewed not as things per se but as “signs,” the vehicles of some representative reality: here, the writer’s intense and cryptic friendships, his repressed love life. As a result, Tóibín encompasses the two objects in the “tourist gaze,” which in John Urry’s words is “constructed through signs, and tourism involves the collection of signs” (3). Equally telling is the way in which the visit to Lamb House draws to an end: “I now had what I was searching for—the two objects over the mantelpieces, the view, the height of the upstairs rooms. All I needed was to go back to work” (“The Haunting” 224). If the novelist’s exposure to impressions had revolved around the principle of the “attraction,” the tourist logic seemingly at work here is that of the souvenir. The meaningful experiences and sightseeing made on the tour are converted into tokens of those very experiences and sights, objectified representations that can be carried home to stand for the memory of the event. The souvenirs Tóibín takes along are clearly not actual ready-made commodities or stereotyped postcards but mental images that condense





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 personal impressions, thoughts, emotions—what James would call “germs” —about a subject that requires in-depth research and further imaginative elaboration. Still, the psychic and intellectual suggestions that set off the narrative imagination are undoubtedly molded in compliance with the visual and experiential organization of the tourist site, fostered by the typical tourist’s hunger for thrilling “discoveries.” As “The Birthplace” already suggested, tourism and creativity are highly compatible spheres, and the author can be effectively fleshed out in the backstage of his home.

A (Brief) Tour of The Master (2004) It is my sense that in The Master the tourist gaze merges with the creative gaze in various significant ways, which here I can only hint at. In a way, one could argue that the overall James devised by Tóibín is produced as an effect of the already-mentioned notion of “staged intimacy.” Our contemporary Zeitgeist being one which avidly consumes reality shows, the demand is for portraits of the artists that expose as much of their private side as possible, an appeal to which the recent novels on Henry James have responded in one way or the other. Tóibín’s, which covers James’s life between 1895 and 1899, is no exception. As child-like tourists, we press our faces against the windows of the many scenes in which the author is portrayed in the privacy of his rooms, waking from disturbing dreams, pondering shreds of stories to write, remembering poignant episodes of the past, exchanging or going over subtle conversations with friends. The domestic Henry James evoked in The Master—like Shakespeare in “The Birthplace” mostly referred to as “He”—is intensely crepuscular, sometimes to the point of evanescence. Not only haunted by his dead and by the specter of failure, he is also a lover of silences and half-charted thoughts, sympathetic to the others and almost uncannily alert to their inmost movements, although fearful of commitment and ready to withdraw into the unreachable depths of his self. The programmatic gesture of disclosure performed by the biographical narrative is constantly undermined by concurrent gestures of denial and disavowal, as one of the first assessments in the opening chapter epitomizes: “He himself learned never to disclose anything, and never to acknowledge the moment when some new information was imparted, to act as though a mere pleasantry had been exchanged” (The Master 5). In similarly pointing out “the specter of ‘nothing’” that haunts The Master (as well as Author, Author by David Lodge), Karen Scherzinger suggests a Lacanian reading of the paradoxical “unrepresentability” of the author conjured up in the novel, according to which readers are “caught up



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in the wistful desire,” impossible to satisfy, “for the ‘real’ James, the transcendental signifier, the Lacanian real beyond” (192-193). I would argue instead that the impossibility of a full revelation, the simultaneous act of exposure and concealment performed by the narrative is a sort of reductio ad absurdum of the tourist mind frame with which the novel is complying and from which, in a way, it sprang. At the same time that it allures readers to spy behind the curtains upon the recondite regions of James’s intimacy, the text shows that the secrets meant to be revealed only generate other secrets to be kept. In tourist sites, likewise, there is no “real” reality behind the stage but “only a mystification designed to generate a sense of reality” (MacCannell 93). Observing such a regime of mystification at work on other cultural planes, McCannell significantly mentions “novels about novelists and television shows about fictional television stars,” which produce “a kind of strained truthfulness similar in most of its particulars to a little lie” (93). A little lie, one might add in this case, that in James-like terms very often coincides with something that remains unsaid. Among the most telling instances of the mystified authenticity pervading The Master, there are the pages devoted to Andersen’s three-day stay at Lamb House, which allow one to grasp yet another level of interplay between the tourist and the fictional gaze. The visual notes taken by Tóibín during his visit are transfigured into a full-blown realistic fiction that creates a strong sense of participation in domestic atmosphere and events. 4 The bust of the Italian count is re-placed in the corner of the dining room from where it “did not receive more than a cursory inspection” by the newly arrived Andersen (300), thus becoming a prop to illustrate the sculptor’s impatience and overflowing vital energy that the quiet, orderly rooms of James’s house do not adequately contain. Later on, the “height of the upstairs rooms” serves to put up an intense night scene, in which James lies down in his bed while Andersen mounts the stairs and prepares for sleep in another room: Henry waited, listening. . . . [He] did not know what Andersen would do now. He wondered if he would not remove his trousers and his underwear and stand naked studying himself in the mirror, looking at how the sun had marked his neck, observing how strong he was, staring at the blue of his eyes, not making any sound. (311)

The reader is here confronted with what is perhaps the highest stake in the exposure of the author’s privacy, the display of his obscure (homo)sexuality. Tóibín faces the challenge with remarkable adroitness and heartfelt sympathy for his subject. Our desire to know and see is no





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 doubt fueled—and partly satisfied—by the image of the young man’s handsome nakedness in proximity to James, through whose viewpoint the voyeuristic/narcissistic details are slowly savored; in the following paragraph, the unveiling will include “[Andersen’s] body powerful and perfect, his skin smooth soft to the touch” (311). While it acknowledges James’s desire for the body of another man, however, the text simultaneously removes such desire to the plane of visual imagination, which not only makes the undressing and the nudity unreal, but reduces to a minimum the participation of James, who keeps still, silent and blindfold (while the narrator remains quite reticent throughout). As the use of negative verbal forms suggests (“did not know,” “would not remove,” “not making any sound”), a concurrent denegation undercuts the erotic fantasy at the very moment in which it takes place, so that, in the end, no event whatsoever occurred and no compromising declarations were made: we have pierced through the veil but surprisingly James’s secret is still safe, as had already been the case with the (undescribed) night James and Oliver Wendell Holmes spent as bedfellows (“He imagined that what happened between them belonged to the secret night, the privacy that darkness brought” [100]). Although built upon the betrayal of James’s anathema against postmortem exploitation, Tóibín’s operation is otherwise deeply respectful of James’s investment in both reticence and in the power of the literary imagination to shape alternative realities. A similar hybrid of betrayal and faithfulness is reproduced at the level of prose, whose conciseness and clarity contradict James’s elaborate phrasing and yet tend to preserve its indirect suggestiveness. In conclusion, I wish to touch on at least one more way in which the novel appears to crucially partake in the workings of the tourist imagination. Like the other novels devoted to various periods and aspects of James’s life, The Master stems from years of research into a vast range of biographical and scholarly materials, as well as from a sweeping mastery of James’s oeuvre. Interestingly enough, in their transition to fictional form, such materials seem to undergo a change of status, not only in the obvious sense that objective, ascertained facts are interpolated with sheer inventions. Although personally reshaped by the novelist and aesthetically interwoven into the narrative machine, the pieces of information regarding James’s life and work end up creating a sort of anthology of representative knowledge about James. The excruciating failure of writing for the theater, the fear of emotional and physical closeness, the abhorrence of scandal, the ambivalent bond of brotherly love and rivalry with William, the pursuit of artistic solitude, up to the countless references to stories and novels incorporated in the narrative, are



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part of a larger assortment of memorable matters that serve to typify the author in the readers’ eyes. The novel itself becomes a “collection of signs,” a distillate of iconic facts, events, and relationships that stand for an otherwise unattainable identity, Henry James. The readers’ capacity to decipher the images of “Jamesness” worthy of preservation is clearly conditioned by their personal background knowledge about the subject. Their reaction can vary from the pleasure generated by instantaneous recognition of familiar notions (and by appreciation of the individual variations introduced by the novelist-biographer), to the pleasure of learning something new about a subject only nominally known, in which case readers take full advantage of the “markers”—the pieces of information about a sight—scattered throughout (i.e. “Guy Domville, his drama about the conflict between the material life and the life of pure contemplation, the vicissitudes of human love and a life dedicated to a higher happiness, was written to succeed” [13]). One of the models of reading activated in the narrative being that of the guidebook, The Master can also be enjoyed as a sort of “Portable Henry James” (and most profitably as a sophisticated guide to its inmost spatial core, Lamb House). Significantly, the centrality of a semiotics of tourism in The Master is paralleled by similar suggestions at play in one of the most recent movies directed by Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris (2011). The protagonist Gil, an aspiring writer of serious fiction dissatisfied with his Hollywood screenwriting job and superficial fiancée, wanders about Paris in an attempt to escape a consumption of the city based on tourist clichés. Through the power of his imagination and by cinematic magic, midnight after midnight he secretly gains access to the milieu of the Lost Generation writers, meeting legendary figures in flesh and blood and participating— with hilarious effects—in some of the discussions that have made (American) literary history in the twentieth century. According to a familiar pattern, in order to get a more authentic experience of both Paris and literature—in fact to get in touch with a more meaningful reality than the one he actually lives—Gil penetrates into spaces closed to outsiders and mixes with the private life of literary celebrities, at the same time that his insider discoveries are presented as purely fictitious constructions, a dreamer’s world. What is more, the knowledge associated with this recovery of authenticity offers itself as a concentration of typified gestures and representative fragments: the protagonist’s (and our) intellectual experience of Modernism corresponds to a set of quirks, noteworthy postures, and memorable lines characteristic of the artists he encounters. As MacCannell has observed, “the tourist integration of society resembles a catalogue of displaced forms.” The tourist consciousness, but





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 one may well say the modern consciousness tout court, thrives upon the rupture of the ties between things and the people and cultures that made them, and paradoxically attempts “to discover or reconstruct a cultural heritage or a social identity” (13). As James understood in “The Birthplace” and elsewhere, there is no possible escape from the cage of tourism, which in fact cannot but mirror our transformed perception of reality and therefore of literature. By a series of synecdochic gestures, literary experience is accessed through the privileged figure of the author, and the author is in turn (re)produced through an arrangement of representative attributes and expressions, whose reality effect is eminently conveyed by a display of domestic privacy. The fictional staging of the author’s house—or rather home—breaks up the illusion of a space of inviolable intimacy while it offers another illusion, the reconstruction of an alternative bond between the author and literary making. After all, houses usually are the places where books get written. Given the impossibility of showing the writing process as it unfolds, the domestic scene turns into an imaginative equivalent of the act of creation. The museum filled with the presence of the infant Shakespeare, the rooms through which a mature James treads and muses, even the address of Rue de Fleurus where Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway heatedly argue, are all fictions per se and as many tourist sites in which we pay phantasmal visits to the authors and their works, possibly as a lure for more in-depth dives into the totality of their creative imaginations.

Notes 1 For references to the studies by Holleran, Ross, and Tanner, see Booth (221), whose approach to the story, however, is very cursory. For a fresh reading of the tale compatible with the one I propose here, see Julie Rivkin’s essay in this volume. 2 Gedge’s motherly overtones, which extend to his solicitude concerning the visitors’ personal safety, also point to the role of surrogate parenthood played by the staff in the tourist industry (Urry 7). For a sustained argument about simulation of intimacy as a means to reach out for authenticity in the story, see Martinez (135137), although rather than being “reified to the point of becoming undistinguishable from a marketing strategy,” Gedge’s staged intimacy seems to me a much enriched and personalized version of the latter, to the point of not being recognizable as marketing per se. 3 Heyns managed to publish The Typewriter’s Tale in 2005. Other novels about James’s life are Emma Tennant’s Felony (2002) and David Lodge’s Author, Author (2004). Lodge discusses the recent vogue of biofictions centered on writers in The Year of Henry James (3-28).



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4

By means of a poetic “betrayal” of fact, Constance F. Woolson’s needlework is substituted with a small painting representing a view of the American wilderness. In Chapter 11, James’s mother speaking through a medium defines the bust and the painting as “special,” but this intimation does not lead to any clarifying statement neither about Henry’s beliefs as regards communication with the dead, nor about his enigmatic relationships with Andersen and Woolson.

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. L’empire des signes. 1970. Œuvres Complètes II. Paris: Seuil, 1994. Print. —. “Pierre Loti: ‘Aziyadé.’” Le degré zéro de l’écriture, suivi de Nouveaux essais critiques. Paris: Seuil, 1972. 170-187. Print. Booth, Alison. “The Real Right Place of Henry James: Homes and Haunts.” Henry James Review 25.3 (2004): 216–227. Print. Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. “A Theory of Tourism.” 1958. New German Critique 68 (1996): 117-135. Print. Heyns, Michiel. “The Curse of Henry James.” Prospect Magazine 102 (September 2004). Web. 10 February 2012. Hillman, James. “Betrayal.” 1964. Senex and Puer. Ed. Glen Slater. Putnam, Conn.: Spring Publications, 2005. 165-187. Print. Izzo, Donatella. “Le metamorfosi di un ‘queer monster’: problemi di genere.” Incroci di genere. De(i)stituzioni, transitività e passaggi testuali. Ed. Mario Corona. Bergamo: Edizioni Sestante, 1999. 87-108. Print. James, Henry. “The Birthplace.” Complete Stories 1898-1910. New York: Library of America, 1996. 441-495. Print. —. Henry James Letters. Vol. 4: 1895-1916. Ed. Leon Edel. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, Belknap Press, 1984. Print. —. A Life in Letters. Ed. Philip Horne. New York: Viking, 1999. Print. —. “The Science of Criticism.” Literary Criticism I: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers. Ed. Leon Edel. New York: Library of America, 1984. 95-99. Print. Lodge, David. Author, Author: A Novel. New York: Viking, 2004. Print. —. The Year of Henry James: The Story of a Novel. London: Harvill Secker, 2006. Print. MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. 1976. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Print. Martinez, Carlo. “Henry James and the Tourist Imagination.” Revisionary Interventions into Henry James. Ed. Donatella Izzo and Carlo Martinez. Napoli: Università degli Studi “L’Orientale”, 2008. 117-145. Print.





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 Midnight in Paris. Dir. Woody Allen. Sony Pictures Classics, 2011. Film. Scherzinger, Karen. “Staging Henry James: Representing the Author in Colm Tóibín’s The Master and David Lodge’s Author, Author: A Novel.” Henry James Review 29.2 (2008): 181-196. Print. Tóibín, Colm. “The Haunting of Lamb House.” Henry James Review 30.3 (2009): 223-226. Print. —. The Master. London: Picador, 2004. Print. Urry, John. The Tourist Gaze. London: Sage, 1990. Print.



 

CHAPTER EIGHT TRAVELING WITH(IN) THE MASTER: TOURIST RHETORIC IN HENRY JAMES’S THEORY OF FICTION CARLO MARTINEZ

Travel has always been recognized as a key feature of Henry James’s work. Criticism has investigated the intricate web that fiction, autobiography, and travel writing form in his works, situating it within the context of his cosmopolitan background and the contemporary vogue for travel literature. In a recent essay on the subject, Roslyn Jolly states that “Henry James without travel is inconceivable,” adding, however, that “[w]hile the importance of travel to James is obvious, the place of tourism in his imagination is more debatable” (343). In the pages that follow, I suggest that James’s imagination is deeply informed by the phenomenon of tourism, and that a specific tourist rhetoric is not only identifiable in his narrative work, but central to his artistic vision. Focusing on James’s critical writings—the only body of his work which has eluded discussion in connection with travel and tourism as yet—I intend to investigate the presence of a tourist rhetoric in his two most influential pieces of criticism: “The Art of Fiction” and the Prefaces. Appearing in the first text only indirectly, albeit at a crucial moment, tourism figures prominently in the second, where it becomes nothing less than a structuring principle of the critical gesture itself. “Movement between countries and the destabilized viewpoint produced by the habit of comparing them,” Jolly also claims, “are at the heart of [James’s] distinct novelistic vision” (343). Drawing on scholarship in the tourist field, I argue how, in these two texts, James’s elaboration of a “distinct novelistic vision” is supported by a creatively adapted tourist rhetoric that he borrowed from the contemporary rise of mass tourism—a “great popular movement,” in Mark Twain’s famous definition (13).

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 The relation between tourism and fiction in the second half of the nineteenth century has often been noted. In commenting upon the cultural work accomplished by the leading U.S. literary magazines of that period, for example, Richard Brodhead notes the key nexus between literature and tourism when he writes that “[i]n its absorption in tourism and vacationing, this work speaks to a leisure conspicuously more affluent than the middleclass housewife’s. Not unrelatedly, it also presumes a higher degree of aesthetic cultivation” (“Literary Field” 34-5). But in James the relation that tourism bears to literary writing appears to extend beyond the fact that his texts were, as Brodhead maintains, “produced for an elite-based reading public” and that they “speak to ‘us’ on the condition that ‘we’ are the kind of people who attach almost unlimited value to vacation travel” (Cultures 131, 126). And it also extends beyond the fact that James displays a “sustained and incisive treatment of tourist/traveller dynamics in plots that stage the problems of attaining ‘culture’ in its several guises” (Buzard 13). In particular, I intend to show that James’s elaboration on the limited point of view technique is deeply entwined with the practices of vision spawned by contemporary tourism, in a process that saw him move from portraying tourist figures in controversial, even parodic, terms in his early writings, to a re-functionalization of the tourist visual practices in “The Art of Fiction,” and finally to an assimilation of these practices within the aesthetic conception articulated in the Prefaces. To recognize that the Prefaces are entrenched in a tourist rhetoric, behind their technically sophisticated and intimidating critical language, means not only to situate James’s critical enterprise within a larger frame of reference, but also, in keeping with the revisionary turn of much recent criticism, to reconsider the import of some tenets of James’s criticism beyond a mere formalistic perspective and in closer connection with their ideological, cultural, and social interactions. Traditionally considered one of his major contributions to fiction and criticism, and a staple of his “novelistic vision,” James’s notion of point of view has recently been called into question by critics contending that it is the product of later formalistic scholars, who linked point of view to narrative voice making it a pivotal technical device in ways which were foreign to the writer’s intentions. Peter Rawlings in particular traces James’s theoretical debts to the coeval debate on concepts such as “focus,” “perspective” and “aspect,” underscoring its connection to a variety of scientific concepts and developments all sharing a special emphasis on “the ocular, visual, and optical dimension” (47). 1 As this consideration makes clear, any discussion on point of view in James should be located within the framework of the centrality of the visual in modern culture. The



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radical transformations this culture went through as a consequence of the emergence of new technologies and practices of seeing, as Jonathan Crary argues, profoundly “redefined the status of an observing subject” (Techniques 3). While scholars have attempted to reconstruct the “complexities of visuality” (Stougaard-Nielsen 9) and the “role of the visual language in representing types of national culture” (Kendall 4) in James’s works, the function of tourism in his confrontation with new practices of seeing and in the elaboration of his own aesthetic vision has drawn far less attention. A perceptive indication of its significance can be found in Pierre Bourdieu’s work. In his description of the transformations of the literary field in the second half of the nineteenth century, the French theorist observes how the visual rhetoric generated by tourism promoted and shaped a new kind of gaze: an aesthetic or “pure” gaze, as he defines it—a gaze governed by its adherence to a set of self-proclaimed norms internal to the artistic field itself, such as its claim to reflexivity, disinterestedness, and autonomy from the rules of other fields.2 In retracing the emergence of such a gaze, Bourdieu points out the intimate imbrication of aesthetics with the rise of tourism in that period: “The history of aesthetic theory and of philosophy of art is closely linked . . . to the history of the institutions suited to fostering access to pure delectation and disinterested contemplation, such as museums or those practical manuals of visual gymnastics called tourist guides or writings on art (among which must be included innumerable travel writings)” (Rules 294). 3 An emphasis on the visual aspects of writing is certainly present both in “The Art of Fiction” and in the Prefaces, but what I want to underline is the complexity and variety of the cultural context in which James gave form to his aesthetic vision. Crary has elucidated how “purified aesthetic perception” should be viewed not as something isolated and distinct, but as part of a “single heterogeneous surface on which discursive objects, material practices, and representational artifacts do not occupy qualitatively different strata” (Suspensions 7). A brief discussion of a passage from one of James’s early fictional works focusing on the so-called “international theme” can provide a useful starting point. Among his numerous texts that stage tourist figures, “Daisy Miller” perhaps offers the clearest evidence of his involvement with the contemporary tourist discourse, best epitomizing its complexities and foreshadowing several of the later concerns James would address in the Prefaces. Having underscored from the very start the tourist dimension of the village of Vevey, Switzerland, where Daisy and Winterbourne meet— “the entertainment of tourists is the business of the place” (DM 238)—the





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 text displays Winterbourne’s first considerations concerning his new acquaintance: Winterbourne presently risked an observation upon the beauty of the view. He was ceasing to be embarrassed, for he had begun to perceive that she was not in the least embarrassed herself. . . . Yet, as he talked a little more, and pointed out some of the objects of interest in the view, with which she appeared quite unacquainted, she gradually gave him more of the benefit of her glance, and then he saw that this glance was perfectly direct and unshrinking. It was not, however, what would have been called an immodest glance, for the young girl’s eyes were singularly honest and fresh. They were wonderfully pretty eyes; and, indeed, Winterbourne had not seen for a long time anything prettier than his fair countrywoman’s various features—her complexion, her nose, her ears, her teeth. He had a great relish for feminine beauty; he was addicted to observing and analyzing it; and as regards this young lady’s face he made several observations. It was not at all insipid, but it was not exactly expressive; and though it was delicate, Winterbourne mentally accused it—very forgivingly—of a want of finish. (242-3) .

From the start, and constantly throughout the novel, both Daisy and Winterbourne are engaged in a number of visual activities: seeing, looking, glancing, glimpsing, perceiving, and observing. This complex array of structures of seeing forms the framework in which the construction of Winterbourne’s limited point of view takes place. At the beginning of the passage, the two characters are engaged in the typical tourist activity of sightseeing, looking at a beautiful view.4 Shortly afterwards, however, the focus of seeing is diverted from the surrounding landscape to Daisy, whom we see through Winterbourne’s perspective. But while Daisy casts superficial glances over the places, displaying a consumer attitude towards them, Winterbourne’s much more cultivated gaze exhibits evident aesthetic ambitions. In his perspective Daisy and the view are associated by their beauty which only he, “addicted to observing and analyzing,” is able to recognize and appreciate. Thus, Daisy, a prototypical tourist figure eager to sightsee and make new experiences, becomes herself a victim of Winterbourne’s reifying but cultivated gaze, which turns her into a curious object of admiration and aesthetic appreciation. His symbolic dissection of her face into its constitutive parts and his final comment concerning its “want of finish” seem a parodic, if disturbing, caricature of an aesthetic evaluation of a painting or a landscape. Yet Winterbourne too, like the circle of American expatriates in which he moves, is wholly immersed in and complicit with the tourist logic. Critical as he is of Daisy’s manners, he unawarely replicates many of them.



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His non-committal flirting with her echoes the same tourist behavior he blames in the girl. Dean MacCannell supplies a convincing understanding of this logic when he states that a “critique of tourists is not an analytical reflection on the problem of tourism—it is part of the problem” (Tourist 10). Winterbourne’s ambivalent attitude toward Daisy, his relentless effort to see beyond her “mystifying manners” (DM 295) to gain access to a more authentic and intimate vision of her, betray him as an ally to the same tourist logic he apparently disparages so much. Hinged on the confluence of the limited point of view technique with tourist dynamics, this story provides a first clue to the importance that tourist practices would have in the development of James’s aesthetic vision.

The Tourist Gaze in “The Art of Fiction” When “The Art of Fiction” was published in 1884 as his personal response to a pamphlet by the same title written by Walter Besant a few months earlier, James was an already established voice in the literary field. In this essay, he moves beyond the quarters of applied literary criticism, a neighborhood he was already very familiar with, to engage the contemporary debate on the artistry of fiction. The terms of James’s claim in favor of the recognition of fiction as art are too well known to require discussion here. Rather, I wish to highlight how James exemplifies his claim with an anecdote which reveals a clear touristic matrix. To Besant’s prescription that a good novelist should write from direct experience only, he retorts that one’s creative imagination must be left free to figure out its own ways of representing reality, even beyond the writer’s own social and material life experiences: “the only condition that I can think of attaching to the composition of the novel is, as I have already said, that it be interesting. This freedom is a splendid privilege, and the first lesson of the young novelist is to learn to be worthy of it” (AF 64). As paradigmatic of this freedom, James presents the following anecdote: I remember an English novelist, a woman of genius, telling me that she was much commended for the impression she had managed to give in one of her tales of the nature and way of life of the French Protestant youth. She had been asked where she learned so much about this recondite being, she had been congratulated on her peculiar opportunities. These opportunities consisted in her having once, in Paris, as she ascended a staircase, passed an open door where, in the household of a pasteur, some of the young Protestants were seated at table round a finished meal. The glimpse made a picture; it lasted only a moment, but that moment was experience. She had got her impression, and she evolved her type. (52)





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 The transient “glimpse” that the English woman novelist catches of a behind-the-scenes Parisian domestic interior, in which some locals are carrying out their daily activities and out of which her “much commended” tale is born, is a complex gesture whose aesthetic implications can hardly be isolated from its social and cultural environment. The passage has been variously interpreted. In a phenomenological key, Paul Armstrong writes that the English woman novelist’s knowledge “derives from an impression achieved as an outside observer at a distance (physical as well as social, economic, and psychological) from the scene she perceives. She begins with a limited and not panoramic view” (40). “Her example,” Armstrong remarks, “shows that, in James’s view, the impression has almost miraculous revelatory power” (39). More recently, Jesse Matz has read her as a “figuration of the Impressionist imagination” (95). As Matz suggests, the act of seeing of the English woman novelist can be understood as symptomatic of Impressionism’s creation of a new visuality. According to Bourdieu, the “symbolic revolution” brought about by Manet and, after him, the Impressionists introduced new “categories of perception and judgment which we now commonly use to produce and comprehend representations” (Field 238). These categories, he explains, generated “a properly aesthetic mode of perception, which places the source of artistic ‘creation’ in the representation and not in the thing represented” (239). From this perspective, the episode can be read as a narrative version of this new Impressionist visuality. The aesthetic quality of the gaze in question does not lie in any intrinsic meaningfulness of the scene itself, but in the way it is turned by the observer into an aesthetic spectacle. The “pure” gaze is such inasmuch as it is (allegedly) able to transform plain, ordinary reality into a richly aestheticized form. This analysis can be profitably integrated with that of Crary, who challenges the idea that Impressionism represented a radical break with the previous visual tradition. By contrast, he emphasizes that “avant-garde artists and writers in the late nineteenth century and the concurrent ‘realism’ and positivism of scientific and popular culture” are “overlapping components of a single social surface on which the modernization of vision had begun decades earlier” (Techniques 5). With this overlapping in mind, I now wish to highlight the way in which the gaze of the English woman novelist is intersected by other social discourses and representational practices beyond strictly aesthetic ones. Incidentally but significantly, Armstrong compares it to that of a tourist, for whom the life of the French protestant youth takes on the hues of a “limited panorama,” as if the English woman novelist had unexpectedly run into a tourist attraction. The gazing she engages in while going up the



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staircase in Paris, in fact, bears a remarkable similarity to those practices of seeing which are usually subsumed under the rubric of the “tourist gaze.” First elaborated by John Urry and quickly established as a central tenet of current tourism studies, the notion of the tourist gaze defines a structure of seeing that informs the tourists’ relation to the places they visit. Although always “socially organized and systematized,” there is “no single tourist gaze as such” (Tourist Gaze 1), since, according to the critic, the tourist gaze manifests itself in a plurality of forms resulting from the interactions of the tourist’s habitus with the social practices, institutions, and discourses of the field. A defining aspect, common to all tourist gazes, however, is “that there has to be something distinctive to be gazed upon”: “the signs collected by tourists have to be visually extraordinary” and “set off from everyday life and experience” (“Tourist Gaze ‘Revisited’” 173). More importantly, the tourist gaze translates the object of vision into a sight, an attraction, or, in more abstract terms, into a “collection of signs” (Tourist Gaze 3). “When a small village is seen,” Urry explains, “what is captured through the gaze is a sight of the ‘real olde England’” (“Tourist Gaze ‘Revisited’” 172). This last observation may also apply to the English novelist woman’s gaze. It is thanks to her specific gaze that the novelist is able to attain a perceptual synthesis of the real life of the “French protestant youth,” to visualize “this recondite being” in its genuine context. Her gaze transmutes an apparently ordinary scene into a sight—a revelatory experience not only for her, but also for the readers who can have the impression of experiencing authentic France. I am not saying that the novelist in question, generally assumed to be Ann Thackeray Ritchie, is necessarily to be seen as a tourist.5 What I want to stress is how, at the most critical juncture of his essay, James resorts to an act of seeing which encodes the category of the tourist gaze in order to express his idea of the radical autonomy that the writer must enjoy to produce a fiction which can legitimately aspire to be called art. One often comes across similar scenes in James’s travel writings. As in Italian Hours for instance: You wonder, as you pass, what lingering old-world social types vegetate there, but you won’t find out; albeit that in one very silent little street I had a glimpse of an open door which I have not forgotten. A long-haired peddler who must have been a Jew, and who yet carried without prejudice a burden of mass-books and rosaries, was offering his wares to a stout old priest. (IH 502)





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 Here we see him recounting his personal, direct tourist experiences in Assisi. Taken from his early travel writings originally produced for the Atlantic Monthly, the excerpt shows a young James negotiating with a typical tourist gaze. The scene is set in a gloomy corner of an ancient Italian building, where a priest and a peddler are having some transactions: tainted with the exotic and the picturesque, it offers another indication of the close connection that binds together tourism discourse with narrative techniques. Not only did tourism create a convenient and fertile meeting ground between texts and readers, between the life experience of the author and the larger public, but it also provided a powerfully socialized, pervasive, and appealing rhetoric to refashion the literary imagination. I now want to focus more closely on the peculiar code of signification by means of which, in both “Daisy Miller” and “The Art of Fiction,” the tourist gaze tends to modify its object and to remake it into an attraction, a sight. Both Winterbourne and the English woman novelist peek into a territory normally shielded from outside public view, but they do it in different ways and with different results. In “Daisy Miller” the tourist gaze is guided by a relentless endeavor to typify, to find a “formula” (DM 247), and to make its object recognizable and accessible. It is this process that destroys Daisy: she is turned into a sign of herself, an attraction which Winterbourne finds extraordinary (“extraordinary mixture of innocence and crudity” [263]; “how extraordinary was this young lady” [288]), but whose authenticity he cannot verify. Driven by the suspicion that there might be a different Daisy behind her pretty looks, he turns her into a “marker” of an ambiguous reality and exploits her as a sign, like tourists who visit places through the consumption of popular “markers.” 6 Winterbourne’s inability to go beyond a vision of Daisy based on the binary opposition of two tourist stereotypes—“American flirt” vs. “innocent girl”—and his implacable efforts to discover the true Daisy indicate the limitations of his way of seeing. They are both ensnared by the logic of the tourist, although with very different consequences largely dependent on the evident gender ideology underlying the whole text. But Urry’s model appears inadequate to account for the gaze constructed by the English woman novelist. What intrigues her is not the singularity of the scene behind the door, but its very ordinariness. Again, MacCannell provides a valuable insight when he postulates the existence of another structure of seeing which he calls “second gaze.” A gaze, a form of “sightseeing that is itself organized around a kernel of resistance to the limitations of the tourist gaze.” “Desire to escape the limitations of the tourist gaze,” he contends, “is built into the structure of the gaze itself—into the fact that the first gaze can exist only if there is a second”



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(Ethics 204-5). In other words, the woman novelist manages to attain a deeper awareness of the reality surrounding her not by rejecting the tourist gaze altogether, but by inhabiting it differently, by engaging it in a selfreflexive way. It is this self-reflexivity which allows her to convert a mere marker of authentic France into a successful artistic representation. Thus, the anecdote signals James’s critical change of attitude towards the tourist logic. For it reallocates the focus from the object of the gaze to the way the gaze is arranged and structured, turning the tourist gaze on its head. Sightseeing breaks away from the narrow confines it was reduced to in “Daisy Miller” and from its attributes of superficiality, standardized behavior, and inauthentic experience, to emerge in “The Art of Fiction” as a powerful artistic tool. James’s recognition of the inherent self-reflexivity of this gaze makes it a legitimate and even ideal resource for the elaboration of his own aesthetic vision. Once refashioned, sightseeing, the structure of seeing that James observed daily around him in the growing numbers of the tourist industry, can even become an expression of artistic freedom.

Touring the New York Edition Two related vogues, risen to unprecedented popularity, profoundly influenced the cultural context in which James began to work on the project of the New York Edition: the vogue for literary tourism and that for the “celebrities at home.” 7 A good illustration of this influence is captured in the tale “The Birthplace” which, written only a few years before the Prefaces, brings the two vogues together in the representation of the “home of the supreme poet, the Mecca of the English-speaking race” (“Birthplace” 134). Hordes of tourists flock to see the world famous attraction, in the hope to get a closer, more personal, even “intimate” view of the revered author. The tale marks another important turning point in James’s attitude towards tourism, anticipating in many respects the tourist rhetoric he would later deploy in the Prefaces. The possibility to peer into the backstage of the works that make up the New York Edition forms the supporting rhetorical frame of the critical operation accomplished in the Prefaces. Since Blackmur’s landmark introductory essay to The Art of the Novel, where they were first collected together in a single volume, the Prefaces have invariably been recognized as a model of criticism, as well as, especially in recent years, an intricate cultural artifact. Declaring them “the most sustained and . . . the most eloquent and original piece of literary criticism in existence,” Blackmur elevated them to the status of a “major monument of [James’s life]” (viii).





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 And yet, the first step of James’s monumentalization consists in a dismissal, even a repression, of the role that tourism plays in the Prefaces: “There is the feature of autobiography, as a rule held to a minimum: an account of the Paris hotel, the Venetian palace, the English cottage, in which the tale was written” (x). Obviously, Blackmur could not but recognize the convergence of autobiography and tourism, but he quickly dismissed the latter as a marginal feature. This view is reasserted by James Buzard, for whom, in “[a]ssembling the New York Edition, James sought a different relation with its readers than the imaginary ‘touristic’ relation out of which his own career as a writer of transatlantic sketches and stories had begun” (282). But this approach takes into consideration neither the conspicuous amount of touristic references that are found in James’s text, nor their function in structuring the critical vision expressed in the Prefaces. As a matter of fact, a travel rhetoric is present from the opening page of the first Preface devoted to the early novel Roderick Hudson, where James recalls his beginning the novel in Florence. If it cannot come as a surprise that his novel appears inextricably linked with his travels, it is more interesting to note that, still in the same page, James compares the process of revision and critical evaluation of his past work to a travel experience. In order to be able to revive “an all but extinct relation with an early work,” he writes, “experience has to organise, for convenience and cheer, some system of observation—for fear, in the admirable immensity, of losing its way” (Prefaces 1039). The exploration that the author-turnedcritic makes of his past work is like that of a traveler who ventures into foreign lands: “We see it as pausing from time to time to consult its notes, to measure, for guidance, as many aspects and distances as possible, as many steps taken and obstacles mastered and fruits gathered and beauties enjoyed. Everything counts, nothing is superfluous in such a survey” (1039). And the critical writing produced is similar to a travel account: “The explorer’s note-book strikes me here as endlessly receptive” (1039). In “The Art of Fiction” James had portrayed the experience that constitutes the material of the artist’s work as a “kind of huge spiderweb . . . suspended in the chamber of consciousness” (52). Here, he presents his critical work as a travel experience: to succeed in his critical journey, James declares, he needs “some system of observation,” the elaboration of a point of view which, in this case, will be an eminently authorial one. And the point of view he chooses is that of a traveler, who takes his own work as the site of an exploration which, I want to show, is endowed with the hallmarks of a tourist experience.



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A first sign that the travel rhetoric to which James alludes in the beginning of his text is more specifically a tourist rhetoric can be found shortly after the passage quoted above, where he describes how the rereading of Roderick Hudson evoked in him “the felt pleasure, during those months—and in East Twenty-fifth Street!—of trying, on the other side of the world, still to surround with the appropriate local glow the characters that had combined, to my vision, the previous year in Florence” (1042). Working on the novel in New York, then, was like looking at a souvenir which helped the author retrieve his past experiences in the Italian city. In writing the novel, James confesses, he was trying to infuse it with a souvenir-like quality, which now, many years later, is able to return again his past experience. Here is the image of Florence that the novel-souvenir re-creates: I fear that what the early chapters of the book most “render” to me to-day is not the umbrageous air of their New England town, but the view of the small cab-stand sleepily disposed—long before the days of strident electric cars—round the rococo obelisk of the Piazza [Santa Maria Novella], which is supported on its pedestal, if I remember rightly, by four delightful little elephants. (That, at any rate, is how the object in question, deprecating verification, comes back to me with the clatter of the horse-pails, the discussions, in the intervals of repose under well-drawn hoods, of the unbuttoned cocchieri, sons of the most garrulous of races, and the occasional stillness as of the noonday desert). (1042-3)

The passage is a postcard-picture of Florence, depicted as a commodity to be marketed to readers who, like mass tourists, are eager to consume it. This scene, though, is not the product of an actual sightseeing but of memory. Sightseeing is now generated by the recollection set in motion by the re-reading of the novel. And memory makes Florence even more touristically exotic thanks to James’s orientalist slip, which substitutes elephants for what are, in fact, turtles. Right from the start, then, James makes his critical gaze interact with the tourist gaze, which attended the composition of the novel and thanks to which he can now bring back to memory the story of that composition. A further example of James’s critical sightseeing can be found in a passage from the Preface to The Spoils of Poynton in which James again visualizes his revision in terms of a complex, multilayered tourist gaze. As he constantly does in the Prefaces, he begins by evoking the circumstances that originated the work, noting how it “began to appear in April 1896, and, as is apt blessedly to occur for me throughout this process of revision, the old, the shrunken concomitants muster again as I turn the pages”





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 (Prefaces 1143). This time, though, the recollection takes a peculiar turn, since it does not bring back memories of a distant place connected with the novel. Rather, it is the revision of his own past work that appears to him like a visit to a distant and exotic place, where the circumstances relating to the writing of the novel “lurk between the lines.” Lines of writing that function “as the barred seraglio-windows behind which, to the outsider in the glare of the Eastern street, forms indistinguishable seem to move and peer; ‘association’ in fine bears upon them with its infinite magic” (1143). Again, James injects an orientalist feel into the passage. In this case, however, it does not refer to the real life experience of the author but to his critical stance. The critical reading is described as a visit to an eastern city in which the author-turned-critic attempts, like a typical tourist, to gaze into his work, which entices him with the allure of a tourist attraction in its own right. What the gazing into this peculiar kind of attraction brings back is an intimate scene of the author’s past life: “Peering through the lattice from without inward I recapture a cottage on a cliff-side, to which, at the earliest approach of the summer-time, redoubtable in London through the luxuriance of still other than ‘natural’ forces, I had betaken myself to finish a book in quiet and to begin another in fear” (1143). Thus, an imaginary tourist gaze supplies the “system of observation” the author needs to activate the process of critical revision. It is through this gaze that he imaginatively recovers and represents the inner workings of his imagination. Only then is “the creative intimacy” with the novel “reaffirmed,” and “appreciation, critical apprehension, insists on becoming as active as it can” (1046). Access to the “intimate history of the business” (1072) of writing constitutes the basis upon which the critical operation of the Prefaces is built, since, as he writes, “intimacy with a man’s specific behaviour, with his given case, is desperately certain to make us see it as a whole” (1092). The picture of a summer cottage “on a cliff-side” caught by his intimate gazing through the windows of his writing is an index of James’s self-reflexive use of the tourist rhetoric. In gaining a behind-the-scenes view of the work under scrutiny, and in measuring the success of the critical operation on the intimacy and closeness it manages to achieve, James takes the tourist logic as the standard paradigm upon which the critical act models itself. What the Prefaces promise to their readers is to allow them to get a close view, to gain an exciting experience, to have an almost first-hand contact with the author himself. One could legitimately wonder, at this point, how much influence this formulation of the critical act exerted on later critical schools prescribing “close reading” as their elective approach to literary texts.



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In fact, “peering” into the back regions of the places visited in order to attain a more intimate and authentic feel is identified by MacCannell as a major driving force of tourism experiences, to the point that, according to him, tourism can be properly conceived as a modern symbolic “quest for authenticity” (Tourist 105). 8 Building on Erving Goffman’s model of social life as arranged into a front stage (where social interactions are publicly carried out in formal, official ways) and a back stage (where interactions are more relaxed, intimate and, supposedly, more authentic), MacCannell assumes the desire to gain entrance into the back stage of the places visited to be an important factor for explaining the popularity of tourism. This assumption leads the critic to identify a third form of space as characteristic of tourist settings: a front region arranged like a back one for the consumption of tourists, and a region of “staged intimacy” and “staged authenticity” (Tourist 91-105). It is this back region that James seems to stage in the Prefaces. Almost in the guise of a consummate tourist operator who knows how to arrange his texts as a perfect setting for staging real, authentic literature, James stimulates the readers’ interest in the New York Edition by exposing it as a monumental tourist attraction. Posing almost as a native informant, and promising to guide readers, along an unbeaten track, to the inner workings of his creative imagination, he recasts the tourist gaze into a structuring principle of his conception of criticism. James’s application of the tourist rhetoric finds its climax in the Preface to The Portrait of a Lady. Once again, the novel functions as a souvenir for the author who, in reading it over, has the impression of finding himself in Venice, seeing “again the bristling curve of the wide Riva, the large colourspots of the balconied houses and the repeated undulation of the little hunchbacked bridges, marked by the rise and drop again, with the wave, of foreshortened clicking pedestrians” (Prefaces 1070-1). But this Preface gives the tourist rhetoric yet another turn—one that makes it even more significant for James’s aesthetic project. Immediately before the quoted passage, he writes: It is a long novel, and I was long in writing it; I remember being again much occupied with it, the following year, during a stay of several weeks made in Venice. I had rooms on Riva Schiavoni, at the top of a house near the passage leading off to San Zaccaria; the waterside life, the wondrous lagoon spread before me, and the ceaseless human chatter of Venice came in at my windows, to which I seem to myself to have been constantly driven, in the fruitless fidget of composition, as if to see whether, out in the blue channel, the ship of some right suggestion, of some better phrase, of the next happy twist of my subject, the next true touch for my canvas, mightn’t come into sight. (1070)





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 As in the first two Prefaces of the series, where he describes his stays in Florence and Paris, here James recalls his gazing at a beautiful view from a window. Even though the scene is different, sightseeing is each time directly connected with novel writing. In the passage just quoted, James dwells on the complex interaction that takes place between his efforts at writing and his simultaneous gazing out of his window to draw inspiration, as if a tourist gaze could help him write the novel. This time, though, the sight seems to respond poorly to the author’s call, or, at least, not directly. It is the very inadequacy of sightseeing that now affords the possibility for the rise of a “pure” gaze, which is not developed in opposition to the tourist gaze but is generated by the dynamic tension between the two. As James had written in Italian Hours,9 “it is a great pleasure to write the word [Venice],” in spite of the fact that “[t]here is notoriously nothing more to be said on the subject,” that “[e]very one has been there, and every one has brought back a collection of photographs” (IH 287), and that the city appears to him as a “vast museum” overcrowded with a “herd of fellow-gazers” who desecrate the city and reduce it to a mere “battered peep-show and bazar” (IH 292). Only by embracing the tourist gaze and by confronting its logic can a “pure” gaze eventually transcend it. James’s profound involvement with the tourist gaze culminates in the well-known metaphor of the “house of fiction” having “not one window, but a million—a number of possible windows not to be reckoned” (Prefaces 1075). The image of James gazing through a window is here replicated and multiplied: at each window of this house “stands a figure with a pair of eyes, or at least with a field-glass, which forms, again and again, for observation, a unique instrument, insuring to the person making use of it an impression distinct from every other” (1075). But this time the house is neither real, like the ones he visited in his travels, nor fictional, like those portrayed in his novels. It is the house of fiction itself. As such, it symbolizes the ultimate self-reflexive turn James gives to the tourist gaze, which now, refined and disengaged from any direct association to tourism, is transfigured into a marker of the artistry of fiction itself: “the pierced aperture, either broad or balconied or slit-like and low-browed, is the ‘literary form’; but they are, singly or together, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher—without, in other words, the consciousness of the artist” (1075). Throughout the Prefaces, James consistently constructs a twofold tourist perspective towards the works that build up the New York Edition. For the author, the edition seems to operate as a gigantic souvenir of his past, enabling him to revive the experiences which presided over the composition of his works. At the same time, for the author-turned-critic, as



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well as for the general readers, these works are presented as tourist sights in their own right which the Prefaces, in the guise of a critical equivalent of a Baedeker or Murray guide, help the readers to visit and experience. The New York Edition, like a colossal marker, aims at attracting the readers’ attention, at rendering fiction, James’s fiction especially, recognizable as art to the gaze of readers, and, above all, at turning his own work into a most renowned attraction in its own right. Elevated to the status of “foundational documents for Anglo-American novel theory” (Hale 79), “The Art of Fiction” and the Prefaces have exerted an influence on the subsequent literary vision which can hardly be overestimated. In sacralizing the tourist gaze from a debased, second-rate experience into a highly aesthetic and dominant critical paradigm, James achieves the recognition of fiction as a form of art channeling it into the modern world—a world in which, though, a tourist figure is inescapably lurking behind the scenes, awaiting the time for its revenge. After all, as he admits in an early essay on Florence, the tourist is his “detested fellow sight-seer” (“Recent Florence” 586). Detested, maybe—and yet his fellow.

Notes 1

José Antonio Álvarez Amorós has maintained that “contrary to general conviction, the term ‘point of view’ in its current technical sense is by no means Jamesian” (47). Peter Rawlings has recently stated that “[n]othing in James authorizes the theories of point of view concocted in his name by Percy Lubbock . . . and even more reductively by Joseph Warren Beach” (38). In his research the critic arrives at “three unavoidable conclusions. James’s positions on narrative point of view are less substantial and sustained than his subsequent commentators have implied; they are far from schematic, or even susceptible of schematization, they are derivative” (42). 2 Bourdieu’s theory is too well known to need detailed account here. For a thorough exposition see his The Rules of Art. 3 Judith Adler had already noted the impact that the rise of tourism produced on visuality: “The traveler’s ‘eye,’ hitherto bound by a normative discourse rooted in featly to science, became increasingly subject to a new discipline of connoisseurship. The well-trained ‘eye’ judiciously attributed works of art, categorized them by style, and made authoritative judgments of aesthetic merit, as travel itself became an occasion for the cultivation and display of ‘taste’” (22). 4 Kendall comments on the popularity, in that period, of Swiss scenery, which became the subject of a cartoon by George Du Maurier entitled “An American View of Swiss Scenery” and published in Punch in 1878, the same year “Daisy Miller” was also published (Kendall 11). 5 Raised for some years in France by her grandparents, Ann Thackeray Ritchie then moved to live in England, but occasionally went back again to France as a





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 tourist. 6 Unlike “the conventional meaning of ‘marker’ in touristic contexts,” usually “restricted to information that is attached to, or posted alongside of, the sight,” the term is used by MacCannell more extensively to indicate “any information about a sight, including that found in travel books, museum guides, stories told by persons who have visited it, art history, texts and lectures, ‘dissertations’ and so forth” (The Tourist 110). At the same time, however, MacCannell also points out the double function of the marker as both “information” and “vehicle for the information,” noting how often “markers” intended as vehicles can become “themselves tourist attractions” (111). It is in this extended sense that I employ the concept of “marker” in my analysis. 7 I refer here to the popular sketches of notable contemporary people written by Edmund Hodgson Yates, first published in the newspaper The World, and later collected in the successful three-volume series Celebrities at Home (1877-79). 8 The concept has become a major staple of contemporary tourism discourse, although, as several scholars have pointed out, and as MacCannell himself made clear from the start, “[n]ot all travelers are concerned about seeing behind the scenes” (96), or are in search of the authentic in their travels. 9 It may be worth recalling that James was revising his travel writings for publication in Italian Hours at the same time that he was writing the Prefaces.

Works Cited Adler, Judith.“Origins of Sightseeing.” Annals of Tourism Research 16 (1989): 7-29. Print. Álvarez Amorós, José Antonio. “Henry James, Percy Lubbock, and Beyond: A Critique of the Anglo-American Conception of Narrative Point of View.” Studia Neophilologica 66 (1994): 47-57. Taylor & Francis Online. Web. 19 July 2012. Armstrong, Paul B.. The Phenomenology of Henry James. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1983. Print. Blackmur, Richard. Introduction. The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces. By Henry James. New York: Scribner’s 1934. vii-xxxix. Print. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Ed. Randal Johnson. Cambridge: Polity Press , 1993. Print. —. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Trans. Susan Emanuel. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996. Print. Brodhead, Richard H. Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. Print. —. “The American Literary Field, 1860-1890.” Cambridge History of American Literature: Prose Writing, 1860-1890. Vol. 3. Ed. Sacvan Bercovitch. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. 11-62. Print.



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Buzard, James. The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to ‘Culture’ 1800-1918. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Print. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. 1990. Cambridge, MA.: The MIT Press, 1993. Print. —. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture.1999. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001. Print. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday, 1956. Print. Hale, Dorothy J. “Henry James and the Invention of Novel Theory.” Cambridge Companion to Henry James. Ed. Jonathan Freedman. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 79-101. Print. James, Henry. Daisy Miller: A Study. Henry James: Complete Stories 1874-1884. Ed. William L. Vance. New York: The Library of America, 1999. 238-295. Print. —. “Recent Florence.” Atlantic Monthly 41 (1878): 586-93. Making of America. Web. 15 Nov. 2011. —. “The Art of Fiction.” Literary Criticism I: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers. Ed. Leon Edel. New York: Library of America, 1984. 44-65. Print. —. “The Birthplace.” The Novels and Tales of Henry James. 1909. Vol. 17. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937. 129-213. Print. —. Prefaces to the New York Edition. Literary Criticism II: French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition. Ed. Leon Edel, New York: The Library of America, 1984. 1035-1341. Print. —. Italian Hours. Collected Travel Writings: The Continent. A Little Tour in France, Italian Hours, Other Travels. Ed. Richard Howard. New York: Library of America, 1993. 279-619. Print. Jolly, Roslyn. “Travel and Tourism.” Henry James in Context. Ed. David McWhirter. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. 343-53. Print. Kendall, Johnson. Henry James and the Visual. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print. MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. 1976. Berkeley: U of California P, 1999. Print. —. The Ethics of Sightseeing. Berkeley: U of California P, 2011. Print. Matz, Jesse. Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Print. Rawlings, Peter. “Narratives of Theory and Theories of Narrative: Point of View and Centres of Consciousness.” Palgrave Advances in Henry





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 James Studies. Ed. Peter Rawlings. Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 35-58. Print. Stougaard-Nielsen, Jakob. “Henry James and Visual Culture.” Introduction. Henry James and the Visual Culture of Modernity. Ed. Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen. Aarhus University, 2006. Web. 26 July 2012. Twain, Mark. The Innocents Abroad. 1869. New York: Penguin, 2002. Print. Urry, John. The Tourist Gaze. 2nd ed. London: Sage, 2002. Print. —. “The Tourist Gaze ‘Revisited.’” The American Behavioral Scientist 36 (1992): 172-186. ABI/INFORM Complete. Web. 9 June 2012. Yates, Edmund Hodgson. Celebrities at Home. 3 vols. London: Office of the World, 1877–79. Print.



 

CHAPTER NINE THE REAL FICTION: TOURISM, MODERN ITALY AND A “CONSCIOUS AND CULTIVATED CREDULITY” TATIANA PETROVICH NJEGOSH

The long formalist hegemony on Henry James and the domestication of the writer’s heterogeneous, massive corpus into a consistent canon erased contradictions, influences, changes. James, so the story goes, was the nineteenth-century author who emancipated literature from the tyranny of reality. While variety is currently an appreciated plus in James’s oeuvre, that same value eclipses the continuities in the writer’s critical and theoretical work, diminishing the importance of his contribution to the theory and practice of literature. Definitely, James was not the advocate of a self-referential literary prose or the Master of the New Critical and Liberal forging. Yet, his loose and often problematic critical corpus displays a few consistent principles, reiterated in the course of time, which are of great value in that they ground the autonomy of the novel in a systematic strategy of aesthetic and psychological reconciliation between binaries such as actual and imaginary, art and life, literary and referential language, rational and symbolic mental processes. As I will argue, in the troubled making of James’s idea and practice of literary autonomy and ontology, the many trips to Italy, as well as the redefinition of ideas of authenticity brought about by modern tourism, played a crucial and neglected role. James’s travels have conventionally been interpreted within the tradition of the Grand Tour, thus relegating the writer in the cage of a typical nineteenth-century elite formation. More recent criticism has worked instead on James and travel to substantiate a “new” figure, that of the (post)modern social and cultural critic. As Donatella Izzo has argued, both the Master and the opposite but specular figure of the culture critic

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 spring out of a shared severing between the interconnected categories of aesthetic and ideology (Portraying the Lady 5). Specifically, this dichotomy erases the enormous structural impact of modern tourism on conceptions of authenticity and reality, and on literature’s ontology, poetics, and practice. While on a strict literary ground the realms of the real and the imaginary did not meet because of the binary exclusive opposition predicated by both rationalistic and positivistic thought and poetics, that same facile dichotomy was replicated and amplified at a middle-class and “mass” level by the spreading of modern tourism. According to James Buzard, modern tourism actually produced a paradoxical rhetoric of anti-tourism fostering redefinitions of cultural authenticity which relied on a post-Enlightenment either/or narrative opposing authenticity to fraud and artless naïveté to modern skepticism. The topos of the diffused contrast between the “true traveler” and the “mere tourist,” as many scholars have argued, deeply influenced the emerging idea of culture as strongly intertwined with the concept of a (lost) authenticity to be regained and re-experienced through “true” travel. In the Preface (1908) to the twelfth volume of the New York Edition, the “conscious and cultivated credulity” is recalled as the peculiar belief giving birth to The Turn of the Screw, but that paradoxical, improbable formula stands for the ideal response to a “new” literature, living, like many other cultural activities and like the psychology of every-day life, through a duplicitous attitude. According to James, belief in fiction works not despite but in relation to our knowing that we are dealing with fiction (see Schaper 38, 40), independently from pseudo-objective criteria of “plausibility”: [W]e believe Balzac, we believe Gustave Flaubert, we believe Dickens and Thackeray and Miss Austen. Dickens is far more incredible than George Sand, and yet he produces much more illusion. In spite of her plausibility . . . [Sand] is always appearing to be telling a fairy-tale. We say in spite of her plausibility, but . . . her excessive plausibility is the reason of our want of faith. (LC2 713)

Criteria of plausibility, verisimilitude, and factuality are dismissed in favor of a proto reader-response theory focusing on the cognitive and emotional effects, the “belief” produced by the “truth” and “reality” of (literary) fiction. The history of literary criticism is “filled with the struggles to make sense” of a “dual awareness”: “We take fiction for truth . . . even if we know it is not truth” (Krieger 337-338). The tormented history of realism, according to Paul Ricoeur, reflects the paradoxical nature of an “impossible” enterprise where James stands as an exemplary



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figure, and where the ambition to represent life is concurrent with the more and more conventional character of the attempt (Ricoeur, Temps et récit 28). In James’s double perspective, a stance simultaneously inside and outside fictional reality, the author’s (and the reader’s) aesthetic response, grants symbolic life to objects whose extension is merely linguistic and whose ontology—its reality effect—depends on the belief they produce. As Emilio Garroni has remarked, this is the “problem” in art, a problem which current aesthetic theories are not able to explain and understand because they still rely on a post-Enlightenment dichotomy between true and false (vi-vii). James’s conscious and cultivated credulity significantly reverses Samuel T. Coleridge’s aesthetic formula based on a rationalistic, manly and willing interruption of rational disbelief, placing at the center of his critical discourse the dismissed, “primitive,” gendered other in the binary informing both nineteenth-century conventional theories of literature and modern tourism: credulity. The duplicitous nature of fiction is mainly an aesthetic issue, but also, as again Garroni argues, a wider anthropological and psychological issue related to the status, the functioning of, and the response to “the imaginary” in mental processes and cultural dynamics (vi-vii; see also Mannoni). 1 As Dan Sperber maintained against Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s theory of an evolutionary acquisition of rationality at the expense of a more primitive symbolic thought, the symbolic order works as a supplementary treatment of perceptive stimuli when the rational order is not able to produce an adequate synthesis at a literal level, as when during the mass the wine is called blood (Sperber 19-20, 35, 37). At a literary level, Ricoeur maintains in La métaphore vive (1975) that the power of poetic language derives from its peculiar referential quality: literature speaks about the world through fiction and a “metaphorical” reference (285-300, 291). In the second half of the nineteenth century, both in Europe and in the U.S., anthropology, history, and academic disciplines such as history of religion or comparative mythology promoted exclusionary approaches opposing magic, contrasting primitive thought to superior logic mental processes—a dichotomy later deconstructed by Claude Lévi-Strauss (Sperber 35, 37). Within the early theories of linguistic reference, Gottlob Frege argued for an absolute distinction between poetic and referential language on the basis that the first had sense but no reference. Poetic “apparent”assertions, which referred to non-existent objects, had neither truth nor falsehood value (qtd. in Doležel 94). On his part, as a writer and a modern American tourist visiting the Old World, James came to dismiss the idea of a primal cultural authenticity waiting to be unveiled by a





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 sensitive traveler as a simplistic and unlikely narration. The Italian Grand Tours produced a clash with the Post-Unitarian Italian kingdom’s problematic modernity and brought the necessity to reconcile, in a new narrative, a conscious credulity, the land of fancy and education—Italy as a splendid relic of the past—and the actual, complex young nation. Moreover, and more significantly, repeated exposure to Italy’s uneven modernity—the simultaneous existence of present and past, merging notions of authenticity, falseness and make-believe, a syncretic bulk of beliefs where Catholicism, paganism, high culture, scientific knowledge and popular folklore—produced complex compromise formations. These proved the power of collective beliefs apparently exorcised by modernity’s linear progress, problematizing a rigid opposition between rationality and symbolic processes, true and false, and substantiating James’s claim to the hybrid status and duplicitous response of modern fiction. James’s ambitious, passionate, and troubled attempt to boost representational possibilities and effects, integrating literature into life (the term he preferred to use in “The Art of Fiction,” in the reviews and in the Prefaces), was thus a tenacious, continuous driving force springing from aesthetic and epistemological needs. Interweaving in a rich and fluid representational fabric realism, romance, the supernatural, and the ghostly, 2 James emancipated the novel from polarized formal strictures and advanced its autonomy, redefining its ontology. Yet, the writer’s sustained search for duplicity both in literature and life can be grasped in its full meaning only by juxtaposing the literary contexts he practiced and the wider Euro-American cultural arena, where modern tourism, James’s travels, and in particular his trips to Italy (1869-1907), contributed to a redefinition of the formal capacities of the novel and of its precarious status. In the first volume of the Autobiography (1913), with a significant blending of the American popular with a British elitist, critical spirit, the mature writer celebrated the conscious and cultivated credulity as a precocious aesthetic awareness generated in a child-flâneur, significantly dismissing the ontogenetic theory of symbolic thought as a primary, primitive, and credulous mental process. The first artistic initiation flourished, at a tender age, in the native New York ground through theatrical minstrelsy—Harriet Beecher Stowe, Phineas T. Barnum, and Matthew Arnold: “We [he and his brother William] attended this spectacle just in order not to be beguiled, just in order to enjoy with ironic detachment and, at the very most, to be amused ourselves at our sensibility should it prove to have been trapped and caught” (James, Autobiography 94).



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James’s aesthetic and psychological disposition draws together life and art, truth and fiction, symbolic and rational mental processes, thus exorcising the reductionist and evolutionary nineteenth-century dichotomy between pre-logic and logic thought or the cautious severing of literature and reality. Calling for an aesthetic and psychic reconciliation against a rationalistic willing suspension of disbelief through literary fiction and the theatre,3 James thought that the actor is the audience, he or she being at the same time inside and outside the part, in possession of and possessed by his or her role, like Miriam Rooth in The Tragic Muse (1890), uncannily redoubled while looking at Peter Sherringham: “Miriam, in the full swing of her part, paused but for an instant and let herself ring out again, while Peter sank into the nearest chair and she fixed him with her illumined eyes, that is with those of the raving Constance” (214). Or like the French actor and doyen of the Comédie Française, Benoît-Constant Coquelin, who in 1887 earned the honorable title of “Balzac of the actors” because when in “complete possession of his form” he “builds up a character, in his supposedly uncanny process, by touch added to touch, line to line, illustration to illustration, and with a vision of his personage breathing steadily before him” (James, Scenic Art 204-205). As argued by Donatella Izzo, James’s authorial dynamics shift between a rigid formal control and the “relinquishing” of power, revealing the “double” feminist “vision” at work in a representational technique which locates him simultaneously inside and outside gender (“Le metamorfosi di un ‘queer monster’” 96; Portraying the Lady 19, 20; emphasis added); at the same time, the writer and the man sustain the dual role of involved performer and detached audience (Litvak 219). Interestingly, and testifying to James’s mature assimilation of tourism in the problematic economy of fictional authenticity, such an ideal, double aesthetic response can be detected even in tourists or “tourist-mongers.” Such is the case of Morris Gedge’s wife, whose role in “The Birthplace” (1903) is crucial but usually neglected. While he sways from excessive credulity to detached skepticism ending with an awkward synthesis, a baroque performance where an exaggerated show is interpreted with cold distance, the narrator makes clear that she knows how poor the historical evidence certifying the authenticity of the English writer’s birthplace is, and that she loves to “believe” it. Hayes too, the U.S. tourist simultaneously “detached” and “amused,” is meta-fictionally “interested” in the “fact of the abysmally little that, in proportion, we know,” in proportion “to what in fact there is to wonder about. That’s the interest, it’s immense” (James, CT 11: 430, 435; emphasis added).





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 Commenting on Sigmund Freud’s Verleugnung (disawoval), Garroni states that not only art, but also many other cultural activities work through a peculiar “duplicity,” a disposition where something is at the same time accepted, believed, and denied, true and false, real and unreal (vi-vii; my translation). James’s conscious and cultivated credulity inheres in belief in fictional objects with a “mere” linguistic extension, whose ontology springs precisely from the belief they produce. In the words of Jean Pouillon, la croyance partagée, collective belief—be it in literature or in contemporary witchcraft, in both of which the only empirical fact is “the word” (Favret-Saada 9 )—has an ontological value because it brings about creative illusion: “Elle produit an effet de réel: elle est operatoire, elle fait croire” (Pouillon 9-10; emphasis added).4 In his autobiography, James ostensibly attributed his aesthetic, racializing initiation to Lower Manhattan minstrelsy, but his troubled human and professional education developed under the sun of another, racialized ground: Italy. At least in James’s case, tourism contributed to a substantial reworking of the pillars sustaining the novel through a paradoxical weakening of the borders between true and false, art and life, consequently complicating the ideal belief—a form of critical adherence—in literary fiction.

Tourism, or Death and Resurgence of the Novel Donatella Izzo has demonstrated that while James participated “in the late nineteenth-century construction of the literary field as autonomous,” his notion of aesthetic autonomy should be disengaged from a heavy set of distorting influences, from T. S. Eliot’s poetic principles to F. O. Matthiessen’s self-transcendental dichotomy between art and life. James’s specific contribution to the idea of artistic autonomy should be reinterpreted as “an artistic commitment to reality,” where autonomy stands for an exhilarating “response” both to the “logic of commodity culture” of the marketplace and to “the constraints of bourgeois morality” (Izzo, “More Lessons” 73, 76). While James demands “the freedom to express” and “experiment,” his fiction “denounce[s]” the split between art and life, representing “the countless ways in which ‘life’ and ‘art’ are mutually involved,” exposing “the defensive and ideological nature of their separation,” and performing “a difficult balancing act” on the “discourse of literary autonomy” (Izzo, “More Lessons” 77). The writer’s concept of literary autonomy seems in fact to be deeply related to a notion of authenticity fraught with competing, intersecting discourses, genres, modes, and representational languages. The supernatural story, the ghost-story, romance, arch-romance, real, realism, the romantic



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are in fluid contact with anthropology, psychology, Modern Spiritualism, Impressionist and Post-impressionist painting, photography, and, of course, with the modern plague apparently condemning, with the abolition of distance, any possible form of authenticity: tourism. Rather than having literature attempt a direct competition with tourism and photography on the terrain of pristine authenticity, James elaborates a strategy of cultural assimilation that is influenced by the idea of the post-Civil War U.S. national identity as a fresh frontier and an open form (Petrovich Njegosh, “‘The good American’”). Displaying a conspicuous dose of anxiety, which betrays the fear of a destiny of derivative mimicry, a patriotic young James praised to his friend Thomas S. Perry the manifest artistic destiny of U.S. citizens. The unlimited belief in innovation through (imperialistic) assimilation, even if cast in a quasi-Emersonian rhetoric, does not dispel the doubt of a contingent un-authenticy of ‘Americanness’: We have exquisite qualities as a race, and it seems to me that we are ahead of the European races in the fact that more than either of them we can deal freely with forms of civilisation not our own, can pick and choose and assimilate and in short (aesthetically &c) claim our property wherever we find it. To have no national stamp has hitherto been a defect & a drawback; but I think it not unlikely that American writers may yet indicate that a vast intellectual fusion and synthesis of the various National tendencies of the world is the condition of more important achievements than any we have seen. (James, LiL 17)

Later, in “The Saint’s Afternoon and Others” (1901, 1909), the Gulf of Naples generates a new aesthetic synthesis between past and present, enfolding a group of little U.S. tourists in the “spirit of the place.” In the magnificent vision of the Bay of Naples on a glorious June day, the “delightful amphibious American children,” literally immersed in the Mediterranean sea, are absorbed into a piece of decorative Renaissance porcelain: “Enamelled by the sun of the Bay as for figures of miniature Tritons and Nereids on a Renaissance plaque” (James, IH 316). In a 1906 letter addressed to U.S. photographer Alvin L. Coburn concerning the illustrations to the New York Edition, James recommended to Coburn to re-present while shunning anything that could be recognizable, thus subtly trying to assimilate Pictorialist photography and its discourse of creative rather than mimetic authenticity. The order was to “do” what “may serve for a sort of generalized and symbolized Venice”: nothing “shabby and familiar,” nor the vulgar, touristic images—“the pompous and obvious things that one everywhere sees photos of” (HJL 4: 428). James’s cautious use of photography and his choice of Coburn reveal his





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 ambivalence towards a representational tool he will later demean because of its “connatural” dependence on the referent. While photography induces “a state of hallucination,” literature could cast “a literary spell” (LC2 1326). As is apparent in “The Future of the Novel,” the anxieties generated by photography as a powerful rival to the novel were increased by a strict interdependence between photography and tourism. In the 1899 essay James laments the industrial production, reproduction, selling, marketing, distribution, and voracious consumption of books. The age of mechanical reproduction smoothed and multiplied the ways of making books, rudely dispelling the former aura emanated by the mythical image of the novel as an “occasional prodigy” (103). The novel, “the book par excellence,” is thus subject to such a “monstrous multiplication” that the only “plain” fact is the working of a Darwinian selection: “The great majority of volumes printed within a year cease to exist as the hour passes,” and to speak of the future of the novel means to concentrate the attention on “those types that have, for criticism, a present and a past” (103, 104). In “Venice,” an 1882 travel sketch, James condemns modern tourism because it suffers from an analogous, vitiated relation to authenticity derived from a mechanical, photographical reproduction of reality. Within the conventional apology of a genre so diffused as travel writing that the author must renounce any pretense of truth, tourism is then subtly deprived of its “referential” value and criticized as second-hand, virtual experience. In the age of mass mobility and photographic reproduction, tourism can well create visual inflation—“the collection of photographs” everybody has because everyone has been there—and linguistic saturation: “The name of St. Mark is as familiar as the postman’s ring” (IH 7). Notwithstanding the grim, conservative portrayal of English and U.S. literature sketched in “The Future of the Novel,” the essay celebrates literature over modernity’s false promoters of experience (mainly tourism and photography), with an astonishing remark on the un-expensiveness of literature. The modern novel’s positive “cheapness” and the relatively democratic availability of literary activities point to the real discriminating values: gender and money. While gender is responsible for the dominant dichotomy between a virile, direct experience of authenticity through “the object represented,” and the feminized, vicarious pleasures of verbal representation (102-103), money settles the final victory of the novel over tourism. If modern tourism is a form of highly organized leisure charged with the imaginative and emotional energies of its practitioners (MacCannell), James’s celebration of the novel as an extension of experience—together with a rare emphasis on the cheapness and easy



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availability of literature—reflect an odd attempt at the creation of a durable specificity for the “literary field.” Interestingly, and once more marking the distance from the image of James as the formal, self-referential elitist master forged by the New Critics, the distinction between literature and first-hand experiences such as tourism is not drawn exclusively on the slippery ground of “aesthetic” authenticity, but on social issues and the material and symbolic status of purchasing power. Money is the crucial parameter ruling the dynamics of cultural acquisition, exchange, and transmission in the modern, industrialized English-speaking countries. If, as Buzard contends, modern tourism was a democratizing, organized form of highly imaginative leisure, the fact that the Continental tour “was becoming more broadly accessible than ever before” after the Napoleonic Wars is, as he remarks, an “exaggerated perception”: “Touring classes” were in fact limited to “the upper and middle classes” of European and U.S. societies (Buzard 6). While Christopher Newman or Daisy Miller are openly defined as affluent U.S. citizens, and James himself, their creator, belonged to the fortunate touring elites, in The Portrait of a Lady “Europe” becomes accessible to Isabel Archer through Ralph Touchett’s money.

The Hallowed Ground of Fictional Authenticity: A Conscious and Cultivated Tourist in Italy James’s characters and fictional worlds are Modernist “portraits without models”—representations without actual correspondence, or extension, outside the text—and their “degree of verisimilitude” is always “artfully obtained” (James, LC2 1230, 1179). On the other hand, the writer claims both his credulity in fiction and the awareness that the “link with reality” of his assertions consists in the “exquisitely calculated,” “harmless hocuspocus under cover of which we might suppose” a character “to have existed” (1181). Hocus-pocus, charm, and spell are James’s recurrent terms to evoke with serious playfulness the peculiar ontology of literary representation. Celebrating modern fiction as a magic circle traced by the author’s and the reader’s detached involvement, the writer trifles with the impossible goal of a referential, literal presence. A synonym of “trickery” and “magic,” presumably a corruption of the mass formula hoc est corpus uttered by Catholic priests in the transubstantiation rite of the Mass, hocus-pocus was one of the obscure words used by seventeenth-century conjurers while performing charms. As is well known, both in the Prefaces to the New York Edition and in the previous bulk of critical writings, James grounds the novel’s pretense





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 to truth and reality by juxtaposing the literary picture with painting and history. What is less known, though, is the fact that those same critical loci bristle, without contradiction, with the ambiguous, heterogeneous semantic fields of theatre, alchemy, witchcraft, magic, illusionism, trickery, forgery, the ghostly, and demonic possession. In the Preface to The Tragic Muse, James compares “the artist” to the “charm-compeller” bent “over his work,” while in the Preface to The Spoils of Poynton he marks the deep complicity, the shared illusion, between the author and the reader. The artist, “the magician” has merely to “don his best cap and gown” to enter “the inner compartment of our box of tricks” (LC2 1118, 1155). The architecture of the New York Edition reinforces the hypothesis of a significant relation between such seemingly diverse symbolic areas. The Turn of the Screw, James’s ghost-story par excellence, is set apart from the other ghost-stories included in the Edition and appears, together with “The Aspern Papers” and “The Liar,” in volume twelve. The other ghostly tales are gathered in volume seventeen with “The Birthplace” and “The Altar of the Dead.” The short stories written from the middle to the late phase enclosed in volume twelve and volume seventeen of the New York Edition focus on apparently heterogeneous subjects: central issues, marginal daily trivia, superstitious relics such as the cult of the dead in the modern urban world, the belief in ghosts, the touristic raving for the birthplaces of literary authors, innocent lies: all this evokes—and reinforces—the power of figurative language and the creative effectiveness of shared, conscious illusion, both in literature and in life. The ghostly apparition in “The Jolly Corner” (1908) is anticipated linguistically by the rich, wildly figurative language the narrator conjures, together with the character, to represent Spencer Brydon’s and Alice Staverton’s dawning sensations, impressions, perceptions, and ideas. The pervasive Jamesian relationship between the supernatural, the ghostly, and the literary has of course already been explored.5 Yet, what many studies seem to miss is the fact that the ghostly and the supernatural should not be read per se, but in relation to James’s general attempt to extend the representational capacity of the novel, as well as to his creation of a wider symbolic, imaginary field deeply related to life. The massive use of the supernatural does not signal the attempted revival of an extinguished aesthetic faith, nor the enhancing of literature’s status and value through a convenient dose of spiritual(istic) varnish. On the contrary, while at an immediate level it ironically plays with the (anti)modern jeremiad of lost authenticity, at a deep level it reflects James’s attempt to re-launch literature’s ontology, dignity, and effect (the conscious and cultivated credulity) through a settling of the binary



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between imaginary and real, without renouncing literature’s literariness. In the Preface to the New York edition of the “Altar of the Dead,” James writes that the “spell” of the supernatural in the ghost story becomes effective only through the “represented thing,” because supernatural phenomena have no “intrinsic value” (LC2 1257, 1259). The point is not so much the shared representational nature of supernatural and fiction, as the peculiar ontology they both share. Both “phenomena” lack a basis in empirical, phenomenological facts, and both produce a shared belief, a paradoxical, simultaneous intermingling of credulity and detachment. In the anti-touristic rhetoric paradoxically produced by modern tourism, the opposition between true and false—the “true, skeptic traveler” vs the “mere, credulous tourist”—deeply influenced the emerging idea of culture as strongly intertwined with the concept of pristine authenticity waiting to be unveiled (Buzard). James, Buzard argues, was ambivalent with regard to this distinction (224). To me, through time and repeated touristic experiences, James actually tried to compose such an aesthetic, psychological, and anthropological dichotomy. The writer knew that, paraphrasing Flaubert, “the tourist—the American tourist—c’est moi,” as he ashamedly confessed to his mother and to his sister during the first fatal encounter with Italy. On the occasion of the trip to Rome in the Autumn of 1869, James wrote to Mary James of the “absolute,” “incredible lack of culture” plaguing his compatriots—the “common travelling Americans” (CL 1855-72 2: 145). Again in 1869, he said to Alice that Rome was “so vast so heavy, so multitudinous that you seem to require all your energy simply to bear up against it,” representing himself as one among the many American tourists abroad—one of the many, that is, decidedly unprepared for the impact of a multilayered and millennial civilization: “Your foremost feeling,” he wrote in that same letter, “is that of your own ignorance” (172). Only through time, repeated touristic exposure, and experience, both as a man and as a writer, did James successfully work out a conscious and cultivated credulity in a problematic, modern authenticity. While dismissing the idea of a reified cultural authenticity, James did not renounce the idea of authenticity tout court. 6 Not dissimilarly from the characters in his ghost stories, he had to find a relation, or better a convincing compromise, between true and false, the real and the supernatural, reality and fiction. James’s numerous trips to Italy brought to light the relics of a magnificent, remote past, but they also revealed an unexpected side of the PostUnitarian kingdom: modernity. The distinctive mark of Italian modernity consists in a continuous redefinition of cultural authenticity and a production of compromise formations such as the Neapolitan jettatura





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 (see de Martino), whose sophisticated daily motto is non è vero ma ci credo: it is not true but I believe it. Italy’s modern, chiaroscuro “pastiches” are perhaps abhorred by John Ruskin, the (English) patron saint of art, but they are loved by James, the American tourist. In “Italy Revisited” (1878), “the Italy of the Future”— where “[t]here is a horse-car from the Porta del Popolo to the Ponte Molle [sic], and the Tuscan shrines are fed with kerosene”—is frankly tired of “our unsufferable aesthetic patronage.” Moreover, if the uneven Italian modernity, a jumble between “the old” and “the new” irritates “Mr. Ruskin,” James, assuming young Italy’s point of view and voice, retorts that “it savours of arrogance to demand of any people, as a right of one’s own, that they shall be artistic. ‘Be artistic yourselves!’ is the very natural reply that young Italy has at hand for English critics and censors” (IH 114). While the first trip brought about the necessity to fuse the ideal Grand Tour with the reality of mass tourism, the subsequent visits as tourist-traveler-writer taught James how to incorporate the imagined Italy and the “real” country, memory and renewed encounter, skeptic distance, revulsion, and ardent desire, in a larger, harmonious canvas. In the letters written on the occasion of his first journey to Italy in 1869, a young James sways between skepticism and credulity, the search for authenticity and the suspicion of fraud. Trying to resist the disturbing seductiveness of Rome and Naples, he alternates the “sensual” and free “roaming the streets” “moaning . . . in a fever of enjoyment” with a virile and Protestant revulsion for the Catholic picturesque of Southern Italy (HJL 1: 181-182). As I argued elsewhere (“‘How a man should meet trouble’”), James would finally learn that Italy could teach new ways to deal with physicality, sexuality, emotions, freedom, as well as with modern aesthetic and epistemological issues. In a 1907 letter to Edith Wharton, James defined Italy as the “old coquina,” “the most beautiful country in the world.” As soon as it is pronounced, the blank stereotype is immediately filled with meaning: Italy’s beauty is full of “complexity” and “interest” (James, HJL 4: 457458). In the course of time James dismissed the reactionary, aestheticized treatment of Italy as a picturesque land of decadent, dusty beauty, backwardness, and poverty, in favor of complex representations where Italy and Italians played the role of dynamic, creative, modern subjects (see IH 310, 313). Italy was actually both the iconic touristic country, and the first European country to set up a national board for tourism (Ente Nazionale per le Industrie Turistiche, 1918), thus participating in the commodification of its beauty and resisting its reifying dynamics. Recent re-conceptualizations of tourism interpret the modern phenomenon as a set



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of different practices in relation with other, asymmetrical modern forces at play in the contact zone of modernity. In the complex context of the contradictory effects generated by tourism, hosting cultures are not necessarily seen as passive elements, but as agents actively and creatively contributing to “prismatic” negotiations of both national identity and authenticity (Satta 4; see also Gallini).

Coda: The Saint’s Afternoon The essays collected in Italian Hours offer problematic cadres of modern, post-Unitarian Italy emphasizing the mirroring, transformative processes of the “mythical” Italian landscape, popular culture, religion and social practices. In “From Chambéry to Milan” (1872) a young and Protestant James privately “enjoys” “the relics of St. Charles Borromeous,” stigmatizing the avidity of the Catholic church in exposing an abhorred real thing, “the black mummified corpse of the saint in a glass coffin.” The corpse is “glittering with voting jewel,” and the whole scene ranks with the gothic horror of a grotesque “performance” where the “jeweler” works hand in hand with the “caretaker” (IH 83-84). In “The Saint’s Afternoon and Others,” a mature James finally writes with evident pleasure and ironical participation of the feast of Sant’Antonio in Anacapri. There, with an almost familiar ease, he offers a dose of credulity and animates the happy saint, or better, his wooden representation: “The saint comes out at last, borne aloft in long procession and under a high canopy: a rejoicing, smiling saint, openly delighted with the one happy hour in the year on which he may take his own walk” (309). The “handling” of the wooden Saint starkly contrasts with the excessive touristic reification of the birthplaces cult lamented by Hayes in “The Birthplace”: “the stiff, smug convention, like a dressed-up sacred doll in a Spanish church which you’re a monster if you touch” (James, CT 11: 435). Introducing specific Italian terms such as festa into his English text, James remarks that the festa del Santo is as “holy and merry and noisy as possible,” while the “office of the Saint—of which the festa is but the annual reaffirmation—involves not the faintest attribute of remoteness or mystery” (IH 309; emphasis added). Alternating the mention of the fabricated statue with the animated figure of a very friendly Saint Anthony, who is “frocked and tonsured, but not at all macerated,” James notices once again the domestic familiarity and shared character of the feast, where the saint “holds in his hand a small wax puppet of an infant





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 Jesus and shows him to all their friends, to whom he nods and bows: to whom, in the dazzle of the sun he literally seems to grin and wink” (309). Saint Anthony of Padua was one of the many “new” Post-Tridentine saints whose cult and feast were transformed to react against both the Protestant iconoclastic attacks on Catholicism and the modern Italian secularization processes. The secularization of feasts was marked by a shift from winter to the summer, thus increasing the thaumaturgical value of rites at the expense of the penitential one (Galasso 150, 145). As James furthermore notices, even the sacred space of the magnificent baroque church of San Michele Arcangelo in Anacapri was domesticated and appropriated, thus healing the diffused, pre-modern dichotomy between sacred and deconsecrated ground: Here, in the sacred shade the old women were knitting, gossiping, yawning, shuffling about; here the children were romping and ‘larking’; here in a manner, were the open parlour, the nursery, the kindergarten and the conversazione of the poor. This is everywhere the case by the southern sea. I remember near Sorrento a wayside chapel that seemed the scene of every function of domestic life, including cookery and others. (IH 310).

Notes 1

Philosophical thought has widely reflected on the semantic ambiguity of the verb “to believe” as well as on the difference between “to believe” and “to know” (Needham 57; see also Pouillon 17; Mannoni 9). 2 See Armstrong; Bell; and Rowe. 3 See Petrovich Njegosh, “‘The good American.’” 4 “It produces a reality effect: it is operational, it makes believe.” My translation. 5 See Banta. Northrop Frye saw it as an attempt to evade the reifying trap of realism (1992), while Julie Rivkin has worked on the relation between literature and the ghostly in the tales of writers and artists (1996). To Timothy Lustig, James’s fiction is “ghostly in its enigmatic impalpability” and “subtle,” ambiguous “allusiveness,” while the relation between fiction and supernatural reveals their common, mediated nature (Lustig 2). Anna Despotopoulou and Kimberly C. Reed, on the basis of Lustig’s arguments, argue that “the ghostly” in James amounts to a “narrative strategy” nuancing the writer’s “realistic-protomodernist technique,” and “giving it the profound elusiveness it is celebrated for” (2). 6 On the basis of Dean MacCannell’s argument, Carlo Martinez has maintained that in James’s “The Birthplace” modern mass tourism deconstructs a reified idea of authenticity and dismisses its ontological pretense: “The artificial or fabricated quality of the concept is in sharp contrast with its purported ontological claims” (Martinez 135). James, though, does not argue for the fabrication of authenticity, as in his version of a naïve, mimetic Trollope, but for a balance between awareness and adherence in response to fiction. In “The Art of Fiction,” while claiming the



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right “to take . . . fiction seriously,” James specifies that “truth” the novelisthistorian is “occupied in looking for” is “(the truth, of course, I mean, that he assumes)” (LC1 47). Literature is thus compared with odd, high and lowbrow travelling companions (history, painting, illusion and card-playing), in the attempt to exorcise a binary opposition between true and false. Being a mere “makebelieve,” in order “not to give itself away, as they say in California,” “a story” “must speak with assurance”: only on this condition the novelist, like the poker’s bluffer, can assume, together with the reader, his “make-believe” to be real (46).

Works Cited Armstrong, Paul. The Challenge of Bewilderment: Understanding and Representation in James, Conrad and Ford. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1987. Print. Banta, Martha. Henry James and the Occult: The Great Extension. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1972. Print. Bell, Michael Davitt. The Problem of American Realism: Studies in the Cultural History of a Literary Idea. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1993. Print. Buitenhuis, Peter. The Grasping Imagination: The American Writings of Henry James. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1970. Print. Buzard, James. The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to ‘Culture,’ 1880-1918. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Print. de Martino, Ernesto. Sud e magia. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1989. Print. Despotopoulou, Anna, and Kimberly C. Reed. Introduction: “I see ghosts everywhere.” Henry James and the Supernatural. Ed. Anna Despotopoulou and Kimberly C. Reed. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 1-12. Print. Doležel, Lubom઀r. Occidental Poetics: Tradition and Progress. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1990. Print. Favret-Saada, Jeanne. Les mots, la mort, les sorts. Paris: Gallimard, 1977. Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage, 1980. Print. Frye, Northrop. “Henry James and the Comedy of Occult.” Genre Trope Gender. Ed. Barry Rutland. Ottawa: Carleton UP, 1992. 13-31. Print. Galasso, Giuseppe. L’altra Europa: per un’antropologia storica del Mezzogiorno d’Italia. Naples: Guida, 2009. Print. Gallini, Clara. Patrie elettive: i segni dell’appartenenza. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003. Print. Garroni, Emilio. “Introduzione.” Octave Mannoni. La funzione dell’immaginario: letteratura e psicoanalisi. Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1972. ii-xv. Clefs pour l’imaginaire ou l’autre scène, 1969. Print.





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 Izzo, Donatella. “La metamorfosi di un ‘queer monster’: problemi di genere.” Incroci di genere: De(i)istituzioni, transitività e passaggi testuali. Ed. Mario Corona. Bergamo: Bergamo UP, 1999. 87-108. Print. —. “More Lessons From the Master.” Revisionary Interventions into Henry James. Ed. Donatella Izzo and Carlo Martinez. Naples: Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale,” 2008. 67-88. Print. —. Portraying the Lady: Technologies of Gender in the Short Stories of Henry James. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2001. Print. James, Henry. Autobiography: A Small Boy and Others, Notes of a Son and Brother, The Middle Years. Ed. Frederick W. Dupee. New York: Criterion, 1956. Print. —. The Complete Letters of Henry James: 1855-1872. Vol. 2. Ed. Pierre A. Walker and Greg W. Zacharias. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2006. Print. —. Complete Tales. Vols. 1-11. Ed. Leon Edel. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1964. Print. —. Henry James Letters. Vols. 1-4. Ed. Leon Edel. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1984. Print. —. Italian Hours. New York: Penguin, 1992. Print. —. A Life in Letters. Ed. Philip. A. Horne. New York: Penguin, 1998. Print. —. Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature; American Writers; English Writers. Vol. I. Ed. Leon Edel and Mark Wilson. New York: Library of America, 1984. Print. —. Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition. Vol. II. Ed. Leon Edel and Mark Wilson. New York: The Library of America, 1984. Print. —. The Scenic Art: Notes on Acting and the Drama, 1872-1901. Ed. Allan Wade. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1949. Print. —. The Tragic Muse. London: Penguin, 1995. Print. Krieger, Murray. “Fiction, History, and Empirical Reality.” Critical Enquiry 1 (1975): 335-360. Print. Litvak, Joseph. Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992. Print. Lustig, Timothy J. Henry James and the Ghostly. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge UP, 1994. Print. MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Schocken Books, 1976. Print. Mannoni, Octave. Clefs pour l’imaginaire ou l’autre scène. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. Print.



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Martinez, Carlo. “Henry James and the Tourist Imagination.” Revisionary Interventions into Henry James. Ed. Donatella Izzo and Carlo Martinez. Naples: Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale,” 2008. 117-145. Print. Needham, Rodney. Credere: credenza, linguaggio, esperienza. Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1976. Belief, Language and Experience, 1973. Print. Petrovich Njegosh, Tatiana. “‘The good American’: Henry James, U.S. American Studies and the Frontiers of National Identity.” Revisionary Interventions into Henry James. Ed. Donatella Izzo and Carlo Martinez. Naples: Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale,” 2008. 231-279. Print. —. “‘How a man should meet trouble’: The Master’s Mediterranean Actors as Models of Self-Possession.” The Henry James Review 24 (2003): 298-306. Print. Pouillon, Jean. Le cru et le su. Paris: Le Seuil, 1993. Print. Ricoeur, Paul. La métaphore vive. Paris: Le Seuil, 1975. Print. —. Temps et récit: la configuration dans le récit de fiction. Vol. II. Paris: Le Seuil, 1984. Time and Narrative. Vol. II, 1990. Print. Rivkin, Julie. False Positions: The Representational Logics of Henry James’s Fiction. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1996. Print. Rowe, John Carlos. The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James. London: Methuen, 1985. Print. Satta, Gino. “Turismo e mutamento culturale.” Turismo e psicologia 0. Padua: Padova UP, 2007: 1-6. Web. 15 November 2011. Schaper, Eva. “Fiction and the Suspension of Disbelief.” The British Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 18.1 (Winter 1978): 31-44. Print. Sperber, Dan. “Il pensiero simbolico è prerazionale?” La funzione simbolica. Ed. Michel Izard and Pierre Smith. Palermo: Sellerio, 1988. 19-43. La fonction symbolique, 1979. Print.







CHAPTER TEN “SPECIMENS INDEED OF HUMAN GREED”: THE MUSEUM OF POPULARITY IN “THE PAPERS” GIANNA FUSCO

James’s capacity to acutely register and stage in his works the cultural shifts that marked his age has been pointed out so often and with such a variety of approaches as to have become almost a commonplace in Jamesian studies. Tourist discourse is no exception, and, as many scholars have noticed, a number of characters, scenes, and even whole works bear witness to James’s observation of the emerging character of tourism as a cultural phenomenon. 1 Through a reading of the novella “The Papers” (1903), my contribution aims at showing how the text intersects discourses about tourism and notions of literariness with another lasting Jamesian preoccupation, namely, that of publicity and of the status of the author as a public figure. Finally, I will try to demonstrate how a close analysis of the latter question allows the emergence of a textual level at which James’s concern is with the nature itself of what we call reality and the conditions of our existence within it. I will immediately point out that tourism is never explicitly referred to in the text and that the story does not feature any tourist, strictly speaking. Yet, not only is it possible to see how the rationale of tourist exploration informs the movements of several characters in the story, to the point that the readers are invited and literally guided to experience London’s geography as if they were reading a map; the novella also introduces the image of the museum as a productive and highly significant metaphor for the changing relationship between the press and the sphere of literariness. Cultural tourism is thus firmly, though indirectly, placed among its evoked scenarios. In fact, as we will see, the narrative shows the interaction between celebrities and the public as constructed and mediated by the press according to the principles of collection and display which structure

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art consumption in museum exhibitions. Tourism thus becomes an implicit organizing rationale of experience, though it is never explicitly thematized at the level of the plot. “The Papers” is characterized by such a reduced number of characters and factual events and, conversely, such an explosion of literary references and linguistic bravura that it would be tempting to consider it first and foremost as pure metaliterary divertissement. However, the complexity and intrinsic quality of the language deployed in the text—incredibly compact, yet extremely rich, a sort of verbal tour de force—aligns this to other late Jamesian works focusing on the investigation of the sphere of art and its constitution at the turn of the century.2 Only three characters are entrusted with all the action in “The Papers,” which is however mostly reduced to comments on off-stage events: young and ambitious journalists Howard Bight and Maud Blandy, and the equally ambitious, but still rather obscure, playwright Mortimer Marshal. Two other characters are constantly referred to, but never make their appearance on the scene of the narrative: Mrs. Chorner and BeadelMuffet, the latter being the empty, absent center of a circular plot as ineffectual in terms of linear progression as it is brilliant in terms of literary achievement and philosophical reflection by James. The narrative, in fact, revolves around Howard and Maud’s endless conversations about Beadel-Muffet, a celebrity of the time, and his attempt to disappear from the public eye, with Mortimer Marshal simultaneously trying to replace him in the pantheon of press celebrities thanks to his connection with the two young journalists. Just when Beadel-Muffet’s parable seems to have taken a tragic turn, with Bight being morally responsible, at least in part, for his death, the missing celebrity is reported as once again on the social scene. The deep plunge they have taken into the mechanisms of the press, however, has compelled the young couple to renounce a career in journalism and embrace one in literature, the latter having been a recurrent theme in their conversations since the very beginning of the novella. Written in 1902, while he was proofreading The Wings of the Dove for publication, “The Papers” seems almost an arena set up by James in order to fully explore, by means of an extreme concentration of focus, one of the many issues he had only indirectly observed in that novel, that is, the dynamics and apparatuses of publicity and popularity. In The Wings of the Dove, through a series of correspondences from the US, young and poor Merton Densher introduces the heiress Milly Theale to the English aristocracy as a sort of cultural icon of the age and a representative of her national character. Caught in the web of the complex relationships Milly establishes in England, Densher is later horrified to find out that his





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 professionalism is misunderstood as mere publicity, as pure promotion of a private person. His painful awareness of the radical opposition between the more traditional press (seeking authoritativeness and political seriousness) and the so called New Journalism (interpreting the tastes and interests of a varied and less committed audience) sets him in sharp contrast to George Flack from The Reverberator (1888), probably the most commented upon among James’s works dealing with the culture of publicity. In offering his American readers gossip and news about the most distinguished Parisian families, Flack is what Densher, under the pressure of the rapidly changing press industry, is constantly in danger of becoming for a British audience in search of a taste of American culture, that is, not an austere, committed man of letters and news, but a contributor to vulgar society papers. 3 This theme of the production of cultural relevance through the press, which is only briefly touched upon in The Wings and developed as an element contributing to the main plot line in The Reverberator, becomes the object of very close scrutiny virtually occupying each page of “The Papers,” where Densher’s horror and Flack’s aggressiveness are translated into the disenchanted ironical distance the two protagonists place between themselves and their work. Howard Bight and Maud Blandy are young and poor representatives of what could be defined as a proletarian class of press workers, whose job consists in feeding the system of the papers with anything they are able to translate into an object of public interest and thus providing the readers with a constant flow of “news,” which in turn keeps the interest of the papers alive and the whole system in motion. The only aim of their work—the direction where journalism as a profession is going—is thus just the construction of the status of public person, as Bight himself explains: “It’s our branch, our preoccupation . . . this pursuit of the incalculable, this study, to that end, of the great forces of publicity” (86). The great forces of publicity, studied and maneuvered by journalists like Bight, ultimately produce the manifestation of a new human species, that of the press celebrities. Far from being victims of the system, the celebrities and the aspiring candidates to fame are willing cooperators in the making of their public destiny: Specimens indeed of human greed—the greed, the great one, the eagerness to figure, the snap at the bait of publicity, he [Bight] had collected in such store as to stock, as to launch, a museum. In this museum the prize object, the high rare specimen, had been for some time established; a celebrity of the day enjoying, uncontested, a glass case all to himself, more conspicuous than any other, before which the arrested visitor might rebound from surprised recognition. Sir A. B. C. Beadel-Muffet, K. C. B.,



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The passage is relevant under several aspects. Coming early in the text and being the first mention of A. B. C. Beadel-Muffet, the invisible center of the whole story, it constitutes, in a typical Jamesian move, a paradigm of interpretation to be tested against the text’s later development and that will thus remain a defining moment in the experience of the reader. In the interpretative game the passage seems to invite, each party involved in the dynamics of publicity is cast in a role from an unmistakably touristic scenario: quite evidently, Howard Bight figures (and certainly perceives himself) as a collector of a very specific sort of objects, that is, the multiple forms of human greed as embodied in a spasmodic desire for public recognition. A. B. C. Beadel-Muffet, on the other hand, figures as the most valuable piece in the collection, the masterpiece around which exhibitions are conceived and against which minor achievements are assessed. The evocation of the visitor as a merely hypothetical figure who “might rebound” before the spectacle of Beadel-Muffet’s conspicuous presence would apparently confine the whole passage within the limits of an extended metaphor. Yet, a closer look at the implications of James’s words will reveal how the text produces here two different levels of meaning. While Bight projects himself in the position of the private collector—that is, of someone who might stock or launch a museum out of the specimens he has gathered first and foremost for private consumption—the role he has played in establishing Beadel-Muffet’s fame and their direct acquaintance actually show him as a mediator between the supply of collectible objects and the organizing logic of exhibitions. In other words, Bight has already “stocked museums” since what he considers his specimens have already been displayed in the papers, which constitute the equivalent of the museum exhibition rooms. Perfectly consistent with the function of exhibition curator he actually performs, Bight’s role is that of contributing to the construction of the celebrity’s public status, while also shaping the audience’s appreciation of its relevance. The display is in fact a crucial moment in the definition of his specimens’ value within the economy of circulation of collectible exemplars. Without an audience to recognize him and his relative position among the other specimens on display, Beadel-Muffet’s glass case would certainly be just empty, since, as his constant absence from the scene fully demonstrates, the case certainly contains Beadel-Muffet’s popularity, but no trace of him. Moreover, James acutely inscribes Bight himself within





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 the dynamics shaping public recognizability and defines the relative position Beadel-Muffet occupies in the metaphoric exhibition room constituted by the papers as a function of their relationship: it is Bight’s personal acquaintance with him that assigns the most prominent position to Beadel-Muffet. In other words, on the one hand Bight selfcongratulatorily makes himself prominent through his creature; on the other hand he is exposed by the text as having his own vested interests in Beadel-Muffet’s success, so that, within the metaphorical framework of the press celebrities as collection pieces, what is on display in the text are actually the museum exhibition technologies, or, in other words, the celebrity-making apparatuses of publicity. While drawing this parallel between the press and the museum exhibition, James is also simultaneously suggesting, through the accumulation of an impressive number of textual clues, how the world of the papers’ celebrities can be metonymically associated to the literary sphere. First of all, there is the question of intertextuality, since, as noticed by Margolis, Sir A. B. C. Beadel-Muffet—the absent, empty, off-stage center of the plot—is a rewriting of another literary character, the similarly named John A. B. C. Smith from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man that Was Used Up,” a short story published in 1839 (Margolis 713). Secondly, the metafictional, purposefully unresolved plot of BeadelMuffet’s story revolves around his desperate and doomed attempts at disappearing from the public eye, to escape the raging, uncontrollable, morbid interest of both the press and the public toward his person, and the mysterious reasons behind his disappearance and reappearance. From the pervasive opposition queer/straight to the highly suggestive names of “Middlesex Incurables” and “Lord and Lady Wispers” (52), the deeply evocative, luridly allusive character of the language through which James develops this particular thread among the many intertwining in the novella is unmistakable, with sexual undertones that are themselves a little linguistic tour de force within the larger one constituted by the whole text.4 With the press’s and the public’s curiosity mounting even more furiously in the face of the possibility of Beadel-Muffet’s violent death, the novella explores James’s panic at contemporary and posthumous investigations of the undisclosed aspects of the author’s life. Beadel-Muffet’s vicissitudes thus question the increasing involvement of the press in the search for and disclosure of often lurid details of personal affairs, with the sole aim of feeding, manipulating, distributing, and sustaining the public interest in events whose only function is in turn that of keeping the system of public attention and newspapers’ influence in perpetual and productive motion.



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Finally, from a narratological point of view, Beadel-Muffet constitutes a sort of mise en abyme of the semiotic essence of literary characters: deprived of the direct interaction with the fictional world to which he belongs that is usually granted to literary characters, Beadel-Muffet’s only existence is that of a sign, of an intangible point at the crossroads of the multiple semiotic axes constituting him as an element of the narrative. Through Beadel-Muffet’s staged absence, or better, his displacement from the narrator’s focus and his sole location in the exchanges among other characters, the text foregrounds the purely semiotic quality of the literary character as such. The overlaps and shifts characterizing the relationship among the three levels of the press, the museum as collection of art and literature, bring together in a compact formation James’s preoccupation with the status of literature as art and the thorny question of the intellectual’s visibility and popularity at the beginning of the twentieth century. But how are these multiple forms of displacement enacted? Given Beadel-Muffet’s textual existence purely as a sign, and thus his utter disconnection from the plan of events, the text produces a sort of staging of the dynamics of publicity through another character, namely Mortimer Marshal and his relationship with Maud, which duplicates that between the missing Beadel-Muffet and Howard Bight. Marshal is a playwright, the author of a drama, Corisanda, out of which he hopes to make his fame as the result of the debate around its literary quality. Disappointed and bewildered by the unresponsiveness of the public as well as the intellectual circles, he unsuccessfully tries to launch the literary controversy through the papers and, more specifically, by accepting Maud Blandy’s request to interview him and then cultivating his acquaintance with her and Howard Bight in order to “appear.” Marshal’s naive delusion is sharply delineated in this exchange between Howard and Maud: “[H]e promptly published the piece, pleading guilty to the ‘littery’ charge—which is the great stand he takes and the subject of the discussion.” Bight had wonderingly followed. “Of what discussion?” “Why, the one he thinks there ought to have been, there hasn’t been any, of course, but he wants it, dreadfully misses it.” (37)

It is worth noticing how Marshal is the only other character really participating in the plot of the story: “The Papers” is, in other words, a text developed exclusively through the interaction between two journalists and a writer, a clear sign of James’s identification of the relationship between literature and the press as crucial to the redefinition of the intellectual





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 sphere at the turn of the century. Maud Blandy has selected Marshal among the many “eager to figure” and has interviewed him in his flat, a textual move perfectly in line with the cultural atmosphere of the time in which the interview emerged as an innovative journalistic technique, suggesting both personal acquaintance with the subject of public attention and intimacy with the reader. The episode also reinforces the parallel between Maud’s connection to Marshal and the off-stage one between Beadel-Muffet and Bight, about which the latter says: “I went to him in the first instance; I made up to him straight, I did it ‘at home’” (27). As Salmon has pointed out, “authors themselves were often the subjects of publicity: far from escaping its glare, the author’s private workroom became one of the most conspicuous objects of public knowledge towards the end of the nineteenth century” (78). Moreover, the interview at home perfectly fits the idea developed earlier, of the reconfiguration of the writer as press celebrity and of the newspapers’ readers as tourists of culture. The image of the author in his house, among his personal belongings, is touristy in more senses than one. At the most immediate level, press readers get glimpses of a social environment they do not belong to. In this relatively unknown world, the journalists and the papers act as guides to accompany the visitors-readers and help them understand how they are supposed to consume what is offered to their judgment, suggesting also ways of interpretation. The intellectual, on the other hand, is offered to the readers’ view framed and labeled just like a museum piece, at the same time singled out among many others as a subject of public interest and contextualized within the cultural policies pursued by journalists and the press industry at large, self-expression being structured, framed, and even manipulated by the interviewer’s questions and comments. Even more interestingly perhaps, the thriving interest of the press system for the writers’ private circumstances, that is, for a dimension of the public figures’ life that is not integral to the reasons upon which their status is supposedly based, seems almost a prefiguration of the fascination and desire for the author’s material life that Anna De Biasio addresses in her contribution to this volume. However, far from being simply a mediator between the writer and the public, the narrator frames Maud Blandy herself and her visit to Marshal’s flat within a touristy dynamics, thus underlining how tourism does not need to be directly thematized, since it constitutes the pervasive atmosphere of the tale, in which each character occupies at a certain point the position of the less-than-competent visitor to unfamiliar spots. Constantly aware of the marks of social and financial privilege surrounding him—“the Chippendale” (28), “the drawing-room



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alone—with eighty-three photographs, and all in plush frames” (30)—on her second visit to Marshal’s flat Maud is treated to a complete tour of the place: “But he showed me everything this time—the bathroom, the refrigerator, and the machines for stretching trousers. He has nine and in constant use” (56). The modern emblems of domestic wealth certainly produce a strong impression on the young woman, who, voicing a fantasy of marrying Marshal just to rouse Bight’s jealousy, betrays her fascination for his bourgeois lifestyle when she imagines herself as just another up-todate facility: “And who, after all, can do him so well as the partner of his flat? It’s like making, in one of those big siphons, the luxury of the poor, your own soda-water. It comes cheaper, and it’s always on the sideboard. ‘Vichy chez soi.’ The interviewer at home” (57). Maud’s interview with the playwright, however, preserves an aura of obvious literariness, as testified by her attempts at selling it to a publication called Brains. Her, and Marshal’s, ambition is frustrated: apparently nobody is interested in her portrait of the young playwright and his involvement in a debate that seems to be fatally doomed to circulate only in the very restricted circle of literary people. Actually, as Maud painfully remarks, the debate Marshal so desperately wants has no circulation at all: “The public attention would seem to abhor the whole matter even as nature abhors a vacuum” (38). In other words, Marshal’s stance about literariness in the theater does not elicit the interest of other intellectuals, nor that of the audience of cheap publications, who are concerned with celebrity as a kind of asset in itself, rather than with the intrinsic or professional qualities of the public figure. Quite obviously, Marshal is conflating, and thus mutually neutralizing, the two very different plans upon which he could try to establish his popularity. The “real” turn-of-thecentury intellectual, the literary writer, the representative of high culture as opposed to mass culture, should, at least openly, shun publicity and be perceived as its reluctant victim, while Marshal actually pursues it with visible pleasure and eagerness, as any Beadel-Muffet would do who has nothing else to offer than his own spectacular visibility. It is true, as Salmon clearly points out, that “the private sphere of art could no longer safely be assumed to be a ‘refuge’ from the sphere of public circulation” (78); yet, what James is suggesting is just the way in which the type of publicity Marshal is soliciting through Maud is completely independent from and even at odds with the nature of his literary work. More specifically, he is also showing how mere publicity can never result in any “intellectual” debate since the latter is rapidly proceeding, at the turn of the century, toward a circulation within very restricted and elitist circles with regard to which the function of the press is that of underlining their





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 exclusivity and somehow contributing to their constitution and validation by way of difference from mass culture. This opposition between two very different forms of public relevance is further confirmed by Bight’s successful attempt at selling a piece about Marshal. Significantly, his strategy is that of making no reference to the question at the center of the playwright’s preoccupation, nor to his protracted effort at soliciting public attention toward his opinions about literature. What Bight produces is in fact just a brief sketch of the author, one that he writes and publishes after having dined with him at his club. The sketch is significantly titled: “Personal Peeps—Number NinetyThree: a Chat with the New Dramatist” (52), a perfect example of the way in which the type of press for which Bight works prepares the reader for a sort of guided museum experience: Marshal, in order to become visible and recognizable, has to be chosen by a discriminating eye, who bridges the gap between the public and art by way of his direct acquaintance with both (“Personal Peeps”; “a Chat”); he is also numbered, as one among many specimens in a catalogue (“Number Ninety-Three”); and finally, he is labeled so as to help the public assign him to the right category (“The New Dramatist”), a process in which his identity paradoxically loses importance just as he gains access to publicity, as signaled by the obliteration of his name from the title. This piece sets the papers machine into motion by simply placing Marshal in the position of the emerging literary personality, and Maud’s interview is finally accepted by Brains. What is relevant here is the absolutely non-literary, and even non-factual, character of Bight’s article. During their conversation at the dinner table, in fact, “Nothing was so much as named, the whole connection was sunk; they talked about clubs, muffins, afternoon performances, the effect of the Finnish soul upon the appetite, quite as if they had met in society” (42). The result is, as noticed by Maud, “journalism of the intensest essence, a column concocted of nothing” (53). By the end of the novella, nobody is exempt from the tourist logic dominating the definitions and consumption of culture: Marshal, himself the object of display, is a tourist when, in a scene that parallels the one at his club, he dines with the two journalists in a cheap pothouse on the Strand. As he notices when Bight invites him and warns him about the radical difference between their humble pothouse and his exclusive club, “They’re just the places I delight in—it would be of an extraordinary interest. I sometimes venture into them—feeling awfully strange and wondering, I do assure you, who people are. But to go there with you—!” (80). The feeling is incredibly similar to that of uncultivated tourists in



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need of a guide, and the way Bight offers to Marshal just what he fantasizes about reveals the degree of imaginative investment characterizing such interactions between the subject and the symbolic nature of the object of display and consumption. Exactly mirroring Marshal, who introduces working-class Maud to the assets of his modern flat, Bight gives the writer the apt and necessary cues to help him appreciate what he somehow already expected to find in a world so different from his own: the delicious coarse tablecloth, the extraordinary form of the saltcellars, and the fact that he had within range of sight, at the other end of the room, in the person of the little quiet man with blue spectacles and an obvious wig, the greatest authority in London about the inner life of the criminal classes. (81)

The scene is the closest one in the text to an explicit touristy scenario, complete with its paradoxical offer of packaged authentic experiences conferring a sort of “Lonely Planet effect” on the whole episode.5 It should be noted here how James himself—the writer who so prominently embodied the movement of the literary sphere toward elitism at the beginning of the twentieth century, and who simultaneously acknowledged the growing influence of the popular press not only on the masses but also, and significantly, on the intellectuals themselves—occupies Marshal’s position within the world of the press inhabited by Bight and Blandy. In metafictional terms, in fact, with “The Papers” James takes a kind of tour of the demi-world of the journalists—these pseudo-writers for money— while being himself such an outsider in the act of appropriating it with the eyes of the sophisticated writer. The reconfiguration of culture (in its broadest sense, from literary influence to the exploration of urban spaces) as a set of collectible and consumable experiences is not represented by James merely as a shift in signification, but rather as the active production of meaning itself. Once again, the key figure in the treatment of this pivotal aspect of the narrative is significantly the writer, Mortimer Marshal. As we have seen, what launches him as a possibly influential figure of his time is Bight’s brief article portraying him in polite conversation over dinner at his club. Though markedly unconcerned with the debate Marshal dreams of as an arena allowing him to emerge, the article actually manages to categorize him for the public as an emanation of the literary world. But rather than just labeling him, the aim of the whole operation is that of producing Marshal, almost literally, in the museum of publicity constituted by the papers as a legitimate representative of the intellectual class. In order to do so, it is just unnecessary to dwell on what would really qualify him for





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 such a role; actually, rather the opposite applies: omission—the production of a lack which implicitly invokes the rules that define the field of literature in Bourdieusian terms and that are passed under silence—is exactly what produces Marshal as an intellectual. The playwright actually phrases his desire in even more radical terms than those of intellectual prominence when he pleadingly asks: “Do let me happen!” (117). As David Howard rightly points out, “there is something more than the personal and social here; we seem to be in, however playfully, metaphysical territory, where existence is publicity. To live is to be published, to have come out, to have appeared” (Howard 58). And yet, it seems to me that James’s treatment of the dynamics involving publicity and existence is even more articulated and consequential than that, as I will try to demonstrate in the last part of this essay. We are incredibly close in fact to Žižek’s theorization of the interplay between the symbolic universe and fantasy, a theorization which can actually be fruitfully employed to shed light on yet another level of signification of this compact and rich text, beyond the insightful registration of the close connection between tourism, the press, and literariness at the turn of the century, which I have traced so far. Besides the question of existing as a consequence of being seen, the narrative repeatedly hints in fact at another fundamental issue, namely that of functioning only within a system and according to an inescapable and all-encompassing logic, which is, in this specific case, that of the papers. All the characters—both those who act “on stage” in the text and those who are just evoked—only exist in the narrative insofar as they are comprised within the system of the press, which thus constitutes their very condition of existence. It is for this reason (and not just for metafictional purposes) that Beadel-Muffet does not need to have any other life than that granted him by headlines and columns within the only universe that really matters and produces reality. Further confirming this reading is Howard Bight’s remark about Beadel-Muffet’s fiancée, Mrs. Chorner, whose ambivalent attitude toward the press is mobilized by the two journalists to advance their understanding of both the mystery surrounding the missing celebrity and the rules governing the papers: “We luckily invented her” (123). Again, James is playing here with two plans of his text simultaneously: the metafictional one, with Bight and his companion acting as the narrative force inventing characters and assigning them roles; and the metaphysical one, with the young couple disposed to probe the boundaries of the reality they inhabit by their attempt at manipulating its constitutive rules.



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Similarly to Žižek’s famous example of the Venus de Milo, in which the missing arms paradoxically produce its beauty and significance as an art object, 6 the universe of “The Papers” is represented by James as a symbolic structure produced by implicit (and only apparent) violations of its explicit rules. Bight’s “preys,” far from legitimately occupying their position as public figures as a consequence of any particular achievement, are for him, as we have seen, specimens of greed. Yet, it is just their transition from the realm of unjustified fame to the category of cultural representativeness that expresses both the functioning of the symbolic structure and its concealing of the obscene (i.e., literally off-stage in Žižekian terminology) economy of greed actually informing the whole process. This shift is achieved through the work of the papers, which produces their conditions of existence just like the museum space turns the items on display into art objects. The obliteration of the real functioning of the press system, on the other hand, is precisely what allows the projection of a fantasy in which the status of press celebrities is the consequence of their merits, and in which they occupy, for example, a position of cultural prestige and offer the public an image of the press as a space dominated by intellectual values untainted by greed or vanity. Such a reading is further confirmed by the connection the text establishes between the papers as a metaphorical museum space and the tourist rationale implicitly informing the whole narrative. As the museum defines art by organizing the conditions for its consumption, thus the tourist logic defines the significance of spaces and experiences by turning them into sights and signs to be consumed, not differently from items on display in an exhibition. Furthermore, the tourist discourse conceals, and even actively denies, the gesture through which experiences are severed from their unmediated contexts of occurrence and organized for mass consumption, while it simultaneously produces a rhetoric of authenticity and individual discovery which pervades the collective fantasy of travelers and visitors and, at the metafictional level, informs the relationship between the reading public and the sphere of culture as presented in the papers. The reading of the press as a Žižekian fantasy further explains both Marshal’s huge investment in publicity and his inevitable failure. The playwright, in fact, as we have seen, tries to bring elitist and sophisticated contents into the mechanism of the popular press, thus showing how, again in Žižekian terms, he takes too seriously the idealization of the press with its commitment to culture and objective truth, ignoring the unwritten rules upon which its influence is actually based. Bight, on the other hand, embodies the opposite and equally doomed desire of mastering these implicit norms, to the point of being able to infinitely reproduce the





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 apparent violations sustaining the symbolic structure of publicity. Having fully gauged the distance between the fantasy and the actual functioning of the press, he repeatedly allows the emergence of the unwritten rules Marshal naively overlooks. But, as Bight is forced to learn by the end of the novella, the fantasy is there with a function, namely that of screening a void, protecting us from the horror of both a complete lack of control over the reality we live in and the utter impossibility of making sense of it. As a matter of fact, several times, and usually in conjunction with crucial events like the reported disappearance/reappearance of Beadel-Muffet, Bight has to confess that he has lost control over the circumstances, despite his selfconfidence in trying to manipulate them for the sheer pleasure of proving his perfect command of the rules governing publicity. At the end of the story, with Beadel-Muffet’s riddle and his real motives still unrevealed, he renounces both control and speculation, finally facing (though in a still bewildered way) the real meaning of his own disgust at the power of the press: while masking the unbearable horror of human greed, the press-asfantasy also “creates what it purports to conceal” (Žižek 6), that is, a horror screening “something ‘more horrible than horror itself,’ the primordial void or antagonism,” the insufferable awareness that “there is no plotting agent behind it, the [press] machine just runs by itself, as a blind contingent device” (Žižek 6n5). It is now possible to see how and why the logic of the plot is that of revolving around a vacuum, with repeated—and ineffective, elusive, though sustained by a rigid rhetoric of progressive revelation—attempts at producing focus, definition, and, through them, clarity. The function of the papers is in this sense crucial: They helped them to wait, and the better, really, the longer the mystery lasted. It grew of course daily richer, adding to its mass as it went and multiplying its features, looming especially larger through the cloud of correspondence, communication, suggestion, supposition, speculation, with which it was presently suffused. Theories and explanations sprouted at night and bloomed in the morning, to be overtopped at noon by a still thicker crop and to achieve by evening the density of a tropical forest. (70)

For Howard and Maud, the papers constitute both a time-filler and a source of distraction: they while away the time, mitigate tension, relieve the pressure exerted by the desire for truth, and control the anxiety produced by the hunger for revelation; they entertain their minds, somehow distracting them from the (vain) insistence in trying to get to a final discovery of truth, while simultaneously cultivating the illusion of getting increasingly closer to a solution. In other words, the function of the



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papers seems to be twofold: firstly to raise and incite the longing for disclosure and the need to know, and then to entertain, handle, and distribute the tension thus created, distracting the readers from the impossibility of ever obtaining a final answer to their questions, but still encouraging and sustaining the collective delusional belief in an increasingly deeper penetration of the mystery that lies behind the fantasy supporting the symbolic system and its norms. The mechanism is quite similar to that described by Benjamin with reference to detective fiction,7 which is in fact a genre James extensively evokes in “The Papers.” At a certain point, the plot even takes a dramatic turn toward the most classic “whodunit” scenario, with a body that might be Beadel-Muffet’s found in a locked hotel room abroad. However, the text soon abandons this possible resolution, a further evidence that no reassuring narrative of disclosed truth is to be found in it. Still, the whole episode (both the discovery of the dead body and the horror it first elicits, followed by a certain indifference once it is clear that the missing celebrity is not dead) gains new significance when we interpret Beadel-Muffet as an ante-litteram Jamesian representation of the Lacanian symbolic order (a reading coherent with the Žižekian approach I am pursuing here), in which the body represents Lacan’s notion of the Real. 8 Beadel-Muffet does not need to have a “physical” existence within the plot because he already exists within the symbolic order and his real referent becomes superfluous; the unnamed corpse of the unsolved crime-fiction plot becomes a representation of this fundamental loss, a sort of material, non-significant residue of the Law of the Symbolic. James’s finely crafted metafictional overlaps and virtual alternative plot lines, together with the simultaneous evocation of different literary genres finally point at the narrative process itself as the only means capable of simultaneously achieving the comprehension of the symbolic universe we inhabit (in the tale, the world of the papers), the projection of the fantasy supporting it (the collective belief in the press as truth), and the negotiation of the distance between the two (Howard’s and Maud’s repeated attempts at finding a formula to explain the rationale of the whole system and finally control it). This complex formation is sustained through both implicit and explicit gestures confirming individual and collective belief. This is the meaning of Bight’s reiterated pressing request to obtain from Marshal the only attitude that can validate the symbolic universe in which they are both inscribed: Bight looked at him now hard. “Would you like to appear?” “Oh, ‘appear’!” Marshal weakly murmured. “Is it, Mr. Marshal, a real proposal? I mean are you prepared——?”





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 Wonderment sat in his eyes—an anguish of doubt and desire. “But wouldn’t you prepare me——?” “Would you prepare me—that’s the point,” Bight laughed—“to prepare you?” (88)

Beyond the obvious reading of Bight’s insistent demand on Marshal’s conscience as a Mephistophelic temptation, we are confronted here with what Žižek calls an “empty gesture” (Žižek 37-40), that is, the willing and spontaneous embracing of what the system requires from you as a precondition to exist within it. In order to “appear,” to have life and significance within the world of the papers (which constitutes, it is by now clear, nothing less than the Lacanian symbolic order of the novella), Marshal has to interiorize the implicit norms regulating it. Failing to do so—that is, taking seriously the only symbolic freedom of declining the system’s compelling demand—or even merely displacing responsibility onto someone else, causes the emergence and unbearable visibility of the unwritten rules upon which the order we inhabit is founded. Maud, on the other hand, faces the same dilemma with regard to her position as a journalist who is not willing to fully submit to the commanding request of undivided loyalty the press system places on her. It is within this framework that Bight’s apparently illogical and self-destructive insistence that she sacrifice him to the papers and his offering of his secret only on the condition that she will publish it finally make sense: “You mean”—she jumped at it—“you’ll tell me what you know?” “Yes, and even what I’ve done! But—if you’ll take it so—for “The Papers.” Oh, for the Papers only!” She stared. “You mean you want me to get it in——?” “I don’t ‘want’ you to do anything, but I’m ready to help you, ready to get it in for you, like a shot, myself, if it’s a thing you yourself want.” . . . “I’ll keep your secret.” He looked at her more gravely. “Ah, as a secret I can’t give it.” (97)

Once again, what he is trying to obtain is an empty gesture on her part with which she fully and independently embraces the system and its unwritten laws. Above all, as is revealed by Bight’s uncompromising belief in the mutually exclusive character of the two options he presents Maud with (publishing his truth or never come to know it), it is only possible to be either fully within the system or utterly excluded from it, to either inhabit the collective fantasy or be expelled from it. Within this logic, even Beadel-Muffet’s apparently absurd attempt to use the papers in order to disappear from them, “his desire for a greater privacy worked through the Papers themselves” (59), becomes the only



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viable option. Beadel-Muffet’s plan entails obtaining from the papers the creation of the sphere of privacy through a process which is not different from the one producing a sphere of publicity. If the world of the papers functions in the text as an all-encompassing symbolic universe (complemented by its phantasmic support), which is the filter through which the characters experience reality, there is no existence outside it and the new, private dimension can only be announced by the papers and derive factual existence from this very announcement. It is for this reason that appearing in the papers and existing are equivalent conditions for Marshal and that even the sphere of privacy can only be constituted through the papers. And it is for this reason that at the end of the novella the only way the protagonists have to emancipate themselves from this logic is that of literally turning their back to the colossal all-embracing fantasy in which they have lived so far. The move to leave the Strand, however, is not fully realized: not only do the protagonists with their dream of becoming writers turn their back on Fleet Street only to leap into another fantasy, namely that of the literary world; but actually, since the whole text is constructed on the premise of the inescapability of the symbolic structure constitutive of the only known reality, the two protagonists cannot really leave this mechanism behind them, but can only announce such a move, a further evidence that they still function according to the rules of the same phantasmic frame within which their very lives (made mainly of reported news and stated intentions) have always been inscribed. There is no escape from and no condition of existence outside this interplay between the symbolic order and the fantasy supporting it, and Howard Bight and Maud Blandy are fully involved in the world of the press until the very last line of the novella, as is proved by their only apparently playful proposition to announce their wedding in the papers, as if to make it exist: “‘That, at least,’ she said, ‘we’ll put in the Papers” (123).

Notes 1 See, among others, De Biasio (2006, 2008), Fujikawa (2008), Goode (1972), Jolly (2010), Martinez (2008), and Parsons (1998). 2 Donatella Izzo makes a similar point in the introduction to her Italian translation of the novella, where she argues that, far from being a simple divertissement, “The Papers” deals with issues of literary codes and popularity which were crucial for James (Izzo xxxii). 3 The Reverberator and “The Papers” are often read alongside each other within the emerging culture of publicity and the debate around New Journalism of the 1880s. See Salmon (1997) and Rubery (2007).





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 4

This aspect of the narrative, which is beyond the scope of this reading, has been fruitfully investigated by Stevens in his study of James and sexuality, where he points out how the language deployed in “The Papers” gains further significance within the context of the coeval Jamesian production as possibly influenced also by the debate around Oscar Wilde’s figure: “In a number of tales published in the 1890s and 1900s, he explores issues of secrecy and publicity, blackmail, scandal, fear of exposure and suicide, and these explorations may be related to the simultaneous repression and promotion of sexuality engendered by [Wilde’s] trials” (Stevens 148). 5 I wish to thank Donatella Izzo who brought what she called the “Lonely Planet effect” of the scene to my attention during a conversation about an early version of this essay. 6 According to Žižek’s argument, it is the space surrounding it, rather than any of its intrinsic qualities, that defines something as art; moreover, such relationship between the object and what is around it is always marked by a lack, by an apparent violation of the rules dominating the definition of what is artistic. A most spectacular instance of such dynamics in our culture is the Venus de Milo, an object whose “imperfection” (the fact that the arms are missing) apparently violates the norms about harmony and beauty defining art, but gains artistic quality within a signifying structure different from that of ancient Greece where it was originally produced. An imaginary version of the same statue, intact and complete, constitutes a fantasy dominating our notions of beauty, a projection which obliterates from our view the real functioning of the symbolic economy of art (Žižek 24-25). 7 Walter Benjamin, “Travelling with Crime Novels,” Appendix A, 165-166. 8 The Real, in Lacanian terms, is what is irretrievably lost with the subject’s entry into the symbolic order, thus constituting the radical lack upon which all relations with reality are based.

Works Cited Benjamin, Walter. “Travelling with Crime Novels.” The Thriller and Northern Ireland since 1969: Utterly Resigned Terror. Ed. Aaron Kelly. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Appendix A. 165-166. Print. De Biasio, Anna. Romanzi e musei. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James e il rapporto con l’arte. Venezia: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 2006. Print. —. “‘The Catalogues Are Finished’: Travelling in Venice According to James.” Tracing Henry James. Ed. Melanie Ross and Greg Zacharias. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. 304-315. Print. Fujikawa, Noriko. “Anti-Touristic Sentiment and the Decay of Venice in Henry James’s ‘The Aspern Papers’ and The Wings of the Dove.” Tracing Henry James. Ed. Melanie Ross and Greg Zacharias. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. 95-109. Print.



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Goode, John. “The Pervasive Mystery of Style: The Wings of the Dove.” The Air of Reality: New Essays on Henry James. Ed. John Goode. London: Methuen & Co, 1972. 244-300. Print. Howard, David. “Henry James and ‘The Papers.’” Henry James: Fiction As History. Ed. Ian F. A. Bell. London: Vision Press, 1984. 49-64. Print. Izzo, Donatella. “‘I Giornali’: Henry James e l’esperienza della modernità.” Henry James. I Giornali. Macerata: Liberilibri, 1990. vii-xxxviii. Print. James, Henry. “The Papers.” The Complete Tales of Henry James. Ed. Leon Edel. Vol. 12. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1964. Print. Jolly, Roslyn. “Travel and Tourism.” Henry James in Context. Ed. David McWhirter. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. 343-353. Print. Margolis, Stacey. “The Rise and Fall of Public Opinion: Poe to James.” ELH 76.3 (2009): 713-737. Project Muse. Web. 16 Feb. 2012. Martinez, Carlo. “Henry James and the Tourist Imagination.” Revisionary Interventions into Henry James. Ed. Donatella Izzo and Carlo Martinez. Napoli: Dipartimento di Studi Comparati dell’Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”, 2008. Print. Parsons, Deborah L. “The Not/Notion of Europe: Henry James and the Gendered Landscape of Heritage Tourism.” Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations 2.2 (1998): 225-250. Web. 20 Sept. 2010. Rubery, Matthew. “Wishing to be Interviewed in Henry James’s The Reverberator.” The Henry James Review 28.1 (2007): 57-72. Project Muse. Web. 16 Feb. 2012. Salmon, Richard. Henry James and the Culture of Publicity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Print. Stevens, Hugh. Henry James and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. Print. Žižek, Slavoj. The Plague of Fantasies. London, New York: Verso, 1997. Print.









PART III: JAMESIAN FRIENDSHIP AND HOSPITALITY



CHAPTER ELEVEN HENRY JAMES: C’EST NOUS; JAMESIAN AFTERLIVES, PART 2 JULIE RIVKIN

If I am host at last It is of little more than my own past. ͒ May others be at home in it. —James Merrill, “A Tenancy”

At the close of our 2008 international conference—hydrangeas burning blue on the Newport seaside lawns, wheeled suitcases pulled from our nineteenth-century lodging to awaiting cars and taxis in the circular drive—I felt the pull away of something created, an event in time, a performance, a party, a something with Henry James at the center that I needed to add to my understanding of Jamesian afterlives. A group of people had come together—100 people from around the world—and for five days we occupied a place where the writer had lived in his childhood, speaking, listening, touring the streets and immersing ourselves in the same air and ocean that had held him, immersing ourselves in the talk of, about, and around Henry James. The event came to its culmination on the evening of the banquet, with Richard Howard ventriloquizing Jamesian voices, reanimating lives to a room of familiars, whose nods and murmurs spoke recognition as well as respect. What came to me was that the conference itself was a genre, a Jamesian genre, and one that sent me back to James for understanding. This paper, then, is a continuation of a set of reflections on the phenomenon of Jamesian afterlives, reflections that move from “Henry James, c’est moi,” an earlier topic of mine, to Henry James, c’est nous, from an individual to a collective form of extension or re-enactment or survival. First person James, part two. First person plural. My thought at the time was that such a phenomenon was anticipated in James’s own work, and that my next paper, as self-indulgently reflexive as

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my previous paper had been, would be about Jamesian parties. I know, of course, that a conference is not a party—after all, it requires homework and is tax deductible—and my Jamesian topic might more reasonably be the various treatments of readership and fame and followers so compellingly and at times damningly traced in James’s tales of writers and artists. But there was another phenomenon that I was experiencing at our conference, what I want to call Jamesian hospitality, particularly since my stint as conference organizer left me feeling as if I had just co-hosted some great birthday party or rite of passage or reunion. What happens when a group of people gathers, as we do, in a kind of aesthetic frame, as an author society, in the name of Henry James? This was the experience I needed James to help me figure out. First, however, a pause and brief recap of the Henry James, c’est moi phenomenon as it bears on this topic of hospitality. My argument in that project was that the James bio novel is a product, among other things, of the particular invitation to identification in James. In the same way that James traces the formation of identity out of acts of identification— typified for me in Strether’s shifting reflections on who he would like to be “like”—his work produces in his readers what Shoshana Felman would call a reading effect. 1 Many readers—Colm Tóibín, Alan Hollinghurst, David Lodge, and Cynthia Ozick most notably in recent years—have answered that invitation by finding themselves in Henry James.2 Tóibín has written beautiful essays about a compositional process that involved just such acts of identification; Cynthia Ozick’s humorous essay “The Lesson of the Master” revels in the incongruities occasioned by her own personal mirroring of the elderly Henry James at the age of seventeen.3 Yet such acts of identification seem highly at odds with a very different dimension of the writer depicted throughout the stories of writers and artists: his highly defended stance. In his recent Monopolizing the Master, Michael Anesko reveals to what lengths James went to defend his private life from investigation. And who among us is unfamiliar with his famous articulation in the essay on George Sand? “The pale forewarned victim,” James wrote, “with every track covered, every paper burnt and every letter unanswered, will, in the tower of art, the invulnerable granite, stand, without a sally, the siege of all the years” (LC2 743). What an irony, then, that James should come in for this particular kind of biographical attention. In the Sand essay, his metaphor is military, medieval, with art as a granite wall, impenetrable. It would be hard to come up with a more definitive image of defended borders. And yet its very archaicism may suggest its vulnerability, particularly to more modern modes of engagement. Art is not just a tower of granite, and the “pale forewarned



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victim” may find a better figure for standing the siege of years in the dinner party than in the fortress. In fact, he might even sit down; I propose here a different, in some ways more genial figure for a collectively constituted authorial afterlife. In fact, the concept I propose invokes both the porousness of identification and the defended boundaries of the tower. It is the antithetical concept of hospitality. Before considering the concept, though, I’d like to examine the practice. I return to the topic of parties, gatherings. Highly sociable novelist that he is (and we all know the anecdote of his year of dining out in London), Henry James depicts a round of parties in his fiction—some that we might long to attend and others that we’d prefer to avoid.4 An evening at the Osmonds would be taxing, however productive of social capital; an invitation to Mrs. Brook’s might be all but unachievable to an outsider; inclusion in the gathering in Gloriani’s garden might require the elevation of the dignitary or the insouciance of the bohemian in a way that would make entrance difficult for many of us; and attendance at one of Mrs. Lowder’s dinner parties would demand a social distinction that few of us could claim. But there was a party whose invitations seemed open and whose purpose was as consequential as any. It was this party’s particular hospitality that seemed pitched to our occasion—Milly’s Venetian party in The Wings of the Dove. What are its elements, and why might I make this claim? The gathering has as its core a potent intention on the part of its host that may explain its particular relation to the afterlife. Susan Stringham keeps this intention implicit, but Kate spells it out for Densher: “We’re making her want to live” (WD 566). Even if all of those present are not aware of the animating motive that draws them in, this motive or intention has its effects on a “we” more extensive than Kate and Densher, a “we” that includes all those in the room. Moreover, it is an intention that extends to the future; it operates both to make life in the present and to make something that remains. The hospitality of the scene constitutes itself proleptically as a memory, something its participants will hold collectively after the event itself has passed. The novel cannot make good on this investment in the future except partially, through Densher, but in a sense all those present carry something that could presumably be tapped for some purpose. They’ve been given a souvenir, a collectible, and it will be something that makes them part of a perhaps never realized community. Although we are introduced to the event through an exchange between its principal organizer, Susan Stringham, and its particularly designated guest, Merton Densher, what especially catches my interest is the effect of



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the party on its more casual guests. The guests at the party are, by and large, tourists, extras in a way, but being present at the party performs a particular alchemy upon them. When I think about our Henry James conferences, the passage that follows comes to mind. Registered from Densher’s point of view, this passage records his experience of the party’s sustaining medium of “beatific mildness,” as it emanates from his host, Milly, and flows outward to include all present: The effect of the place, the beauty of the scene, had probably much to do with it; the golden grace of the high rooms, chambers of art in themselves, took care, as an influence, of the general manner, and made people bland without making them solemn. They were only people, as Mrs. Stringham had said, staying for the week or two at the inns, people who during the day had fingered their Baedekers, gaped at their frescoes and differed, over fractions of francs, with their gondoliers. But Milly, let loose among them in a wonderful white dress, brought them somehow into relation with something that made them more finely genial; so that if the Veronese picture of which he had talked with Mrs. Stringham was not quite constituted, the comparative prose of the previous hours, the traces of insensibility qualified by “beating down,” were at last nobly disowned. (WD 561-62)

This particular effect fascinates me in that it seems the enabling gift of the party—that it can transform the random tourists into “something that made them more finely genial,” that makes them—almost—the elements of a recomposed Veronese painting. I want to pause for a moment on the figure of the tourist, since my conceit is that this is our place in James’s picture, that we conference goers are, in our way, tourists in Henry James, who, in our finer moments, and through some special efforts on the part of our host, become elements of the picture. We all undoubtedly feel a special affinity to the figure of the tourist right now, since we are those people “staying for a week or two at the inns, people who during the day had fingered their Baedekers, gaped at their frescoes and differed, over fractions” of euros, if not with gondoliers, perhaps with vendors in the Campo dei Fiori. James’s phrase captures the particular baffled effort of the tourist, whose purpose is to reach some kind of experience of personal and aesthetic connection or penetration, but who remains caught at the threshold, struggling with guidebooks and foreign currency, unable to gain access to those renowned and beautiful things that have brought her around the globe. So much of tourism is difficulty, failure, as James knew so well. But this party, if Merton Densher’s vision is accurate, brings its guests over the threshold,



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into the picture, so that they are no longer gaping at a surface that refuses entry. Densher’s recognition of the party’s effects on its casual guests follows directly from his reflections on his own status. When Susan draws attention to what living in a palazzo allows—“It’s a Veronese picture, as near as can be” (WD 557)—Densher’s response is to feel an outsider: “The way smooth ladies, travelling for their pleasure and housed in Veronese pictures, talked to plain embarrassed working-men, engaged in an unprecedented sacrifice of time and of the opportunity for modest acquisition!” (558). Susan might insist on his central role—“You’ll be the grand young man who surpasses the others and holds up his head and the wine-cup” (558)—but Densher, “plain embarrassed working-man” that he feels himself to be, stands aside from the splendors of art. Susan acknowledges the prosaic economy that drives him—“the daily task and the daily wage” (558)—but she also insists on something that subsumes the workaday world. The way in which Densher and the casual tourists are all drawn in—leaving aside both daily wage and pedestrian expenditure— that is, the workaday world either at home or on holiday—suggests that the party may have a particular economy, an economy associated at once with the concept of the gift and with that of hospitality. Comprehending that economy requires a sense of how the guests are implicated in Milly’s design. Their presence must be contrasted to Milly’s isolation when she first receives her diagnosis: “[N]ow she knew why she had wanted to come by herself. No one in the world could have sufficiently entered into her state: no tie would have been close enough to enable a companion to walk beside her without some disparity” (378). Her initial sense of how this discovery makes her absolutely alone is followed by the antithetical sense—that what she has is the common case, the human case, but not something to be shared with any individual: “She literally felt, in this first flush, that her only companion must be the human race at large, present all around her, but inspiringly impersonal, and that her only field must be, then and there, the grey immensity of London” (378). These responses constitute, when I read them, something like James’s version of a process most associated with Kubler-Ross; these are stages in the work of recognizing oneself in a fatal diagnosis. In James the stages are not denial and then anger, but a great shift from absolute aloneness to a similarly blank universality, from one’s unique condemnation to one’s recognition of common mortality. Living, though, takes a different prescription. The gathering in Venice might be seen as the converse of her initial response; she is now neither alone nor paired impersonally with the human race in general. Instead, she



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is the host to the guests at her party. The weight is on the specific, the way she accommodates her particular guests into the picture. In accommodating guests, though, the party also accommodates other intentions, as James so clearly traces out in the novel’s Preface: If her impulse to wrest from her shrinking hour still as much of the fruit of life as possible, if this longing can take effect only by the aid of others, their participation (appealed to, entangled and coerced as they find themselves) becomes their drama too—that of their promoting her illusion, under her importunity, for reasons, for interests and advantages, from motives and points of view, of their own. (WD 199)

As much as Milly needs these others, she cannot host them except by enabling them to act “for reasons, for interests and advantages, from motives and points of view, of their own.” Even subdued to the aesthetic design of the Veronese, even moved by the recognition of the animating intention that brings them together, the guests cannot help but pose the problem of their otherness. No one presents that otherness more potently than Kate and Densher, for whom the party is the moment of articulating their own counter-design for Milly: “Since she’s to die, I’m to marry her?” (WD 570). But even the tourists engage in their own small betrayals. To explore the way this otherness works both in Milly’s party in Venice and in our own gathering in the name of Henry James, I propose a turn to Jacques Derrida’s late work on the subject of hospitality.5 In his essay Of Hospitality, Derrida offers an ethical and political meditation on the response to the foreigner, other, or stranger. But the essay also has an aesthetic application, as it says something about admission within other borders, other frames. In Of Hospitality Derrida finds that hospitality presents a conundrum in the way that it both insists on and makes impossible a full accommodation of otherness. In his formulation, the absolute law of hospitality insists on a total receptivity: Let us say yes to who or what turns up, before any determination, before any anticipation, before any identification, whether or not it has to do with a foreigner, an immigrant, an invited guest, or an unexpected visitor, whether or not the new arrival is the citizen of another country, a human, animal, or divine creature, a living or dead thing, male or female. (Derrida 77)

Yet how can such a law be enacted except through particular laws that set guidelines and impose limits, define borders and mark transgressions? Any particular codes of hospitality require and depend on such an absolute law, and yet they only enact any particular forms of hospitality by



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betraying the law they represent. And how could one not be wary of opening one’s country, one’s home, one’s self to the wrong guest? Consider, for example, the welcome afforded Oedipus, a “yes to who or what turns up,” that turns out to have such transgressive consequences. The concept of hospitality flowers in James for the same reasons it does for Derrida; it is a paradoxical concept, and the vexed nature of the borders (of the self, of the nation, of the text) makes it as important to defend against the encroachments of the foreign as it is to invite in the other. Milly lives in and through others; she is also inevitably taken over by others. The literary text similarly extends an impossible hospitality, an invitation to dwell in its house, to feast at its table and celebrate in its midst that nonetheless decries its own impossible fulfillment. The stakes, in each case, are living itself; the host depends on the guest for vitality, even as the guest depends on the host. Hillis Miller explored this contradictory logic in his essay “The Critic as Host,” resisting the claim that deconstructive readings were parasitical upon formalist ones by showing that the host and the guest were reversible, commensal, dining at the same table. It is my sense that James offers the same insight, his welldefended ego the very symptom of the paradoxical need for the guest. Yet the guest, however much needed, cannot help but endanger the home, cannot help but bring an impossible otherness into the picture. How, then, is hospitality possible, when the openness it requires threatens to undo the home to which it bids one welcome? It makes sense to me that this is at once a political and an aesthetic question—the problem of the stranger not just in the home country but in the work of art. How can there be a work of art without its guests, its uncanny others to receive, consume, extend, and undo it? Grave reflections, and how do these bear on our case? When I gave this paper in Rome, I wasn’t ready to answer the question of how hospitality in its more troubling sense might be reflected in our own gathering. I could see how Kate and Densher were both realizing Milly’s intention to live and, in realizing it, also betraying it. But what of us, happy travelers in Henry James territory? In the foreground for me was the alchemy of aesthetic transformation, an experience that was being produced for all of us present under the benign gaze of Henry James, reproduced in the succession of collectible conference posters that encircled our hall. Tourists though we were in Rome, we were not exactly tourists in Henry James. In fact, most of us sought more sustained residence, more ongoing employment. The Henry James Society on holiday in Rome was only part of the story. Most of us have been living in James, on James, for



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a more extended time. We had prolonged our stay, become naturalized citizens, long-time residents, in fact, in James country. Like Milly’s guests, we too had other motives, other interests. I needed to look again at the tales of writers and artists to think further about how this impossible aesthetic hospitality might fit our case. My turn was to James’s tale “The Birthplace.” “The Birthplace” offers one of the fiercest condemnations of the betrayed afterlife in its account of the commercialized literary tourism industry, yet it also offers a pass to the man who succumbs to pressure and keeps the business going. What might it have to offer to those who have found a home in the Henry James Society? The tale’s protagonist Morris Gedge, left almost without means in his meager employment “in charge of the grey town-library of Blackport-onDwindle, all granite, fog and female fiction” (CT 11: 405), after having failed in his previous employment as master of a now defunct school, finds his fortunes turned around by the offer of “wardenship of so different a temple . . . the most sacred [shrine] known to the steps of men, the early home of the supreme poet, the Mecca of the English-speaking race” (405). Released from his “actual narrow prison,” he marvels at the prospect of dwelling in Shakespeare, dwelling in Arden (though these names remain unspoken): He felt as if a window had opened into a great green woodland, a woodland that had a name, glorious, immortal, that was peopled with vivid figures, each of them renowned, and that gave out a murmur, deep as the sound of the sea, which was the rustle in forest shade of all the poetry, the beauty, the colour of life. It would be prodigious that of this transfigured world he should keep the key. (405)

The metaphoric window emphasizes the domestic frame for this experience of aesthetic amplitude; the vista to which it gives access is a kind of summa of the arts, a forest of Arden populated with all the prodigious figures of Shakespeare’s oeuvre, an organic creation of visual and auditory pleasures, “murmuring” and “rustl[ing]” and rich with color. Domestic also in the most literal sense, his new position includes lodgings, “a house joining on to [the Birthplace] as a sweet old parsonage is often annexed to a quaint old church” (408). For him, the prospect is nothing short of dwelling in Shakespeare, dwelling on the very ground of a sacred aesthetic experience. The access will be intimate, immediate, physical; in references that become increasingly religious even as they become more tactile, Gedge marvels at



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Henry James: c’est nous; Jamesian Afterlives, Part 2  the wonder of fairly being housed with Him, of treading day and night in the footsteps He had worn, of touching the objects, or at all events the surfaces, the substances, over which His hands had played, which his arms, his shoulders had rubbed, of breathing the air—or something not too unlike it—in which His voice has sounded. (411)

And Gedge will be more than guest in this home; he will be host and provider of hospitality to others; he will “keep the key.” Interestingly, neither the school nor the library have given him such access—a monitory observation for academics like ourselves whose careers of teaching and research shuttle us between just such spaces. But hosting the Birthplace turns out to be a task far different from what his readings of Shakespeare might have led him to anticipate. The script of bardolatry, he discovers, is a sham; his predecessor, praised for her practiced delivery (even while Gedge notes her grammatical lapses), mouths platitudes. The shrine is vacant, haunted by no great poetic spirit, and the windows of his home are distinguished more by their cosy curtains than by their vistas into the literary sublime. Gedge, faced with the option of telling sentimental lies or remaining silent, discovers in himself a new critical sense that dictates silence. But his passive protest is a costly one; when word of it reaches the Shakespeare establishment, he is given to understand that his job is at stake; it’s not acceptable for him to “give away the Show” (CT 11: 445). 6 Reminded that he stands to lose his position if the Birthplace loses its profits, Gedge sacrifices his critical sense and devotes himself to producing a credible performance. The story grants a surprising value to this turn that might seem a betrayal. Indeed the heart of the story is actually in the place made within this regime of commercialization for a small happy new talent, the voice of Gedge himself. Although his dedication to the poet-genius was originally expressed in his silence, his refusal to speak the inauthentic script with his treacherous thrills of presence (“here, here is the spot,” etc.), his own genius now takes flight in his amplification of the script. Indeed, Gedge finds his own minor fame in speaking for the Bard, developing his own transatlantic reputation as performer. Interestingly, Gedge’s happier fate was not initially part of the design for this tale; comparing the idea outlined in the notebooks with the actual tale, Tony Tanner points out that the tale was originally to have ended with his renunciation of Shakespeare, the literary ideal spoiled by its commercialized betrayal. But as Tanner points out, in the same way that the tale grew beyond its initial planned length of 6,000 words to an actual length of over 25,000, the tale acquired an “afterlife” for Gedge beyond this renunciation. Tanner emphasizes James’s compositional metaphors of



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the work taking on resistant life of its own—in this case a horse refusing to be broken—that are familiar to readers of the prefaces. This resistant life of the unmastered creature might more properly be Gedge’s, as the tale shifts focus from the betrayed afterlife of the deceased poet-god to the lives launched in his wake. Although Gedge’s critical sense is rather melodramatically sacrificed in the process—“I strangled it, poor thing, in the dark. If you’ll go out and see, there must be blood (446)—something else is born in the Birthplace. The performer he becomes is just that new creation, with its status confirmed by the audience he wins for his artistry. Gedge’s performance is granted sanction through its reception by a little fan club of his own—the American couple that come to visit not once but twice, marking in their return a recognition of new life in the empty shrine. Like Gedge’s own second act, they too constitute an addition to the original plan for the tale. Recognizing Gedge on their first visit for his refined skepticism, taking him in as a critical presence interesting in his own right, they are the appropriate ones to be present for his rebirth in a different guise. Far from excoriating his inconsistency and submission to base commercial motives, they grant his work a delicate respect. And while his wife fears he is indulging in a hyperbole of performance just as risky as his earlier silent resistance, the tale confers its modest reward for his success. The tale ends with one version of that reward: far from being dismissed by his employer, he gets a raise. A reward in that currency, though, might suggest that what he does is subject to the same satire as all the other commercial practices associated with the Birthplace industry. However, I think not. The other reward is in this couple’s feeling for him, a feeling that reminds me of that exercised by Doctor Hugh for Dencombe in the concluding dialogue of “The Middle Years.” The principle Dencombe articulates seems a kind of ground rule of the artistic afterlife: “The great thing is to have made somebody care” (CT 9: 75). And care they do, their enviable lives of privilege and “transcendent freedom” (CT 11: 434) apparently incomplete without something they find only here. Indeed, the fact that Gedge has acquired a transatlantic reputation is its own minor marvel, sufficient to bring the interested couple back not for “Shakespeare” but for him. “The Birthplace” offers an allegory that, I like to think, mildly fits our case—that James perhaps surprises himself, or at least departs from his initial design in the writing—to recognize a growth in the guest/host who makes a home in the dwelling of the poet. The tale registers him not a parasite but a minor voice of his own, and it even makes the currency of his recognition the very one in which the literary initially seems to be betrayed. Here is a sampling of Morris Gedge’s speech:



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Henry James: c’est nous; Jamesian Afterlives, Part 2  Across that threshold He habitually passed; through those low windows, in childhood, He peered out into the world that He was to make so much happier by the gift to it of His genius; over the boards of this floor—that is over some of them, for we mustn’t get carried away!—his little feet often pattered . . . This, therefore, I need scarcely remind you, is what makes the small space between these walls—so modest to measurement, so insignificant of aspect—unique on all the earth. There is nothing like it . . . anywhere in the world . . . You may find elsewhere perhaps absolutely fewer changes, but where shall you find presence equally diffused, uncontested and undisturbed? (CT 11: 450-51)

Kitsch? Parody? Or profession of some residual earnest wish? It is hard to judge the tone of the utterance, but impossible to mistake its urgent eloquence. If the presence is not that of the poet, it is certainly that of Gedge himself. And, I recognize, it resembles, just a little, my own tone in speaking of our gatherings in Henry James territory. Gedge might be an odd figure to invoke as a member of the Henry James Society, and yet. The James Society does adhere to its own mystique of presence—even in its meeting places that follow James from New York to Paris to Venice to Newport to Rome. And its walking tours might not insist on James’s footsteps with quite the particularity that Gedge does on those of his poet, but the ghosts of such passages are implicit nonetheless. Moreover, as Alison Booth has suggested, James not only practiced the literary tourism decried in “The Birthplace,” describing his visit to the home of Washington Irving in The American Scene, but he added a new stop to the literary tourism map when he acquired Lamb House as his home. Booth views Lamb House as rather like the New York Edition, a “Writer’s Home” to fit the “House and Haunts” genre of literary pilgrimage duly being invented in the midnineteenth century. That is, Booth sees Lamb House as doing for the Life what the New York Edition did for the Work, creating the terms of access, framing a monument for posterity. 7 While the Henry James Society, schooled in tales like “The Death of the Lion” and “The Real Right Thing” as well as the after-effects of the New Criticism, has tended to pay its respects to the Work rather than the Life, the meeting places testify to an accompanying quest for personal presence not unlike the one that animates the pilgrims to the Birthplace. But if Lamb House was acquired in part to host such visits, if it was a place where not only James’s own guests could stay overnight, but also his future guests might come to visit, then perhaps the Life is not so off-limits as the tales of writers and artists might make us think. Moreover, if the problem in “The Birthplace” is that the Shakespeare spirit fails to haunt the sacred place (and one section of the



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tale reads like a “Jolly Corner” that fails to produce an alter ego), the Gedge spirit does come to life in just that locale. The Gedge spirit—a modest fellow who knows that you need a place to live and a way to make a living—is, I submit, another way to see ourselves in relation to Henry James. Perhaps the idealized version of living in James—dwelling in gilded chambers of art, as do the tourists in the Venetian palace become part of a Veronese painting—needs as its accompaniment a recognition of the modest conditions of existence we also need to meet—an academic home, an academic name. This tale, let’s say, allows us to be guests in James by acknowledging what it means to make a living. It is a home, an income, a reputation, a community of recognition, an art, a voice. Those of us in the Henry James Society have found that in Henry James—and it is not a despicable thing. So I submit a second figure, steering around the publishing scoundrels of all guises, to set beside the guests at Milly’s table who make her want to live. Living in the house adjoined to the shrine, not adulators, and yet not skeptics, interested rather than disinterested, willing to find a community in those who come to join us, given to hospitality in the aesthetic. Gedge, after all, runs out of steam at the school and the library—and so I submit do we, without coming a little closer to the aesthetic shrine, without getting a little recognition, without being guests and hosts at something closer to the personal sublime. Henry James, c’est nous.

Notes 1

In fact, my argument is that Strether is transformed through a cathexis that doesn’t distinguish clearly between identification and desire, a confluence registered in the double meaning of Chad’s statement to Strether about Madame de Vionnet: “She won’t do anything worse to you than make you like her.” Likings and likenesses, or desire and identification, converge in this phrasing. See Rivkin, “‘She won’t do anything worse to you than make you like her’: Identification, Desire and the Light of Paris in The Ambassadors” and “Henry James: The Genius of the Unconscious,” as well as “Henry James, c’est moi.” Felman’s concept of reading effects is that a reader unconsciously reproduces the lexical motifs of the text in a manner that repeats its own transferential dynamics. 2 What has been called the year of Henry James (2004) saw the publication of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty; David Lodge’s Author, Author; and Colm Tóibín’s The Master, among other works. Cynthia Ozick’s Foreign Bodies is more recent, though her essay “Lesson of the Master,” published in Art and Ardor, makes clear the long history of her identification with Henry James.



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See Colm Tóibín’s “Henry James for Venice” and Cynthia Ozick’s “The Lesson of the Master.” Ozick’s essay contains a humorous warning that brought the Henry James Society into new visibility for me: I want, parenthetically, to recommend to the Henry James Society—there is such an assemblage—that membership be limited: no one under age forty-two need apply. Proof of age via birth certificate should be mandatory; otherwise the consequences may be harsh and horrible. I offer myself as an Extreme and Hideous Example of Premature Exposure to Henry James. I was about seventeen, I recall, when my brother brought home from the public library a science-fiction anthology, which, through an odd perspective that perplexes me still, included “The Beast in the Jungle.” It was in this anthology, and at that age, that I first read James— fell, I should say, into the jaws of James. I had never heard of him before. I read “The Beast in the Jungle” and creepily thought: Here, here is my autobiography. From that time forward, gradually but compellingly—and now I yield my scary confession—I became Henry James. Leaving graduate school at the age of twenty-two, disdaining the Ph.D. as an acquisition surely beneath the concerns of literary seriousness, I was already Henry James. When I say I “became” Henry James, you must understand this: though I was a near-sighted twenty-two-year-old young woman infected with the commonplace intention of writing a novel, I was also the elderly bald Henry James. Even without close examination, you could see the light glancing off my pate; you could see my heavy chin, my watch chain, my walking stick, my tender paunch. (Ozick 294) 4 I am indirectly indebted to Adrian Poole’s “Nanda’s Smile” for this conceit about Jamesian parties. That is, the way Poole poses the question of what Nanda would be like to meet invites us to see our own engagements with James as social encounters. 5 In making this turn, I am guided by Daniel Hannah’s reading of Alan Hollinghurst’s Nicholas Guest: Nick’s ejection from the Fedden household at the close of the novel after tabloids expose his relationship with Wani, who is dying of AIDS, reveals the “guest” status of gay culture in class-bound aesthetics: the gay observer is retained as the perfect guest, the refined observer, in the heteronormative house of capitalist acquisition so long as evidence of his sexuality is reduced to pure aesthetic taste, so long as bodily signs of his gayness remain private, invisible. In this way, Hollinghurst’s novel, like Jacques Derrida’s late writings, calls into question the place of the “guest,” the invited other, in Western culture; both writers pursue, in different forms, the fantasy and the limitations, in language and in practice, of hospitality. (17) Hannah’s focus on the “guest” status of gay culture is compelling and persuasive; it led me to think of the various ways in which a logic of hospitality might work in the tracing of Jamesian afterlives. Hollinghurst could be considered a “guest” in Henry James in ways both similar to and different from his character Nick’s status



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as guest. 6 Zemgulys notes that the allusion to the Show (and particularly “the Biggest on Earth” [445]) links the Birthplace to the Barnum and Bailey circus, called the Greatest Show on Earth. P. T. Barnum was supposedly attempting to acquire the Shakespeare birthplace (for shipment to the United States), and the Shakespeare Memorial Trust undertook its purchase and preservation in response to this attempt. The tale emphasizes that the literary pilgrims who come to this shrine are predominantly American; Zemgulys explores the transatlantic patterns of literary consumption that undergird the tale. 7 Booth characterizes the “discourse of ‘homes and haunts’” as “a hybrid genre of travel narrative, literary journalism, biography, and guidebook—that supported the rise of literary tourism in the nineteenth century” (216). For an elaboration of the analogy Booth draws between Lamb House and the New York Edition, see “Homes and Haunts” (223-24).

Works Cited Anesko, Michael. Monopolizing the Master: Henry James and the Politics of Modern Literary Scholarship. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2012. Print. Booth, Alison. “The Real Right Place of Henry James: Home and Haunts.” The Henry James Review 25 (2004): 216-227. Print. Derrida, Jacques, with Anne Dufourmantelle. Of Hospitality. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2000. Print. Felman, Shoshana. “Turning the Screw of Interpretation.” Literature and Psychoanalysis. The Question of Reading: Otherwise. Ed. Shoshana Felman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. 94-207. Print. Hannah, Daniel. “The Private Life, the Public Stage: Henry James in Recent Fiction.” Journal of Modern Literature 30.3 (2007): 70-94. Print. Hollinghurst, Alan. The Line of Beauty. London: Macmillan, 2004. Print. James, Henry. The Complete Tales of Henry James. Vols. 9 & 11. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1964. Print. —. Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition. New York: The Library of America, 1984. Print. —. The Wings of the Dove. Novels 1901-1902: The Sacred Fount, The Wings of the Dove. New York: Library of America, 2006. Print. Kubler-Ross, Elizabeth. On Death and Dying. New York: Macmillan, 1969. Print. Lodge, David. Author, Author. New York: Viking Penguin, 2004. Print. Miller, J. Hillis. “The Critic as Host.” Deconstruction and Criticism. Ed. Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman, and



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J. Hillis Miller. New York: Seabury (Continuum), 1979: 217-53. Print. Ozick, Cynthia. Foreign Bodies. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt. 2010. Print. —. “The Lesson of the Master.” Art and Ardor. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1983. 291-297. Print. Poole, Adrian. “Nanda’s Smile: Teaching James and the Sense of Humor.” Henry James Review 25.1 (2004): 4-18. Print. Rivkin, Julie. “The Genius of the Unconscious: Psychoanalytic Criticism.” Palgrave Advances in Henry James Studies. Ed. Peter Rawlings. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 55-79. Print. —. “Henry James, C’est moi: Jamesian Afterlives.” Henry James Review 31.1 (2010): 1-6. Print. —. “‘She won't do anything worse to you than make you like her’: Identification, Desire and the Light of Paris in The Ambassadors.” Igitur 4 (2003): 87-96. Print. Tanner, Tony. “The Birthplace.” Henry James: The Shorter Fiction: Reassessments. Ed. N. H. Reeve. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1997. 7794. Print. Tóibín, Colm. “Henry James for Venice.” The Henry James Review 27.3 (2006): 192-201. Print. —. The Master. New York: Scribner, 2004. Print. Zemgulys, Andrea. “Henry James in a Victorian Crowd: ‘The Birthplace’ in Context.” The Henry James Review 29.3 (2008): 245-56. Print.





CHAPTER TWELVE “WE SHALL NEVER BE AGAIN AS WE WERE”: FRIENDSHIP AND FICTION IN HENRY JAMES COLLIN MEISSNER1

But it is readily seen that friendship is only an idea . . . and unattainable in practice. . . . Friendship thought as attainable in its purity or completeness . . . is the hobby horse of writers of romances. (Immanuel Kant 585)

Long after Henry James’s death in 1916, Edith Wharton would write that James was “perhaps the most intimate friend I ever had” (Powers 12). James was already a celebrated older novelist when he and Wharton met and began what became a lifelong friendship. For James, Wharton was affectionately known as “Dearest Edith” up until the time he died. On Wharton’s side, James’s friendship “was the pride and honour of my life” (Powers 21). No reader familiar with James is surprised by Wharton’s testimonials. Indeed, Wharton’s is one in a litany of great friendships, male and female, James enjoyed and cultivated over his life. Long before “facebook,” Henry James was one of those people others wanted to “friend.” From his side, James nurtured a deep pool of friends for many reasons, often seeking out interesting people as much for themselves as for the various stimulations they could provide his voracious mind—and James could be voracious in the rawest sense of the word. Noting the predatory quality of James’s ego, T. S. Eliot remarked with fascination about how James “preyed . . . upon living beings” in search, always, of something he could refine into art.2 But while James was and has been rightly criticized for taking a sometimes mercenary approach to friendship, in the big picture it is not the predatory ego that comes down to us from the past, but the man who embraced the living and learning value of friendship as a tool for life; this is the James who speaks to us through his fiction as a “friend” and shows us what that means in real terms.

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“Friendship” for James was as much a concept as it was a performance, something as complex in his personal life as it was in his public work as a novelist and critic. James was acutely aware that “friendship” in and of itself as a thing—and those types or kinds of friendship one may have or move through over the course of his or her life—almost always came with both utilitarian and extra utile components. Examples might include James’s friendship with Edith Wharton, his long-lived friendship with W. D. Howells, or, more indeterminately, his friendship with Howard Sturgis. With this in mind, it matters to know that Henry James was not a wealthy man. He was comfortable to be sure, but he never had the ease of movement and self-possession real money brings. And he knew it. He knew it when he travelled in Europe; he knew it when he tried to settle in Paris, “short of funds” and increasingly long on the knowledge that the doors of the Faubourg St. Germain would remain forever closed to him, “an eternal outsider,” and he knew it all during those times he sat as an invited guest at someone’s dinner table or spent an evening or stay at someone’s home in America, in London, in the country side, and in Italy, to name a few (Edel 194, 203). This is not to say James wasn’t a famous and sought after man, just that beneath the surface James understood himself, to some extent, as the entertainment. This may seem like a brutal assessment of a great writer, but James would have agreed in principle. However, finding out what James truly thought about his own performance of friendship is made all the more difficult because of the relentless way he guarded his personal affairs from scrutiny during his own life and upon his death. While the recent efforts of Pierre Walker and Greg Zacharias to publish a complete collection of letters James wrote (projected to run to one hundred volumes containing more than 10,000 letters) allow us to know James better than ever, James’s destruction of thousands of letters written to him,3 often those most personal and those in response to specific letters he wrote, ensure that the Master will keep us guessing.4 For the purpose of my argument about friendship in James’s fiction, and to minimize the dangers of biographical conjecture, I make a divide between James’s real-life friendships and his depictions of friendships in his fiction. I do not necessarily think the one arena tells us anything qualitatively different than the other, but the practical distinction makes the argument both less cumbersome and more illuminating. I want to end up arguing not just for a theory of friendship in James’s fiction, but that that theory of friendship is a good way of coming to understand James’s narrative aesthetics. In other words, how would an understanding of James’s presentation of friendship help us understand James’s fiction? What does the performance of friendship reveal about the construction of



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narrative, and how do both assist James in constructing works of fiction that offer us an effective means of becoming acquainted with the ideas of perception, experience, and wisdom in their particular and most general sense? James’s depictions of friendship have much in common with other major thinkers on the issue from Aristotle up through Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and more recently Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jacques Derrida. Before I make those connections, however, it is important to make a connection between James’s idea of friendship and his use of ambiguity. Jamesian ambiguity has long been a central topic of discussion in James scholarship. It strikes me that an examination of friendship in James has to run along the same grooves as those examinations of textual ambiguity. Take for instance James’s remark in his Preface to The American where he says, “The real represents to my perception the things we cannot possibly not know, sooner or later, in one way or another; it being but one of the accidents of our hampered state, and one of the incidents of their quantity and number, that particular instances have not yet come our way” (1062-3); or this well-known passage from his essay on “The Art of Fiction,” “Humanity is immense, and reality has a myriad forms . . . Experience is never limited, and it is never complete” (52). These are celebrated remarks about the challenges posed by life itself, and, in Jamesian scholarship, about the nature of interpretation and understanding. But through the framework of James’s fiction one can also read these remarks as comments about the practice of friendship at its most fundamental level. Comments about the essential unknowability of almost anything, about experiences which invariably exceed one’s grasp, or of people who finally remain outside one’s realm of understanding appear throughout James’s work and reveal the complexity of his belief in the difficulty of arriving at any kind of determinative understanding. It might seem paradoxical to say that the failure of understanding becomes the medium for understanding, but James seems to be saying something like this and then showing, through the fiction, the many ways in which this dynamic works. When thinking of friendship, then, one could say that works such as The American, The Portrait of a Lady, and The Ambassadors invariably show how the failure of friendship is the medium for friendship just as the failure of understanding becomes its medium. In the confusing realm of understanding, James wants the reader to be wary, to know that ambiguities abound, and that in every case the ambiguity is as much a product of what one brings to the situation or event as anything inherent in the particular moment. “Try,” James instructed, to be “one of the people on whom nothing is lost” (AF 53). Try, that is, to be open to the possibility



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that things will exceed your capacity for understanding and that the only way you can get the most out of anyone or anything is to let it speak to you on its own terms. In the realm of a friendship theory, James’s remarks here about experience, about understanding and perception, sound similar to what Henry David Thoreau had to say about the practice of friendship. For Thoreau, friendship is built upon openness to otherness; it thrives on the expansion of consciousness and subjectivity that comes through the dynamic and interanimating contact between individuals who approach each other without prejudice. “Friends,” Thoreau believed, “do not live in harmony merely . . . but in melody.” Understanding of self, of other, of the world is for Thoreau the principal achievement of friendship, if for no other reason than that the practice of friendship ineluctably places one in a position of constant growth—the kind of openness James counseled: “To his Friend a man’s peculiar character appears in every feature and in every action, and it is drawn out and improved by him” (Thoreau, Week 217). In a sense, the practice of friendship, when done without restriction, requires the laying bare of one’s complete self before another and with the knowledge that what will come back as a result of this exposure is not just someone different than what one was, but also that you will emerge from the encounter as someone about whom you will surely have less certainty than before. The process of friendship, as James and Thoreau describe it, places one in a state of perpetual actualization, in James’s words, “never limited” and “never complete.” Or, as Thoreau would say, the “price of friendship is the total surrender of yourself, no lesser kindness, no ordinary attentions and offerings will buy it” (Journal 479).5 This last bit of advice is equally relevant to the way James manipulates the function of friendship in his novels. The way in which characters choose to be friends—with whom, for what reasons, and with what consequences—reveals itself to be a minefield of risk in an arena built upon calculation and misinterpretation. Any number of examples from James’s novels underscore this remark. Think, for instance, of the complicated relations between Maggie Verver, Charlotte Stant, and Prince Amerigo, or between Pemberton and Morgan Moreen from “The Pupil,” or the oddly predatory relations between Hyacinth Robinson and Paul Muniment, the practical arrangement between Christopher Newman and Benjamin Babcock, or Lambert Strether’s catalogue of friendships. Nothing is ever what it seems. In The Portrait of a Lady, Madame Merle declares that “when a friendship ceased to grow it immediately began to decline—there being no point of equilibrium between liking a person more and liking him less” (525). The reader sees Madame Merle’s remark here



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in a number of ways. On the surface it is in league with the catalogue of casual, witty, and even advisory remarks she delivers to Isabel throughout the early stages of their acquaintanceship. The most famous might be her response to Isabel when the latter claims that clothes can’t express her, that she only wears them because, as she says, “they are imposed upon me by society.” “Should you prefer to go without them?,” Madame Merle replies (PL 398). At this point James shows us two women who are still feeling each other out, two women who enjoy each other’s company for what it has in return. If we were to pin down the nature of their friendship at this moment using Aristotle as our guide, we might say that it is one based on either pleasure or advantage, and not necessarily, or not specifically, because either one of the women admires the virtuous characteristics of the other. 6 For Aristotle, these are limited kinds of friendships. They can be good, but the good is always going to be fraught with limitations. In a sense, they are friendships with a sunset clause. As he explains in the Nichomachean Ethics, “Those who are friends for the sake of utility part when the advantage is at an end; for they were lovers not of each other but of profit” (1157a.14-16). Madame Merle captures the utilitarian aspect of this kind of friendship when she challenges Isabel’s testimonials of devotion by saying “A stationary affection” is “impossible—it must move one way or the other” depending on intent and advantage, relational shifts the novel will later accentuate (525). Madame Merle is perhaps even more realistic when she says: “You will be my friend till you find a better use for your friendship” (396). In both cases, however, what James foregrounds is the use value Aristotle speaks of in pleasure or advantage friendships: “Those who love for the sake of utility love for the sake of what is good for themselves, and those who love for the sake of pleasure do so for the sake of what is pleasant to themselves, and not in so far as the other is the person loved but in so far as he is useful or pleasant” (1156a.14-18). In modern parlance befitting The Portrait, James is describing a buyer-beware world in which the valueadded component of friendship has limitations that can only be mutually beneficial if both sides remain equally aware of the motives at play. James underscores the risk factors in this kind of friendship for Isabel, and through her, for the reader, at the very moment the two women negotiate the terms of their friendship, with Madame Merle, as it eventually turns out, offering considerably less than a factual representation of herself.7 In the novel these discoveries become traumatic for Isabel on a personal level, but James suggests that the consequences of misdirected notions of friendship can be measured more broadly in the way in which families, communities, and even states can become stunted, as we see in the



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connective web that includes a cast of characters stretching from the United States to Europe. Of course, when discrepancies occur, fiction thrives, and it is in the discrepancies that James excels as a novelist. The narrative and aesthetic structures of The Portrait are more heavily dependent on Isabel’s impercipience than they are on the deception and ambiguities of Madame Merle and Gilbert Osmond. To this end, willfulness and pride on Isabel’s part contribute as much to her victimization as do malevolence and cunning on Osmond’s and what is ultimately maternal concern and desperation on Madame Merle’s. Thus, the trajectory of discovery in the novel is matched in lock step with the trajectory of revolution in Isabel’s and Madame Merle’s “friendship.” The novel’s interpretive tension relies on the degree to which Isabel herself is directly responsible for her being deceived. From her first encounter with Madame Merle, Isabel wants to will a friendship into being and as a result puts herself at risk of manipulation. “She had an ideal of friendship,” we’re told, but “she often reminded herself that there were essential reasons why one’s ideal could not become concrete. It was a thing to believe in, not to see—a matter of faith, not experience” (383). The reader, watching these relations unfold from the outside, is placed in a similar situation of discrepant, discontinuous, and then dawning awareness. In other words, the narrative is made active and immediate because the main events of the novel are often mediated through what becomes an increasingly questionable friendship in which one of the participants—Isabel—loses more and more control at those very moments when she believes exactly the opposite. James plays this forward up to and then beyond the moment of Isabel’s famous night vigil during which she reconceives her understanding of her past experiences, of her “friendship” with Madame Merle, and of herself. For Isabel, her evaluation of her friendship allows her to stumble into knowledge and self-awareness. She experiences a form of hermeneutic liberation and moves closer to becoming the ideal Jamesian subject—“one of those on whom nothing is lost,” but at a tremendous and likely irredeemable loss. In the end it is not without some irony that James writes a novel titled The Portrait of a Lady in which almost every aspect of outward action is completely dependent on how one understands the idea of friendship and the discrepancies between what that idea literally looks like in action but winds up being in deed. At this point, readers of the novel are asked to reconsider Isabel’s notion of an “ideal of friendship,” a “thing to believe in, not to see.” Despite all of the testimony and will to believe throughout the novel, what The Portrait finally shows us is that, strictly speaking, there may never be a time in the novel when Madame



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Merle and Isabel are “friends.”8 They may say all the right things, and the reader is swept along in that conversation, but what they do turns out to be part of some other region of that “huge silken spider web” of experience James spins (AF 52). In The Portrait, friendship functions as a narrative tool, a vehicle that takes us toward an empowering degree of self-understanding not so much because of what it gives, but through what it takes away.9 Yet while Isabel and Madame Merle fail, each in her own way, Isabel also succeeds monumentally. Readers of the novel have questioned its end since its publication, specifically Isabel’s reasons for returning to Rome. The claim of friendship could be the answer. After all, what has Isabel learned in the course of her experience if not something about the maturity of self knowledge true friendship requires, which includes responsibility to others above selfishness or self-centeredness, but also, as Aristotle argues throughout his Nicomachean Ethics, responsibility to and love of oneself. The novel guides toward this understanding of Isabel’s experience. For example, if we argue that Isabel returns to Rome because she recognizes the responsibility she has to Pansy, and even to the commitment which comes with her fidelity to her marriage vows, despite her full understanding of Osmond’s deceit, we can do so in her own words. At the end of her experience in The Portrait, Isabel Archer turns her own flip responses on end and embraces a notion of true friendship and responsibility which becomes a thing to see and enact more so than something which could only be imagined. To this extent, Isabel’s outward action of return is James’s way of showing how much of an inward revolution has occurred. Reading the novel’s end this way does not necessarily change how it comes across, but it does enhance our understanding of Isabel’s character and growth. During her night vigil Isabel memorably reveals that while she “had taken the first steps” of her married life “in the purest confidence,” she “had suddenly found the infinite vista of a multiplied life to be a dark, narrow alley, with a dead wall at the end” (629). At the novel’s conclusion James has Isabel experience again a shock of recognition scene, but this time showing the “dead wall” to come tumbling down: His kiss was like a flash of lightening; when it was dark again she was free. She never looked about her; she only darted away from the spot. There were lights in the windows of the house; they shone far across the lawn. In an extraordinarily short time—for the distance was considerable—she had moved through the darkness (for she saw nothing) and reached the door. Here only she paused. She looked about her; she



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The Ambassadors takes up the issue of friendship where The Portrait leaves it off. Most immediately, Strether comes to understand his utility value in what he had deceived himself into thinking was a friendship: “He was Lambert Strether because he was on the cover” of the Woollett Review, “whereas it should have been, for anything like glory, that he was on the cover because he was Lambert Strether” (AM 63). In this novel James shows what can be achieved when friendships lock onto and are guided by aspects that transcend utilitarian (and by utilitarian one can read “monetary”) intentions. Aristotle’s argument is helpful here as well. Aristotle suggests that the highest forms of friendship are those that transcend plain utility, be it pleasure or use, and derive their strength from connections with the other based on inherent qualities of character. “Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good, and alike in virtue; for these wish well alike to each other qua good, and they are good in themselves” (1156b.7-9). These are the kinds of friendship, Aristotle explains (in terms James would find agreeable), that move across time and get to the core of who we are. The life of the friend, the cumulative lived experiences, lives through the friend and extends beyond him or her to become an influential and component part of the other’s being. I think that Aristotle’s claims about the cumulative value of this kind of enduring friendship can tell us something very important about The Ambassadors and James’s ideas about the civic and social value of art, or at least the kind of art he produced. Aristotle’s highest form of friendship depends upon the quality of virtue inherent in both parties of a friendship. That is, one cannot truly friend someone for reasons other than the good qualities of his or her character. But this too is complicated. Aristotle is essentially speaking of a kind of friendship with benefits, no pun intended. This higher level of friendship is dynamic and interanimating; what one gives rebounds back and initiates a process of self-awareness and self-understanding that exceeds anything one can accomplish on his or her own. So while Aristotle says that a friend is someone who wishes or to whom are wished good things for that person’s sake, he goes on to explain that “the characteristics of friendship . . . will be found most in a man’s relation to himself; he is his own best friend and therefore ought to love himself best” (1168b.4-10). To be sure, this is what Strether finally gets through his interactions—his friendships—with Chad, Marie de Vionnet, and Maria Gostrey. The dynamic process James plays throughout the narrative shows us a man slowly learning who he is and why, a man learning to understand



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things on their own and eventually his own terms, and a man who learns how to become himself, how to become “Lambert Strether” through learning how to be almost like “Chad Newsome,” or how to be like the best Chad has to offer. James brings this point home in the novel’s ambiguity-laden conclusion. Strether, we recall, pleads with Chad to stay put: “Let me accordingly appeal to you by all you hold sacred,” he says. And Chad, we find, eventually throws over Marie de Vionnet for just those principles: “I mean the money in it,” as he explains his decision (356, 360). To some extent, Chad’s mercenary rationale is blandly unsurprising. Guided by a utility notion of friendship, Chad inevitably exhausts the cache Marie de Vionnet has to offer and moves on to his next opportunity. The “business” of friendship, here connected by Chad, the money, and the advertising enterprise he speaks of, is something James will revisit with a vengeance when he writes The American Scene and chastises Americans for their willingness to do anything to anyone and put up with anything themselves for the money in it.11 This “Chad as cad” argument is fairly straightforward, but then not quite. The finer narrative point of Chad’s behavior is not meant to portray Chad, but Strether. If in the course of their friendship Strether learns how to love himself in a non narcissistic way, we have to ask when and how; and if we ask those questions we cannot avoid two important correspondences: first that Strether is pretty far down a relationship road with Mrs. Newsome for the utilitarian value of the money in it; and second, that he eventually throws Mrs. Newsome over for what we could say is the money in it. What The Ambassadors eventually means comes down to the way in which we understand the difference between Chad and Strether. In the end, James makes us see that while Chad’s abandonment of Marie de Vionnet is a diminishing move and paints him as a mercenary who is unable to move beyond a use value paradigm of friendship and responsibility, Strether absorbs what is best about Chad’s character over the course of their friendship and allows those characteristics to interrogate and finally change his own sense of self, of responsibility, and of value. In the process, Strether is brought from a position of despair or something like acedia (“he was Lambert Strether because he was on the cover”), to envy (Chad “was a link for hopeless fancy, and implication of possibilities—oh if everything had been different”), to a position of self-empowerment. This final stage includes a rejection of those things that had held him captive: “That, you see, is my only logic. Not, out of the whole affair, to have got anything for myself” (63, 126, 365). Of course, what is suggested in the novel’s final scene is that in taking nothing for himself Strether walks away a completely free and self-determining man.



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Readers of Aristotle have at times misunderstood his remark about learning to love oneself most of all (1168a.28-34) as a statement of selfinterest and narcissism: that is, what do I discover in my friends but flattering images of myself. If we step out of this argument for a moment, we can see how James purposefully uses this misperception of friendship’s intentions as a structural component in The Ambassadors, especially where he shows Chad’s magnetism and power over others as deployed self-interested narcissism. “Chad,” Strether observes, “was always letting people have their way when he felt that it would somehow turn his wheel for him” (337). Strether notes the deficiencies as his own larger awareness develops: Chad, who Strether can’t believe is the same person he knew in Woollett, is eventually discovered to be someone who “[h]abitually left things to others, as Strether was so well aware, and it in fact came over our friend in these meditations that there had been as yet no such vivid illustration of his famous knowing how to live” (330). Later, when struck with increasing wonder at Madame de Vionnet, who “had but made Chad what he was . . . had made him better, . . . had made him best,” Strether wrestles with a certain uneasiness of perception: “it came to our friend with supreme queerness,” the narrative puts forth, that Chad “was none the less only Chad” (341). Again, what Strether’s insight underscores is the smallness of Chad’s capacity for friendship in any degree beyond its pleasure or use value, an insight which effectively snuffs out the interactive dynamic of Strether’s friendship with Chad. If one looks back over the arc of their friendship, what slowly emerges is something that looks very much like a way of reading a James novel. Like Strether, the reader learns to distinguish between degrees of reality, to read between and beyond the lines, to look past the surface on the one hand and scrutinize his or her own motivations on the other.12 As James explains in his provisional “Project of Novel,” what Strether comes to understand from his “strange, half-bitter, half-sweet experience” is that at the end it has all “happened for him, for his own spirit, his own queer sense of things” (387). Labeling Strether as “our friend” then, is more than a quaint narrative device; it is James’s way of establishing a readerly connection which moves from a friendship of utility—the initial guide through the novel, the center of consciousness who introduces us to things and people—to a friendship based on quality of character, on virtue, on goodness, and even on love—Aristotle’s highest measure of virtue—which rebounds back upon the reader. In his Preface to “The Lesson of the Master” James spoke of his belief in the public and even democratic value of art and of what he saw as his role as novelist, someone who could be an agent of change and



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help cultivate the “high and helpful . . . civic use of the imagination” (1230). As a text, The Ambassadors shows how this process works through the center of consciousness, Lambert Strether. Even the basic plot outline sets up this dynamic. Strether is sent by his “friends” to rescue Woollett’s son from the hands of a “base, venal” woman who “has got hold of him” in Paris (45). His is a utilitarian mission rooted in the bedrock belief that the Woollett frame of mind understands exactly what the Parisian field of action is all about. Our “friend” Strether, the friend of use value, will shepherd us safely through that arena of decadence and bring us, as James’s notes to the novel suggest, through to the other side of that experience.13 But something amazing happens in Paris. Strether learns to distinguish between types, kinds, and degrees of friendship, and in the process carries the reader through the same process of hermeneutic refinement. While it is hard to think about The Ambassadors differently after we have completed it, it is easy to imagine that the plot structure, involving a wealthy young American man lounging around Paris in the company of a married Parisian femme du monde, could support Mrs. Newsome’s point of view. Much of the pleasure of discovery in the novel is finding out how much we, like Strether, have been wrong, based on erroneous assumptions, which include the idea that New England must be right! And much of the difficulty in the end is coming to embrace Strether’s own hard-earned and uneasy wisdom about the immensity of life, and the need, as he says to Marie de Vionnet, to “never think a step further than I’m obliged to” (342). This last remark from Strether comes as his assurance to Madame de Vionnet that he cannot think ill of her based on everything he knows. It turns over if not Strether’s initial point of view, certainly the fixed and judgmental attitude of Woollett and whatever degree of community he felt with that crowd. But it is also a teaching moment. Both Emerson and Thoreau conceived of friendship as something we find in and through others, something one gives, more than something one receives, but in the giving one receives a refined and enhanced understanding of his or her self and the world. This is why, to some extent, both Emerson and Thoreau regarded friendships as enriched and even defined by the differences between the friends rather than as dependent on similarities. We learn of ourselves through those aspects of our friends that are different from us. It is in the collisions and challenges that we learn to take on, absorb, understand, and become more. This is the idea of friendship Emerson extolled when he argued that a requirement of true friendship was that the friend “not cease to be himself.” The “only joy I have in his being mine,” Emerson declared, “is that the not mine is mine.” And as though speaking



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of Strether’s disappointment in Chad—of Chad’s weakness in standing up to Woollett—or in holding “sacred” what is not worth holding at all, Emerson goes on to describe what forecloses or even makes friendship impossible: “I hate, where I looked for a manly furtherance, or at least a manly resistance, to find a mush of concession” (208). When we look at the efforts Strether makes to influence Chad’s decision to defy Woollett, his advocacy of what amounts to fidelity within adultery, James presents a Strether who is positively Emersonian on the issue of friendship. Emerson believed one was “[b]etter a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo,” a position to which Strether demonstrably adheres (208). Finally, Emerson’s examination of friendship also gives us a powerful means of navigating through the ambiguity of Strether’s final renunciation in a way that underscores the extent of his achievement. In passing on Maria Gostrey’s offer—“There’s nothing, you know, I wouldn’t do for you”— Strether actualizes what Emerson argued was the highest form of friendship: “the ability to do without it” (208). Through the lens of friendship then, at least the lens Emerson crafts and James seems to share, Strether’s decisions at the novel’s end can only be exactly what they are. In the end, to some extent, as Derrida has argued, friendship of this kind requires a willingness to “love before being loved” (8). 14 In the Jamesian picture, it is not so much that Woollett is wrong, but that the Mrs. Newsomes or the Waymarshes of the world mistake their individual opinion for universal knowledge, which renders them unable to see anything other than their own point of view. As a result they can’t give, even an inch, which means they can’t really receive, even at the most microcosmic level. The difference between the two can be measured in real human terms. The novel’s end presents a very complicated and compelling Marie de Vionnet who laments to Strether her deep and heartfelt feelings: “It’s how you see me” that matters most; “it’s how you see me . . . and it’s as I am, and as I must take myself, and of course it’s no matter.” And it is the equally complex and broadly wise Strether who is able to get beyond the surface and understand the following: It was actually moreover as if he didn’t think of her at all . . . She was older for him to-night, visibly less exempt from the touch of time; but she was as much as ever the finest and subtlest creature, the happiest apparition, it had been given to him, in all his years, to meet. (343)

In the global picture the distinction between Woollett and Strether, and the distinction between friendships based strictly on utility and those on quality of character, can explain the difference between a worldly, cosmopolitan, and future-oriented point of view and a more nativist,



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parochial, and past-oriented one. James continually wrestled his way through this struggle in his fiction and in his personal life, sometimes more successfully than others. But he never forgot what was at stake. True friendship, James believed, offered a mirror of and for self-knowledge; in the image of someone else friendship offered a model for one’s own behavior and beliefs. If we were to borrow from Aristotle here, we could say that Isabel Archer and Lambert Strether show us examples of how friendship can help one to achieve “noetic actualization” as a “moral agent,” a state of being Aristotle believed was the highest form of self and civic actualization.15 To this end fiction is one of the best vehicles we have for examining the complexities friendship and, through that, life can produce. This is a point Martha Nussbaum beautifully explains in her examination of The Golden Bowl, and one which fits this argument about friendship, fiction, and The Ambassadors as well. As a kind of moral philosophy, a work like The Ambassadors underscores both the risk and reward of friendship. “The entire text” is “revealed as the imaginative effort of a human character who displays himself here as the sort of character who reads lives and texts so as not to cheapen their value” (42). This sounds like Lambert Strether. As a study in friendship, The Ambassadors throws down a familiar Jamesian gauntlet, that friendship is an immense sensibility, is never complete, and comes in myriad forms. James shows us a demanding kind of friendship, a kinetic interaction between individuals and between readers and texts that almost takes away more than it gives, or at least that gives only after having demanded much more than we anticipated. This kind of fiction is anything but escapist and our relationship with it far from passive. James shows us the work of friendship through the work of fiction and the power of fiction through the work of friendship. To borrow from The Wings of the Dove, once we live through this process “we [can] never be again as we were” (509).

Notes 1

This essay was built from many a long and stimulating conversation over years with my teacher, mentor, colleague, and good friend James Walton. He is missed. 2 Lyndall Gordon intensely scrutinizes the predatory James in her biographical study A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art. Citing Eliot’s remarks about James’s almost vampirical behavior with certain “interesting” subjects, Gordon argues that James seemed to be governed by an almost willful need to possess certain kinds of people, notably women, of whom Gordon argues convincingly Minny Temple and Constance Fenimore Woolson were prime examples (1-9). James makes his own similar argument throughout many of his Prefaces in which he talks about how he was in constant search of raw material to



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refine into art. Eliot’s remark above suggests he may well have been thinking of James’s own observations about female characters in his Preface to The Portrait of a Lady: “the wonder being . . . how inordinately, the Isabel Archers, and even much smaller female fry, insist on mattering” (1077). 3 At one point destroying more than forty years of correspondence in an effort to ensure against future biographers. 4 James’s huge corpus of letters—mostly those he wrote to others—has been a somewhat controversial source of material for studying the man ever since Leon Edel published his 4 volume selection, Henry James: Letters (Cambridge, 197484). The Walker/ Zacharias project offers increasingly detailed and comprehensive images of James, but scholars of James are always aware of how much James understood himself as a public and even performing subject in his letters. As Lyndall Gordon has argued, “James’s own letters are, for the most part, too public, too busy, too fulsome to give much away” (6). 5 Thoreau’s point here is similar to the argument Derrida makes in his Politics of Friendship where he discusses friendship as a process, as something which perpetually seeks reigniting and reaffirmation as part of its sentient and determining action. Gadamer describes this same dynamic as the “negativity of experience.” In terms of the practice of friendship, the negativity of experience (by which Gadamer means those experiences which, because they are new, expose us to and introduce new things or ideas that we did not know of before) describes the process by which one gains insight into his or her self. The practice of friendship, for Thoreau and for James, always leads to insight, which is, as Gadamer argues, “more than knowledge of this or that situation. It always involves an escape from something that had deceived us and held us captive. Thus insight always involves an element of self-knowledge” (317, 319-20). In the most practical way, Gadamer’s explanation here is the story of Isabel Archer’s convoluted friendship with Madame Merle. 6 This latter remark is important in the larger context of The Portrait of a Lady because James will use Isabel’s misreading of her attraction to Madame Merle and the nature of their friendship as a narrative tool through which he can underscore the vaulting or presumptive nature of Isabel’s interpretive behavior. 7 The narrative is teasingly complex here. Madame Merle initially doesn’t lie or manipulate Isabel’s understanding outright, but seeds Isabel’s tendency to misinterpret by playing up the terminal nature of utilitarian friendship. Adopting a world-weary manner, Madame Merle suggests to Isabel that her affections will change, and in preparation Isabel should be “sure to have [a reason] ready for the day [she] begin[s]” to think less of her. Of course the suggestion provokes a testimonial of endless devotion from Isabel—“I shall never begin” (395). Shortly thereafter, Madame Merle moves from obfuscation and manipulation to outright falsehood in what, in hindsight, seems to be the purposeful deception of Isabel in order to gain the upper hand in their “friendship.” Claiming to be at the end of her tether, Madame Merle laments that “the best part [of her life] is gone, and gone for nothing,” that she has nothing to show “[n]either husband, not child, nor fortune, nor position, nor the traces of beauty which I never had.” That at least the childless portion of Madame Merle’s lament turns out to be a notable falsehood becomes a



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determining aspect of the novel, and the way Isabel comes to reinterpret conversations like these becomes one of the signature aspects of James’s aesthetics, a point the novel celebrates in the famous night vigil scene of chapter 42. 8 Aristotle has much to say on this aspect of misunderstood friendship as well: “a wish for friendship may arise quickly,” as it clearly does on Isabel’s side, “but friendship does not,” as the novel inescapably reveals (1156 b.31-32). 9 James’s essays on fiction writing, his Prefaces, as well as his many essays about writers and artists offer a wealth of examples detailing the kind of intentionality I’m suggesting he made operative in his aesthetics. One example is the following from his essay on “The Novels of George Eliot”: “In every novel the work is divided between the writer and the reader; but the writer makes the reader very much as he makes his characters. When he makes him ill, that is, makes him indifferent, he does no work; the writer does all. When he makes him well, that is, makes him interested, then the reader does quite the labour. In making such a deduction as I have just indicated, the reader would be doing his share of the task; the grand point is to get him to make it” (922). 10 If Isabel’s intention is to return to Rome out of, among other things, obligation to Pansy’s future, she does fulfill a standard of friendship Thoreau believed tantamount: “Friends do not do what they think they must, but what they must” (Week 219). 11 James will speak in The American Scene of people guided by a postulate of gain, of a citizenry caught up in the “wash of gold” and a culture dedicated to “the commercial at any cost” (AS 420). His depiction of New York’s skyscrapers as facing each other with nothing more to say of themselves than of their temporally utilitarian value mirrors James’s depiction of the vague, mercenary, and ultimately hollow Chad Newsome at the end of The Ambassadors. Like Chad moving through people, looking for the next best thing, the skyscrapers “never begin to speak to you . . . with the authority of things of permanence or even things of long duration.” Rather, for them James imagines “one story is as good only till another is told, and sky-scrapers are the last word of economic ingenuity only till another word be written” (AS 420). 12 In this sense we could say the novel follows Aristotle’s argument about the good man’s love of self: “The good man should be a lover of self (for he will both himself profit by doing noble acts, and will benefit his fellows).” It is hard not to follow Aristotle’s argument a little further here and use his remarks as a commentary on Chad, who certainly seems an example of exactly the kind of man Aristotle suggests should not love himself: “The wicked man should not [love himself]; for he will hurt both himself and his neighbors, following as he does evil passions” (1169a.12-16). 13 In his “Project” notes, James explains that Strether “has come so far through his total little experience that he has come out on the other side” (390). 14 Derrida goes on in this section of his account of friendship in language that fits this discussion of friendship in James generally and in The Ambassadors specifically: “The friend is the person who loves before being the person who is loved; he who loves before being the beloved, and perhaps . . . he who loves before being loved” (9). A simple addition of names here, Strether and Chad, for instance,



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would allow us to read Derrida’s comment as an explanation of the state of being into which Strether emerges “on the other side” of the novel and why. So too does Derrida’s observation tell us much about why Chad—the archetypal receiver of affection—comes up so short. 15 The connection between primary friendship and virtuous actualization is one of the central themes of Aristotle’s ethics and it plays a central role in Aristotle’s discussion of the relationship between friendship and civic harmony. As Suzanne Stern-Gillet has remarked, “friendship plays a unique and crucial role in the noetic actualization of moral agents. More precisely . . . primary friendship enables such agents to gain conscious awareness of their own individual moral excellence, or selfhood, since Aristotelian selfhood is a byword for virtue embodied” (51).

Works Cited Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Ed. Richard McKeon. Trans. W. D. Ross. New York: Random House, 1941. 927-1112. Print. Derrida, Jacques. Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins. London: Verso, 1997. Print. Edel, Leon. Henry James. A Life. New York: Harper and Row, 1985. Print. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Friendship.” Essays, First Series. The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Vol. II. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1904. 189-218. Print. Gadamer, Hans Georg. Truth and Method. Trans. Garrett Barden and John Cumming. New York: Crossroads, 1985. Print. Gordon, Lyndall. A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art. London: Chatto and Windus, 1998. James, Henry. 1903. The Ambassadors. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960. Print. —. The American Scene. Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America. English Hours. The American Scene. Other Travels. Ed. Richard Howard. New York: Library of America, 1993. 351-736. Print. —. “Art of Fiction.” Literary Criticism. Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers. Vol. 1. Ed. Leon Edel. New York: Library of America, 1984. 44-65. Print. —. “The Novels of George Eliot.” Literary Criticism. Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers. Vol. 1. Ed. Leon Edel. New York: Library of America, 1984. 912-933. Print. —. The Portrait of a Lady. Henry James. Novels: 1881-1886. New York: Library of America, 1985. 191-800. Print.



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—. Preface. The American. Literary Criticism. French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition. Vol. 2. Ed. Leon Edel. New York: Library of America, 1984. 1053-1069. Print. —. Preface. “The Lesson of the Master.” Literary Criticism. French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition. Vol. 2. Ed. Leon Edel. New York: Library of America, 1984. 1225-1237. Print. —. Preface. The Portrait of a Lady. Literary Criticism. French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition. Vol. 2. Ed. Leon Edel. New York: Library of America, 1984. 1070-1085. Print. —. “Project of Novel.” The Ambassadors. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960. 373-391. Print. —. Wings of the Dove. 1902. New York: Oxford UP, 1984. Print. Kant, Immanuel. Practical Philosophy. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Ed. Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Print. Nussbaum, Martha. “Flawed Crystals: James’s The Golden Bowl and Literature as Moral Philosophy.” New Literary History 15 (1983): 2550. Print. Powers, Lyall, ed. Henry James and Edith Wharton. Letters: 1900-1915. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990. Print. Stern-Gillet, Suzanne. Aristotle’s Philosophy of Friendship. Albany NY: State U of New York P, 1995. Print. Thoreau, Henry David. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Boston: J. R. Osgood and Company, 1873. Print. —. Journal. Vol. IX. “July 13, 1857.” The Writings of Henry David Thoreau. Ed. Bradford Torrey. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Riverside Press Edition, 1906. 479-481. Print.







CHAPTER THIRTEEN TRANSFORMING HOSPITALITY AND FRIENDSHIP IN HENRY JAMES: FROM “A LONDON LIFE” TO THE AWKWARD AGE MERLE A. WILLIAMS

Henry James’s treatment of hospitality in his fiction of the late 1880s and the 90s is marked by a number of distinguishing features. The hospitable is framed in terms of constellations of sociability, informed by definite principles of inclusion and exclusion, which in turn are rooted in a sense of shared values. Personal genealogies are investigated, while a commonly understood language (both significative and cultural) is at once acknowledged and tested. Laura Wing of “A London Life” (1888) is thus accepted as the earnest younger sister of the irrepressible Selina Berrington, whose scandalous exploits have steadily eroded her claims to respectable recognition. “Oh, my dear, it isn’t the business of little girls to serve as parachutes to fly-away wives!” the forthright Lady Davenant asserts, when Laura visits her at the dower house on the Berrington estate. “You can come to me, you know, whenever you like, I don’t know another girl I would say that to,” she adds by way of advice, comfort, and renewed censure of the contamination implicit in continuing association with Selina (94-95). When Laura bursts into tears of shame and regret at her sister’s conduct, Lady Davenant responds with a magisterial moral condescension almost worthy of one of Oscar Wilde’s elderly grandes dames: “Ah, my dear, don’t cry or I shall take back my invitation. It would never do if you were to larmoyer. If I have offended you by the way I have spoken of Selina, I think you are too sensitive. We shouldn’t feel more for people than they feel for themselves. She has no tears, I’m sure” (95). That settles the question of hospitable obligations as far as Lady Davenant is concerned.

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Laura finds herself entangled in the toils of British hospitality both because she is economically dependent on her sister’s resources, despite her passionate disapproval of Selina’s amorous adventures, and because she was brought up in the United States. At once critical of the sexual license of her sister and brother-in-law, yet reluctantly complicit with their lifestyle through the absence of practical alternatives for genteel survival—integrated into English mores yet resistant to their wholehearted assimilation—she torments herself with her liminal and ineffectual position. She also becomes distressingly aware of her capacity for disingenuous compromise and convenient self-deception, particularly in the wake of her brother-in-law Lionel’s revelations about a secret trip Selina makes to Paris, presumably to meet her current lover. Laura is brought to recognize the unsteadiness of her cherished moral principles through her susceptibility to thinly disguised bribery and cheap consolation: This was very characteristic of [Lionel’s] good nature; it had come over him that after all she wouldn’t like [“the subject he had opened up to her so luminously”], and if the free use of the gray ponies could make up to her for the shock she might order them every day in the week and banish the unpleasant episode from her mind. (134-35)

The arrival in London of Mr. Wendover, a naive and conscientiously upright visitor from the United States, brings her relief, since it enables her to displace her energies—not to mention hospitable social relations—into an alternative American modality. However, Mr. Wendover unwittingly fails her (and her sometimes neurotic moral strenuousness) when he avoids proposing marriage as an antidote to an incipient scandal engineered by Selina. In a desperate attempt to force his commitment, thus redeeming her perceived public image of ethical conduct, Laura bursts out, “Why have you come so often? . . . To see me—it was for that? . . . You have come very often—too often, too often!” This gauchely inept appeal almost immediately shows Laura that the amazed Wendover “was quite unprepared for her question, that he was distinctly not in love with her”; so she melodramatically flees the scene of her self-created humiliation (185). This collapse of hospitable understanding, which is to some degree precipitated by differing British and American conceptions of the boundary between friendship and courtship, is addressed by Lady Davenant with a consummate mixture of quiet humor, tact, and pragmatic manipulativeness. In an encounter as low key and decorous as the preceding confrontation was crassly embarrassing, she informs Mr. Wendover that Laura is “the nicest girl” she knows. Playing adroitly with



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his sense of decency, reinforced by a lurking predilection for gallantry, Lady Davenant converts a panicky instinct for flight into genuine emotional attachment, even devotion (196-99). Yet Laura is not to be so easily reconciled. With a self-defeating intensity of imagined moral scrupulousness, she herself transgresses the established rules of propriety by pursuing her disgraced sister to the Continent, rejecting Wendover’s conciliatory pleas and earning Lady Davenant’s formal disapproval. The story ends with Laura’s finding shelter with distant relatives in Virginia, a “situation” which Wendover figures as “unspeakably dreary” (212). However, such simple hospitality doubtless offers the consolation of an untainted reputation, as well as a reassuring conformity to convention. James’s slightly strained comedy of manners in “A London Life” shows close affinities with Jacques Derrida’s account of a “conditional hospitality” which is constituted by a pact with the foreigner as xenos or “guest-friend,” as distinguished from “the absolute other, the barbarian . . . absolutely excluded and heterogeneous.” Derrida also highlights bonds of reciprocity between host and guest, in addition to sustained commitment to a “familial or ethnic group” which is determinable by name (Of Hospitality 21-23). Equally pertinent are a shared language as an “ensemble” of mutually recognized norms and meanings, the prerogative to question the guest (usually in a friendly or loving manner), and the applicability of laws which mark “limits, powers, rights, and duties” (Of Hospitality 13133, 27, 75-77). Parameters of this kind are again seen to apply in “The Chaperon” (1891), although James’s title here reflects his teasingly ironic touch. Rose Tramore sets out to rescue her mother from social ostracism in consequence of an ill-considered elopement with a lover. Yet Rose’s heart has “not been wrung at all”; instead, she has “her eyes fixed on a special achievement” prompted by her “latent energy”—“her purpose [is] a pious game” (78). This attitude contrasts markedly with the austere position of the grandmother who has helped to bring her up. When Rose offers to visit after moving to her mother’s home, the old lady coldly replies, “You may come if you like, but you’ll come no further than the door. If you leave this house now you don’t enter it again” (83). Yet Rose ignores this exclusion and her prospective suitor’s ardent warning about “how terrible, how cruel, the world can be” (89). This she dismisses as a slavish adherence to convention, prompted by reluctance to lose any inheritance which may be expected from her intractable grandmother. With briskly assumed indifference, Rose willfully rejects all salutary constraints, risking her remaining family ties and forfeiting the space of congenial communal interaction.



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Nonetheless, she succeeds or rather she is in large measure guided to success by the involvement of her concerned suitor, whose values come to controvert Rose’s initial (and reductively arrogant) assumptions about him. Captain Jay ruefully suppresses the inquiring urge to take Rose and her mother “on trial” when he chances to meet them in Italy. However, he secures a proud and defiantly contradictory confession. On the one hand, Rose starkly acknowledges that she and her mother have “no social existence, we’re utterly despised. . . . No one has anything to do with us, no one speaks to us, no one looks at us”; on the other, she insists that they are “extraordinarily happy” (107-9). Yet it is Bertram Jay’s disgust at Lady Maresfield’s machinations in attempting to exact Rose’s marriage to her ridiculously unprepossessing son as the price of Mrs. Tramore’s readmission to polite circles that brings the narrative to fruition. Captain Jay possesses both the capacity and the understated determination to snub Lady Maresfield’s powerful, if “too worldly,” daughter (112-14). Mrs. Vesey, in her turn, transmutes subtle offence into social capital by redefining the conditions of hospitality as the exploitation of emerging modern trends. She contrives the proto-theatrical attraction of seeing “Rose bring in her dreadful mother” at a variety of glittering events (115), until the older woman is thoroughly relaunched into the fashionable, upper class set. Thanks to Bertram Jay’s intervention, Mrs. Tramore’s warm, if narrowly domestic, welcome is ironically subordinated to a contingent and superficially more appealing public popularity: she “has now so many places to go to that she has almost no time to come to her daughter’s. She is, under her son-in-law’s roof, a brilliant but a rare apparition” (118). So James simultaneously undercuts and restructures the contingent laws of hospitality in order to expose their inherent malleability and their related hypocrisy. The potential suffering of alienation, of estrangement from self and accessible society, is neatly conjured away by reversing the status of protective parent and trusting child, not to mention the potential influence of culpability and innocence. Seeking to interpret The Awkward Age (1899), however, opens disturbingly new terrain, both radically reorientating any discussion of hospitality and ultimately inviting ways of interrogating the topic that are noticeably different in kind from those examined in James’s previous endeavors. Superficially, the novel offers a succession of scenes that are focused on hospitable engagement: in Vanderbank’s apartment, in Mrs. Brookenham’s “temple of analysis,” at country houses, at Tishy Grendon’s dinner party, or in Nanda’s recently furnished sitting room. However, it is the very form of the text with its apparently objective dramatic design and its kaleidoscopic, sometimes scintillating, conversational effects that



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challenges the critic. These perplexities have been astutely examined by both Margaret Walters and David Kurnick. Kurnick argues that “The Awkward Age goes to extraordinary lengths to subject its reader to what James elsewhere calls the ‘ghostly ordeal’ of reading a play—of imagining a performance that remains an object of gauzy make-believe” (114). This process, as he notes, is complicated by the text’s aspiration to a past conditional tense (“it would have been [interesting]”) calling for implied completion in the subjunctive mood (“had this world existed”) (Kurnick 113). Moreover, the foreclosure of access to the psychological inwardness frequently investigated in realist or modernist fiction, compounded by the free proliferation of dialogue, generates a shadowy sub-text redolent of erotic license—even perversion.1 Such dark undercurrents subtly pollute the exercise of hospitality in the novel. When Mr. Longdon visits Vanderbank in the opening book, differing standards of reciprocated courtesy, propriety, and tact soon make themselves felt. Mr. Longdon is disconcerted not only by Van’s confident possession of photographs of both Little Aggie and Nanda, but by the nonchalance of his comments on the girls’ features and relative charms. As Julie Rivkin has aptly observed, the juxtaposed styles of the photograph frames—Neapolitan crimson fur for Aggie and chastely glazed white wood for Nanda—highlight the differences in personality and matrimonial prospects between these girls. Yet both are to be treated as virginal commodities circulating within the prevailing market system, while Mr. Longdon’s exchange of views with Vanderbank inadvertently congeals into an informal appraisal of commercially realizable attributes (see Rivkin 176-79). An equally invidious breach of Vanderbank’s role as Mr. Longdon’s host and Mrs. Brookenham’s frequent guest is to be detected in his dismissive exposure of Mrs. Brook’s falsification of Nanda’s age under the pressure of cultivating her own youthfulness (3637, 39).2 Discomfiting suggestions of intimacy hover in the air which Mr. Longdon’s mode of address has infused with the aura of past reticences and salutary, dignified restraints. These shadowy imputations ultimately prove more damaging than the Duchess’s outright attack on Mrs. Brook’s method of educating Nanda, precisely because infractions of conventional hospitality, spiced with innuendo masquerading as debate, have become the self-validating stock in trade of the Buckingham Crescent drawing room. Mrs. Brookenham’s readiness to counsel unfaithful wives, such as Fanny Cashmore and Carrie Donner, on their vexing romantic liaisons, curiously domesticates the illicit as the socially permissible, if only within the framework of sophisticated salon gossip. Yet it is her conversations with



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the fellow worshippers in her “temple of analysis” that most tax the notion of hospitality and the flexibility of generally understood discourse. Her disclosure—or is it her betrayal?—to Mitchy of Mr. Longdon’s intention to make a substantial settlement on Nanda in return for Vanderbank’s commitment to marrying the girl leads into speculation as to whether Van actually can, or will, take such a step. Van restlessly replies to his hostess’s skeptical view that he will evade any conclusive involvement, thus removing “the element of real suspense”: “What is splendid, as we call it, is this extraordinary freedom and goodhumour of our intercourse and the fact that we do care—so independently of our personal interests, with so little selfishness or other vulgarity—to get at the idea of things. . . . [Mrs. Brook] offers me the truth as she sees it, about myself, with no nasty elation if it does chance to be the truth that suits her best. It was a charming stroke.” (222)

Mrs. Brook caps this judgment with the claim that the “principal beauty” of this “effort to live together” is sincerity. In a quick succession of ingenious ripostes, “sincerity” then becomes “simplicity,” which in turn is translated into being “natural” (223). Dorothea Krook seems unfortunately to misgauge both the tone and the artificial rhythm of this interaction when she argues that it demonstrates dispassionate and clear-sighted selfknowledge (146-51). To describe such asphyxiatingly contrived and manipulative verbal maneuvering as “natural” at once stretches the boundaries of legitimate questioning and violates the respect for others that is intrinsic to hospitality. Vanderbank has already threatened to puncture the taut surface of this illusion by looking at his companions “a little foolishly” and muttering a qualified regret about his breach of Mr. Longdon’s confidence: “I think I’ve been rather an ass!” (219). Moreover, Mitchy’s cultivated comic extravagance thinly masks his anguished yearning to marry Nanda; he parodies his ethical sensibility at once to disguise his pain and to continue playing by the rules of a self-consciously transgressive parlor game: “What on earth is left for a man just rotten with goodness! It renders necessary the kind of liking that renders unnecessary anything else” (226-27). Incipient self-knowledge is remolded and obfuscated through a parade of urbane tolerance that belies selfish ambitions and deeply seated insecurities, which in their turn are inflected by the incompatibility between desire and its fulfillment. Open indulgence in such calculatedly witty discussion constitutes what Emmanuel Levinas calls “the temptation of temptation,” the assumption that intellectual inquiry should recognize no restriction on its alluring liberty in pursuit of multiple varieties of potentially pleasurable and



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enriching knowledge, for the seeker is “simultaneously outside everything and participating in everything.” Temptation of this kind is seen as infinite, starting “in the midst of engagement, [which nevertheless] assures itself a continual disengagement.” This flirtation with a theoretically driven knowing is thus set against a wisdom whose self-consonance eschews the undiscriminating satisfaction of Luciferian exploratory excursions (“The Temptation of Temptation” 33-35). 3 Under the “temptation of temptation” the other is neither welcomed nor affirmed, but delivered over to a rapacious curiosity that exploits and potentially maims. So the privacy of Nanda’s selfhood and her cherished aspirations for the future are exposed and indifferently soiled on the pretext of what Vanderbank terms “extraordinary critical freedom” or “high intellectual detachment” (225). Yet Van himself cannot escape unscathed; his equivocal gesture of loyalty to Mrs. Brook, in violating a contrary loyalty to Mr. Longdon, strips bare his endemic evasiveness, even his moral hollowness, not to mention his self-serving embrace of assumed social proprieties. The “siren song” of the “temptation of temptation,” as Levinas calls it (33), suggests a supplementary approach to the formal conundrum of The Awkward Age. Kurnick’s claim that Nanda, like her mother, is devoted to the “talk” of the novel—even if one buys it off with Mrs. Brook’s claim that it is “mere talk” (230)—and the parallel contention that the girl’s body is “simply tortured into expressive significance” with the functional collapse of strictly dramatic techniques (119, 122) now seem less persuasive. There is more at stake than aesthetic poise, polished, diverting conversation, and gratifying erotic allusion. The Duchess, deliberately and vulgarly, captures this concern in the assertion that Nanda is “fairly sick— sick as a little cat—with her passion” for Vanderbank (190). This scarcely original insight is endorsed by the “torrent of tears” that follows their torturous farewell, with the animal image of sheer physical pain starkly repeated: “Her buried face could only, after a moment, give way to the flood, and she sobbed in a passion as sharp and brief as the flurry of a wild thing for an instant uncaged” (379). Contrary to the equivocations of Mrs. Brook’s drawing room, Nanda is moved to a rare and unrestrained release of natural feeling. She reacts with the violence of a formerly imprisoned animal, yet her immersion in modern manners simultaneously figures as the confining medium. Against the backdrop of implied psycho-sexual and social experimentation, Nanda explodes the decadently perverse (as Krook astutely remarks), while approaching the intense turbulence of the tragic. Her considered admission to Mitchy that she “positively like[s] to love in vain” (260) confirms her paradoxical internalization of those very treacherous standards of purity and virginity which must invalidate the



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frank lucidity of her perception, rendering her intrinsically unacceptable to Van (see Krook 162). Her avowed pretext of having invited him to tea so as to request his continuing devotion to her mother is transparently untenable. Her genuinely overwhelming, but finely dissembled, love for Vanderbank finds its outlet in a consummate respect for his fragile persona that refuses to force upon him “an awkwardness” like a “disfigurement or a hurt.” Her parting gift, which aims to evaporate the awkwardness of their joint situation, allows him the delusory consolation of having “dealt with a difficult hour in a gallant and delicate way” (353). Yet approaching events from their conclusion tends to obscure the shifting ambiguities and subtextual uncertainties that vibrate throughout the novel. At least twice, Vanderbank has come dangerously to the brink of proposing marriage to Nanda, once in the park at Mertle and again in Mr. Longdon’s garden at Beccles. On the first occasion, the discursive catalyst is finding Nanda “astonishingly” like her mother. Echoing Mrs. Brook with a candor that innocently transforms the older woman’s skillfully distilled charm, Nanda describes her entry into adult experience as her “being now so in everything and squeezing up and down no matter whose staircase. Isn’t it one crowded hour of glorious life?”. The coyly self-effacing narrator of The Awkward Age then offers one of his tantalizingly unspecific, periodic glosses: “It might in fact have appeared to a spectator that some climax had come, on the young man’s part, to some state of irresolution as to the utterance of something. What were the words repeatedly on his lips, yet repeatedly not sounded?” (165). Predictably, it may seem, the moment passes. With unaffected prescience, Nanda has already forestalled the offer which she so eagerly continues to anticipate. “I shall never change—I shall be always just the same,” she comments, “the same old-mannered, modern slangy hack” (164). Later she will tell Mrs. Brook quite directly, “I shall never marry” (241). Yet in a dialogue with Mr. Longdon immediately after Vanderbank’s failure to propose, Nanda insists that she will “never, never, never” marry Mitchy, seemingly keeping her options open against all reasonable expectations (173). The episode at Beccles with its idyllic pastoral setting is sketched as a variation on the nuptial theme; to borrow from the register of William James’s philosophical pragmatism, the same returns as the subtly different. In this instance, Nanda recognizes that Little Aggie is the “real old thing,” the traditionally unsullied and marriageable virgin, but argues that, falling short of this perfection, she would prefer to “brazen it out” as herself. Vanderbank follows her metaphor, yet refuses the implicit classical myth of the steady degeneration of the world and its values by



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exclaiming: “Your brass, my dear young lady, is pure gold!” Despite these favorable omens, however, the exchange almost inevitably circles back to Vanderbank’s male modesty in the face of unsavory disclosures, as well as the confession of Nanda’s contaminating immersion in London life and manners (250-51). In this instant, Van seems “infinitely touched” by the “strange, grave, calm consciousness of their common doom” and the narrator once again interposes: An observer at all initiated would . . . fairly have hung on his lips, and there was in fact on Vanderbank’s part quite the look of the man—though it lasted but just while we seize it—in suspense about himself. The most initiated observer of all would have been Mr Longdon, who would now have been destined, however, to be also the most defeated, and the sign of whose tension would have been a smothered “Ah, if he doesn’t do it now!” Well, Vanderbank didn’t do it “now,” and the long, odd, irrelevant sigh that he gave out might have sufficed as the record of his recovery from a peril lasting just long enough to be measured. (251)

A sense of wasted, even compromised, opportunity is captured by the ponderous past conditionals which characterize this passage. Infinite compassion becomes the infinitesimal duration of that vital suspense which Mrs. Brook has so confidently and expediently discounted. Van withdraws invidiously into a trivial dismissal of Harold’s squalidly obvious borrowing of money. He becomes resolutely inhospitable to the pure gold of Nanda’s painful honesty, to the history of their sustained association, to the ambivalent generosity of Mr. Longdon’s promised endowment. Nanda’s prospects are effectively settled by her stark acknowledgement that she has read the risqué French novel which becomes the focus of attention at Tishy Grendon’s party. Vanderbank can neither attenuate nor condone such a socially damaging announcement, yet he retains some sensitivity to his own weaknesses. Implicitly setting his predilection for uncritical acceptance and soothing admiration against Nanda’s sturdily angular integrity, he tells her at their parting that he is afraid of her conscience: “I haven’t a conscience. I only want my fun” (354). This rouses a ghostly echo of the ubiquitous Mrs. Brook, whose “flower of maternal wisdom” is that “one must just bring [one’s conscience] up to a certain point and then leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you’re nice to the second house-maid.” The discrete narrative voice duly adds an apparently innocuous appraisal of this bon mot: “Mrs Brook was as ‘nice’ to Nanda as she was to Sarah Curd—which involved, as may easily be imagined, the happiest conditions for Sarah” (232-33). Irony destabilizes sophisticated assurance, as the covert nastiness which Mr.



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Longdon suspects is briefly unveiled. Nanda is relegated to the domain of domestic complications, humored but condescendingly allotted her status and kept in her place. It hardly seems accidental that Mrs. Brook’s fusion of moral and household philosophies should give way to a recital of financial troubles, which she aims to solve quite deviously by inducing others to support various family members for the duration of the summer (239-40). Not unlike Van, she deliberately circumscribes her conscience and keeps alert for possible amusement, which may explain a certain resemblance in Nanda’s treatment by her thoroughly modern mother and her reluctant suitor.4 Nanda’s yearning for unstinted love and the consummation of marriage can fruitfully be elucidated through the lens of Derrida’s description of “absolute,” rather than “conditional,” hospitality. Absolute hospitality requires that I open my home and that I give not only to the foreigner (provided with a family name, with the social status of being a foreigner, etc.), but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other, and that I give place to them, that I let them come, that I let them arrive, and take place in the place I offer them, without asking of them either reciprocity (entering into a pact) or even their names. (Of Hospitality 25)

In this fashion, Derrida continues to sketch the contours of an enticingly paradoxical notion: It is as though [absolute] hospitality were the impossible; as though the law of hospitality defined this very impossibility, as if it were only possible to transgress it, as though the law of absolute, unconditional, hyperbolical hospitality, as though the [Kantian] categorical imperative of hospitality command[s] that we transgress all the laws (in the plural) of hospitality . . . Let us say yes to who or what turns up, before any anticipation, before any identification . . . whether or not the new arrival is . . . a human, animal, or divine creature, a living or dead thing, male or female. (Of Hospitality 7577)

This, in effect, is the unheeded appeal that Nanda makes to Van, although it is necessarily nuanced by her identity as human and female (unavoidably bound and constrained by the limiting identifications that have been imposed on her). Against almost all hope and the harsh lessons of her experience, she reaches out towards a near-impossible and unconditional affirmation of what may “turn up.” Lisa Guenther aptly explains the Levinasian resonance informing Derrida’s construct of hospitality when she proposes that the advent of “the Other gives to me the capacity to give to him infinitely, in response to



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his absolute command” that he be welcomed categorically and given place (65). Uprooted by this encounter from selfish possession and a flattering representation of the world as the site of sheer enjoyment, the awakened self then acquires “new powers . . . of welcome, of gift, of full hands, of hospitality” (Geunther 65; Levinas, Totality and Infinity 205). This perspective is amplified by a reading of “discourse” which is sharply differentiated from the “mere talk” of Mrs. Brook’s “temple of analysis.” Levinas argues that “in discourse I expose myself to the questioning of the Other, and this urgency of the response—acuteness of the present— engenders me for responsibility; as responsible I am brought to my final reality. This extreme attention does not actualize what was in potency, for it is not conceivable without the other” (Totality and Infinity 178; see also Guenther 71). So Nanda’s silent urging of Vanderbank to reverse and transmute the familiar polarity of their relations becomes not only the compelling call of the other on the self, but also a mute promise that he will be given the gift of giving. However, Van declines to overstep even the already infringed laws of a conditional hospitality that protects his sleek social appearance and affords him his fun. Beyond this, he resists the self-actualization of a discourse that exceeds clever wordplay, witty diversion, or the elaborate camouflage of unpalatable circumstances by opening itself to the urgent claims of another. In spite of his moments of pregnant hesitation, when a marriage proposal waits to be born, Van will not be called to responsibility. An absent presence in The Awkward Age, then, as much a dimension of its shifting, coruscating subtext as the attendant range of erotic surmises, is Nanda’s yearning for the provisionally denominated lovence that Derrida, tracking Nietzsche’s Human All Too Human and The Gay Science, examines in his Politics of Friendship. 5 This anticipation is precariously predicated on a tenuous “perhaps.” “Perhaps,” writes Derrida, one day, here or there, who knows, something may happen between two people in love, who would love each other lovingly (is this still the right word?) in such a way that friendship, just once, perhaps, for the first time (another perhaps), once and only once, therefore for the first and last time (perhaps, perhaps), will become the correct name, the right and just name for that which would then have taken place, the condition being that it takes place between two, “two people,” as Nietzsche specifies. (66)

The repeated “perhaps” signifies an unprecedented possibility, necessarily derived yet radically distinct from all prior philosophical formulations. Moreover, the moment of decision that precipitates lovence must be lived by a self that has become other to and for itself, aporetically avowing



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knowledge and responsibility, yet making a mad or unconscious leap into the “perhaps” that severs it from all antecedents and all consequences (Politics of Friendship 67-69). Such an enactment of friendship in love, exceeding established denotations of “friendship,” is not so much an impossibility as a transcendence of all defined and substantiated theoretical constructs; it becomes a shimmering or lure on the horizon of possibility, refracted through Derrida’s encounter with Nietzsche. Beyond philosophy —and therefore “perhaps” aphilosophical—it participates in the imaginative vibration of fiction. It optatively permeates The Awkward Age in the guise of a Jamesian operative irony that “implies and projects the possible other case, the case rich and edifying, where the actuality is pretentious and vain.” In framing this notion, James muses that the envisaged case is possibly “a campaign, of a sort, on behalf of the something better (better than the obnoxious, the provoking object) that blessedly, as is assumed, might be” (AN 222).6 These speculations turn into yet another teasingly sketched scenario for the performance of the vestigial dramatic script of the novel in the conditional and subjunctive moods: the fulfillment of Nanda’s loving friendship for Vanderbank that might, and should, have been if any lasting, “real suspense” had pertained. In practice, the published and printed text of The Awkward Age settles back into an often abused conditional hospitality and qualified friendships. The outlook is almost as bleak as Vanderbank’s initial diagnosis suggests. He asserts that he has never really “believed in the existence of friendship in big societies—in great towns and great crowds. It’s a plant that takes time and space and air.” In accordance with this rationale, it can “take place” (following Derrida) in the receptive seclusion of Beccles, but not in the “huge ‘squash’” of London society with its “elbowing, pushing, perspiring, chattering mob.” Mr. Longdon anxiously insists that Vanderbank “ought to” care about this fundamental deficiency in his personal interactions, but the discussion soon drifts away to new topics (39). In the modified context of Mertle, Van assures Nanda that they are “such jolly old friends that we really needn’t so much as speak at all” (159). Later he agrees to her bravely wistful proposition that he is “the best friend” she has (162), but the hollowness of these discriminations and their trite evasion of any taxing responsibility inevitably emerges. Again, the incident with the French novel at Tishy’s party is sufficient provocation to put Van to flight. Friendship with Mr. Longdon, however, acquires quite a different coloration. As Nanda candidly informs Vanderbank, in controversion of his expedient assumptions, “I feel since I’ve known Mr Longdon that I’ve almost the sort of friend who makes nobody else count” (162). Her “almost” functions here with an analogous force to the



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Derridean “perhaps.” Is this the indeterminate substitute for lovence with Vanderbank, a just and loving friendship between two people in the spirit of categorical hospitality? Nonetheless, this relationship too has fallen short of escaping contamination by the pervasive “squash” of London sociability and manners. As Margaret Walters shrewdly comments, the retreat to Mr. Longdon’s putative “Suffolk Arcadia” disturbs the reader, because it is unclear whether he and Nanda are to be regarded as father and daughter, youthfully protective mother and elderly child, or even husband and wife (218). These connotations of sexual ambivalence are intensified by Mr. Longdon’s former attachment both to Vanderbank’s mother and Nanda’s grandmother, Lady Julia, whose resemblance she at once carries and confutes. If Mr. Longdon might have been Nanda’s grandfather, generous dedication may potentially reverse itself into disquieting reverberations of possible incest and/or adultery, intimations which are simultaneously reinforced and undercut by the inevitable sterility of the planned union.7 These problems are complicated by the issue of pride. With bristling masculine dignity, Mr. Longdon implicitly condemns Vanderbank’s choice to avoid marriage, resolutely ignoring the succession of visiting cards left at his London hotel, because “pride’s all right when it helps one to bear things.” By contrast, Nanda speaks on behalf of Van’s reputation, contending that she prefers to “grovel” in order to take most from her bitter disappointment (377). It is her unconditional hospitality, after all, in never uttering a word of recrimination that has allowed him to save face. Yet this apparently transcendent welcoming of what has arrived prompts Mr. Longdon to retort: “I like, you know . . . your saying you’re not proud.” Nanda’s awkward response and partial denial, “I’m glad I’m anything—whatever you may call it and though I can’t call it the same— that’s good for you,” elicits a revelation that converts the agonized endurance of devastating loss into sheer abjection. “Heedless” of her appeal, Mr. Longdon states what she has struggled to preserve in silence as unspeakable: “It would be easier for me . . . if you didn’t, my poor child, so wonderfully love him” (379). In a single excruciating gesture, Nanda is metamorphosed from the gracefully pure Aeolian-harp, pictured by Mitchy as vibrating sensitively in a drawing room window, to her despairingly reductive self-image as “a sort of little drainpipe with everything flowing through” and letting the dirt stick to it (260). 8 The hyperbolical hospitality of the arrival-yet-to-come crumbles irrevocably, unless it is a “dead thing” that has manifested itself. What remains? A friendship of belatedly dubious renunciation, stiffened and ironized by throbbing pride, while redemptive lovence glides



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spectrally between the lines as the forfeit possibility of a hospitable “perhaps” . . .

Notes 1

See Kurnick 110 and 114. This preoccupation with the veiled sexual allusiveness of The Awkward Age offers a more tightly reasoned development of the trend set by Maxwell Geismar in Henry James and the Jacobites and still earlier by Edmund Wilson in “The Ambiguity of Henry James.” For Wilson, the text is populated by a “gibbering disembowelled crew who hover about one another with sordid, shadowy designs” (192). 2 This text of The Awkward Age is taken from the New York Edition of 1908. 3 Levinas’s essay pivots on the fundamental conceptual distinction between the “temptation of temptation” and the readiness of the Children of Israel to affirm, “We will do and we will hear” (Exodus 24:7), in advance of receiving the Ten Commandments. This response Levinas construes neither as servile obedience to divine requirements nor as childish naivety, but as Temimut, “the essence of Jacob”: “an absolute uprightness which is also absolute self-criticism, read in the eyes of the one who is the goal of my uprightness and whose look calls me into question” (“The Temptation of Temptation” 48). In this way, ethics is instituted. 4 This emphasis on conscience and morality points to a corresponding trajectory of criticism represented at an early stage by F. R. Leavis’s comment in The Great Tradition that The Awkward Age is “a tragedy conceived in an imagination that was robustly, delicately and clairvoyantly moral” (170). Equally attuned both to James’s flair for social comedy and his moral awareness is Dorothea Krook’s commentary on the novel in The Ordeal of Consciousness (135-66). 5 In the essay entitled “This Mad ‘Truth’: The Just Name of Friendship,” Derrida examines the complex and aporetic interweaving of two positions adumbrated in Human All Too Human. While the dying sage insists “friends, there are no friends,” his foil, alter ego, and reconstituted self, the living fool, counters with “foes, there are no foes” (Politics of Friendship 50). This kind of dynamic between friendship and enmity might also be applied to the competitive, yet mutually dependent, social inter-relations of James’s novel. 6 With regard to Adrian Poole’s account of recent critical engagements with The Awkward Age, this approach would probably be construed as a “deep” reading, or (one would hope) at least as a “good story”—perhaps even as “a bad story well told” (9-10). 7 This aspect of the novel is thoughtfully considered by Julie Rivkin in relation to its convoluted and often confusing sexual politics (197-98; 173-74). 8 Nanda’s ambivalent duality because she is caught in a predicament similar to the differential oscillation of the Platonic pharmakon between “remedy” and “cure,” thus suggesting the active play of difference as Derridean différance, is discussed elsewhere (see Williams 261-63).



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Works Cited Derrida, Jacques, with Anne Dufourmantelle. Of Hospitality. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2000. Print. Derrida, Jacques. Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins. London and New York: Verso, 1997. Print. Geismar, Maxwell. Henry James and the Jacobites. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963. Print. Guenther, Lisa. The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction. Albany, NY: State U of New York P, 2006. Print. James, Henry. “A London Life.” The Complete Tales of Henry James. Ed. Leon Edel. Vol. 7 (1888-1891). Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1963. 87-212. Print. —. The Art of the Novel. Introd. Richard P. Blackmur. New York and London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1962. Print. —. The Awkward Age. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1966 [1908]. Print. —. “The Chaperon.” The Complete Tales of Henry James. Vol. 8 (18911892). Ed. Leon Edel. Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1963. 71-118. Print. Krook, Dorothea. The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1967. Print. Kurnick, David. “‘Horrible Impossible’: Henry James’s Awkward Stage.” Henry James Review 26.2 (2005): 109-29. Print. Leavis, F. R. The Great Tradition. London: Chatto and Windus, 1962. Print. Levinas, Emmanuel. “The Temptation of Temptation.” Nine Talmudic Readings. Trans. Annette Aronowicz. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1990. 30-50. Print. —. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne UP, 1969. Print. Poole, Adrian. “Nanda’s Smile: Teaching James and the Sense of Humor.” Henry James Review 25.1 (2004): 4-18. Print. Rivkin, Julie. False Positions: The Representational Logics of Henry James’s Fiction. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1995. Print. Walters, Margaret. “Keeping the Place Tidy for the Young Female Mind: The Awkward Age.” The Air of Reality: New Essays on Henry James. Ed. John Goode. London: Methuen, 1972. 190-218. Print. Williams, Merle A. “Henry James and the Redefinition of ‘Awkward’ Concepts through Fiction.” Henry James Review 18.3 (1997): 258-64. Wilson, Edmund. “The Ambiguity of Henry James.” The Question of Henry James. Ed. F. W. Dupee. London: Allan Wingate, 1947. 160-90. Print.





PART IV: JAMESIAN SEXUALITIES



CHAPTER FOURTEEN VERENA TARRANT, BASIL RANSOM, AND COMPULSORY HETEROSEXUALITY IN THE BOSTONIANS PIERRE A. WALKER

James’s novels and stories often spark critical debate, and The Bostonians is no exception. Is this novel pro- or anti-feminist? Is it pro- or antihomosexual? Does it enforce James’s father’s conservative ideas about gender roles or does it respond in a nuanced way to those ideas? Does the narrator sympathize with or satirize Basil’s and/or Olive’s feelings, thoughts, and politics? Which major character are readers supposed to sympathize with, and are we supposed to be glad or sad or mad at the end of the final chapter when Verena departs with Basil? Critics have responded variously to these questions, making The Bostonians an important James text for, variously, biographical criticism, gender studies, feminism, new historicism, criticism of James’s politics, and gay studies.1 One reason these questions are so difficult to answer and a cause of the resulting lack of critical consensus about The Bostonians is the narrator’s use of free indirect discourse to paraphrase different characters’ inner thoughts, which makes it very difficult for readers to know which characters’ thoughts to agree with and therefore which characters the novel is satirizing and which it is not. The indirect discourse tends to be phrased in such a way that it is not possible to know what reaction the narrator means readers to have to characters’ thoughts. As a result, readers have no clear guide that they are expected to respond one way or another. An example of this use of free indirect discourse is the passage describing Mr. and Mrs. Tarrant’s past: As the daughter of Abraham Greenstreet, Mrs. Tarrant had passed her youth in the first Abolitionist circles, and she was aware how much such a prospect was clouded by her union with a young man who had begun life as an itinerant vendor of lead-pencils (he had called at Mr. Greenstreet’s

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door in the exercise of this function), had afterwards been for a while a member of the celebrated Cayuga community, where there were no wives, or no husbands, or something of that sort (Mrs. Tarrant could never remember) . . . (865)

The passage begins as a list of facts in Mrs. Tarrant’s earlier life: she was “the daughter of Abraham Greenstreet”; the young Selah Tarrant was “an itinerant vendor of lead-pencils” who had “called” at the Greenstreet door “in the exercise of this function”; Tarrant had been a member of the Cayuga community. But then the list of facts turns to paraphrasing Mrs. Tarrant’s reaction to what went on at Cayuga: “there were no wives, or no husbands, or something of that sort.” But what does this mean? How can there be wives but no husbands or vice versa? Or were there only husbands or only wives—in which latter case, what did that make Mr. Tarrant? Why can Mrs. Tarrant “never remember”? Is it because she is stupid or ignorant or naive? Or is it because she does not want to remember? Typically of James’s fiction and especially of The Bostonians, the text leaves all of these questions unanswered.2 Another passage that also raises more questions than it answers is the one where Basil Ransom first encounters Selah Tarrant: Ransom simply loathed him, from the moment he opened his mouth; he was intensely familiar—that is, his type was; he was simply the detested carpet-bagger. He was false, cunning, vulgar, ignoble; the cheapest kind of human product . . . He had seen Tarrant, or his equivalent, often before; he had “whipped” him, as he believed, controversially, again and again, at political meetings in blighted Southern towns, during the horrible period of reconstruction. (853)

Some of the language of this passage states facts: “Ransom simply loathed him”; “He had seen Tarrant, or his equivalent before.” But other phrases, “the detested carpet-bagger” and “blighted Southern towns, during the horrible period of reconstruction,” carry value judgments that, while they clearly convey Basil’s judgments, might or might not convey the narrator’s. The issue is to whom to attribute the adjectives “detested,” “blighted,” and “horrible.” To a former Confederate soldier, like Basil, the “carpet-bagger” would likely be “detested” and the “period of reconstruction” “horrible.” But reconstruction was not necessarily “horrible” to a recently liberated southern slave or to northerners who went south to create jobs for former slaves, like James’s younger brothers Wilkie and Robertson James did, or to found schools for former slaves—these were not “detested carpet-baggers” to everyone. Calling a southern town “blighted” also reveals a particular



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attitude—for “blighted” is a more loaded term than a neutral epithet like “war-torn” would be. Even the use of the derogatory term “carpet-bagger” in itself reveals a particular attitude. These modifiers reveal an attitude of disapproval towards reconstruction, and they oblige readers to accept or react against the attitude the words convey. For while this attitude of disapproval is clearly Basil’s, it is not certain from the free indirect discourse whether the narrator shares the disapproval. The uncertainty puts readers in the position of choosing to agree or disagree that the “carpet-bagger” was “detestable” and that reconstruction was “horrible.” If they agree, readers inevitably find themselves slipping into a degree of acceptance of Basil’s world view or into concluding that The Bostonians endorses Basil’s views; if they disagree, they are more likely to perceive that the narrator satirizes Basil’s opinions. At one point in The Bostonians the text presents a moment of narrative clarity entirely unlike in the passages about the Cayuga community and reconstruction. This moment comes during the scene where Basil and Verena visit New York’s Central Park. Unlike in the Cayuga and detested carpet-bagger passages, in this moment in Central Park the narrative suspends its usual ambiguities and opaqueness and provides an unequivocal access to Verena’s reactions. This moment is the central point in the novel; it marks the turning point in Verena’s feelings about Basil, the earliest moment where she finds him attractive. At the same time it is the point when Verena becomes powerfully affected by Basil’s idea that monogamous heterosexuality and domesticity are the normal or natural life choices for a woman. The suspension of free indirect discourse and its attendant ambiguities at this very moment of the novel marks the change in Verena’s feeling toward Basil. It also serves as a marker to emphasize Basil’s bluntly expressed view of heterosexuality and domesticity. Lastly, this central moment in The Bostonians makes it possible to apprehend the text’s critique of the supposed normalcy of what Adrienne Rich almost a century later would famously describe as “compulsory heterosexuality.” To apprehend that The Bostonians critiques a late-nineteenth century version of compulsory heterosexuality is to make possible an interpretation of this novel that is not about whether the younger Henry James was endorsing or not endorsing his father’s sexual politics.3 Quite the contrary, it makes possible an interpretation that shows the novel to be deeply sensitive to how women in general and particularly Verena and Olive have silence imposed upon them. Many of James’s early fictions, as Donatella Izzo has shown, place the young woman in a circle of authority figures, often men, who seek to control and speak for the young woman. For instance, in the early Roman



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story, “Adina,” the title character hardly utters a word, as Sam Scrope and Angelo Beati contend to influence and control her. Also, James’s narrator, as in “Daisy Miller” or The Tragic Muse, never allows us direct access to the thoughts of the title character. Although The Bostonians is an omniscient narrative that does occasionally give us access to Verena’s inner thoughts, Verena is still like Adina or Daisy Miller or Miriam Rooth in being the young woman everyone wants to use, influence, and control, whose speech everyone wants to direct—so much so that she at times hardly seems allowed a will of her own. Ironically, since most of the criticism of The Bostonians focuses on Basil or Olive or both, the critics themselves, through their comparative neglect, reflect this silencing of Verena.4 Basil shares the idea that everyone wants to control Verena, and he tells her so in the scene in Central Park: “You always want to please some one, and now you go lecturing about the country, and trying to provoke demonstrations, in order to please Miss Chancellor, just as you did it before to please your father and mother. It isn’t you, the least in the world, but an inflated little figure (very remarkable in its way too), whom you have invented and set on its feet, pulling strings, behind it, to make it move and speak, while you try to conceal and efface yourself there. Ah, Miss Tarrant, if it’s a question of pleasing, how much you might please some one else by tipping your preposterous puppet over and standing forth in your freedom as well as in your loveliness!” (1114)

Basil is telling Verena that other people take advantage of her desire to please, that for the sake of others she is “pulling [the] strings” of the “puppet” she has made herself into. As a result she is not being herself: “It isn’t you”; you “conceal and efface yourself.” The solution he proposes for her, the solution that would allow her “your freedom,” is to cease to please the others and to focus on pleasing him: “how much you might please some one else.” The freedom Basil proposes to her is not really a complete freedom from having to please others; this irony surely does not escape readers, for he is proposing that she substitute pleasing her parents or Olive or the women’s movement’s supporters with pleasing him and that she become his puppet instead of theirs. He apparently is not proposing that she be herself, except that he no doubt believes that he is, for he believes that a woman is being herself if she devotes herself to staying at home and pleasing her man. As he had said earlier in the conversation: “My plan is to keep you at home and have a better time with you there than ever” (1112). In other words, a woman for Basil is true to herself, is



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doing the natural thing, if she devotes herself to the domestic sphere and to her man, to “the realm,” as he says, “of family life and the domestic affections” (1116). What Basil is advocating to Verena is the gender ideology that Rich would later critique in “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience” as a “lie”: The lie is many-layered. In Western tradition, one layer—the romantic— asserts that women are inevitably, even if rashly and tragically, drawn to men; that even when that attraction is suicidal (e.g., Tristan and Isolde, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening), it is still an organic imperative. In the tradition of the social sciences it asserts that primary love between the sexes is “normal”; that women need men as social and economic protectors, for adult sexuality, and for psychological completion; that the heterosexually constituted family is the basic social unit; that women who do not attach their primary intensity to men must be, in functional terms, condemned to an even more devastating outsiderhood than their outsiderhood as women. (64)

Rich is saying that (to use David Van Leer’s words) “dominant culture makes heterosexuality ‘compulsory’ by falsely claiming that everyone is naturally attracted to people of the opposite sex” and that “society’s role in instituting behavioural norms like heterosexuality” is “obscured” (103). Both Rich and Van Leer are criticizing what Basil believes: that it is “an organic imperative” that women are attracted to men, that this attraction is “normal,” even if the attraction is (as it will prove in Verena’s case) selfdestructive; that women “need men” (and in Verena’s case, him) “as social and economic protectors . . . and for psychological completion”; “that the heterosexually constituted family” (or “family life and the domestic affections” in Basil’s terms [1116]) “is the basic social unit”; and that women who do not live according to this ideology are “condemned” to a certain kind of “outsiderhood,” what Basil calls in reference to Verena’s lecturing publicly for the women’s movement “a poor perversity” (1030). It could be debated that Basil and Rich, speaking as they do almost a century apart, are not addressing the same social conditions. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has shown that Victorian American bourgeois society often condoned life-long, deeply emotional attachments between women even within the context of heterosexual marriage and the cults of domesticity and true womanhood.5 In fact, one of her historical examples of such a relationship includes James’s good friend, Sarah Butler Wister, mother of Owen Wister, the novelist, and lifelong close friend of Jeannie Field Musgrove (Disorderly Conduct 55-59, 67). 6 At the same time,



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though, Smith-Rosenberg concedes that “beginning in the 1880s and 1890s” sexologists were “insisting that conventional sexuality (heterosexual, monogamous, reproductive, quintessentially bourgeois, as Michel Foucault reminds us) constituted the apex of human sexual evolutions” and therefore making “heterosexuality both essential to and symbolic of social order” (Disorderly Conduct 40). In other words, James’s character Basil was not alone in the mid-1880s (when James wrote The Bostonians, even if he set it a few years earlier) in arguing for the supposed “normalcy” of monogamous heterosexuality and domesticity. During the conversation in Central Park, while Basil is expressing views not unlike what Rich calls compulsory heterosexuality, it is by no means clear that readers must agree with him that a woman’s natural place is the domestic sphere and her natural role to please her man any more than they must agree that reconstruction was “horrible.” Basil thinks that Verena is manipulated by everyone else. Basil thinks that she is not free to be herself and that she should confine herself to the domestic sphere—to his domestic sphere. But as with the other ambiguous passages throughout The Bostonians, readers do not have to agree. However, at the end of the Central Park scene, in describing Verena’s response to what Basil says in this conversation, the text of The Bostonians is exceptionally definite, thus providing readers with a solid basis upon which to base their own response to the entire scene. The narrator tells us directly what Verena’s reaction is: that she feels considerable “discomposure” (1115) and that Basil’s charge makes “her heart beat with pain. . . . Verena had been affected by her companion’s speech . . . in a way that pushed her to throw up the discussion and determine that as soon as they should get out of the park she would go off by herself” (1115). The text does not say that Verena looked discomposed to Basil; it tells us that she was discomposed, and one can only conclude from this that Basil had hit a vulnerable spot, one that Verena perhaps didn’t even know she had. The text is telling us clearly that she senses that he might be right, that she is everyone else’s manipulated puppet, that she hasn’t been free to be herself, and that these possible realizations are extremely disconcerting to her. Her discomposure is also a sign that, rightly or wrongly, domesticity and compulsory heterosexuality exert a certain persuasive force over her. By suspending its typical free indirect discourse here the narrative marks Verena’s discomposure as the turning point in her attraction to Basil. She now realizes that she will not be able to “convert” him to the women’s movement (1118). In fact she no longer wants to convert him: “how glad she was (really, positively, now), that Mr. Ransom was on the wrong side. If he had been on the right—!” (1118). “If he had been on the



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right”—? Well, what? Clearly if he could have been sympathetic to the movement, it would have been impossible for her to resist being attracted to him, whereas for the moment at least, she can believe that she isn’t or shouldn’t or couldn’t be attracted to him. Or as she tells him, previously “I wanted to convert you”; now “I want you to remain as you are!” (1118). How much safer! At the same time, the inability to complete the sentence, “If he had been on the right—”, is a sign of the silence that Basil’s plans for Verena will eventually impose on her. Verena experiences at the end of the Central Park scene a panic comparable to the panic that John Marcher experiences in the scene in “The Beast in the Jungle” shortly before May Bartram’s death when he realizes—or the story’s readers realize—that she is in love with him and that he couldn’t—or, perhaps worse, could—respond in kind to May’s overture of affection (“Beast in the Jungle” 526-27). The similarity is that as with John Marcher’s panic, Verena’s is a sign that she has been confronted with a deep truth to the situation about which she not only was not aware but did not and does not—but at the same time does—want to be aware. Marcher has to face (and yet continues to resist facing) several disturbing truths of his situation: that May is attracted to him, that he is supposed to be attracted to her, and that perhaps the reason that he cannot reciprocate her feelings as she would like is because it is not in him to have such feelings for a woman. By the same token but with the sexualities reversed, Verena has to face (and yet continues to resist facing) an apparent truth that is disturbing to her: not only that she is attracted to this pushy man who is attracted to her but more importantly that he expects—and society in general expects—that she should be attracted to him and that she should want to conform to the kind of life he proposes for her. Narrative clarity and the effect of Basil’s attractiveness come together in the scene in Central Park with Basil’s idea that a woman is naturally meant for domesticity and that her purpose in life is to please her man. In other words the moment of narrative clarity about Verena’s reaction marks the significance of the metonymically linked (by virtue of its all being part of Basil’s Central Park speech) awakening of Basil’s attractiveness as a lover to Verena and the appeal of domesticity and monogamous heterosexuality. To put it simply, Basil is saying: “You, Verena, don’t really want to be the spokesperson of a political movement; you wouldn’t really be yourself. To really be yourself, you need to be mine, my homemaker and domestic plaything. You know this is what you really want and that this is what society expects.” And while the text is not saying that it is in fact what she really wants or what any woman should want, it is saying



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that Verena is deeply shaken by the possibility that this could indeed be what she wants or should want. About that, James’s narrator is unusually unambiguous, but that is all the clarity that is needed, for what the text as a result clearly shows is that Basil’s appeal to domesticity and to the idea that a woman should want to be attracted to one man, should want to devote her life to looking after him, his home, and his children, has an evident and deep affect upon Verena. It is all the clarity that is needed because what really wins when Basil gets Verena out of the Boston Music Hall in the last chapter is the kind of compulsory heterosexuality and domesticity that Basil advocates. Through its unambiguous report of her reaction in Central Park, James’s text makes it incontrovertibly clear that Verena is deeply shaken by Basil’s argument that it is normal, that it is inherently natural, for one man and one woman to want to make their lives together in one home where they raise a family. That Verena is so deeply shaken is not to say that The Bostonians endorses compulsory heterosexuality but rather that Verena is at first potentially attracted to the idea and then compelled to conform to it, which is different. Previously, Verena had expressed to Olive an approval of the ideology of free love. “‘I must say,’ said Miss Tarrant, ‘I prefer free unions’” (878). But Olive recognizes that Verena’s talk of “the marriage-tie” (877) and “free unions” is but the consequence of Verena’s innocence and naïveté: “Verena was perfectly uncontaminated, and she would never be touched by evil” (877); she does not know what she is saying and is just aping what she has heard. How different Verena’s views on sexual relations must be after her “discomposure” in Central Park and Basil’s speech about domesticity (1115). In other words, the naïve, innocent Verena of the novel’s beginning is like Freud’s polymorphously perverse child, innocently capable of anything until it learns to conform to social norms, just as the discomposed Verena after the scene in Central Park herself ends up conforming to the social norms that Basil advocates. Therefore what the end of The Bostonians suggests is that one can either conform to social norms, to monogamous heterosexuality, the route that Verena finally takes, or one can be figuratively “trampled to death and torn to pieces” like “the sacrificial figure of Hypatia, whirled through the furious mob of Alexandria” (1217), as Olive is in the novel’s final paragraphs. But if running off with Basil at the end means that Verena submits to compulsory heterosexuality, the tears she sheds in the novel’s final sentence and that “were not to be the last she was destined to shed” (1219) suggest that by conforming she does not reap the reward Basil had implied she would, of being “free” and no longer someone’s puppet.



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Therefore, while the plot structure of The Bostonians endorses compulsory heterosexuality in so far as it says, this is what society expects of people, it also critiques the idea of compulsory heterosexuality by dramatizing for us, through Verena as well as through Olive, the price these women pay whether they conform or not. Furthermore, the way the novel ends, with Verena rushed away before her Music Hall speech can start and Olive running out on to the stage with no clear purpose, shows that part of the price women pay is to be silenced.7 The Central Park scene provides a moment where the narrator’s tone changes, where the appeal to Verena of conforming to a social norm (to become the kind of woman Basil argues women should be and lead the kind of life he thinks they should lead) reveals its persuasive power. The significance of this moment is that Verena does eventually yield to the persuasive power of that pressure to conform, and yet she reaps no reward as a result; at the same time Olive does not yield, nor does she reap any reward. Therefore, there is no advantage to a woman whether she conforms or not. One can reach such a conclusion thanks to the unusually (for The Bostonians) clear tone that James’s narrator offers in the conclusion to the Central Park scene. As a result, my argument is that interpreting The Bostonians as a critique of compulsory heterosexuality is more solidly grounded than interpretations of this novel that, for instance, appeal to other texts—texts that can be just as equivocal and open to interpretation—like what James might have written or said about his father’s philosophy or what Henry James Sr. might have written about gender.8 This conclusion might seem to beg the question: does The Bostonians mean its readers to accept that this is how it should be, that society pressures people to conform and whether they do or not, it costs them, just as it might be asking readers to accept that the period of reconstruction was “horrible”? Or does The Bostonians mean readers to react against the necessity of the pressure to conform and to ask whether there is not or could not be another way? One could answer that just by raising the second alternative—couldn’t there be another way?—one in fact does make possible a reaction against the pressure to conform. But then one has to ask, how far does this text license one to go in questioning whether there could be another way, which is both a way of deferring an ultimate answer and of adding to the silence imposed on Olive and Verena, which in turn is another way of emphasizing the nature of the power that silences them. Part of the fascination of James for critics over the last thirty-five years lies in how hard his fictions are to pin down. In the late 1970s and early 1980s in books like Frank Kermode’s The Genesis of Secrecy and The Art



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of Telling, the unanswerable secrets or mysteries in James’s fictions, like the unknown “figure in the carpet” in Hugh Vereker’s works, or the content of Jeffrey Aspern’s papers, or Marcher’s fate in “The Beast in the Jungle,” were all instances prompting careful readers to attempt to interpret what is ultimately uninterpretable. The Sacred Fount, The Turn of the Screw, “The Figure in the Carpet” have in common that they create gaps that cannot be closed, only gloried in; they solicit mutually contradictory types of attention and close only on a problem of closure. The confounding of simple expectation—the not telling us what it was that Maisie knew—is a way of stimulating the reader to a fuller exercise of his imagination: to make him read in a more exalted sense (not “devour”). Consequently the affair will not be grasped, even in its ambiguity, without many readings, and those readings will find senses which remain inexplicit. (Kermode, Art of Telling 95-96)

Kermode’s view is that gaps, silences, mysteries, and secrets in James’s fiction lead the careful reader to understand all the better that things cannot be completely understood. His view could be taken as representative of an understanding of Jamesian ambiguity that was current at the time (the 1970s and early 1980s) and still has an influence decades later. Since the appearance of Eve Sedgwick’s “The Beast in the Closet,” what couldn’t be explicitly stated in James’s fiction becomes “spaceclearing negatives to void and at the same time to underline the possibility of male same-sex genitality” or the sign of “the love that dare not speak its name” (Sedgwick 202-3). Kermode’s and Sedgwick’s approaches to secrecy in James have in common an attempt to name the unnamable, to assign a signifier to James’s signified, but a signifier that is at least in part ambiguous, as Sedgwick’s phrase, “to void and at the same time to underline,” demonstrates. There is another way of approaching the secret that is not revealed in James (was Daisy a “bad girl” or not?), the ambiguity that resists reduction (did the governess see ghosts?), the mystery that is never unveiled to readers (what was the figure in the carpet of Vereker’s works?), or the dilemma that is not clarified (is The Bostonians a satire of the women’s movement or a criticism of patriarchal society, and what will Olive do once she appears on the stage of the Music Hall?). That different way consists of seeing the secret, the signified which has no obvious signifier, as the transgressive in general, as that which cannot be said precisely because it cannot be said. An example of what I mean occurs in an extraordinary and powerful passage near the end of part two of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The passage describes the



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speech Alexander Dubcek made to the Czech nation after his return from the Soviet Union at the end of the Prague Spring. The Soviets had kidnapped Dubcek, brought him forcibly to the USSR, threatened him with execution, and then returned him and restored him to a position of apparent power. A chastened Dubcek returned to Czechoslovakia as the Soviets’ puppet to tell the Czech people to cool it, to toe the line. He returned, humiliated, to address his humiliated nation. He was so humiliated he could not even speak. Tereza would never forget those awful pauses in the middle of his sentences. Was he that exhausted? Ill? Had they drugged him? Or was it only despair? If nothing was to remain of Dubcek, then at least those awful long pauses when he seemed unable to breathe, when he gasped for air before a whole nation glued to its radios, at least those pauses would remain. Those pauses contained all the horror that had befallen their country. (72)

Dubcek, Kundera’s text makes clear, cannot state what has really happened to him and what is really happening to his country. His speech, in the memory of Kundera’s character Tereza, is reduced not to its words but to Dubcek’s silences. The words of the speech, presumably dictated beforehand by the Soviets, do not convey what Dubcek wants to convey. While his lengthy pauses are the natural result of the trauma of Dubcek’s experience, of his having to abjure everything and conform to the Soviets’ will, these silences do, nevertheless, convey his real message: “those pauses would remain.” What the silences convey is “all the horror that had befallen their country,” and Tereza grasps the meaning behind Dubcek’s silences. Silence, therefore, is the only way Dubcek can express what he really wants to say. It is sometimes the only means of expression the weak have. Thus silence, secrecy, the unspoken, the unnamable, become the vehicle for expressing transgressive ideas. What Kundera’s text shows James’s does too, though for less obvious reasons. Dubcek cannot speak what he wants to speak in Kundera’s novel because his life is at the mercy of one of the most powerful empires in all of human history. The power that obliges James’s texts to resort to secrecy, silence, and mystery is much more subtle than Soviet tanks driving through Prague. But it is a form of power none the less, and the silence and secrecy of James’s texts are a way of talking back to that power. They are not specific words of protest responding to specific abuses of power any more than Dubcek’s silences were, but they are transgressive nevertheless. And the power of these silences lies in their not being specific and therefore in their signaling any and all kinds of transgressiveness.



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Notes 1

The classic work of biographical criticism on The Bostonians is Alfred Habegger’s chapters “The Lessons of the Father” and “The Return of the Father in The Bostonians” in Henry James and the “Woman Business” (27-62, 182-229). A rejoinder to Habegger appears in Andrew Taylor’s chapter on The Bostonians, “Doing the ‘public justice’: New England Reform and The Bostonians,” in Henry James and the Father Question (141-74). For Habegger and Taylor the debate hinges on James’s possible responses to his father’s writing on gender and on the attitude of both father and son to the work of Thomas Carlyle, which is significant because Basil Ransom “was an immense admirer of the late Thomas Carlyle” (James, The Bostonians 975). Judith Fetterley, in introducing (102-12) her feminist reading of The Bostonians (101-53), effectively summarized and (in Leland S. Person’s words) “scored [earlier] ‘phallic critics’ for their misogynistic and homophobic readings of the novel” (Person 110). Claire Kahane combines psychoanalytic and feminist criticism in her reading of The Bostonians. Person’s chapter on The Bostonians in Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity is a nuanced study of gender roles in James’s novel (105-23). Wendy Graham’s chapter on The Bostonians in Henry James’s Thwarted Love uses a new historicist methodology to demonstrate that Olive’s sexuality would have been recognizable to James’s contemporary readers (145-76). Terry Castle, who famously called Olive “English and American literature’s first lesbian tragic heroine” (171), introduces (150-52, 154) her influential early gay studies reading of The Bostonians (150-85) by demonstrating how “duplicitous” (to use Hugh Stevens’s word) previous critics had been in denying that The Bostonians is “a novel about lesbianism” all the while criticizing Olive for in fact being “a pathological, morbid, hysterical lesbian” (Stevens 92). David Van Leer, who echoes Castle in calling Olive “the first fully conceived lesbian protagonist in modern fiction” (93), and Stevens (90-116) also read The Bostonians from a gay studies perspective. 2 During an interview in late 1904, James responded to the observation that “His stories leave the reader with a question of ‘moral purpose’ ‘tendency’ at the end”: “What if it leave you with that question at the end?” James is reported as responding, “is not that the trick that life plays? Life itself leaves you with a question—it asks you questions.” The interviewer would conclude that just “as he [James] expresses it of life, [his] story leaves you with a question—not what happens to the story, to the characters, but a question about what the situation, put with rare truth as it is, means in life” (Brooks 37). 3 See Habegger and Taylor. 4 The feminist-influenced or gay studies-influenced criticism on The Bostonians focuses primarily on Olive (see Castle, Graham, Stevens, Van Leer), while the biographic work of Habegger and Taylor focuses on the similarities and/or differences between Basil’s opinions and those of both Henry Jameses. Person focuses largely on Basil. Fetterley examines the rivalry between Basil and Olive but includes a nuanced section on Verena (141-43). 5 See Smith-Rosenberg’s chapter, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” collected in 1985 in



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Disorderly Conduct (53-76) but originally published in 1975 as the lead article of the inaugural issue of Signs. 6 When Smith-Rosenberg collected “The Female World of Love and Ritual” in Disorderly Conduct, Wister’s last name ended up consistently misspelled, except in a caption to the fourth page of illustrations following page 150 (Disorderly Conduct 55, 305n7, 306nn8-11). But the name is correctly spelled in the original article publication (“Female World” 4, 4-5nn6, 8-10). And since Disorderly Conduct refers to the appropriate family ties (daughter of Fanny Kemble and Pierce Butler, mother of Owen Wister), the appropriate Butler and Wister mailing addresses (Butler Place, South Carolina and Germantown, Pennsylvania), and the appropriate archival source for the Butler-Wister papers (the Historical Society of Pennsylvania) (308nn7-10), there is no doubt that Smith-Rosenberg means the same Sarah Butler Wister whom James knew. 7 In leaving Olive in suspension, James’s ending is very different from the ending James Ivory and Ismail Merchant gave to their film adaptation, where Olive appears on the stage and begins to extemporize a speech. 8 See the debate between Habegger and Taylor referred to in note 1.

Works Cited The Bostonians. Dir. James Ivory. Prod. Ismail Merchant. Perf. Christopher Reeve and Vanessa Redgrave. 1984. Criterion Collection, 2003. DVD. Brooks, Florence. “Henry James in the Serene Sixties.” Henry James on Culture: Collected Essays on Politics and the American Scene. Ed. Pierre A. Walker. Lincoln: U Nebraska P, 1999. 35-41. Print. Castle, Terry. The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. Print. Fetterley, Judith. The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978. Print. Graham, Wendy. Henry James’s Thwarted Love. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. Print. Habegger, Alfred. Henry James and the “Woman Business.” Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Print. Izzo, Donatella. Portraying the Lady: Technologies of Gender in the Short Stories of Henry James. Lincoln: U Nebraska P, 2001. Print. James, Henry. “Adina.” Complete Stories 1864-1874. Ed. Jean Strouse. New York: Library of America, 1999. 904-45. Print. —. “The Beast in the Jungle.” Complete Stories 1898-1910. Ed. Denis Donoghue. New York: Library of America, 1996. 496-541. Print. —. The Bostonians. Novels 1881-1886: Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians. Ed. William T. Stafford. New York: Library of America, 1985. 801-1219. Print.



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—. “Daisy Miller: A Study.” Complete Stories 1874-1884. Ed. William L. Vance. New York: Library of America, 1999. 238-95. Print. —. The Tragic Muse. Novels 1886-1890: The Princess Casamassima, The Reverberator, The Tragic Muse. Ed. Daniel Mark Fogel. New York: Library of America, 1989. 701-1255. Print. Kahane, Claire. “Hysteria, Feminism, and the Case of The Bostonians.” Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Ed. Richard Feldstein and Judith Roof. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989. 280-97. Print. Kermode, Frank. The Art of Telling: Essays on Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983. Print. —. The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1979. Print. Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Trans. Michael Henry Heim. 1984. New York: Harper-Perennial, 1991. Print. Person, Leland S. Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity. Philadelphia: U Pennsylvania P, 2003. Print. Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience.” Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985. New York: Norton, 1986. 23-75. Print. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. 2nd ed. Berkeley: U California P, 2008. Print. Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America. New York: Knopf, 1985. Print. —. “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1975 (1): 1-29. JSTOR. Web. 16 January 2012. Stevens, Hugh. Henry James and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. Print. Taylor, Andrew. Henry James and the Father Question. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Print. Van Leer, David. “A World of Female Friendship: The Bostonians.” Henry James and Homo-Erotic Desire. Ed. John R. Bradley. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999. 93-109. Print.





 

CHAPTER FIFTEEN WHAT NANDA KNEW: A TRUTH NOT UNIVERSALLY ACKNOWLEDGED IN THE AWKWARD AGE ALAN M. NADEL

In James’s novels, it is a truth universally debated, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of . . . something to do with marriage (his own or someone else’s, reproductive or non-reproductive, sexually active or chaste). Marking Catherine Sloper as her exemplary case, Mary Anne O’Farrell has detailed some of the associations between James and Austen. And certainly we can delineate an array of parallels connecting The Awkward Age with Pride and Prejudice. Both works, for example, focus upon young women whose marriage prospects are delimited by the fact that their families lack the fortune to secure for them, through marriage, the style of life to which they have been accustomed. In the Brookenham family, as in the Bennet family, the patriarch has distanced himself from this concern, while the mother obsesses over it from a perspective characterized less by good judgment or sound ethics than dubious self-interest. All the principal men in both novels, moreover, are far better situated than the eligible women. (Even Mr. Collins, whose present income is modest, as heir to the Bennet estate, is destined to acquire the financial security that the Bennets are destined to lose.) This disparity in both novels structures virtually all of its intercourse. In Elizabeth Bennet’s rejection of Darcy’s proposal or her rejection of Collins’s, which parodies—or is parodied by—Darcy’s first proposal, the crucial issue is whether her pride exceeds the limitations of her circumstances, and conversely whether Collins’s and Darcy’s pride in their more fortunate circumstances prejudices their sense of prerogatives. Similarly, Nanda and Aggie, most notably, as well as many of the married women in The Awkward Age, are investigating and repositioning their dependencies in regard to more independent men.1

 

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Both novels, moreover, are constructed as a series of negotiations— often competing negotiations—over the fate of young women and their families. In many ways, the extraordinary string of conversations that organizes the narrative of The Awkward Age mirrors the dialogues in Pride and Prejudice, in part reflective of the influence on Austen of epistolary fiction, commensurate with the influence of stage drama on some of James’s novels, most notably, What Maisie Knew, The Other House, and The Awkward Age. The premise for these negotiations, however, remains persistently heteronormative in Austen and ostensibly so in James, one important difference between the two novels, I shall argue, being the degree to which each novel embraces the possibility that society requires lesbians to be willing parties to these negotiations. In this regard, I believe that James resolves The Awkward Age by giving away the secret to which Pride and Prejudice remains willfully oblivious.

Giving Each Other Away Giving secrets away, of course, is common practice in the world of The Awkward Age. The novel opens, after all, with a negotiation between Longdon and Vanderbank—the first of many—over the disposition of Nanda and of her mother, Mrs. Brook, as she is generally called, linking her identity to a castrated version of her husband Edward’s surname, Brookenham. That conversation establishes not only the central object of negotiation in the novel but also the terms of negotiation. When Vanderbank indirectly lets slip that Mrs. Brook may be older than she acknowledges, he notes to Longdon, “Yes, I rather gave her away, and you’re struck by it” (28), by a “trick,” as Vanderbank calls it, “so vulgar and odious” (28). “It strikes you,” Vanderbank goes on, also as the kind of thing we must constantly be doing; it strikes you that, right and left, we probably keep giving each other away. Well, I dare say we do. . . . Practically we all know it and allow for it, and it’s as broad as it’s long. What’s London life after all? It’s tit for tat. (28)

Giving each other away literally becomes the action of the novel. Nanda gives Aggie to Mitchy and later takes Mitchy back; Longdon takes Nanda from the Brookenhams, and then they take her back, and finally Longdon takes her back from them. Nanda takes Vanderbank from Mrs. Brook and then gives him back to her (or at least tries to). And so it goes, too, for an array of minor characters. Lord Petherton and Harold, moreover, are as much tokens of exchange as they are agents of trade. As Nanda explains to Londgon, Mitchy doesn’t care



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for his money. For anything anyone may think. For Lord Petherton, for instance, really at all. Lord Petherton thinks he has helped him—thinks, that is, that Mitchy thinks he has. But Mitchy’s more amused at him than at anybody else. He takes everyone in. (138)

The phrase “giving each other away,” like its kindred term, “taking everyone in,” describes the signifying system at work in the novel, the process by which people are revealed (and thereby commodified).2 Since Vanderbank’s definition of London life is purely economic—tit for tat—to operate in London (as Vanderbank sees it), one must know the value of every “tit” and the worth of each “tat” for which it is traded. The literal activity, moreover, depends upon the figurative: in order to be given away, that is, traded, one first has to be given away, that is, revealed, at least to the extent that assessment can become possible. When Nanda gives Aggie to Mitchy, for example, consider how much the discussion centers on Aggie’s worth, just as earlier, Mitchy’s pursuit of Nanda had been described in carefully evaluated distinctions: were Nanda either better looking or wealthier, Mitchy’s interest would be untenable: “‘If I had any money,” Nanda went on, ‘or if I were really good-looking . . . he wouldn’t come near me. And I think that ought to settle it’” (139). Therefore, as Julie Rivkin explains, “When Mitchy exposes a system of representation that depends on a certain use of women, he also and necessarily draws attention to an economic system. The position the virgin occupies in this system of representation is in fact analogous to the one she occupies in a capitalist economy” (164-5). Thus if The Awkward Age is about people giving each other away—as the expression links exposure or exchange to the ritual of marriage— Vanderbank occupies the perfect perspective from which to represent London life as pure trade, because he identifies himself as having a “fulcrum for salvation which consists [in] the absence of a rag of illusion” (36), and at the end of the novel he explains to Nanda, “I haven’t a conscience. I only want my fun” (288). Despite the fact that Nanda protests that she too wants her fun, the exchange is glaringly unequal, not because, as I will argue, it has become clear that Nanda’s fun does not depend on Vanderbank’s but, rather, because their fun is mutually exclusive. Nanda’s ostensive tactlessness had exposed this fact when, at a crucial moment, she had “innocently” cast her innocence in doubt by writing Vanderbank’s name on a salacious French novel. This occurs in “Book VIII,” titled “Tishy Grendon,” despite the fact that Tishy, herself, is somewhat marginal to the climactic events that transpire at a banquet she throws, which Mrs. Brook and her crowd (or circle), including Nanda, Longdon, and Vanderbank attend.



 

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Like much of the evidence that James presents, the title of Book VIII points to a detail so evident that it is overlooked, not only by the characters in the novel but, I believe, by many of the novel’s readers and critics. As Mark Goble, reflecting conventional wisdom, has written, By writing Vanderbank’s name on the French novel she can establish that it was never meant for a young girl; no respectable gentlemen like Vanderbank, even if declined enough that he must earn his living as a petty bureaucrat for the General Audit, would put this kind of book into adolescent hands. Thus according to Nanda’s demandingly circuitous logic, by inscribing the book as Vanderbank’s, she is not acting for herself at all. (208)

In Goble’s reading, Nanda’s “act of simple ‘bookkeeping’ that, by her reckoning at least, she claims innocent enough” (208), is the faux pas that renders her innocence (incorrectly) dubious, and thus costs her the opportunity to acquire the situation she desires. I think the moment is better read, however, as Nanda’s strategy to evade, without giving herself away, a situation she desires to avoid. To do so, she must appear to give herself away, as the power relations in the novel provide no other tenable option.

Without Thinking Highly either of Men or of Matrimony As in Pride and Prejudice, the prolific negotiations hone for the reader the nuances—ethical, tactical, communicative—of intercourse between persons of unequal power. If, however, Pride and Prejudice reflects the strategies of and constraints upon financially disempowered women, The Awkward Age transforms Austen’s novel by positing the Bennet girls in a world that adds sexuality and sexual orientation to the variables of the social economy that Austen balances. These circumstances apply, James makes clear, as well to parent as to child. Like Mrs. Brook, Mrs. Bennet, Austen explicitly tells us, is a very attractive woman, and like Mrs. Brook she is at an awkward age, such that the age of her children precludes a self-presentation that might suggest her availability to pursuing her own needs and desires, for it is clear that her husband has, like Edward Brookenham, established a peaceable distance from his wife; he has exchanged (tit for tat, so to speak) an object of desire for a source of amusement. In The Awkward Age, however, as Paula Marantz Cohen points out, Mrs. Brook’s “desire to marry off her daughter is pursued, but so are other schemes and interests: Nanda’s future is simply part of the extension and elaboration of a more complex design



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involving all the relations within which Mrs. Brook is implicated” (165). In other words, because of her mother’s role as a sexual subject, and because of the desires and goals that her mother derives from that role, Nanda’s task of navigating the marriage plot is even more complicated than Elizabeth Bennet’s. In The Awkward Age, I am arguing, James presents the problems of Pride and Prejudice through the lens of a world where, because people are always giving each other away, and because being given away at the altar multiplies rather than forecloses options, the variables involved have multiplied to an awkwardly large magnitude. To pursue this point, I want to compare Nanda not to Elizabeth Bennet but to Elizabeth’s friend, Charlotte Lucas. Represented in many ways as Elizabeth’s intellectual peer, Charlotte disappoints Elizabeth by pursuing and marrying Mr. Collins after Elizabeth has rejected him, for Charlotte, “without thinking highly either of men or of matrimony [considered marriage] the only honorable provision for well-educated women of small fortune . . . their pleasantest preservative from want” (Austen 86). Although the novel valorizes Elizabeth’s disappointment with Charlotte, on purely pragmatic grounds Charlotte is correct, even if she falls short on romantic or ethical grounds, and Mrs. Bennet’s chagrin with Elizabeth for turning Mr. Collins down is far more grounded in economic reality than is Elizabeth’s integrity or her father’s amusement. In this regard, of the women in The Awkward Age, Aggie would clearly provide the appropriate pragmatic model for Elizabeth, who should have married not for love but for the freedom to pursue pleasure. Charlotte Lucas has done so, although her pleasure appears to accrue from domestic security and independence rather than (heterosexual) dalliance. What saves Elizabeth from eventual ruin is not good judgment but Darcy. And even then, Darcy only provides a heteronormative solution. While it is pointless, based on one short passage, to speculate about Charlotte’s sexual orientation, Charlotte nevertheless accurately articulates the situation of gay women in her society, that is, women for whom even their own, charming, amazingly rich Mr. Darcy would not solve all their problems. Consider in this light the difference between Aggie and Nanda, young women whose circumstances at the outset of the novel are generally similar. Aggie’s upbringing, however, as the Duchess makes clear, differs from Nanda’s, such that Aggie comprises the quintessence of commodified sexuality upon which is premised the system of exchange in the crowd that populates The Awkward Age’s social circle. 3 As Rivkin notes, in “a particularly telling passage, Mr. Longdon marvels at the efforts that have gone into the production of little Aggie” (165). The passage Rivkin quotes concludes: “Little Aggie differed from any young person he had ever met



 

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in that she had been deliberately prepared for consumption and in that furthermore the gentleness of her spirit had immensely helped the preparation” (145).

Prepared for Consumption The phrase “deliberately prepared for consumption” suggests at least two possibilities, one pertaining to Aggie’s instruction and the other— emphasized by the sentence’s concluding clause—to the attitude she, herself, formulated. One type of preparation makes her a consumable, and the other makes her a consumer. Because Aggie seamlessly incorporates these two forms of preparation, her virginity feeds the sexual needs of her circle’s social economy, and the event of its being purchased enables her to feed her own needs. With apparent alacrity, Aggie, epitomizing her circle’s values, has prepared herself for what she was being prepared for. As both object and agent, she preserves her circle’s system of exchange. In this way, as Rivkin makes clear, she is the antithesis of Nanda, whose actions disrupt the social economies by undermining the exchange value of virginity and the trade in women that it perpetuates. Rivkin’s astute and detailed analysis, however, like Susan Mizruchi’s anthropologically based examination of the monitoring and controlling of female sexuality in the novel, requires a tacit acceptance of heterosexual norms. Unlike Aggie, Nanda was not prepared for consumption, that is, not appropriately instructed by her mother. Therefore, Nanda’s having read the French novel might suggest that, as an autodidact, she had prepared herself, and had done so improperly. Unlike Aggie, she may have started to become an agent of consumption before she has properly ceased to be its object, and that makes her damaged goods. Her mother’s deft staging, conventional readings assert, exposes her by making her admit this—that she has read the novel—publicly and unambiguously, in a short declarative sentence. But that exposure, I think, is better read as an effect orchestrated by Nanda herself, one that hides the truth Nanda is not prepared to reveal: no preparation will make her marriageable because her form of “virginity”— if we call it that—cannot be commodified within the exchange system definitive of her mother’s circle. She has said this explicitly in Book V, explaining to Longdon not only her own situation but also the terms of marriage in her social milieu, at the conclusion of which Longdon insists: “I wish immensely you’d get married!” (142). “Impossible,” she responds, followed by the explanation: “I shall be one of the people who don’t. I shall be at the end . . . one of those who haven’t” (142). Because at that



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time her “only preservative from want” depended on a social economy for which she was unprepared (not socially unprepared, I am arguing, but constitutionally), she does not explain to Longdon the basis for her emphatic prediction. Conceivably, she could have explained, as I think she does at the end of the novel, that she is naturally disinclined to pursue the pretext of happiness through heterosexual coupling. This possibility, however, has not appeared on the broad horizon of contemporary criticism, despite the general consensus that, as David Kurnick puts it, The Awkward Age is “distinctive . . . for its attack on the power of the marriage plot to assign significance to certain parts of a life story, and for its mapping of a less punishing scene of sexual publicity than those current in fin-de-siècle culture” (109). Although the novel, as Kurnick points out, “makes room for homosexuality, fetishism, masochism, pedophilia, nymphomania, gender inversion, exhibitionism, scopophilia, and prostitution, and thus constitutes a veritable roll call of late-century deviance” (115), lesbianism is the one variant that, according to Kurnick’s catalogue, seems to have escaped James’s notice, or simply to have escaped Kurnick’s.4 If so, Kurnick is not alone. J. Hillis Miller, for example, comfortably speculates about the possible gayness of several of the novel’s male characters, including Vanderbank: “Vanderbank’s homosexuality,” Miller posits, “if he is gay, makes him unmarriageable . . .” (139; italics in the original). Putting aside Miller’s implicit linking of sexual orientation and marriageability—contradicted even by Miller’s own discussion of Mitchy—the transparency with which Miller excludes Nanda from such speculation is hard to ignore: She “can only love someone like Vanderbank . . .” (136; emphasis added). Thus Miller concludes, Nothing is left at the end but for 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 . . . (137)

Like Miller, most of the critics who admit queer possibilities tend to exempt Nanda. Michael Trask’s reading, organized around elaborate anal economies in the novel, is an exception, to the extent that he sees the novel’s vast homoerotic anality as including the female characters, such as Mrs. Brook, “an omnipresence repeatedly characterized by her ‘taking everything in’” (118); Aggie, who hides the French novel by sitting on it; and Nanda: “[James] manifests his impulse toward (homo)sexual knowledge not only through a queer writing practice but also a gender crossing already visible in the figure of Nanda” (128). Although Trask’s



 

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astute reading of The Awkward Age as deploying James’s homosexual desire is very convincing, his argument regards the principal women as agents of a male homosexual dynamic. In lesbian symbology, however, anality and anal penetration are neither crucial nor definitive. Nanda may manifest aspects of male homosexuality reflective of a Jamesian unconscious, or of a deep encoding, but at the diegetic level, the possibility of Nanda’s being a homosexual woman remains as obscure for Trask as it does for the array of critics who fail to entertain any queer possibilities in the work.5 David McWhirter comes closest, perhaps, to seeing Nanda as being consciously motivated by her sexual orientation when he says that what is awkward about The Awkward Age is its “queerness” (219) and explains that “James in all his awkwardness is . . . trying an experiment for which Nanda’s queerness provides the enabling site” (219). McWhirter links that experiment to James’s “response to something like an awkward age in the history of the novel itself” (220), an age when conventions “work to exclude as ‘unnatural’ and hence unutterable alternative forms of knowledge, experience, and desire” (220). McWhirter never articulates, however, the specifics of Nanda’s queerness, conflating that figurative category with the novel’s experimental form.

A Closet Drama This aligns him with Kurnick, who bases his argument on the idea that “the novel imagines and protects a narrative space of ‘queer condonations,’ a world of erotic permission founded on a cultivated disinterest in questions of psychological depth and sexual truth” (109). For Kurnick, however, it does so through its experimental form. By comparing the reader’s experience of The Awkward Age to that of reading a play, and further, by connecting that formal quality to the work’s engagement with sexual alternatives, Kurnick is, in effect, describing The Awkward Age as a closet drama, which it is, in more ways than one. There is a generic dislocation: drama to be read rather than enacted, a novel to be read as a (closet) drama, rather than anchored to a narrative focalized by an implied author. For Kurnick, the deviant form both embodies and contains the sexual deviance prolific in the social lives of the characters, at the same time that it thematizes the closeting of prolific deviation. It is as if readers, perhaps coaxed by the novel’s dramatic form to do so, have become members of Mrs. Brook’s circle, who opt to be diverted from what should be evident: “before interesting objects, the unanimous occupants, almost more concerned for each other’s vibrations than for



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anything else, were apt rather more to exchange sharp and silent searchings than to fix their eyes on the object itself” (75-6). The noted lack of physical description in the novel reminds us how little before the eyes of the principals and of the reader is visible. Thus, when something in the novel is made graphic, such as Vanderbank’s name written on the French novel in Nanda’s hand, we must be told repeatedly, as though it might otherwise go unseen in the same way that Tishy falls outside the circle’s apprehension. While she is the subject of much (pejorative) discussion, especially in regard to how her relationship with Nanda reflects poorly on Nanda, when she appears as host of the banquet in her own home, she remains virtually unseen. Despite Nanda’s coaxing, for instance, Vanderbank cannot even determine the color of Tishy’s gown, demonstrating a blindness that typifies the members of Mrs. Brook’s circle, all of whom mark Tishy with indeterminacy: Her companions could only emphasize by the direction of their eyes the nature of the responsibility with which a spectator would have seen them saddled—a choice, as to consciousness, between the effect of her being and the effect of her not being dressed. (227)

The nature of a spectator’s responsibility collapses here into a social dilemma about how to classify Tishy, given that she presents two unacceptable images, that of being inappropriately dressed or of, inappropriately, being undressed. Revealing the circle’s inability to read Tishy when she is actually before their eyes, this description provides an important prelude to the moment at Tishy’s party when Nanda appears to be figuratively undressed. Here, in order to deal with Tishy and their own discomfort, the circle reduces Tishy to a pair of alternative effects, making Tishy, in effect, indecipherable. While her spectators can perceive a sexualized body revealed by an unsubtle display, they cannot orient that body or its owner. While they can recognize that marriage has made Tishy miserable, they cannot see exactly why. While they can disparage Nanda’s intimate relationship with Tishy, they cannot interpret it.

Nanda’s Hand Especially since, when Nanda’s indiscretion becomes visible, Nanda will use Tishy as her excuse (she read the scandalous French novel “For Tishy” [231]), the response to Tishy’s attire provides a model for the moment Nanda will tip her hand, the hand, as Vanderbank points out, he knows “so well” (230), despite what he tells Nanda is “the barrenness of our



 

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intercourse” (230). The conventional reading of this moment is that Nanda has created an effect, in the same way that Tishy’s clothing had, in this case, of her being less innocent than she should be. As a result, Nanda loses the chance of marrying the person she truly loves. A careful reading, however, suggests instead, I believe, that Nanda has played her hand so as to tip Vanderbank’s. As Nanda makes clear, the French novel is not in Tishy’s house so that Tishy may read it. And if Nanda did not bring the book to the house or display it at the party for that reason, even more certainly, she did not write Vanderbank’s name on it for any reason relating to Tishy. In the absence of alternative explanations, Nanda’s purpose, like Vanderbank’s name on the cover, seems, as James puts it, “written rather large” (223). Nanda’s graphic display will force Vanderbank to acknowledge sharing a salacious discourse with Nanda’s mother, a discourse that Nanda deemed unsuitable for Tishy. The fact of that relationship and its scandalous content, moreover, will circulate throughout the party, and Aggie, drawn to the book (that Nanda casually—but not accidentally—displayed) because Vanderbank’s name was on it, wrestles with Lord Petherton over its possession. That Aggie hides the book by sitting on it and that Petherton nevertheless secures it form topics of discussion in the next room, among the whole of Mrs. Brook’s circle, including Vanderbank, although neither he nor Mrs. Brook know at the time that the book is the one Vanderbank had loaned to Mrs. Brook. Thus, in using their discussion of the book to characterize Aggie’s promiscuity, Vanderbank and Mrs. Brook are unknowingly revealing their own. When the book comes to light, they are revealed and, it appears, so is Nanda when she acknowledges that she has read it. Her salacious knowledge is derivative; it is knowledge of her mother’s knowledge, knowledge of what her mother and Vanderbank have known together. As Vanderbank must admit: “The responsibility’s wholly mine for setting the beastly thing in motion” (251). If Vanderbank put it in motion, Nanda has circulated the knowledge of his having done so, and thereby tricked her mother and Vanderbank into incriminating themselves. Thus, she has bested Vanderbank at his own game, the game of tricking people into giving themselves away, about which he had bragged. Nanda, after all, has orchestrated the entire scene: the book she took from her mother (that her mother had received from Vanderbank), the name she wrote on it, the hand that she wrote it in. A cohost of Tishy’s banquet, she put the book out to be discovered, just as she put Vanderbank’s name on its blue cover, just as she wrote it large enough to attract attention.



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In this way, Nanda has forced Vanderbank to forego his anonymity in the process of asserting his desire for it. There can be, moreover, nothing innocent about Vanderbank’s indiscretion. He did not want to be connected to the book or to his having given it to Mrs. Brook, but Nanda’s staging has allowed him no alternative to giving the effect of having been indiscreet and of wanting to hide his indiscretion. He has been pinned down, outed, so-to-speak, in a way that Tishy, who produced two alternative effects, was not. In this regard, Nanda’s situation mirrors Tishy’s. Simultaneously, Nanda appears too innocent—naively writing Vanderbank’s name on a book whose ownership should have remained a private matter—and not innocent enough to have ignored the book altogether. The circle, should it so choose, can see Nanda as the victim of an innocent faux pas and/or as someone less innocent than she should appear. They could choose, figuratively, as they did literally about Tishy, “between the effect of her being and the effect of her not being dressed.” Cleverly, she has also maneuvered Vanderbank into having to choose between these two effects, and in confronting him with that option she has provided grounds for his rejecting her (along with the bounty Longdon has placed on her head). The text gives us evidence, furthermore, that Vanderbank may be concerned not that Nanda revealed a lack of innocence but an excess of cleverness. He says so immediately after she evades his question about the book, and immediately before she tells him she had read it. In this space, Vanderbank must know he has been tricked, exposed and outsmarted, even if he does not know that he will experience the full repercussions of being given away later in the evening, after Aggie has had her fling with his book. In this context, it is hard not to read the first interchange between Nanda and Vanderbank about the book as revealing the rejection for which Nanda will later provide Vanderbank an adequate pretext. “The beauty of you,” Vanderbank says, is that you’re too good: which, for me, is but another way of saying you’re too clever. You make no demands. You let things go. You don’t allow in particular for human weakness that enjoys an occasional glimpse of the weakness of others.” She had deeply attended to him. “You mean perhaps one doesn’t show enough of what one wants?” “I think that must be it. You’re so fiendishly proud.” She appeared again to wonder. “Not so much so, at any rate, only to want from you—“ “Well, what?” “Why what’s pleasant for yourself,” she simply said.



 

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“Oh dear, that’s poor bliss!” he declared. “How does it come then,” he next said, “that, with the bareness of our intercourse, I know so well your hand?” (230)

When Vanderbank acknowledges that Nanda is too clever, he is recognizing Nanda’s agency (echoing, to some degree, the moment in Pride and Prejudice when Elizabeth Bennet turns her disempowerment into power by rejecting Darcy). Nanda, appearing to wonder, has made clear to Vanderbank that their intercourse will bear no fruit; in acknowledging that fact, Vanderbank is also recognizing Nanda’s handicraft in undoing their future. Was this undoing the product of error or scheme? Sheila Teahan has called it her “definitive and fatal exposure” (156). But might it be, instead, her disguise, a false definition of what is actually “scandalous” about Nanda: instead of being precociously sexual, perhaps she is immune to the kind of sexual behavior that renders the French book scandalous?

“As I Am” In this light, I want to suggest that Nanda’s conversation with Longdon, which concludes the novel, can be read as her coming out, her giving herself away to Longdon so that she may give herself away to him, and thus that, in turn, her parents may abandon the expectation of giving her away (at the altar). It is necessary for Nanda to be explicit—or at least as explicit as anyone can be in James—because, as Longdon states as the precondition for the discussion: “I don’t see anything for myself. . . . Anything I may yet see which I don’t already see will be only, I warn you, so far as you shall make it very clear” (304). What Nanda makes very clear is that Longdon may take her away “if you’ll take me as I am” (307). Lest he interpret this as meaning that, as Longdon says, she so wonderfully loves Vanderbank, Nanda exclaims, “‘Ah! But I don’t. Please believe me when I assure you that I don’t’. . . . It burst from her, flaring up in a queer quaver, that ended in something queerer still—her abrupt collapse, on the spot, into the nearest chair, where she choked with a torrent of tears” (309). While it is possible to believe, as Teahan does, that Nanda’s collapse disclaims her renunciation of Vanderbank, I think that a stronger reading sees the tears as an expression of agony over the pride that prevents her from articulating the reason she cannot love Vanderbank, an agony exacerbated by the fact that Longdon has explained she must be very clear. Nanda’s pride is much in competition with Longdon’s, since Longdon had offered to make her—



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and thus her husband—very wealthy should she marry. Having informed Vanderbank exclusively of this prize, Longdon feels insulted by Vanderbank’s rejection of Nanda, which is synonymous with Vanderbank’s rejection of Longdon’s wealth. But Nanda overcomes her pride once more: “It is I—it’s I, therefore,” she said as if she must then so look at it with him, “it’s I who am the horrible impossible and who have covered everything else with my own impossibility. For some different person you could have done what you speak of, and for some different person you can do it still.” He stared at her with his barren sorrow. “A person different from him?” “A person different from me.” (309)

Nanda’s problem is that she is not a different person, and Longdon’s agreement to take her as she is, as she explains to him, is “you know, for a girl—extraordinary” (310), and she further clarifies that “extraordinary” is something “we must naturally be” (310). Vanderbank, in other words, ought to have realized, as Longdon finally has, that everything’s different from what it used to be. About Vanderbank, Nanda tells Longdon, “Oh, he’s more old-fashioned than you.” “Much more,” said Mr. Longdon with a queer face. (311)

The queer face that signifies Longdon’s acceptance of Nanda as she is, along with Nanda’s doubly queer behavior in confessing that she, as she is, constitutes the impossibility of her loving Vanderbank or of Longdon’s arranging a marriage for her with anyone else: these details come as close as James will get to being explicit about our seeing that Nanda’s extraordinary situation requires us to understand why any marriage is impossible for her. Revising our assumptions about Nanda’s sexual orientation, as I think James indicates we should, impels us to view some of her “problems” or “mistakes” as strategies or ruses. Thus if, like Elizabeth Bennet, she faces the problem of maintaining integrity, despite her gender and her economic fragility, her solution merges Elizabeth’s ethics with the pragmatism of Charlotte Lucas, for, like Charlotte, Nanda must strategize so as to preserve herself from want while not giving herself away. Like Charlotte and all the Bennet girls, Nanda is in no position to reject suitors, especially wealthy, socially acceptable ones. Further, in her social economy, her ethics require that if she disappoints, she must compensate. Thus her arrangement of Mitchy’s marriage to Aggie is the perfect chess move, removing her most eligible suitor and



 

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compensating him with a woman far more attractive than she. Like all chess moves, this rearrangement of the pieces creates new threats and requires new tactics: the removal of Mitchy creates the opportunity for Vanderbank, upon whom her mother had laid claim. Longdon’s bounty, for which Vanderbank has the de facto first refusal option, moreover, favors Nanda greatly in her competition with her mother, even if, as Nanda knows, Vanderbank’s marriage with her could in the long run provide a cover for Mrs. Brook’s relationship with him (an arrangement similar to the one James will explore at length in The Golden Bowl). In a similar way, Aggie’s marriage to Mitchy, which made a public fact of her acquisition of wealth and her loss of innocence, has facilitated rather than prohibited her promiscuity. Nanda, therefore, must thus get Vanderbank to reject her, in compensation for which she will later return him to her mother and her mother to him. To do this, she evokes her innocence in order to cast it into doubt, that is, in order to raise questions in Vanderbank’s mind about it, a card that, for example, Aggie no longer has the option of playing. By her hand Nanda has denied Vanderbank her hand, the same hand that she withholds from Mitchy, both figuratively and literally. When Nanda takes Mitchy back into the realm of her friendship, she does so with the understanding that, as he puts it upon their parting, “. . . I mayn’t kiss your hand?” “Never.” “Never?” “Never.” (303)

“Everything’s Different from What It Used to Be” Given the forces against her—social and economic—Nanda’s accomplishment is quite extraordinary, especially for a girl of her age, which clearly is not the age of innocence, but rather an age that threatens to end marriage as it was then known, chiefly by making visible its unspoken tenets, by giving it away. As Merle Williams has pointed out, “Nanda’s innocence is special and ethically original because it not only transmutes but also transcends familiar and culturally acknowledged categories” (261). My friend Rachel Brownstein has suggested a counter argument to my reading: why would anyone queer or not want to marry Vanderbank? But the counter argument to her counter argument is: why would anyone want to marry anyone in The Awkward Age? Faced with the prospects in this novel, Lily Bart, no doubt, would have killed herself by the middle of Chapter Three. But James is looking forward here to a



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different age, the one from which Wharton, six years later, in The House of Mirth, is looking back with an awkward belatedness, a belatedness already reflected by Nanda’s proclamation at the end, “Everything’s different from what it used to be” (310). Certainly Nanda is marking a personal transition, but if the eponymous “awkward age” is a stage in life, Nanda’s age is no less awkward than Vanderbank’s, which allows him, potentially, to adore at the same time a late adolescent and her youthful mother, or than Longdon’s, which allows him few options but to fixate on an earlier age when he played Vanderbank to Nanda’s grandmother. And the novel commences with a discussion between Vanderbank and Longdon about the awkwardness of Mrs. Brook’s lying about her daughter’s age as her own preservative from aging. If each character is at an awkward age, perhaps it is because all of them live in an awkward age, an age when spouses are always and only beards. In Pride and Prejudice, Mrs. Bennet is ridiculed because all five of her daughters are out at the same time; in James’s awkward age, all the Mrs. Bennets are out, and everyone is giving them away.

Notes 1

This is not to suggest that all the men are independent or equally so. Of the principals in The Awkward Age, Longdon and Mitchy stand alone in their amassed financial resources, and at the other end of the spectrum, Harold or Petherton, far beyond their ostensive presumptions to the contrary, are largely dependent on others. 2 Trask has detailed how the process of “taking in” participates in an extensive and elaborate system of homoerotic anality that structures relations in the novel. In his reading, therefore, the act of “giving away” is more antithetical to “taking in.” 3 Culver details the implications of Nanda’s British-style education in comparison with Aggie’s, which is based on a Continental philosophy. 4 While one could argue that Kurnick lists “homosexuality,” which includes lesbianism, none of the examples that Kurnick provides to support his list involve female homosexuality. 5 For example, Cohen, Culver, Mizruchi, Teahan, and Rivkin.

Works Cited Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton, 1966. Print. Cohen, Paula Marantz. The Daughter’s Dilemma: Family Process and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel. Ann Arbor: U Michigan P, 1991. Print.



 

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Culver, Stuart. “Censorship and Intimacy: Awkwardness in The Awkward Age.” ELH 48.2 (1981): 368-386. Print. Goble, Mark. “Awkward Ages: James and Hitchcock in Between.” The Men Who Knew Too Much: Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock. Ed. Susan M. Griffin and Alan Nadel. New York: Oxford UP, 2011. 203218. Print. James, Henry. The Awkward Age. New York: Penguin, 1987. Print. Kurnick, David. “‘Horrible Impossible’: Henry James’s Awkward Stage.” The Henry James Review 26 (2005): 109-129. Print. McWhirter, David. “What’s Awkward about The Awkward Age?” Centuries’ Ends, Narrative Means. Ed. Robert Newman. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996. 212-221. Print. Mizruchi, Susan L. “Reproducing Women in The Awkward Age.” Representations 38 (Spring 1992): 101-30. Print. O’Farrell, Mary Ann. “Missing Jane Austen: Henry James Considers the Old Maid.” The Henry James Review 27.1 (2006): 1-9. Print. Rivkin, Julie. The Representational Logics of Henry James’s Fiction. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1996. Print. Teahan, Sheila. The Rhetorical Logic of Henry James. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1995. Print. Trask, Michael. “Getting into it with James: Substitution and Erotic Reversal in The Awkward Age.” American Literature 69.1 (1997): 105138. Print. Wharton, Edith. The House of Mirth. London and New York: Oxford UP, 2000. Print. Williams, Merle A. “Henry James and the Redefinition of ‘Awkward’ Concepts through Fiction.” The Henry James Review 18.3 (1997): 258264. Print.



 

CHAPTER SIXTEEN “IF YOU’VE HAD YOUR WOMAN, I’VE HAD . . . MY MAN”: MAY BARTRAM’S AMBIVALENCE IN “THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE” LESLIE PETTY

Critics have long noted the paradoxical nature of Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle.” It is one of the author’s most opaque works and at the same time one that insists on the “moral of the story”—John Marcher has “missed” the love of May Bartram, making his life what James called “a great negative adventure.” Such overtness after such covertness has made many readers suspicious of the ending, but since Eve Sedgwick’s groundbreaking work in The Epistemology of the Closet, we have new ways to make much of what’s illegible legible. It is now impossible, for example, to read the story without acknowledging that Marcher quite possibly has an embattled sense of sexual self. Nevertheless, if Sedgwick’s and subsequent readings have opened up a myriad of possibilities for Marcher outside of his declaration that what he’d missed was a fulfilling heterosexual relationship—loving a woman for herself—the majority of readings of May are unusually resistant to such alternatives or subversions. 1 This is not to say that critics haven’t complicated the simplistic interpretation of May-as-selfless victim to Marcher’s obtuse solipsism. Gert Buelens and Donatella Izzo in particular have given us especially convincing feminist readings that demonstrate the power that May holds, both in her mastery of Marcher’s narrative and in the silence that she uses to gain some control in her situation. However, neither Buelens nor Izzo entertains—for long—the possibility that May is just as ambivalent about the demands of compulsory heterosexuality as Marcher seems to be. Entertaining this possibility is difficult, of course, because as Sedgwick observes, “Of May Bartram’s

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history, of her emotional determinants, of her erotic structures, the reader learns very little; we are permitted, if we pay attention at all, to know that we have learned very little” (199). Without question, the main reason we know so little of May’s past or her desires is because we have access to her primarily—though not exclusively—from Marcher’s perspective, and he invariably casts her in romanticized, feminized terms that ultimately tell us more about him than about her. Nevertheless, if we recoup at least a context, if not a history, for May by looking at the competing narratives of single womanhood at the turn of the century, and then reconsider the few bits of information we have of her that are independent of Marcher’s interpretation—her actions, her dialogue, and the occasional confidences from the narrator—we open up the possibility for a less conventional reading of May that suggests she, too, is conflicted about the demands of courtship and marriage. Carolyn Tate’s recent work has made it easier for us to see this less conventional reading; following Sedgwick’s lead, Tate argues that May, like Marcher, “has a secret with a potentially homosexual content” (18). However, in what follows, I read May’s attitude as one of ambivalence about the heterosexual order, rather than an outright rejection of it. From the beginning, “The Beast in the Jungle” creates a tension between two contradictory narratives of single womanhood at the fin de siècle: the Spinster and the New Woman. The story opens at Weatherend, an estate Marcher is visiting with a party of friends who are there to admire its “fine things” and “treasures of all the arts” (496). As he looks around, he sees May Bartram, whose face is “a reminder, yet not quite a remembrance” (497). As he tries to recall why he knows her, he watches her intently, and before they even speak he believes he has “penetrated to a kind of truth that the others [at Weatherend] were too stupid for” (4978). “[W]ithout being able to say in the least why,” he is convinced that May is a “poor relation” of the owners, one who “enjoy[s] at periods a protection that she paid for by helping, among other services, to show the place and explain it” (497). Marcher imagines a life of dependence and deprivation for May, one in which she must not only rely on the charity of her family for survival but also unofficially “work” for her living by serving as a docent. He continues to summon an image of her misery, and, warming to his task, is convinced that “she was there on harder terms than anyone; she was there as a consequence of things suffered” (498). Although Marcher believes this vision demonstrates that he has “more imagination” than the others at Weatherend, his melodramatic conjuring confirms that he does not (497). Izzo has aptly noted that Marcher’s “mental theater is gender connotated,” and in this case, he relies on



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conservative convention to facilely cast May in the role of Victorian spinster (228). This pathetic character, lonely, bitter, vulnerable, became a well-recognized one in the nineteenth century and early twentieth, deflating for some the threat of the single woman at a time when greater professional opportunities and changes in social attitudes were contributing to a significant increase in the number of women who either never married or delayed doing so. Marcher’s assessment of May is similar to the many stories of loveless misery that served as a backlash to these increased social freedoms; as Nina Auerbach has observed, the single woman was “tolerated [by some] more easily as society’s piteous victim” (qtd. in Doan 10). Marcher’s own observations, as well as May’s subsequent actions, however, belie this characterization. Even as he pities her, Marcher must admit that “it was impossible to look less” needy than May does; in fact, she is “distinctly handsome” (497). May is stylish and attractive, a far cry from the spinster stereotype. And, if Marcher’s worldview is “gender connotated,” there is very little evidence that May’s is. She certainly defies Marcher’s expectations. She does not offer a “vulgar reminder of any ‘sweet’ speech” when they talk of their initial encounter, making “no claim on him of a compliment or a mistake” (501). Instead, she wants to know if Marcher has ever met the extraordinary fate he expected for himself ten years earlier. A few moments later, she boldly asks if his fate might simply be “falling in love,” admitting that she hadn’t asked this question during their previous conversation a decade ago, because she “wasn’t so free-and-easy then” (504). Nevertheless, there’s no suggestion that she is asking with any motivation other than curiosity. What emerges, then, is a counter-depiction of May as a woman who is attractive, confident, and forthright, but not interested in playing conventional romantic games. She is not, however, a young ingénue, like Daisy Miller or Isabel Archer. May is thirty and has grown into her confidence, a fact which aligns her with a competing image of single womanhood—the New Woman—that emerged at the turn of the century thanks to the changes brought on by the woman’s movement on both sides of the Atlantic. Naomi Rosenthal asserts that this image was in competition with that of the traditional spinster: “Because the women best positioned to enjoy the fruits of these changes [brought about by the woman’s movement] were those least encumbered by domestic responsibilities . . . it was the unmarried woman who stood in the public mind as the prime exemplar of feminine freedom” (13). Thus, it is difficult to parse what we are to make of May’s situation; as a single woman she is caught between these two states. While we know



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that a few of Marcher’s assumptions are correct—as a single woman May has had to rely on her great-aunt for financial support, and until she gains her inheritance she is “a dependent with a pride that might ache though it didn’t bristle”—we also know that the first thing she does with her money is “acquire property,” setting up an independent household (506). For a young-ish woman in her early thirties, this is a rather radical move, because, as Rosenthal reminds us, “Not until the turn of the century could single women live alone” without inviting serious social censure (13). Certainly, Marcher fails to see the radical implications of May’s independent household. Tate points out that “Marcher never fully recognizes that May’s significant inheritance alters her social mobility and suggests new possibilities for her subjectivity. He can only think that she is a woman who needs to be ‘remunerated’” (26). In fact, Marcher’s obtuseness on this matter is part of a larger narrative pattern that Izzo identifies: “The Beast in the Jungle” is really “two stories”: “Marcher’s master narrative, hegemonic and explicit . . . and May Bartram’s subaltern and implicit counternarrative” (236). Certainly, these competing narratives of spinsterhood and New Womanhood can be mapped onto this external division between Marcher and May (Izzo 236). However, May experiences an internal division as well. Indeed, both stories are hers, and it is her ambivalence about her place in the heterosexual economy that explains some of her subsequent choices. On one hand, her pride and affective desires make her chafe at the pity and alienation associated with single womanhood, while on the other, her intellect and artistic sensibility render her hesitant to commit herself fully to a heterosexual relationship. In calling May “ambivalent,” I am invoking Judith Butler’s use of the term, especially in Bodies that Matter.2 Butler writes that This “being a man” and this “being a woman” are internally unstable affairs. They are always beset by ambivalence precisely because there is a cost in every identification, the loss of some other set of identifications, the forcible approximation of a norm one never chooses, a norm that chooses us, but which we occupy, we reverse, resignify to the extent that the norm fails to determine us completely. (86; emphasis added)

Butler points out the rather impossible situation for all of us. Our entry into the social order is predicated on our interpellation: we internalize the expectations and desires of our gender to a certain extent, and yet, we simultaneously resist the confinement and loss of possibilities attendant to our situational identity. This internal instability can lead to the subversion of the dominant order; we perform the social role expected of us, but we do so imperfectly, in a way that shows that the ideal version of this role is



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unattainable, and in many ways, undesirable. Put another way, while it is impossible for May to escape the heterosexual imperative (or even to recognize fully that she wants to escape it), she obeys this imperative in a way that evinces her reluctance to inhabit it fully.3 An examination of May’s ambivalence provides one answer to what Buelens has identified as the question that “has always puzzled critics of ‘The Beast in the Jungle’: what is it that attracts May Bartram to this selfcentered man?” (22). I would suggest that she desires him because she senses she cannot fully have him. It is worth remembering that May is thirty when the story opens, and given her appearance and social skills, not to mention the frequent encounters she has with visitors to Weatherend, she lacks neither the attributes nor the opportunity to marry. Therefore, for whatever reason, we can surmise that she has chosen not to do so, a choice indicating that she and Marcher are more alike than they may appear at first glance. Certainly, their concept of “falling in love” is the same. When May asks Marcher if being in love “hasn’t proved the great affair” for which he’s waiting, Marcher replies, “Here I am, you see. It hasn’t been overwhelming”; to which May replies, “Then it hasn’t been love” (504). To be overwhelmed isn’t necessarily a pleasant experience, but it is certainly one in which you lose all sense of self-control, a state of vulnerability that neither character finds comfortable. Their agreement on this issue explains May’s sympathy for Marcher at the beginning, which he finds inexplicable. In fact, May tells Marcher that his secret seemed “simple” to her, because “[she] seemed, as [he] spoke, to understand it” (503). May’s immediate recognition of the “truth” of Marcher’s dilemma—when the rest of the world presumably laughs at him— demonstrates that she not only sympathizes with his situation but identifies with it. She is, in effect, as marginalized from the world as he is, and she also seems equally reluctant to rectify this situation by conforming to society’s gendered expectations. While some have noted that May’s not behaving like other women in this opening section makes her a safe friend for Marcher, as she does not press him into a confirmed romantic relationship, it seems that she gains too; the opening can just as easily be read as mutual ambivalence about romantic entanglement, as their budding friendship offers the trappings of heterosexuality without some of its obligations. In this light, May’s choice to “watch with” Marcher, to see how his life unfolds, is not merely self-abnegation, but a decision (as well as a performance) that is mutually beneficial. In his recent essay on “The Beast in the Jungle,” Matthew Helmers articulates one of the immediate benefits of their alliance: it somewhat mitigates the marginality brought on by their singleness: “They begin a



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relationship that appears as and performs heterosexuality in its unification of a male and female figure, yet in its performance somehow maintains a distance from the institutionalized Weatherend couples” (107). The two “fit in” as never before, but they are able to maintain a “distance” from society that sounds remarkably like Butler’s concept of ambivalence. Helmers, however, attributes the subversive element of their relationship all to Marcher. Following the lead of so many other critics, Helmers reads Marcher and May as foils, designating her as the “knowledgeable heterosexual” and him as the “ignorant homosexual” (109). He uses these terms advisedly, ultimately debunking the notion that Marcher is “ignorant” or unequivocally “homosexual” by showing how the “queer time” he inhabits leads Marcher to an alternate form of knowledge, one that “opens up new spaces . . . for the subject” (Helmers 113). Specifically, Marcher is able to lead a “life of endless presents in which the knowledge of future and past remains elusive” (Helmers 107). However, while Helmers easily sees how living outside of chronological time enables Marcher to escape the attendant binaries of heterosexual/ homosexual, ignorant/knowledgeable, normal/deviant, he reifies May’s normative status by aligning her with chronological progression, calling hers a “predictable matrix of . . . time” (112). And yet, May Bartram is also living an achronological life, if chronological time indicates a typical heteronormative trajectory, as Helmers suggests. She exists perpetually in a state of being not-yetmarried, just as Marcher does. Intriguingly, Helmers suggests that, while Marcher’s transcendence of binaries depends on this liminal state, “[what] Marcher [also] desires in this tale is the future, a guaranteed future that can only be guaranteed through committing himself to the female” (113). Clearly, May, too, desires a “future,” one that is unimaginable as a spinster, whose future has “passed her by,” or as a New Woman, who depends on her (relative) youth for identity. Recognizing May’s conflicting desires to escape the heteronormative trajectory but also to have a “future” helps us understand what she gains by choosing to “wait” with Marcher. Consider, for example, this rather elliptical exchange that takes place several years later, after they have become each other’s primary companion. Marcher asks, “‘What is it that saves you?’—saved her, he meant, from that appearance of variation from the usual human type” (516). What he really means, of course, is how has their relationship kept her from being noticed and considered deviant, which is his own fear. May’s response is illuminating: “I never said,” May Bartram replied, “that it hadn’t made me talked about.”



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May Bartram’s Ambivalence in “The Beast In The Jungle” “Ah well then you’re not ‘saved.”’ “It has not been a question for me. If you’ve had your woman I’ve had,” she said, “my man.” “And you mean that makes you all right?” She hesitated. “I don’t know why it shouldn’t make me—humanly, which is what we’re speaking of—as right as it makes you.” (516-7)

Izzo argues that this scene in particular shows that “May’s complicity in Marcher’s secret is at the cost of her respectability,” and certainly, their relationship has probably made her the object of gossip (228). I would add, however, that she has really only traded one position of marginality for another. As a single woman unattached to a man, she would be cast in the role of spinster by many around her and be pitied by her contemporaries—not a pleasant alternative for someone with an aching pride. This scene dramatizes what Tessa Hadley identifies as a central concern of James’s late work: “how notions of femaleness are shaped and enforced within a late nineteenth-century leisure class” (14). May is, socially speaking, stuck between a rock and a hard place, given that neither spinster nor suspected mistress is a conventionally acceptable role, and though women were gaining independence at the turn of the century, there was still a heavy backlash to their straying from accepted boundaries. May must, therefore, negotiate a rather impossible situation, and we learn that even in its nebulous state, her relationship with Marcher has several advantages over being alone. Not only does May now enjoy a degree of human companionship, but she also has access to intellectual and aesthetic experiences she would not have otherwise. In fact, the “payoff” for waiting with Marcher begins almost immediately after they reconnect. In the early days of their friendship, Marcher takes her “to the National Gallery and the South Kensington Museum, where, among vivid reminders, they talked of Italy at large—not now attempting to recover, as at first, the taste of their youth and their ignorance” (506). Unlike her turn as a docent for Weatherend, May has stimulating, not one-sided, conversations about art and culture with Marcher. Later on, they go to the opera, sing together at the piano, and celebrate her birthday. Perhaps most significantly, she has throughout their relationship the opportunity to be what Buelens calls “writer-creator,” a concept I discuss at length below (24). Undoubtedly, she has “had her man,” which releases her from the asexual appearance of spinsterhood, but she chooses to remain in a relationship that perpetually defers definition, dwelling, like Marcher, in the possibility of escaping the strict confines of compulsory heterosexuality. Their analogous situations are made clear in the above dialogue when May reminds Marcher that they are both human—more



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alike than different—even in a world that is decidedly “gender connotated” and invested in their radical differences; thus their relationship makes her “as right as it makes [him].” Indeed, other exchanges reveal the extent to which May downplays the romantic potential of their relationship, providing further evidence of her inherent ambivalence. When Marcher jokes that perhaps the extraordinary event he has anticipated for so long is actually May’s “acquiring a house in London,” she responds that “she was by no means satisfied with such a trifle, as the climax to so special a suspense” (509). It is an odd reply, if we read her—as so many do—as hopelessly in love with Marcher. She deflates his (admittedly teasing) aggrandizement of her moving within closer proximity, thereby prolonging the resolution of their long wait together. In fact, she pointedly forestalls the possibility that their increased intimacy (implied by Marcher’s joke) could, in fact, be the climax of Marcher’s (passive) quest. In this way, May insures that they need not overtly acknowledge the obvious expectation that the two will eventually marry. May makes a similarly deflective maneuver when she observes, “What saves us, you know, is that we answer so completely to so usual an appearance: that of the man and woman whose friendship has become such a daily habit, or almost, as to be at last indispensable” (511). It is easy to read this observation as an attempt to hide her love for Marcher, but it is equally plausible to read it as a more sincere statement. May reminds Marcher of the way their relationship is predicated on their “making believe” together that they are like other people. By calling attention to this performative, imitative quality, May demonstrates that, on some level, she is aware of how, in Butler’s words, “the parodic inhabiting of conformity” evident in their relationship “subtly calls into question the legitimacy” of heteronormativity (82). I am not arguing, necessarily, that May does not love Marcher. In fact, the text intimates that she does by pointing out that “[t]here was but one account of her that would have been true all the while, and that she could give, directly, to nobody, least of all to John Marcher” (383). This “true account” may very well be her love for Marcher, but if it is, it is also true that May refuses to articulate her feelings to him and thus make her love known. 4 This refusal, May’s silence about her feelings, is what Izzo identifies as “the most problematic issue in the tale” (230). While I agree that May’s reticence is a fundamental interpretive issue, I do not read it, as Izzo does, as primarily symptomatic of feminine propriety. Such a reading is complicated by our first impression of May, when she declares herself “free-and-easy” enough to talk about love outright. Instead, May’s concealment of her feelings can be read as a manifestation of her



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ambivalence about permanent romantic attachment. Certainly, she has opportunities to tell Marcher her “truth.” Most notably, in section three, when Marcher asks her how he can “repay” her for “help[ing] [him] to pass for a man like another,” the narrator tells us: “She had her last grave pause, as if there might be a choice of ways. But she chose. ‘By going on as you are’” (517; emphasis added). If Marcher goes on as he is, then May gets to continue as she is as well. Whether she is conscious of a wish to remain in this limbo state or not, she does, in fact, perpetuate it with her request, indicating a desire on some level to do so. Why May prefers to go on as she does with Marcher—even if she sincerely loves him—can be better understood in light of some of the arguments that Victoria Coulson has recently made about Henry James’s relationship with Constance Fenimore Woolson. Starting with Leon Edel’s biography, there is a long tradition of reading “The Beast in the Jungle” as in part inspired by this relationship, and while I am not arguing for a reductive biographical reading, I do believe that feminist interventions like Coulson’s can help us understand James’s fiction as well.5 For the purpose of this argument, it is worth noting that Edel relies on the narrative of the Victorian spinster to explain the James/Woolson relationship as a onesided love affair. However, Coulson complicates such a reading by treating seriously Woolson’s artistic and intellectual ambitions: On the surface Constance appears to be the spinster victim of Henry’s bachelor egotism, but their apparent conflict masks an underlying affiliation in a disavowed project of conservative resistance. . . . Constance would never have chosen Henry had she not sensed his basic unavailability, and she took advantage of his sexual ambivalence to play out her irreconcilable longings for heterosexual validation and intellectual equality. (97)

Like Woolson, May is intellectually intrepid and aesthetically curious, and significantly, one of the things Marcher misses about May is that hers is essentially an artistic sensibility, not a feminine one. Throughout the story, Marcher is convinced that May “knows” more about his fate than he does, even though he is aware that she can’t possibly have any more actual knowledge than he does. He thinks, however, that she has “finer nerves”: “That was what women had where they were interested; they made out things, where people were concerned, that the people often couldn’t have made out for themselves. Their nerves, their sensibility, their imagination, were conductors and revealers” (518). Clearly, May is invested in Marcher’s case, but the nature of her interest is more complex than many critics have realized. While Marcher only thinks about what he gains from



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it, May’s investment seems more about gaining human knowledge and artistic experience than any particularly “feminine” investment in romance. Carolyn Tate offers a provocative reading of this scene, arguing that May’s “knowledge [of Marcher’s life] comes from experience” (23). However, Tate is using the term “experience” literally in this instance, and while I agree that May and Marcher inhabit similar subject positions, it seems to me that we should also understand May’s “experiences” in Jamesian terms, given her fecund imagination. In the “Art of Fiction,” James describes experience—the necessary raw material for an artist to create—as “an immense sensibility . . . 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 the air into revelations” (52). While James uses the masculine pronoun here, elsewhere in the essay he uses the feminine; clearly, the author does not limit “finer nerves” to women; he limits them to artists and writers. Writing on this passage, critic Kevin Ohi says that in James’s definition, “Experience thus resists objectification. . . . Neither the mind itself nor an object in the world, experience, in these terms, transgresses the dichotomy between inside and outside that would ground an analogy linking cognition and representation as simple mimetic processes” (143). Put another way, experience is neither recording what one sees from the outside nor is it pure interior invention. It is the ability to be both inside and outside of a subject at once, much the way May Bartram is able to penetrate John Marcher’s character: “It was only May Bartram who . . . achieved, by an art indescribable, the feat of at once—or perhaps it was only alternately—meeting the eyes from in front and mingling her own vision, as from over his shoulder, with their peep through the apertures” (511). Hadley observes that in James’s late novels, women at least “carry life away with them in armfuls,” noting that “[there] is a surplus of experiences and fulfillments for the women as well as the men” (18). Such experiences and fulfillments, however, are rarely fully satisfying, conventional heterosexual relationships, though Hadley insists that sexual desire is a large part of the pleasure. I would suggest that the same dynamic is at work in this late story. Consider, for example, May’s rejoinder when Marcher voices his fear that their intense intimacy has meant she “hadn’t really had time to do anything else”: “Anything else but be interested?” she asked. “Ah what else does one ever want to be? If I’ve been ‘watching’ with you, as we long ago agreed that I was to do, watching is always in itself an absorption.” (512)



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May Bartram may very well feel erotic desire for Marcher, but this reply confirms that she also enjoys the aesthetic pleasures and intellectual challenges that come from the perpetual deferment of any open declaration of love, and her ambivalence stems in part from her reluctance to give up these pleasures. Ultimately, May never fully overcomes this ambivalence, even in the climactic moment in section four, when she stands before Marcher, “all draped and all soft, in her fairness and slimness,” with her face, “all kind but all expectant” (525, 527). Buelens says that at this moment, May “tries to communicate her love without breaking her own secret,” a secret over which she wants to maintain mastery (24). However, if May’s secret is her love, how can she reveal it without revealing it? What Buelens does point out here is May’s unwillingness, even at the end, to definitively declare her love and thus end the equivocal nature of her relationship with Marcher. Even though she tells him enigmatically that “It’s never too late,” the reality is that it is too late for them to consummate in any meaningful way a sexual or romantic relationship, as May is terminally ill and on the brink of death (526). Even more tellingly, as she walks closer and closer to him, she does so “as if still full of the unspoken . . . at once hesitating and deciding to say” (526). Ultimately, May decides not to say anything; she only “[closes] her eyes” while giving in to a “slow fine shudder” (527). Most critics read this moment as May’s radical disillusionment, her final realization that Marcher will never recognize and reciprocate her love. However, within the context of the interpretation I am advancing, it is equally viable to read this scene as the moment when May’s internal resistance to the social order ultimately wins out. She has, in many ways, fulfilled her desire for a “future” with Marcher; she has had her man, and her quasi-romantic life, but this moment dramatizes her ultimate inability to acquiesce to the dominant order. The reader encounters May only once more, during her final interview with Marcher. At their last meeting, she assures him that he no longer needs to wait for the Beast to pounce, because the catastrophic event they have looked for “has come” (529). May never reveals how she knows or what form the Beast has taken, but Coulson’s reading of the James/Woolson relationship can illuminate some potential answers to this enigma: Looking for accomplices in resistance, Henry and Constance tacitly agree to pose as mutually intelligible failures. They play . . . a collaborative game that disguises—from themselves—their resistance to the authority of heterosexual gender definitions. They assume these parts in order to experience themselves as sexually intelligible: their underlying purpose is



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to protect both participants from having to commit either to an embrace of heterosexuality or to its rejection. (134)

May’s conviction that the Beast “has come” could signal her awareness of a similar collaborative game played by herself and Marcher, or, it may be a more self-deluded utterance, a continued concealment of the façade that the two of them have erected to maintain their ambivalent subversion of the social order. Of course, saying that Marcher deceives himself at the end is nothing new. Many critics have argued that the explicit moralizing of the story—“it was she that he’d missed”—is an ersatz epiphany, one that allows him to cling to his delusions, even if they disagree about the nature of those delusions. We should consider seriously, though, what May achieves by “watching with Marcher” all those years. She may believe that she wants what women are supposed to want—marriage—but her actions and her experiences demonstrate that she is at least somewhat content to forestall this commitment in exchange for artistic and intellectual freedom.

Notes 1 For example, Sedgwick suggests that what May “gets” out of her sexless relation with Marcher is an increasing sense of cognitive “power” because she knows more than Marcher about his own desires, but while Sedgwick is perhaps the first to make overt the possibility of Marcher’s homosexuality, she takes May’s heterosexuality for granted, stating, “it is true that she feels desire for [Marcher]” (261). In a similar vein, Victoria Coulson has said that Marcher is “equally unable to recognize himself either as a lover of women or as a conscious refuser of women” (130), but she does not identify any corresponding ambivalence in May, whom she calls, “the most stubbornly persistent of [James’s fictional female] confidantes,” whose “desire” for Marcher is perceived by him as mere “disinterested service” (129). In a markedly different vein, Lomeda Montgomery has identified May not as a victim of Marcher’s obtuseness but as an aggressive “lamia figure” or a “witchlike creature” who “defines [Marcher’s] destiny, possesses his ego, and devours his identity” (140). 2 To a lesser degree, I am also invoking Victoria Coulson’s discussion of “ambivalent realism.” 3 I am indebted to Gert Buelens for pointing out to me how useful Butler’s work would be in making the argument I put forth in this paper. 4 Carolyn Tate’s recent argument hinges on the claim that “Bartram does not erotically desire Marcher” (19). While that possibility also works within the framework of this essay, I would argue that we simply cannot know how much May does or does not erotically desire Marcher; all we do know is that she never openly declares any feelings for him.



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5 Sedgwick also sees traces of the James/Woolson relationship in “The Beast in the Jungle,” wondering if James’s own “denied homosexual panic” didn’t contribute to the suicide of Woolson, James’s “secreted-away companion of so many of his travels and residencies” (196).

Works Cited Buelens, Gert. “In Possession of a Secret: Rhythms of Mastery and Surrender in ‘The Beast in the Jungle.’” The Henry James Review 19.1 (1998): 17-35. Project Muse. Web. 30 March 2011. Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter. 1993. London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2011. Print. Coulson, Victoria. Henry James, Women and Realism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print. Doan, Laura. Old Maids to Radical Spinsters: Unmarried Women in Twentieth Century Novels. Urbana: U Illinois P, 1991. Print. Hadley, Tessa. Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure. New York: Cambridge UP, 2002. Print. Helmers, Matthew. “Possibly Queer Time: Paranoia, Subjectivity and ‘The Beast in the Jungle.’” The Henry James Review 32 (2011): 10117. Project Muse. Web. 1 November 2011. Izzo, Donatella. Portraying the Lady: Technologies of Gender in the Short Stories of Henry James. Lincoln: U Nebraska P, 2001. Print. James, Henry. “The Art of Fiction.” Literary Criticism. Vol. I. Ed. Leon Edel. New York: Library of America, 1984. 44-63. Print. —. “The Beast in the Jungle.” Complete Stories 1898-1910. Ed. Denis Donoghue. New York: Library of America, 1996. 496-541. Print. Montgomery, Lomeda. “The Lady is the Tiger: Looking at May Bartram in ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ from the ‘Other Side.’” “The Finer Thread, The Tighter Weave”: Essays on the Short Fiction of Henry James. Ed. Joseph Dewey and Brooke Horvath. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 2001. 139-48. Print. Ohi, Kevin. “‘The Novel is Older, and so Are the Young’: On the Queerness of Style.” The Henry James Review 27 (2006): 140-55. Project Muse. Web. 30 May 2011. Rosenthal, Naomi. Spinster Tales and Womanly Possibilities. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001. Print. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. 1990. Updated ed. Berkeley: U of California P, 2008. Print.



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Tate, Carolyn. “Interrogating the Legibility of Queer Female Subjectivity: Rethinking May Bartram’s ‘Bracketed’ Character in ‘The Beast in the Jungle.’” The Henry James Review 33.1 (2012): 17-29. Print.



 

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN HYSTERIC SUBJECTS IN THE WINGS OF THE DOVE BETH S. ASH

One way for a criticism to be transformational is to address an author’s central concerns in an argument that is as convincing as it is surprising and innovative. Then, our view of the author’s “ultimate topic,” as Slavoj Žižek puts it, is really changed (289). In his 2006 reading of The Wings of the Dove, “Kate’s Choice or the Materialism of Henry James,” Žižek observes that “the ultimate topic of [much of] James’s work is the effect of capitalist modernization on ethical life” (289), and he goes on to argue that the beautiful but brutal Kate Croy is the novel’s truly ethical actor. His reading is remarkable and ingenious, but in the end unconvincing—in part because Žižek fails to recognize the utter persuasiveness of a certain traditional perspective. That is, the point of view on Milly Theale’s sacrifice for Merton Densher and his moral regeneration through her that insists this sacrificial ethic is the moral center of the novel, and also insists this center is deeply compromised. What the traditional view does not really explain is why the ethical center does not hold.1 Rather than arguing that the cruelest character is actually the most ethical, as Žižek does, I hope to cast moral choice in the novel in new light by arguing that the novel’s central ethic of sacrifice is shadowed by the sexual stance of hysteria. The ethic is marred because the quality of sacrifice cannot be disambiguated from this psychosexual stance that denies (which is not the same as to sublimate) carnal love in favor of a so-called “higher” or transcendent, spiritual love. The critical stakes of a focused reading of hysteria in the novel begin to be clarified when we consider the social/ethical claims that Wendy Graham makes for Wings in Henry James’s Thwarted Love and also the sex/gender argument of Evelyn Ender in Sexing the Mind: NineteenthCentury Fictions of Hysteria. For Graham, James recognizes, in Fredric Jameson’s words, “the fallen world of capitalism” and critiques that world

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by means of Milly’s martyrdom. Graham uses Paul de Man’s allegory of irony to explain that James “demystifies” the social by depicting Milly as an ironic figure of “pure mystification” (Graham 238). In Graham’s view, James endows Milly with the over-the-top attributes of “an impossible otherworldliness” and he depicts Milly turning her face to the wall in “a hystericized rejection of economic and sexual intercourse.” The stark contrast between Milly and the surrounding corruption that she recoils from is what allows the economic and sexual relations in the novel to be seen in their hyperbolic profanity (Graham 238). I agree with Graham that Milly’s self-sacrifice, her dying to avoid waking up in this terrible world, is a hysterical solution, but I disagree that this solution can work as social critique, or have real ethical meaning, since it sustains the fantasy that there is (perhaps in the past, or in transcendental space) somewhere a better world. In The Wings of the Dove (1902), Milly Theale’s hysterical renunciation or rejection is a flight from the same place of economic and sexual exploitation that Isabel Archer, in The Portrait of a Lady (1881), purposefully inhabits, since Isabel renounces her freedom and assumes the strictures of her marriage. Renunciation as principled engagement is missing from The Wings of the Dove, and as will be shown, there is simply too much evidence in the Notebooks, in the preface to the New York Edition, and finally in the generalized situation of hysteric intersubjectivity in the novel to think that James meant his readers to take Milly—or her hysteria— ironically. Ender focuses on The Bostonians, rather than on The Wings of the Dove, but, in her introduction to Sexing the Mind, she briefly characterizes Milly as the novel’s “sick and sublime” heroine, as “a version of the Hysterika, afflicted as she is with a mysterious illness whose symptoms mark a spiritual or mental condition” (9). Of primary interest is how Ender defines this “condition.” She mostly views hysteria as an authoritarian social construct, namely, a biological essentialism for fixing women in orthodox gender roles. But at one point in her discussion of James, she departs from that definition and invokes Freud, specifically, “the complex of castration” (Ender’s words). She does so in order to interpret the famous incident in James’s life, when, in the course of extinguishing a fire, James incurs a wound—what he has described as his “horrid even if . . . obscure hurt” (Ender’s punctuation). She reads this incident as “a case of conversion [symptoms] and male hysteria” (123), and goes on to read The Bostonians as marred by James’s need to defend against impaired virility. He compensates by overstating Basil Ransom’s manhood and



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making him the spokesman of a rigid discourse of sexual difference (124125). There are many problems with Ender’s use of Freud’s castration complex (the basis for his theory of hysteria as a faulty negotiation of Oedipal relations). Freud talks about the real penis, and therefore castration has to be taken literally. Freudian theory trades on a series of equivalencies: male is to female as penis is to lack, and as castration anxiety is to penis envy. Freudian literalism necessarily subverts Ender’s anti-essentialist feminist position and commits her, however unwittingly, to gender conservatism. In the Freudian view, both the psychologically healthy woman and the hysteric suffer a real lack that is unbearable; however, the healthy woman finds a remedy in having a real male child. What is more, in the Freudian model, femininity very nearly equates with hysteria, since the so-called “remedy” of baby = penis may only be defensive displacement of lack. A Freudian analysis of male hysteria cannot avoid this feminization, and therefore James, the gay man, literally becomes in Ender’s argument a woman, un garçon manqué. Lacanian and Object Relation theories are necessary in order to move beyond this kind of unmodified Freudian reading and to approach the problematic of hysteria in The Wings of the Dove with the theoretical sophistication it deserves. Both versions of contemporary psychoanalysis regard non-neurotic development as a process of, first, the separation from the mother, the loss of the illusion of singular union, and second, the introduction of mediation or triangulation by the paternal symbolic function which, in turn, radically redefines the intimate exchanges between child and mOther. With this “second” birth of the subject as a desiring being comes an exchange of the thing representations of the maternal sensuous idiom for word representations, the human alienation in language. Both theories recognize the difference between principles and the parents as bearers of principles. So, without minimizing the theoretical disputes here, it might still be said that for either theory, the symbolic paternal function structures the divided, speaking subject, thereby liberated from the imaginary obligation to be complete. Both theories move beyond the impasse of Freudian literal castration (now relegated to the imaginary process) and define neurosis as a breakdown in separation/alienation. Lacanian Paul Verhaege elaborates the two possibilities of non-neurotic and neurotic subjectivity—of “becoming a subject with a desire of one’s own based on symbolic castration, or opting for dependency of one’s neurotic desire on the Demand of the Other” (the mother is the first other and the father is the second) (Does the Woman Exist? 213). For both Relational and Lacanian theory, hysterical neurosis



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is not gendered female and not primarily about gender roles (a feminine malady), but is centrally about sexuality. For, continued dependency of desire on the demand of the other thwarts “a desire of one’s own” and, with this, any enjoyment of the body. Instead there is pleasure in deprivation, including the paradoxical enjoyment of sexualized asceticism. I begin with James’s preface to the New York Edition of The Wings of the Dove and the November 1894 entries from the Notebooks to show how his authorial idealization of Milly and his construction of her character in ethical and sexual relation (in his notes) have fixed the distinctively problematic limits of moral action in the novel, and then I use central points of Žižek’s argument to develop my alternative reading of moral action as over-determined by hysteric sexual positioning. This sexual stance deserves to be seen as the fundamental psychology of the novel, since all three major actors, Milly, Kate, and Merton, in different ways figure the hysteric subject whose desire belongs to the other, who aims at dissatisfaction instead of satisfaction, and thus entangled in an intersubjective dynamic of serving and resisting, knows neither pleasure nor freedom to choose otherwise.

James’s Construction of Milly, from Preface and Notes to Finished Novel In the 1909 preface to The Wings of the Dove, James implicitly identifies his authorial performance with his heroine, Milly Theale. John H. Pearson, in a valuable study of James’s prefaces, investigates the narrative of the novel’s creation in the 1909 preface for the way in which it instructs the reader to receive the novel itself. Pearson pertinently observes that James “presents a heroic struggle with the bifurcated consciousness of the text. James claims that he is not completely satisfied with the outcome, but in the process he positions himself in the place of his noble and sacrificial heroine, Milly Theale, and elicits sympathy, perhaps even empathy from the reader” (69; emphasis added). In Pearson’s account, when James considers the limitations of his text (which he identifies as a problem of proportion in the reflecting centers, namely, too much of Kate and therefore not enough of Milly), he invites the reader to put aside actual textual imperfections in order to imagine along with him an ideal authorial reconstruction, one that is based on his best intentions and truly suited to his ideal heroine. Pearson allows us to see that Milly is something more than James’s revered symbol of “an unspotted princess.” She is the mirror in which the author recognizes the ideal power, the purity and nobility, of his artistry.



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As the authorial presence of the preface, James is a deferential and modest witness to Milly; he tells us that he only deals with her narratively by means of indirection “as an unspotted princess is ever dealt with” (Preface 16). His constitutive, creating artistry is acknowledged only in the opposite terms of self-subordination and dedicated sacrifice, where authorial submission is the purest form of authorial recognition. One might well surmise that in reviewing the novel for the New York Edition James was not at all likely to recognize, much less probe, any ethical shortcomings in his depiction of Milly, since his authorial self-idealization is bound up with Milly as a higher order of being. Further, the preface’s depiction of the author’s power-as-devotional sacrifice refers us back to the entries from James’s Notebooks of the previous decade, of November 3 and 7, 1894, where James first begins to develop the idea for The Wings of the Dove, and where he is fairly obsessed with the purity of his (as yet unnamed) heroine. James’s notes show us the same triad of characters that we get in the finished novel, but James is preoccupied, in his initial shaping of the relation between “the dying girl” and “the young man,” with whether or not the “taste of happiness” that the young man is supposed to give “the young creature condemned to death (by consumption, by heart disease or whatever) by the voice of her physician” should take the form of a “physical, passional rapture” (Edel and Powers 102-3). In the November 3 entry, James rejects this carnal sexual relation between the two “on account of the ugliness, the incongruity, the nastiness, en somme, of the man’s ‘having’ a sick girl” (103); and in the November 7 entry, he contemplates the possibility of an actual marriage plot for the novel—“the idea of the man’s agreeing with his fiancée that he shall marry the poor girl in order to come into her money and in the certitude that she will die and leave the money to him” (104; James’s emphasis). But here (as in the earlier entry), James rejects all the intimacies that would inevitably accompany engagement and marriage, as he puts it, all dreams “of being possessed and possessing” (105). In the finished novel, of course, Kate urges Merton to marry Milly, but Merton is ambivalent—at once consenting to stay on in Venice, but not following through with Kate’s plan of marriage, until the gravity of Milly’s illness leads him to abandon this plan entirely. In the notes, we clearly witness the creation of James’s idea of the selfless heroine, her act of generosity that is entirely removed from sexual desiring which is, as James explains it, preeminently a class of egotistic pleasures. If James had written nothing more about his heroine than his statement that being so much in love, “she would leave [her lover] the money



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without any question of marriage,” we might see her “passionate beneficence” as an expression of sublimation recalling the theology of St. Paul: that is to say, a substitution of celibacy and charity for the sexual pact of marriage, in which the immediate object of desire is sacrificed for the greater reward of Christian love and transcendence.2 However, James’s notes focus on the mental eradication of the body, so that he makes his heroine’s selflessness a function of her sexlessness. As he explains it, egotistic pleasures are equivalent to, or at least, best illustrated by, pleasures of the flesh, “of being possessed and possessing.” In James’s rationale, his “poor creature” is completely without these egotistic-sexual yearnings and, therefore, has no want for “anything so vulgar as an engagement” or marriage (in order to express sexual love). Her yearning is in no way egotistical because it is in no way sexual. And given that ugliness and vulgarity unavoidably result for James from the offending and offensive sexuality (of the girl’s sickly body), he must, it seems, turn illness into a means of precluding carnal relations—in James’s phrasing, she must be “already too ill for that.” These words are part of an extended reflection on how any physical relation would result in a nasty, decidedly second-rate story: Oh, she is dying without having had it? Give it to her and let her die—that strikes as sufficiently second-rate. Doesn’t a greater prettiness, as well as a better chance for a story, abide in her being already too ill for that, and in his being able merely to show her some delicacy of kindness, let her think that they might have loved each other ad infinitum if it hadn’t been too late. (Edel and Powers 103)

For his ill heroine, talk of love is a very pretty alternative to the act of love. According to this logic, the young man’s wordings evoke “love ad infinitum” and thereby bring the girl to repeated imaginings of him, her lover, even as he endlessly redirects her to exchange bodily sexuality for a paradoxical spiritual sexuality. Christopher Bollas writes in his study entitled Hysteria that “the most prominent paradox of the hysteric is the exchange of carnal sexuality—specifically, the genital drive—for spiritual sexuality. Where once the body and its drives prevailed upon the self to accept the animal within, the hysteric vigorously refuses this logic, but uncannily converts carnal excitation into spiritual excitation” (25). For the hysteric, the sexual body is an anti-libidinal object; the body must be without sex or, more accurately, a pre-genital body, and the mind becomes, as Bollas also says, the hysteric’s “sex object as it conjures images and sensations that are auto-erotically pleasing” (149).



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The finished novel does give us “the girl” of the notes in Milly, whose sexuality is all in her head, in mental excitement and verbal foreplay. But “the man” is reconfigured in the men—that is, Milly’s physician, Sir Luke Strett, and Merton Densher—who exist for Milly primarily in terms of her auto-erotic musings, and these reveries (given primarily from Milly’s reflecting consciousness) effectively obliterate recognition of the other in favor of fantasized sexual-spiritual engagement. Milly resists, at first, presenting herself to Sir Luke for treatment because even his compassionate medical science is for her “directly divesting, denuding, exposing” of her physical body, a body she shamefully experiences as abject. But Milly’s resistance gives way to an intense rapport with Sir Luke based on her becoming “somehow so sufficiently aware that her doctor was—however fatuous it might sound— exceptionally moved” by her and “that she could believe herself to have caught him in the act of irrelevantly liking her” (Wings 164). Apparently, so much does Sir Luke “like” Milly that when she informs Susie Stringham that the doctor plans to meet Susie at Lancaster Gate, Milly erotically (and only half in jest) teases herself and Susie with the thought that Sir Luke will not be making a professional visit, but rather a declaration of love. “He was in love [with Milly] and needed a confidant [Susie] to work it” (186). Indeed, at Milly’s first interview with Sir Luke, she is overwhelmed by her perception of her doctor’s supposed interest. We read: what made her most stammer and pant was its thus queerly coming over her that she might find she had interested him even beyond her intention . . . At the same time that she struggled, however, she also surrendered; there was a moment at which she almost dropped the form of stating, of explaining, and threw herself, without violence, only with a supreme pointless quaver that had turned the next instant, to an intensity of interrogative stillness, upon his general good will. (151)

This is deeply physical language—stammering and panting, struggling and surrendering. Still, Milly throws herself not on Sir Luke’s person, “with a supreme pointless quaver,” but on his good will. The passage is highly suggestive of at least a half-erotic transference, where, in Bollas’s view, therapeutic words might be “taken as forms of touching, caresses of the hysteric’s other body,” that is, of the soul (59). What are these words? Milly prolongs her stay at Sir Luke’s office by generally querying, “So you don’t think I’m out of my mind?” And he follows: “‘Perhaps that is,’ he smiled, ‘all that’s the matter’” (160; James’s emphasis). Sir Luke places all emphasis on the mental and tells Milly to be



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in love by “doctor’s direction” (269); and even though he hardly knows it, Sir Luke colludes with Milly’s wish to repress her body, the wish to love without sex ruining the relationship. This is hysteric desire. It does not matter whether (as indicated by James’s notes) Milly suffers from an actual body ailment that she denies, or whether she suffers from a false (or hystericised) ailment, as here, Sir Luke all too unknowingly suggests. (I prefer to go with what we have seen in James’s notes and surmise that James did not fully see the implications of Sir Luke’s observation.) Moreover, when we consider that the very structure of the doctor-patient relationship stipulates that transference love is (or should be) unrequited, Sir Luke becomes the ideal love object of the hysteric. Milly says to Kate, “he’ll take care of me for ever and ever” (151). Sir Luke is clearly the master sustaining power over life, and Milly’s ready dependency on Sir Luke’s kind of care allows her as supplicant to entertain the hysteric fantasy of exchanging bodily existence for immaterial existence, of going on “for ever and ever” and, all that time, knowing her doctor’s care as her secret passion. The basic dynamic of Milly’s rapport with Sir Luke underlies her relation with Merton, at least in the sense that her head is filled with fantasies of unrequited “love,” the passion of her soul. In Venice, when Kate has left and Merton stays behind to execute their deception, he visits Milly alone in her chambers. He thoughtlessly asks her if it is “safe” for her to “break her custom of not leaving the house,” to which she responds “Safe—?” and then looks at Merton “for twenty seconds [with] an exquisite pale glare” (354). Merton knows that he has touched the “supersensitive nerve” of her illness (354). But he readily denies that there has been any narrowing of herself and her relations—as he puts it, “I’ll believe whatever you tell me” (about her bodily self). And this blanket acceptance then allows Milly to repress any sense of her body and replace it with her mental will to live (“I want so to live!” [354]). Merton silently registers Milly’s pain and then he looks deeply at her. The text reads: “What had taken place for him, however—the drop, almost with violence, of everything but a sense of her own reality—apparently showed in his face” (355). Note that the text does not say his sense but a sense, which ambiguously means either Merton’s or Milly’s “sense of her own reality.” And, indeed, Milly does use the gap created by Merton’s denial and his silent, soulful look, to convert his vivid sense of her pain into something “that she could take for something else” (355)—namely, his love. This moment, in which Milly seeks her soul mate by looking into Merton’s eyes, is not based simply on his carrying out Kate’s deception, but on Milly’s need to move the actual into a fantasy realm of a silent



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communion between lovers who will never touch each other except with their eyes. And when Milly learns from Lord Mark the plain truth that Merton has not broken with Kate, she remains faithful to her disembodied erotic fantasy, and for his part, as will be shown, Merton learns how to share Milly’s delusion. Guided by the hysteric’s internal imaginings, the partner exchanges (the possibility of) intersubjective communications for “intersubjective repressions,” as Bollas puts it (166). And this is hardly the basis of a promising ethical relation.

Ethics and Hysterical Desire Before moving to textual analysis, I want to introduce Lacanian views of hysteria that are consistent with and augment the Object Relations theory that I have used (and will continue to deploy), since Lacanian theory further allows me to develop Žižek’s reading of the novel’s psychodynamics and ethics in juxtaposition to my own. Kate engages a sexual partner in Merton, but in that relationship she must control desire or, in Bruce Fink’s words, “master desire.” Milly manages her desire by idealizing it, but Kate needs what Fink calls a “triangular circuit” of desire to have the excitement of desire without sexuality. In A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Fink says that “the other is the desiring subject in the hysteric’s fantasy— usually a partner (lover or spouse) who desires when and how the hysteric as object sees fit. Indeed, the hysteric orchestrates things in such a way as to ensure that the other’s desire remains unsatisfied, leaving the hysteric a permanent role as object” (127). The partner, namely, the one who is a desiring subject, becomes a puppet for the hysteric. The hysteric must control the other’s desire because s/he cannot enjoy the other’s sexuality. The hysteric can only desire by orchestrating the partner’s desire, and s/he can only tolerate the partner’s desire when it remains unsatisfied. Fink explains that the hysteric keeps desire alive by seeking out “another woman with whom she can involve or ensnare her partner in a triangular circuit of desire” (127; Fink’s use of a female subject and his emphasis). Fink reads the case of the butcher’s wife from Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams in terms of this hysteric triangulation of desire. He says that “The butcher’s wife detects a desire in her otherwise-so-very-satisfied husband for another woman, the wife’s female friend, but she is also able to create one if she feels the need to. The hysteric finds a way, just when it seems her husband is most satisfied, to provoke a desire in him for something else, or even for someone else” (126-127). The hysteric



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triangulation is the effect of an inadequate separation from the mOther, which creates a profound anxiety about merger and maternal sensuous pleasure. In Fink’s view, the hysteric can handle “desire” but not “jouissance” (120). The point is to be the cause of her partner’s desire, detecting and creating things or persons for him to desire, and not to satisfy the partner herself—ideally, to leave him unsatisfied, since the partner’s desire ensures the hysteric’s continuity as a desiring being. We shall see how both Milly and Kate act as virginal puppet masters of Merton’s desire, but I want to return briefly to Milly in order to suggest that in her gift to Merton, Milly fantasizes a union between ideal self and lover, a lover who desires without a body and is under her spiritual control. In “Kate’s Choice,” Žižek regards Milly’s sacrificial death and bequest as a “fake” ethical sacrifice, just as I do. However, he focuses exclusively on Milly’s serving Merton with a double bind of guilt. In Žižek’s view, Milly’s gestures seem to say, “I offer you wealth as the supreme proof of my saintly kindness, but if you accept, you will be marked by an indelible stain of guilt and moral corruption, and if you do the right thing and reject it, however, you will also not be simply righteous—your very rejection will function as a retroactive admission of your guilt” (295-296). Žižek’s interpretation is certainly important, but it does not take into account that, with her so-called gift, Milly does not just seek revenge against the man she has loved because she is, at the time of her death, still in love with Merton and that, after her death, Merton is in love with her. We see in the closing lines of the novel that Merton no longer cares for Kate herself because, as Kate says, “Her [Milly’s] memory’s your love. You want no other” (456). Hystericized desire is suggested by Kate’s emphasis on the word want. It is as if Milly were to say to Merton, “I offer you all that you want (namely, the money to marry Kate), but my selflessness, which binds you to me and idealizes you, at once masters your desire and refuses you any satisfaction. I keep you wanting, just as I want you to want”: that is to say, in a state of perpetual sexual dissociation. In Žižek’s view, Kate refuses the guilt with which Milly traps Merton, and therefore Kate (and not Milly) is the one who enacts the true ethics of the novel. Kate refuses both the man and the money and her decision is unexpected insofar as Kate has been egotistically calculating right up until the moment of her choice—a choice that leads her to abandon the symbolic order as commodity and marriage broker, and by means of which she becomes fully responsible for her freedom. There are at least two problems with this reading of Kate. The first is that Žižek misreads the actual terms of the novel’s ending. Kate says that she can’t touch the



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money (it would be social suicide for her to do so) except through marriage to Merton: “How can I touch it but through you”; however, Merton, though he has offered to marry Kate, will not in fact touch the money: as he says, I renounce it “through you” (454). He makes this offer of marriage to Kate out of a sense of continuing obligation toward her, but Kate in fact stands to get nothing from marrying him—neither Merton’s love nor Milly’s bequest. The second problem is that Žižek fails to read the unconscious content of James’s depiction of Kate, namely, her parenting and her triangulation of desire (in her relations with Milly and Merton), which are so indicative of the hysteric’s sexual positioning. Let’s look at Kate in terms of Relational Theory, with the focus on the mother’s role in creating the conditions for hysteria. Both Eve Sedgwick and Wendy Graham comment importantly on how Lionel Croy is visually pleased by his daughter’s female figure, but remains indifferent to her as a parent. Lionel’s paternal absenteeism, I believe, sets Kate up for a return to Maud, the surrogate mother, and with this, the damaging possibility of renouncing realized desire. For Sedgwick, in “Is the Rectum Straight?,” Lionel has a queer eye for Kate’s surface beauty, but he ignores Kate’s daughterly claims on him, and that indifference, as Sedgwick puts it, “deserves to be called sexual indifference, not just familial indifference” (82). Thus for Sedgwick, due to Lionel’s parenting, Kate cannot achieve her own coherent sexuality. Graham argues that Lionel’s refusal of the role of the paternal third leaves Kate, in her relation with Merton, with a need to re-negotiate the Oedipal script. However, this heterosexual possibility is short-circuited: in Graham’s words, “Kate is not in love with Merton; she has formed a [paternal] transference to him, which enables her to sustain the imposture of love” (221). Graham is right that Kate sustains an “imposture of love,” but I think it is very misleading to read Kate’s inhibited desire for Merton as due to her unconscious projection of an off-limits Oedipal father (and I will show why). Nevertheless, if we take salient aspects of Sedgwick’s and Graham’s readings together, I think we see, first with Sedgwick, the little-girl psychic sexuality (of a preoedipal, bi-sexual imaginary) and, second with Graham, a suspension or deferral of adult sexuality in the imposture of love, and thus find the beginnings of a description of Kate’s hysteric position. And while both critics comment on Kate’s lack of sexual responsiveness (Sedgwick calls her “frigid” and Graham sees her as sexually anesthetized), neither makes the point that Kate’s dissociation from sexual embodiment is an intrinsically hysteric response to the parental injunction that victimizes her—that requires her performance on the marriage market as a much desired, and yet paradoxically desexualized object, with a much diminished claim to her



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own body and desire. Once we see how Lionel’s relation with Kate denies her sexual subjectivity, then it follows that Lionel’s directive to Kate to return to Maud is effectively a consignment of the daughter to the preOedipal mother. Kate as child must be extremely attentive to this mOther, who insists on the illusion of a false sexual self that she has created for her daughter/niece. Merton sees that Kate is Maud’s “poor actress—he could see how [Kate] always passed: her wig, her paint, her jewels, every mark of her expression impeccable, and her entrance accordingly greeted with the proper round of applause” (217). Kate must keep her mask on, stay “all in her part” (218). Kate is figured, in Maud’s imaginary, as what Bollas calls a “specular creature invested in by mother and child alike”—or, as he also puts it, a Barbie child (63). Maud has for years imagined Kate living a Barbie life in a fabulously expensive Barbie house, and as long as Kate cannot help but respond to this demand (to complete) the mOther (as Kate puts it, “a general surrender of everything . . . to Aunt Maud’s looming personality” [23]), Kate has no access to her desire. But there is a more conflictual dynamic at work here. In Beyond Gender, Paul Verhaege explains that hysteria is a conflictbased merger and separation: “the other is completed by the hysterical subject. At the same time, the other tendency is at work as well, the one aiming at separation, thus causing a split in the hysterical subject and the ever-present hysterical conflict” (157). What allows Kate partly to resist Maud’s demand? Of course, it is the intrigue that she creates with Merton to gain Milly’s fortune. However, this intrigue is not merely a consciously plotted alternative to Maud’s plans (Kate’s attempt to obtain the money for the man she supposedly loves). It is also an unconscious enactment of the hysteric’s “circuit of desire,” where Kate keeps her desire alive by cultivating Milly’s desire for Merton, and by urging Merton to hold Milly spiritually close, showing him how to hold Milly, so that she feels “so delicately, so considerately embraced” (184), and finally by directing Milly to desire Kate herself as Merton desires her. Milly says, “If I were a man I would simply adore [Kate]. In fact I do as it is” (302). Kate provokes Merton, who wants only her, to be somewhat in love with Milly, and she deceives Milly by performing indifference to Merton. The result is that Merton pines for her in ways similar to the Petrarchan lover. And Milly, once set vibrating with desire for Merton, and hoping to help him get over Kate’s departure from Venice, simply inflames Merton all the more by telling him how worthy of adoration Kate is. This triangulation, Merton marvels, is “one of those rare cases of exaltation—food for fiction, food for poetry—in which a man’s fortune with one woman who doesn’t



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care for him [Kate] is positively promoted by the woman who does [Milly]” (248-249). And Kate may be overtly deceiving Milly, but she is unconsciously using her to tease and tantalize her own lover. It is her absence from her lover that is eroticized, for that erotic lure is the only way she can constitute her desire, a desire for which there can be no shortage of wanting (regimen of deprivation) and no erotic fulfillment. Oedipal structuring triangulates desire in a stable form, thereby producing the desiring subject, and the hysteric circuit is an unstable substitute for Oedipal triangulation, thereby producing the subject who must be satisfied with unsatisfied desire. Thus, Graham is half right in that Kate has missed Oedipal structuring, but Graham fails to see that this flimsy, neurotic alternative to Oedipal structuring—the hysteric “circuit of desire”—must be erected when the Oedipus fails. And this psycho-logic establishes Kate in essential forms of dependency, either on Maud or on her partner Merton. She can leave Merton, but she cannot escape projecting and re-projecting hysteric conflict onto any erotic relation that she has. Thus, Žižek mistakes Kate’s leaving Merton for ethical autonomy, when her departure signals a return to Maud, a return that will begin the whole hysterical conflict over again. In the end, Merton exchanges his empty and sexually stifled relationship with Kate for loving Milly, but only from the moment of her death. And this spiritual engagement completely undoes his erotic being. According to Žižek, Merton’s love for Milly (for her having died for him and Kate) is “a fake, a case of what Freud called moral masochism” (304). Žižek is not wrong, but Merton’s need to punish himself (and Kate as well) takes the form of his own desexualization. If Merton has made himself available to Milly “through Kate’s idea of him” (Wings 317), then the “cure” (understanding that the cure is more apparent than real) for Merton’s complicity with Kate pushes him, out of guilt, to be for Milly “through Milly’s own” idea of him (317). Kate tells Merton that during his lonely stay in Venice, as Milly was dying, Milly herself (clinging to her fantasy) had convinced Sir Luke that Merton was sincere, “That it was her you loved” (441). Upon his return from Venice, he is invited to Maud’s as Milly’s “stricken suitor.” This role, in his view, had given him “private hours of wondering what had become of his sincerity” but also hours “of simply reflecting that he had it [that is, his sincerity] all in use” (412). Ultimately, however, Merton does surrender to the view of himself as Milly’s stricken suitor. At the moment when Milly’s letter of bequest arrives, Merton refuses to touch it because he hears in his “spiritual ear” what “might have been audible as a faint, far wail” (451). This is his imaginative revelation of Milly’s sacrificial pain,



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and her pain speaks to Merton now as a passion with which he is at one. The faint, far wail, Merton imagines, “might prevail there in the stillness of his rooms” and might prevail “in his soul, that was somehow one with it” (451). If Merton is a violating sexual being—guilty of having deceived Milly about his relationship with Kate and pushing his carnal desires onto Kate against her wishes—then Merton’s guilt is removed through pain, but pain that he imagines as his ascetic spiritual union with Milly. It is the very absence of Milly that becomes the source of Merton’s passion, one that is inevitably masochistic, and yet affords his flight into deception as truth and into a wail of despair that is defensively, hysterically reinterpreted as a higher order of love between disincarnated souls. All three characters show us that the failure to own the sexual body, due to hysteria, plays havoc with ethical relatedness. The acts of “giving”—Milly says, “I give and give and give” (301)—of giving up one’s partner (Merton and Kate) or one’s life and fortune (Milly) are all acts based on incapacity to inhabit the sexual body, a repudiation of it; therefore, giving (oneself) to the other in “love,” as Merton and Milly go on to do in an ecstasy of self-sacrifice, compounds the initial rejection of the sexual self and cannot make the self accountable to itself or the other. With her gift, Milly controls Merton, who is compelled to be one with her, mentally and in erotic deprivation. His assumption of the ascetic task of caring for Milly “for ever and ever” in her absence is meant to inoculate him from his guilt, not to come to terms with it. And all three characters show us how their relatedness only mimics the give and take of considered, empathic, and ethical connection, for their counterfeit is actually a heavy regimen of repression, one exacted by the self who captivates, controls, and subdues the other, and then is mutually enforced (by self and other).

Notes 1 2

See Samuels and Sears. See Eickhoff 40.

Works Cited Bollas, Christopher. Hysteria. New York: Routledge, 2000. Print. Edel, Leon, and Lyall H. Powers. The Complete Notebooks of Henry James. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. Print. Eickhoff, Andrew R. “A Psychoanalytic Study of St. Paul’s Theology of Sex.” Pastoral Psychology 18.4 (1967): 35-42. Print.



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Ender, Evelyn. Sexing the Mind: Nineteenth Century Fictions of Hysteria. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995. Print. Fink, Bruce. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Theory and Technique. Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1997. Print. James, Henry. The Wings of the Dove (1902). Middlesex, UK: Penguin, 1976. Print. —. Preface. The Wings of the Dove. The Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton, 1978. 3-16. Print. Graham, Wendy. Henry James’s Thwarted Love. Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 1999. Print. Pearson, John H. The Prefaces of Henry James: Framing the Modern Reader. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 1997. Print. Samuels, Charles T. “The Ambiguity of Henry James.” The Wings of the Dove. By Henry James. The Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton, 1978. 574-580. Print. Sears, Sallie. “The Negative Imagination: Form and Perspectives in the Novels of Henry James.” The Wings of the Dove. By Henry James. The Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton, 1978. 551-563. Print. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Is the Rectum straight?: Identification and Identity in The Wings of the Dove.” Tendencies. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993. Print. Verhaeghe, Paul. Does the Woman Exist?: From Freud’s Hysteric to Lacan’s Feminine. Trans. Marc du Ry. New York: Other Press, 1997. Print. —. Beyond Gender: From Subject to Drive. New York: Other Press, 2001. Print. Žižek, Slavoj. “Kate’s Choice, or, the Materialism of Henry James.” Lacan: The Silent Partners. London: Verso, 2006. Print.



 

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN “THE DEAR LITTLE TOBACCONIZED SALON”: HENRIETTA REUBELL AS QUEER SALONNIÈRE IN HENRY JAMES’S PARIS PAUL FISHER

Following Leon Edel’s lead, recent biographers of Henry James have understood Henrietta Reubell (c. 1849-1924), James’s wealthy FrancoAmerican friend, chiefly as a passive female confidante, to whom James wrote 119 known letters.1 These letters, often lengthy and detailed, have so far been cited primarily as evidence for Henry James’s life. Although they contain more information about Reubell than any other extant source, few if any scholars have examined these letters with a view to documenting Reubell’s own life and career. Very little other documentary evidence of Reubell’s Paris salon at 42 avenue Gabriel has survived, a circumstance that has promoted a reductive view of Reubell, also reinforced by her historical silence: although the James archive at Houghton Library houses 499 letters written to James, not a single letter from Reubell has been preserved. 2 Other documentary evidence on Reubell’s life is scant, and some of this has been rediscovered only recently. For example, John Singer Sargent’s small portrait of Reubell, watercolor and gouache on paper, dated 1884-85, was privately-owned and unknown to Sargent scholars until 1988—just one index of an obscured history that is only now coming to light (Ormond and Kilmurray154). Recently, Peter Brooks has rightly understood Reubell as highly relevant to questions of James’s sexuality, interpreting her as a nonsexual foil to Paul Zhukovsky, whom James met in Paris at about the same time (Brooks 16, 38-39). In Brooks’s account of 1876, however, Reubell emerges mainly as a rejected heterosexual courtship opportunity: “If I wanted to desire to marry an ugly Parisian-American, with money and toutes les elegances,” Brooks quotes James as writing his brother William, “Miss R would be a very good objective. But I don’t” (qtd. in Brooks 16;

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CL 1872-76 3: 106). In other words, Brooks detaches Reubell from what Eric Savoy characterizes as the “queer affiliations and identifications” that Brooks otherwise acknowledges in James’s Paris milieu (200). Yet Reubell’s role in James’s career is arguably both more significant and transgressive, as her salon in the avenue Gabriel historically accommodated such sexually unconventional figures as Oscar Wilde, Robert de Montesquiou, Edmond de Polignac, and John Singer Sargent, creating what I will argue is a queer cultural space—“queer” in this analysis encompassing a range of illicit sexualities—a chameleonic and ambiguous physical, social, and linguistic space that also accommodated the skittish and “respectable” James. James’s own framing of this sexualized potential emerges powerfully if codedly in The Ambassadors (1903), in which the character of Miss Barrace, modeled on Reubell, provides much more than the domestically feminine “cherished foyer” that Leon Edel ascribed to James’s and Reubell’s forty-year friendship (Henry James: A Life 190). Though Miss Barrace serves the specific sexual economy of James’s novel, she nevertheless illuminates the historical Reubell by delineating what straitlaced Lambert Strether calls “the irregular life” (AM 82). In fact, James’s fictional portrayal of Miss Barrace is arguably more radical and revelatory not only than Edel’s biographical rendition of a conventionally feminine “Miss Reubell” but also than James’s epistolary representation of Reubell’s “dear little old Petite Salon,” with its throne-like but domestically unthreatening red velvet sofa (19 Oct 1909, 1149). Although some evidence of Reubell’s social if not sexual unconventionality emerges from James’s letters, James’s courtly, affectionate, and guarded correspondence provides an incomplete and necessarily distorted picture of Reubell and her salon, and one that appears especially one-sided when paired with James’s fictional portrait of 1903. Through Miss Barrace’s heavy smoking, doubleentendre, and sexual innuendo, James’s novel hints at this character’s marked sexual unconventionality and encodes her as a keeper of erotic secrets and illicit information, hidden knowledge that allows her to facilitate liaisons in the art world. In this essay, I will explore how such a representation sheds light on Reubell’s historical role in Paris as a bohemian art hostess, a generation before Gertrude Stein, as well on her relation to James’s life, sexuality, and career. Even with James’s extensive letters to her, Reubell suffers from a documentary obscurity that creates problems and limitations in determining her historical role. Yet this very obscurity suggests the historical invisibility and erasure of women’s lives as well as the marginalization of unconventional or queer milieus. Reubell’s connection with high-profile



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literary and artistic figures might have placed her at the center of Parisian bohemia and modernity but more often relegated her to a marginalized, rarified, and semi-secret—perhaps even “closeted”—status. What is more, Reubell, neither a writer nor an art collector, chose to pursue that ephemeral and ineffable women’s career, a salon hostess or salonnière. Unlike Gertrude Stein in a later generation, Reubell did not document or mythologize her own salon, and the only other substantial description of it appears in the memoirs of British painter William Rothenstein (18721945). Yet both James’s and Rothenstein’s accounts make it clear that “the tall Etta,” “the shepherdess of the studios,” “la grande Mademoiselle,” as James called her, offered more than just the “very considerable capacity for development” that James initially imagined in her (HJL 2: 42; CL 1872-76 3: 106; Hirshler 71-72). Rothenstein, who disliked “pseudogeniuses,” found Reubell the “most notable personality among the Americans [he] met with in Paris”; he portrayed her as “permit[ting] anything,” fostering “adventurous conversation,” and facilitating vital alliances in the Paris art world (Rothenstein 1: 81). Reubell’s “adventurous conversation,” which Henry James lovingly recreated in The Ambassadors, has not otherwise survived, but it was partly a product of her unconventional, cosmopolitan, and rebellious family background. Her paternal great-grandfather, Jean-François Reubell (1747-1807), was a fiery Alsatian Jacobin who later took part in the Thermidorian Reaction and helped bring down Maximilien Robespierre, becoming president of the Directoire in 1795 and remaining active in Revolutionary politics until Napoleon’s coup of 1799. 3 Henrietta’s paternal grandfather, Jean-Jacques Reubell (1777-1847), “a man of high spirit” and a Revolutionary general at twenty-one, visited the United States in 1803 and was bold enough not only to marry one Mademoiselle Pascault in Baltimore but also to encourage his friend, Jérôme Bonaparte, the Emperor’s brother, to marry an American, Elizabeth Patterson. Back in Paris, Jean-Jacques intrepidly defended Jérôme to the Emperor’s face and thus was forced to take refuge from Napoleon’s wrath in America for more than a decade. Henrietta’s father, Frédéric, seems to have lived more quietly, but in 1839 he also married an American, Julia C. Coster, in New York City. Coster’s father, Henrietta’s maternal grandfather, was John G. Coster, a Dutch-born New York merchant whose large fortune rivaled that of his friend and Masonic brother, John Jacob Astor. Etta Reubell inherited money, but her elite status was revolutionary, entrepreneurial, and transnational, a legacy she evidently savored.4 Reubell’s specific modes of transnational mobility, both inherited and cultivated, formed the basis for a cosmopolitan salon that, somewhat



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unusually in Paris, readily combined French, British, and American figures. The woman James described as an “arch Parisienne” or “our Parisian idol,” and who often embodied Paris itself for him, was actually most often socially labeled, as an Anglophone inhabitant of the American colony, as an American (1 Jan 1893, 1115; 10 Sep [1893], 1119). Yet James’s correspondence suggests that Reubell never visited the United States even though her family owned property in New York City as late as 1900 and though James tried repeatedly to entice her to visit “the great, queer country” (New York Times, 20 Feb. 1900; 11 Mar. [1886], 1065). Reubell’s travels conformed to the well-worn routes favored by elite American expatriates—England, Switzerland, and Italy as well as parts of France—and she often took such holidays in conjunction with Americans, for example at Dinard in Brittany with her friends the Edward Darley Boits in the summer of 1882 (3 Sep. [1882], 1048). Later in life, Reubell made frequent visits to a cure spa at Ouchy, near Lausanne, in Switzerland, a habit that inspired James to tweak her national identity yet again, calling her an “incurable Swiss” and a “vraie Vaudoise” (10 Nov. 1895, 1131). So complex, chameleonic, and flexible an identity suited an art hostess who aspired to negotiate the Paris art world, an increasingly transnational milieu in the late nineteenth century as more international students filled the art schools and more non-French painters exhibited at the Salons. Like Gertrude Stein, Reubell seems to have come to salon hosting indirectly and through her brother. Jean-Jacques (“Jack”) Reubell (c. 1850-1933), an art collector married to another wealthy American, Adeline E. Post, originally lived at 42 avenue Gabriel, his sister’s famous address in the heart of the American “colony” near the Champs-Élysées, though he later moved to 65 rue d’Anjou and 25 rue de Marignan; he apparently met Henry James, through Mrs. James Mason Crafts, before his sister did (Sutliffe 80; Tully 289; Hooper, “American Colony” 779; HJL 2: 20; CL 1872-76 3: 51). Educated at Cambridge, Jack Reubell fraternized with British and American artists and writers, including James, who described him as Henrietta’s “handsome brother” (26 Mar. [1878], 1040). Though passing references to the “Reubells”—Jack and Etta—appeared in James McNeill Whistler’s correspondence on into the 1880s, Jack Reubell seems increasingly to have left to his sister the field of living artists and writers.5 James scarcely mentioned Jack Reubell after the 1870s, except to send him and his sister condolences on the death of his wife in 1892 (25 Jan [1892], 1103). In later life, Jack Reubell pursued an interest in European court swords and daggers, eventually donating his collections to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum in



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New York (Bashford 228-33; Grancsay 115-18). He accumulated museum objects while his sister accrued painters and not their paintings—another difference from Gertrude Stein and possible reason for Henrietta Reubell’s historical obscurity. In its initiatory stages, Reubell’s salon also involved her mother Julia Coster Reubell, with whom Etta lived until her parent’s death in 1884. Julia Reubell no doubt served as an anchor of respectability during the crucial formation of her daughter’s salon, counterbalancing the potential sexual transgressiveness of the Parisian art world. In this respect Reubell’s situation resembled that of the new wave of women artists being trained in Paris in the 1880s and 1890s, likewise operating through a paradox, as described by Christine Stansell, between women’s respectable role as “tastemakers” and cultural authorities, and women artists’ perceived threat as “disruptive sexual figure[s]”: “Of all the arts in the nineteenth century, only acting had such transgressive connotations for women as did painting and sculpting” (26, 32). Though Reubell was not a painter, her role as a “shepherdess of the studios” implied an intimacy with the sexually charged bohemian spaces of French art production, popularized in the transatlantic press and in such works as George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894). Accordingly, James’s attentiveness to Reubell’s mother in the early stages of the friendship demonstrated his persistent preference for the perceived traditional domesticity and conventional femininity of Reubell’s household over her more daring art-world activities, even if these transgressive pursuits made her one of his most compelling Parisian friends. Reubell’s “admirable little salon,” as James called it, was largely informal, amateur, and focused on “society”; indeed, Reubell is sometimes misleadingly labeled a “wealthy socialite” (Edel, Life of Henry James 2: 294; 26 Mar. [1878], 1040). James, though one contemporary credited him with “carr[ying] the salon spirit about with him,” chose chiefly to memorialize not Reubell’s gatherings but rather his private tête-à-têtes with her on her red velvet sofa, under a golden canopy, in an alcove that accumulated “the fragrance of all the cigarettes that have been smoked out in the discussion of the pleasant things of Paris” (Harris 829-30; Edel, Life of Henry James 1: 301; 1 Nov. [1884], 1056). James seems to have avoided Reubell’s Sunday gatherings more than he frequented them; but although her “saloon for gifted infants” sometimes amused him, and though he tellingly characterized her salon and its clientele as “little” or “young” (“votre petit monde”; “votre jeune monde”), he also affirmed his friend’s “delightful qualities” as well as her “cachet” in coordinating this



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long-running if highly specialized feature of the Parisian social and artistic landscape (HJL 3: 435, 107; 5 Dec. [1882], 1051; 27 June [1883], 1052). By contrast, Rothenstein’s account foregrounds Reubell’s salon as a career achievement, portraying her as having mastered crucial prerequisites of a high-culture Belle-Époque art hostess. Late Victorian society- and artjournalists insisted, for example, that the central female personage of a salon needed to be what one writer called a “particular lion.” Accordingly, Rothenstein observed that Reubell, besides being “a maiden lady, with a shrewd and original mind,” featured as a “striking figure,” reminding him of “Queen Elizabeth—if one can imagine an Elizabeth with an American accent and a high, shrill voice like a parrot’s.” A salon mistress was also thought to embody “quite remarkable tolerance and un-selfconsciousness [sic],” inviting “all and sundry” to her dinners and thus networking isolated artists. Rothenstein reported that Reubell, who invited “[a]ll that was distinguished in French, English, and American society,” indeed proved “adept at bringing out the most entertaining qualities of the guests at her table. She would often ask us to meet people whom she felt we would like, or who she thought might be of use” (Harris 829-30; Rothenstein 1: 81). This quintessentially feminine role of hostess— supportive, behind-the-scenes, secondary—was easily taken for granted, erased, or forgotten, but, in Reubell’s case as in others, this work had consequential results: Rothenstein encountered James and Whistler at her dinners, and James met Sargent through her agency. Erica Hirshler’s recent discovery that James met Sargent two years earlier than Leon Edel believed—in 1882 and not 1884—hints at how private and enclosed, and how relevant to queer interaction, her “petit monde” would have been (Hirshler 72-73; 16 Oct. 1882, 2602). James’s own accounts of the salon weighed the heteronormative domesticity of Reubell’s home-based cottage industry against the potentially queer luxuriousness, especially as constructed in James’s epistolary discourse, of her “lambris dorés” (palatial home) (13 Oct. [1883], 1053). Along with aestheticized images of Reubell smoking in “the dear little tobacconized salon,” James frequently referenced her old red velvet sofa as a metonymy for Reubell’s complex role as a personal confidante, social networker, and elite arbiter of culture (5 Dec. [1885], 1062). This “immemorial sofa,” “the red plush sofa of 1850,” allowed James playfully to explore some of the contradictions of a role that for him evoked the high-cultural cachet of French belles-lettres if also, more uneasily, a potentially transgressive female-centered tradition (19 Oct. 1909, 1149; 14 Oct. [1890], 1095).6 That James characterized Reubell’s iconic sofa as a throne (“the throne, in Europe, to which—as it’s one of the most ancient—



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I am most loyal”) connected him to the convention of representing salonnières as queens, as Rothenstein had done with his reference to Queen Elizabeth: a metaphor potentially both empowering and dismissive (11 Oct. 1900, 1142). For James, however, Reubell’s sofa was less a site of gender identity and cultural authority than a complex terrain of high-cultural discourse, labeled “conversation,” that encompassed both the public and interactive mode of her salon and the private colloquy of her tête-à-têtes. For James, Reubell’s essential art-form and professional medium was her “inimitable conversation”: when James described his friend as “the most delightful of Miss Reubells,” a “masterpiece” that shouldn’t be retouched, this was the type of achievement he objectified (21 Jun. [1892], 1108; 15 Jun. [1885], 1058). That Reubell was a “high-tempered” American woman, that she was “brilliant” and capable of being “intimately appreciated” in cultivated circles, owed to her abilities as a conversationalist, both as an intimate confidante and as the more authoritative and assertive maîtresse of a salon (26 Mar. [1878], 1040; 9 Jan. 1882, 1046). A salonnière’s conversation, perishable and ephemeral, depended for its preservation on its transcription and representation by others; no one recorded Reubell’s table talk, however, and James in his correspondence did not serve as Reubell’s Boswell. James’s letters, however, reflect the range of cultural expertise to which a Belle-Époque high-art hostess might aspire. For example, Reubell owned an orchestra box (baignoire) at the Théâtre Français, and discussions of contemporary English and French drama fill many letters (4 May [1893], 1117). Predictably, James and Reubell discussed literature, most often James’s own work—a reflection, too, of the “laden” book table that prominently featured in Reubell’s salon (29 Dec 1893, 1122). Their most frequent topic was contemporary painting—the explicit specialty of Reubell’s salon—most often the work of their mutual friend John Singer Sargent, who appears, briefly or extensively, in almost a third of James’s letters to Reubell. James’s remarks on Sargent in these letters have figured prominently in Sargent scholarship—for example James’s detailed appraisal of Sargent’s portrait of Ellen Terry in 1889 (23 Mar. [1889], 1089). Yet although James could pronounce on Sargent’s opus and career, Sargent functioned most often as a discursive focal point through which conversation, here in its epistolary simulacrum, could be generated and perpetuated. In the complex of discourses that James labeled “conversation,” it was the mode and manner of Reubell’s talk as much as its material that made its performance consumable, memorable, and distinctive to a salon hostess. “Your charming letter,” James wrote Reubell in 1890, “quite causes my



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mouth to water over the gallery of types you looked at through the longhandled eye-glass & the pretty cigarette smoke that both suit you so well” (14 Oct. [1890], 1095). Such stylized conversational matter, performed by a palpable dramatic persona, was witty, anecdotal, perhaps even literary— but also a matter of “interesting gossipry,” as James described it (26 May 1900, 1141). On James’s part, at least, such gossip rarely amounted to “adventurous” conversation, as it primarily treated the travels, engagements, marriages, births, and deaths of mutual acquaintances, with only an occasional excursion into scandals such as the “Eames explosion,” the highly publicized divorce case between soprano Emma Eames and society painter Julian Story (9 Sep. [1891], 1101). But although most of the gossip on James’s side of the correspondence appears heteronormative, gossip as an ambiguous and suggestive queer discourse would have great resonance in James’s fictional embodiment of Reubell in The Ambassadors. One of the very few of Reubell’s remarks James recorded also preserves this racy, provocative aspect: “Your remark about Sargent’s nude brown girl [Egyptian Girl, 1891] (he was too modest to make her white,) is highly delightful”—a worldly observation, complexly juxtaposing race and sexuality in the fraught nineteenth-century context. James endorsed such unfeminine conversational daring insofar as he encouraged Reubell to “[c]ontinue to defy all formulas & to delight all friends” (21 Jun [1892], 1108). James’s epistolary account of Reubell’s salon, in fact, shows some awareness of the protofeminist and queer implications of the physical, cultural, and discursive space of Reubell’s salon. In 1893, James satirically phrased these possibilities as interrogatives: “Do the little painters still turn up on Sunday afternoons, and the scrappy ladies thirst for more tea?” (29 Dec 1893, 1122). Reubell’s salon, that is, not only incorporated both art and literature but also, more daringly, “little painters” and “scrappy ladies” as essential personas in the salon’s collective performance. For James, these perceived types figured as humorous incarnations of social categories that for Reubell seem to have held central importance in her salon’s construction. Both “little painters” and “scrappy ladies,” that is, enacted key violations of both gender and sexual norms that Ruebell’s salon seems also to have facilitated and encouraged. To treat James’s second category first, Reubell’s salon regularly featured at least one bold and unconventional if not “scrappy” woman— Mary Louisa (“Isa”) Cushing Boit (1845-1894), the wife of American expatriate artist Edward Darley Boit. James described this expatriate Bostonian as “kind, light, laughing, eternally juvenile” as well as “brilliant,” invoking her in almost every letter he wrote Reubell up until Boit’s death



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in 1894 (10 Oct. 1894, 1124; 12 Nov. [1886], 1068). James saw Boit as unconventional enough in her femininity to have “as much business with daughters as she has with elephants” (10 Sep [1893], 1119). Reubell’s close friendship with “Iza,” as James idiosyncratically spelled her name, comes across in the letters as a strong, vibrant female partnership: to James these two were “Iza & Etta,” and James attributed to Reubell a highly cohesive feminine bond, such that Isa, “once she readjusts her flounces in Paris, will pin you to those petticoats & not suffer you to stray so far from her fluttering wing” (16 Jan. [1891], 1096). In considering their mutual role, James declared that he would someday, in his fiction, “do you & Mrs. Boit, dans le même sujet” (20 June [1888], 1080). Though no such pairing emerged in The Ambassadors, this friendship for James palpably underpinned Reubell’s salon, as Reubell was “in alternation with Mrs. Boit . . . the shepherdesses of the studios”—a phrase by which James seems to have implied not primarily that they conducted tours of Paris art studios—a common activity in the Belle-Époque high art world—but that they actively managed the connections and careers of young artists (26 Feb. [1884], 1054). The “little painters” at Reubell’s salon, as constituents of Reubell’s “petit monde,” disparagingly hinted at the queer element that was a salient feature of the salon. With more established figures like Edmond de Polignac and Robert de Montesquiou, James could consider Reubell as “la grande Mademoiselle,” even if he dismissively pronounced the flamboyant Montesquiou “curious, but slight” ([5 Jul. 1885], 1059). James’s dislike of some of the more colorful, blatant, or extroverted of Reubell’s queer salonnards—the bluff, masculine Sargent being a salient exception— meant that his letters documented their presence and activities chiefly through scorn and distaste. For example, James was not sure he would have “altogether reveled” in an “Oscaresque breakfast” Reubell hosted in 1888, and he roundly criticized to Reubell Oscar Wilde’s speech after a performance of Lady Windermere’s Fan in 1892, where the playwright appeared “with a metallic blue carnation in his buttonhole & a cigarette in his fingers”—provocative smoking in this case striking James as anything but charming (29 Sep. [1888], 1086; 25 Feb. 1892, 1105). Reubell’s attitude toward Oscar Wilde and her other guests appears markedly more tolerant and flexible than that of James, who preferred to consider Reubell’s entertainments as “gracefully Bohemian & comfortably romantic” rather than daring or outrageous. And indeed Reubell seems to have walked a fine line between genteel and bohemian spheres in Paris (29 Sep [1888], 1086).



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Such an ambiguous and liminal space, however, produced its own dynamic advantages for the salonnière and her guests. A hostess’s métier of making introductions would have had particular significance for the queer underground of the Paris art world. At the very least, Reubell seems to have resembled Marcel Proust’s Mme Verdurin in the case of the Baron de Charlus and Charlie Morel, able to tolerate or encourage her members’ nonnormative desires in the interest of her “petit noyau” or “petit groupe.”7 Such a view is supported by Rothenstein’s account: even though Rothenstein made a career as an establishment figure—had a happy marriage and directed the Tate Gallery for three decades—his representation of Reubell foregrounds her subtle transgressive agency. Reubell “permitted anything but dullness and ill manners,” Rothenstein wrote, “delighting in wit and paradox and adventurous conversation.” He also noted that Reubell vocally defended her friend Oscar Wilde against “Whistler’s jibes” (Rothenstein 1: 81). Such advocacy demonstrated personal loyalty as well as a salonnière’s signal trait of tolerance. But there is evidence that, though “respectable” at least in the context of expatriate Paris, Reubell deliberately cultivated queer connections and that her “adventurous conversation” and “permit[ting] everything” reflected an active, knowledgeable unconventionality. Perhaps surprisingly, James’s fictionalized portrait of Reubell in The Ambassadors recuperates these very submerged queer tendencies. Lambert Strether discovers Miss Barrace to be “mature meager erect and eminently gay, highly adorned, perfectly familiar, freely contradictious.” He worries that her milieu in Paris constitutes “the most baited, the most gilded of traps,” and that, as a worldly, mysteriously-knowledgeable expatriate, she embodies “new measures, other standards, a different scale of relations” (AM 79). These “new measures” and “other standards,” in addition, codedly connect to sexuality through Miss Barrace’s smoking—a habit modeled on Reubell, along with her high-pitched excitable voice and abundant turquoise jewelry. In 1888, when Reubell perceived something of herself in the character of Madame de Cliché in The Reverberator, James assured her that when he actually portrayed her in fiction, it would be “with all your accessories”—and the most suggestive of these, in The Ambassadors, would be Miss Barrace’s cigarettes (20 June [1888], 1080). Although in James’s letters Reubell’s smoking figured as a cozy nostalgic fragrance, in historical context this habit—as James was certainly aware—carried provocative connotations. By the 1870s, when James met Reubell, cigarettes were considered, according to historian Cassandra Tate, “the province of chorus girls, actresses, prostitutes, and other women of doubtful reputation” (24). According to the New York



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Times in 1879, “the practice of smoking among ladies seems to be generally regarded as the usual accompaniment of, or prelude to, immorality” (“Women and Smoking” 2). Dolores Mitchell has also documented the link between late nineteenth-century women’s smoking and rebellion, feminism, and sexual irregularity: “[W]omen smokers were usually ‘outsiders’—actresses, prostitutes, lesbians, degenerate society women, or ‘new women’ for whom cigarettes symbolized deviance” (3). French art frequently depicted “prostitutes, grisettes, and lorettes smoking with men at masked balls, in billiard rooms, and in boudoirs,” imbuing cigarettes with “dangerous associations” (Mitchell 3). Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen reinforced the link between women, cigarettes, and sexual promiscuity both in France, and, after its first American performance in 1878, in the United States. In the Anglo-American world, high-profile cases of women conspicuously smoking created scandal, intrigue, and infamy for figures such as Lola Montez (Eliza Rosanna Gilbert, 1818 or 1821-1861), the Irish “Spanish dancer” and mistress of Ludwig I of Bavaria; Lillie Langtry (1853-1929), the actress and lover of Edward VII; and Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864-1952), the American “New Woman” photographer and journalist—all of whom appeared in bold poses, holding cigarettes, in widely circulated photographs. In a case more parallel to Reubell’s, Natalie Barney (1876-1972), a later expatriate hostess in Paris, also conspicuously sported a cigarette as well as a female lover. Sargent, who painted many provocative portraits, chose to depict Reubell without a cigarette, as did Rothenstein in his memoir, but such omissions chiefly establish the more subtle or hidden quality of Reubell’s still-marked unconventionality. For Miss Barrace, however, in James’s wonderful and suggestive phrase, “her smoking was the least of her freedoms” (AM 81). In The Ambassadors, in fact, Strether becomes obsessed with Miss Barrace’s “freedoms”; he frets about these as the “sum . . . of her license,” as a mysterious accumulation of female vice, but these freedoms actually correspond to historical liberties associated, often pejoratively, with the “American colony” in Paris in which Reubell lived her life. Besides smoking and speaking frankly, Miss Barrace enjoys the unfeminine privilege of circulating at parties unattended—a liberty that journalist Lucy Hooper in 1874 considered very “American” but which others associated with French or expatriate laxity (AM 143; Hooper, “American Colony” 780). As an independent older woman outside the marriage market, Miss Barrace commands great social and physical mobility—key to her role as a risquée savante and social mediator in the novel. In a different sense from Strether, Miss Barrace qualifies as an “ambassador”—



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between bohemian and bourgeois, licit and illicit spheres—a worldly female who doesn’t fit into obvious categories of feminine disrepute catalogued by contemporary observers—being neither an “adventuress,” a divorcée, a demimondaine, or one of a “flock of dusky-fleeced sheep, or of soiled doves” whom some Americans saw as a “moral blot” in the general “evil and dissipation” of Paris (Hooper, “French Society” 395; Hooper, “American Colony” 781). On the contrary, Miss Barrace’s wide knowledge of the art world anchors her among respectable “wealthy and aesthetic persons” who pursue “artistic and social tastes”—although she raises suspicions about art bohemia when she remarks, “Oh, the artist-quarter and that kind of thing,” a comment that leads prudish Waymarsh to form a “grave estimate of her own laxity” (Hooper, “American Colony” 780; AM 81). Miss Barrace’s “laxity,” in fact, crucially consists in her illicit knowledge of hidden Parisian worlds and her ability to express such knowledge under the scrutiny of normative morality. Such a power was understood as a salient feature of the “American Colony,” whose racy conversation struck Richard Harding Davis as symptomatic: “The American Colony is not wicked,” Davis wrote in 1895, “but it would like to be thought so . . . [They] tell risqué stories and talk scandalously of each other and even of young girls” (275). Yet whereas Davis portrayed such talk as fatuous affectation, for Miss Barrace gossip and innuendo expand into a complex discourse of liberation, suggestion, and celebration. Her self-expression—a knowing, approving, playful language of sexuality, though couched in insider codes—emerges as Miss Barrace’s most crucial “freedom.” Her rapturous admiration of Mme de Vionnet as “wonderful” reveals a swooning appreciation of a woman who not only has “beautiful shoulders” but also can enticingly morph into “fifty women.” Miss Barrace’s repeated reaction to Mme de Vionnet is a high-pitched and orgasmic “Oh, oh, oh!” that enacts veiled same-sex eroticism, especially because she cannot account to Strether for this frisson: “I’m very strange; I’m like that; and often I can’t explain” (AM 187-89). Yet, more than suggesting lesbian desires—and, despite Reubell’s close friendship with Isa Boit, no evidence for or against this possibility emerges from historical sources—the narrative constructs Miss Barrace as an observer, interpreter, and facilitator of other people’s sexuality. Miss Barrace, that is, doesn’t “live all [she] can”—in James’s famous phrase—so much as approve of those who do. Miss Barrace’s pleasures remain vicarious, and her chief “freedom” lies in the knowledge of the rich sexualities around her and her ability simultaneously to capture and obscure them in language. Such a character seems particularly Jamesian,



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but this contradiction also fits Reubell’s historical role as hostess of an ambiguous art-world salon. Rothenstein foregrounded Reubell’s “adventurous conversation,” and James reformulated it as a tantalizing, rich, ineffable medium of verbal implication related to Reubell’s performance of a salon—a portrayal all the more provocative, incidentally, given the historical silencing of Reubell’s actual voice. In the novel, as Miss Barrace discusses Little Bilham, Chad, and Mme de Vionnet, Strether tries to decode her insinuations: “If Strether had been sure at each juncture what . . . [Miss Barrace] talked about, he might have traced others”—other “freedoms,” that is—“and winced at them.” Bewildered by Miss Barrace’s verbal license, Strether puritanically wrestles with Miss Barrace’s queer implications, inwardly exclaiming “Oh no—not that!” at each of her innuendoes (AM 81-82). But in Miss Barrace’s petit monde the sexual content is very much “that,”—the stressed Jamesian pronoun without a nameable antecedent—and her relative freedom to speak about illicit love remains highly stimulating and powerful to Strether and to the narrative itself. James celebrated this power in the cultured and safely-fictionalized Miss Barrace but seemingly kept it silent and private in the case of the historical Reubell, all of whose letters he apparently destroyed. Were these, like her gossipy, tobaccolaced conversation, too “adventurous”? Puzzlingly, Whistler, Wilde, Sargent, and her other salonnards didn’t preserve Reubell’s correspondence, either—though probably not because this original, daring talker wrote dull or trivial letters. In this light, The Ambassadors corrects distortions in Edel’s and other accounts, providing an evasive yet compelling portrait of Miss Barrace as a keeper of queer spaces—linguistic, psychological, and social. The novel also intriguingly maps both the powers and limitations of an unconventional salonnière as a pioneer of such queer space—in its manifold relations to other versions of such space that were emerging during Reubell’s lifetime and, as it happens, right on her doorstep. Reubell’s salon lay not only in the heart of the American Colony but also next to the “most popular homosexual meeting place in Paris” between the 1870s and 1918, the lower segment of the Champs-Élysées (Jackson 29). Though social historians have tended to understand queer spaces in terms of emerging subcultural terrains—in the case of the “ritzy” Belle-Époque Champs-Élysées, “bars, cafes, bathhouses, and theaters”—such space was not limited to boulevard life but also complexly connected to aristocratic, artistic, and even genteel terrains (Choquette 156; Jackson 29). Especially under the management of such a bold, tolerant, mediating figure as



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Reubell, multiple social worlds could intersect even in James’s cherished and rarified “labris dorés.”

Notes 1

According to A Calendar of the Letters of Henry James, this number is greater than letters written to Ariana Curtis (100 letters), Isabella Stewart Gardner (100 letters), or Mary Cadwalader Jones (113), though fewer than letters written to Grace Norton (174) and Edith Wharton (173) (Mamoli Zorzi 237). The Houghton archive holds 108 letters that James wrote to Reubell between 1878 and 1914; in this essay, these letters will be cited parenthetically by date and Houghton’s numbering of the letters: Correspondence and Journals of Henry James Jr. (MS am 1094). Houghton Library, Harvard University. 2 Only two documents in the archive contain a thin, neat pen-script that is possibly Reubell’s handwriting, two of James’s envelopes on which dates “Received” and “Answered” have been recorded. (27 Aug. [1892], 1111; 19 Dec. 1895, 1137). As Reubell did not employ a secretary, it seems reasonable to attribute these entries to her and to see them as evidence of her meticulousness as a correspondent to James, who almost always began his letters to her with charming apologies for not having replied to her letters with equal alacrity. 3 Rothenstein mistakenly believed that Jean-François Reubell was Henrietta’s grandfather, but he was her great-grandfather, according to Dean Bashford (Rothenstein 1: 81; Bashford 232). 4 Bashford 230-32; Grancsay 115-118; “Died—Reubell” 2; New York Marriage Notices, 1836-1842, New York Society Library; Lanier 103. 5 For example “the Reubells in Paris,” mentioned in James McNeill Whistler to Thomas Waldo Story, [1883-84], Huntington Library, HM 46360; or “You can show [newspaper cuttings] to the Ruebells,” in Whistler to Julian Story, [May 1889], Library of Congress, PWC 2/60/1. 6 The power, importance, and self-determination of seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury French salonnières has been debated especially since the publication of Dena Goodman’s feminist The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994). Goodman argues that salon hostesses were “not social climbers but intelligent, self-educated, and educating women” (76). More recent scholarship, however, has substantiated a more complex characterization of women’s roles in these as well as nineteenth-century salons. 7 In Proust’s novel, one member of Mme Verdurin’s artistic salon is “très étonné d’apprendre que les Verdurin consentaient à recevoir M. de Charlus” (“astonished to learn that the Verdurins consented to receive M. de Charlus”); Mme Verdurin furiously replies that “Vous faites entièrement erreur” (“You are entirely mistaken”), with the motive of keeping the baron’s violinist lover, Charlie Morel, as an attraction of her Wednesday salon (Proust 2: 154, 157). Reubell’s motives seem to have been more generous and tolerant as well as less manipulative. For an analysis of Mme Verdurin as a salon hostess, see Viti 20, 42, 80, and 96.



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Works Cited Bashford, Dean. “The Reubell Collection of Court Swords and Early Daggers.” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 21 (Oct. 1926): 228-33. Print. Brooks, Peter. Henry James Goes to Paris. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007. Print. Choquette, Leslie. “Homosexuals in the City: Representations of Lesbian and Gay Space in Nineteenth-Century Paris.” Homosexuality in French History and Culture. Ed. Jeffrey Merrick and Michael Sibalils. New York: Harrington Park Press, 2001. 149-67. Print. Davis, Richard Harding. “Americans in Paris.” Harper’s 91 (July 1895): 272-84. Print. “Died—Reubell.” New York Times, 28 Sept. 1884, n.p. Edel, Leon. Henry James: A Life. New York: Harper and Row, 1985. Print. —. The Life of Henry James. 5 vols. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1953-72. Print. Grancsay, Stephen V. “The Jean Jacques Reubell Bequest.” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 29 (Jul. 1934): 115-18. Print. Harris, Muriel. “Salons Old and New.” North American Review 213 (3 June 1921): 827-32. Print. Hirshler, Erica. Sargent’s Daughters: The Biography of a Painting. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2009. Print. Hooper, Lucy H. “The American Colony in Paris.” Appleton’s Magazine (20 Jun. 1874): 779-81. Print. —. “French Society and Parisianized Americans.” Appleton’s Magazine (26 Sept. 1874): 395-98. Print. Jackson, Julian. Living in Arcadia: Homosexuality, Politics, and Morality in France from the Liberation to AIDS. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009. Print. James, Henry. The Ambassadors. New York: Oxford UP, 1985. —. The Complete Letters of Henry James. 1872-1876. Vol 3. Ed. Pierre A. Walker and Greg W. Zacharias. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2008. —. Correspondence and Journals of Henry James Jr. (MS am 1094). Houghton Library, Harvard University. —. Henry James Letters. Ed. Leon Edel. 4 vols. Cambridge: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1974-84. Lanier, Henry Wysham. A Century of Banking in New York, 1822-1922. New York: George H. Doran, 1922. Print.



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Mamoli Zorzi, Rosella. “Private and Public Subjects in the Correspondence between Henry James and Isabella Stewart Gardner.” Henry James Review 31 (2010): 232-238. Print. Mitchell, Dolores. “The ‘New Woman’ as Prometheus: Women Arts Depict Women Smoking.” Women’s Art Journal 12 (Spring-Summer 1994): 3-9. Print. Ormond, Richard, and Elaine Kilmurray. John Singer Sargent: The Early Portraits. New Haven: Yale UP, 1988. Print. Proust, Marcel. Sodome et Gomorrhe. Vol 2. Paris: Nouvelle Revue Française, 1922. Print. Rothenstein, William. Men and Memories. 2 vols. New York: CowardMcCann, 1931-32. Print. Savoy, Eric. “France, French, and the French.” Henry James Review 30 (2009): 196-206. Print. Stansell, Christine. “Women Artists and the Problems of Metropolitan Culture: New York and Chicago, 1890-1910.” Cultural Leadership in America: Art Patronage and Matronage. Ed. Wanda Corn. Boston: Gardner Museum, 1997. 25-38. Print. Sutliffe, Albert. The Americans in Paris: with Names and Addresses, Sketch of American Art, Lists of Artists and Pictures, and Miscellaneous Matter of Interest to Americans Abroad. Paris: T. Symonds, 1887. Print. Tate, Cassandra. Cigarette Wars: The Triumph of the Little White Slaver. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. Print. Tully, Baron de, ed. Annuaire des Grand Cercles. Paris: Lahure, 1897. Print. Viti, Elizabeth Richardson. Mothers, Madams, and “Lady-Like” Men: Proust and the Maternal. Birmingham, AL: Summa 1994. Print. “Women and Smoking.” New York Times 1 Sept. 1897. Print.



 

PART V: REFRAMING JAMES’S SOCIAL WORLD

 

CHAPTER NINETEEN THE AMERICAN’S OPTIONS AND FUTURES NAN Z. DA

“A futures contract is an agreement between two parties to buy or sell an asset at a certain time in the future for a certain price.” —Hull, Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives “[Newman was] successful in copper . . . only so-so in railroads, and a hopeless fizzle in oil.” —James, The American, New York Edition (1907)

As James was making his famously fraught emendations to The American for the New York Edition, he decided to change a detail about Newman’s economic activities that seems over-fussy for a simple allegory of American Capitalism, in which such details would amount to a wash anyway. In the 1877 edition (thirty years prior to the NY Edition), Newman is prompted to speak about his “odious success” back in America and describes himself as having been “successful in copper . . . but very mixed in other mining ventures . . . [and having taken] quite a back seat in oil” (44). The perspective of thirty years gave James a long view of the nail-biting financial reversals brought on by shifts in speculative activity induced by new instruments of speculation. A railroad bubble bursting in the 1880s and the rise of “big oil” and oil-land speculation in the American southwest1 offered James a small, but not insignificant, pathos: he could change Newman’s preparedness for the future of domestic financial markets from adequate to barely adequate: from “taking a back seat” to “a hopeless fizzle” (NY Edition 41). James’s backdating of trends in global finance capitalism presents us with something more than pathos, however. The American, I argue, selfpresents as coming from an earlier phase of transatlantic economic development than it actually does. From what we can glean from the novel itself and the later revise—that James was picky about what kind of financier Newman was, and not just the fact that he was one—we can see

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 that he intentionally made Newman someone whose economically informed sensibilities exceeded the ostensible economic order of the times to which he has been assigned. Pairing Old World themes with narratological innovations afforded by the most cutting-edge finance— modeled on instruments such as bonds, options, and futures—The American is a novel that only poses as a story about the ethical horizons of the American industrial capitalist. Financial speculation creates fascinating possibilities for narratology, a fact which American Naturalist writers like Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser understood so fully and, I argue, James understood even before them: aside from the fact that its pyrotechnics make for page-turners, financial speculation also turns imaginations of possible futures, risks, and outcomes into transferable texts (bonds, contracts, more exotic futures claims) that another unknown agent or person can use to rapidly recalibrate the present and the future. As can be seen in The American, and another work written during the mid-1890s American financial crisis, “The Coxon Fund” (1894), changes in the instruments of speculation irreversibly impacted James’s narratological method. 2 A little economic history is perhaps necessary here. Sophisticated derivatives trading became institutionalized in America over the course of the nineteenth century with three historical markers: the founding of the Chicago Board of Trade in 1848, the New York Cotton Exchange in 1870, and the New York Coffee Exchange in 1885. The Chicago Board of Trade was formed to trade in futures, then-called “forward contracts.”3 The first contract was drawn in March of 1851 on corn futures and, fourteen years later, standardized futures contracts were introduced. In a finance economy, “futures” and “options” are two kinds of derivatives, a derivative being a “commodity” whose value is tied to another, underlying commodity or asset that is used predominantly for the purposes of speculation and/or the management of future risk. Options and futures, specifically, are financial instruments whose values are tied to the occurrence (or non-occurrence) of an event, deployed by and large to neutralize future outcome and hedge risk (life insurance serving as the best example). A future is a contract that obliges a buyer/seller to buy/sell a certain commodity at a certain price at a future date and an option is the same type of instrument minus the obligation. 4 More importantly for our understanding here, speculation using options and futures often occurs without the underlying ever changing hands, and far more frequently by engineering futures outcomes that can be deferred, transferred, evaporated, or reneged.5 The strange properties of the speculative instruments of finance are found in The American, the first of James’s novels and a work relatively



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ignored perhaps because its system of signification is “too obvious,” dismissible as the work of a young James only trying his hand at transatlantic themes. In order to account for the infusion of finance into the novel beyond genre-dressing, we have to remember that in James’s fiction financial derivatives and the market activity that is associated with them— speculation—have less to do with money and far more to do with accounting for and laying claim to all imaginable possible futures. Therefore, some clearing of the air is necessary, not least because the novel itself and its entire cast of characters ask to be encased inside simple economic and national binaries. We must understand what finance is not in this novel—despite the novel’s overt invitation to missignification—in order to understand what it is. First, the themes of The American and their relation to finance remain underdescribed by the dialectic between finance and narrative as sequentially advanced by Walter Benn Michaels, Frederic Jameson, and Mary Poovey. 6 The epistemological structure of finance capital in the novel works beyond the critique of finance capital: finance is not the atavistic money that precipitates the dissipation of comedic/moral structures when they come up against represented economic realities, as George Levine has argued in “Literary Realism Reconsidered.” Finance here is also not simply literary realism’s material consciousness, a reading under which The American would more closely resemble one of those “itnarratives” of bonds, notes, cheques, deeds, and commercial products that seem to have a will of their own (see Frank Norris’s wheat trilogy for examples of these commodity narratives). 7 Options and futures (and all derivatives) precisely take no material form, their logic being completely displaced onto narratology and dialogue. Paying close attention to the oddities of Newman’s social dealings in France, this essay tracks the economic-narratological transfers that turn finance-thinking into deferred outcomes, pre-imagined futures and counterfictional depths. Taking finance as a form that works paralogically with genre, this essay mounts a new economic reading of The American in order to get the text out from under the economic reading of The American, the familiar and reductive one that recapitulates the manifest plot of the novel by accepting wholesale the antagonism between predatory New World capitalism and Old World intractability. Christopher Newman’s capitalism is not a mere matter of “dip me in the pot and turn me into gold” (205), as Valentin de Bellegarde understands it; it involves, instead, counterintuitive coordination between future events and present gains through the tactics of finance-thinking. Disaggregating finance-thinking from the financier as a generic type will help us redescribe the central dilemma faced by Newman—traditionally



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 understood as an ethical-cultural impasse—as James’s wariness about the genre of the American financier novel for which people like William Dean Howells, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser would come to be known.8 James’s novel investigates finance not as a social theme, or as the material makeup of realism, but as an existential crisis. Is it possible to be an American financier in a novel without being typed as an American financier? Is it possible to translate financial intelligence into idiosyncratic making-meaning in the world? Is it possible to work within a structure of profit and gain that is simultaneously a forfeiture, a manner of cruising? Answering these questions ambivalently, The American captures the American novel at the brink of an irreversible conflation of the American type with the American financier. The American famously opens with Newman lounging on a divan in the Louvre, directing his appetent gaze first to the discrete markers of European high culture—the paintings—then to a specimen of Parisian culture itself—Mademoiselle Noémie. Then, and later, Newman offers to spot the Nioches for Noémie’s “dot,” or dowry, in exchange for smaller copies of “the six most difficult pictures in the Louvre” (63).9 Before long we realize Newman has overpaid for a frivolous nothing, duped because Noémie can’t paint at all and has coquettishly admitted as much all along. From the outset the narrator—who, significantly, diminishes from view as the novel progresses—cheekily coaches the reader on how to read this development. “An observer, with anything of the eye for national types” could see both the “undeveloped connoisseur” and the “ideal completeness with which he filled out the national mould” (17-18). 10 Talky and conspiratorial, this narrator works in league with his readers to facilitate Newman’s total absorption in the stereotype he is hand-picked to live out. Many readers of The American have gone along with the advice of this narrator and read this exchange between Newman and Noémie as his Capitalist hubris in miniature, focusing on the naked imperialism behind his fateful “combien?” Newman is often singled out (in James criticism and American literary criticism at large) as a metonym of late nineteenthcentury American economic imperialism. In his book The Mediating Nation: American Literature and Globalization from Henry James to Woodrow Wilson, Nathaniel Cadle points such a finger: “Newman may have renounced his cut-throat business practices by the time he arrives in Paris, but he has neither renounced the resulting wealth nor the sense of entitlement that his wealth gives him.” Cadle concludes that “Newman encounters an economy he is unable to comprehend because money cannot procure for him his most desired objects of desire” (90). The encountering of an incomprehensible sphere by Newman, in Cheryl Torsney’s reading,



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means flexing his hegemonic muscles through the medium of language. In her article, “Translation and Transubstantiation in The American,” Torsney performs a displaced reading of Newman’s cultural fumbles in Paris, showing how “a failure of translation lies at the heart of Newman’s failed colonial adventure” (41). For critics like Cadle and Torsney, the story’s denouement reiterates a straightforward critique of US imperialism: his “embarrassment” at the end of the novel, or his mistakes in lingual and cultural translation, result from his attempts to map Capitalist—and thus, American imperialist—logic unto the domestic sphere. His wavering in front of the burnt letter is interpreted as epistemological angst or crosscultural misstep, in either case as fitting contrapasso for his purse-pride and his Americanness (two characteristics that amount to the same thing). Even if we allow for a certain amount of aesthetic dalliance and fuddyduddyness characteristic of “American capitalists,” his commissioning the copies from Noémie makes no sense. When Noémie mocks Newman for investing in her poor skills as a painter, he thus appraises the situation: In spite of the ridiculous blunder of which he stood convicted, he was very far from being a simpleton, and he had a lively suspicion that Mademoiselle Noémie’s sudden frankness was not essentially more honest than her leaving him in error would have been. She was playing a game; she was not simply taking pity on his aesthetic verdancy. What was it she expected to win? The stakes were high and the risk was great; the prize therefore must have been commensurate. (63)

By advance-purchasing the most difficult pieces without any quality control, Newman does something that exceeds the rationale of capitalist commodity culture. Uninterested in the paintings as copy or the copies as painting, Newman buys and sells outside of commodity markets entirely. The request and its odd terms (e.g., the difficulty of the pieces) and Noémie’s dissimulations are part of an increasingly ludic exchange of contingency which has as its goal neither quality knockoffs of the paintings nor their actual completion. Newman buys an option—the act of copying the paintings—and sells a future—a fixed price for their satisfactory completion. “I hold to my offer,” he reassures her, “do what you can, and I will buy what you paint” (64). Back in America, Newman was both industrialist and financier and it is really this latter profession—dabbling in the speculative markets of rail shares, oil shares, and copper shares—that gives him the greatest amount of self-identification and psychological pleasure and restlessness. Jeffrey Clymer has argued that “Newman’s specific transformation from capitalist to tourist extends rather than ends his associations with the logic of the



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 stock market” (133). Indeed, Newman’s European grand tour is more accurately the trans-Atlantic transmogrification of financial logic into narrative logic in conjunction with the constant disavowal repudiation of “vulgar Capitalism.” Portraying himself idealistically to Madame de Cintré, he preempts her thus: You think of me as a fellow who has had no idea in life but to make money and drive sharp bargains. That’s a fair description of me, but it is not the whole story. A man ought to care for something else, though I don’t know exactly what. I cared for money-making, but I never cared particularly for the money. There was nothing else to do, and it was impossible to idle. (160)

This confession has the benefit of being ironically true: uninterested in the ends of money-making, Newman now searches for an alternative to money-making—preferably an open-ended, self-perpetuating activity that simultaneously draws from his skills as a financier and protects him from being “typed” as a financier. Prior to his entanglements with the Bellegardes and the Nioches in Paris, Newman confesses to Tristram the pangs of wasted intelligence: “Here I don’t feel at all smart. My remarkable talents seem of no use” (32). After the battle of wits with the Bellegardes, the satisfactions offered by the actual stock exchange seem all too paltry. He returns to America only to find that “he had nothing to do here . . . but [felt that] there was something beyond the ocean that he was still to do; something that he had left experimentally and speculatively, to see if it could content itself to remain undone” (304). Newman structures reality using financial intelligence and yet doesn’t want to be a “financial type”; thus, Newman insists on the narrative of disavowal of the “financial type” when he relates to his friend Tristram how he forfeited opportunity to corner an adversary on the stock market, and how, disgusted, he left that life for Paris to put his “remarkable talents” to use. What Newman actually showcases (in the exchange with Mr. Tristram and in many other moments) is an entirely different kind of American yearning: the desire for cleverness in one arena to completely carry over to another. Newman’s yen for the stock market transfers so beautifully to the stuffy, economically backward world of French society because his range of action there is restricted to transacting in removes, to derivativethinking. Early in The American, foreshadowing the final showdown between Christopher Newman and the Bellegardes, Newman and Madame de Bellegarde have a cryptic exchange in which she self-presents as “a very proud and meddlesome old woman,” to which he responds, “Well, I



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am very rich” (128). It would seem that the antagonized characters have just put their cards on the table. But this is not so. Just as Madame de Bellegarde under-represents her true peeves—in the end we realize it is not her pride but guarded secrecy that sets her against Newman—so Newman under-represents his leverage in the social game. The efficacy of his rebuttal, “I am very rich,” derives less from its truth-value than from its deployment at this particular moment in time. Although his wealth is tossed around for effect, it functions more like a placeholder that provokes reactionary measures, coordinates other players’ decisions in advance, and lays claim to future outcomes for developments that remain opaque or unavailable to him. So he rigs the game he has to play as best he can by indicating he can make good on a series of contingent claims. To Valentin he says, “I’m as good as the best. Who the best are, I don’t pretend to say. . . . This is a line of speculation I should not have chosen . . . but if your people will have it so, I will do my best” (107); and to the icy Madame de Bellegarde and her son Urbain, “He was eager to make it known that he would readily answer all questions and satisfy all exactions” (123). The Bellegardes have a distaste for direct dealing and when Newman realizes that “taking [their] measure was not easy,” he adapts a preemptive strategy (120). He agrees in advance to fulfill the claims they have not yet made on him and compensate for the damages they would not yet know to bring against him. Contingency claims impregnate this story, which has a simple, even inane, premise, with counterfictional largeness—that is, as Robyn Warhol has theorized, gestures toward unnarrated possibilities that are mentioned only to be “left unsaid” (230). Newman’s offers all take the form of contingent futures (i.e., “I don’t know what you’ll ask of me but I am willing to sell my agreement to your future requests, whatever they may be, here and now”). Futures agreements, as opposed to simple monetary transactions, amplify characters’ horizons of expectations with multiple realities that do not have to be narrated. A good example of this is the fact that his initial bribe to Mrs. Bread—“I would give [you] a million dollars to know what they did to her” (255)—proves completely ineffectual and he has to try again with a second, open-ended promise: “Oh, I will take care of you! You shall come and live with me. You shall be my housekeeper, or anything you like. I will pension you for life” (257). This, the equivalent of a financial future, is again nothing but the promise to make good on a future claim. And it does the trick. Mrs. Bread hands over the incriminating letter saying, “Dear, dear, sir, . . . you think of everything” (257). Mrs. Bread and the reader alike fill in the likely



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 outcomes of Newman’s promises, and this creates a fold in the narrative that does not require the actuation of those promises. Far from having an allegory’s flat and linear time-space, The American has a telescopic structure with scalable narrative space. Since options and futures games are by definition interpersonal and collaborative, many of the characters begin to traffic in options and futures, betting on outcomes which may never need to come to pass. One such character is Mrs. Tristram. Rarely analyzed in James scholarship, she remains one of the most devious and fascinating figures in The American. Mrs. Tristram helps Newman identify an “under-valued asset” in the marriage market—the widow Claire de Cintré—but instead of the traditional meddler or matchmaker, Mrs. Tristram has bigger stakes in mind (though again, as in the case of Newman, the motives remain ambivalent and purposely misrepresented). Having excited his interest in the lady, Mrs. Tristram proceeds to play Newman in the game he plays best: securing future contingencies. “Before I have known you six months I shall see you in a fine fury,” she teases him. “It exasperates me. . . . You have what must be the most agreeable thing in the world—the consciousness of having bought your pleasure beforehand, and paid for it” (41). Mrs. Tristram’s challenge is a “futures contract,” insofar as the spread of profit and loss has no concern with the underlying asset (Madame de Cintré), turning far more on what the opponent will do once he realizes he has contracted himself to perform a certain task in the future, at a price that he cannot be sure he correctly assessed in the present. Conjoining the grammar of economic speculation to the grammar of courtship and romance, Mrs. Tristram turns the stakes of the argument: “Bravo!” said Mrs. Tristram, “that is very fine. You are the great Western Barbarian, stepping forth in his innocence and might, gazing awhile at this poor effete Old World, and then swooping down on it.” “Oh come,” said Newman. “I am not a barbarian, by a good deal. I am very much the reverse . . .” “I don’t mean that you are a Comanche chief, or that you wear a blanket and feathers. There are different shades.” “I am a highly civilized man,” said Newman. “ . . . I should like to prove it to you.” Mrs. Tristram was silent awhile. “I should like to make you prove it,” she said, at last. “I should like to put you in a difficult position.” (42)

Knowing in advance the most probable outcome of Newman’s pursuit of Claire de Cintré, Mrs. Tristram makes the courtship an incidental byproduct of an ethical test; at the same time, she has already rearranged the terms of that test. In the structural economy of the novel, letting the



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Bellegardes off the hook is taken to be the act of forgiveness that defines Newman’s Americanness. These are the mean terms. Newman goes into this fast-paced “futures contract” with Mrs. Tristram thinking his identity as a “civilized man” is in question. He comes out participating in the fixing of his own national allegory. At this moment Newman is not yet aware of the switch, and so when Mrs. Tristram says, “I believe in you, Mr. Newman. You flatter my patriotism,” he makes the stupefied response, “Your patriotism?” (42). In this inductive test the terms offered are the following: ethical transcendence or a lesser (flat) kind of American. If Mrs. Tristram establishes the parameters of her narrative and secures the range of Newman’s possible actions as different shades of Americanness, she devastatingly changes her logic at the end of the novel. Upon Newman’s tossing the incriminating letter into the fire, she undercuts his moment of transcendence (and ethical self-satisfaction) by remarking, “they believed that, after all, you would never really come to the point. Their confidence, after counsel taken of each other, was not in their innocence, nor in their talent for bluffing things off; it was in your remarkable good nature!” (309). If the initial logic is “ethical transcendence or a stereotypically barbarian American,” the final logic is “ethical transcendence because and only because you are a flat American, the kind stereotypically and therefore predictably associated with ‘good nature.’” Making an ethical decision works against Newman either way. Not only is the act of reprieve itself a kind of derivative and a continuation of Newman’s finance-thinking, as I have already shown, it is also a precondition of the terms offered by Mrs. Tristram at the onset, terms which Newman increasingly but begrudgingly internalizes. The American is a “set up,” or rather, a series of set-ups, for both Newman and the reader. The unnamed narrator, as well as other “narrators” in the dramatis personae, conditions the expectations of the reader and Newman himself for what constitutes Americanness. Finance, in the hands of these narrators, loses its discursive function and becomes a programmatic feature of the American imperialist. After the humiliating and abrupt rejection, Newman finally wrestles out of the Bellegardes the confession that they ultimately rejected his suit because they could not bring themselves to stomach his moneyed-ness; in other words, they could not accept the American financier type. In actuality, Newman “loses” because he has tried too hard to secure the future. To make sure the Bellegardes would not back out, Newman rigs an engagement announcement party, tactically designed to secure the occurrence of a reciprocal event, the Bellegardes’ engagement party. “We endeavored to bind ourselves,” explains Urbain, “but it was that” (referring to Newman’s



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 party), finishes his mother, “that opened our eyes and broke the bonds” (218). Newman, who back in America was “successful in copper . . . only so-so in railroads, and a hopeless fizzle in oil” (41)—copper, railroads and oil representing the least to the most difficult things on which to speculate at the end of the nineteenth century—meets his match in the Bellegardes who simply do not want to play any longer. Another way of stating this is that Newman’s financial intelligence undercuts itself once it enters social spheres which, though quick to pick it up, are not ultimately dedicated to its unraveling. The American, as I have argued, tries to pass itself off as operating within an earlier stage of economic development (New World industrial capitalism) than it actually does. Finance-thinking works as a new-fangled narratological tool and yet at the same time finance itself is repeatedly coded in the socially embedded and socially recognizable form of vulgar capitalism. If we reframe The American as an allegory of the clash of two systems of fictional representation—the genre of romance and the genre of the financier—we can better understand why this kind of literary overcoding occurs. According to Niklas Luhmann, systems derive their condition of possibility from the borrowing and hacking of the language of other systems. Like other social systems, love is a system that, interested only in its own perpetuation and functional operation, communicates through textual discourse and makes recourse to literary codes to make its adaptations to modernity’s changing environments appear natural and matter-of-course. The nesting of romance in social injustice fiction or legal fiction that we often see nowadays, for example, would not represent reflections of love in those spheres; on the contrary, such hybrid genres evidence the willful transformation and distortion of the social injustice and legal systems in service of the self-expression of romance (Love as Passion). In the evolution of love literature, Luhmann finds a continuous hijacking of the symbolic order of other social spheres. A Luhmannian reading of The American would reveal that the social system of heteronormative romance (with its attendant melodramatic plot structures) relies on the injection of the language and logic of finance in order to keep itself going and this because the social system of heteronormative romance wanes in the face of modernity. Finance comes into the system not as a prop but as a set of functional codes that allow the characters to make what seems impossible (the American Capitalist’s marrying into the ancien régime) possible. The make-shift use of the semantics of another system is not accidental but absolutely necessary for a system’s perpetuation in the face of its own demise. Moreover, the more unlikely an outcome within one system seems (Newman gets the girl despite all



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contraindications, say), the more rapidly the other system (finance) devolves into a symbolic structure. Saturated with the logic of finance but operating in social structures undedicated to finance, The American reveals the compensatory bargains negotiated between symbolic structures more than those negotiated between cultural constructions (such as the hegemonic American versus the recalcitrant French old guard). In a letter he penned while preparing for the staged version of The American, James chronicled the Barings Brothers and Co.’s bank failure of 1890: The collapse of the bloated Barings . . . lodged us all, for days, on the edge of quite universal smash, the biggest financial disaster since finance was invented—a ticklishness apparently by no means yet allayed—& then the squalid Irish drama, made still more so by the effrontery and baseness of the newspaper. They are, to my sense, high comedy now. (LiL 233)

If James’s reaction to the bank failure of 1890 reveals his attention to the effects of finance gone awry as interwoven with “squalid drama,” it also throws into relief his delirium in bringing together complicated financial problems and botched domestic dramas as adjacent pairs. A very small irony of The American lies in Newman’s renouncing Wall Street to play in a marriage market which plops him finally in front of the house of the Carmelites on the Rue d’Enfer, an edifice surrounded by a “highshouldered blank wall,” with “the pale, dead, discoloured wall stretch[ing] beneath it far down the empty side street” (305). Puns aside, this Wall Street to walled street trajectory underscores another, deeper irony which Newman himself could not even foresee, which is that in using his financial logic to cruise, to prolong his own participation in narrative richness and complexity, Newman speeds up his own propulsion into a crude melodramatic allegory, in which the princess is cloistered behind unscalable walls, in which the knight dies from an off-target wound in a botched pistol duel, in which the housekeeper holds all the dirty family secrets, and in which those secrets involve bedside poisonings, licentiousness, and jealousies. It is my contention that Newman makes use of financial intelligence to buck against this kind of melodramatic determinism, but that his financial intelligence makes subtle and internal differences that have no sizeable impact in the interpretive outcome of the story, that fall below the threshold of making-meaning. In her tour-de-force, Open Secrets—a study of narrative events and intelligences that make no difference and register no real effect—AnneLise François purposely cordons off James from a corpus of work that showcases these types of recessive action:



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 The precariousness of such anticipatory gestures—the potential for shame, exposure, misprision risked and averted in imagining what the other wants—might fill the pages of a Jamesian novel, but in the end James remains on [Open Secrets]’s peripheries, in part because, unlike the compulsive interpreters found in James’s fiction, the subjects of the works included here simply walk away from the vertigo of doubt, uncertainty, and interpretive second-guessing opened up by the other’s subjectivization. (56; emphasis added)

Because Jamesian characters have that voracious need to know, to interpret, and to act on their findings and interpretations, they remain, for François, fundamentally antagonistic to the notion of uncounted experience: a claim on reality, time and others that is from its incipience a relinquishing, an unconcern for making good or gain on knowledge, on others, and on oneself. And while I do agree that Newman cannot, as François says, “walk away from the vertigo of doubt,” and do see qualitative differences between figures like Newman, Maisie, Maggie Verver, and, say, Fanny Price or Lucy Snow, I also believe that there are Jamesian characters that only pretend (to others and to themselves) to work within a scheme of realizing potential—whether that potential be sexual, mental, or financial—when in fact the real desire is to cruise, to move serially and not progressively from person to person, experience to experience. Christopher Newman is a cruiser, taking more pleasure in engineering plots through the pre-arranged dispensation of capital than in the collecting, accumulating, and useful disposing of capital: He liked doing things which involved his paying for people; the vulgar truth is that he enjoyed “treating” them. This was not because he was what is called purse-proud; handling money in public was on the contrary positively disagreeable to him; he had a sort of personal modesty about it, akin to what he would have felt about making a toilet before spectators. But just as it was a gratification to him to be handsomely dressed, just so it was a private satisfaction to him (he enjoyed it very clandestinely) to have interposed, pecuniarily, in a scheme of pleasure. To set a large group of people in motion and transport them to a distance, to have special conveyances, to charter railway-carriages and steamboats . . . (197)

With this private admission, we can see Newman’s financial sensibility manifested as an authorial desire. Interposing in “schemes of pleasure” implies a deep mediation in the direction of people’s lives that extends far beyond the shaping of present reality through capital; setting “large group[s] of people in motion” further suggests a preference for openendedness over predetermination. As Sharon Cameron has shown, the



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exposure of the Bellegardes is itself a kind of imagined future event that has pre-generated multiple satisfactions and narrative threads. Rather than read Newman’s decision to burn the incriminating letter as “an inevitable consequence of his ‘remarkable good nature,’ or of the fabled innocence of the American type,” Cameron suggests we “see Newman’s enjoyment of his power as contingent upon its sacrifice; as contingent upon the illusion of sacrifice; as contingent per se: as having meaning only with reference to Newman’s understanding of the Bellegardes’ interpretation of his action” (40). The scene in the novel most conducive to flat, allegorical interpretation is also the most narratologically unstable, where contingent alternatives (if A, then B; if C, then D) that may not be justified or even plausible are turned over, enjoyed, and relinquished. It is when the convoluted lines of impact are not yet certain and what others stand to lose or gain not yet sifted out that Newman experiences ontological and intelligence fullness. Like the plan to “interpose[], pecuniarily, in a scheme of pleasure” (197), epistemological speculation in the letterburning scene has built-in narratological options that allow Newman to cruise, or, continue as is, even if only for a little while. But the problem faced by this of James’s habitual cruisers is that cruising has to assume the narrative form of acquisition (profit and loss), and, more devastatingly, cruising more likely than not takes on the contours of an allegory of national types. The catch-22 into which Newman contracts himself is this: Newman has to possess the intellectual wherewithal of the quintessential American financier to play the game at all, but if he plays the game at all he is merely an American financier and nothing more. The terms of Mrs. Tristram, which are the same as the narrator’s—proposed protocol for ethical transcendence—testify to the novel’s perverseness in the handling of the concept of American identity, which we can now see as structurallyand self-imposed identity coercion made in the interstices of financethinking’s contact with the world. Newman is not an American financier superimposing on an old French society; he is a character who has found himself in a story about an American financier superimposing himself on an old French society and has to improvise to carve out another kind of economic-aesthetic mode of being. And yet Newman’s own self-styled distinctions register little difference in the overall meaning of the novel, rigged to go down (and have everything come down) to the interpretive rabbit-hole that is his final decision to forfeit his revenge and burn the incriminating letter. If the story is punishing, it is only because the subtle differences between thinking about finance narratologically and thinking



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 about it exploitatively make no aggregate impact, subsumed under the totalizing logic of ethical transcendence.

Notes 1

The span between the 1877 edition and the 1908 NY Edition of The American saw the birth of companies like Standard Oil (1870) and Texaco (1901) and an explosion in oil speculation, itself already tied to land speculation by the first decade of the twentieth century. James would also have been familiar with the rise of Standard Oil from reading and editing William Dean Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes in the late eighties and early nineties. 2 The events of “The Coxon Fund” take place before and after the American market crash of 1893; the “crash in New York,” George Gravener divulges to the narrator, “lost [Ruth’s father] no end of money” (154). The rapid economic growth in America in the 1880s produced within it a large financial bubble caused primarily by unregulated speculation in railroads, and when it burst panic ensued, catalyzed by the declared bankruptcy of Philadelphia and Reading Railroad on February 23, 1893. Several banks closed after runs, and the crash radiated outwards, principally on account of the U.S. Government’s failure to back up its notes. The dangers of speculation manifested as over-valuing (taking a “long” position on the market) or undervaluing (taking a “short” position on the market), and the fallout in representation haunts the central themes of the story. 3 A forward contract “is an agreement to buy or sell an asset at a certain future time for a certain price. It can be contrasted with a spot contract, which is an agreement to buy or sell an asset today” (Hull 1). 4 “Like a forward contract, a futures contract is an agreement between two parties to buy or sell an asset at a certain time in the future for a certain price. Unlike forward contracts, futures contracts are normally traded on an exchange” (Hull 4). “Options are divided into two kinds: call options give the holder of a stock the right to buy the underlying asset by a certain date for a certain price; a put option gives the holder the right to sell the underlying asset by a certain date for a certain price” (Hull 5). 5 Credit default swaps, for example, illustrate the intense contingency governing derivative trading and show how the effects of a few miscalculations of what is likely to happen will amplify across multiple spheres: a couple goes to the bank and takes out a mortgage on a house and the bank treats that mortgage as a security. That bank, loath to have too much equity in reserve show up on its balance sheet, will cut up that security (of the incoming mortgage payments) and sell the pieces as bonds. The risk of mortgage default thus diffused, the banks will lose the incentive to monitor closely incoming mortgages because they are going to turn around and sell them the next day anyway. Meanwhile, the bonds issued by those banks and institutions are bought up by parties who have bought insurance against the next-to-zero possibility that these banks will ever default. This kind of insurance, otherwise known as a credit default swap, is issued by insurance companies betting on that very unlikelihood, thus regarding the monies received



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from selling CDSes as good as income. Not only do these companies fail to set aside enough funds for that hypothetical rainy day, they themselves package these CDS contracts with other options and derivatives which reenter the stock market as exotic commodities for highly volatile trading. When the underlying asset— houses—depreciates, the shock is amplified by the many layers of derivatization and speculation. 6 Walter Benn Michaels has made a similar argument for the impact of changes in the financial sphere on fin-de-siècle American literature in The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism. The periodization offered by Michaels is slightly off, however, because it shifts the impact of financial innovations on fiction and narration to the latter end of the nineteenth century. Even by the mid-nineteenth century, the decoupling of credit instruments (bonds, notes, paper money) from specie was not by far the strangest or most radical shift in the financial marketplace. Like Michaels, Jameson yokes finance to narratology but forces an artificial synchronicity. Jameson bases his periodization, in which late capitalism matches up with postmodernism as twin historical developments, almost completely on Ernest Mandel’s timeline in Late Capitalism, which has since been discredited in the social sciences. Late capitalism or finance capitalism, in various forms and degrees of sophistication, existed long before its debut in Mandel’s heuristics, and does not cleanly line up with any particular mode of production or global cultural agenda. The faulty periodization does not obviously implicate Jameson’s cultural extensions of the logic of late capitalism. In her piece “Writing on Finance” and elsewhere, Mary Poovey historicizes the trans-Atlantic dialectic between texts of a financial nature and the emergent narrative forms. “Just as financial journalists began to borrow literary conventions in the middle of the decade,” she writes, “so novelists soon began to introduce financial themes into their fictions. The result was a set of (admittedly uneven) exchanges and crossovers at the level of themes and formal features that drew financial journalism and realist novels into a relationship of generic proximity” (18-19). But the “paperiness” of finance, heteroglossically tipped into realist novels, represents only one of the ways that finance and financial documents can affect the ontological makeup of a text. 7 The Octopus (1901), The Pit (1903), and the intended final volume, The Wolf. 8 See Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes (1889), Norris’s The Pit (1901), and Dreiser’s The Financier (1912). 9 All citations to the novel hereafter will refer to the 1978 Norton Edition (the New York Edition). 10 James uses the diminishing second person narrator to signal the over-coding and overdrawing of Newman as an American capitalist. Just getting into The American, one notices the infrequent appearance of a first person narrator who solicits the reader in negative and typological constructions of Newman’s identity and subjectivity. The first person voice/second person narration shows up near the beginning: “Our friend’s eye” (18); “I know not” (26); “I am inclined to think (37); “I have ventured to trim and sift it” (52); “I don’t know how much our friend learned” (55); “I’m afraid” (69); “I have said” (74). In many of these and other instances, we see the narrator chiding Newman for hypocrisy, reducing him to a



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 type, or otherwise engaged in constructing Newman in ways that the rest of the novel undercuts. But this narrator disappears by the end.

Works Cited Cadle, Nathaniel. The Mediating Nation: American Literature and Globalization from Henry James to Woodrow Wilson. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2008. Print. Cameron, Sharon. Thinking in Henry James. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989. Print. Clymer, Jeffrey A. “A Market in Male Bodies: Henry James’s The American and Late Nineteenth-Century Boxing.” The Henry James Review 25.2 (2004): 127-145. Print. François, Anne-Lise. Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008. Print. Hull, John C. Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives. New York: Prentice Hall International, 2000. Print. James, Henry. The American. New York: Norton, 1978. Print. —. The American. Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Co., 1877. Print. —. A Life in Letters. Ed. Philip Horne. New York: Penguin Classics, 2001. Print. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1990. Print. Levine, George. “Literary Realism Reconsidered: ‘The World in Its Length and Breadth.’” Adventures in Realism. Ed. Matthew Beaumont. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007. 13-32. Print. Luhmann, Niklas. Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy. Trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. Print. Michaels, Walter Benn. The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987. Print. Poovey, Mary. Genres of the Credit Economy. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. Print. Torsney, Cheryl B. “Translation and Transubstantiation in The American.” The Henry James Review 17.1 (1996): 40-51. Web. Warhol, Robyn. “‘What Might Have Been Is Not What Is’: Dickens’s Narrative Refusals.” Counterfactual Thinking/ Counterfactual Writing. Ed. Dorothee Birke, Michael Butter, and Tilmann Köppe. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co., 2011. 227-39. Print.



 

CHAPTER TWENTY CLASS TIES IN “THE PUPIL” MANUELA VASTOLO

The long short-story “The Pupil” was first published in Longman’s Magazine in 1891, and later came out in the New York Edition alongside two famous Jamesian texts: the novel What Maisie Knew (1897), which is filtered through a girl’s perspective, and “In the Cage” (1898), a long story seen from a telegraphist’s point of view. Whereas the novel has consistently received wide critical attention, the two shorter stories have been underestimated for a long time and have elicited the interest of critics only in the last few decades. Specifically, most criticism about “The Pupil” has focused on the relationship between the tutor and his pupil, on the ethical dimensions at play in it, and on determining the roles and the responsibilities of the Moreens and/or Pemberton in Morgan’s death. 1 More recently, several essays have also highlighted the homoerotic dynamics between the child and the teacher, an interpretation which is suggested but is never made explicit in the text (Hoy; Caserio; Zwinger). A different approach is displayed in a group of articles that highlight the role played by the economic sphere (Bell; Canavan) and in a collection of essays that investigates the function of unspoken communication in the short story as a whole (Goldoni). This paper, which is part of a wider project dealing with class dynamics in a set of Jamesian short stories, focuses on the representation of social classes in “The Pupil” in light of Pierre Bourdieu’s theories on social space. Specifically in Distinction, the French sociologist emphasizes some key concepts—those of capital, field, habitus, and taste. Disassociating his ideas from a Marxist social ladder primarily understood in economic terms, Bourdieu conceives a multidimensional social space, in which the individual positions himself or herself according to different forms of capital—social, economic, and cultural. In Bourdieu’s view, in modern societies autonomous fields of production, within which subjects are located and circulate, exist according to their own rules. Through

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everyday contact and practice within the field—which includes both the social space and the education they have received—, they acquire a habitus, an interiorization of the intellectual and perceptive habits of the field, a coherent set of dispositions, tastes, and opinions. This allows them to behave according to a sens pratique that unconsciously governs their choices. Moreover, the habitus is not only the generating principle behind the practices, but also a classificatory system for the practices themselves. Based on these assumptions, Bourdieu states, taste and aesthetic choices are not in-built, but are part of the habitus and separate the class fractions from each other. As a result, distinctions based on social class are always reinforced by the social agents that unconsciously legitimize and reproduce the forms of domination and the common opinions of each field. This means that social differences condition the chance of a person acquiring those aesthetic dispositions that are commonly supposed to be universal. In this paper I will apply Bourdieu’s theories in order to shed light on the social and cultural dynamics implied in the textual dynamics of the short story, through a detailed analysis of its social and symbolic space. What emerges is James’s extraordinary analytical acumen in detecting the historical, social, and cultural dynamics of his time, and his ability to grasp the fundamentals of the social system in which he lived, through both direct and indirect representations, cultural processes, social practices, and power structures, as well as to represent how the social distance between the subjects prevents each of them from identifying with a different habitus and decoding the marks of another habitus. The stratification of social hierarchies at the end of the nineteenth century provoked an unprecedented attention to detail in all fractions of society. By showing the behavioral nuances and different word choices of the characters and the narrator, the text highlights the distance between an aristocratic class endowed with a hereditary symbolic capital, coming from tradition and solid social prestige, and the rise of a new social class, a middle class endowed with economic capital, which wished to enter the highly select society of gentlemen who possessed cultural and social capital. Moreover, the adoption of Bourdieu’s critical lens brings to light how James represents the ruthlessness of power structures insofar as the social practices and the spaces where the new class obtains its social endorsement are foreclosed to the newcomers who, by mistakenly flaunting the marks of distinction, ultimately show that they do not possess them. Set between Italy, France, Great Britain and, analeptically, Switzerland at the end of the nineteenth century, “The Pupil” features a young



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 American tutor, Pemberton, and his student Morgan Moreen, as well as the whole Moreen family. 2 While looking for a job, the tutor accepts a teaching position with the rich American family, who reside in Nice. When the Moreens realize Pemberton’s interest and increasing affection for their child, they stop paying him. Pemberton agrees to work without payment in return for the freedom to tell Morgan the truth about his parents. In the meantime, the young student urges his tutor to go away and find a well-paid job. When Pemberton is told about a vacant position with a wealthy English family, he leaves for London, but then abandons the job and joins the Moreens in their new location in Paris upon receiving an alarming wire about Morgan’s worsening health. After he has spent a short time with Morgan, the Moreens’ social façade collapses and they ask him to provisionally foster the child. Pemberton hesitates and in that moment Morgan dies. While my reading, as previously stated, will primarily illustrate James’s capacity to show how Bourdieusian types of capital—specifically economic and symbolic capital (conceived as a form of value unrelated to the economic sphere)—intersect in the positioning and the trajectory of the characters in the social space, I cannot disregard the formal structure of the text, that is, the variable gap between the narrator and the point of view, and thus I will also consider the epistemological issues raised in the text.

Troubled Double Visions Divided into eight chapters of increasing length, the short story is almost completely filtered through Pemberton’s point of view and, unusually for James’s short stories, is told by an extra-diegetic narrator who does not directly intervene in the story. Pemberton’s limited perspective is intersected by the young Morgan’s refracted view of his own family and the social sphere in which they live. As some critics have noted, Morgan is one of the first young reflectors, who act as keen and sensitive filters of consciousness and as observers of their surrounding reality, even when they are unable to interpret it.3 If Pemberton’s point of view prevails in the first part of the story, it is later destabilized by his discussions with Morgan, which re-frame and lead Pemberton’s point of view; as to the Moreens, Pemberton’s feeling, “Dear me, yes. Charming people” (149), is later framed and contradicted by Morgan’s opinion, “All they care about is to make an appearance and to pass for something or other” (169). Pemberton’s point of view is also thrown off balance by the unknown temporal distance between the events and Pemberton’s future recollection; indeed, through this distance the Moreens acquire a quality which is



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described as “phantasmagoric, like a prismatic reflexion or a serial novel” (143). This casts doubts on Pemberton’s memories, which distance themselves from referentiality, and are instead multiplied and refracted in literary codes. The unreliability of memory is also emphasized as Pemberton “pitiably and confusedly” (152) mixes up the two Parisian stays with his young pupil. In short, the temporal filter modifies the perception of the narrative world, as well as the presentation and evaluation of the other characters, and overlaps with the double focalization, which is the harbinger of a prismatic (and therefore unstable) perception in itself. In fact, James himself synthesizes the features of this double vision in the Preface to the New York Edition: “All I have given in The Pupil is little Morgan’s troubled vision of them as reflected in the vision, also troubled enough, of his devoted friend” (Novels and Tales xviii). These two gazes are not only prismatic and framed by the narrator, but also troubled. This multiplicity of intersecting gazes emerges on a narrative level as well: in order to single out the characters at the beginning, the narrator does not employ the characters’ names, but instead chooses to describe them by using several different expressions connected to their social condition or their position relative to other characters. For example, Pemberton’s name is deferred for almost a page, during which he is called “the poor young man” or “this personage”; likewise, Morgan’s name is given only on the second page; until then, he is referred to as “the little boy” (descriptive and quite neutral), “his little charge” (from Pemberton’s point of view) and “their companion” (where Pemberton and Mrs. Moreen’s perspectives meet). In this sense, the text highlights the multilevel representation of each character and the social positioning of the subjects. The narrative technique becomes the means of showing the multiple and conflicting positionings inscribed in the text, and suggests a relative image of both the characters and the social dynamics in which they live. Furthermore, the incipit of the text emphasizes the codes implied in the social dynamics and the places which the Moreens and Pemberton occupy in the social space: “The poor young man hesitated and procrastinated: it cost him such an effort to broach the subject of terms, to speak of money to a person who spoke only of feelings and, as it were, of the aristocracy” (137). This statement of Pemberton’s embarrassment highlights the inconvenience of any discourse about money according to the upper classes, be they aristocracy or landed gentry. In Bourdieusian terms, we are faced with the protagonist’s habitus, his



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 ideas of class, distinction, and taste, with only partial and indirect access to the field dynamics wherein he lives. In contrast, the second part of the short story represents Pemberton’s gradual realization of the social field and a more complex perspective, as well as a reconfiguration of several dynamics. The protagonist’s position in the social space is focused upon in the opening pages: he owns a certain amount of cultural capital, primarily represented by his academic humanistic education at Yale and Oxford; he perceives himself in the vanguard (“he had richly supposed himself to be reacting against a Puritan strain” [144]); and is provided with respectable acquaintances, such as the English lady who secures the job for him. Yet, lacking a stable occupation and economic capital, which he squandered in a vague “one year experience,” Pemberton is caught up in economic necessity. At the same time, the text also describes him as “modest . . . even timid” (139), fearful of the potential superiority of his pupil over him. In this sense James portrays the position of young tutors at the end of the nineteenth century: even if endowed with a cultural capital legitimized by the educational system, they were unskilled individuals with limited talent, who started work as tutors as soon as they left their studies or their own tutors, due to economic necessity. As a result, tutors were in the position of “dominated” subjects and had a limited and limiting social status in comparison to the “dominant” subjects who were primarily endowed with economic capital. In contrast, Morgan is a member of a wealthy American family traveling across Europe, and is described as “intelligent” (138), “supernaturally clever” (147), and endowed with “curious intuitions and knowledges” (140). He is a young teenager whose habitus is under construction, with all the potentialities and trajectories still open to him. Nevertheless, Morgan is already steeped in a social and economic field, of which he is able to grasp the contradictions, clearly expressing them. We gradually understand the Moreens’ role through Morgan’s words, as they are filtered by Pemberton; retrospectively, however, we realize that his perception of his family's true position was correct from the start: in his first meeting with Pemberton, while they discuss the Moreens’ wealth, Morgan interrupts his mother and Pemberton by saying: “The less you expect the better! . . . But we are people of fashion” (140; emphasis in the original), thus disclosing what is going to happen and speaking ironically about his family’s status. It is Pemberton’s limited point of view, with which the reader initially identifies, that does not allow us to understand the implications of this statement at the get-go. The importance of vision is highlighted from the very title, which, as



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Balestra suggests, is polysemic: “The Pupil,” in fact, refers both to the pupil of the eye and to the scholar-student, therefore referring to both Pemberton as reflector and Morgan as student. Yet, in an ironic reversal of roles, it is Morgan who is able to understand the world and guides Pemberton, while Pemberton assumes the role of a naïve pupil intent on learning the social dynamics of a sphere which is unintelligible to him. The linguistic ambiguity suggests the affinity between them, as well as the reversal of their functions. Nevertheless, their differing abilities to decipher social codes seem to hint at their difference in habitus—their different opinions and beliefs—and their different social positions. This distance is highlighted on the spatial level at the end of the first chapter where Morgan, on the balcony above, observes Pemberton below him (142). The scene is repeated some pages later, when the Moreens stand on the balcony in Venice and observe the high society walking or sailing along the Grand Canal (174). In this sense the Moreens appear more solid and closely-knit than Pemberton’s vision is initially able to understand.

Silent but Telling Distinctions In contrast to much Jamesian fiction, as Izzo observes, one of the main features of this story is the redundant, evasive, and deceitful hypercommunication of the protagonists whose main activity is telling something different from, or less than, what they think: it is a deviant communication involving both Pemberton and the Moreens regarding what they know to be false yet give others to understand as true. For example, Pemberton lies to Morgan about his willingness to be his tutor— “can you doubt it after such a description?” (141), immediately followed by “Yet he didn’t want to come at all” (141)—while the Moreens insist on expressing their belonging to the aristocratic upper classes. Simultaneously, the text displays recurring breaches of the rules of taste and distinction of the upper-class to which the Moreens crave entry, through “unspoken communication,” that is to say the cluster of gestures, gazes, and objects, described by the narrator. 4 All the details and characters that exceed the demands of the mere plot, and meant only to describe the delicate moral and affective relationship between Pemberton and Morgan, suggest that James is also representing a cross-section of society in detail and is able to understand the complex interaction between the different types of capital, the class dynamics and the inexorable structures of power. From the beginning, words such as “aristocracy” (137), “honour” (138), and “improper” (138) show the central position of social connotations, whereas the choice of the two adjectives “affable”



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 (137) and “amiable” (138) to connote the Moreens seems to disclose their future downfall:5 the Moreens have a vague benignity of manner, but no fixed social qualities (which would be more directly conveyed by adjectives such as “kind” or “friendly”). The incoherence of the details and the incongruous juxtaposition of the words in the opening phrases turn elegance and distinction into lowermiddle class pretentiousness: if the “jewelled hand” supposedly suggests a well-off woman, the adjective “fat” introduces a disturbing element to the description of the character; similarly, if the “gants de Suède” are an unmistakable mark of symbolic capital and upper-class distinction, the adjective “soiled” disturbs the connotation. As a result, both the jewels and the gloves appear to be pretentious. Thus the text suggests the characters’ inability to understand, not so much the importance of the object in itself, which can be purchased and obtained with money, but, more importantly, the symbolic capital of the etiquette surrounding the object. To debunk the myth of Henry James as a writer who does not use concrete details, this short story displays several common objects—many garments, the carriage, the banjo and the piano, to name just a few—and each of them is intended to connote the characters on a symbolic level. And, of course, the story opens with Pemberton’s hesitation about the idea of talking about money. If the upper-class behavioral code, which Pemberton seems to know about, implies a genteel appearance of indifference to the matter of money, it is also true that the text constantly focuses on money—Pemberton’s calls for payment and the amount of money offered, received, refused, sent, discussed, and exchanged (Bell). Once again, the effect is the incoherence and, therefore, the pretentiousness which characterizes the whole group.

Forgetfulness and Absences in the Social Space In order to describe the social space represented in the short story, it is worth considering the positioning of the protagonists in comparison with the other characters in the story. First of all, the Moreens’ contiguity with and habitual visiting of the European upper classes is repeatedly thrown into question. Pemberton’s perception of Mrs. Moreen as genteel and of the Moreens as a family with which he would really “see life” (144) is not confirmed in the text. On the contrary, as we have seen, it highlights the incoherence of the Moreens’ taste by employing incongruous details, and also shows the distance between the family and the other characters. Additionally, the worldly



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events mentioned by Mrs. Moreen—“they were a perfect calendar of the ‘days’ of their friends” (145)—are never represented, but rather reported by the woman, which casts doubt on their existence. The Moreens, like several wealthy Americans at the end of the nineteenth century, move among the European cities symbolically associated with the social and cultural European elite—Nice, Paris, Venice. Yet, although the choice of places and type of enjoyment show how the family attempts to affirm its belonging to the upper class, what is constantly betrayed is its belonging to a different class. The villa at Nice seems to have a worldly appearance because upper-class people are mentioned in association with it. This is enough to give Pemberton a “dazzling sense of culture” (145), but there are no scenes in which these meetings are actually represented. Furthermore, these acquaintances “sometimes forgot” (145) the agreed-upon meetings, and this is an impropriety according to the strict social code of the time, which signals the distance of the Moreens from the upper class. On the contrary, the visitors to the villa are “mysterious men with foreign titles and English clothes” (145), who entertain the young Moreens, speak improperly loudly, and demonstrate an incongruity between their clothes and their language. This is yet another breach in the coherence of taste. In this sense James pitilessly represents both a slice of the improvised social climbers and the unreliability of Pemberton’s point of view, who is revealed as unable to recognize the marks of distinction and vulgarity: “it was a houseful of Bohemians who wanted tremendously to be Philistines” (146). The social isolation of the Moreens from the upper class reemerges in Venice, where they go to meet the Dorringtons, a supposedly aristocratic family whose male members are given the title “lord,” i.e., Lord Dorrington and his son Lord Verschoyle. Although Mrs. Moreen has chosen her own day to visit with them, in accordance with the upper-class code, the text notes that “the Dorringtons never came” (174), while at the same time implying the indelicacy of calling at the hotel where the Dorringtons reside. Moreover, the category of “lord” does not specify a particular level of aristocracy, thereby stressing the extraneousness of the Moreens to the upper-class sphere. Even the physical distance provided by the balcony, which recurs in the text, marks the social distance between the Moreens and the surrounding world. Additionally, the casual encounter between Lord Dorrington, Mr. Moreen, and Ulick near San Marco’s church, which Pemberton observes at a distance, once again suggests the complexity of class relations. Pemberton’s description is significant: he “saw the old lord turn up with



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 Mr. Moreen and Ulick, who showed him the dim basilica as if it belonged to them” (174). The assumption of ownership in Mr. Moreen and Ulick’s manners proves to be at odds with the detached attitude towards art which is typical of the upper classes: it betrays the possessive attitude of the wealthy middle class, which is ultimately indifferent to the artistic place itself. The impropriety of the behavior is emphasized even more by Pemberton, who wonders if “his companions took a fee from him” (174). Thus it stresses how the Moreens resemble awkward and improvised tour guides, associated with the economic sphere and separated by an unbridgeable cultural distance from the Dorringtons. From a Bourdieusian perspective, the difference between the habitus is also a class distance—while Lord Dorrington is supposedly strolling through Venetian squares, the Moreens are on the “look out” for ways to turn the artistic-cultural space represented by the church into potential economic profit, for the purpose of social climbing. The text hints at the impermeability of the habitus: the social distance between the three subjects—Lord Dorrington, Mr. Moreen, and Pemberton—prevents each of them from identifying with a different habitus and decoding the marks of another class. And it is this inability to decode the distinctive marks that ultimately determines the Moreens’ failure. On the other hand, even if Pemberton’s comment is ironic, it is also true that he is once again thinking from an “economic” perspective. The social gap also becomes clear in the relationship between the Moreens and Mr. Granger, “a rich vacant American—a big bill with a flourishy heading and no items” (185), who, supposedly out of solidarity with his fellow countryman, lends the Moreen family his box at the theatre, but does not show up himself. What is highlighted is the distance between an aristocratic class endowed with a hereditary symbolic capital, and a class of newcomers who, by flaunting the marks of distinction, reveal that, in reality, they do not own them. From this perspective, it is significant that, in contrast to the abundant, deceitful hypercommunication of the protagonists, all the upper class characters communicate in silence, using distinctive hallmarks—the strolls, the visits to the basilica, their oversights, their absences and their behaviors. It is deliberate that, while Mr. Moreen and Ulick are often defined as “men of the world” and their “theory of life” is a rapacious “look out”—both features suggesting their belonging to a middle class associated with money and business—Pemberton notices “how much less . . . Lord Dorrington carried himself as a man of the world” (174; emphasis added). The text implicitly suggests that the upper-class distinction passes through different symbolic elements, including a



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different relationship with the legitimate cultural and social network, without the ostentation of symbolic objects. In such a structure, Pemberton’s perspective proves to be different: despite his hesitant utterance, he understands the distance between the aristocracy, and the new social climbers and adventurers who aim to acquire a different status through the symbolic nature of clothes, manners, and marriages. At this point in the story, Pemberton occupies another sphere: that of the scholar legitimated by culture, and the detached observer, together with Morgan, of the social dynamic.

Adventures and the Imagination: Metaphorical Spaces As in much Jamesian fiction, in this story space plays a crucial role and places become “connotators” of social hierarchies and characters’ trajectories. The cities in which the story is set suggest the trajectory of the Moreens’ social hunting: European cities, symbols of art and refinement, where the life of the upper classes takes place. It is significant that even if the Moreens move from one city to another in search of the beau monde, they are primarily portrayed in closed, private, isolated spaces: their villa at Nice, their different flats in Paris, their Venetian lodgings. The details highlight their descending trajectory: if the villa at Nice has terraces and balconies, a piano and a banjo, the Parisian apartment has far more negative connotations: “a small furnished apartment—a fourth-floor in a third-rate avenue, where there was a smell on the staircase and the portier was hateful” (151). Things go from bad to worse: on their return to Nice, the Moreens no longer own the villa and move into a hotel, while in Venice, the coastal city which sheltered high society at the end of the century, the family resides in an apartment which, although on the Grand Canal, is actually located in an “old palace” with a “comfortless hall,” where the “high battered casements shook in the storm” (175). Finally, the small hotel on the Champs Elysées, which is chaotic and shabby, is also a socially connoted space: “Confusion reigned in the apartments of the Moreens—very shabby ones this time, but the best in the house . . . with objects displaced” and an “extinguished hearth in . . . a little dishonoured salon” (190). The Moreens’ dwellings prove to be the distinctive mark of their social position, about which they cannot lie. Pemberton’s realization of the social masquerade of his employers corresponds to a spatial description which offers a blaze of closure: “his little servile room, which looked into a close court where a bare dirty opposite wall took, with the sound of shrill clatter, the reflexion of lighted back windows” (156). In contrast, Morgan and Pemberton are repeatedly associated with



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 open spaces: they display a flâneur attitude when they wander around Parisian museums, raid street book-stalls, visit Venetian and Parisian churches and monuments, and stroll along the Bois de Boulogne. Even if the protagonists live in the same cities, the spatial connotations change, as does their fruition of the spaces: the cities appear to be enjoyed by the tutor and his pupil for the disinterested pleasure provided by the art in them, which highlights a seeming resemblance in taste between the pair; whereas the Moreens display a “professional acquaintance with Continental cities” (145) and aim to marry off their daughters. Nevertheless, the short story does not leave any opposition stable, any gap too neat. The clear-cut opposition between the sphere of culture, affection, and spiritual affinities—a disinterested and morally “noble” one—and the sphere of business, calculation, and money is destabilized in the textual, stylistic and metaphorical levels of the story. Before the tragic ending, Pemberton perceives himself in spatial terms “as a dislodged block in the edifice” (186), and the simile shows the ambiguity of the character who identifies himself as a part, although removed, of the edifice. As mentioned above, edifices are constantly associated with the Moreens. In this sense Pemberton seems to embody those who adapt to the different circumstances with a sens pratique that allows the subject to survive. On a more abstract level, the text seems to suggest that the cultural capital that Pemberton owns is, to some extent, connected to a sphere that works according to different codes and rules, but is also functional to and complicitous with the preservation of the social structure. By going over the text again, several analogies between the Moreens and Pemberton emerge. Like the Moreens, Pemberton has squandered his wealth before becoming indigent; he was unable to pay the “inn” where he lived, just as the Moreens are tenants in arrears and are thrown out of their apartment. The Moreens’ behavior is reproachable, but this is also true of Pemberton when he suddenly abandons the English family where he had started work. Furthermore, throughout the text, the Moreens’ words delude Pemberton, while symmetrically Pemberton’s words delude Morgan. Overall, the macro oppositions dissolve in the representation of an ambiguous reality in dizzy transformation. In this sense the recurrence of some polysemic words in the text is significant as they set in motion multiple isotopies involving the economic, personal-affective, and symbolic sphere and, moreover, intertwine with Pemberton’s interpretive ability. In the early pages the word “figure” recurs with constantly different meanings: there is the expression “figure of salary,” in connection with money, in the first paragraph, which is



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shortly followed by the verb “figured” in connection to Pemberton’s interpretive skills and, a few pages later, by the expression “figures and manners” referring to the physical appearance of the young Moreens. Money, comprehension, and appearances intertwine to represent a society where neat social boundaries between social fractions blur, just as the willingness to establish them increases. Other semantic overlaps emerge with words such as “charge,” meaning an amount of money as well as the term Pemberton uses for Morgan; “interest” which, again, connects the economic to the social and affective sphere; and “delicate,” which refers both to Pemberton’s payment and to Morgan. In contrast to the representation of great historical events, the contradictions of the time, as well as the operational modes of field dynamics and the relationship between representation—the symbolic capital—and other aspects of the economic and social sphere, appear in a condensed form. The sense of society and the multiple negotiations between habitus and field, then, emerge in the refractions of the characters’ individuality. The fake and deceitful orderly world of the beginning of the story becomes a messy disorder, a disruptive and destructive storm at the end, where the victim is Morgan, whose lucid gaze intersects with Pemberton’s optical and intellectual blurring. Like several other Jamesian “young reflectors,” Morgan possesses an ultrasensitive perception and is a keen observer of the social dynamics of his family: he calls them “awful frauds” and is able to translate into words (in a different way from Maisie or the anonymous narrator in “In the Cage”) the implications of the situation, which include Pemberton’s attempted lies: “awful whopper.” 6 Yet, he is in a situation of complete impotence, to which he cannot but yield. However, the text also signals Morgan’s limits of perspective, related both to his age (Pemberton considers him as “clever,” but also “infantine” and “‘jolly’ superficial”) and his social position. The boy is portrayed as able to understand the meanness of his parents’ behavior, yet unable to understand Pemberton’s duplicity, or the affinity between his tutor and his family. Possessing a “romantic imagination, fed by poetry and history” (172), Morgan filters the world unrelated to his parents through a literary mind: words which are typical of gothic and adventure novels such as “hero,” “horror,” “poison,” “escape,” “romantic,” “sea,” “land,” and “storm” recur several times. Taken up with the construction of a “boy’s book” with his tutor, dealing with their escape and their future together, far from the Moreens, Morgan succumbs to the real storm at the realization of his tutor’s lies. The text states: “The turn taken was away from a good boy’s book—



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 the ‘escape’ was left on their hands” (192; emphasis in the original). Just as in “In the Cage,” which analogously contains water imagery and literary references, James seems to suggest that romantic imagination is crucial to life: it is a tool for survival and a legitimate filter through which to face reality. Yet, it is literature and not reality itself: the “good boy’s book” is a book by definition, a representation that is subject to interpretation. The passage from representation to reality, from verisimilitude to truth without interpretation, discloses the final crisis. Critics have provided multiple interpretations of the ending, trying to assess the responsibility for Morgan’s death. The text does not offer any suggestions regarding the adults’ responsibilities nor will it give voice to Morgan’s thoughts, but instead leaves the interpretation to the reader. However, some elements are worthy of attention. Throughout the short story, Pemberton’s name is often preceded by the adjective “poor,” primarily signaling his economic indigence. Yet, when Pemberton reaches the Moreens in Paris—after he has sent some money to Mrs. Moreen and has abandoned the rich English youth—the adjective “poor” appears again without any economic connotation (he has been well paid in England), thus becoming the narrator’s indirect comment on his choices and the escalation of human misery that will follow. Finally, it is worth adding another textual aspect, the absence of a trait rather than its presence: throughout the story, the narrator refers to the tutor as “our friend” and “our young man,” in order to build a bridge between the reader and the reflector. Nevertheless, from Pemberton’s return to France to the very end, no such friendly expression can be found: no final connection is built by the narrator to rescue the tutor. Pemberton and Mrs. Moreen hug Morgan’s corpse in a symmetrical position in the final scene, which seems to suggest, as many critics have noted, their complicity. Of that tragedy the reader, like the narrator, becomes a powerless spectator. From a Bourdieusian point of view, the complicity of the social agents as well as the powerlessness of the narrator and the reader join to convey the multiple never-ending reproduction of forms of domination in social space. In conclusion, the application of Bourdieu’s theories to “The Pupil”— through a close reading focused on the diegetic, formal, and linguistic levels of the text—provides a useful lens through which to view the representations of social class, in order to highlight James’s ability to represent the subtle implications of the multiple intersections of the economic and symbolic capital, which eventually determine our position in the social space.



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Notes 1

As an example, see Shine. All quotations are drawn from the New York Edition of the short story “The Pupil,” published in the volume The Portable Henry James, edited by M. D. Zabel. 3 Think also of the limited point of view in What Maisie Knew. See Shine. 4 See the introduction to the collection of essays edited by Annalisa Goldoni. 5 Think of the famous incipit of Emma by Jane Austen, where all the adjectives “handsome, clever, and rich” hint at the ensuing downfall. 6 The first edition includes the expression “transparent fiction” which openly reveals the ongoing dynamics (730). The expression in the New York Edition is more indirect but it significantly connects Pemberton and the Moreens since the “awful whopper” is typical of all of them. 2

Works Cited Balestra, Gianfranca. “Epifanie dello sguardo e del silenzio.” Goldoni 7990. Bell, Millicent. “‘The Pupil’ and the Unmentionable Subject.” Raritan 16.3 (1997): 50-63. Print. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. 1979. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984. Print. —. The Rules of Art. Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. 1992. Trans. Susan Emanuel. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996. Print. Canavan, Thomas. “The Economics of Disease in James’s ‘The Pupil.’” Criticism 15.3 (1973): 253-264. Print. Caserio, Robert L. “Anti-Social James.” The Henry James Review 31.1 (2010): 7-13. Print. Goldoni, Annalisa, ed. La comunicazione non verbale in “The Pupil” di Henry James. Roma: Nuova Arnica, 1994. Print. —. “Introduzione.” Goldoni 7-16. Hoy, Helen. “Homotextual Duplicity in Henry James’s ‘The Pupil.’” The Henry James Review 14.1 (1993): 34-42. Print. Izzo, Donatella. “Tradimenti e traduzioni: la problematicità della comunicazione non verbale in ‘The Pupil.’” Goldoni 117-130. Print. James, Henry. The Novels and Tales of Henry James. Vol. 11. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1908. v-xxii. Print. —. “The Pupil.” 1891. Henry James. Complete Stories 1884-1891. New York: Library of America, 1999. 714-758. Print. —. “The Pupil.” 1908. Ed. Morton Dauwen Zabel. The Portable Henry James, New York: Penguin, 1977. 137-193. Print.



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 Shine, Muriel. The Fictional Children of Henry James. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1969. Print. Zwinger, Lynda. “Bodies That Don’t Matter: The Queering of ‘Henry James.’” Modern Fiction Studies 41.3-4 (1995): 657-680. Print.



 

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE VALUE IN HENRY JAMES’S “PASTE” (1899): UNDERSTANDING JAMES AS A MICROSOCIOLOGIST MAYA HIGASHI WAKANA

David McWhirter, in his Preface to the recently published Henry James in Context (2010), writes that James’s modernity consists in his “responsive[ness] . . . to the material and historical conditions that in his own time determined new, specifically modern forms of experience, desire and subjectivity” (xix); James’s characters are modern, writes McWhirter, not only because they engage in modern-day activities but also because “their consciousnesses are produced and shaped by . . . historical, social and material developments” (xx). Accordingly, the essays in McWhirter’s volume focus on influences such as consumer culture, money and class, print culture, nationalism and imperialism, sexualities, and even manners. Here, I use the modifier “even” before the word “manners” not because I feel manners are trivial but, on the contrary, because manners are so pervasive that they become practically invisible, as in the habitual everyday gestures social individuals spontaneously make in the presence of others, and which go far beyond issues such as whether, for example, to eat peas with a knife (O’Farrell 195) or “the habits and ways, tweaked by style” that generate, reflect, preserve, and expose relations (O’Farrell 198). I contend that manner and manners are at the very heart of the dilemmas and confusions James’s protagonists undergo and that the conscious or spontaneous need for James’s social beings to behave civilly is responsible for their consistent inconsistencies—in the way they feel, think, and behave. Indeed, my claim is that the significance of manners, despite the abundant attention critics have given to James’s works as novels of manners, is still vastly underestimated. Because we cannot discern in literary works what we fail to recognize in everyday life, I, for one, have had to educate myself about that aspect of

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day-to-day living that we take so much for granted, namely, everyday civility, which—it turns out—is the domain of microsociology. James saw and portrayed a phenomenon about which twentieth-century microsociologist Erving Goffman (1922–1982) wrote extensively: what happens during face-to-face interaction rituals that reflects, reifies, or undermines ongoing power relations among people, thanks to each individual’s need to avoid embarrassment on all fronts. I should note, however, that as James discerned and as sociologists observe when discussing Goffman’s microsociology, although power relations in the larger social order are built into the microsocial dynamics of interaction (Rogers 102; Cahill 145), a microsocial set of norms “sui generis” (Rawls 136) is also at work. The effect of manners and civility on the consciousness of James’s characters in face-to-face situations needs to be independently investigated, and when we do so, the influence of those other, larger historical, cultural, and social factors also needs to be considered—but, I contend, in an essentially microsociological light. James’s novels are centrally concerned with the stagelike quality of everyday life, with individuals being required to express their positions and identities, one scene at a time and both on the front stage and backstage. Because of this need, the Jamesian self is, to use the words of social thinker George Herbert Mead (1863–1931), “essentially a social phenomenon” (133). One of the central claims I share with critics Sharon Cameron (77), Ross Posnock (136), and Gert Buelens (29–30), therefore, is that in James, consciousness and thinking are social. According to Mead, the phenomenon of the mind arises during an individual’s interaction with others. The self, in “tak[ing] the attitude of the other” or of generalized others, becomes an object to itself so that it can assess how it might act and react “intelligently, or rationally” (Mead 134, 138) in the larger world. An inner conversation—that is, thinking— then takes place as the self tries to successfully adapt to and influence its environment. In short, James’s selves are adaptive and thereby inevitably fragmented.1 The test of my claims rests on the plausibility of the readings I provide. In this essay, I therefore examine James’s “Paste,” first published in Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly in 1899 and later included in James’s New York Edition in 1909, to show how even in a short piece like this one—of fewer than 6,000 words—James’s microsociologically accurate portrayal of the perils and pitfalls of everyday living reigns.2 Contrary to Q. D. Leavis’s assessment that Henry James’s “Paste” is “an adaptation of one of [Guy de] Maupassant’s slickest stories, and is hardly less shallow than its model” (178), or Peter Rawlings’s estimation of the story as “slight” (xx), I claim that “Paste” is a carefully crafted gem that illustrates how character



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Charlotte Prime’s microsocial need to generally fit in with society repeatedly determines her line of behavior, thereby making her actively want to behave in a manner that not only proves detrimental to her selfinterest but is also, when viewed from a broader perspective, inconsistent in a consistent way. In other words, like Posnock, I am of the view that James, like Mead, understood the self as “essentially a social phenomenon” (Mead 133) that arises in the process of interaction. When interacting with one another, parties adapt their behavior to what they assume is the overall situation. As Goffman writes, “The rule of behavior that seems to be common to all situations and exclusive to them is the rule obliging participants to ‘fit in’” (Behavior 11). Authenticity and imitation, the genuine and the copy, the true and the adulterated, and the real thing and paste—such contrasts have always been central to the understanding of James’s works. In the Preface to “Paste,” James tells us that the germ of his tale comes from Maupassant’s “La Parure”3 but promises that his pearls are his and the drama they generate is “a new little ‘drama,’” with “a new setting” “as different as possible from the other,” that is, Maupassant’s (x). To be sure, as I will demonstrate in this paper, James’s short story is itself no mere imitation of Maupassant’s tale but is original—authentic, if you will. I contend that in this story, James explores the issue of authenticity and value not only of the pearls but also of the individuals whose relationships are essentially defined by the power of face-to-face interactions—with James’s pearls as their focus—which in turn defines their relationship to the pearls. James’s pearls are different from the gems in Maupassant’s story. In Maupassant’s “La Parure,” the author spells out for his readers that his gems are fake, whereas the authenticity of James’s pearls is ultimately irrelevant. James’s readers, who are led to believe that the pearls are real, respond to Charlotte’s ostensible loss at the end of the story and to her friend Mrs. Guy’s corresponding gain. However, whether the pearls really are real is never verified. Indeed, not much is verifiable about James’s pearls. They are shrouded in mystery, and one guess is as good as another with respect to the so-called truth about how Charlotte’s aunt—who was an actress before becoming a vicar’s wife, “the effaced Miss Bradshaw” (“Paste” 334)—obtained the pearls, how they came to be placed in a tin box “on the top shelf of the old school-room closet” (319), and how Mrs. Guy finally gains possession of them at the end of the story. James offers us an account only of how his social beings react to the pearls and how, for Charlotte, the value of the gems fluctuates, indeed metamorphoses—the gems go from being fascinating and faintly romantic to undesirable, from undesirable to desirable and romantic, and, by the end of the narrative,



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from desirable and romantic to, I contend, essentially irrelevant. Pearls in general have always been valued, but a brief look at the history of these gems informs us that their value has varied over time, depending on the availability of other precious stones, such as diamonds; the increase in the variety and supply of pearls; the purpose the gems served at various moments in history; and the technological advances of the early twentieth century that ultimately made cultured pearls affordable for everyone, thereby lessening the worth of the natural item.4 The value of pearls both generates and results from social appreciation, that is, it is both the cause and effect of a social phenomenon. In short, their value is socially determined—or, as sociologists would say, socially constructed. The value of the pearls within James’s story also fluctuates, depending on how each character appreciates the pearls and how the others with whom the characters interact respond to this appreciation.5 Arthur Prime, Charlotte Prime, and Mrs. Guy react to the pearls in reacting to one another in their respective ways and at various junctures, thereby generating a variety of assessments, and as the so-called Thomas Theorem aptly pronounces, “if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences” (Thomas and Thomas 572).6 James demonstrates that the value of his pearls is also socially—that is, microsocially—constructed: anyone, including the reader, who becomes as involved in the face-to-face exchanges in this story as the characters do, comes more or less to believe that the pearls are real, whether or not they truly are. The first character we meet in the story is Arthur, who invites his cousin Charlotte to look at what she at first interprets as “a confused cluster of bright objects” (316). This happens the day after Arthur’s stepmother’s funeral. By then, Arthur has gone through his stepmother’s things, taking special pains—he professes to even having used a stepladder—to ensure he has not missed anything of value in his stepmother’s closet. Apparently, he has also had ample time to look through his stepmother’s various belongings before discussing them with Charlotte. Inevitably basing his assumptions of others’ behavior on what he knows to be true for himself, Arthur believes that had any of the jewelry he found been real, his stepmother would have sold it—as Arthur himself would do, James thereby seems to suggest. Arthur’s assessment of his stepmother’s jewelry as fake, including a certain string of pearls that Charlotte suspects may be real, is also supported by his need for them to be “rotten paste” (322, 335), because his stepmother could not have been able to afford them herself: if any item among his stepmother’s jewelry had been real, Arthur concludes, it would have to have been a gift from some admirer, thereby hinting at some form of illicit exchange. And



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simply put, Arthur cannot stomach the idea that a stepmother of his could ever even be suspected of such scandalous behavior. Inevitably, Arthur’s judgment of his stepmother’s pearls reveals more about Arthur than about his stepmother; according to Arthur, the pearls have to be paste, so that the reputation of his stepmother—a vicar’s wife—can continue to be unquestioned. As Aviva Briefel writes, “Arthur realizes that the first step to reconstructing his step-mother’s life as a respectable woman is to prove that the objects she has left behind are incontestable forgeries” (163). Family honor is at stake. Critics have typically referred to Arthur as “priggish” (Terrie 11; Wagenknecht 119), “prudish” (Putt 256), “broadly unpleasant” (Rawlings xxi), and “unlikeable” (Knieger 468; emphasis in original). I contend that, as an interactant, Arthur is honest, if clumsy. In determining his performance as a faithful son-in-law, Arthur fails to consider certain elements that a more shrewd and resourceful interactant would surely have noted. For example, a skillful interactant would have managed to not reveal that he wasted no time in rifling through his dying stepmother’s belongings or the way his mind works. Arthur’s suggestion to Charlotte that his stepmother would have sold the necklace had the pearls been real only reveals Arthur’s tendency to gauge an item’s value in predominantly monetary terms. In addition, Arthur is consistently clumsy from beginning to end, such as when he unwittingly shows “the intention . . . rather than the expression, of feeling something or other” (315). He “leave[s] [Charlotte] to pick [his observations] up without assistance” (315), giving her what he believes are worthless jewels, remarking, “‘then please take them,’ . . . in a tone of relief which expressed somehow more of the eager than of the gracious” (318). He also “turn[s] his back on her and walk[s] away” (321) whenever he wishes to avert the possibility of a challenge. Arthur presents what Goffman would call a stable “face”—“the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact” (Interaction 5)—that of a self-absorbed and standoffish defender of family honor, and thereby of his honor, who tries his clumsy best to seem to do the right thing. When Charlotte is with Arthur, she has difficulty disagreeing with his assessment of her aunt’s pearls as paste. For one, Charlotte, like Arthur, seems not familiar enough with the real thing to know the difference: Charlotte “flush[es]” and is overcome by “embarrassment” (326) when Mrs. Guy later expresses her amazement that neither Arthur nor Charlotte could recognize that the pearls are real. For another, after Arthur’s initial treatment of her, Charlotte is only too glad to be back “in face,” as Goffman would say, as Arthur’s relative, which allows her to experience



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“feelings of confidence and assurance” (Interaction 8). Although Charlotte is a member of the Prime family, Arthur does not treat her like one at first, so her immediate response when Arthur asks her to come look at some of her aunt’s things is one of general relief. Being upgraded to the status of a relative from that of a member of the “snubbed order” (316) who is “out of face” (Interaction 8; emphasis in original) is uplifting. Because one’s face is a product of one’s claims for one’s self, supported and reinforced by others’ assumptions of it, face is partly defined by the kind of deference others show the individual.7 Thus, only when Arthur treats Charlotte as a relative does Charlotte feel like one, “with a better little hope of coming in for some remembrance, some relic” (316). In face as a relative, Charlotte is immediately drawn to the “strangely vulgar” jewelry, which seems to tell “a far-off faded story” (316). This is before Charlotte hears Arthur’s opinion of her aunt’s possessions. Even though both Arthur and Charlotte take pains to adapt to what the overall situation seems to call for, Charlotte, the woman, is the one who undertakes most of what Goffman calls “face-work” (Interaction 27), and the first challenge Charlotte meets is to adjust to Arthur’s “line,” the “pattern of verbal and nonverbal acts” through which Arthur “expresses his view of the situation” (Interaction 5; emphasis in original). Charlotte senses that Arthur’s face is of one who insists he knows better than she does. With Arthur directly in front of her, Charlotte’s desire to remain in face as his relative drives her to adjust to him and accept his assessment of his stepmother’s jewelry. Although Charlotte jumps inwardly when Arthur catches her engaging in backstage thoughts about the possible reasons her aunt chose to marry Arthur’s father—she feels she can perceive Arthur’s thoughts, so, she spontaneously reasons, he should be able to perceive hers—, she is immediately relieved to find that Arthur is as backstage, literal, and worldly as she is. Arthur calls his stepmother’s things “old stuff of the time she never liked to mention” (317). Without questioning this sweeping generalization of her aunt’s past as an actress, Charlotte continues to adapt to Arthur’s tone. She is careful “to show intelligence, yet keep clear of twaddle,” tries “not to be less knowing” (317), and occasionally “sound[s]” (322) him by “risk[ing]” (317) and “[throwing] off” (318) comments so as to flexibly pay deference to Arthur’s backstage demeanor, while also performing a level of intimacy in keeping with Arthur’s backstage tone. Yet Arthur makes Charlotte feel, for lack of a better expression, forever distanced, even rejected. His backstageness allows only him to express familiarity. With his “virtuous sternness” (318), “small sniff of impatience” (320), “allowance for [Charlotte’s] simplicity,” and “manner”



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that “made her feel she had probably been wanting in tact” (321), Arthur succeeds in leading Charlotte to believe she needs to remain alert, inoffensive, and constantly ready to adapt. Even though she shows that she perfectly understands his need to repudiate the theory that the pearls might have been a gift to his stepmother from an admirer, “Arthur had made for her somehow the difficulty that she could n’t show him she understood him without seeming pert” (322). The mere gesture of reassuring, and thereby comforting, Arthur makes Charlotte feel as though she were being patronizing and therefore disrespectful toward Arthur: Charlotte recognizes that Arthur needs to feel that he is in control, not she. Even though Arthur’s behavior and attitude seem to demand that he be reassured of her understanding that the pearls are paste, Charlotte intuits that he cannot condone such reassurance. To avoid friction, Charlotte ultimately resorts to “[meeting] him with a certain blankness, but adequately enough . . . for him to regard the subject as dismissed” (322). Charlotte also accepts Arthur’s assessment of the pearls as paste because she is in part like Arthur: “herself sensitive and shrewd” (315), Charlotte tends to think in as calculating and practical a manner as Arthur does. As she quietly muses over her aunt’s jewelry, which seems to tell the story of her aunt’s life as an actress and the choice she made in marrying a widowed vicar, Charlotte finds herself gauging Mrs. Prime’s career in utilitarian terms: “This career could n’t have been eminent and must much more probably have been comfortless” (317), she concludes. Had it been eminent and comfortable, Charlotte reasons, her aunt would not have traded it in for marriage to “a widowed cleric with a small son,” even if he were “honest,” with “a large sense of Shakespeare,” and even if she were an actress “a few years his senior” (316). Indeed, Charlotte can be as literal and calculating in her values as Arthur can. James is careful to inform us that “in her penniless state she would have parted with it [the pearl necklace] for money” and “gave herself also to dreams of what in this direction it would do for her” (334)—like Arthur, perhaps. What Charlotte might do, so might Arthur, she reasons, which explains why, toward the end of James’s narrative, Charlotte is prone to imagining that Arthur sold the pearls to the jewelers at Bond Street or engaged in some form of one-on-one transaction with Mrs. Guy. Charlotte’s judgment of other people’s behavior is, as is the case with Arthur, inevitably based on her knowledge of herself. In short, the value of Mrs. Prime’s pearls is initially determined by Arthur’s need for them to be paste, Charlotte’s inability to tell the difference between real and fake pearls, her desire to stay “in face,” Arthur’s ability to define the situation, Charlotte’s need to show her



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adeptness at “face-work” (Goffman, Interaction 27) with him, the genderoriented structure of interaction, and Charlotte’s similarities with Arthur, including her tendency to engage in cost-benefit analyses. Furthermore, Charlotte understands Arthur’s obsession with the issue of decency and moral noninferiority in discussing his stepmother’s pearls, because Charlotte herself is obsessed with similar issues: one false move, and Charlotte could lose her reputation as, and her sense of being, a respectable lady—even if she is a working one (Charlotte is a governess, what M. Jeanne Peterson calls a “lady-employee” [12])—much in the same way that Arthur could lose his honor, should his family’s honor be questioned.8 Arthur and Charlotte would agree that vulgarity and suspicion must be avoided at all costs. Therefore, when Charlotte first shows her aunt’s pearls to Mrs. Guy, she “promptly express[es] a fear” that they might be “too garish” (324). Her internalized need to avoid any signs of vulgarity is so powerful that she must observe its dictates even when nobody else is looking: we learn that Charlotte has not even tried the pearls on for fear of “stoop[ing] to approved ‘imitation’” (326). Her insistence on impeccable taste and honesty is thus linked to her need to feel respectable and proper. Thanks to Mrs. Guy, however, Charlotte comes to interpret her aunt’s keepsake in a completely different—that is, a positive—light. Mrs. Guy, who is not a member of the Prime family and is therefore free from any need to defend its honor, as Arthur seems intent on doing, calls the pearls “the darlings” (332) and notes “a special charm in them,” adding that they “tell so their history” and “breathe a tenderness” (333). According to Mrs. Guy, the pearls are “things of love” and “things of passion” (333). Because Charlotte spontaneously adjusts her behavior and sympathies to those of the party with whom she is interacting at the moment, she finds herself unable to contradict Mrs. Guy’s assessment of the pearls as real. For one, Charlotte’s social position as a governess in receipt of wages creates an affiliation between her and her actress aunt, “the effaced Miss Bradshaw” (334), as well as between her and Mrs. Guy, both of whom seem to be in the position of having to fend for themselves.9 A natural allegiance emerges among the three women. For another, Mrs. Guy’s face, like Arthur’s, is stable, and we learn that she has “the face of a baby and the authority of a commodore” (323), with “a certain air of established habit in the eyes” (331). Not only does Mrs. Guy tell Charlotte to come to her room rather than offering to go to Charlotte’s whenever they look at or discuss Charlotte’s aunt’s possessions, but also Mrs. Guy is always definite in her responses and “to the point” (324) in what she says. In addition, Mrs. Guy, like Arthur, is able to make Charlotte feel ignorant



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and petty: Charlotte thinks to herself, “There was a capacity in Mrs. Guy’s tone for a sinking of persons—!” (328). After Mrs. Guy pronounces—without inhibition or reservation—that Mrs. Prime’s pearls are real and valuable, the “little governess at Bleet” begins to “put on the necklace . . . in secret sessions; she wore it sometimes under her dress; she came to feel verily a haunting passion for it” (334). Rather than denying the pearls’ authenticity, Charlotte joins Mrs. Guy in celebrating it, but in secret, as Charlotte imagines the late Mrs. Prime may have done. As we have seen, the value of James’s pearls undergoes multiple interpretations. Charlotte’s aunt’s pearls are a “burden” (324) when Charlotte believes they are paste, because she fears that people might consider Charlotte vulgar for having them. They are a source of “dread” when the pearls become Charlotte’s and she begins to suspect they are real (330), because she then fears what people might think of her aunt and/or of her for possessing such a valuable object that neither woman could possibly have purchased on her own. Yet a close reading tells us that from the very beginning, Charlotte senses a sentimental value in her aunt’s gems, too, to the extent that she contradicts Arthur’s declaration that the pearls are “trash” by claiming, “They’re relics. I think they have their melancholy and even their dignity” (317). Indeed, the more Charlotte thinks about the pearls, the more they become “touching” and “more attaching for her than she could now confide to any ear” (334). Charlotte begins to wear the pearls in secret because they seem to attest to “how bad or how happy—in the sophisticated sense of Mrs. Guy and [Arthur]”—her aunt “must have been to have had to be so mute!” (334). Charlotte identifies with the person she comes to think of as “the effaced Miss Bradshaw,” and when Charlotte wears her aunt’s pearls in secret, they become “the effaced Miss Bradshaw” (334), or Charlotte’s version of her aunt as expressed by the jewelry. Charlotte is initially ashamed of, then dreads, and eventually feels deeply attached to the pearls. Her assessment of their value varies wildly, thanks to her flexibility and to her having—as most of us do—more than one face: she is a respectable member of the Prime family; a practical, “sensitive,” and “shrewd” woman (315), who needs to fend for herself; a governess who must be perceived as a lady rather than a fallen member of the middle class; and a working woman who seems to understand the pain and happiness of “the dear dead kind colourless lady whose career had turned so sharp a corner in the middle” (333). Just as the pearls’ value changes as Charlotte assumes different faces when interacting with Arthur and Mrs. Prime, what the pearls stand for also changes: a potential piece of



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incriminating evidence of Charlotte’s bad taste, potential proof of her aunt’s scandalous behavior, “splendid pearls” that are “decidedly . . . exquisite” with “excellent” value (336, 327), and an extension of Charlotte’s vulnerable self. As for the ownership of the pearls, despite the various things Arthur does or professes to have done with the gems—from “gather[ing] them together, march[ing] off with them to a drawer, put[ting] them in and click[ing] the key” (336), to claiming he has smashed them, to either selling them to or leaving them with the Bond Street jewelers—Charlotte is well aware that she voluntarily returned the pearls to Arthur and that he has chosen to not give them back to her again—whether because of denial, disgust, stinginess, or even avarice. Logically speaking, then, what Arthur does with his pearls is for Arthur to decide, not Charlotte. But Charlotte feels “full of her private wrong” (337) when Mrs. Guy, toward the end of James’s tale, tells her that the magnificent pearls she wears to an event hosted at Eaton Square are in fact Arthur’s; that Arthur “disposed of” (337) them at Bond Street rather than smashing them, as he told Charlotte he had done; and that Mrs. Guy discovered them at Bond Street purely by accident and bargained for them there. Charlotte’s “start” (336), her gestures of gasping and panting, and “morbid[ity]” (337), attest to her panic at having lost possession of her aunt’s pearls, and in feeling the loss, Charlotte is forced to acknowledge her ultimately less-thanresigned feelings about her aunt’s jewelry. Given that Charlotte cannot ask, let alone challenge, Arthur about what he did with his belongings—she can easily imagine Arthur telling her that what he does with his pearls is his business, not hers, and asking why Charlotte is so obsessed with his necklace—Charlotte’s wrong can only be private, not public. If Charlotte could somehow verify that Mrs. Guy went directly to Arthur’s residence to purchase—or perhaps even engage in some dubious exchange for—the pearls, then Charlotte could at least claim to be the victim of her circumstances, not their author. Even so, Charlotte cannot deny having played an active part in losing the pearls to Mrs. Guy. To make matters worse, Charlotte also remembers thinking, “Might n’t he [Arthur] have a grand magnanimous moment” of refraining from “the shabbiness of taking it [the pearl necklace] back” (334)? Charlotte recalls having felt that she might still have a chance to own the gems herself. If Arthur had insisted on taking the necklace back from Charlotte, though, Arthur would have been the shabby party, not Charlotte. But Arthur reclaimed possession of the pearls legitimately, claiming that he must have another expert examine them. He then blamed Charlotte for insulting his stepmother by insinuating that the pearls were real, claiming instead that



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the jewelers at Bond Street had determined that the pearls were instead paste, thereby saving his honor and his face at the expense of Charlotte’s. And now she must accept that her aunt’s valuable pearls are around Mrs. Guy’s neck. The profound frustration Charlotte experiences in learning that her aunt’s necklace now belongs to Mrs. Guy suddenly forces Charlotte to become aware of her feeble convictions: does she or does she not feel entitled to her aunt’s pearls? That Charlotte should question why her aunt’s pearls are around Mrs. Guy’s neck instead of hers is an anomaly to her renunciatory line of claiming nothing for herself unless the item has been given to her and its value clearly understood. Her obsession with the necklace attests to her muddled expectations with respect to it: why should Charlotte wish to reclaim for herself what she has of her own accord renounced and which Arthur, with or without a clear understanding of its value, has not chosen to return to Charlotte? Embarrassment, Goffman aptly writes, “has to do with unfulfilled expectations” (Interaction 105– 06), in this case, involving the piece of Charlotte’s aunt’s jewelry that Charlotte chose to relinquish to Arthur in the name of impeccable honesty. Thanks to the rude awakening she experiences when she sees the pearls around Mrs. Guy’s neck, Charlotte becomes fully aware that she had furtively expected an acknowledgment of her moral noninferiority, and possibly an additional reward in the form of her aunt’s pearls, and this forces her to descend—in her own estimation—from the sublime to the ridiculous and to understand herself like never before. Subsequently, revelations about Charlotte’s inevitable inconsistencies in her value judgments and her position regarding the pearls, both of which seem to attest to her superficiality, loom ominously before her, and Charlotte blushes—experiencing a “flood of crimson” (336)—when her face as an honest and respectable lady gives way to that of a “goose” (331), in Mrs. Guy’s terminology, and a hypocrite, in her own. In the end, Charlotte is unable to deny that Mrs. Guy is no hypocrite and clearly not a goose. By the end of James’s narrative, then, Charlotte’s obsession with what are now Mrs. Guy’s pearls is an expression of both her wish and her inability to deny her own “goosehood” and, perhaps, inauthenticity. For Charlotte, not only have the pearls themselves become all but irrelevant as an item to be pursued for their own sake, but—and this is my guess—she would also like more than anything to be able to forget that they ever existed, now that they threaten to attest to the inconsistent, chameleon-like way she knows she has acted in dealing with her cousin Arthur and her friend Mrs. Guy—which is how she is required to act, microsocially.



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When viewed from a microsociological perspective, then, both Arthur Voss’s assessment of Charlotte as “scrupulously honest” (152) and S. Gorley Putt’s assessment of her as a “selfless [ninny]” (256) become equally valid. James had the insight of a microsociologist, and because value in his works is both social and microsocial, it is also inextricably linked to the microsocial issue of face and the multiple selves that social beings must skillfully manage, which, as I hope this essay has effectively illustrated, James both understood and successfully depicted in his pearl of a story. Sociologist Randall Collins notes that social life “forces us to switch back and forth between many complicated roles” and thus makes people “somewhat untruthful, inconsistent, and dishonorable” (50). Charlotte’s inconsistencies and perceived dishonor, despite her constant and sincere efforts to the contrary, are likewise inevitable outcomes of everyday living and its accompanying morality: as sociologist Gregory W. H. Smith points out in discussing Goffman’s microsociological perspective, morality is “built right into the detail of interaction,” “not something that is diffusely located in ‘society’ but is rather mediated and renewed in everyday social encounters” (100). James, I contend, would have fully agreed.

Notes 1

I originally made the claims presented in this paragraph in the “Introduction” to Performing the Everyday in Henry James’s Late Novels (Ashgate 2009). I wish to express my gratitude to Stephen Arata, Bryson Clevenger, and David L. Rubin of the University of Virginia for reading and commenting on this essay. I also thank the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) and Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) for supporting this project (KAKENHI Grant Number 23520345). 2 Subsequent references to the work will be from James’s New York Edition and cited parenthetically in the text. 3 Henry Terrie points out that because James replaces the diamond necklace in Maupassant’s work with a pearl one, he is also indebted to the author’s “Les Bijoux” (“The Jewels”), in which, Terrie notes, “Maupassant himself had reversed the premise” (10). See Christina E. Albers’s “Paste,” in A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Henry James, for a succinct summary of the story’s source and some critical essays about this work by James. 4 See, for example, The Book of the Pearl: The History, Art, Science and Industry of the Queen of Gems by George Frederick Kunz and Charles Hugh Stevenson; Pearls: Ornament & Obsession by Kirstin Joyce, Shellei Addison, and Sumiko Mikimoto; and Pearls: A Natural History by Neil H. Landman, Paula M. Mikkelsen, Rüdiger Bieler, and Bennet Bronson.



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5

Sociologists Randall Collins and Michael Makowsky claim that Goffman’s microsociological perspective, which I contend overlaps with that of James, invites us to do the following: “Instead of trying to focus on some independent things that people seem to be talking about, we should watch them as they are talking about it. The ultimate reality is a puzzle, sometimes a myth, and the ‘realest’ thing we can catch hold of is the behavior of the people constructing reality” (252). 6 See also “The Thomas Theorem and the Matthew Effect” by Robert K. Merton, which discusses, among other things, the history of the theorem, which dates back to the time of the Greek philosopher Epictetus (382–83). 7 “Deference,” according to Goffman, is “that component of activity which functions as a symbolic means by which appreciation is regularly conveyed to a recipient of this recipient,” and these “marks of devotion represent ways in which an actor celebrates and confirms his relation to a recipient” (Interaction 56–57; emphasis in original). 8 The inconsonant status of governesses as “lady-employee[s]” (12) has been well documented in M. Jeanne Peterson’s essay “The Victorian Governess: Status Incongruous in Family and Society.” 9 I am indebted to my friend Margaret Gargano for her thoughts on the social status of Mrs. Guy, which she shared in an email correspondence. Although the word “friend” is used repeatedly in “Paste” (324, 325, 332, 336) to describe the relationship between Mrs. Guy and Charlotte, Mrs. Guy’s social status is never clearly defined, perhaps indicating her ambiguous status as a woman struggling in the periphery of society.

Works Cited Albers, Christina E. “Paste.” A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Henry James. New York: G. K. Hall, 1997. 689–94. Print. Armstrong, Paul B. The Phenomenology of Henry James. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1983. Print. Briefel, Aviva. “Paste and Pearls: Drawing the Boundaries of Female Identity.” The Deceivers: Art Forgery and Identity in the Nineteenth Century. By Aviva Briefel. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2006. 146–74. Print. Buelens, Gert. “In Possession of a Secret: Rhythms of Mastery and Surrender in ‘The Beast in the Jungle.’” The Henry James Review 19.1 (1998): 17–35. Print. Cameron, Sharon. Thinking in Henry James. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989. Print. Cahill, Spencer E. “Toward a Sociology of the Person.” Sociological Theory 16.2 (1998): 131–48. Print. Collins, Randall. “Theoretical Continuities in Goffman’s Work.” Erving Goffman: Exploring the Interaction Order. Ed. Paul Drew and Anthony Wootton. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1988. 41–63. Print.



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Collins, Randall, and Michael Makowsky. The Discovery of Society. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005. Print. Goffman, Erving. Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. New York: The Free Press, 1963. Print. —. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. New York: Anchor, 1967. Print. James, Henry. “Paste.” The Novels and Tales of Henry James. Vol. 16. New York: Scribner’s, 1909. 313–37. Print. —. Preface. The Novels and Tales of Henry James. Vol. 16. New York: Scribner’s, 1909. v–xii. Print. Joyce, Kirstin, Shellei Addison, and Sumiko Mikimoto. Pearls: Ornament & Obsession. New York: Simon, 1993. Print. Knieger, Bernard. “James’s ‘Paste.’” Studies in Short Fiction 8.3 (1971): 468–69. Print. Kunz, George Frederick, and Charles Hugh Stevenson. The Book of the Pearl: The History, Art, Science and Industry of the Queen of Gems. New York: Dover, 1993. Print. Landman, Neil H., Paula M. Mikkelsen, Rüdiger Bieler, and Bennet Bronson. Pearls: A Natural History. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001. Print. Leavis, Q. D. “Henry James: The Stories.” Scrutiny 14 (1947): 117–19. Rpt. in Collected Essays. Vol. 2: The American Novel and Reflections of the European Novel. Ed. G. Singh. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1947. 177–84. Print. McWhirter, David, ed. Henry James in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. Print. Mead, George Herbert. Mind, Self, and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Ed. Charles W. Morris. 1934. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1962. Print. Merton, Robert K. “The Thomas Theorem and the Matthew Effect.” Social Forces 74.2 (1995): 379–422. Print. O’Farrell, Mary Ann. “Manners.” Henry James in Context. Ed. David McWhirter. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. 192–202. Print. Peterson, M. Jeanne. “The Victorian Governess: Status Incongruous in Family and Society.” Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age. Ed. Martha Vicinus. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1973. 3–19. Print. Posnock, Ross. The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991. Print. Putt, S. Gorley. The Fiction of Henry James: A Reader’s Guide. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968. Print.



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Rawlings, Peter, ed. Henry James’s Shorter Masterpieces: Vol. 2. 2 vols. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1984. Print. Rawls, Ann Warfield. “The Interaction Order Sui Generis: Goffman’s Contribution to Social Theory.” Sociological Theory 5 (1987): 136–49. Print. Rogers, Mary F. “Goffman on Power, Hierarchy, and Status.” The View from Goffman. Ed. Jason Ditton. London: Macmillan, 1980. 100–33. Print. Smith, Gregory W. H. Erving Goffman. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print. Terrie, Henry, ed. Henry James: Tales of Art and Life. Schenectady, NY: Union College P, 1984. Print. Thomas, William Isaac, and Dorothy Swaine Thomas. The Child in America: Behavior Problems and Programs. New York: Knopf, 1928. Print. Voss, Arthur. The American Short Story: A Critical Survey. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1973. Print. Wakana, Maya Higashi. Performing the Everyday in Henry James’s Late Novels. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009. Print. Wagenknecht, Edward. The Tales of Henry James. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1984. Print.



 

PART VI: JAMESIAN NARRATIVE AND TEXTUALITY

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO THE HALF-LIFE OF FIGURES SHEILA TEAHAN

The characters in James’s “The Story of a Year” are half-hearted; they have half a mind to do things; and, too often, they don’t know the half of it. One of the story’s principal tropes is that of “halfness”: the text is rife with figures of incompletion, interruption, and suspension; with promises half made and secrets half kept. The following passages are exemplary of the text’s preoccupation with figures of halfness. Elizabeth (as I shall not scruple to call her outright) was leaning upon her companion’s arm, half moving in concert with him, and half allowing herself to be led, with that instinctive acknowledgement of dependence natural to a young girl who has just received the assurance of lifelong protection. (23) “I should be thankful, if I were half as good as Lizzie.” (33) “I’m half sorry I told you.” (34) These were doubtless to be (and she half knew it) the happiest days of her life. (36) But Mrs. Ford was mistrustful of this semi-confidence. (38) She sat in a half-stupor. (46) She was like an actor who finds himself on the stage with a half-learned part and without sufficient wit to extemporize. (49) Lizzie’s fortunes became old stories to her before she had half read them through. (49-50) And then, as if this effort was beyond her strength, she half staggered back to the sofa again. (58) She half shook him off, and retreated toward the door. (60)

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“Elizabeth!” cried Bruce, half stupefied, “in God’s name, what do you mean by these crazy speeches?” (66)

“The Story of a Year” employs and is structured around the figure of aposiopesis (Greek, “becoming silent”), defined by Richard Lanham as “[s]topping suddenly in midcourse, leaving a statement unfinished; sometimes from genuine passion, sometimes for effect” (20). As a figure of incompletion, aposiopesis is linked to such similar figures as interpellatio (interruption), obticentia (a pause or sudden break), reticentia (keeping silent), and praecisio (a cutting off) (Lanham 91, 104, 131, 117). Puttenham calls aposiopesis “the Figure of silence,” defining it as an “auricular figure of defect, and is when we begin to speake a thing, and breake of in the middle way, as if either it needed no further to be spoken of, or that we were ashamed, or afraide to speake it out” (178). I am interested in investigating aposiopesis not merely as an ornamental or syntactical rhetorical figure understood as a “departure[] from customary usage to achieve special effects without a change in the radical meaning of the words” (Harmon 199), as reflected in Lanham’s and Puttenham’s formulations, but as a narrativizable figure that operates at the levels of rhetorical and narrative agency. In doing so I build on the work of Kevin Ohi, whose analysis of such tropes as zeugma, syllepsis, and chiasmus in late James teaches us that the agency of figuration troubles and denaturalizes the categories of plot and character to which figurative language is usually thought to be subordinate. Challenging received assumptions about the primacy of the thematic over the tropological, Ohi reads The Golden Bowl’s plots of marriage and adultery as productions of the figural operations of syllepsis and zeugma (33-58). To be sure, “The Story of a Year,” James’s second published tale, displays little of the elliptical temporality, ambiguous agency, or complex tropology of The Wings of the Dove or The Golden Bowl; but the contrasts between the operation of figure in “Story” and in James’s late fictions are, I would contend, contrasts of degree rather than kind. The workings of tropology in “Story” confound the received critical sense of the alleged lack of sophistication of James’s early fiction. His Civil War stories of the sixties (to include “The Story of a Year,” 1865, “Poor Richard,” 1867, and “An Extraordinary Case,” 1868) are often dismissed or mentioned in passing as immature fictions whose principal interest lies in their anticipation of the more substantial realist texts of the eighties.1 Yet “The Story of a Year” is readable as an allegory of aposiopesis whose recurring figure of incompletion is not only verbal, as reflected in the passages quoted above, but causal and narratological in nature.



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As the story opens, Lizzie Crowe has just become engaged to Jack Ford, her guardian’s son. The couple’s playful banter, in the course of a walk that turns out to coincide with the arrival of Jack’s marching orders for Virginia, addresses questions of selfhood, temporality, intentionality, and agency. It further poses questions about the relation of language, and especially of figural language, to all of these, that it will be the story’s work to unpack, though not to resolve. Before the dialogue revealing that Jack has proposed to Lizzie immediately before the narrative opens, the lovers watch a purple prose sunset that is implied to mirror Ford’s idealized imagination of war. The aggressive martial rhetoric of the narrator’s clichéd and florid dramatization of the sunset, displacing an imaginary battle from earth to sky, both reflects and distances itself ironically from Ford’s allegorical reading of it as reported in free indirect discourse: As Ford looked at the clouds, it seemed to him that their imagery was all of war, their great uneven masses were marshalled into the semblance of a battle. There were columns charging and columns flying and standards floating,—tatters of the reflected purple; and great captains on colossal horses, and a rolling canopy of cannon-smoke and fire and blood. The background of the clouds, indeed, was like a land on fire, or a battleground illumined by another sunset, a country of blackened villages and crimsoned pastures. The tumult of the clouds increased. . . . They seemed to sway in confused splendor; the opposing squadrons bore each other down; and then suddenly they scattered, bowling with equal velocity towards north and south, and gradually fading away into the pale evening sky. The purple pennons sailed away and sank out of sight, caught, doubtless, upon the brambles of the intervening plain. Day contracted itself into a fiery ball and vanished. (24)

Jack and Lizzie read quite differently this lurid skyscape of purples, crimsons, and pinks, the hectic coloration of which is echoed in Lizzie’s perhaps erotically flushed complexion. “That is an allegory,” said the young man, as the sun went under, looking into his companion’s face, where a pink flush seemed still to linger: “it means the end of the war. The forces on both sides are withdrawn. The blood that has been shed gathers itself into a vast globule and drops into the ocean.” “I’m afraid it means a shabby compromise,” said Elizabeth. “Light disappears, too, and the land is in darkness.” “Only for a season,” answered the other. “We mourn our dead. Then light comes again, stronger and brighter than ever. Perhaps you’ll be crying for me, Lizzie, at that distant day.”



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“Oh, Jack, didn’t you promise not to talk about that?” says Lizzie, threatening to anticipate the performance in question. (25)

Where John reads the sunset as nature’s prolepsis of a triumphant end to bloody conflict, Lizzie perceives neither victory nor clarity but a defeated “shabby compromise”—a resonant phrase for a story centered on the problem of the promise. A compromise both is and is not a promise. The rare and obsolete senses of “compromise” as a promise or mutual promise (Oxford English Dictionary 1) residually subtend its modern meaning, in which the Latin prefix “com” (together, or together with) ironically attenuates the promise it supplements, compromising it. The promise immediately in question here is Jack’s promise to Lizzie not to allude to the possibility that he may be killed in battle, a dreaded eventuality that he links here, strangely enough, to the image of returning light. The two speculate about how John will “look” when he returns from the war: “sun-burnt,” bearded, or, in the dialogue’s subtext, wounded and perhaps emasculated.2 The dialogue leads to a playful debate about the comparative vanity of women and men: “Oh, the vanity!” cried Lizzie, “the vanity of men in their faces! Talk of women!” and the silly creature looked up at her lover with the most inconsistent satisfaction. “Oh, the pride of women in their husbands!” said Jack, who of course knew what she was about. “You’re not my husband, Sir. There’s many a slip”—But the young girl stopped short. “’Twixt the cup and the lip,” said Jack. “Go on. I can match your proverb with another. ‘There’s many a true word,’ and so forth. No, my darling: I’m not your husband. Perhaps I never shall be. But if anything happens to me, you’ll take comfort, won’t you?” “Never!” said Lizzie, tremulously. “Oh, but you must; otherwise, Lizzie, I should think our engagement inexcusable.” (25-26)

Lizzie’s unfinished proverb mirrors the slippage between engagement and marriage that structures the story’s plot. In her discussion of the same proverb in Trollope’s The Small House at Allington, Carolyn Dever observes that this “metaphor itself signifies a problem of timing and of space, the failure of a vessel to find its proper point of contact with the body, and the improper, premature spilling of a liquid.” Dever’s contention that the “slip between the cup and the lip is a parable of narrative as well as sexual misfire” (139) in Trollope applies equally to James. 3 Here, Jack completes Lizzie’s proverb for her, and his own



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suspended and equivocal answering proverb compounds the ambiguity of the exchange. Whether or not they are themselves “spoken in jest”—the omitted predicate of “there’s many a true word”—both proverbs comment on the causality of the story’s marriage plot. Lizzie’s proverb identifies a slippage between the initiation of an action and its completion, and both proverbs refer to a slippage between intention and action. Is the force of a promise (or a proverb, for that matter) etiolated if its intentionality is jesting rather than sincere? How might one distinguish between a promise and a compromise, shabby or otherwise? The definition of “shabby” as having “lost its newness or freshness of appearance; dingy and faded from wear or exposure” (Oxford English Dictionary 1a) also describes cliché, of which the two well-worn proverbs quoted in “The Story of a Year” are examples. Lizzie’s lexical application of the term “shabby” to a speech act, such as a compromise, carries the authority of no less than Samuel Johnson, who derides “shabby” itself as a “word that has crept into conversation and low writing; but ought not to be admitted into the language” (Johnson 1805). Dr. Johnson finds the word itself to be symptomatic of its denoted meaning. In its ethical sense, “shabby” refers to “persons, their actions, etc.: Contemptibly mean, ungenerous, or dishonourable. Often applied, in a lighter tone, to conduct which is less friendly or generous than one had hoped for” (OED 2a). This ethical meaning of “shabby” might fairly characterize Lizzie’s subsequent infidelity to Jack, who predicts that he will “see a vast deal of shabbiness and baseness” in war, although he does not expect that he will do so in his romantic life (26). The rare and obsolete sense of “shabby” as “dirty or muddy” (OED 3a) further applies to Lizzie’s dress after this fateful walk: at the story’s opening, her skirts are “fearfully bedraggled,” and she is judged by the narrator to be “reckless of her stockings” (23). In an unwitting prolepsis of Lizzie’s subsequent betrayal of Jack, Mrs. Ford reproachfully exclaims upon their return from the muddy walk, “Why, Elizabeth, look at your skirts!” (30). Warning Lizzie against the sentimental clichés of war fiction, Jack exhorts her: “If by chance I’m taken out of the world, I want you to beware of that tawdry sentiment which enjoins you to be ‘constant to my memory’” (the phrase is placed in ironic scare quotes, whether by the narrator or mentally by Ford himself rendered undecidable by the free indirect style). He continues: “There are some widows and bereaved sweethearts who remind me of the peddler in that horrible murder-story, who carried a corpse in his pack” (26). Jack then exacts from Lizzie the story’s central promise: he urges her to keep their engagement a secret on the ground that “secrecy would leave us much freer . . . leave you much



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freer.” Lizzie reacts indignantly—yet with unconscious prescience—to the unflattering yet proleptic implication subtending this speculation: “Oh, Jack, how can you?” cried Lizzie. “Yes, of course; I shall be falling in love with some one else. Freer! Thank you, Sir!” Jack responds with an impossible bind that will generate the rest of the story: “But mind, I don’t want to bind you to secrecy. Hang it, do as you please! Do what comes easiest to you, and you’ll do the best thing” (29). From the three imperatives of this contradictory triple injunction—keep the engagement a secret; don’t keep it a secret; and do as you please—Lizzie chooses the first alternative, what the narrator terms “inviolate secrecy” (31). Elaborating his theory that keeping the engagement secret would benefit Lizzie, Jack explains: “You’re very young, you know. You’re responsible to yourself of a year hence. You’re at an age when no girl can count safely from year’s end to year’s end” (30). Playing on the story’s title, which on one reading identifies its subject as temporality itself, Jack advances a theory of the self’s relation to time. On this view, Lizzie is ethically responsible to a future self who does not yet exist and who is posited to be at least potentially discontinuous from one year to the next. In his study of the speech act in James, J. Hillis Miller discusses the motif of the English marriage novel in which a female protagonist recognizes her engagement or marriage as an error. Citing the examples of Wuthering Heights, Can You Forgive Her?, Middlemarch, The Egoist, and The Portrait of a Lady, Miller observes that each of these texts engages the problem of the relation between the selfhood of the female protagonist and her speech act, whether that speech act is the promise of engagement or the marriage vow itself. Of the theme of the broken engagement, Miller remarks: “Though a woman could break an engagement to marry, this was seen as an act of perjury, a breach of promise, that is, a particularly reprehensible speech act. Such foreswearing branded her as a ‘jilt.’ A jilt was, apparently, someone without solid grounds of selfhood allowing her to make a promise and keep it” (73). Commenting on Isabel Archer’s putative return to Osmond at the end of The Portrait of a Lady, Miller remarks on the novel’s notorious occlusion of the ground of this decision: Subjectivity has no solid basis in a perdurable, pre-existing, and indestructible selfhood. Selfhood is created and created anew from moment to moment by speech acts. You do not have a self first and then decide on the basis of that. You decide, for reasons that remain ineffably mysterious and unaccountable. The decision gives you a self. (78)



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As we see in “The Story of a Year,” James’s fictions reflect an awareness of this problematic well in advance of Portrait. Arguably, this awareness is the more striking given the relative absence in a work like “Story” of the kind of exploration of interiority we associate with his major novels from Portrait on. Ironically, given the tortuous terms of the promise of secrecy he exacts from Lizzie, Jack immediately discloses the engagement to his mother, and so further compounds the aporetic character of the bind he has imposed on Lizzie. When Mrs. Ford expresses displeasure at the engagement, he concedes: “I’m half sorry I told you.” “I’m glad of such a proof of your confidence. But if you hadn’t, of course Elizabeth would have done so.” “No, Ma’am, I think not.” “Then she is even more reckless of her obligations than I thought her.” “I advised her to say nothing about it.” Mrs. Ford made no answer. She began slowly to fold up her work. “I think we had better let the matter stand,” continued her son. “I’m not afraid of time. But I wish to make a request of you: you won’t mention this conversation to Lizzie, will you? nor allow her to suppose that you know of our engagement? I have a particular reason.” (34)

Jack may be half-sorry that he has revealed the engagement, but his half regret leaves in place the impossible half-injunction he has imposed on his fiancée and mother alike. The asymmetrical bind generated by the discrepancies between (as a Jamesian narrator might put it) their knowledge of each other’s knowledge—Lizzie is bound to secrecy by ignorance, Mrs. Ford by knowledge—creates an epistemological drama that anticipates The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl. After Jack’s departure for the war and from the narrative, the cheap plot trick4 of Mrs. Ford’s role as guardian keeps Lizzie under her watchful, suspicious, and resentful eye. At first, Lizzie uses her leisure to undertake a course of self-improvement. She peruses Jack’s library and attempts to read Faust, an apt intertext whose ironic thematics of knowledge and temptation go over Lizzie’s head but not ours. (The narrator dryly observes of her endeavor: “The secret of this preference was in certain marginal notes in pencil, signed ‘J.’ I hope they were really of Jack’s making” [36].) Lizzie’s relation with her prospective mother-in-law is structured by the asymmetrical gaps in knowledge which Jack has fashioned: Mrs. Ford “grudged the young girl the dignity of her secret; her own actual knowledge of it rather increased her jealousy, by showing her the importance of the scheme from which she was excluded.” Lizzie’s



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silence about the engagement incenses Mrs. Ford even further: “Of Jack, as a good friend and her guardian’s son, she spoke very freely. But Mrs. Ford was distrustful of this semi-confidence . . . ‘Of all things,’ she would sometimes mutter, ‘to be patronized by that little piece!’ It was very disagreeable, for instance, to have to listen to portions of her own son’s letters” (38; emphasis in original). The synecdochic logic of aposiopesis allows Lizzie to speak of Jack only in pieces, as a friend but not as her fiancé, and she herself becomes, to Mrs. Ford’s resentful thinking, a “little piece.” Here the plot produces for Lizzie a trap in the form of a proposed extended visit to Mrs. Littlefield in a nearby town. Mrs. Ford urges her to accept this invitation with the clear idea of creating just such a romantic triangle as ensues. In a sartorial blazon that is preemptively ironized by his disavowing preterition (“I trust I shall not be held to a minute description of our dear Lizzie’s person and costume” [41]), the narrator devotes the better part of a paragraph to a cataloguing of Lizzie’s attire on the evening she meets Robert Bruce: I give you my word for it that Elizabeth made as pretty a show as it is possible to see. She was of course well-dressed. Her skirt was of voluminous white, puffed and trimmed in wondrous sort. Her hair was profusely ornamented with curls and braids of its own rich substance. From her waist depended a ribbon, broad and blue. White with coral ornaments, as she wrote to Jack in the course of the week. Coral ornaments, forsooth! And pray, Miss, what of the other jewels with which your person was decorated,—the rubies, pearls, and sapphires? One by one Lizzie assumes her modest gimcracks: her bracelets, her gloves, her handkerchief, her fan, and then—her smile. Ah, that strange crowning smile! (41)

The second-person apostrophe buried in the narrator’s rhetorical question is sharply ironic, given that the passage buries Lizzie’s “person” in a mound of nouns and adjectives, or clothes and jewels, from underneath which her “crowning smile” barely emerges, disembodied and Cheshire cat-like, “assumed” (by an effect of zeugma) or donned like any other ornament (rhetorical or material). The de-facing and depersonalizing bathos of the passage does not signify a triumphal “crowning” so much as a rhetorical and ontological confounding of Lizzie’s “person” by her “costume.” Indeed, in the dancing that follows, agency appears to become lodged in her costume, for she dances with Bruce so exclusively and immoderately that her hostess reproves her: “Your sash is unpinned, my dear.—I think you have danced often enough with Mr. Bruce. If he asks



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you again, you had better refuse” (42). The unpinning of Lizzie’s sash is an emblematic wardrobe malfunction that repeats the earlier muddying of her skirt. (In a homage to Austen, it further alludes to the sexually loaded detail of Lydia’s torn gown in Pride and Prejudice, the “great slit in my worked muslin gown” she mentions in the breezy letter to Mrs. Forster in which she announces her elopement with Wickham [Austen 236]). Similarly, at a “grand affair” to which Lizzie is subsequently invited by Bruce’s sister, she “was thought by some persons to look prettier than ever. The vaporous gauze, sunny hair, the coral, the sapphires, the smile, were displayed with renewed success” (43). In place of the eyes like sapphires and lips like coral familiar from the conventions of the Petrarchan sonnet, we have here their ironic re-materialization in the corals and sapphires themselves, as if Lizzie has been displaced by a literalized blazon of herself. And does not the “vaporous gauze” punningly suggest a vapid gaze? Even the vestigial physical trace of the smile in the earlier passage has been absorbed, as it were, by the material envelope of her presentation to the grammatically passive gaze of “some persons.” In both passages, Lizzie hides her secret in plain view, as if she has regurgitated all over herself the contents of the “tightly clasped jewelcasket” that “her little mouth turn[s] into” and in which she hoards the “pearls” of her secret engagement to Jack (28). 5 The text’s blazon-like catalogues of her attractions imply that Lizzie’s “character,” in both senses of that term, is to be understood less in terms of the depth psychology of so-called realism than as an effect of figuration and wordplay. Mrs. Ford’s criticism of Lizzie when she learns of the engagement advances a similar metafictional questioning of realist characterization. When Mrs. Ford complains to her son that “Lizzie’s shallow,” he agrees: “‘Hang it! she is shallow,’ said Jack. But when a thing’s shallow, you can see to the bottom. Lizzie doesn’t pretend to be deep” (32). This estimate of Lizzie’s shallowness seems to be a consensus; the narrator similarly notes that Lizzie’s emotional attachment to her fiancé weakens in his absence: “The passion which, in her simple, shallow way, she had confided to the woods and waters reflected their outward variations; she thought of her lover less, and with less positive pleasure” (39). 6 The text’s insistence on its protagonist’s lack of psychological depth goes against the grain of the commitment to realism routinely ascribed to James, and to his early fictions in particular. Despite its realist trappings (romantic walks, parties, train rides), the story’s narrative work is produced less by characterological motivation than by the pressure of figuration and wordplay. Bruce happens upon Lizzie at the train station on her way home two days later. When Mr.



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Littlefield notices Bruce, Lizzie discourages Littlefield from accosting him, crying out with unconscious irony, “Perhaps Mr. Bruce is engaged” (43). Bruce seats himself beside her in the railway car, and the subtext of their flirtatious byplay advances considerably their covert romance. Bruce “stowed away her shawls, umbrella, and reticule. She would keep her muff? She did well. What a pretty fur!” (43). This reticule has already been the object of Lizzie’s “little scream of merriment”: when Mr. Littlefield proposes that she secure her train ticket in her glove, she playfully reproaches him, “Mr. Littlefield, how can you? I’ve a reticule, Sir” (43). The reticule recurs to the narrator’s trope for the pleasure Lizzie takes in hoarding the secret of the engagement, when she is imagined to be “not ill pleased to find her little mouth turning into a tightly clasped jewelcasket” (28). James does not require Freud’s analysis in Dora some forty years later to reinforce the connotations of the reticule and the muff as signifiers of female sexuality.7 When the narrator’s free indirect discourse registers Bruce’s admiration of her “pretty fur,” Lizzie returns the compliment: “It’s just like your collar” (43, 44). While Lizzie and Bruce discuss the danger that he may be “carried off” if the train departs with him still on board—he says, “I’m afraid I shall, unless I put the newspaper between us”—the newspaper literally and figuratively interposes between them in the form of the news that Ford has been seriously wounded, news that sends Lizzie into a “half-stupor” (44, 46).8 Shortly after Ford is wounded, and as Lizzie’s romantic entanglement with Bruce progresses, she has a proleptic dream that proves predictive of the story’s conclusion. It seemed to her that she was walking in a lonely place, with a tall, darkeyed man who called her wife. Suddenly in the shadow of a tree, they came upon an unburied corpse. Lizzie proposed to dig him a grave. They dug a great hole and took hold of the corpse to lift him in; when suddenly he opened his eyes. Then they saw that he was covered with wounds. He looked at them intently for some time, turning his eyes from one to the other. At last he solemnly said, “Amen!” and closed his eyes. Then she and her companion placed him in the grave, and shovelled the earth over him, and stamped it down with their feet. (48-49)

Rawlings points out that, in light of Jack’s earlier warning about “bereaved sweethearts who remind me of the peddler in that horrible murder-story, who carried a corpse in his pack” (“Story” 26), “Lizzie has done no more than to take Jack at his word, even at the risk of burying him prematurely” (Rawlings 48). Her dream outdoes Jack’s monitory image, reconstructing the corpse as an agent who arises from the grave to interpose between



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herself and Bruce. The trope of reanimation is less fantastic than proleptic, dramatizing as it does Ford’s disconcerting inability to make up his mind in this whether he will live or die: he comes close to death and then inconveniently returns to life, like the undead corpse who climbs out of the grave. Answering the rhetorical question he poses to Lizzie when they discuss the danger of his dying in the war—“What rights has a dead man?” (26)—Jack here asserts the right to arise from the grave to haunt Lizzie even before he is dead. Like the “unlaid ghost” who haunts Mrs. Ford’s empty house after he is wounded (50), Jack’s oxymoronic “unburied corpse” figures the undead status in the story of the promise itself, which is shown to be attenuated, incomplete and—like Ford’s injunction to Lizzie to keep their engagement a secret—at once half activated and half withdrawn. When she receives news that Jack’s death appears imminent, Lizzie accepts Bruce’s proposal of marriage and “half-staggers” to the sofa. Unlike the successfully buried corpse of Lizzie’s dream, however, Jack refuses to stay put on his deathbed, and he is accompanied home four days later by his mother; the narrator notes: “It was, indeed, almost a question, whether Jack was not dead” (59). Their return occasions the exposure, by a neighbor who has witnessed Bruce’s pronounced attentions, of Lizzie’s lying promises to both men. The Medusa-like gaze that Mrs. Ford fixes on Lizzie after her interview with Miss Cooper—“so hard, so cold, so reproachful, that Lizzie was transfixed”—reveals that Lizzie’s shabby secret is out. As if in unconscious response to the exposure of Lizzie’s perfidy—indeed, there is “something fatal in the silence that followed” after Mrs. Ford goes to her son’s room and locks the door—Jack takes his final turn for the worse, against medical advice, as it were: “Dear Lizzie, I am not going to get well. They are all very much mistaken. I am going to die” (63, 65). He issues an equivocal deathbed benediction, one that underlines and formalizes the story’s romantic triangulation. “Your heart has found its true keeper,” he tells Lizzie: “‘So we shall all three be happy. Tell him I bless him and honor him. Tell him God, too, blesses him. Shake hands with him for me,’ said Jack, feebly moving his pale fingers . . . ‘I’ll look at you till the last. For a little while you’ll be mine, holding my hands—so—until death parts us.’” The narrator concludes: “Jack kept his promise. His eyes were fixed in a firm gaze long after the sense had left them” (65). This fixed and fixing gaze reprises his mother’s own transfixing and reproachful gaze, and it plays ironically against Lizzie’s earlier speculation about how Jack will “look when you get back” from the war (25). The question of Jack’s appearance has been here deflected into another kind of “look,” the doubled accusatory gaze of mother and son.



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Lizzie indeed comes to think of Mrs. Ford as a “long-faced Nemesis in black silk,” in a fulfillment of the narrator’s likening of her to Atropos in her bitter response to the news of the engagement: “from the grimness with which she bit off the end of her thread it might have seemed that she fancied herself to be executing a human vengeance” (64, 33). I have argued that, far from exemplifying the workmanlike apprentice fiction that James’s Civil War stories are often taken for, “The Story of a Year” performs a sophisticated critique of the received understanding of the conventions of so-called realism. More, its conclusion is surprisingly programmatic in its rehearsal of the close of The Portrait of a Lady, complete with the liminal tropes of the doorway, gate, and the path. Returning from a restless walk, Lizzie saw a tall figure standing beneath the budding trees of the garden, hesitating, apparently, whether to open the gate. Lizzie came upon him almost before he had seen her. Bruce’s first movement was to put out his hands, as any lover might; but as Lizzie raised her veil, he dropped them. “Yes, Mr. Bruce,” said Lizzie, “I’ll give you my hand once more,—in farewell.” “Elizabeth!” cried Bruce, half stupefied, “in God’s name, what do you mean by these crazy speeches?” “I mean well. I mean kindly and humanely to you. And I mean justice to my old—old love.” She went to him, took his listless hand, without looking into his wild, smitten face, shook it passionately, and then, wrenching her own from his grasp, opened the gate and let it swing beside her. “No! no! no!” she almost shrieked, turning about in the path. “I forbid you to follow me!” But for all that, he went in. (65-66)

As implied by the apparent ironic understatement of the closing sentence, Bruce will, it seems (unlike Caspar Goodwood), win Lizzie after all. At the same time, this closing passage recapitulates and amplifies rather than resolves the story’s problems of intentionality. Lizzie’s offer of her hand “in farewell” belies the clear implication that she will soon give him her hand in marriage. Her overwrought manual byplay with Bruce is by turns invitational and repellent, both aggressively passional and merely passiveaggressive. The bodily mismatch between Bruce’s “listless hand” and his “wild, smitten face” bespeaks a disjunction between action and affect or “meaning”; and he ultimately enters the gate in defiance of Lizzie’s mixed, “almost” shrieking prohibition, itself accompanied by her own ambivalent turnabout. None of this discordant detail bodes very well for



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the perhaps unpromising union of Lizzie and Bruce, if promising is a possibility.

Notes 1

Rawlings is unusual among critics in discerning a “discourse and thematics of irony already more than embryonic in the first short stories” (44). He further observes: “Carefully tangential, these tales are more an abuse than a use of the war, making it subservient to a campaign in which popular fiction, common assumptions about the unproblematic nature of representation, and torrid zones of gender come under a reviling scrutiny” (46).  2 See Rawlings’s analysis of the story’s gender-bending thematics of crossdressing (48-50). 3 Perhaps not altogether coincidentally, The Small House at Allington also involves a “double” engagement—Crosbie engages himself to Lady Alexandrina while he is already engaged to Lily Dale. Further, the novel’s “moment of erotic misfire” (Dever 139) is marked by an aposiopetic self-interruption: “‘Because—,’ said he; and then he stooped over her and pressed her closely, while she put up her lips to his, standing on tip-toe that she might reach to his face” (qtd. in Dever 140).  4 See Ryan. 5 The narrator adds: “Nay, would she not on this occasion have been thankful for a large mouth,—a mouth huge and unnatural,—stretching from ear to ear? Who wish to cast their pearls before swine? The young lady of the pearls was, after all, but a barnyard miss” (28). Rawlings points out that James here “writes close to” Pope’s mock-heroic mode in “The Rape of the Lock” (177n30).  6 Edel echoes this consensus in his assessment of Lizzie as a “shallow Mary Garland” (220).  7 On the reticule, see Freud 87 and 94-96. In The Awkward Age, the photograph of Aggie is bordered by “something that looked like crimson fur” (26), a detail proleptic of her later promiscuity. Mizruchi reads this as a sacrificial image alluding to the reddened goat in Henry Holman Hunt’s The Scapegoat, a painting that James knew (189-91). The sexual and sacrificial implications clearly are interrelated. 

Works Cited Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. London and New York: Penguin Books, 1996. Print. Dever, Caroline. “Gross Vulgarity and the Domestic Ideal: Anthony Trollope’s The Small House at Allington.” Victorian Vulgarity: Taste in Verbal and Visual Culture. Ed. Susan David Bernstein and Elsie B. Michie. Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009. 139-52. Print.



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Edel, Leon. Henry James, The Untried Years: 1843-1870. New York: Avon Books, 1953. Print. Freud, Sigmund. Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. New York: Collier Books, 1963. Print. Harmon, William. A Handbook to Literature. 12th ed. Boston and Columbus: Longman, 2012. Print. James, Henry. The Awkward Age. London and New York: Penguin Books, 1987. Print. —. “The Story of a Year.” Henry James Complete Stories 1864-1874. New York: Library of America, 1999. 23-66. Print. Johnson, Samuel. A Dictionary of the English Language (1755). johnsonsdictionaryonline com. Web. Lanham, Richard A. A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. 2nd ed. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1991. Print. Miller, J. Hillis. Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James. New York: Fordham UP, 2005. Print. Mizruchi, Susan L. The Science of Sacrifice: American Literature and Modern Social Theory. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998. Print. Ohi, Kevin. Henry James and the Queerness of Style. Minneapolis and London: U of Minneapolis P, 2011. Print. Puttenham, George. The Art of English Poesie. Kent State, OH: Kent State UP, 1970. Print. Rawlings, Peter. Henry James and the Abuse of the Past. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Print. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Cheap Plot Tricks, Plot Holes, and Narrative Design.” Narrative 17.1 (2009): 56-75. Print. “shabby, adj.” OED Online. December 2012. Oxford University Press. Web. 3 January 2013.



 

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE DISAVOWAL AND THE DIALOGIC LATE JAMES STYLE CHRISTINE MCBRIDE

Henry James’s importance to narrative theory is difficult to overestimate. Not only does James’s work provide orienting concepts for AngloAmerican theories of the novel, his fiction factors canonically in theories and typologies foundational to classical narratology. 1 Nor has the old Master been shouldered out in recent years, as classical approaches have given way to post-narratological novel theory, in which James’s work still holds as a literary reference point for contextualist and cognitivist theorists. Yet James’s two greatest legacies to theorists of the novel— point of view and the celebrated late style—have proved something of a thorn in theory’s side. The relationship between these two techniques is the pricking point itself. For Gérard Genette, James’s late “reflector” (or figural) novels offer clear examples of the theoretically absolute distinction between focalization (“who sees?”) and narration (“who speaks?”). For Franz Karl Stanzel, the importance of James’s figural novels lies in their combination of the two techniques, whereby one or more figures in the novel (characters) ostensibly displace the narrator as the central agent of narration. The debate has important implications for style; consequently, Monika Fludernik notes, “James’s style constitutes one of the supreme puzzles of narrative theory” (Natural 213; emphasis added). Where to class James’s style? Is it, as Genette would argue, an authorial device to be distinguished from the perspective of the characterized reflector? Or is it, in part or whole, a textured voice-effect 2 that points back to reflectors whose acts of speech and habits of mind it traces? Insofar as we regard style as the manifestation of voice, do we (like Leo Bersani) hear one voice—James’s—resounding in these pages, or do we record, as William B. Thomas and Fludernik herself do, a “dual register” (Thomas 118) in

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which “the narrator’s and the characters’ language and point of view are inextricably intertwined” (Fludernik, Natural 213)? The two problems are closely intertwined, with structural ambivalence at the level of perspective complicating vocal attribution at the level of prose style. In this paper I explore the narratological significance of relations between viewpoint and voice in James’s late novels—particularly in those novels that employ multiple reflectors: The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl. The ambivalence of vocal and stylistic attribution at the structural level, I maintain, redoubles in a dialogic double-mindedness that plays out in the grammar and diction of these novels’ late style. Problems of style, in other words, reference the narrative structure of these texts. In illustrating this point and investigating its implications for our understanding of narrative and voice in James’s fiction, this paper also works to reclaim style as an important category for narrative theory. Narratology has tended to exclude prose style from its analysis of narrative discourse, relegating concerns with the language of the text to linguistics (stylistics) and close reading—enterprises concerned primarily with interpretation or aesthetic appreciation, rather than with the analysis of narrative function. This omission has created gaps within narratological understandings of discourse (i.e., the Russian Formalists’ syuzhet), which is premised on a sharp distinction from story (or fabula)—as narrative’s means from its matter. Narratological attempts to cordon off prose style from the narrative discourse, however, necessarily side-step the ground of James’s figural novels, wherein character and utterance, or story and style, are mutually constitutive. In arguing for style as an active site of discourse, Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on polyphony provides a way of productively complicating current narratological understandings of voice. This paper approaches the late James style through Bakhtin, analyzing the interrelation of voice and point of view in the late novels. As I underline the dialogical qualities of James’s late style, I will dwell on one particular and recurrent stylistic trope: disavowal. This trope both enacts and illuminates the noted ambivalence of perspective in these novels’ narrative structure (Leech and Short 109-110). Moreover, James’s late prose also manifests significant structural and rhythmic affinities with the grammar of disavowal, a verbal act which it perpetually stages, en abyme.

Narrative Theory and James’s Late Style To see her alone, the poor girl, he none the less promptly felt, was to see her after all very much on the old basis, the basis of his three visits in New



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Disavowal and the Dialogic Late James Style York; the new element, when once he was again face to face with her, not really amounting to much more than a recognition, with a little surprise, of the positive extent of the old basis. Everything but that, everything embarrassing fell away after he had been present five minutes: it was in fact wonderful that their excellent, their pleasant, their permitted and proper and harmless American relation—the legitimacy of which he could thus scarce express in names enough—should seem so unperturbed by other matters. (Wings II.6 70) “It’s only their defending themselves so much more than they need—it’s only that that makes me wonder. It’s their having so remarkably much to say for themselves.” Her husband had as usual lighted his cigar, remaining apparently as busy with it as she with her agitation. “You mean it makes you feel that you have nothing?” (The Golden Bowl I.3 277)

There is not much critical disagreement concerning the elements of James’s “late style,” a phenomenon attested to by James’s contemporary reviewers and latter-day critics, as well as (more recently) by the methods of quantitative stylistics.3 In the brief excerpts above, especially the first narrated passage, we may observe its signature movements: the persistent interruption, qualification—and often negation—of central clauses, which maneuver sinuously from empty or abstract subjects across oblique human objects to attenuated verb phrases, with nary a concrete noun, in this stream of language, to cling to. Heady in abstraction, circumlocutory in diction and syntax, these sentences feel longer than they are. And fuzzier, more evasive: the prose defers concrete affirmatives, though its negations are insistent, and they come in every color and stripe (“none the less,” “not really . . . much more,” “everything but . . . fell away,” “unperturbed”). Perhaps the most striking pattern in James’s late prose is this incongruity between the forcefulness of its negations and its shrinking approach to concrete subjects and objects. This double movement, by which the prose both asserts and undoes its assertions, consolidates the impression of verbal excess. One might be inclined to quote Fanny Assingham here, in declaring that these sentences have remarkably much—so much more than they need—to say. If this is a style, what artistic or narrative function can we ascribe to that “remarkable muchness,” to the distracting doubleness of James’s late prose, which pulls us back persistently to problems of form? With this question, we might turn to narrative theory. Curiously, style is a category that narrative theory has largely excluded. Neither Gerald Prince’s Dictionary of Narratology (1987) nor Routledge’s more recent Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (2005), for instance, even has an entry for “style.” Classical narratology’s case for



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excluding style as an object of study4 rests upon two key premises: (1) that the form of style is hyper-particular, if not idiosyncratic (e.g., to a writer, a period, or school) and therefore, while of interest for aesthetic or interpretive enterprises, is of limited value for the study of narrative systems per se; (2) that style, or text, belongs to the matter and not the form of narrative, the latter being the proper domain of narratology. Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on voice, however, challenges these narratological oppositions. Tzvetan Todorov celebrates Bakhtin for providing what he calls “a Poetics of the Utterance,” which mediates between stylistics and structural linguistics, combining tools of both (Todorov x). It is a defense that has become timely once again: Bakhtin’s innovative approach to style speaks both to narrative theory’s longstanding interest in poetics and to contextualist questions animating new, post-narratological work. Not only does Bakhtin’s study grant significant attention to microstructures of style, but he also locates the underpinnings of their form and content in ideological currents of the social context. Reconceiving prose style as discourse—as utterance—Bakhtin locates the “voices” of a novel in the culturally available languages of ideology (the heteroglossia) which echo through and across its characters’ discourse. In the social context, Bakhtin roots not only the contents of prose style but its narrative and linguistic structure as well. The style of the utterance, in Bakhtin’s theory, clearly participates in the “how” of narrative. Style is for Bakhtin the very backbone of narrative structure. In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin locates the building blocks of narrative in the language of the text itself, rather than in the abstract structures, such as plot and narration, where narratology has been wont to find it. He argues that it is at the level of voice, where language acquires intonation, intention—the accents of a personal or generic style—that character, and thereby plot, are formally constructed. For Bakhtin, voice is the means by which story is organized into discourse. 5 Yet Bakhtin’s definition of “voice” is broader than the narratological category, not only comprehending the overtly “voiced” discourse of narration and character speech but also including direct and indirect modalities of characters’ represented thought and consciousness. Bakhtin reads character “voice” as resonating even in narrated passages, where he finds characters’ intentions and intonalities rippling through the language; his notion of voice thus includes passages in free indirect discourse and figural narration, wherein diction and deixis invite ascription to focalizing characters, whose discourse ostensibly blends with or is layered into the (authorial) narrator’s language. Bringing together “a plurality of consciousnesses” in the language of the text, where they “combine but are not merged”



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(Bakhtin 6), this “dialogic principle” of construction solicits comparison to the effect James achieves in his late novels by juxtaposing passages focalized through different reflectors. On the face of it, James’s late novels might seem far flung from the polyphony Bakhtin describes. For many critics, James represents the quintessence of monological mastery, and his focalizing characters, or reflectors, the very agents of that authority. For Dorothy Hale, “if there was ever an example in Bakhtinian terms of the monological writer—the writer who muffles the heterogeneity of discourse . . . whose characters all speak in the voice of their author—that would be Henry James” (“Restriction” 196; emphasis added). As Bakhtin points out, the same charge was often leveled against Dostoevsky, that “the heroes of Dostoevsky’s novels all speak one and the same language, namely the language of their author” (182). A closer look at what happens to voice and style in James’s late novels with multiple reflectors illuminates a key conceptual overlap with the latter’s dialogism.

Stylization: “Unidirectional Double-Voiced Discourse” The charge that James’s characters “all speak in the same voice” is true only in part. A novel such as The Wings of the Dove illustrates the limits of this claim. Here, the reflector mode of narration, with its stylistic evocation both of characters’ thought-acts (in free indirect discourse) and habitual modes of thought (what Fludernik deems reflectorization proper), shows traces of different character idioms, or styles. Take for instance, Susan Stringham when we first meet her in chapter three: To be in truth literary had ever been her dearest thought, the thought that kept her bright little nippers perpetually in position. There were masters, models, celebrities, mainly foreign, whom she finally accounted so and in whose light she ingeniously labored; there were others whom, however chattered about, she ranked with the inane, for she bristled with discriminations; but all categories failed her . . . in the presence of the real thing, the romantic life itself. That was what she saw in Mildred, what positively made her hand a while tremble too much for the pen. (I.3 107)

This passage reveals Susan’s character stylistically, granting her a voiceeffect by mimicking an insinuatingly “magazinish” idiom. Through the mocking tones of James’s narrator, who objectifies that discourse, the diction and syntax of the passage highlight its differences from the idiom we have come, thus far in the novel, to associate with James’s narrator. In contrast to the long, slow, measured Jamesian cadence, the prose here is



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fatuously heightened (“her dearest thought,” “ingeniously labored”), rapid in its shifts, and tending to eschew qualifications (“all categories,” “positively made her hand tremble too much”). Some of these differences are linguistic (e.g., in rhythm and lexis), but they are not exclusively so; the passage is also marked by contrasting intonations. The melodramatic and precious tone of the passage (“bright little nippers,” “accounted so,” “made her . . . tremble”) rings with Jamesian irony, as though the narrator were recoiling from a mawkish influence held at a distance by the encasing prose. Yet in this example, voice and viewpoint remain critically unstable. Two distinct voices are clearly discernible at moments (“Mildred” indicates Susan’s language; James refers to the girl as Milly); in other places they seemingly fuse. “The real thing, the romantic life itself”: these phrases are familiar, pet phrases of the novelist and, at the same time, no less cliché than the precious expressions insinuatingly ascribed to Susan Stringham. In this case, the stylistic “doubleness” marks the very threshold of dialogism, for if we hear two voices, they do not hold equal status. This is a case of stylization, in which James’s narrator catches and mimics Susan’s idiom, inhabiting its intention yet simultaneously diminishing that voice through its very inflation. A similarly unstable (but here competitive) dynamic is present in the first half of The Wings of the Dove, where James spars with Densher’s journalistic idiom; the latter offers a refreshingly clear opposition, for example, to Kate’s evasive language or to Maud Lowder’s heavily euphemistic discourse, which is conspicuously laden with double entendres. James’s stylistic parries with Densher, however, provide a more nuanced case than the one I have just described, for the opposition between them fades in the latter half of the novel. As Densher becomes more absorbed socially in elite society, his style becomes imitative of its manner and draws measurably closer to that of the self-consciously elite novelist. Formally distinct, the voice effects of James’s reflectors in the novel are parsed by the narratorial idiom, even as they are absorbed into its text. The result is a prose style that amplifies the “characteristic ambivalence” Leech and Short note in Jamesian narrative. This oscillation in registers, I contend, reflects the critical and self-critical drives of the late novels, which on the one hand distance their own idiom from objectified and stylized (character) voices yet ultimately concede points of identification with the intellectual process of their protagonists. At its greatest degree of alterity from the narrator’s idiom, the voiceeffect of a late-James character most clearly resembles the type of connection between character and voice that Bakhtin identifies. One



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example of the “conflict” between these voices, wherein different intentions are heard in the resonance of quoted language, comes in book five of Wings, where Milly anticipates Lord Mark’s wish to “take care of” her: At the same time it was as if the thing had practically been said by the moment they came in sight of the picture; since what it appeared to amount to was “Do let a fellow who isn’t a fool take care of you a little.” The thing somehow, with the aid of the Bronzino, was done; it hadn’t seemed to matter to her before if he were a fool or no; but now, just where they were, she liked his not being; and it was all moreover none the worse for coming back to something of the same sound as Mrs. Lowder’s so recent reminder. She too wished to take care of her—and wasn’t it, à peu près, what all the people with the kind eyes were wishing? Once more things melted together . . . (I.5 220; emphasis added).

Here, the implied blurring of Mrs. Lowder’s and Lord Mark’s intonations signals, slightly below Milly’s threshold of awareness, the collusion between their two points of view. For Milly, these “sounds” may “melt together,” but reflected through Milly’s and the narrator’s lenses they acquire another set of intentions: James’s reader is more likely to discern the gap between the sense these “kind” words have in Milly’s consciousness and the more calculating intention that Maud Lowder’s language implies.

Disavowal and the Dialogism of James’s Style More interesting than these marginal cases, where language and style cleave along characterological lines, James’s late prose exemplifies a more subtly double-voiced discourse, whereby intentions ostensibly collide within an individual subject. In representing the consciousness of his characters as internally divided, James reproduces a stylistic feature that Bakhtin terms “internal polemic” (199), whereby utterance gains form (or style) through an anticipated and forestalled encounter with the discourse of a projected other; in such cases, the utterance mirrors formally its dialogic confrontation, “reflect[ing] in itself [the] anticipated objections, evaluations, points of view” (Bakhtin 196) of a real or imagined interlocutor. Bakhtin’s key example is Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, where the text serves as the narrator’s self-defense against anticipated judgment from without. James’s late novels yield evidence of a similar stylistic, in a form unmentioned by Bakhtin. Here, internal polemic is directed toward the contrary intention—not confession, but disavowal.



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Disavowal is perhaps best understood as the other face to confession’s coin: for if confession defends itself in the act of conceding, disavowal’s defense is quietly to acknowledge conflict (and its troubling implications for the speaker) while putting it aside. Disavowal, Freud notes, “is always supplemented by an acknowledgement; two contrary and independent attitudes always arise and result in the situation of there being a splitting of the ego” (23:204). In disavowal the subject re-presents the troubling experience to him- or herself, attempting to “remodel” or “replace” the reality that has proved inhospitable to the subject’s desiring mind (Freud 19:185). The metaphorical resonances of disavowal’s etymology are suggestive of this double intent: to avow is to “call to oneself,” whereas the prefix of the word (“dis”) negates this, indicating a reversal, a removal—a step back. This shuttling movement of call-and-retreat signals the dialogic context of disavowal, its interpenetration by opposed intentions. The metaphor also underlines the narrative properties of disavowal: as a verbal structure, it both contains and circumvents conflict, eliding an insuperable contradiction. Juxtaposing two contrary propositions in language, disavowal yokes together a pair of intentions it fails to synthesize. Stylistically, disavowal speaks with two contrary voices. In their work on conversational disclaimers, linguists Maryann Overstreet and George Yule illuminate certain stylistic features of disavowal, which appear in baroque elaboration in James’s prose. They describe disavowal in the context of dialogue as a form of “alignment talk” whereby a speaker acknowledges her intention to commit an action she knows to be socially problematic while indirectly soliciting the interlocutor to reject that negative interpretation of the action (Overstreet and Yule 48, 49). The linguists define the “basic structural formula” for the verbal act as “not X but Y,” as in “I don’t want to sound like your mother or anything, but I think you should wait” (Overstreet and Yule 46). In the coupling of negated and opposed clauses (“not . . . but”), we may see the acknowledgement and “remodeling” of reality to which Freud refers. What is elided by these sentences is any explanation of how Y proves an exception to the judgment signaled by X. What is more, lexical choices render the syntax of relation more indirect than the juxtaposition of clauses might imply. For instance, the extender, “or anything,” softens the opposition between clauses, rendering it asymmetrical and increasingly imprecise. The language of the two clauses also differs in their degrees of concreteness or abstraction. The combined effect is to imply an undoing of the contradiction that is nevertheless signaled by the structure of the sentence. What these disclaimers do—as we see James’s characters do in



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so many sentences within the late novels—is to assert two contradictory intentions, while disowning the conflict between them. Turning back to James’s novels, we can observe this dynamic of a double-voiced intention (at once accusing and excusing the speaker) in a dialogue between the Assinghams: Bob Assingham looked at it hard. “Which of them do you call her best friend?” She gave a toss of impatience . . . “It’s for us, therefore, to be hers.” “Hers”? “You and I. It’s for us to be Charlotte’s. It’s for us, on our side, to see her through.” “Through her sublimity?” “Through her noble, lonely life. Only—that’s essential—it mustn’t be lonely. It will be all right if she marries.” “So we’re to marry her?” “We’re to marry her. It will be,” Mrs. Assingham continued, “the great thing I can do.” She made it out more and more. “It will make up.” “Make up for what?” As she said nothing, however, his desire for lucidity renewed itself. “If everything’s so all right what is there to make up for?” “Why, if I did do either of them, by any chance, a wrong. If I made a mistake.” “You’ll make up for it by making another?” And then as she again took her time: “I thought your whole point is just that you’re sure.” (Golden Bowl I.4 85-6)

The exchange is marked by a sally between two different voices, which nonetheless weave in and out of implied synthesis (as I/you slips into us/we, then back to the I/you of discourse). In the course of the novel, Fanny increasingly internalizes this dialogue. As the narrator tells us in book three of the first volume, “he made her, when they were together, talk, but as if for some other person; who was in fact for the most part herself” (278). Yet the voices “differ” in two salient respects. In intention, Bob’s voice accuses, while Fanny’s exculpates. Stylistically, moreover, Bob’s curt, broken syntax pushes toward the clarification of objects and verbs left unspecified in Fanny’s indirect, incomplete clauses, which— while abbreviated—are nevertheless expressed in a lengthier, more rhetorical cadence (“the great thing”; “her noble, lonely life”). More “remarkable” is the disavowing logic of Fanny’s premises: “It’s for us,” runs the complete clause, “to see her through . . . her noble, lonely life. Only . . . it mustn’t be lonely”; likewise, the projected marriage will “make up” for the “wrong” (softened to “mistake”) that she has previously



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asserted (Bob points out) she was “sure” she had not committed. The language that sustains the disavowal is marked by a style of excess and elision, which work together to forge an asymmetry between the implied judgment and exculpation. Rich in interrupters, empty subjects, unspecified pronouns, and the conditional mode (as Bakhtin asserts, “conditional discourse is always double-voiced discourse”), the passage sustains an ambiguity which thereby permits suspension of two contradictory meanings. In compelling Fanny to name the objects of her prepositions (“Through?” “up for what?”), Bob’s interventions seek to complete Fanny’s syntax. He is not, however, altogether successful; as much is clear from Fanny’s final evasions. To Bob’s query (“what is there to make up for?”), Fanny eludes specification of her sentence’s object and turns to an alternative syntax, maintaining the indirection of her answer by responding to the “what . . . for” interrogative with a “why, if” clause. Although Fanny dodges, Bob’s interruptions nevertheless touch the points of conflict in Fanny’s language. As Fanny says to Bob, revealingly, “You give me a point de repère outside myself—which is where I like it. Now I can work round you” (I.3 284). The excess of her resultant circumlocutions plays out a dynamic in which, as in another context, “she let herself wince at being thus incriminated only that she might protest” (I.3 277). We find a similar dynamic internalized by Densher in the second half of Wings. In the example below, Densher reflects upon his decision to stay in Venice—and therefore to deceive Milly. Here, James represents Densher putting the situation to himself as a mere submission to an “adventure” already cut out for him, which “he mustn’t fall below.” All the imperatives align to negate the aspect of choice in Densher’s decision, to represent his role to himself as a necessary, even chivalrous, obedience to “form”: He was engaged distinctly in an adventure—he who had never thought himself cut out for them, and it fairly helped him that he was able at moments to say to himself that he mustn’t fall below it . . . It began to strike him then that departure wouldn’t curtail, but would signally coarsen his folly, and that above all, as he hadn’t really “begun” anything, had only submitted, consented, but too generously indulged and condoned the beginnings of others, he had no call to treat himself with superstitious rigour. The single thing that was clear in complications was that, whatever happened, one was to behave as a gentleman—to which was added indeed the perhaps slightly less shining truth that complications might sometimes have their tedium beguiled by a study of how a gentleman would behave. This question, I hasten to add, was not in the last resort Densher’s greatest worry. (Wings II.8 184)



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The style of this passage is constructed around an unspoken hole, a space where its two underlying premises refuse to come together and thus fragment the discourse. As briskly as Densher puts aside his reservations, his self-deception is patent. We are unlikely to miss the sidelined acknowledgements of “less shining . . . complications” to what Densher has, “really,” consented to begin. The passage collects such signifiers of acknowledged culpability, even as it uses negation, circumlocution, and abstraction to stage Densher’s disavowal of the guilty choice. In the space between these two, contrary viewpoints—the acknowledgement of culpability, and the disavowal of direct responsibility—the prose gathers its thickness. As the pendulum movement of the sentence swings between avowal and negation, metaphor and abstraction, the passage takes shape around a pair of contradictory assertions, which animate its movement as they brush up against one another repeatedly, while remaining “independent and unmerged” (Bakhtin). Yet the seams show through this fabric of text. In the negated asides, we detect Jamesian irony; in clauses where Densher approaches confrontation with the implications of his decision (“he had no call to treat himself”; “the slightly less shining truth that complications might . . . have”), the prose turns away from clarity of vision, toward euphemistic abstraction (“superstitious rigor,” “have their tedium beguiled”). The note of irony resounds in the sheer number of minimizing qualifiers, by which Densher minimizes his culpability: “He was able at moments to say to himself,” “above all, as he hadn’t really ‘begun’ anything” (emphasis added). What is remarkable about these markers of irony, of course, is that—contrary to the case of Susan Stringham’s stylization—we recognize them as characteristic signifiers of James’s own late style. If, as I have argued, James is at his most monologic when characters speak least like him (e.g., Bob Assingham, Susan Stringham, Merton Densher in the first half of Wings), I am here suggesting that it is when the “voice” of a character becomes least distinct from the narrator’s prose that James generates the dialogism Bakhtin terms “internal polemic.” The features of this voice that Bakhtin identifies are found also in the idiom of characters like Fanny Assingham and Merton Densher (increasingly, as these novels develop). Here is Bakhtin: Hidden polemical discourse is double-voiced, although the interrelationship of the two voices here is a special one. The other’s thought does not personally make its way inside the discourse, but is only reflected in it, determining its tone and its meaning. One word acutely senses alongside it someone else’s word speaking about the same object, and this awareness determines its structure. (196)



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In such passages, the disavowal of responsibility is at issue not only thematically but grammatically, as these sentences displace human agents from active control of the verb and equivocate as to the complement of their predicates. Such prose lands us in a world, Ralf Norrman has argued, “where you do not know who does what to whom, or why” (185). The “intensity and ambiguity” that Norrman notes is as fully structural as it is stylistic. For the disavowal of responsibility enacted at the level of voice also references the broader form of these novels. Here, where character voice is least objectified—that is, least distinct from the style of the narratorial idiom—“stylization,” as Bakhtin writes, “becomes style . . . and discourse becomes two-faced” (198). Who speaks? Who sees?—at such moments? The language confounds the question, presenting us with two contradictory answers. It is indeed a “two-faced” style. In the examples of disavowal I have presented, the crisis of language and form points, moreover, to a social origin. The disavowals of James’s characters acquire stakes most visibly as they link up with the plot—e.g., where Milly Theale is clearly betrayed—but these ethical decisions are contracted in the characters’ represented lives of thought. At that level, a character’s voice (and subjectivity) acquires form through his or her internalization of intersubjective encounters. At this level we may diagram formally the process by which James’s characters become self-objectifying, other to themselves; here we find them persistently measuring themselves by their perceived judgment by others. Thus Fanny, in analyzing Charlotte Stant and the Prince, thinks always of effects upon her social perception (is it that their “having so much remarkably to say for themselves,” Bob asks of Fanny, “makes you feel that you have nothing?”). Likewise Densher makes a pretense of shaping and judging his conduct by internalized standards that he converts to laws of form: “The law was not to be a brute—in return for amiabilities”; “whatever happened, one was to behave as a gentleman.” The materials James’s characters use to make themselves, the forces that clash in their acts of disavowal, pit against each another two imperatives of this upper-middle-class world: socially determined self-interest and social form. At the seams of discourse—these moments of disavowal—James’s characters struggle to reconcile the contradictions of those social laws and to reconcile them, where possible, with desire. In this process disavowal proves a key mechanism, and it underlines the sense in which James’s novels are dialogic. In disavowal, like confession, we find the mind struggling to be free of the other (confronting the social law that impinges upon desire) and in doing so reflecting the centrality of the other to the formation of self. If the



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polyphonic novel develops through the clash of these voices, however, what we observe in James’s fiction is the acknowledgement and sidestepping of this conflict. Here the clash of contradictory imperatives is contained. For instance, in Densher’s discourse from chapter four of book six of Wings, by deceiving Milly he commits himself to Kate’s plan, while simultaneously concealing from himself the lie: “Well, if you come to that, I don’t either!” she laughed. The words gave him, as soon as they were uttered, a sense of responsibility for his own; though during a silence that ensued for a minute he had time to recognise that his own contained after all no element of falsity. Strange enough therefore was it that he could go too far—if it was too far—without being false. His observation was one he would perfectly have made to Kate herself. And before he again spoke, and before Milly did, he took time for more still—for feeling how just here it was that he must break short off if his mind was really made up not to go further. It was as if he had been at a corner—and fairly put there by his last speech; so that it depended on him whether or no to turn it. (Wings II.6 86)

Cloaking both drives in imperatives (“an undue acquaintance with Kate’s ways . . . he mustn’t show,” yet he “must break short off”; he must not be false), Densher’s disavowal of the conflict—whereby deception becomes self-deception—marks his turning of a “corner,” skirting direct confrontation with the implications of his choice. Here again, the “content of the law” (“no element of falsity”) provides the content of the discourse, the lexis of what can be spoken and avowed. The close connection between desire and the law’s transgression, however, gives structure and context (“the corner”) to the utterance. Thus, in contrast to the fierce clash of voices in Dostoevsky’s novels, Jamesian disavowal reflects two voices without either brooking compromise between them or radicalizing their conflict. Gaining form through the conflict of social laws qua internalized voices, James’s novels go beyond the extreme subjectivism Bakhtin finds in later modernist writers such as Proust and Joyce (Bakhtin 37). Even as James’s late prose—with its various structural, syntactical, and lexical strategies of subterfuge— continually reflects the failed dialogue between the voices it contains, Jamesian disavowal proves dialogic in form and style. The affinities between James’s late style and the acts of disavowal it reflects, as it were, en abyme suggest a new reading of the ethical implications of the late style. Colm Tóibín and Kristin Boudreau, among others, have praised the late James style for its suggestively ethical attainments: e.g., its use of indirection to preserve openness and to



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generate new harmonies through the layering of perspectives. The persistent problem of disavowal in these fictions, however, indicates the novels’ often overlooked ambivalence about this style of discourse. In reflecting disavowal, James’s late prose points to the critical underside of this ostensibly open-ended process: its capacity to short-circuit ethical awareness and possibilities for action through its very attenuations, to disclaim human agency, and to defer known conflicts to moments of crisis—moments in which these disavowals split, like the proverbial bowl, into quietly protested truths and open lies.

Notes 1

James’s legacies to Anglo-American and “new” novel theory are the subject of Hale’s Social Formalism. James’s work also plays a key role in classic narratological texts, such as Todorov’s The Poetics of Prose and Genette’s Narrative Discourse. 2 See Aczel for a critique of the voice metaphor as applied to narration and style. Challenging what he regards as a misapplication of “voice” to the implied author, Aczel argues for voice as “a composite configuration of voices,” “best identified contextually as an alterity effect” in the play of intentions between narrator and character/s (“Hearing” 494). 3 Among the many fine studies of James’s late style, see Chatman, Hoover, Laitinen, Leech and Short, Norrman, and Ohi. Krook and Watt also offer canonical discussions. The stylometric work of Hoover establishes through the quantification of stylistic micro-features that the distinctions between early, middle, and late James “rest on a very firm foundation” (180). 4 For versions of this argument see Todorov and Phelan. 5 What narratology calls “discourse” is not synonymous with Bakhtin’s use of the term. Prince’s Dictionary recognizes two discrete definitions of discourse. The first refers to “the expression plane of narrative . . . the ‘how’ of a narrative as opposed to its ‘what’”; here is what narratology, drawing on Russian formalism, regards as the narrative discourse of story: the sum of operations performed on the fabula to render it as syuzhet (also called plot or discourse). This definition is distinguished from the second, Benveniste’s “discourse,” which refers to the subsystem of language used in contexts of utterance and “involv[ing] some reference to the enunciation” and thus to “a sender and a receiver” (Prince 21). Here we approach Bakhtin’s notion of discourse as socially situated utterance.

Works Cited Aczel, Richard. “Hearing Voices in Narrative Texts.” New Literary History 29.3 (1998): 467-500. Print.



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—. “Understanding as Over-hearing: Towards a Dialogics of Voice.” New Literary History 32.3 (2001): 597-617. Print. Bakhtin, M. M., and Caryl Emerson. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Print. Benert, Annette Larson. “Dialogical Discourse in ‘The Jolly Corner’: The Entrepreneur as Language and Image.” Henry James Review 8.2 (1987): 116-25. Print. Bersani, Leo. “The Narrator as Center in The Wings of the Dove.” Modern Fiction Studies 6.2 (1960): 131-44. Print. Boudreau, Kristin. Henry James’s Narrative Technique: Consciousness, Perception, and Cognition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1972. Print. Chatman, Seymour. The Later Style of Henry James. Oxford: Blackwell, 1972. Print. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Vintage, 1992. Print. Fludernik, Monika. “New Wine in Old Bottles? Voice, Focalization, and New Writing.” New Literary History 32.3 (2001): 619-38. Print. —. Towards a “Natural” Narratology. London: Routledge, 1996. Print. Fowler, Roger. Linguistics and the Novel. London: Methuen, 1977. Print. Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. 24 vols. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1995. Print. Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1988. Print. Hale, Dorothy J. “Fiction as Restriction: Self-Binding in New Ethical Theories of the Novel.” Narrative 15.2 (2007): 187-206. Print. —. Social Formalism: The Novel in Theory from Henry James to the Present. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. Print. Herman, David. Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. London: Routledge, 2005. Print. Hoover, David L. “Corpus Stylistics, Stylometry, and the Styles of Henry James.” Style 41.2 (2007): 174-203. Print. Jaffe, Charles M. “Disavowal: A Review of Applications in Recent Literature.” The Annual of Psychoanalysis 16 (October 1986): 93-110. Print. James, Henry. The Art of the Novel. Critical Prefaces. Ed. Richard P. Blackmur. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934. Print. —. The Golden Bowl. 2 vols. New York: Scribner, 1937. Print. —. The Wings of the Dove. 2 vols. New York: Scribner, 1937. Print.



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Krook, Dorothea. “The Late Style.” The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James. By Dorothea Krook. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1962. 390-413. Print. Laitinen, Tuomo. Aspects of Henry James’s Style. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1975. Print. Leech, Geoffrey N., and Mick Short. Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose. London: Longman, 1981. Print. McIntyre, Clara F. “The Later Manner of Mr. Henry James.” PMLA 27.3 (1912): 354-71. Print. Norrman, Ralf. The Insecure World of Henry James’s Fiction: Intensity and Ambiguity. New York: St. Martin’s, 1982. Print. Ohi, Kevin. Henry James and the Queerness of Style. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2011. Print. Overstreet, Maryann, and George Yule. “Formulaic Disclaimers.” Journal of Pragmatics 33 (2001): 45-60. Print. Phelan, James. Worlds from Words: A Theory of Language in Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981. Print. Prince, Gerald Joseph. A Dictionary of Narratology. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2003. Print. Shen, Dan. “How Stylisticians Draw on Narratology: Approaches, Advantages, and Disadvantages.” Style 39.4 (2005): 381-95. Print. Smith, Irena Auerbuch. “The Golden Goal: Toward a Dialogic Imagination in Henry James’s Last Completed Novel.” The Henry James Review 16.2 (1995): 172-90. Print. Stanzel, Franz Karl. Narrative Situations in the Novel. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1971. Print. Thomas, William B. “The Author’s Voice in The Ambassadors.” The Journal of Narrative Technique 1.2 (1971): 108-21. Print. Todorov, Tzvetan. Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Print. Tóibín, Colm. “All a Novelist Needs.” Henry James Review 30.3 (2009): 285-88. Print. Watt, Ian. “The First Paragraph of The Ambassadors.” Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Ruth Bernard Yeazell. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1994. Print.



 

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR THE MYSTERY OF CHARACTER AND JAMESIAN ANTIPSYCHOLOGY: BERSANI, CAMERON, OHI LEE CLARK MITCHELL

For nearly half a century now, the more persuasive assessments of Henry James’s fiction have been those inspired by his delight in verbal style, in the textual surfaces of his novels. Long before (and often since), thematic readings of character had seemed especially appropriate for James, whose central figures appear complexly, compellingly affected by fears and desires, deprivations and inhibitions—in short, by complicated subjectivities akin to their readers, all but waiting to be psychologized. But inspired first by the “linguistic turn” of structuralism, then deconstruction, critics began to acknowledge James’s late characters in particular as largely inscrutable, subjectively unknowable, indeed as figures intended to be wholly unpsychologized. Leo Bersani first advanced this radically antimimetic approach, resisting the long familiar habit of attributing underlying motives to Kate Croy or Maggie Verver and instead focusing on their overt expressions of consciousness. Soundly rejecting any reading of Jamesian character as pure subjectivity, he turned conventional interpretative practice on its head: James’s occluded late style and convoluted narrative dynamics do not, he argued, emerge from strained psychologies, representing something already there; instead, style itself produces consciousness that only takes shape as one speaks. Or as Bersani, inverting figure and ground, boldly declared: “The surfaces of our thought and our speech don’t merely cover up the depths behind thought and speech. They have appeals of their own” (129). Others since have championed the antimimetic appeal of these “surfaces,” both mental and verbal, enforcing Bersani’s theoretical reversal and adumbrating a counterintuitive interpretive strategy most succinctly delineated by Kevin Ohi: “Character

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and psychology seem less to motivate than to be generated by narrative effects and effects of style” (46). Again, the usual questions about the subjectivity of characters in late James are just as irrelevant for Ohi as for Bersani, since all we can legitimately know is what it is characters say they want, not why or what it feels like to them. Therefore, instead of inquiring into the presumptive psychological reasons that may impel them, we need to focus on what it is they actually achieve, and more specifically on how their rhetorical configuration allows consciousness to emerge. This interpretive challenge has formed a salutary development for readers of late James, turning us away from hypostatized characters (often simply paraphrased in simpler language from the texts themselves) back to the complex words that evoke them, compelling us to attend to the narrative tropes and figures of speech that often undermine the psychological claims we want to make. Instead of domesticating texts by transposing them into familiar moral terrains, we are rightly cautioned to accept the tensions of James’s late narratives as frankly contradictory, even mysterious. Yet like all powerful critical gestures, this antipsychological focus on the close reading of textual surfaces risks its own kind of misprision, if only because that focus seems to require the density of James’s late style to sustain its antimimetic claims. Bersani makes that position explicit and in detail, while Ohi’s exclusive concentration on novels of the major phase serves as tacit endorsement.1 In the following, I want to pursue the idea that, contrary to Bersani and Ohi, James’s early fiction can be as resistant to psychology as his later novels, offering scenes and characters in a more straightforward (early) style that nonetheless confounds conventional mimetic claims for character. But then, I would like to survey the transition from Bersani to Sharon Cameron (herself, a powerful antimimetic reader) to Ohi, as each in succession focuses with ever-increasing intensity on “the surfaces of . . . thought and speech” in late James. For the closer those obscure surfaces are read (Ohi offering the most sustained of close readings), the more we come to realize that style not only creates consciousness but also elicits irresistible psychological claims (Ohi offering the least consistent antipsychological perspective). Perhaps the best place to begin is with the commonsense notion that fictional characters are available to us in ways that actual people are not. There is a “fundamental difference between people in daily life and people in books,” E. M. Forster proclaimed in a blatantly psychological claim, to which he then artlessly added: “In daily life . . . neither complete clairvoyance nor complete confessional exists. We know each other approximately, by external signs, and these serve well enough as a basis



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for society and even for intimacy” (47). By contrast, Forster believed that “in the novel we can know people perfectly,” which explains “why Amelia and Emma cannot be here. They are people whose secret lives are visible or might be visible: we are people whose secret lives are invisible” (6364). Forster presumed he was dealing in commonplaces, truths selfevident to common readers and plausible even to those more sophisticated in less self-conscious moments. Yet on the evidence, not even early James would have agreed. Consider The American (1877) and our first view of Christopher Newman, who as just a physical body seems bafflingly elusive: our friend’s countenance was supremely eloquent. The discriminating observer we have been supposing might, however, perfectly have measured its expressiveness, and yet have been at a loss to describe it. It had that typical vagueness which is not vacuity, that blankness which is not simplicity, that look of being committed to nothing in particular, of standing in an attitude of general hospitality to the chances of life, of being very much at one’s own disposal, so characteristic of many American faces. It was our friend’s eye that chiefly told his story; an eye in which innocence and experience were singularly blended. It was full of contradictory suggestions; and though it was by no means the glowing orb of a hero of romance, you could find in it almost anything you looked for. Frigid and yet friendly, frank yet cautious, shrewd yet credulous, positive yet skeptical, confident yet shy, extremely intelligent and extremely goodhumoured, there was something vaguely defiant in its concessions, and something profoundly reassuring in its reserve. (18-19)

The “contradictory suggestions” and implicit oxymorons that structure this initial portrait anticipate the mysteries of character that will persist throughout the novel. For contrary to Forster’s claim, even the selfevidence of “external signs” is here obscured, with our fictional understanding reduced to the same “approximate” status we allegedly experience in daily life. More intriguing than Newman’s uncertain physiognomy is the moment that drives the plot itself, when he initially decides to come to Europe by foreswearing revenge: I woke up suddenly, from a sleep or from a kind of a reverie, with the most extraordinary feeling in the world—a mortal disgust for the thing I was going to do. . . . And all this took place quite independently of my will, and I sat watching it as if it were a play at the theatre. I could feel it going on inside of me. You may depend upon it that there are things going on inside of us that we understand mighty little about. (34)2



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Like the earlier passage, likewise relatively straightforward, this belies Forster’s claim that “we can know people perfectly” in novels, or even that they can know themselves. Newman here, devoid of will, incapable of understanding his own motives, simply wonders what he will do next. And the novel’s latter half only confirms its antipsychological status, as Peter Brooks has shown in describing the melodramatic plot that comes to pass: “One could indeed say that Newman’s imagination here generates the novel to come” (61). What ensues seems magically the consequence of his histrionic speculations, though it is not at all clear why his habits of imagination work as they do, or what psychologically might have contributed to this characteristic disposition toward the melodramatic. That uncertainty continues right to the end, when Mrs. Tristram notes that the Bellegardes relied on his “good nature,” prompting sudden second thoughts on his having burned the evidentiary letter: “Newman instinctively turned to see if the little paper was in fact consumed; but there was nothing left of it” (309). What does go through his mind here? We never know. Intentions, psychology, subjectivity: all are strangely externalized, moved to a level of consciousness that requires only action, not knowledge. And James’s later revision of The American in the New York Edition excises even this final instinctive “turn,” making Newman that much more mysterious. Washington Square (1880) offers a second example of inscrutable psychology, again written in James’s typical early style, relatively free of figurative language. Catherine Sloper experiences something akin to Newman’s suspended will—here, however, rendered not in first-person but third. Her father, having disapproved of her marriage to Morris Townsend, excites in her an entirely new feeling, which may be described as a state of expectant suspense about her own actions. She watched herself as she would have watched another person, and wondered what she would do. It was as if this other person, who was both herself and not herself, had suddenly sprung into being, inspiring her with a natural curiosity as to the performance of untested functions. (104)

Once again, a scene of consciousness strangely externalized seems to defy motivation, as if one’s psychology were inscrutable not simply to others but even to oneself. Still, that has hardly slowed critics eager to celebrate Catherine’s emergent selfhood, her feminist ploy of silence, her abrupt defiance of father, lover, Aunt Lavinia, all of whom impose limiting assessments upon her. Catherine’s reticence, moreover, not only induces others to speak but has evoked a similar response from critics eager to



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account for the cruelties she endures and their effect on her psychology (see Auchard, Berlant, and Gregory). But the novel itself never says. On the contrary, it reveals a strangely voiced, even perplexing view of Morris Townsend in their final confrontation, offered in free indirect discourse: She had lived on something that was connected with him, and she had consumed it in doing so. This person did not look unhappy. He was fair and well-preserved, perfectly dressed, mature and complete. As Catherine looked at him, the story of his life defined itself in his eyes: he had made himself comfortable, and he had never been caught. (244)

What are we to make of her having “lived on something that was connected with him,” now consumed—by what? Age? Weariness? Vengeful satisfaction? And how does Catherine read the “story of his life defined” in his eyes? This would seem just a short step from those moments in the late novels when characters actively speak for each other, imputing thoughts to one another. As a final example, take The Spoils of Poynton (1897), where character appears as impenetrable as anywhere else in James. Owen Gereth, the figure whose possession by three women defines the plot, often seems to consist of little more than Fleda’s belief in him. In fact, one way to understand the novel is as teetering at that moment when he nearly confesses his love to Fleda, just as Mrs. Brigstock enters the room, sees a fallen biscuit, and jumps to the appropriate conclusion that they are enthralled. Her fear is, of course, precisely Mrs. Gereth’s hope, who now returns the spoils to Poynton in order to clinch Fleda’s engagement, only to confirm ironically that the unscrupulous Mona will succeed. In large part, the plot turns on Owen’s resemblance to Churchill’s Russia, “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” And to clarify the extent to which critics psychologize that enigma, a student of mine once opined that Owen had masterminded his marriage to Mona—that far from being simple, he simply acted as if he were to use Fleda to recover the spoils (in short, Owen’s final letter indicates he has been suave and smart all along). But Fleda is just as mysterious, and her idealism and aggressive passivity—which seem “idiotic perversity” to Mrs. Gereth (183)—become for readers a reason to ponder the assumed psychology behind such behavior. We wonder as well at her “sweet little scruples” (183) and are disconcerted by the novel’s conclusion, where Mrs. Gereth’s remark that Mona “was sure of you” (204) echoes Mrs. Tristram’s cutting allusion at the conclusion to The American. Yet unlike Newman, Fleda’s very lack of regret suggests that she does indeed know her own mind, knows what she aspires to, leaving us with the sense that she somehow wants to lose



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Owen. As Lawrence Holland concludes, there is something deeply inscrutable about the psychology that fosters Fleda’s renunciation, turning her away from a marriage that fails to comport with her high requirements for a “transforming passion” (98) coupled with “utterly reciprocal harmony” (105). And yet, however inscrutable, Holland also wisely intuits what might be Fleda’s rationale for cherishing an idealist vision of Owen that Owen himself cannot live up to. Thinking hard about the mysterious Fleda this way—or given their mysteries, thinking about Christopher Newman and Catherine Sloper in a similarly psychological fashion—represents for Bersani a misguided critical effort. He does focus, after all, on late James, but we might consider those scenes of mystery in the earlier novels as proleptic fictional gestures, rudimentary moments waiting for the richer suasions of James’s late style. And viewed so, Bersani would say, such scenes demand of us neither psychological insight nor greater knowledge of hidden depths. After all, consciousness need not be psychologized as the source of behavior or the cause of actions. We should instead simply recognize how fully James’s style itself constructs a view of events that cannot be reduced to the paraphrase of psychology, morality, or some other mappable subjectivity. Bersani initiated this antipsychological approach by celebrating what otherwise had long been construed as a stylistic liability: “James works toward a richly superficial art in which hidden depths would never ironically undermine the life inspired by his own and his characters’ ‘mere’ ingenuities of design” (132). In short, Bersani’s reading of the late novels directs our attention to a narrative surface unroiled by deeper meanings in need of interpretation. Instead of mysteries of character (construed as behavioral drives, psychic complexes, defense mechanisms) that might somehow explain Maggie Verver’s emerging will to power, or her persistent resistance to knowledge, or her history of arrested development, we are now turned to James’s figurative prose itself, in the artful play of consciousness it reveals behind her forceful efforts to redirect marital relations. As Bersani states, in what seems at first like dismissive tones: Maggie’s speculations really produce nothing; they are simply a way of filling time while she . . . is standing outside of time. She does absolutely nothing but wait for the single fiction she promotes—that of her own and her father’s happy marriages—to stifle every other way of living the story. Her art includes discriminations but it doesn’t depend on them; indeed, it seems to depend on her stubbornly presenting again and again her original design. (150)



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From this perspective, The Golden Bowl (1904) resembles the game of contract bridge at Fawns, played as a celebration not of the resonances of subjectivity but rather of the ploys with which characters parry each others’ efforts. “Maggie lies, and waits to see what time will do,” Bersani observes, which informs his radical thesis that “The best talk and the best thought would be the talk and the thought which resist interpretation. Language would no longer reveal character or refer to desires ‘behind’ words; it would be the unfolding of an improvised and never completed psychological design” (139). Words simply unspool in a process that complicates narrative design and fosters an elaborate sense of conscious deliberation. Psychology, then, far from giving an interpretive context for dialogue or otherwise informing narrative action, becomes little more than a shifting consequence of what has been said. We are fascinated not by Maggie’s assumed subjectivity, adduced from past behavior and imputed to psychological constraints, but rather by her “freely improvising intelligence” (143). And in a move now familiar to students of deconstruction, Bersani deftly identifies Maggie’s final gesture to Amerigo with the novel’s gesture toward us: “The coerced freedom which Maggie gives to Amerigo, analogous to the freedom which art offers to criticism, consecrates a marriage in which there is finally nothing to say or to know” (Bersani 151). That conclusion may well give pause, since it suggests that the mystery of character evoked in earlier novels written in a more straightforward style is nowise reduced by fuller rendition, greater detail, more verbal and narrative pyrotechnics. Character was and is inexplicable, measured only in terms of the success one achieves, reminding us with a stark nudge that The Golden Bowl ends in Maggie achieving her goal, brutally so, but only to experience feelings of “pity and dread” for Amerigo. She knows little of what is now in store with her husband, and nor do we; everything, even after five hundred dense pages, remains frighteningly unclear. Twenty years after this initial assault on psychological interpretations of late James, Sharon Cameron advanced Bersani’s argument against “the comfortable superstition of truth” (155). More attentively, however, she casts her eye on the intricacies of James’s “richly superficial art” itself, moving discussion from the kind of incisive generalizations favored by Bersani to a series of close readings. 3 Focusing on specific passages, Cameron teases out the implications of characters supposedly thinking— or rather, teases out the process by which thoughts produce the effects they are often assumed to represent. Thus, she argues, the late novels are really indifferent to the questions of knowledge so many critics have brought to



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bear (What might Maggie or Adam really intuit about their spouses’ relations? What do Kate or Milly actually know of each others’ feelings?). Rather, the novels are centrally concerned with questions of meaning and interpretation (What ends might Maggie achieve via Charlotte? Who wields power in the relation between Kate and Milly? How, as Fanny Assingham might ask, might characters get others to do their bidding?). As Cameron starkly concludes, characters in The Golden Bowl are not concerned with what can be known but rather with what can be done. . . . Thus characters are operators not actors. In the first half of the novel Charlotte in particular tries to control what kinds of things are said and by whom they are said. In the second half of the novel Maggie in particular tries to control what kinds of things are thought and by whom they are thought. (84, 86)

Control, in other words, is the salient feature of the late novels—a premise Bersani had already firmly established, but one that Cameron manifests in more complex configurations than Bersani ever adduced. Characters do not merely speak tentatively for each other but rather actively ventriloquize each other—imagining others’ putative speech in ways that enforce others’ actions, even if those imagined words are never actually heard. Ascribing conversations to others becomes, for Cameron, a contestation of power, creating meanings that reveal little of one’s personal psychology but everything about a character’s efforts to control the turn of events. Take the eerie moment when Amerigo first sees the golden bowl, broken in three, as Maggie watches: “Yes, look, look,” she seemed to see him hear her say even while her sounded words were other—“look, look, both at the truth that still survives in that smashed evidence and at the even more remarkable appearance that I’m not such a fool as you supposed me. Look at the possibility that since I am different there may still be something in it for you—if you’re capable of working with me to get that out.” (454)

For Cameron, this scene exemplifies Maggie’s imperial consciousness, with unsaid words nonetheless having effects as dire as if they had been spoken: “To voice another’s thoughts . . . is not sympathetically to understand those thoughts but rather preemptively to produce them” (95). Far from sharing meanings, characters are complicit in a ruthless violence of thinking to effect their own ends; or as Cameron observes, “the closest one can get to another is the distance requisite to see that meanings are not mutual” (102). Once more, an antipsychological approach reminds us of how little we actually can know of subjectivity, free from the manifest



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need to secure control for oneself. Twenty years later again, Kevin Ohi has turned the screw of interpretation even tighter, focusing more intently on what he refers to as James’s “queer” style. Observing that “metaphor in the late fiction ceases to be subordinated to the representation of consciousness,” he argues that: Many of the figures . . . migrate to descriptions and even to the spoken dialogue of characters who can . . . have as yet no inkling of the context ostensibly motivating them. . . . One effect is to turn consciousness inside out; another is to disrupt any understanding of language as a “rendering” of consciousness by giving agency instead to the figures that ostensibly convey it, making consciousness an after-effect of its rendering. Character and psychology seem less to motivate than to be generated by narrative effects and effects of style. (45-6)

Ohi then reads each of the late novels as characterized by dominant rhetorical tropes: zeugma, syllepsis in The Golden Bowl; free indirect discourse, apposition in The Wings of the Dove (1902); figures of belatedness throughout. Such attention to style reveals how thoroughly the purported psychologies so often adduced by critics are undercut by James’s “queer” figures of speech and baffling narrative patterns. Like Cameron, if even more comprehensively, Ohi offers local readings that reinforce an argument for the construction of consciousness —indeed, make consciousness contingent on a series of rhetorical structures themselves. Consider Adam Verver, pursued in the billiard room at Fawns by a randy Mrs. Rance, separated by “the vast table [which] thrust itself between them as an expanse of desert sand. She couldn’t cross the desert, but she could, and did, beautifully get round it.” Here, Ohi observes, “The coming together of vehicle and tenor produces a comical effect” that links billiard table, desert sand, and a later invocation of that “great alkali desert of cheap divorce.” But as he adds parenthetically, invoking the moment for a larger antipsychological argument: “(It is less that figures render characters’ thoughts than that the thoughts themselves seem to occur in, even to be ‘caused’ by, the movement between [or within] figures.)” (49). Ohi’s figurative readings have the effect of further dislodging psychology from late James as a central concern, extending Bersani’s and Cameron’s efforts on behalf of the master’s rhetorical strategies. Yet curiously, he seems unaware that Seymour Chatman anticipated this argument forty years before, in a celebrated study of the effects of James’s late style: “Indeed, it often seems as if James created characters as anchors for abstraction rather than abstractions as part of the illusion of character” (20). That insight is almost



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prescient, not only in matching the chiasmatic interpretive habit of the antipsychologists but as well in reminding readers of the commanding verbal resonances of James’s novels (something too often ignored at the time by critics intent on character study). Despite a rich variety of examples that confirm in detail what Bersani merely asserted, however, the most striking feature of Ohi’s study is the tension between his post-structuralist argument, on the one hand, and, on the other, his recurrence to moments that are nonetheless deeply psychological. Consider this apt description of Strether, which ensues after a discussion of the characteristic stylistic gestures of belatedness in The Ambassadors (1903) (including deferral, extraposition, analepsis, and syntactical postponement). Strether’s “regret seems less that he was never young than that he was not old soon enough. To live is thus not to be on the train but rather to realize that one should regret having missed it, and to find oneself, perhaps, no longer at a loss to name what one has lost” (Ohi 155). That reading of regret rests on a telling inference about Strether’s subjectivity, something we had thought excluded from an argument based on James’s late style. Conversely, Chad Newsome lacks any regrets, having never lived belatedly, and thus is “disappointingly inadequate to his own life” (Ohi 156). Again, persuasive as this may be, the conclusion derives not from thoughts produced by figures of speech that for the antipsychologist bring Chad to fictional life, but rather from more conventionally familiar assumptions about a character’s lack of selfconsciousness. And this is even more true of Ohi’s stirring assessment of the conclusion to The Ambassadors: I would therefore insist that, as moving as the novel can be, Strether’s predicament is not sad, that the exorbitant forms of critical investment the text inspires are not to be explained by an identification with the futility of reading; the dominant affect as the novel draws to its close and Strether declines to get anything for himself is not disillusionment or disappointment, not resignation or renunciation, not sadness but joy. (164-5)

The tone with which this is expressed makes Ohi’s earlier antipsychological claims ring slightly hollow, especially as he here imputes “critical investment,” “inspiration,” “identification,” and “affect” to our reading of Strether, even to Strether’s reading of himself. Strikingly, belatedness now becomes more than simply a topos in the late novels. Ohi invokes it not just as stylistic weirdness (in the old-fashioned meaning of “queer”) but to endorse the repeated “potentialities” of a gay subject position: “belatedness is queer, not because it renders the sad predicament of gay forms of life in a homophobic context but because of its power to return



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potentiality to a life. That coming out always occurs too late . . . allows one the sometime equivocal opportunity to confront the potentiality of identity” (169). Here, a study that reveals how tropes of belatedness bring Kate, Maggie, and Strether to consciousness finally offers a psychological view of belatedness perfectly evocative for the gay reader, and suitably poignant for any reader. Ironically, it might be said that the triumph of Ohi’s book is in finally failing to live up to its strict post-structuralist agenda. And this has little to do with whether one agrees with his readings or not. Strong as is his chapter on The Ambassadors, for instance, many will be unpersuaded by his appreciative endorsement of the novel’s conclusion, in which Strether’s renunciation (“Not, out of the whole affair, to have got anything for myself” [512]) seems perverse and self-deluded in a novel that testifies above all to both belatedness and mutual involvement. Sheila Teahan, herself an antipsychologist, more aptly describes her own troubling disappointment over “Strether’s fundamental unaccountability” (104). But though Ohi is unpersuasive here, what strikes one as admirable in his reading is the effort to convince us of “joy” in that ending, if only because it belies the sometimes cheerless claims made by so many antipsychologists for James. Human subjectivity, self-directed and psychologically dense, is not easily swept aside, even when we agree that consciousness often does ensue from “the surfaces of . . . thought and speech.” Once again, it is worth recalling that Seymour Chatman was there first: “I have argued that by nominalizing verbs of mental action, James makes them, rather than the mere human to whom they attach, the topic of the discourse. Grammatically, this entails the partial or total elimination of the real actor, his removal to an oblique position or even complete disappearance.” (35) This could almost pass for Bersani or Cameron, though unlike them, Chatman only edges on the antimimetic, never attempting to totalize that vision or otherwise sweep subjectivity from the scene James creates. Partly, Chatman’s hesitancy seems to have resulted from realizing how resonant and contradictory that scene actually was, in putting James’s narrative practice paradoxically at odds with the psychological richness he wanted to evoke: “Indeed, one of James’ motives for metaphor—so much increased in the later work—may very well have been his consciousness of the de-dramatizing effects of ‘telling’ about the inner life of his characters” (53). Rhetorical surfaces do seem to align with an antipsychological impulse in James, even as his narratives more generally press us to wonder “about the inner life of his characters.” In short, even Ohi responds to what he otherwise laments as “the power of . . . identificatory movements within



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the narrative to extort judgments” (60). But though such judgments can indeed slide over into “moralizing readings” (an ever-present risk that rightly troubles Ohi), that possibility only means as readers we need to be at once more precise and more tentative. This is where the antipsychologists are salutary, in compelling us to listen carefully to what is not said as well as what is said in James (that is, in not unduly explaining gaps in consciousness via the preformed reticulations of psychology). Granted that, as Ohi claims, “psychological predicaments follow from narrative structures” (106), it is still neither possible nor desirable to ignore those occasions when the opposite occurs—that is, when narrative structures ensue from psychological patterns that create them. The fact is that James’s novels seem to oscillate in this, giving us characters who solicit our psychological ruminations, testing us as we judge them, even as they remain ultimately enigmatic, early and late. At just such critical impasses, it may be useful to consider Ruth Yeazell’s observation that “the very rhythms of James’s late style enact this relentless unfolding of awareness; in the language itself we sense the peculiar force with which knowledge—half-dreaded, half-desired—thrusts itself upon the conscious mind” (25). Consciousness, meaning, power, psychology, knowledge, self-control: the currents of Jamesian interpretation keep shifting among these poles, and late James compels us to return to moments in earlier novels where characters also seem mysterious even to themselves. Is that because James had already begun to anticipate the need for a style more adequate to his evolving narrative needs, as Chatman surmises, in order to dramatize characters’ experience, allowing figures of speech to more adequately shape our view of their consciousness? Probably not. But even with early characters so relatively undefined as Christopher Newman or Catherine Sloper, we cannot avoid making psychological surmises in an effort to understand. That impulse is irrepressible, even among those self-consciously resistant. The paradox is embodied in J. L. Austin’s notorious contrast of statements that name (or describe) with statements that act (or perform). For as J. Hillis Miller observes of the relation between speech acts and passion, an irresolvable tension is embedded in this apparently simple contrast. “The problem of passion” itself rests in the distinction between constative and performative utterances, the problem of whether the outward expression of passion, in words or other signs, simply reports, constatively, an emotion that already exists inwardly, or whether the outer expression creates, performatively, the inner passion. Do I first feel love and then say “I love you,” or does saying “I love you” bring about the passionate state of being in love? (Miller 159)



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One would be hard pressed to find a more elegant distinction between psychologist and antipsychologist, subjectivity and consciousness—a distinction that collapses even as it is made. To conclude: the mystery of other people compels us in life (as E. M. Forster might well have said), mysteries that we think are satisfied in the supposed accessibility of the realist novel (as Forster did say). But James is there to show that the novel need not be that way, giving us characters who represent unfathomable secrets, partly reflected in their own emergent figures and tropes, partly in the refined explanations we offer to understand them. Although the secrets may be unfathomable, however, that is not to say that characters are unknowable apart from their successes and failures. We recognize in them the patterns that also help make us human, and in projecting our own psychologies onto them, understand more fully their suasive effect on us. James’s style offers not firm ground on which to establish understanding (with consciousness emerging only from narrative tropes), but rather a web in which interpretations compete, identificatory positions are tentatively established, and our fuller understanding of what it means to be caught up by words and made accountable (in all senses of that word) is, at least for the moment, illuminated.

Notes 1

Bersani states: “While it’s at least possible to detect ‘behind’ Isabel Archer’s unfocused appetite for experience a terror of sex made fairly explicit in her scenes with Caspar Goodwood, the grounds for what we might think of as ‘vertical’ motive (plunging down ‘into’ personality) eventually disappear from James’s fiction. There is no reason to believe . . . that an inability to be active with women explains Strether’s adventures in The Ambassadors, or that Maggie and her father have an ‘unhealthy’ attachment to each other in The Golden Bowl. In James’s late fiction, the narrative surface is never richly menaced by meanings it can’t wholly contain. Complexity consists not in mutually subversive motives but rather in the expanding surface itself which, when most successful, finds a place in its intricate design for all the motives imaginable” (130). 2 Ross Posnock speaks of this moment as “James’s untying of the knot of personality,” and refers to Newman’s awareness here “of his own nonidentity” (316). Coincidentally, in his later Preface to the New York Edition, James recalls his conception of the novel itself in terms that strikingly correspond to this scene of Newman waking up in a horse-drawn hack: I recall that I was seated in an American ‘horse-car’ when I found myself, of a sudden, considering with enthusiasm, as the theme of a ‘story,’ the situation, in another country and an aristocratic society, of some robust but insidiously beguiled and betrayed, some cruelly wronged, compatriot: the point being in especial that he should suffer at the hands of persons



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pretending to represent the highest possible civilisation and to be of an order in every way superior to his own. What would he ‘do’ in that predicament, how would he right himself, or how, failing a remedy, would he conduct himself under his wrong? This would be the question involved, and I remember well how, having entered the horse-car without a dream of it, I was presently to leave that vehicle in full possession of an answer (2). It is as if James not only mystifies his character’s psychology, but his own, in offering an explanation for the novel’s genesis that simply appears to him without explanation or rationale. 3 Omri Moses has aptly observed of Bersani’s recent study of “The Beast in the Jungle,” that “One remarkable quality of Bersani’s reading is that it is ultimately so vague. This is part of a deliberate interpretive strategy . . . In this respect, he avoids reproducing the protagonist’s own distorted forms of interpretation, forms that seek to penetrate beneath appearance in order to find ‘the real truth’ behind his life’” (268). That deliberate strategy might be said to characterize Bersani’s earlier work as well.

Works Cited Auchard, John. Silence in Henry James: The Heritage of Symbolism and Decadence. University Park: Penn State UP, 1986. Print. Berlant, Lauren. “Fancy-Work and Fancy Foot-Work: Motives for Silence in Washington Square.” Criticism 29 (1987): 439-58. Print. Bersani, Leo. A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature. Boston: Little, Brown, 1976. Print. —. “The Narrator as Center in The Wings of the Dove.” Modern Fiction Studies 6:2 (1960): 131-144. Print. Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. New Haven: Yale UP, 1976. Print. Cameron, Sharon. Thinking in Henry James. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989. Print. Chatman, Seymour. The Later Style of Henry James. 1972. Westport, CN: Greenwood P, 1986. Print. Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1927. Print. Gregory, Melissa Valiska. “From Melodrama to Monologue: Henry James and Domestic Terror.” The Henry James Review 24 (2004): 146-167. Print. Holland, Laurence Bedwell. The Expense of Vision: Essays on the Craft of Henry James. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1964. Print. James, Henry. The Ambassadors. 1903. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986. Print.



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—. The American. 1877. Ed. James W. Tuttleton. New York: Norton, 1978. Print. —. The Golden Bowl. 1904. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987. Print. —. The Spoils of Poynton. 1897. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987. Print. —. Washington Square. 1881. New York: Modern Library, 1997. Print. Miller, J. Hillis. Speech Acts in Literature. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001. Print. Moses, Omri. “Henry James’s Virtual Beast.” The Henry James Review. 32.3 (2011): 266-73. Print. Ohi, Kevin. Henry James and the Queerness of Style. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2011. Print. Posnock, Ross. The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. Print. Teahan, Sheila. The Rhetorical Logic of Henry James. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1995. Print. Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. Language and Knowledge in the Late Novels of Henry James. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976. Print.

  



 

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE TEXTUAL MONUMENTS / CRUMBLING IDOLS; OR, WHAT WE NEVER KNEW ABOUT HENRY JAMES (AND NEVER THOUGHT TO ASK) MICHAEL ANESKO

No small part of the Legend of the Master has come down to us through Henry James’s magisterial assertion of authorial power: his apparently unceasing dedication to craft and detail, a commitment that often entailed a corresponding diminution of his popular marketability. No one knew this better than the editors who continued to publish him, even at a risk to their corporate balance sheets. As early as 1909, William Crary Brownell (at Scribner’s) could claim that James’s “career has been an honorable one in a very special way and to a very marked degree. He has scrupulously followed his ideal. Neither necessity nor opportunity has prevented him from doing, apparently, just what he wanted. He has never, at any rate, yielded to the temptation to give the public what it wanted” (Brownell 339). With dismal sales figures for Scribner’s New York Edition (190709) all too readily at hand, Brownell knew what he was talking about. Yet without the New York Edition the Legend of the Master is unthinkable. That textual monument (wryly compared by James to Shelley’s Ozymandias)1—and especially the series of Prefaces that the author wrote for it—has come to symbolize (even to incarnate) the Master’s adherence to the most rigorous aesthetic principles. Even Scribner’s tried to promulgate and to capitalize on that perception, affirming in their initial advertising prospectus that “this definitive edition” would include “all of the author’s fiction that he desires perpetuated.” The prospectus also highlighted the fact that James had “devoted many months to the most careful and scrupulous revision of all the novels and tales” to give the edition “a literary unity such as, it is believed, no collected edition of any

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author’s work heretofore issued has ever enjoyed.” The Prefaces, the frontispieces (executed by Alvin Langdon Coburn: “one of the most accomplished and sensitive artist-photographers now living”), the exquisite details of manufacture (such as special paper watermarked with the author’s monogram, initials that also were stamped in gilt on each volume’s front cover)—all of these features constituted “an elaborate edifice whose design and execution are absolutely unique,” the publisher claimed, “owing to their complete unity of effect” (“Novels” 212-13).2 As Stuart Culver and others have suggested, the Edition’s commercial failure paradoxically secured its hallowed stature as a monument to James’s unyielding integrity at the same time that its printed volumes have provided a bibliographical foundation for the perpetuation of the Master’s aura.3 At least since F. O. Matthiessen made the case for the indisputable primacy of what he christened James’s “major phase” (of which the New York Edition was the culminating accomplishment), 4 the academic community—and the publishers who cater to it—have privileged the revised texts of the author’s works and typically have chosen them as copy-texts for almost all the modern reprints of James’s fiction that have been adopted for classroom use. 5 Knowingly or not, such critics and professors have swallowed (and dutifully followed) the purported logic of Scribner’s original advertising hype. As the last versions to be touched by James’s pen, these texts presumably best represent his final intentions. Amplifying this logic is the testimony of the author himself, who insisted to one skeptic that “I shouldn’t have planned the Edition at all unless I had felt close revision—wherever seeming called for—to be an indispensable part of it” (HJL 4: 371). To his publisher, too, James laid down numerous imperatives to guarantee (as he put it) “the full security of the text.” Having margin to proofread was essential “to ensure that absolutely supreme impeccability that such an Edition must have & that the Author’s eye alone can finally contribute to.” (He even went so far as to implore Scribner’s type-setters “to adhere irremoveably” to his abstemious punctuation “& never to insert death-dealing commas” [LiL 433]). Such evidence—or at least such rhetoric—has greatly embellished James’s reputation for editorial infallibility. For years, the only blemish on that reputation arose from the comic embarrassment of the perverse bibliographical history of The Ambassadors, in which, it was alleged, James overlooked the fact that two of the novel’s chapters appeared in reverse order. But even that wart has been removed, since new evidence (and careful rereading) has shown that, all along, the error was not the author’s but rather the critics’.6 One certain feature of the Legend of the



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Master has been (to paraphrase The Ambassadors) not just James’s invariable rightness, but his horrible sharp eye for what makes him so. The legend largely has gone unquestioned because so little really serious work has been done with James’s texts.7 In the absence of more rigorous investigation and textual criticism, it has been almost inevitable that the assertions of mastery circumjacent to the New York Edition have contributed to a somewhat exaggerated estimate of James’s editorial prowess. As Adrian Poole recently has said, “It is a complex fate, being an editor, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of the New York Edition.” My own current study of the various texts of The Portrait of a Lady (to prepare the first scholarly edition of that novel)8 has obliged me to revise my judgment in this matter, because those texts (and their histories) betray a much less masterful James at work. Even for the New York Edition, it is worth pointing out, James could sometimes falter. Despite his very close attention to the text of The Portrait, for example, James did not catch an inconsistency that had stared out from the book from its earliest appearance as a serial in Macmillan’s Magazine back in 1880-81. At the end of the novel, when Isabel has fled back to England to be with Ralph before he dies, she is met at Charing Cross by Henrietta Stackpole and Mr. Bantling, who propose that she stay the night and then depart for Gardencourt the next morning at ten o’clock. Later in the same chapter, the characters reappear at Paddington Station (the proper station for westbound departures to Oxfordshire), but it is now two o’clock in the afternoon. Neither James nor his editor at Macmillan’s (and not even the typically more eagle-eyed staff at the Atlantic) caught this inconsistency when the serial first appeared; James again failed to detect it when he revised sheets of Macmillan’s for the first British and American book editions (1881); the error went uncorrected in the 1883 “Collective Edition” of the novel; and again it went unnoticed by James in 1906. Only when Scribner’s type-setters brought this to the Master’s attention did James acknowledge the oversight and emend the “stupid little old uncorrected misprint of the original edition” (HJ2). In at least one other instance, James also was obliged to thank Scribner’s “for calling my attention to the extraordinary oversight of which I was guilty on the accompanying page of the Portrait. I have altered the wrong word” (HJ1). Surviving evidence does not reveal what that “wrong word” was; but clearly James had relaxed his attention to “the full security of the text.” In these instances, at least, Scribner’s blue pencil was sharper than the Master’s.



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Then again, James was directly responsible for introducing new inconsistencies. While keeping track of the exact chronology of events in The Portrait of a Lady is not a simple task, it is possible to aver that the bulk of the novel spans a period of five years from 1871 to 1876.9 In the New York Edition, however, Lord Warburton ages prematurely: he is 35 years old at the beginning and 42 at the novel’s climax. In all his earlier textual incarnations, Warburton grows older at the expected rate and is an arithmetically correct 40 when we reach Chapter XLIII. Neither publisher nor author caught or corrected a significant error of pronoun reference in Chapter X—the moment when Henrietta Stackpole has been badgering Ralph Touchett about his dilettantish want of seriousness, which she attributes to his regrettable expatriation. “Well, now, tell me what I shall do,” Ralph asks her. “Go right home, to begin with.” “Yes, I see. And then?” “Take right hold of something.” “Well, now, what sort of thing?” “Anything you please, so long as you take hold. Some new idea, some big work.” “Is it very difficult to take hold?” Ralph enquired. “Not if you put your heart into it.” “Ah, my heart,” said Ralph. “If it depends upon my heart—!” “Haven’t you got a heart?” “I had one a few days ago, but I’ve lost it since.” “You’re not serious,” Miss Stackpole remarked; “that’s what’s the matter with you.” But for all this, in a day or two, she again permitted him to fix her attention and on this occasion assigned a different cause to her mysterious perversity. (PL-NY 1: 126, emphasis added)

Because James used a paste-up of pages from the first American (Houghton, Mifflin) edition of Portrait as the basis for his revision, this error was mistakenly retained. Every other version of the novel correctly assigns the “mysterious perversity” to Ralph, who properly owns it (Nowell-Smith 307-9). Closer analysis of the earlier textual versions of The Portrait of a Lady should also make us rethink James’s editorial habits and practice. There are reasons, of course, why we have come to think of James as an inveterate reviser, perpetually fiddling with his prose, always aiming at some better form of expression. The impulse, plain and simple, is written into many of his tales, perhaps most famously in “The Middle Years” (1893), in which the ailing writer Dencombe (with his new novel just out) already—and irresistibly—has begun to scribble emendations on its



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freshly-printed pages. “I see you’ve been altering the text!” his new friend, Dr. Hugh, exclaims, after picking up Dencombe’s copy of The Middle Years by accident and finding penciled notations in the margins. Then the narrative voice approvingly chimes in: Dencombe was a passionate corrector, a fingerer of style; the last thing he ever arrived at was a form final for himself. His ideal would have been to publish secretly, and then, on the published text, treat himself to the terrified revise, sacrificing always a first edition and beginning for posterity and even for the collectors, poor dears, with a second. (CS 344)

The same editorial imperative, assuredly, emboldened James to subject especially his early works to wholesale revision for the New York Edition. And like so many dutiful Dr. Hughs, James’s literary acolytes were quick to praise the heroic dimensions of that labor. With several volumes of the Edition yet to be published, Percy Lubbock nevertheless was willing to affirm that, through the process of revision, James had accomplished something truly novel. Unlike the collected works of so many other writers, the New York Edition was not just a uniformly-bound series of discrete titles; rather it was “a densely-woven tapestry, in which style, line, colour, and composition are all of a piece, all inherent, all part of one process” (Lubbock, “The Novels” 249). Immediately after the author’s death, Theodora Bosanquet, his faithful amanuensis, also defended the Master’s editorial prerogative against any and all who claimed that, in revising, James had somehow spoiled his earlier work. “His struggle was always to stretch his power of expression to the compass of the things he saw and felt,” she insisted; “and it seemed to him, when he re-read his forgotten stories, that he had missed in writing them countless precious opportunities for rendering vision and feeling which the process of revision allowed him at last to retrieve” (Bosanquet, “Henry James” 1004). 10 It was “Henry James’ profound conviction,” she later testified, “that he could improve his early writing in nearly every sentence. Not to revise would have been to confess to a loss of faith in himself” (Bosanquet, Henry James at Work 40). And that, to her, was unthinkable. James found that faith, arguably, early on in his career, largely because of the logistical complications of serial publication, which often left him unable to check or correct his own type-set contributions before printed copies of a magazine were in the hands of subscribers. Losing that opportunity only made him more eager (and determined) to exercise greater editorial control when the next one came around: in the interval, that is, before his serial texts appeared in bound volumes. Characteristically, James would use his printed serial texts—proofs, on the



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rare occasion when he had them, or actual pages (or tear-sheets) of the magazine when he didn’t—as a platform for revision, scribbling his emendations in the margins or as cramped interlineations squeezed between lines of print. When in 1877 the ever-enterprising publisher James R. Osgood persuaded an obviously reluctant James to resuscitate his rather feeble first novel, Watch and Ward (which had been serialized in the Atlantic in 1871), the author’s revisions on the magazine tear-sheets made for frightful copy. “I have kept the copy for Watch and Ward very long,” he confessed; But the truth is I have been unable to bring myself to the point of really sending it to proofs. I have been half hearted about it, and have kept putting this off from week to week. I have at last decided, however, not to retreat from the answer I originally gave you, and I send back the sheets by this post. I have riddled them with alterations and made a great mess for the printer. I must absolutely see proofs. (HJL 1: 138)

According to one authority, James made more than eight hundred substantive and incidental refinements to his original text.11 To ensure that the type-setters got things right, whenever possible James would ask (as in this instance) to see proof-sheets before stereotype plates were cast. Printers were liable to make errors when they had to work from such difficult copy. Almost none of these revised copy-text pages has survived from any period of James’s career, so it might seem impossible to envision just how intricately the author retouched his prose. One remarkable exception, however, is the set of paste-up sheets that James used to rework The American (1877) for the New York Edition. Percy Lubbock included a photograph of one of its horrifically re-written leaves in his 1920 edition of The Letters of Henry James—a single page from the novel, with dozens of emendations in balloons, tethered by squiggly lines of ink, surrounding what little was left of the original printed text—as a graphic illustration of how seriously the Master set his mind to the task (LHJ 2: facing 70). After this “copy” was completely retyped (all 478 pages—imagine that task!), James bestowed the full set of revised paste-ups upon James B. Pinker, his literary agent, as a grateful testament to that man’s steadfast loyalty in hammering out all of the complicated business arrangements that were a necessary precondition for getting the Edition published at all. After Pinker’s death, this uniquely fascinating artifact—“a curiosity of literature,” James called it (“at least of my literature” [LiL 436])—reverted to the author’s nephew, who in turn deposited it in the Harvard University Library as part of the vast collection of James family papers he had been



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accumulating. This version of The American has since been published in facsimile, “a curiosity of literature” for sure: a one-of-a-kind textual hybrid. And even this wasn’t the last word, because (as the volume’s editor notes) “the text of the New York Edition as issued contains many variants from the version here presented. The corrected proofs which would presumably represent a further process of revision are not known to exist” (iv). With James, most textual histories are like an incomplete set of Chinese boxes, one version tucked into another and then another and another, but often with pieces (i.e., intervening versions) gone missing or surviving only as fragments. The complicated case of The American should not, however, be taken as a typical demonstration of James’s overweening editorial control. At earlier stages of his career, in particular, other factors frequently compromised the author’s handling of his texts, especially when his travel commitments interfered with easy communications and the transmittal of documents. As he was scurrying to leave Cambridge in October of 1875, for example, the serial sheets of Roderick Hudson (which would not finish its run in the Atlantic until December) could hardly come fast enough. “It would be a great favor if you could let me have each day considerably more proof of ‘Roderick Hudson,’” he pleaded to the printer: I am afraid otherwise I shall not be able to finish revising before the 17th, on which day I leave Cambridge for Europe. About two-thirds (or a little less) of the volume remain to be seen thro’ the press in these coming ten days. I shall need at this rate to see upwards of 30 pages a day, instead of the usual 12. I have not yet had proof of the XIIth part of R.H. from the Atlantic—so that if you will have that put thro’ with as little delay as possible it will also be a service. (HJL 1: 483)

Somewhat ironically, even this stage of revision ultimately would not satisfy James, who insisted on reworking the book yet again before Macmillan republished it in England just four years later. So convinced was he of the novel’s betterment that he instructed his American publisher to destroy the original plates of Roderick Hudson and to import additional sheets of the title from Macmillan, whenever demand for additional copies would require them. “The English edition is virtually a new book,” he crowed, “& a very superior one; & it is only in that form that I wish it presented again to the American public” (LiL 132). In exchange for this concession, James surrendered his American royalties on future sales of the title, to compensate Houghton, Mifflin for the loss of their investment in stereotyping labor and materials.



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James’s decision to live abroad made revision both more difficult and, for a time at least, tactically imperative. Especially in the late 1870s, as he was trying to gain a foothold in the literary precincts of London, James felt obliged to cater to the expectations of British readers when opportunities arose to publish work that previously had appeared solely in American periodicals or been aimed exclusively for the American market. James’s close revision of Roderick Hudson for Macmillan’s 1879 reprinting of that novel is one example. Perhaps more curious is the bibliographical history of Confidence (1879/80), a title that James used in both countries to leverage his position with his respective publishers—Houghton, Osgood in Boston; Macmillan in London. Already James had sold the serial rights to Confidence to Scribner’s Monthly (the only full-length novel by the author to be published in that magazine) with an eye to making his accustomed outlets (the Atlantic and Harper’s Monthly) feel the pressure of competition. As James confessed to his sister, “You will probably lament [my novel’s] appearance in that periodical; but this won’t matter in view of its immediate republication both at home and here. And after all in Scribners, one’s things are read by the great American people—the circulation, I believe is enormous” (HJL 2: 225). Better still was the generous laxity of Scribner’s purse-strings: James received $250 for each monthly installment of Confidence—more than twice what he had been paid by the Atlantic for Roderick Hudson and The American—empowering him to demand an equivalent amount from Howells when negotiating the serialization of The Portrait of a Lady. Scribner’s also tried to lure James away from rival houses by offering the novelist unusually liberal terms for book publication: a royalty rate of 12½ per cent, one-fourth more than the 10 per cent James then was receiving from Harper’s or Houghton.12 Even though later critics have dismissed this title (perhaps too hastily) as one of James’s most negligible performances,13 its significance for the author’s professional life was almost pivotal. James’s motives for dealing with Confidence as he did couldn’t have been more clear. He laid them bare in a letter to his father, dispatched from Paris in October 1879. “It may interest you to know,” he confided— with obvious pride— that I am (for my next novel at least,) leaving the unremunerative Macmillans. I received for the first time a fortnight since their statement of accounts, for the six publications they have made for me; and it was so largely to their advantage and so little to mine, that I immediately wrote to Chatto & Windus, to ask them on what terms they would publish Confidence for me next Christmas. They instantly replied in so favourable a sense (offering me a substantial sum down for the copyright for three



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years) that I have closed with them; and I trust it will operate as a salubrious irritant to Macmillan, who wants my books very much, but doesn’t want to pay for them! I did the same six weeks ago to Scribner & Co., who immediately offered me for the volume—Confidence—much better terms than Osgood (a sum down and a royalty, larger than O’s); meanwhile I received from Osgood such a plaintive letter, more in sorrow than in anger, that I have given him the book—a weak proceeding, natural to the son of my father.14 (HJL 2: 259-60)

Even James’s apparent concession to Osgood had a latent tactical purpose. After being chided by his mother for his seemingly limp handling of the matter (clearly she was disappointed at her son’s buckling under to Osgood’s saccharine appeal), James disclosed his underlying reasons, which were properly pecuniary, in the long run. “I winced (but very discreetly) under your comments upon my weakness of conduct with Houghton & Osgood,” he began. But this was not pure weakness—it was also diplomacy. I was just at that moment negotiating with them the terms of publication of my next year’s novel [The Portrait of a Lady] in the Atlantic, & I thought that if I was disobliging in the matter of my little book this year, they might revenge themselves by being difficult with regard to that. I think it probable, by the event, that I was well-inspired. Between the Atlantic & Macmillan I am to receive for the production in question upwards of 700 £, (seven hundred pounds).15 (HJ6)

Clearly in matters of business, James could keep his horrible sharp eye on the main chance. His eyes were also fixed, for the moment, on matters of style. In revising Confidence for book publication, James (as by now he was accustomed) used tear-sheets of Scribner’s Monthly as a preliminary copytext, emending them as needed before sending one set to Chatto and the other back to Boston for Houghton, Osgood’s edition. The verbal discrepancies between the English and American editions reveal that James tried to fine-tune the novel’s mode of address to accommodate each respective audience, altering his serial text to demonstrate an easy familiarity with different national idioms. A modest sampling of some of these textual variants will make this clear:



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390 American Edition

English Edition

awfully this loathsome gossip a couple of red-tiled roofs El Dorado whence he had drawn the ability for so remarkable a feat I stuck it to the end

fearfully this idiotic fiction a brace of red-tiled roofs a hidden treasure how the deuce he had managed it I saw it through

Another way of understanding these differences is to appreciate that, for Confidence, James had unusual editorial latitude in preparing his copy. Osgood’s American edition did not appear on the heels of Chatto’s, but rather only after a two-month delay. James was quite proud of the “2 very pretty vols” that Chatto & Windus published on 10 December 1879; but, as he told his father, “Osgood’s edition [would] not come out till February (or thereabouts) owing to his sending me proofs” (HJ6). 16 Having that generous interval, the author could exercise considerable freedom in tailoring his copy-text for different national audiences. But we should remember that, for James, these circumstances were atypical.17 In stark contrast, for much of his early career (when he was dispatching numerous articles, reviews, and short stories from England and the Continent back to editorial offices in the United States), James seldom had the opportunity to see proofs of his work before that material was circulated in the increasing number of periodicals that published him. Deadlines for copy and the vagaries of the trans-Atlantic mail often made it logistically impossible for proof sheets to reach James—and be returned with his corrections—before the presses had to roll. Not surprisingly, then, James frequently pleaded with his correspondents to ignore his magazine contributions altogether. “Thank you for waiting to see my things as they are printed at home,” he wrote Grace Norton early on from London. “I confess that the fashion and the company in which they usually come back to me here makes me want rather to hide them away than to show them. To care for them I must wait till I put them into volumes” (HJL 2: 137). Before long, his disdain became habitual. “I have always hated the magazine form, magazine conditions & manners, & much of the magazine company,” he complained to his old friend (and former editor!) Howells in 1895 (Anesko, Letters, Fictions 298). When another friend expressed some pleasure in reading The Spoils of Poynton as it made its serial appearance (under the title The Old Things), the news simply made James wince. “I ‘squirm’ at the thought of your ‘following’ a thing of which I have seen no proof,” he confessed to Morton Fullerton. “I make what I do



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so much better in the proof that the désobligeance of the Atlantic has, to my own sense, the effect of exposing me in public in mere underclothing. For God’s sake wait till the small story is in a little book, with its face washed & its trousers buttoned” (HJ7). James would employ a similar metaphor—the writer as kindly nanny or nursemaid, tidying up his children before sending them down to greet adult company—in his much later Preface to The Golden Bowl, the last in the New York Edition series, in which he offered his personal rationale for authorial revision (LC2 1330-31). Handicapped by expatriation, James not infrequently asked other members of the Quincy Street household in Cambridge to act as surrogate proofreaders. James’s father had occasion to check at least some of his itinerant son’s travel pieces and stories for the Atlantic, the Galaxy, and other periodicals. He even went so far as to censor the younger Henry when he came across offensive passages. James Senior exercised that paternal prerogative, for example, when he read the proofs of “The Madonna of the Future,” and found two fleshy episodes, “both utterly uncalled for by the actual necessities of the tale.” Justifying his use of the scissors, the father warned the author that the two scenes would confer upon the tale “a disagreeable musky odour strikingly at war with its unworldly beauty.” James Senior went in person to the office of the Atlantic and told the editor that he “would take upon [himself] the responsibility of striking out the two episodes,” for which the evertimorous Howells was grateful (James, Sr.). William James performed a similar office when serial proofs of The American reached Quincy Street. Objecting violently to some of the vernacular Americanisms his brother had let drop from Christopher Newman’s lips, William told Henry that such language would make “the reader’s flesh creep,” and he unilaterally instructed Howells to strike them out. Henry, in fact, was grateful for such intervention, as he explained to his editor: “It is all along of my not seeing a proof—which is a great disadvantage” (Anesko, Letters, Fictions 124).18 If such domestic avenues for correction were unavailable, the consequences were all too familiar—and regrettable. When the April 1879 issue of the Atlantic arrived in London, James complained to his parents that “The Pension Beaurepas” was “full of distressing misprints: Bonrepas should be ‘Bonrepos’ &c. ‘Allegory’ should be colloquy!—‘lurking around’ should be looking around, &c” (HJL 2: 229). The editor, too, got a similar dressing-down; still, James easily could imagine what Howells would answer. “But che vuole, you’ll say, with my hand?” (Anesko, Letters, Fictions 133). As anyone who has tried to read them knows, James’s flowing and fluid pen-strokes can be notoriously difficult to



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decipher. Small wonder that editors and type-setters, working under strict deadlines, often misread his autograph intentions. From a certain (Whiggish) angle, this litany of complaint might seem to anticipate and confirm the image of James as an author who subjected his printed work to merciless scrutiny. The textual record of The Portrait, however, strongly suggests that James was not always especially watchful or aggressive about proofreading his material (even when he had the opportunity). Every reader of The Portrait of a Lady will remember one of the novel’s pivotal scenes (James doesn’t let us forget it), when Isabel, who has returned late one afternoon to the Palazzo Roccanera unnoticed, silently observes her husband in close company with Madame Merle: What struck Isabel first was that he was sitting while Madame Merle stood; there was an anomaly in this that arrested her. Then she perceived that they had arrived at a desultory pause in their exchange of ideas, and were musing, face to face, with the freedom of old friends who sometimes exchange ideas without uttering them. There was nothing shocking in this; they were old friends in fact. But the thing made an image, lasting only a moment, like a sudden flicker of light. Their relative position, their absorbed mutual gaze, struck her as something detected. But it was all over by the time she had fairly seen it. Madame Merle had seen her, and had welcomed her without moving; Gilbert Osmond, on the other hand, had instantly jumped up. He presently murmured something about wanting a walk, and after having asked Madame Merle to excuse him, he left the room. (PL 357)

Almost unconsciously, the impression Isabel receives at this moment precipitates her great meditative vigil in a later chapter, confirming as it does an awareness “of her husband and Madame Merle being in more direct communication” than she had previously suspected (PL 371). The rest of Chapter 42 famously records Isabel’s quickening dread of the full implications of her marriage—the prison house in which she has been locked up (“the house of darkness, the house of dumbness, the house of suffocation” [PL 375]). And the same chapter comes to a close with a determined reiteration: When the clock struck four she got up; she was going to bed at last, for the lamp had long gone out and the candles had burned down to their sockets. But even then she stopped again in the middle of the room, and stood there gazing at a remembered vision—that of her husband and Madame Merle, grouped unconsciously and familiarly. (PL 381)



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Given this scene’s intrinsic importance, it is something of a surprise (to say the least) to read that, just at the moment when Isabel passes the threshold of the drawing-room, what she sees is this: Madame Merle sat there in her bonnet, and Gilbert Osmond was talking to her; for a minute they were unaware that she had come in. (PL 357, emphasis added)

So the text of The Portrait reads in its first serial appearance (Macmillan’s Magazine), in the first British edition (Macmillan, 1881), in the first American edition (Houghton, Mifflin, 1881), in the second British edition (Macmillan, 1882), and in the Macmillan “Collective Edition” (1883). Only the editor of the Atlantic (Thomas Bailey Aldrich) caught this mistake and changed the copy-text for his magazine, altering sat to stood to redress the bald inconsistency that the author had overlooked. James, however, missed numerous opportunities to rectify his error. He revised sheets of Macmillan’s to give his publishers copy-text for the first three printed editions and failed to notice it then; only for the much later New York Edition did someone recognize this blunder and substitute a rather bland was for the offending sat. Significantly, James did not correct the mistake in his own revised copy of the novel; whether it was he—or rather someone at Scribner’s—who caught the error later in proof cannot categorically be determined (Mazzella 1:153). Another glaring misprint in Chapter 42 seems perhaps even less understandable. As Isabel ponders her fate and tries to reconstruct the mechanism of her entrapment, she reminds herself of Osmond’s beguiling character: It had not passed away; it was there still; she still knew perfectly what it was that made Osmond delightful when he chose to be. He had wished to be when he made love to her, and as she had wished to be charmed it was not wonderful that he succeeded. (PL 373)

Yet, in the sentence immediately prior to these, it is Osmond who has been taken in: “Ah, she had him immensely under the charm!” (PL 373). Here the objective pronoun him erroneously has been substituted for the past participle been. And, once again, James did not discern the mistake until more seriously attending to his revisions for the New York Edition. (Perhaps this was the “extraordinary oversight” of which he was guilty, when it was pointed out by Scribner’s press-men?) At any rate, all the other previously printed versions repeat the error, James never having noticed it in proof.



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Other curious inconsistencies in these early texts arguably have less striking bearing on one’s reading of them. Gardencourt, for example, is first described for us as standing “upon a low hill, above the river—the river being the Thames, at some forty miles from London” (PL 2). Geographically, this would place the Touchett’s country-house just where it should be, since James had been inspired by Hardwick House, a Tudorstyle mansion that sits on a slight rise at Whitchurch-on-Thames in the English county of Oxfordshire. (Coburn’s hazy photograph of Hardwick House would serve as the frontispiece for the first volume of the New York Edition Portrait, glossed simply as “The English Home.”19) By the end of the novel, however, Gardencourt has somehow floated downstream into a neighboring county (Berkshire), where Isabel goes to attend her dying cousin (cf. PL 509). Elsewhere we find that Lord Warburton’s moated estate, “Lockleigh,” mistakenly becomes Gardencourt (PL 89);20 that “Mr. Osmond” somehow becomes Mr. Osborne (PL 227); that “Edward” Rosier is mistakenly rechristened Robert;21 even that “Pansy” can be referred to instead as an almost uncanny Milly.22 And who knew that we would find the well-endowed Osmonds living in the street—in the “Piazza” Roccanera (PL 365)23—instead of in the magnificent Palazzo of the same name? Or that Warburton’s unimaginable impudence mistakenly could be watered down to a much less offensive “imprudence” (PL 417)?24 If we are inclined to agree with Horace—et idem / indignor quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus—then we also have to admit that sometimes James nods, too. When Macmillan reissued The Portrait of a Lady two years later (capitalizing on the novel’s already acknowledged fame to have it be the first three volumes in the popularly priced 1883 Collective Edition), the firm’s printers caught most of these mistakes and corrected them when new plates were manufactured. But, as with almost any book-making process, a handful of new errors were introduced, which James had no occasion to rectify, since he never saw proofs of this Edition.25 James had almost no hand in the construction of the Collective Edition—other than approving it, after Macmillan assured him that the house could produce really “charming” books for a mere 18-pence per volume (Correspondence 77). The author was in the United States when Macmillan began setting type in April 1883, and James remained in America until the end of August, settling the estate of his late father, who had died in December of the preceding year. Consequently, James had no opportunity either to revise the printer’s copy-texts or to proofread their work. The only corrections James made were to the Chatto & Windus text of Confidence, when Macmillan’s type-setters discovered that the proper names of



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characters in that novel had been misattributed in several different places26—yet another instance of James’s failing to catch mistakes in the original proofs. To air these Jamesian textual peccadilloes is hardly to waft the breath of scandal. (If anything, the relatively small number of misprints that escaped James’s notice is quite remarkable.) On the contrary, such evidence of the Master’s fallibility should simply remind us that, by paying meticulous attention to his texts, today’s scholarship can make amends for conditions that sometimes prevented him from doing so. Better comprehension of the complex textual histories of the different versions of James’s texts, including those of The Portrait of a Lady, will help us better appreciate not merely the Master’s human shortcomings but, more especially, his almost super-human labor. In all of their variant-riddled multiplicity, these texts in unison command obedience to a very Jamesian dictum, first articulated in “The Art of Fiction” (1884): any editor of Henry James surely must “try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!” (LC1 53).

Notes 1

On 25 August 1915, James wrote to his old friend Edmund Gosse, lamenting the fate of his “poor old rather truncated edition . . . which has the grotesque likeness for me of a sort of miniature Ozymandias of Egypt (‘look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’)—round which the lone and level sands stretch further away than ever” (HJL 4: 776). 2 Besides the ordinary subscription issue, Scribner’s also published a truly limited edition of James’s Novels and Tales, 156 numbered sets printed on larger pages of handmade Ruisdael paper. 3 See Culver and Anesko, “Collected Editions.” 4 F. O. Matthiessen, Henry James: The Major Phase. Of particular importance to my argument is the influential appendix to this volume, “The Painter’s Sponge and Varnish Bottle,” in which Matthiessen insisted that James’s revisions for the New York Edition (his example here was The Portrait of a Lady) were made “at the plentitude of his powers, and they constituted a re-seeing of the problem of his craft” (152). 5 Notable exceptions being Roderick Hudson (1875) and The American, where preference has gone (for the former) to the still-much-revised 1879 Macmillan edition and (for the latter) to the first (1877) American edition. The Library of America uniformly has chosen first book editions as copy-texts, but the number of paperback editions of James’s works they have published is very small. At present, only Major Stories and Essays is available for classroom use. 6 See Young and McGann. 7 It is certainly true that challenges to the concept of “mastery” have come from different quarters—all working, as Ross Posnock has said, to break “the aura” of



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James’s author function—but close examination of different versions of his texts has not figured in them. See Posnock, esp. chap. 4. 8 Cambridge University Press has commissioned a new edition of The Complete Fiction of Henry James, in thirty volumes, to be published in chronological installments and completed by 2016, the centennial year of the author’s death. 9 The best reconstruction is offered by M. E. Grenander, Beverly J. Rahn, and Francine Valvo. 10 In another eulogistic essay, Lubbock also gave full weight to James’s editorial judgments. “Of his earliest work there was very little that he allowed in the end to survive,” Lubbock wrote; “most of the tales of his youth—and many of the later years—were ruthlessly excluded from the edition in which, a few years ago, he arrayed and revised so much of his fiction as could pass his scrutiny” (Lubbock, “Henry James” 61). 11 Leon Edel gives that number in a gloss of James’s letter to his father (19 April [1878]), a document in which the author justifies the rather mercenary incentive (“a good way of turning an honest penny”) for republishing so flimsy a work. “If I get any fame,” he anticipated, “my early things will be sure to be rummaged out; and as they are there it is best to take hold of them myself and put them in order. So I lately gave great pains to patching up Watch and Ward, and, as I have seen all the proof, suppose it will come out instantly” (HJL 2: 167, and 168n2). A variorum edition of the novel, prepared by Jay and Joseph Spina, is now accessible on-line: http://www2.newpaltz.edu/~hathawar/WatchandWardVariorum.pdf. 12 Scribner’s editor, Edward L. Burlingame, clearly wanted to seize the present advantage. “Doesn’t it seem to you—” he queried Charles Scribner, “—as it certainly does to me—that it is worth while to make him a decidedly good offer on this opportunity? He is (thus far) almost entirely unattached in the matter of publishing; and his future is certainly valuable enough to make an effort to connect him here” (Burlingame). 13 It has to be admitted that the author himself was inclined to write the book off as minor scribble-work. “‘Confidence,’” he told a friend in 1914, “is a very poor thing—I wholly disowned it in the definitive Edition; I mean kept it, with various other things, snubbingly out. So do I try to live down a shameful past—or at least one with shady episodes” (HJ4). 14 James was paid £100 for the three-year lease of the British copyright in Confidence, an equivalent of $11,000 in 2009 dollars (HJ5). 15 In the end, James would receive even more for the simultaneous serialization of The Portrait of a Lady: £1050, or a tad in excess of $111,000 in 2009 dollars. 16 Even with this advantage, we should note, James did not catch all the printer’s errors when he proofread. The Library of America reprint of Confidence corrects a dozen minor misprints that went uncorrected in Osgood’s first American edition (1277). 17 The mature thrust of James’s trans-Atlantic career as a novelist worked instead to diminish or erase such distinctions. As he told his brother a decade later, “I have not the least hesitation in saying that I aspire to write in such a way that it would be impossible to an outsider to say whether I am, at a given moment, an American writing about England or an Englishman writing about America” (HJL 3: 244).



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18 William’s letter to his brother has not survived, but Henry James quotes from it in his own to Howells. 19 James identified the place in his instructions to Coburn (Henry James to James B. Pinker, 14 June 1906, HJL 4: 410). See also Richards. 20 But corrected in the Atlantic 47 (January 1881): 8. 21 Macmillan’s Magazine 43 (February 1881): 265; but corrected in the Atlantic 47 (March 1881): 352. 22 Macmillan’s Magazine 43 (March 1881): 335; but corrected in the Atlantic 47 (April 1881): 455. James’s precocious cousin Mary (“Minny”) Temple (1845-70), who died young from tuberculosis, customarily is seen as having informed the characters of many of the novelist’s heroines, including the doomed Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove (1902). 23 But corrected in the Atlantic 48 (August 1881): 222. 24 Again, correctly emended in the Atlantic 48 (September 1881): 356. 25 Apart from a handful of accidental errors, the printers introduced three substantive variants into the 1883 text of The Portrait:

From the first she had thought this prospect small, and Isabel had been struck with the positive, discriminating, competent way view which she took of the measure of his remainder of life. [chapter 19] He leaned back with his legs crossed, lounging and chatting chattering, while Goodwood, more restless, but not at all lively, shifted his position, played with his hat, made the little sofa creak beneath him. [chapter 48] “Think of me, sometimes,” she said added. [chapter 50] None of these emendations was retained when James revised the novel for the New York Edition, making it that much less likely that he introduced them in 1883. 23 On the 18th of August 1883—and again on the 6th of September—Macmillan sent James small numbers of proof pages, asking him to correct possible errors. In his first query, Macmillan told the author that he had received from the printers “a proof of some pages in Confidence with a question which I do not feel competent to answer. Will you kindly say whether it should be ‘Mrs. Gordon’ or ‘Mrs. Wright’” (Correspondence 84). Similar problems cropped up later, when another proof-sheet contained “some proper names which [the printer] thinks must be wrong” (Correspondence 85). The author’s responses have not survived. James did revise the copy-texts of “The Siege of London” and “The Point of View,” stories which had only recently appeared in magazines, and which were first published in England in the Collective Edition.



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Works Cited Henry James Letters—Abbreviations HJ1 — Letter to Charles Scribner’s Sons. 23 April 1907. MS Scribner Archive (Author Files I, Box 81, Folder 3). Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Princeton University Library, Princeton, NJ. HJ2 — Letter to Charles Scribner’s Sons. 15 October 1907. MS Scribner Archive (Author Files I, Box 81, Folder 3). Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Princeton University Library, Princeton, NJ. HJ3 — Letter to Chatto & Windus. 5 Oct. [1879]. MS Chatto & Windus Letterbooks (MS 2444/11, p. 483[b]). University of Reading, Reading, UK. HJ4 — Letter to Constance Gardner. 9 April 1914. BMS 1094.1 (120), Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. HJ5 — Letter to Henry James, Sr. 16 Dec. [1879]. BMS Am 1094 (1891), Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. HJ6 — Letter to Mrs. Henry James, Sr. 18 Nov. [1879]. BMS Am 1094 (1890), Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. HJ7 — Letter to William Morton Fullerton. [1896]. BMS Am 1094.1 (115), Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

Other Works Cited Anesko, Michael. “Collected Editions and the Consolidation of Cultural Authority: The Case of Henry James.” Book History 12 (2009): 186208. Print. —. Letters, Fictions, Lives: Henry James and William Dean Howells. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Print. Bosanquet, Theodora. “Henry James.” Fortnightly Review 101 (June 1917): 995-1009. Print. —. Henry James at Work. 1924. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2006. Print. Brownell, W[illiam] C[rary]. American Prose Masters. New York: Scribner’s, 1909. Print. Burlingame, Edward L. Letter to Charles Scribner. 29 Aug. 1879. MS Burlingame Letterbooks 1: facing p. 226. Scribner Archive, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Princeton University Library, Princeton, NJ.



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Culver, Stuart. “Ozymandias and the Mastery of Ruins: The Design of the New York Edition.” Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship. Ed. David McWhirter. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1995. 39-57. Print. Grenander, M. E., Beverly J. Rahn, and Francine Valvo. “The TimeScheme in The Portrait of a Lady.” American Literature 32.2 (1960): 127-35. Print. James, Henry. The American: The version of 1877 revised in autograph and typescript for the New York Edition of 1907; Reproduced in facsimile from the original in the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Ed. Rodney G. Dennis. Ilkley [Eng.]: Scolar Press, 1976. Print. —. Confidence. Novels 1871-1880. New York: Library of America, 1983. Print. —. Complete Stories 1892-1898. New York: Library of America, 1996. Print. —. The Correspondence of Henry James and the House of Macmillan, 1877-1914: “All the Links in the Chain.” Ed. Rayburn S. Moore. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1993. Print. —. Henry James Letters. 4 vols. Ed. Leon Edel. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP: 1972-84. Print. —. Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature; American Writers; English Writers. Ed. Leon Edel & Mark Wilson. New York: Library of America, 1984. Print. —. Literary Criticism: French Writers; Other Writers; The Prefaces to the New York Edition. Ed. Leon Edel & Mark Wilson. New York: Library of America, 1984. Print. —. The Letters of Henry James. 2 vols. Ed. Percy Lubbock. New York: Scribner’s, 1920. Print. —. Henry James: A Life in Letters. Ed. Philip Horne. New York: Penguin, 1999. Print. —. The Portrait of a Lady. London: Macmillan, 1882. Print. —. The Portrait of a Lady [New York Edition]. 2 vols. New York: Scribner’s, 1908. Print. James, Henry, Sr. Letter to Henry James. 14 Jan. [1873]. BMS Am 1092.9 (4197), Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Lubbock, Percy. “Henry James.” Quarterly Review 203 (July 1916): 6074. Print. —. “The Novels of Mr. Henry James.” Times Literary Supplement (8 July 1909): 249-50. Print.



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Mazzella, Anthony J. “The Revised ‘Portrait of a Lady’: Text and Commentary.” 6 vols. Diss. Columbia 1970. Print. Matthiessen, F. O. Henry James: The Major Phase. New York: Oxford UP, 1944. Print. McGann, Jerome. “Revision, Rewriting, Rereading; or, An Error [Not] in The Ambassadors.” American Literature 64.1 (1992): 95-110. Print. “The Novels and Tales of Henry James.” The Book Buyer 32 (Dec. 1907): 212-13. Print. Nowell-Smith, Simon. “Texts of The Portrait of a Lady 1881-1882: The Bibliographical Evidence.” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 63 (1969): 304-10. Print. Poole, Adrian. “A New Edition of Henry James’s Complete Fiction: Choosing the Text.” Henry James International Conference (10 July 2008), Newport, RI. Address. Posnock, Ross. The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. Print. Richards, Bernard A. “Transformed into Fiction: Henry James and Hardwick House.” Country Life (29 Oct. 1981): 1500-03. Print. Young, Robert E. “An Error in The Ambassadors.” American Literature 22.3 (1950): 245-53. Print.



 

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX “EXTRAVAGANTLY COLLOQUIAL”: JAMES’S ORAL PHASE MELANIE H. ROSS

“George Du Maurier,” James’s commemorative essay published in September 1897, a year after his close friend of nineteen years had died and roughly six months after James had begun dictating his work, is worth reading for many reasons, though it has been little, if at all, discussed by James scholars. It is a beautiful, melancholy evocation of the depth and tenor of the friendship conducted by the two men during endless walks in Hampstead, London, and elsewhere. The essay abounds in synonyms like “peregrination” and “sociable saunterings” for what James calls “causerie” and “flânerie” in his letters, written in both French and English, to Du Maurier (James, [1897] 885, 887; Letter [1891]). The points of identification between the two were legion: half French, as a young man, Du Maurier lost sight traumatically in one eye, though James describes how he “holds up a singularly polished and lucid mirror to the drama of English Society” with observing powers superior even to James’s (Partial 341; James [1897] 887).1 David Lodge, building his book, Author, Author: A Novel, around their friendship—that was his germ—underlines Du Maurier’s “sensitivity” and “tact,” and his support and sympathy towards James, whom he respected and admired as a “distinguished writer” (Lodge 273, 323).2 Leonée Ormond, in her chapter on James and Du Maurier in the latter’s biography, attests to how special each was to the other, noting the existence—or survival!—of almost the entirety of their exchange of letters at the Houghton library (396). The friendship more or less began (James writes that he can’t remember when exactly) with a “small disaster” over Du Maurier’s illustration of Washington Square and faced challenges years later as Du Maurier succeeded where James had always hoped to, writing the first ever “best sell[er],” Trilby, with his second novel published at age 60 (his first was published when he was 57) (James [1897] 879; Lodge 327). Certainly the essay can be read for clues as to

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how James processed Du Maurier’s success, juxtaposed as it was with James’s failure with Guy Domville, as Lodge does. However, my concern is somewhat different, if related. James, as he depicts his great pleasure in the two men’s talks and walks, emphasizes that what they talked about (and how Du Maurier talked about it) is reproduced in Du Maurier’s novels. I hope to show what James’s narrative of Du Maurier’s turn to writing in the “George Du Maurier” essay, however (in)accurate about Du Maurier it may be, tells us about James’s own recent turn to dictation, a different form of writing than he had practiced before. James will sum up Du Maurier and his writing with the word “personal” and Du Maurier, revealingly, writes to James that James’s own non-fiction is often more personal than his fiction (“George” [1897] 877): Your work is never more delightful to me than when you are dealing with real people, or places—and this is no disparagement to your other work, for I may say at once that in dealing with people & places your work is more delightful than that of anyone else I can think of. —Where the special charm lies I can’t say—but suspect that it is because you interweave a great deal more of yourself in such studies than when you are writing fiction. (qtd. in Ormond 405-6)

I place the same importance on the essay and the relationship as Lodge does, and hope to show how the personal nature of this particular James essay provides glimpses of even earlier (family) ties, at their earliest stages, and, in so doing, helps us to understand James’s relationship to his own writing. Crucial to my argument will be James’s mission, until a key about-face in the essay, to portray Du Maurier’s writing as effortless flow and facility. My question is as follows: what difficulties in James’s own writing process might he be masking, since Du Maurier’s writing experience, as we’ll see, was far from easy—is it easy for anyone? Lodge writes: Reading the finished article [“George Du Maurier”] through for the last time, before sending it off to Harper’s, he realized that it was as much about himself as about Du Maurier—about confronting, defining and refining his own literary ambitions, and finally exorcising the demon of envy which had threatened in the last two years to mar his pleasure in their long friendship. (338)

But what does the essay tell us about James’s writing “self”? In the opening to “George Du Maurier” (1897), James explains:



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When the wonder at last came of his putting forth Trilby and its companions my own surprise—or that of any intimate—could shade off into the consciousness of having always known him as a story-teller and a master of the special touch that those works were to make triumphant. He had always, in walks and talks, at dinner, at supper, at every easy hour and in every trusted association, been a novelist for his friends, a delightful producer of Trilbys. If there were but one word to be sounded about him, none would in every particular play so well the part of key-note as the word personal . . . all converse with him was concretely animated and, as I have called it, peopled . . . . (877)

Early, then, James encapsulates his case: Du Maurier has always already written Trilby(s)! His “converse” was so vivid with scenes and characters from his past and present life that they felt real and present, concretely walking and talking which James embraced in his friendship; enacted in his dictating through pacing and gesturing; and hoped to simulate in his writing. For, the scene of dictation was indeed “concretely animated and . . . peopled”—someone was there; it was person-al! However, Du Maurier’s talk, James also makes clear, did not center only on himself, since the “intimacy” James called a “luxury” arose in part from James’s sense that he could talk about almost anything with Du Maurier: He had all a Frenchman’s love of speculation and reflection, and I scarce remember, in all the years of this kind of converse with him, any twist or turn—certainly on any wholly human matter—that could bring me, as I was not exempt from memories of having been brought in other cases, with my nose against a wall. And all this agility of spirit, of curiosity and response, was mixed with an acceptance, for himself, of the actual and the possible. (885-6)

Of the actual James, we could say, as Du Maurier’s words about James’s non-fiction writing testified. James’s typists, I think, mirrored something of these refreshing, helpful, and inspiring qualities, and we’ll return to the difference this made for James and why. As we’ve already seen, James collapses both Du Maurier’s speaking and living into his writing: Du Maurier’s novels are basically him on the page, “a trio of books which, as he lived them, as it were, so much more than wrote them, gave others also the rare and charming sense of their being more lived than read” (“George” [1897] 878). And: Everything in him, everything one remembers him by and knew him by and most liked him for, is literally, is intensely there; every sign of his taste and his temper, every note of his experience and his talk. His talk is so

 

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Perhaps also manifesting a mourning friend’s wish here, James is not alone in the fantasy that thinking or speaking could be impressed directly onto the page automatically, to create an article or novel. On the other hand, James brings to life such a fantasy with his own “report[ing]” (or recording) “emissar[ies]”: his typists. James, in a letter to Du Maurier written when the early installments of Trilby appeared, initiates the blur that Du Maurier’s “talk” can be “with tongue or with pen” (888) by writing, à propos of Trilby, “it’s most delightfully and vividly talked! And then drawn!” (1894).3 In a short essay on Trilby written during its early installments, James’s description of the novel’s style seems to downplay the effort it took to construct it: “It all belongs to the social, audible air, the irresponsible, personal pitch of a style so talked and smoked, so drawn, so danced, so played, so whistled and sung, that it never occurs to us even to ask ourselves if it is written” (“George” [1894] 875-6). In that same letter to Du Maurier shortly after, James writes of his embarrassment over this essay, calling it a “cretonnerie.”4 He continues in an apparent projection, “tell me you don’t hate me” for the essay (1894). Perhaps one reason James feels bad is just this need to de-emphasize the writerly achievement of the novel so “irresponsibl[y]” (not) written. After all, to achieve the effect James describes is far from easy. And yet, in his commemorative essay, our point of focus, when he has a chance to make any amends necessary, James actually recycles this striking quote, citing but transforming it slightly with different pairings, to describe Trilby’s style, “the extraordinary general form, the form that is to be described as almost anything, almost everything but a written one” (“George” [1897] 900-1). James’s double point, that Du Maurier’s writing does not feel like writing and that it impressed itself onto the page in a near magical, if physical, fashion, remains his key-note. James allies Du Maurier further with the oral by noting his beautiful voice passed down to him by his father and “an adoration of the musical voice” to which his novels attest (“George” [1897] 891). But James boils Du Maurier’s style down not only to the spoken voice, but to speaking in its most “social, audible” form: “the whole performance is a string of moods and feelings, of contacts and sights and sounds. It is the voice of an individual, and individuals move to the voice . . . . Nothing so extravagantly colloquial was ever so exact a means to an end” (899). I



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want to suggest here that the individual James “moves” to the voice as well, just as he will move through his voice. Colloquial: from “colloquy”; etymology, “together + speaking” (“Colloquial,” a.; “Colloquy,” sb., OED). James, too, for reasons I hope to show, will strive for and achieve the “extravagantly colloquial” in his own composing technique.5

James For why was dictation to an “amanuensis” (HJL 61), as James called his typist, such a conduc(t)ive writing process, wherein he was able to “bridg[e]” the “silences” that surrounded or separated his self and another? (HJL 41) If dictating could help connect James’s thoughts and ideas, his “insides,” to (those of) another person, dictation could also help ease the way from James’s inside to his own outside. Certainly, a remark recorded years later by Theodora Bosanquet, James’s last typist, “it all seems . . . to be so much more effectively and unceasingly pulled out of me in speech than in writing,” points to the passage from inside to out that dictation facilitated (248). Later we will return to James’s physical constipation, described in early letters to his brother William from Rome, that the terminology here evokes. Dictation also provided a factor James had long found crucial for his writing: intervention. Ten years after “George Du Maurier,” James writes to his brother William, shortly after having hired Bosanquet, “[she] confirms me in the perception, afresh—after eight months without such an agent—that for certain, for most, kinds of diligence and production, [James underscores and crosses out “such an agent”] the intervention of the agent is, to my perverse constitution, an intense aid and a true economy! [Added in with a caret:] There is no comparison!” (1907). James uses the word “agent” twice, as if to emphasize that dictation displaces the acting, active part (“agent” is etymologically rooted in “agere, to act, do”) of writing onto someone else (“Agent,” sb., OED). James’s move here is particularly interesting when contrasted with what James calls above Du Maurier’s “irresponsib[le]” style. But in shifting responsibility onto the typist and (possibly) displacing his own sense of irresponsibility onto Du Maurier, James masks the issue of “responseability,” which the typist provided in the act of simply transcribing James’s words. Intervention also designates something that comes in between, a blockage that paradoxically releases blockage and facilitates—as the density of James’s later prose style, obstructing while revealing, repeats. What James called the “embroidered veil of sound” of his pronounced

 

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words and the typewriter’s rhythmic tapping could be seen to serve such a purpose (HJL 41). Interestingly, though James emphasizes Du Maurier’s beautiful singing voice, as we’ve seen, James’s second typist, Mary Weld wrote in her journal: “He dictated beautifully. He had a melodious voice and in some way he seemed to be able to tell if I was falling behind. Typewriting for him was exactly like accompanying a singer on the piano” (qtd. in Hyde 152). Weld’s enjoyment, as reported by H. M. Hyde, helps explain James’s inscription on The Wings of the Dove for Weld, “‘from her collaborator’” (qtd. in Hyde 150). James’s “veil,” however, has an earlier analogue in his essay “London” of 1888, where “the best time for writing” is “Christmas week” when people are out of town but “the friendly fog” remains; “during the lamplit days the white page he tries to blacken becomes, on his table, in the circle of the lamp, with the screen of the climate folding him in, more vivid and absorbent. . . . The weather . . . muffles the possible interruptions. It is bad for the eyesight, but excellent for the image” (Essays 32-33). Screens, mufflings, folding in: all enable James’s writing and are ideas to which we will return. For James, being muffled or covered may have evoked his mother’s literalized, physicalized, “nutritional” form of care and love. Mary James, as critics like James Anderson, Susan Griffin, Jean Strouse, and Carol Holly have convincingly demonstrated, expressed (or failed to express) love and care predominantly through literal nourishment and various forms of nursing: for example, in a letter Mary James offers the following counsel, “a mother ought to ‘husband all her strength and vigor to nourish her baby, and not exhaust herself by taking sole care of it’” (qtd. in Strouse 24). “Nourishment” takes the place of care, is itself the care, with emotional care or love, implied within her locution “sole care,” too exhausting and to be delegated to others. Griffin names the attentions Strouse singles out in the following Mary James letter as predominantly “oral” (Mary is telling him that though William is home, she has never so often thought of Henry): “I feel so often that I want to throw around you the mantle of the family affection, and fold you in my own tenderest embrace. —It seems to me darling Harry that your life must need this succulent, fattening element more than you know yourself” (qtd. in Griffin 130). Visiting Europe at age 31, muffled or smothered from afar in his mother’s simultaneously literal and figurative milk, James has to be physically present to receive this “fattening” element. Since it is not love, it cannot last, but rather is digested, requiring another in- or trans-fusion. Writing to William in 1874, Mary James describes her happiness and pleasure at not having been replaced by Wilky James’s wife, by framing weaning as a negative, undesirable process: “He writes most affectionately



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to me, a good sign that his wife has not weaned his love from his mother—my heart yearns over both of you my precious children, to think of you both being ill, and I so far away.” Weaning, here, is something to be celebrated as not having happened, since it signals the end or death of love rather than mature separation bridged by love. Nursing, providing nourishment, once again, equals love, not an expression thereof and Mary James wishes she could provide herself, in person, rather than her thoughts or supportive love, as a cure for what ails her two other sons. It is not surprising that Henry James would have internalized not a stable, separate, loving mother but rather this approach to connecting which required a kind of prosthetic, ever literally present mother to have any mother at all. A separate, flourishing, loving self that was anything other than a reflection of the one she was looking for: this might kill his mother! 6 Instead, we read from James in London at age 26: “There is another Atlantic Cable, quite as stout as the telegraph, one end of which is moored in Quincy Street, + the other tied thro’ one of the sad perforations of my heart. It is simply my dear mammy’s apron-string, from which I calculate never to be detached” (Letter [1869]). James indicates that a never-severable, physical-if-metaphorical “cable” attaches him to his mother. Whether, as Greg Zacharias has suggested in discussion, James’s stance here is partially a performance, calculated to prolong his parents’ financial support for his trips by giving them what they want, it is nevertheless notable that James returns to his mother her equation between (physical) separation and death, harkening back to the earliest moments of infancy, even before birth. Strouse zooms in on Mary James’s use of the term “fold” to describe her “embrace” and hazards that disentangling himself from these “complicated folds” (or not) may well have something to do with James’s “lifelong disinclination” to the marriage Mary James so jarringly advocates subsequently in her letter (25). From a Freudian psychoanalytic perspective, a stable sense of self hinges on both internalizing and feeling safely separate from a loving mother. Anderson describes William’s “fragile self-structure” as originating in “the child’s experience early in life with a mother who is fundamentally unempathic and anxious,” not separate enough, or possessing enough of a separate sense of self, to be able to give empathically of that self to help foster another’s separate self, as Holly discusses in her analysis of Henry’s description of a mother who lived solely through or as her children, (Anderson 64; Holly 152-6). As I am trying to suggest, an understandable fear of simply losing himself or being smothered and covered under his mother seems to have added anxiety to liminal moments, where inside crosses to outside, such that blanketing or obstructions seemed to soothe

 

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and facilitate, and paradoxically replicate, as did a resulting implied (with plico the Latin for “to fold”) style of expression (“Plico” OLD). Interestingly, and perhaps not coincidentally, Trilby treats what Kaja Silverman calls, in another context, “fantasies of the maternal voice” (72100). In Trilby the title character possesses a voice (partial, since Trilby requires mesmerism or a take-over by Svengali to sing in tune) that infuses in all who hear it a state of blissful well-being. This is one side of the fantasy of the maternal voice, according to Silverman, that the voice, as a kind of condensation of the early mother, could restore “wholeness,” counter-act “castration,” the inevitable limitations, disappointments and losses of growing up, in order to blanket, soothe and surround, in a womblike fashion, a way that voice can and that the mother’s voice is fantasized as having, at one time, done (72-100). Perhaps predictably, such super-human, impossible efforts on the part of Trilby result in her death from exhaustion. The other side of such fantasies, which, as Silverman emphasizes, is an almost necessary corollary, is of total annihilation and suffocation (to echo Janet Adelman’s Suffocating Mothers which describes a similar phenomenon in Shakespeare) deriving from the absolute dependence of the infant on a loving mother. The fantasy if really satisfied, would be fatal, so both enticing and terrifying. Trilby, therefore, to my mind, inhabits the same world that James’s dictation process works through. James does not analyze many of Trilby’s aspects, which might have helped him to fathom possible explanations for Trilby’s success. The novel dramatizes shared voices, voices coming together as one, from one who intensely wished he could do the job himself, who lacked the “voice” to do so, but who, nevertheless, found an impossible means, vampiristically, through another’s. James’s six months established practice of dictation was in its own way a mingling of voices, of “talkative wanderings,” between himself and Du Maurier (James, “George” [1897] 884). James’s non-vampiristic relationship with Du Maurier, I am suggesting here, helped James mend previous ones and both inspired and (pre-)figured his relationship with his amanuenses. James’s friendship modeled a relationship between two people who were very similar—with many points of identification—but also different and separate. The relationship provided nourishment and nurturance of an emotional sort, a true “listening.”



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James and Du Maurier (Again) Voice, in the form of a lecture, paves Du Maurier’s path to writing, James asserts, and he calls Du Maurier’s appearance in front of his audiences, “a new incarnation. That is distinctly the name to give to the manner the père de famille had finally lighted upon of addressing the many-headed monster [the public]” (James, “George” [1897] 895). “Incarnation” evokes the physical presence of auditors and speaker, the body-language important for James’s dictating as well. But, in locating and defining Du Maurier’s needed transition to writing, James acknowledges that for Du Maurier, writing was not as easy as pie. Even though James allows that Peter Ibbetson, Du Maurier’s first book, has already appeared, Du Maurier’s lectures enable a transition to a different form of writing, just as did James’s move to dictation. As in the model Kaja Silverman discusses where the mother ushers the child into the world of subjectivity and speech through listening and teaching (as “acoustic mirror”), Du Maurier’s eager audiences eased the transition from orally delivered written lecture to writing which would appear without the actual presence of the author7 (Silverman 80): As he stood there and irresponsibly communicated . . . He had just simply found his tone, and his tone was what was to resound over the globe . . . . As this tone was essentially what the lecture gave, the best description of it is the familiar carried to a point to which, for nous autres, the printed page had never yet carried it. The printed page was actually there, but the question was to be supremely settled by another application of it [i.e. Trilby]. It is the particular application of the force that, in any case, most makes the mass (as we know the mass,) to vibrate . . . . (James, “George” [1897] 895)

Here Du Maurier’s “irresponsib[ility]” is linked with the oral, the sounded, the “familiar.” The family and “fame” (etymologically rooted in “report” and “to speak”), the latter of which James is both trying to account for and characterize here, are each contained in and echoed by “familiar”: indeed, all play a part in James’s own turn to the oral, too (“Fame,” sb.1, OED). Perhaps Du Maurier’s avoidance of writing, which we will hear described shortly by James, contained within it a prescient fear of the reading audience, whom one does not control once the book is out; James sees Du Maurier as “turn[ing] his face to the wall” from the hullaballoo surrounding Trilby’s success (“George” [1897] 897). These risks or anxieties over publication (not the same when recounting stories to one’s friends) are similar to those which James fictionalizes in “The Middle

 

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Years” and which Michael Anesko analyzes for the actual James. Attempting to account for the Trilby phenomenon and its effects on Du Maurier, James traces Du Maurier’s publishing success back to his storytelling, as we have seen, but most strikingly, not to mention contradictorily, to Du Maurier’s resistance to writing these stories down. And it is here that James performs that about-face on his equation between Du Maurier talking and Du Maurier writing. The gulf between the two was in fact very deep! And, the success that attended Du Maurier’s Trilby, which James hangs on the hinge or bridge of lecturing from a transcript, mid-way between speaking and writing, is itself inextricably linked with, explainable somehow by, Du Maurier’s inability, or, refusal, or simple lack of desire, to write. In making Du Maurier’s transition look effortless, James erases not only Du Maurier’s difficulties but also, possibly, his own. The “drama” or “play [the success of Trilby] had begun far back”: In the old easy moments of one’s first conversational glimpse of the pleasant fabulosities that he carried in his head and that it diverted him— with no suspicion of their value—to offer as harmless specimens of woolgathering. No companion of his walks and talks can have failed to be struck with the number of stories that he had, as it were, put by; none either can have failed to urge him to take them down from the shelf, to take down especially two or three which will never be taken down now. . . . . He had worked them out in such detail that they were ready in many a case to be served as they stood. That was particularly true of a wonderful history that occupied, at Hampstead, I remember, years ago, on a Summer’s day, the whole of an afternoon ramble. (James, “George” [1897] 901)

Du Maurier’s tales were “worked . . . out” and “ready . . . to be served as stood,” but out loud, only. And that choice has resulted in a loss, in stories “put by” on “the shelf,” heard by selected friends but “never to be taken down now,” a very different story from the effortless writing of James’s earlier depictions. As with James, whose turn to dictation provided what James felt to be the ideal conditions for writing, some set of changes prompted—allowed? —Du Maurier to write, at the age of 55. But this was, in some respects, too late: James himself is left to communicate Du Maurier’s “wonderful history” which we, readers of James (or Du Maurier), can know only thanks to James: There comes back to me a passage in some old crowded German marketplace, under a sky full of gables and towers, and in spite of the dimness of these gleams I retain the conviction that the plan at least, to which years of



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nursing of it had brought a high finish, was a little masterpiece of the weird, of the Hofmannesque. Years of nursing, I say, because what I almost best remember is the author’s mention of the quite early period of life—the beginning of his connection with Punch—at which he had, one evening, in a company of men at dinner, been led to tell his tale. “But write it, in the name of wonder write it!,” they had with one voice exclaimed; to which he had been obliged to object alas, the plea of a more pressing play for his pen. He was never to write it, for he was not, till too late, to be sure. He wrote in the long interval only the legends attached to his designs. (“George” [1897] 902)

What is most remarkable to James (expressed in his characteristically veiled locution, “almost best remember”) is that Du Maurier’s postponement of writing lasted so long, dating back to when Du Maurier’s career with Punch first begins, which James expresses as the “quite early period of life.” This expression, unusual for the context (and James feels the need to clarify it), may be suggested to James subconsciously, by his twice used directly before, “nursing.” Fascinatingly, spontaneous flow, as James has earlier described Du Maurier’s move from oral to written, is here metamorphosed to a flow that remains an oral or even internalized (thought-)flow, without moving to writing. Such an attachment to “nursing,” to “years of nursing,” or to what James calls in the closing paragraph of his essay “the nursing attitude” (905) sounds very much like a blockage. There, in James’s account, Du Maurier works and works without publishing; while, in the former instances, Du Maurier tells and tells (or thinks and thinks) without writing. In the final example, amidst the hurly-burly created by/as his success with Trilby, Du Maurier (re)turns to his work, his novel The Martian published posthumously, to what James calls, “the spark, burning still and intense, of his life-long, indefeasible passion for seeing his work through.” In a paradox which is perhaps the emblematic paradox of the essay, James continues, “no conditions, least of all those of its being run away with, could divert him from the nursing attitude” (905). Seeing one’s work through and being committed to the nursing attitude are in tension as even the last paragraph of his essay specifies: The other books had come and gone—so far as execution was concerned— in a flash; on the studio table, with no harm meant and no offence taken, and with friendly music in his ears and friendly confidence all around. To his latest novel, on the other hand, he gave his greatest care; it was a labor of many months, and he went over it again and again. There was nothing indeed that, as the light faded, he did not more intensely go over. (905)

 

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James specifies that “execution” was quick, but that depends on the perspective of when the story of (not) writing began; and ultimately, “execution” returns to protracted “labor”! Du Maurier’s novel-composition history buttresses James’s assessment of nursing, an attitude running counter to weaning, or separation. For Du Maurier’s stories, their “plan at least,” as James is sure to note above (for, as we know, a plan for writing is not the same as what ends up being written), brought to a however “high finish” by “years of nursing,” are nevertheless unwritten and therefore lost to posterity. Nursing took the place of writing, a “labor of many months” that was not simply a prelude to delivery but also instead of one. In “Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood,” Freud (whose formulation, “investigating has taken the place of acting and creating,” I echo above) describes a similar process by which prematurely arrested infantile sexual researches in childhood lead to sublimation of the sexual drive into creativity in Da Vinci, but ultimately endless research without completion (75; 59-85). And yet, something allowed Du Maurier to transcend, even if he then returned to, “nursing.” The source of “to nurse” is “nourice,” from “nutrire,” to nourish, to “feed, foster, cherish” (“Nurse,” sb.1.; “Nourice” etym.; “Nourish,” v., etym, OED).8 For James at least, friendship with Du Maurier offered a grown-up version of loving nurturance and sympathy, not literal “nutrition” or physical care, that allowed for each friend to exist as separate but similar individuals who also connected. James’s soothing dictation scene dramatized aspects of Du Maurier and James’s friendship while also repeating some of the literal care, the physical presence, of a mother-substitute, but this time focusing on what James himself wants to say and silencing a controlling mother. Certainly, dictation facilitated written weaning or separation: “production,” as James called it in the letter to his brother. Dictation “pulled out” James’s writing from where James was holding on to it (in some way) or trying to keep it inside. And, indeed, as mentioned earlier, a striking series of letters (circa 1869-70) reveals just such a “rhetoric of constipation,” as Beth S. Ash has called it in discussion, but literalized. I regret not to be able to do justice here to these letters. They are fascinating, and not just in the slippage they dramatize among “moving” language, people and bowels—and, of course, James dearly hoped, as a writer, to “move.” The letters describe, in detail, James’s painful and “moving intestinal drama,” in the words of his brother, or it might be more accurate to say, blocked intestinal drama (127). And while I am indeed suggesting a link between James’s early, blocked intestines and later less literal writerly obstructions which dictation dislodged, I wish here to draw



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attention to James’s own admission of “the nursing attitude.” Many critics have pointed to psychosomatic illnesses in the James family—that illness was the (only) way to ensure empathic care.9 And these illnesses may have had physical bases, as with the “lame patte” James called the hurt hand that precipitated James’s beginning dictating; but James’s very terminology here indicates the illnesses’ symbolic components as well (James’s father, after-all, had lost half his leg as a child) (HJL 41). Towards the end of the series written during a trip to Europe, within which James has revealed an excited and overflowing response to Rome which some have suggested might actually have precipitated his need to shutdown and retreat to the far less stimulating (except when it comes to bowels) Malvern in England for a spa/cure, James writes, I have quite given up the idea of making a few retrospective sketches of Italy. To begin with I shall not be well enough (I foresee) while here; & in the second place I had far rather let Italy slumber in my mind untouched as a perpetual capital, whereof for my literary needs I shall draw simply the income—let it lie warm & nutritive at the base of my mind, manuring & enriching its roots. (Correspondence 148-49)

Here the “manure” of Italy, a curious metaphor, “untouched” and asleep, will be a source of endless creation and creativity—cast here as “nutriti[on]”—in the future, as “capital” of which James will simply “draw” or pull out “income.” Constipation both figures and prevents his (non)writing here—he is not “well enough,” because of constipation, to write. And yet James has already “let Italy out,” as it were, to his brother, to an audience, a version of writing that resembles Du Maurier’s storytelling to his friends. For James’s writing to move from this inactive, dormant, blocked (but “manuring” or is it “nursing”?) state inside to outside, to be born and to grow to be produced and published, in its most ideal form—“there is no comparison”—the voice, the oral, the colloquial will intervene for reasons that are deeply personal: James turns the oral around to become “master”!

Notes 1 James also wrote a shorter piece introducing an exhibition of Du Maurier’s cartoons and art work. The piece in Partial Portraits is another wonderful essay, with many autobiographical elements as well. I regret not having the space to discuss how Du Maurier’s art, and James’s discussion of it, enters into the picture, as it were. 2 Lodge writes in a prologue, “Nearly everything that happens in this story is based

 

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on factual sources” (1). His acknowledgements list the several places (literally, two or three) where he diverges from fact. Thus, though the novel is not a work of scholarship, per se, it is written by a scrupulous scholar and novelist and is full of imaginative analysis that feels very true. For instance, in juxtaposing James’s decision to begin dictating with his agreeing to write the “George Du Maurier” essay—from one paragraph to the very next—Lodge tacitly makes that connection. I came to Lodge’s book at the very final stages of working on this essay at the suggestion of Ernie Gilman. It was a joy to find another’s similar intuitions on similarly trodden paths expressed in the form of a story. 3 Trilby was in fact dictated because of Du Maurier’s increasing eye difficulties (Ormond 442). 4 “Cretonne” is a kind of “thick cotton fabric” or “a piece of fat from under a pig’s skin, fried and used as dog food” (“Cretonne”; “Creton,”; “Panne,” 2., Tresor). Perhaps, though, James meant “cochonnerie” (from “cochon” or pig), something dirty, bad or unhealthy, of very bad quality (“Cochonnerie,” B., Tresor, trans mine). 5 See Edel’s use of “colloquial” in his chapter on James beginning dictation (174). 6 See Anderson for an analysis of how and why Mary James could not give emotional, empathic love. Though the article focuses on William, Anderson describes how Henry conformed successfully to Mary’s expectations and needs, coming to be known as “the angel” of the house (and hence a reflection of Mary’s supposed self-sacrificing, selfless, and uncomplaining qualities). Anderson also describes how the illnesses of her family seemed to/served to keep her well—a vampire syndrome. 7 Composition theorist Peter Elbow discusses the importance of a present or imagined audience for writing, a most human need (Elbow 191-8). 8 See Jennifer L. Fleissner’s “Henry James’s Art of Eating” for analysis of James’s relation to the oral via food, and for an in depth survey of writers on James’s “Fletcherizing” phase. For how James’s writing connects to the oral, and, more generally, for a psychoanalytic interpretation of James’s writing process, as it fits in with the other members of his family, see Green, esp. 18-22. 9 See Gerald E. Myers’s introduction to the Correspondence, xxiii-v.

Works Cited Adelman, Janet. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays. New York, NY: Routledge, 1992. Print. Anderson, James William. “In Search of Mary James.” Psychohistory Review 8 (1979): 63-70. Print. Anesko, Michael. “Textual Monuments / Crumbling Idols; Or, What We Never Knew About Henry James (And Never Thought To Ask).” Transforming Henry James. Ed. Anna De Biasio, Anna Despotopoulou, and Donatella Izzo. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013. 381-400. Print.



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Bosanquet, Theodora. Henry James at Work. London: The Hogarth Press, 1924. Print. Du Maurier, George. Trilby. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Print. Edel, Leon. Henry James: The Treacherous Years. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1969. Print. Elbow, Peter. Writing With Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. Print. Fleissner, Jennifer L. “Henry James’s Art of Eating.” ELH 75 (2008): 2762. Print. Freud, Sigmund. “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. Vol. 11. Ed. James Strachey. Trans. Alan Tyson. New York: Norton, 1989. 59137. Print. Green, André. “The Functions of Writing: Transmission Between Generations and Role Assignment Within the Family, in Henry James and his Family.” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 75 (1994): 585-608. PEP Web. Web. 1 January 2012. Griffin, Susan. “The Jamesian Body: Two Oral Tales.” Victorians Institute Journal 17 (1989): 125-139. Print. Holly, Carol. Intensely Family: The Inheritance of Family Shame and the Autobiographies of Henry James. Wisconsin: U of Wisconsin Press, 1995. Print. Hyde, H. Montgomery. Henry James at Home. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969. Print. James, Henry. Essays in London and Elsewhere. London: James R. Osgood, McIlvaine & Co., 1893. Print. —. “George Du Maurier” (1894). Literary Criticism. Vol 1. New York: Library of America, 1984. 870-76. Print. —. “George Du Maurier” (1897). Literary Criticism. Vol 1. New York: Library of America, 1984. 876-906. Print. —. Letter to Mary Walsh James and Henry James, Sr. 13 June 1869. TS. Henry James Center Archive. Omaha. —. Letter to George Du Maurier. 27 March 1891. MS. Houghton Lib., Cambridge MA. —. Letter to George Du Maurier. May 1894. MS. Houghton Lib., Cambridge MA. —. Letter to William James. 17 October 1907. MS. Houghton Lib., Cambridge MA. —. Henry James Letters. Ed. Leon Edel. Vol 4. Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1984. Print.

 

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—. Notes (no. 15 of series) on a Collection of Drawings by Mr. George Du Maurier Exhibited at the Fine Art Society. London: Printed by J. S. Virtue and Co., 1884. Print. —. Partial Portraits. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1970. Print. James, Mary Walsh. Letter to William James. 23 June 1874. MS. Houghton Lib., Cambridge. James, William. The Correspondence of William James: Vol 1. Ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley. Vol 1. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1992. Print. Lodge, David. Author, Author. New York: Viking, 2004. Print. Ormond, Leonée. George Du Maurier. Pittsburgh: UP, 1969. Print. Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Print. Oxford Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Print. Silverman, Kaja. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988. Print. Strouse, Jean. Alice James: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980. Print. Trésor de la Langue Française. Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1978. Print.



 

PART VII: VISUALITY IN/AND HENRY JAMES

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN TRANSFORMATION AND ANAMORPHOSIS: ASPECTS OF JAMES’S LATE ARTISTIC VISION IN RELATION TO HOLBEIN ALEX DOUGHERTY

Hans Holbein the Younger’s masterpiece The Ambassadors (1533) in the National Gallery confronts the viewer with an intrusion of the uncanny. The painting forces a shift in position by the viewer in order for the famous anamorphic skull to appear. Once the painting is viewed closely, from a low, oblique angle, the distorted form magically reconstitutes itself out of a shadowy realm, as if emerging from the interstices of the painting’s planes, while the bright frontal presentation of the ambassadorial figures disappears from sight. Having glimpsed this unsettling revelation at an uncomfortable angle, the viewer naturally retreats to a safe distance to view once again the hallucinatory brilliance of the frontal composition. The spectator has been drawn into the spell of an anamorphic spectacle, which always involves a temporal process of restless movement, a forming and transforming of opposing images within one frame—“ana-” from the Greek for “up, back, again, anew, return to” and “morphe,” meaning form. It has been established by scholars that Henry James named his late novel The Ambassadors after this painting,1 and in a letter to the Duchess of Sutherland, who was daunted by the novel, he outlines the best way to approach reading it: “Read five pages a day—be even as deliberate as that—but don’t break the thread. The thread is really stretched quite scientifically tight. . . . [T]he very most difficult thing in the art of a novelist is to give the impression and illusion of the real lapse of time, the quantity of time . . . and all the drawing-out the reader can contribute helps a little perhaps the production of that spell” (HJL IV: 3023). James invokes a sense of magic which was often used to characterize the thaumaturgic wonder of anamorphic prodigies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and he even seems to allude to the artistic technique used to produce the distorted image, which involved stretching threads

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“scientifically tight” from an original “straight” image onto an oblique surface. 2 James invites the reader/observer to cultivate the deliberation necessary to unfold the work in time, so as to participate in an anamorphic process of revelation. In his Preface to The Ambassadors James asserts that “the business of my tale and the march of my action, not to say the precious moral of everything” is the “demonstration” of a “process of vision” (AN 308). The deliberately enigmatic quality of Holbein’s painting seems to have attracted James as an analogy for the nature of his late novel and its technique. Throughout the Prefaces, James makes several attempts to elucidate his fascination for the novel as “the most independent, most elastic, most prodigious of literary forms” (AN 326), and it is with this question of technique and representation that I will be concerned in this paper, with a special focus on anamorphosis. Scholars have covered much of this material before, but I believe a deeper understanding of the significance of perspective and its refinements in some of the late works can further illuminate the nature of the novel as a genre and James’s meditations regarding its significance at the turn of the twentieth century. James had a fascination for the pre-eminently theatrical art of the Renaissance, and especially the paintings of Holbein; he wrote the short story “The Beldonald Holbein” in 1899, inspired by a Holbein portrait of an elderly woman, immediately before he began work on The Ambassadors in 1900. A comparison of these texts and their conceptions reveals a striking commonality of themes. In his Preface to the stories including “The Beldonald Holbein” James writes in reference to this story of his return to the “old American subject” of “Europe so constantly in requisition as the more salient American stage or more effective repoussoir, and yet with any particular action on this great lighted and decorated scene depending for half its sense on one of my outland importations” (AN 280). James describes this spectacular artifice in terms of “the innumerable parts of the huge machine, a thing of a myriad parts, about which the intending painter of even a few aspects of the life of a great old complex society must either be right or be ridiculous” (281). The relationship between America and Europe and his imaginative conception of his craft are envisaged in terms of theater and painting; Europe is paradoxically the “American stage” or forestage onto which is projected the “action” which emanates from the American background source and which lends the dramatic interest. James recalls an older sense of “machine” as describing the architectonic structure of the theater; in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the ancient theatrum mundi metaphor was revived all over Europe and the first permanent theaters

 

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since antiquity were constructed, the universe itself could also be described as the machina mundi. Among the first of many echoes of Shakespeare in The Ambassadors, Hamlet’s advice to the players to hold “the mirror up to Nature to show . . . the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” (3.2.22-4), becomes in James’s Preface to this novel the “question of form and pressure” in depicting his hero’s “projection of consciousness” on “the appointed stage” of Paris where it is “led such a wonderful dance” (AN 317). James’s technique consists in “describing the capture of the shadow projected by my friend’s anecdote” (313); thus it was “his charming office to project upon that wide field of the artist’s vision—which hangs there ever in place like the white sheet suspended for the figures of a child’s magic lantern—a more fantastic and more moveable shadow” (311). In this way, both works are conceived in terms of metaphors of the technology of optical projection, integral to the production of anamorphic images. James refers to the “dropped grain of suggestion” (307) for his novel as the point of its originary “projection,” and a glance at the “germs” of the two stories reveals that they are indeed rooted in the same imaginative theme, expressing itself in similar motifs and techniques which flowered in James’s writing at the turn of the century. Most obviously, a similar relationship between America and Europe holds in both narratives: “elderly” Americans, comparatively inexperienced or naïve, cross the Atlantic and are plunged into a sophisticated and jaded urban “society.” In his notebook entry of 31 October 1895, within the sketch for The Ambassadors, James makes plans for a “little group I should like to do of Les Vieux—The Old” (CN 141). The “germ” of “The Beldonald Holbein” as recorded in the sketch of 16 May 1899, certainly suits this plan for a cluster of works: James sets down an anecdote concerning an old lady coming from America into the “‘aesthetic’ perceptive ‘European’ air” after “long, arduous,” “dull, small life” and “all the artists raving about her” because of her resemblance to a Holbein portrait (CN 183). Indeed this “drama of small smothered intensely private things” (“The Beldonald Holbein” 390), seen through the eyes of a breezily articulate society painter for whom it “dropped into . . . memory a rich little gallery of pictures, a regular panorama” (400), “exquisitely susceptible of notation” (390), reads like a preparation for The Ambassadors in its depiction of a fin de siècle urban setting, “a superior sophisticated world” (399)—in this case London, though with strong Parisian connections—in the cold grip of an obsession with visual appearance and observation. In this etiolated, artificial world, even “time and life were artists” (394), and women are prized for the degree to which they resemble portraits painted



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by Old Masters such as Titian and Holbein. Lady Beldonald, an aging American widow of great beauty and vanity, preserved as if “in a plateglass case,” behind a “show-window” which “you might smash your knuckles on before you could crack it” (377-8), employs an impoverished lady from a “minor American city” (405) to be her companion. Intended as a “foil” of ugliness, the elderly companion fatefully outshines her mistress by turning out to be “the greatest of all the great Holbeins” (384), “the handsomest thing in London”; on her face “every wrinkle was the touch of a master” (386). Her old-fashioned beauty is caught in the painter’s gaze, as he explains to the envious widow, “with a click like a steel spring” (388). The imagery of entrapment in or by an optical machine foreshadows the denouement of this “notable comedy” (393); the intense rivalry of the women over which one is the more beautiful or worthy to be painted means it is “to be the death of one or the other of them, though they never spoke of it at tea” (402). After a whirlwind of celebrity in the artistic circles of London “the famous Holbein” disappears, “producing a consternation as great as if the Venus of Milo had suddenly vanished from the Louvre”: “the gem of our collection—we found what a blank it left on the wall” (403). The companion has been sent back to the obscurity of small-town America where no one has the visual culture to recognize her as a Holbein and the anonymity is so devastating that she is “snuffed out like a small candle.” “The Beldonald Holbein” has finally “stepped out of her frame” (405). James’s elegant tale has an ambiguous tone. Told from the perspective of a facetious aesthete and verging on a comic melodrama, it may simultaneously be read as a sharp, even bitter, critique of a vacuous and cruel portion of society, and as an obscure domestic tragedy. The ebulliently heartless “comic” narration (the frontal perspective) forms the distortion which is reformed or transformed in the reflective reader’s conscientious mind into a “tragedy” (the oblique perspective). James signals this overall “anamorphic” structure and the reader’s appropriate response in smaller details of language. It is in these details that the alternative, reversed interpretation of the events runs into or shows through the first presentation, like projected shadows showing through a sheet or screen. The quotations above show how radically the Lady’s companion is perceived by the aesthetes as an object rather than a person—primarily “it” is a Holbein owned by Lady Beldonald, an ornament, a thing, or perhaps most tellingly, a dead insect or mere mechanical “organism” (394). In cheerfully using such language, the characters in the story betray their callousness; the reverse moral position is thus obliquely signalled by the author. A prominent motif in the story is

 

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the repeated use of chiastic inversion, which has been described by Ralf Norrman as “an abstract model whose influence permeates James’s entire fictional world and dominates his thinking” (137-38). Chiasmus, the rhetorical term for mirror reversal, can be applied not only to the larger anamorphic structure but also to microcosmic devices such as antithesis and oxymoron. A characteristic example from the beginning of “The Beldonald Holbein” shows how antithetical sentence structure acts as a governing principle in conversational exchanges: “She hasn’t done,” my visitor said, “what she ought.” “Do you mean she has done what she oughtn’t?” “Nothing horrid—oh dear no.” And something in Mrs. Munden’s tone, with the way she appeared to muse a moment, even suggested to me that what she “oughtn’t” was perhaps what Lady Beldonald had too much neglected. (375)

Here the repeated inversion of sense creates a curious see-saw rhythm in which propositions are asserted and denied, appropriate to the reciprocity of rather sterile wit between characters. But at a deeper level, such inversions begin to create a sense of ambiguity and irresolution in the narrative—of significances glimpsed awry or obliquely, which will be employed to much more complex effect in The Ambassadors. Writing The Ambassadors at the turn of the twentieth century, James registers precisely the urban domain of panoramic visibility and objectivization which has come into being through a world-transforming process of mechanization and its accompanying “aesthetic consciousness.”3 The “hugely distributed” (AM 413) cosmopolitan city-as-theater, flooded with a homogenous “glare” (75) of “dazzling” (413) summer light, is seemingly populated, as Dorothea Krook has noticed of James’s late work, with “intelligences, which seem to be as free, luminous and comprehensive as those of angels” (403). “Given such a prodigious quantity of light,” Krook writes, “what . . . will they not see? Where, in such a noontide of light, can the shadow fall?” (405). Under the thaumaturgic spell of this light, everyone and everything seems “wonderful” (the word occurs just short of one hundred times in the book), or “charming” (seventy-two times): even the stolid and refractory Waymarsh is swept up in the process of idealization: “He’s delightful. He’s wonderful,” [Miss Barrace] repeated. “Michelangelesque!”—little Bilham completed her meaning. “He is a success. Moses, on the ceiling, brought down to the floor; overwhelming, colossal, but somehow portable.” (AM 168)



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The sketch for The Ambassadors reveals how James was primarily concerned with the depiction of the effect on his protagonist of the city as “spectacle”; he wanted to show the figure of an elderly man who hasn’t “lived,” hasn’t at all, in the sense of sensations, passions, impulses, pleasures—and to whom, in the presence of some great human spectacle, some great organisation for the Immediate, the Agreeable, for curiosity, and experiment and perception, for Enjoyment, in a word, becomes, sur la fin, or toward it, sorrowfully aware. (CN 141)

Showing James’s prescience in his phenomenology of such a “spectacle,” Guy Debord’s descriptions of the “society of the spectacle” from the other end of the century can illuminate this strangely “inverted world”: “The spectacle is the material construction of the religious illusion. . . . [T]hose cloud-enshrined entities have now been brought down to earth” (18). This is a “world that really has been turned on its head” where “truth is a moment of falsehood” (14). This leads to a paradoxical mode of being: “For one to whom the real world becomes real images, mere images are transformed into real beings—tangible figments which are the efficient motors of trancelike behaviour,” which entails “elevating” the sense of sight; “The most abstract of the senses, and the most easily deceived, sight is naturally the most readily adaptable to present-day society’s generalised abstraction” (17). Strether is dazzled by the Parisian panorama, as he remarks late in the novel: “Of course I moved among miracles. It was all phantasmagoric” (AM 452). Strether’s “consciousness” is “projected” into the “great human spectacle” and encounters the vitiated “aesthetic consciousness” of the Parisian beau monde in the garden of the artist Gloriani. Strether remarks here to his other artist acquaintance little Bilham: “You’ve all of you here so much visual sense that you’ve somehow all ‘run’ to it. There are moments when it strikes one that you haven’t any other.” “Any moral,” little Bilham explained, watching serenely, across the garden, the several femmes du monde. (168)

Emblematically, another acquaintance, Miss Barrace, always carries a lorgnette “with a remarkably long tortoiseshell handle” and has a strange power of not being: “She seemed, with little cries and protests and quick recognitions, movements like the darts of some fine high-feathered freepecking bird, to stand before life as before some full shop-window. You

 

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could fairly hear, as she selected and pointed, the tap of her tortoiseshell against the glass” (167). She makes a remark to Strether that is similar to the one little Bilham has just made about the “visual sense”: “I daresay . . . that I do, that we all do here, run too much to mere eye. But how can it be helped? We’re all looking at each other— and in the light of Paris one sees what things resemble. That’s what the light of Paris seems always to show. It’s the fault of the light of Paris—dear old light!” “Dear old Paris!” little Bilham echoed. (169)

Such evocations of the novel’s situations culminate in one of Strether’s flowing meditations, vouchsafed to Sarah Pocock, regarding the strange sequence of ambassadorial visitations from America occurring in the book: “Everything has come as a sort of indistinguishable part of everything else. Your coming out belonged closely to my having come before you, and my having come was a result of our general state of mind. Our general state of mind had proceeded, on its side, from our queer ignorance, our queer misconceptions and confusions—from which, since then, an inexorable tide of light seems to have floated us into our perhaps still queerer knowledge.” (375)

A strange trancelike mode of existence is here rendered, in which everything seems to resemble everything else, bathed in a homogenizing light. It has been remarked how the novel’s shifts in perspective are reminiscent of the structural principle of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, which veers between dutiful Rome and licentious Egypt; the effect of this restless anamorphic movement in both works is to make reality itself seem unstable, deliquescent—“indistinct / As water is in water” (4.15.10-11).4 In James’s novel, the ubiquitous imagery of light and water comes together as a “tide of light”; it is a “fathomless medium” in which characters are suspended, “passing each other, in their deep immersion, with the round impersonal eye of silent fish” (143). The paradoxes accumulate in this inverted world. The total spectacle represents, in Debord’s words, “the despotism of the fragment imposing itself as the pseudo-knowledge of a frozen whole, as a totalitarian worldview”; it has “fulfilled itself in the immobilised spectacle of nonhistory” (151). Rather than an ideal illusion presented to the imperfect, temporal world of the viewer in a very privileged and partial way, as with Holbein’s painting, in James’s book the temporal world is now being obscured by the engulfing world of atemporal illusion. No longer does a visionary image of reality exist in reciprocity with an imperfect world



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haunted by death; the world of mortals is losing its inherent obliquity (at least in appearance) and the idealized picture of Descartes’ “visionary eye” 5 is in the process of imposing itself. What was a fragile ideal is becoming actuality—the traditional dialogue between the world’s temporal imperfection and an unrealizable perfection is being suppressed. It is as if in Paris the characters inhabit a “frozen” world of homogenous time and space. Such an effort to exclude time, to achieve a godlike dominion over a realm of objects, finds its embodiment in the modern institution of the princely Kunstkammer, like the “little museum” of Maria Gostrey’s apartment (AM 196), her “empire of ‘things,’” which is “the innermost nook of the shrine” for the “lust of the eye” (105). Strether has to negotiate a labyrinth of illusion, a “maze of mystic closed allusions” (222), interlocked frames and pictures concealing the truth—he is obsessed with and deceived by appearances, most dramatically in Gloriani’s garden where he mistakes Chad’s relationship with Madame de Vionnet as wholly “virtuous”; he moves through Europe’s glittering spectacle of poses and manners, as if “in the high clear picture—he was moving in these days, as in a gallery, from clever canvas to clever canvas” (432). Earlier in the book, Strether’s perception of Paris has merged topics from Descartes’ philosophy, of seeing the world through a window apparently peopled by automata moving more geometrico, like clockwork, with nature as an anthropomorphic artificer: “He watched little brisk figures, figures whose movement was as the tick of the great Paris clock, take their smooth diagonal from point to point; the air had a taste as of something mixed with art, something that presented nature as a whitecapped master-chef” (76). At the end of the book he recalls the clock analogy, wondering wistfully if his career in Paris has not resembled “one of the figures of the old clock at Berne. They came out, on one side, at their hour, jigged along their little course in the public eye, and went in on the other side. He too had jigged his little course” (469). Across the temporal span of the book, then, the sense of time in the city is figured as fleeting and mechanical, associated with a certain meaninglessness and melancholy, Walter Benjamin’s “homogenous, empty time” (qtd. in Taylor 463). Within this perspective, human figures resemble uncanny or comically grotesque puppets, while the consciousness which haunts them is fabricated by a nature or powers beyond nature which have the absurd aspect of mighty confectioners. But against this distanced and relatively superficial vision, the book evokes the possibility of a different temporal and spatial experience, one of depth and involvement, which is hardly “experience” at all, but rather the forgetfulness or overcoming of subjectivity. The scene in Gloriani’s garden, “the spacious cherished

 

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remnant” (161) of old Paris, already points to such a possibility in its evocation of the architectural setting. Here a rich cultural memory is preserved, “values infinitely precious” (3), and natural life is harbored in “the tall bird-haunted trees, all of a twitter with the spring”; in its contact with the obscure depths of history and the regenerative earth, the setting is a shelter for “survival, transmission, association, a strong indifferent persistent order” (161). Madame de Vionnet and the setting of her apartment also embody this depth, a “deeper depth than any” (432); here Strether senses a similar “spell of transmission—transmission from her father’s line” (196), and registers through her the full significance of his final disillusionment. Both she and Chad intrude into and puncture the consistency of Strether’s clichéd idyll of the French countryside, which he has seen as if through the frame of a mediocre Lambinet canvas, causing Strether to recognize the carnal reality of their attachment. This moment can be compared to seeing the smear of the anamorphic skull in the Holbein portrait, and the ensuing part of the novel (culminating in the scene of Strether’s final meeting with Madame de Vionnet in her apartment) can be compared to the coming into focus of the opposing image in the anamorphic process of vision. Strether’s idealized self-delusion—his “false position” (AN 313) grounded in New England propriety and naivety (his “frame”)—is gradually dissolving as he is forced to change his position in order fully to perceive the reality behind appearances. In the room of her final scene with Strether, “where clusters of candles . . . glimmered over the chimney-piece like the tall tapers of an altar” (AM 432) and the sound of a fountain murmurs from outside, Madame de Vionnet gives herself up to an overflowing of emotion, “giving up all attempt at a manner” (441). The situation functions as a parallel to the enigmatic scene at the cathedral of Notre Dame. There he glimpsed her in “the sacred shade” of a chapel in “supreme stillness,” “strangely fixed, and her prolonged immobility showed her . . . as wholly given up to the need”; “she had placed herself, as he never did, within the focus of the shrine, and she had lost herself, he could easily see, as he would only have liked to do” (233). As he “played his eternal nippers over Gothic glooms,” Strether is in “museum mood” (234) and finds himself again poignantly an outsider, unable to participate in the real devotion displayed by the lady in the glimmering darkness, in the “vastness and mystery of the domain” (235). Similarly, in the “dim diffused elegance” of her apartment, he can only watch from a safe distance her “passion, mature, abysmal, pitiful”— “could only stand there at a loss, stand with his sense of having upset her . . . . He had to listen to her in a silence that he made no immediate effort to



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attenuate” (441). She has just expressed a vision of life far removed from the appropriative model of living for “the Immediate, the Agreeable, for curiosity, and experiment and perception, for Enjoyment” (CN 141) associated with a barren aestheticism and the touristic accumulation of “experiences” like possessions in a Kunstkammer or canvasses in a gallery. Rather than to “live all you can,” she is prepared to “give all you can,” to surrender her sense of self—the “wretched self” which is “always making one somehow a fresh anxiety. What it comes to is that it’s not, that it’s never, a happiness, any happiness at all, to take. The only safe thing to do is to give” (AM 439). With this moral epiphany, she reveals her selfsurrender to love’s power over her even unto death (she believes Chad’s probable departure will kill her), and that she has been “taken,” having “given” herself. Strether imagines water rising around her and realizes “it took women, it took women; if to deal with them was to walk on water what wonder that the waters rose?” (440). With this final image of deliquescence around the figure of Madame de Vionnet, who has been consistently compared to Shakespeare’s aging Cleopatra (might she commit suicide?), the opposing image in the anamorphic process comes into full focus. Despite his witnessing of this tragic display, it is ambiguous how much Strether is transformed by the process of vision. The major anamorphic ensembles of the Renaissance were intended to point towards a spiritual transformation through the revelation of a deeper truth, but this seems not to be an option open to Strether at the turn of the twentieth century. He gains greater clarity of perception regarding his place of origin; he “sees” the true nature of Mrs. Newsome of Woollett, that she inhabits an ossified temporal and moral realm: “She is more than ever the same” (468)— semper eadem, the motto of the Reformation Tudor monarchs. But despite his “projection” into the distorting, crowded European milieu, perhaps he too retains the same essential characteristics, like an anamorphic image in projection. His “horrible sharp eye” for being “right” ensures that he must stick to his ambassadorial role until the bitter end; his own “logic,” “not, out of the whole affair, to have got anything for myself,” means he cannot give himself to Maria Gostrey and take her “offer of exquisite service, of lightened care, for the rest of his days” (470). He does realize that in some measure he has renounced his “self” and has not been acting for his own personal gain, becoming rather a ground of mediation for others. However, his sacrifice is of a lesser order than Madame de Vionnet’s: He had absolutely become, himself, with his perceptions and his mistakes, his concessions and his reserves, the droll mixture, as it must seem to them, of his braveries and his fears, the general spectacle of his art and his

 

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Thus Strether fulfils his ambassadorial, representative role. He understands that “his intervention had absolutely aided and intensified their intimacy” (435). His assiduity had become an imaginative space for them into which they could project and dramatize their affair and force it to a crisis, which seems to have had the effect, ultimately, of repelling Chad and reminding him of his home duties. In this, Strether has been like a mirror, a site of representation, analogous to the novel and to the novelist’s imaginative role. It is a strangely paradoxical mode of existence, which James registers in terms of pairs of opposing characteristics, culminating in the final oxymoron of “common priceless” (435). Earlier, Strether, like an observing artist, is described as having “the oddity of a double consciousness. There was detachment in his zeal and curiosity in his indifference” (22). Strether’s first vision of Paris is highly significant, crystallizing the book’s anamorphic interfusion of surface and depth: “It hung before him this morning, the vast bright Babylon, like some huge iridescent object, a jewel brilliant and hard”; “It twinkled and trembled and melted together, and what seemed all surface one moment seemed all depth the next” (83). In his phenomenology of the elements, Gaston Bachelard has shown how the imagery of jewels in poetic writing can conflate the terrestrial and the celestial, hanging in the intangible sky like stars yet emanating from the material depths of the earth (223). Furthermore, James’s imagery invokes Biblical comparisons for the city: paradoxically, it is “Babylon,” the evil and idolatrous antithesis of the Heavenly Jerusalem, yet its description echoes that of the Celestial City in Revelations, “garnished with all manner of precious stones” (Revelations 21.19). A transcendent ideal, envisioned as beyond the space and time of this world, when made a project of immanent materialization, swings into its opposite, an uncanny, even demonic reality. The image of the city as a materialized Heavenly Jerusalem, a great crystalline stone, points to the transformation of the European city which began in the Renaissance and was continuing apace at the turn of the twentieth century. The application of the idealizing protocols of geometrical perspective was the main vehicle of this transformation, whereby, as a recent commentator has described, “a world [is created] in which the transcendental, intelligible levels of reality are seen as immanent in what is directly visible in everyday life” (Vesely 138). By the early sixteenth century, in the work of high Renaissance artists and architects such as Leonardo da Vinci, Bramante, or Holbein, this had culminated in a vision of the whole cosmos (mundus) as “an



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optical universe, a universe made up of light, which is geometrically regular, in intersection with sight, which is also geometrically regular” (Summers 180). In the 1907 Preface to Roderick Hudson James considers that “really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle in which they shall happily appear to do so,” and he continues: “He is in the perpetual predicament that the continuity of things is the whole matter for him, of comedy and tragedy; that this continuity is never broken, and that, to do anything at all, he has at once intensely to consult and intensely to ignore it” (AN 5). The problem of the “labyrinth of the continuum,” in Leibniz’s phrase, of infinite relations in a “universe” and how to depict them with an “eternal” geometry, was the central concern of the scientific revolution, which conceived of the natural world as a homogenous, mechanical system of spatio-temporally related units of mass. The novel itself arose as a genre against the background of scientific and industrial reform, which completely changed Western conceptions of the natural world and the place of man within it, and James makes one of his enigmatic references to just this transformation in the name of the protagonist of The Ambassadors, Lambert Strether. Hazel Hutchison has shown that Strether’s first name is a reference to the Alsatian philosopher and perspectival cosmologist J. H. Lambert, a hero of the Enlightenment to whom Kant wrote: “I hold you to be the greatest genius in Germany” (qtd. in Hutchison, “The Other Lambert Strether” 243). Lambert’s investigations into perspective led him to rediscover principles of projective geometry, the mathematical basis for anamorphosis, which had been the concern of Descartes and Girard Desargues in the previous century. Many reasons are assigned for the mechanization of life in the nineteenth century, but the mathematical development of perspective geometry was an absolute prerequisite for it in allowing for the precise and constant visual representation of phenomena. Despite the fact that Lambert coined the word “phenomenology” it would seem that his “empiricism” is closer to the “phenomenalism” of the Leibniz-Kant tradition, and to the idealism of Balzac’s Louis Lambert— very different from the post-Husserlian turn to the Lebenswelt. It is rather James himself, as he says in his Preface, who will confront his hero with “the authenticity of concrete existence” (AN 311-2). J. H. Lambert continually held to his “great principle” that the disorder in the universe from our terrestrial perspective can only be apparent, and that a magnificent, hidden order will be revealed if we find the correct position for viewing, through a mental experiment which escapes the earth. Through such speculation, Lambert embodied for his contemporaries the

 

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power of a liberated imagination: “The imaginary as an exotic, utopian or cosmological thought experiment [which] is always at the same time a perspectival device” (Blumenberg 529). As a radical Copernican, Lambert’s imagination is like a perspectival “machine,” 6 and more precisely, an anamorphic structuring of experience; since “the Copernican revolution accomplished a kind of anamorphosis of the universe . . . it required man to abandon his customary point of view in favour of one that is uncustomary but appropriate to viewing God’s Work” (Hallyn 102). James depicts the space of the novel as an imaginary mental “arena” or theater (from the Greek theatron, “place for seeing”), presided over by the “majesty” of the author’s creative spirit (AN 328). In the “discriminated preparation” of scenes and “the fusion and synthesis of picture” (AN 323), Paris becomes an elaborate theater of visual devices. Indeed, the Paris which James knew had been crafted as a sequence of theatrical facades and perspectival vistas by Baron Haussmann; the epitome of the bourgeois theater, the Palais Garnier, had been completed in 1875. The city had become a sequence of controlled set pieces, homogenized according to a principle of optical distance, rigidly organized according to a hierarchy of wealth and opulence. The old Paris was separated from the new, the poor from the rich, just as in the late nineteenth-century theatre the onlooker was separated from the stage by the framing device of the proscenium arch, through which he saw a bright dream-world unfold from his subjective isolation in the darkened auditorium. Just such a theatrical experience is vividly evoked at the Théâtre Français, where Strether first encounters Chad; he is isolated in the darkness of a theatre box, able only to contemplate Chad, who suddenly arrives once the play has begun. It appears that the young man has undergone a “transformation unsurpassed” (118) after his stay in Paris, which strikes Strether with an alienating force, as he later complains: “It isn’t playing the game to turn on the uncanny” (140). Indeed, in his reflections on the novel’s technique in his Preface, James indicates that this is an important, emblematic moment. Here he pinpoints two modes of description alternating in the book, the “scenic” and the “non-scenic,” and in this moment of the novel, rather than looking frontally at the stage performance, Strether makes a lengthy sidelong contemplation of Chad, the object of his ambassadorial mission. There is no possibility of dialogue in the silent theater box, and instead the reader is plunged into a long description of Strether’s inward ruminations regarding his “new vision,” his “perception of the young man’s identity” (117), which is a tour de force of free indirect discourse. In the Preface James writes proudly of this moment as an example of his novel’s “prodigious” ability to sidestep the scenic perspective: it is “a real extension . . . of the



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very terms and possibilities of representation and figuration” and specifically consists in “the so-inscrutably-applied side-stroke or short-cut of our just watching, and as quite at an angle of vision as yet untried” (AN 326). The novel, James notices, is “full of these disguised and repaired losses, these insidious recoveries, these intensely redemptive consistencies,” in which though “direct presentability” is “diminished and compromised,” the oblique view adds “the charm of opposition and renewal” (AN 326). It is precisely this “process of vision,” these shifts of perspective in which we gain a deeper sense of Strether’s “poor old trick of quiet inwardness” (AM 375) and of his reflective assimilation of his perceptions (often in darkness, or “the watches of the night” [119]), that can be compared to the movement of anamorphic formation and reformation of images. James’s sensitive phenomenology of the city chimes with the observations of a great contemporary and philosopher whose books James owned, Friedrich Nietzsche, for whom, centrally, “there is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing’” (119).

Notes I would like to thank Dr Rebekah Scott for her invaluable help and Professor Adrian Poole for his kind remarks on an early draft. 1 See Hutchison, Seeing and Believing 79-105; Tintner 87-94. 2 See Baltrusaitis 54-55 for a clarification of the projection technique used in painting these images. 3 I use this phrase in reference to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s critique of the Cartesian epistemology at the basis of the abstraction inherent in “aesthetic consciousness” (89-100): “Aesthetic experience is indifferent to whether or not its object is real, whether the scene is the stage or whether it is real life” (89). 4 For anamorphic perspective in Antony and Cleopatra, see Thorne, ch. 6. 5 See Judovitz. 6 The German polymath Georg Christian Lichtenberg (1742-1799) relates that Lambert “used sometimes to call his genius a machine” (qtd. in Blumenberg 529).

Works Cited Bachelard, Gaston. Earth and Reveries of the Will. An Essay on the Imagination of Matter. Dallas: The Dallas Institute Publications, 2002. Print. Baltrusaitis, Jurgis. Anamorphic Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1979. Print. Blumenberg, Hans. The Genesis of the Copernican World. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1987. Print.

 

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Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald NicholsonSmith. New York: Zone Books, 1995. Print. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. 2nd ed. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. London: Sheed & Ward, 1999. Print. Hallyn, Fernand. The Poetic Structure of the World: Copernicus and Kepler. New York: Zone Books, 1993. Print. Hutchison, Hazel. “James’s Spectacles: Distorted Vision in The Ambassadors.” The Henry James Review 26.1 (2005): 39-51. Project Muse. Web. 14 Dec. 2010. —. “The Other Lambert Strether: Henry James’s The Ambassadors, Balzac’s Louis Lambert and J. H. Lambert.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 58 (2003): 230-58. JSTOR. Web. 10 Sep. 2012. —. Seeing and Believing: Henry James and the Spiritual World. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Print. James, Henry. The Ambassadors. 1903. Ed. Adrian Poole. London: Penguin, 2008. Print. —. The Art of the Novel. Critical Prefaces. Ed. Richard P. Blackmur. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934. Print. —. “The Beldonald Holbein.” 1901. New York: Scribner’s and Sons, 1909. 375-406. Print. —. The Complete Notebooks of Henry James. Ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers. Oxford: Oxford UP: 1987. Print. —. Henry James: Letters. Ed. Leon Edel. Cambridge, MA: HarvardBelknap P, 1974-84. 4 Vols. Print. Judovitz, Dalia. “Vision, Representation, and Technology in Descartes.” Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision. Ed. David Michael Levin. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993. 63-86. Print. Krook, Dorothea. The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1967. Print. Levin, David Michael, ed. Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1993. Print. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage-Random House, 1989. Print. Norrman, Ralf. The Insecure World of Henry James’s Fiction: Intensity and Ambiguity. London: Macmillan, 1982. Print. Summers, David. The Judgement of Sense. Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. Print. Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Print.



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Thorne, Alison. Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare: Looking Through Language. London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2000. Print. Tintner, Adeline R. Henry James and the Lust of the Eyes. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1993. Print. Vesely, Dalibor. Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2004. Print.



 

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT “BORN BUT ONCE”: PHOTOGRAPHIC (SELF-)REPRESENTATIONS AND THE SOCIOCULTURAL INVESTMENT OF SINGULARITY IN HENRY JAMES’S “THE REAL THING” AND “THE PRIVATE LIFE” SERENA FUSCO

The “private life” is nothing but that zone of space, of time, where I am not an image, an object. It is my political right to be a subject which I must protect. (Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida)

Introduction The aim of this essay is to explore the cultural, historical, and epistemological significance of photography to two short stories by Henry James. Photography and its emerging paramount social impact are openly tackled in “The Real Thing,” a tale initially published in 1892. Epistemologically speaking, photography works as one of the codes that problematize representation. At one level, photography is associated with the flatness and vulgarity of crude realism, indiscriminate publicity, questionable artistic production, and commodification. At another level, the story precisely blurs the boundary between “the real thing” and “the real thing as representation.” This blurring can be read as “photographic,” not only with relation to the indexical nature of photography (and the related tendency of photography to conflate representational practices and represented objects) but also, significantly, if one reads James’s story as advocating the necessity to conceive of representation as social act. Representation and self-representation entail an investment in and against pre-existing codes of authority and authenticity: representation is

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constructed in “The Real Thing,” as the real thing, as sociocultural investment in, and validation of, one discrete portion of reality, according to a process that is socially isomorphic to the framing and validation of a photograph.1 “The Real Thing” stages an articulated interclass drama that entwines not only reality and representation, but also their economic and social premises, weaving a “truth regime” wherein representational choices—deciding what is real, (in)authentic, proper, or even convenient in the public sphere of representation—entail material and social consequences. Despite the fact that photographic language is thematically absent from “The Private Life”—also published in 1892—it is nevertheless present, I contend, as a subtext and, simultaneously, as a “metalanguage” informing the structure of other representational strategies thematized in the story. Compared to “The Real Thing,” “The Private Life” depicts a more nuanced, intra-class social stratification. The characters of this tale inhabit their social status as an ability to master codes, as cultural competence and authority, and participate in a tension that I still call “photographic”—one between different ways to produce, contextualize, socially invest in, and profit from the irreducible singularity of each representational act.

I “The Real Thing” has frequently been read as an allegory of the process and pitfalls of artistic creation when confronted with “the forces of the real” (Rawlings 452). It is told in the first person by an artist/illustrator, who accepts to employ a genteel pair in financial straits, Major Monarch and his wife. The Monarchs offer to serve as models, either for the sketches of “contemporary life” (RT 8)2 the narrator realizes for black and white popular magazines—or, preferably, for the illustrations that will accompany Rutland Ramsay, the first of the books of a “projected edition deluxe of one of the writers of our day” (13). After the narrator has sympathized with the Monarchs and hired them, he finds increasingly difficult to put them to use. He grows unsatisfied with and concerned about his work and, as models for Rutland Ramsay, he starts employing Miss Churm, a young “freckled Cockney” (15), and his Italian servant Oronte. When the Monarchs realize that they are about to lose their source of income, they desperately resort to trying themselves out as servants. Eventually, too touched by their pathetic situation, the narrator dismisses them. I am especially interested in how “The Real Thing” weaves together the “epistemological” and the “social.” On the one hand, the story



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thematizes the relationship between reality and representation. On the other hand, it weaves the aforementioned theme with a reflection on social roles, expectations, and conventions. In my view, the tale suggests how social roles and conventions contribute to shape, and are in turn shaped by, representation as a fundamentally public, sociocultural act—i.e. by the fact that discrete subjects of representation cannot but become visible, circulate, and be exchanged in the public sphere.3 “The Real Thing” stages one of the few open confrontations with photography in James’s fiction. The tale has been read as an expression of James’s antagonistic and anxiety-ridden relation with this medium. In the past decade or so, scholars have increasingly explored the position of photography in James’s art and life—in many cases, as a relation of troubled mastery.4 In 1892, photography is brought into “The Real Thing” as a problematic practice of sociocultural significance to be reckoned with—a practice of significance that cannot but inform representation in general, including artistic representation. While the threatening, disempowering sides of photography cannot be downplayed, photography also constitutes the horizon for “going public” in a culture that is suspended between intrinsic value and exchange value, detail and structure, singularity and typicality. Photography as problematic horizon of representation works as a “metalanguage”—becoming pervasive while always being named and thematized very cautiously. Photography works as a metalanguage, I contend, in a double sense: first, in its power to shape the representation of reality, i.e., to determine what passes as “the real thing” and what does not; 5 second, by contributing to bring to the foreground the social, public unconscious of representation—i.e., unveiling that the choice of what is worth representing is not innocent, because it always entails material consequences. On the occasion of their first encounter with the narrator, the Monarchs remark, as an asset, their talent for being photographed. While they have no previous experience as models for sketches, they have “been photographed, immensely” (RT 11; emphasis in the original). This is immediately associated with the public circulation of their representation as something of dubious propriety. Of their photographs the Monarchs have “given quantities away . . . with our autographs and that sort of thing.” The narrator inquires, “as a harmless pleasantry,” whether these photographs are to be found in the shops, and Major Monarch eagerly replies that “yes, hers—they used to be” (11). This preliminary, apparently lighthearted exchange (or perhaps, lighthearted on the part of the narrator, even too seriously intended on the part of the Monarchs), sets the tone for the whole representational, social, and economic struggle that occupies the



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tale. After her husband’s rejoinder, Mrs. Monarch, with “her eyes on the floor” (11), adds that her photographs are not to be found in the shops anymore. While it is unclear whether the “autographed” photos were originally intended for sale or for more private forms of distribution, one is left to wonder where Mrs. Monarch’s embarrassment comes from— from having been “in the shops,” or not being there anymore? This scene sets a circulation of representations problematically located across public and private spheres. This creates, quite early in the text, a fundamental ambivalence as to what can, or should be valued—an ambivalence as to what is socially acceptable, what is economically convenient, and whether the two can—at the cost of embarrassment—be reconciled. At the heart of this ambiguity is photography, both as a representational practice and as a mode of production of objects (in this case, Mrs. Monarch’s photographs) that circulate. Following the narrator, Peter Rawlings reads the Monarchs’ talent for photographic rendition as epitomizing the stubborn, rigid resistance of (vulgar) reality to (creative) representation: I began to find her too insurmountably stiff; do what I would with it my drawing looked like a photograph or a copy of a photograph. Her figure had no variety of expression—she herself had no sense of variety.… I placed her in every conceivable position, but she managed to obliterate their differences. (RT 18; emphasis added)

Rawlings has written on the cultural impact of the invention of the rollfilm camera and the diffusion of mass photography, and James’s horrified reaction to it, arguing that “‘The Real Thing’ can be read . . . as an allegory in which the tyrannical forces of the real and the vulgar, unless subjected to the processes of selection and idealization [on part of the artist], can be all-vanquishing” (452). I would immediately remark, though, that the narrator’s discomfort does not arise from an unmediated contact with reality, but, instead, from a clash between different modes of representation. According to Rawlings himself, James’s short story allegorizes how mass photography heralds a disturbingly “democratic” leveling of the subjects of representation: a leveling that is, apparently, threatening to the artist.6 In this sense, the tale can be read as allegorizing a world that is ridden with ready-made representational references to the point of flattening and obscuring reality: “James . . . recoil[s] from the plethora of monochrome certainties which he saw Kodak as representing. Kodak seemed to substitute reality for its appearance, obstructing an awareness of the [artistic] processes involved in negotiating a consensus



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about the incoherent, fathomless nature of the represented world” (Rawlings 454; emphasis added). The diffusion of photography as a historical reason for blurring the distinction between reality and representation has, it has been argued, fundamental consequences for James’s late stylistic choices. 7 Stuart Burrows has contextualized James’s work in the broader context of a modernist “crisis of representability” in American fiction largely due, in his view, to a continuous “engagement with the camera” (5): “[R]ealism’s ‘compulsory and compulsive visibility’ is actually the sign of a loss of faith in . . . [the] ability to represent the world—a loss that leads directly to ‘modernism’s skepticism toward the continuity between seeing and knowing’” (5; emphasis added).8 This crisis of representability appears to be metonymic in nature: the essential continuity between realism and modernism—both linked to the presence of the camera—resides in the emergence of the indistinguishability of things. According to a marketinflected logic, things and objects are similar because they can be exchanged, occupy each other’s place. “The Real Thing,” Burrows suggests, is a turning point in James’s work because it applies this logic and extends it to people. The narrator remarks that Mrs. Monarch has no sense of variety: “She was always a lady certainly, and into the bargain was always the same lady. She was the real thing, but always the same thing” (RT 18). Mrs. Monarch is “always the same” not because she is unmediated reality, but because she is already highly mediated. She is a type, and photography has contributed to cast her as a type: “It is never completely clear whether the Monarchs are the real thing because they have been photographed, or whether they have been photographed because they are the real thing. . . . It is the Monarch’s typicality that makes them the real thing” (Burrows 82, 85). Now I would like to take Burrows’s argument in a slightly different direction, suggesting that one of the keys to the story’s ambivalence, triggered by the presence of photography, lies exactly in problematizing the distinction between individuality and typicality. Mrs. Monarch is “always the same lady”: but it is unclear whether, in order to function properly as a model, she should be more singular or more typical—more of “herself” or more of a “different lady.” Photography’s potential for endless multiplication and exchange does not erase its investment in the referent, its irreducible attraction to singularity. The paradox of photography lies in the fact that, to borrow Jonathan Crary’s description of modern capitalism, it “makes exchangeable what is singular” (10; emphasis added). The story’s difficulty to discriminate between “types” and “characters” illustrates this oscillation:



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I wanted to characterize closely, and the thing in the world I most hated was the danger of being ridden by a type. . . . I held that everything was to be sacrificed sooner than character. When they averred that the haunting type in question could easily be character, I retorted, perhaps superficially, “Whose?” It couldn't be everybody’s—it might end in being nobody’s. (RT 19)

In order for a singular thing to be exchangeable, one must set a standard of values, and a standard of comparison. Typicality is, from this perspective, an always-receding horizon of possibilities. If James allegorizes how “the real thing” is already mediated, how reality is made of types, and that those are photographic types, types are exchanged and acquire significance and value in their public visibility, against and in contrast with other types. In Crary’s terms, “[p]hotography and money . . . establish a new set of abstract relations between individuals and things and impose those relations as the real. It is through the . . . interpenetrating economies of money and photography that a whole social world is represented and constituted exclusively as signs” (13). Despite their earnestness and professionalism, the Monarchs’ fatal mistake lies in their inability to separate essence and performance. Their stiffness comes from their confidence in being “the real thing” in the sense of possessing an intrinsic value: “[T]here were moments when I was oppressed by the serenity of her confidence that she was the real thing. All [their] dealings were an implication that this was lucky for me” (RT 18; emphasis in the original). The Monarchs do not realize that the (economic) bargain taking place in the tale is always in the order of types: when drawing Mrs. Monarch, the narrator finds himself “trying to invent types that approached her own, instead of making her own transform itself—in the clever way that was not impossible, for instance, to poor Miss Churm” (18; emphasis added). Embodying types entails professionalization and a capacity to market oneself. Miss Churm, whom Mrs. Monarch’s perceives as vulgar, can look down on the Monarchs, being, so to speak, of a much older line in the profession: “Professionally, they didn’t know how to fraternize . . . they must have felt . . . that she was . . . secretly derisive of their ever knowing how” (20; emphasis added).9 Richard Salmon has extensively investigated James’s relation to the expanding “culture of publicity” of his time. By the latter term, Salmon broadly refers to the discursive space that harbors the transformations of, and the debate around, the public role of literature, art, and culture. 10 Within this context, “The Real Thing” allegorizes a paradox and a predicament: at a moment of increased negotiation with public culture and increasing professionalization of the sphere of representation, it is



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inevitable, for the subjects of representation, to invest in singularity; yet singularity only makes sense as social representation. Before starting to employ the Monarchs, the narrator observes: “I guessed . . . that they had their points. . . . [T]hese advantages struck me as preponderantly social; such for instance as would help to make a drawing-room look well. However, a drawing-room was always, or ought to be, a picture” (RT 9; emphasis in the original). If reality is already mediated—populated with representations, types—this mediation is presented next to its sociocultural counterpart: at best, in the narrator’s lighthearted way, social embarrassment; at worst, for the Monarchs, financial trouble. I have already remarked that “The Real Thing” has been read as an allegory of how “the real thing” “threatens” representational freedom. If we reverse this and adopt the point of view of the Monarchs, it seems that it is “the real thing” that has to come to terms with the changing social rules of representation. We might perhaps turn on their heads the readings that have mostly seen artistic creation (the “picture”) threatened by dull social reality (the “drawing room”) and imagine reality lagging behind artistic creation. “The real thing” necessitates to invest itself according to already cast types, while attempting to be—and advertising itself as—single, unique, and new. If, at one level, the tale evokes photography’s problematic status in terms of its stubborn realism—its “analogical plenitude,” or, as Roland Barthes would say, its alleged adherence to its referent 11 —James also posits photography’s power to generate irreducible singularities that are inevitably open to public, social investment—with different results. In the story of the illustrator and the Monarchs, James seems to suggest that not everything that is singular is exchangeable at all times. If irreducible singularity, like a photograph, apparently adheres to the real thing, one needs to learn how to make it valuable, and in most cases strive for that— exactly what the Monarchs only cursorily understand, as Major Monarch’s tone (strikingly similar here to the tone of an advertisement) half suggests: “Do you think she [Miss Churm] looks like a Russian princess?” Major Monarch asked with lurking alarm. “When I make her, yes.” . . . “Well now, here’s a lady”—and with a persuasive smile he passed his arm into his wife’s— “who’s already made!” (RT 15-16; emphasis in the original)

At the end of the story, the Monarchs are dismissed by the narrator against the payment of an unspecified sum of money, and we are left with doubts as for their fate. The Monarchs invest in being “The Real Thing” to



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be represented, and their investment does not repay in the long term. We are left to wonder whether their investment does not pay off because they bank too much on their singularity, or on their typicality. If any clear-cut distinction and hierarchy between real and unreal has been questioned, and photography has contributed to this questioning, “The Real Thing” also allegorizes the social implications of this questioning, and the fact that one cannot but attempt to make one’s advantage, or one’s survival, starting from that.

II Also published in 1892, “The Private Life” is a lot about the significance, and value, of singularity. At the same time, the story demonstrates that singularity is created through exposure in a public environment. When singularity circulates, it becomes “style,” a language of recognition suspended between individual expression and social valorization.12 Differently from “The Real Thing,” photography as a technique for recording, reproducing, and displaying images is never explicitly thematized in “The Private Life,” but it is nevertheless present, I contend, as cultural horizon and symbolic repertoire. The tension between singularity and public exposure is shown to be the ground of style and cultural authority, and is shown to be at least partly grounded in a “photographic” logic of tension between singularity and the chain of signification: “A solid black point aims at me straight in the eye. The punctum, the absolute singularity of the other, points at me. Perforating the page, each punctum also links together the passages that it separates” (Saghafi 98). “The Private Life” opens with the presentation of a group of people who share social class and (at least some degree of) public status: “[W]e had by a happy chance the fleur des pois: Lord and Lady Mellifont, Clare Vawdrey, the greatest (in the opinion of many) of our literary glories, and Blanche Adney, the greatest (in the opinion of all) of our theatrical . . . [in London,] people endeavored to ‘book’ them six weeks ahead” (PRL 191).13 The group is socially compact, yet somehow composite in terms of sociocultural competence: “We were more or less governed by the laws and the language, the traditions and the shibboleths of the same dense social state” (192). This initial passage immediately underlines that the social class the story’s characters belong to is characterized by a density of signs to be interpreted, and that the tools to interpret these signs are not equally distributed.



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Removed from their usual London context, on their “annual holiday,” the group members take pleasure in being “different”; in an apparent return to innocence, their human quality emerges once they have taken distance from the strict demands of English public life (192). At the beginning, the writer Clare Vawdrey appears to be, in the narrator’s eyes, the only character whose identity is unaffected by this reterritorialization: He had his hours and his habits, his tailor and his hatter, his hygiene and his particular wine, but all these things together never made up an attitude. . . . He was exempt from variations, not a shade either less or more nice in one place than in another. He differed from other people but never from himself, save in the extraordinary sense I shall throw my light upon. (193; second emphasis added)

Vawdrey appears here notably similar to Mrs. Monarch in “The Real Thing”: the two characters in the two different tales share the trait of “never differing from oneself”—a trait that the narrator of “The Real Thing” considers an effect of photography. Vawdrey is soon revealed, though, to be the bearer of an “extraordinary” difference (193): he has an “other self” for fulfilling the obligations of social life (217). Upon an incursion into the literary man’s room to retrieve a manuscript, the narrator unexpectedly stumbles upon a silent figure writing in the dark. Later, talking to the actress Blanche Adney, he finds out that at exactly the same time, another Vawdrey was entertaining her on the terrace of the Gasthaus. To the narrator and Blanche, the duplication makes perfect sense, and explains the writer’s lack in social charme: “[O]ne goes out, the other stays at home. One’s the genius, the other’s the bourgeois, and it’s only the bourgeois whom we personally know” (212). “The world was vulgar and stupid, and the real man would have been a fool to come out for it when he could gossip and dine by deputy” (229).14 “If Clare Vawdrey’s double” (213), notes Blanche Adney, Lord Mellifont “isn’t even whole” (214). The latter is more than anyone a “model off the pedestal” (201), an image on display. He is the public character par excellence, who devotes his talents to the amelioration of social life: “[H]e was first—extraordinarily first . . . essentially at the top of the list and the head of the table” (194). “He had a costume for every function and a moral for every costume . . . for an immense circle of spectators” (198). As the quintessential public figure, Lord Mellifont combines a talent for playing with nuances (he always changes for dinner “with remarkable adjustment and suitability” [198]) with “the absolute singleness of his identity” (216; emphasis added). Significantly, in the New York Edition Preface to “The Private Life,” James questions the very



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idea of singleness embodied by Lord Mellifont: “Was he, such an embodiment of skill and taste and tone and composition, of every public gloss and grace, thinkable ever as occasionally single?—since to be truly single is to be able, under stress, to be separate, to be solus, to know at need the interlunar swoon of some independent consciousness” (“Selections” 53). This questioning takes, in diegetic terms, the shape of another uncanny mystery: Blanche Adney reveals that Lord Mellifont literally and suddenly disappears if no one is around: “[H]e’s there from the moment he knows somebody else is” (PRL 221). While Vawdrey’s social habits never add up to an “attitude,” Lord Mellifont’s public and apparently consistent attitude is spectrally haunted by the “entr’acte[s]” (216) of his public performances. He is present only in the camera obscura of the minds of those who devoutly follow his public performances, but on whom he ultimately depends. In cursorily touching upon “The Private Life,” Salmon remarks a fundamental ambivalence. In his view (and this holds for his broader discussion of the age of James’s literary activity), the emphasis on privacy cannot be said to precede the pervasiveness of publicity. To the contrary, the two historically exist in a logic of supplementarity and reinforce each other: The very fact that this right [to privacy] was first formulated in response to the historically specific practices of the popular press suggests . . . [that t]he need to preserve an autonomous space of privacy arose only in relation to modern forms of publicity. To this extent, “privacy” can only be deemed “inviolate” once it is already subject to violation. (Salmon 89)

From this perspective, the sacrality of the literary genius appears less a premise than a consequence of his public status, and the literary genius and the social bard in the story suddenly appear more similar than at first sight. Clare Vawdrey and Lord Mellifont are repeatedly juxtaposed in the exchanges between the narrator and Blanche Adney. Simultaneously, their having traits in common is one of the ambivalences carefully constructed in the text. Their very juxtaposition hints at their interdependence and, to some extent, their interchangeability. On more than one occasion, either the narrator or Blanche apparently start speaking of one, while they were actually speaking of the other (PRL 217). Blanche and the narrator are not only “mixing things up” (205); they are playing against each other what they know about Lord Mellifont and Clare Vawdrey, in order to dig into their respective mysteries—they are, so to speak, trading exposures: “‘I don’t like to expose him,’ I said. ‘Why not, if I expose Lord Mellifont?’”



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(205). The two characters under scrutiny are not merely swapped out of confusion: they are traded, exchanged. I shall presently return to this. Vawdrey’s “alternate identity” writes “in the dark” (212), whereas his mundane counterpart is visible, projected in the world of light. In symbolic terms, the image offered is that of a camera obscura. Vawdrey is both “literally” sitting in it (elaborating “images” that will be put on paper) and he himself is a product of it, a reverse image of the authorial figure existing outside. The visual split between a negative image and its positive counterpart is another staple of the photographic imagination. Within a bigger canvas of visual references,15 “The Private Life” especially tackles the “image walking about” (201), i.e., the image projected from a living body and simultaneously developing a life of its own—but always a supplementary one, never gaining, so to speak, full independence. According to Sidney E. Lind, Vawdrey’s “other personality . . . may not even be designated a doppelgänger. If we consider Poe’s ‘William Wilson’ as a classic case in fiction of the doppelgänger, it will be remembered that William Wilson’s double duplicates his action, he does not supplement it” (321; emphasis in the original). Evoking the consistency and weight of his public reputation, Lord Mellifont is openly associated with death and spectrality: “When he was talked about I had always had a sense of our speaking of the dead. . . . His reputation was a kind of gilded obelisk, as if he had been buried beneath it; the body of legend and reminiscence of which he was to be the subject had crystallized in advance” (PRL 198-99; emphasis added). This association with death immediately resonates with Barthes’s passionate discussion of photography. In the initial part of his influential book Camera Lucida, Barthes describes the photographed subject as a “kind of little simulacrum . . . which I should like to call the Spectrum . . . because this word retains . . . a relation to ‘spectacle’ and adds to it that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead” (9). Significantly, Barthes’s reading of photography conjoins two dimensions: the studium and the punctum. “[T]he punctum . . . is an addition: it is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there” (55; emphasis in the original). The punctum is a detail, something that “traverses” the studium of the image (i.e., its whole interest and cultural readability), stirring the passionate interest of the spectator and creating a space beyond the photograph: “Once there is a punctum, a blind field is created (is divined) . . . a whole life external to [the photograph] . . . fantastically [fantasmatiquement]” (Barthes 57). To quote Jacques Derrida commenting on Barthes, “we are prey to the ghostly power of the supplement: it is this unlocatable site that gives rise to the specter” (41; emphasis in the



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original). The historically revolutionary power of photography is to be found in the fact that, after photography, we are forced to believe in the past in itself, in its radical similarity and otherness to the present: its spectral quality, its ineludible having-existed haunts us. The past cannot be mythified anymore: “Henceforth the past is as certain as the present” (Barthes 88). Laura Saltz has analyzed James’s reaction, recounted in his autobiography A Small Boy and Others, to the late reproduction of a famous daguerreotype portraying him as a child next to his father. Saltz underlines that James writes “of the subject of the image [i.e., himself as a child] as if he were dead” (259), thus presenting the incommensurability between the subject of the daguerreotype and the subject who looks at the image, that is, the elderly self of the author. The power of photography both reinforces the claim to identity, authority, and authorship, and it fills it with a sense of incommensurability, of spectral return of the past in the present that is, according to Barthes, the uncanny power of photography. While death and photography are ciphers of radical singularity, they are always displayed against the horizon of publicity: in the case of James’s autobiography, in yet another construction of the writer’s public self; in Lord Mellifont’s case, in the construction of a “singleness of identity” that, in order to be perceived as such, cannot but rely on what is, to paraphrase Barthes, outside the photograph. Through Lord Mellifont, “The Private Life” reveals the ghastly crystallization of expectations around a public figure, and how this crystallization is filled with gaps, voids— hence the inevitable necessity to deterritorialize and reterritorialize, 16 to provide a context, a social investment for each single splendid act. Vawdrey also has expectations to come to terms with: those of a society which, like the narrator, worships a literary figure and wants to discover within the public man the reflection of the “private” one who writes in the dark and who creates the “splendid” (PRL 212) literary products that circulate in the public sphere. In the narrator’s eyes, the writer in the darkened room “looked like the author of Vawdrey’s admirable works . . . infinitely more like him than our friend does himself” (212). In terms of expectations and circulation, Vawdrey is style, too. In juxtaposing Clare Vawdrey and Lord Mellifont, James offers two related possibilities, within the same “dense social state,” to “singularly” come to terms (with different functions) with a world that increasingly cherishes visibility and publicity. In the aforementioned “dense social state,” the exchangeability of what is singular (to paraphrase Crary), so typical of the photographic age, becomes a matter of negotiating cultural competence and cultural capital,



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and that also invests, as James well knows, the world of literary production. “The Private Life” has justly been read as another exploration of the inevitable tension between art and society, so recurrent in James.17 I would stress how sociocultural competence and artistic talent are here thematized side by side, and that one is often “exchanged” with the other. According to Peggy McCormack, “all Jamesian fictions operate as exchange economies” (1), and James’s literary trajectory follows his protagonists’ “increased ability to recognize and resist [their] society’s economic attitudes” (4). In the case of both “The Private Life” and “The Real Thing,” this ability also consists in recognizing and dealing with the socioeconomic implications of chosen representational strategies. The use of “economic” terms in “The Private Life” is accordingly significant. Lord Mellifont is the ultimate horizon, pure style, “gilded,” almost a “universal equivalent” that determines the exchange value for the rest, holding everyone under his influence and redeeming all awkward moments. If Vawdrey’s “other,” public self “circulates” (PRL 212), Lord Mellifont seems to offer a necessary background for the writer’s “second-rate” daily performance (194). In an exchange between cultural and social capital, those who are around Blanche Adney “thought she told them the secrets of the pictorial nature, in return for which they gave her relaxation and tea. She told them nothing and she drank the tea; but they had all the same the best of the bargain” (201). If shrewdly exchanged, social value and representational power can economically maximize each other. The characters in the story are in search of their convenience and an adequate backdrop to display themselves. Blanche Adney craves for “the great part” (231), and she wants Vawdrey to provide it.18 The narrator, a would-be dramatist disregarded by Blanche, attempts to reinvent himself and benefit from his proximity to more socially authoritative peers. This is ironically thematized when he is approached by a lady (possibly a fellow guest at the hotel) who requests his autograph for a birthday-book: “[S]he had been asking the others and couldn’t decently leave me out. . . . I hesitated between two days. . . . She opined that I had surely been born but once, and I replied of course that on the day I made her acquaintance I had been born again” (206).

Conclusion In analyzing how James’s fiction elaborates a broad sense of engagement with the world into figures of speech, and rhetorically constructs itself as a “commentary on living” (Zacharias xi), Greg Zacharias observes that in



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James “[t]he moral is so closely bound to the aesthetic and to the social that if one admits James’s interest in the aesthetic, one should also admit his interest in the social and thus in the moral” (xiii). Exploring two different social contexts, the tales I have discussed demonstrate that each representational act is highly individual, yet it cannot be isolated from its social context, because it is in such a context that it becomes readable and valuable. These two tales dramatize the irreducible tension, historically experienced by James and his contemporaries, between the increasing value placed on individuality, uniqueness, singularity on the one hand, and representation as a fundamentally public, sociocultural act on the other. Photography as metalanguage contributes to orchestrate patterns that connect artistic expression, cultural authority, and social prestige. Photography is not present as an isolated technique of image-making, but as an approach to signification that invests in the referent while making it exchangeable with what it is not. While “The Real Thing” openly stages the sociocultural investment of singularity as an economic struggle, “The Private Life” takes that struggle to the heart of the privileged classes, turning it into a dramatization of different forms of cultural authority. Photography, in both overt and covert forms, works as the representational unconscious accompanying—and validating—other practices of representation.

Notes 1

“[Photography is] a representation of the real that owes its objective appearance not to its agreement with the very reality of things . . . but rather to conformity with rules which define its syntax within its social use, to the social definition of the objective vision of the world” (Bourdieu 77). 2 References to this edition will from now on be included parenthetically in the text. 3 I shall return to the issue of publicity later in this paragraph as well as in the second paragraph. For a comprehensive treatment of the issue, see Salmon. 4 This troubled relation is exemplified in the much-quoted Preface to the New York Edition of The Golden Bowl, where James cautiously opens to photography, describing it as “as different a ‘medium’ as possible” and praising Alvin Langdon Coburn’s photographs, which illustrate his work “discreetly disavowing emulation” (8). The most famous and explicit relation between James and photography is of course his collaboration with Coburn for the New York Edition. For works exploring James’s relation to photography see Graham, Grossman, Ross, Saltz, Schwarzschild, Sonstegard, and Stougaard-Nielsen. 5 See Bourdieu. 6 It should be remarked that Rawlings discriminates between Kodak “popular” photography and the daguerreotype that, according to Benjaminian categories, still



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maintains (and even reinforces) an aura. This aura is what endlessly reproducible mass photography destroys. 7 On this see Grossman. 8 In this passage, Burrows quotes Seltzer and Jacobs. 9 Paradoxically, professionalism becomes the locus where propriety is salvaged. The Monarchs take pains that their relation with the narrator, as well as with their “colleagues”—the other models, the “vulgar” Miss Churm and Oronte—be professionally proper: “[Mrs. Monarch] was alive to the propriety of keeping our relations markedly professional. . . . She wished it to remain clear that she and the Major were employed, not cultivated” (RT 18). Mrs. Monarch’s “professionalism” intersects with her sense of being, despite economic disadvantage, at a higher station of life than the narrator: “If she approved of me as a superior, who could be kept in his place, she never thought me quite good enough for an equal” (18). Furthermore, Mrs. Monarch’s sense of propriety blends the social and the representational: she assumes that an artist should refrain from unrealistic or excessive representations, and contemporary “vulgarity” should be “properly hidden,” not made visible to the public (as Miss Churm shouldn’t be). The “real thing” of the title can in this sense refer to the Monarchs’ socially cherished representational illusion of being a lady and a gentleman no matter how low they may economically sink. 10 See Salmon. 11 See Barthes. In the second section, I shall touch upon how, in Barthes, the adherence of the photograph to its referent casts realism against the backdrop of spectrality. 12 The idea that style and “taste” are socially invested and investible individual choices finds of course its source in Pierre Bourdieu’s seminal work, La Distinction (see Bourdieu 1979). 13 References to this edition will from now on be included parenthetically in the text. 14 In James’s own terms in the Preface to the New York Edition, “The Private Life” dramatizes a “mystery”: the “whole aspect and allure of the fresh sane man, illustrious and undistinguished . . . was mystifying; they made the question of who then had written the immortal things such a puzzle” (“Selections” 51). 15 Like in the case of other innumerable other works by James, the vocabulary of visuality permeates “The Private Life.” While I shall not discuss this broader rhetorical framework (already extensively investigated in James’s work), in order to limit my interest to the more restricted implications of photography, allow me to observe that visuality in “The Private Life” ranges from the characters’ interest in sketching and more generally in the picturesque, to the repeated use of a vocabulary revolving around words like “image,” “reflection,” and “lightning.” 16 My repeated usage of terms such as “deterritorialize” and “reterritorialize” cannot but hark back to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s elaboration of the concept in Mille Plateaux. Capitalisme et schizophrénie (1980). In Paul Patton’s introductive synthesis: “Deterritorialization is defined as the complex movement or process by which something escapes or departs from a given territory . . . [i.e.,] a system of any kind, conceptual, linguistic, social, or affective. . . .



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Reterritorialization does not mean returning to the original territory but rather refers to the ways in which deterritorialized elements recombine and enter into new relations in the construction of a new assemblage or the modification of the old” (Patton 52). 17 See Bargainnier, Bresnick, and Lind. 18 Seen in this light, the whole story might appear as Blanche Adney’s and the narrator’s fantasy of casting the others, of being directors of a drama instead of being an actress in need of a part and a detached observer.

Works Cited Bargainnier, Earl F. “Browning, James, and ‘The Private Life.’” Studies in Short Fiction 14 (1977): 151-58. Print. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Print. Bourdieu, Pierre. La distinction. Critique sociale du jugement. Paris: Minuit, 1979. Print. —. Photography: A Middle-Brow Art. Trans. Shaun Whiteside. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. Print. Bresnick, Adam. “The Artist that Was Used Up: Henry James’s ‘Private Life.’” The Henry James Review 14.1 (1993): 87-98. Project Muse. Web. 19 August 2010. Burrows, Stuart. A Familiar Strangeness: American Fiction and the Language of Photography, 1839-1945. Athens and London: The U of Georgia P, 2008. Print. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. Print. Derrida, Jacques. “The Deaths of Roland Barthes.” The Work of Mourning. Ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 2001. 31-68. Print. Graham, Wendy. “Pictures for Texts.” The Henry James Review 24.1 (2003): 1-26. Project Muse. Web. 19 August 2010. Grossman, Julie. “‘It’s the Real Thing’: Henry James, Photography, and The Golden Bowl.” The Henry James Review 15.3 (1994): 309-28. Project Muse. Web. 19 August 2010. Jacobs, Karen. The Eye’s Mind. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2001. Print. James, Henry. Preface. The Golden Bowl. London: Penguin Classics, 2009. 3-22. Print. —. “The Private Life.” The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories. London: Penguin, 1986. 191-231. Print. —. “The Real Thing.” The Real Thing and Other Stories. London: Aegypan, 2006. 7-29. Print.



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—. “Selections from Henry James’s Prefaces to the New York Edition.” The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories. London: Penguin, 1986. 33-53. Print. Lind, Sidney E. “James’s ‘The Private Life’ and Browning.” American Literature 23.3 (1951): 315-22. JSTOR. Web. 19 August 2010. McCormack, Peggy. The Rule of Money: Gender, Class, and Exchange Economics in the Fiction of Henry James. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1990. Print. Patton, Paul. Deleuzian Concepts: Philosophy, Colonization, Politics. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010. Print. Rawlings, Peter. “A Kodak Refraction of Henry James’s ‘The Real Thing.’” Journal of American Studies 32.3 (1998): 447-62. JSTOR. Web. 19 August 2010. Ross, Melanie H. “‘The Mirror with a Memory’: Tracking Consciousness in the Preface to The Golden Bowl.” The Henry James Review 26.3 (2005): 246-55. Project Muse. Web. 19 August 2010. Saghafi, Kas. “Phantasmaphotography.” Philosophy Today 44 (2000): 98111. ProQuest. Web. 7 January 2012. Salmon, Richard. Henry James and the Culture of Publicity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Print. Saltz, Laura. “Henry James’s Overexposures.” The Henry James Review 25 (2004): 254-66. Project Muse. Web. 19 August 2010. Schwarzschild, Edward L. “Revising Vulnerability: Henry James’s Confrontation with Photography.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 38.1 (1996): 51-78. ProQuest. Web. 5 July 2011. Seltzer, Mark. Henry James and the Art of Power. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1984. Print. Sonstegard, Adam. “Painting, Photography, and Fidelity in The Tragic Muse.” The Henry James Review 24.1 (2003): 27-44. Project Muse. Web. 19 August 2010. Stougaard-Nielsen, Jakob. “Frontispieces and Other Ruins: Portraits of the Author in Henry James’s New York Edition.” The Henry James Review 28. 2 (2007): 140-58. Project Muse. Web. 19 August 2010. Zacharias, Greg W. Henry James and the Morality of Fiction. New York: Peter Lang, 1993. Print.



 

CONTRIBUTORS

Michael Anesko is Professor of English at The Pennsylvania State University. He has written several books on Henry James including, most recently, Monopolizing the Master: Henry James and the Politics of Modern Literary Scholarship, published by Stanford University Press in 2012. He is editing The Portrait of a Lady for the forthcoming Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James, for which he also serves as a general editor. Beth S. Ash is Associate Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati. Among her publications are several psychoanalytic articles on James’s major fiction and a monograph on Conrad, Writing In-Between: Modernity and Psychosocial Dilemma. Martha Banta is Professor Emeritus, University of California, Los Angeles. Among her contributions to James studies are essays in Henry James in Context and New Essays on The American; “Henry James and the New Woman”; and introductions to Washington Square and The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1876-1878. J. Michelle Coghlan is a post-doctoral lecturer at Princeton University. Recent work has appeared in Arizona Quarterly, The Henry James Review, and Must Read: Rediscovering American Bestsellers. She is presently at work on two projects: “Sensational Returns” charts the spectacular second-life of the Paris Commune in late nineteenth and early twentiethcentury American literary, visual, and performance culture; “Culinary Designs” explores the rise of food writing and the making of American taste in the long nineteenth century. Nan Z. Da is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of English language and literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is currently completing a dissertation that offers a theoretical history of the sociology of literature in nineteenth-century Sino-American exchanges. Her work on Henry James looks at the conditioning relationship between literary/extraliterary things and characters’ sense of possibility.

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Anna De Biasio is Assistant Professor of Anglo American Literature at the University of Bergamo. She has written essays on a number of nineteenth-century American writers and is the author of Romanzi e musei. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James e il rapporto con l’arte (Venezia 2006), a study of the connections between museums, the rise of tourism, and the emergence of the “art novel” in the United States. She is currently working on a project about the representation of female violence in the nineteenth-century novel. Anna Despotopoulou is Assistant Professor of English Literature and Culture at the University of Athens, Greece. She is the co-editor of Henry James and the Supernatural (with K. Reed; Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and Reconstructing Pain and Joy (with C. Lascaratou and E. Ifantidou; Cambridge Scholars, 2008) and author of several articles on Henry James, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, and other nineteenthcentury writers in journals and collections. Alex Dougherty is studying for a Ph.D. at the Architecture School in Cambridge and has published on Baroque architecture and perspective. Paul Fisher is a biographer and cultural historian who has taught literature and history at Yale, Wesleyan, Boston University, and Harvard, and is currently Associate Professor of American Studies at Wellesley College. His books include Artful Itineraries: European Art and American Careers in High Culture, 1865-1920 (Garland, 2000), House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family (Henry Holt, 2008), and The Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent, His Patrons, and Sexuality in the Art World of the Belle Époque (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, forthcoming). Gianna Fusco is EFL Lecturer at the University of Naples “L’Orientale.” She is the author of Uomini in secondo piano. Protagoniste femminili e deuteragonisti maschili nel romanzo del tardo Ottocento (L’Orientale, 2007) and of several essays on Henry James, Kate Chopin, and Emily Dickinson. She is currently completing a book on American TV series in a transnational perspective. Serena Fusco, Adjunct Professor of English at the University of Naples “L’Orientale” and Resident Director of the CIEE Study Center in Naples, is currently completing a book on the construction of “Chineseness” as a transnational narrative of cultural identification in Chinese American women’s literature. She has also published on Asian American photography



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and queer identity, comparative literature and China, the HBO adaptation of Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America, and Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club. Susan E. Gunter is a Professor of English Emerita at Westminster College, Utah. She is the author of Alice in Jamesland: The Story of Alice Howe Gibbens James (Nebraska, 2009), the co-editor with Steven H. Jobe of Dearly Beloved Friends: Henry James’s Letters to Younger Men (Michigan, 2001), and the editor of Dear Munificent Friends: Henry James’s Letters to Four Women (Michigan, 1999). She was the keynote speaker at the Centennial of William James’s death. Donatella Izzo is Professor of American Literature at “L’Orientale” University, Naples, Italy. A former President of the Henry James Society, she is the author of several books and essays on Henry James (Portraying the Lady: Technologies of Gender in the Short Stories of Henry James, U of Nebraska P, 2001) as well as on other U.S. writers, and the editor of volumes and journal issues on literary theory and on American studies. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi is Professor of American Literature at the University of Venice and Director of the Graduate School in Languages, Cultures and Societies until 2011. Among her recent publications are Henry James, Letters to Isabella Stewart Gardner, London, Pushkin Press, 2009; “Hemingway: fifty years after his death,” in Hemingway’s Veneto, Treviso, 2011; “William Dean Howells,” in Ca’ Foscari. Palazzo Giustinian, ed. F. Bisutti and G. Biscontin, Venice, 2012. She is currently President of the Venice Committee of the Dante Alighieri Society. Carlo Martinez is Associate Professor of American Literature at Università “Gabriele D’Annunzio,” Chieti-Pescara, Italy. He has published on Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Leslie Marmon Silko, Mary Noailles Murfree, and David F. Dorr. Christine McBride is an independent scholar based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has taught at Stanford University, Notre Dame de Namur University, and Reed College. She has published on Henry James and narrative theory and is currently at work on a book manuscript entitled The Problem with Possession in Henry James: Literary Markets, Narrative Theory, Modernist Style.



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David McWhirter is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University. He is the author of Desire and Love in Henry James (1989) and editor, most recently, of Henry James in Context (2010). He is currently completing a monograph on James’s late 1890s fiction and editing Roderick Hudson for the forthcoming Cambridge University Press Complete Fiction of Henry James series. McWhirter’s recent articles, on James and other topics, have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, Mississippi Quarterly, ELN, and The Henry James Review. Collin Meissner is author of Henry James and the Language of Experience (Cambridge UP, 1999, pbk, 2010). He is Assistant Dean of Undergraduate Studies at the University of Notre Dame. His essay on “Friendship” is part of a project on “Passionate Attentions: Friendship and Form in Modern Fiction.” He is completing a book entitled Capital Crimes: The Role of Money in American Literature and Culture. Lee Clark Mitchell, Holmes Professor of Belles-Lettres at Princeton University, has written essays on a range of modern American authors. His books include Witnesses to a Vanishing America: The NineteenthCentury Response (1981), Determined Fictions: American Literary Naturalism (1989), The Photograph and the American Indian (1994), and Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film (1996). His present project involves the intersection of ethics and aesthetics in contemporary discussions of Henry James. Alan Nadel, William T. Bryan Chair of American Literature and Film at the University of Kentucky, is the co-editor (with Susan Griffin) of Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock: The Men Who Knew Too Much (Oxford UP), and he is the author of four monographs, including Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (Duke UP) and, most recently, Television in Black-and-White America: Race and National Identity (UP of Kansas). His essays have appeared in numerous journals, and he has won prizes for the best essay in Modern Fiction Studies and in PMLA. Leland S. Person is Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati. His most recent books are The Cambridge Introduction to Nathaniel Hawthorne (2007), Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity (2003), and a Norton Critical Edition, The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings (2005). With Gerald Kennedy, he is currently editing a volume (American



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Novels to 1870) in the 12-volume Oxford History of the Novel in English, to be published by Oxford University Press. Tatiana Petrovich Njegosh is Assistant Professor of U.S. Literature and Culture at Università degli Studi di Macerata (Italy). She has published several essays on Henry James and on U.S. authors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her most recent work is Parlare di razza. La lingua del colore tra Italia e Stati Uniti (edited with Anna Scacchi, ombre corte 2012). Leslie Petty is Associate Professor of English at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, where she teaches courses in American literature and Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her book, Romancing the Vote: Feminist Activism in American Fiction, 1870-1920, was published in 2006 by the University of Georgia Press. Julie Rivkin is a Professor in the Literatures in English Department at Connecticut College. She is the author of False Positions: The Representational Logics of Henry James’s Fiction (Stanford UP 1996), as well as numerous articles on James and other writers, and co-editor with Michael Ryan of Literary Theory: An Anthology (Blackwell 1998, 2004). She is currently editing What Maisie Knew for the Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James. Melanie H. Ross teaches English at the United States Merchant Marine Academy. Coeditor with Greg Zacharias of Tracing Henry James, she has published articles on Shakespeare and on James. She is currently working on a book-length project entitled “A Maritime Henry James?”. Sheila Teahan is Associate Professor of English at Michigan State University. She is the author of The Rhetorical Logic of Henry James and of essays in The Henry James Review, Arizona Quarterly, Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism: The Turn of the Screw (ed. Peter Beidler), The Norton Critical Edition of The Wings of the Dove (ed. Richard Hocks), Palgrave Advances in Henry James Studies (ed. Peter Rawlings), Henry James in Context (ed. David McWhirter), and elsewhere. She was President of the International Henry James Society in 2001. Manuela Vastolo holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Naples “L’Orientale” and is currently a post-doc guest student at the John F. Kennedy Institute in Berlin. She is the author of



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several essays on Asian American literature and an essay titled “In the Cage of Class,” which deals with one of Henry James’s famous short stories. Maya Higashi Wakana is a professor at the School of International Relations, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan. She is author of Performing the Everyday in Henry James’s Late Novels (Ashgate, 2010) and is presently preparing a volume on intimacies in works of James, Edith Wharton, Jane Austen, and George Eliot. Pierre (Peter) A. Walker is Professor of English at Salem State University. He is author of Reading Henry James in French Cultural Contexts and of numerous articles and book chapters on Henry James, African American literature, and literary theory. He is the editor of Henry James on Culture: Collected Essays on Politics and the American Social Scene, and with Greg W. Zacharias is general editor of The Complete Letters of Henry James. Merle Williams is a personal professor of English at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. She is the author of Henry James and the Philosophical Novel: Being and Seeing (CUP, 1993; repr. 2009), and is currently editing The Awkward Age for Cambridge University Press’s forthcoming Complete Fiction of Henry James. Other publications are in the fields of Romantic poetry, Modernist fiction, and Trauma Theory, with the relations between Literature and Philosophy constituting a major focus.



INDEX

Abel, Elizabeth, 78, 88n, 90 Aczel, Richard, 363n Adelman, Janet, 408, 414 Adler, Judith, 124n, 125 Albers, Christina E., 330n, 331 Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 393 Allen, Woody, 106, 109 Álvarez Amorós, José Antonio, 124, 125 Andersen, Hendrik, 73, 74n, 75, 102, 104, 105, 108n Anderson, James William, 406, 407, 414n Anesko, Michael, 6, 165, 177, 390, 391, 395, 410, 414 Aristotle, 4, 183, 185, 186, 188, 191, 193n, 194n, 195 Armstrong, Paul B., 115, 125, 141n, 142, 331 Arnold, Matthew, 11, 131 Ash, Beth S., 5, 412 Auchard, John, 39, 75, 370, 379 Auerbach, Nina, 244 Austen, Jane, 129, 226, 227, 229, 230, 237, 240, 241, 317n, 344, 348 Bachelard, Gaston, 428, 431 Bakhtin, M. M. 351, 353, 354, 355, 359, 360, 361, 362, 363n Bakhtin, M. M., and Caryl Emerson 364 Balestra, Gianfranca, 309, 317 Baltrusaitis, Jurgis, 431n Balzac, Honoré de, 41, 129, 132, 379, 429, 432 Banta, Martha, 3, 141n, 142 Bargainnier, Earl F., 449 Barnum, Phineas T., 131, 177

Barthes, Roland, 94, 95, 108, 434, 440, 444, 445, 448n, 449 Bartolini, Francesco, 65, 74 Bashford, Dean, 275, 284n, 285 Beach, Joseph Warren, 124 Bell, Michael Davitt, 141n, 142 Bell, Millicent, 18, 22, 75, 304, 310, 317 Bellini, Giovanni, 27 Benert, Annette Larson, 364 Benjamin, Walter, 57, 158, 161n, 425, 447n Berlant, Lauren, 370, 379 Bersani, Leo, 350, 364, 366, 367, 371-76, 378n, 379n Besant, Walter, 114 Bismark, Otto von, 81 Bizet, Georges, 281 Blackmur, Richard, 118, 119, 125, 210, 364, 432 Blumenberg, Hans, 430, 431 Bollas, Christopher, 261, 262, 264, 267, 269 Booth, Alison, 94, 95, 107n, 108, 174, 177n Bosanquet, Theodora, 385, 398, 405, 415 Botticelli, Sandro, 27 Boudreau, Kristin, 362, 364 Bourdieu, Pierre, 6, 112, 115, 124n, 125, 155, 304-07, 312, 316, 317, 447n, 448n, 449 Bramante, 428 Bresnick, Adam, 449 Bricklin, Jonathan, 62, 63 Briefel, Aviva, 323, 331 Brodhead, Richard H., 111, 125 Brooks, Florence, 223n, 224

458 Brooks, Peter, 271, 272, 275, 369, 379 Brooks, Van Wyck, 19, 21n, 22 Brown, Bill, 77, 91 Brownell, W[illiam] C[rary], 381, 398 Buelens, Gert, 242, 246, 248, 252, 253n, 254, 320, 331 Buitenhuis, Peter, 141 Burlingame, Edward L., 396, 398 Burrows, Stuart, 438, 448, 449 Butler, Judith, 245, 247, 249, 253n, 254 Buzard, James, 79, 80, 91, 111, 119, 126, 129, 136, 138, 142 Cadle, Nathaniel, 291, 292, 303 Cahill, Spencer E., 320, 331 Cameron, Sharon, 299, 300, 303, 320, 331, 366, 367, 372-74, 376, 379 Camporesi, Pietro, 65 Canavan, Thomas, 304, 317 Caneva, Giulia, 67, 74 Casciato, Maristella, 65, 66, 74 Caserio, Robert L., 304, 317 Castle, Terry, 223, 224 Chatman, Seymour, 363n, 364, 374, 376-77, 379 Chatto & Windus (publisher), 388, 389, 390, 394 Chopin, Kate, 216 Choquette, Leslie, 283, 285 Clymer, Jeffory, 89, 91 Clymer, Jeffrey A., 292, 303 Coburn, Alvin L., 134, 382, 394, 397, 447 Coghlan, J. Michelle, 3, 91 Cohen, Paula Marantz, 229, 240 Coleridge, Samuel T., 130 Collins, Randall, 330 Collins, Randall, and Michael Makowsky, 331, 332 Consoli, Gian Paolo, and Susanna Pasquali, 66, 74 Coquelin, Benoît-Constant, 132 Cottler, Susan, 56, 63

Index Coulson, Victoria, 250, 252, 253n, 254 Crary, Jonathan, 112, 115, 126, 438, 439, 445, 449 Culver, Stuart, 240, 241, 382, 395, 399 Curtis, Ariana, 284n Da, Nan Z., 5 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 412, 415, 428 Darwin, Charles, 59, 62, 135 Davis, Richard Harding, 282, 285 De Biasio, Anna, 4, 151, 160n, 161 de Man, Paul, 257 de Martino, Ernesto, 139, 142 Deakin, Robert, 67, 74 Debord, Guy, 423, 424, 432 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, 448n Derrida, Jacques, 4, 169, 170, 176, 181, 190, 192n, 193n, 194n, 198, 205-07, 209n, 210, 444, 449 Derrida, Jacques, with Anne Dufourmantelle, 177, 210 Descartes, René, 425, 429, 432 Despotopoulou, Anna, 141n, 142 Dever, Caroline, 339, 348n Dickens, Charles, 129, 303 Doan, Laura, 244, 254 Doležel, Lubom઀r, 130, 142 Dumont, Dora, 56, 63 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 353, 354, 356, 362, 364 Dougherty, Alex, 7 Du Maurier, George, 6, 124n, 40106, 408-16 Eames, Emma, 278 Edel, Leon, 41, 80, 89, 91, 180, 192, 195, 210, 250, 271, 272 276, 283, 396n, 399 The Complete Notebooks of Henry James (ed. with Lyall H. Powers), 17, 51, 257, 259, 260, 420, 423, 427 Henry James: A Life, 53, 194, 285

Transforming Henry James Henry James: The Treacherous Years, 414n, 415 Henry James: The Untried Years, 348n, 349 The Life of Henry James, 275, 285 Eickhoff, Andrew R., 269 Elbow, Peter, 414, 415 Eliot, George, 41, 193n, 194 Eliot, T. S., 5, 11, 21n, 22, 133, 179, 191n, 192n Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 134, 181, 189, 190, 194 Ender, Evelyn, 257, 258, 270 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, 94, 108 Favret-Saada, Jeanne, 133, 142 Felman, Shoshana, 165, 175, 177 Fetterley, Judith, 223, 224 Fink, Bruce, 264, 265, 270 Fiorini, Elisabetta, 67, 75 Fisher, Paul, 5, 89n, 91 Flaubert, Gustave, 41, 129, 138 Fleissner, Jennifer L., 414, 415 Fludernik, Monika, 350, 351, 354, 364 Forster, E. M., 88, 91, 367, 368, 369, 378, 379 Fowler, Roger, 364 François, Anne-Lise, 298, 299, 303 Franz, Ettore Roesler, 74 Frege, Gottlob, 130 Freud, Sigmund, 90n, 91, 133, 219, 257, 258, 264, 268, 270, 345, 348n, 349, 357, 364, 407, 412, 415 Frye, Northrop, 141, 142 Fujikawa, Noriko, 160, 161 Fullerton, Morton, 390, 398 Fusco, Gianna, 4 Fusco, Serena, 7 Fussell, Edwin Sill, 88, 89n, 91 Gadamer, Hans Georg, 181, 192n, 194, 431n, 432 Galasso, Giuseppe, 141, 142 Gallini, Clara, 140, 142

459

Gardner, Isabella Stewart, 284n, 286, 453 Garroni, Emilio, 130, 133, 142 Gautier, Théophile, 80, 89n Geismar, Maxwell, 19, 22, 209, 210 Genette, Gérard, 350, 363, 364 George I, 101 Giorcelli, Cristina, 72, 75 Goble, Mark, 229, 240 Goffman, Erving, 122, 126, 320, 321, 323, 324, 326, 330, 331n, 332, 333 Goldoni, Annalisa, 304, 317 Goncourt, Edmond de, 80 Goode, John, 160n, 162, 210 Gordon, Lyndall, 191n, 192n, 194 Gosse, Edmund, 395n Graham, Wendy, 88n, 90n, 91, 223n, 224, 256, 257, 266, 268, 270, 447n, 449 Grancsay, Stephen V., 275, 284n, 285 Green, André, 414n, 415 Greene, Brian, 56, 63 Gregory, Melissa Valiska, 370, 379 Grenander, M. E., 396, 399 Griffin, Susan M., 90n, 91, 241, 406, 415 Grossman, Julie, 447, 448, 449 Guenther, Lisa, 205, 206, 210 Gunter, Susan, 3 Habegger, Alfred, 19, 21, 22, 223, 224 Hadley, Tessa, 248, 251, 254 Hale, Dorothy J., 124, 126, 354, 363, 364 Hallyn, Fernand, 430, 432 Hannah, Daniel, 176n, 177 Haralson, Eric, 21n, 22 Harmon, William, 337, 349 Harper’s (publisher), 38, 90, 388, 402 Harris, Muriel, 275, 276, 285 Haussmann, Georges Eugène (Baron), 68, 74n, 430 Havens, Catherine, 59

460 Helmers, Matthew, 246, 247, 254 Hemingway, Ernest, 107 Herman, David, 364 Heyns, Michiel, 94, 100-01, 107n, 108 Hillman, James, 98, 108 Hirshler, Erica, 273, 276, 285 Holbein, Hans (the Younger), 7, 418-22, 424, 426, 428, 432 Holland, Laurence Bedwell, 371, 379 Holleran, James V., 95, 107 Hollinghurst, Alan, 165, 175n, 176n, 177 Holly, Carol, 15, 22, 406, 407, 415 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 16, 105 Hooper, Lucy H., 274, 281, 282, 285 Hoover, David L., 363, 364 Horne, Philip, 91, 108, 143, 303, 339 Hosmer, Harriet, 44 Houghton, Mifflin (publisher), 384, 387, 388, 389, 393 Houghton Library, 271, 284, 401 Howard, David, 155, 162 Howells, William Dean, 13, 14, 40, 47, 50, 60, 61, 180, 291, 301, 302, 388, 390, 391, 397n, 398 Hoy, Helen, 304, 317 Hull, John C., 288, 301n, 303 Hunt, Henry Holman, 348n Hutchison, Hazel, 85, 91, 429, 431n, 432 Hyde, H. Montgomery, 406, 415 Irving, Washington, 174 Izzo, Donatella, 95, 97, 108, 128, 132, 133, 143, 144, 160n, 161n, 162, 214, 224, 242, 243, 245, 248, 249, 254, 309, 317 Jackson, Julian, 283, 285 Jacobs, Karen, 448, 449 Jaffe, Charles M., 364 James, Alice, 15, 18, 41, 45, 57, 58, 59, 89n, 138, 416 James, Harry, 55, 60

Index James, Henry “Adina,” 215, 224 “The Altar of the Dead,” 137, 138 The Ambassadors, 3, 4, 5, 7, 13, 17, 22, 46, 52n, 53, 78, 81, 83-89, 90n, 91, 165, 175n, 181, 182, 186-92, 193n, 194, 272, 273, 278, 279-85, 375, 376, 378n, 379, 382, 383, 418-31, 432 The American, 6, 136, 181, 182, 288-301, 302n, 303n, 368, 369, 370, 371, 377, 378n, 380, 386, 387, 388, 391, 395 The American Scene, 29, 31, 39n, 77, 80, 174, 187, 193n “The Art of Fiction,” 7, 110, 111, 114-19, 124, 126, 131, 141n, 181, 194, 251, 254, 395 “At Isella,” 13, 22 “The Aspern Papers,” 137, 221 Autobiography: A Small Boy and Others, Notes of a Son and Brother, The Middle Years, 10, 12, 21, 23, 131, 133, 143, 173, 384, 385, 445 “The Autumn of Florence,” 24, 35, 38n The Awkward Age, 5, 21n, 196, 199-210, 226-41, 348n, 349 “The Beast in the Jungle,” 5, 11, 176n, 218, 221, 224, 242-54, 379n “The Beldonald Holbein,” 41922 Beloved Boy. Letters to Hendrik C. Andersen 1899-1915 (ed. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi), 73, 74, 75 “The Birthplace,” 4, 94-103, 107, 118, 132, 137, 140, 141n, 171-75, 178 The Bostonians, 5, 212-24, 257 The Bostonians (film), 224n

Transforming Henry James “The Chaperon,” 5, 198-99, 210 The Complete Letters of Henry James (ed. Walker and Zacharias), 12-22, 40-46, 48-50, 52, 56, 87, 60, 61, 68, 73, 74, 81, 138, 272, 273, 274 The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, 17, 51, 257, 259, 260, 420, 423, 427 Confidence, 388-90, 394, 396, 397, 399 Correspondence and Journals of Henry James Jr. (MS am 1094), Houghton Library, Harvard University, 284, 285, 398 “Daisy Miller: A Study,” 52, 71, 72, 75, 112-14, 117, 118, 124, 126, 136, 215, 221, 225, 244 “The Death of the Lion,” 174 Essays in London and Elsewhere, 415 “The Figure in the Carpet,” 221 “George Du Maurier,” 401, 402, 405, 414, 415 The Golden Bowl, 11, 37, 182, 191, 239, 299, 337, 342, 351, 352, 358, 366, 371, 372, 373, 374, 378, 380, 391, 447 “The Grand Canal,” 33, 39 Hawthorne, 43, 52, 53, Henry James Letters (ed. Leon Edel), 18, 69, 73, 82, 100, 101, 134, 139, 273, 274, 276, 382, 386, 388, 389, 390, 391, 395, 396, 397, 405, 406, 413, 418 “In the Cage,” 304, 315, 316 Italian Hours, 23, 24-26, 29-31, 33-38, 39n, 39, 53, 60, 63, 69, 71-75, 116, 123, 125n, 126, 134, 135, 139-41, 143

461

“Italy Revisited,” 30, 31, 33, 34, 38, 38n, 139 “The Jolly Corner,” 137, 175, 364 “The Last of the Valerii,” 51, 67, 75 “The Lesson of the Master,” 188, 195 A Life in Letters (ed. Philip Horne), 101, 108, 134, 143, 298, 303, 382, 386, 387, 399 Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature; American Writers; English Writers, 108, 126, 143, 194, 399, 415 Literary Criticism. French Writers, Other European Writers, the Prefaces to the New York Edition, 23, 63, 126, 143, 177, 195, 399 A Little Tour in France, 71 “A London Life,” 5, 196-198, 210, “The Middle Years,” 10, 23, 143, 173, 384, 385 Notes of a Son and Brother and The Middle Years, 12, 23, 143 Notes (no. 15 of series) on a Collection of Drawings by Mr. George Du Maurier Exhibited at the Fine Art Society, 416 “The Novels of George Eliot,” 193n, 194 “Occasional Paris,” 17, 21n, 22n, 23 “The Papers,” 4, 145-61, 162 Partial Portraits, 413n, 416 “Paste,” 6, 319-331, 332 The Portrait of a Lady, 4, 15, 23, 52, 72, 75, 122, 136, 181, 182-84, 192n, 194, 195, 224, 257, 341, 347, 383, 384, 388, 389, 392-94,

Index

462 395, 395n, 396n, 399, 400, 451 Preface to The Wings of the Dove, 259 The Princess Casamassima, 20, 21n, 78, 80, 82, 83, 91, 92, 225 “The Private Life,” 7, 434, 435, 441-46, 447, 448n, 449, 450 “Project of Novel”: The Ambassadors, 188, 195 “The Pupil,” 6, 182, 304-16, 317n, 317 “The Real Thing,” 7, 434, 43541, 442, 446, 447, 449, 450 “Recent Florence,” 38, 124, 126 “The Reverberator,” 147, 160, 162, 225, 280 Roderick Hudson, 3, 11, 39, 4052, 52n, 53, 61, 67, 70, 71, 75, 119, 120, 387, 388, 395n, 429, 454 “A Roman Holiday,” 24, 31, 38, 60, 63, 71 “Roman Rides,” 26, 37, 38n, 70, 73 The Sacred Fount, 221 “The Saint’s Afternoon,” 24, 33, 35, 36, 38, 38n, 134, 134, 136, 140 The Scenic Art, 143 “The Science of Criticism,” 7, 99, 108 “Siena Early and Late,” 33, 34, 39n A Small Boy and Others, 21n, 23, 143, 445 The Spoils of Poynton, 120, 37, 370, 380, 390 “The Story of a Year,” 6, 33648, 349 The Tragic Muse, 84, 91, 132, 137, 143, 215, 225, 450 Transatlantic Sketches, 38n, 39n, 51, 80, 91 “Tuscan Cities,” 37, 39n

“The Velvet Glove,” 46, 52n, 53 “Very Modern Rome,” 68, 71, 75 “Venice,” 34, 35, 36, 38n, 39n, 135 Washington Square, 224, 369, 379, 380, 401, 451 William Wetmore Story and His Friends, 44, 69, 75 The Wings of the Dove, 4, 5, 10, 39n, 39, 146, 161, 162, 16669, 177, 191, 195, 256-69, 270, 337, 342, 351, 354, 355, 364, 374, 379, 397n, 406, 455 James, Henry Sr., 15, 43, 44, 45, 46, 52n, 58, 59, 60, 68, 69, 72, 89n, 212, 214, 220, 398, 399, 415 James, Mary Walsh, 6, 15, 18, 44, 57, 108n, 89n, 138, 389, 406, 407, 414n, 414, 415, 416 James, Robertson, 18, 59, 213 James, Wilkie, 18, 213 James, William, 3, 13, 14, 16, 18, 21n, 34, 41, 42, 48, 49, 50, 53, 54-62, 63, 64, 82, 105, 131, 271, 332, 380, 391, 397n, 400, 405, 406, 407, 414, 415, 416, 453 Jameson, Fredric, 256, 290, 302n, 303 Jay, Martin, 60, 63 Johnson, Samuel, 340, 349 Jolly, Roslyn, 110, 126, 160, 162 Jones, Mary Cadwalader, 284n Joyce, Kirstin, Shellei Addison, and Sumiko Mikimoto, 330n, 332 Judovitz, Dalia, 431n, 432 Kahane, Claire, 223n, 225 Kant, Immanuel, 20, 23, 179, 195, 205, 429 Katz, Philip M., 79, 92 Keats, John, 36 Kendall, Johnson, 112, 124n, 126 Kermode, Frank, 220, 221, 225 Kessner, Thomas, 38n, 39 Knieger, Bernard, 323, 332

Transforming Henry James Krieger, Murray, 129, 143 Krook, Dorothea, 201, 202, 203, 209n, 210 Kubler-Ross, Elizabeth, 168, 177 Kundera, Milan, 221, 222, 225 Kunz, George Frederick, and Charles Hugh Stevenson, 330n, 332 Kurnick, David, 200, 202, 209n, 210, 232, 233, 240n, 241 La Greca, Orazio, and Pierduilio Maravigna, 68, 75 Lacanian Criticism 103-04, 158-60, 258-59, 264-65, 270 Laitinen, Tuomo, 363n, 365 Lamb House, 94, 100-05, 106, 109, 174, 177 Landman, Neil H., Paula M. Mikkelsen, Rüdiger Bieler, and Bennet Bronson, 330n, 332 Lanham, Richard A., 337, 349 Lanier, Henry Wysham, 284n, 285, Lawson, Andrew, 44, 53 Leavis, F. R., 209n, 210 Leavis, Q. D., 320, 332 Lee, Daryl, 80, 89n, 92 Leech, Geoffrey N., and Mick Short, 351, 355, 363n, 365 Lefebvre, Henri, 88n Levenstein, Harvey A., 79, 92 Levin, David Michael, 432 Levinas, Emmanuel, 4, 201, 202, 205, 206, 209n, 210 Levine, George, 290, 303 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 130 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 130 Lichtenberg, Georg Christian, 431n, Lind, Sidney E., 444, 449n, 450 Litvak, Joseph, 132, 143 Lodge, David, 103, 107n, 108, 109, 165, 175n, 177, 401, 402, 413n, 414n, 416 Lowell, Effie, 17 Lowell, James Russell, 12 Lubbock, Percy, 124n, 125, 385, 386, 396, 399

463

Luhmann, Niklas, 297, 303 Lustig, Timothy, 141n, 143 Lyons, William, 56, 63 MacCannell, Dean, 94, 98, 101, 102, 104, 106, 108, 114, 117, 122, 125n, 126, 135, 141n, 143 MacDonald, Bonney, 48, 53, 73, 75 Macmillan (publisher), 383, 387, 388, 389, 393, 394, 395n, 397n, 399 Mamoli Zorzi, Rosella, 3, 73, 75, 284n, 286 Manet, Edouard, 115 Mannoni, Octave, 130, 141n, 142, 143 Margolis, Stacey, 149, 162 Martinez, Carlo, 4, 95, 107n, 108, 141n, 143, 144, 160n, 162 Matthiessen, F. O., 133, 382, 395n, 400 Matz, Jesse, 115, 126 Maupassant, Guy de, 320, 321, 330n Mazzella, Anthony J., 393, 400 McBride, Christine, 6 McCormack, Peggy, 446, 450 McGann, Jerome, 395n, 400 McIntyre, Clara F., 365 McWhirter, David, ix, 3, 126, 162, 233, 241, 319, 332, 399, 454, 455 Mead, George Herbert, 320, 321, 332 Meissner, Collin, 4, 90n, 92 Merrifield, Andrew, 89, 92 Merton, Robert K., 331n, 332 Miano, Giuseppe, 66, 68, 75 Michaels, Walter Benn, 290, 302n, 303 Michelangelo (Michelangelo Buonarroti), 49 Mill, John Stuart, 11 Miller, J. Hillis, 170, 177, 178, 232, 341, 349, 377, 380 Mitchell, Dolores, 281, 286 Mitchell, Lee, 6

464 Mizruchi, Susan L., 231, 240, 241, 348n, 349 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 80 Montesquiou, Robert de, 272, 279 Montgomery, Lomeda, 253, 254 Moses, Omri, 379n, 380 Musset, Alfred de, 80 Nadel, Alan M., 5, 241 Needham, Rodney, 141n, 144 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 206, 207, 431, 432 Nora, Pierre, 88n, 92 Norrman, Ralf, 361, 363n, 365 Norton, Charles Eliot, 12, 16, 60 Norton, Grace, 15, 16, 18, 40, 43, 57, 68, 284n, 390 Norton, Jane, 43, 44 Nowell-Smith, Simon, 384, 400 Nussbaum, Martha, 5, 191, 195 O’Farrell, Mary Ann, 226, 241, 319, 332 O’Rell, Max (Léon Paul Blouet), 20, 23 OED, 340, 349, 405, 409, 412 Ohi, Kevin, 251, 254, 337, 349, 363n, 365, 366, 367, 374-77, 380 Ormond, Leonée, 401, 402, 414n, 416 Ormond, Richard, and Elaine Kilmurray, 271, 286 Osgood, James R., 386, 388, 389, 390, 396n Overstreet, Maryann, and George Yule, 357, 365 Ozick, Cynthia, 84, 92, 165, 175n, 176n, 178 Pana-Oltean, 85, 90n, 92 Parsons, Deborah L., 160n, 162 Pater, Walter, 11 Patton, Paul, 448n, 449n, 450 Pearson, John H, 259, 270 Perry, Ralph Barton, 60, 63 Perry, Thomas Sargeant, 11, 12, 16, 18, 134

Index Person, Leland S., 3, 223n, 225 Peterson, M. Jeanne, 326, 331n, 332 Petrovich Njegosh, Tatiana, 4, 134, 141n, 144 Petty, Leslie, 5 Phelan, James, 363n, 365 Phillips, Adam, 19, 20, 23 Pinker, James B., 386, 387n Poe, Edgar Allan, 149, 162, 444, 453 Polignac, Edmond de, 272, 279 Poole, Adrian, 91, 176n, 178, 209n, 210, 383, 400, 431n, 432 Poovey, Mary, 290, 302n, 303 Posnock, Ross, 57, 59, 61, 62n, 64, 320, 321, 332, 378n, 380, 395n, 396n, 400 Post, Adeline E., 274 Pouillon, Jean, 133, 141n, 144 Powers, Lyall, 22, 53, 179, 195, 260, 261, 269, 443 Priest, J. A., 92 Prince, Gerald Joseph, 352, 363n, 365 Proust, Marcel, 280, 284n, 286, 362 Putt, S. Gorley, 323, 330, 332 Puttenham, George, 337, 349 Ramieri, Anna Maria, 66, 67, 76 Rawlings, Peter, 111, 124n, 126, 127, 178, 320, 323, 333, 345, 348n, 349, 435, 437, 438, 447n, 450, 455 Rawls, Ann Warfield, 320, 333 Reed, Kimberly C., 141n, 142, 452 Reubell, Henrietta, 5, 271-84, 285 Reubell, Jean-Jacques (“Jack”), 274-75 Rich, Adrienne, 214, 216, 217, 225 Richards, Bernard A., 397n, 400 Ricoeur, Paul, 129, 130, 144 Ritchie, Ann Thackeray, 116, 124n Rivkin, Julie, 4, 107n, 141n, 144n, 175n, 178, 200, 209, 210, 228, 230, 231, 240n, 241 Rogers, Mary F., 320, 333 Roosevelt, Theodore, 19, 20, 23

Transforming Henry James Rosenthal, Naomi, 244, 245, 254 Ross, Kristin, 89n, 92 Ross, Melanie H., 6, 161, 447n, 450 Ross, Morton L., 95, 107n Rothenstein, William, 273, 276, 277, 280, 281, 283, 284n, 286 Rowe, John Carlos, 141n, 144 Rubery, Matthew, 160n, 162 Ruskin, John, 11, 29, 30, 139 Ryan, Marie-Laure, 348n, 349 Saghafi, Kas, 441, 450 Saint Anthony of Padua, 140, 141 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustine de, 11 Salmon, Richard, 151, 152, 160n, 162, 439, 443, 447n, 448n, 450 Saltz, Laura, 445, 447n, 450 Samuels, Charles T., 269n, 270 Sand, George, 129, 165 Sargent, John Singer, 271, 272, 276, 277, 278, 279, 281, 283, 285, 286, 452 Satta, Gino, 140, 144 Savoy, Eric, 272, 286 Schaper, Eva, 129, 144 Scherzinger, Karen, 103, 109 Schwarzschild, Edward L., 447n, 450 Scott, Rebekah, 431n Scribner’s (publisher), 381, 382, 383, 388, 389, 393, 396n Sears, Sallie, 269n, 270 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 5, 77, 221, 225, 242, 243, 253n, 254n, 254, 266, 270 Seltzer, Mark, 83, 448n, 450 Shaer, Matthew, 84, 92 Shakespeare, William, 94, 100, 103, 107, 171, 172, 173, 174, 177n, 325, 408, 414, 420, 424, 427, 433, 455 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 381 Shen, Dan, 365 Shine, Muriel, 317n, 318 Sica, Paolo, 65, 66, 68, 76 Silverman, Kaja, 408, 409, 416

465

Simon, Linda, 55, 64 Smith, Gregory W. H., 330, 333 Smith, Irena Auerbuch, 365 Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, 216, 217, 223n, 224n, 225 Sonstegard, Adam, 447n, 450 Sperber, Dan, 130, 144 Spina, Jay, and Joseph, 396n Stansell, Christine, 275, 286 Stanzel, Franz Karl, 350, 365 Stein, Gertrude, 107, 272, 273, 274, 275 Stern-Gillet, Suzanne, 194n, 195 Stevens, Hugh, 161n, 162, 223n, 225 Story, William Wetmore, 44 Stougaard-Nielsen, Jakob, 112, 127, 447n, 450 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 131 Strouse, Jean, 75, 224, 406, 407, 416 Summers, David, 429, 432 Sutliffe, Albert, 274, 286 Syrjamaa, Tania, 71, 76 Tanner, Tony, 75, 95, 107n, 172, 178 Tate, Carolyn, 243, 245, 251, 253n, 255 Tate, Cassandra, 280, 286 Taylor, Andrew, 223n, 224n Taylor, Charles, 425, 432 Taylor, Eugene, 62, 64 Teahan, Sheila, 6, 237, 240n, 241, 376, 380 Temple, Mary (Minny), 10, 11, 18, 191n, 397n Tennant, Emma, 107n Terrie, Henry, 323, 330n, 333 Terry, Ellen, 277 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 72, 129 Thomas, William B., 350, 365 Thomas, William Isaac, and Dorothy Swaine Thomas, 333 Thoreau, Henry David, Thorne, Alison, 431n, 433

466 Tintner, Adeline R., 431n, 433 Todorov, Tzvetan, 353, 365 Tóibín, Colm, 94, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 109, 165, 175n, 176n, 178, 362, 365 Torsney, Cheryl B., 291, 292, 303 Trask, Michael, 232, 233, 240n, 241 Trollope, Anthony, 339, 348, 141n Tully, Baron de, 274, 286 Turgenev, Ivan, 41 Twain, Mark, 110, 127 Urry, John, 94, 102, 107n, 109, 116, 117, 127 Valsiner, Jaan, 62, 64 Van Leer, David, 216, 223n, 225 Van Winkle, Edgar, 13 Vastolo, Manuela, 6 Veeder, William, 21n, 23 Veneziano, Domenico, 27 Verhaeghe, Paul, 258, 267, 270 Vesely, Dalibor, 428, 433 Viti, Elizabeth Richardson, 284n, 286 Voss, Arthur, 330, 333 Wagenknecht, Edward, 323, 333 Wakana, Maya Higashi, 6, 333 Walker, Pierre A., 2, 5, 11, 22, 40, 53, 62n, 63, 75, 79, 91, 92, 143, 180, 192n, 224, 285 Walkowitz, Rebecca L., 20, 23 Walsh, Catherine (Aunt Kate), 45 Walters, Margaret, 200, 208, 210 Warhol, Robyn, 294, 303 Watt, Ian, 363n, 365 Weld, Mary, 406

Index Wharton, Edith, 139, 179, 180, 195, 240, 241, 284n, 456 Whistler, James McNeill, 274, 276, 280, 284n Whitman, Walt, 46, 48, 57 Wilde, Oscar, 100, 161n, 196, 272, 279, 280, 283 Williams, Merle A., 4, 209, 210, 239, 241 Wilson, Edmund, 209n, 210 Wister, Owen, 216, 224n Wister, Sarah Butler, 44, 79, 92, 216, 224n Wolkenstein, Julie, 90n, 92 Woolf, Virginia, 20, 23 Woolson, Constance Fenimore, 102, 108n, 191n, 250, 252, 254n Wyckoff, Albert, 21n Yablon, Nick, 78, 92 Yates, Edmund Hodgson, 125n, 127 Yeazell, Ruth Bernard, 365, 377, 380 Young, Robert E., 395n, 400 Zacharias, Greg W., 2, 11, 22, 40, 53, 62n, 63, 75, 89n, 91, 92, 143, 161, 180, 192n, 285, 407, 446, 450, 455, 456 Zemgulys, Andrea, 177n, 178 Zhukovsky, Paul, 271 Žižek, Slavoj, 5, 155, p156-159, 161n, 162, 256, 259, 264-66, 268, 270 Zucconi, Guido, 65, 74n, 76 Zwinger, Lynda, 304, 318