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Henry James was one of America's foremost novelists, essayists, and men of letters although he spent most of his adult life abroad and died a naturalized English subject. Indeed, his career reflects the transformation of American literature from an insular, isolated tradition founded in rebellious but dependent relation to its British progenitors to a cosmopolitan one connected to the broadest currents of modern thought of England and Europe. But James did more than supervise the internationalization of American letters. He expanded the range of formal and thematic possibility for both his contemporaries and his successors. In a career spanning almost forty years of intense productivity, James helped reshape the novel into a vehicle of high aesthetic ambitions, experimented with form and technique in audaciously productive ways, and wrote some of the most adventuresome literary criticism of his or any time. Thematically, his work registered with precision the transformations of American as well as English society: the rise of a new upwardly mobile class steeping themselves in the culture of the Old World to provide a rootedness their home denied them; the metamorphoses of gender and the complexities of sexual and family life that followed from them; the consequences of America's ascendancy to a new kind of capitalist power in a world where previous formations seemed attenuated, anachronistic, or corrupt. To read James, then, is to encounter this paradox: this writer who reshaped the very notion of his medium so that it became increasingly hermetic, elite, and self-referential reflected with the utmost alertness the radically reshaping world he faced. James helped bring into American letters the model of modernism—of the artist devoting himself to his high vocation with intense absorption and passion—while registering the making of the modern.
The Making of a Novelist
To understand both sides of James's role, it is crucial to understand his extraordinary family. James's grandfather, William James Sr., was an Irish Presbyterian immigrant who made a fortune in various speculations, the most crucial of which was real estate in upstate New York at the time of its opening via the Erie Canal: among other things, he owned the swampy land on which Syracuse, New York, was to be built. His father, Henry James Sr., broke his disapproving father's restrictive will and was endowed with an unencumbered fortune worth millions of dollars in current terms, at a time before income or inheritance taxes. Henry Sr. was able, therefore, to devote himself to his interests in the mystical teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg and the education of his five children: Henry, born in New York City on 15 April 1843; his older brother, William; and his younger siblings, Garth Wilkinson (Wilky), Robertson, and Alice. Indeed, the two projects often seemed identical. As Henry Jr. put it, "what we were to do…was just to be something, something unconnected with specific doing": the same perfection of the spirit he sought in Swedenborg was what the older Henry James hoped to create in his children. To this end, the children were educated by a succession of tutors and in a number of schools, both in New York and abroad during the family's extended trips to England, France, Germany, and Switzerland. The results of the elder James's experiments were mixed. On the one hand, the James family was scored by recurrent bouts of depression, alcoholism, and self-destructive behavior of various sorts, particularly among the three younger siblings. On the other, it produced not only one of America's foremost novelists but also, in William, one of its greatest philosophers and theorists of psychology, and in Alice, the author of a diary of such power that it is regularly taught both as a primary document of nineteenth-century women's experience and as a compelling piece of writing in its own right.
By virtue of his family and its remarkable freedoms, both financial and existential, a young novelist was formed. Endowed with a remarkably wide-ranging set of experiences on both sides of the Atlantic, and liberated from what one of his characters was to call "the very mill of the conventional," superbly connected to the American literary establishment of his time—Emerson was a family friend, as were James Russell Lowell and Charles Eliot Norton, and on his first independent tour of England, James hobnobbed with Ruskin, Rossetti, and George Eliot—James self-consciously set out, from an early age, to devote himself to a literary career. To be sure, he had to face practical exigencies, but a year at Harvard Law School at the age of nineteen cured him of erring too far in that direction. Instead, he profited from his family connections to place journalism and reviews in the toniest of American journals, such as the Atlantic Monthly and the North American Review (many of which were reprinted in a book of essays, Transatlantic Sketches, in 1875), while he set out, in a fairly deliberate manner, to teach himself the craft of writing. His early stories, among them The Romance of Certain Old Clothes (1868) and Professor Fargo (1874), are best read as five-finger exercises in the most powerful available fictional idioms, including melodrama, ghost stories, and the work of Hawthorne, about whom James was to write a famously misleading biographical sketch in 1879. An early novel, Watch and Ward (1871), also was also published in the Atlantic, and announced James's interest in the refiguring of sexual relations in an era of changing conventions of courtship. It prefigured as well James's careerlong suspicion of sexual passion and the institution of the nuclear family; the eponymous ward, Nora Lambert, is watched over from the age of twelve by Roger Lawrence, who raises her to be his bride when she reaches the age of maturity; although numerous (and often ludicrous) plot complications intervene, his plan ultimately comes to fruition.
But it was in 1875, when he began serializing his first major novel, Roderick Hudson, and 1876, when The American appeared—the first novel deemed worthy by James of entry into his collected works, the so-called New York Edition—that James fully emerged as a major new talent on the fictional scene. Both of these works delineate preoccupations that would recur throughout James's career. Roderick Hudson, for example, brings James's careerlong self-consciousness about the making of his craft together with a narrative of spectatorship that also would repeat itself throughout in his career. The first is represented by the American sculptor, Roderick, a beautiful young man in love with both his artistic potential and the innocent young Mary Garland. The second is embodied by Roderick's friend and patron, Rowland Mallet, who both observes and maddeningly monitors Roderick's productivity, progress (or lack thereof), and love life, especially after Roderick pursues his art to Europe and begins to dally with a seductive American émigré, Christina Light, now the Princess Casamassima. Roderick's career—and life—end disastrously, his career in a creative block that is not helped by Rowland's incessant exhortations to produce, and his life in a ghastly objectification of that block: his body is recovered after an ill-advised, and quite possibly suicidal, hike on a glacier.
The American announces James's pursuit of what F. O. Matthiessen (1944) called the International Theme—and what James's contemporary Mark Twain called, in the book of that name, the matter of "Innocents Abroad." The innocent in this case is a prepossessingly handsome American millionaire resonantly named Christopher Newman; in Paris on a European tour, he meets and becomes romantically entangled with a gorgeous widow, Claire de Cintré, née Bellegarde, to whom he proposes over the opposition of her elder brother, Urbain, but with the encouragement of her younger brother, Valentin, and who initially accepts his proposal. Simultaneously, Newman finds himself emotionally engaged with a poor but crooked family of copyists; as a result of his multiple attachments, his friend Valentin is killed in a duel. Claire de Cintré retreats to a convent, and ultimately Newman learns the truth of her family history: her mother had killed her father and conspired with Urbain to cover up the crime. Shocked and disillusioned, he destroys the letter that tells him of the family secret and prepares to leave Paris forever, a sadder but presumably wiser man.
Many of James's most crucial themes—the conflict between a too innocent American protagonist and an attenuated, corrupt Europe—are present, in undeveloped form, in The American. So, too, is his play with genre: the novel moves from a comic mode of cross-cultural misunderstanding into a romantic melodrama worthy of Balzac or Hawthorne, James's most pressing precursor (The Marble Faun, too, has dark women concealing murderous pasts and an oppressive Catholic establishment bedeviling clueless Americans). The novel was received with respect, but a certain degree of confusion, upon its serialization and publication in 1876–1877. But James's next reworking of that theme, his novella Daisy Miller (1878), earned him what he wanted most: praise and public attention. Indeed, for this young novelist eager to establish himself as an independent professional, Daisy Miller provided everything he could have wished—except the financial windfall he felt he deserved.
What James did in the novella was to recast The American scenario with a beautiful young woman, Daisy Miller, in the place of Christopher Newman; simultaneously he imported, from Roderick Hudson, the figure of the detached, repressed, and repressive observer, whom he here calls Winterbourne. The two meet in a Swiss resort that "assumes…some of the characteristics of an American watering-place"; the charming appearance of this young woman from Schenectady captures the eye of this bachelor with –a great relish for feminine beauty.– He is impressed, too, by her refusal to follow the conventions governing young, unmarried women—Daisy travels to the Castle of Chillon with Winterbourne, for example, without any chaperone. Following her to Rome, he observes her increasingly shocking conduct, climaxing with a late-night visit to the Coliseum with a disreputable if charming Italian, Giovanelli. Having contracted malaria at that pestilential spot, Daisy dies, and chilly Winterbourne is left to ponder the tragic gap between her fresh American innocence and a diseased, pestilential Europe—and to avoid thinking about his own emotional detachment from this flirtatious, but ultimately innocent, young woman.
Published first in the Cornhill Magazine and then simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic, Daisy Miller sparked an enormous controversy, for it was perfectly timed to speak to issues increasingly at the center of the educated middle classes in both England and America. Contesting both American ideas about the Old World and Old World notions of the American, the novella also brought to the fore the figure of the so-called "American girl"—the innocent ingenue who questions the conventions of gender and sexuality that were increasingly the focus of public concern in both arenas. But because of the lack of an international copyright law, James realized next to nothing on his own notoriety, setting the stage for a series of frustrated engagements with the increasingly remunerative, but increasingly selective, mass market of his era. Shaking off his financial disappointment, James rapidly produced a charming study in his newly minted vein of cross-cultural misunderstanding, The Europeans (1878), and wrote his massively misleading essay on Hawthorne, one of the clearest exemplifications of Harold Bloom's notion of the anxiety of influence that literary history affords us. As numerous critics have shown us—Richard Brodhead (1986) is the most recent and the best of them—Hawthorne is everywhere in James's writing, from the earliest stories to the Marble Faun-like Prince of The Golden Bowl. Yet in his biographical essay, James adopts a superior tone toward his precursor, decrying the limitations of American life that afflicted him and damning The Scarlet Letter with faint praise, finding it inferior to a minor English romance, Lockhart's Adam Blair.
Struggles with influence of a different sort are discernible in James's infamous catalog of the things that were missing in Hawthorne's America—and by implication in James's own: "No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities, nor public schools—no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class—no Epsom nor Ascot!" The passage was calculated to infuriate James's countrymen; and it did. What they missed was not only James's tone, designed, as Richard Poirier (1960) observed, to parody the tone of the upper-class English twit James was taken to be, but also his sense of the imaginative possibilities that the American scene afforded. "The American knows that a good deal remains; what it is that remains—that is his secret, his joke, as one may say," James's passage enigmatically concludes. Although James was to move to England permanently, returning to America only in 1882–1883 and again in 1904–1905, his work never lost this dual sense of his native country as a land of boundless imaginative possibility, not despite but because of its relative lack of history and culture.
Achievement and Experiment: The First Major Phase
In 1880, James began a novel that translated his concerns—the collision between rootless Americans and overcivilized Europeans, new possibilities of gender identity, the consolations of detached, almost voyeuristic observation—into an entirely new register. This novel, The Portrait of a Lady (1881), was his first great achievement, and one of the finest novels of the nineteenth century. Like most of James's fiction of the 1870s, and the majority of his writing for the rest of his career, Portrait focuses on a group of expatriate Americans in England and Europe. Leisured, cultured, but just a bit bored, Daniel Touchett and his son Ralph are idly passing their time at Daniel's country estate, Gardencourt, but find themselves reenergized when Daniel's all but estranged wife, Lydia, brings with her to England her niece, a beautiful and enthusiastic orphan named Isabel Archer. Isabel is everything these men are not: lively, enthusiastic, and alert, she is a less flirtatious, more thoughtful version of Daisy Miller. But this American Girl, too, has the resistance to convention that both marks the type and makes its fate so problematic; when her Aunt Lydia reproaches her for staying up late to talk to Ralph and his friend, Lord Warburton, Isabel thanks her for informing her of the social prohibition but claims that she wants this knowledge only "so as to choose" whether to follow it.
Despite, or perhaps because of, this very American insistence on freedom of choice, Isabel attracts one suitor after another: first Lord Warburton; then her American swain, the practical-minded Caspar Goodwood; then, ambivalently and perhaps unknown to himself, the invalid Ralph. The last of these, immured in the characteristically Jamesian position of detached watching, nevertheless actively intervenes in Isabel's life, convincing his father to leave her a considerable fortune in his will, so as, in his own words, to "meet the requirements of her imagination"—and his own. This fairy-tale–like bequest, however, leads to disaster. Falling under the influence of yet another expatriate American, Madame Merle, Isabel is maneuvered into marrying an indolent aesthete, Gilbert Osmond, a widower raising his charming young daughter, Pansy, in Florence. Isabel soon is forced to realize her mistake: Osmond, far from being "the man with the best taste in the world," is a thinly disguised fortune hunter, one who seeks dominion over Isabel's life and Pansy's even as he uses his fortune to achieve the worldly status that he has always craved. And worse: Isabel learns that her best friend, Madame Merle, had been his lover in the distant past and is the mother of Pansy. Shocked at the duplicity with which she has been surrounded, the no longer innocent Isabel defies her husband's hypocritical invocation of Old World proprieties ("I'm not conventional, I'm convention itself," he tells her) and visits Ralph on his deathbed. Her rejected suitor, Caspar Goodwood, visits her after Ralph's funeral and urges her to flee with him from her dead marriage, but—in one of American literature's most famous and most vexing conclusions—she flees from his passionate kiss, back to Rome, presumably to keep her promise to aid Pansy's efforts not to be crushed by the iron will of her father. The novel ends without any definitive conclusion—with Isabel's friend, Henrietta Stackpole, urging Caspar to follow her yet again.
Portrait is a virtuoso performance. Generically, it ranges from the classic nineteenth-century idiom of Jane Austen and George Eliot to sheer melodrama and even the ghost story (after Ralph dies, Isabel thinks she sees him as the ghost of Gardencourt), invoking along the way the wish-fulfillment energies of romance and placing them in dialogue with the disenchanting logic of the realistic novel. More important, it engages in remarkable experimentation with time and perspective. Not only does it end with a famously open conclusion, but the novel's plot contains a gaping hole about two-thirds of the way through the volume. The reader witnesses, in sequential order, the events leading from Isabel's arrival in England to just before her fateful marriage to Osmond, but then James skips eventful years of her life before resuming the story, in medias res for a second time. Long passages in the novel, moreover, are placed within the perspective of individual characters, none more striking than in chapter 42, in which a married Isabel, having witnessed her husband and Madame Merle in a position of silent communion betokening an unexpected intimacy, muses all night in front of a fire. Giving us for the first time Isabel's own account of her marriage as she reviews, reassesses, and revises her own attitudes toward it, the passage is a bravura performance, dense with brilliant figurations as it performs the remarkably complicated task of showing a character mentally reworking the process by which she came to be deceived—in part by her husband, in part by her own idealizations and illusions. As such, it serves not only as a remarkable piece of writing in its own right, but also (as Laurence Holland [1972] powerfully argued) a model for James's own art of representation. For throughout his career, he not only revisited his characteristic themes, situations, and obsessions (the plot of Portrait, for example, is reshuffled, with quite different ends, in his late novel The Golden Bowl, 1904), but also systematically rewrote his own fictions in the same way Isabel reviews her own life, most powerfully in the massive effort of revision that constitutes the late New York Edition of his collected works.
In Portrait, in other words, James reaches for what is to become his hallmark contributions to American letters: the collapse between the act of narration and that of interpretation, the insistence on the importance of perspective and perception in the making of meaning, and the conjunction between all of these ideas in the reshaping of literary form. All of these are perceptions that we might associate with subsequent fiction-making—with that of the modernist or even the postmodern novel. And all are notions that circulated in James's own moment. The pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, whose understandings of signification and the aesthetic are cognate to James's, for example, was an acquaintance of Henry James in Paris during the 1870s, and many of the experiments in form that James brought to fruition are on display in the self-conscious fiction of the philosophically inclined George Eliot, which James read and admired as it emerged. Indeed, one of James's most important functions as a writer and a critic is to serve as a relay between different models of cultural and literary practice—to bring the advanced intellectual culture of England and the Continent to the attention of an eager but provincial American audience. He served this role not only with respect to Eliot and English culture, but also, and perhaps more importantly, with that of France. James brought the novels and aesthetic doctrines of De Maupassant, Zola, Balzac, and a host of others to the attention of literary America through the voluminous criticism, short and long, that he published throughout his career. And he vividly argued in works like the crucial 1884 essay The Art of Fiction for the proposition that prose fiction was as highly wrought an art as lyric or epic—a proposition that his own highly experimental fiction and his lifelong dedication to his art vividly instantiated.
James's work becomes, in this period, strikingly speculative with respect to the questions of gender. As its title indicates, for example, The Portrait of a Lady centers on the representation of female identity under rapidly changing social circumstances: it foregrounds the process by which Isabel is "framed," in all senses of that word, not only by those who seek to constrict her, like the pestiferous aesthete Osmond, but also by the benign Ralph, who imagines her, in a crucial passage, as a fine "Titian" or a beautiful building, or by the author himself. The open ending of the novel, however, suggests that James wishes to grant her the possibilities of escaping from those aestheticizing constructions, even if it means returning to her oppressive marriage, albeit as an advocate for her stepdaughter Pansy.
No such surcease is granted the heroine of James's next major fiction, The Bostonians (1886), produced after his first visit to America in a decade and, James wrote, "a very American tale." In this novel, the woman in question, Verena Tarrant, is no "lady," but rather the daughter of a shady mesmerist and medium; when put in trance by her father, Selah, Verena discourses with spectacular eloquence. She is taken up by a circle of Boston feminists, especially by Olive Chancellor, the erotic quality of whose passion for Verena is barely concealed by the author. She is simultaneously wooed by Olive's cousin Basil Ransom, a Southerner living in the city of abolitionists, who wins her away from Olive—but, one senses at the end of the novel, at the cost of constricting her scope of possibilities and happiness. Despite its brilliant style, The Bostonians is one of James's grimmest tales. Love of all sorts—parental, heterosexual, lesbian—is equated with possession; Basil's elopement with Verena parodies a knight's rescue in romance but reads more like rape. Olive ends the novel heartbroken, and Verena enters a "union so far from brilliant," crying tears that were, the narrator predicts, "not the last she was destined to shed." While this downbeat conclusion evidences James's interest in reproducing, on an Anglo-American medium, the effects of the French realist fiction he had been reading and writing about (the plot is borrowed from Alphonse Daudet's L'Évangeliste), it nevertheless failed to win the approval of the press or the public. Indeed, the predominant response to the novel not only among critics, but by James's often critical brother William, was outrage at his irreverent treatment of Boston transcendentalist and suffragette circles—this despite the fact that the most affectionately portrayed character in the book, Miss Birdseye, was a thinly disguised portrait of the New England luminary Elizabeth Peabody (sister-in-law of both Hawthorne and Horace Mann).
The relative failure of The Bostonians was followed by the greater failure of James's next major fiction, The Princess Casamassima (1886). Set in contemporary London and written in the currently popular naturalist mode (with a bow to Dickens), the novel focuses on one of James's few lower-class characters—albeit the illegitimate son of a British aristocrat: the bookbinder Hyacinth Robinson. Caught up in an anarchist conspiracy, but drawn away from it by the beautiful Christina Light (the eponymous princess of the title and, of course, Roderick Hudson's femme fatale), Hyacinth is torn between his politics and his love of art and the fine things of the world, a conflict so grievous that he finally kills himself rather than choose between them. The inconclusiveness and generic shifts of the novel disappointed critics and the reading public alike, as did James's next major fiction, The Tragic Muse (1890). There, too, the conflict between a commitment to the public and the aesthetic spheres is central; it is played out in the divided consciousness of Nick Dormer, a young man with a promising future in Parliament who also wishes to devote himself to a career as a portrait painter—a devotion to art that, as in Casamassima, is registered in Nick's attraction to an exotic woman, in this case, the maniacally focused Jewess Miriam Rooth, who transforms herself from an unpromising ingenue to the Tragic Muse of the title.
Terminations and New Beginnings
If, after the success of the early 1880s, James's novelistic career had turned sour by the end of that decade, he responded with characteristic forthrightness by turning to a different medium: the theater. Theatrical representation had always been of powerful interest to James; in his autobiography, he recounts that one of his earliest and most powerful memories was of witnessing a performance of the stage adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and moments in his earlier fiction, especially The American and Portrait of a Lady, are resolutely melodramatic. Now, he began explicitly writing for the stage: a version of The American met with minor success in 1890, and, encouraged, James threw himself into a new career as a playwright, climaxing with Guy Domville (1894). An unfriendly audience reception at the London premiere—James was called onto the stage but booed—failed to make up for the respectful reviews. The fact that Oscar Wilde's Importance of Being Earnest opened at the same theater immediately after Domville closed, and won precisely the plaudits James yearned for, added to his bitterness. Humiliated and depressed, James turned his back on the medium to which he had devoted the past five years of his life.
With characteristic fortitude, however, James entered the most productive period of his long career. Although he published two books with the revealing titles of Terminations (1895) and Embarrassments (1896), they contained a number of remarkable stories, including The Middle Years, The Death of the Lion, and The Figure in the Carpet, in which James is concerned with representation as such, and its relation to the disenchanted and disenchanting world of the enlarging but erratic fin-de-siècle marketplace. Perhaps even more revealing of his mood at this time is a story titled "The Next Time," in which a superbly gifted writer attempts to pander to a mass audience, but repeatedly fails to produce anything short of a masterpiece, which wins him only further neglect. Despite this sense of career deadlock—or perhaps because of it—James's experiments in form became increasingly audacious. He began writing short novels—The Spoils of Poynton (1897), What Maisie Knew (1897), The Awkward Age (1899)—and elongated short stories, such as In the Cage (1898). These works show the impress of his experiments in the theater; particularly in Maisie and The Awkward Age, long passages of dialogue are starkly juxtaposed with passages of focused description and minute interpretation, creating an effect at once intensely dramatic and strikingly stylized.
His characteristic themes undergo a similar metamorphosis. Many of the works of this period take the perspectivism of his earlier work and combine it with his growing concern with the vicissitudes of hidden, sexual knowledge, and push both further, giving us a world of sexual conspiracy rendered in the consciousness of a switchboard operator (In the Cage) or an innocent child being used as a pawn in a vicious divorce case (Maisie) or an innocent adolescent facing a sexually corrupt marriage market (The Awkward Age). Perhaps the most impressive example of these tendencies is The Turn of the Screw (1898), which, published in Collier's and reissued in book form, provided him with his biggest success since the early 1880s. The tale is narrated by a repressed and obsessed governess who becomes convinced that her two young charges have been possessed by the spirits of two departed, and highly eroticized, servants; restricted to her consciousness, it can be read either as a tragic ghost story, in which that act of possession ultimately kills one of her charges, or as a tale of obsessional madness, in which she creates out of her own hysterical monomania the possession scenario, then frightens one of the children to death with it.
The fictions of the 1890s also bring to the fore a concern with male-male relations—sometimes rivalrous, sometimes eroticized, sometimes both—that had always been implicit, and became more explicit, in James's fiction. James's stories of the era, such as The Pupil (1891) and The Lesson of the Master (1892), focus, with effects ranging from the sentimental to the ironic, on intensely felt relations between authoritative older men and admiring younger ones. Such a concern is correlated with James's increasingly close emotional relationships with younger men, especially the sculptor Hendrik Andersen, to whom he was passionately devoted in precisely this period. Biographers have argued incessantly about the exact nature of James's relations with these younger men, to little effect. But clearly such relations are reflected throughout James's work not only in persistent thematics in which erotic intensities recur between older and younger men but also in the increasingly prominent scenes (most pronounced in The Ambassadors [1903] and The Sacred Fount [1901]) in which men watch, with avid fascination not unmixed with jealousy, other men desire women.
The Major Phase
The brilliant experiments of the fin de siècle also usher in James's greatest sustained era of creativity, a period between 1900 and 1905 called by F. O. Matthiessen the Major Phase. The great novels of this period—The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Golden Bowl (1904)—and the lesser but still fascinating accomplishments, such as James's memoir of his 1904–1905 tour of America, The American Scene (1907), or his fascinatingly odd experiment in narration-as-monomania, The Sacred Fount—are all marked by a distinctive style that became James's hallmark, to the frustration of his public (expressed with the greatest of eloquence by his hypercritical brother William). Narrative in these texts is obliquely represented, usually filtered through the central consciousness of a character or characters, who tell or retell the stories that compose James's plot as they struggle to figure out the motives behind the oblique behavior of individual characters. Descriptive passages are dense with figuration, profusely elaborated: an extended comparison between Maggie Verver's sense of her marital condition and a pagoda in The Golden Bowl goes on for several pages. Often, to add to their complexity, these passages are tied to the consciousness of individual characters, and frequently to their experience of art works: Lambert Strether of The Ambassadors spends a summer afternoon in the country and imagines himself in a painting by Emile Lambinet, a minor French landscape painter; Milly Theale of The Wings of the Dove looks at a painting of a young woman by the Florentine mannerist Bronzino and realizes her own mortality. Yet underneath this dense proliferation of figure and refined references to cultural and aesthetic artifacts lie plots worthy of the popular novels or melodramas James both abhorred and adored: stories of adultery, sexual passion, double-dealing, conspiracy. The effect is as remarkable as it is idiosyncratic, rendering for us a world whose surface is as opaque as its depths are passionate.
Although the second written of the "major phase" novels, The Ambassadors was the first published, and in many ways is the most formally perfect novel of James's career; certainly James thought so, calling it in his 1909 preface to the New York Edition of the novel "frankly, quite the best, 'all round,' of all my productions." It follows the story of Lambert Strether, a middle-aged American dispatched to Paris by his indefatigable American fiancée, Mrs. Newsome, to retrieve her son Chad from what seems to be the clutches of an older woman, in order to return to the family business. On his way, Strether meets an American expatriate, Maria Gostrey, who serves as his guide to the Old World, and an old American friend, Waymarsh, who is gradually converted from a strenuous Puritanism to the ease of Parisian life. In Paris, he searches out Chad, meeting along the way a young artist, John Little Bilham, who helps put him in touch with Chad; meeting the object of his quest, he discovers him much improved over his callow American self. And he soon meets and admires the woman with whom Chad is involved, Jeanne de Vionnet, the estranged wife of a decadent aristocrat. Although the situation seems to be rife with sexual possibilities, everyone Strether meets assures him that Chad is striving to do the right thing—that, as Little Bilham puts it, "he wants to be free but he isn't used…to being good"—and that he and Madame Vionnet are just friends—that theirs is, as Strether comes to believe, a "virtuous attachment." (Little Bilham even hints that Chad's true interest is in Madame de Vionnet's daughter, to whom Little Bilham ends up attached at the end of the novel.)
Not noticing, or perhaps not caring, that all of these avowals are couched in highly ambiguous terms, Strether begins to enjoy Paris, a city he had loved when he visited it with his long-deceased wife. So much is he under its spell that at a garden party at the home of a Whistler-like painter, Gloriani, he urges Little Bilham to "live all you can; it's a mistake not to." Sensing his dereliction of duty, Mrs. Newsome sends out new representatives, the comically named Pococks, to succeed where Strether, clearly, has failed. To escape the censorious Pococks and the Parisian muddle, Strether sets out to enjoy a perfect day in the country—only to encounter, while boating on the Seine, Chad and Madame de Vionnet sharing an unspoken closeness that betokens, for Strether, "the deep, deep truth of the intimacy revealed." Recognizing that he has been gulled, he returns to Paris, ultimately to plead Madame de Vionnet's case to Chad—who, his adventure having been completed, is preparing to leave for a future career in advertising. Strether prepares to return home as well, to face the wrath of Mrs. Newsome, renouncing the life of abundant sensations he has rediscovered in Paris and spurning Maria Gostrey, who has subtly but effectively made clear her affections for him.
The Ambassadors is a brilliantly comic novel, relying on the narrative method—its restriction to the consciousness of Lambert Strether—to generate an accumulation of ironies in its reckoning of the gap between his "too interpretative innocence" and the realities of passion and betrayal that govern the Parisian world. When Strether first encounters Paris, he compares it to a brilliantly shimmering gem in which "what seemed all surface one moment seemed all depth the next": Strether consistently confuses the two, seeing only the superficial sense of the words that his friends use to euphemize Chad's situation, not pausing to probe their implications, assess their omissions, judge them in strategic context. When Little Bilham says, of Chad, "he isn't used to being so good," we are in a position to note the qualifications implicit in both the verb and the adjective—the implication that he may not be able to achieve his aspiration, and the sense that the aspiration itself is cloaked in ambiguity: Does "good" mean chaste? Or compassionate—is he letting Madame de Vionnet down easily while preparing to return home? Or something else entirely? Similar ambiguities pervade the catchphrase "virtuous attachment": that first word of course again can be taken in the sense of chaste or in that of honest or in that of sincere or even in its etymological sense of powerful, manly; and the second can denote just about any kind of intimate relationship imaginable. Seeing depths where Strether sees surfaces, witnessing his attempts to interpret emotions and attachments that are literally out of his depth, the reader is invited to celebrate a comic sense of superiority to poor Strether, so much so that when his disillusionment comes, it is, or ought to be, no surprise to us.
Yet underneath that comic sense of superiority there is, or ought to be, a sense of the stakes that inhere in his experiences there, a sense frequently conveyed in the metaphors by which the narrative is structured. For contained within Strether's own interior monologue is a series of figures that, rather than euphemize, exaggerate the effects of the events he is witnessing. Under the question of Chad's behavior, he senses "violence," savagery; when he speaks to Madame de Vionnet after it has become clear that Chad is abandoning her, he mentally compares her to the aristocratic Madame de Roland, being led off to execution during the French Revolution. "He had ranged himself," Strether concludes in a post office where he imagines the women around him "arranging, pretexting goodness knew what," "on the side of the fierce, the sinister, the acute." Strether's visions may be hyperbolic and melodramatic, an imaginary by-product of the conjunction between his Puritanism and Paris. But they lend an important moral weight to the novel by suggesting that the realm of manners and intimate relations is as full of cruelty, violence, and passion as the public sphere of war, social conflict, and revolution. And they lend as well a greater weight to his own seeming idealizations. Strether's Lambinet-inflected day in the country, for example, reminds us of the powers as well as the deficiencies of his vision: if, like Ralph Touchett, Strether makes the fatal mistake of confusing art and life, he does so in the service of a vision that sees the world as a better place than it truly is. And if his renunciation of Maria and return to a clearly irate Mrs. Newsome seem unnecessarily self-punishing, his desire not to gain personally from his experience in Paris contrasts appealingly with what comes to seem, by the end of the novel, Chad's appalling selfishness.
The same process—the discovery of a hidden, primal drama beneath the glittering surface of the social, and the quest to transcend them—becomes James's chief subject in the rest of the novels of the Major Phase, and James is capable of running an enormous number of changes on these themes. The former is, for example, the parodic subject of his extraordinary jeu d'esprit, the short novel The Sacred Fount, which represents the other side of Strether's trial by consciousness, and makes explicit the links between voyeurism, vicariousness, and masochism that are implicit in Strether's more delicate behavior. The nameless narrator of The Sacred Fount finds himself obsessed with the idea that every relationship around him is a form of vampirism—that the vital energies of one partner wax while those of the other wane. He attempts to interpret the couples around him in an English country house according to this theory, ultimately sharing it with his interlocutor, Mrs. Brissenden, who tells him that he is mad. As indeed he is—but not without conveying, in his very hyperbolic insanity, brutal truths about the exploitative power struggles that constitute the world James's characters inhabit.
Exploitation of a different sort is the basis of the plot (again, in all senses of that word) of The Wings of the Dove. There, a beautiful, young, rich, orphaned heiress, Milly Theale—mortally ill with some unspecified disease—meets an impecunious but commanding young woman, Kate Croy, whose father, Lionel, has lost his fortune and social standing under suspicious but unspecified circumstances. Kate is in love with the charming but idle Merton Densher. Lacking the funds to marry, Kate hatches a scheme: Merton will woo and then marry Milly, then inherit her fortune when she dies. He agrees—asking her to seal the deal by sleeping with him—and the plot seems to be going well until, in a moment in Venice, Merton realizes that one of his rivals, Lord Mark, has revealed Kate's love for Merton to Milly, and that she has banned him from her house. The tragedy, combined with her illness, deals Milly a fatal blow; but when she dies, she nevertheless leaves her fortune to Merton, who falls in love with the beauty and generosity of her memory. Almost sadistically, he turns to Kate to offer her a choice: either he will accept the money, in which case he cannot marry her, or he will marry her, in which case he cannot accept the money. The novel ends with a haunting moment in which Densher poses Kate his impossible choice: "I'll marry you, mind you, in an hour." "As we were?" "As we were?" [she asked]. "As we were." But she turned to the door, and her head shake was now the end. "We shall never be again as we were!"
Wings, like its successor The Golden Bowl, extends the method of The Ambassadors by conjoining the most exalted of language with the basest of passions. Indeed, here the "late manner's" conjunction of opaque, almost impenetrable language and racy, almost melodramatic plots is enacted by the characters in the novel, who, until perhaps its end, use an exalted language to euphemize the truth and consummate their schemes. Thus when Sir Luke Strett, her doctor, offers Milly the Stretherian advice to "live," it's a sign that he knows she's soon to die. Kate and Merton use a highly aestheticized language, the language of art appreciation and beauty, to describe Milly and their ugly plot—she is "exquisite," says Kate, "so wonderful"; in Milly's invalidism lies, Kate claims, "the beauty of her," the word "beauty" signifying both the pathos of Milly's condition and its utility to her and Densher. As the novel continues, however, Milly, too, learns to speak in precisely this euphemistic, aestheticized idiom. Indeed, in one of the most horrifying if resonant scenes in the novel, she starts to think of herself in one of Kate's pet terms for her, that of the dove; she breathes in that term for her own innocence, makes it her own, without understanding precisely what it means. But after her discovery of Kate and Merton's perfidy, Milly begins to transform herself into this very image both in her own appearance—she starts to dress entirely in white and floats down the staircase in her Venetian palazzo—and in Densher's retrospective memory of her after her death, in which she is transformed into the biblical wings of the dove, a manifestation of the Holy Spirit. As such, she represents both James's horrific vision of the social world, and of what it can do to innocents, and a possibly redemptive response—a transformation into sheer resonant symbol that grows out of, yet stands outside, the vicissitudes of historical time and social savagery.
Not for nothing, then, can the late James be compared to the currents of thought with which he was surrounded, and to which he was increasingly attuned, the high-art styles of aestheticism, decadence, and protomodernism. These stylistic and thematic influences—with their elaboration of figurative language and increasing use of resonant symbols, their focus on sexuality and sadomasochism, their exaltation of pale, mortal female beauty—combine with James's careerlong interest in melodrama to produce not only the particular amalgam that is Wings, but also that of his last great novel, The Golden Bowl. Like Wings, or for that matter, The Portrait of a Lady, The Golden Bowl focuses on a young, innocent woman who is the victim of a plot: Maggie Verver, the only daughter of an art-loving American millionaire, Adam Verver, marries the charming but impecunious Prince Amerigo without knowing that he had been in love with her equally impecunious American friend, Charlotte Stant. Charlotte and Amerigo secretly meet just before the wedding to buy to a gift for Charlotte to present to Maggie. In a small Bloomsbury antique shop presided over by an Italian-speaking Jew, Charlotte considers a golden bowl, which Amerigo rejects because he thinks the surface conceals a crack. The seemingly perfect but deeply flawed bowl symbolizes the marriage it is intended to celebrate: its gilt covering cannot obscure the guilty secrets it contains, or the deep crack or flaw that mars its seemingly perfect structure.
And we soon witness just how flawed that structure turns out to be. From the prince's perspective, we witness the odd union that he has entered into, the oddity of which is only heightened when Adam, besieged by fortune hunters, marries Charlotte. The result is a weirdly incestuous ménage à quatre, one in which the closeness between father and daughter remains unchallenged by their new marital status, and in which the former lovers Charlotte and the prince are thrown into uncomfortable propinquity. After resisting the continuing erotic charge, they finally succumb after a weekend at a country house ironically named Matcham.
With this new shift in the geometry of their interrelation, the narrative switches its point of view, focusing on Maggie's consciousness. For after his return home, Maggie senses an indefinable change in her husband, and begins to piece together the fact of his intimacy with Charlotte. This process, which comes to an indisputable climax when she herself purchases the gilt bowl from the antiquary and, when he comes to take the bowl back—telling her that there is, as Amerigo had suspected, a crack in it—learns of Amerigo and Charlotte's intimacy during their visit there. As with Isabel Archer or Milly Theale, this moment comes as a revelation to her of the world's possibility for deceit, corruption, evil. Yet unlike her predecessors, she fights back—and on the world's terms. She maneuvers her father into returning with Charlotte to America (in James's fictional universe, a fate akin to banishment). She signifies to Amerigo that she knows of his transgression, and silently challenges him to amend his behavior. Most important, she lies to Charlotte: giving her protestations of her continuing affection, denying that she has anything to charge her with. "It was only a question," Maggie says, "of not by a hair's breadth deflecting into the truth." All the while Maggie witnesses Charlotte's own pain: her desperate desire to know whether Maggie knows, her silent agony at the withdrawal of the prince, her future as the participant in a loveless marriage.
Maggie's seeming sadism conjoins with the characteristic Jamesian thematic of voyeurism in a remarkable scene, one of the most striking in the Jamesian canon, in which she sees with shocking clarity her beautiful, talented, brilliant friend seeming to be led by Adam as if she were controlled by a silken noose; Maggie hears her silent screams, recognizes that "Charlotte was in pain, Charlotte was in torment," yet recognizes as well that to save her own marriage, she must torture her betraying friend. The novel ends with Charlotte dispatched, finally, to American City, America, along with the archetypal American Adam, and Maggie and the prince free, for the first time, to make their own marriage, together. Now irrevocably pledged to and in love with his own wife as the two of them witness Charlotte's splendor one last time, the prince gathers Maggie into an ambiguous embrace: "See?" he says, responding to her desire that she look. "I see nothing but you." "And the truth of it," James concludes, "had with this force, after a moment so strangely lighted his eyes that as for pity and dread of them she buried her own in his breast." Witnessing the consummation of her own artifice, transformed into the audience of her own drama, Maggie cannot bear to look at what she has wrought.
The Golden Bowl is James's last great novel, and in many ways is a successful recapitulation of the themes, possibilities, and concerns he had been dealing with for his entire career. But, as in sonata form, his recapitulation translates his characteristic themes into an entirely new key. In thematic terms, it brings the concern with the so-called International Theme to a climax, representing in Adam the consummation of a new American capitalist power seeking to validate itself by purchasing the art treasures of Europe—and a son-in-law for his beloved daughter. To be sure, Adam and his wife, Charlotte, like so many of James's more problematic protagonists, have to be dispatched back to America. Maggie, however, represents a new possibility within that dispensation: this American girl, unlike her predecessors, can stay in the Old World in a successful marriage, even producing, as no other James heroine is able to do, a child who, as an emblem of her cosmopolitan success, is the product of both American and European parents.
Representationally, the novel brings to the fore James's favorite devices and helps prepare for their similar development or elaboration in the fiction we call "modern." Consider, for example, that we witness a brilliant development of James's trademark mixture of narration and interpretation. The narration is pushed further than any previous fiction; standing within the perspective of first the prince, then of Maggie, we not only experience the drama of knowledge that each of them, differently, performs, but also witness what they do with that knowledge, how they shape their own lives, and the lives of those around them, in the course of their attempts to understand the very facts that govern their experience. A similar development is represented by the prominent role given to Fanny Assingham and her husband, Colonel Bob, who both help narrate actions of their problematic friends and parse their meaning. Like Ralph Touchett, Fanny does not merely observe; she performs a crucial symbolic role in the narrative when she smashes the golden bowl into three pieces after learning that Maggie has learned, through acquiring it, of the prince and Charlotte's former intimacy. Equally significant is Maggie's response to her friend's actions. She picks the bowl up and reunites its shattered pieces, performing her decision to restore her marriage despite its structural flaws.
It is but one short step from this to the fictional experiments of the later 1910s and 1920s, like those of Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier or the stream-of-consciousness techniques of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf; or, more unexpectedly if equally crucially, to William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, with its admixture of obscure narration and interpretation: Jason Compson and Shreve McCannon are the direct descendents of Fanny and Colonel Bob. Equally important to James's successors—to writers like Pound or Eliot or Stevens—perhaps, was his increasingly explicit sense that in the aesthetic lay the only stable locus of value in a world of vertiginous change. "It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance," James wrote to H. G. Wells after Wells included a vicious parody of James's contorted prose in his novel Boon; there is no greater evidence for the increasing cogency of this proposition than Maggie Verver's fraught gesture of reconstituting the golden bowl. Maggie and James alike seek to gather the shattered fragments of life and shape them into the smooth perfections of aesthetic form.
Late James and the Specter of Modernity
Yet James's continuing interest in human passions and his openness to the varieties of modernity differentiate him from his modernist successors. His 1903 story The Beast in the Jungle details the story of John Marcher, a man who shies away from experience because of his conviction that he is to face some cataclysmic event, undergo some life-altering change, that he metaphorically describes to his friend May Bartram as the springing of the beast in the jungle; only after her death, many years later, does he realize that the true cataclysm, the true springing of the beast, was his withdrawal from May and from a passionate engagement with life, as he waited for that abysmal event. And in the long story "The Jolly Corner," Spencer Brydon, an expatriate American, returns to New York and encounters there a mutilated but wealthy version of himself, a representation, he realizes, of what he might have been had he stayed in America. This sense—of the danger, but also the possibilities—of a rapidly industrializing America is also conveyed in James's memoir of his 1904–1905 trip to the United States, The American Scene (1907). This astonishingly complex work pays tribute to the vanishing America of James's youth—to old New England and upstate New York—and details James's sense of the continuing schism that defines the American South. But he is also alert to the rise of the new leisure class and its consecrated places of worship—the "Hotel World"—and as well to the teeming slums of the new urban metropolises like New York. Although James's attitude seems to be one of intense nostalgia for the ancien régime, there is a decided openness to modernity on display in his responses that distinguishes them from the conservative harrumphings of many of his contemporaries. In his famous portrayal of the Lower East Side, for example, James comes close to the class- and race-based contempt evinced by so many gentry intellectuals toward the teeming Jewish- and Italian-dominated slums of New York. But there is also, in his account of this "New Jerusalem," a recognition of the cultural and social vitality that it brings along with it, a recognition, as well, of James's own relative obsolescence—and that of his class—in the face of these new social facts.
On his return to England at the age of sixty-two, having been feted as one of America's—and the world's—great men of letters, James's remarkably productive career entered its final phase. To be sure, this era is not marked by the brilliant fictional achievements of the previous decades, although James did continue to write novels such as The Outcry (1911) and the posthumously published fragments The Ivory Tower (1917) and The Sense of the Past (1917). But it was remarkable, nevertheless, for two major retrospective endeavors, one dealing with James's work, the other with his life. The first of these is his remarkable work toward crafting the New York Edition of his Novels and Tales (1907–1917), a task involving both the systematic rewriting of many of his major fictions and the creation of prefaces that muse over the act of their creation. For this edition, James translated all of his novels—but particularly the early ones—into the idiom of the later work, so much so that works like The American or The Portrait of a Lady might be said to be entirely new works, with greater finish of style and depth of psychology. And while his prefaces may have been too idiosyncratic to have served as a vade mecum to the art of fiction (as envisioned by one of James's acolytes, Percy Lubbock, who synthesized them into his 1921 volume, The Craft of Fiction), they nevertheless contain some of James's most striking reflections: the comparison of romance to a balloon tethered to the real in the preface to The American, for example; the famous description of the house of fiction in that to The Portrait of a Lady; the eloquent evocation of the act of re-vision in the preface to The Golden Bowl. More important is the thoroughness and self-consciousness of his endeavor. In a moment when literary criticism tended to be impressionistic, belles-lettristic, and judgmental, James's energetic self-awareness provided a new, more self-conscious model for thinking not only about fiction, but about literature itself.
Similarly mold-breaking is the other major product of James's last phase, his autobiographies. Written under the shadow of his beloved brother William's death in 1910 and of Henry's own increasing mental and physical distress in the last decades of his life, A Small Boy and Others (1913) and Notes of a Son and Brother (1914) not only evoke the distinctive world of the extended James family and the vanished world from which it came; they also offer profound meditations on memory itself, viewing it not as a passive recollection of things past but as a process creatively involved in the making of meaning. Reading these works, one is reminded that they appeared contemporaneously with the first volumes of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu—that James's last work of retrospection was as audaciously experimental as any of the writing of his own moment.
James's final years were spent not in nostalgia, no matter how brilliantly represented, but in engagement with the contemporary world at its most malignant. He responded to the outbreak of World War I with horror, and devoted himself, like his American predecessor Whitman, to tending wounded troops; and as a gesture of solidarity with the land in which he had spent much of his adult life, James became a British subject in 1915. He died in London on 28 February 1916, and his ashes were conveyed back to America and buried in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the exile returning home one last time.
The Afterlives of a Novelist
No account of James's career would be complete without a record of his extraordinary critical reception. After his death, James was canonized by the early modernist movement; this expatriate who devoted himself to his art was commemorated by a special issue of The Modern Review containing respectful essays by Pound, Eliot, and Ford Madox Ford, and Eliot and Pound often alluded to James's work and example in their own. Soon, however, a counterrevolution in critical esteem occurred, led by Van Wyck Brooks and Vernon Parrington, who critiqued James for precisely the qualities that the modernists admired: they scorned James as the very embodiment of the elite, expatriate aestheticism which their politics and aesthetics alike were devoted to opposing. During the 1930s and early 1940s, James's critical stock fell to new lows, only to be revived, after World War II, in one of the most remarkable critical reversals on record. Through the efforts of a disparate group of critics, including the Harvard professor F. O. Matthiessen, the biographer and anthologist Leon Edel, and the Columbia professors Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling, James came to be reinstalled at the very center of critical practice in both popular and academic culture. New editions of his work were issued, many of them in the newly popular form of paperback classics, and Edel's massive biography appeared to critical acclaim. Many of his works, especially stories like Daisy Miller and The Turn of the Screw, became staples of the undergraduate classroom. Academic literary criticism proliferated, particularly under the aegis of the so-called New Criticism, or the close, intrinsic interpretation of literary texts, which found in James's figurative and narrative craft a perfect match for its methods—the best of which, and perhaps the best critical study of James across the board, being Laurence Holland's The Expense of Vision (1972).
Inevitably, however, a critical reaction set in. Although in the 1970s James's texts proved quite amenable to the newly emergent phenomenological and deconstructive technologies of reading, Marxist and "new historicist" critics like Carolyn Porter (1981) and Mark Seltzer (1984) launched a critique of James's politics of vision, stressing the ways in which his imaginative investment in spectatorship might prove complicit with oppressive class constructions or the mechanisms of Foucaultian power/knowledge. Simultaneously, feminist critics questioned the established canon of American literature, an effort that necessarily entailed questioning both the place of James and that of the critical practices he espoused. More recently, however, James's work has found a different place in literary and cultural studies. Some—like Ross Posnock (1991), Beverly Haviland (1998), and Sara Blair (1996)—have read James as this entry has attempted to do, as being more open and attuned to modernity and its vicissitudes than the anti-Jacobite school has been willing to admit. Others, working under the dispensation of "queer theory," have found in James either a profound instance of "homosexual panic"—this is the substance of Eve Sedgwick's reading of The Beast in the Jungle (1991)—or a practitioner of an out-and-out and quite undisplaced queer writing, as Hugh Stevens (1998) argues. And in the popular sphere, James continues to win new audiences, as film and television versions of his novels, including Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl, have appeared—with more to come. All of which is to say that, almost a century after his death, James continues to find readers in both elite and middlebrow culture energized by his highly wrought and audaciously experimental art, by his critical account of human passions and their social instantiations, and by the passions that were distinctively his own—for analysis, for subtlety, for a richness and complexity of imaginative expression, for a freedom of consciousness that was increasingly, for James, as it is for us, at risk in the burgeoning world of modernity that made it possible.
Works
Watch and Ward (1871)
A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales (1876)
Roderick Hudson (1876)
Transatlantic Sketches (1875)
The American (1877)
Daisy Miller (1878)
The Europeans (1878)
French Poets and Novelists (1878)
Hawthorne (1879)
Washington Square (1880)
The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
The Art of Fiction (1886)
The Bostonians (1886)
The Princess Casamassima (1886)
Partial Portraits (1888)
The Tragic Muse (1890)
The Pupil (1891)
The Lesson of the Master (1892)
Guy Domville (1894)
Terminations (1895)
Embarrassments (1896)
The Spoils of Poynton (1897)
What Maisie Knew (1897)
In the Cage (1898)
The Turn of the Screw (1898)
The Awkward Age (1899)
The Sacred Fount (1901)
The Wings of the Dove (1902)
The Beast in the Jungle (1903)
The Ambassadors (1903)
The Golden Bowl (1904)
English Hours (1905)
The American Scene (1907)
Novels and Tales (1907–1917)
The Outcry (1911)
A Small Boy and Others (1913)
Notes of a Son and Brother (1914)
Notes on Novelists (1914)
The Ivory Tower (1917)
The Sense of the Past (1917)
Jonathan Freedman
Further Reading
Anderson, Quentin. The American Henry James. New Brunswick, N.J., 1957. Powerfully argues for the centrality of Henry James Sr.'s thought to the work of his son.
Blackmur, R. P. Studies in Henry James. Edited by. Veronica Makowsky. New York, 1983. Highly Jamesian essays in manner as well as matter.
Blair, Sara. Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation. Cambridge, 1996. The most challenging recent account of James in the context of contemporary scholarship on racial and national identity.
Brodhead, Richard. The School of Hawthorne. New York, 1986. Contains the best study of the complex relation between James and his most important American precursor.
Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess. New Haven, Conn., 1975. Extraordinary readings of James's novels in the context of the French theatrical tradition—and in their own right.
Cameron, Sharon. Thinking in Henry James. Chicago, 1989. Rigorous interrogation of James's representations of mental process.
Edel, Leon. Henry James. 5 vols. Philadelphia, pp.1953–1972. The standard biography. Idiosyncratic, and too Freudian, it nevertheless remains the standard work.
Freedman, Jonathan. Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism and Commodity Culture. Stanford, Calif., 1991. Reads James as responding to the literary avant-garde of the 1890s and early years of the twentieth century.
Freedman, Jonathan, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Henry James. New York, 1998.
Geismar, Maxwell. Henry James and the Jacobites. Boston, 1963. An impassioned critique of James and his admirers.
Habegger, Alfred. Henry James and the "Woman Business." New York, 1989. A critical account of James's appropriations of popular sentimental fiction, with particular emphasis on the gender dynamics involved therein.
Haviland, Beverly. Henry James's Last Romance: Making Sense of the Past and the American Scene. Cambridge, 1998. A sympathetic account of James's last decade of literary production.
Holland, Laurence. The Expense of Vision: Essays on the Craft of Henry James. Princeton, N.J., 1972. A complex, brilliant, and knotty reading of James's fictional practices considered on their own terms.
The James Family Including Selections from the Writings of Henry James, Senior, William, Henry & Alice James. New York, 1947. A splendid commentary and anthology.
Krook-Gilead, Dorothea. The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James. Cambridge, 1962. Fine thematic criticism of the work.
Lewis, R. W. B. The Jameses: A Family Narrative. New York, 1991. An excellent and highly accessible account of this remarkable family.
Matthiessen, F. O. Henry James: The Major Phase. New York, 1944. A spectacularly lucid explication of James's major fiction, and a prime contribution to the James revival.
Pippin, Robert. Henry James and the Modern Moral Life. New York, 2000. Places James in the context of a sophisticated philosophical inquiry into morality and ethics.
Poirier, Richard. The Comic Sense of Henry James: A Study of the Early Novels. New York, 1960. Still the best reading of the early fiction.
Porter, Carolyn. Seeing and Being: The Plight of the Participant Observer in Emerson, James, Adams and Faulkner. Middletown, Conn., 1981. A bracing account of James's work in the context of Marxist theory, especially that of Georg Lukacs.
Posnock, Ross. The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity. New York, 1991. Theoretically sophisticated arguments for James as a positive participant in the drama of modernity.
Rowe, John Carlos. Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James. Madison, Wis., 1984. This, and the 1998 item, are virtuoso attempts to read James through the lens of contemporary literary theory.
Rowe, John Carlos. The Other Henry James. Durham, N.C., 1998.
Sedgwick, Eve. The Beast in the Closet. In her Epistemologies of the Closet. Berkeley, Calif., 1991. Brilliant reading of the story—and, by implication, James's career—as a case of "homosexual panic."
Seltzer, Mark. Henry James and the Art of Power. Ithaca, N.Y., 1984. An austere and challenging reading of James through the theoretical lens of Michel Foucault.
Stevens, Hugh. Henry James and Sexuality. Cambridge, 1998. The most convincing reading of James as a "queer" writer.
Yeazell, Ruth. Language and Knowledge in the Late Novels of Henry James. Chicago, 1976. Elegant accounts of the procedures of the late fiction.
From The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature
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