Decadence in the Late Novels of Henry James

Decadence in the Late Novels of Henry James Anna Kventsel Decadence in the Late Novels of Henry James This page int...

Author: Anna Kventsel

39 downloads 1237 Views 1019KB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

Decadence in the Late Novels of Henry James

Anna Kventsel


This page intentionally left blank

Decadence in the Late Novels of Henry James Anna Kventsel

© Anna Kventsel 2007 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–00827–4 ISBN-10: 0–230–00827–5

hardback hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 16

9 15

8 14

7 13

6 12

5 11

4 10

3 09

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

2 08

1 07

To my parents

Life’s self is nourished by its proper pith, And we are nurtured like a Pelican brood. John Keats, Endymion

Contents Acknowledgments

viii

List of Abbreviations

ix

1. Introduction

1

2. ‘The Historic Muse’: On The Ambassadors

26

3. ‘The Adventure of Shipwreck’: On The Wings of the Dove

57

4. ‘The Passions of Princes’: On The Golden Bowl

135

5. Afterword

207

Notes

211

Works Cited

219

Index

224

vii

Acknowledgments I am grateful to the Rothschild Foundation and the Fulbright Foundation in Israel; the period of research abroad they funded brought this work to fruition. To my colleagues in the English Department of the Hebrew University. Special thanks to Leona Toker, Elizabeth Freund, Eynel Wardi, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan and Moshe Ron. To Ruth Bernard Yeazell from Yale University and to Margaret Cone from Darwin College, Cambridge, for their good will as hosts at their institutions. To Orit Sen Gupta, a master of yoga whose teaching reveals itself not least in matters of writing. To Helen Craine and Christabel Scaife at Palgrave Macmillan and the staff of Macmillan India, for their ever-prompt and friendly expertise. To the reader for Palgrave Macmillan, for his heartening review. To Adrian Poole, who read and commented on various drafts, with great patience and a wonderful keenness of insight. Above all, to John Landau and Baruch Hochman. Without their sustaining presence in my academic life from its earliest days, this project would not have been undertaken, much less completed. Baruch’s invaluable skill in editing helped recast the ‘loose and baggy monster’ I had produced in its present trimmer, more amenable form.

viii

List of Abbreviations A AA Ab AB AHJ AN AS BC BV CHAN CM CP CT CWO D DFRE DHJ DL EA EV FP FR FT GB GT HAHJ HJ HJCP HJL HJLE HJPA HJHED ID IH IM IRS

The Ambassadors ( James 1986) The Awkward Age ( James 1987) Autobiography ( James 1956) Agnolo Bronzino (McComb 1928) The American Henry James (Anderson 1957) Aspects of the Novel (Forster 1990) The American Scene (James 1993) The Birth of the Clinic (Foucault 1973) The Breaking of the Vessels (Bloom 1982) Cultural History of the American Novel (Minter 1994) Cuire le Monde (Malamoud 1989) The Civilizing Process (Elias 1978) The Canterbury Tales (Chaucer 1987) A Crown of Wild Olive (Ruskin 1866) A Writer’s Diary (Woolf 1954) The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Gibbon 1960) Death in Henry James (Cutting 2005) Desire and Love in Henry James (McWhirter 1989) Elegy for an Age (Rosenberg 2005) The Expense of Vision (Holland 1964) False Positions (Rivkin 1996) The French Revolution (Carlyle 1980) The Finer Tone (Wasserman 1953) The Golden Bowl (James 1987) The Great Tradition (Leavis 1962) Henry Adams and Henry James (Rowe 1976) Henry James (Poole 1991) Henry James and the Culture of Publicity (Salmon 1997) Henry James: A Life (Edel 1977) Henry James and the Lust of the Eyes (Tintner 1993) Henry James’s Permanent Adolescence (Bradley 1999) Henry James and Homo-Erotic Desire (Bradley 1999) ‘On the Imagination of Death’ (Hochman 1975) Italian Hours (James 1968) Illness as Metaphor (Sontag 1978) ‘Is the Rectum Straight?’ (Sedgwick 1993) ix

x

List of Abbreviations

IT IW JF JSRE L LB LC I LC II LE LK MF MP MSMC N NER NHJ NS OC PL PP PR R RO SA SB SF SFII SLJK SM SR T TC TD TIT TM VRE WD WMA

‘Introduction to The Tempest’ (James 1968) Invalid Women (Herndl Price 1993) The James Family (Matthiessen 1980) James and the Shadow of the Roman Empire (Poole 1997) Letters ( James 1974–84) Lucrezia Borgia (Gregorovius 1948) Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers (James 1984) Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition ( James 1984) Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (Pound 1954) Language and Knowledge in the Late Novels of Henry James (Yeazell 1976) The Marble Faun (Hawthorne 1961) Henry James: The Major Phase (Matthiessen 1963) Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (Adams 1986) The Complete Notebooks (James 1987) The Norbert Elias Reader (Elias 1998) The Novels of Henry James (Cargill 1961) Natural Supernaturalism (Abrams 1971) The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James (Krook 1962) A Private Life of Henry James (Gordon 1998) The Principles of Psychology (James 1981) Playing and Reality (Winnicott 1971) The Renaissance (Pater 1980) Rage for Order (Warren 1948) Sincerity and Authenticity (Trilling 1972) Seeing and Being (Porter 1981) The Sacred Fount (James 1994) Somatic Fictions (Vrettos 1995) The Selected Letters of John Keats (Keats 1951) The Statesman’s Manual (Coleridge 1986) Sartor Resartus (Carlyle1937) Tragedy (Poole 2005) The Trial of Curiosity (Posnock 1991) A Thing Divided (Landau 1996) ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (Eliot 1994) The Tragedy of Manners (Crews 1957) The Varieties of Religious Experience (James 1985) The Wings of the Dove (James 1986) The Waning of the Middle Ages (Huizinga 1990)

1 Introduction

I I read the novels of the major phase, The Ambassadors (1903), The Wings of the Dove (1902) and The Golden Bowl (1904), as a finely calibrated exploration of fin-de-siècle experience, a framework within which they form a cumulative, coherently evolving corpus. The late novels invoke familiar western polarizations – spirit and matter, mind and body, subject and object – in order to grapple with a psycho-cultural impasse. Jamesian decadence is seen, in this light, as the expression of an impulse toward dissolving rigidified polarities; this impulse reflects a current of morbid anxiety, but also fosters emergent modes of psychocultural regeneration.1 The late fiction refracts important currents of the civilizing process, as the sociologist Norbert Elias conceptualizes it. Elias’s study, a sociohistorical inquiry into what Freud described as the range of discontents inherent to civilized life, trenchantly articulates the nexus between culture and self, in their reciprocal dynamic molding; it brings into focus a ‘civilizational shift’ in the early modern period, which makes for ‘transition to a further stage of self-consciousness at which the inbuilt self-control of the affects grows stronger and reflective detachment greater, while the spontaneity of affective action diminishes’ (CP, 258). The modern homo clausus, the isolated self, whose experience is at the center of Elias’s analysis, bears directly on the Jamesian insular, embattled center of consciousness: Since the European Middle Ages, the balance between we- and I-identity has undergone a noticeable change, that can be characterized briefly as follows: earlier the balance of we- and I-identity 1

2


was heavily weighted towards the former. From the Renaissance on, the balance tilted more and more towards I-identity. More and more frequent became the cases of people whose we-identity was so weakened that they appeared to themselves as we-less I’s. […]. The experience underlying the notion of the we-less I is clearly the conflict between the natural human need for an emotive affirmation of one’s own person by others and others’ need of affirmation by oneself, on one hand, and fear of fulfillment of the need and resistance to it on the other. The need to love and be loved is the strongest condensation of this natural human craving. […] Whatever form it takes, the emotive need for human society, a giving and receiving in affective relationships to other people, is one of the fundamental conditions of human existence. What the bearers of the human image of the we-less I appear to suffer from is the conflict between the desire for relationships with other people and their own inability to satisfy this desire. […] The chord struck by this theme, particularly in the twentieth century, suggests that we are not concerned here with an isolated, individual problem, but with a habitus problem, a basic feature of the social personality structure of people in the modern age. (NER, 231–2) The Jamesian reflective centers, taken as late avatars of Elias’s homo clausus, embody fin-de-siècle subjectivity in ways that may be seen as paradigmatic. The ordeal of consciousness in the late fiction involves a destabilization of rigid psychic defenses, that is, of internal mechanisms of screening and control, instrumental to self-steering in the regulative channels of a culture shaped, increasingly, by forces of the market and processes of cultural imperialism – ‘the forms of power produced by the advent of a new international plutocracy’ (HJ, xiii). The decadent moment lays bare the precarious, vulnerable nature of identity in its crystallized, ever-more-rigid mode; at the same time, it exposes the self to the corrosive forces of a heightened ambivalence. In the nineteenth century, Rousseauian views, which regarded even (or especially) the choicest fruits of civilization as products of vast processes of repression and oppression, were voiced, most influentially, by Marx and by Nietzsche – the Nietzsche of The Genealogy of Morals (1887), but also, decisively though less pronouncedly, the Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy (1872).2 No less relevant, in this context, is the localized historical perspective of Carlyle, in The French Revolution (1837). Carlyle holds that the barbarism of the Revolution was unleashed by the Enlightenment itself, as a dark counterforce to the worship of reason.

Introduction

3

Viewed through this lens, civilization comes to seem as mere ‘wrappage,’ through which the savage nature of humanity ‘can still burst, infernal as ever’ (‘Flame-Picture,’ FR III 5:7, 328; EA, 27). James’s late fiction, with its kindred concerns, is haunted by imagery of the Revolution, couched in Carlyle’s feverish idiom. The much-studied ‘international theme’ serves as a vehicle for exploring the psycho-cultural conflict with which James’s late novels engage. The cross-cultural matrix, polarizing Europe and America, stages an encounter between archetypal modes of cultural experience: between a Catholic culture of matter and a Protestant culture of spirit. Matter is associated, here, with archetypal constructions of maternity and femininity, which serve as objects of profoundly ambivalent desire. In the spirit of Henry Adams’s Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904), Catholic Europe is projected as a conflicted cultural arena, where the ideal symbolized in the virginity of the Virgin vies with a rich tradition of eroticized femininity.3 The densely communal, sensuous experience of Catholic Europe is played off against the dissociative vision and the subjective proclivity of the American Puritan tradition: introverted, dematerialized and desexualized. This formulation of the terms of James’s late cultural morphology is intended to suggest his imaginative recasting of cultural modalities, rather than his sense of socio-historical actualities.4 ‘America’ and ‘Europe’ – ‘Europe’ as, especially, medievalized and orientalized – stand largely for symbolic modes of experience, associated with what may be schematically thought of as introversion and extroversion, respectively, and with imaginative cognates such as west and east (as well as north and south), modern and premodern, spirit and matter, isolation and merging. These opposing modes are embodied in the interplay of two closely aligned strands of imagery, the sailing vessel and the ‘vessel of consciousness.’ The motif reverberates through the prose of the late period, attaining its fullest resonance in the Critical Prefaces of the New York Edition (1907–9). Two metaphors, mutually opposed in a shifting relation of figure and ground, are at play, forking from the single image of the vessel. In ‘The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words,’ Freud refers to a humbler cognate, the anagram of ‘tub’ and ‘boat’ (160), which figures suggestively in the context of The Golden Bowl. In the Preface to The Wings of the Dove, Milly Theale is a ‘big vessel,’ whose foundering produces a whirlpool around it, and, in close proximity, a ‘vessel of sensibility’ (LC II, 1291–2). Consciousness in the late prose is often a liquid; in The Golden Bowl, the adulterous affair is described as ‘filled to the brim with the wine of consciousness’ (GB, 553). Experience, too, is often fluid; in The Ambassadors, Strether is seen ‘shaking the bottle in which life

4


handed him the wine of experience,’ and finding ‘the taste of the lees rising […] into his draught’ (A, 187). There are two kinds of vessels, then, mutually opposed in their relation to a potent fluid – a fluid of consciousness, or a ‘vital fluid’ of experience.5 The drinking vessel contains the fluid, while the sailing vessel keeps it out of its inner space. The former, a vessel of consciousness, embodies a fantasy of inviolate, integral inwardness; the latter embodies the mental interior as void, in relation to external experience. The individual mind is present to itself so long as it persists in its integrity; but so long as it persists in its integrity, it remains cut off from its nutritive sources in the matrix of culture. A third kind of vessel, the ‘frail vessel,’ the matrix-symbol of The Golden Bowl, should be configured with the antithetical pair. The late fiction draws on imaginative patterns which situate femininity within a paradoxical sphere, yoking together a fantasy of both bodily intactness and carnality. The Preface to The Portrait of a Lady insists on the ‘absolute,’ ‘inordinate’ importance of the experience of women in fiction: ‘George Eliot has admirably noted it: “In these frail vessels is bourne onward through the ages the treasure of human affection’” (LC II, 1077). Eliot’s image, in Daniel Deronda, is, however, of ‘delicate’ vessels, not frail ones (124). The slip calls to mind the scriptural figuration of woman as the weaker vessel (I Peter 3:7), and with it Hamlet’s apostrophe, ‘Frailty, thy name is woman!’6 In an early essay on George Eliot, James draws on the motif of frailty, suggesting that ‘a weak woman; is ‘weaker than a weak man’ (LC II, 925). At the threshold of the major phase, The Sacred Fount (1901), last in a series of ambiguous narratives in the first person, explores the ‘frailty’ associated in the later writing with the ‘vessel’ which is archetypically feminine. The corpus of ambiguous tales, composed through the 1890s, serves Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan in her structuralist analysis of literary ambiguity, a concept she defines as the production by a literary text of two equally supportable but mutually irreconcilable interpretations. Ambiguity, in these texts, functions as a formal correlative to psychological isolationism; the first-person reflector faces a mystery with a haunting sexual hub, which he or she is incapable of penetrating because of the insular, aporetic structure of the fictional world the reflector constructs and inhabits. Sexuality is perceived as a vital, potentially empowering, yet fundamentally unattainable source of knowledge. In contrast to tales like ‘The Liar’ and ‘The Figure in the Carpet,’ and even, to a great extent, The Turn of The Screw, The Sacred Fount does not engage this crisis of dissociation, which is exacerbated here to a point of

Introduction

5

near-madness in the narrator, as a more or less arbitrary manifestation of individual aberrancy. Rather, it generates a symbolic account, ‘an apologue or parable’ (SF, 19), of a malaise with distinctive cultural underpinnings. For the first time, the subjectivist predicament acquires strong transpersonal resonances. There are marked compositional elements which serve to enlarge and generalize the narrative scope of the novel: the classical, allegorical frame supplied by the title; the observance of neoclassical unities; and the prototypical setting, where a model English country house is made to epitomize Polite Society. Above all, the vampire conceit, the most explicitly decadent motif in the Jamesian corpus, places the novel in a clearly defined aesthetic and cultural domain.7 The vampire conceit posits the depletion of vital and mental energies through erotic intimacy. In this erotic sphere, it also posits a dissociation of vital and mental planes. It centers on two couples, one recently married, the other suspected of conducting an affair. The first pole of this configuration (the primary pole, not only in terms of representational chronology, but also of the imaginative investment it draws) projects the uncanny rejuvenation of a wife past her prime, and the corresponding senescence of her young husband. The other pole projects the lapse into dullness of a clever, charming woman, and the increase in acuity of her putative lover, a dullard. The Sacred Fount principle represents the particular inflection, for James, of the traditional topos of feminine ‘frailty.’ The erotic matrix it bears out suggests a friability of the containing structures of the archetypically feminine consciousness, which leads to disruption and incontinence at the point of passionate contact. In the language of The Awkward Age, erotic exposure turns the frail vessel into ‘a sort of a little drain-pipe with everything flowing through’ (AA, 210). Exuberant, overflowing femaleness, internalized as a disruptive impulse within the self, is projected as a powerful natural current, a conduit or reservoir, a sacred fount or fund of plenty; but it is also an invasive and draining element which violates the retentive core of identity, the essential autonomy and privacy of its inner resources. Frailty emerges in the late novels as the tendency of archetypically feminine characters, European or Europeanized women, to crack, leak, overflow, inundate, and so dissolve or shatter boundaries, invade, deplete or consume interiors. Mme de Vionnet, in The Ambassadors, and Charlotte Stant, in The Golden Bowl, are prone to such modes of deliquescence. These women become, under severe psycho-social constraints, adept at containing their excesses; they learn to discipline and

6


manipulate their flux, subjecting it to rigors emblematized in forms of ostentatious spectacle – circus-ring stunts, trapeze acts, aquatic gymnastics, all highly controlled protean feats, with a strong agonistic element. The performer’s plasticity and poise tends to strain and give way under the pressure of passion. Mme de Vionnet, who habitually arranges and composes herself into states of ‘universal possession’ (A, 275, 278), is also capable of overflowing in a deluge of tears, ‘giving up all attempt at a manner’ (A, 483). Charlotte Stant’s figure is a wonder of containment, resembling a ‘long loose silk purse, well filled with gold-pieces, but having been passed empty through a finger-ring that held it together’ (GB, 73); but Charlotte too can experience and invite oceanic surrender – breaking up, breaking down, melting and mingling (GB, 259). The subjective experience of such characters is entered into in varying degrees, often minimally. Where it is made available, we encounter guilt-laden subjectivities, haunted by visions of the victims, potential or actual, of their spillover. In The Golden Bowl, the Assinghams, a mature married couple, provide a grotesque model of sustained though highly constrained containment, in the Sacred Fount mode. Fanny’s exotic expansiveness, her ‘so free orientalism of type’ (296), is held in check by the Colonel’s parsimoniousness; he is given to ‘editing’ her mental excesses, just as he edits, ‘savingly, with the stump of a pencil, her redundant telegrams’ (GB, 87). On the other hand, her fleshly and florid physical presence seems to keep him ‘hungrily thin, with facial, with abdominal cavities quite grim in their effect’ (GB, 86). Under his censorious gaze, her mental activity attains the disciplined elasticity of the celebrated performer at the Aquarium, ‘who, in a slight, though tight, bathing-suit, turned somersaults and did tricks in the lake of water which looked so cold and uncomfortable to the non-amphibious’ (GB, 85). Colonel Bob’s restrictive and restricted mental powers are suggested in the comparison of his ‘smooth head, with the particular shade of its white hair,’ to a ‘silver pot reversed’ (GB, 86). This type of mental retentiveness – ‘high dry spare’ (301) in contrast to his wife’s full-bodied amphibiousness – resonates ironically with the anal association of her name, combined with their surname.8 Their London home, Cadogan Place, brings to mind the lidless Cadogan teapot, modeled on a Chinese wine vessel and named after the first Earl of Cadogan (1728–1807), reputedly the first Englishman to own one. The Cadogan, popularized during the oriental rage of the Regency, is filled through a hole in the bottom, and emptied right side up; an interior funnel prevents the liquid from leaking out through the hole.

Introduction

7

This curious context illustrates the way in which Colonel Assingham’s military exploits in the eastern outposts of the Empire become linked, figuratively, with his struggle to check his wife’s mental and bodily boundary-breaking propensities. These struggles seem, in part, to have recoiled upon him. The Colonel, like Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), seems to have ‘gone native’ in the pursuit of Empire. His physiognomy is of an Asian cast; the hollows of his eyes are ‘deep and darksome,’ his cheekbones and the bristle of his moustache are ‘worthy of Attila the Hun’ (GB, 86). The proverb which resonates in The Ambassadors, ‘one might as well perish by sword as by famine,’ is resonant here, too; the Colonel’s abstemious discipline seems liable to collapse into its opposite, unharnessed drive, evoked in the buried allusion to the barbarous invasion of the west by the Huns. Analogously, the analytic appetite of Fanny’s mind, with the disciplinarian rigors it is subjected to, carries the suppressed charge of her physically passionate temperament. Inside the frame of her childless marriage, and in the context of the systematic satire to which her physicality gives rise, it is difficult to think of her mental overflow as anything but a compensatory expression of an ebullient, potentially unruly sexuality. In this, Fanny resembles the obsessionally driven narrator of The Sacred Fount, whose hypertrophied speculative faculties are compulsively engaged in probing sexual mysteries. His drive for epistemological penetration is paradigmatically expressive of a morbid, displaced sexual impulse. In The Sacred Fount, mental hypertrophy, with its charge of morbid aggressiveness, seems to serve as a way of warding off the terrors of the cannibal fantasy of the Sacred Fount. Penetrative knowledge is at once armor and weapon in this struggle. At the ‘secondary’ pole of the matrix, where one partner battens on the faculties of the other, the mental armature of the male vampire and the enfeeblement of the woman’s mind form a nightmare vision which corresponds to the matrix of bodily vampirism but is also divorced from it. Consciousness and cognition in the novel crystallize in dissociation from, as a defense against, passionate craving. This rift between the conscious mind and psycho-sexual experience masks or mystifies the patterns of the mind’s dis-ease, but fails to dispel or neutralize the craving which informs it. In The Ambassadors, the Sacred Fount matrix recurs, with the uncanny element, central to The Sacred Fount, domesticated, as the novel selfconsciously implies. Here, in the face of miraculous transformations, it will not do ‘to turn on the uncanny’; instead, it is ‘poor dear old life simply that springs the surprise’ (A, 178). The novel’s international theme

8


mutes the potential supernatural implications of a situation in which an adulterous affair causes premature aging in a young lover, and extraordinary youthfulness in his mature mistress. In the international framework, Chad Newsome’s silver hair serves as a visible sign of his initiation into old-world manners and morals, while the unfading freshness of Mme de Vionnet is felt to be part of the innate, hereditary graces of the type she embodies, the Parisian femme du monde. The typology of the novel reaches further and deeper, recasting the imaginative materials of The Sacred Fount in a Christian mold, based on the historical opposition of American Puritanism and European Catholicism, as James conceives it, as well as on the theological opposition of spirit and matter. Taken, in the language of The Sacred Fount, as ‘an apologue or parable,’ the vampire theme bears out a complex, disjunctive configuration of body and mind, or matter and spirit, which in the old-world setting of The Ambassadors acquires distinctive Christian overtones. The archetypal dyad of The Sacred Fount tensely constellates the Sacred Fount of physical vitality, a principle of material, maternal plenitude, with the life of the mind or spirit, seen as a holy writ or a sacred font – that is, as a vision of disembodiment and transcendence. In typological exegesis, transfigured material presence is embodied in the conception of the Virgin Birth, as prefigured in the Burning Bush of Exodus. The material, maternal element of the Virgin is infinitely regenerative, through a passion that transcends sexuality, and is exempt from organic processes of consumption and waste. Spirit, on the other hand, is sustained through an exacerbated mode of material consumption, a sacrificial waste of organic substance, whose epitome is the Passion of Christ. The Eucharistic, trans-substantiated Body of Christ is traditionally imagined anti-typically against carnal passion, as subsuming and transfiguring it. Radically paradoxical, this figure has its roots in a sermon attributed to Augustine, where Christ’s mounting of the cross is interpreted erotically, as His marriage to the heavenly city: Like a bridegroom Christ went forth from His chamber. He went out with a presage of His nuptials into the field of the world […]. He came to the marriage bed of the cross, and there, in mounting it, He consummated his marriage [Re. Christ’s words on the cross, ‘consummatum est’ in the Vulgate, John 19:30]. And when he perceived the signs of the creature, He lovingly gave himself up to the torment in the place of His bride […] and he joined the woman to Himself forever. (NS, 45)

Introduction

9

In a typological sense, then, the dyad of Son and Bride sustains in resisting, and resists in sustaining, an erotic imagination of passion. It negates it in the sense that the creatural body is destroyed, and affirms it in the sense that the Bride or Woman is fused with the body, in its destruction and mystic transfiguration. The psycho-cultural vision of the late phase, like the historicism of Adams’s Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, is deeply responsive to the complexity of this traditional, old-world conception.9 The Ambassadors unfolds distinctively in contrapuntal movement to the Puritan trajectory as it is traced in Chartres, from moral abstraction to sensuous communion. Reversing the course of the Pilgrims, the journey from America to Europe reaches back to a sacramental Rupture of Planes, and Real Presence – it moves away from the desacramentalized reality inherited from the Puritans, to the palpable, passional Presence of Christ in and as ourselves. It also reaches back to the passional presence of the Virgin, a presence purged from the devotional sphere and the cultural legacy of the Puritan Fathers. The inverted ‘pilgrimage’ (A, 116) to Paris, in quest of the lost element of the feminine, registers a sense of cultural privation, closely akin to the hungry anti-Puritanism of Chartres. ‘The proper study of mankind is woman,’ Adams writes, ‘and by common agreement since Adam, it is the most complex and arduous. The study of Our Lady, as shown by the art of Chartres, leads directly to Eve, and lays bare the whole subject of sex’ (MSMC, 187). The agents of the Reformation would have none of this subject. Scandalized by the unorthodox nature of Our Lady’s worship – by the near eclipse of the Trinity by Mariolatry – they ‘were not satisfied with abolishing her, but sought to abolish the woman altogether as the cause of all evil in heaven and on earth. The Puritans abandoned the New Testament and the Virgin in order to go back to the beginning and renew the quarrel with Eve’ (MSMC, 261). In terms of Adams’s scenario, however, the deposition of the Virgin spells the decline of religion itself. Divesting itself of feminine influence, the Church ‘lost nearly everything of value to it or to the world, except its philosophy’ (MSMC, 260). In The Ambassadors, the Parisian femme du monde revives the feminine archetype of the old world, in which woman is at once immaculate and sexual. Like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, Mme de Vionnet is a creature of infinite variety, tantalizing and paradoxical. She is intimately associated with Notre Dame Cathedral, but is a type of Venus, too – ‘a goddess still partly engaged in a morning cloud,’ or ‘a sea-nymph waist-high in the summer surge’ (A, 256). Henry Adams spells out this mythological kinship; the Virgin, for him, is the last and greatest in a series of pagan goddesses, Astarte, Isis, Demeter and Aphrodite; and like Mme de Vionnet,

10


with her tenebrous hereditary privileges, the Virgin is also ‘the most varied historical character’ (MSMC, 187, 267).10 The ambiguous element of the femme du monde is figured in a striking image of Paris, a ‘vast bright Babylon,’ hanging ‘like some huge iridescent object, a jewel brilliant and hard, in which parts were not to be discriminated nor differences comfortably marked. It twinkled and trembled and melted together, and what seemed all surface one moment seemed all depth the next.’ Sensuous flux generates, here, a sense of cognitive and moral equivocality, accompanied by something akin to psychological alienation. Consciousness confronts an object it perceives as cut off from itself, precariously suspended and highly unstable. We sense the forbidding nature of the object and its arbitrary, tantalizing metamorphic processes; unaccountable freezings and meltings, crystallizations and liquefactions. In The Ambassadors, an inherently aloof, abstemious sensibility is brought to bear on a traditional cultural matrix, which renders erotic experience vitally present but also essentially illicit. Within this frame, sexuality as such is experienced as adulterous, as well as adulterating, an unholy admixture of spirit and matter, subject and object. Marriage, above all, is a paradoxically sacralized, institutionalized form of adultery. The Sacred Fount fantasy configures marriage in the archetypal pattern of Christian sacrifice, as it is portrayed in the passage from Augustine: the female body thrives while the male body is consumed, and the spirit thrives in dissociation from the body. Erotic passion is a self-annihilative mode, insofar as it is assimilated into a pattern of sacrificial passion; and it is riddled with conflict insofar as it resists such assimilation.

II The transition from The Sacred Fount to The Ambassadors is marked by a shift from first-person to third-person narration, and a concomitant renunciation of narrative ambiguity. The international matrix of The Ambassadors, with its large cultural polarities and ‘civilizational’ resonances, provides the Jamesian center of consciousness with a field of reference which interprets and subsumes the radical isolation of firstperson narrators, whose last avatar is the narrator of The Sacred Fount. In the Preface to The Ambassadors, James comments on the merits and demerits of first-person narration, eschewed now in favor of the thirdperson mode. He notes that the split in the first-person narrative into autobiographical subject and object, or narrator and agent, is compositionally less restrictive than the third-person mode; such compositional

Introduction

11

facility, however, is secured at the expense of ‘certain precious accommodations’; the objection, specifically, is to the ‘terrible fluidity of self-revelation’ in the first-person narrative (LC II, 1316). In part, the anxiety of first-person narration which the Preface addresses has to do with an imperfectly adjusted imagination of exposure; a jealously guarded inwardness is felt to be impinged upon and threatened by disjunctive externality. On the other hand, an external frame of reference might, it is felt, serve to accommodate or contain a threatening inward flux, a rampant, potentially incontinent subjectivity. The third-person mode might minister to a viable unfolding of interiority, offering, as it were, an intermediate experiential zone, which would bridge the gulf between subjectivity and its objects, but also affirm the boundaries of discrete identities. In The Ambassadors, the endeavor to negotiate and inhabit this intermediary narrative space yields an elusive, scintillating texture of reflexive ambiguities and ironies. Adrian Poole describes this idiom as a ‘relation’ between narrator and protagonist – as ‘James’s most cunning blend of twoness and oneness’ (HJ, 46). There is a sense in which the narrative investment in this ‘relation,’ with its subtle interplay of concealments and exposures, becomes its own absorbing spectacle, and bars the Jamesian center of consciousness from full participation in the drama it mediates. In The Wings of the Dove and in The Golden Bowl, single-center narration branches off into what the Preface to The Wings of the Dove calls the ‘law of successive centers’ (LC II, 1294). James describes this new method in the Preface to The Golden Bowl, having first reviewed the earlier one; the single-center method, he says, consists of projecting the story through the opportunity and the sensibility of some more or less detached, some not strictly involved, though thoroughly interested and intelligent, witness or reporter, some person who contributes to the case mainly a certain amount of criticism and interpretation of it […]. The somebody is often, among my shorter tales, I recognize, but an unnamed, unintroduced and (save by right of intrinsic wit) unwarranted participant, the impersonal author’s concrete deputy or delegate, a convenient substitute or apologist for the creative power otherwise so veiled and disembodied. (LC II, 1322; my emphasis) The Preface proceeds to comment on the way in which the method ‘betrays itself’ in The Golden Bowl, a betrayal which ‘may be one of the liveliest sources of amusement in it’ (LC II, 1321). In particular, the

12


diversification of narrative focus seems to allow for greatly enhanced participation and embodiment: It’s not that the muffled majesty of authorship doesn’t here ostensibly reign; but I catch myself again shaking it off and disavowing the pretence of it while I get down into the arena and do my best to live and breathe and rub shoulders and converse with the persons engaged in the struggle that provides for the others in the circling tiers the entertainment of the great game. There is no other participant, of course, than each of the real, the deeply involved and immersed and more or less bleeding participants; but I nevertheless affect myself as having held my system fast and fondly, with one hand at least, by the manner in which the whole thing remains subject to the register, ever so closely kept, of the consciousness of but two of the characters. While the ‘successive centers’ of The Wings of the Dove strain to reflect the ordeal of the dying heroine, an experience impervious, at the core, to reflective consciousness (LC II, 1298), the two centers of The Golden Bowl emerge as fully capable of reflecting their reciprocal drama (LC II, 1324). They accomplish, to an unequalled degree in James’s oeuvre, an integration of reflective consciousness with participatory experience. Each is a reflective register, a ‘vessel of consciousness’ (LC II, 1089), while being ‘just as consistently a foredoomed, entangled, embarrassed agent in the general imbroglio, actor in the offered play’ (LC II, 1323). Their quality of embodied and participatory consciousness displaces the isolated centers of the ambiguous tales, as well as the finely attuned but recessive, guarded center of The Ambassadors.11 The late fiction probes and strives to mend ‘rifts’ within the fabric of consciousness and experience. The endeavor, increasingly fleshed out through the sequence of novels, is to generate for consciousness a viable, fluent mode of expressiveness and responsiveness. In terms of the international polarity, the densely communal, interknit element of the Catholic tradition of Europe is played off against the dissociative vision and the subjective proclivity of the American Puritan tradition, yielding increasingly rich and evocative imaginative textures. European initiations involve a metaphorical breaking of vessels of consciousness, invasions of de-sexualized and de-historicized ‘Puritanical’ reflectors by ‘Catholic’ visions of the frail vessel, which is the female body traditionally conceived. The rarefied fluid of consciousness, exposed to the European element, undergoes a ‘chemical change’ – a

Introduction

13

kind of sea-change, as it is figured in The Wings of the Dove (WD, 279). It materializes, into a vital fluid – libidinal or erotic passion, embodied in the culture’s religious and erotic archetypes. For the Jamesian center of consciousness, Europe is the stage of meaningful full-bodied action, in contradistinction to the reclusive, abstractionist American mode. In a deep sense, however, action here takes on the meaning of passion (from the Latin ‘patior,’ to bear or to suffer) as in the agon of tragic drama, where actor is agonist, and where the protagonist suffers. The imagistic tissue of the late style is rife with visions of alimentary consumption; natura devorans is natura devorata, consuming is inseparable from being consumed, in the mode of the Eucharist. The Eucharistic vein taps into a communal, passional, carnal experience. In Endymion, Keats describes Love in a similar spirit: ‘Life’s self is nourished by its proper pith, / And we are nurtured like a Pelican brood’ (814–5).12 The international theme knits together appetitive consumption at the European pole and the accumulation of fabulous fortunes at the American pole. American wealth, an increasingly blatant aspect of the capitalist market, figures, most distinctively in The Ambassadors, as a devolutionary phase in the tradition of Presbyterian Gentility.13 The new forms of wealth, allied to America’s vision of Empire, are seen, in the framework of their historical and cultural underpinnings, as permeated by a hunger for Europe. American magnates, heirs and heiresses go hungry, in this sense, until they succumb to the European mode of self-consumption. The immaterial forms of production and affluence associated with America emerge in their relation to psycho-cultural consumerist hunger, focused on the organic, material plenty of Europe. The American imperialist drive is refracted as a form of cultural undernourishment; the new plutocracy is irresistibly, recursively drawn to Europe, where its wealth is materially invested and consumed. The treasures of European art, in this context, are inseparable from the human resources of the old world. The artistic order and the human order interpenetrate; both are implicated in the double-edged mode of old-world consumption, and are liable to consume their American consumers. These human resources include not only Prince Amerigo, Kate Croy or Merton Densher, but also, less obviously, Mme de Vionnet, who is engrossed in Chad if not ‘acquired’ by him, and correspondingly holds him in an old-world quasi-contractual relationship, a form of institutionalized concubinage, which interferes with industrial and business undertakings across the Atlantic. In The Ambassadors, without buying up anything or anyone, the American characters still reflect the

14


power of wealth to intrude itself into the fabric of European life, and so anticipate the active voracity of their avatars in the later novels.14 In The Wings of the Dove, European socioeconomics is transposed into cultural psychodynamics; the struggle here is not between a working class and a leisure class, but between the ‘working’ and the ‘worked.’ The ‘working,’ in this paradoxical terminology, are social parasites, and the ‘worked’ are sacrificial hosts; but the radical communality, the inbred nature of the commonwealth renders the distinction between the two orders highly elusive; so, ‘the worker in one connection was the worked in another; it was as broad as it was long – with the wheels of the system, as might be seen, wonderfully oiled’ (WD, 169). It is, at all events, the American heroine who brings on a crisis in the European commonwealth. Milly Theale is mortally afflicted with an ailment, a type of consumption, which, among its various ramifications, is linked to the voracity of immeasurably wealthy Americans in Europe. Her condition surfaces just before her departure for Europe, and her journey reflects the fatal implication of the reclusive American consciousness in the communal malaise of the old world. Her itinerary suggests progressive embroilment in Catholic experience; in the course of a year, she travels from Switzerland, through London, to Venice, where she dies. The route leads from Protestantism, via the Anglican admixture, to Catholicism, finally approaching the cradle of Christianity in the eastern terminus of classical European Christianity. The nameless malady in The Wings of the Dove, James’s most conspicuously Symbolist novel, invites a symbolic reading. In contrast to the structuring mystery of The Beast in the Jungle (1902), which turns out to revolve flatly around the hero’s dissociation from experience, the mystery here is richly suggestive. Its core symbol is consumption, in a doubleedged sense – like the fire in Shakespeare’s sonnet, ‘consumed with that which it was nourished by.’ In the Preface, James speaks of his heroine’s story in terms of ‘this, that and the other irreducible anxiety’ (Preface, 39). ‘Anxiety,’ in the root sense (from the Latin ‘angere,’ to squeeze or strangle), is associated with insufficiency of air: angustiae spiritus, shortwindedness. The figurative language of the Preface concretizes the association through imagery of breathing; Milly is pictured as drawing her breath in pain amidst the elements of her situation (Preface, 40), and the narrative focus makes for ‘our drawing our breath through [her] lungs’ (Preface, 48). The novel itself, however, raises the possibility that Milly suffers from consumption only to dismiss it. Her trouble, it seems, cannot be ‘a bad case of lungs,’ since consumption, discovered in time, is curable, while

Introduction

15

Milly’s condition appears to be ‘past patching’ (WD, 283–4). Hers apparently is ‘a case for surgery.’ The mentioning of her eminent London physician provokes the exclamation: ‘Ah fifty-thousand knives!’ (WD, 285). Elsewhere, he is referred to as ‘the great master of the knife’ (WD, 384). Milly Theale is the namesake and, in part, a fictional evocation of James’s New England cousin, Minny Temple, who died from consumption in 1870, soon after he had struck out on his transatlantic travels. In 1892, in London, he witnessed the final stages of his sister’s doomed struggle with breast cancer.15 The illness in The Wings of the Dove draws on and transmutes James’s response to both deaths, taking shape as a symbolic amalgam of consumption and cancer. The Notebook entry of 1894 speaks of death ‘by consumption, heart-disease or whatever’ (N, 102). Cancer, poignantly muted here, will surface in the imagistic texture of the novel; the suggestion of cardiac complaint will crystallize as Milly’s final crisis of a broken heart. The fictional illness reflects a conflict between two psycho-physical impulses: the ‘cancerous,’ ‘accretive’ urge of the body, and the ‘consumptive’ urge of the spirit. The tension, again, is between hypertrophy and wasting of bodily tissue. The contrastive pathologies eerily shade off into each other: tumefaction of the flesh and tuberosity of the lungs, the latter blocking the passage of air, or spirit, through the body. Consumption, in this sense, belongs to the order of Freud’s antithetical concepts. In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag provides an extended lexicographical insight into the etymological and typological conflation of cancer and tuberculosis, from late antiquity until the late nineteenth century: Throughout most of their history, the metaphoric uses of TB and cancer crisscross and overlap. The Oxford English Dictionary records ‘Consumption’ in use as a synonym for pulmonary tuberculosis as early as 1398. […] But the pre-modern understanding of cancer also invokes the notion of consumption. The OED gives as the early figurative definition of cancer: ‘Anything that frets, corrodes, corrupts, or consumes slowly and secretly.’ […] The earliest literal definition of cancer is growth, lump or protuberance, and the disease’s name – from the Greek karkinos and the Latin cancer, both meaning crab – was inspired, according to Galen, by the resemblance of an external tumor’s swollen veins to a crab’s legs […]. But etymology indicates that tuberculosis was also once considered a type of abnormal extrusion: the word tuberculosis – from the Latin tuberculum, the diminutive of tuber, bump, swelling – means a morbid swelling, protuberance,

16


projection, or growth. Rudolf Virchow, who founded the science of cellular pathology in the 1850s, thought of the tubercle as a tumor. Thus, from late antiquity until quite recently, tuberculosis was – typologically – cancer. And cancer was described, like TB, as a process in which the body was consumed. The modern conceptions of the two diseases could not be set until the advent of cellular pathology. […] And it was not possible definitely to separate cancer from TB until 1882, when tuberculosis was discovered to be a bacterial infection. Such advances in medical thinking enabled the leading metaphors of the two diseases to become truly distinct and, for the most part, contrasting. (IM, 15–6) Michel Foucault, in The Birth of the Clinic, is concerned with the advent of tissue pathology around the turn of the nineteenth century and the radical shift it brought about in medical views of disease.16 Through this new prism, disease is no longer perceived in simple opposition to health, as an invasion of the organism by a nocent agent from without; its roots are sought in morbid alterations of tissual texture, forms of degeneration which are internal to the organism, which emerge out of it and carry it toward its own demise. Wear comes to be seen as ‘an ineffaceable temporal dimension of organic activity.’ Tissues are ‘disorganized’ from the moment they move into action and confront the outside world; death insinuates itself, not only in the form of possible accident, but as the deep structure of life, its immanent modality (BC, 158). Such disorganization may even turn against itself, as in the case of tuberculous degeneration, when the ulceration of the nuclei causes the destruction of the tubercles themselves (BC, 157). The medical gaze becomes vivisectionist, in its effort to detect signs of tissual lesion veiled by the living flesh. In this, its action is analogous to the action of disease; disease, like the clinical gaze, ‘is an autopsy in the darkness of the body, dissection alive’ (BC, 131). Nineteenth-century medicine is ‘haunted by that absolute eye that cadaverizes life and discovers in the corpse the frail, broken nervure of life’ (BC, 166). But the medical eye which pathologizes life endows it, by the same stroke, with individuality, as it probes the unique modulations of disease in each manifestation. ‘Only individual illnesses exist: not because the individual reacts upon his own illness, but because the action of the illness rightly unfolds in the form of individuality’ (BC, 168–9). In early modernity, a period whose sensibility was marked by death no less pronouncedly, mortality appeared under the sign of the macabre, a universal liability, blind to differences of fate and fortune, ‘a sort of

Introduction

17

egalitarian saturnalia’ (BC, 171). Late modernity, by contrast, leans toward the morbid, a subtle perception of the way in which life finds in death its most differentiated figure. The morbid is the rarefied form of life, exhausted, working itself into the void of death; but also in another sense, that in death it takes on its peculiar volume, irreducible to conformities and customs, to received necessities; a singular volume defined by its absolute rarity. The privilege of the consumptive: in earlier times, one contracted leprosy against a background of great waves of collective punishment; in the nineteenth century, a man, in becoming tubercular, in the fever that hastens things and betrays them, fulfills his incommunicable secret. That is why chest diseases are of exactly the same nature as diseases of love: they are the Passion, a life to which death gives a face that cannot be exchanged. (BC, 171–2) In The Wings of the Dove, the two views of death, old and new, collectivized and differentiated, are interlarded. The novel embodies the latterday anatomizing, particularizing, clinical gaze, as well as the traditional perspective on mortality, informed by religion. Partly by means of this complex juncture, the calcified integuments of individuality suffer corrosion, here. Consciousness is subjected to a process of being consumed and transformed, as it enacts a series of passionate involvements, in an imaginative field that evokes the Christian Passion. Sacrificial destructiveness, arrived at through the breakdown of conscious divisions and barriers, turns out to have a paradoxical gestational and parturitive dimension, which emerges as the novel performs a difficult movement of readjustment, staging a ‘kenotic’ transition, from rarefaction to eroticized embodiment. The morbid-gestational imagination which in The Wings of the Dove takes full possession is present in embryo in the image of Strether floating to his North Atlantic home as if on a bier, through the subterranean caverns of Kubla Khan. The focus in The Ambassadors on three-dimensional, containing spaces – natural, architectural and imaginative – marks an early phase of an evolving preoccupation with environments that might hold together polarized urges. Strether’s overwrought imagination seeks relief in unencumbered urban vistas – ‘the hugely distributed Paris of summer, alternately dazzling and dusky, with a weight lifted for him off its columns and cornices and with a shade and air in the flutter of awnings as wide as avenues’ (A, 455). By degrees, the late fiction teaches

18


itself to recognize shadowy, tortuous spaces, like the decaying rococo interiors in The Wings of the Dove, and the haunted, rotund and crooked passageways of Fawns in The Golden Bowl. At Fawns, Maggie Verver becomes ‘a mistress of shades’ (GB, 423) and learns to inhabit labyrinthine psychic and imaginative recesses. Knowledge of the maze, for her, is a form of power – power that eluded an array of earlier lucid avatars, above all the eponymous Maisie. But more than power is at stake here; Maggie’s occult mastery fosters inner maturational, transformative processes, whose sources the novel is able to tap, and whose rhythms it follows with remarkable attunement. This mode of inner generativity, the ‘principle of growth’ (AA, 132; LC II, 1120) revealed fully, perhaps, for the first time in a Jamesian subjectivity, is conjured into being by the prose of the late period, a ‘great containing vessel’ for the psychic charges released into it.17 The late style, a superfine register of particularized, often rarefied subjectivity, is also, as Austin Warren and others have stressed, an oral, performative medium; its elusive, allusive textures are articulated through and against the organic expressiveness of voice. Insular innerness unfurls and takes on organic cadence and form as it acquires resilience and elasticity. In the Preface to The Ambassadors, James finds the novel to be still, ‘under the right persuasion, the most independent, most elastic, most prodigious of literary forms’ (LC II, 1321). The right persuasion seems to entail, above all, the development of formal and stylistic means for elaborating subjectivity, investing and embodying it through tensions and contradictions.

III My reading stresses the manifestations of psychic fissures or rifts in the late novels, which I take to resonate reciprocally with a projected historical-cultural polarity, Catholic Europe and Puritan America. This focus is in tune, to some extent, with a recent revival of interest in mapping James’s religious imagination; but the current critical literature that shares this concern, with its various, variously intersecting interpretive stresses, treats James’s weave of theological figuration as a secularized idiom, transposed into psychological, socio-cultural or aesthetic fields of reference.18 The secularizing perspective is, in one sense, a welcome corrective to traditionalist readings of religious motifs in the Jamesian corpus. ‘If we follow the religious parallels too closely,’ Frederick Crews cautioned, adjusting his own Christian humanist insights, ‘we end in absurdities’ (TM, 109). As a rule, the endeavor to trace the figures in the tapestry of James’s late fiction requires the interpretive pressure of close

Introduction

19

textual analysis. Scriptural typology in the late corpus yields its coherence under such pressure, too, though not as a vehicle of traditional creeds or devotional temperaments. This is not to say, however, that the orbit of religious experience in the late novels is best thought of as secularized; it is no more so, essentially, than the more obvious mythopoeic spectrum of later Modernist writing. The quasi-historical religious quest of Henry Adams may serve as an analogy, again. To quote John Carlos Rowe, Mont St Michel and Chartres ‘reveals the twentieth-century relation to medieval unity as it emphasizes our discontinuity from that unity. As such it is not history but an imaginative and symbolic act, performed by Adams himself, which fills the empty choir of Chartres and relives the “dead faith” of the Virgin’ (HAHJ, 46). James’s late phase appears, in this light, as another complex ‘symbolic and imaginative act’ of psychic and cultural revivification. The allegorical, typological motifs that hover close to its surface serve to qualify and complicate representational verisimilitude. Cutting against the grain of representationalism, the allegorical vein makes present a play of psychic realities, of dynamic inner life, which the novelistic fabric captures in its unfolding. The heightened, flattened use of type and symbol, sometimes bordering on the grotesque, forges a link with buried strata of psychic experience, highly charged infantile modes of attachment and strife. The emergence of this psychic field of force is tied to the activation of archetypal projections, rooted in the matrices of religion and myth. The resurgence in the late novels of the cross-cultural matrix, after two decades of submergence, plays a pivotal role in the transmutation of James’s realist mode, with its predominantly interpersonal and social concerns, into a register of psychic and spiritual processes and transformations. Late-Jamesian poetics reveals a fundamental inter-implication of subjectivity and the matrices of its culture, a sense of the psyche vibrating against shared deep structures, at once extrinsic and intrinsic to it. This reciprocal strain of the late creative impulse invites conceptualization vis-à-vis a current of object-relations theory, as formulated in the work of D. W. Winnicott. Creativity, for Winnicott, is a mode of inhabiting a potential or intermediary space, between subject and object, inner and outer reality. He explores the life of the psyche in terms of its rootedness in infantile play, an essential creative capacity extending well beyond childhood into aesthetic and cultural spheres.19 The aesthetic and cultural investments of late-Jamesian subjectivity emerge as deeply congruent with Winnicottian thought. As crucially for James as for Winnicott, psychic generativity is experienced inseparably from

20


objective encounter; the object created is, inseparably, the object found. In the late novels, this porous, permeable imaginative mode, with its concomitant loosening or removal of psychic stringencies and barriers, allows an unprecedented range of intense, ambivalent emotion to penetrate and transform the novelistic texture. The late novels are, in this sense, an extended exploration, in discursive or narrative as well as structural, stylistic and figural ways, of ambivalence in desire, and of the transformative possibilities, for consciousness and desire, embodied in the imaginative capacity to experience and contain ambivalence. A letter to Hendrik Andersen, written shortly after the completion of The Wings of the Dove, gives voice to the anguished ripening of such experience: I’ve gone through Death, and Death, enough in my long life, to know how all that we are, all that we have, all that is best of us within, our genius, our imagination, our passion, our whole personal being, become then but aids and channels and open gates to suffering, to being flooded. But, it is better so. Let yourself go and live, even as a lacerated, mutilated lover, with your grief, your loss, your sore, unforgettable consciousness. Possess them and let them possess you, and life, so, will still hold you in her arms, and press you to her breast, and keep you, like the great merciless but still most enfolding and never disowning mighty Mother, on and on for things to come. (L, IV, 228) The deepening experience of desire, in the late novels, ministers to a striking attunement and expansion of conscious experience, an ability to invest, mobilize and project consciousness into a sphere of expressive interplay, beyond its self-limiting bounds – ‘on and on for things to come.’ This playful mobility involves a growing sense of having broken free of and outlasted, in altered form, moribund archetypes of self, with their obsolete cultural molds. The elaborate mode of symbolization in the late novels has been taken to derive its meaning from particular representational contexts and relations. Adrian Poole writes of the symbol of the golden bowl that it ‘never remains securely focused, possessed of an identity independent of the interpretations attached to it’ (HJ, 132). John Carlos Rowe puts the case still more forcefully: The Jamesian symbol is defined by its genetic and processive nature. The golden bowl, the wings of the dove, the ivory tower are from the

Introduction

21

beginning flawed, absent, empty. The symbolic process itself is an accumulation of meaning, a shaping of form through variant interpretations […]. Symbols are made by being talked about and around. The symbolic construct is the successive interrelation and interpenetration of consciousnesses. In its objective form the Jamesian symbol provides an arbitrary form for ‘measuring motions’ in social relations. In its linguistic significance the symbol embodies the function of relations, the defining and incarnating process that is at the basis of our human reality. (HJHA, 44–5)20 Without contesting the claim that the Jamesian symbolization takes place processually and relationally, I would stress that James’s characters do not live exclusively in a representational network of personal relationships. They inhabit an intensely imagined cultural sphere, at once external and internal to them, with which the symbols in the novels continually engage. The figure of the rifted lute, as it is deployed in The Wings of the Dove and in The Golden Bowl, is associated with the ‘vessel of consciousness’ and the ‘frail vessel’; it points reflexively to a preoccupation with subjectivity and its objects, and so may serve as a further illustration of the way in which the late texture patterns subjectivity through and against historical and cultural frames. In the Wings of the Dove, a ‘rift within the lute’ figures Milly’s mortal illness (WD, 127). The body of the lute, shaped like a sliced pear, with a long fingerboard, is an instrument with immediately sensuous associations; imagining a rift in it is implicitly continuous with imagining the female body as a flawed, frail vessel, diseased in the intrinsic sense of morbid lesion. A flaw, rift, disruption or ailment becomes the defining imaginative experience of the female body. Corporeality is experienced as flawed, and the mind recoils and dissociates itself from it. In The Golden Bowl, ‘rifts within the lute,’ like the fractured golden bowl, are immediately suggestive of adulterous sexuality (GB, 292). The rifted lute, like the frail vessel, conjures an array of aesthetic and cultural presences. It puts us in mind of the Renaissance, the inceptive moment of modern western subjectivity, a period which Walter Pater thought of as blessed with an unparalleled ‘unity of spirit’ (R, xxiv). The epigraph to the 1893 edition of The Renaissance, taken from Psalms, is ‘Yet shall ye be as the wings of a dove.’ For Pater, the phrase is evocative of sensuous, aesthetic cultivation; the biblical verse is a promise of plenty to the Children of Israel: ‘Though ye have lien among the pots, yet shall

22


ye be as the wings of a dove covered with silver, and her feathers with yellow gold’ (68:13). The dove of James’s novel, however, is a composite, cleft figure, not only a creature of flesh, but also a soul-bird, the scriptural Dove or Paraclete. The tension between these symbolic aspects is best embodied in the contrast between the garnished, edible dove of the psalm Pater cites and the solitary, unworldly dove in Psalm 55: My heart is sore pained within me: and the terrors of death are fallen upon me / Fearfulness and trembling are come upon me, and horror hath overwhelmed me. / And I said, Oh that I had wings, like a dove! For then would I fly away, and be at rest. / Lo, then would I wander far off, and remain in the wilderness, Selah. / I would hasten my escape from the windy storm and tempest. (55: 4–8) Here, again, is the international polarity of Europe and America, in embryo – the fleshly dove, emblematic of the carnality of Europe, and the unworldly dove in the wilderness, emblematic of Puritan spirit. In the Jamesian context, the dove of Psalm 68 is a figure for alimentary consumption, which in the late novels links up with aesthetic and cultural forms of consumption; it is associated with communal European experience, where, as in Eucharistic symbolism, consumption is also the condition of being consumed. In The Wings of the Dove, Milly’s decline is filtered through a succession of aesthetic prisms – Pre-Raphaelite, Symbolist and Baroque; above all, it comes to be associated with the Renaissance, through a rich vein of allusions to Bronzino, Titian, Veronese, and, not least, Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s romances – The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale, in particular – serve as a kind of imaginative template for the recuperative and transformative thrust of the late fiction, beyond its morbidities. It seems, at the same time, that James’s recuperative imagination demands an undoing of the divisive matrix of self-consciousness, a fraught legacy of the Renaissance. The moribundity of inherited cultural forms is figured in The Wings of the Dove through imagery of shipwreck, submergence and sea-change, which conjure[s] a sea-surged, ravaged vision of Venice. A fallen monument of the Renaissance and the Baroque, now decadent and depleted, Venice seems to be encroached upon, about to be engulfed by a shadowy orient. The dying dove’s rope of pearls – orients – is a suggestive ramifying symbol. And the lute, with its susceptibility to internal rifts, is a westernized avatar of the medieval, oriental Oud (‘lute,’ first recorded in the fourteenth century, comes from the Arabic ‘Al-Ud,’ literally, ‘wood.’).

Introduction

23

In the wake of the crises of surrender with which the late fiction is filled, a live pulsation of self-consciousness, transformed like the pearls in Ariel’s song, comes to be experienced through and against a shifting but palpable, contiguous reality. The figural dichotomy of the vessel finds a momentary resolution, in this spirit, near the end of The Golden Bowl. Maggie is figured as ‘a creature consciously floating and shining in a warm summer sea, some element of dazzling sapphire and silver’ (GB, 506). Although the fluid of consciousness is exteriorized here, consciousness is not lost to itself. The fluid bears the imagistic imprint of its containing vessel, since sapphire and silver are not only colors, but also gemstone and precious metal. Their shimmer seems to suggest the transformed reality of the shattered crystal golden bowl, the lingering presence of the solid object within the liquid, of form within flux. If shimmer and luster in the novel tend to crystallize and solidify in constrictive and menacing ways, crystal, in its turn, will tend to deliquesce. The evocation, here, is of something akin to a ‘stream of consciousness,’ as William James describes it in his Principles of Psychology. Thought, he writes, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as ‘chain’ or ‘train’ do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. (PP, 233) The stream of consciousness near the conclusion of The Golden Bowl is projected as a mode of experiential fluency; dissociative consciousness is superseded, disruption transformed into continual flow. As in Buddhist psychology, some of whose currents are assimilated into William James’s Pragmatism, the mind’s disjunctive abstractions, the antithetical pull of attraction and repulsion, withdrawal and merging, are absorbed into an ongoing movement of subjective life. The image of the broken golden bowl in Ecclesiastes is worth recalling in this context: ‘Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. / Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was; and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it’ (12:6–7). The verse seems, in its cryptic way, to juxtapose vessel and liquid, container and contained; the pair seems to figure the precarious co-presence, in life, of matter and spirit. In death, the vessel is shattered, and the two

24


elements are torn asunder; the spirit returns to its maker, and the body returns to its native element, the earth. The Golden Bowl evokes a different vision; the breaking of the vessel issues in a vital, mobile co-presence of matter and mold, always in flux, but always, in this, susceptible of imaginative renewal. The image of Maggie afloat in sapphire and silver may be juxtaposed, further, with the image in The Ambassadors of Paris as iridescent pendant. The early sense of dissociation from an object perceived as tantalizingly mutable is replaced by a sense of profound mutual adaptation between consciousness and its containing environment. In The Ambassadors, the felt disjunction of consciousness and experience is poignantly aligned with a pervasive anxiety about the passage of time. Strether’s vulnerable sense of leisure is threatened, throughout, by the ubiquitous ‘tick of the great Paris clock’ (A, 111). A mode of haste and waste is reflected elsewhere in a pregnant metaphor: ‘Strether hadn’t had for years so rich a consciousness of time – a bag of gold into which he constantly dipped for a handful’ (136). The image has been aptly construed as an ironic rendition of Franklin’s aphorism, ‘time is money’ (Introduction, 28). By extension, in terms of the données of the novel, Strether’s subversive delay in Paris deprives him of a bag of gold.21 Time, here, is objectified and externalized, an illusory reified resource or provision outside the self, which, however, acquires a predatory internality, consuming the self even as it is being consumed. Time as an object emerges as a threatening feminine entity. The Preface to The Tragic Muse describes Paris in terms of a ‘leakage of time’ (LC II, 1109), and leakage, or liquefaction, is what the Parisian muse of The Ambassadors is tragically, but also repellently, prone to. A description of the hours in a Latin motto Strether recalls evokes for him the succession of women Chad is rumored to have been intimate with, and embodies their fatality: ‘Omnes vulnerant, ultima necat’ (A, 121). The image of Maggie afloat is of a very different cast. It suggests a mutual attunement of the rippling movement of consciousness, its ‘silver and sapphire,’ and the timeless, continual fluctuation of the deep; the two are mutually reflexive and, as it were, mutually containing. The sense of aliveness associated, here, with a synchronous experiential continuum of surface and depth, inside and outside, derives from a synchronicity, increasingly realized through the novelistic sequence, of psychic and cultural experience, a subtle and compelling interfusion of imaginings. In The Golden Bowl, Maggie comes to perceive her relationship with her husband in terms of delicate, passionate contiguity

Introduction

25

between an uncharted personal geography and the imprints of cultural embeddedness: It was strange, if one had gone into it, but such a place as Amerigo’s was like something made for him beforehand by innumerable facts, facts largely of the sort known as historical, made by ancestors, examples, traditions, habits; while Maggie’s own had come to show simply as that improvised ‘post’ – a post of the kind spoken of as advanced – with which she was to have found herself connected in the fashion of a settler or a trader in a new country; in the likeness even of some Indian squaw with a papoose on her back and barbarous beadwork to sell. Maggie’s own, in short, would have been sought in vain in the most rudimentary map of the social relations as such. The only geography marking it would be doubtless that of the fundamental passions. (GB, 548–9)

2 ‘The Historic Muse’: On The Ambassadors

I The Ambassadors explores the dynamics of ‘double consciousness,’ a complex pulsation of ‘detachment in zeal’ and ‘curiosity in indifference’ (56), which in a different frame of discourse might be called ambivalence. Psychic experience, with its charge of ambivalence, is refracted culturally, through the double prism of the international theme. The psycho-cultural field of force generated through the international polarity yields the first fully realized expression of fin-de-siècle subjectivity in the Jamesian corpus. The cross-cultural matrix, polarizing Europe and America, stages an encounter between archetypal modes of cultural experience – between what is conceived as a ‘Catholic’ culture of matter and a ‘Protestant’ culture of spirit. Matter is associated, here, with archetypal constructions of maternity and femininity, which serve as objects of profoundly ambivalent desire. In the spirit of Henry Adams’s Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904), Catholic Europe is projected as a conflicted cultural arena where the ideal symbolized in the virginity of the Virgin vies with a rich tradition of eroticized femininity. The densely communal, sensuous element of Catholic Europe is played off against the dissociative vision and the subjective proclivity of the American Puritan tradition: introverted, dematerialized and desexualized. The imaginative recursion in the late novels to historical, Catholic Europe finds expression in a symbolic pattern, whose imagistic elements are encoded in the compositional ‘germ’ of The Ambassadors, the scene at Gloriani’s garden (Preface, 33–4).1 Lambert Strether, of Woollett, Massachusetts, a widower ‘in the afternoon of life’ (91, 272), revisits Paris, and falls under the spell of the old world. His unexpected enchantment 26

‘The Historic Muse’: On The Ambassadors 27

is painfully mixed with the sense that for him, at this time, it is ‘just simply too late’ (214) – that he has forfeited his share of essential experience. This sense of privation is expressed in a gastronomic conceit, properly Parisian: The affair – I mean the affair of life – couldn’t, no doubt, have been different for me; for it’s at best a tin mould, either fluted or embossed, with ornamental excrescences, or else smooth and dreadfully plain, into which, a helpless jelly, one’s consciousness is poured – so that one ‘takes’ the form, as the great cook says, and is more or less compactly held by it. Still, one has the illusion of freedom; therefore don’t be, like me, without the memory of that illusion. (215) It is worth noting, in the first place, how attenuated the conception of individual consciousness seems to be here; the fluid of the mind is universal, common to all, and the diversity of its molds is amenable to typological classification. With the development of the figure, the initial dualistic sense of matter and mind, frame and consciousness, container and contained, is resolved into a unity: the raw is converted into cooked, the crudity of separateness refined into a subtle synthesis. The self in oldworld culture is a kind of ‘consommation’ (122), an item on a menu, nourishing a culture whose civilizing agency is closely allied to its culinary flair. In Europe, the forms of culinary, aesthetic and cultural consumption are forms of passional experience, which resonates at various levels with a Christian vision of sacrifice. A vision of the Passion is wrought into the fabric of the novel, and informs its structural design. Through the evocative presence of the Parisian Notre Dame, the perfect chiasmus of the novel’s ‘hourglass structure’ (AN, 137) becomes linked with the cruciform shape of a Gothic cathedral. Notre Dame in The Ambassadors anticipates the elaborate architectural symbolism of the later novels; it is an imaginative precursor of the Palazzo Leporelli, the Pagoda and the Ivory Tower. Here, evoking the archetypes of Christ and the Virgin, it serves to focus a polarized experience of the body, as both mangled and virginal. The novel explores and elaborates this fraught, paradoxical sense of corporeality. Recent scholarship has placed the theological veins in the late fiction in rich biographical and socio-cultural contexts.2 Here, without going over the ground that has been covered, the tenor of James’s response to oldworld religious forms is worth attending to. The Autobiography speaks of a youthful ‘detachment of sensibility’ (Ab, 198) from the private theological

28


speculation of the Elder Henry James. The son’s ‘dissociation’ is coupled with a yearning, spelled out elsewhere in the memoir, for full-bodied forms of worship. As against his father’s leaning toward ‘the abstract,’ he himself wished for ‘a state of faith, a conviction of the Divine, an interpretation of the universe – anything one might have made bold to call it – which would have supplied more features or appearances,’ a more commonplace sense of ‘social and material crowdedness’ (Ab, 337–8). In Transatlantic Sketches (1875), his early record of European travel, James contrasts the personal, embodied appeal of Catholic art with the passionless tradition of ‘western heresy.’ The ‘terribly distinct Apostles’ at the medieval church of Torcello strike him as ‘intensely personal sentinels of a personal Deity. Their stony stare seems to wait for ever vainly for some visible revival of primitive orthodoxy, and one may well wonder whether it finds much beguilement in idly-gazing troops of Western heretics – passionless even in their heresy’ (IH, 77–8). In the Milanese Basilica of St Ambrose, ‘with its spacious atrium and its crudely solemn mosaics,’ he feels that ‘it is surely your own fault if you don’t forget Dr. Strauss and M. Renan and worship as grimly as a Christian of the ninth century’ (IH, 130). In the Hawthorne biography (1879), James bemoans the things that are ‘absent from the texture of American life’: ‘No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy […], 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 […]’ (LC I, 351–2).3 Two decades later, The Ambassadors seeks to recover this very texture of medieval, Catholic Europe. The novel inhabits an acutely modern moment, yet strives, as a kind of latter-day ritual vehicle, to conjure back a lost plenitude of experience, a real presence of the old faith.

II With the eschewal of narrative ambiguity and the resurgence of the international subject, the reflective center of The Ambassadors is projected into an imaginative arena of history and culture. The insular integrity of the vessel of consciousness, so jealously guarded in The Sacred Fount, is sacrificed, and the individual mind abandons itself to the influence of what T. S. Eliot, after Matthew Arnold, called ‘the mind of Europe’ (TIT, 29). In terms of the cultural polarity of the international subject, ‘the mind of Europe’ is juxtaposed with the isolationist, abstractionist American spirit; the interknit communal element of Catholic


Europe is brought to bear on the introspective vision and the subjective proclivity of the Puritan American tradition. Strether comes to Paris as a vessel of the old New England spirit, the Puritan ‘sacred rage’ (85), congealed now into moral dogmatism. His journey hovers uneasily between imaginative domains of the past and the future. He is a ‘missionary’ of Mrs Newsome, ‘the lady of Woollett’ (219, 303) and his literary patroness, a wealthy widow whom he expects to marry on his return. His mission is to ‘save’ (Preface, 43) her prodigal son from the snares of an old-world temptress, and restore him to his duties in the new world; Chad Newsome is called on to take charge of the new advertising section of the family industry. The sacred rage of Woollett is an atrophied form – ‘gentrified,’ in Santayana’s sense – of a once fervent idealism; with the genteel tradition itself, it is increasingly eroded through vulgar association with the marketplace. The commodity manufactured by the Woollett industry remains pointedly nameless, ‘indeed unnamable’ (98). The family fortune is an undignified ‘new sum’; ‘Woollett,’ in this connection, is a ‘wallet,’ and Jim Pocock (peacock vain?), a prosperous businessman and Chad’s brother-in-law, a ‘pocket.’ These receptacles and their contents, like the ‘pocket’ Mrs Pocock uses for her moral transactions in Paris (341), are both abstract and highly material. Chad’s professional prospects are satirized, no doubt, but in a spirit that discloses areas of earnest conflict.4 The idiom of modernity employed in relation to Woollett forges a complex link between professional achievement and a fully crystallized sense of self. Strether’s attachment to Mrs Newsome is fueled by anxious desire to preserve his ‘one presentable little scrap of identity’ (101), vouchsafed by her – the editorship of the glossy Woollett Review, which, though unmarketable, nonetheless belongs to the culture of the market. The novel finds ways, to which I turn in greater detail later, of exploring the modern juncture of self and profession. For the moment, it may be well to linger with the counter-stress, which invests Mrs Newsome, a latter-day muse of mechanical reproduction, with archaic authority – the authority of a feudal lady with an errant knight in her service, or a queen commanding a counselor and envoy. She comes to be figured as a type of Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen (90) – ‘a moral swell,’ cold and handsome (90, 102), and still with ‘the girdle of a maid’ (323). By way of antithesis, Strether pictures the Europeanized Maria Gostrey as Mary Stuart (90–1), Catholic and passionate.5 Against the backdrop of French Catholicism, however, Maria evokes the plainness and limpidity of Dutch Protestantism. She offers Strether a secluded refuge, a ‘retreat,’ ‘a haunt of ancient peace,’ dedicated to time-honored amenities – ‘to

30


pleasant knowledge, to intimate charm, to antique order, to a neatness that was almost august.’ The descriptive focus on the display in her dining room of small old crockery, ideally kept pewter and specimens of vivid Delft (507), is a gentle parody of Dutch and Flemish genre painting. At the behest of the lady of Woollett, then, Strether is sent to Europe to resume the Puritan ‘quarrel with Eve’ (MSMC, 261). Maria Gostrey, a partial incarnation of the archetypal old-world woman, crosses his path en route, at Chester, but fails to arouse in him the historical spirit of combat.6 She is an expatriate, socially unanchored, but permeated with a passion for social classification; ‘the mistress of a hundred cases or categories, receptacles of the mind, subdivisions for convenience,’ she pigeonholes ‘her fellow mortals with a hand as free as that of a compositor scattering type’ (60). Her store of experience turns her, for Strether, into a true daughter of Eve; it has ‘the effect of appearing to place all knowledge […] on this original woman’s side’ (68; my italics). The ‘types of Woollett,’ he comes to feel, are two exactly, ‘the male and the female,’ while the types of Europe are diverse, marked by ‘a series of strong stamps’ applied on them ‘as if from without’ (92). The rigid bipolar typology of Woollett comes close to suggesting that the two types do not fully mix with each other. The typology of Europe, of course, is of a different order. In Paris, Strether finds the prodigal Chad uncannily improved – palpably transformed by ‘a miracle almost monstrous’ (178); the uncouth youth, now prematurely silver-haired, has turned into a suave cosmopolite, with the inveterate savoir faire of ‘a social animal’ (265). Chad’s case seems to expose the ‘strong stamps’ of old-world culture as the stigmata of a life of passion. The European ‘types’ are marked by their carnality, which, as James’s imagery implies, is a condition not free from suffering; it resonates typologically with the Passion of Christ and the Virgin. The ‘prime producing cause’ (173) of the miracle seems to burn with the civilizing passion of the ancient queens of France – a passion which Henry Adams describes as a type of the Virgin’s love. So, while the Virgin was miraculously using the power of spiritual love to elevate and purify the people, Eleanor [of Guienne] and her daughters were using the power of earthly love to discipline and refine the Courts […]. [Their ideals] were a form of religion, and if you care to see its evangels you had best go directly to Dante and Petrarch, or, if you like it better, to Don Quijote de la Mancha […]. Eleanor and her daughter Mary and her granddaughter Blanche knew as well as St Bernard knew, or St Francis, what a brute the emancipated man could be; and as though they foresaw the society of the sixteenth and eighteenth


century, they used every terror they could invent as well as every tenderness they could invoke, to tame the beasts around them. (MSMC, 201) Marie de Vionnet, whose civilizing influence Chad seems to have absorbed physically, lives in separation from her husband, the brutish Count de Vionnet. Divorce is not to be thought of, and it follows that ‘short of a catastrophe’ (372), the countess and Chad have no matrimonial prospects. Strether, in defiance of Woollett opinion, teaches himself to think of their attachment as ‘virtuous.’ The chiasmus traced by the crisscrossing plot lines involves a symmetrical reversal of original positions: Chad leans increasingly toward Woollett and business, while Strether, converted to the ‘Religion of Europe,’ abandons the cause of the lady of Woollett for the sake of the lady of Paris. He holds his ground as a grand ‘tribute to the ideal’ (369), until the ‘virtuous attachment’ is revealed to him, traumatically, as sexual.

III Strether’s initiation into the religion of Europe, with its mysterious, tormenting core of sexual passion, is prepared for by Maria Gostrey. Maria is a ‘general guide’ to the European labyrinth – it is a ‘fate,’ she says, a predestined vocation to which she has abandoned herself (65). She sacrificially bears on her back ‘the load of our national consciousness, or, in other words – for it comes to that – of our nation itself. Of what is our nation composed but of men and women individually on my shoulders?’ (66). Her ‘innermost mission and use’ is to minister to her compatriots’ repatriation; she sends them back ‘spent’ (78), depleted by passions. She herself is forever on the brink of being converted or consumed – always at the mercy of ‘some familiar appetite in ambush, jumping out as she approached, yet appeasable with a temporary biscuit’ (79). She is a temporary substitute, a ficelle or bit of string, caught between two worlds, old and new, in a kind of ceaseless purgatorial vacillation.7 To Waymarsh, a lawyer from Milrose, Massachusetts, and Strether’s traveling companion, she appears in a less ambiguous light. With his predisposition for judgment, a Puritan’s low tolerance for intermediacies and intercessions, he sees in her a personification of historical Europe, a Jesuit in petticoats, a representative of the recruiting interests of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church, for Waymarsh – that was to say the enemy, the monster of bulging eyes and far-reaching quivering

32


groping tentacles – was exactly society, exactly the multiplication of Shibboleths, exactly the discrimination of type and tones, exactly the wicked old Rows of Chester, rank with feudalism; exactly in short Europe. (81–2)8 Strether’s ‘inward picture’ of Chester is more subtle and perturbing, and it too colors and is colored by the presence of their guide: The tortuous wall – girdle long since snapped, of the little swollen city, held half in place by careful civic hands – wanders in narrow file between parapets, smoothed by peaceful generations, pausing here and there for a dismantled gate or a bridged gap, with rises and droops, steps up and steps down, queer twists, queer contacts [...]. (64) His anxiety with respect to Maria tends to surface in figures of shadowy architectural spaces. Her rooms in the Quartier Marboeuf are like the profane ‘temple’ of a collector, ‘the innermost nook of a shrine – as brown as a pirate’s cave’ (141). On one occasion, he feels ‘the pure flame of the disinterested,’ which burns ‘in her cave of treasures as a lamp in a Byzantine vault’ (367). There is about her a sense of medieval or eastern mystique, in part incongruous and ironized; she might be a bourgeois descendant of Mary the Gypsy, or of Esmeralda in Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831). Notre Dame Cathedral, however, is associated primarily with Marie de Vionnet, Maria’s girlhood friend; it is Marie, not Maria, who brings out in full Strether’s archetypal vision of the old-world woman. In the Preface, this vision is rendered indirectly, through imagery of vessel and fluid. Strether’s original state, before his Parisian conversion, ‘might have been figured by a clear green liquid, say, in a neat glass phial; and the liquid, once poured into the open cup of application, once exposed to the reaction of another air, had begun to turn from green to red, or whatever, and might, for all he knew, be on its way to purple, to black, to yellow’ (Preface, 40; my italics). It emerges that the air of Paris is not altogether a breathing medium; it has the materiality of things consumed, ‘a taste as of something mixed with art, something that presented nature as a white-capped master-chef’ (111). The art of consumption and the consumption of art, the two matrices of French culture, are present here to the exclusion of other forms of experience – to the exclusion, above all, of the vast open


spaces of the American wilderness. Parisian nurture, alimentary and artistic, carries with it an anxiety over being smothered or devoured. Paris in The Ambassadors is essentially another name for the archetypal parisienne. The transfused liquid of the mind, with its ‘violent variability’ (40), is intimately associated with her presence. A hint of violence lurks in name ‘Vionnet’; we think of the countess as ‘violee,’ but her own temperament, too, is ‘both sensitive and violent’ (223). She is a creature of infinite variety – ‘various and multiform,’ like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra (256).9 She is a type of Venus, too, ‘half mythological and half conventional,’ ‘a goddess still partly engaged in a morning cloud,’ or ‘a seanymph waist-high in the summer surge’ (256). Above all, she is a type of the medieval Virgin as Adams projects her – the Virgin perceived as the last and greatest, ‘the most varied in character,’ of a series of pagan goddesses – Astarte, Isis, Demeter, Aphrodite (MSMC, 187, 267). On his arrival, Paris presents itself to Strether in the image of a scintillating femme du monde: It hung before him […], the vast bright Babylon, like some huge iridescent object, a jewel brilliant and hard, in which parts were not to be discriminated nor differences comfortably marked. It twinkled and trembled and melted together, and what seemed all surface one moment seemed all depth the next. (118) In The Ambassadors, as in the novels that follow, jewels and ornaments function emblematically. The high respectability of Mrs Newsome’s ‘ruche’ contrasts with the quaintness of Maria’s ‘antique jewel,’ pendant on a red velvet band. The value of the jewel is uncertain, though Strether is ‘complacently sure’ of it (90). Madame de Vionnet wears a ‘collar of large old Emeralds,’ whose worth becomes inestimable, we sense, through physical contact with her; the green seeps into her silvery garb of silk and crape, and is ‘more dimly repeated, at other points of her apparel, in embroidery, in enamel, in satin, in substances and textures vaguely rich.’ Her head, in turn, has an argent quality, suggesting ‘a notion of the antique, on an old precious medal, some silver coin of the Renaissance’ (256). The house in the Rue de Bellechasse figures in this sense as a jewel-case (‘chasse’), holding a priceless object. The house is a historical monument of the private order, suffused with some glory, some prosperity of the First Empire, some Napoleonic glamour, some dim lustre of the great legend; elements clinging still

34


to all the consular chairs and mythological brasses and sphinxes’ heads and faded surfaces of satin striped with alternate silk. The place itself went further back – that he guessed, and how old Paris continued in a way to echo there. But the post-revolutionary period, the world he vaguely thought of as the world of Chateaubriand, of Madame de Staël, even of the young Lamartine, had left its stamp on harps and urns and torches, a stamp impressed on sundry small objects, ornaments and relics. Ranged in glass cabinets, at once highly private and highly public, the relics seem almost to include the hostess, who appears ‘beautifully passive under the spell of transmission’ (235–6). She rests, however, in the eye of a storm, at the still center of historical turbulence; her house is haunted by historical phantoms, the ghost of the Empire, its ‘faint far-away cannon-roar’ (361). Our sense of Mme de Vionnet is informed throughout by historical archetypes. The typicality of the minted image on the silver coin bears out the historical typicality of the image of the woman. She embodies and is embodied by an encased jewel, an heirloom or a precious relic, as well as, variously, the historical city itself, and the vaulting interior of a church. Maria Gostrey pictures her as St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. In their school days, Marie was ‘dazzlingly, though quite booklessly clever; as polyglot as a little Jewess (which she wasn’t, oh no!) and chattering French, English, German, Italian, anything one would […].’ Thanks to this linguistic facility, she is one of the ‘types’ whom one may conveniently approach in one’s native English, ‘who don’t keep you explaining – minds with doors as numerous as the many-tongued cluster of confessionals at Saint Peter’s. You might confess to her with confidence in Roumelian, and even Roumelian sins.’ (224) The passage glides from language to mind, from verbal mediation to immediate, sacral Presence. Linguistic facility blends into psychological penetration, turning, at last, into a kind of Pentecostal grace, and an unorthodox priestly investiture.10 The contrast between the sheer typicality, to Strether’s ear, of her French – a Romance vernacular imbued with the mysteries of her faith – and the idiosyncrasies of her English, springs to mind in this connection. Her French has the effect of fairly veiling her identity, shifting her back into a mere voluble class or race to the intense audibility of which he was by this time inured. When she spoke the charming slightly strange English he best knew her by he seemed to feel her as a creature, among all the millions, with a language quite to herself, the real monopoly of a special shade


of speech, beautifully easy to her, yet of a color and a cadence that were both inimitable and matters of accident. (464) This, of course, is an aspect of her Strether alone can unveil, an aspect peculiar to his relation with her, and which meets his peculiar need; it would be lost in her silent, mystic exchanges with Chad, in their moments of extreme intimacy (466). Mme de Vionnet is, above all, perfectly adaptable; her mind is a universal receptacle of individual irregularities and differences, like a ‘many-tongued cluster of confessionals.’ The figure, we may note, is intensely physical; it seems to conjure an uncanny vision of the oral cavity. Recalling the image of the city as a ‘vast bright Babylon,’ we may be tempted to think of the multiplicity of languages in scriptural terms, as a sign of humanity’s distance from the divine. Mme de Vionnet’s bodily mind, however, is a kind of nave, a vessel in the architectural sense – a receiving womb, where languages cease to signify and the mind merges with primal Matter, not in verbal communication, but in a fantasy of alimentary communion. This quality of sheer receptiveness has its counterpart in the figuration of the Virgin as the Triclinium, the ‘Refectory of the Trinity.’ According to Adams, the medieval Trinity is wholly subsumed in the Virgin; ‘Chartres represents, not the Trinity, but the identity of the Mother and Son. The Son represents the Trinity, which is thus absorbed in the Mother’ (MSMC, 95, 200). Strether is drawn to Notre Dame Cathedral, the site of his first fateful encounter with Mme de Vionnet, in a spirit of longing for absorption and assimilation. The great church had no altar for his worship, no direct voice for his soul; but it was none the less soothing even to sanctity; for he could feel while there what he couldn’t elsewhere, that he was a plain tired man, taking the holiday he had earned. He was tired, but he wasn’t plain – that was the pity and the trouble of it; he was able, however, to drop his problem at the door very much as if it had been the copper piece that he deposited, on the threshold, in the receptacle of the inveterate blind beggar. He trod the long dim nave, sat in the splendid choir, paused before the clustered chapels, and the mighty monument laid upon him its spell. (272) Soon the prolonged stillness of a lady-worshipper in a side-chapel, her back turned to him, attracts his notice.

36


She only sat and gazed before her, as he himself often sat. But 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 should only have liked to do. She was not a wandering alien, keeping back more than she gave, but one of the familiar, the intimate, the fortunate, for whom these dealings had a method and a meaning. (274) The meeting that follows leads to a déjeuner of omelette aux tomates and strawberry-colored Chablis in another ‘place of pilgrimage for the knowing’ (277), dedicated, like the cathedral, to rites of alimentary communion. Strether, his carefully cultivated reserve dispelled in a ‘smash’ (279), gives in fully now to his companion’s charm. His surrender issues in a profession of faith in the ‘virtuous attachment’ – a giddy experience, rendered in a figure whose resonance is grotesquely alimentary: he feels the situation running away with him, and is able to recall the moment of its having ‘taken the bit in its teeth’ (279). The keen sensuous detail in which the meal is rendered evokes something of the vivid, unselfconscious character of the medieval, as it might figure for a romancer like Hugo. The work of Hugo provides a frame, notably, for the earlier scene of recognition in the cathedral. When the dim worshipper at the chapel, risen from her meditation, approaches Strether in the nave, he is mentally occupied with a recent purchase of the Hugovian corpus in 70 bound volumes, a miracle of cheapness, he was assured by the shopman, at the price of the red-and-gold alone. He looked doubtless, while he played his eternal nippers over Gothic glooms, sufficiently rapt in reverence; but what his thought had finally bumped against was the question of where, among packed accumulations, so multiform a wedge would be able to enter. Were seventy volumes in red-and-gold to be perhaps what he should most substantially have to show at Woollett as the fruit of his mission? (274) He mentions ‘the great romancer and the great romance’ to her, as well as his purchase of the ‘blazing’ collection. As he speaks, this expensive ‘plunge’ and its blaze merge into his experience, now, of ‘plunging’ with her (276); the ironic notion of a pricey and illusive romance inflects the sense in which she becomes ‘romantic for him, far beyond what she could have guessed’ (275). Through and against this filter of


irony, ‘Gothic glooms’ are able to rise to the surface of the scene at the restaurant, with peculiar intensity. ‘Ancient proverbs’ sound ‘in the tone of their words and the clink of their glasses, in the hum of the town and the plash of the river. It was clearly better to suffer as a sheep than as a lamb. One might as well perish by sword as by famine’ (280). The momentary intrusion of free indirect thought, here, suggests the invasion of consciousness by the archaic experience of a culture. The first proverb is a garbled, Christianized version of ‘As well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb.’ The hanging, implicitly, is the suffering of the lamb, Christ’s passion on the Cross. Here, however, one suffers as a sheep, in the fullness of physical maturity; communion in Christ is transformed, in an inchoate fantasy, into erotic communion. The second proverb, surfacing for the second time (138), is part of a larger figural pattern, which associates Puritan Woollett with a dearth of nutrition, and Catholic Paris with violent physical contact (the sword), projected as cookery and consumption. In the cathedral, Strether is able to persuade himself of Mme de Vionnet’s ‘innocence.’ Churchgoing in a state of unconfessed sin, only ‘to flaunt an insolence of guilt,’ is a flagrancy irreconcilable with his sense of her delicacy (276). Still, for the Protestant imagination, devotional contradiction is the very element of historical Catholicism. The image of Paris as Woman and Jewel, ‘the vast bright Babylon,’ is a playful allusion, not free from anxiety, to the whore of Babylon in Revelation, ‘arrayed in purple and scarlet color, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornications’ (17:4). The Reformers, of course, identified this lurid figure with the Old Faith. In Spenser’s Faerie Queene, the Catholic Church figures as the treacherous Fidessa, ‘clad in scarlet red / Purfled with gold and perle of rich essay’ (I.111–12).

IV The late fiction draws on imaginative patterns which situate femininity within a paradoxical sphere, yoking together a fantasy of bodily intactness and carnality. James’s frail female vessels are always in danger of cracking under the pressure of this vision. In The Ambassadors, the most sonorous instance of such a ‘smash’ is Sarah Pocock’s public appearance, near the end of her Parisian sojourn, in a crimson dress. The sight affects Strether, synesthetically, ‘as the sound of a fall through a skylight’ (390); the synesthetic effect suggests a sudden bewildering synthesizing perception of a New England woman as a sexual being.

38


Henry Adams saw the Church of the Virgin as a doctrinal anomaly, built not upon a rock, as it were, but on a frail crystal. It is purely magical while it stands, since, like the crystal bowl in James’s last novel, it is internally cleft. Adams speaks of the mirabilia of the cult of the Virgin as the only ‘crack and cranny’ in the orthodoxy of the Church ‘through which human frailty could hope to escape’ (MSMC, 238). Mme de Vionnet is fully possessed of, and possessed by, this magical vulnerability. Strether’s faith in her virtue rests on the ‘odd foundation’ of her beauty (496) – the beauty which is her very frailty. Her sublimity, like the Virgin’s, is all too human. In Adams’s terms, ‘The Mother alone was human, imperfect and could love; she alone was Favour, Dualism, Diversity […]. If the Trinity was in its essence unity, the Mother alone could represent whatever was not Unity; whatever was irregular, exceptional, outlawed; and this was the whole human race’ (MSMC, 248). Such irregularity is the ‘sharp rupture of an identity’ whereby Chad, to Strether’s sense, is converted into ‘somebody else’ (154). Chad’s transformation has left an imprint on his body, whose effects, here attenuated and domesticated, are darkly reminiscent of the Sacred Fount principle. He is prematurely aged, while Mme de Vionnet, the mother of a marriageable daughter who cannot be ‘an hour less than thirty-eight’ (222), is in the very flower of youth, capable of looking only 20, ‘as young as a little girl’ (403). This uncanny configuration is associated, again, with the dyad of the Virgin and Christ: the Son wastes away in body, while the Mother flourishes in unconsumed virginity, like the typological Burning Bush in Genesis. At the same time, Chad remains an ‘irreducible young Pagan’ (170), and Mme de Vionnet an earthly vessel of sexuality. ‘Chad,’ a name whose resonance with ‘cad’ has been noted (JSRE, 87), is also Welsh for ‘battle.’ On the occasion of Strether’s last visit with Mme de Vionnet, the ‘smell of blood’ around the house in the Rue de Bellechasse, a sensuous correlative to her exposed adultery, recalls the description in the Preface of literary composition as a ‘hunt’ (‘chasse’). The pursuit of ‘the unseen and the occult’ elements of the scheme, as by ‘the clinging scent of the gage […] already in hand,’ is as exciting, says James, as any ‘dreadful old pursuit of the hidden slave with bloodhounds and the rag of association’ (Preface, 37). In a similar vein, on his first visit to Chad’s rooms on Boulevard Malesherbes, Strether imagines he can ‘sniff’ ‘the charming scent’ of a woman’s influence (131).11 ‘Chasse’ in the sense of pursuit threatens to merge here with the object pursued, ‘chasse’ in the sense of jewel case or reliquary. For Strether, therefore, the pursuit takes place at a distance from itself. At the culminant moment of his occult chase, when Mme de Vionnet is


undermined by ‘the strange strength of her passion’ (482), it is ‘as if he didn’t think of her at all, as if he could think of nothing but the passion, mature, abysmal, pitiful, she represented, and the possibilities she betrayed’ (483). His fraught sense of the dissolution of the contours of identity in abysmal ‘passion’ emerges through and against emotional dissociation. She strikes him then as suddenly older, and for all her cultivation, ‘as vulgarly troubled […] as a maidservant crying for her young man.’ It is here, however, that she comes most to resemble Cleopatra, who in the absence of Antony is ‘No more but e’en a woman, and commanded / by such poor passion as the maid that milks / and does the meanest chares’ (IV.xv.78–80). Adrian Poole writes that Strether is faced here with what he has been in search of all along: ‘The sign of passion, and specifically of a woman’s passion, that is at once, it seems, the cause and the consequence of desire. To put it too brutally, he has wanted to see a woman suffer […]’ (HJ, 55). The encounter taps into a half-buried violent reality, but at the same time, not unlike the staged scene of Cleopatra’s death, partakes in the order of ‘panem et circenses’ (197). It is of the very element of Paris, which Strether perceives, on one occasion, as the stage of a vast ‘parade of the circus’ (340). A form of spectacle, albeit private, a sacrificial display which both solicits and bars the viewer’s participation. In the passionate deadlock Strether is made to witness, Mme de Vionnet is brutalized by Chad, and Chad, in turn, is preyed upon by his passion. He cleaves to her to the death, he says, ‘and one can’t but have it before one, in the cleaving – the point where the death comes in’ (505). The antithetical meaning of ‘cleaving’ echoes in his reiteration of the word. Chad seems to be speaking, as directly as he can, of his cachet, the complex dissociative experience of a man ‘marked out by the women’ (167). The dissociation of his character is figured in a sinister conceit, where the image of ‘the mangle’ serves to evoke unavowed domestic violence: ‘He ‘put out’ his excitement, or whatever other emotion the matter involved, as he put out his washing; than which no arrangement could make more for domestic order. It was quite, in short, for Strether himself to feel a personal analogy with the laundress bringing home the triumphs of the mangle’ (428). Mme de Vionnet, variously a Venus rising from the waves, a sea nymph, a sponge and a drowning Ophelia (481–2), is, as James said of George Sand, invariably ‘liquid’ (LC II, 980). Her linguistic fluency is an essential aspect of this quality; language of a certain complexion and texture is, it seems, capable of being invested with primary orality and corporeality. Here, the ‘putting out’ of soiled clothes and the ‘triumphs of the

40


mangle,’ strange rituals in which Strether obscurely officiates, carry a bodily, erotic resonance. In this world, sexual passion happens darkly, in impenetrable privacy, outside the precincts of the impoverished, depleted life of consciousness. Passion in Paris is a form of sacrifice, and Strether, too, undergoes a Parisian martyrdom. When the ear is attuned to this resonance, the novel seems to vibrate with the imagery of The Lamb of God. The motif is present aurally in ‘Lambert’12 and in ‘Lambinet,’ and typologically in ‘Abel,’ the late Mr Newsome. It is intimated in the name ‘Woollett,’ whose inhabitants are once pictured as browsing sheep, pulled up by a ‘turn of [Chad’s] wrist and a jerk of the far-flung noose’ (172). It is picked up in the image of ‘rumination’ in the salle a manger (405) and again in the mangled proverb, ‘it is better to suffer as a sheep than as a lamb.’ At a late moment, Chad is witnessed languidly consuming ‘roast mutton’ (502), an image unlikely to go down easily for us. Strether himself figures hyperbolically in an image-pattern of sacrifice and redemption. He is ‘like a lamb’ to Sarah (447), but intends to ‘save’ Mme de Vionnet, if he can (244). The whole thing, he predicts, will come upon him, and he will be used for it ‘to the last drop of [his] blood’ (373). He becomes vulnerable, ‘woundable by Chad’s lady, in respect to whom he had come out with such a store of indifference.’ (280) He feels himself pierced by golden nails she is driving into his flesh, ‘exquisitely remorseless.’ (260, 285, 363) In the end, he finds he has been suffering for everyone – for Chad, for Chad’s lady, and even for young Jeanne de Vionnet – Jeanne who is brashly married off, martyred like the medieval saint whose name she bears, in an appalling instance of oldworld ‘vieille sagesse’ (364). At the same time, he feels he must atone for his very readiness to suffer. ‘I have been sacrificing so to strange gods,’ he tells Little Bilham, ‘that I feel I want to put on record, somehow, my fidelity – fundamentally unchanged after all – to our own. I feel as if my hands were embrued with the blood of monstrous alien altars – of another faith altogether’ (393). Little Bilham seems to have experienced Parisian paganism in a still more radical mode: ‘They’ve simply – the cannibals! – eaten me; converted me, if you like, but converted me into food. I’m but the bleached bones of a Christian’ (205).13 When the nature of the ‘virtuous attachment’ is revealed to Strether, his Christlike predisposition emerges in its fraught relation to erotic fantasy. The ‘quantity of make-believe’ involved in the affair strongly disagrees with his ‘spiritual stomach’ (468); the coupling of passion and betrayal seems to produce in him a grotesque Eucharistic effect, a momentary fusion of spirit and flesh into bodily, organic consciousness.


From absorption in the outraged ‘consciousness of that organ,’ he passes into a nocturnal reverie about the lovers. ‘He recognized at last that he had really been trying all along to suppose nothing. Verily, verily his labour had been lost. He found himself supposing innumerable and wonderful things.’ In the poignant hybridity of tone, which is the hallmark of the novel, the grave biblical cadence conjures up lost labors of love, the complex erotic play of Shakespearean comedy. In the wake of the disclosure, Strether feels himself ‘mixed up with the typical tale of Paris’ (472), a tale of passion and communion which seems to pervade, oppressively, the atmosphere of the Parisian public center of communication, the General Post Office. The fabulous ‘special’ quality of the ‘virtuous attachment’ (372) and, correspondingly, his own sense of specialty in its presence, give way to a sense of commonality and commonness. At their final interview, Mme de Vionnet attributes to Strether a Christlike ethos of sacrifice: ‘I don’t pretend you feel yourself victimized, for this is evidently the way you live, and it’s what – we agreed – is the best way’ (483). His recoil from the depths of passion she embodies is a retreat, above all, from the common, all-too-human order of victimization. Her passion, as he perceives it, renders her tragically vulnerable; it associates itself with divinity and infinity, yet doomed to remain conflicted, deficient or ‘earthly,’ under the sway of the ideal. She had but made Chad what he was – so why should she think she had made him infinite? She had made him better, she had made him best, she had made him anything one would. But it came to our friend with supreme queerness that he was none the less only Chad. Strether had the sense that he, a little, had made him too; his high appreciation had, as it were, consecrated her work. The work, however admirable, was nevertheless of the strict human order, and in short it was marvelous that the companion of mere earthly joys, of comforts, aberrations (however one classed them) within the common experience should be so transcendently prized. The real ‘coercion’ of the moment, Strether makes out, is ‘to see a man ineffably adored. There it was again – it took a woman, it took a woman; if to deal with them was to walk on water what wonder that the water rose? And it had never surely risen higher than around this woman’ (483). Earlier in the same passage, he has figured women as ‘endlessly absorbent’ (481–2). Here, the vision of Mme de Vionnet with water rising around her, followed directly by the overflow of her tears, confronts

42


him with her mode of erotic liquefaction. Facing her in her raw element, an aquatic creature, like a sponge – ‘endlessly absorbent,’ as if draining his vital fluids – he obeys a deep-seated Puritanical impulse, and withdraws into spiritual insularity. Christlike, in defiance of the laws of matter, he deals with her by ‘walking on water.’ The image conveys an intimate and radical rejection of her very being, an absolute refusal of mixing. She, in turn, plays Mary Magdalene to his Christ: ‘Of course, as I’ve said, you’re acting, in your wonderful way, for yourself; and what’s for yourself is no more my business – though I may reach out unholy hands so clumsily to touch it – than if it were something in Timbactoo’ (483). Her words recall the Noli Me Tangere scene after the Resurrection: ‘Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my father’ ( John 20:17). The moment resonates ironically with the scene at Notre Dame Cathedral, where Strether imagines her to be seeking ‘sublime support,’ and wishes to grant her freedom to ‘clutch’ at him for help. ‘Every little, in a long strain, helped, and if he happened to affect her as a firm object she could hold on by, he wouldn’t jerk himself out of her reach.’ And again: ‘Since she took him for a firm object – much as he might to his own sense appear at times to rock – he would do his best to be one’ (277).

V The Noli Me Tangere passage, with its intimate resistance to tactility, registers the tension of a ‘double consciousness,’ of detachment-in-zeal and curiosity-in-indifference. In terms of the typology of profession in the novel, this mode of persistent self-distancing is linked to the work of the critic, and counterpoised to the work of the artist. The latter type is emblematically portrayed in Gloriani, the illustrious old-world sculptor, who is powerful and sensual, like a ‘glossy male tiger, magnificently marked’ (216), and seems to draw on a reservoir of inscrutable, ‘terrible’ life (200). He is, however, helplessly trapped in his own molds. He resembles a beautiful bossed or minted image; in his ‘medal-like’ face, every line is ‘an artist’s own,’ and time tells ‘only as tone and consecration’ (200). Speaking of the miracle of Chad’s transformation, Strether attributes it to ‘the fate that waits for one, the dark doom that rides’; this doom may appear uncanny, but really it is only ‘poor dear old life’ that ‘springs the surprise’ (178). For Gloriani, much as for Chad, life seems to have sprung a Medusa face. In pursuit of her image he has become her prey, her type, congealed and glazed over in his passion. The critic’s more guarded pursuit of art and life is intended, in this sense, to shield the finer, more vibrant elements of consciousness from


the impingements of objects. Strether is firm to the last in his refusal to see himself as the hero of his European situation (380). His conflicted movement between the worlds of Woollett and Paris places them in a single psycho-cultural sphere, as disjunctive versions of each other. We are made to see individual identity, at the Woollett pole, as ‘woundable’ in the face of ‘poor dear old life’ and the surprises it springs; but passions and their vicissitudes are strenuously defended against, even as they are constantly craved and courted. Woollett, in this constellation, has severed itself from passionate living, and has thereby acquired a moral distinction, a form of high selfsufficiency. If, as Henry Adams believed, the medieval Trinity was in danger of becoming absorbed in the Virgin, at Woollett, the Virgin becomes spiritualized and absorbed in the Trinity. As against the single, suffering lady of Paris, Woollett is represented by a grotesque female Trinity. Mrs Newsome and Sarah are mother and daughter – the daughter opening ‘so straight down’ (352) into the mother that her matriarchal name seems to stand for both, just as ‘the plural pronoun’ can be made to refer to both, and exclude others (430). Mrs Newsome is ‘all cold thought,’ and Sarah is able to ‘serve’ it, ‘without its really losing anything’ (446). To complete the Trinity, there is ‘the ghost of the lady of Woollett,’ (303) made present in transatlantic letters and telegrams, as well as in silences and ruptures. With the approach of their final break, Strether experiences Mrs Newsome as ‘essentially all moral pressure,’ so that ‘the presence of this element was almost identical with her presence. It wasn’t perhaps that he felt he was dealing with her straight, but it was certainly as if she had been dealing straight with him. She was reaching him somehow by the lengthened hand of her spirit [...].’ (416) Mamie Pocock, finally, emerges as a kind of female Christ; like Jeanne de Vionnet, she is a type of the martyred virgin, ‘bridal’ and ‘blooming’ without a groom (379, 382, 383), transported to Europe, it seems, to be maimed by passion. Half-muted suggestions of Chad’s sexual investment in these young women – the one his niece, the other his lover’s daughter – tacitly explore fantasies of incest. Incestuous patterns surface increasingly, in the late fiction, within the orbit of ‘the fundamental passions’ (GB, 548). Here as elsewhere, this psychic domain is approached through archetypal imaginative filters – Christ and the Virgin, and their martyrs and saints. Mrs Newsome, reaching out for Strether with her ghostly hand, writes profusely, when she is not defiantly silent. Under stress, she cables; her telegram summoning Strether back by the first steamer is delivered directly to the hotel, by the pneumatic tube. Communication with her can have a quality of dissociated immediacy, but it is always disembodied.

44


Her tactile sense seems neutralized or sterilized – how else could she find the glazed covers of the Woollett Review ‘pleasant to touch’? (117). She herself ‘won’t be touched’ – her ‘whole moral and intellectual being or block’ repels physical contact (448). Resistant to touch, she is also deficient in tact. The vulgarization in her letters of the ‘virtuous attachment’ could make Strether exclaim on her want of it, even if ‘she couldn’t at best become tactful as quickly as he. Her tact had to reckon with the transatlantic ocean, the General Post Office and the extravagant curve of the globe’ (183). Indeed, the sense of the curvaceousness of the earth, with which Strether by now is on terms of easy familiarity, is as far beyond the reach of the imagination of Woollett as are the tact and tactility of Paris. For a time, their correspondence thrives on their differences, for ‘what was after all more natural than that it should become more frequent just in proportion as their problem became more complicated?’ (246). At bottom, however, Strether is averse to explanations, and tormented by the frenzy of correspondence they generate: No one could explain better when needful, nor put more conscience into an account or a report; which burden of consciousness is perhaps exactly the reason why his heart always sank when the clouds of explanation gathered. His highest ingenuity was in keeping the sky of life clear of them. Whether or no he had a grand idea of the lucid, he held that nothing ever was in fact – for any one else – explained. One went through the vain motions, but it was mostly a waste of life. A personal relation was a relation only so long as people either perfectly understood or, better still, didn’t care if they didn’t. From the moment they cared if they didn’t it was living by the sweat of one’s brow. (153) Mme de Vionnet, by contrast, does not ‘keep you explaining’; her mind, we recall, is as receptive as ‘the many-tongued cluster of confessionals at Saint Peter’s.’ While Mrs Newsome transcends embodiment, Mme de Vionnet, ‘endlessly absorbent,’ transmutes the ordinary uses of language into bodily experience. For Strether (to say nothing of James), ‘living by the sweat of one’s brow’ is, precisely, writing – writing as an ongoing, painstaking affirmation of individual identity in the pursuit of a vocation. The kind of effortless living associated with Mme de Vionnet is a twofold negation, of labor and of self – a state of undifferentiated being, preclusive of individuating action. Mme de Vionnet is powerfully associated with a venerable and highly evolved civilization; yet she also represents a form of radical passivity, which embodies the very principle of opposition to


Woollett entrepreneurship; she keeps her lover absorbed in her, and thus cut off from the industrious life Woollett would consign him to. More broadly, the economy of production, here, is cut off from the economy of consumption. The Woollett industry, aided by an advertising section, seems to generate money in a dematerialized mode, and to reinvest it in such indigestible products as the green glossy Woollett Review, whose covers form the ‘specious shell’ of purely conceptual work, ‘a mere rich kernel of economics, politics, ethics’ (116). The review contrasts not only with the ripe display of lemon-colored volumes at a Parisian bookstore, ‘as fresh as fruit on the tree’ (116), but also, still more poignantly, with the carnal, ‘salmon-colored’ Paris Revue (375). American plutocrats go hungry, in this sense, unless they turn to the European mode of appetitive consumption. In the novels that follow, such immaterial production emerges distinctly in relation to consumerist hunger, focused on the material, organic plenty of Europe. American magnates and heiresses are irresistibly drawn to the old world, where they allow their fabulous fortunes to be invested and consumed. The individuating agency of writing, another form of immaterial industriousness, figures for Strether in terms of spatial and temporal separateness – concretely, in terms of his distance from his correspondent and employer. At Chester, charmed by the red velvet band around Maria Gostrey’s neck, an emblem of breathless sensuality, he feels that ‘a man conscious of a man’s work in the world’ can have nothing to do with such lures (90). Mrs Newsome’s Elizabethan ruche, we gather, has never so troubled his professional conscience. His sense of identity requires breathing space – a space which writing, as a medium of spirit (the pneumatic tube comes to mind), is able to define and inhabit. While Mrs Newsome’s spirituality stands for the possibility of breathing, Mme de Vionnet’s corporeality is umbilical – anaerobic, or aquatic, as well as alimentary. She is an organic reservoir of plenty, an inexhaustible fund, opposed to life ‘by the sweat of one’s brow’ in the broad sense of psychological, moral and professional agency. A life of passion, in this configuration, leads to regressive states of merging and nonentity. Strether’s psycho-cultural choice is, as it were, between starvation and suffocation – or between famine and hanging, to mix one’s proverbs. At the commencement of his Parisian experience, he has an anxious fantasy of being seen by Mrs Newsome in his state of breathless immersion: ‘poor Lambert Strether washed up on the sunny strand by the waves of a single day, poor Lambert Strether thankful for breathing-time and stiffening himself while he gasped’ (113). Respite from the Parisian overflow of sensation is afforded by the General Post Office, the ‘sunny stand’

46


in whose direction he is headed, with a view of collecting his letters from Woollett. Imagery of water comes to figure for him an intimate bond with Mme de Vionnet – a sense of being launched with her in one boat, while the expectation at Woollett is that he should rather ‘cling with intensity to the brink, not to dip so much as a toe into the flood’ (338). The conceit finds a literal correlative in the image of the current that carries her, with Chad, on their boating excursion in the country; Strether’s impression, just before they float into his ken, is that such a river ‘set one afloat almost before one could take up the oars’ (459). The idea of Woollett comes, in turn, to embody a threat of dehydration, if also a welcome sufficiency of air. Strether’s nascent interest in Mamie makes him suddenly, as under the breath of some vague western whiff, homesick and freshly restless; he could really for the time have fancied himself stranded with her on a far shore, during an ominous calm, in a quaint community of shipwreck. Their little interview was like a picnic on a coral strand; they passed each other, with melancholy smiles, and looks sufficiently allusive, such cupfuls of water as they had saved. (381) In the midst of the aquatic life of Paris, Sarah Pocock, in ‘splendid isolation’ (399), struggles to preserve her own pneumatic mode of being. ‘She can breathe,’ Strether says of her at the party her brother gives in her honor. The din of festivity is drowned for him in the sound of her respiration. Her respiration is, as he puts it, literally all he can hear (400). For all its psychological subtlety, the method of portraiture that emerges here hardly corresponds with our notions of realist representation. We experience Mrs Newsome’s ‘whole moral and intellectual being or block,’ the congealed form of pressure she embodies, not strictly within the confines of character, but as the revelation of a mechanism of psychic coercion which inhibits desire. A dimension of psychic depth unfolds through the attenuation of representationalist strategies, as characters become informed by psycho-cultural presences and patterns.

VI The strain on the imagination of desire finds expression, for Strether, in the fiction of the ‘virtuous attachment,’ a theory whose cultivation reveals the deep strangeness of passionate intimacy in the imaginative


domain of the novel, and helps assert, with this, the presence and authority of individual consciousness against the de-individuating currents of passion. If passion is experienced as an assault on the discrete sphere of consciousness, the theory of the ‘virtuous attachment,’ with its subjective interpretive edge and its investment in the phenomenology of the singular, is a way for consciousness to defend itself. The peculiar imagistic texture of The Ambassadors grows, in part, out of this focus on the interface of consciousness and craving. The late fiction is pervaded with figurative imagery of alimentary consumption, but there is no other work by James where this figurative vein has as its counterpart such intense preoccupation with the physical, gustatory acts of consuming and being consumed. It is as if the metabolism of the novel were burdened with an excessively rich diet, which made processes of imaginative conversion difficult and halting. The sense, throughout, is of the difficulty of maintaining a live connectedness between the worlds of Woollett and Paris. The umbilical channel of Europe passes, through the reflective medium of consciousness, into the opposite element, immaterial cables and tubes. The vascular system of the body, as it were, is displaced into language and thought, and it is not clear how its organic life may survive the passage into conscious, communicable experience. The Preface figures the ‘note absolute’ of the novel in an image suggestive of an ordeal of this kind. Strether is pictured standing ‘full in the tideway, driven in, with hard taps, like some strong stake for the noose of a cable, the swirl of the current roundabout it’ (Preface, 34). A cable, or tether, seems to be stretched into transcendent space, from the projected figure of the body in passion. The image, as of an imaginative tightrope act, serves to link Strether, in name and experience, with an array of stunts and performances depicted in the late novels – figurative theatricals, circus-ring displays, water gymnastics and trapeze acts. This paradoxically tensile experience, as of an outstretched cable fastened to an immaterial object, is imaginatively sustained against the vortex of history itself. The experience of The Ambassadors is of ‘writing against time’ (301), a protracted anticipation of foredoomed collapse. This sense of urgency surfaces, at one point, in a beautiful, ambiguous metaphor: ‘Strether hadn’t had for years so rich a consciousness of time – a bag of gold into which he constantly dipped for a handful’ (136). Harry Levin, in his Introduction, reads the image as an ironic rendition of Franklin’s aphorism, ‘time is money’ (Introduction, 28). By extension, in terms of the donées of novel, Strether’s subversive delay in Paris deprives him of a bag of gold. He is cheated from his leisure by the ubiquitous ‘tick of the great Paris clock’ (111), emblem of pervasive, continual forfeiture.

48


Virtually every new installment of the narrative picks up the thread with a reference to the temporal scheme, and the text bristles with carefully measured temporal pointers, marking the passage of time often to the last precision of minutes. Within this frame, the strained pleasures of divagation enacted in the movement of syntax and plot – pauses, anticipations, excursions and recursions – are always threatened by the sensuous experiences they filter. In a characteristic instance of syntactic involution, a sensuously charged experience can be precipitated and abridged; a remembered ‘foretaste’ becomes a ‘climax,’ and the ‘presentiments’ with which the moment is ‘warm’ are already, at the same time, ‘collapses’ (79). Time as the ticking of the Paris clock is insistently objectified and externalized; it is experienced as a resource or provision outside the self, which, however, acquires a predatory internality, consuming the self even as it is being consumed. At one point, time as an object emerges fully as a threatening, invasive feminine presence: ‘Omnes vulnerant, ultima necat’ (121) – Strether remembers having read of the Latin motto, a description of the hours observed on a clock by a traveler in Spain. The reference, we know, is to Gautier’s Voyage en Espagne (1843), and the phrase evokes for Strether the succession of women with whom Chad is rumored to have been intimate in foreign countries. This epigrammatic conflation, here, of Eros and Time brings out the embodied, incarnational imagination of temporality in the novel, but also the fatality associated with it. History is the element of predatory erotic embodiment, and the ‘historic muse’ (151) of the novel, the archetypal femme du monde, is a revelation of embodied Eros. Initially, the narrative consciousness maintains an ironic distance from its muse. Strether’s modest Parisian affair does not seem to belong among her meaningful ‘outbreaks,’ his ‘ships’ are likely to seem mere ‘cockles’ to her (151). At the theater box, where Chad is about to make his first appearance, Strether’s nervous excitement suggests a consciously inflated analogy with the ‘accidents of high civilization,’ the life of high pressure led by ‘kings, queens, comedians’ (153). On his first flânerie, however, memories of his first visit, years before, yield a personal sense of history as an ongoing process of displacement and waste. Historical recognition of this kind involves, for him, an agonizing tactility: ‘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’ (111). At Gloriani’s party, he rubs shoulders with gros bonnets, ambassadors and duchesses. Above all, he meets the supreme type of the femme du


monde, in whose archetypal personal history his own vision of history will crystallize. The early portrayal of Maria Gostrey as Mary Stuart, in a ‘cut down’ dress and a velvet band encircling her throat, prefigures the final portrayal of Mme de Vionnet as a historical incarnation of Passion. Approaching the house in the Rue de Bellechasse for the last time, Strether’s susceptibility to the vibrations of ‘the vague voice of Paris’ subjects him to 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 broken out. They were the smell of revolution, the smell of the public temper – or perhaps simply the smell of blood. (475)14 Mme de Vionnet is dressed ‘in the simplest coolest white, of a character so old fashioned […] that Madame Roland on the scaffold must have worn something like this.’ The white robe serves as a kind of typological fulfillment of the motif of red in women’s apparel: Maria’s velvet band, the gleam of the color of wine on Marie’s black robe at Notre Dame (275) and Sarah’s crimson gown. Marie de Vionnet’s passion is rendered as a convergence of antithetical images: the scriptural echo of the Apocalypse, ‘the robes washed and made white in the blood of the Lamb’ (Revelation 7:14), and the bloody image of the guillotine. A cleft sense of sanctity in sin reveals itself, here, as the core of a late moment in a fraught historical trajectory.

VII In the aftermath of his ordeal, Strether toys with the idea that ‘he might for all the world have been going to die.’ The prospect of returning to Woollett spells ‘reckoning’ and ‘extinction.’ He pictures himself floating toward it as on a bier, on Coleridge’s underground river, ‘through these caverns of Kublah Khan’ (489). The Coleridgean figure is an early instance of the seepage into James’s late fiction of Romantic and Victorian visions of the east. In The Wings of the Dove, the colonialist ‘heir of all the ages’ of Tennyson’s Locksley Hall is recast as the ‘heiress of all the ages,’ whose personal ordeal has powerful cultural or civilizational repercussions. The Jamesian east figures largely within the psycho-cultural frame of the declining west. Austin Warren, in

50


a footnote to his discussion of James’s late metaphoric style, points to the characteristic opacity of the eastern imagery; the oriental figures, he writes, ‘most habitually betoken the strangeness of that East which is East and hence incommunicable to the West’ (RO, 151, n2). This strangeness, however, acquires resonance in relation to the familiar; it is, in this sense, imaginatively continuous with the strange and wayward cultural forms of Europe – French medievalism in The Ambassadors, or Venetian Rococo in The Wings of the Dove. The sacrificial matrix of The Ambassadors seems to suggest that civilized life, projected here through elaborate patterns of French history and culture, is essentially moribund – like the fire in Shakespeare’s sonnet, consumed with that which it was nourished by. The image of consciousness as a ‘helpless jelly,’ poured into multiform molds and baked by the Great Cook, seems to express the essence of the human lot, in a sense peculiarly resonant with the religious codices of ancient India. Charles Malamoud, in a study of Vedic ritual titled Cuire le Monde, gives the taxonomic definition of man in the sacred texts: ‘Des tous les animaux aptes à être victimes sacrificielles l’homme est le seul qui soit apte aussi à faire des sacrifices’ (CM, 8). Sacrifice is thus the definitive condition of existence and action. As ‘burnt offering,’ or cooking, it is performed on an object, but in Vedic India, as well as in the world of The Ambassadors, it is at a fundamental level a sacrifice of self. Still, if the germinal conceit of The Ambassadors presents the condition of sacrifice as predetermined and universal, the Great Cook and his human molds could not have figured with equal force in a novel set in Venice or London. As Carlyle remarked, the definition of Man as the ‘Cooking Animal’ is highly acceptable to the French, but fails to account for the inhabitants of Tartary, Greenland or the Orinocco (SR, 41–2). James’s metaphor of divine cookery is rooted in the world of French gastronomy, a world steeped in the historical imagination of Eucharistic sacrifice. It invokes, at a single stroke, the determinism of the Calvinist heritage and the Eucharistic tradition of the rival persuasion, set in the French milieu appropriate to them. In The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924), Johan Huizinga examines chronicles of meals at the medieval court of Charles the Bold. Their tone strikes him as suitable to a portrayal of ‘sacred mysteries.’ The chronicler, he says, submits to his reader grave questions of precedence and of service, and answers them most knowingly – Why is the chief-cook present


at the meals of his lord and not the ‘écuyer de la cuisine?’ How does one proceed to nominate the chief-cook? To which he replies in his wisdom: When the office of chief-cook falls vacant at the court of the prince, the ‘maîtres d’hotel’ call the ‘écuyers’ and all the kitchen servants to them one by one. Each one solemnly gives his oath, and in this way the chief-cook is elected [….] Why do the ‘panetiers’ and cup-bearers form the first and second ranks, above the carvers and cooks? – Because they are in charge of bread and wine, to which the sanctity of the sacrament gives a holy character. (WMA, 41) In The Ambassadors, the sense of cultural specificity that informs the vision of sacrifice, with the degree of circumscription and estrangement it entails, vies with the sense of universality, the ineluctable commonality, which the vision itself predicates. This divided attitude is expressed in the germinal conceit of the Cook and his molds as a split in the reflective mode; the reflective center is part of the ‘helpless jelly’ – the collective, sacrificial fluid of consciousness – but at the same time keeps aloof, and is able to regard it (itself) from a mysterious vantage point, transcending its determining laws. One ‘takes’ the form, reflexively, in the Great Cook’s phrase, but may conceivably leave it at will, resisting its formative pressure. The meeting with the lovers by the river, a scene of recognition whose model is vividly Greek, is projected through a bifocal lens of this kind. As in the earlier recognition scene in Notre Dame, the moment of insight is filtered through half-strange cultural screens, which the mind is able to animate without fully inhabiting. Strether’s refusal to see himself as the hero of his situation creates a distancing perspective, which governs his excursion to the country from the start. He strikes out with the conscious design – ‘artless enough,’ as the narrative voice artfully puts it – of rediscovering in some pastoral spot a landscape by Lambinet he has once seen in a Boston gallery. French ruralism has been ‘practically as distant as Greece’ for him (452); but this is only as distant as the origin of his aesthetic filters – the pastoral, but also classical tragedy. The wish to see ‘the remembered mixture resolved back into its elements’ (453), to restore to nature his memory of the painting, harbors a twofold fantasy, of dismemberment and of kenotic evacuation. These psychic pulses suggest the complex charge of aesthetic experience at the cultural moment Strether inhabits; a charge that figures, again, as the price of the small Lambinet, which was ‘beyond the dream of possibility’ (452).

52


He alights at a randomly chosen rural destination, and easily steps into the picture-frame: The oblong gilt frame disposed its enclosing lines; the poplars and willows, the reeds and the river […] fell into a composition, full of felicity, within them. The sky was silver and turquoise and varnish; the village on the left was white and the church on the right was gray; it was all there in short – it was what he wanted: it was Tremont street, it was France, it was Lambinet. (453) This constructed, factitious setting conceals under its placid surface the sharp, bitter edge of a tale by Maupassant (454). Strether anticipates the imminent coup de théâtre, in an objectively unaccountable sense of being still, even with his mission thrown over, ‘engaged with others and in the midstream of his drama,’ with the ‘catastrophe’ still to come. (458) The ‘scene’ and ‘stage’ of his dramatic action (458), ‘the picture and the play’ (459), peopled with ‘characters’ (458) whom he himself has consciously projected, can end in nothing less surprising than the prodigious coincidence, ‘the miracle of the encounter’ (463) about to take place; this fateful accident conforms to the formal conventions of Greek drama, with its culminant ‘catastrophe’ – literally, a sudden turn of events. The novel engages here in an ironic play on the Aristotelian notion of peripeteia, surprise sanctioned by causality. At the local inn, the Cheval Blanc, he arranges with the hostess a gastronomic ‘climax’ (458) for the day; she, for her part, serves him a ‘bitter’ before his repast. The consumption of the ‘bitter’ coincides with the arrival, which has its own pungency, of two other guests – by the river, as she has predicted, and in a boat of their own (459). The hostess, ‘a stout white-capped deep-voiced woman,’ is a female avatar of the Great Cook, a vision of ‘nature as a white-capped master-chef.’ Her means, Strether feels as he approaches the inn, are ‘few and simple, scant and humble’; but they are ‘the thing, as he would have called it, even to a greater degree than Madame de Vionnet’s old high salon where the ghost of the empire had walked.’ All the while, however, the ghost of the Empire hovers backstage. The rustic air, at the Cheval Blanc, has a Parisian taste as of something mixed with art; it is pregnant with suggestion, every breath of the cooler evening is ‘somehow a syllable of the text.’ Just before the appearance of his friends, Strether’s musings seem to conjure them up; or, rather, they seem to ‘offer themselves, in the conditions so supplied, with a kind of inevitability’


(458). The runaway situation ‘with the bit in its teeth,’ has now, at the ‘White Horse’ (the recurrence of the name in English is telling), been led to water, and will be made to drink. The play on the formal inevitability of the unexpected has the effect, in part, of puncturing the notion of determination; it suggests a possibility of treating experience ironically, from without, and its cultural molds as mutable. Greek determinism itself may be regarded as a thing of the past. Miss Barrace, a Gallicized expatriate, is once compared to ‘one of the famous augurs replying behind the oracle, to the wink of the other’ (399); the figure points to the obsolescence of the great oracular tradition, whose debasement in the Roman period is associated here with latter-day decadence. At the same time, it is far from clear what possibility of life is held out in the negative vision of one who has moved into this outer darkness, beyond the purview of cultural embeddedness.

VIII In part, the novel itself seems to recognize an impediment to its imaginative unfolding, something that may be described as an impairment of its capacity for play. The Ambassadors is in an obvious sense the most playful of James’s late fictions; the distancing of consciousness from what it recognizes, increasingly, as its formative patterns, liberates a critical, ironic sensibility. This very playfulness, however, curbs a fuller possibility for consciousness of playing itself out, through and beyond the limits of its imprints and grids. The novel seems to dream of, without allowing for, the imaginative scope of tragic action. Play, experienced above all as a form of dramatic action, emerges in the late novels as a highly expressive, generative mode of conscious being. It steers clear of the Scylla and Charybdis of The Ambassadors, living by the sweat of one’s brow and the dream of aquatic, umbilical immersion. In dramatic terms, it opens into the space of classical tragedy, which holds together action and passion, the full force of agency and profound receptiveness. The trope of ambassadorship may be taken to represent the novel’s aporetic response to the problem of agency; the ambassador, here, is committed to a slavish, mechanically representationalist form of service, or else rebels and forfeits all possibility of significant action. Actors, on the other hand, are agents as well as agonists; their performance has a simultaneously inward and outward orientation, an inseparably subjective and objective force. James’s late imagination is particularly attuned to the primary sources and matrices of ludic forms. Strether’s European journey is, in this

54


sense, a quest for the kind of nurturance that might issue in richer, fuller modes of play. Maria Gostrey offers provision that is less than fulfilling; having ‘held out his small thirsty cup to the spout of her pail,’ he hopes to be able to ‘toddle alone,’ taking his nourishment, as he puts it, from other tributaries (296, 303–4). Still, his imaginative ‘toddle’ remains a strained, precarious activity. It crystallizes as an embattled response to reality, craving its nourishment and refusing it at the same time. It disguises a truth, ‘the deep, deep truth’ (468), as he puts it, of his friends’ intimacy, with which he is all the while kept anxiously preoccupied. When it is out, he finds that it has not been far to seek, despite such ‘quantity of make-believe’ as has been practiced; and that the practice of make-believe has been in part his own. ‘It was all very well for him to feel the pity of its being so much like lying; he almost blushed, in the dark, for the way he had dressed the possibility in vagueness, as a little girl might have dressed her doll.’ His sense of betrayal mixes with a sudden perception of exclusion, which leaves him feeling bereft, ‘lonely and cold’ (468). He had tried to act a part in a human drama, but the drama now revealed its mainspring, a compelling source he cannot tap. This apprehension of curtailed participation, with the revelatory dimension of his own complicity, is the heart of his recognition. After the pattern of Oedipus Rex, he emerges as the object as well as the subject, the prey and the hound, in the occult hunt the novel stages. Unlike Oedipus, however, and much like his fictional avatar in The Beast in the Jungle (1903), he shies away from objectified action (an action whose misplaced center he nonetheless becomes), displacing it by a self-regarding theater of consciousness. The third-person narrative mode alerts us to the ways in which the fine and supple texture of Strether’s consciousness, the flickering lambent quality evoked by his name,15 becomes its own absorbing drama, a ‘relation,’ as Adrian Poole speaks of it, between narrator and protagonist, which is ‘James’s most cunning blend of twoness and oneness’ (HJ, 46). The narrative investment in reflexive ironies and ambiguities reads as an internalized, structured response to the presence of an object that frustrates and entices, baffles and lures. It is at once a defense against and a helpless enactment of the exclusionary spectacle whose emblem is Paris: ‘some huge iridescent object, a jewel brilliant and hard, in which parts were not to be discriminated nor differences comfortably marked. It twinkled and trembled and melted together, and what seemed all surface one moment seemed all depth the next.’ Consciousness, here, confronts an object it perceives as detached from itself, precariously suspended, highly unstable. We sense the alien nature of the object and its beguiling,


arbitrary metamorphic processes; unaccountable freezings and meltings, crystallizations and liquefactions. The reflexive withdrawal of consciousness from its object has its counterpart in an imaginative avoidance, structured into the fabric of the novel. In The Ambassadors, the projection of maternal, feminine archetypes is marked by a split. Mrs Newsome and Mme de Vionnet, like Woollett and Paris, belong to a single psychic economy; they are polarized aspects of a single maternal, feminine entity, experienced as sublime and exclusory, but also tantalizingly alluring. As characters, however, these poles remain fixed in their separateness; they come to no significant reciprocal resonation. Mrs Newsome’s daunting, impervious presence, her ‘whole moral being or block,’ is once figured as ‘some particularly large iceberg in a cold blue northern sea’ (448); Mme de Vionnet, at the other pole, is a creature of the same element, in a liquefied, overheated phase. The imaginative conduits leading from one to the other are, however, largely blocked, as if the novel shrank from expressing in full the conflicted longings by which it is gripped: the experience of desire as prohibitive and of prohibition as desirable. It seems that without fully realized conflict, the full range of play remains unrealized as well. Maria Gostrey is thus ‘the most unmitigated and abandoned of ficelles,’ and the Preface proposes frankly ‘to tear off her mask’ (Preface, 47). She is a piece of mechanical, instrumental stagecraft, artificially connective. In this sense, as her surname intimates, she embodies a form of the ‘ghostly’ – a device laid bare, like Miss Barrace’s false augurs. The reference to her as ‘abandoned’ ficelle is, of course, poignantly punning. Strether justifies his final rejection of her by a predetermined ‘logic’ of being right – of ‘not, out of the whole affair, to have got anything for myself’ (512). Such logical stringencies are wrought into the very structure of perception and consciousness, as a defense against the woundable nature of experience. It is less a matter of ‘being “right,”’ Maria observes, than of one’s ‘horrible sharp eye’ for what makes one so. Self-consciousness, which takes the form of moral stricture, is used here to circumvent the ambiguous investments, treacheries and failings of live contact.

IX In The Ambassadors, some of the constitutive, sustaining of structures of consciousness are laid bare, examined and destabilized. The final gesture of the novel, sighing itself ‘all comically, all tragically’ away, is

56


charged with a sense of indeterminacy: comedy and tragedy, aliveness and deadness, are bewilderingly entwined. The fullness of life realized through forms of empathic play is felt to be fatal to the armature of the self, its means and mechanisms of survival. In The Wings of the Dove, this paradox is entered and engaged with. Milly Theale, in the early phase of her European adventure, toys with unripe imaginings of romance, ‘like the secrecies of a little girl playing with dolls when conventionally ‘too big’ (190). As the action unfolds, however, play is increasingly worked into the tragic, passional matrix of the novel, and becomes a vehicle for psychic reconfiguration. The striking figural textures of The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, which draw heavily on theatricality and spectacle, may be taken, in this respect, as a surface index for a performative deep structure. In this light, the late prose emerges as a medium shaped by sensuous currents which, as they manifest themselves in language, are variously engaged with, resisted, deflected, filtered or transmuted; or, to put it the other way around, purposive, conceptualized and generalized expression can recoil from, collapse or mutate into sensuously charged forms. The prose of The Ambassadors is, I have suggested, interspersed with unprocessed sensuous material. Dining with Waymarsh at their Parisian hotel, Strether experiences a guilty thrill, which mixes with an urge to make a ‘confession’ to his friend, ‘in the very taste of the soup, in the goodness, as he was innocently pleased to think of, of the wine, in the pleasant coarse texture of the napkin and the crunch of the thick-crusted bread’ (130). At the Cheval Blanc, he can anticipate ‘partaking, at the close of day, with the enhancements of a coarse white cloth and a sanded floor, of something fried and felicitous, washed down with authentic wine’ (454). This anticipated repast turns into a convivial meal with his friends, ‘a marked drop into innocent friendly Bohemia,’ in the course of which, however, his consciousness, though ‘muffled,’ is said to have had ‘its sharpest moments’ (465), impressions stored for future assessment. These moments reveal to him later the amount of fiction and fable, the quantity of make-believe he has been forced to ‘swallow,’ and which so disagrees with his ‘spiritual stomach’ (468). It seems, beyond the particulars of the episode, that the narrative itself balks here at the sensuous cravings it expresses, which are imperfectly adjusted to the conscious and aesthetic apparatus at its disposal. In the later novels, sensuous, especially alimentary imagery is largely absorbed into elaborate metaphoric tissues, as if to dramatize its enhanced imaginative digestibility, as well as the highly complex nature of these digestive, transformative processes.

3 ‘The Adventure of Shipwreck’: On The Wings of the Dove

In memory of Liat Berman

I Intertexture Like the ‘germ’ of The Ambassadors, the compositional core of The Wings of the Dove can be extricated from the whole. In The Ambassadors, a young man is urged to live all he can, by an older man who feels he might have lived with greater passionate intensity. In The Wings of the Dove, the action develops from a young woman’s ‘passionate yearning to live while she might’ (Preface, 39). To live all one can, or to live while one might; in its context, the juxtaposition suggests, among other things, that a zest for life is no more to be taken for granted than longevity, and, further, that there is a sense in which the two may be exclusive of each other. In The Ambassadors, the Jamesian center-of-consciousness awakens to a sense of its own historicity, its being in time. Individual experience in time serves as a vehicle for the projection of a historico-cultural matrix – the international theme – within which individual temporality unfolds, at a pace felt to be inherently accelerated, and becomes invested with interpretable meaning. In the imaginative economy of the novel, the motto of the hours, ‘omnes vulnerant, ultima necat’ symbolically translates into the wasting away of life through erotic experience; the ‘last one,’ possessing what remains of the young hero’s ‘finer mortality,’ is not an hour, but a woman (A, 121). A consciousness of the passage of time is thus embedded in a large symbolic pattern, which renders it culturally meaningful. Time is conflated with Eros, and perceived, in this frame, to 57

58


be perpetually running out, even as the network of symbolic and cultural meanings associated with it proliferates. The Wings of the Dove, too, is an intricate weave of cultural symbols, spun around a vision of untimely death. And here too, symbolism seems to constitute the time-ridden fabric of consciousness, as consciousness is made to resonate within a vast historical and cultural domain. A malignity, or fatality, marks the construal and construction of cultural symbols, placing the novel at an early point in the trajectory of modernist depictions of a western apocalypse.1 Ezra Pound, another modern poet of the Apocalypse, was baffled by the fiction of James’s late phase, but read into the fiction of the middle period a proleptic perception of the ‘Armageddon’ unleashed in the new century (LE, 297). He considered James’s work as a whole an awe-inspiring representation of cultures – his word is ‘races’ – in titanic struggle. James, he writes, ‘uses forces no whit less specifically powerful than the proverbial ‘doom of the house’ – destiny, deus ex machina – of great traditional art. His art was great art as opposed to over-elaborate or over-refined art by virtue of the major conflicts which he portrays’ (LE, 297–8). In The Ambassadors, these vying cultural forces are embodied in the large historico-theological configuration of the international theme. In The Wings of the Dove, more palpably than in The Ambassadors, the ‘major conflicts’ of this theme are filtered through the prism of finde-siècle decadence, that tenor of the late prose which might in itself strike us, in Pound’s words, as ‘over-elaborate or over-refined.’ Milly Theale is imagined through and against a Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist typology of femininity. She is also beset and animated by an intuition of ‘her shrinking hour’ (Preface, 37), a figure whose urgency, revealed as a poignant conflation of space and time, finds its match in the early writing of Walter Pater. Her fate is ‘to live fast’; the question for her is ‘of the short run, and of a consciousness proportionately crowded’ (127). In the Conclusion to The Renaissance, Pater speaks of just such a density of consciousness under the sign of mortality. ‘Great passions,’ he writes, ‘give us this quickened sense of life’; the exhortation to seize the moment – so as not, ‘on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening’ (R, 189) – is informed by a paradox, centered on the double meaning of ‘quickened’: enlivened and hastened. A passion for life and life’s passions are inseparably joined to a sense of life’s pathos, its brevity and frailty. For James’s heroine, the doom of fast living is, in the same circular way, at once the cause and the consequence of passional experience: if she is capable of passion, it is because, like Pater’s humanity, she is under sentence of death; and if she seems to be under sentence of death, it is because she is capable of passion.

‘The Adventure of Shipwreck’: On The Wings of the Dove 59

In the novels of James’s late phase, such passional temporality is regarded as a ‘European’ phenomenon. The Sacred Fount principle, whose softened operation is traceable in The Ambassadors, represents a psycho-cultural matrix which controls life’s rhythms, in defiance of any universalizing notion of a merely biological determinism. Aging and rejuvenation are perceived as psychologically and culturally inflected processes, subject to the hidden laws of passion. Strether’s exacerbated sense of time seems to emerge in Europe, and to exhaust itself in his intensely sensuous Parisian adventure. It is the sensuous appeal of Europe which precipitates the sense of urgency and transience. The life of the senses reeks of mortality; like the fire in Shakespeare’s sonnet, consumed with that which it was nourished by, it is double-edged, selfannihilative. The Wings of the Dove explores just such a process – that is, the selfconsuming urgencies of Milly Theale’s desire to live. Its elements, and especially Milly’s romantic entanglement, are mobilized to dramatize the deeply paradoxical nature of her mystifying disease. At the center of a novel which gestures conspicuously toward Symbolism, the nameless malady invites a symbolic reading. James consciously equivocates about its nature, and in doing so conflates several possibilities in suggestive ways – centrally consumption and cancer, but also heart disease and the crisis of a broken heart.2 This equivocality suggests a conflict between two psycho-physical impulses – impulses directly relevant to the international theme as it is defined in the late phase. Cancer refracts the accretive urge of the body, consumption the ‘consumptive’ urge of the spirit. For all the drama of the contrast between them, the pathologies eerily shade off into each other, since the one entails tumefaction of the flesh and the other tuberosity of the lungs, which blocks the passage of air, or spirit, through the body. Both are relevant to Milly’s progress through the novel. For Milly, consciousness, materializing in a disease-wasted body, is subjected to a process of being consumed and transformed. It does so through and against the frame of the Christian Passion, which provides a symbolic matrix for her growing experience of love. Sacrificial destructiveness, which is arrived at through the breakdown of conscious divisions and barriers, turns out to have a paradoxical gestational and parturitive dimension. This emerges as the novel performs a difficult movement of readjustment, staging as it does a kenotic transition in Milly, from rarefaction to eroticized embodiment which yet entails a literal consumption of her fleshly being. Indeed, the essential action of the novel lies here, in the response of Milly’s hectic, aspiring, contradiction-ridden, emphatically American being to the world of embodied experience – symbolically of Europe,

60


with which Kate and Densher are at least in part identified. Its emphasis is here, rather than in the lurid drama of the plot Kate Croy and Merton Densher weave ‘against’ Milly. Part of James’s extraordinary achievement lies in the way he positions the story of Milly’s fatal illness, ‘which ceases at a given moment to be renderable’ (Preface, 46), within the field of this conspiracy, and in the skill with which that story is cast in terms that explore the cultural and symbolic ramifications of Milly’s plight rather than her individual psychology. The imagery of the Preface reflects crucial elements of James scheme, bringing into play as it does an elemental opposition between air and water, where air is cognate with ‘spirit,’ and water with ‘matter.’ As in The Ambassadors, this imagistic binarism serves to embody the impossible crossing from America to Europe, rendering the European experience as a kind of death by drowning. From a self-contained ‘vessel of sensibility’ (Preface, 39), Milly is transfigured into a sea-like being. Her ‘sensibility’ becomes, as it were, submerged in an external watery medium, a powerful, impersonal vortex. James initially figures this vortex as ‘some pool of Lorelei’ (Preface, 38); later, he substitutes for the image of Lorelei, where the attractive force seems consciously willed, an image of action which is impersonal, devoid of self-consciousness and desire. I have named the Rhine-maiden, but our young friend’s existence would create rather, all round her, very much that whirlpool movement of the waters produced by the sinking of a big vessel or the failure of a great business; when we figure to ourselves the strong narrowing eddies, the immense force of suction, the general engulfment that, for any neighbouring objects, makes immersion inevitable. (Preface, 39) Kate Croy and Merton Densher think of Milly as ‘a creature saved from a shipwreck,’ who may therefore ‘surely, in these days, on the doctrine of chances, go to sea again with confidence.’ At the same time, it seems that if Milly is to have her life’s adventure, she is not likely to escape another wreck. ‘There are wrecks that are not adventures,’ says Kate, and Densher quips, dubiously: ‘Well – if there be also adventures that are not wrecks!’ (284). Life’s adventure thus seems to be predicated, on symbolic shipwreck. The theme of shipwreck is elucidated in The Golden Bowl, where the referents of its symbolism are made crystal clear. Early in that novel Maggie Verver speaks of her faith in her marriage as ‘divided into water-tight


compartments,’ to preserve it from sinking. The Prince, her husband-to-be, wishes above all to be assured of her faith in his integrity: ‘You do believe I’m not a hypocrite? You recognize that I don’t lie nor dissemble nor deceive? Is that water-tight?’ The question, to which he had given a certain intensity, had made her [...] stare an instant, her colour rising as if it had sounded to her still stranger than he had intended. He had perceived on the spot that any serious discussion of veracity, of loyalty, or rather of the want of them, practically took her unprepared, as if it were quite new to her. He had noticed it before: it was the English, the American sign that duplicity, like ‘love,’ had to be joked about. It couldn’t be ‘gone into.’ So the note of his enquiry was – well, to call it nothing else – premature; a mistake worth making, however, for the almost overdone drollery in which her answer instinctively sought refuge. ‘Water-tight – the biggest compartment of all? Why it’s the best cabin and the main deck and the engine-room and the steward’s pantry! It’s the ship itself – it’s the whole line. It’s the captain’s table and all one’s luggage – one’s reading for the trip.’ She had images, like that, that were drawn from steamers and trains, from a familiarity with ‘lines,’ of ‘own’ cars, from an experience of continents and seas, that he was unable as yet to emulate; from vast modern machineries and facilities whose acquaintance he had still to make […]. (GB, 51) The passage bears out, in nuce, a psychological inflection which James repeatedly sought to embody in all the avatars of his prototypal American heiress. Her type is informed at once by a craving for intimacy and a shrinking from its complexities and risks; she takes refuge in dissociated, often spectacular action, here the lubricated ocean and rail travel of globe-trotting privileged Americans. As Maggie develops her conceit, the sailing vessel becomes a figure for emotional evasion, a denial of emotional depths; the anxious playfulness with which she fixes on and literalizes the image of ‘water-tight compartments’ deflects the response the Prince hopes to elicit. It is the inner life of this ‘vessel of consciousness,’ not her faith in her marriage, which emerges as ‘water-tight.’ There is an underlying sense, therefore, that a ‘smash’ (51), a foundering and submergence, is inevitable, if the marriage is to reach a form of fulfillment. In The Wings of the Dove, too, the reaching out for love seems to depend on shipwreck – the displacement of a watertight, ‘aerobic’ predisposition by a ‘watery’ one. Maggie’s early faith in the Prince’s integrity rests on

62


anxiety-laden modes of psychic compartmentalization, precarious fortifications against the threat of watery diffusiveness. Milly’s survival is similarly grounded in a miraculous, or abstract-statistical, faith in the safety of ‘a creature saved from shipwreck’ – an invulnerability magically gained, as it were, through vulnerability already suffered and attested. These flawed articles of faith are associatively linked with Christ’s miracle of walking on water, a motif engaged with in The Ambassadors. For Strether, the fantasy of miraculous buoyancy serves to stave off the threat of Mme de Vionnet’s watery, engulfing seductiveness. Milly’s shipwreck, a symmetrically opposed fantasy, figures the terrors and longings of full-blown sexuality. In the Preface, sexuality, with its potential fatality and its power to induce transformation, are evoked through the figure of Lorelei. In the novel, Lorelei becomes ‘leviathan,’ a mythic sea-beast, who stirs the stream and draws feet of water (127).3 Another, submerged mythic presence may be Swinburne’s Aphrodite, mother of strife, who, in Atalanta in Calydon (1865) has ‘wings as a dove’ (796), and in Chastelard (1865) is invoked as ‘fair fearful Venus made of deadly foam’ (V.ii). The deathly dimension of Milly’s experience, her ordeal by water, is figured as the foundering of a vessel – implicitly, as insufficiency of air, or excess of fluid. Milly, however, is associated not only with the vessel – no longer watertight – but also with the whirlpool that engulfs it. In the novel, she seems to suffer, paradoxically, at once from consumption and from cancer; in the preface, she seems to be a victim of Lorelei’s enchantment, as well as that enchantress herself. Lorelei may put us in mind of Wagner’s Rhine-maidens in the Ring cycle (1848–74); Milly, figured during her Alpine journey as ‘a mine of something precious’ (136), has an affinity with the keepers of the Rhinegold. Her descent from the Alps to the Mediterranean is described as a ‘Wagner overture’ (128), and here it is the Liebestod, a part of the Prelude to Tristan and Isolde (1857–9), which springs to mind. To James, The Wings of the Dove was essentially a ‘love-story,’4 and the romance of Tristan, an age-old tragic tribute to romantic love, is subtly wrought into its fiber; in The Golden Bowl, it will make itself felt with augmented force. Wagner’s opera, composed at a period when Victorian poets, too – Arnold, Tennyson and Swinburne – were reworking the tale, brings into focus, for the two novels, a vision of the fraught proximity of love and death.5 Mutually irreconcilable, mutually annihilative urges animate Milly in her afflicted state and culminate in a surge of references to internally contradictory situations. On being told by a medical authority that she is meant to live fully and be active, she has a sense of coming face to face with an inherently human, universal dilemma, as ‘that of a poor


girl – with her rent to pay for example – ’ (217), rudimentary but also complex and bewildering, because life, in the world she inhabits, turns out to border closely on death. Walking in solitude, away from the stir of the city, she finds herself in the Regent’s Park, among wanderers anxious and tired like herself; here doubtless were hundreds of others just in the same box. Their box, their great common anxiety, what was it in this grim breathing space, but the practical question of life? They could live if they would; that is, like herself, they had been told so: she saw them all about her, on seats, digesting the information, recognizing it again as something in a slightly different shape familiar enough, the blessed old truth that they would live if they could. (215; italics added) The ‘practical question of life’ is put here, as in the Preface, in terms of anxiety, and the difficulty of breathing. Anxiety and exhaustion appear here as a vast and common experience, yet Milly’s perception, in a moment of extraordinary openness and empathy, dislodges their familiar, ordinary meaning; she sees them not as obstacles to a life deeply desired, but as expressions of stymied desire, an impaired wish for living. The people around her ‘could live if they would’; the will, accordingly, would amount to the possibility, in an inverted version of the ‘blessed old truth that they would live if they could’; yet the vital function of life, breathing, is, for humanity, a grim struggle. With an exacerbated consciousness of death, Milly embraces the challenge of ‘living by option, by volition’ (213); yet such strenuous living comes itself to reek of mortality. The looming menace banishes ‘the beauty of the bloom […] from her old sense of safety’; instead, she is offered another kind of beauty, ‘the beauty of the idea of a great adventure, a big dim experiment or struggle in which she might more responsibly than ever take a hand’ (214). This different, onerous commitment to life involves a kind of inward rupture; a feminine fantasy is, it seems, coercively masculinized, and a tender, intimate idea of self is discarded, in favor of an active, combative one: It was as if she had had to pluck off her breast, to throw away, some friendly ornament, a familiar flower, a little old jewel, that was part of her daily dress; and to take up and shoulder as a substitute some queer defensive weapon, a musket, a spear, a battle-axe – conducive possibly in a higher degree to a striking appearance, but demanding all the effort of the military posture. (214)

64


In this new guise, as of a Napoleonic soldier, Milly assumes an active sense of the body, which she experiences as an alien, rigidified, embattled posture. Kate Croy perceives this rigidity in her friend as an inorganic, clockwork quality, which is at once an aspect as well as a negation of her illness. Milly would not show for an invalid, she says, ‘any more than your watch, when it’s about to stop for want of being wound up, gives you convenient notice or shows as different from usual. She won’t die, she won’t live by inches. She won’t smell, as it were, of drugs, she won’t taste, as it were, of medicine. No one will know’ (284). For Milly, the expression of life as action is reactive, combative, and in this sense life-denying; active being, above all the condition of inhabiting a body, seems to constrain, cripple or destroy the life of the body. This double-edged experience of embodiment has as its corollary the haunting suggestion of suicide which comes to color Milly’s predicament and haunt her story as it unfolds. The linking together of embodiment and suicide emerges first in the crucial scene of the Alpine abyss. In a compressed anticipatory mode, which lets surface a raw imagination of violence, the scene plays out Milly’s approaching descent, from the crisp Swiss heights to the stifling air of London and then to the sultriness of Venice – indeed, it intimates the terms of her entire trajectory. The descent from the mountain pass, or arête, is figured as a fall – the pass is an impasse, the arête an arrêt, and the passage through it a form of death – a death of the body, which is not, in Milly’s case, to be distinguished from its materialization. This, if we wish, is the central paradox her story expresses. The scene is rendered indirectly; it is filtered through the consciousness of Milly’s companion, Susan Shepherd Stringham, and its initial focus is Milly’s fabulous fortune. Milly is a ‘princess’ of a special order, and Susan’s mode of attendance, or ‘service,’ is ‘like court life without the hardships.’ Strikingly free of concern with her wealth, Milly is yet unable to get away from its presence; it was in the fine folds of the helplessly expensive little black frock that she drew over the grass as she now strolled vaguely off; it was in the curious and splendid coils of hair, ‘done’ with no eye whatever to the mode du jour, that peeped from under the corresponding indifference of her hat, the merely personal tradition that suggested a sort of noble inelegance; it lurked between the leaves of the uncut but antiquated Tauchnitz volume of which, before going out, she had mechanically possessed herself. She couldn’t dress it away, nor walk it away, nor read it away, nor think it away; she could neither smile


it away in any dreamy absence nor blow it away in any softened sigh. She couldn’t have lost it if she had tried – that was what it was to be really rich. It had to be the thing you were. (133) The stress is on the strong determining force of Milly’s fortune, a force which is yet in a state of latency, awaiting realization. Here, as elsewhere in the late fiction, American wealth serves as a kind of metonymy for human potentiality; it is a near abstraction, which, to come into its own, must seek expression in the material reality of Europe, becoming, as it were, invested. Milly’s English friends see her as ‘an angel with a thumping bank account’ (283), as if her spirit, an angelic essence, had an ideal financial counterpart, a Platonic idea of materiality. In this context, in a Miltonic vein, Milly is said to have the world ‘before her’ (282). In the echo of Paradise Lost, there is a suggestion of the fully human, ‘natural’ possibilities opened to Adam and Eve, when, upon their expulsion from Eden, they are compelled to take possession of the earth (XII, 637–49). At the same time, the Alpine scene resonates with the scene of Christ’s vertiginous temptation in Paradise Regained, recast as a scene of embodiment, an Incarnation which is a Fall into humanity. Like Blake’s Thel, daughter of Seraphim, Milly quits an ethereal realm of spirit, to experience life in the flesh. Her ascent to the avian, angelic heights of the mountain pass accentuates, contrapuntally, the radical descent which is to follow. In Plato’s Phaedrus, the soul’s energy, winged Eros, is impelled heavenward, away from the body. Here, the soul-bird sheds its plumage and becomes incarnate, through an eroticized kenotic process. Thinking of this moment in terms of investiture or incarnation is a fruitful possibility. In this context, the rarefied quality of Milly’s presence, which troubled generations of readers, including Virginia Woolf, F. R. Leavis and Frederick Crews, becomes symbolic of a struggle to attain embodiment, or corporeality.6 Milly’s mode of incarnation is rendered as a profane, erotically charged version of Christ’s kenosis. At the sight of her perched over the abyss, Susan thinks of her as ‘a mere maiden,’ liable ‘to slip, to slide, to leap, to be precipitated by a false movement’ downward. The language is sexually charged, and points in a particular direction, still unrevealed; the ‘horrible hidden obsession’ which Susan suspects Milly to harbor emerges not only as a suicidal wish, but also as a romantic passion; it is romance, experienced as a passion of martyrdom, which precipitates the girl’s descent from the Alpine heights to London. The conjunction of Eros and death, at this point, is sharply focused. Milly’s birdlike perch functions as a symbolic correlative to her angelic

66


quality; but while she is a Dove, or Paraclete, the scene unfolds as a subversive version of the Son’s temptation in the wilderness. She chooses the kingdoms of the earth, desiring ‘all’ rather than renouncing them, and in this betrays the spiritual essence of her being. She is not, like Milton’s Son, borne aloft on angels’ wings, ‘As on a floating couch through the blithe air’ (IV.585), but falls like the Tempter. Pace Matthiessen and Crews, it is only literally true that she is not tempted by a devil.7 In Paradise Regained, Satan’s fall resembles the self-inflicted death of the Theban Sphinx, who ‘Cast herself headlong from th’ Ismenian steep’ (IV.575) when Oedipus had solved the riddle of Man. Milly’s descent, like Oedipus’s tragedy, is a fall into humanity – a fleshbound, death-bound incarnation. In a fundamental sense, this incarnation is incapable of being accomplished. If Milly experiences life in the body, it is through bodily affliction, a strife between the will to be and the will not to be. Her projected desire for ‘all’ the kingdoms of the earth emerges as an inability fully to desire any – that is, as an irresolvable ambivalence about desire itself. In this sense, her descent is similar to the descent of Thel, Blake’s seraphic princess, who wishes for an earthly life, but recoils from her own morbid vision of earthly sexuality. Her final, renunciatory vision is of the mutual embeddedness of sex and death. Thel’s motto, echoed in the title of James’s next novel, speaks, moreover, of a symbolic breach between heaven and earth: Does the eagle know what is in the pit? Or wilt thou go ask the Mole? Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod? Or Love in a golden bowl? In Blake’s vision, the eagle’s ignorance of the pit, which seems to stand for the spirit’s withdrawal from the earth, is associated with the hollowing out of what is best thought of, perhaps, as Eros in its cosmic form. Wisdom seems absent from the silver rod, and love from the golden bowl; if the two symbols are taken to carry a sexual meaning, the severance of heaven from earth emerges as a form of erotic severance.8 Through such patterns of thematic correspondence, the rich intertexture of the Alpine scene refracts the nature of Milly’s ordeal. A deeper aspect of James’s art, however, is revealed in the way the cluster of intertexts serves to generate or enact the psycho-cultural crux it points to. The allusive texture, with its symbolic matrices, produces in Milly, for us, the effect of attenuated, alienated presence; it blocks the fluency and


expressiveness of her fictional life. At the same time, this texture is indispensable, as the medium through which her being and desire are given body and voice.

II Precipitancy Formal elements are no less integral to the projection of this drama. It is said of Milly that she ‘could give time as nobody else could’ (245). She is referred to then as ‘the American girl,’ in a spirit that calls to mind a worldlier counterpart, in a French adage: the most beautiful girl in the world, who cannot give more than she has. Her generous bestowal of time, as of money, is a feature of the national character, and qualified by special liabilities: the dictum ‘time is money’ resonates here ironically, as it does in The Ambassadors. The flow of Milly’s inner life is released in Europe; by the same stroke, however, it becomes constrained by an exacerbated European consciousness of time. Her descent form the Brünig is an unfolding which has disruption in its very integuments; it is liable or destined for sudden collapse, abolishing process and time, as in Kate’s image of the unwound watch. Emblematic of this is the brevity of the encounters and interviews which is a central compositional device in the novel. It is a salient feature, in particular, of Sir Luke Strett’s consultations; his name, in this connection, chimes with ‘strait,’ as well as with ‘stress.’ He has ten minutes to devote to Milly on their first meeting – by a rare accident, as he puts it, for in general he tries to keep his consulting hours ‘rigorously free’ (202). This rigorous freedom is later mocked, its paradoxical nature exposed, through Susan’s transparently naïve appreciation; ‘I could see that for him it was long’ (320), she reports, at the end of a visit which lasts a quarter of an hour. His expertise manifests itself in the measured, punctilious forms of his practice; these, ironically, are wholly ineffectual where his patient of the ‘shrinking hour’ is concerned. The prospect he wishes to make real to her, of embodied life unfolding freely in time, is one from which he is himself excluded. Sir Luke – as his name, among other attributes, is meant to suggest – is a doctor in the apostolic tradition, a healer of souls; the human condition is determined, for him, by transitoriness and mortality. Milly’s affliction, constituted, as I have already noted, by a combination of consumption and cancer, symbolically refracts the operation in her of a will to die. To the extent that the symbol functions, for James, as a private mortuary record, it refracts the mortal illnesses of Mary Temple

68


and Alice James, but also refers to the suicide of Constance Fenimore Woolson, early in 1894. Woolson’s death was followed, in the same year, by the first Notebook entry on The Wings of the Dove. Memories of the three women may have played a part in shaping the spatial and temporal trajectory of the novel. Mary Temple and Alice James died in March, on opposite sides of the Atlantic; Mary Temple in New York, Alice James in London. Constance Fenimore Woolson died in Venice, in January; her last diary entry is from Christmas Day (PL, 122, 248, 266). Milly’s travels begin in spring and end in winter; she starts from New York, stops in London, and dies in Venice, on Christmas Eve. Beyond this memorial frame, the journey limns the historical and cultural space the novel inhabits. It begins at Ultima Thule (71), a fashionable London residence which figures as the northernmost reach of civilization, and ends in Venice, at a hired Rococo palace. Its final reach is the southernmost reach of Christendom since the fall of Byzantium, latterly an emblem of cultural decline and dispossession. The temporal frame unfolds under a pattern whose resonance is archetypal: from spring to winter, and from winter to spring again; the span of a year, with moorings in Christmas and Easter. Within this spatio-temporal framework we find rich permutations of the international subject which, as in The Ambassadors, is charged with familial figures and motifs of orphaning developed in the context of maternal deficiency as well as maternal nurture. These take their particular coloration from Milly’s personal circumstances, but also refract Jame’s sense of what it means to be an American. Milly is no commonplace American heiress. She not only inherits a fabulous fortune but is said to be ‘the heir of all the ages’ (Preface, 38), a phrase which links her to the hero of Tennyson’s Locksley Hall. Yet her heritage is radically different from his. His is an exclusively European heritage, and like a good Englishman of his age, he espouses a Macauleyan creed of progress. Milly for her part is quintessentially American and moves in different geographic and temporal directions. Having traveled from the new world to the old, she compulsively immerses herself in history. The future, which is the native element of Tennyson’s protagonist, is utterly lost to her, and yet she is ‘the first woman of her time’ (353), much as Tennyson’s protagonist marches ‘in the foremost files of time.’ Her privation, within the cultural frame she both defines and is defined by, suggests the displacement of the highVictorian meliorism celebrated in Locksley Hall (there too ironically perhaps) by a darker vision – the vision, verging on the apocalyptic, which Pound discerned in James’s later work.


Even Milly’s radical independence at the outset – her ‘liberty of action, of choice, of appreciation, of contact’ (Preface, 38) is, in fact, a function of radical bereavement. The Tennysonian hero is also an orphan, but he tries to convert his personal losses into gain. Even the loss of his mother is sublimated in a rhetorical gesture. ‘Mother age,’ he prays, ‘for mine I knew not – help me as when life begun.’ In his plea, she becomes a figure of cultural generativity. Such an appeal to a maternal spirit of culture, punctuated by a sense of maternal absence, is of a Jamesian cast, even if its rhetorical register is not. For James’s heiress, on the other hand, cultural nurturance emerges as a rather sinister form of maternal surrogacy. Milly’s orphaning, so differerent from her Tennysonian counterpart’s, is itself, by a kind of metonymy, an expression of cultural decline. Milly’s past is an elaborate New York history of ‘the loss of parents, brothers, sisters, almost every human appendage, all on a scale and with a sweep that had required [a great] stage’ (123); it is in this context that Susan first thinks of her as ‘stricken.’ In the Preface, Milly is figured as ‘the last fine flower – blooming alone, for the full attestation of her freedom – of an “old” New York stem’ (38). The extinction of her ‘old’ New York line and her own stricken state suggest a hereditary malaise, whose origins are traceable to the greater, more illustrious social stage of Europe. She is a kind of Baudelerian fleur du mal – a ‘final flower’ (126), ironically associated, perhaps, with the originary ‘Mayflower’ – sprung in the soil of the new world from a blighted European transplant. The American heiress, more like a homing pigeon in this than a literary Dove, must make her journey back to Europe; her very freedom, rooted as it is in dispossession, compels her to seek restitution at the place of origin. Her travels are guided by adopted maternal figures, Susan Shepherd Stringham and the late, aptly named Mrs Shepherd, Susan’s pioneering Vermont mother. Mrs Shepherd now figures in her daughter’s mind as ‘having apparently, almost like Columbus, worked out, all unassisted, a conception of the other side of the globe’ (131). So far from discovering a new world, however, these mothers and daughters nostalgically seek the tradition of Europe, which they regard, in terms borrowed from Tennyson again, as a ‘standard of comparison for all cycles of Cathay’ (131). Milly’s orphaning leaves her painfully exposed – ‘[i]solated, unmothered, unguarded’ (143). Her experience recasts, as we know, the early orphaning of James’s Temple cousins; but beyond the biographical frame of reference, the motif has strong socio-cultural repercussions. A passage from the essay on Florida in The American Scene (1907) describes the plight of the archetypal American Girl in terms of cultural

70


orphaning. The literally ‘unmothered’ state is symbolically extended here to include an entire generation, Milly’s national sorority. James’s inward ear registers the voiceless complaint of the American girl, ‘the questioning wail of the maiden’s ultimate distressed consciousness.’ This is how he renders it: How can I do all the grace, all the interest, as I’m expected to? – yes, literally, all the interest that isn’t the mere interest on the money. I’m expected to supply it all – while I wander and stray in the desert. Was there ever such a conspiracy, on the part of a whole social order, toward the exposure of incompetence? Were ever crude youth and crude presumption left so unadmonished as to their danger of giving themselves away? (AS, 708–9) James proceeds in his own voice, to figure the American social order in the guise of a great blank unnatural mother, a compound of all the recreant individuals misfitted with the name, whose ear the mystic plaint seemed never to penetrate, and whose large unseeing complacency suggested some massive monument covered still with the thick cloth that precedes a public unveiling. We wonder at the hidden marble or bronze; we suppose, under the cloth, some attitude or expression appropriate to the image; but as the removal of the cloth is perpetually postponed, the character never emerges. The American mother, enshrouded in her brown holland, has, by this analogy, never emerged. (AS, 709; my italics) The personification of ‘the American social order’ as a ‘great blank unnatural mother’ is worth lingering with. Milly’s motherlessness emerges, in its light, as an element in the symbolism of the international subject; specifically, it suggests the failure of a viable cultural order to form in the new world. Elsewhere in The American Scene, the sense of this failure is expressed through imagery of nutritional dearth.9 In The Wings of the Dove, as in The Ambassadors, a symbolic matrix which figures American culture in terms of alimentary want, and European culture in terms of alimentary plenitude, informs the dynamics of international exchange. Milly’s ‘boundless freedom’ is like that of ‘the wind in the desert’ (126), the freedom of a wasteland, a condition which involves, for her, a pronounced physical attenuation. In her American


period, she is, to Susan, a ‘striking apparition’; ‘slim, constantly pale, delicately haggard’ (122). The girl, Susan perceives, is ‘starved for culture,’ and Susan, whose diet is rich in literary fiber, for she is not content ‘to live by bread alone’ (123), sets out to provide her with a taste (126). The ‘desert’ of America is in fact a symbolic space of orphaning, abandonment and hunger; but the American correlative to bodily depletion is spiritual expansiveness, a freedom as of the wind in the desert. Europe, by contrast, is, as in The Ambassadors, a nurturing womb, a fleshly maternal space, densely inhabited. European maternity involves an imagination of embodied and eroticized femininity, associated with spiritual decadence; as such, it plunges the Europeanized self into a form of mortal struggle. Milly’s journey to Europe is an embarkation on a ‘war path’ (214), as much as it is an imaginative quest for maternity and femininity; it is a desperate measure, in tune with the suggestion in The Ambassadors that it is ‘better to suffer as a sheep than as a lamb,’ or ‘to perish by sword rather than by famine’ (A, 280). Milly is ‘the mere last broken link’ (166) in a dislocated ancestral chain whose origin is Europe; the westbound trajectory is patrilineal, insofar as it is associated with the Puritan fathers. The enabling links in the recursive chain are, by contrast, symbolically matrilineal: the late Mrs Shepherd, Susan Shepherd Stringam, and Susan’s girlhood friend, Maud Manningham, now the widowed Mrs. Lowder, Milly’s initiatrix into London Society. The swift descent from the Brünig pass into the heart of London’s social scene figures, for Milly, as the stuff of fairytales, with Susan in the ‘glittering’ guise of a fairy godmother. Preparing for their first entertainment, Milly almost insists ‘on dressing her as one; and it was no fault of the girl’s if the good lady hadn’t now appeared in a peaked hat, a short petticoat, diamond shoe-buckles, brandishing the magic crutch’ (147). This fanciful, grotesque, rather sinister masquerade (the ‘magic crutch’ bodes no good) bears out something of the deep alienation which marks Milly’s encounter with Europe and its maternalism. Like Strether’s early experience of Paris, Milly’s initiatory encounter with London gives rise to a fearful but alluring fantasy of immersion. ‘It wasn’t then, as the prospect seemed to show, so difficult to get into the current, or to stand at any rate on the bank. […] and yet the elements were different enough from any of her old elements, and positively rich and strange’ (149). She withholds herself, partly, as she oscillates between the current and the bank. Still, there is the premonition of danger – of a sea-change. The allusion to The Tempest suggests a process of transformation, through shipwreck and drowning.

72


Maud Lowder’s dinner-party creates in Milly a sense of being ‘completely involved,’ an engulfment rife with resonances of art and culture, yet not without intimations of threat: The very air of the place, the pitch of the occasion, had for her both so sharp a ring and so deep an undertone. The smallest things, the faces, the hands, the jewels of the women, the sound of words, especially of names, across the table, the shape of the forks, the arrangement of the flowers, the attitude of the servants, the walls of the room, were all touches in a picture and denotements in a play […]. (149) To her interlocutor, the super-civilized Lord Mark, she speaks of her desire to see in Europe ‘the places she had read about’ (150). Yet her exposure has been precipitous – ‘unduly precipitated,’ as she feels (147) – in her descent from the Brünig, partly, it seems, as a response to her reading. Her Tauchnitz, abandoned at the pass, suggests that even if she has chosen, in Susan’s phrase, not to ‘cut short the thread’ (140), the thread itself may be radically discontinuous (140). Susan, Milly’s literary instructor, is always provided with ‘“fine” work,’ a hooked needle and a ball of silk (140), the ‘string’ pictured in her name. On leaving the Alps, she engages in tracing old clues, mending loose threads in her network of European connections (146). The Moirae, fairy godmothers of the classical world, come to mind, at this juncture; Klotho and Atropos, the spinster and the weaver, are the immediate models, but they are unthinkable without Lachesis, who wields the shears and cuts the thread. There is a sense in which Milly’s desire for life is precipitate, like desire for death. The descent to London is ‘unexpected,’ with little in the way of ‘preparations and introductions.’ It ‘might have been supposed to be the crown, and to be achieved, like a siege, by gradual approaches’ (141), but instead Milly takes the city by storm. She leaves the hungry Swiss heights to embrace a human interest, for which her craving is bound up with an anxious sense that she might not have it ‘for long’; for, ‘if it wasn’t for long – if nothing should happen to be so for her – why the particular thing she spoke of would probably have most to give her in her time, would probably be less than anything else a waste of her remainder’ (141). She and Susan resolve to ‘eat and drink because of what might happen to-morrow,’ directing their course, from that moment, ‘with a view to such eating and drinking’ (142). So, the quest for nurture and culture involves, for Milly, an epicurean sense of the transience of such things.


Milly’s social debut does not fail to place her, in part to her chagrin, in a ‘readable’ cultural frame. Her measure is taken, she is accounted for, classified according to type; Lord Mark, she feels, makes no more of her being a stranger and an American ‘than if she and her like were the chief of his diet’ (152). Lord Mark is himself a kind of delicate dish, ‘seasoned and saturated’ (154); yet if he is susceptible of being consumed, he is also an expert consumer; Milly strikes him as a kind of failed transplanted crop – ‘a cheap exotic, imported almost wholesale,’ about whose ‘habitat,’ ‘conditions of climate, growth and cultivation, its immense profusion but its few varieties and thin development,’ he seems perfectly satisfied. (161) The notion of the ‘thin development’ of the American type occurs to Milly herself, at another oscillatory moment between withdrawal and immersion. The élan of the party affects her in a complex way; it produces a sense that her doom might be ‘to live fast,’ and the urgency of a ‘consciousness proportionately crowded.’ In this crowdedness, however, while plates were changed and dishes presented and periods in the banquet marked; while appearances insisted and phenomena multiplied and words reached her from here and there like plashes of a slow thick tide; while Mrs Lowder grew somehow more stout and more instituted and Susie, at her distance and in comparison, more thinly improvised and more different – different, that is, from everyone and everything: […] while this process went forward our young lady alighted, came back, taking up her destiny again as if she had been able by a wave or two of her wings to place herself briefly in sight of an alternative to it. (157; my italics) The contrast between the growing material presence of Mrs Lowder and Susan’s growing thinness and ‘difference’ is telling; ‘Lowder’ seems to measure it in decibels, in complex resonance with the increase of density measured in ‘Dens[h]er’ – a form of growing deafness in him, more or less conscious and calculated. Milly’s alternative to the tidal waves and crowded consciousness of the moment is to form an ideal vision of herself as a ‘success,’ in a sense which at once implicates her in the actual social circumstances and removes her from them. She adopts the term from Lord Mark, yet rejects his mercenary understanding of it. He posits that she is to be used by Mrs Lowder, since ‘Nobody here, you know, does anything for nothing’ (157), but she, defiantly, describes her hostess as ‘an idealist’: ‘She idealizes us, my friend and me, absolutely. She sees us in a light […]. That’s all I’ve got to hold on by. So don’t deprive me of it’ (157–8). Milly’s imaginative facility, which seems to increase,

74


resentfully, in reaction to Mark’s deficiency in that quarter, flies in the face of her material conditions. She takes up her destiny, ‘as though by a wave or two of her wings’; and her flight of spirit involves an intense idealization of her experience. One aspect of this spiritual flight is a confirmed sense that she and Mark ‘couldn’t or wouldn’t mix’; at the same time, she experiences a ‘perverse quickening’ of her relation to him: ‘What queerer consequence of their not mixing than their talking – for it was what they had arrived at – almost intimately?’ (159). Milly seems to slip here into the mode of Noli Me Tangere, familiar from Strether’s European imbrication – an intimate refusal of contact. The imagination of immersion is coupled here, as in The Ambassadors, with a paradoxical inability, or unwillingness, ‘to mix,’ and with an increasing need to set herself apart – to control the situation from above the fray, even as she moves irrevocably toward her doom.

III The Dovelike The inability either to engage with or to disengage herself from the ‘human scenery’ of Europe underlies Milly’s moral reaction to her London circle, and heightens the recurrent sense of the unresolvably paradoxical nature of her situation. Her willful idealism rests precariously on her sense of herself as a mean offering, a ‘poor present’ (153), and she repeatedly defines herself as meager rather than full, as well as an object of pity rather than a source of largesse. She infuses her social situation with a spirit of disinterestedness by dematerializing herself, physically and psychologically if not financially. As the sick girl, depleted and reduced, she is to be pitied but not desired, exploited and consumed. She assumes that Kate, hale and handsome, can only care for her by being sorry for her, rising through compassion ‘to the height of the disinterested’ (160). Indeed, Milly establishes her early relationship with Kate on the grounds of Kate’s ‘natural pity’ for her (160). Later, her proclivity not only for soliciting pity but also for dispensing it is expressed in the unfolding of her relationship with Densher. Having half-sensed and privately rejected the possibility of a secret intimacy between her friends (166, 179–85), she is all too eager to put her faith in Kate’s explicit disavowal, and in doing so paves the way for her later immolation. She tries Kate’s version as a ‘cover,’ which she draws up to her chin ‘with energy. If it didn’t, so treated, do everything for her, it did so much that she could herself supply the rest’ (246).


The pun in ‘cover’ signals that Milly has begun here to prepare for the role of comforter she is to assume in relation to Densher. Above all, of course, it is she who seeks and takes comfort in the position and process of bestowing comfort. The cover – a down comforter, surely, as John Bayley has it (Introduction, 24) – figures the disingenuousness which informs, or deforms, her cultivation of disinterestedness. As comforter, she is physically concealed, covered ‘up to her chin’; the notion of Densher’s romantic availability gives rise to a vision of herself as an invalid, bed-ridden. In figural terms, erotic fantasy is bound up here with the debilitating comfort of sickness – the comfort, that is, of not oneself being desirable. The combination of physical frailty and moral fervor emerges as a characteristically American malaise, the overwrought condition of ‘American nerves’ (274). Maud Lowder’s London brings out, for Milly, Susan’s essentially American constitution, ‘more thinly improvised, and more different – different, that is, from everyone and everything’ (157). Milly herself, on the occasion, is confronted with her own peculiarly American ‘morbid anxiety’ to please (152). This high-strung sensibility is an American, or rather the American neurosis. At the Brünig, Susan calls it, all too tolerantly, ‘American intensity,’ even as she frets about the prospect of being treated, by Milly, ‘to some complicated drama of nerves (129–30). Figurally, the exacerbated American temperament has a birdlike quality. At the dinner-party, Milly combats her fearful fantasy of immersion and engulfment by a fantasy of soaring and alighting, ‘taking up her destiny again as if she had been able by a wave or two of her wings to place herself briefly in sight of an alternative to it’ (157); the ‘wave’ of her wings, with its lingering suggestion of water, is subtly ironic. Elsewhere, in a strained display of sociability, she postures as the proverbial American Girl, and sounds for her guest, in nervous chitchat, her ‘native woodnote’ (244). Ironically, again, nothing is more truly in character for the American Girl than the ‘morbid anxiety’ to please, which Milly experiences in this scene with great poignancy. She clings to the Rockies – in conversation, we gather (248), but the locution conjures an image of a bird in the wilderness, a rock pigeon, the solitary dove of Psalm 55.10 It is in Europe, as refracted through the prism of English sensibility, that the avian American spirit can find expression. Milly’s birdlike quality discovers itself in the overarching image of the Dove, with which Kate presents her as the deep truth about her nature. On the night of the epiphany, or theophany, of the Dove, Kate’s ruthless, animal vitality is a source of anxiety to Milly; in retrospect, she feels herself to have been ‘alone with a creature who paced like a panther’ (235). Kate’s dark

76


prediction that Milly ‘may very well loathe her yet,’ draws from Milly a helpless plea: ‘Why do you say such things to me?’ This unexpectedly had acted, by a sudden turn of Kate’s attitude, as a happy speech. She had risen as she spoke, and Kate had stopped before her, shining at her instantly with a softer brightness. Poor Milly had enjoyed one of her views of how people, wincing oddly, were often touched by her. (236) Milly’s helplessness in the face of Kate’s aggression, curbed only for a time, crystallizes in the next moment as complete acquiescence in Kate’s response: ‘Because you’re a dove,’ with which she felt herself ever so delicately, so considerately, embraced; not with familiarity or as a liberty taken, but almost ceremonially and in the manner of an accolade; partly as if, though a dove who could perch on a finger, one were also a princess with whom forms were to be observed. It even came to her, through the touch of her companion’s lips, that this form, this cool pressure, fairly sealed the sense of what Kate had just said. It was moreover for the girl like an inspiration: she found herself accepting as the right one, while she caught her breath with relief, the name so given her. She met it on the instant as she would have met revealed truth; it lighted up the strange dusk in which she lately walked. That was what was the matter with her. She was a dove – Oh, wasn’t she? (236) Kate’s impalpable embrace is a kind of physical correlative to the emotional ‘wincing’ at Milly’s touch. Milly’s vulnerability, strangely contagious, is a formidable barrier to intimate contact; intimacy, for her, is a form of violation, and this intense susceptibility inspires horror. Susan, ‘with piety and passion,’ longs ‘to leave her untouched because no touch one could apply, however light, however just, however earnest and anxious, would be half good enough, would be anything but an ugly smutch upon perfection’ (126–7). The cold kiss Milly receives from Kate seals her fate; if it is a Judas-kiss, as many have suggested, it helps her assume her Christlike nature – the Christ of Noli Me Tangere. Her ‘inspiration,’ at this moment, is paradoxically inimical to breathing – she catches her breath ‘with relief’ as at a


compelling diagnostic insight, long delayed, though it holds little promise of wellbeing; the ‘matter with her’ is recognized, given substance and form, as the condition of the ‘dovelike’ (237). At once, she embarks on a study of the ‘dovelike’ (237), and the narrative elucidates the paradoxical nature of that condition. An incipient clarity about the way ‘a dove would act’ leads at once to ‘quite readopting’ her plan with respect to her doctor. ‘Sir Luke Strett comes, by appointment, to see me at eleven,’ she instructs Susan, ‘but I’m going out on purpose. He is to be told, please, deceptively, that I’m at home and you, as my representative, when he comes up, are to see him instead. He’ll like that, this time, better. So do be nice to him’ (237). That she should thus be deputized by her princess, serve as her proxy in this royal encounter, strikes Susan as a proposal truly ‘Byzantine’ (238); she stares, at first, as if it were ‘a priceless Persian carpet unrolled at her feet’ (237). Milly, by virtue of these manipulations, comes to be perceived as majestic, and this radically undercuts her human accessibility. Very quickly, she takes on a sort of Byzantine princeliness. Having met Kate and Densher at the museum, she detains them for luncheon; ‘the American girl could give time as nobody else could,’ we learn at this point, and what she thus gave ‘she therefore made them take – even if, as they might surmise, it was rather more than they wanted’ (245). A most ordinary fear, of facing her doctor, is turned into a form of capital, and yields a gift both princely and tyrannical. The tyranny bears out the fear; for after all, in relation to time, she is, in reality, not only a plebeian, but a pauper. The scene serves as a template for the essentials of the plot, staging as it does an elaborately contrived postponement of a grim revelation. Milly’s princely pose throughout it is an armature – the form which her dissociation takes, which epitomizes and in part perhaps causes the condition of decadence. ‘Her glassy lustre of attention’ conceals an agony of ‘inward tension’ (248). Princeliness, or dovelike generosity, here, is a mode of denying what Wordsworth, in a Lucy poem, calls ‘human fears.’ It cuts her off, at once from the intimate truth about herself, and from spontaneous human involvement. Involvement becomes coercion, a selfserving exercise of ‘power’ over a captive interlocutor (247–8) – a power she will exercise, in the end, with special force from beyond the grave. The ‘dovelike’ has further resonance. In an implicit pun, it is Columbine and pertains to America. When Densher pays Milly a visit in London, her dovelike quality recovers for him a feature of the national character, familiar from his recent American sojourn. American girls, ‘when, rare case, they had the attraction of Milly, were clearly the easiest people in the world. Had what had happened been that this specimen of

78


the class was from the first so committed to ease that nothing subsequent could ever make her difficult’ (296) ? The difficulty at stake, seemingly dissipated by Milly’s insistence on ease, has to do with the treatment of her as ‘one of the afflicted.’ She takes care, at once, to conjure away the possibility of being treated by him in such a way: ‘She was never, never – did he understand? – to be one of the afflicted for him’ (297). She does, it seems, protest too much; increasingly she grounds her social existence as well as her unrealized romance in a sense of incapacitation for life. If, as it emerges, desire is a source of deep terror to her, invalidism serves to undermine her desirability. Invalidism itself, however, gives rise to anaclitic anxieties, regressive terrors of dependence and want. As a buffer against these, she removes herself from the sphere of compassion and care. Sacrificing the prerogatives of infirmity, she dissociates herself altogether from her needs; instead, compulsively, she takes to bestowing gratuitous compassion on others. In what the novel projects as an archetypically ‘American’ spirit, she assumes the quasi-divine nature of Comforter, while her human core becomes insular, unreachable. The inception of this alienation is recorded through Densher’s perception of the difficulty of forming a viable relationship with her. He recalls Kate’s account of their friend as ‘too proud for pity,’ and ‘fiercely shy about so personal a secret.’ In the course of his visit with her, however, he finds that if his pity hadn’t had to yield to still other things it would have had to yield quite definitely to her own. That was the way the case had turned round: he had made his visit to be sorry for her, but would repeat it – if he did repeat it – in order that she might be sorry for him. […] Odd enough was it certainly that the question originally before him, the question placed there by Kate, should so of a sudden find itself quite dislodged by another. This other, it was easy to see, came straight from the fact of [Milly’s] beautiful delusion and her wasted charity. (297–8) ‘If he was interesting, it was because he was unhappy,’ he makes out; ‘and if he was unhappy it was because his passion for Kate had spent itself in vain; and if Kate was indifferent, inexorable, it was because she had left Milly in no doubt of it.’ Whatever Kate’s role in causing the imbroglio, Densher comes to regard Milly’s attitude as a kind of sublime emotional perversity. Her sense of her position was clearly one that she ‘liked,’ and it exhaled its shy fragrance of heroism, for it was not aided by any question of parting with Kate. She would be charming to Kate as well


as to Kate’s adorer; she would incur whatever pain could dwell for her in the sight – should she continue to be exposed to the sight – of the adorer thrown in with the adored. It wouldn’t really have taken much more to make him wonder if he hadn’t before him one of those rare cases of exaltation – food for fiction, food for poetry – in which a man’s fortune with the woman who doesn’t care for him is positively promoted by the woman who does. (302) The ‘exaltation’ through heroic self-denial belongs to Milly, as much as to Densher. Later in the same scene, she is again ‘exalted’ in this mode, rejecting the collective ‘sympathy’ which Densher tries to extend to her on behalf of her friends. His retraction then comes as a gesture toward deifying her; sympathy, he concedes, is ‘doubtless a pale word. What we shall feel for you will be much nearer worship’ (304). In Venice this process is carried further. Milly becomes ‘the priestess of the worship’ (337), as well as a princess – ‘the great and only princess,’ as Susan puts it. Her palace is perceived as a kind of court, but ‘such a court as never was: one of the courts of heaven, the court of a reigning seraph, a sort of a vice-queen of an angel’ (384). And it is here, at its most exalted, that her Paraclete-like nature finds its most movingly human expression. She says to Lord Mark, who pleads with her against her palatial cloistering: ‘No, I mustn’t listen to you – that’s just what I mustn’t do. The reason is, please, that it simply kills me. […] I give and give and give – there you are; stick to me as close as you like and see if I don’t. Only, I can’t listen or receive or accept – I can’t agree. I can’t make a bargain. I can’t really’ (353–4). Through the English portion of the novel, we are licensed to think of Milly as a lame ‘duck’ (221); ‘teal’ is embedded in her surname, and ‘mallard’ is suggested by ‘Mildred,’ her Christian name; ‘mallard,’ in turn, is suggestive of ‘malady,’ like the enclitic ‘illy’. As the action unfurls, the duckling is transformed, not into a swan, as in the fairytale, but into Paraclete, Comforter and suffering Christ. The transmutation captures the psycho-cultural dynamics of the late fiction with great poignancy. Psychic experience emerges as laden with inherited, archetypal motifs; at the same time, archetypes are filtered through psychic prisms. Milly-as-Paraclete remains needy and desiring, creaturely. In a striking turnabout, she comes to crave devotion, and earns it through the passion of her body. Her devotees are Sir Luke, her trusted physician, and Susan, in the symbolic role of a nurse. She relishes their ministrations, without expecting a cure.

80


If devotion, in a word, was what it would come up for the interested pair to organize, she was herself ready to consume it as the dressed and served dish. He had talked to her of her ‘appetite,’ her account of which, she felt, must have been vague. But for devotion, she could now see, this appetite would be of the best. Gross, greedy, ravenous – these were doubtless the proper names for her: she was at all events resigned in advance to the machinations of sympathy. (222)

IV Healing The dovelike in Milly is fostered by various doctors, who are all imaged as birds of one species or another, and who, as Kate and Densher have it, are ‘after her,’ just as she is ‘after them’ (285). Her American physician is a Dr. Finch (137); Strett suggests ‘strut[hious], an order of flightless birds’ (TD, 96); and her last, Venetian doctor, Tacchini (426), is a turkey or a cock, ‘tacchino,’ in Italian; the idiom ‘fare il tacchino,’ to strut about, suggests a kinship with the English colleague. Even Dr. Buttrick (316) – a Boston expert, who does not belong to Milly’s medical entourage – is a pigeon of sorts, the butt of a trick. Here, the sense in which Milly herself is a pigeon, manipulated and exploited, is meaningful; like the ungainly multitude of pigeons at the Piazza San Marco, it serves to deflate and parody the sublimity of the Dove. The touch of grotesquerie about Milly’s medical flock symptomatizes a conflict associated with the multivalence of a doctor’s vocation. The word ‘doctor’ bears witness, etymologically, to the origin of the profession in spiritual instruction, a commitment to the healing of souls rather than bodies or minds, to soteriology rather than therapeutics. Sir Luke, like a religious healer, is celibate and eremitic, solemnly pledged to his practice. Milly pictures him, on their first meeting, as a sacred vessel, the ‘crystal-clean,’ ‘great empty cup of his attention’ set between them (202). The encounter affects her as a sacrament: ‘I feel – I can’t otherwise describe it – as if I had been on my knees to the priest. I’ve confessed and I’ve been absolved’ (205). Sir Luke’s aristocratic title translates back, readily enough, into an apostolic entitlement. St Luke, like Sir Luke, was a physician (Colossians 4:14), and is therefore the patron of doctors and surgeons. His emblem is the ox (pecus), and he is thus a patron of butchers, too. A buried bovine association is with ‘pecunia,’ linked to the fabulous fees he receives; this streak of irony underwrites a rare colloquialism, ‘it will be


capital to find you there’ (331), referring to the prospect of meeting Milly in Venice. ‘Luke,’ in this context, chimes with ‘lucre,’ much as ‘Mark’ – another apostolic and titled name – chimes with ‘market.’11 The name has further symbolic ramifications. Luke the Evangelist is also a patron of painters, sculptors and workers in glass; he is the first of the Greek icon artists, believed to have painted the Virgin from life. Dante Gabriel Rossetti draws on the legend in a sonnet, honoring the saint who ‘first taught Art to fold her hands and pray’ (‘St Luke the Painter,’ 1870). Susan and Milly would have read in Gibbon (DFRE, 218) of the Byzantine empress Eudocia, who returned from her pilgrimage to the Holy Land with ‘the chains of St Peter, the right arm of St Stephen, and an undoubted picture of the Virgin, painted by St Luke’ (DFRE, 472). Sir Luke too has the makings of a patron of art. Densher believes that ‘if he hadn’t been a great surgeon he might really have been a great judge. I mean of the beautiful.’ Sir Luke’s connoisseurship accounts for his special interest in Milly, whom he has ‘judged’ in terms of the beautiful (428). In this, he is associated less immediately with the Evangelist, than with latter-day medical practice, with its surgical, vivisectionist gaze. To draw on Foucault’s argument in The Birth of the Clinic, medical experience in the nineteenth century, grounded in the field of anatomical pathology, evolves a new understanding of disease as tissual degeneration. Medicine encounters ‘the tangible space of the body, which at the same time is that opaque mass in which secrets, invisible lesions, and the very mystery of origins lie hidden’ (BC, 122). Foucault lays stress on the physical, sensory nature of modern diagnostics, which he identifies with aesthetic sensibility. The clinical gaze ‘travels from body to body,’ its trajectory situated purely in the space of ‘sensible manifestation’ (BC, 120). Analysis is deployed ‘at the level of an aesthetic,’ and prescribes ‘the norms of an art. The sensible truth is now open, not so much to the senses themselves, as to a fine sensibility’ (BC, 121). Sir Luke is a physician cut in an aesthetic mold (the gaze or ‘look’ of a connoisseur is intimated in the name), and his sensibility is able to impart to his patient an ambiguous sense of embodiment. Foucault’s account is suggestive on this point: a clinician’s gaze has a three-dimensional range, and operates synesthetically; it is informed by a tactile and aural interface with the patient’s body, while keeping a tactful distance from it, and resisting its material density (BC, 122, 163–4). For Foucault, such pathological embodiment forms the basis for individuality in the nineteenth century, a notion which resonates richly with The Wings of the Dove. Milly’s relationship with Sir Luke seems in part to pivot, as Andrew Cutting has suggested, on his tacit affirmation of her ‘personal pathological capacity,’

82


his view of her as ‘uniquely capable of dying. She goes to him with this capacity in mind,’ writes Cutting, ‘and he enhances her sense of it, not by specifying any particular pathology, nor by depriving her of her right to become ill, but by recognising her individual freedom and creativity with genteel reticence’ (DHJ, 90). But affirmation of individuality is not the prime mode of The Wings of the Dove. It is subject to corrosion by typological symbolism, a mode characterized, in Coleridge’s formulation, ‘by a translucence of the Special in the Individual or of the General in the Especial or of the Universal in the General. Above all by the translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal’ (SM, 410). In The Wings of the Dove, timeless archetypes – the Dove, the Evangelist, Christ and the Virgin – are subjected to a rather turbulent immersion in the ‘many-colored stream of history’ (239), in the temporal and in the particular. Their symbolic charge is powerfully at play in the formation of individual consciousness and identity, but the splicing of type to archetype remains disjunctive, the temporal, material modalities of the symbol vying, always, with its ideal forms. So it is, distinctly, with Sir Luke. During Milly’s final crisis, he seems to wish to absolve Densher’s guilt. The interaction of the two men is like ‘that of a doctor and a patient,’ and has a religious flavor. Densher feels that he is offered a ‘benediction,’ which carries real weight. Ironically, however, it is ‘just by being a man of the world and by knowing life, by feeling the real,’ that Sir Luke is able to bestow his ‘mercy’ (444–5). His stay in Venice is not without a worldly aspect. With Densher as cicerone, he looks up pictures and recovers impressions, haunts a little the dealers in old wards, and seems to know just what he wants (444). Sir Luke comes close to evoking, here, an aesthetic tradition associated with Pater, a rigorous Epicurianism informed by a deep and intimate preoccupation with death. Sensuous pleasure, in his hours of leisure, bears the imprint of professional austerities, while these ministrations, ironically, evince a concern not free from calculation; they are ‘proof of a huge interest as well as of a huge fee’ (445). The apostolic emblem of the bull is literalized, here, as pecuniary interest. The mixture in Sir Luke of spiritual and material interests may be taken to typify the mingling in the novel of ‘the Eternal and the Temporal’; of the immediately present and the world of art and the mytho-historical imagination. Sir Luke embodies a characteristic hybridity of type. On their first meeting he appears to Milly, oddly, ‘half like a general and half like a bishop.’ Despite this division in him, or perhaps because of it, she attributes to him the penetrative insight of a confessor: ‘He knows


all about me, and I like it. I don’t hate it a bit,’ she says after the interview (203). The second interview deepens in her the sense, almost mystical, of being completely known by him. ‘Now she knew not only that she didn’t dislike this – the state of being found out about; but that on the contrary it was truly what she had come for, and that for the time at least it would give her something firm to stand on’ (206). It turns out, strangely, that the firmness she experiences through his agency comes from learning from him that she is ‘in some way doomed.’ Her vision of ‘life put into the scales’ relieves an earlier sense of ‘rattling loose’; the absence of ‘process,’ purpose and structure, is now replaced by a ‘first approach to the taste of orderly living.’ Sir Luke’s effect on her is finally transformative. Despite her fated mortality, she comes to figure, first as a work of craftsmanship and then as a work of art. At the close of their second interview, we see her, through his eyes, as a kaleidoscopic image in glass: ‘All her little pieces had now fallen together for him like the morsels of coloured glass that used to make combinations, under the hand, in the depths of one of the polygonal peepshows of childhood’ (211). Before long a more suggestive version of the image emerges, one which has rich resonance in the overall pattern of images and allusions in the novel: the image of an ancient mosaic at Ravenna. The Byzantine motif is associated with Sir Luke in this context, as if to underpin his kinship with the Greek Apostle and his icon. The mystery which shrouds his meeting with Milly feeds into an inclination of Susan’s to mystify and elevate her companion, fostering in her ‘an indulgence verily Byzantine.’ Milly does her best to oblige her for it really placed Susan herself so handsomely to be Byzantine now. The great ladies of that race – it would be somewhere in Gibbon – were apparently not questioned about their mysteries. But poor Milly and hers! Susan at all events proved scarce more inquisitive than if she had been a mosaic at Ravenna. Susan was a porcelain monument to the odd moral that consideration might, like cynicism, have abysses. Besides, the Puritan finally disencumbered –! What starved generations wasn’t Mrs Stringham, in fancy, going to make up for? (218–9) The modulation, here, of free indirect discourse blurs the boundaries between the projected experience of the two women, allowing us to see in both the link between self-effacement and self-aggrandizement, indulgence and self-indulgence. Susan’s starved desire mirrors Milly’s, just as

84


cynicism and consideration come to resemble each other in each of them. Desire, all the while, remains reciprocally unfulfilled. Susan, for Milly, rigidifies into porcelain, and the image of the mosaic at Ravenna carries an aural suggestion of a lingering ravenous need, and a visual suggestion of bodily tenuity and fragmentariness. Later, pacing to and fro in her apartment, Milly comes to seem to herself ‘a little, really, like a caged Byzantine’ (219). Like Kate’s figure of the Dove, the Byzantine figure recurrently strikes a responsive cord in her reflexive imagining. Indeed, if the dovelike is somehow compatible with being a princess (236), Byzantine princeliness is perhaps particularly dovelike – purged of all gross materiality. At the same time, the Byzantine feeds the dovelike appetite for devotion; Susan adopts its hyperbolic courtly forms in response to a new voracity in her princess-Paraclete. At its initial phase, this is a court life ‘without the hardships’ (133). Princeliness has as its conditions a historically unanchored American fortune, and, by extension, a sensibility dissociated from historical, materially-grounded realities. An American princess is not ‘hideously relative to tiers and tiers of others’ (235); she is an absolute, a splendid isolate.

V Armature By degrees, the princely in Milly is ‘Europeanized’; already in London, it loses its absolute quality, begins to mix in old-world affairs, relations and hierarchies. Her ‘American’ aloofness itself is incorporated into existing cultural patterns. At the commencement of her adventure, the most ‘American’ of her attributes, her wealth, finds reflection in the idiosyncrasies of her appearance (133); in England, however, her ‘merely personal tradition’ of dress is absorbed into a recognizable aesthetic frame. Her eccentric beauty and ‘noble inelegance’ is of a sort celebrated by the PreRaphaelites, and the Pre-Raphaelite prism reinforces the medieval, Byzantine and European aspects of her presence. In the early days of her friendship with Kate, she is seen as ‘a wandering princess,’ ‘waited upon at the city gate by the worthiest maiden, the chosen daughter of the burgesses’ (164). The wandering princess leads a life of high ceremony, mimicked here by the stylized idiom of the depiction: It was the real again, evidently, the amusement of the meeting for the princess too; princesses living for the most part, in such an appeased


way, on the plane of mere elegant representation. That was why they pounced, at city gates, on deputed flower-strewing damsels; that was why, after effigies, processions and other stately games, frank human company was pleasant to them. (164) The vision of princely estrangement, in the midst of splendor and pomp, is later picked up in the description of Milly’s Continental travels. She makes her way to Venice with an ever-growing entourage, ‘a rolling snowball, condemned from day to day to cover more ground.’ Susan amplifies these associations when she compares the journey to the Empress Catherine’s progress across the steppes of Russia: ‘improvised settlements’ appear at each turn of the road, ubiquitous villagers are seen ‘waiting with addresses drawn up in the language of London,’ or ‘in the more insistent idioms of American centers’ (337). The analogy resonates on multiple levels. The nerve centers of European civilization are overlaid, laid waste, in imagination, by an eastern wilderness; the pun in the reference to the Empress’s ‘progress’ enhances the irony. The Empress’s historical expedition is a paradigmatic instance of princely dissociation. As Catherine’s entourage swept through Siberia, model villages were improvised along her route, thinly disguising the pervasive destitution. Earlier, Milly has pictured pity as ‘a head on a pike, in a French revolution, bobbing before a window’ (209) – an evocative fantasy, in this context, since French princesses were guillotined for cutting themselves off from their subjects. The guillotine serves to suggest something of the psychic reality of the dissociation explored throughout the fiction of the late phase – a dissociation that crystallizes here as the severance of head from body, and of self from community. Hoist by its own petard, such isolation can only be exacerbated, not relieved, by empathy. Pity figures, therefore, in compressed symbolic form, at once as guillotined victim and as her executioner. On the Continent, Milly experiences a new kind of estrangement. So European (or Byzantine, this time in the Russian tradition) has she become that she is now estranged from her compatriots. ‘Short intervals, to her own sense, now stood for great differences, and this renewed inhalation of her native air had somehow left her to feel that she already, that she mainly, struck the compatriot as queer and dissociated’ (338). More poignantly, she is also estranged from her intimate companions, with whom she refuses to share her ‘own conception of her validity’ (339). ‘Validity,’ in this curious locution, is a Latinate reference to the state of her health, and the lexical choice is clearly intended to

86


mime her evasiveness. It is perhaps clear enough, after all, even in English, that insofar as she is ‘valid,’ she is not an invalid; but we sense that her ‘validity’ is not a matter of physical soundness alone. The idiosyncrasy of the phrase seems to point to and enact an infirmity which has to do, precisely, with her impaired emotional expressiveness. Like the empty mystery in ‘The Beast in the Jungle,’ the mystery of Milly’s condition is in this sense void of positive content – it is a pathology of mystification, designed to attract interest, and even devotion, yet preclude more intimate modes of relationship. The persistent refusal of pity, her ‘systematic bravado,’ is an effort to prevent an ‘avalanche’ – ‘the avalanche that Milly lived so in watch for and that might be started by the lightest of breaths; though less possibly the breath of her own stifled plaint than that of the vain sympathy, the mere helpless gaping inference of others’ (340). The terror is less of a positive catastrophe, than of exposure and violation. It is as if the snowball effect of her social successes en route threatened to destroy her. She fears an avalanche of pity, and fears, at the same time, her own stifled need of it. Anxiety about her health is inseparable from anxiety about publicity. If the breath of her ‘stifled plaint’ suggests consumption, it also suggests the depth of her reserve, of her failure to give shape and expression to inward experience. The imagery of snow hints, after all, at a consumptive’s dependence on ‘beastly “climates’’ ’ – truly beastly, rather than mild ones, like ‘Engadines, Rivieras, boredoms’ (221). We find Milly fulfilling, in an emotional rather than climatic sense, an early fantasy of being sent by her doctor to the North Pole (211).12 Leaving a hot and stale London, where ‘the end of everything’ is felt in ‘the exhausted air, that of the season at its last gasp’ (205, 187), she is driven toward the opposite emotional climate, cold and dry. However, if the sultry and sticky is hard to bear, the arctic strikes her with terrors of its own. Her condition snowballs: the stifled need deepens, as alienation hardens; and defenses congeal as they are increasingly threatened by inward eruption or implosion. Her ordeal keeps her giddily oscillating between psychological extremes of ‘weakness and strength,’ ‘peril and option,’ ‘fortune and fear’ (340). By name, Milly belongs to the sisterhood of ‘Marys’ in the late fiction – Marie, Maria, May, and lastly Maggie. ‘Mildred,’ however, has its own resonance; the old English meaning may be rendered as ‘gentle force.’ Yet the crux for her, in terms of this ramifying set of images, is the passage from the mildness of a dove to the dreaded force of a lion. On the Continent, however, she remains ‘an anxious fighter of the battle of life’ (313); if she is forceful, she is also fearful, as in the more familiar usage of


‘dread.’ A rigid, glacial or metallic surface of strength conceals and seals off an incommunicable vulnerability. The military posture adopted in London is enhanced by a ‘fixed mask,’ a ‘harness,’ a ‘general armor’ (339, 341). Above all, perhaps, the rigidified body, in harness or armor, defends against a sense of fleshly excesses, emissions, and transmutations: of the gaseous, fluid, viscid, tissuey, pulpy realities of bodily life. This revulsion from the flesh emerges with poignancy in a passage beginning with a vision of a martyred body. Susan, we are told, witnesses the phenomenon of Milly’s social triumph in London, much as ‘some spectator at an oldtime circus might have watched the oddity of a Christian maiden, in the arena, mildly, caressingly, martyred. It was the nosing and fumbling not of lions and tigers but of domestic animals let loose as for the joke’ (277). To Densher, the case presents itself in complex – and ominous – images of barnyard and circus. The circus figures both in its ancient, martyrological and its modern show-biz meaning. The little American’s sudden social adventure, her happy, and no doubt, harmless flourish, had probably been favored by several accidents, but it had been favored above all by the simple sprint-board of the scene, by one of those common caprices of the numberless foolish flock, gregarious movements as inscrutable as ocean currents. The huddled herd had drifted to her blindly – it might as blindly have drifted away. There had been of course a signal, but the great reason was probably the absence at the moment of a larger lion. The bigger beast would come and the smaller would then incontinently vanish. It was at all events characteristic, and what was of the essence of it was grist to his scribbling mill, matter for his journalising hand. That hand already, in intention, played over it, the ‘motive,’ as a sign of the season, a feature of the time, of the purely expeditious and rough-and-tumble nature of the social boom. The boom as in itself required – that would be the note; the subject of the process a comparatively minor question. Anything was boomable enough when nothing else was more so; the author of the ‘rotten’ book, the beauty who was no beauty, the heiress who was only that, the stranger who was for the most part saved from being inconveniently strange but by being inconveniently familiar, the American whose Americanism had been long desperately discounted, the creature in fine as to whom spangles or spots of any sufficiently marked and exhibited sort could be loudly enough predicated. (277–8; first and last italics added)

88


The satire is, in great measure, James’s own. The account of an American’s estrangement in London, and the mordant view of celebrity, read like confessions. At another level, the sense of London society as a freak show, a savage performance for a savage audience, carries a psychic charge of anxiety, which may be linked, in part, to James’s failure and exposure as a playwright a decade earlier. The image of oceanic undercurrents – strikingly introduced to suggest the arbitrary movements of cattle – invests the animal energy of the public with a dark, unconscious charge. The ‘lion’ who is the celebrity of the moment turns literally into a beast, and is ‘incontinently’ chased away by a larger one. The word is used in the obsolete sense of ‘immediately,’ but it conjures a fantasy of private bodily functions shamefully exposed, or of bodily fluids shamefully emitted. Celebrity emerges as a state of rare, exotic bestiality. To the extent that the passage is, in its way, confessional, ‘American’ otherness seems to serve in it as a cipher for sexual otherness; in this sense, the ‘American’ lion lives in terror of exposure as a sodomite, before a prurient, sadistic public. No less powerful, however, in terms of Milly’s fictional experience, is the sense that the imagination of sexual deviance cannot be distinguished from the imagination of sexuality itself. From the ‘American’ perspective, where passion is of a transcendental order, Milly is a Christian maiden martyred by a pagan mob, or dismembered at the arena by a pack of beasts. From the ‘European’ perspective, where passion belongs in the realm of matter and Eros, she is herself a circus-beast, spangled or spotted, exotic, in the midst of the less remarkable native herd. At best, it seems, the body is experienced as bestial; the ‘American’ body, however, is not merely bestial but, as such, suffers from a sense of deep incongruousness and anomalousness. The spotted beast of the London Season is pivoted, imaginatively, against the ‘unspotted princess’ of the Preface, who cannot be presented directly. ‘So, if we talk of princesses,’ writes James, ‘do the balconies opposite the palace gates, do the coigns of vantage and respect enjoyed for a fee, rake from afar the mystic figure in the gilded coach as it comes forth into the great place’ (Preface, 50). In the role of ‘unspotted princess,’ Milly is unapproachable and untouchable; this is the condition at once of her princeliness and of her invalidism, a ‘gilded coach’ or gilded cage of debility; but the conceit of French royalty is darkly suggestive of the opposite condition, the extreme visibility and prehensibility of being ‘dragged shrieking to the guillotine – to the shambles’ (N, 107).


The figure of Milly as unspotted princess is further fleshed out in the course of her Continental journey. Kate, ‘a wondering pitying sister’ in whom Milly is unable to confide, watches her ‘wistfully,’ as if from the far side of the moat she had dug around her tower. Certain aspects of the connexion of these young women show for us, such is the twilight that gathers around them, in the likeness of some dim scene in a Maeterlinck play; we have positively the image, in the delicate dusk, of the figures so associated and so opposed, so mutually watchful: that of the angular pale princess, ostrich-plumed, black-robed, hung about with amulets, reminders, relics, mainly seated, mainly still, and that of the upright restless slow-circling lady of her court who exchanges with her, across the black water streaked with evening gleams, fitful questions and answers. (339) Milly’s isolation, the singularity and apartness of her situation, are refracted, at this moment, through an aesthetic-cultural prism, and in this sense are partly transformed. What has previously, as a feature of the ‘American,’ seemed like personal eccentricity, is brought into a frame again – this time, the frame of Continental Symbolism, a riper, fuller incarnation of the Pre-Raphaelite spirit. Milly, a strange foreign bird, ‘duskily draped, sable-plumed, all but incongruously shod’ (214), alights in Continental Europe as if it were the stage of a Symbolist drama – an imaginative habitat congenial in its strangeness. The two figures in the projected scene, ‘so associated and so opposed,’ one restless and the other still, embody a tension at the heart of Symbolist art, a simultaneous straining toward opposites – movement and stasis, passion and contemplation, sense and transcendence. Their tense mutual watchfulness has strong morbid undertones: Kate, the slow-circling figure, hovers like a scavenger – the kite suggested by her name – watching a dying creature. Milly’s moribund state seems to serve as a trope for the Symbolist imagination itself – besieged, impinged upon by desire, across a self-imposed defensive divide, like the moat and tower of a medieval citadel. More than ever, here, she is the lucid reflector of a cultural matrix. The medievalism of tower and moat, figures depicting her break with the world, resonates with a previous archaism, late-medieval and oriental: the ‘rift within the lute’ which figures her illness (127). The moat and the rift portray the illness in terms of rupture and dissociation, and the lute places it in a distinct artistic and cultural light. Like the fractured golden

90


bowl, the rifted lute is emblematic of an imaginative, artistic and cultural malaise. The lute, whose body is shaped like a sliced pear, with a long fingerboard, is an instrument with a sensuous appeal; a rift in it is imaginatively continuous, in an anatomical and sexual sense, with a rift in the female body. Corporeality and sexuality, experienced as forms of affliction, become identified with bodily disruption and, correspondingly, with psychological rupture – a defensive dissociation of mind from body. Susan’s favorite authors, Pater and Maeterlinck (126), specifically suggest the decadent parentage which Milly, on the Continent, comes to experience as her own. The suggestion is made in a nominal as well as a substantive sense; the authors’ names form a ‘link,’ ‘paternal’ and ‘maternal.’ For Susan, Pater and Maeterlinck are writers of ‘poetry’; but she has an affinity, too, for writers of Continental ‘history’: Marbot, a chronicler of recent French history, and Gregorovius, a scholar of Italian medievalism and early modernity. The pairing is meaningful; Jamesian decadence places itself at the end of a vast historical trajectory, and never tires of tracing and retracing the domain of its imagined origins. As she moves through the stages of her progress, Milly becomes increasingly immersed in the historical medium. In England, Kate mentally charges her with not having ‘the imagination of terror, of thrift, the imagination or in any degree the habit of conscious dependence on others’ (167). She later puts it to Milly herself, not only in terms of fortune, but also in terms of national identity: ‘You’re an outsider, independent and standing by yourself. You’re not hideously relative to tiers and tiers of others’ (235). The European situation is, by contrast, relative and relational; a matter of relative values and meddlesome relatives. But the American situation, crystallized around a solitary figure ‘with a thumping bank account’, is fulfilled through investments in Europe, embroilments in the European melee; it meshes into nets of connections and interconnections. In the Preface, Milly’s European crisis is pictured as ‘the whirlpool movement of water, produced by the sinking of a big vessel or the failure of a great business’ (39). Read in terms of the imagistic typology of the late phase, the trope suggests the centrifugal force of Europe, in the process of historicizing American consciousness. The image of a foundering vessel makes a brief appearance in the novel, as the transatlantic Cunarder Susan imagines; the stoutest of its kind would be sunk by the weight of the ‘world’ – the world to which the ‘Pilgrim Fathers’ had turned a cold shoulder, but which she and her charge, at their peril, were preparing to face (164). In the language of the Prefaces, the Jamesian vessel is ‘frail’; it can be freighted with no grosser cargo than distilled ‘sensibility,’ without peril.


Its voyage into the ‘world’ risks shipwreck and submergence, an absorption of consciousness into a vast undifferentiated element, a maternal abysm, a womb of history. The Preface embodies this pool or vortex in the figure of a Continental muse – Lorelei, the Rhine-maiden, who tempts and tows free-floating ‘sensibilities’ into the deep.

VI Mirrors and Molds The sinking of spirit and fortune, in this scenario, has to do with the loss of the sense of independent being. The American voyager becomes aware of origins lost and denied, and is seized by an emotional necessity to recover them. The fantasy of recovery generates with it a fearful fantasy of loss of autonomy, merging and absorption: of being sucked into the world of history, of subjectivity, and, most difficult, into the realm of hitherto inert desires. For Milly, the phantasmatic experience of recovery and loss takes place during the episode at Matcham. It is richly elucidated by what Matcham is, by what it contains, and by the associations of both what it is and what it contains. Like Newmarch in The Sacred Fount, Matcham, the archetypal English Country House, embodies something like a Platonic idea of society. In The Golden Bowl, the Country House, also called Matcham, is revealed in its full social luster and moral ambiguity. Here, it serves a more localized function, as the setting in which Milly is ‘matched’ with a painted likeness of herself, Bronzino’s portrait of Lucrezia Panciatichi.13 The match, to draw further on the resonance of name, emerges as an uncanny vision of ‘home,’ a scene of traumatic recognition, as in Freud’s understanding of the uncanny. The painting, however, also figures as a cultural icon, and the uncanny operates through it not only at the level of self, but at the level of culture as well. The scene at Matcham is the initiatory moment of a process of recursive transfiguration, at the end of which, in Venice, a dowdy, jejune PreRaphaelite princess turns into a historical work of art – a work in the spirit of Venetian Renaissance, a Titian or a Veronese. The viewing of Bronzino’s portrait has been read as a decadent trope, modeled on The Picture of Dorian Gray: that is, as a scene in which the construction of self is staged as a reflexive encounter.14 Here, however, reflexive self-fashioning is not only personal, but takes place through and against historical and cultural framing. Decadent tropes are examined and interpreted in terms of their cultural sources. Milly’s recognition crystallizes around a vision of a

92


mythic cultural Ancestress, who is the feminine genius of historical Europe. Matcham, whose ‘historic’ air suggests ‘an almost extravagantly grand Watteau composition’ (188), sets off in her a process of accelerated maturation, projecting her far back into European history, but also advancing her into the world of embodied experience. Here too, precipitation of social experience is accompanied by an inrush of temporal awareness, a proleptic nostalgia, in feeling ‘the freshness of the first and only prime.’ The house, a ‘great containing vessel,’ is a medium and a receptacle. It is factitious or ‘appointed,’ a construct, but nevertheless capable of holding as well as engulfing. Immersed in the dense social scene, Milly and her friends are pictured as ‘swimming together in the blue’ (191). The ‘note of the blue,’ however, emerges as a particular quality of Lord Mark, and mutates from liquid into thread, ‘a suspended skein of silk within reach of the broiderer’s hand.’ The hand belongs to Aunt Maud, whose freemoving shuttle takes ‘a length of him at rhythmic intervals,’ while he, ‘ever so consentingly,’ knows he is being ‘worked in’ (191). The fluid they all float in is suggestive of filaments, networks and patterns, entanglements and assimilations, material, materiality and labor, all associated with European forms of connectedness, as well as of artistic production. The concatenation of figures draws to a close with an image of an oriental carpet. Aunt Maud’s affection for Milly figures as ‘the enveloping flap of a protective mantle, a shelter with the weight of an eastern carpet. An eastern carpet, for wishing purposes of one’s own, was a thing to be on rather than under; still, however, if the girl should fail of breath, it wouldn’t be, she could feel, by Mrs Lowder’s fault’ (193). Aunt Maud is figured repeatedly through imagery of the orient; we see her as ‘the car of juggernaut’ (113), as ‘florid, alien, exotic’ (145), amid ‘arabesque and cherubs’ (468). Here, as elsewhere in late corpus, oriental figures suggest the ultimate stages of decadence, a failure of breath and extinction of spirit. Oriental spaces, such as the imagined durbar in the representation of Milly’s first impression of Matcham (190) and Aunt Maud’s protective mantle, are womblike, but also tomblike. Still, as she puts it, it is not because of Aunt Maud that she should ultimately fail of breath (193). Like Susan Shepherd Stringham, Aunt Maud is a mediatrix; she takes over Susan’s tutelary function largely in an instrumental sense. She is ‘a grand natural force’ (193), without a mind or will of its own, a tidal wave that bears Milly ‘home,’ to the fraught scene of her encounter with the Matcham portrait. Aunt Maud, nee Manningham, carries an echo of ‘home’ in the suffix of her maiden name, as Susan Stringham does in the suffix of her married


name. In the context of such naming, Susan, nee Shepherd, undertakes, in the capacity of literary tutor, to shepherd Milly, a kind of stray lamb, from the American wilderness back to European cultivation. As Stringham she is a quintessential Jamesian ficelle, a symbolic string, and recreates for Milly a maternal, ‘umbilical’ connection with the nourishing and carnal element of Europe – the primordial home from which the Pilgrim Fathers severed themselves and their descendants. This return is not without ambivalence. With her habitual nippers (124) and her literary bent, Susan has a certain typological affinity with Strether, traceable in their names; her ‘string’ chimes with his ‘tether.’ She, of course, is a partisan of the European cause from the start, and earnestly in pursuit of a ‘love interest’ for her charge. Still, in their early London days in England, Susan has moments of Strether-like reaction against the milieu into which they are increasingly drawn. At these times, as Milly puts it, the Europeanized ‘Mrs Stringham’ reverts to her New England ‘Susan Shepherd’ side (178). The latent violence associated, throughout, with being in Europe, lends special meaning to James’s figural depiction of his ficelles in the Preface to The Portrait of a Lady. He speaks of them as running breathlessly beside the coach in which the principal characters are seated, like ‘the fishwives who helped to bring back to Paris from Versailles, on that most ominous day of the first half of the French Revolution, the carriage of the royal family’ (LC II, 1082). Here, the sense of danger finds expression in another image of engulfment. Just prior to the Matcham episode, Susan compares her relationship with Milly to a bit of land in danger of flooding. She and Milly might have been ‘afloat, like some island of the south, in a great warm sea that represented, for every conceivable chance, a margin, an outer sphere, of general emotion; and the effect of the occurrence of anything in particular was to make the sea submerge the island, the margin flood the text’ (182). The floating relationship, a ‘text,’ is under constant threat of submergence in an undifferentiated southern – European or perhaps oriental – watery element. The occurrence of ‘anything in particular,’ through specific forms and textures of interaction, precipitates collapse into an archetypal, maternal flow of ‘general emotion.’ Aunt Maud, a more capacious vessel of the ‘general emotion,’ brings Milly in touch with the traditional aspects of this element. ‘Manning,’ the first portion of her maiden name, derives from the Gaelic word for ‘monk.’ At Lancaster Gate, in spirit with such pedigree, she has introduced Milly to a ‘real bishop,’ with traditional paraphernalia – ‘a complicated costume,

94


a voice like an old-fashioned wind instrument, and a face all the portrait of a prelate’ (148). At Matcham, she guides her to a real portrait – a true relic of Renaissance Italy, real, as it seems to emerge, in the tradition of the Vera Icon. It is as if a pair of fairy godmothers, a Puritan and a Catholic, through acts of magical adoption, conducted Milly to the image. First it is Susan, ‘in a peaked hat, a short petticoat and diamond shoe-buckles, brandishing the magic crutch’; then Aunt Maud, with the ‘protective mantle,’ a kind of airtight wishing carpet. We are made to feel the proverbial danger of wishes and their fulfillment, in the powerful ambivalent charge of the fantasy of recovered maternal presence. As we are led, with Milly, into the inner sanctum, the ‘mystic circle’ (194) of the house, we have a sense of moving inside a picture-frame – Rococo style, a Watteau fête galante – into a deeper layer of history and art. The viewing of Bronzino’s portrait is placed en abîme, suggesting something of the centripetal pool of the Jamesian sense of the past. The portrait materializes as a precipitate revelation, ‘a sort of magnificent maximum, the pink dawn of an apotheosis coming so curiously soon’ (196). Looking at it through tears, she sees the face of a young woman, all splendidly drawn, down to the hands, and splendidly dressed; a face almost livid in hue, yet handsome in sadness and crowned with a mass of hair , rolled back and high, that must, before fading with time, have had a family resemblance to her own. The lady in question, at all events, with her slightly Michaelangelesque squareness, her eyes of other days, her full lips, her long neck, her recorded jewels, her brocaded and wasted reds, was a very great personage – only unaccompanied by a joy. And she was dead, dead, dead. Milly recognized her exactly in words that had nothing to do with her. ‘I shall never be better than this.’ (196) Reflected in this ‘pale sister’ (197), Milly recognizes her own hereditary susceptibilities. The image is ‘dead,’ of course, in obvious senses: the canvas and paint it is made of are dead, and so is Bronzion’s historical model; but it is dead, too, paradoxically, in the very form of aliveness it is able to communicate. Though the painted figure has been dead for centuries, it is precisely the lingering reality of her experience, her great imaginative proximity, which affects her viewer with such force. Milly says that she has lived her life as if she were dead, and expects, in consequence, to die as if she were alive (183); now, she seems to discern the


same quality of death-in-life and life-in-death in her symbolic kinswoman. The figure in the painting seems to her to be ailing, like herself, and the ailment seems, somehow, intimately reflexive of her own; she shall never be better than ‘this.’ It may be that Milly senses in the image the familiar isolation of a foreigner, and a heretic – Lucrezia Panciatichi was a Frenchwoman among Italians, and a Huegenot among Catholics. Ironically, there may be something of the Reformer’s iconoclastic impulse which, implicitly, the two women share. To Milly, the ‘green’ of Lucrezia’s complexion may foreshadow the ‘starved generations’ (219) of Puritans from whom she is descended, a cultural privation whose source, in this context, is the dearth of images, and which intensifies with time; for if Lucrezia’s complexion is green, Milly’s is ‘several shades greener’ (197). At the same time, there is the impulse for radical identification with an image – the wish to live out the deep submissiveness to reflexive experience, as it is circulated in an image-worshiping culture. The aura of magic and marvel which surrounds the scene, the air of romance, generates, for the climax of encounter, an iconodule field of reference. The resemblance between portrait and viewer is so striking, that the former comes to seem miraculously ‘real.’ The fictional transposition of the painting in space and time, from the Uffizi to Matcham, and from Renaissance Florence to England at the turn of the century, produces an imaginative dislocation; it is as if the portrait were created on the spot, with Milly as its model; or, equally, as if Milly were created on the spot, modeled on the portrait. In its opening scene, the novel confronts us with another reflexive image, created on the spot through more conventional optical means: Kate’s reflection in the mirror, which she contemplates with a cold, critical eye. There, at the opposite pole of reflexive identification, we glimpse alienation; and we find that for Milly, extremes of identification and alienation exist as simultaneous aspects of the reflexive encounter, and tend to shade off into each other. She discerns in the portrait a familiar physical frailty, but is unable to perceive a positive resemblance; ‘one never knows oneself,’ she tells Lord Mark. Insofar as reflexivity fails to produce recognition, it produces a sense of depletion, of a ghostly insubstantiality. Lord Mark, however, sees a different image from the green and sickly one Milly projects, as well he might; the sensuous curve of the lips, the rich detail of dress and coiffure, the glittering jewels, are not easy to overlook. He misconstrues Milly’s anxiety about ever being ‘better’ than the painted woman; aesthetically, he encounters, the sitter is surely

96


‘well enough,’ is indeed ‘splendid,’ while morally Milly must have the advantage, since of the sitter ‘one doubts if she was good’ (196). Such attractions, he seems to imply, are not gained without some sacrifice of innocence.15 Milly’s blindness to the beauty of the figure is perhaps associated with what is known in modern diagnostics as dismorphobia, body-image disorder. She is, at any rate, correspondingly blind to what her companion sees as the figure’s moral, rather than physical, frailty; the life of the flesh, with its complexities and liabilities, remains inassimilable into the conscious sphere of her experience. The encounter with the portrait nevertheless enhances, for Milly, a certain possibility of erotic expressiveness, molded into preexisting artistic and cultural forms. This eroticized mode surfaces in the scene of encounter at the National Gallery, a companion piece to the earlier scene at Matcham. Milly comes to the museum for a dip into ‘the many colored stream of history.’ With the predilection for human scenery that has guided her descent from the Brünig, her preference for ‘life’ over ‘learning,’ she now feels a need for ‘possible great chances,’ ‘possible great moments’ of aesthetic appreciation. In art, there might be relief from the oppositional pull of the mind. Once in the ‘benignant halls,’ surrounded by the Titians and the Turners, she longs to lose herself among the lady-copyists, who, ‘spectacled, aproned, absorbed,’ seem ‘to show her for a time the right way to live. She should have been a ladycopyist – it met so the case. The case was the case of escape, of living under water, of being at once impersonal and firm. There it was before one – one had only to stick and stick’ (239). The pause near the lady-copyists is relevant, clearly, to issues of representation – the study and reproduction of life in art. Densher’s mother was a ‘patient’ practitioner of the copying industry – virtually the only fact ever disclosed about her, apart from the son’s lasting devotion to her ‘image’ (115). Wittingly or not, Milly is adopting at this moment something of Densher’s psycho-cultural history, shaped by the ‘impersonal and firm,’ but also on occasion watery medium of Europe; an imaginative undercurrent, a tributary of the variegated stream of history, seems to be directing her toward him. She does not approach the lady-copyists, as she does not wish to purchase ‘an imitation.’ Presently, however, caught in a whirlpool of irony, she comes upon Densher himself, the original creation of a lady-copyist. He materializes just when she has quite ‘lost herself’ inside an imaginative mold. She has been contemplating American tourists, who seem


‘cut out as by scissors, coloured, labeled, mounted.’ She sees herself joined with them in a ‘community of collapse,’ through their shared experience of the ‘toughness’ of Europe (240). Her own condition is rendered paradigmatic, a peculiarly American phenomenon, contrasted with English, and, more broadly, European experience. As in the scene of Milly’s entering into a Watteau painting, Densher steps directly into this cultural frame. Seated in one of the chairs placed in clusters for restful observation, she watches, not the Titians or the Turners, but the Americans drifting by, ‘in all the vividness of absent criticism’ (241). Still, at a certain point, a trio of female compatriots, with whose crudities she is ‘generically’ familiar, stops before her, to comment on an object on the other side of the room. ‘Handsome? Well, if you choose to say so.’ It was the mother who had spoken, who herself added, after a pause during which Milly took the reference as to a picture: ‘In the English style.’ The three pairs of eyes converged, and their possessors had for an instant rested, with the effect of a drop of the subject, on this last characterization – with that, too, of a gloom not less mute in one of the daughters than murmured in the other. (241) In spite of satire, Milly’s affinity with the American ladies is real. She turns in search of the ‘handsome’ object of their attention, easily taking the reference to the ‘the English style’ to reflect her own appreciation of that school. Then, as it dawns on her that the hall displays Dutch genre painting, she discovers Densher in the crowd of visitors, and identifies him as the object of appraisal. The identification, she makes out, testifies to her concurrence in the ladies’ tribute, ‘however qualified; and indeed ‘the English style’ of the gentleman – perhaps by instant contrast to the American – was what had had the arresting power’ (242). Lastly, she becomes aware of Kate’s presence at Densher’s side, and of the fact that she is witnessing a tryst. The romantic situation crystallizes, for Milly, through a complex interplay of artistic and cultural strands, suggestive of the mutual implication of ‘life’ and ‘learning’ – the determination of experience, sympathies, antipathies and passions, by inherited categories of culture and art, with the possibility of a more or less smooth movement in and out of culturally defined frames.

98


VII Orients The novel’s first volume concludes with the episode at the gallery and its aftermath. After its midpoint, which the Preface calls a ‘makeshift middle’ (47), the action is played out, irresistibly, as passion. The preface is shot through with the language of Greek tragedy; Milly is pictured as an ‘offered victim,’ whose passion is ordained by ‘the associated Fates.’ Her ordeal is ‘the soul of drama’ – ‘the portrayal […] of a catastrophe determined in spite of oppositions’ (37). This passive, passional strain yields what the Preface calls the ‘false and deformed’ latter half of the novel (47). In a letter to Mrs Cadwalader Jones, James described the structural flaw of The Wings of the Dove in anatomical terms, suggestive of a division between body and mind. The novel, he writes, has a center which is not in the middle and ‘too big a head for its body’ (L, IV, 247). The concern with disproportion revolves around the Dickensian exposition, displaying Kate, with her thwarted romance, against her family background.16 Kate is imagined throughout the novel as gifted with a forceful physical presence; her early portrayal, in particular, ‘absolutely declined,’ the Preface insists, ‘to be enacted save in terms of amplitude’ (42). The latter half of the novel, focused on Milly’s ordeal, calls for a different treatment. Here, the illusion of mass must be rendered, without the illusion of extent; the organic extension of ‘mass’ is harnessed by a compositional geometry, a law of symmetry. The structure of the novel is, in this sense, emblematic; an organic urge for mass and extent vies with an urge for abstract, dimensionless form. As in The Ambassadors, the structural frame captures and expresses an ordeal of body and mind. In The Ambassadors, cruciform geometry, the hourglass structure, has an iconicity not far removed, say, from the pictogram of George Herbert’s ‘Easter Wings.’ Here, too, structure is reflexive, responsive to an imaginative preoccupation with the division of head from body, and with mental and physical correlations, proportions and deformations. Through this misshapen form, the symbolism of the international – but also the incarnational – theme is entered into fully and organically. Here, the consummation of the process of incarnation is a stilled, hushed form of passion, Symbolist in spirit. Milly’s Venetian Rococo palace fulfills the earlier vision of her, in Maeterlinck’s vein, as a princess in a tower, divided from the world. In palatial seclusion, she cultivates a deep quiescence, which is paradoxically active – an ‘adventure of not stirring’ (345).


Stirring, evidently, would cause an eruption of tension strenuously kept at bay. Milly’s position, of a deracinated American in an age of international cultural appropriation, becomes painfully pronounced in Venice. The palace is hired, and, though the best of its kind, is only ‘the thorough make-believe of a settlement’ (336). With its flamboyant opulence, it is not only full of charm, but also alien, and in part repelling. The rental transaction is carried out, shamefacedly, in a latterday spirit of commerce: Charming people, conscious Venice-lovers, evidently, had given up their house to her, and had fled to a distance, to other countries, to hide their blushes alike for what they had, however briefly, alienated, and over what they had, however durably, gained. They had preserved and consecrated, and she now – her part of it was shameless – appropriated and enjoyed. Palazzo Leporelli held its history still in its great lap, even like a painted idol, a solemn puppet hung about with decorations. Hung about with pictures and relics, the rich Venetian past, the ineffaceable character, was here the presence revered and serviced. (336–7) Through and against her experience of displacement, she claims proprietorship as an officiant in these rites; the eccentric and alien in her asserts itself as a paradoxical link with the relics of the past. We find her, ‘awkward novice though she might be,’ moving ‘slowly to and fro as the priestess of the worship’ (337). Sinking ‘into possession’ (334) of the Baroque shrine, she too becomes a thing of the past – an animated artwork, phantomlike, fulfilling her vision of herself as the Bronzino portrait at Matcham. If she is out of place here, she is also, by the same token, archetypically at home. Filtered through her increasingly passive consciousness, archetypal forces emerge, in strife with each other; spirit and matter, air and water, yoked together in close proximity of opposition. Lord Mark’s company elicits for her a poignant sense of ‘their excluded disinherited state’; the place turned on them a face that was cold in its beauty, that was full of a poetry never to be theirs, that spoke with an ironic smile of a possible but forbidden life. It all rolled afresh over Milly: ‘Oh the impossible romance –!’ The romance for her, yet once more, would be to sit there for ever, through all her time, as in a fortress; and the idea became an image of never going down, of remaining aloft in the

100 Decadence in the Late Novels of Henry James

divine dustless air, where she would hear but the plash of the water against stone. The great floor on which they were was on an altitude, and this prompted the rueful fancy. ‘Ah never to go down – never, never to go down!’ she strangely sighed to her friend. ‘But why shouldn’t you,’ he asked, ‘with that tremendous old staircase in you court? There ought of course always to be people at top and bottom, in Veronese costumes, to watch you do it.’ She shook her head both lightly and mournfully enough at his not understanding. ‘Not even for people in Veronese costumes. I mean that the positive beauty is that one needn’t go down. I don’t move in fact,’ she added – ‘now. I’ve not been out, you know. I stay up. That’s how you happily found me.’ (345) As at the Brünig, the spatial poetics of the novel links descent with mortality; the image of remaining aloft, in the divine dustless air, taps into the vision of a life extending into ghostly infinity. The idea that she should like to die in her palace (347), conveys a vision of living not fully distinguished from dying – immured, entombed, and thus charmed, paradoxically inoculated. She will endeavor, she says, to buy the place – ‘for a price’; but if she gets it, she shall cling to it. ‘It will be my life – paid for as that. It will become my great gilded shell; so that those who wish to find must me come and hunt me up.’ ‘Ah then you will be alive,’ said Lord Mark. ‘Well, not quite extinct, perhaps, but shrunken, wasted, wizened; rattling about here like the dried kernel of a nut.’ (348) The sense of avian heights, of dry air and desiccation, is curiously mingled here with a suggestion of sultry, salty, marine life; the image of the ‘great gilded shell’ is not without resonance with an oyster shell, with a pearl as its dried rattling kernel. A fantasy of submergence in aquatic depths seeps into the fantasy of aerial elevation. The presence of water in the airy interior is almost palpable: the summer sea, ‘stirring here and there a curtain or an outer blind’ is pictured breathing ‘into its veiled spaces’; she feels contained by the palace, ‘in it, as in the ark of her deluge’ (342). Memories of Matcham, revived for her through Lord Mark’s presence, are superimposed on the Venetian surroundings, and enter the novel’s already well-established imaginative domain of shipwreck. Her tears before the portrait appear now as ‘the sign of her consciously


rounding her protective promontory, quitting the blue gulf of comparative ignorance and reaching her view of the troubled sea’ (343). The vision of watery death is evoked by the leitmotif of Milly’s pearls, a silver thread that runs through the novel. The pearls are a contrastive element in her apparel; against ‘her big black hat, so little superstitiously in fashion,’ and ‘her fine black garments throughout,’ there is the ‘swathing of her throat’ in white, ‘an infinite number of yards of priceless lace,’ whose folded fabric is kept in place by the heavy rows of pearls, and hangs down to her feet ‘like the stole of a priestess’ (312). In Venice, at her last grand entertainment, we see her ‘lodged,’ for the first time, as her ‘type’ requires her to be – as near as possible to a Veronese picture, her Pre-Raphaelite strangeness transformed into antique splendor (381). She appears, as she has never done before, in white, having quitted ‘her almost monastic, her hitherto inveterate black’ (386). Her pearls, above all, come, on this occasion, into their own. ‘Everything suits her so,’ Kate says to Densher, especially her pearls. They go so with her old lace. I’ll trouble you really to look at them.’ Densher, though aware he had seen them before, had perhaps not ‘really’ looked at them, and had thus not done justice to the embodied poetry – his mind, for Milly’s aspect, kept coming back to that – which owed them part of its style. Kate’s face, as she considered them, struck him: the long, priceless chain, wound twice round the neck, hung, heavy and pure, down the front of the wearer’s breast – so far down that Milly’s trick, evidently unconscious, of holding and vaguely fingering and entwining a part of it, conduced presumably to convenience. ‘She’s a dove,’ Kate went on, ‘and one doesn’t somehow think of doves as bejewelled. Yet they suit her down to the ground.’ ‘Yes – down to the ground is the word.’ Densher saw now how they suited her, but was perhaps still more aware of something intense in his companion’s feeling about them. Milly was indeed a dove; this was the figure, though it most applied to her spirit. Yet he knew in a moment that Kate was just now, for reasons hidden from him, exceptionally under the impression of that element of wealth in her which was a power, which was a great power, and which was dove-like only so far as one remembered that doves have wings and wondrous flights, have them as well as tints and soft sounds. It even came to him dimly that such wings could in a given case – had, truly, in the case with which he was concerned – spread themselves for protection. Hadn’t they, for that matter, lately taken an inordinate reach, and weren’t Kate and Mrs Lowder, weren’t Susan Shepherd and he,


wasn’t he in particular, nestling under them to a great increase of immediate ease? All this was a brighter blur in the general light, out of which he heard Kate presently going on. ‘Pearls have such a magic they suit every one.’ (389) In full possession of her pearls, Milly emerges as a creature of this world, invested with wealth and power, like the fleshly gilded dove of the psalm. By the same stroke, she emerges as death-ridden and, as if by contagion, death-dealing. Earlier, a panoramic glance at the Piazza San Marco registers this worldly nature of the dove; the Piazza is empty while Venice is at breakfast, ‘except for the parties of importunate pigeons picking up the crumbs of perpetual feasts’ (371). Alimentary plenitude is counterpoised here with hunger, emptiness and waste. The deathliness associated with consumption is evoked through the swathing of Milly’s throat, and the heavy chain of pearls, dragging her down to the ground. Like the cord or tether by which Strether is bound, or the image of the silken noose in The Golden Bowl, the chain of pearls embodies the attractive force of matter, a mortal attraction. The magic of pearls is that they suit everyone; in this, they serve as a metonymy for pure, undifferentiated matter, in death. Matter, here, is imaginatively affiliated with the orient as well. The rope of pearls – orients – belongs to a larger pattern of oriental strands the novel weaves together. Within the oriental frame, the choice of Venice as the site of Milly’s death is widely and variously suggestive. The historical role of the city as the southernmost reach of the Western Church and the Apostolic Catholic tradition centered on the figure of St Mark resonate in the Venetian portion of the novel, but no less resonant is the historical connection of the republic with Byzantium, and the imprint left on it by the Islamic orient. ‘The great mosque-like church,’ a cultural hybrid, ‘domed and pinnacled,’ serves – like Notre Dame in The Ambassadors – as a kind of architectonic matrix for the fictional setting. Such mixture is the stylistic hallmark of palazzo Leporelli, ‘all arabesques and cherubs’ (468); less obviously than the arabesques, the cherubs too are of an oriental, biblical origin. But oriental motifs serve primarily to convey a vision of western decadence; they are an essential ingredient in the Rococo mélange, the aesthetic hypertrophy of the city. Palazzo Leporelli has for ornaments medallions of purple and brown, of brave old melancholy colour, medals as of old reddened gold, embossed and beribboned, all toned with time and all flourished and scalloped and gilded about, set in


their great moulded and figured concavity (a nest of white cherubs, friendly creatures of the air) and appreciated by the aid of that second tier of lights, straight openings to the front, which did everything, even with the Baedekers and photographs of Milly’s party dreadfully meeting the eye, to make of the place an apartment of state. (334–5) Venetian Baroque emerges as a time-honored tradition which, however, teeters on the verge of the grotesque, and links in this to the aesthetic culture of Victorian England, typified by the décor at Lancaster Gate and treated as a graceless, lifeless extension of the Baroque, patently grotesque (106). English decadence, projected in terms of hypertrophied matter, is bound up, for James, with the imagination of Empire, as it strains eastward. Aunt Maud, dubbed ‘Britannia of the Marketplace’ (73), a phrase of Ruskin’s coinage, virtually personifies the spirit of imperialist Victorian acquisitiveness.17 Under the sign of Ruskin’s Stones of Venice, the novel juxtaposes the decadence of the Venetian republic with a vision of contemporary England.18 The alliterative juxtaposition of the ‘the Titians and the Turners’ (239), at the National Gallery, strikes this chord early on. Lord Mark, the consummate Englishman, is associated by name with the Patron Saint of Venice, and supplies, further, a phantasmatic genealogical connection: he is uncle to a duke, though not of ‘ducal value’ himself; ‘with a duke in the family, and at the other end of the string’ (289), he may almost be supposed to be descended from the Doges. The shared maritime–mercantile matrix, of which Ruskin makes much, emerges with some prominence; through the medium of historical Venice, the imperial present takes on the twofold aspect of the oriental and the materialist-mercantile. Eugenio, Milly’s suave, exploitative homme d’affaires at the palace – ‘a mercenary monster’ (341) – incarnates the spirit of materialism. The gondolier, brown Pasquale, embodies an image from the seafaring orient (358). It was the near east, in fact, that first presented itself to James as a suitable setting for the latter portion of the novel; the Notebook entry from 1894 speaks of ‘Nice or Mentone – or Cairo – or Corfu’ (N, 107). Beginning in a Puritan Ultima Thule, the trajectory ends, very nearly, in an infidel south. The polarity of Puritanism and orientalism is tapped, here, at its biblical source; the typology of the novel plays off the solitary, ‘ascetic’ dove of Psalm 68, against the worldly, ‘decadent’ dove of Psalm 55. Like death itself, decadence, finally, is seen as a state in which polarities shade off into each other, to the point of merging. Venetian Baroque, a variety of decadence which ultimately becomes Milly’s own,


is an almost preposterous conjunction of elements at once polarized and under-differentiated – of cherubs and arabesques, of gaiety and gilt, or, to borrow Simone Weil’s pairing, of gravity and grace; the vision of transcendence, at the palace, is hard to distinguish from a vision of immersion and submergence. Palazzo Leporelli, as its name suggests, is associated with the pleasures of high civilization as well as its blights. ‘Lepore,’ Italian for ‘wit’ or ‘humor,’ derives from the Latin ‘lepor’ – pleasantness or charm; aurally, however, and in terms of the novel’s données, it is also a kind of luxurious leprosarium. The Venetian model for the fictional palace, where James enjoyed extended periods of hospitality, is easy to identify; it is named, rather more grimly, Palazzo Barbaro. In the spirit of Freud’s ‘Theme of the Three Caskets,’ Milly’s pleasure dome is a sepulchral grotto, its beauty a phantasm which eases her passage into death.19

VIII ‘So Associated and So Opposed’ An analogously complex concatenation of elements is at work in the way the grand reception at the palace unfolds as a recasting of the Last Supper of Christ. Milly is too sick to come down for dinner, enacting, it almost seems, His wish that the cup should pass from His lips. Later, however, she assumes the duties of host, and presides over the musical performance. She has on ‘a wonderful white dress,’ which recreates her, for Densher, as a figure in a picture by Veronese – a frame in which she is housed through Mark’s and Susan’s projections (345, 381, 386). The scene seems, in fact, to draw on two Veronese paintings, both on scriptural subjects: The Supper in the House of Levi (Luke 5: 27–35), in the Venice Academy, and The Marriage Feast at Cana (John 2:1–11), in the Louvre. The stress, in both paintings, falls on the relation of feasting to sacrifice.20 The figuration of her presence is evocative. Densher experiences it as watery – diffuse and ‘happily pervasive.’ ‘He moved about in it and it made no plash; he floated, he noiselessly swam in it, and they were all together, for that matter, like fishes in a crystal pool.’ It is the unaccustomed white of her dress which seems somehow to diffuse her, allowing her to circulate ‘with a clearness intensified’ (386). The liquefaction of her clothes relates, imaginatively, to an imminent dissolution of antithetical tensions – tensions emblematized by the contrast between her ‘inveterate black’ and the white of her lace and her pearls. This paradigmatic pair of opposites, black and white, now merges into an undifferentiated whiteness. The chromatic absorption reflects an original


semantic identity of the words ‘black’ and ‘white’ – ‘blanc.’ The approach of death is refracted, here, as the collapse of an antithetical structure within language, a structure which Freud, in ‘The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words,’ associates with the antithetical structure of desire and the repression of desire, a conflation essential to Milly’s ordeal.21 The blanching of Milly’s dress removes the contrast between the passionate red of her hair and the monastic black. With the dissipation of this tension, she is transformed from a Lorelei or a Titian Temptress (404), into a ginger-headed ‘reigning seraph, a sort of vice-queen of an angel’ (384) – as if she joined the ranks of the gilt cherubs on her ceiling. The ugly duckling of the London days has turned into a swan, but the swanlike quality is hardly of this world, and Milly’s single appearance in this role may be taken as a kind of swan song. The musical entertainment she offers, like the white of her dress, plays a part in the process of liquefaction which the episode sets in motion; Kate and Densher experience it as a ‘solvent’ (388). The atmosphere, for Densher, has a general quality of melting, or of guttering. On entering the great saloon, he finds it illuminated by ‘even more candles than their friend’s large common allowance – she grew daily more splendid; they were all struck with it and chaffed her about it’; the candles seem to Densher to light up ‘the pervasive mystery of Style’ (379). The triumph of Style is seen, here, in its connection with investment, expenditure and waste. Milly’s splendor is bound up with consumption, in its multivalent sense; it spells the liquidation of her worldly affairs. In a precipitate, radically compressed transition, the liquidity of her abstract fortune merges with material depletion, a wasting away of assets and possessions. Milly’s personal style, the ‘aggravated grandeur’ of her hospitality, crystallizes around the scene from Veronese, projected in suspended animation. Susan gives it a grotesque, almost lurid inflection in casting herself as ‘the inveterate dwarf, the small blackamoor, put into a corner of the foreground for the effect. If I only had a hawk or a hound or something of that sort I should do the scene more honour. The old housekeeper, the woman in charge here, has a big red cockatoo that I might borrow and perch on my thumb for the evening. (381) Densher claims not to see, at this point, how he might be included in the picture. ‘What part was there for him, with attitude that lacked the


highest style, in a composition in which everything else would have it?’ By degrees, however, it emerges that the bestiary conjured by Susan sufficiently accounts for his presence, along with the presence of Milly and Kate. Milly, a bird of strange feather, red-haired and exotic, is readily associable with the big red cockatoo; Kate is a bird or prey, a kite or a hawk; Densher, without knowing it, comes to be associated with the rapacity of a hound, as the sound of his name (‘denture’) might suggest. In the course of the evening, Kate’s conspiratorial scheme is articulated through her intense concern with Milly’s pearls. Densher’s vision of the full reach of the dove’s wings as ‘a brighter blur in the general light,’ owes something to the sensory imprint of the pearls – a brighter white against the white of her dress. This exacerbated whiteness stands now, paradoxically, at once for her material power, the worldly spread of her wings, and for her angelic essence, or Christlike transfiguration. Under-differentiation, the cessation of vital tension symbolized in the figure of white upon white, threatens, as the dove spreads her wings, to draw others, or otherness, into its sphere. Kate’s view of pearls, to which she gives expression at this moment, carries with it a sinister sense of death’s indiscriminate sway: ‘Pearls have such a magic that they suit every one,’ she remarks, and Densher replies, frankly: ‘They would uncommonly suit you’ (389). The transferability of jewels he imagines points, at a deeper level, to a paradoxical interchangeability of character between Milly and Kate. In the symbolic bestiary of the novel, Kate, in relation to Milly, is portrayed as a wild cat (170), or as a pacing panther (235); the consonance of ‘Kate’ with ‘cat’ is telling, of course. This feline, predatory quality contrasts with the mild avian figures of ducks and doves. Doves, however, as Densher mentally notes, are not all mildness; they ‘have wings and wondrous flights, have them as well as tints and soft sounds.’ (389) In the figure of the Dove, moreover, Milly hovers as a transcendent presence. And Kate, far from being purely catlike, has an avian quality of her own. There is a powerful typological affinity between the girls, in spite of the strong opposition. Orphaning and bereavement are among the symbols of their archetypal kinship. As part of the compositional deformity the Preface laments, the action begins not with Milly’s staggering losses, but, more subtly but poignantly, with Kate in partial mourning, after the death of her mother. At the Venetian soiree, Kate has on a ‘little black frock’ (388), Milly’s habitual attire. Milly, on the other hand, is implicated in the vital, passionate element we associate with Kate, through the imagination of


sexual fatality she becomes invested with as her death draws near; it is she, rather than Kate, who is figured as Lorelei, and a Titian Temptress. A passage in the Preface hints at the way in which each of these polarized characters is liable to morph one into the other. The two halves of the novel, later described as mutually out of proportion, are first imaged as equal parts of a whole, like a medal hanging free, whose obverse and reverse are ‘beautifully […] optional for the spectator.’ Though the ‘center’ is clearly formed by the ‘regenerate young New Yorker and what might depend on her,’ the ‘circumference’ is ‘every whit as treatable […]. Preparatively and, as it were, yearningly – given the whole ground – one began, in the event, with the outer ring, approaching the center thus by narrowing circumvallations’ (Preface, 40). As the conceit unfolds, the medal undergoes a curious transformation. It is flattened into two-dimensionality, and the spatial polarity of face and back is displaced by a polarity of circumference and center. Then the polarity of circumference and center is itself dissolved, as the circumference moves into the center, reproducing something of the movement of a whirlpool. The sequence bears comparison with the imagery of the Maeterlinck scene, where Milly, a still center, is poised against the slow-circling figure of Kate, at once ‘associated’ and ‘opposed.’ Kate is upright and restless, while Milly is seated, motionless; at the same time they are remarkably alike, fantastically ornamented against a backdrop of black: the princess is ostrich-plumed, black-robed, hung about with amulets, reminders, relics; the lady-in-attendance, ‘with thick dark braids down her back,’ draws over the grass ‘a more embroidered train.’ The water of the moat by which they are divided from each other reflects these somber, studded colors; it is black, and ‘streaked with evening gleams’ (339). Division seems to be underlain here by sameness. The watery barrier, in this sense, is a paradoxical passage, where opposed principles converge.22 This movement toward convergence – figured as circumvallation, a halted bellicose penetration – seems to be charged with the meaning of a crisis, experienced at once as a sexual consummation and as a sacrificial death. At this divisive juncture, we witness the morbid sacralization of sexual encounter and, conversely, the sexualization of illness and death. The image in the Preface of the medal hanging free functions, in this sense, as a kind of Symbolist trope, which merges Eros and death. There was a point at which Eros and death actively coincided in James’s imagination of a moment of consummation between Milly and Densher.


In the Notebook entry of 1894, James describes his exploration of the possibility of Milly’s ‘physical surrender’ to Densher before her death: It has bothered me in thinking of the little picture – the idea of the physical possession, the brief physical, passional rapture which at first appeared essential to it; it bothered me on account of the ugliness, the incongruity, the nastiness, en somme, of the man’s ‘having’ a sick girl: also on account of something rather pitifully obvious and vulgar in the presentation of such a remedy for her despair – and such a remedy only. ‘Oh, she’s dying without having had it? Give it to her and let her die’ – that strikes me 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. (N, 103) As we have it in the novel, this last encounter is projected retrospectively and elliptically. The account delivered of it at Lancaster Gate is highly foreshortened, rarefied. The silt of sexual fantasy is filtered out, however, only to spread through earlier phases of Milly’s ordeal.23 Her fraught reticence on the subject of her ailment acquires, in Kate’s description, a subtle sexual inflection: ‘she has, as to what may be preying upon her, a kind of ferocity of modesty, a kind of – I don’t know what to call it – intensity of pride’ (284). Later, Kate’s prediction that Milly will be ‘made up to,’ socially sought after, generates for Densher a vision of ‘their young friend on a pile of cushions and in a perpetual tea-gown, amid flowers and with drawn blinds, surrounded by the higher nobility’ (286). Finally, of course, it is Kate, not Milly, who experiences sexual consummation. Her ‘physical surrender,’ however, is rendered as a sacrificial act, a martyrdom, which, in the imaginative economy of the novel, resonates with Milly’s death and the bequest of her fortune. The Preface suggests something of the affinity between these two acts of sacrifice: Heaven forbid, we say to ourselves during almost the whole Venetian climax, heaven forbid we should ‘know’ anything more of our ravaged sister than what Densher darkly pieces together, or than what Kate pays, heroically, it must be owned, at the hour of her visit alone to Densher’s lodging, for her superior handling and her dire profanation of. (Preface, 46)


The ‘prime afterglow’ of Kate’s visit to his rooms lingers, for Densher, as a dark sacrament, a ‘constant still communion’ (401). Under its influence, he retreats into febrile solitude. No other act was possible for him than the renewed act, almost the hallucination, of intimacy. Wherever he looked or sat or stood, to whatever aspect he gave for the instant the advantage, it was in view as nothing of the moment, nothing begotten of time and chance could be, or ever would; it was in view as, when the curtain has risen, the play on the stage is in view, night after night, for the fiddlers. He remained thus, in his own theater, in his single person, perpetual orchestra to the ordered drama, the confirmed ‘run’; playing low and slow, moreover, in the regular way, for the situations of most importance. (400) This ritual drama, an action which is a passion, marks even as it re-enacts Kate’s sexual sacrifice, as well as Densher’s sacrificial surrender, ‘his renewed engagement to fidelity.’ The force of the engagement, the quantity of the article to be supplied, the special solidity of the contract, the way, above all, as a service for which the price named by him had been magnificently paid, his equivalent office was to take effect – such items might well fill his consciousness when there was nothing from outside to interfere. Never was a consciousness more rounded and fastened down over what filled it. (401) In language that blends sacrament with commerce, the movement is from protracted ‘communion’ to a ‘renewed fidelity’ suggestive of marriage. A later passage, still in this vein, revolves around the figure of a dark confession. Milly’s death leaves Densher radically exposed before his lover and accomplice. Kate’s secret knowledge takes on a paradoxically public quality; ‘his act, so intimately associated with her and never to be recalled or recovered,’ seems to be abroad on the winds of the world. His honesty, as he viewed it with Kate, was the very element of that menace: to the degree that he saw at moments, as to their final impulse or remedy, the need to bury in the dark blindness of each other’s arms the knowledge of each other that they couldn’t undo’. (500)


The ‘act’ by which Densher is haunted is, inextricably, his complicity in Kate’s plotting, and the sexual surrender with which his complicity has been rewarded. Sexual consummation, in this sense, becomes closely bound up with dying. Milly’s posthumous gift to Densher, which seems to function as a spiritual correlative to Kate’s sexual sacrifice, enhances this imaginative nexus. The arrival in London of the missive from Venice on Christmas Eve, timed, proleptically, to coincide with her death, creates for Densher the dark sacramental valence that informs his intimacy with Kate. On Christmas day, he walks into the Oratory – the Catholic Church on Brompton Road where the marriage of the Prince and Maggie, in The Golden Bowl, is destined to take place. Half-willingly and almost by accident, he finds himself on the edge of a splendid service – the flocking crowd told of it – which glittered and resounded, from distant depths, in the blaze of altarlights and the swell of organ and choir. It didn’t match his own day, but it was much less of a discord than some other things actual and possible. The Oratory, in short, to make him right, would do. (480) The service is sketchily rendered, but it is a meaningful prelude to the central event of the day – the afternoon visit he pays Kate at her ‘place of exile,’ the Chelsea home of her sister, Mrs Condrip. He goes there to inform Kate of Milly’s death, and of the coincident arrival of her letter, addressed to him in her own hand. He and Kate make much of his intimate recognition of the handwriting (477–8), and of the charged physical presence of the document. With Kate, we learn of his direct intuitive perception of it, among lesser letters, on entering the house: ‘[…] my eyes went straight to it, in an extraordinary way, from the door. I recognised it, knew what it was, without touching it’ (488). Kate replies to this, ‘One can understand.’ She listened with respect. His tone however was so singular that she presently added: ‘You speak as if all this while you hadn’t touched it.’ ‘Oh yes, I’ve touched it. I feel as if, ever since, I’d been touching nothing else. I quite firmly,’ he pursued as if to be plainer, ‘took hold of it.’ It emerges, however, that while Densher has ‘touched’ the letter, he has not yet read it, having left it for Kate to break the seal. He wishes, as he puts it, to offer her a ‘tribute,’ ‘a sacrifice,’ thereby to acknowledge ‘the


admirable nature of [her] own sacrifice,’ the act of ‘splendid generosity’ of which she proved herself capable in Venice. The suggestion, throughout the scene, is that the letter carries Milly’s presence, not only by force of contiguity in the past, but also by force of iconicity, of hypostasis, as in the case of the portrait at Matcham. The offer of it to Kate as a tribute, a sacrifice to match her own, reveals the sense of underlying unity between Kate’s sexual surrender and Milly’s surrender to death. The act of unsealing the letter, then, might be imagined as a spiritual deflowering. With the compression of time and the mystic tactility it brings into Densher’s experience, the vision of its sealed ‘sacred script’ (497) is more than holy; it is charged with an apocalyptic significance, as of the Seals of Revelation. Unsealed, it must yield a writing to end all writing, a speech to end all speech, a merging of word and flesh, like St John’s consumable, consuming book of divine prophecy (Revelation 10:8–11). The end of the action intimates a culmination cognate with the biblical Apocalypse.

IX Bildung and Romance The white-on-white of Milly’s dress and pearls spells the dissolution of the black-on-white medium of imaginative writing, as we have known it. Her figure in white is a kind of fulfillment of the early image of immersion in a watery maternal element, which makes ‘the margin flood the text’ (182). The novel itself suggests that it too is subject to a blurring of its generic character. Milly is projected as an American muse, a heroine of romance. Susan discerns in her ‘the romantic life itself’ (125). It is as the heroine of a New England romance that Susan conceives of her (125, 184); but as Milly embarks on her quest for a ‘motive,’ for some formative passion, she is irresistibly drawn to Europe (184), the domain of realism. This hybrid mode of romance mounts American romance, with its abstract-allegorical orientation, on Europe’s socially engaged, realist traditions. The Preface to The American engages the subject of novelistic ‘romance,’ pitting it against a notion of ‘reality’ (LC II, 1061): These values represent different sorts of and degrees of the communicable thrill, and I doubt if any novelist […] ever proposed to commit himself to one kind or the other with as little mitigation as we are sometimes able to find for him. The interest is greatest […] when


he commits himself in both directions; not quite at the same time or to the same effect, […] but by some need of performing his whole possible revolution, by the law of some rich passion in him for extremes. (LC II, 1062) James proceeds to define the ‘near and familiar’ as everything that is susceptible of becoming directly known; ‘romance,’ on the other hand, stands for ‘the things that can reach us only through the beautiful circuit of and subterfuge of our thought and our desire’ (LC II, 1063). Romance is for the most part ‘reducible to the idea of the facing of danger.’ But the danger need not be a conventional matter of ‘boats, or of caravans, or of tigers, or of “historical characters,” or of ghosts, or […] of beautiful wicked women […].’ The action may gain in subtlety and depth by interiorizing its dangers (LC II, 1063–4). Ultimately, romance is distinguished by the quality of experience with which it deals – experience liberated, so to speak; experience disengaged, disembroiled, disencumbered, exempt from the conditions that we usually know to attach to it. The greatest intensity may so be arrived at […] when the sacrifice of community, of the ‘related’ sides of situations, has not been too rash. […] The balloon of experience is in fact of course tied to the earth, and under that necessity we swing, thanks to a rope of remarkable length, in the more or less commodious car of the imagination […]. The art of the romancer is […] to cut the cable, to cut it without our detecting him. (LC II, 1064–5) Romance, clearly, is the native element of the American protagonist, who, like the genre, is ‘disengaged, disembroiled, disencumbered.’ Europe, on the other hand, stands for realism – the experience of being ‘relative to tiers and tiers of others,’ affiliated and embroiled. As the two domains converge, realist representation is subverted and transformed. The spirit of romance infuses itself into ‘the way things happen,’ undermines its solidity, plunges it into a swirl, like the pool of Lorelei. This process unfolds in what is best thought of as a dynamic psychic space, calibrated with the projected fictional world. In terms of the metaliterary field The Wings of the Dove engages, it is the Bildungsroman, the European social drama of tutelage and initiation, which is transmuted into romance. Milly is drawn to Europe in pursuit of Bildung; hers is a genre-bound odyssey. The English


scene, epitomized for her in the thickly woven social fabric of Kate’s life, presents itself in literary terms. Kate strikes her as ‘the product of a packed society who should be at the same time the heroine of a strong story.’ From the beginning, she places ‘this striking young person […] in a story,’ sees her, ‘by a necessity of the imagination, for a heroine,’ feels it ‘the only character in which she wouldn’t be wasted’ (165). The données of Kate’s situation are the stuff of novels. Her father’s nameless delinquency and disgrace; the protracted suffering of her mother, and her untimely death; the wretched indigence of her sister, poor widowed Marian, and of the orphaned brood of nephews; the ruthless ambition of her wealthy aunt; the secret powerful ‘male interest’ we sense about her (178) – these complexities are full, to Milly’s sense, ‘of English, of eccentric, of Thackerayan character’ (165). At the same time, it turns out that Milly’s exposure to the English scene lacks the distinctiveness, the well-defined contours of novelistic representations. Her visit to Chelsea is a perplexing revelation of the ambiguities, rather than the fixities, of English social stratification. With our young woman’s first view of poor Marian everything gave way but the sense of how in England, apparently, the social situation of sisters could be opposed, how common grounds for a place in the world could quite fail them: a state of things sagely perceived to be involved in an hierarchical, an aristocratic order. Just whereabouts in the order Mrs Lowder had established her niece was a question not wholly void as yet of ambiguity […]; but it was clear Mrs Condrip was, as might have been said, in quite another geography. She wouldn’t have been to be found on the same social map, and it was as if her visitors had turned over page after page together before the final relief of their benevolent ‘Here’! (177) In default of the ‘stouter stuff’ of reality, Marian’s circumstances work themselves, for Milly, ‘into the light literary legend – a mixed wandering echo of Trollope, of Thackeray, perhaps mostly of Dickens’ (178). She tries to place Mrs Condrip – whose name is unmistakably Dickensian – in a dense novelized English milieu; but the English idiom is diffused by a sense of bewildering ‘differences, bridges, intervals,’ rents in the tissue of social experience and of fictional verisimilitude. In time, Milly’s American sensibility enters and tempers her social sphere, attenuating the imbricated presence of hard social realities within it. To alleviate the tension of the encounter at the National


Gallery, she resorts to ‘her own native wood-note,’ making use of her ‘unused margin as the American girl – closely indeed as in English air the text might appear to cover the page’ (244). The American note, put to use as an agent of social lubricity, is part of a high-strung masquerade, an anxious denial of complications. Under its sign, Milly becomes ‘as spontaneous as possible and as American as it might conveniently suit Mr Densher, after his travels, to find her.’ She says ‘things in the air,’ and flatters herself that she strikes him as saying them ‘not in the tone of agitation but in the tone of New York. In the tone of New York agitation was beautifully discounted’ (244). Such strenuous idealization is productive of its own kind of text, covering the page, as it were, less closely. Tense juxtapositions of ideal against real generate the element of romance, expressive of a ‘rich passion for extremes.’ If, in the imaginative geography of the late phase, America stands for the element of dissociation from social realities, and Europe for the element of absorption in them, England represents a paradoxical middle-ground, a juncture of antithetical forces. The tension between the ideal and the real, sustained for a time in the transitional imaginative space of England, is apparently too acute to minister to less fitful, more enduring aesthetic modes. The journey to Venice witnesses the undoing of the antithetical pull, as the two forces, realism and romance, converge in a movement toward annihilative, Symbolist consummation. The latter half of the novel systematically subverts the conventions of Bildung, of tutelage and initiation, which frame the early phase of Milly’s European adventure – a development prefigured by the discarding of the Tauchnitz volume at the Alpine pass. In the tightening grip of her illness, as she becomes increasingly dovelike, the tutelage of Susan and of Sir Luke is, in turn, dismissed or usurped. Recast in the role of Comforter, she is subject to the ‘woe’ of perceiving Susan’s ‘torment of helplessness,’ rather than to her own torment; ‘the pledge of protection and support’ in the crisis is, ironically, hers alone (315). In metafictional terms, the tutelary tradition of the novel is subsumed here in the antitype of scriptural tutelage and initiation. Milly tugs against her Bildung to assume Christlike spiritual mastery. When she turns her face to the wall, her Christlike passion merges with Kate’s sexual passion, projecting a kind of Augustinian Ur-figure of sacrifice. To Densher, the Venetian air makes itself felt, at this time, as a ‘non-conductor of messages’ (412, 425). The arrested circulation of air suggests a breakdown of communicability, as well as a mysterious responsiveness in nature to the human drama. Nature, however, is highly urbanized, and its sentience, such as it is, is a self-conscious manipulation of Symbolist


tropology. The Venetian storm, which breaks out together with Milly’s crisis and rages for three days, until communication with the palace is resumed, is an almost parodic enactment of Ruskin’s ‘pathetic fallacy.’ In Ruskin’s account, set out in Modern Painters (1856), when the mind is affected by ‘strong emotion,’ is falls into morbid confusion, attributing subjective life and will to natural objects (III, 164–6). Here, the aesthetics of passion informs the description of the ‘rupture of peace’ which Densher experiences on being refused admittance to Milly’s presence; in a Symbolist mode, animate and inanimate, subjective and objective, are mutually contaminated. It was a Venice all of evil that had broken out […]; a Venice of cold lashing rain from a low black sky, of wicked wind raging through narrow passes, of general arrest and interruption, with the people engaged in all the water-life huddled, stranded and wageless, bored and cynical, under archways and bridgeways […]. There were stretches of gallery paved with squares of red marble […]; and the whole place, in its huge elegance […] was […] like a great drawing room, the drawing room of Europe […]. (415–6) The grafting of interior onto exterior, in the scene of the storm and subsequently in the scene of fine weather, captures something of the passion of the mind, as it imposes inscape on external reality. A vision of Piazza San Marco as an interior, ‘a great social saloon, a smooth-floored, blueroofed chamber of amenity’ also structures the scene in which Densher and Kate scheme their assignation. Instead of entering the cathedral with their friends, they remain in the square. Outside, beyond earshot, their very exposure affords a paradoxical ‘solitude and security.’ The paradox crystallizes in relation to Milly, whose presence filters in through the audible ‘flutter of the doves,’ blending into the ‘bright historic air.’ The flutter of doves is ‘the only sign for their ears’ – a curious synesthetic locution – and in this sense reassuring; but Milly’s presence invades their consciousness as well, creating between them a radical consonance which renders speech superfluous and begets ‘a fear in the heart of each’ – a fear of intimate rather than public exposure, which is yet infused with the turbulent air of history (373). When the silence is broken, Densher makes plain his demand ‘to be loved’ (276) – his demand, that is, that Kate come to his private quartiere (378). In its conflation of privacy and exposure, inwardness and exteriority, the scene taps into a current of corrosive passion, which courts a vision of fusion of self and other.


In the world of the nineteenth-century novel, the literary cognate of sharable experience is the topos of psycho-social initiation, the Bildung of realist fiction. The Ambassadors, where a middle-aged innocent undergoes tutelage at the hands of an experienced youth, sets the tutelary tradition in ironic relief. In The Wings of the Dove the irony is radicalized to the point of subversion. As the action progresses, the quasi-realist, quasiDickensian, socially invested mode of its early portion is taken over by the ingrown imagination of Symbolism. In the latter, ‘false and deformed’ portion of the novel, Kate and Densher are drawn into a sacrificial plot, as by ‘the strong narrowing eddies, the immense force of suction, the general engulfment’ caused, in the figuration of the Preface, by the pool of Lorelei. Their conspiratorial relationship entails, increasingly, a sacrifice of a sense of individual being, an absorption into what the Preface calls their ‘subjective community’ (Preface, 49). To draw further on the language of the Preface, they are ‘a pair of natures well-nigh consumed by a sense of their intimate affinity and congruity, the reciprocity of their desire’ (Preface, 48). The sense in which their desire ‘consumes’ is closely related to the sense in which it is furtive, secretive – the sense in which it finds expression in conspiracy, and cuts them off from wider contact and communication with others. Writing to Mrs Humphry Ward in September 1902, James described the necessity of conspiracy to the dramatic unfolding of his action. Commenting on James’s sense of the centrality of drama in the novel, as expressed in the letter, John Bayley elicits a fruitful generic tension, with reference to The Wings of the Dove, between novel and drama. In terms of the novel as drama, he writes, Densher and Kate are indeed ‘not separate individuals but a “relationship” pure and simple’; the two become one in their scheme. Correspondingly, their separation from each other removes them from the world of drama, and places them back in a novelistic world. ‘They – and especially Kate – become individuals, with all the potential of the single, the individuals that they once were when we learnt their history at the beginning of the novel’ (Introduction, 16). Implicit in Bayley’s discussion is the Aristotelian stress on action over character in tragic drama. The novel is frequently seen as the province of individualized character, while Aristotelian drama is the province of action, propelled through archetypal, functional agency. In his speculations on the relation between character and action, James pretty largely conflates the two. Indeed, close tracking of his formulations suggests that character is tantamount to action. The action of The Portrait of a Lady crystallizes, for him, in the scene of Isabel’s midnight vigil – ‘a representation simply of her motionless seeing, and an attempt withal to


make the mere still lucidity of her act as “interesting” as the surprise of a caravan or the identification of a pirate’ (LC II, 1084). The act of seeing, witnessing the agony of consciousness, is an introspective enactment of a passion of martyrdom – ‘martyr,’ literally ‘witness’ in Greek, is etymologically associated with anxiousness, thoughtfulness or mindfulness. In this spirit, the Preface to The Tragic Muse speaks of the ‘hero’ of a work of fiction as a ‘martyr,’ a tragic victim (LC II, 1118). What appears to be, in James’s critical thinking, an anti-Aristotelian sense of the primacy of character rather than of action, is finally an aspect of a deeply Aristotelian imaginative current. Much like the archetypal agent of Greek drama, the Jamesian character is conceived as an agent of sacrifice; he or she is primarily an agonist, and only secondarily an individualized, autonomous novelistic protagonist. James’s tendency to stress the germinal importance of character, and the inextricability of character from action (LC I, 54–5; LC II, 1071–84) is suggestive, above all, of his predilection for characters who are susceptible to a martyr’s passion, and for dramatic action which is passional at its core. All this does not obviate the presence of novelistically actualized – and realistically motivated – characters in even the most tragico-sacrificial dimensions of The Wings of the Dove; as we shall see when we return to consider other aspects of the representation of Kate and Densher in the later parts of the novel.

X Tragic Drama and Romance The tension between novel and drama is, of course, continuous with the tension between the realist mode and Symbolism or romance. If the early phase of Kate’s relationship with Densher is novelistic, as the action unfolds it gravitates toward tragic drama. The plot, in the double sense of narrative movement and conspiracy, siphons off reality from the dyadic conspiratorial sphere, and in doing so deprives the two characters of individual agency. The range of willed action and choice available to the protagonist of the Bildungsroman is curtailed here; increasingly, Kate and Densher come to inhabit a regressive, shadowy, sacrificial world. Characteristically, in the aftermath of their sexual encounter, Densher remains caught in a space of deep but exposed inwardness. The trappings of outer reality fail to reassert themselves, and he is subjected, instead, to the ‘renewed act, almost the hallucination of intimacy.’ He becomes a paradoxical witness-agent, indeterminately passive and active, in a scene of sacrificial passion. The recurrent ‘act’ is in view for


him, as, ‘when the curtain has risen, the play on the stage is in view, night after night, for the fiddlers.’ He remains ‘in his own theater, in his single person, perpetual orchestra to the ordered drama, the confirmed ‘run’; playing low and slow, moreover, in the regular way, for the situations of most importance’ (400). But even the novelistic beginning, which ultimately finds its resolution in this phantasmal solitary agon, lacks the psychological amplitude we associate with realism. The late style itself cuts against the grain of the illusionist density and solidity of the novel’s opening. In an ambivalent response to The American Scene, William James compares his brother’s evocation of realities to ‘the illusion of a solid object, made (like the “ghost” at the Polytechnic), wholly out of impalpable materials, air, and the prismatic interference of light, ingeniously focused by mirrors upon an empty space’( JF, 341). It is through such spectral prismatic art that the material world of Europe is projected in the late novels. In The Wings of the Dove, materiality and materialism are embodied in the English female characters, in a manner which, however, hauntingly borders on the allegorical. Kate’s Aunt Maud is ‘Britannia of the Marketplace,’ and Kate, under her aunt’s auspices, recognizes in herself a great susceptibility to ‘material things.’ But even the material things are rendered within heavily fraught symbolic fields. Aunt Maud’s material plenty is figured as an edible substance. Indeed, to the extent that Aunt Maud embodies a principle of thoughtless action, of unselfconscious identification with the object on whose behalf her energies are mobilized, she is at once, reflexively, eater and eaten, the ‘nutritive pudding’ and its consumer. So, while Kate longs for a taste of her bounty, she yet finds herself, in the suggestive idiom, ‘with her heart in her mouth.’ Tasting of Aunt Maud’s offering might be a form of self-consumption, and the risk of being ‘devoured’ through such contact is fully present to Kate; she pictures herself as a tender morsel, ‘a trembling kid, kept apart a day or two till her turn should come, but sure sooner or later to be introduced into the cage of the lioness’ (73). The lioness herself, at that, is in no sense a self-directing agent; she is decked out as if for a show, and would have been ‘an extraordinary figure in a cage or anywhere, majestic, magnificent, high-coloured, all brilliant gloss, perpetual satin, twinkling bugles and flashing gems, with a lustre of agate eyes, a sheen of raven hair, a polish of complexion that was like that of well-kept china and that – as if the skin were too tight – told especially at curves and corners. (73)


Circuses, theaters, gladiatorial contests and other evocations of sacrificial passion abound in the language used to portray Kate in relation to her aunt (95–6, 104–5, 109, 171–2). The novelistic representation of her behavior and motives is heavily colored by the symbolic fields in which she is placed and by the quality of the conflicts attributed to her. In the Preface, an etiological formula, gesturing toward melodrama, serves to underpin the conception of her character; her father’s disgrace, his ‘compromised and compromising’ image, was ‘all effectively to have pervaded her life, was in a certain particular way to have tampered with her spring’ (43). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, whose reading focuses on homoerotic strains in the novel, suggestively lingers over the image of the spring; in the sense of a wellspring and of a panther spring, she writes, it is associated with ‘Kate’s dangerousness and her coiled up store of reserve energy’; but the spring as of a trap or a switchblade suggests ‘her sometimes mechanicalness, with her way of being “sharp” and “ironic”’; embedded in her ‘irony’ is the metallic ‘iron’ (IRS, 94). For Sedgwick, Kate’s steely energy reveals the autoerotic and homoerotic valences of her sexuality, a sexuality marked, correspondingly, by frigidity toward men. Kate’s frigidity, however, is only one side of the coin; it is no simple ‘indifference’ (IRS, 94) we are asked to perceive in her, but an ambivalence. On Densher’s return from American, we witness something of the harnessed force of her passion for him. Urging her to take him ‘just as he is,’ and finding himself gently repulsed, he is moved to ‘seize her with a sudden intensity.’ He laid strong hands upon her to say, almost in anger, ‘Do you love me, love me, love me?’ and she closed her eyes as with the sense that he might strike her but that she would gratefully take it. Her surrender was her response, her response her surrender, and though scarce hearing what she said, he so profited by these things that it could for the time be ever so intimately appreciable to him that he was keeping her. (262) Later, it is she who comes to him under the same ‘compulsion,’ and takes hold of him ‘in her urgency to the same tender purpose’ (265). If Kate has about her something of the chill and rigidity of metal, her intimate passages with Densher kindle a latent fire. Her refusal to meet him privately in his London lodging seems to him potentially eruptive; if she had consented to drive away with him and alight at his house, he speculates, ‘there would probably enough have occurred for them, at the foot of his steps, one of those strange instants between men and


women that blow upon the red spark, the spark of conflict, ever latent in the depths of passion’ (253). When she promises to come to his rooms in Venice, his pleasure has a gustatory poignancy. ‘He had never, he then new, tasted, in all his relation with her, of anything so sharp – too sharp for mere sweetness – as the vividness with which he saw himself master in the conflict’ (398). The ‘conflict’ has just found expression for Kate in a momentary rigidity – a ‘rigour’ curbing her ‘readiness.’ Densher believes that her readiness is ‘the woman herself, and this other thing a mask, a stop-gap and a ‘dodge’’ (397–8). Nevertheless, the somber ‘afterglow’ of their sexual encounter leaves him with the ashen sense of vitality consumed. Kate’s resistance is neither a matter of indifference nor of a fusty prudery. Her love for Densher is distinctly of its time; they are both ‘children of a supercivilized age’ (379), and she, to her own sense, is ‘the contemporary London female, highly modern, inevitably battered, honourably free.’ (91). Above all, it is her aloofness which is highly modern; if she is battered, she is also barricaded. Her ‘rigour’ suggests a kind of rigor mortis, bodily as well as emotional; a freezing which screens off melting and burning, the terrors of dissolution aroused with her passion. When she casts Milly’s letter in the fire, we glimpse the divisive, chilling and consuming nature of her passion in its starkest tragic and symbolic – ultimately, romance-related – form.

XI The Noble Tradition A tense proximity of opposites is imprinted on the characters like ‘a series of strong stamps,’ to use the language of The Ambassadors. Here, the stigmata which determine much of the impression they make upon us draw freely on an iconography of spiritualized birds and fleshly, carnivorous beasts, an iconography which reinforces the impression made by the images of circus, gladiatorial arena and all manner of sacrifice elsewhere in the novel. Aunt Maud, as noted before, is – variously – a lioness, capable of sudden ‘feline’ jumps (170). But Aunt Maud, to Kate, is also a creature who settles on her ‘with her wonderful gilded claws.’ ‘You speak,’ Densher observes, ‘as if she were a vulture.’ ‘Call it an eagle,’ Kate says, ‘with a gilded beak as well, and with wings for great flights’ (103). Sir Luke is a birdlike spiritual healer but also a social celebrity, a medical lion, who feeds on Milly’s fortune. Lord Mark, too, is associated with the apostolic tradition, with St Mark’s emblem, which is also the


emblem of Venice: the winged lion, a swooping bird-beast. Densher calls him a hound (436), yet there is a sense in which the glass at Florian’s through which he sees him is a mirror (416), and the figure behind it, fiendishly rapacious, is a reflection of Densher himself. Still, the self-image Densher cherishes is birdlike. He speaks to Kate of his Continental upbringing, ‘perched’ with her ‘like a cicerone and his victim on a tower-top,’ before ‘the bird’s eye view’ of early migratory years abroad (114). Kate herself is figured as a pacing panther (235), but she takes part, as well, in Densher’s European flights. By name, she is cat, kite and crow, much as her father is lion and crow. In the opening scene, facing the mirror in her father’s apartment, she is raven-like, dressed ‘altogether in black,’ readjusting ‘her black closely-feathered hat’ and retouching ‘the thick fall of her dusky hair’ (56). Her last words – ‘We shall never again be as we were,’ alluding to the raven’s ‘Nevermore!’ in Poe’s haunting poem – hark back to this image. For all the avian and feline images which cluster around her – also, possibly, because of them – Kate is made to radiate a ‘pure talent for life,’ a decisive and highly generalized trait which transcends the rich animal imagery which marks her presence (362, 479). Through Densher, this special gift of ‘type’ attains its full-blown expression, by ‘the famous law of contraries,’ the reciprocal attraction of opposites. Densher, in this oppositional matrix, represents the principle of ‘mind’ (87). His role is to guide and inform her energy, like a cicerone, or, as she figures him, ‘a map of the continent or a handsome present of a delightful new “Murray”’ (115); his role is also to contemplate and to possess her as a resource, as his imaginative Continent, as a vision of nature herself, red, perhaps, in tooth and claw. Their relationship is based on an economy of lack and dependency, on a sense of being poor where the other is rich (87), and it is marked from its inception by lapses of vital connectedness. The lovers develop an ‘air of old friends’; they go through ‘phases of apparent earnestness in which they might have been settling every question in their vast young world’; and there are periods of silence, side by side, ‘when “a long engagement” would have been the final reading of the signs on the part of a passer struck with them’ (93). Their acquaintance, however, is short – too short, they feel, for an engagement, yet ‘long enough for almost anything else.’ Marriage, in this paradoxical situation, is ‘somehow before them like a temple without an avenue’ (93). In conversation, they cultivate a ‘constant perception of the incongruity of things,’ giving expression, in this form, to the disjunctive nature of their tie. Kate is permissibly ‘violent and


almost unfeminine,’ ‘quite as if they had settled, for intercourse, on the short cut of the fantastic and the happy language of exaggeration’ (97). ‘The happy language of exaggeration,’ a hyperbolic, carnivalesque, precipitate idiom, casts in ironic relief the role insistently assigned to Kate, of a literary heroine in the tradition of Shakespeare’s romances and Jane Austen’s novels. This literary orbit, which Lionel Trilling, after Hegel, calls ‘noble,’ is the province of the ‘the beautiful soul,’ whose visionary norm of life is an archaic ideal of ‘order, peace, honor, and beauty’; the attributes of the noble inhere in a ‘happy and (as used to be said) prosperous marriage, in the sufficiency and decorum of fortunate domestic arrangements’ (SA, 73–4). In the world of The Wings of the Dove, where princeliness is descended from a fractured, exhausted, usurped line, Hegelian nobility falls to the lot of the shabby genteel, Dickens’s domain reconceived. Kate, as Densher perceives her, embodies, not quite auspiciously, perhaps, the flair of Jane Austen’s most spirited character, Elizabeth Bennet. In this light she is ‘not the sort of stuff of romance that wears, that washes, that survives use, that resists familiarity. Once in any degree admit that, and your pride and prejudice will do the rest’ (113). With the thickening of their plot and the deepening of their private communion, she is transformed from an Elizabeth Bennet into a Cleopatra, a woman of inexhaustible ‘variety.’ In the spirit of a bibliophile, picturing Kate as ‘a whole library of the unknown, the uncut’ (290), Densher becomes engrossed in her conspiratorial plot. ‘Mere curiosity’ about her designs generates for him ‘its quick, its slightly quaking intensities. He had compared her once, we know, to a new book, an uncut volume of the highest, the rarest quality; and his emotion (to justify that) was again and again like the thrill of turning the page’ (392). The need to ‘justify,’ or satisfy his high-brow preferences, is evidently imperfectly answered by the giddy thrill of curiosity – a common thriller would excite the same emotion. Densher wished, earlier, not to be reduced to ‘reading the romance of his life in a cheap edition’ (362). Now, he experiences ‘an exasperation, a resentment, begotten truly by the very impatience of desire, in respect to his postponed and relegated, his so extremely manipulated state.’ Densher’s ‘pure passivity’ (380) gives way at last, and he takes on a role in the ‘management’ of the plot (362); a chapter in the romance of his life is to be written by him, rather than read. But his faith in the enterprise is lost, and he is beset by a sense of the brazenness of his muse; such, for him, are the conditions for action. Naming Kate’s wish that he should marry Milly since Milly is to die sparks conflict; he wonders how


she can bear her idea, to which she replies, ‘Well, when you know me better you’ll find out how much I can bear’ (395). That it was left to him to know her, spiritually, ‘better’ after his long sacrifice to knowledge – this was a truth he hadn’t been ready to receive so full in the face. She had mystified him enough, heaven knew, but that was rather by his own generosity than by hers. And what, with it, did she seem to suggest she might incur at his hands? (395) The use of free indirect style to convey his sense of outraged innocence is rife with irony; the passage, moving from a sense of achieved ‘spiritual’ knowledge of Kate to a sense of sexual knowledge still withheld, reveals his covert complicity in her scheme. Active sexuality, when they get there, involves, for them, a traumatic coincidence of typological modes. Kate, whose genius is for impassioned action, passes into submissiveness, while Densher, whose genius is for impassioned contemplation, commits, in exacting what he takes as his due, an act of violence. The conversion of each strain into its opposite violates the integrity of type, the discreteness which has nourished attraction; dissociative desire, of the sort that is so pivotal for the international subject, threatens to consume and be consumed, as it is precipitated into consummation. The drama of sacrifice enacted in the relationship between Kate and Densher is projected in literary and cultural terms as well as psycho-sexual ones. Kate’s plot and the molding into it of her character resonate with and against the tradition of ‘noble’ tales and heroines. A type of Cleopatra, finally, her energy and variety mask (but also express) a different, darker dynamism, a pulse of sacrificial passion. When her type and her plot come to their tragic fulfillment, Densher’s ‘old sense of her variety,’ (453) a spectral image of her once full-bodied being, returns. In the final phase of their relationship, their contact has, for him, the quality of ‘fine velvet,’ ‘multitudinous as only the superficial can be’ (502). Under this seductive, rococo surface there is variety, even turmoil, and the contrast has its charm ‘such being the interest of a creature who could bring one back to her by such different roads. It was her talent for life again; which found in her a difference for the differing time. She didn’t give their tradition up; she but made of it something new’ (501). This late vision of Kate’s variety and spirit is joined to a vision of her as a Flower of Evil; she holds her head high, her poise is a wonder, as she carries ‘a little stiffly’ her old sense of the unspeakable at


home – a mystery grown stale, for Densher (502). Her talent for the ‘great life,’ steeped to the core in decay and corruption, appears finally as a sterile enticement. Indeed, Kate’s prospects are dreary. At Christmas, Densher observes Lord Mark in Mrs Lowder’s carriage, ‘ensconced’ in her favor, soliciting the favor of the niece (477). Once imaged as a ‘breezy boy’ (165), she seems destined to mature into the unsexed type her aunt represents – the aunt who spread in the niece’s chambers a ‘great grey map of Middlesex’ (72), and whose maiden name was ‘Manningham.’ Aunt Maud mans the house, holds the fort; her sexual being aberrates into unmitigated power-seeking. The alliance with Lord Mark, which Kate is to form at her behest, will fuel a joint impulse of self-aggrandizement, a domestic expression of the spirit of Empire. With Kate, the surviving heroine of The Wings of the Dove, the heroine as such, the ‘frail vessel’ of novel and romance, is projected into a catastrophic future. If the action centered on Milly and the action centered on Kate configure a shared imaginative domain, Milly’s death refracts through the prism of Kate’s trajectory the atrophy of literary imagination, the wasting of its animating force, even as it resonates to the possibility of her continuing presence.

XII Sea-Change The Preface, we may recall, asserts that ‘the poet essentially can’t be concerned with the act of dying’ (36). Yet when her crisis sets in, Milly herself foresees a chiastic shift, releasing her from death-in-life: ‘Since I’ve lived all these years as if I were dead, I shall die, no doubt, as if I were alive’ (183). In The Ambassadors, chiasmus, which structures the action of the novel, embodies a crystallized vision of sacrifice; here, it seems to move through and beyond sacrifice, in the process of its enactment and projection of transformation. Densher conjures a grim vision of Milly on her deathbed, tormented by her consciousness, ‘crucified by its pain’ (466). There is a sense in which Milly’s consciousness has always been an instrument of torture – a vise in which it has held itself, and a rack or scaffold for the body. A dislocation of matter and mind, tantamount to death, is evoked paronomastically in one of her exchanges with Sir Luke: ‘So you don’t think I’m out of my mind?’ ‘Perhaps that is,’ he smiled, ‘all that’s the matter’ (212). Yet another set of associations carries us in a more positive – almost a redemptive – direction. Milly turns her face to the wall when she can no


longer bear to be conscious, when she has ‘given up beyond all power to care again’ (454). In terms of biblical typology, however, the gesture is suggestive not of despair, but of hope; King Hezekiah, in the teeth of death, turns his face to the wall and prays for deliverance (Kings 20:1–5; Isaiah 38:1–6). Here, as in the white-on-white of Milly’s dress on the night of her party, the blank space of the wall suggests chromatic depolarization. The oppositional mode of her consciousness, figured throughout by the tension of white-against-black of her pearls and dress, is dissolved. Consciousness seeks in blankness, its vanishing point, contact with undifferentiated, formless being, with the whirlpool or the abyss. As in the biblical story of the ailing king, the turn toward blankness is a leap of faith, potentially transformative and regenerative. This turn is elucidated by a series of formulations in James’s late writings, as well as in the work of his brother. In an essay entitled ‘Is There a Life after Death’ (1910), Henry James speaks of the possibility of ‘carrying the field of consciousness further and further, making it lose itself in the ineffable’ ( JF, 611). In this piece, the afterlife is conceived as an unfurling of the sphere of consciousness, or ‘personality,’ beyond its moorings in the sensible world, a growing sense of spiritual kinship with the universe ( JF, 610), of ‘immersion in the fountain of being. Into that fountain, to depths immeasurable, our spirit dips – to the effect of feeling itself, qua imagination and aspiration, all scented with universal sources. What is that but an adventure of our personality, and how can we after it hold complete disconnection likely? I do not so hold it, for my own part, and, above all, I freely concede, do not in the least want to. Consciousness has thus arrived at interesting me too much and on too great a scale – that is all my revelation or my secret; on too great a scale, that is, for me not to ask myself, what can she mean by such blandishments – to the altogether normally hampered and benighted random individual that I am. Does she mean nothing more than that I shall have found life, by her enrichment, the more amusing here? But I find it, at this wellnigh final pass, mainly amusing in the light of the possibility that the idea of an exclusively present world, with all its appearances wholly dependent on our physical outfit, may represent for us but a chance for experiment in the very interest of our better and freer being and to its very honor and reinforcement; but a chance for the practice of and initial confidence of our faculties and our passions, of the precious personality at stake – precious to us at least – which shall have been not unlike the sustaining frame on little wheels that often encases growing infants, so that, dangling and shaking about in it,


they may feel their assurance of walking increase and teach their small toes to know the ground. I like to think that we here, as to the soul, dangle from the infinite and shake about in the universe; that this world and this conformation and these senses are our helpful and ingenious frame, amply provided with wheels and replete with the lesson for us of how to plant, spiritually, our feet. ( JF, 613–4) The vision is of umbilical cosmic connectedness – the soul dangling from the infinite and shaking about in the universe. With this, there is a measure of autonomy for the planting of one’s feet, a dimension of ardent individual exploration. The sense, as Keats had it, is that life is not a vale of tears, but of soul-making; and that the making of a soul requires a bodily frame, and a gargantuan appetite for ‘matter.’ Universal matter comes close to figuring as maternal provision; it nourishes a consciousness whose ripening is slow, whose craving is not exhausted in the course of a lifetime. Milly, who does not die by inches, whose spirit is nipped in its moment of flowering, embodies in fiction the anagogic promise of which the essay speaks. Those in whom we saw consciousness, to all appearance, the consciousness of us, slowly deménager, piece by piece, so that they more or less consentingly parted with it – of them let us take it, under stress, if we must, that their ground for interest (in us and in other matters) ‘unmistakably’ reached its limit. But what of those lights that went out in a single gust and those life passions that were nipped in their flower and their promise? Are these spirits thinkable as having emptied the measure the services of sense could offer them? Do we feel capable of a brutal rupture with registered promises, started curiosities, waiting initiations? The mere acquired momentum of intelligence, of perception, of vibration, of experience in a word, would have carried them on, we argue, to something, the something that never takes place for us, if the laboratory-brain were not really all. ( JF, 608)24 It is Kate who registers, as the novel draws to a close, the quality of Milly’s lingering presence. Densher is in love with Milly’s memory, she says; Milly died ‘for’ him, to win for herself this shadowy love. ‘I used to call her, in my stupidity – for want of anything better – a dove. Well she stretched out her wings, and it was to that they reached. They cover


us’ (508). At their final juncture, Densher listens in stillness, watching Kate’s face but not moving. Then he only says: ‘I’ll marry you, mind you, in an hour.’ ‘As we were?’ ‘As we were.’ But she turned to the door, and her headshake was now the end. ‘We shall never again be as we were.’ (509) Milly continues to live, transformed, through the reach of her dovelike wings, or the whirlpool movement produced by her ‘sinking.’ In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James describes a kindred sense of the occult as it bears on the natural world. ‘The further limits of our being plunge […] into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely “understandable” world.’ This unseen or mystical region ‘is not merely ideal, for it produces effects in the world. When we commune with it, work is actually done upon our finite personality, for we are turned into new men, and consequences in the way of conduct follow […] upon our regenerative change’ (VRE, 515–6). A formulation of the same in a ‘nugget’ reads thus: ‘God is real since he produces real effects’ (VRE, 517). If in turning her face to the wall Milly turns toward ‘prayerful communion’ with transrational energies (VRE, 524), her action produces ‘real effects.’ Sir Luke brings her back to life (461), as if by miracle, and she holds a valedictory, benedictory interview with Densher. The meeting comes to figure for him as an alembicated spiritual experience, hieratic, mystically colored. When his sense of the mundane regains its ground, the scene, steeped in mystery, barely conceivable, resurfaces at a distance, as if taken from the pages of a book. The essence of it is that something ‘too beautiful and too sacred to describe’ has taken place; to his recovered sense, he has been ‘forgiven, dedicated, blessed’ (469). The benediction is a complex gesture, to say the least. It turns Densher into ‘a haunted man – a man haunted with a memory’ (469). His last vision of her reveals ‘her beauty and her strength’ – a ‘gentle force,’ allowing her ‘to die in her own extraordinary way’ (460). If she lived as ‘one of the weak,’ in death the dovelike element of wealth and power, of wings and wondrous flights, comes into its own. Her wings ‘cover,’ as Kate puts it. They spread, capture and sever; at the same time, through the very rupture they cause, they generate a distinctive ambiance, a space with its own resonance, texture and tint. ‘Teal’ – a color as well as a bird – loses the physical contours of the birdlike and resolves into sensation; it is


etherealized, in a precise sense, into an enveloping medium, distilling its quality into the atmosphere. Densher’s ‘hushed,’ ‘passive’ expectancy when he is given his blessing spells a sense of alteration in the conditions of being; ‘staying his breath, but half-understanding,’ he is ‘yet dimly conscious of something immense and holding himself painfully together not to lose it’ (468). His final moment with Kate, its stillness and silence, bears the mark of his transformation, of holding together, possessing and being possessed by a different reality. Readers have often responded to the coercive, vengeful or persecutory dimension of Milly’s afterlife.25 Such coercion as may be sensed (whether one thinks of it in character-based, motivational terms, or in more fluid terms, as an expression of psychic valences) is at any rate not gratuitous; it emerges as part of a need to inhabit an integrated psychic and imaginative space, in which self-possession can be experienced and emotional life unfold, beyond fissure and fragmentation. In rudimentary form, this possibility is sought in the cultivation of a sense of the present, in lieu of an overpowering sense of the past and the future. Milly’s death displaces the two strains, associated and opposed, which govern temporal consciousness in the novel; breathless precipitancy recedes, but so does psychic and cultural retrospection. If, in Kate’s words, Densher’s memory is his love, it marks the inception of love, not its terminus. Paradoxically, it is determined less sharply by nostalgia than by irrevocable ‘change’ (508), a break with the past. It is of the order of the unprecedented, James’s favorite imaginative haunt. Milly’s afterlife potency bears comparison to the ‘religion of doing’ (LC II, 1340) toward which William James inclined, under the influence of eastern lore. For religion ‘unweakened by transcendentalistic met physics,’ he writes, judgment carries ‘execution with it’; it is ‘in rebus as well as post rem, and operates “causally” as partial factor in the total fact’ (VRE, 522). A form of such immanent action is projected through Milly’s death. She dies, after her last meeting with Densher, so he might ‘understand’ her. ‘From that hour you did,’ Kate says. ‘And I do now. She did it for us’ (508). The imaginative stress is on mystic ‘execution,’ sacrificial action which enters the fabric of the world and transforms it. Of the transformative power of religion, William James writes: ‘The world interpreted religiously is not the materialistic world over again, with an altered expression […]. It must be such that different events can be expected in it, different conduct must be required’ (VRE, 518). The difference, above all, for Henry James as much as for William, lies in the sense that ‘where God is, tragedy is only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution are not absolutely final things’ (VRE, 517).


‘Shipwreck’ and ‘dissolution,’ in their provisional nature, are refracted in The Wings of the Dove and in The Golden Bowl through Shakespeare’s late plays. In The Wings of the Dove, Milly’s shipwreck and watery death belong to a larger pattern of sea-change inspired by The Tempest – a work described by James ‘as the rarest of all examples of literary art’ (1907; IT, 82). Early on, imagery from The Tempest is wrought into the fabric of Milly’s representation: ‘She was alone, she was stricken, she was rich, and in particular was strange’ (123). In imagistic terms, the character is poised for the action or passion in store for her – a European immersion, whose elements are ‘positively rich and strange’ (149). The ‘chemical change’ (279) she suffers is reminiscent, again, of the song Ariel sings as Ferdinand contemplates his father’s presumed death by drowning (I.ii.396–404). Baruch Hochman interprets Ariel’s song as an engagement with our fear of death, confronting this fear even as it strives to contain it. The song, he holds, invokes some of our most daunting images of death and dissolution – the human skeleton, and our eyes, experienced as the most vulnerable of our organs – and transforms them into ‘coral’ and ‘pearls’: things no less precious and permanent than they are ‘rich and strange.’ Similarly, the sea-nymphs’ ‘knell’ is perceived as the transformation of the threat of the sirens – or of Lorelei, tempting sailors to death by water – into permanent commemoration through endless reiteration of the death-knell that marks our passing, our evanescence (ID, 36–8). The Wings of the Dove performs, in this sense, a delicate countermovement to The Tempest, colored by immersion in the death-ridden element of decadence. The author of The Tempest, James suggests, is ‘notoriously not morbid’ (IT, 93), a claim which cannot be made with equal force of the author of The Wings of the Dove; but if James’s vision of death-in-life is at odds with Shakespearean vitality, something rich and strange, not dreamt of, so to speak, in the Shakespearean corpus, may animate his vision of death.26 The novel responds to Ariel’s song contrapuntally, through its own portrayal of the metamorphic magic of pearls. While Milly is alive, pearls represent her material and mortal nature. After her death, her burnt letter is figured as a pearl cast into the sea, or as ‘the sacrifice of something sentient and throbbing.’ The sea, for the pearl, is an archaic womb, and the frail creature sacrificed to is also a fairytale gift – or, indeed, a gift for Christmas – in soft wrappings. The passage pictures Densher nurturing the thought of his loss, nursing it, as it were, into life.


He kept it back like a favourite pang; left it behind him, so to say, when he went out, but came home again the sooner for the certainty of finding it there. Then he took it out of its sacred corner and soft wrappings; he undid them one by one, handling them, handling it, as a father, baffled and tender, might handle a maimed child. But so it was before him – in his dread of who else might see it. Then he took to himself at such hours, in other words, that he should never, never know what had been in Milly’s letter. The intention announced in it he should but too probably know; only that would have been, but for the depths of his spirit, the least part of it. The part of it missed for ever was the turn she would have given her act. This turn had possibilities that, somehow, by wondering about them, his imagination had extraordinarily filled out and refined. It had made of them a revelation the loss of which was like the sight of a priceless pearl cast before his eyes – his pledge given not to save it – into the fathomless sea, or rather it was like the sacrifice of something sentient and throbbing, something that, for the spiritual ear might have been audible as a faint far wail. He sought and guarded the stillness, so that it might prevail there till the inevitable sounds of life, once more, comparatively coarse and harsh, should smother and deaden it – doubtless by the same process with which they would officially heal the ache in his soul that was somehow one with it. It moreover deepened the sacred hush that he couldn’t complain. He had given poor Kate her freedom. (502–3)27 The ‘sacred hush’ in Densher’s London rooms is a reflex of the hallowed stillness in his Venetian rooms after Kate’s visit. The two episodes are intimately associated, as well as opposed; Kate’s passion consumes, while Milly’s consumed letter liberates. Through their joint agency, Densher finds a habitable space for the imagination, a release which wounds even as it vivifies. Breaking the seal, a psychic counterpart to the trauma of sexual encounter, must have petrified and paralyzed, like the consummation, ‘awful’ in its completeness, of Kate’s visit, with the loss it brings in its wake, ‘of the warmth of the element of mystery’ (401). But Densher has given poor Kate her freedom. A regenerative influence seems to work through her act of violence, mysteriously, beyond the conscious reach of the characters. The logic of liberation, here, is not psychological but typological, or psycho-cultural. In life, Milly burned, even when possessed by love for Densher, like the Virgin, in a sexless fire. Her death, by contrast, becomes human, carnal, as it blends,


psychically and imaginatively, with the sexual act. Heraclitus said that men and gods are always dying each other’s life, living each other’s death. Milly’s trajectory encompasses these poles – humanity dying into the divine, divinity dying into the human. The ‘maimed child’ born with the burning of the letter is the strange fruit of Densher’s recovered sexual imagination, the return of ‘the warmth of the element of mystery,’ a flame which does not scorch and consume. The child is born, miraculously, not of a Virgin, but of two mothers. The pain mingled with tenderness, the throbbing sentience it evokes seem to emerge as part of a labor of integration – a movement toward containing and modulating the vision of dual maternity, and the forked experience of desire it expresses. This movement toward accommodation involves its own form of renunciation and surrender, a sacrifice of the destructive fantasy of allconsuming presence. Kate’s early wish is to ‘sacrifice nobody and nothing’; she wants and she shall try ‘for everything’ (102). Milly, in her London days, with the world before her, is, like Kate, oblivious of the principle which decrees, within the psychic economy of the novel, that ‘she can’t have everything’ (282). The heart of the matter, as Densher once puts it, is that ‘everything’s nothing.’ (99) Infinite desire for an infinite object, each burning without being consumed, produces crippling duality, fenced-off isolation in place of encounter. One striking expression of such desire, which clearly registers its rigidity, is Pater’s image of the gemlike flame. In The Ambassadors, the Paterian image is recast as a vision of the feminine as some huge iridescent object, a jewel brilliant and hard, in which parts were not to be discriminated nor differences comfortably marked. It twinkled and trembled and melted together, and what seemed all surface one moment seemed all depth the next. The jewel of The Ambassadors is a lucid reflector of the conflict involved in desire; its stony sphere and the shifting elements within suggest an oppositional tug between attraction and repulsion, melting and congealing. The sense is of arrested flow; the mind’s iridescence is trapped in fixed oscillation, suspended in ambivalence. James’s image of the vessel – as both the vessel of consciousness and the sea-faring vessel – figures consciousness as polarized between selfenclosure and dissolution; a vessel of consciousness is self-contained and self-preserving, while a sea-faring vessel is contained in a vast watery element and its interior is gutted, despoiled of self. In The Wings


of the Dove, a third mode of being emerges, as if from the wreck of these vessels. Consciousness comes to experience itself as contained as well as containing, like a jewel at the bottom of the sea. The castaway pearl of Densher’s fantasy suffers a sea-change, outside the sphere of ordinary consciousness, in the rich metamorphic space of romance. James, writing of The Tempest, pictures this space as a jeweled ring: The value of The Tempest is, exquisitely, in its refinement of power, its renewed artistic freshness and roundness, its mark as of a distinction unequalled, on the whole […] in any predecessor. Prospero has simply waited, to cast his magic ring into the sea, till the jewel set in it shall have begun to burn as never before. (IT, 89) The fullness of artistic expression in The Tempest is born, as if by magic, of an act of renunciation. In Shakespeare’s Tempest, Prospero abjures his magic not by casting a ring into the sea, but by breaking his staff and drowning his book (V.i.50–7); the ring may be a stray Wagnerian echo. The magic of Prospero-Shakespeare, at all events, resides in a lapidary flame, ignited, perhaps, in dry air, but burning on, as the imagery implies, at he bottom of the sea. The Tempest extends itself into both realms, with its high-reaching ‘exhalations of beauty,’ and its ‘deep wells of poetry,’ from which ‘crystalline cups’ may be drawn (IT, 82–3). At the bottom of the sea, the magical lambency of the jewel transforms the antithetical conception of container and contained. Here, the shimmer of the incandescent interior belongs to the enveloping medium as well. The jewel melts together, within and without; its rigid contours blend into the circumambient water, its liquefactions and solidifications mirror the processual flux of sea-life. It is a lucid reflector, but also ‘a deeply involved and immersed and more or less bleeding’ (LC II, 1321) participant in a pulsating transconscious action. If eyes can crystallize into jewels, jewels can perhaps deliquesce, soften into organic substance again. So, the Jamesian vessel of consciousness can ease itself into reflexive, contiguous relationship with a living environment, at once contained and containing, interior and exterior, solid and fluid. The novel has a keen sense of jewels as products of chemical change, petrified organic substance. In the Alps, Susan figures Milly as ‘a mine of something precious,’ spread beneath her feet. ‘She seemed to herself to stand near the mouth, not yet quite cleared. The mine but needed working and would certainly yield a treasure. She wasn’t thinking either, of Milly’s gold’ (136). There is an echo, here, of Donne’s erotic elegy, ‘On his


Mistress Going to Bed’: ‘O, my America, my Newfoundland / My kingdom, safest when with one man mann’d / My mine of precious stones, my empery.’28 Milly’s mythically sprawled subterranean body is, in fantasy, a precious ore; her decomposing flesh mingles with the earth to produce her riches. But cast like a pearl into the sea – where, archaically, it has been formed – her putrefying, petrifying body may, in fantasy, recover its organic sentience and suppleness. A subtle contiguity is formed, between the bowels of the earth and the womblike sea, between digestive and gestational processes, defecation and parturition.29 The loosening of the grip of hard oppositions – container and contained, solidity and flow, flesh and spirit – is associated with a space and a mode of relationship which the essay on the afterlife figures, quietly, as playful: the infant soul dangles and shakes about in the universe – a universe imagined as maternal. In Playing and Reality, D. W. Winnicott ponders the reflexive role of the mother in child development. ‘Ordinarily,’ a word fraught with difficulty in Winnicottian theory, a baby who looks into the mother’s face sees himself or herself reflected in it. But what of the baby, in less ordinary cases, ‘whose mother reflects her own mood, or, worse still, the rigidity of her own defences’ (PR, 112)? Contemplating the Bronzino portrait at Matcham, Milly comes face to face with a maternal image in which she fails to recognize herself, whose opacity and rigidity suggest that the painted woman is ‘dead, dead, dead’; deadness then becomes, for Milly, a channel for reflexive identification. In this emotional frame, Susan’s absolute availability is compensatory, but not restorative; the element in it of grotesque servility responds to a punitive impulse it is powerless to transform. Aunt Maud, at the other emotional pole, embodies stony, impervious maternity. The ‘great glaze of her surface’ (108) and ‘the hard smooth sheen’ of her face (227), suggest, in terms of the psychodynamics of reflection, her obstructiveness, her failure to transmit. Her eyes resemble precious stones – ‘agate’ or ‘onyx’ (73, 225, 228). ‘Onyx,’ or chalcedony, black and white layered crystal, seems the more cogent here. It comes up twice, in relation to Milly, and projects a stony gaze, serving as a mirror which petrifies, as in an altered version of the Medusa myth. The black and white of the eye are reflected in Milly’s accoutrements: in the black of her dress and white of her lace and her pearls, chromatic emblems of psychic divisiveness and rigidity. In the metamorphic space of romance, however, onyx may change into pearl, and pearl into eye. The pearly eye is oriental; like chalcedony, a precious stone inlaid into the walls of the Heavenly City (Revelation 21:19), it carries a suggestion of apocalyptic transformation. The vision is of


Britannia of the Market, the mercantile spirit of Empire, sinking and merging into its colonial other. The pearl produced through this seachange, the ‘maimed child’ of Densher’s vision, is a distant kin of the living pearl of The Golden Bowl – Maggie Verver, a Margaret or Margarita. ‘Margarita’ is not only ‘pearl,’ of course, it is also ‘daisy’; and Maggie – like Daisy, Mamie, May or Milly – belongs to James’s sorority of the frail vessel, his sacrificial Marian type. But Maggie is also a lost daughter of romance – a Perdita, Marina or Miranda, passing through shipwreck and sea change into full-blown womanhood. Near the end of The Ambassadors, Strether’s journey of return to America is figured as an oriental death-journey; he floats as on a bier on Coleridge’s subterranean river, through the caverns of Kubla Khan (489). The submergence of consciousness as it passes through the cavernous interior, a ‘great containing vessel’ of romance, holds a promise of regeneration – a promise realized, in part, near the end of The Wings of the Dove. Densher resurfaces there, in fantasy, from oceanic immersion, clinging to an emergent rock in mid-Atlantic (499). His clinging, literally, is to a secret he has been keeping from Kate – the secret of his correspondence with Susan, across the Atlantic, after Milly’s death. Dissimulation saves him, at this time, from terrible intimacy, ‘the waste of waters’ (499) he shares with Kate, figured also as a deathly embrace – ‘the need to bury in the dark blindness of each other’s arms the knowledge of each other that they couldn’t undo’ (500). The rock, a spatial inversion of the subterraneous cavern, is, for all its exposedness, strangely protective; it stands for Densher’s restored ‘personal privacy’ (499), for a space of his own and the possibility of writing it generates. At the same time, the protuberant rock in the ‘bottomless grey expanse’ seems to suggest a revival of erotic desire. The impulse is mediated, as it were, through Milly’s phantom presence, but arises out of and against Kate’s elemental being. Densher’s resting place is likely to strike us as precarious and utopian, a no-place; neither America nor Europe, nor, by extension, the orient. ‘Merton,’ or ‘sea-town,’ hovers between land and water; the name conjures the enduring solidity of an Oxford college, and with it the marine and maternal (mer, mère), morbid (mort) element of Venice. In The Golden Bowl, imaginative pearl diving is less equivocally associated with the British Isles, with full-blooded human embroilments in the megalopolitan setting of latter-day London.

4 ‘The Passions of Princes’: On The Golden Bowl

I Genealogies Fresh Starts At a late moment in The Wings of the Dove, Densher has a vision of the kind of life with him which would suit Kate: ‘What a person she would be if they had been rich – with what a genius for the so-called great life, what a presence for the so-called great house, what a grace for the so called great positions! He might regret at once […] that they weren’t princes or billionaires’ (502). The Golden Bowl taps this fantasy at its source. It is concerned with ‘the passions of princes,’ to borrow James’s own phrase about Shakespearean drama (LC II, 1078). At a Foreign-Office party in London, Charlotte, wife of an American billionaire, in company with her stepson-in-law, an Italian prince, is presented before royalty. The Italian ambassador solicits her attendance in French, the language of diplomacy: ‘A desire for your presence, Madame, has been expressed en très haut lieu, and I’ve let myself in for the responsibility, to say nothing of the honour, of seeing, as the most respectful of your friends, that so august an impatience is not kept waiting.’ The Prince adds ‘with authority, indeed with a certain prompt dryness: “You must go immediately – it’s a summons”’ (226). In The Ambassadors, with its mock-ambassadorial drama, the imperialdynastic motif figures prominently, but ironically. In The Wings of the Dove, it is projected through metaphors, such as Milly’s American princeliness and the typology of Empire associated with Aunt Maud. In The Golden Bowl, it is made real, testifying to the enhanced presence, in the novel, of far-reaching material processes. The international theme ramifies 135


here into an exploration of the imagination of Empire, focused on the movement of the Empire westward – the Translatio Imperii observed by Roman historians, in its modern phase. This expanded scope of the international matrix allows the novel to articulate a geo-cultural vision which resonates deeply with the concerns of the epoch.1 In terms of the international theme, the westward movement of Empire reflects a need to dissociate from the consuming element of oldworld culture. Prince Amerigo marries an American heiress in the wish ‘to screen out’ an illustrious but opprobrious ancestral legacy – a legacy which combines ‘voracious’ greed and futility, the latter suggestive of immersion ‘in some chemical bath.’ The marriage is intended to project him into a ‘new history,’ a sterilized ‘scientific’ future – ‘science’ being ‘the absence of prejudice backed by the presence of money’ – where ‘the rich peoples,’ with their ‘vast modern machineries and facilities,’ hold sway (51–3). The Roman branch of the Prince’s ancestry is associated with the Borgias, the founder of whose line, like the Prince’s forebear, was a ‘wicked Pope’ (47). Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, later Pope Alexander VI, had three natural children by his mistress, Vanozza Catanei. Giovanni, the eldest, was murdered, with the Pope’s connivance, by Cesare, his younger brother. The fratricide, a cardinal, resigned his priesthood to take up a life of action; his exploits as a soldier and a potentate inspired Machiavelli’s The Prince (1505, 1515). Gregorovius (who is given an honorary citation in The Wings of the Dove) chronicled the vices and crimes of the family in a monograph devoted to his sister, Lucrezia (1874). The appellation ‘Machiavelli’ serves, in one instance, to link Prince Amerigo with the Borgia Prince (62). Elsewhere, a link is forged between Charlotte and the Borgias. Charlotte’s effect on other women is described as poisonous; in her presence, they come to resemble people at the Borgia court, watching each other ‘begin to look queer after having had the honour of taking wine with the heads of the family.’ Charlotte, at that, is no common intriguer; far from ‘consciously dropping poison into their cup,’ she is ‘just herself the poison, in the sense of mortally disagreeing with them’ (177). Readers of Gregorovius might recall that Charlotte was the name of Cesare Borgia’s French wife (LB, 72). In The Golden Bowl, the Prince and Charlotte share a Roman past, which they conceal from their American sposi. When they are established in their marriages to the Ververs, the adulterous, quasi-incestuous liaison they enter is refracted through the prism of the Borgia annals. The Prince feels deprived, in his legitimate relationships, of his hereditary ‘passion of personal loyalty.’

‘The Passions of Princes’: On The Golden Bowl 137

That was what it all came back to again with these people among whom he had married – that one found one used one’s imagination mainly for wondering how they contrived so little to appeal to it. He felt at moments as if there were never anything to do for them that was worthy – to call worthy – of the personal relation […]. He might vulgarly have put it that one had never to plot or to lie for them; he might humorously have put it that one had never, as by the higher conformity, to lie in wait with the dagger or to prepare insidiously the cup. These were services that by all romantic tradition were consecrated to affection quite as much as to hate. But he could amuse himself with saying […] that they were what he had once for all turned his back on. (261) The services associated with the ‘romantic,’ Roman tradition are, however, not easy to renounce. He withholds them from the people among whom he has married, confirming, in this, his rupture with his past; but he confers them on Charlotte. The romantic tradition is one in which, to draw again on the language of The Ambassadors, parts are not to be discriminated nor differences comfortably marked – in which the spheres of love and hate are prone to being reciprocally invaded. A clean break, in this frame, is a vital need, as well as a fear. On the eve of his marriage, Charlotte foists on the Prince a vision of the clandestine past they share. She proposes a morning excursion in search of a wedding gift for Maggie. Their foray is to be kept a secret – to be, the Prince gathers, ‘practically as private as their old mornings in Rome and practically not less intimate.’ He is leery of ‘any present, […] any positive making of mystery,’ sensing the resemblance of the little plan before him to occasions, of the past, from which he was quite disconnected, from which he could only desire to be. This was like beginning something over, which was the last thing he wanted. The strength, the beauty of his actual position was in its being wholly a fresh start, was that what it began would be new altogether. (106) But the fantasy of a ‘fresh start,’ for the Prince, is itself recursive, embedded in his ancestral beginnings. If the Roman branch of his family is associated with bondage to the past, the Florentine branch embodies the dream of release. His great Florentine ancestor was Amerigo Vespucci, the discoverer of America; and it was by virtue of this forebear’s achievement that the


scion and namesake was able to make the discovery of ‘the Americans’ (95), some four centuries later. The latter discovery took place in the Villa Borghese; nevertheless, it had its own venturesome aspect. Shortly after the Ververs’ arrival in Rome, the Prince made bold to approach a carriage in which Maggie was seated with a mutual friend, Fanny Assingham. He got in, Fanny recalls, was introduced, and went home to tea with them. They had met; they had seen each other well; they were in relation. The rest was to come of itself and as it could. It began, practically, […], in our drive. Maggie happened to learn, by some other man’s greeting of him […] that one of the Prince’s baptismal names […] was Amerigo: which […] was the name, four hundred years ago, or whenever, of the pushing man who succeeded where Columbus had failed, in becoming the godfather, or name-father, to the new Continent […]. (94) A measure of pushing, some of the driving force of the upstart, is even now, it seems, required in order to dislodge one’s native ties, and join ‘the rich peoples’; but allegiance to science and fact, in place of romance, may be of the essence as well. Vespucci, of course, was scientific – ‘sagacious,’ in the language of his contemporaries (Encyclopedia Americana, XXVIII, 55); a gifted geographer and cosmographer, and above all free from oldworld prejudice. But a subtle counterforce, a feminine influence, is at work against fresh starts, dissolving and absorbing them into the element of oldworld romance. The Prince’s connection to the Florentine explorer comes in ‘by the women’; that is by some obliging woman of old, who was a descendent of the pushing man, the make-believe discoverer, and whom the Prince is luckily therefore able to refer to as an ancestress. A branch of the other family had become great – great enough at least to marry into his; and the name of the navigator, crowned with glory, was, very naturally, to become so the fashion among them that some son, of every generation, was appointed to wear it. My point is at any rate that I recall noticing at the time how the Prince was from the start helped with the dear Ververs by his wearing it. The connexion became romantic for Maggie the moment she took it in; she filled out, in a flash, every link that might be vague. ‘By that sign,’ [Fanny] quite said to [herself], ‘he’ll conquer.’ (95)


The Prince, though aided by Vespucci’s celebrity, makes his conquest, like Constantine the Great, by the traditional sign of the cross. The movement implicit in Fanny’s allusion is eastbound rather than westbound. Constantine united the Empire of the West with the Empire of the East, and made Byzantium-Constantinople his capital, moving eastward the seat of imperial power. For the Prince, the victorious cross is above all the Roman Catholic faith. Maggie wears as a pendant a little silver cross blessed by the Holy Father (402). Her faith, we know, is a matrilineal legacy; her father has been loosely willing, always, to let it be taken for his, since, without its ‘solid ease,’ ‘making the stage firm and smooth, the drama of her marriage mightn’t have been acted out’ (147). The marriage, we sense, serves as emotional compensation for the pain of Maggie’s early orphaning; like Milly’s European travels, it holds a promise of return to a maternal place of origin. The Prince’s hereditary claim on the new world is, we might say, instrumental; it sparks an interest, which is then nourished, for her, by his Roman ancestry. At Fawns, her father’s hired English estate, in the milieu of his collected pieces, she is within reach of a source – fons – of such nurture.2 But she remains appetitive, if not quite ‘starved for culture,’ with a relish for its best, or worst, gleanings. Maggie’s attraction to the Prince is avowedly of this order. Before their marriage, he speaks to her of the historical burden he carries: ‘One is made up of the history, the doings, the marriages, the crimes, he follies, the boundless bêtises of other people – especially of their infamous waste of money that might have come to me. Those things are written – literally in rows of volumes, in libraries; are as public as they’re abominable. Everybody can get at them, and you’ve both of you wonderfully looked them in the face. But there’s another part, very much smaller doubtless, which, such as it is, represents my single self, the unknown, unimportant – unimportant save to you – personal quantity. About this you’ve found out nothing.’ Maggie replies that the Prince’s personal quantity is ‘the promised occupation of her future,’ and declares her intrepidity in the face of his past. ‘Oh I’m not afraid of history! […] Call it the bad part if you like – yours certainly sticks out of you. What was it else […] that made me originally think of you? It wasn’t – as I should suppose you must have seen – what you call your unknown quantity, your particular self. It was the generations behind you, the follies and crimes, the plunder and the


waste – the wicked Pope, the monster most of all, whom so many of the volumes in your family library are all about. If I’ve read but two or three yet, I shall give myself up the more – as soon as I have time – to the rest. Where therefore’ – she had put it to him again – ‘without your archives, annals, infamies, would you have been?’ (47) The Prince’s self-conscious reply is that in such a case he might have been ‘in a somewhat better pecuniary situation.’ We gather that without his ‘archives’ and in a state of greater solvency, the desirability of the marriage, on his part as well, might have been less certain – not least, perhaps, at this juncture, because of Maggie’s failure to respond to his ‘personal quantity.’ East and West The Prince’s elusive ‘personal quantity’ is associated, at least in part, with individual energy, with a ‘scientific’ leaning – the ‘absence of prejudice backed by the presence of money’ – and with an excursive drive, away from the communal element of Europe. In this, it partakes of the spirit of the new world, but also, correspondingly, of the spirit of the Renaissance, with its flair for invention and discovery. At the turn of the nineteenth century, however, such possibilities of excursion fail to materialize. In conversation with Fanny Assingham, once an American, recursiveness emerges, for him, as his appointed course after his marriage. Hoping for tutelage in American morals and manners, he appeals to her as a westbound seafarer, a latter-day Vespucci, facing his own ‘great voyage – across the unknown sea,’ and ignorant of ‘the points of the compass.’ Fanny, however, resists his notion of maritime ‘adventures’ to come. ‘You talk about ships, but they’re not the comparison,’ she claims, rather equivocally, perhaps, for she herself clings to the figure. ‘Your tossings are over – you’re practically in port. The port,’ she concludes, ‘of the Golden Isles’ (59–60). The Prince’s figures of ocean travel are particularly unnerving, at this moment, because of the news, not yet divulged to him, of Charlotte’s return from America. More than ever, his future, as the maker of his match conceives of it, must be circumscribed by duty; he is to swear off ‘adventures of shipwreck’ and seek safe anchorage. For a contemporary explorer, there seems to be no prospect of auspicious western journeys. Marriage itself places him in the port of the Golden Isles – literally in a London townhouse called Portland Place, and imaginatively in the Hesperides, at the westernmost limit of the navigable world.


The Prince is no stranger to the sense that his marriage might leave his ship moored, becalmed or stranded. When the legal documents have been signed and his fate has been ‘practically […] sealed’ (44), marriage comes to figure for him as wreckage, rather than anchorage. He pictures himself as the shipwrecked Gordon Pym, eponymous hero of a story by Edgar Allan Poe, who, drifting in a small boat further toward the North Pole – or was it the South? – than any one had ever done, found at a given moment before him a thickness of white air that was like a dazzling curtain of light, concealing as darkness conceals, yet of the colour of milk or of snow. There were moments when he felt his own boat move upon some such mystery. The state of mind of his new friends, including Mrs Assingham herself, had resemblances to a great white curtain. He had never known curtains but as purple even to blackness – but as producing when hung a darkness intended and ominous. When they were so disposed as to shelter surprises the surprises were apt to be shocks. (56) The passage figures the caving in of an antipodal, polarized imaginative space; north and south, darkness and light, shelter and danger, all blend together into Poe’s obstructive ‘blankness.’ On the eve of his marriage, the Prince is in presence of a vision of apocalypse not unlike that which pursues the traveler in John Donne’s poem ‘Good Friday 1613 – Riding Westward.’ If the east were to catch up with the rider on his westward journey, the vision might engulf him: ‘Could I behold those hands, which span the poles / And tune all spheres at once, pierced with those holes? / Could I behold that endless night, which is / Zenith to us and our antipodes / Humbled below us?’ Later, the Prince’s adulterous affair defines and inhabits a similar space, without zenith and antipodes. He and Charlotte are placed ‘in the same boat’ – ‘Mr Verver’s boat,’ which keeps them both ‘pecuniarily afloat’ (228); setting sail, however, is another matter. Their course is unillumined and uncharted, ‘unprecedented,’ as it seems, because it is impossible to follow. Its perils are its inconsistencies. Charlotte, at times, spoke of their taking refuge in what she called the commonest tact – as if that principle alone would suffice to light their way; there were others when it might have seemed, to listen to her, that their course would demand of them the most anxious study and the most independent, not to say original, interpretation of signs. She talked now as


if it were indicated at every turn by finger-posts of almost ridiculous prominence; she talked again as if it lurked in devious ways and were to be tracked through bush and briar; and she even on opportunity delivered herself in the sense that, as their situation were unprecedented, so their heaven was without stars. (243) It is the ‘commonest,’ here, which is ‘devious’; adultery, in its mixture of common and strange, is uncanny to Charlotte and the Prince, much as marriage is uncanny to Kate and Densher – ‘somehow before them like a temple without an avenue’; uncanny, we might say, like sexuality itself. The Prince and Charlotte must navigate without stars, and they have left their pilot in port. Fanny, the undisputed ‘doyenne’ of her transplanted tribe (65), offers them no guidance, a failure whose scale is mythic, like the scale of her exploits in bygone days. To the tribe of expatriates, she figures as another Pocahontas. Her marriage to Colonel Bob is taken to belong to the far twilight of the age, a primitive period when such things – such things as American girls accepted as ‘good enough’ – hadn’t begun to be; so that the pair had been, as to the risk taken on either side, bold and original, honourably marked, for the evening of life, as discoverers of a kind of hymeneal Northwest Passage. (65) The Northwest Passage to the Pacific, sought since the days of Columbus, was yet to be completed when James’s simile was conceived; Amundsen, in his expedition of 1903–6, was the first modern explorer to cross over. Fanny, however, through her hymeneal crossing, has been precipitated eastward, or southward, to the orient or the tropics, a journey at once ‘unprecedented’ and recursive. From a Pocahontas, she has turned into ‘a daughter of the South, or still more of the East, a creature formed by hammocks and divans, fed upon by sherbets and waited upon by slaves’ (64). Her indolence and leisure are false, like her pearls and palms and courts and fountains; they conceal a restless New York mind, whose punctual ‘discipline’ is Europe. Her type is fully ‘in the fashion of the hour’ (64), and the disparities and contradictions it embodies reflect the temper of the age. Her vision of life as ‘multitudinous detail’ – detail whereby she is ever, appearances notwithstanding, ‘unappalled and unwearied’ (64) – is bound up with a hungry passion for analysis. Human complications are above all palatable, like ‘a large dish presented to her intelligence and inviting it to a feast.’ She handles matters cautiously, ‘[picking] out after


consideration a solitary plum’ (222). Like a containing vessel, she gathers every precious ‘drop’ of information ‘for immediate bottling, for future preservation’; she receives it on the spot into the ‘crystal flash of her innermost attention’; later, she should be able ‘chemically to analyse it,’ ‘in the snug laboratory of her afterthought’ (230). Fanny’s analytic appetite sublimates a physically passionate temperament, rendered passive. Set off against her ‘amplitude of person’ (64), and her ‘so free orientalism of type’ (296), the Colonel’s soldierly ‘leanness of person’ (86) figures, on a domestic scale, imperial strife against a vast wayward east. The military conceit is introduced through an image of his ‘extremely slender’ jerky foot, on whose ‘good appearance,’ in its ‘neat integuments of fine-spun black silk and patent leather’ he is intently focused. It seemed to confess, this member, to consciousness of military discipline, everything about it being as polished and perfect, as straight and tight and trim, as a soldier on parade. It went so far as to imply that some one or other would have ‘got’ something or other, confinements or barracks or suppression of pay, if it hadn’t been just as it was. (86) The disciplined foot, which carries a thinly disguised sexual charge, suggests repressive, punitive measures of physical containment. Imperial rule is continuous, in this context, with castigation of the body, with its refractory urges. The Colonel’s leanness – quite distinct from physical laxity, and verging on the ‘abnormal’ – seems to have been determined ‘on the part of superior powers by views of transport and accommodations.’ He ‘did’ himself as well as his friends mostly knew, yet remained hungrily thin, with facial, with abdominal cavities quite grim in their effect, and with a consequent looseness of appearance that, combined with a choice of queer light shades and of strange straw-like textures, of the aspect of Chinese mats, provocative of wonder at his sources of supply, suggested the habit of tropical islands, a continual cane-bottomed chair, a governorship exercised on wide verandahs. (86) This preternatural tenuity, a motif familiar from The Wings of the Dove, is complemented by strict habits of thrift. Regimental training enables the Colonel to ‘make economy blossom like a rose’; in retirement, his time is given wholly ‘to the gardening in question’ (65). Life, to him, is primarily a matter of ‘pecuniary arrangement’ (86), a spirit in which he prunes, too, his wife’s superabundant intellect. He edits ‘for their general


economy’ the play of her mind, just as he edits, ‘savingly, with the stump of a pencil, her redundant telegrams’ (87). The childlessness of the Assinghams symbolically attests the deflection of the sexual charge of their relationship, as if for fear of physically devouring and being devoured. The vampire principle plays itself out intellectually, a level at which things can be dealt with ‘without getting near them’ (87). Fanny may perpetrate ‘crimes’ in thought, but the Colonel – luckily for him, as she has it – never drives her back on her ‘nature’ (301). Where her husband is concerned, her affinity for the illicit is expressed in extravagant mockery of his stunted mental faculties, while he struggles to ‘edit’ her mental excesses. With her ‘free orientalism of type,’ she is capable, at a pregnant hour, of falling into sibylline silence, like an ‘immemorially speechless Sphinx, about at last to become articulate.’ The Colonel, on whom the orient has left its deep mark, sets her off then as ‘some old pilgrim of the desert camping at the foot of that monument’ (296). The primary allusion, evidently, is to the Egyptian Sphinx, but the Greek Sphinx, devouring and female, seems to lurk in the background.3 The Greek Sphinx, a composite creature, beast and bird, winged lion, is a kind of emblem of Fanny’s cleft nature, her hungry spirit and devouring flesh. More commonly she is associated not with the desert but with water. The Colonel is given to watching her in her ‘favorite element,’ subtly analyzing social ‘situations,’ much as he has watched the lady at the Aquarium turning somersaults and doing tricks, wearing a slight, though tight, bathing-suit. Fanny is ‘amphibious’ (85) while he is ‘high dry spare’ (301), and she performs for him ‘quite as if he had paid a shilling.’ (85) The suggestion is of a sadistic sexual fantasy, exotic enough to be dissociated from its object almost completely. Empire The interludes at Cadogan Place, scenes of fantasy and strife in a straitened domestic economy, gesture satirically at the mercantile, martial and cultural sway of the British Empire. The Empire is refracted as embattled, abusive and abused, and also as very nearly obsolete. The Colonel’s ‘violence of speech’ calls to Fanny’s mind a retired General, ‘playing with toy soldiers, fighting and winning battles, carrying on sieges and annihilating enemies with little fortresses of wood and little armies of tin’ (85). American expansionism, economic and cultural, is refracted in the subtler and more sinister forms of coercion employed by Adam Verver, in private and in public. He wields a power of ‘insolent’ acquisitiveness,


founded on the appurtenances of the new world, science and machinery, but mobilized for a conquest of the old world, a ‘rifle of the Golden Isles’ (140), where his ship, as Fanny early on remarks, has safely drawn in (60). With the rise of the American Collector, the westward progress of civilization has reached its final stretch; it now reverses its course. In London, Adam is figured as having ‘pitched a tent, suggesting that of Alexander furnished with the spoils of Darius’ (54). The simile points to the eastward extension of his Greek Empire; but as a symbol of imperial energy, the Greek frame of reference, focused on the Golden Isles, is equivocal; the Golden Isles represent the furthest western reach of the Greek world, and Fanny maps them onto a vision of America itself, a real El Dorado of the Gilded Age. The figure of the Golden Isles appears in a context which further complicates the fantasy of imperial expansion embedded in it. The passage is concerned with Adam’s discovery, in midlife, of his vocation as a Patron of Art, and its figural matrix derives from a sonnet by Keats, ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ (1816), lodged in Adam’s mind as ‘Keats’s sonnet about stout Cortez in the presence of the pacific’ (139). ‘It is a revealingly partial reading of the poem which remembers it like this,’ Adrian Poole notes, adding that Adam does not inspire confidence in his ‘capacity for patient wonder’ when we learn, further, that ‘a couple of perusals of the immortal lines had sufficed to stamp them in his memory’ (JSRE, 83; GB, 139). The poem is indeed very striking, and nowhere more so than in its concluding lines, which Adam recalls so vividly; yet Poole does well to spell out James’s whispered suggestion that this latter-day imperialist, ‘all set to “rifle the Golden Isles,” has already rifled poor Keats’s poem’ ( JSRE, 83). But perhaps the passage also reveals a helpless sympathy on James’s part for his looting protagonist. The Keatsian context brings home a sense of the narrowed horizon, of the imaginative belatedness of Adam’s historical moment. The last Jamesian connoisseur bears a family resemblance to a series of predecessors – in the late novels, to Strether, Densher and Sir Luke – of whom he is the most relentlessly ambitious. He numbers himself among ‘the great seers, the invokers and encouragers of beauty,’ who dangle ‘not so far below the great producers and creators’ (140). To speak of critics and patrons as ‘seers’ is of course equivocal; and while the distinction is perhaps not a rigid one, it is nonetheless vexed, in a sense which ‘Chapman’s Homer’ helps bring into focus. The poem, the first of Keats’s full-fledged poetic flights, inhabits a space and a time which are at once concrete and unconstrained. Translation or transmission, literary and imperial, is experienced as an inspired, creative act which is attuned


to the pulsation through it of a reality beyond itself. The revelation of Homer in Chapman is projected through the prism of the Renaissance, a newborn age, whose propulsion toward discovery and appropriation, scientific and geographic, is still, at least in fantasy, innocuous. The sonnet’s octet is antiquarian, medievalized in diction and imagery; it speaks of travels in ‘the realms of gold’ and ‘goodly states and kingdoms,’ of the ‘bards’ of western islands and their ‘fealty to Apollo,’ and of Homer’s maritime ‘demesne.’ At the turn of the sonnet, the register changes, and Keats, like Chapman, speaks ‘out loud and bold.’ Gilded archaism gives way to a sense of vitality and novelty; imaginative serfdom is emancipated into personal perception and expression, strikingly original but faithful, in this, to the live archaic origins of the imagination. Through this crisis of individuation, Keats is liberated into a vision all his own, though steeped in former visions; the vision of a sea – an ocean – never glimpsed by Homer. In the modern, western idiom of both Chapman and Keats, the Aegean is transformed into the Pacific, the furthest western bourn, a ‘pure serene’ waiting to be breathed in by a ‘vessel of sensibility’ (LC II, 1292) both gentle and stout, at once a watcher of the skies – say, a Galileo – and a conqueror of sea and land. In The Golden Bowl, Keatsian Romanticism is translated into fin-de-siècle decadence, and the imperial spirit of Regency England into the plutocratic spirit of Gilded-Age America. Adam Verver is a later heir of the Renaissance than Keats, but also, in a sense, a more distinctive one – a child of the brave new world and a master of the science and machinery that brought this world into being. But the new world of the Gilded Age seems to be aging, without having ripened. In The Golden Bowl, it figures much as it does in George Clemenceau’s pronouncement; America seems to have passed from barbarism to decadence, without achieving any civilization between the two. As with the illness in The Wings of the Dove, the sense is of organic process gone awry, and, correspondingly, of a collapse of space and time, a ‘shrinking hour,’ expressed through the recursive quest of American spirit and fortune, a regressive wish to repossess the Golden Isles of the east. Poole remarks that ‘Keats’s poem keeps a distance between the wondering watcher [of the skies] and the eagle-eyed conqueror, and it arrests the latter before he starts rifling the Golden Isles’ (JSRE, 83). In Adam, the stargazer and the conqueror uncomfortably blend; the serene, pacific space conjured by Keats – a space of negative capability, where such imaginative co-presence is possible, where wonder is sustained, half-knowledge and contradiction are tolerated – is curtailed. In Keatsian as well as in Jamesian poetics, such curtailment amounts to a loss of the


immediate ‘sense of Beauty,’ a sense which in a poet ‘overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration’ (SLJK, 21, Dec 1817, p. 92). The Jamesian connoisseur is a Keatsian poet-manqué, whose relationship to the beautiful is determined by a possessive impulse and who aspires to reach, more or less irritably, beyond ‘doubts, mysteries and uncertainties.’ In point of historical accuracy, it was not Cortez but the less illustrious Balboa who first caught sight of the Pacific from the heights of Darien. That Keats’s conquistador is misnamed is perhaps a matter of fertile half-knowledge, a poet’s creative unconcern for fact and reason. For Adam Verver, however, misidentification, the shadow of inauthenticity, is a haunting concern. His son-in-law, procured for his daughter like a morceau de musée (49), is, the novel stresses, descended from a ‘make-believe’ discoverer. Adam’s expertise allows him to ‘satisfy himself, so to speak,’ about the value of this human acquisition, just as it serves to satisfy him about the Luini purchased at the time of the betrothal (179). The Luini is later referred to again, obliquely, as the ‘early Florentine sacred subject’ (573) which was given to his daughter on her marriage, and which strikes him, along with the Prince, as one of the ‘good things’ she has come to possess though his ‘rare power of purchase’ (574). Labeling a work of the Tuscan painter a ‘Florentine subject’ seems to point to the appraisal of him, prevalent at the time, as a lesser Leonardo, an epigone of the Florentine master, with whom he was frequently confused. For Adam, the ‘question of appearances’ has ceased to count on every ground save the artistic. ‘He cared that a work of art of price should “look like” the master to whom it might perhaps be deceitfully attributed; but he had ceased on the whole to know any matter of the rest of life by its looks’ (144). The peculiar logic of the sentence mimics the warp that characterizes the man; his failure of response to appearances and surfaces is the mark of a profound recessiveness, a detachment of sensibility, which emerges here in conjunction with a collector’s anxiety over misevaluation. His passion for beauty, evoking another Keatsian trope, is bound up with a passion for truth; and doubts about the truth, impossible finally to dispel, riddle his pursuit. His identification, through Keats’s sonnet, with the wrong imperial plunderer suggests a murky mistrust of his aesthetic entitlement. Like a tamer counterpart to Wilde’s Everyman in the ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’ (1898), he seems destined to steal the thing he loves. With other dispossessed Americans of James’s fiction, disinherited heirs of all the ages, he lays a claim he cannot validate to a lost old-world source of plenty.


His quest is impelled by cravings not free from hostility, and by a sense of anxious dependence; there is little enough in it, indeed, to suggest a Keatsian capacity for patient wonder. Adam’s Pacific is a Homeric Aegean, emblem of the Graeco-European cultural sphere. But while his westernness is shaped by regressive urges, his wish is to transplant the Golden Isles, in space and time, to American City, the Bunyanesque setting for his spectacular philanthropic venture. Rather than westernizing the east, he would easternize the west, through the civilizing agency of a museum; at the same time, he would bury the east, its treasures violently uprooted, in the wilderness of the American Midwest. His Midwestern ‘palace of art,’ designed like a Greek temple, takes morbid shape as a great reliquary, a mausoleum whose inauguration is haunted by anticipation of ‘final rites’ (143). Ironically, this palace or temple or burial dome is constructed in the spirit of the Puritan Pilgrims, like a city upon the hill, shining out ‘to bless the land,’ and with the age-old ecclesiastic solidity of ‘a house on a rock’ (142). Earlier, Adam himself is figured as a Bunyanesque Pilgrim; having ascended his ‘hill of difficulty,’ he has reached, in middle age, a platform at its apex, ‘looking down, if one would, on the kingdoms of the earth, and with standing-room for but half a dozen others’ (133). As in The Wings of the Dove, the Miltonic echo serves to suggest the distance of the aspiring spirit from the earth, even when the earth is the object of its pursuit. More poignantly, the suggestion is also of the condescension, the ‘looking down, if one would,’ of the arriviste. Adam’s civilizing effort betrays, above all, a need to browbeat America’s barbarians with his marmoreal bequest. On the eve of his marriage, the Prince anticipates his own entombment in the opulent sepulcher (50); he would be a ‘representative precious object,’ with the ‘great marks and signs,’ the ‘high authenticities’ of ‘pieces of the first order’ (139). For Adam, we come to perceive, the first order is devotional, hieratic; he tastes of experience, as if officiating at an ongoing Eucharistic service, from a figurative precious receptacle, ‘a little glass cut with a fineness of which the art had long been lost, and kept in an old morocco case stamped in uneffaceable gilt with the arms of a deposed dynasty’ (179). The imagery evokes a fissure or rupture in the texture of Adam’s consciousness, and with this, the sealed-off, insular quality of his being. It is difficult not to read ‘uneffaceable guilt’ into the history of the deposed dynasty which is at once his own and not his own, usurped and disowned – a connection whose gilded surface is cut off from its darker depths. The museum of American City is erected as a ‘monument to the religion he wished to propagate, the


exemplary passion, the passion for perfection at any price’ (143). The price of Adam’s perfectionism, and its motive force, is a buried destructiveness, stamped inversely, it appears, as strenuous denial, on his conscious experience, like gold coating on a fragile vessel. A link between the physical structure of the museum and Adam’s psychic involution is forged through the chiming of the image of the ‘shell’ constructed for the building with the image of Adam’s emulation of the ‘snail,’ his slowness and reserve in pursuing his plan (143). Armored withdrawnness turns here into monumentalized self-regard, a condition evoked again in another context, seemingly distant but deeply congruous; in James’s memoirs, Tennyson’s poetic posture is said to display the mystified quality of the Bard ‘as through the supposed veils of its long self-consciousness’ (Ab, 594). Such muffling of the self is reflected in the dazzling white curtain, the mist or veil in which Adam’s mind appears to the Prince to be ‘shrouded’ (57). Elsewhere, we find Adam aching for the ‘impersonal whiteness’ into which ‘the many-coloured human appeal,’ with its ‘gradations of tint, diminishing concentric zones of intensity, of importunity,’ must ultimately fade. ‘It shaded off, the appeal – he would have admitted that; but he had as yet noted no point at which it positively stopped’ (130). The wish to divest humanity of its variegated appeal has its match in a financier’s colorless mental regimen: ‘Variety of imagination – what is that but fatal in the world of affairs unless so disciplined as not to be distinguished from monotony?’ In the years of amassing his fortune, he was ‘inscrutably monotonous behind an iridescent cloud,’ and the cloud has remained ‘his native envelope – the soft looseness, so to say, of his temper and tone, not directly expressive enough, no doubt, to figure an amplitude of folds, but of a quality unmistakable for sensitive feelers’ (131). At issue here, in part, is an ambivalent matrix, continuous with Jonathan Freedman’s argument in Professions of Taste, which links fin-desiècle aestheticism with the culture of the marketplace; a latter-day man of imagination is inwardly polarized between the urge to master the forces of the market and the urge to escape them, and the polarity threatens, always, to collapse into sameness. Such effacement of difference is evoked through the reference to Poe, whose figure of a dazzling white curtain, ‘concealing as darkness conceals,’ is strongly resonant with Adam’s ‘type.’ Poe’s nationality acquires a special significance, here; his penchant for mystification shows, in the Prince’s phrase, ‘what imagination Americans could have’ (56). Configured in terms of the international theme, the suggestion is that polar extremes, like the


North and South Poles in Gordon Pym, America and Europe, market and art, are liable to lose their contrastive distinctiveness. Adam’s celebrity, it is said, is recognized in ‘two hemispheres’ (513), eastern and western; but the psycho-spatial extension of these spheres is imperiled by his scheme of dismantling the east, for artificial reconstitution in the west. Through Poe, the imaginative strain of destruction and refabrication links up directly with Symbolist aesthetics; and it is the Prince who, as if to dramatize his Poevian insight, embodies in his role as an animate museum piece the siphoning off of subjectivity from the aesthetic sphere he has come to inhabit. In the mythology subtly woven, for the Prince, around fictional fact, his two lines of descent fork from a common source in an ancestral annus mirabilis, 1492, when Cardinal Borgia was elected Pope and Columbus embarked on his first voyage to the West Indies. At his late moment, pervaded with a sense of depletion and waste, the Prince experiences the centripetal attraction of a lost archaic identity, but also a centrifugal counter-urge, associated with the progress of science and machinery. Hereditary futility is ‘screened out,’ as by a mechanically operated iron shutter or plate glass (52–3), a crude but functional mechanism of dissociation. Elsewhere, a ‘lightning elevator’ figures a mechanism of dissociation, abridgment and displacement. The ‘moral sense’ of the old world resembles a ‘tortuous stone staircase – half-ruined into the bargain! – in some castle of our quattrocento’; the Prince contrasts it to ‘the ‘lightning elevator’ in one of Mr Verver’s fifteen story buildings.’ The American moral sense ‘works by steam – it sends you up like a rocket. Ours is slow and steep and unlighted, with so many of the steps missing that – well, that it’s as short in almost any case to turn round and come down again’ (62). If the moral order of the old world is backward, it is also psychologically grounded, cognizant of the gravitational force that operates, often tortuously, on the human fabric. American morality, on the other hand, strives for a skyscraping, transcendental rectitude, removed from the sphere of full-bodied human complexity. At the inception of the Prince’s adulterous affair with Charlotte, this division between mental and bodily experience is portrayed with great poignancy; Charlotte follows the Butler at Portland Place up to the landing from which the Prince’s room opens, and reaches the door panting from the effect of the staircase. In thought and speech, however, she mounts, after the Butler’s departure, ‘with the whizz and the red light of a rocket, from the form to the fact: ‘What else, my dear, what in the world can we do?’ (249)


Heritage For the Prince, the dream of a scientific future is undermined by the haunting return of the past, of old-world superstition bound up with human complexities. Charlotte, like a folkloric figure of ill omen, returns from America on the eve of his marriage, and raises these specters. Upon arriving, she inquires of him when the wedding is to take place: on Friday? – on Saturday? ‘Oh on Friday, no! For what do you take us? There’s not a vulgar omen we’re neglecting. On Saturday, please, at the Oratory, at three o’clock – before twelve assistants exactly.’ ‘Twelve including me?’ It struck him – he laughed. ‘You’ll make the thirteenth. It won’t do!’ ‘Not,’ said Charlotte, ‘if you’re going in for ‘omens.’ Should you like me to stay away?’ (81) The Prince proposes, instead, that they should have in ‘some old woman,’ of the kind kept in churches for such purposes, to round the number. The omens return, however, in a different, more pressingly personal guise, when Charlotte tries to persuade him to accept as a gift from her the gilded bowl with the hidden flaw. The object is exquisite, he concedes, and therefore dangerous: ‘Per Dio I’m superstitious! A crack’s a crack – and an omen’s an omen’ (123). Charlotte argues that if, as he fears, ‘we may perish by cracks in things that we don’t know,’ then for absolute safety gift-giving should be avoided altogether (123); but the Prince is confident of his ability to discern invisible cracks ‘by instinct’; ‘I don’t fail. That will always protect me’ (124). The instinct for safety of which he speaks entails a rift of another sort, produced through disengagement, a rupture mirrored here by a twofold break, in speech and typography: ‘Anything you consent to accept from me –’ But he paused. ‘Well?’ ‘Well, shall be perfect.’ (124) He is thinking, specifically, of a flawless offering on the occasion of her marriage, which must materialize for him, as he frankly confesses, as the occasion for casting her off (124).


In giving, his fear is of staking out a hidden core of self, of subjecting it to a disruptive process of becoming known. His vision, after Poe, of a ‘great white curtain’ which separates him from his prospective relations bears out his sense of the opacity, to them, of his ‘personal quantity.’ In conversation with Maggie, he seems anxious that this quantity find expression, so that he may escape ‘futility’; but in a later, introspective passage, it is the idea of self-realization, measured against ‘the quantity of confidence’ reposed in him by the Ververs, which proves to be laden with anxiety. He knows he is the subject of ‘general expectation,’ an expectation not so much of anything in particular as a large bland blank assumption of merits almost beyond notation, of essential quality and value. It was as if he had been some old embossed coin, of a purity of gold no longer used, stamped with glorious arms, medieval, wonderful, of which the worth in mere modern change, sovereigns and half-crowns, would be great enough, but as to which, since there were finer ways of using it, such taking to pieces was superfluous. That was the image for the security in which it was open to him to rest. He was to constitute a possession yet escape being reduced to his component parts. What would this mean but that practically he was never to be tried or tested? What would it mean but that if they didn’t ‘change’ him they really wouldn’t know – he wouldn’t know himself – how many pounds, shillings and pence he had to give? (56–7) Beyond the avowed need to have his mettle tried, the passage registers the force of his resistance to being ‘changed’ in the process – reduced, fragmented, wasted through material investment. The mystery beyond the veil, the ‘white mist’ of the Ververs’ confidence, emerges for him as a question of required action: ‘It would come to asking what they expected him to do.’ They, however, would look at the matter differently: ‘Oh, you know, it’s what we expect you to be!’ (57). The license is to remain in essential integrity, preserving the indivisible, ‘ameristic’ quality traditionally attributed to the soul and echoed in his Christian name. This, however, is also a state of obsolescence, of a ‘purity of gold no longer used.’ Like the lost art of glasswork which captures Adam’s imagination, or the deposed dynasty whose arms are stamped on his glass in uneffaceable gilt, the Prince has the paradoxical, fragmentary integrity of a relic, frozen in time. The feeling which prevails with him is that, ‘say what they might,’ the Ververs’


estimate of him would subject him, sooner or later, to ‘the practical proof’ (57); he would be to taken apart, reduced to ever smaller pieces. For the present, however, he allows himself to be purchased all of a piece, a perfect fragment. ‘You’re a rarity,’ Maggie tells him, ‘an object of beauty, an object of price. You’re not perhaps absolutely unique, but you’re so curious and eminent that there are very few others like you – you belong to a class about which everything is known. You’re what they call a morceau de musée’ (49). A treasure of this order, about which everything is known, inspires concern rather than confidence, as if its fissiparous nature might reveal itself at any moment. The Ververs pour their ‘extraordinary American good faith’ into the Prince in the form of pecuniary liquidity, as a kind of ambivalent apotropaic measure, which courts the very treachery it would avert. This special fluid of good faith seems to have sweetened the waters in which he now floated, tinted them as by the action of some essence, poured from some gold-topped phial, for making one’s bath aromatic. No one before him, never – not even the infamous Pope – had so sat up to his neck in such a bath. It showed for that matter how little one of his race could escape after all from history. What was it but history, and of their kind very much, to have the assurance of enjoyment of more money than the palace-builder himself could have dreamed of? This was the element that bore him up and into which Maggie scattered, on occasion, her exquisite coloring drops. (48) Maggie ministers in this way to his sensuous immersion, even while she pictures her faith in him as a watertight compartment or a car, aboard a steamer or a fast-moving train, in her father’s world of ‘vast modern machineries and facilities’ (51). Anxiety lurks in the way her sense of the ‘watertight’ in relation to the Prince tends to overrun itself, as if her defenses were prone to precipitous collapse: ‘Water-tight – the biggest compartment of all? Why it’s the best cabin and the main deck and the engine-room and the steward’s pantry! It’s the ship itself – it’s the whole line. It’s the captain’s table and all one’s luggage – one’s reading for the trip.’ Elsewhere, we recall, her reading for the trip, the promised occupation of her future, is the annals of the Prince’s history, a more literal corpus and less than perfectly suited to the cultivation of pervasive trust. Maggie’s dissociations and denials are produced in response to an anxiety-laden imagination not only of deceit, but also, inextricably, of love; she fears the profundities of intimacy as much as its betrayals.


The surface buoyancy of maritime lines is tensely linked, for her, with the depth of genealogical lines, submerged historical cargo, both fearful and alluring, familiar and strange. Her surface mobility resists historical depth, but also leads into it. The rarefied, watertight medium of her consciousness transforms through contact with the Prince; it materializes, condenses into lubricous substance, even as her abstract fortune liquefies. Financial lubrication turns into sensuous lubricity, a sweet and scented, nutritive element which is also stifling, debilitative, ‘devouring’ (179). The novel opens, in this spirit, with a vision of imperial possession beset by a sense of passivity, displacement and fragmentation: The Prince had always liked his London, when it had come to him; he was one of the Modern Romans who find by the Thames a more convincing image of the truth of the ancient state than any they had left by the Tiber. Brought up on the legend of the City to which the world paid tribute, he recognised in the present London, much more than in contemporary Rome, the real dimensions of such a case. If it was a question of an Imperium, he said to himself, and if one wished, as a Roman, to recover a little the sense of that, the place to do so was on London Bridge, or even, on a fine afternoon in May, at Hyde Park corner. (44) At present, he encounters London in August, at the turn of the season, with the ‘flush of the streets’ beginning to fade. He strays into Bond Street, his gaze attracted fitfully by objects displayed in the shops and by women of fashion passing him on the pavement or seated in carriages. His imagination, working at comparatively short range, caused him now and then to stop before a window in which objects massive and lumpish, in silver and gold, in the forms to which precious stones contribute, or in leather, steel, brass, applied to a hundred uses and abuses, were as tumbled together as if, in the insolence of Empire, they had been the loot of far off victories. The young man’s movements, however, betrayed no consistency of attention – not even, for that matter, when one of his arrests had proceeded from his possibilities in faces shaded, as they passed him on the pavement, by huge beribboned hats, or more delicately tinted still under the tense silk of parasols held at perverse angles in waiting victorias. (44; my emphases) Objects, aesthetic and human, seem to fail to take shape, for the Prince, as meaningful wholes, just as past and present fail to assume distinctive,


continuous contours; the loot of Empire is massive and lumpish and tumbled together, and the faces of women recede behind a disjointed display of accessories no less bewildering in their multiple uses and abuses. The taut, punctuated acoustic texture of ‘or more delicately tinted still under the tense silk of parasols,’ formed against the drawn-out, drifting cadence of the sentence, captures the close proximity, as in the insistent idiom of the fin de siècle, of the delicate and the perverse. In the reigning confusion the passage records, the resonance of far-off imperial ‘victories’ with the idle ‘victorias’ is telling; the sense is of the end of an era and the decline of an empire, made palpable, above all, by the recent death of Queen Victoria. In February 1901, James elegized her in a letter to Oliver Wendell Holmes: I mourn the safe and motherly old middle-class queen, who held the nation warm under the fold of her big, hideous scotch-plaid shawl and whose duration had been so extraordinarily convenient and beneficent. I felt her death much more than I should have expected; she was a sustaining symbol – and the wild waters are upon us now. (L, IV, 184) In the multiple ‘victories’ and ‘victorias’ the Prince imagines and beholds, the single ‘sustaining symbol’ that was the queen seem to break into fragments. Empire, once a tightly holding maternal space, collapses into watery chaos; but Empire itself, with its middle-class queen and her big, hideous marsupial fold, seems aberrant, its provision of safety illusory; the evocation is of an unnatural, unnaturally protracted gestation. The opening movement of the novel conjures a vision of Empire internally fractured. At Bond Street, on the eve of his marriage, the Prince appears, reflexively, both as looter and loot, imperial heir and collectible item. ‘Capture’ crowns his pursuit, but the energy of pursuit turns against itself, and he becomes his own captive; his fate is sealed with ‘something of the grimness of a crunched key in the strongest lock that could be made’ (44). When his effort is consummated, he finds himself at the point of being consumed. As a gentleman, like his future father-in-law, he belongs to a species of edible, gallinaceous birds. ‘I’m like a chicken, at best,’ he tells Maggie, ‘chopped up and smothered in sauce, cooked down as a crème de volaille, with half the parts left out. Your father’s the natural fowl running about the basse-cour. His feathers, his movements, his sounds – those are the parts that with me are left


out.’ ‘Ah, as a matter of course –’ Maggie replies, ‘Since you can’t eat a chicken alive’ (46). The Prince counters that in his desire for American vitality he is, precisely, eating her father alive – ‘which is the only way to taste him.’ The joke refracts his buried aggression through a prism of archetypal civilizing forms, those of gastronomic connoisseurship. Later, we witness Adam’s American verve (here the link to his biblical type, the original Adam, is most immediately present) consumed by the ‘devouring element’ of his passion (179). 'Eaton Square,' the town house he occupies with Charlotte after their marriage, is aptly named. On the brink of the marriage, the pair travels to Paris, an archetypal scene of oldworld Eros, which figures for him in terms of dismemberment and consumption. The air is susceptible of being ‘tasted,’ its density inimical to flight. The hotel court is overarched and glazed, muffled against loud sounds and guarded against crude sights, heated, gilded, draped, almost carpeted, with exotic trees in tubs, exotic ladies in chairs, the general exotic accent and presence suspended, as with wings folded or feebly fluttering, in the superior, the supreme, the inexorably enveloping Parisian medium, it resembled some critical apartment of large capacity, some ‘dental,’ medical, surgical waiting-room, a scene of mixed anxiety and desire, preparatory, for gathered barbarians, to the due amputation or extraction of excrescences and redundancies of barbarism. (204) But if Adam joins a throng of barbarians here, elsewhere he figures as an ‘infant king,’ who, for all his physical insignificance, represents the force of a dynasty (267). He is particularly associated with the Georgians, above all with the flamboyant orientalism of the Prince Regent. At Fawns, a door in the wall opening into the ‘old’ garden, ‘old with the antiquity of formal things,’ is said to have a slab with a date set above it, ‘1713, but with the old multiplied lettering’ (152). Queen Anne died in 1713, and was succeeded in the following year by the first King George. Fawns is a hired estate, an ancestral home whose proprietor is established thriftily in a minor residence, ‘within sight and sense of his profit’ (153). This circumstance serves to focus, for Adam, the double image of dynastic heir and looting barbarian, deposer of dynasties. The Ververs are western barbarians, but they take royal possession of their English abode. The Principino – born in New York, ironically – has for his use vast private apartments, ‘not much more easily accessible than if the place had been a royal palace, and the small child an heir-apparent’ (150). A gift received from his grandfather ‘early in his career’ remains housed at


Fawns until the family departs – an ‘ample antique historical royal crib, consecrated reputedly by the guarded rest of heirs-apparent’ (536). The royal crib links up, in this context, with another receptacle, the titular golden bowl, which Maggie purchases, in the latter half of the novel, as a gift for her father. The fictional bowl is associated with an actual one, another ‘ample antique historical royal’ gift – a golden bowl given by the first King George to the Lamb family, whose ancestral home in Rye came into James’s possession in 1897. Leon Edel writes of the historical bowl: During the Christmas season of 1902, James had an opportunity to view, in a vault at the local bank, an objet d’art which belonged to the descendants of the Lambs, whose house he now owned. It was a golden bowl, presented by George I when, during his stay in Lamb House, he attended the christening of a recently born baby in the family. To one of the Lamb descendants, James wrote that ‘this admirable and venerable object’ had ‘a beautiful colour – the tone of old gold – as well as a grand style and capacity.’ He added that he was eager for ‘every ascertainable fact’ about Lamb House, the ‘charming, graceful, sturdy little habitation’ in which he hoped ‘in time (D.V.) to end my days.’ (HJL, 582)4 The royal bowl and the royal crib suggest something of the complexity inherent, for James, in dynastic or genealogical imagination. Such imagination is haunted by fears and fantasies of rifts and ruptures, dislocations, depositions and usurpations. Adam Verver and Prince Amerigo are at once usurpers and Pretenders, indeterminately Young and Old. Adam’s symbolic affiliation reaches back to the first deposition of a monarch in the history of England, and to a dynasty which long antecedes the Georgians and the Jacobite Pretenders; he is associated with Edward II, the deposed and murdered Plantagenet king entombed at Gloucester. Dynastic legitimacy, conceived as part of a civilizing order, gives rise to anxieties and desires which center on amputation and extraction, consuming and being consumed. The pattern is revealed in relation to Adam and the Prince, and extends finally to the Principino. To his grandfather, the boy, like other human specimens of value, is a morceau de musée; the difference is that this most precious of the collector’s ‘precious small pieces’ lends itself freely to being handled. Adam can ‘manipulate and dandle’ him, ‘already almost toss and catch again,’ as he cannot ‘a correspondingly rare morsel of an earlier pâte tendre’ (144). The language selfconsciously points to a cannibal fantasy, inscribed into the image of the Principino as a morsel of the ‘tender paste’ of eighteenth-century porcelain. The psycho-cultural genealogy of Europe is perceived here


as a phantasmal record of the individual’s disintegration, ingestion and absorption.

II Architecture Pavilion and Forge If civilization, in its extension into Empire, has physical attributes, it emerges as voracious, omnivorous; with this, however, it seems to suffer from a weak digestion, an impaired capacity for absorption and retention. It ingests and interiorizes its objects, but the interior, imperfectly distinguished from externality through constant impingement on it, remains in fragments, cluttered with ill-accommodated spoil. The Prince’s flânerie on Bond Street gives rise to such a vision of ‘civilization condensed,’ as does the museum of American City, and the curiosity shop at Bloomsbury which numbers the golden bowl among its treasures. The collection at the Bloomsbury shop is distinguished by Napoleonic objects, dimmed or damaged vestiges of a recently fallen empire. These relics are eastern, in part, and contained within an eastern frame – handled like pieces in a game of chess by a Jewish antiquarian. The space is close and cavernous, but flatness and fragmentariness are figured by the array of objects displayed as on a chessboard. This spatial effect finds its stylistic counterpart in the interlarding of the syntax – here as much as ever a faceted, multidimensional medium – with asyndetonic cataloging sequences. Of decent old gold, old silver, old bronze, of old chased and jewelled artistry, were the objects that, successively produced, had ended by numerously dotting the counter where the shopman’s slim light fingers, with neat nails, touched them at moments, briefly, nervously, tenderly, as those of a chess-player rest, a few seconds, over the board, on a figure he thinks he may move and then may not: small florid ancientries, ornaments, pendants, lockets, brooches, buckles, pretexts for dim brilliants, bloodless rubies, pearls either too large or too opaque for value; miniatures mounted with diamonds that had ceased to dazzle; snuff-boxes presented to – or by – the too-questionable great; cups, trays, taper stands, suggestive of pawn-tickets, archaic and brown, that would themselves, if preserved, have been prized curiosities. A few commemorative medals of neat outline but dull reference; a classic monument or two, things of the first years of the century; things consular, Napoleonic, temples, Obelisks, arches, tinily re-embodied,


completed the discreet cluster; in which, however, even after tentative re-enforcement from several quaint rings, intaglios, amethysts, carbuncles, each of which had found a home in the ancient sallow satin of some weakly-snapping little box, there was, in spite of the due proportion of faint poetry, no great force of persuasion. (115) The sense of refinement coupled with weakness is evoked again in the representation of the Parisian hotel where Charlotte accepts Adam’s proposal of marriage. Here too, the ambiance, surgical and devouring, has an oriental flavor; it is overheated and ubiquitously ‘exotic’ (204). At Brighton, where the proposal is precipitated, the ‘devouring element,’ a consuming mixture in Adam of artistic and erotic passion, emerges elaborately in relation to the orient. His resolve figures as a conflagration, a ‘burning of his ships’ (191). The image-cluster generated around the sacrifice of these vessels, the lurid grandeur, red glow, crackle and blaze of the combustion (192–5), intensifies the association of the city, as of Venice in The Wings of the Dove, with the south and the sea. In the preceding novels, Paris and Venice are experienced through and against a dominant architectural presence – Notre Dame Cathedral in the first instance, and St Mark’s Cathedral in the second. Here, in a similar vein, Brighton vibrates against the presence, implicit but vividly felt, of the Prince Regent’s Coleridgean pleasure dome, the Royal Pavilion. The Pavilion serves as a kind of real-life counterpart to Maggie’s fantasized Pagoda, the complex symbol of her marriage with which the second volume opens. The scene at the Brighton hotel registers a sense of the place as pervasively, indiscriminately eastern, swarming with ‘types,’ and resounding with ‘a din in which the wild music of gilded and befrogged bands, Croatian, Dalmatian, Carpathian, violently exotic and nostalgic, was distinguished against the perpetual popping of corks’ (189). For Adam, the setting ministers to an absorption of consciousness in a dense communal medium. Away from the ‘noble privacy’ of Fawns, he is conducted by Charlotte, in a ‘flattered passive state,’ into ‘the high pitch and high colour of the public sphere’ (189). The public sphere, Charlotte’s native element, is made present, above all, through ritualized eating and drinking at the house of Mr Gutermann-Seuss, the Jewish art dealer. (The name, partly in tune with the scatological resonance of ‘Assingham,’ suggests ‘gut,’ ‘gutter’ and ‘sewers.’) By means of a curious shift in narrative focus, Mr Gutermann-Seuss, the head of a gregarious exotic ‘tribe,’ is portrayed in terms of mysterious kinship with Charlotte,


whose indeterminate ‘race-quality’ (77) suggests that she has in her the blood of every race (294). To the casual eye a mere smart and shining youth of less than thirty summers, faultlessly appointed in every particular, he yet stood among his progeny – eleven in all as he confessed without a sigh, eleven little brown clear faces, yet with such impersonal old eyes and astride of such impersonal old noses – while he entertained the great American collector whom he had so long hoped he might meet, and whose charming companion, the handsome frank familiar young lady, presumably Mrs Verver, noticed the graduated offspring, noticed the fat ear-ringed aunts and the glossy cockneyfied, familiar uncles, inimitable of accent and assumption, and of an attitude of cruder intention than that of the head of the firm; noticed everything as from the habit of a person finding her account at any time, according to a wisdom well learned of life, in almost any ‘funny’ impression. (190; my italics) The tribal element is represented here, very nearly, as Charlotte’s own. The modulation of reflective centers bears out an affinity with the dealer, and her ‘familiar’ attitude chimes with the less appealing familiarity of the glossy cockneyfied uncles. Implicitly, too, there is an affinity with the clear-faced aged children; before long, in response to Adam’s proposal, she will speak of herself as old, in counterpoint to his lingering youthfulness (193). Charlotte seems to draw her suitor into the tribal fold, and they partake of a sacramental repast, a mixture of Catholicism and orientalism suggestive at once of Communion and of Marriage. With ‘the renewed encompassment of the tribe,’ Adam feels ‘quite merged in the elated circle formed by the girl’s free response to the collective caress of the shining eyes, and by her genial acceptance of the heavy cake and port wine that, as she was afterwards to note, added to their transaction, for a finish, the touch of some mystic rite of old Jewry’ (192). The transaction, literally the purchase of a set of blue damascene tiles, is also the purchase of Charlotte sexually; it is this latter acquisition which is marked by the touch of a mystic rite, a heterodox marriagefeast. A ‘charlotte,’ we may recall, is a French dessert; the cake and wine consumed communally with the Gutermann-Seusses are symbolic of Charlotte’s body and blood, in an act of sacrificial sexual consummation. Through the transaction with Mr Gutermann-Seuss, Charlotte is invested with an artistic and pecuniary value, even as the oriental tiles are eroticized. Artistic and sexual acquisitiveness are conflated, and the


pecuniary element taps a transgressive fantasy of prostitution – the ‘harlotry,’ coupled with ‘charlatanism,’ her name evokes. Charlotte’s very presence, apt and able, in the separate room where the tiles change hands, is transgressive; no companion of Cortez could have been, in Adam’s phrase, ‘a real lady’ (141), and the force of the analogy is palpable at this moment. His late wife – presumably a real lady – might have prevented him from reaching his Darien, scaling the ‘vertiginous Peak’ of aesthetic connoisseurship (141); Charlotte, on the other hand, physically accompanies him, on quitting the Gutermann-Seusses, to the promontory he has chosen for making his proposal: a great consolidated cliff overlooking the city of stucco, architecturally perched, the rumbling beach and the rising evening tide, and ‘the close neighbourhood of a great replete community about to assist anew at the removal of dish-covers’ (193). Adam’s peak of connoisseurship is a condition apart, seamy but circumscribed, dissociated from the general decency of his character. It was all at bottom in him, the aesthetic principle, planted where it could burn with a cold still flame, where it fed almost wholly on the material directly involved, on the idea (followed by the appreciation) of plastic beauty, of the thing visibly perfect of its kind; where, in short, despite the general tendency of the ‘devouring element’ to spread, the rest of his spiritual furniture, modest scattered and tended with unconscious care, escaped the consumption that in so many cases proceeds from the undue keeping-up of profane altarfires. Adam Verver had in other words learned the lesson of the senses, to the end of his own little book, without having for a day raised the smallest scandal in his economy at large; being in this particular not unlike those fortunate bachelors or other gentlemen of pleasure who so manage their entertainment of their compromising company that even the austere housekeeper, occupied and competent below-stairs, never feels obliged to give warning. (179) At Mr Gutermann-Seuss’s, Charlotte comes to embody and be embodied in Adam’s ‘compromising company’; she absorbs into herself the Eros with which his artistic acquisitions are charged, and imparts to them the quality of her own erotic appeal. The treasure itself here, the objects on behalf of which Mr Verver’s interest had been booked, established quickly enough their claim to engage the latter’s attention; yet at what point of his past did our


friend’s memory, looking back and back, catch him, in any such place, thinking so much less of wares artfully paraded than of some other and quite irrelevant pleasures? Such places weren’t strange to him when they took the form of bourgeois back parlours, a trifle ominously grey and grim from their north light, at watering-places prevailingly homes of humbug, or even when they wore some aspect still less, if not perhaps still more, insidious. He had been everywhere, pried and prowled everywhere, going, on occasion, so far as to risk, he believed, life, health and the very bloom of honour; but where, while precious things, extracted one by one from thrice-locked yet often vulgar drawers and soft satchels of old oriental silk, were impressively ranged before him, had he till now let himself, in consciousness, wander like one of the vague? (190–1) If Charlotte’s presence produces in her companion an unwonted vagueness, it also heightens his susceptibility to the Eros of the objects: The damascene tiles, successively and oh so tenderly unmuffled and revealed, lay there at last in their full harmony and their venerable splendour, but the tribute of appreciation and decision was, while the spectator considered, simplified to a point that but just failed of representing levity on the part of the man who had always acknowledged without shame in such affairs the intrinsic charm of what was called discussion. The infinitely ancient, immemorial amethystine blue of the glaze, scarcely more meant to be breathed upon than the cheek of royalty – this property of the ordered and matched array had inevitably all its determination for him; but his submission was, perhaps for the first time in his life, of the quick mind alone, the process really itself, in its way, as fine as the perfection perceived and admired: every inch of the rest of him being given to the foreknowledge that an hour or two later he should have ‘spoken.’ (191) It is Adam’s ‘quick mind alone’ which determines the purchase, but its subtle movement eroticizes the blue glaze, in a fantasy of kissing a royal cheek. Such arousal is the fruit of impossible contiguity between pure mentality and pure plasticity; it is figured as unrealizable physical contact, tactility as faint as a gentle exhalation. Later, still apparently unmindful of ‘the felicity of his acquisition and the figure of his cheque, quite equally high,’ his purchase fuels his imagination of the anticipated intimate passage with Charlotte; her silence when he seals the


transaction generates in him an expectation of ‘deferred criticism as fragrant as some joy promised a lover by his mistress, or as a big bridal bouquet held patiently behind her’ (192). The figure of his check, which has been named in her presence, is closely associated in his mind with his intention to ‘speak.’ He finds a sentimental link, an obligation of delicacy, or perhaps even one of the penalties of its opposite, in his having exposed her to the north light, the quite properly hard business-light, of the room in which they had been alone with the treasure and its master. She had listened to the name of the sum he was capable of looking in the face. Given the relation of intimacy with him she had already beyond all retraction accepted, the stir of the air produced […] by the high figure struck him as a thing that, from the moment she had exclaimed or protested as little as he himself had apologised, left him but one thing more to do. A man of decent feeling didn’t’ thrust his money, a huge lump of it, in such a way, under a poor girl’s nose – a girl whose poverty was, after a fashion, the very basis of her enjoyment of his hospitality – without seeing, logically, a responsibility attached. (192) Sentiment is chillingly linked, here, to a breach of delicacy. The duality that structures Adam’s experience is captured symbolically by the figure of his check; this inordinate immaterial sum represents an impulse of recoil into abstraction, but also a counter-impulse, which feeds on the attraction between spirit and matter. It is suggestive, in particular, of the cost to the spirit of contact with matter. The encounter between these principles occurs for him precipitously, at the point where pecuniary interest is fixed on inanimate matter – the point where consciousness skirts embodied life. The purchase of Charlotte with the oriental tiles, her refraction in an object flat and fragmented, lets surface the life-denying quality of Adam’s intimate dealings. If Charlotte is ‘morbid’ (206), as he later puts it, her sensibility finds its match in his. Clay, earth and even, by association, decaying human flesh, are part of the materiality of the tiles. The clay is glazed over, however; its heavenly blue is emblematic of a polarized spiritual urge, an enveloping layer contiguous with matter but also dissociated from it. The glaze calls to mind the single remarkable feature of Adam’s appearance, his ambiguous blue gaze. His eyes are ‘almost strangely beautiful’ (161), not least, perhaps, because of the operation in and through them of a defensive rigidity, with a particular aesthetic appeal – a quality as of ceramic glaze,


like the pâte tendre or vieux Saxe of his chinoiseries, but reminiscent, too, of the pearls in The Tempest, rich and strange. Adam’s eyes are open equally to light and dark, admitting both ‘the morning and the evening in unusual quantities.’ They resemble ‘a pair of ample and uncurtained windows,’ but there is ‘the ambiguity of your scarcely knowing if they most carried their possessor’s vision out or most opened themselves to your own’ (161). They have the opacity of a curtain of light, concealing as darkness conceals. The Prince’s eyes, in contrast, are like ‘the high window of a Roman palace, of an historic front by one of the great old designers, thrown open on a feast-day to the golden air’ (69); for this heir of the Renaissance, the air circulates and the gaze moves freely, sociably, between the private and the public space. The tense proximity of opposites, as in the chromatic pattern of white, black and blue, recalls the compression of Milly’s trajectory, the absence of modulation in her passage from the vertiginous heights of spirit to the nadir of flesh. Milly is figured as ‘an angel with a thumping bankaccount,’ and Adam as ‘an angel with a human curiosity’ (173); the attributes are assigned with some poignancy, but there is a clear family resemblance between the angels. Like Milly, Adam is at once an ‘infinite agent’ (133) and a Christlike ‘incredible little idealist’ (237). Christlike, he is susceptible to being betrayed, and destined to be sacrificed. Maggie pictures him pleading with her: ‘“Sacrifice me, my own love; do sacrifice me, do sacrifice me!” Should she want to, should she insist on it she might verily hear him bleating at her, all conscious and all accommodating, like some precious spotless exceptionally intelligent lamb’ (382). His passage from the ‘years of darkness’ to the ‘years of light’ (142), from the period of amassing a fortune to the period of aesthetic connoisseurship, is represented, incongruously, as both abrupt and static, with ‘acquisition of one sort’ serving as ‘a perfect preliminary to acquisition of another’ (142). The dark years were in fact illuminated by a light of their own, and animated by the familiar opposition between transcendent idea and gross matter. He dealt in ‘transcendent calculation and imaginative gambling,’ but these required ‘forging and sweating,’ ‘polishing and piling up his arms’ (142). Like an Olympian blacksmith in a ‘strange workshop of fortune,’ he dwelt in and wrought upon ‘the chamber of his brain. This establishment, mysterious and almost anonymous, the windows of which, at hours of the highest pressure, never seemed, for starers and wonderers, perceptibly to glow, must in fact have been during certain years the scene of an unprecedented, a miraculous white-heat, the


receipt for producing which it was practically felt that the master of the forge couldn’t have communicated even with the best intentions. The essential pulse of the flame, the very action of the cerebral temperature, brought to the highest point, yet extraordinarily contained – these facts themselves were the immensity of the result; they were one with perfection of machinery, they had constituted a kind of acquisitive power engendered and applied, the necessary triumph of all operations. (130–1) This ‘master of the forge,’ the pulse of whose harnessed flame is expressed with equal force as ‘acquisitive power’ in business and in artistic patronage, inspires thoughts about a forged, factitious identity – defensively polarized, segmented, resistant to what James speaks of as a ‘principle of growth’ (AA, 132; LC II, 1120). The fear of forgery which haunts his chosen métier is suggestive, in this sense; his possessive but rigidly confined relation to objects of value creates psychic elisions or lacunae in the sphere of full-bodied human contact. His meager physique, with a ‘concave little stomach’ (161), has its temperamental counterpart in a failure to recognize and inhabit bodily space. The unvarying, geometrically patterned arrangement of his clothes, dotted and checkered in white, black and blue, ‘quaintly indifferent to climates and seasons’ (161), reflects his leaning toward abstraction, away from bodily presence. In his devouring passion for art, he seems to rule over a Keatsian realm of gold, a timeless ‘cold pastoral,’ above all breathing human passion. Arbor and Gallery Fawns, with its Greek arbor, is portrayed, in part, as a factitious Arcadia. The imagery through which it is introduced conveys plasticity and marked contrasts, and a sense of flatness rather than depth. The large clear windows of the house, like Adam’s ample uncurtained eyes, look out ‘into spaces of terrace and garden, of park and woodland and shining artificial lake, of richly condensed horizon, all dark blue upland and church-towered village and strong cloud-shadow […]’ (129). A little old church ‘on the “property”’ is, to Adam, another museum piece he would have been glad to transport, ‘as it stood, for its simple sweetness, in a glass case, to one of his exhibitory halls’ (147). But Fawns, or fons, for all its surface picturesque constructedness, taps a buried, rather turbid source of vitality; it is capable of revealing itself as a dense and tortuous, treacherous, beguiling imaginative space – a historical crib, a womb and tomb of time, circular like Maggie’s vision of the haunted rotunda (524).


When knowledge of the affair between the Prince and Charlotte penetrates the surface of his consciousness, Adam speaks of the idyllic quality of the place with a keen sense of its unreality. ‘There seems a kind of charm, doesn’t there? on our life – ‘ he tells Maggie, and quite as if just lately it had got itself somewhat renewed, had waked up refreshed. A kind of wicked selfish prosperity perhaps, as if we had grabbed everything, fixed everything, down to the lovely object for the last glass case in the last corner, left over, of my old show. That’s the only take-off, that it has made us perhaps lazy, a wee bit languid – lying like gods together, all careless of mankind. (387) There is, he confesses, ‘something haunting – as if it were a bit uncanny – in such a consciousness of our general comfort and privilege’; and the uncanny, for him, takes shape as the oriental. He pictures their group, in its charmed existence, ‘sitting about on divans, with pigtails, smoking opium and seeing visions. “Let us then be up and doing” – what is it Longfellow says? That seems sometimes to ring out; like the police breaking in – into our opium den – to give us a shake’ (388). Earlier, he has been seen ‘smoking, smoking, always smoking in the great Fawns drawing-room,’ while listening to Charlotte at the piano; the room twinkles with ‘tapers […] in the large dark spaces,’ and a ‘vagueness’ spreads itself about him ‘like some boundless carpet’ (183). Carpeting, here part of a shadowy oriental scene, serves later as a figure for lurking evil; Maggie comes face-to-face with the duplicity of the adulterers, as with ‘some bad-faced stranger surprised in one of the thick-carpeted corridors of a house of quiet of a Sunday afternoon’ (489). The ‘bad-faced stranger’ is associated, in turn, with Maggie’s strong, ambivalent attachment to her father. Adam’s collection of personal gifts from her – the quaint, humble array of which the golden bowl was to form part – is made up of objects ‘dedicated to the grimacing, not to the clear-faced gods’ (433; my emphasis). The Principino’s pair of nurses, Mrs Bogle in town (393, 578) and Mrs Noble in the country (181, 182, 536), is a fairytale incarnation of this forked principle; Mrs Noble, in consonance with her name, is invariably majestic (181, 182, 536), while ‘bogle,’ a dialect form of ‘bogey,’ is a hobgoblin. On the surface, Adam and Maggie have an affinity with the clearfaced gods. Adam’s ‘neat colorless face, provided with the merely indispensable features,’ is above all ‘clear’; it resembles a ‘small decent room, clean-swept and unencumbered with furniture,’ its windows ample and uncurtained (161). Maggie strikes the Prince, before their marriage, as


‘extraordinarily clear,’ against the backdrop of his dark family annals (47). Later, her inner experience, like her father’s, is figured as a cleanswept, unencumbered interior; and here the conceit is openly suggestive of a proclivity for compartmentalization. Her inchoate suspicions of the adultery emerge as growing ‘accumulations of the unanswered.’ They were there, these accumulations; they were like a roomful of confused objects, never as yet ‘sorted,’ which for some time now she had been passing and re-passing, along the corridor of her life. She passed it when she could without opening the door; then, on occasion, she turned the key to throw in a fresh contribution. So it was that she had been getting things out of the way. They rejoined the rest of the confusion; it was as if they found their place, by some instinct of affinity in the heap. They knew in short where to go, and when she at present by a mental act once more pushed the door open she had practically a sense of method and experience. (334–5) She finds herself piecing together shreds of evidence, as if searching through refuse for things of value; ‘she might have been picking small shining diamonds out of the sweepings of her ordered house. She bent, in the pursuit, over her dustbin; she challenged to the last grain the refuse of her innocent economy’ (354). Her rage for order is transformed into something quite different, a passion for precious stones. When she has pieced her truth together, Fanny finds her overdressed and ‘overcharged’ with jewels, as if she were displaying the fearful, fascinating contents of her closed room. In extreme agitation, she seeks ‘disguise and refuge’ in ‘arts of dress, multiplied to extravagance, almost to incoherence.’ She had ever visibly her idea – that of not betraying herself by inattentions into which she had never yet fallen, and she stood there circled about and furnished forth, as always, in a manner that testified to little personal processes. It had ever been her sign that she was for all occasions found ready, without loose ends or exposed accessories or unremoved superfluities; a suggestion of the swept and garnished, in her whole splendid yet thereby more or less encumbered and embroidered setting, that reflected her small still passion for order and symmetry, for objects with their backs to the walls, and spoke even of some probable reference in her American blood to dusting and polishing New England grandmothers. (430)


The Puritan spirit is precariously balanced for her, at this moment, with the pressure to expose accessories or superfluities stored in the recesses of consciousness. She veers away from her New England grandmothers, but the movement overwhelms her, for a time; she looks as if she had been carried to her ‘princely’ apartment ‘all attired and decorated like some holy image in a procession,’ a festal effigy of a ‘miraculous Madonna’ (430). The swept and garnished earthly paradise at Fawns is transformed, too, under the pressure of Maggie’s surplus of consciousness. The unexplored ‘labyrinth’ of Adam’s mind (185) comes to be mirrored for her in thick-carpeted corridors, a mazy multiplicity of rooms and circuitous passages. His world emerges as an unstable Arcadia, inhabited by grimacing gods as well as clear-faced ones. The Prince, in his early days there, is figured as a ‘domesticated lamb tied up with a pink ribbon’ (154); the pastoral at Fawns, however, is home not only to beribboned lambs and fauns, but also to goat-gods and satyrs, and even fiercer spirits. Maggie becomes filled with the passion of ‘really agitated lambs’ (414), but can also resemble a ‘timid tigress’ (332); Charlotte turns into a less recessive predator, a ‘splendid supple shining creature’ roaming at large (490, 492, 521). Maggie’s vision at the gallery, of Adam leading Charlotte by an invisible halter, projects the spirit of the place in its darkest aspect. Her father, acting upon her own unspoken wish, is about to lead his wife into exile, a death-in-life in his artistic necropolis. At the gallery, entrapped at last by her ‘native passion for beautiful objects’ (523), Charlotte acts as cicerone to a constant stream of visitors, rehearsing the role she is to play at the spectral American museum. Under the spell of the doom that awaits her, the gallery takes on ‘the likeness of some spacious central chamber in a haunted house, a great overarched and over-glazed rotunda where gaiety might reign, but the doors of which opened into sinister circular passages.’ In an effort to conceal their anxiety, the inhabitants keep these figurative doors carefully closed – ‘all save the door that connect[s] the place, as by a straight tented corridor, with the outer world, and, encouraging thus the irruption of society, imitate[s] the aperture through which the bedizened performers of the circus are poured into the ring’ (524–5). The ‘large element of “company”’ seems to serve ‘as of a kind of renewed watersupply for the tank in which, like a party of panting gold-fish, they [keep] afloat’ (524). The image, as of a passage into a womb-like space, links up with the vision of Charlotte with a ‘long loose silken halter looped around


her beautiful neck’ (523). The halter, like the transatlantic tether in The Ambassadors, suggests an umbilical cord as well as a death-noose. An early passage likens her figure to a ‘long loose silk purse’ – a purse ‘well filled with gold-pieces, but having been passed empty through a finger-ring that held it together’ (73). Here, an image of strangulation is joined to that of a morbidly narrow waist. Charlotte’s address to the visiting public resounds through the gallery ‘as if it had been a church ablaze with tapers and she were taking her part in some hymn of praise’; but the high quaver of her voice reverberates, for Maggie, ‘like the shriek of a soul in pain’ (526). Maggie and Adam, a pair of angels of vengeance, are moved to ‘strange tears’ at the sight of the infernal torment she suffers at their hands (526–7). The Prince is away from Fawns at this time, and Maggie discerns in his absence ‘a beauty of intention’ all the more touching for being ‘obscure.’ ‘It was like hanging over a garden in the dark; nothing was to be made of the confusion of growing things, but one felt they were folded flowers and that their vague sweetness made the whole air their medium’ (528). The dark luxuriant garden embodies the Prince’s emotional openness to herself, but also the agony of his separation from Charlotte. Maggie mentally perceives his pain as a ‘pale hard grimace,’ brought on by the echo of ‘the strange wail of the gallery’ (529). With Maggie, we are asked to think of the passion of the adulterers as self-disruptive, ‘a state of bliss made insecure by the very intensity of the bliss,’ and finally destroyed by it. This is one of the things that are revealed to her when she gains visionary insight into the dark, lush mysteries of the affair. The sylvan world of Fawns, alluring but precarious, gives shape to her imaginings; ‘they swarmed,’ we are told, like the strange combinations that lurked in the woods at twilight, they loomed into the definite and faded into the vague, their main present sign for her being however that they were always, that they were duskily, agitated. Her earlier vision of a state of bliss made insecure by the very intensity of the bliss – this had dropped from her; she had ceased to see, as she lost herself, the pair of operatic, of high Wagnerian lovers (she found deep within herself these comparisons) interlocked in their wood of enchantment, a green glade as romantic as one’s dream of an old German forest. The picture was veiled on the contrary with the dimness of trouble; behind which she felt indistinguishable the procession of forms that had lost all so pitifully their precious confidence. (519)


This ‘cold pastoral’ is Norse rather than Grecian; it figures the fullblown, death-bound passion of Tristan and Isolde, one of the central intertextual frames of The Wings of the Dove. Church, Palace Pagoda The Prince’s presence at Fawns in the early days of his marriage is portrayed by his father-in-law in architectural terms. It seems to put at risk, threaten to overbear, an inveterately humble and easeful, unstructured existence; it is like ‘a great Palladian church,’ ‘something with a grand architectural front,’ suddenly dropped into ‘some pleasant public square, in the heart of an old city’ (135). Imaginatively, for Adam, his Georgian estate is transformed into a medieval Italian piazza, prepared for the reception of a Renaissance monument. A church in the harmonious Palladian style may be a reassuring vision, not wholly out of kilter in ‘wide wooded Fawns, with its eighty rooms, as they said, with its spreading park, with its acres and acres of garden and its majesty of artificial lake’; still, it has complex passages between the east end and the west, through ‘side doors of entrance – large, monumental, ornamental […] – as for all proper great churches’ (136). In retrospect, the descent of Palladian architecture upon Fawns shows no ‘great visibility of transition,’ no ‘violence of accommodation’ (136). But with the further elaboration of the conceit, the imagination of Palladian geometry is deconstructed, exposing an underlying affinity of the church with the Gothicism and orientalism of the Ducal Palace in Venice, or with Maggie’s vision of the pagoda. The Palladian fantasy recoils upon itself; Adam’s grateful recognition that the Prince has not ‘proved angular’ (136), is expressed by way of contrast rather than analogy with the Palladian style. If the angular is a matter of ‘sharp corners and hard edges,’ ‘the stony pointedness of the grand right geometry,’ contact with the Prince emerges, beguilingly, as ‘contact but with practically yielding lines of curved surfaces. “You’re round, my boy,’’ says Adam, ‘you’re all, you’re variously and inextricably round, when you might, by all chances, have been abominably square. I’m not sure, for that matter,’ [he adds], ‘that you’re not square in the general mass – whether abominably or not. The abomination isn’t a question, for you’re inveterately round – that’s what I mean – in the detail. It’s the sort of thing in you that one feels – or at least I do – with one’s hand. Say you had been formed with a lot of little pyramidal lozenges like that wonderful side of the Ducal Palace in Venice – so lovely in a


building, but so damnable, for rubbing against, in a man, and especially in a near relation. I can see them all from here – each of them sticking out by itself – all the architectural cut diamonds that would have scratched one’s softer sides. One would have been scratched by diamonds – doubtless the neatest way if one was to be scratched at all – but one would have been more or less reduced to a hash. As it is, for living with, you’re a pure and perfect crystal.’ (137–8) The syntactic interruptions and figural contortions of the passage are revealing. The Prince’s ‘curved surfaces’, considered not en mass but ‘in the detail,’ turn into ‘a lot of pyramidal lozenges,’ like the delicate oriental tracery on the façade of the Palazzo Ducale, or the decorated façade of the pagoda. Far, indeed, from the broad angularity of a Palladian church, such roundness can nevertheless have its protuberances and hard edges. As for pure and perfect crystals, they too are susceptible to being fractured, internally, on lines and by hidden laws of their own. The Prince is said to have ‘taken’ Adam’s idea of his crystalline nature without betraying confusion, for he was well accustomed by this time to taking; and nothing perhaps even could more have confirmed Mr Verver’s account of his surface than the manner in which these golden drops evenly flowed over it. They caught in no interstice, they gathered in no concavity; the uniform smoothness betrayed the dew but by showing for the moment a richer tone. (138) Adam’s Gorgon gaze seems to petrify the flesh even as it arouses it. And if the Prince’s flesh is susceptible to arousal, as his blush here seems to reveal, it can hardly be free of interstices, concavities, protrusions and imperfections. These require constant lubrication, the even flow of his father-in-law’s golden drops, much as the gilt of the golden bowl is needed to conceal the crack in the crystal. It emerges for the Prince that his ‘curves’ were important because they had been unexpected, or, still more, unconceived; whereas one had always, as in his relegated old world, taken curves, and in much greater quantities too, for granted, one was no more surprised at the resulting feasibility of intercourse than one was surprised at being upstairs in a house that had a staircase. (138)


Yet the Prince’s figure itself is, we recognize, a form of moral curvature; climbing a staircase to the second floor, in his relegated old world as well as in his new, is no trivial matter. While the Prince can seem to resemble a Palladian church, Charlotte can look like a classical sculpture, a ‘muse’ with ‘the sylvan head of a huntress’ (72–3). She is portrayed in terms of a vivid but attenuated physicality, the coherence of classical beauty strained in her to the point of eccentricity, and perceptible ‘in the detail’ rather than as a whole. So, ‘the face [is] too narrow and too long, the eyes not large, and the mouth on the other hand by no means small, with substance in its lips and a slight, the very slightest, tendency to protrusion in the solid teeth, otherwise indeed well arrayed and flashingly white’ (72). On the eve of his marriage, the Prince examines her features ‘as a cluster of possessions of his own,’ ‘items in a full list, items recognised, each of them, as if, for the long interval, they [have] been “stored” – wrapped up, numbered, put away in a cabinet’ (72). The disintegrative gaze registers, as the door of the cabinet seems to open of itself, the itemized ‘relics.’ He saw again that her thick hair was, vulgarly speaking, brown, but that there was a shade of tawny autumn leaf in it for ‘appreciation’ – a colour indescribable and of which he had known no other case, something that gave her at moments the sylvan head of a huntress. He saw the sleeves of her jacket drawn to her wrists, but he again made out the free arms within them to be of the completely rounded, the polished slimness that Florentine sculptors in the great time had loved and of which the apparent firmness is expressed in their old silver and old bronze. He knew her narrow hands, he knew her long fingers and the shape and colour of her finger-nails, he knew her special beauty of movement and line when she turned her back, and the perfect working of all her main attachments, that of some wonderful finished instrument, something intently made for exhibition, for a prize. He knew above all the extraordinary fineness of her waist, the stem of an expanded flower, which gave her a likeness also to some long loose silk purse, well filled with gold-pieces, but having been passed empty through a finger-ring that held it together. It was as if, before she turned to him, he had weighed the whole thing in his open palm and even heard a little the chink of the metal. (72–3) The piecemeal scrutiny, with its keen-edged focus on the shape and color of teeth and fingernails, takes the body apart even as it registers classical


poise and completeness. The sculpted image, chiseled in ‘old silver and old bronze’ but gracefully mobile is, like the Prince’s crystalline or marmoreal surface, neither animate nor inanimate but something of both. It has the organic suppleness of a flower stem, and the sheen of polished old metal. These opposites combine to produce the effect of an artifact, a ‘finished instrument,’ ‘intently made for exhibition, for a prize.’ The metallic quality of this highly wrought instrument is carried over from the image of old silver and bronze to the image of gold coins in a long loose silk purse, as if to highlight the materiality and materialism associated with it. Charlotte’s dense materiality is yet peculiarity vulnerable to waste, a homonym suggested by the stress laid on her preternatural slimness, ‘the extraordinary fineness of her waist.’ If her waist resembles a well-filled silk purse held by a ring at its center, it also resembles an hourglass. As a sylvan huntress, and later as a predatory beast, she seems almost to personify Devouring Time. Her ‘chink of gold’ sounds for the Prince again at Matcham, as they are precipitated toward their escapade at Gloucester (282); like the figure of the bag of gold in The Ambassadors, it suggests a heightened consciousness of the wasting away of time. Time materializes in the novel as a social, communal presence, and so as Charlotte’s very element. While Maggie sinks into domestic reclusion with her father and child, Charlotte, with the Prince at her side, takes charge of the family’s ‘social relations,’ displaying a genius for representation ‘in the great world and in the grand style,’ which rests indeterminately on ‘appetite’ or ‘patience’ (262). The ‘London treadmill’ engages what she calls her ‘frivolous side,’ her ‘pleasant constitutional curiosity’; at the same time, it has ‘possibilities of dullness, ponderosities of practice, arid social sands, the bad quarters of an hour that [turn] up like false pieces in a debased currency’ (263). Sociability for her is contractual duty, a ‘remunerated office.’ The Ververs have ‘brought her in – on the crudest expression of it – to do the “worldly” for them,’ she tells the Prince, and she gets so much by her marriage that she should deserve no charity if she stinted her return (263–4). Eventually, she finds herself working for them ‘like a horse’ (319); the ‘business of social representation’ becomes an ‘affair of living always in harness’ (341). The cluster of issues evoked here resonates not only at the level of verisimilitude, in terms of the interface of self and society, but also, more elusively, in terms of the interface of psyche and culture. The dark psycho-cultural aspects of social experience involve a harnessing of


consciousness to a world of matter, which induces an ‘appetite’ and causes suffering – ‘patience’ in its root sense; it generates desire and with it a sense of ongoing consumption and waste – of the bad quarters of an hour, turning up like bad pennies. To Adam, the public is a terrifying phantom, a ‘many-mouthed monster,’ the exercise of whose lungs he constantly stimulates; he encounters it at a remove, in the journals he reads so as to ‘insulate, orientate himself afresh by [its] sound, over his gained interval’ (146–7). Charlotte is an extension of this clamorous sphere, and she fosters his ambivalent connection with it. While she does the ‘worldly,’ he is released into a closed-off sphere of sexless intimacy, in which he and Maggie are ‘like children playing at paying visits, playing at ‘Mr Thompson and Mrs Fane,’ each hoping that the other would really stay to tea’ (218). With the Principino, the trio is a kind of mock holy family; Maggie is ‘more than a daughter’ (135), and the boy is a ‘hapless halforphan’ (151), deprived of a father but fully possessed of a grandfather. Maggie all this while is ‘secretly wretched’ (303). Her persistent concern for her father betrays an anguished sense of the human frailty of this infinite agent. By degrees, she finds she has always made ‘anxiety her stupid little idol’ (381), and grows conscious of a need for ‘some understanding between them in consequence of which he should cut loose’ (381). His unworldliness, which has mobilized her solicitude with such force, now seems like a form of handicap. Charlotte, she feels, has been ‘called in’ to relieve the family of the worldly, much as ‘a specialist might be summoned to an invalid’s chair’ (471). Such services require unusual courage as well as skill, and early on she describes her friend to her father in such terms; Charlotte is ‘not afraid – not of anything; and yet she no more ever takes a liberty with you than if she trembled for her life. […] I myself of course don’t take liberties, but then I do always by nature tremble for my life. That’s the way I live’ (168). Her vision of the pagoda, at the structural center of the novel, displays her fearfulness in close relation to her father’s vulnerability, and the opacities and rigidities it produces in him. In a variation on the motif of glazing and gilding, she once pictures his ‘inattackable surface’ as ‘a firm outer shell,’ as of ‘marvellous enamel’ (464), and once as ‘polished old ivory’ (532). This ‘inscrutable’ quality (397) seems to permeate her fantasy of the ‘tower of ivory’ or ‘outlandish pagoda’ (327), risen at the center of the garden of her life like the grandest of his oriental pieces. This tower or shrine or pavilion figures the mysterious ‘arrangement’ that has allowed her, ‘so strikingly,’ to marry without breaking with her past (328). Its exterior is projected in vivid detail. It was


plated with hard bright porcelain, coloured and figured and adorned at the overhanging eaves with silver bells that tinkled ever so charmingly when stirred by chance airs. She had walked round and round it – that was what she felt; she had carried on her existence in the space left her for circulation, a space that sometimes seemed ample and sometimes narrow: looking up all the while at the fair structure that spread itself so amply and rose so high, but never quite making out yet where she might have entered had she wished. She hadn’t wished till now – such was the odd case; and what was doubtless equally odd besides was that though her raised eyes seemed to distinguish places that must serve from within, and especially far aloft, as apertures and outlooks, no door appeared to give access from her convenient garden level. The great decorated surface remained consistently impenetrable and inscrutable. (327) In part, the vision may suggest a transferal of her sense of the impenetrable from her father to her husband; the ivory tower, her initial figure for her situation, is after all the symbol par excellence of dissociation. At the same time, this dissociative surface, with its apparently solid smoothness, emerges as highly unstable; the ivory tower collapses into extravagant exoticism, a movement reminiscent of Adam’s precipitous figural passage from the Palladian church he associates with the Prince to the Palazzo Ducale. Adam’s exotic imaginings, the set of oriental tile from Brighton and the façade of the Venetian palace, tend toward flatness and fragmentariness. The pagoda, by contrast, has an interior, prominently present to Maggie in fantasy, though interdicted like the precincts of a Mohammedan mosque to a heretic. This space seems to be symbolic of a psychic sphere, polarized between dissociation and destructive intimacy, which she has long inhabited without apprehending or experiencing. At present, though trembling for her life, she determines to enter it with the fullest awareness (327–8).

III Metamorphoses ‘Rifts within the Lute’ Like a rifted lute or a cracked crystal vessel, the novel is structurally cleft in twain; the division between the parts is marked by the adulterous episode at Gloucester, which is not rendered directly, or is rendered as the cleavage itself. With the shift of narrative focus between the volumes


from husband to wife, the Prince’s experience, above all his threatened and threatening sexuality, is increasingly refracted or encompassed in the enlarged conscious sphere of the Princess. As knowledge of the adultery permeates her conscious life, we witness her ordeal of confronting her beleaguered imagination of sexuality itself. The ‘adulterine element’ of the situation (N, 115) is a concept treated by the novel as largely continuous with sexuality as such, not least with marital sexuality. So, the episode of the marriage proposal at Brighton consciously evokes the furtive Bloomsbury episode, where Charlotte, like Adam at Brighton, risks ‘life, health, and the very bloom of honour’ for a precious object. Both antiquarians are Jewish, and the objects in their possession are oriental and eroticized. For Charlotte and the Prince, the golden bowl is associated with the lute (292), an oriental instrument, or the mandolin, the classical counterpart of the lute (290) – perhaps the ‘wonderful finished instrument’ to which the Prince compares her body, and which is yet susceptible of being rifted (292). At the Bloomsbury shop, it emerges that the bowl figures in Charlotte’s fantasy not as a wedding gift for Maggie, but as her own gift of love, either from or for the Prince (122–5). Her imaginative affinity with the bowl surfaces with some poignancy when she learns from the Prince of the hidden ‘crack’ in the crystal; ‘her colour rose at the word,’ yet her interest in the object was made ‘even tenderer and stranger’ (123). When she questions the dealers about it, she seems to be groping for figures to refract her own sexual nature: ‘Does crystal then break – when it is crystal? I thought its beauty was its hardness.’ Her friend, in his way, discriminated. ‘Its beauty is its being crystal. But its hardness is certainly its safety. ‘It doesn’t break,’ he went on, ‘like vile glass. It splits – if there is a split.’ ‘Ah!’ – Charlotte breathed with interest. ‘If there is a split.’ And she looked down again at the bowl. ‘There is a split, eh? Crystal does split, eh?’ ‘On lines and by laws of its own.’ ‘You mean if there’s a weak place?’ For all answer, after an hesitation, he took the bowl up again, holding it aloft and tapping it with a key. It rang with the finest sweetest sound. ‘Where’s the weak place?’ (121) On leaving the shop, she lies to the Prince about the price of the bowl, which was named to her in his absence: five pounds – ‘[r]eally so little,’


and only a third of the actual figure (120, 123). She seems to want to press home to the Prince the ease or impunity with which he desire for a sexual object might be satisfied. After the Bloomsbury episode, at the Regent’s Park, Charlotte offers herself to him ‘for nothing.’ I don’t care what you make of it, and I don’t ask anything whatever of you – anything but this. I want to have said it – that’s all. I want not to have failed to say it. To see you once and be with you, to be as we are now and as we used to be, for one small hour – or say for two – that’s what I’ve had for weeks in my head. I mean, of course, to get it before – before what you’re going to do. So, all the while, you see,’ she went on with her eyes on him, ‘it was a question for me whether I should manage it in time. (107) ‘It’ is a matter of speaking against time, but seems, even prior to articulation, to be consigned to a nostalgic past: That’s what I was to have said. I didn’t want simply to get my time with you, but I wanted you to know. I wanted you’ – she kept it up, slowly, softly, with a small tremor of voice but without the least failure of sense of sequence – ‘I wanted you to understand. I wanted you, that is – to hear. I don’t care, I think, whether you understand or not. If I ask nothing of you I don’t – I mayn’t – ask even so much as that. What you may think of me – that doesn’t in the least matter. What I want is that it shall always be with you – so that you’ll never be able quite to get rid of it – that I did. I won’t say that you did – you may make as little of that as you like. But that I was here with you where we are and as we are – I just saying this. Giving myself, in other words, away – and perfectly willing to do it for nothing. That’s all. (107–8) In a kind of twist on the topos of Carpe Diem, the urge to seize the moment is itself a wasteful, sacrificial gesture, a giving away of oneself for nothing. Through extreme temporal compression, the passion of living is projected as a passion of sacrifice. The fragmented participle near the end of sequence, ‘I just saying this,’ a reflexive gesture with little referential meaning, is peculiarly emblematic of a consciousness fixed on the ravaged moment.


The sexual suggestion in relation to the golden bowl resurfaces at Matcham, when the lovers, alone on the terrace, prepare to depart for Gloucester together. The Prince describes the day as ‘a great gold cup that they must somehow drain together.’ Charlotte reminds him, ‘apropos of great gold cups,’ of ‘the beautiful one, the real one,’ ‘the gilded crystal bowl in the little Bloomsbury shop,’ and declares her intrepidity in the face of hidden ‘cracks’ – ‘rifts within the lute,’ in the ‘pretty’ English locution the Prince offers (292). A combined sense of seclusion and exposure enhances the intimacy of their talk, and each finds in the other’s voice a synesthetic ‘taste as of something slowly and deeply absorbed.’ Try as he may to remove himself from Charlotte and her cracks – ‘risk them as much for yourself, but don’t risk them for me’ – the flavors of his body blend with hers, and his superstitions, by which he holds and which, he claims, are ‘every one to-day on our side,’ become colored by her desire. For the lovers, complete possession of and by the other is a dispossession of self; the movement, as in an alternation of figure and ground, is between ‘everything’ and ‘nothing.’ ‘These days, yesterday, last night, this morning, I have wanted everything,’ Charlotte says, and the Prince engages to accommodate her: ‘You shall have everything’ (295). In The Wings of the Dove, we are admonished that ‘everything’s nothing.’ Here too, in resonance with the ‘nothing’ at Bloomsbury, these opposites blend together. ‘I feel,’ Charlotte says, ‘as you always make me feel everything, just as you do; so that I know ten miles off how you feel!’ (292). This is the case, above all, with the excursion to Gloucester. The Prince intones the name to himself half the night through, ‘Glo’ster, Glo’ster, Glo’ster,’ ‘quite as if the sharpest meaning of all the years just ended were intensely expressed in it. That meaning was really that his situation remained quite sublimely consistent with itself, and that they absolutely, he and Charlotte, stood there together in the very lustre of this truth’ (291). Charlotte too, all the while, has been intent on Gloucester, recalling its ‘cloisters and towers,’ and the ‘tomb of some old king’ (291–2). He marvels at this parity of thought, and she explains: ‘I thought you would think, we have, thank goodness, these harmonies. They’re food for superstition if you like. It’s beautiful,’ she continues ‘that it should be Gloucester; “Glo’ster Glo’ster” as you say, making it sound like an old song’ (293). His incantatory iteration harmonizes with the ‘barely-tremulous serenity’ of his voice when he speaks of the rifted lute (292), and with the serenading mandolin he conjures for Charlotte. ‘It only wants a moon, a mandolin and a little danger to be a serenade’ (290), he calls to her from the terrace, as she appears at her window upstairs; and yet the musical spell they cast on each other is far from serene. ‘Loss and lust,’ Poole


notes, ‘are hidden in “Gloucester,” and all that glisters is not gold. “Gloss” and “lustre” also slip out of this remarkable word, in which James seems to have concentrated the most salient features of the intimate relations between Charlotte and the Prince’ (HJ, 133–4). The Prince’s sense of the consistency of his situation, ‘the lustre of his truth,’ is deeply equivocal, much as the word ‘gloss,’ as noun and verb, hovers in the novel ‘between the sense of covering something over with a smooth sheen, like the gilt on the golden bowl, and the sense of interpreting something’ (HJ, 134). A gilded surface can suggest covert guilt; here, one of the truths that are glossed and glossed over is the historical memory of the cabal against the king buried at Gloucester, a murderous conspiracy in which the adulterous queen and the crown prince had a part. A ghostly affinity with King Edward II allows Adam to insinuate his presence into the scene. Colonel Assingham may well have regicide in mind when he predicts of the Gloucester escapade, in a suitably medieval, Chaucerian spirit, that ‘murder will out’ (418; CT, 3052). In its historical context, the lovers’ intrigue becomes associated with oedipal murder – that is, with the breaching of a primeval taboo, an infraction of the familial boundaries of identity. It is in this sense, again, of an assault on the discreteness of identity, that ‘lust’ and its ‘lustre’ resonate with ‘loss’ most poignantly. So, Charlotte’s prescience with respect to Gloucester arouses in the Prince anxiety over the frangibility of his inner space. She strikes him, at this time, as ‘terrible.’ ‘I had been keeping my idea so cleverly for you while there you already were with it.’ ‘You had been keeping it “for” me as much as you like. But how do you make out that,’ she said, ‘that you were keeping it from me?’ ‘I don’t – now. How shall I ever keep anything – some day when I shall wish to?’ ‘Ah for things I mayn’t want to know I promise you shall find me stupid.’ (294–5) Meanwhile, the psychic sympathy between them cheats them of the possibility of fully giving and receiving, even as it fills them with an alltoo-familiar urgency, the heady sense of the wasting away of time. The scene of their meeting on the terrace, before their departure together, is marked by the gift of ‘a rich white rosebud,’ an echo of Herrick’s ‘To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time.’ It is springtime, and the day itself is in


‘open bloom’ (289–90), which they would harvest to the full. Charlotte, at her window, detaches the rose from its company with another in the front of her dress, and flings it down to the Prince. He caught it in its fall, fixing her again after she had watched him place it in his buttonhole. ‘Come down quickly!’ he said in an Italian not loud but deep. ‘Vengo, vengo!’ she as clearly, but more lightly, tossed out; and she had left him the next minute to wait for her. (290) Charlotte herself is ‘fixed’ at this moment, pinned down with the Prince’s identical flower. The imagery of a fall, of entrapment and of mutual reflexiveness, and with it the surging sense of urgency, are bound up with the lovers’ use, just then, of the Prince’s mother tongue. The Prince’s English, we know, is ‘convenient, in life, for the greatest number of relations,’ ‘convenient, oddly, even for his relation with himself.’ Nonetheless, he conjectures that as time goes on, there may still ‘be others, including a more intimate degree of that one, that would seek, possibly with violence, the larger or the finer issue – which was it? – of the vernacular’ (45). Such another relation – at once, in a dangerous way, external and deeply internal to himself, and one in which recourse, ‘possibly with violence,’ to the vernacular is sought and found – is his present relation with Charlotte. They use the vernacular at the Bloomsbury antique shop, and the risk involved in the deep familiarity it expresses, the sense in which it tends to impinge on the boundaries between inside and outside and become haunted by terrors of invasion and exposure, is dramatized by the shock of discovering that the polyglot antiquarian has been privy to their conversation. Charlotte’s uncanny gift for languages is associated, for the Prince, with modes of communal intermingling – with her exotic ‘race-quality’ (77), and with the high publicity of circus-performance – she juggles with her ‘tongues’ as a ‘conjurer at a show juggles with balls or hoops or lighted brands’ (78). Her ‘strange sense for tongues,’ above all the ‘almost mystifying instinct’ for Italian (78), much like ‘the play of her extremely personal, her always amusing taste’ (72), is a bodily, gustatory quality, one which is noted ‘on her lips’ (78) but may be pictured, in fantasy, as a many-tongued oral cavity, like the image in The Ambassadors of the cluster of confessionals at St Peter’s. Her gifts, like Mme de Vionnet’s, are associated with forms of social amenity and cultural nurturance; to the Prince, a perfect felicity in the use of Italian is the ‘rarest, among the


Barbarians, of all civil graces’ (78). But her gifts are associated, too, with her voracity, as of a beast of prey – the voracity of ‘the devouring element.’ Through such associations, she refracts for the Prince an archetypal maternal presence. She bears an affinity with his vision of Italy as a melancholy damsel with a mandolin, whose ‘plaintive’ serenade outside his window disturbs his rest at night. This ‘hovering haunting ghost, as of a creature to whom one had done a wrong, a dim pathetic shade crying out to be comforted’ (180), leaves its mark on his morning with Charlotte at Matcham, which seems to him to want only a moon, a mandolin and a little danger for a serenade. The view from the terrace there reminds him of ‘the still more nobly terraced Italy’ (286); it is a ‘sun-chequered greenwood of Romance’ (283), darkening in the distance where Gloucester is dimly discernible. In his visions, Italy, too, is draped in a darkness of its own. In Rome, he has a ‘big black palace, the Palazzo Nero,’ and his estate in the Sabine hills is covered by a ‘cloud of mortgages,’ ‘buried beneath the ashes of rage and remorse, a shroud as thick as the layer once resting on the towns at the foot of the Vesuvius’ (156). The plaintive nocturnal serenade of the land merges, at the last, with Charlotte’s wail, ‘the strange wail of the gallery’ at Fawns. Matricide, among other kinds of death, seems to hover over the dark brink of renderable experience, at Gloucester. While Charlotte’s felicity in the use of Italian allows the Prince a maximum of personal expressiveness, their speech, at the height of expressivess, tends to collapse into muteness. At Matcham, she addresses to him a graceful shrug, accompanied by an utterance in the vernacular – ‘Cosa volete?’ She affects him then as ‘more than Roman’ (281), and their mode of communication, ‘winged by a community of passion,’ approaches ‘divination’, so the Prince’s inner attunement, ‘practically without words, without any sort of straight telegraphy,’ arrives ‘at a felt identity with Charlotte’s own’ (282). The sense of a ‘perfect parity of imagination’ registers for the Prince as the ‘flash’ of a ‘mirror played at the face of the sun’ (283). Taken emblematically, the image suggests a merging of the spheres of subjectivity (mirror) and objectivity (sun), into sheer reflexiveness. The flash of reflexive light and the ‘chink of gold’ in the Prince’s ear (282), crystallized moments of ecstatic communion, reflect and echo, ominously, the flash of Charlotte’s ‘cold smile’ (279), earlier, and the ‘hard ring’ of her voice (280). At Matcham, opposites tend to collapse into morbid fusion; there is an ‘element of staleness in all the freshness and of freshness in all the staleness, of innocence in the guilt and of guilt in the innocence’ (289). Adultery, an unholy union of divided elements, is the central symbol


for such under-differentiation. In the scene of seduction at Portland Place, the lovers’ vows are sanctified by ‘the saints in glory.’ Their kiss, with its fraught sanctity, is an overflow and interflow of experience reflexively in excess of itself. All at once, as at the issue of a narrow straight into the sea beyond, everything broke up, broke down, gave way, melted and mingled. Their lips sought their lips, their pressure their response and their response their pressure; with a violence that had sighed itself the next moment to the longest and deepest of stillnesses they passionately sealed their pledge. (259; my italics) The violence tears here at the texture of time. The grammar of tense in the last sentence is all but unreadable, and so is the image of ‘the longest and deepest of stillnesses,’ compressed by the syntax between two pulses of passion. Charlotte’s gift of herself to the Prince, her sacrificial present or presence, violently revives for him the sense of the past; the past ‘meet[s] the future close, interlocking with it, before his watching eyes, as in a long embrace of arms and lips, and so handling and hustling the present, that this poor quantity scarce retain[s] substance enough, scarce remain[s] sufficiently there, to be wounded or shocked’ (249). ‘Noble Captives’ As a core-symbol of sexuality, the golden bowl carries such a concentrated charge of meaning that its discovery and destruction, like the sacrifice of ‘the scapegoat of old’ in the image conjured by Maggie (487), may be expected to dislodge and transform a vast psychic and cultural organization. When Maggie makes the purchase of the bowl, the cluster of psycho-cultural forces embodied in it crystallizes just below the surface of her consciousness. Her foray into Bloomsbury is incited by a recalled ‘allusion of Charlotte’s, of some months before – seed dropped into her imagination in the form of a casual speech, about there being in Bloomsbury such “funny little fascinating” places and even sometimes such unexpected finds’ (432). The figure of imaginative insemination by her stepmother suggests a symbolic genealogical line, even as her perusal at the British Museum, before the excursion to the shops, of the ‘records of the Prince’s race’ suggests a literal one (427). Her quest is of a birthday present for her father, and she feels herself, on the occasion, possessed of a legacy of ‘noble and beautiful associations,’ secured no less for him than for her son (432).


In the poetics of the late phase, Aristotelian peripeteia, surprise sanctioned by causality, is recast in the deployment of the action or plot within inherited matrices of psyche and culture. This is the case, distinctly, with the drama of the acquisition of the bowl. The bowl, however, is also an emblem of possible disruptions and transformations in inherited patterns. At Portland Place, it is displayed on the mantelpiece, in place of a splendid Louis-Seize clock, a ‘trophy’ now relegated to a less prominent position (435). By way of contrast with the clock, the bowl is associated with the ‘consular, Napoleonic’ collection at the Bloomsbury shop; it is as if history, figured in the continued ticking of a monarchic timepiece, were dislodged by revolution. In the presence of the bowl, after the disclosure of its history, Maggie feels herself to be ‘living with eternity’ (452). Her ordeal spans a year, beginning after the Easter party at Matcham and ending in the summer of the following year, with the departure of the Ververs for America. Near its conclusion, this period figures for her as the Revolutionary Terror. She pictures herself sharing with the Prince his last days of captivity, ‘as if she were waiting with him in his prison – waiting with some gleam of remembrance of how noble captives in the French Revolution, in the darkness of Terror, used to make a feast or a high discourse of their last poor resources’ (561). For the first and only time in the late corpus, the fictional situation detaches itself, here, in invoking the Revolution, from fantasies of sheer destructiveness; the Ververs’ leave-taking spells for Maggie ‘clear liberation,’ while for victims of the Revolution ‘the scaffold was certain’ (561). The passage through this death-chamber of the imagination involves a constant threat of surrender to consuming emotional conflict. Maggie figures it as a ‘labour of detachment,’ which holds the Prince and her, paradoxically, in a ‘steel hoop’ of intimacy (423). The image of the ‘steel hoop’ is associated with Charlotte’s purse-like figure, and so with the Prince’s intimacy with her; but the terrors and allures of surrender have now taken root in Maggie’s tormented consciousness. In her Revolutionary prison-cell, she wonders, in the face of all that has been witnessed and endured, whether the promise of approaching liberation might be nothing more than a morbid delusion: ‘her clearnesses, clearances – those she had so all but abjectly laboured for – threatened to crowd upon her in the form of one of the clusters of angelic heads, the peopled shafts of light beating down through iron bars, that regale on occasion precisely the fevered vision of those who are in chains’ (561). The novel, with Maggie, is haunted by a vision of resolution as mirage, of a perilous happy end, as in Shakespearean romances, where spectral presences of narrowly averted tragedies hang over brittle comic closures.


But the vision of the prison-cell, of the body in chains polarized against a false transcendence, fails to account for the full trajectory of Maggie’s ordeal. When her labors begin, Fanny insists that ‘what’s in the air always has – hasn’t it – to come down to the earth’ (302). Later, a vision of descent informs Adam’s voiceless appeal: ‘Everything’s remarkably pleasant, isn’t it? – but where for it after all are we? up in a balloon and whirling through space or down in the depths of the earth, in the glimmering passages of a gold mine?’ (375). In The Wings of the Dove, the bowels of the earth and entrails of the body are fertile ground for imaginative transformation. Here, drawing on a similar figural domain, transformation is projected in terms of impregnation and gestation, with a subtle play, carried over, again, from the previous novel, on the image of a pearl. At Matcham, the Prince thinks of the extraordinary ‘freedom’ afforded him by his marriage as a ‘huge precious pearl,’ ‘perfect and rounded and lustrous,’ which has ‘dropped itself, with its exquisite quality and rarity, straight into his hand’ (291). The pearl – ‘Margarita’ – is associated with Maggie by name; and while it is to Charlotte that the pearl of his marriage is offered, as in a fantasy of insemination, the figure finds its way back to Maggie after the screened-off scene of lovemaking at Gloucester. Through its means, the structural rift in the novel comes to suggest a mysterious sexual passage. In her state of nascent recognition, Maggie resembles ‘the frightened but clinging mother of an unlawful child’; the idea she is possessed by is ‘the proof of her misadventure, but likewise all the while only another sign of a relation that [is] more to her than anything on earth’ (330). The adultery is perceived at this moment as her own – a newly born, half-alien passion for a husband both hers and not hers – a passion whose most striking emblem is the ‘outlandish’ pagoda suddenly risen at the center of the garden of her life (327). A little like a magpie (her name evokes the kinship), she turns to her intimate treasures, long stowed away in ‘deep receptacles’; she takes to ‘dipping, at off moments and quiet hours, in snatched visits and by draughty candle-light, into her rich collections and seeing her jewels again a little shyly but all unmistakably glow’ (330). When the Prince returns, tardily, not from Matcham but from Gloucester, he is met with a flourish of passion and pride of possession – the first surprise to which she has ever treated him, ‘a poor thing,’ she feels, but ‘all her own’ (332). The phrase is Shakespearean, and its original context, in As You Like It, contains a pearl. ‘A poor virgin, sir,’ Touchstone says of Audrey, ‘an ill-favour’d thing, sir, but my own; a poor humour of mine,


sir, to take that no man else will. Rich honesty dwells like a miser, sir, in a poor house; as your pearl in your foul oyster’ (V.iv.55–9). For Maggie, virginity or chastity mixes here with adultery. The climactic points of the drama of reunion figure for her as ‘firm pearls on a string’ (332), a kind of ongoing emission or transmission of the seed released at Matcham. Transmission seems to take place from mistress to wife, but also from stepmother to stepdaughter. The scene of reunion powerfully embodies the reflexive element in Maggie’s relationship to Charlotte, as if, like a virginal daughter, she were seeking a maternal pattern for her emergent sexuality. While the Prince is delayed, she beguiles her anxiety in examining her new gown, but this occupation is not free from anxieties of its own. She finds herself wondering whether the gown would at last really satisfy Charlotte – Charlotte who dresses to perfection, but whose ‘possible and rather inscrutable judgment’ of her stepdaughter’s clothes leaves the latter, ‘in these connections, constantly and intimately “torn”; conscious on one side of the impossibility of copying her companion and conscious on the other hand of the impossibility of sounding her, independently, to the bottom’ (334). Charlotte’s opacity may bespeak absorption in an agonistic enactment of her own bodily presence – an ordeal which to Maggie’s sense, all of a piece here with the bewilderments of infants, suggests an unattainable but coveted sublimity. But Maggie’s anxieties, though capable of inducing states of paralysis, are also capable, ‘once in a great while,’ of exciting a wish for experimentation, eliciting mobility and freedom of play; in this spirit, she determines to see, presently, whether she might not surprise Charlotte by wearing ‘something a little less out of the true note than usual’ (334). The amplified imaginative scope of the novel – amplified, specifically, vis-à-vis The Wings of the Dove – is nowhere more remarkable than in the mobile emotional range Maggie is given in the process of coming out. Charlotte and Maggie are played off against each other as principles of stasis and verve – qualities to which their maiden names, ‘Stant’ more distantly than ‘Verver,’ respectively allude. Before the party at Matcham, when the Ververs entertain at Eaton Square, Maggie usurps, in her habitual ‘anxiety’ on her father’s behalf (265), ‘well-meaningly and perversely,’ Charlotte’s role of hostess (266). Charlotte, in her ‘placed condition, her natural seat and neighbourhood, her intenser presence,’ irradiates a ‘passive grace,’ fully-formed and fused, in the mode of the ‘equilibrium’ (336) she has created for the family. Against this


‘intenser presence,’ Maggie, in a swirl of agitation, is intensely mobile. The Prince notes her resemblance to her father, at times so vivid and coming out, in the delicate warmth of occasions, like the quickened fragrance of a flower; her resemblance […] to a little dancing-girl at rest, ever so light of movement but most often panting gently, even a shade compunctiously, on a bench; her approximation, finally – for it was analogy somehow more than identity – to the transmitted images of rather neutral and negative propriety that made up, in the long line, the average of wifehood and motherhood. If the Roman matron had been, in sufficiency, first and last, the honour of that line, Maggie would no doubt, at fifty, have expanded, have solidified to some such dignity, even should she suggest a little but a Cornelia in miniature. (266) Gripped by ambivalence, the Prince captures and parodies, here, the trope of transformation which is a staple of the international subject; Maggie, predictably but far from appealingly, will change from an anxious American to a stately Roman, and from a daughter to a matron. Later, however, Maggie herself recasts this vision, in playful hyperbolic terms which seem to explode the sense of the commonplace in it. She pictures herself enacting for the Prince, who is ‘fixed in his place as some statue of one of his forefathers,’ the proverbial ‘relation of the mountain to Mahomet.’ Amerigo’s place was like something made for him beforehand by innumerable facts, facts largely of the sort known as historical, made by ancestors, examples, traditions, habits; while Maggie’s own had come to her simply as that improvised ‘post’ – post of the kind spoken of as advanced – with what she was to have found herself connected in the fashion of a settler or a trader in a new country; in the likeness even of some Indian squaw with a papoose on her back and barbarous beadwork to sell. Maggie’s own, in short, would have been sought in vein in the most rudimentary map of social relations as such. The only geography marking it would be doubtless that of the fundamental passions. (548) Her passion has ripened, and been transferred from father to husband. The Prince’s seeming stillness frightens, frustrates and tantalizes her, partly because it resembles Charlotte’s, and partly because it raises the


specter of a fixed attachment to Charlotte. In the face of this, she moves breathlessly, grotesquely but spectacularly, from the deep orient to the far west, from Mohammedan faith to paganism and commerce, from colonial settlement to aboriginality, all in pursuit of or subjection to fundamental emotion. At the inception of her affair with the Prince, Charlotte describes herself as ‘just fixed – fixed as fast as a pin stuck up to its head in a cushion. I’m placed – I can’t imagine any one more placed. There I am!’ (220). The intensity, here, of her sense of her own being is inseparable from her sense of fixedness. Fixedness is at once a torment and a compulsion, and the compulsion for torment, the pleasure taken in pain, is the imaginative domain of fixedness. Before Maggie’s marriage, Charlotte says, thinking of a possible gift for her: ‘Anything of course, dear as she is, will do for her. I mean if I were to get her a pin-cushion from the Baker-Street Bazaar’ (110). Anything, again, is nothing; ‘dear’ as Maggie is, financially as well as sentimentally, no gift offered her can escape seeming trivial. With this settled sense of an impasse, Charlotte prepares for herself, in figural terms, the cushion on which she is to be pinned. Her investment in social hierarchies is the most vivid expression of her rigidities. She is a connoisseur of the common, remarks beggars, remembers servants, recognizes cabmen; she can distinguish beauty in dirty children and admire ‘type’ in the faces of hucksters’ stalls. The Prince, purebred aristocrat that he is, does not see below a certain social level, taking ‘the meaner sort for granted’; ‘the night of their meanness’ makes ‘all his cats grey’; but Charlotte’s vision acts ‘for every relation’ (113). ‘The meaner sort’ sets off her sense, chronically undernourished, of her own superior worth. At the same time, her ill-defined social position and the fear of declassing it brings with it breed anxious identifications with the lowly. At Bloomsbury, the ‘low-brow’ (113) antiquarian sparks her interest, and it is the offence her interest gives which determines, years later, his intervention against her, on Maggie’s behalf. Interlocked forms of domination and submission structure her married life. She enters her union with Adam proposing to be ‘useful about Maggie’ (224), and regards the social distinction she attains as a form of servitude; she is ‘had in,’ as the servants say of extra help, to serve as a complementary wheel for the lumbering family coach (341). When she offers herself to the Prince, she comes in a rickety growler, wearing a dull dress and a black Bowdlerized hat, suggestive of ‘conscious humility’ (249–50). When Maggie reclaims her superior standing, the ‘ladyin-attendance’, though ‘an established favourite, safe in her position,’ is


quick to acknowledge that ‘a little queen, however good natured, [is] always a little queen, and [may] with small warning remember it’ (351). In this altered constellation, Charlotte assumes and discharges ‘the character and office of one of those revolving subordinate presences that float in the wake of greatness’ (426). In Maggie’s vision of her at the gallery, led by Adam’s imaginary noose, she holds her audience together ‘as if by something almost austere in the grace of her authority’ (525); at the same time, she displays to her husband and stepdaughter ‘her cheerful submission to duty’ (526). Before the households part ways, in the drawing room at Portland Place, the Prince and Maggie prepare for the Ververs’ valedictory visit. They seem, on the occasion, ‘distinctly bourgeois,’ and are poised as if ‘awaiting the visit of Royalty’; the Prince goes down, ‘for all his princedom, to meet, on the stopping of the chariot, the august emergence’ (570). Adam’s sole distinction, as ever, is a marked absence of ‘attitude,’ but his daughter can feel him, still, ‘simply weave his web and play out his long fine cord.’ In response to this tacit pressure, Charlotte assumes a distinct, distinguished manner, as of majesty enthroned; with ‘a shade of the official […] in her beauty and security,’ like ‘some coloured and gilded image’ (572). She is something of a Cleopatra, too, a woman of variety, but her preference is all for ‘varieties of […] nobler aspects’ (572). She strikes Maggie as ‘great’ – great for the world before her, and not to be wasted in the application (578). Her gilded, mummified state may be the fruit of a strenuous effort of conservation from waste; but with this effort she is locked into a ghastly equilibrium of grandeur and fear, a fractured role of queen and pauper. At Matcham, she promised the Prince that he should find her ‘stupid’ for things she might not wish to know (294–5). The stupidity for which he finally condemns her (565) is a form of moribund conservatism, an obsolescence portrayed as monarchic; the strangulative noose by which she is held seems to connect her to the noble victims of the Revolution. Forsaken by Her Pedestal The Prince’s dismissal of Charlotte, brutal if not unmotivated, figures not only, perhaps not chiefly, in the sphere of verisimilitude. In the sphere of psychic dynamics, the epithet he uses serves to link his recoil from her to her own mechanism of dissociation; he is strategically ‘stupid,’ at this moment, like she is, with respect to things he might not wish to know. Their joint stupidity, in this sense, defends against susceptibilities to hauntings such as Maggie fearfully foresees; if the households were to separate, she wonders, ‘would no sombre ghosts of the smothered past


on either side show across the widening strait pale unappeased faces, or raise in the very passage deprecating denouncing hands?’ (376). Her vision of the wail of the gallery, which seems to absorb into itself the Prince’s banished ghosts, suggests the permeability of the texture of consciousness, in some of its states, to apparitions of this kind. But Maggie is capable of seeking, not merely suffering, ghostly possession. With her ‘winged concentration’ (519), through ‘flights of divination,’ she clings to Charlotte like a bee, sharing with her the experience of the Prince’s rejection, in a spirit at once compassionate and persecutory. For this, she breathed Charlotte’s cold air – turned away from him in it with her, turned with her, in growing compassion, this way and that, hovered behind her while she felt her ask herself where then she should rest. Marvellous the manner in which, under such imaginations, Maggie thus circled and lingered – quite as if she were, materially, following her unseen, counting every step she helplessly wasted, noting every hindrance that brought her to a pause. (520) A variant of the apian figure resurfaces before long in a reference to the gadfly of classical myth. Charlotte’s situation confusedly evokes for Maggie ‘some echo of an ancient fable – some vision of Io goaded by the gadfly or of Ariadne roaming the lone sea-strand.’ She herself, correspondingly, ‘might have been for the hour some far-off harassed heroine – only with a part to play for which she knew exactly no inspiring precedent’ (537). The unprecedented seems to pertain here, at least in part, to a psychic mixture of self and other; Maggie is both gadfly and Io, pursuer and pursued; ‘Io,’ the first-person pronoun in the vernacular, is rife with ambiguity; who is to tell who she (I) is? Focused through the lens of The Metamorphoses, Maggie’s experience seems to project such crossings, invasions and minglings into a larger frame – the pulsating movement of consciousness beyond itself, in which its very vitality finds expression. In an earlier passage, she pictures herself as Ariadne and the Prince as Theseus. ‘Hadn’t she,’ she mentally argues, ‘fairly got into his labyrinth with him? – wasn’t she indeed in the very act of placing herself there for him at its center and core, whence, on that definite orientation and by an instinct all her own, she might securely guide him out of it?’ (454). But to guide him out of it, in this mazy version of the myth, an aspect of her own self, Charlotte-Ariadne, will have to be abandoned on some lone seastrand.


In the events surrounding the purchase and destruction of the bowl, historical unfolding, rather than myth, is made to vibrate against the pulse of consciousness. Time in its objectified mode – the pre-Revolutionary mode of the Louis Seize clock – is dislocated in one sense, but readjusted in another, tuned more finely into subjective experience. When the vendor of the bowl is seized with compunction for the dubious transaction with Maggie, he acts on a scruple ‘rare enough in vendors of any class, and almost unprecedented in the thrifty children of Israel’ (479). The scruple is of the imaginative order, if not the scale, of the Conversion of the Jews, and it surfaces in response to the free-ranging friendliness of the Principessa. Maggie likes ‘chinoiseries’ – by heredity, according to the Prince (155); the ‘Kitties and Dotties’ she entertains at Fawns, once pictured as an American tribe of Wandering Jewesses (502), come under this rubric, and so does the Jewish antiquarian. More or less free from a passion for appraisal and possession, as well as from class-consciousness, she turns her chinoiseries into playmates. The imaginative attunement of which she is capable – to people, places and objects, their presence and history – emerges with some force when the bowl is broken. In Ecclesiastes, a broken golden bowl figures the approach of death (12:6–7); Maggie’s experience, however, resembles a birth – it is like coming ‘out of a dark tunnel, a dense wood, or even simply a smoking room,’ and having ‘thereby at least for going on the advantage of air in her lungs’ (469). In a concrete figural sense, the suggestion with respect to the bowl is of an imposed static formation coming apart; the vessel splits neatly in three, two fragments and a foot, and the pieces cannot be removed all at once – the foot is carried away separately. With nothing to hold them, no solid pedestal, the broken halves cannot be fitted together again (451). Maggie’s ‘whole idea’ of the adultery ‘has a crack,’ Fanny says when she smashes the bowl, since the Prince has never been ‘half so interested’ in her as he is now (447); he has cast off his reserve, ‘given up his forms’ (447). With the Prince at her side, in the presence of the fragments of the bowl, Maggie experiences, in fact, an inward fracture, a ‘sudden split between conviction and action.’ Conviction remains rooted, ‘planting its feet the more firmly in the soil,’ but action soars up, condemned to ‘the responsibility of freedom’ by the glimmering possibility, ‘richer with every lapsing moment, that her husband would have on the whole question a new need of her’ (453). Later, for a spell, she yearns again for the golden bowl ‘as it was to have been,’ ‘with all our happiness in it,’ ‘without a crack’ (475). Later still, however, we witness such nostalgia take morbid shape vis-à-vis the


triune china vessel at the Fawns gallery. ‘The largest of the three pieces,’ Charlotte instructs her audience, has the rare peculiarity that the garlands looped round it, which as you see are the finest possible vieux Saxe, aren’t of the same origin or period, or even, wonderful as they are, of a taste quite so perfect. They’ve been put on at a later time by a process known through very few examples, and none so important as this, so that though the whole thing is a little baroque its value as a specimen is I believe almost inestimable. (526) The looped garlands are associated, inescapably, with the halter by which Charlotte is forcibly led. More broadly, the image embodies consciousness suspended in a historical moment and caught in a utopian bind; its flow is arrested and it comes, instead, to reflect and determine value and taste. Maggie’s final vision of her father as a work of art is of this vein, as well; for a long moment, she is turned into a ‘typical charmed gazer, in the still museum, before the named and dated object, the pride of the catalogue, that time has polished and consecrated’ (513). Her final vision of Charlotte and the Prince together reflects a modern replication of the same lifeless state; they seem to be ‘sitting as still to be thus appraised, as a pair of effigies of the contemporary great on one of the platforms of Madame Tussaud’ (574). As against the crystallized, arrested strife of opposition which yields the flavor of the ‘baroque,’ the Renaissance seems to hold a promise of release. Before her marriage, Maggie appears to her husband-to-be as a creature ‘not of this age’ but ‘of a braver and finer one’ – a type of whom ‘the cinquecento, at its most golden hour, wouldn’t have been ashamed’ (49). For her father, the ‘particular suggestion in her aspect’ is enhanced by connoisseurship; it is ‘kept sharp, year after year, by the collation of types and signs, the comparison of fine object with fine object, of one degree of finish, of one form of the exquisite with another.’ His expert sense perceives her – or indeed creates her – in the form of some slight slim draped ‘antique’ of Vatican or Capitoline halls, late and refined, rare as a note and immortal as a link, set in motion by the miraculous infusion of a modern impulse and yet, for all the sudden freedom of folds and footsteps forsaken after centuries by their pedestal, keeping still the quality, the perfect felicity, of the statue; the blurred absent eyes, the smoothed elegant nameless head, the impersonal flit of a creature lost in an alien age and passing as an image in


worn relief round and round a precious vase. She had always had odd moments of striking him, daughter of his very own though she was, as a figure thus simplified, ‘generalised’ in its grace, a figure with which his human connexion was fairly interrupted by some vague analogy of turn and attitude, something shyly mythological and nymph-like. The trick, he wasn’t uncomplacently aware, was mainly of his own mind; it came of his caring for precious vases only less than for precious daughters. (172; my italics) The interruption of Adam’s ‘human connexion’ with his daughter’s image, the displacement of his personal vision of her by an aesthetic vision informed by historical patterns and types, has a liberating effect; it frees her from the imaginative constraints of her present, and steeps her very modernity in the spirit of an alien age. The impulse whereby she comes off her pedestal, like the animate statue of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, is fully ‘modern,’ an aspect of the mobility of her American identity; at the same time, it expresses a quality intrinsic to the historical identity she comes to possess. In the image of the ‘sudden freedom of folds and footsteps forsaken after centuries by their pedestal,’ the curious use of the passive voice evokes the mystery of the passage from stillness to motion while ‘keeping still the quality, the perfect felicity, of the statue.’ She seems to combine a permanence of presence with mobility, ‘passing as an image in worn relief round and round a precious vase’; the vase, another archetypal vessel of consciousness, has variety in sameness, a presence both stable and shifting. The sense in which the Prince and the Princess, with the departure of the Ververs, seem to turn ‘distinctly bourgeois,’ suggests, not least, the sense in which the novel strives to make itself at home in the domain of the noble – forsaken, as it were, by its pedestal and brought into the many-colored stream of history. This is one of the spheres in which James’s imagination comes into contact with Shakespeare, a yeoman’s son with a flair for portraying ‘the passions of princes.’ For James, imaginative fluency and the sense of historical flow is borne through the ages, transmitted from the Renaissance to the late modern period, through the ‘frail vessels’ of Shakespearean romance: Imogen, Marina, Perdita, Miranda – daughters in the process of transforming into brides. In the recasting of The Winter’s Tale for and through Maggie, it is the daughter, not the mother, who descends from the pedestal, and her


reanimation seems to depend on the loosening of her father’s emotional hold on her. The idea has its counterparts in Shakespearean romance, of course; in Pericles and The Winter’s Tale, the daughters are physically lost, and in The Tempest, Prospero inhabits a charmed sphere of art which alters profoundly his ‘human connection’ to Miranda. Adam, all-powerfully ‘weaving his spell’ for his daughter, is associated not only with Prospero in The Tempest, but also with Prospero-Shakespeare in James’s Introduction to the play.5 Like the latter character, he seems to have ‘simply waited, to cast his magic ring into the sea, till the jewel set in it shall have begun to burn as never before’ (IT, 93). Maggie is a kind of jewel, and she wields a kind of magic – her name joins the lapidary (‘margarita’) with the necromantic (‘magus’). But her magic requires autonomy, or, rather, perhaps, her magic is her autonomy – a magic neither more nor less extraordinary, finally, than the flaring up in a daughter, created in the image of her parents, of a life all her own. So, Maggie, curiously, can be both nymphlike and nunlike; and, ‘discreetly heedless, through her long association with nobleness in art, to the leaps and bounds of fashion,’ can wear her hair down straight and flat over her temples, ‘in the constant manner of her mother,’ though her mother was not ‘a bit mythological’ (172). The mystery, with this, is in the provision for Maggie, not least through her father’s artifice, his dark magical web, of a rich atmosphere in which to move, breathe and have her being. To be forsaken by her pedestal is to know a pain which the figural texture of the novel, insisting as it does on Maggie’s sacrificial role in the family drama, links with Christ’s anguished cry on the Cross: ‘Eli Eli, lama sabachthani? That is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ (Matthew 27:46). But sacrifice has the effect of infusing her world with a vital presence, akin to emanation of the Holy Spirit in Trinitarian theology. On the terrace at Fawns, before the scene of her Christlike sacrifice in the arbor, she pictures the members of her circle as ‘figures rehearsing some play of which she herself is the author’ (488). Such mastery, it appears, has to be granted and transmitted, if it is not to be usurped. When she parts from her father, she keeps the ‘early Florentine sacred subject,’ the Luini which was given to her on her marriage, and which here is identified and appraised within a sphere of art intrinsic to the novel. The gift betokens the translatability into the present of mythic, historical and personal pasts; like a talisman, it embodies the presence of the Holy Family in a profane one, of the Renaissance in modernity, of a father in a husband.


Conscious of her father looking at the picture, taking his last leave of it in silence, Maggie too takes her leave. The tenderness represented for her by his sacrifice of such a treasure had become to her sense a part of the whole infusion, of the immortal expression; the beauty of his sentiment looked out at her always, from the beauty of the rest, as if the frame made positively a window for his spiritual face: she might have said to herself at this moment that in leaving the thing behind him, held as in her clasping arms, he was doing the most possible toward leaving her a part of his palpable self. (573) Liquid Crystal The play Maggie authors demands a delicately balanced performance, which would transform without destroying her field of psychic and social attachments. Contact with her father at this time is pictured, variously, as a ‘golden’ or ‘silver mist’ (347, 358), a ‘fine’ ‘exquisite tissue,’ (421, 509), a ‘thin wall’ which must not be pierced, a hanging ‘transparency’ which must not be breathed too hard upon (509). Contact with Charlotte, too, is a ‘silver tissue of decorum’ (351), veiling a complex, wayward emotional tracery. Her early sense of an ‘abrupt bend in her life’ (335) threatens to violate the decorous surface of her relations with the Prince, precipitating her from alienation to a fantasy of destructive, self-consuming intimacy. The reliance of their life together on ‘a special “form’’’ might have been justified, she feels, ‘so long as the form was kept only for the outside world and was made no more of among themselves than the pretty mould of an iced pudding, or something of that sort, into which, to help yourself, you didn’t hesitate to break with the spoon’ (344). Her imaginative sphere at this time is straitened, beleaguered, and her very endeavor to temper or modulate it reflects her condition of high tension. Rectitude, here, calls for an ‘extraordinary form of humbugging’; it is a question of ‘not by a hair’s breath deflecting into the truth’ (498). She thus enters a Kriegsspiel with a perilous ‘edge’; no longer playing with ‘blunt and idle tools,’ she is beset by visions of a gleaming ‘bare blade’ (331). These chilling forms, however, are translated into her emotional idiom, amplifying and transforming it even as they are themselves being transformed. The stage for her game of war is set years before, with Charlotte’s announcement of her engagement. The Prince congratulates his future


mother-in-law in a telegram intended, in fact, obliquely for his wife: ‘‘A là guerre comme a la guerre then’ – it had been couched in the French tongue. ‘We must lead our lives as we see them; but I am charmed with your courage and almost surprised at my own’‘ (244). To Charlotte, after repeated perusals, the message remains ambiguous (345); in a paradoxical way, her fluency in French, associated here with the francophone arena of les liaisons dangereuses, only impedes her understanding. The Prince’s challenge is aimed – covertly, desperately – at Maggie, whose French is poor, in a sense not purely literal. The Prince himself, we learn early on, speaks English ‘too well,’ and claims to be able to speak ‘worse’ only when he speaks French; ‘intimating thus that there were discriminations, doubtless of the invidious kind, for which that language was the most apt,’ but intimating further, as Maggie is prompt to observe, that the idiom supposes a ‘cleverness’ she is not a person to rise to (45). The Prince takes up arms, in this sense, against the disarmed and disarming; but when his declaration of war is transmitted at last – by proxy, from mistress to wife – it is met fully, if on altered terms. In part, when Maggie learns of the adultery, she labors to master a traditional psycho-cultural grammar, but this grammar transforms with her growing proficiency. She draws out ‘the little Princess’ in herself (373–4), a Machiavellian creature capable of diplomacy and duplicity (471, 359), and her strategies seem to operate on an imperial scale; on her bidding, Fanny commits to diffusing ‘restlessly nothing but peace – an extravagant expressive aggressive peace,’ ‘a kind of helmeted trident-shaking pax Britannica’ (470). Maggie’s vision of Fanny is, however, not only imperial but also maternal, and it is Fanny’s complete emotional availability that Maggie solicits when she is launched into her fray. She ‘would verily at this crisis have seen Mrs Assingham’s personal life or liberty sacrificed without a pang,’ and her ‘victim,’ meeting the challenge, strikes her as ‘ready almost for anything.’ Maggie, in this, is at once accusatory and her trusting. Increasingly aware of her friend’s meddlesome part, from early days, ‘in all their fortunes,’ she builds now before Fanny’s eyes on her ‘original affectionate interest’ – ‘very much as a wise or even as a mischievous child, playing on the floor, might pile up blocks, skillfully and dizzily, with an eye on the face of a covertly-watching elder’ (395). Fanny’s responsiveness, which fosters in Maggie such giddy imaginative surges, atones for an early exploitative self-interest. Her concern in devising the Prince’s marriage has been, in her words, a ‘motherly mash,’ ‘the case of a woman a man doesn’t want, or of whom he’s tired, or for whom he has no use but such uses, and who’s capable, in her infatuation, in her passion, of promoting his interests with other women rather than


lose sight of him, lose touch of him, cease to have to do with him at all’ (413). Now, as she opens herself to the need Maggie is able to press home, a recuperative possibility emerges for them, and sets a pattern for the supple emotional maneuvers Maggie learns to perform and orchestrate. When they confront each other in the presence of the golden bowl, Fanny witnesses her friend, ‘even though in all her pain, refuse, in the interest of their strange and exulted bargain, to take advantage of the opportunity for planting the stab of reproach.’ She sees her ‘look at her chance for straight denunciation, look at it and then pass it by,’ and feels herself ‘with this fact hushed well-nigh to awe’ at Maggie’s ‘lucid higher intention’ (436). Later, Maggie lets pass still fiercer visions of ‘evil’ and of ‘the lurid’ (489, 487), which tempt her with the self-consuming agon of victim and avenger. Fanny’s brazen willingness to lie – ‘to lie,’ as she puts it, ‘till we’re black in the face’ (410), carves out for Maggie a sphere of experience and gains her a stretch of time in which her new reality can begin to take root. Fiction, here, is an area of a tense but viable, transfiguring contact with the real, where fact is allowed to metabolize, pass into imaginative modes and be transformed by them. Such processes seek articulation in the body, in its visible form and presence, its organization and its movement in space; their shifting phases are refracted through a concentration of imagery of motion – of leaping and rising (342, 453), of dancing (330, 479), of improvised theatricals (348, 360, 469), of horseback acrobatics and trapeze acts in the circus (374, 534). Terrors of rigidity alternate and mix, for Maggie, with terrors of spasmodic mobility, and disciplined action vies and mixes with spontaneity and suppleness. In The Golden Bowl, as in the earlier novels of the late phase, embodiment is often figured emblematically through lapidary imagery. At the Ambassador’s party, waiting for the Prince in public view, on the grand staircase, Charlotte’s ‘hour’ as well as her person is ‘brilliantly crowned,’ and everything ‘[hangs] together, [melts] together, in light and colour and sound; the unsurpassed diamonds that her head so happily carried, the other jewels, the other perfections of aspect and arrangement that made her personal scheme a success, the proved private theory that materials to work with had been all she required and that there were none too precious for her to understand and use – to which might be added lastly, as the strong-scented flower of the total sweetness, an easy command, a high enjoyment, of her crisis. (214)


The sinuous flow of the sentence into a perception of the ‘crisis’ reflects the seductive ease of passage, for Charlotte, from ‘hanging together’ to ‘melting together.’ The crisis lurks in this very passage, from perfect poise to deliquescence; it is the link between lapidary hardness and waste, which sets in relief the high exposure of the body to the ‘hour.’ Fanny wears her jewels in a different spirit; she treats the Colonel to a view of ‘her highly-decorated back – in which, in odd places, controlling the complications of its aspect, the ruby or the garnet, the turquoise and the topaz, gleamed like faint symbols of the wit that pinned together the satin patches of her argument’ (319). Like the ‘metaphysical’ wit of the Baroque for Dr Johnson, Fanny’s wit yokes together by violence, precariously, in fragments and patches, the mind to the senses. For Maggie, jewels figure and link dissociative mental states with precipitations of awareness. Her inchoate suspicion of the adultery rises to the surface of her consciousness in a process of recovery akin to the picking of ‘small shining diamonds out of the sweepings of her ordered house’ (354). The piecing together of these fragments of insight has a cataclysmic effect, figured as submersion in a lapidary sea; her ordered house is swept by a ‘warmly-washing wave,’ traveling far up the strand toward her. In retrospect, she seems to herself to have ‘lived for hours she couldn’t count under the dizzying smothering welter – positively in submarine depths where everything came to her through walls of emerald and mother-of-pearl’ (354). Such terrors of submergence are countered by phases of embattled rigidity. In the period of suspense before the bowl is discovered, Maggie seems ‘as hard […], in spite of her fever, as a little pointed diamond’ (425). In the presence of the bowl, the diamond-edge in her transforms into a ruby flush. She is for the first time in her life rather ‘bedizened,’ as if she had on ‘too many things, overcharged herself with jewels, wore in particular more of them than usual, and bigger ones, in her hair’; but the effect owes much, it turns out, ‘to the bright red spot, red as some monstrous ruby,’ burning in either of her cheeks (430). If earlier she had the quality of a diamond in spite of her fever, here the fever is the jewel itself; the body seems to absorb into itself its alien lapidary passion. Later, she speaks to her father of complete emotional absorption. To love in the most ‘abysmal and unutterable way,’ she says, is to be ‘beyond everything,’ where ‘nothing can pull you down’; she adds with a turn to gaiety that feeling as she does ‘beyond everything,’ she seems often not to know quite where she is. Adam perceives the ‘fine pulse of passion in it, the suggestion as of a creature consciously floating and shining in a warm summer sea, some element of dazzling sapphire and silver, a creature


cradled upon depths, buoyant among dangers, in which fear or folly of sinking otherwise than in play was impossible’ (506; my italics). His vision transforms her, here, into a mermaid or nymph, a playful Lorelei. The ‘dazzling element of sapphire and silver’ recalls the earlier image of her consciousness steeped in submarine depths with ‘walls of emerald and mother-of-pearl.’ Mother-of-pearl, for Maggie, is a figure specifically maternal; but if in the earlier passage she seems to founder in a maternal abyss, here she is buoyant, ‘cradled’ upon it. The sense of containment the image conveys is free of anxiety. The sparkle of ‘sapphire and silver’ imparts a gemlike or metallic quality, a ghostly solidity, to the current on which Maggie is ‘consciously floating and shining.’ We seem to witness the transformation of a ‘vessel of consciousness’ – wrought in silver or gold, crystal or sapphire – into a stream of consciousness. By a kind of natural magic, solid form is preserved in the flux, as the glint of metal and gemstone; form and substance, container and contained, mind and matter, are released from polarized fixity and set in cradling motion. The Prince, in the wake of such underminings and fluidities, comes to feel that ‘[t]aste in him as a touchstone’ is ‘all at sea’ (563). The image suggests another liquefied crystal, the reflective medium of an altered, fluent reality.

IV Antitypy This new mobility of consciousness is expressed through and against archetypal matrices of passion and sacrifice. Lifted from its pedestal or anchorage, sacrifice is projected into a buoyant sphere of play, where loss and gain modulate into each other, and produce a pulse of ongoing transformation. On the terrace at Fawns, menaced by the prospect of a public scandal, Maggie is seized by a primitive terror, which takes the lurid aspect of a Pre-Raphaelite orientalist image, the eponymous scapegoat of Holman Hunt’s academy painting (1854).6 She feels as if she were freighted with the general peril like the sacrificial victim in that ‘terrible picture,’ who ‘had been charged with the sins of the people and had gone forth into the desert to sink under his burden and die’ (487). She prepares to face Charlotte ‘with the definite prevision, throbbing like the tick of a watch, of a doom impossibly sharp and hard’; to this doom, ‘after looking at it with her eyes wide open,’ she nonetheless bows her head (492).


Keenest and hardest, at this time, is her sense of being forsaken by her father, like Christ on the Cross. She watches him at his card game, and feels his wife, at her side, doing the same. Not yet since his marriage, we are told, has she ‘so sharply and so formidably known her old possession of him as a thing divided and contested.’ For a minute, then, ‘just a supreme instant, there burned in her a wild wish that her father would only look up’; if he did, ‘he might make some sign – she scarce knew what – that would save her; save her from being the one this way to pay all. He might somehow show a preference – distinguishing between them; might out of pity for her signal to her that this extremity of her effort for him was more than he asked’ (494). Her plea is a recasting of Christ’s prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, ‘O my Father, if this be possible, let this cup pass from me’ (Matthew 26:39); and Adam, like the Heavenly Father, fails to respond. In the next moments, however, the Passion of scripture curves off, for Maggie, into a different path; she denies all grievances, and suffers herself to be kissed by Charlotte, while the card players, who have risen from their game, are ‘flagrantly’ watching (499). The ‘chill’ of the embrace completes the ‘coldness’ of conscious perjury; it is a Judas kiss, as in The Wings of the Dove, but here it is impossible to tell victim from perjurer. Charlotte’s embrace of her, Maggie feels, is not to be distinguished from her embrace of Charlotte; and in the crossing – a passive, will-less form of action – the burden of sacrifice passes from one woman to the other. A vision of Charlotte as scapegoat emerges for Maggie directly before the embrace; she sees her rival ‘rising there radiantly before her,’ yet ‘really off in some darkness of space that would steep her in solitude and harass her with care’ (498). The game of cards which frames the scene marks the opening of a ludic order into the order of the novel’s fictional reality; this playful environment contains the dynamics of sacrifice but also fuels it, stimulates its unfolding and transformation. Maggie, we learn, knows nothing of bridge; her father is ‘a high adept, one of the greatest,’ while she, in her stupidity, has ever been ‘his small, his sole despair’ (486). Now, however, performing an enabling turnabout, she takes over his ground of play and makes it her own; his penchant for ‘transcendent calculation and imaginative gambling’ is translated through her into a materialized, embodied arena of intimate conflict and contact. Maggie’s traffic in the playful has its climax in a second scene of confrontation with Charlotte, set in the Greek arbor. This time, she assumes her Christlike role histrionically. Her extravaganza of self-abasement, intended to ease Charlotte into her doom, allows her to take in and in


part depolarize the combined experience of desire and recoil that this doom represents. The ‘Greek’ frame brings the Judeo-Christian figure of the scapegoat into the orbit of classical drama and myth; the satyr or goat (tragos) which forms a part of the word ‘tragedy’ links Maggie’s scene of sacrifice with ancient, Dionysian histrionic forms, as well as with the more modern form of satiric drama. If these forms of heightened play seem to lead to purgative release (katharsis), they seem to do so through an elaborate engagement of the retentive, absorptive capacities of the imagination. The arbor scene is preceded by luncheon with the local priest, ‘good holy hungry man,’ whose poorly balanced eating is the object of biting satire (531, 532–3). Maggie’s hope against hope of receiving spiritual sustenance is met, at the end of the meal, with no more than the ‘twiddle of thumbs over the satisfied stomach and the full flush, the comical candour, of reference to the hand employed at Fawns for Mayonnaise of Salmon’ (533). She is made conscious, awkwardly, of ‘having, from the first of her trouble, really found her way without his guidance,’ and wonders if he suspects ‘how more than subtly, how perversely’ he has been dispensed with. ‘Some day at some happier season she would confess to him what she hadn’t confessed, though taking so much on her conscience; but just now she was carrying in her weak stiffened hand a glass filled to the brim, as to which she had recorded a vow that no drop should overflow’ (531). Her effort is to contain a painfully polarized inner state, move delicately through it without succumbing to its oppositional tug. Her glass calls to mind Christ’s cup of death, but in her Christlike display of humility in the arbor, a paradoxically playful agon, she serves it to Charlotte and assumes, with this, Charlotte’s archetypal role of Borgia poisoner. The passion of their previous encounter becomes a parody of itself, a ‘passionate parade’ (544). ‘You want to take my father from me?’ she exclaims; and as the ‘sharp successful almost primitive wail in it’ makes Charlotte turn, the movement seems to attest ‘the felicity of her deceit’ (543). All the while, however, something throbs in her as it did the night she stood watching the card game and ‘denied that she had suffered’ (543). If she is ready to lie again, so that she will indeed have done ‘all’ (544), it is in order that the burden of sacrifice might be denied, in play, but not cast off – denied, but retained for each through the other. The glass filled to the brim she pictures herself carrying to the arbor, a vessel associated with the golden bowl and with the ‘great gold cup’ the Prince and Charlotte drain together at Gloucester, lends its shape, finally, to the adulterous affair as she herself projects it, a relation ‘filled


to the brim with the wine of consciousness’ (553). The image is preserved at the core of the inward drama she undergoes after parting from Charlotte; it is a drama of dissociative identification – an ordeal against a figurative glass pane, which seems to pit her vindictiveness against her tenderness and immobilize both. In the arbor, to her sense, Charlotte was hiding neither pride nor joy – she was hiding humiliation; and here it was that the Princess’s passion, so powerless for vindictive flights, inveterately bruised its tenderness against the hard glass of her question. Behind the glass lurked the whole history of the relation she had so fairly flattened her nose against to penetrate – the glass Mrs Verver might at this stage have been frantically tapping from within by way of supreme irrepressible entreaty. Maggie had said to herself complacently after that last passage with her stepmother in the garden at Fawns that there was nothing left her to do and that she could thereupon fold her hands. But why wasn’t it still left to push further and, from the point of view of personal pride, grovel lower! – why wasn’t it still left her to offer herself as the bearer of a message reporting to [the Prince] their friend’s anguish and convincing him of her need? She could thus have translated Mrs Verver’s tap against the glass, as I have called it, into fifty forms; could perhaps have translated it most into the form of a reminder that would pierce deep. ‘You don’t know what it is to have been loved and broken with. You haven’t been broken with, because in your relation what can there have been worth speaking of to break? Ours was everything a relation could be, filled to the brim with the wine of consciousness; and if it was to have no meaning, no better meaning than that such a creature as you could breathe upon it, at your hour, for blight, why was I myself dealt with all for deception? Why condemned after a short couple of years to find the golden flame – oh the golden flame! – a mere handful of ashes?’ Our young woman so yielded at moments to what was insidious in these foredoomed ingenuities of her pity that for minutes together sometimes the weight of a new duty seemed to rest upon her – the duty of speaking before separation should constitute its chasm, of pleading for some benefit that might be carried away into exile like the last saved object of price of the émigré, the jewel wrapped in a piece of old silk and negotiable some day in the market of misery. (552–3; my emphasis)


The passage reflects a movement from emotional conflict to a form of agonistic play; play ‘that would pierce deep’ – pierce the glass partition – but only conditionally. The ventriloquist mode, hovering between thought and speech, at once her own and not her own, inward and participatory, is sustained through these tensions; in the ludic sphere it creates, the adulterous affair can be acknowledged and engaged with. Mobility in time becomes imaginable, and with it emotional commerce. The form of giving emblematized in the jewel, a figure intimately associated with Maggie, suggests a process of hardening, a crystallization as if toward metabolic secretion; at the same time, it suggests the formative and compensatory possibilities which viable separation may hold in store. Avian imagery, which figures here the difficult proximity of vengefulness and tenderness, serves elsewhere, too, to embody the constraint of polarized emotion, as well as the complex effort of release. Maggie’s early sense of entrapment is pictured, in a concatenated imagesequence, as a ‘vault’ or ‘solid chamber of […] helplessness’, as a ‘bath of benevolence’ suited for ‘a patient of some sort, a nervous eccentric or a lost child,’ and a as a ‘gilded cage’ (355). In a passage leading to the scene on the terrace at Fawns, the caged bird, trapped in delusion, is Charlotte. Maggie has a vision ‘of gilt wires and bruised wings, the spacious but suspended cage, the home of eternal unrest, of pacings, beatings, shakings all so vein, into which the baffled consciousness helplessly resolved itself.’ Bafflement and resolution merge for both, here, and Maggie draws back from Charlotte’s ‘grim attempt’ through the bars, as ‘instinctively as if the door of the cage had suddenly opened from within’ (484). On the terrace, Charlotte, a bird turned beast, stalks Maggie like a tigress – ‘a splendid supple creature loosed from her cage.’ But it is Charlotte, too, who is persecuted by Maggie’s unappeased rage, and Maggie herself who is menaced by it; her own retributive urge assaults her ‘as a beast might have leaped at her throat’ (488). The transformation from bird to beast suggests a vulnerable, volatile imagination of sacrifice – the sense in which meekness can take the form of persecution, and persecution of meekness. At the close of the scene in the arbor, Charlotte throws at Maggie a last accusatory challenge: ‘You haven’t worked against me?’ Maggie now feels persuaded of the success of her deceit and of Charlotte’s entrapment. She ‘took it, and for a moment kept it; held it, with closed eyes, as if it had been some captured fluttering bird pressed by both hands to her breast. Then she opened her eyes to speak. “What does it matter – if I’ve failed?” (544). Her histrionic finale allows for a subtle, delicate gesture towards containment, above all, it seems, of the act of sacrifice


itself. In its very enactment, sacrifice emerges as a frail sentient creature, which can be tended, perhaps, and nursed into life. The final figure of play, for Maggie, is the game of dice. The word – derived from ‘Dare,’ ‘to give,’ ‘to render,’ ‘to play’ – marks the quintessential form of aleatory play, the very model of ludic experience. At the close of her drama, after the Ververs’ departure, in the brief moments before she is rejoined by the Prince in their drawing room, Maggie comes to project the ‘reward’ that awaits her in such terms of incalculable return: Here it was then, the moment, the golden fruit that had shone from afar; only what were these things in the fact, for the hand and for the lips, when tested, when tasted – what were they as a reward? Closer than she had ever been to the measure of her course and the full face of her act, she had an instant of terror that, when there has been suspense, always precedes on the part of the creature to be paid, the certification of the amount. Amerigo knew it, the amount; he still held it, and the delay in his return, making her heart beat too fast to go on, was like a sudden blinding light on a wild speculation. She had thrown the dice, but his hand was over her cast. On his return, ‘with her sight of him renewed to intensity, she seemed to have a view of the number. His presence alone, as he paused to look at her, somehow made it the highest, and even before he had spoken she had begun to be paid in full. With that consciousness in fact an extraordinary thing occurred; the assurance of her safety so making her terror drop that already within the minute it had been changed to concern for his own anxiety, for everything that was deep in his being and everything that was fair in his face. So far as seeing that she was ‘paid’ went he might have been holding out the money-bag for her to come and take it. But what intensity rose for her between the act and her acceptance was the sense that she must strike him as waiting for a confession. This in turn charged her with a new horror: if that was her proper payment she would go without money. (579) This scene of deflected consummation is the last in a series of such charged intimate encounters. An early attempt of seduction on the part of the Prince gives her a taste of ‘the terror of the weakness’ which ‘the felicity of his tenderness and the degree of her sensibility’ might produce in


her (345). By degrees, she acquires skill in resisting, averting and transforming the different kinds of climax with which he repeatedly, more or less willfully, tempts her (357, 363–4, 560, 567–9). In the novel’s final passages, this transformative impulse figures as a form of arduous, hazardous play. D. W. Winnicott speaks of the phenomena of play as having ‘no climax,’ in contrast to the phenomena based on instinct, which have an essential orgiastic element. The latter ‘become seductions unless based on a well-established capacity in the individual person for total experience’ (PR, 98–9). In James’s fiction, all too often there seems to be little to choose between seduction and play; and if Maggie is compelled to the last to bargain for time, it is in order to play out seduction itself in an orbit of unbroken, inclusive experience. So, she and the Prince urge each other to ‘wait’ (567), put off their reconciliation, until the Ververs have taken their leave. On parting from him before this last visit, she feels intensely for the lingering moment and almost with a terror her endless power of surrender. He had only to press, really, for her to yield inch by inch, and she fairly knew at present, while she looked at him through her cloud, that the confession of this precious secret sat there for him to pluck. The sensation was for the few seconds extraordinary; her weakness, her desire, so long as she was yet not saving herself, flowered in her face like a light or a darkness. (568) This mutual contamination of darkness and light is transformed, after the scene of parting, into a form of mutual containment. A tragic perception, expressed in the lingering presence of Charlotte between them, informs their reunion; its darkness is not dispelled, finally, but brought in, encompassed by a luminousness which is its strange reflex. ‘Isn’t she too splendid?’ Maggie says of Charlotte, ‘offering it to explain and to finish. ‘Oh splendid!’ with which he came over to her. ‘That’s our help, you see,’ she added – to point further her moral. It kept him before her therefore, taking in – or trying to – what she so wonderfully gave. He tried, too clearly, to please her – to meet her in her own way; but with the result only that, close to her, her face kept before him, his hands holding her shoulders, his whole act enclosing her, he presently echoed: “See”? I see nothing but you.’ And the truth


of it 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. (580)7 The sense of ‘pity and dread’ resonates here in counterpoint to Aristotle’s notion of katharsis; it seems to be preservative rather than purgative of tragic passion. Tragic insight, moreover, seems to draw its force at this moment from a close contiguity with the sphere of comedy. The ‘dark blindness’ of the embrace in The Wings of the Dove is placed here in high relief, under full illumination. For Maggie, the scene harks back to earlier figures of blinding – to her ‘bandaged eyes’ after the breaking of the bowl (451), and to the light of the lurid on the terrace at Fawns, which she feels, instead of seeing, turn into blackness (487). Near the end, her anxiety over the die being cast is figured as ‘a sudden blinding light on a wild speculation’ (579); next, her terror of the unknown becomes a terror of the definite and irrevocable. Her final moment of blindness deflects this polarized vision; blinding passion is resolved into a passion that looks beyond itself, and survives its own blaze.8 Adam’s vision of Charlotte’s sacrifice presents itself to Maggie at such a remove, as both her own and not her own. The italicized deictic pronoun seems to stress, above all, the absence of fixed reference and the high mobility of the experience: There was his idea, the clearness of which for an instant almost dazzled her. It was a blur of light in the midst of which she saw Charlotte like some object marked by contrast in blackness, saw her waver in the field of vision, saw her removed, transported, doomed. And he had named Charlotte, named her again, and she had made him – which was all she had needed more: it was as if she held a blank letter to the fire and the writing had come out still larger than she hoped. (512) John Landau draws attention to the link between this fantasized blank letter, written in invisible ink, and the real unopened letter in The Wings of the Dove. ‘The letter in The Wings of the Dove,’ he writes, ‘is consumed by fire; the letter in The Golden Bowl in conjured into existence by fire’ (TD, 106). Sacrifice, projected here into an area of play, transforms blankness into writing again, through the restorative action of a fire that does not consume.


The sacrificial figure, an object marked in blackness and set in motion, carried into and out of the clear field of vision, seems to reveal in its movement a rudimentary phenomenology or metaphysics of the mind. The blank field figures as a kind of Ur-consciousness, a materia prima or antitype, onto which concretized casts, molds or types are imprinted or projected. A cast die may determine the ‘shadow’ or figure; yet primal matter, it seems, is characterized by ‘antitypy’– the power of resisting alteration or penetration.9 The pulse of consciousness seems to enact a process of continual formation and reabsorption of figures, out of and into antitypical blankness. As in the image of the shadowy sacrificial figure, form crystallizes out of and against a formless element, into which it is also cast off, to be consumed and recast. Passing fluently through fixities and polarities, the invisible ink of consciousness can be made to appear, by ocular distortion or a chemical change – a kind of natural magic – in the form of writing.

5 Afterword

The Jamesian stream of consciousness is expressed as a force of ongoing resistance to the psycho-cultural molds in which subjective experience is cast. Molding is of the essence of this movement, as is the counterpressure toward release. The Critical Prefaces of the New York Edition draw on this dialectic, while seeking to configure their own poetics of fiction. The ‘elasticity’ of novelistic form is viewed against the fixed form of Aristotelian tragic drama; novelistic form is represented as an extension of tragic vision beyond itself, into what may be thought of as the encompassing vision of romance. Aristotelian metaphysics is implicitly involved, here, in the consideration of Aristotelian poetics; the dualistic metaphysics of Spirit-PotentialityForm and Physis-Actuality-Matter insinuates itself into the preoccupation of the Prefaces with Aristotelian tragedy. The Preface to The Awkward Age, the most ‘scenic’ of James’s fictions, registers the tragic burden, for him, of the perfect welding of ‘substance’ and ‘form’ (LC II, 1127) attained through the rigor of dramatic composition. ‘Something in the very nature, in the fine rigour, of this special sacrifice (which is capable of affecting the form-lover, I think, as really more of a projected form than any other) lends [the dramatic principle] a coercive charm; a charm that grows in proportion as the appeal to it tests and stretches and strains it, puts it powerfully to the touch’. (1131–2) The formal rigor to which The Awkward Age owes its ‘coercive charm’ depends on a relentless pursuit of the subject, which leads to ‘overtreatment’ (1135). The process of composition ‘has been to pump the case gaspingly dry, dry not only of superfluous moisture, but absolutely 207


(for I have encountered the charge) of breathable air’ (1134). The dense texture of the novel yields a purely dramatic medium that is both watertight and airtight. Representational ‘looseness’ or ‘expansibility’ cannot be reconciled with ‘any idea the mould of the ‘stage play’ might hope to express without cracking and bursting’; so, in The Awkward Age, the close compositional weave ‘abides without a moment’s deflexion by the principle of the stage-play’ (1135). In this, ‘it helps us ever so happily to see the grave distinction between substance and form in a really wrought work of art signally break down.’ The two principles ‘are separate before the fact, but the sacrament of execution indissolubly marries them, and the marriage, like any other marriage, has only to be a “true” one for the scandal of a breach not to show’ (1135; my emphasis). The Preface to The Ambassadors speaks, in a similar vein, of the delight and suspense, ‘the thrill of a game of difficulty breathlessly played,’ generated through compositional stringencies. James’s ‘dramatist’ is a hunter ‘for the unseen and the occult,’ who ‘always, by the very law of his genius, believes not only in a possible right issue from the rightlyconceived tight place; he does much more than this – he believes, irresistibly, in the necessary, the precious ‘tightness’ of the place (whatever the issue) on the strength of any possible hint’ (1307). In The Ambassadors, this ‘tightening’ of the composition is achieved by means of confining narrative focus to a single consciousness, ‘employing but one center and keeping it all within my hero’s compass’ (1313). This formal constraint is a principle ‘essentially ravenous, without scruple and without mercy, appeased with no cheap nor easy nourishment. It enjoys the costly sacrifice and rejoices thereby in the very odour of difficulty – even as ogres, with their ‘Fee-faw-fum!’ rejoice in the smell of the blood of Englishmen’ (1314). Single-center narration, a sacrificial, devouring compositional matrix, is in keeping, above all, with the Aristotelian principle of unified action; at the risk of curtailing ‘vivacity’ and ‘variety,’ the novel gestures toward something like the austere formal purity of tragedy. One’s work should have composition, because composition alone is positive beauty; but all the while […] how, as to the cheap and easy, at every turn, how, as to immediacy and facility, and even as to the commoner vivacity, positive beauty might have to be sweated for and paid for! […] All the sophistications in life might have appeared to muster on behalf of the menace – the menace to bright variety – involved in Strether’s having all the subjective ‘say,’ as it were, to himself. (1315)

Afterword

209

Compositional unity itself, however, derives in The Ambassadors from a cleft principle. The novel divides itself, says James, ‘into the parts that prepare, that tend in fact to over-prepare, for scenes, and the parts, or otherwise into the scenes, that justify and crown the preparation’ (1317–8). While the disparate modes of ‘preparation’ and ‘scene’ seem to attain, on the whole, a ‘fusion and synthesis,’ the ‘form and figure’ of the novel nonetheless admits of marked violations of the scenic principle. At issue, here, is the ‘inevitable deviation (from too fond an original vision) that the exquisite treachery even of the straightest execution may ever be trusted to inflict on the most mature plan […]’ (1319–20; my emphasis). The representational virtue that occasionally insists, in The Ambassadors, on being ‘other than scenic,’ does so ‘for the charm of opposition and renewal’; and James believes that from an equal play of such opposition the book gathers an intensity that fairly adds to the dramatic – though the latter is supposed to be the sum of all intensities; or that has at any rate nothing to fear from juxtaposition with it. I consciously fail to shrink in fact from that extravagance – I risk it, rather, for the sake of the moral involved; which is not that the particular production before us exhausts the interesting questions it raises, but that the Novel remains still, under the right persuasion, the most independent, most elastic, most prodigious of literary forms. (1320–1) This panegyric to the novel, with which the Preface concludes, is about a movement of the imagination, both agonistic and elastic, through, against and beyond fixed sacrificial forms. In The Awkward Age, ‘execution’ is a ‘sacrament,’ an indissoluble marriage of Form with Matter. The compositional mode of The Ambassadors is marked by a sense of ‘the treacheries of even the straightest execution,’ an ambiguous phrase with an ominous ring. A suggestion of violence lurks in the use of the term ‘execution,’ as in the attribution of ‘coercive charm’ to a particular instance of it. In the present context, the sacramental fusion of form and substance comes close to suggesting a Eucharistic sacrament of sacrifice. In the late novels, however, the principle of composition is realized as a continual dynamic straining against the sacramental passional deep structure of Aristotelian drama. Dramatic action is a mode of sacrificial ‘execution’ – an imaginative scaffold, like the guillotine or the Cross, which the supple, capacious form of the novel incorporates and strives to transform, remaining positively ‘more true to its character in proportion as it strains, or tends to


burst, with a latent extravagance, its mould’ (1075). The late-Jamesian novel is, in this sense, an imitation of the quintessential action of the mind, as it reaches past patterns of sacrifice, dislodges the tragic, stretches and bends it and loosens its bonds.

Notes 1 Introduction 1. Jonathan Freedman’s Professions of Taste explores the literary culture of the fin de siècle in terms of the shaping forces of the market. Despite the difference in focus, Freedman’s positioning of the late novels in relation to the canons of Ruskin, Morris and Pater serves as a valuable frame of reference for my argument. Charles Bernheimer’s study, Decadent Subjects, helpfully defines decadence in terms of ‘the dynamics of paradox and the ambivalence that it sets in motion’ (Editors’ Preface, xv). 2. Adrian Poole, in his recent discussion of tragedy, makes the point with great acumen (T, 64–5). 3. James’s patterning of heterosexual desire is neither undermined nor overshadowed, but rather charged and enriched, by his attunement to patterns of same-sex desire. Tessa Hadley’s Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure offers a constructive critical perspective, in this connection; the study fruitfully juxtaposes configurations of heterosexual desire in the late fiction with the homoerotic emphasis of recent criticism. John Bradley, one of the finest writers on homoerotic desire in James, strikes a helpful note in the critical controversy over the sexual investments of James’s fiction: ‘Neither James’s critics ‘defending’ James from gay readings nor gay critics ‘claiming’ James as a gay novelist are to the point: to unearth a concern with homosexuality in much of his fiction is not to invalidate all previous interpretations, but rather to provide a variation on them which sits alongside or merges with them’ (HJPA, in HJHED, 52). 4. See, however, Adrian Poole’s remarks on the historical forces which animate the international theme, in Henry James, pp. 25–6. 5. The motif responds not least to the fluide vitale of the Will in Louis Lambert (1832), Balzac’s philosophical novel, which in its turn draws on Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (1819). Lewis Lambert Strether is the namesake of Balzac’s eponymous hero (63), and Louis Lambert resonates with The Ambassadors on many levels. 6. For a closely related reading of this image-cluster, see Adrian Poole’s Henry James, p. 91. 7. See, in this context, the discussion of the novel in terms of decadent aesthetics in Jonathan Freedman’s Professions of Taste, pp. 203–4. Leon Edel places James’s vampire theme in a biographical context; see his Henry James: A Life, p. 10. 8. Quentin Anderson was the first to note the suggestion (AHJ, 289, n7). 9. This particular intertextual relation between The Ambassadors and Chartres is symptomatic of a wider affinity between James and Adams, discussed, to cite one salient example, in John Carlos Rowe’s Henry Adams and Henry James.

211

212 Notes

10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

On the divergence of social attitudes between Adams and James, see Ross Posnock’s The Trial of Curiosity, pp. 198–9 and p. 320, n4. Quentin Anderson comments on the affinity; Mme de Vionnet, for Strether, is ‘something very like Henry Adams’s conception of the Virgin, a creature alien yet fascinating, whom one might in the past have loved, who had in the past ordered the world’ (AHJ, 215). F. O. Matthiessen notes a kinship with Pater’s Mona Lisa (MP, 41), and the kinship with Anatole France’s Thais (1890) is no less distinctive. Adrian Poole writes of Mme de Vionnet as an embodied vision of historical necessity; his reading has special resonance within this intertextual field (JSRE, 85–8). Carolyn Porter, in the framework of a Lukácsian reading, traces a similar formal trajectory, without, however, taking note of the abandonment of narrative ambiguity in the passage from The Sacred Fount to The Ambassadors (SB, 123–7). Earl Wasserman suggests that what Keats has in mind here is ‘something approximately Eucharistic’(FT, 32). Robert Dawidoff in The Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage, and Ross Posnock in The Trial of Curiosity, examine the affinities between The Ambassadors and Santayana’s indictment of American Gentility. Posnock sees James’s modes of cultural engagement as a challenge, in the spirit of Santayana, to ‘the rigid genteel psyche’ (192) of bourgeois Protestant America. His interest in the psychodynamics of reaction against American Gentility, suggestively explored in terms of a poetics of ‘traumatophilia’ and restless curiosity (235), is apposite to my focus on the Anglo-European, fin-de-siècle field of reference. Cultural-materialist readings of the late corpus are often concerned with closely related patterns, conflations of production and consumption, action and passion, detachment and involvement. David Minter notes that in The Portrait of a Lady ‘the line between being passive and being active dissolves’; so, in the language of Finnegans Wake, ‘My consumers, are they not my producers?’ (CHAN, 7–8) Carolyn Porter focuses on the ‘structure of reification’ erected by capitalism, and the struggles mounted in the novels ‘against its destructive power – struggles in which the complicity of the detached observer occupying the contemplative stance of reified consciousness surfaces with potentially shattering effect’ (SB, xxxii). Richard Salmon reads The Ambassadors as a troubled response to the rise of mass culture, arguing that the late fiction ‘could no longer simply be used as a medium ‘in’ which advertising was held up as an object of critique; it had also to recognize itself in the image of the other’ (HJCP, 177). Ross Posnock traces the immanent stance of the reflective center in The Ambassadors, his ‘entanglement in the very structures he would revise’ (TC, 243).The materialist approach is a register primarily of socio-cultural currents and tensions. My own approach is at once narrower and more expansive, wishing to focus the deep structures of Jamesian subjectivity in terms of a cultural or ‘civilizational’ manifold. Lyndall Gordon’s biography provides a compelling account of James’s ambivalent relation to his ailing cousin, and of his complex response to his sister’s illness. Andrew Cutting has drawn attention to the pertinence of Foucault’s analysis to The Wings of the Dove. See Death in Henry James, pp. 88–90.

Notes 213 17. The figure appears in The Wings of the Dove: ‘The largeness of style was the great containing vessel’ (WD, 188). 18. Andrew Taylor, in Henry James and the Father Question, examines the theological inflection of the Jamesian corpus in relation to the spiritual philosophies of James Senior and Emerson. Susan Mizruchi, in Science of Sacrifice, explores social-scientific refractions in the fiction of a religious tradition of sacrifice. Robert Weisbuch interprets the Jamesian ‘Idea of Evil’ as a psychological reworking of Puritan metaphysics, a framework in which James ‘stakes out his postcolonial claim as an American writer’ (104). Robert Dawidoff, in The Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage, reads James’s qualified tribute to the Puritan past as a form of reaction against the whittled down Gentility of latter-day America. Earlier studies in this domain include Matthiessen’s group biography, The James Family, and Richard A. Hocks’s Henry James and Pragmatistic Thought. Edwin Fussel’s The Catholic Side of Henry James is a compendium of references to Catholics and Catholicism in the Jamesian corpus. 19. See, in particular, Playing and Reality. 20. Others, notably F. R Leavis and Dorothea Krook, have complained about the ‘diagrammatic,’ ‘arbitrary’ and ‘heavy handed’ quality of the more extravagant late figures (GT, 193; OC, 391). 21. In his essay on Time, Norbert Elias explores the increasing standardization of temporal experience in the west since early modernity, and aligns it with the development of a particular ‘pattern of self-control, the self-imposed compulsion to know the time’ in individuals. He sets out a correspondence between ‘a social structure with an indispensable but also inescapable network of temporal definitions, and a personality structure with a very acute and disciplined sensitivity to time’ (6). Members of urbanized, industrialized societies ‘feel at their backs the pressure of everyday clock time and – more intensely as they grow older – the flight of calendar years’ (7). The early stage at which the social regulation of time begins to be internalized by the individual ‘contributes much to the solidity and inescapability of the personal time-conscience. The inner voice asking the time is ever present. It is no wonder that, to people with this personality structure, the experience of all natural, social, personal sequences in terms of the regulative time symbols of their societies often appears as a feature of their own nature, and then of human nature in general. People equipped with such an ingrained uniform and omnipresent time-conscience find it difficult to imagine that there are others who lack the ever-alert compulsion to know the time. This individualization of social time-control therefore bears in almost paradigmatic form the features of a civilizing process’ (23).

2 The Ambassadors: ‘The Historic Muse’ 1. Biographical background on this germinal scene is supplied in Edel’s Life (HJL, 447), among other sources. 2. For details, see n18 of the Introduction. 3. The passage echoes Hawthorne’s own sense, given voice in the Preface to The Marble Faun (1860), ‘of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country

214 Notes

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong […]. Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens, and wallflowers need ruin to make them grow’ (MF, vi). Richard Salmon, following Michael Anesko’s argument in Friction with the Market, discerns in The Ambassadors a growing awareness on James’s part of a forced complicity with the marketeering strategies of the publishing industry. The conflicts with which materialist criticism is concerned here are, however, intimately tied up with other, psychic and cultural domains of friction. The three Marys of the novel, Maria, Marie and Mamie, have an archetypal kinship with the Marys of Scripture, as well as with a number of royal Marys – Mary Stuart, Bloody Mary, Marie Antoinette. Other late heroines, too, have Marian names: May in The Sacred Fount and in The Beast in the Jungle, Milly and Maud in The Wings of the Dove and Maggie in The Golden Bowl. These characters seem to link up biographically, in different ways, not only with James’s cousin, Mary (Minny) Temple, but also with his mother, Mary Walsh James, and with his favorite niece, Mary Margaret (Peggy) James. Julie Rivkin notes that Maria’s ‘act of mediation opens up a way for Strether that is far from the course he had intended to travel’; hence her surname, which ‘falls one consonant short of ‘go straight’ and leaves us with the openended sound and open path of “go stray”’ (FP, 69). On the ficelle, see the Prefaces to The Portrait of a Lady and The Ambassadors (LC II, 1082, 1317), and the letter to Violet Hunt from 16 January 1902 (L, IV, 221). The farcical European conversion in store for Waymarsh is signaled by his name. Displacing ‘Waymark’ in the Notebooks, the version we have suggests ‘the transformation of severity into uncertainty and the breakdown of proper boundaries that is the fate of New England in the novel’ (FP, 69). In Shakespeare’s play, Enobarbus says of Cleopatra: ‘Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety. Other women cloy / The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry / Where most she satisfies’ (II.ii.244–7). The alimentary figure clearly runs with the grain of James’s vision of his heroine; but the phrase ‘various and multiform’ points more directly to Virgil’s ‘varium et mutabile semper femina’ than it does to the Shakeperean verses. With the presence of Dido it invokes, the allusion to the Aeneid (IV.569) is inflected with a predication of abandonment – a vein fulfilled later, in the recasting of Mme de Vionnet as a forsaken Cleopatra (see p. 18). Above all, however, the Virgilian echo serves to deepen the mythic and historical resonances which conjure the novel’s muse into being. The double prism of Antony and Cleopatra and the Aeneid bring into sharp focus an imaginative field polarized between occident and orient, a central dimension of James’s international theme. On the multilingual confessionals at St Peter’s, see The Marble Faun, ‘Altars and Incense’ (XXXVIII), pp. 256–7. Chad is associated with Titian’s ‘overwhelming portrait of the young man with the strangely-shaped glove’ in the Louvre (145). In the portrait, the young man’s hands are a locus of special interest; the naked hand is tensed and seems misshapen, with only the thumb and the ringed index finger fully visible. The strangely shaped glove, held in the other hand, is vaguely suggestive of flayed skin.

Notes 215 12. St Lambert was a seventh-century martyr, who died a violent death, perhaps as a result of an outspoken denunciation of the adultery of a dignitary. 13. The Puritan men of the novel are pagans of a different race; Jim Pocock is once imaged as a tent-dweller (373), and Waymarsh as Chief Sitting Bull (253). The sense in which extreme westernness, embodied in the American Indian, may be ‘predestined’ for a transformative encounter with the east emerges more distinctly in The Golden Bowl, through the figures of Pocahontas and the Indian squaw (GB, 65, 548). 14. An early version of this image appears in a letter sent to William James from Paris in the fall of 1872. The traveler laments the general ‘want of comprehension of the real moral situation of France […]. Beneath all this neatness and coquetry, you seem to smell the Commune suppressed, but seething’ (L, I, 300). 15. My thanks to Eph Gerber for suggesting the link with the flame-like.

3 The Wings of the Dove: ‘The Adventure of Shipwreck’ 1. In ‘On the Imagination of Death,’ Baruch Hochman describes ‘the great monuments of twentieth-century fiction – Ulysses, Women in Love, The Magic Mountain, probably also Remembrance of Things Past and The Trial [as] in effect doomsday books’ (ID, 45). John Rosenberg, in Elegy for an Age, points to a similar tenor in late-Victorian poetry; in such notable long poems as ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland,’ The City of Dreadful Night and Idylls of the King, he writes, ‘the fin-de-siècle became a type of the fin-dumonde’ (EA, 76). 2. On this subject, see the Introduction, pp. 14–6. Critical discussion, including the work of Diana Price Herndl (IW, 191), Athena Vrettos (SFII, 16) and Andrew Cutting (DHJ, 83–5, 89–90), offers different perspectives, medically informed, on the ambiguity in which Milly’s illness is cloaked. My own sense is that here, as elsewhere in the late corpus, ambiguity is not sustained in its pure form, but serves instead to flesh out a knotty cluster of meanings. 3. On Leviathan, see Job 41:15–32; Isaiah 27:1 and Psalms 74:26. See also Milton’s verses, in Paradise Lost I.200–3 and VII.411–16. The Apocryphal Book of Enoch describes the origins of a female Leviathan (60:7–8). 4. See the letter to Howells from 25 January 1902, and the letter to Mrs Humphry Ward from 2 September 1902 (L, IV, 224, 242). 5. Arnold’s rendition is Tristram and Iseult (1852), Tennyson’s is ‘The Last Tournament’ (1871), and Swinburne’s is Tristram of Lyonesse (1882). Pictorial renditions include works by Morris, Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Beardsley. Oscar Cargill makes much of the link between the Tristan myth, especially Wagner’s Tristan, and The Wings of the Dove. His sense, however, is that James’s theme is not passion but the rejection of passion, and that the novel is written in reaction against the Wagnerian Liebestod (NHJ, 338–9 and passim). 6. Virginia Woolf objected, above all, to the treatment of Milly’s death. Her diary entry of 12 September 1921 complains of a manipulative ‘juggling and arranging of silk pocket handkerchiefs,’ behind which Milly ‘disappears’ (D, 39). F. R. Leavis says that Milly ‘isn’t there, and the fuss the other characters make about her as a “Dove” has the effect of an irritating sentimentality’ (GT, 158).

216 Notes

7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

Frederick Crews describes her as ‘the most romantic and ethereal heroine in all Jamesian fiction’; even when exerting her power, she is ‘somehow passive and intangible; her status as a symbol always prevails’ (TM, 66, 59). See The Major Phase, pp. 64–5 and The Tragedy of Manners, p. 76. Thel’s presence in The Wings of the Dove seems to be evoked aurally in Milly’s surname. Critics from F. O. Matthiessen to, most recently, Sharon Cameron (1989), have linked Blake’s heroine with Maggie Verver, a less resonant pairing, inspired by the image of the golden bowl. See, for instance, the passages on Richmond, Florida and California, pp. 691–2. The association of the dovelike with Puritan America owes much to the dovelike character of Hilda in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun [‘The Virgin’s Shrine’ (VI), p. 45, and passim]. In James’s study of Hawthorne, Hilda figures as a ‘somewhat rigid New England girl’; after witnessing the murder scene, she enters a confessional at St Peter’s ‘and pours out her dark knowledge into the bosom of the Church – then comes away with her conscience lightened, but not a wit less a Puritan than before’ (LC I, 446). Adrian Poole draws attention to the latter pairing, in the context of a rich reading of the resonance of the word ‘mark’ in the novel (HJ, 115–17). The numismatic meaning of ‘mark’ has special bite in relation to the apostolic typological frame. Lord Mark’s reappearance in Venice – a ‘second descent’ (493), into the Piazza San Marco itself – recalls the miraculous reappearance of the Evangelist’s relics when the eleventh-century basilica was being erected; here, however, the noble bearer of the name turns up ignobly, like a bad penny. Patricia Crick notes the reference to the North Pole as ‘an example of James’s topicality. The first successful expedition to the Pole took place in 1908–9’ (n1, p. 514). The trope of the Poles figures again, with greater salience, in The Golden Bowl. The portrait, datable to around 1540, is at the Uffizi. Its identification with the fictional portrait was made by Miriam Allott, in an essay from 1953, ‘The Bronzino Portrait in Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove.’ See Professions of Taste, pp. 212–15. Lucrezia’s Panciatichi’s portrait was painted as a companion piece to a portrait of her husband, Bartolomeo. The inscription on her ‘recorded’ pendant reads ‘amour dure sans fin’; with the emblematic breviary she holds open, it must have been intended to suggest uxorial devotion, graced by divine love (AB, 60; 154, n736). Lord Mark’s darker view of her character seems to allude to a modern appropriation, Vernon Lee’s recasting of the portrait as her villainous Medea (see HJLE, 98). In ‘Faustine,’ Swinburne probes an idea which, in more or less explicit ways, informs the vision of fatality in much decadent literature, and resonates strongly with the portrait-scene at Matcham: ‘The transmigration of a single soul, doomed as though by accident from the first to all evil and no good, through many ages and forms, but clad always in the same type of fleshly beauty. The chance which suggested to me this poem may happen any day to any man – the sudden sight of a living face which recalled the well-known likeness of another dead for centuries […]’ (410). See The Major Phase, p. 55.

Notes 217 17. In ‘Traffic,’ Ruskin attacked British culture for recognizing no deity but the ‘Goddess of Getting-On,’ ‘Britannia of the Market’ (CWO, 66). 18. Jonathan Freedman argues the point convincingly. See his joint discussion of The Stones of Venice and The Wings of the Dove, in Professions of Taste, p. 99. 19. ‘Leporelli’ calls to mind, too, the mercenary servant Leporello in Don Giovanni. Here, reincarnated as Eugenio, he is the presiding spirit of the palace. Like Mozart’s opera, the Venetian portion of the novel explores an imaginative juncture of lust, greed and death. 20. Lawrence Holland offers a detailed analysis of the paintings in relation to the fictional scene (EV, 307–8, 313). See also Adeline Tintner’s discussion of The Marriage Feast at Cana, in HJLE, 101–2. 21. In The Breaking of the Vessels, Harold Bloom traces the presence of a ‘trope of blankness, at once whiteness or colorlessness, yet oddly also blackness’ (BV, 75), in works by Milton, Coleridge, Emerson and Stevens. The blank, for Bloom, stands for ‘both unwritten page and unviewable abyss,’ and is associated with the exclusion of desire. In terms of Freud’s theory of antithetical primal words, it represents ‘a defense prior to any drive against which we need to defend’ (BV, 78). 22. Quentin Anderson derives Kate’s surname, ‘Croy,’ from ‘Yorc,’ an encrypted reference to Milly’s birthplace (AHJ, 243). 23. Eve Sedgwick has drawn attention to the eroticization of Milly’s illness; the illness, she suggests, ‘can at certain moments be figured as if it were a pregnancy’ (IRS, n18, p. 100; see also pp. 88–9). 24. Andrew Cutting reads the essay, in close conjunction with The Wings of the Dove, with a special stress on the revelation in it of a power-seeking, ‘colonising’ consciousness (DHJ, 119). Here and elsewhere, this Napoleonic strain, as it is often thought of, is all too easily overemphasized or misrepresented. James is remarkably attuned, in all imaginative spheres, to configurations of power, and his attunement has the effect of transforming and remolding, not without traceable struggle, the drive to possess and subdue, as well as the leaning toward states of extreme powerlessness and vulnerability. 25. To cite two examples: John Bayley is prepared to see in Milly’s generosity ‘a species of revenge’ (Introduction, 15). Adrian Poole speaks of Densher’s ‘fearful and guilty recourse,’ at this juncture, to the need for transcendent meaning, a need which the novel has in other ways brought near to obliteration (HJ, 121). 26. On the complex valence of ‘morbidity,’ for James, see Andrew Cutting’s discussion in ‘The Wings of the Dove and the Morbid’ (DHJ, 85–93 and passim). 27. Adrian Poole has called my attention to two other pearls worth considering here: Pearl, the child of adultery in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), and – more immediately to the point, given the Venetian context – Othello’s image, in his final speech, of ‘the base Indian’ [Q ; or ‘Iudean’ in F] who ‘threw a pearl away / Richer than all his tribe’ (V.ii.350–1). 28. Elizabeth Drury, for whom the poem was written (1669), was, like Milly, an heiress who died in early womanhood. 29. Eve Sedgwick lays stress on related image-clusters, in The Wings of the Dove and elsewhere in the late corpus. On the circulation of the concept of ‘waste’ in the James family, see Posnock’s The Trial of Curiosity, p. 175, and Taylor’s Henry James and the Father Question, pp. 35–9.

218 Notes

4 The Golden Bowl: ‘The Passions of Princes’ 1. Highly relevant, in this context, is Adrian Poole’s essay on the Jamesian vision of empire as it is filtered through the prism of Rome. 2. Gore Vidal notes the homonymy (Introduction, 15). 3. Wilde’s ‘Sphinx’ (1894) is such an Egypto-Grecian hybrid. 4. On James’s purchase of Lamb House, and the connection of the place with the Georgian dynasty, see Edel’s Life, pp. 460–1. 5. When the novel begins Adam is 47 (130), like Shakespeare after composing The Tempest. James mentions the figure in his 1907 Introduction to the play (IT, 81). 6. James saw the painting in adolescence, at the Academy show of 1858, and found it ‘so charged with the awful that I was glad I saw it in company – it in company and I the same: I believed, or tried to believe, I should have feared to face it all alone in a room’ (Ab, 178). 7. The tragic undertones in this scene of comic reintegration have been pointed out by many, including R. P. Blackmur (Introduction, 5–13), Dorothea Krook (OC, 317–24), Ruth Bernard Yeazell (LK, 125), David McWhirter (DL, 198) and John Landau (TD, 133). 8. See, in this context, Northrop Frye’s ‘The Argument of Comedy.’ 9. The term is used by Hobbes in the Leviathan (Part I, Ch 1, p. 7). He may have taken it from Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Phyrrhonism: ‘some say that body is defined as having three dimensions together with counter-pressure (antitypia)’ (3:39).

Works Cited Works by James Fiction James, H. The Ambassadors. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986. _______. The Awkward Age. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987. _______. The Complete Tales of Henry James (12 vols). London: R. Hart-David, 1962–5. _______. The Golden Bowl. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987. _______. The Ivory Tower. New York: Scribner, 1917. _______. The Sacred Fount. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994. _______. What Maisie Knew. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. _______. The Wings of the Dove. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.

Non-fiction James, H. Autobiography: A Small Boy and Others, Notes of a Son and a Brother, The Middle Years (ed. F. W. Dupee). New York: Criterion Books, 1956. ———. ‘The American Scene,’ in Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America. New York: The Library of America, 1993. ———. The Complete Notebooks (eds L. Edel and L. H. Powers). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. ———. ‘Introduction to The Tempest,’ The Complete Works of Shakespeare (ed. S. Lee, vol. XVI). Renaissance Edition, 1907; rpt. Shakespeare: The Tempest (ed. D. J. Palmer). London: Macmillan, 1968, pp. 79–95. ———. ‘Is There a Life After Death’ (1910), rpt. F. O. Matthiessen, The James Family: A Group Biography. New York: Vintage, 1980, pp. 602–14. ———. Italian Hours (ed. H. Mitgang). New York: Horizon Press, 1968. ———. Letters (ed. L. Edel; 4 vols). Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1974–84. ———. Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers (eds L. Edel and M. Wilson). New York: The Library of America, 1984. ———. Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition (eds L. Edel and M. Wilson). New York: The Library of America, 1984.

Biographies Edel, L. Henry James: A Life. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Gordon, L. A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art. New York: Vintage, 1998. Matthiessen, F. O. The James Family: A Group Biography. New York: Vintage, 1980.

219

220 Works Cited

Other sources Abrams, M. H. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: W. W. Norton, 1971. Adams, H. Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986. Allott, M. ‘The Bronzino Portrait in Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove,’ Modern Language Notes. LXVIII (January, 1953), pp. 23–5. Anderson, Q. The American Henry James. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1957. Anesko, M. ‘Friction with the Market’: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Aristotle. Ars Poetica (trans. G. E. Else). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977. ———. Metaphysics (trans. W. D. Ross; 2 vols). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948. Balzac, H. Seraphita, Louis Lambert and The Exiles (trans. C. Bell). New York: Hippocrene Books, 1989. Bayley, J. ‘Introduction,’ The Wings of the Dove. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986, pp. 7–29. Bernheimer, C. Decadent Subjects: The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Culture of the Fin de Siècle in Europe (eds T. J. Kline and N. Schor). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Blackmur, R. P. ‘Introduction,’ The Golden Bowl. New York: Dell Laurel, 1963, pp. 5–13. Blake, W. The Complete Poems. London and New York: Longman, 1989. Bloom, H. The Breaking of the Vessels. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Bradley, J. R. ‘Henry James’s Permanent Adolescence,’ Henry James and HomoErotic Desire (ed. J. R. Bradley). New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999, pp. 45–68. ———. Henry James’s Permanent Adolescence. New York: Palgrave, 2000. Cameron, S. Thinking in Henry James. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Cargill, O. The Novels of Henry James. New York: Macmillan, 1961 Carlyle, T. The French Revolution. London: Everyman, 1980. ———. Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrock. New York: Odyssey Press, 1937. Chaucer, G. The Riverside Chaucer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Coleridge, S. T. ‘Selections from The Statesman’s Manual (1816),’ The Norton Anthology of English Literature (ed. M. H. Abrams; 2 vols). New York: W. W. Norton, 1986, vol. 2, pp. 409–11. Crews, F. C. The Tragedy of Manners: Moral Drama in the Later Novels of Henry James. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957. Cutting, A. Death in Henry James. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Dawidoff, R. The Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage: High Culture vs. Democracy in Adams, James, and Santayana. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. Donne, J. Complete Poems. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986. Elias, N. The Civilizing Process (trans. E. Jephcott). Oxford: Blackwell, 1978. ———. The Norbert Elias Reader: A Biographical Selection (eds Johan Goudsblom and Stephen Mennell). Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. ———. Time: An Essay (trans. E. Jephcott). Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.

Works Cited

221

Eliot, G. Daniel Deronda. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990. Eliot, T. S. ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,’ Contemporary and Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies (eds R. C. Davis and R. Schleifer), New York: Longman, 1994, pp. 28–33. Encyclopedia Americana (30 vols). Danbury: Grolier, 1985. Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1990. Foucault, M. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (trans. A. M. Sheridan). London: Tavistock, 1973. Freedman, J. Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. Freud, S. ‘The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words,’ The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (ed. J. Strachey; 24 vols). London: Hogarth Press, 1953, vol. 11, pp. 155–61. ———. Civilization and Its Discontents (trans. J. Riviere). London: Hogarth Press, 1953. ———. ‘The Theme of The Three Caskets,’ The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (ed. J. Strachey; 24 vols). London: Hogarth Press, 1953, vol. 12, pp. 291–301. ———. ‘The Uncanny.’ The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (ed. J. Starchey; 24 vols). London: Hogarth Press, 1953, vol.17, pp. 217–56. Frye, N. ‘The Argument of Comedy,’ English Institute Essays (ed. D. A. Robertson). New York: Columbia University Press, 1949, pp.58–73. Fussell, E. S. The Catholic Side of Henry James. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Gibbon, E. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. London: The Reprint Society, 1960. Gregorovius, F. Lucrezia Borgia: A Chapter from the Morals of the Italian Renaissance (trans. J. L. Garner). London: Phaidon Press, 1948. Hadley. T. Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Hawthorne, N. The Marble Faun. New York: Signet, 1961. ———. The Scarlet Letter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960. Herndl Price, D. Invalid Women: Figuring Feminine Illness in American Fiction and Culture 1840–1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. Hobbes, T. Leviathan. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1947. Hochman, B. ‘On the Imagination of Death,’ The University of Denver Quarterly: A Journal of Modern Culture. 10:1 (Spring, 1975), pp. 30–49. Hocks, R. A. Henry James and Pragmatistic Thought. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1974. Holland, L. B. The Expense of Vision: Essays on the Craft of Henry James. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964. Huizinga, J. The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study of the Forms of Life, Thought and Art in France and the Netherlands in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (trans. F. Hopman). Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990. James, W. The Principles of Psychology (3 vols). Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981. ———. The Varieties of Religious Experience. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.

222 Works Cited Keats, J. The Complete Poems. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988. ———. The Selected Letters of John Keats (ed. L. Trilling). New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1951. Krook, D. The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962. Landau, J. ‘A Thing Divided’: Representation in the Late Novels of Henry James. London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996. Leavis, F. R. The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad. London: Chatto and Windus, 1962. Levin, H. ‘Introduction,’ The Ambassadors. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986, pp. 7–29. Malamoud, C. Cuire le Monde: Rite et Pensée dans L’Inde Ancienne. Paris: Editions la Décourverte, 1989. Matthiessen, F. O. Henry James: The Major Phase. New York: Oxford University Press, 1963. McComb, A. Agnolo Bronzino: His Life and Work. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928. McWhirter, D. Desire and Love in Henry James: A Study of the Late Novels. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Milton, J. The Complete Poetry of John Milton. New York: Doubleday, 1971. Minter, D. L. Cultural History of the American Novel: Henry James to William Faulkner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Mizruchi, S. The Science of Sacrifice: American Literature and Modern Social Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Pater, W. H. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Poole, A. Henry James: New Readings. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991. ———. Tragedy: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. ———. ‘James and the Shadow of the Roman Empire: Manners and the Consenting Victim,’ Enacting History in Henry James (ed. G. Buelens). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 75–92. Porter, C. Seeing and Being: The Plight of the Participant-Observer in Emerson, James, Adams and Faulkner. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1981. Posnock, R. The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James and the Challenge of Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Pound, E. ‘Henry James,’ Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. London: Faber and Faber, 1954, pp. 295–338. Rimmon, S. The Concept of Ambiguity: The Example of James. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977. Rivkin, J. False Positions: The Representational Logics of Henry James’s Fiction. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Rosenberg, J. Elegy for an Age: The Presence of the Past in Victorian Literature. London: Anthem, 2005. Rossetti, D. G. Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Collected Poetry and Prose. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Rowe, J. C. Henry James and Henry Adams: The Emergence of a Modern Consciousness. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1976. Ruskin, J. Modern Painters (5 vols). Orpington and London: George Allen, 1897. ———. The Stones of Venice. Orpington and London: George Allen, 1898.

Works Cited 223 ———. ‘Traffic,’ A Crown of Wild Olive: Three Lectures on Work, Traffic, and War. New York: Wiley, 1866, pp. 47–80. Salmon, R. Henry James and the Culture of Publicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Sedgwick, E. Kosofsky. ‘Is the Rectum Straight? Identification and Identity in The Wings of the Dove,’ Tendencies. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993, pp. 73–103. Sextus Empiricus. Outlines of Phyrronism (trans J. Annas and J. Barnes). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Shakespeare, W. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. London: Collins, 1991. Sontag, S. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Vintage Book, 1978. Spenser, E. The Faerie Queene. London: Longman, 1987. Swinburne, A. C. Poems and Ballads and Atalanta in Calydon. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000. Taylor, A. Henry James and the Father Question. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Tennyson, A. Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson. New York and London: Macmillan, 1894. Tintner, A. R. Henry James and the Lust of the Eyes: Thirteen Artists in His Work. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1993. Trilling, L. Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972. Vidal, G. ‘Introduction,’ The Golden Bowl. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987, pp. 7–18. Virgil. Aeneidos: Liber Quartus (ed. A. S. Pease). Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935. Vrettos, A. Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Warren, A. Rage for Order: Essays in Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948. Wasserman, E. R. The Finer Tone: Keats’s Major Poems. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1953. Weisbuch, R. ‘Henry James and the Idea of Evil,’ The Cambridge Companion to Henry James (ed. J. Freedman). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 102–19. Wilde, O. The Complete Oscar Wilde. New York: Crescent, 1990. Winnicott, D. W. Playing and Reality. London: Routledge, 1971. Woolf, V. A Writer’s Diary. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1954. Wordsworth, W. The Poems. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990. Yeazell, R. Bernard. Language and Knowledge in the Late Novels of Henry James. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.

Index Abrams, M. H., Natural Supernaturalism, 8 Adams, Henry, 3, 9, 19, 26, 30, 33, 35, 38, 43, 211–12 n9; see also medievalism adultery, 3, 8, 10, 21, 38, 136, 141, 142, 150, 166–7, 169, 175–6, 179, 181, 184–5, 190, 195, 197, 200–2, 215 n12, 217 n9 Alexander the Great, see under explorers and conquerors allegory, 5, 19, 111, 118, and passim; see also bird- and beastsymbolism; Christian typology Allott, Miriam, 214 n13 ambiguity (in narrative), 4, 10, 11, 12, 28, 54, 210 n11, 213 n13 ambivalence, 2, 3, 20, 26, 66, 93, 94, 118, 119, 131, 149, 153, 166, 174, 186, 211 n1, 212 n15, and passim; see also dissociative experience Amundsen, Roald, 142 anaclitic experience, 78; see also anxiety: regressive experience Andersen, Hendrik, 20 Anderson, Quentin, 211 n8, 212 n10, 217 n22 Anesko, Michael, 214 n4 antithetical words, see under language; see also polarity antitypy, 205, 218 n9 anxiety, 1, 11, 24, 29, 37, 54, 61–3, 72, 75, 76, 88, 95, 114, 117, 147–8, 152, 153, 156–7, 168, 174, 179, 185–6, 187, 198, 203, 205 and breathing, 14, 20–1, 32, 33, 45–6, 63, 76, 86, 92, 156 and regressive experience, 44–6, 53, 78 apocalypse, imagination and imagery of, 49, 58, 68, 111, 133, 141, 215 n1; see also Revelation

Aristotle, see under genre: tragic drama Arnold, Matthew, 28, 62, 215 n5 Augustine, St, 8, 10, 114 Austen, Jane, 122 Balboa, Vasco Núñez de, see under explorers and conquerors Balzac, Honoré de, 211, n5 Baroque, the (Rococo), 18, 22, 50, 68, 94, 98, 99, 102–3, 123, 190, 191, 197; see also Donne; Herbert; Herrick; Milton; Watteau Baudelaire, Charles, 69, 123 Bayley, John, 75, 116, 217 n25 Beardsley, Aubrey, 215 n5; see also Pre-Raphaelite imagery Bernheimer, Charles, 211 n1 bildung, bildungsroman, see under genre: realism bird- and beastsymbolism apian, 189 avian, 21–2, 29, 65, 69, 74–80, 89, 100–2, 105–6, 115, 120–1, 127, 144, 155, 184, 202–3, 214 n10, 216 n5 bovine/caprine/ovine, 37, 40, 49, 71, 80, 82, 87–8, 164, 168, 182, 189, 198–200 canine, 38, 54, 105, 106, 120–1 feline, 42, 75, 86, 87–8, 106, 112, 118, 119, 120–1, 144, 168, 202, 218 n5 marsupial, 155 see also allegory; Christian typology; Leviathan birth (insemination, impregnation, gestation, parturition), imagery of, 8, 17, 35, 45, 47, 53, 59, 71, 91, 92, 93, 126, 129–31, 133, 155, 156–7, 165, 168, 182, 183, 184–5, 190, 217 n23; see also Christian typology: kenosis

224

Index Blackmur, R. P., 218 n7 Blake, William, 65, 66, 217 n8 blank, trope of the, 70, 105, 125, 141, 152, 205–6, 217 n21; see also language: antithetical words Bloom, Harold, 217 n21 body-image disorder (dismorphobia), 96 Borgia, the House of, 136, 150, 200; see also Renaissance Bradley, John R., 211 n3 Bronzino, Agnolo, 22, 91, 94–6, 99, 133, 216 n13, 216 n15; see also Renaissance Buddhist psychology, 23; see also James, William Bunyan, John, 148; see also Renaissance Burne-Jones, Edward, 215 n5; see also Pre-Raphaelite imagery Cadwalader Jones, Mary, 98 Cameron, Sharon, 216 n8 cancer, see under illness Cargill, Oscar, 215 n5 Carlyle, Thomas, 2–3; 50; see also French Revolution, the Catherine the Great, 85; see also empire center-of-consciousness narration, see under narrative focus Chapman, George, 145, 146; see also Renaissance Chaucer, Geoffrey, 179; see also medievalism Christian typology, 8, 9, 19, 30, 49, 125, 205 Adam, 159 the Burning Bush, 2, 38, 130–1 the Cross (crucifixion, cruciform), 8, 27, 37, 98, 139, 193, 198, 209; see also rhetorical figures: chiasmus the Dove-Comforter-Paraclete, 22, 66, 82, 74–80, 106, 193, 202 Eve, 30 the Holy Family, 9, 30, 38, 147, 174, 193 Judas, 76, 199

225

kenosis, 17, 51, 59, 65 the Lamb of God, 40, 49, 71, 93, 164, 168 Mary the Gypsy, 32, 214 n5 Mary Magdalene, 42, 214 n5 Noli Me Tangere, 42, 74, 76 the Passion of Christ , 8–10, 13, 17, 37, 40, 43, 59, 79, 104, 114, 116–8, 123, 164, 193, 198, 209, 217 n20 Satan, 66 the Scapegoat, 168, 182, 198, 199, 218 n6 St Joan, 40 St John, 111; see also Revelation St Lambert, 215 n12 St Luke, 80–1, 82; see also Luke St Mark, 80, 81, 89, 102, 115, 120, 216 n11 St Mary (the Madonna, the Virgin), 3, 8–10, 19, 26, 27, 33, 35, 38, 43, 81, 130, 131, 168, 212 n10, 214 n5 St Peter, 81; see also Peter St Stephen, 81 the Trinity, 35, 38, 43, 193 the Virgin Birth, 8, 131 see also allegory; bird- and beastsymbolism; Eucharistic imagery; sacrament churches (basilicas, cathedrals, places of worship), see under shrines and palaces civilizing process, the, 1, 2–3, 10, 27, 30, 44, 49, 50, 212 n14; see also Elias class and the market, 2, 13–4, 27, 29, 32, 45, 80–1, 82, 90, 99, 103, 105, 109, 118, 133, 136, 144–7, 149–50, 152, 160–3, 164–5, 173, 176, 190, 212 n14, 214 n4 and social standing, 30, 31, 39, 41, 63, 65, 68, 76–7, 79, 84–5, 88–9, 90, 103, 112–3, 122, 135–58 passim, 182–88, 192, 195 see also French Revolution, the

226 Index classical myth, 8, 9, 33, 34, 53, 54, 55, 62, 65, 66, 72, 131, 144, 146, 164, 165, 166, 168, 169, 171–2, 173, 188–9, 192, 193, 198, 214 n9, 218 n5 Clemenceau, George, 146 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 49, 82, 134, 159, 217 n21 colonialism, see under imperialism Colossians, 80 Columbus, Christopher, see under explorers and conquerors confession, sacrament of, see under sacrament Conrad, Joseph, 7 Constantine the Great, see under explorers and conquerors consumption, see under illness; and passim Cortez, Hernando, see under explorers and conquerors Crews, Frederick C., 18, 65, 66, 216 n6 Crick, Patricia, 216 n12 Cutting, Andrew, 19, 81, 82, 212 n16, 215 n2, 217 n24, 217 n26 Darius, see under explorers and conquerors Dawidoff, Robert, 212 n3, 213 n18 defense mechanisms, see under dissociative experience Dickens, Charles, 98, 113, 116, 122; see also genre: realism dissociative experience (defense mechanisms, splitting) 1–25 passim, 26, 28, 39, 43, 54–6, 61, 77, 78, 84–91, 123, 136, 144, 148–151, 153, 161, 163–5, 175, 188, 197, 201; see also ambivalence; polarity Donne, John, 132–3, 141; see also Baroque Dove, see under Christian typology Drury, Elizabeth, 217 n28 Dutch art, 29–30, 97 early modern period, the, see under Renaissance Ecclesiastes, 23–4, 190

Edel, Leon, 157, 211 n7, 213 n1 Edward II, 157, 159; see also medievalism Elias, Norbert, 1–2, 212 n21 Eliot, George, 4 Eliot, T. S., 28 Elizabeth I, 29, 45; see also Renaissance Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 213 n18, 217 n21 empire, 2, 7, 13, 33–4, 52, 68–9, 81, 85, 90, 103, 124, 134, 135–6, 138–9, 144–50, 154, 155, 158, 183, 186–7, 195, 213 n18, 215 n9, 217 n24, 218 n1; see also explorers and conquerors Enoch, 215 n3 Epicurianism, 72, 82 Eucharistic imagery, 8, 9, 13, 22, 28, 40, 50, 51,148, 209, 212 n12; and passim; see also sacrament Eudocia, Empress, 81; see also empire Exodus, 8 explorers and conquerors Alexander the Great, 145 Attila the Hun, 7 Balboa, Vasco Núñez de, 147 Columbus, Christopher, 69, 77, 138, 142, 150, 158, 182 Constantine the Great, 139 Cortez, Hernando, 145, 147, 161 Darius, 147 Napoleon, Bonaparte, 33, 64, 158, 182, 217 n24; see also French Revolution, the Vespucci, Amerigo, 137, 138, 139, 140 see also empire ficelle, the, 31, 55, 93, 212 n7 focus, focalization, see under narrative focus Forster, E. M., Aspects of the Novel, 27 Foucault, Michel, 16–7, 81, 212 n16 Franklin, Benjamin, 24, 47 Freedman, Jonathan, 149, 211 n1, 211 n7, 217 n18

Index French Revolution, the, 2–3, 33–4, 49, 64, 85, 88, 90, 93, 158, 183, 188, 190, 214 n5, 215 n14, 217 n24 Freud, Sigmund ‘The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words,’ 3, 15, 105, 217 n21; see also language: antithetical words Civilization and Its Discontents, 1 ‘The Theme of The Three Caskets,’ 104 ‘The Uncanny,’ 91 Frye, Northrop, 218 n8 Fussell, Edwin, 213 n18 Gautier, Theophile, 48 gems, see under ornaments genre realism, 19, 46, 111–8, 124 romance, 22, 36, 62, 95, 111–20, 122, 124, 132–4, 137, 138, 169–70, 181, 183, 192–3, 213–4 n3 pastoral, 37, 40, 51, 71, 93, 165–70 satire, 7, 29, 88, 97, 144, 200 tragic drama, 2, 12, 13, 51–3, 62, 66, 98, 116–120, 123, 128, 183, 200, 204–5, 207–10, 211 n2 Genteel Tradition, the, 13, 29, 212 n13, 213 n18; see also Puritanism Georgian dynasty, the, 6, 63, 146, 156–7, 159, 177 Gerber, Ephraim, 215 n15 Gibbon, Edmund, 81, 83 Gilded Age, the, 145, 146 Gordon, Lyndall, A Private Life of Henry James, 68, 212 n15 Greek drama, see under genre: tragic drama Greek and Roman myth, see under classical myth Gregorovius, Ferdinand, 90, 136 Hadley, Tessa, 211 n3 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 28, 213–4 n3, 216 n10, 217 n27 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 122

227

Heraclitus, 131; see also classical myth Herbert, George, 98; see also Baroque Herndl, Diana Price, 215 n2 Herrick, Robert, 179; see also Baroque Hobbes, Thomas, 218 n9 Hochman, Baruch, 129, 215 n1 Hocks, Richard A., 213 n18 Holland, Lawrence B., 217 n20 Holman Hunt, William, 198, 218 n6; see also Pre-Raphaelite imagery Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 155 homo clausus, see under Elias Howells, William Dean, 215 n4 Hugo, Victor, 32, 36; see also medievalism Huizinga, Johan, 50–1; see also medievalism Humphry Ward, Mary, 116, 215 n4 Hunt, Violet, 216 n15 illness, 7, 15–7, 21, 59–84, 86, 89–90, 102, 105, 107, 114, 146, 212 n15, 215 n2, 217 n23; and passim imperialism, see under empire international theme, the, see under polarity, polarization; see also empire Isaiah, 125, 215 n3 James, Alice, 68, 212 n15 James, Henry, The Ambassadors, 26–56 and passim The American Scene, 69–70, 118, 216 n9 ‘The Art of Fiction,’ 117 Autobiography, 27–8, 149, 218 n6 The Awkward Age, 5, 18, 165 The Beast in the Jungle, 14, 54, 86, 134, 214 n5 Daisy Miller, 134 ‘The Figure in the Carpet,’ 4 The Golden Bowl; 135–206 and passim ‘The Liar,’ 4 ‘George Sand,’ 39 Hawthorne, 28

228 Index James, Henry, – continued ‘Introduction to The Tempest,’ 129, 132, 193, 218 n5 ‘Is There a Life after Death?’ 125–6 The Ivory Tower, 20 Letters, 20, 98, 116, 155, 214 n7, 215 n14, 215 n5 Notebooks, 15, 68, 88, 103, 108, 176, 214 n8 Prefaces, 3–4, 10–1, 14, 18, 24, 26, 29, 32, 38, 47, 55, 57, 58, 60, 62, 63, 68, 69, 88, 90–1, 93, 98, 106, 107, 108, 111–2, 116, 117, 119, 124, 207–10, 214 n7 The Sacred Fount, 4–5, 6, 7–8, 10, 28, 38, 59, 91, 134, 144, 211 n7, 212 n11, 214 n5 Transatlantic Sketches, 28 The Turn of the Screw, 4 What Maisie Knew, 18 The Wings of the Dove, 57–134 and passim his late symbolism, 20–1 his poetics of fiction, see under genre and cultural-materialist criticism, 212 n11, 212 n14 and queer studies, 119, 211 n3; see also Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky and theological criticism 18–9, 213 n18 James, Henry Senior, 27–8, 213 n18 James, Mary Margaret (Peggy), 214 n5 James, Mary Walsh, 214 n5 James, William, 23, 118, 127, 128, 215 n15 jewels, see under ornaments Job, 215 n3 John, 8, 42, 104 Johnson, Samuel Dr, 197 Joyce, James, Finnegans Wake, 212 n14 Keats, John, 13, 126, 145–8, 165, 170, 212 n12 kenosis, see under Christian typology Kings, 125 Krook, Dorothea, 213 n20, 218 n7

Laclos, Pierre Choderlos de, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, 195 Lambinet, Emile Charles, 40, 51–2 Landau, John, 205, 218 n7 language, linguicity (and orality, and reading, and silence, multilinguality, and writing), 8, 18, 34–5, 29, 38, 39, 42, 44–5, 47, 56, 64, 72, 90, 93, 110–11, 114, 115, 121, 122, 128, 134, 135, 143–4, 169, 178–81, 184, 195, 202, 205–6 and antithetical words, 3, 4, 15, 39, 104–5, 132, 217 n21; see also Freud: ‘The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words’; blank, trope of the see also genre lapidary imagery, see under ornaments Leavis, F. R., 213 n20, 215 n6 Lee, Vernon (Violet Paget), 216 n15 Leonardo da Vinci, 147; see also Renaissance Leviathan, 62, 213 n3; see also bird- and beastsymbolism Levin, Harry, 24, 47 Lorelei (Rhine-maiden, siren), 60, 62, 91, 105, 107, 112, 116, 129, 198; see also Wagner Luini, Bernardino, 147, 193; see also Renaissance Luke, 104; see also Christian typology: St Luke Lukács, Georg, 210, n11 Macauley, Thomas, 68 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 136, 195; see also Renaissance Maeterlinck, Maurice, 89, 90, 98, 107; see also Symbolism magic, 38, 62, 71, 72, 79, 92, 94, 95, 102, 106, 129, 132, 166, 193, 19, 206 Malamoud, Charles, 50 Marbot, Baron de, 90; see also explorers and conquerors: Napoleon; empire Marie Antoinette, 214 n5; see also French Revolution, the

Index marriage, sacrament of, see under sacrament Mary, Bloody, 214 n5; see also Renaissance Mary Stuart, 29, 49, 214 n5; see also Renaissance Marx, Karl, 2; see also class Matthew, 193, 199 Matthiessen, F. O., 132, 212 n10, 213 n18, 216 n7, 216 n8, 216 n16; The James Family, 118, 125–6 Maupassant, Guy de, 52 McComb, Arthur K., Agnolo Bronzino, 216 n15 McWhirter, David, 218 n7 medievalism, 19, 22, 27, 28, 32, 33, 35–7, 40, 43, 50–1, 84–5, 89–90, 152, 157, 170, 178–9; see also oriental imagery; Pre-Raphaelite imagery; Wagner: Tristan and Isolde Milton, John, 65–6, 148, 215 n3, 217 n21; see also Baroque Minter, David, 212 n14 mirrors, mirroring (reflectors, reflexiveness), 2, 4, 11, 12, 21, 24, 28, 47, 51, 54–5, 83, 84, 91–7, 98, 118, 121, 130, 131, 132–3, 149, 151, 155, 160, 168, 180–2, 185, 191, 198, 204, 212 n14 Mizruchi, Susan, 213 n18 Morris, William, 211 n1, 215 n5; see also Pre-Raphaelite imagery Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 217 n19 museums and galleries, 51, 91–7, 103, 104, 113–4, 148–9, 158–9, 165, 168–9, 181, 182, 188–9, 191, 214 n11, 216 n13 Napoleon, Bonaparte, see under explorers and conquerors; see also French Revolution, the narrative focus, 4–5, 10–2, 14, 28, 48, 51, 54, 56, 60, 159–60, 175–6, 212 n11 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 2

229

Noli Me Tangere, see under Christian typology Norse myth, see under Wagner orality, see under language oriental imagery, 3, 6–7, 9, 22, 33, 39, 49–50, 68, 69, 77, 81, 83–4, 85, 89, 94, 98–104, 133, 134, 139, 142, 143, 144, 156, 158–164, 166, 170–1, 174–5, 176, 186–7, 198, 214 n9, 217 27, 218 n3; see also empire; ornaments; race; vessels (containers) ornaments (gems, jewels, lapidary imagery) 10, 22, 23, 32, 33, 34, 37, 38, 54–5, 63, 72, 94, 95, 101, 102, 104, 106, 111, 118, 125, 129, 130, 131, 132–4, 142, 154, 158, 164, 167, 171, 184–5, 193, 196, 197–8, 201, 202, 217 n27 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 189; see also classical myth palaces, see under shrines and palaces Palladio, Andreas (Palladian Architecture), 170–1, 172, 175; see also Renaissance Paraclete, see under Christian typology: Dove passion, see under Christian typology; genre: tragic drama Pater, Walter Horatio, 21, 22, 58, 82, 90, 131, 211 n1, 212 n10 Peter, 4; see also Christian typology: St Peter Plato, 65 play (ludic forms), 12, 19–20, 52–6, 144, 158, 185, 194–5, 196, 199–206; see also genre: tragic drama; spectacle; Winnicott Pocahontas, 142, 215 n13; see also race Poe, Edgar Allan, 121, 141, 149–50; see also Symbolism polarity, polarization, 5, 7, 17, 27, 55, 95, 103–4, 107, 125, 131, 133, 149, 175, 184, 200, 202, 205, 206

230 Index polarity, polarization, – continued and the international theme, 1, 3, 22, 10, 12, 13, 18, 22, 26, 28, 30, 43, 86, 141, 149–50, 214 n9, 216 n12 see also dissociative experience; language: antithetical words Poole, Adrian, 2, 11, 20, 39, 54, 145, 146, 178–9, 211 n2, 211 n4, 211 n6, 212 n10, 216 n11, 217 n25, 217 n27, 218 n1 Porter, Carolyn, 212 n11, 212 n14 Posnock, Ross, 211–2 n9, 212 n13, 212 n14, 217 n29 Pound, Ezra, 58, 68 Pragmatism, 23; see also James, William Pre-Raphaelite imagery, 22, 58, 84, 89, 91, 101, 198; see also Beardsley; Burne-Jones; Holman Hunt; Morris, Rossetti; Swinburne, Tennyson; Wilde; medievalism; Symbolism Prince Regent, the (Regency), see under Georgian dynasty, the Psalms, 21–2, 75, 102, 103, 215 n3 psychic conflict, see under ambivalence Puritanism, 3, 9, 13, 18, 22, 26, 28, 29–30, 31–2, 37, 42, 69, 71, 83, 90, 93, 94, 95, 103, 111, 148, 167–8, 213 n18, 215 n13, 216 n10 race, 7, 28, 29, 34–5, 53, 58, 83, 97, 103, 135, 136, 142, 153, 158, 159–61, 175, 176, 180–1, 182, 186–7, 190, 195, 215 n13, 217 n27 real presence, 9, 28, 34; see also sacrament realism (representationalism, verisimilitude), see under genre reflectors, reflexiveness, see under mirrors, mirroring Regency, see under Georgian Dynasty, the Renaissance, 1, 2, 16, 21–2, 33, 58, 91, 94, 95, 135–40, 146, 150,

164, 170, 172, 191–193, 213 n21; see also Bronzino; Leonardo; Luini; Palladio, Titian; Veronese; Chapman; Shakespeare; Spenser; explorers and conquerors: Balboa, Columbus, Cortez, Vespucci; Borgia, the House of; Elizabeth I; Mary, Bloody; Mary Stuart; Machiavelli Revelation, 37, 49, 111, 113; see also apocalypse rhetorical figures apostrophe, 4 asyndeton, 158 chiasmus, 27, 31, 98, 124, 131; see also Christian typology: the Cross hyperbole, 40, 84, 122, 186 paronomasia (pun), 3–4, 39–40, 55, 75, 77, 80–1, 85, 124, 187; see also language: antithetical words synesthesia, 37, 81, 115, 178 Rhine-maiden, see under Lorelei Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, 4 Rivkin, Julie, 214 n6, 214 n8 Rococo, see under Baroque Roland, Marie, 49, see also French Revolution, the romance, see under genre Rosenberg, John, Elegy for an Age, 3, 215 n1 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 81, 215 n5; see also Pre-Raphaelite imagery Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 2 Rowe, John Carlos, 19, 20–1, 211 n9 rupture of planes, 9; see also sacrament Ruskin, John, 103, 115, 211 n1, 217 n17, 217 n18 sacrament, 9, 34, 51, 80, 107, 110 communion, 35, 36, 37, 41, 109, 127,160, 181 confession, 34, 35, 37, 44, 56, 80, 82, 109, 180, 200, 204 marriage, 8–9, 10, 40, 43, 104, 109, 110, 160

Index ‘of execution,’ 207–10 see also Eucharistic imagery; real presence; rupture of planes Salmon, Richard, 212 n14, 214 n4 Sand, George, 39 Santayana, George, see under Genteel Tradition, the satire, see under genre scatological imagery (retention, secretion), 5, 6–7, 18, 39, 47, 56, 133, 158, 200, 211 n8, 217 n29 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 211 n5 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 119, 217 n23, 217 n29 Sextus Empiricus, 218 n9 Shakespeare, William, 41, 122, 129, 135, 183, 192–3 Antony and Cleopatra, 9, 33, 39, 122, 123, 188, 214 n9 As You Like It, 184–5 Cymbeline, 192 Hamlet, 4 Othello, 217 n27 Pericles, 134, 192–3 The Tempest, 22, 129, 132, 134, 192–3, 218 n5 The Winter’s Tale, 22, 134, 192–3 ‘Sonnet LXXIII,’ 14, 50, 59 see also Renaissance shrines and palaces, 9, 20, 27, 28, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 42, 44, 46, 48, 49, 51, 52, 68, 79, 80, 88, 98–104, 110, 115, 121, 142, 148, 151, 156, 157, 158, 159, 164, 165, 169, 170–5, 178, 180, 181, 184 siren, see under Lorelei Sontag, Sontag, 15–6, space, intermediary; 4, 11, 18, 19–20, 23–4, 45, 53, 68, 71, 112, 114, 117, 125, 127, 128, 130, 132, 133, 134, 141, 155, 158, 164, 165, 166, 168, 175, 179, 193, 198, 213 n17 and negative capability, 145–7 see also play; Winnicott spectacle (circus, dance, display, gymnastics, performance, theatricals), 5–6, 11, 12, 39, 47, 48, 52, 53, 54, 56, 72, 87–8, 89,

231

109, 117–8, 119–20, 168, 175, 180–1, 187–8, 189, 193, 194, 196–7, 199–200, see also genre: tragic drama; play Spenser, Edmund, 37; see also Renaissance splitting, see under dissociative experience Stevens, Wallace, 217 n21 stream of consciousness, see under James, William Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 62, 215 n5, 216 n15; see also PreRaphaelite imagery Symbolism, 14, 22, 58, 59, 89, 98, 107, 114–5, 116, 117, 149–50; see also Maeterlinck; Poe; PreRaphaelite imagery Taylor, Andrew, 213 n18, 217 n29 Temple, Mary (Minny), 67–8, 69, 212 n15, 214 n5 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 62, 68–9, 121, 149, 215 n5; see also Pre-Raphaelite imagery Thackeray, William Makepeace, 113; see also genre: realism Tintner, Adeline, 216 n15, 217 n20 Titian, 22, 91, 96, 97, 103, 105, 107, 214 n11; see also Renaissance tragic drama, see under genre Trilling, Lionel, 122 Trollope, Anthony, 113; see also genre: realism tuberculosis, see under illness Turner, Joseph Mallord William, 96, 97, 103 Tussaud, Madame, 191 typology, see under Christian typology vampire theme, the, see under James, Henry: The Sacred Fount Vedic ritual, 50 Vera Icon, 94 Veronese, Paolo, 22, 91, 100, 101, 104, 105, 217 n20; see also Renaissance Vespucci, Amerigo, see under explorers and conquerors

232 Index vessels (bowls, china, containers, cups, phials, glasses, receptacles, vases), 3–4, 6, 18, 20, 21, 23–4, 27, 30, 32, 54, 66, 80, 89–90, 92, 93, 104, 118, 132, 133, 134, 136, 137, 143, 148, 149, 151, 152, 153, 157, 158, 166, 173, 175, 176, 178, 179, 182, 183, 184, 190, 191–2, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200–1, 205, 213 n17 architectural, 34, 35 frail, 4, 5, 12–3, 21, 37, 38, 90,124, 134, 149, 192 sailing (and shipwreck), 3–4, 46, 48, 60, 61–2, 69, 71, 90, 91, 100, 112, 128–9, 131–2, 134, 140–1, 145, 153, 159, 198 of sensibility or consciousness, 3–4, 12, 21, 28, 29, 60, 61, 80, 91, 131–2, 143, 146, 192, 198, 200–1 Victoria, Queen, 155; see also empire Vidal, Gore, 218 n2 Virgil, 214 n9; see also classical myth

Virgin, the, see under Christian typology Vrettos, Athena, 215 n2 Wagner, Wilhelm Richard the Ring cycle, 62, 132, 169–70 Tristan and Isolde, 62, 169–70, 215 n5 Warren, Austin, 49–50 Wasserman, Earl R., 212 n12 Watteau, Jean Antoine, 92, 94, 97; see also Baroque Weil, Simone, 104 Weisbuch, Robert, 213 n18 Wilde, Oscar, 91, 147, 218 n3; see also Pre-Raphaelite imagery Winnicott, Donald Woods, 19–20, 133, 204, 213 n19; see also space, intermediary; play Woolf, Virginia, 215 n6 Woolson, Constance Fenimore, 68 Wordsworth, William, 55 writing, see under language Yeazell, Ruth Bernard, 218 n7

Decadence in the Late Novels of Henry James

Death in Henry James

Henry James

Decadence

Decadence

The Guilty (Henry Parker Novels)

The Stolen (Henry Parker Novels)

The Fury (Henry Parker Novels)

The Evolutionary Imagination in Late-Victorian Novels

Life of the Late Henry Harris

The late novels of Eudora Welty

Henry James and the Supernatural

Decadence

Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure

Henry James and the Language of Experience

The Rhetorical Logic of Henry James

The Martian Invasion Journals of Henry James

Henry James and the Art of Dress

The language of a master: theories of style and the late writing of Henry James

Decadence

Decadence

Palgrave Advances in Henry James Studies

Henry James and his Prose

Henry James and Queer Modernity

Henry James, Women and Realism

A Companion to Henry James

Henry James: The Writer and His Work

Henry James and the Father Question

Henry James and the Philosophical Novel

Late, Late in the Evening

The Poetics of Decadence: Chinese Poetry of the Southern Dynasties and Late Tang Periods

Decadence in the Late Novels of Henry James

Death in Henry James

Henry James

Decadence

Decadence

The Guilty (Henry Parker Novels)

The Stolen (Henry Parker Novels)

The Fury (Henry Parker Novels)

The Evolutionary Imagination in Late-Victorian Novels

Life of the Late Henry Harris

The late novels of Eudora Welty

Henry James and the Supernatural

Decadence

Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure

Henry James and the Language of Experience

The Rhetorical Logic of Henry James

The Martian Invasion Journals of Henry James

Henry James and the Art of Dress

The language of a master: theories of style and the late writing of Henry James

Decadence

Decadence

Palgrave Advances in Henry James Studies

Henry James and his Prose

Henry James and Queer Modernity

Henry James, Women and Realism

A Companion to Henry James

Henry James: The Writer and His Work

Henry James and the Father Question

Henry James and the Philosophical Novel

Late, Late in the Evening

The Poetics of Decadence: Chinese Poetry of the Southern Dynasties and Late Tang Periods

Recommend Documents