Henry James, Women and Realism

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HENRY JAMES, WOMEN AND REALISM

Women were hugely important to Henry James, both in his vividly drawn female characters and in his relationships with female relatives and friends. Combining biography with literary criticism and theoretical inquiry, Victoria Coulson explores James’s relationships with three of the most important women in his life: his friends the novelists Constance Fenimore Woolson and Edith Wharton, and his sister Alice James, who composed a significant diary in the last years of her life. These writers shared not only their attitudes to gender and sexuality, but also their affinity for a certain form of literary representation, which Coulson defines as ‘ambivalent realism’. The book draws on a diverse range of sources from fiction, autobiography, theatre reviews, travel writing, private journals and correspondence. Coulson argues, compellingly, that the personal lives and literary works of these four writers manifest a widespread cultural ambivalence about gender identity at the end of the nineteenth century. victoria coulson is a Lecturer in American Literature at the University of York.

HENRY JAMES, WOMEN AND REALISM VICTORIA COULSON

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521879811 © Victoria Coulson 2007 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2007

ISBN-13 978-0-511-37908-6

eBook (NetLibrary)

ISBN-13 978-0-521-87981-1

hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

page vi viii

Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Introduction: ambivalent realism

1

1

Alice James and the portrait heroine

25

2

The actress and the orphan: Henry James’s art of loss, 1882–1895

60

Teacups and love letters: Constance Fenimore Woolson and Henry James

96

3 4

Realism and interior design: Edith Wharton and Henry James

141

Epilogue: 1892

190

Notes Bibliography Index

198 224 236

v

Acknowledgements

This book began life as a doctoral dissertation. I am grateful to the British Academy for my PhD studentship, and to the Cambridge English Faculty Members’ Fund for additional financial support. I would like to thank the librarians of Cambridge University Library, the Cambridge English Faculty Library, Benicia Public Library (California), the Western Reserve Historical Society (Cleveland, Ohio), the Rare Books and Manuscripts Room of the Butler Library (Columbia University), and the Pierpont Morgan Library (The Morgan Library and Museum, New York). I am grateful to the Western Reserve Historical Society, the Rare Books and Manuscripts Room of the Butler Library (Columbia University), and the Pierpont Morgan Library for granting permission to quote from archival material. Parts of this book have appeared in different form in The Henry James Review. I am grateful for permission to incorporate that work here. My research on Constance Fenimore Woolson was greatly assisted by Cheryl Torsney, who provided photocopies of a large number of unpublished letters, as well as advice on archive visits. I would like to thank Robert Coulson and Kirsty Coulson and especially my mother, Anne Coulson, whose indefatigable power of prećis has improved many versions of this book over the years. My life as a PhD student was warmed and cheered by the friendship of Liz Bassett, Rowan Harris, Peter Howarth and Liza Knight. Taylor McNamee had unfailing enthusiasm and faith in this project. Parts of this book were written during my research fellowship at Selwyn College, Cambridge. I am grateful to the Master and Fellows of Selwyn for giving me that opportunity. I also want to vi

Acknowledgements

vii

thank Maud Ellmann and Jean Chothia for their professional support at a significant time. Colleagues at the University of York make it an interesting and happy place to be. I am grateful in particular to Derek Attridge for reading and commenting on parts of this book. I was immensely fortunate that Adrian Poole supervised my PhD. I hope that this book has been enriched by what I continue to learn from him, especially his honouring of the integrity and particularity of ideas.

Abbreviations

Full details of all works cited are given in the Bibliography. The following abbreviations are used throughout the book: A AA AJD B BG CFW CN E EA GB HJ/EW HJL I–IV HM PC

Henry James, The Ambassadors, 2 vols. (New York: Scribners, 1909) Henry James, The Awkward Age (1899; New York 1908) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966) Alice James, The Diary of Alice James, ed. Leon Edel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982) Henry James, The Bostonians (1886), in Henry James: Novels: 1881–1886 (New York: Library of America, 1985) Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (1934), in Edith Wharton: Novellas and Other Writings, ed. Cynthia Griffin Wolff (New York: Library of America, 1990) Constance Fenimore Woolson, Constance Fenimore Woolson, arr. and ed. Clare Benedict (London: Ellis, 1932) Constance Fenimore Woolson, Castle Nowhere: Lake-Country Sketches (Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1875) Henry James, The Europeans (1878) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964) Constance Fenimore Woolson, East Angels (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1886) Henry James, The Golden Bowl (1904) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981) Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters 1900–1915, ed. Lyall H. Powers (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1990) Henry James Letters, ed. Leon Edel, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974–84) Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905), in Edith Wharton: The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome (London: Chancellor, 1994) Henry James, The Princess Casamassima (1886), 2 vols. (New York: Scribners, 1908) viii

List of abbreviations PL RK SF SP STP TA TM WD WMK

ix

Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881) (New York 1908) (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1967) Constance Fenimore Woolson, Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches (New York: Appleton, 1880) Henry James, The Sacred Fount (1901) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994) Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton (1897) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971) Henry James, The Sense of the Past (New York: Scribners, 1917) Henry James, The American (New York: Scribners, 1907) Henry James, The Tragic Muse (1890), (New York 1908), intro. Philip Horne (London: Penguin, 1995) Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (1902), (New York 1909) (London: Penguin, 1986) Henry James, What Maisie Knew (1897), in What Maisie Knew, In the Cage, The Pupil (New York: Scribners, 1908)

Introduction: ambivalent realism

I am grieved to hear that Mrs Stoddard is ill; why do literary women break down so, and . . . act so? It almost seems as though only the unhappy women took to writing. The happiest women I have known belonged to two classes; the devoted wives and mothers, and the successful flirts, whether married or single; such women never write. (Constance Fenimore Woolson to E. C. Stedman [1876?])1

The novel is the only developing genre and therefore it reflects more deeply, more essentially, more sensitively and rapidly, reality itself in the process of its unfolding. (Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Epic and Novel’)2

restive conservatives This book explores the structural interdependence of writing, gender and cultural authority within a small, yet suggestively representative, group of late nineteenth-century expatriate American writers. It focuses on the textually mediated relationships between Henry James (1843–1916) and three of his most important female friends: his sister Alice (1850–92), career hysteric and author of a significant diary, and the novelists Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840–94) and Edith Wharton(1862–1937). At the heart of this book is the claim that the distinctively ambivalent private, professional and literary lives of Henry James, Alice James, Constance Fenimore Woolson and Edith Wharton adumbrate the contours of inarticulate discontent within a conservative but increasingly restive, and beleaguered, cultural establishment. From the middle of the nineteenth century, both in Britain and the United States, the ‘Woman Question’ was a central focus of debate. In Britain topics such as marriage laws, property rights and 1

2

Henry James, Women and Realism

suffrage, higher education and job opportunities, and female emigration, were increasingly debated from the 1860s,3 while in the United States rapid political and socio-economic change formed the background for significant upheavals in the family and in relations between women and men.4 ‘Even the most contented [women]’, Martha Vicinus argues, ‘could not help but be affected by the intense debate on the position of women that swirled around them’.5 By the 1880s, the legal structures of patriarchal tradition were being dismantled by feminist reforms through legislative acts which materially improved women’s status: the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882 and the Guardianship of Infants Act in 1886.6 There was a major setback to the cause of female suffrage when the women’s amendment to the Reform Bill was defeated in 1884, but this served only to redouble the commitment and energy of women activists. ‘Though the term was not introduced until 1890 or so, the movement that came to be called ‘‘feminism’’ became large and outspoken during the second half of the 19th century’ and Elaine Showalter has described the period of 1880–1910 as ‘intensely feminist’.7 From the 1880s, discussion of the nature and social role of women became more radical with the emergence of that icon of cultural change, the New Woman. ‘[S]ingle, highly educated, economically autonomous’, the New Woman was both ‘a specific sociological and educational’ phenomenon and a provocative cultural symbol of female independence:8 a development reflected by the fact that between 1883 and 1900 more than a hundred novels were written about the New Woman.9 With her ‘simultaneous challenges to the gender-based division of labor, the ideal of the bourgeois home, and the hierarchy of class’, the New Woman embodied a serious threat to the Victorian social order;10 and she was joined in the cultural imaginary by such decadent figures as the homosexual and the aesthete, whose challenges to traditional constructions of masculinity were equally radical. At the fin de sie`cle, the conceptual foundations of separate spheres ideology were under attack; now the cultural avant-garde began to call into question the social construction of gender itself. Recent historians have borrowed George Gissing’s characterisation of the 1880s and 1890s as a period of ‘sexual anarchy’ to show that by the last decade of the century ‘the system of patriarchy was under attack not only by women, but also by an avant-garde of male artists, sexual


3

radicals, and intellectuals, who challenged its class structures and roles, its system of inheritance and primogeniture, its compulsory heterosexuality and marriage, and its cultural authority’.11 As Rita Felski remarks, the result of this new historiographic focus is that a period ‘once deemed . . . conservative . . . and still in the throes of Victorian ideology . . . now looks much more exciting, innovative, and quintessentially modern’.12 Other historians have stressed that these radical elements represented a tiny social minority. Yet, vociferous, eloquent, provocative, they nevertheless constituted a radical elite, a cultural avant-garde leagued against what Kate Millett calls ‘enormous odds of cultural resistance’.13 Discussing the situation in the United States, Diane Price Herndl stresses that the vast majority of women were not New Women: ‘Even at the height of the first women’s movement, only a very small percentage of women (around 4–5 percent) actually went to college’, and only half of those who graduated went on to pursue professional careers.14 Rather than bringing about direct, radical and widespread alterations in the patterns of everyday life, the avant-garde was applying significant pressure to the cultural establishment, making it not only self-conscious, but also self-consciously threatened by the prospect of change; and the result was a reactive hardening of prescriptive gender roles and an increased surveillance and policing of hegemonic norms. Whereas the mid-Victorian preoccupation with stereotypes of women may be seen as indicating a concern with the ‘imperfect enforcement’ of gender roles,15 the radical minority challenge to hegemonic social values at the fin de sie`cle produced a correspondingly more severe reaction from dominant elements of the culture. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s argument about the agonistic interdependence of socio-sexual deviance and medico-juridical surveillance, Showalter describes how ‘[a]t the same time that new opportunities for self-cultivation and self-fulfilment in education and work were offered to women, doctors warned them that pursuit of such opportunities would lead to sickness, sterility, and race suicide . . . From the 1870s onward, [a] generation of doctors . . . presented a constellation of rigid views on gender roles.’16 The second half of the nineteenth century thus presents a changing complex of contradictory and ambivalent attitudes in relation to the politics of gender. A widespread mid-Victorian debate about stereotypes of femininity

4


develops into a radical interrogation of the social construction of sexual difference; and as this social critique becomes more radical it becomes less acceptable to majority opinion, while retaining cultural centrality as a topic of political and artistic debate. There is thus a paradoxical tightening-up of hegemonic norms around the fin de sie`cle, as the ‘Woman Question’ becomes radicalised. It is in this context that the ‘ambivalent realists’ of this book claim their place as peculiarly symptomatic of their culture. With the exception of Alice’s passionate interest in Irish politics, Woolson, Wharton, and Alice James were social conservatives and never identified themselves with any form of avowed feminist thought; yet for each of these women there was a disjunction between a conscious commitment to conservative values, and the lived experience of the social and psychological disentitlements that nevertheless ensued. All three women found that compliance with the traditional imperatives of respectable femininity led not to social success and personal happiness, but rather to various forms of dissatisfaction and marginality. Alice James’s lifetime career of hysterical illness can be understood as an obedient response to the expectation that femininity be a kind of sexualised passivity; yet the paradoxical self-assertiveness with which Alice embraced this identity took her beyond social centrality and towards the marginality of chronic invalidism. Constance Fenimore Woolson achieved both popular and critical acclaim for her literary work, but she could never fully reconcile her intellectual ambition with her loyalty to conservative gender roles, and thus her authorial success inevitably figured to her as a sign of her failure to marry. Alice and Constance came to think of themselves as spinsters: a painful but perversely reassuring gender identity that clings to social legitimacy by asserting some relationship with sexually validated femininity – a failed relationship. In contrast, Edith Wharton made an outwardly successful Society marriage; but it was rumoured to be a mariage blanc, and it ended in divorce when her husband became mentally ill. Marriage failed to protect Edith from social shame; and, as did her affair with William Morton Fullerton, it ended by confirming her sense of the disappointments of sexual intimacy. Through their different experiences of the coercions and failed promises of femininity, these women came to develop a restless and never fully articulable ambivalence towards the social authority of gender expectations.


5

Thus, seeking the traditional entitlements and rewards of femininity, each discovers herself in a kind of internal exile. Without ever consciously rebelling, each woman resists or complicates gender conventions enough to provoke the criticism of other, more compliant women, who came to stand as punitive embodiments of her own conservative loyalties. Both Alice and Edith – at different times – were objects of disapproval for Alice’s brother William’s wife, Alice Howe James (known in the James family, with rather pointed distinction, as Mrs Alice). Mrs Alice was deeply uncomfortable about Alice’s Boston marriage with Katharine Loring; and after Henry’s death, Mrs Alice refused to accept Edith Wharton as editor of a collection of Henry’s letters, on the grounds that she had heard that Mrs Wharton had been unfaithful to her husband. Constance’s younger sister Clara – a rather conventional woman, widowed, with a daughter – functioned as a similar figure of feminine reproof to her older sister. Constance also found herself besieged by a legion of phantasmatic female critics and rivals: the wives of the literary men with whom Constance corresponded throughout her writing life, whether these women actually existed or not (for the unmarried Henry James, Constance repeatedly evoked ‘a sweet young American wife’17). For his part, Henry James’s attitude towards heterosexual masculinity was vexed and complex: his compliance with the social imperatives of masculinity is problematised at every point by a profound imaginative kinship with women, an affiliative communion with feminine structures of subjectivity that is unparalleled elsewhere in the work of nineteenth-century male writers; and recent scholarship has charted his emotional – and possibly physical – resistance to male heterosexuality. Henry James’s queer selves have been emerging into critical daylight since Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s pioneering work on male homosocial desire in fiction and ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ (Between Men, 1985; Epistemology of the Closet, 1991). Today there is a fruitful absence of consensus as to what, exactly, it means to read James ‘as’ a ‘homosexual’, with claims ranging from positivist biographical assertions of physically enacted same-sex desire (such as Sheldon M. Novick’s The Young Master (1996), or, in more literary-critical mode, the collection edited by John R. Bradley, Henry James and Homo-Erotic Desire (1999)) to the most subtle arguments about cultural modality and imaginative alliances

6


(a suggestive recent example being Eric Haralson’s Henry James and Queer Modernity (2003)). These various works represent a salutary turn in Jamesian studies from an unexamined orthodoxy of presumptive heterosexuality (which coexisted oddly with the equally prevalent feeling that James’s masculinity was somehow not quite right) to the current climate of critical debate in which the only point of agreement is that when we think of James and sexuality we can, often, profitably chercher l’homme. This book does not aim to articulate a queer James: my focus is on the structures of social identity which, though invariably bound up with the construction and experience of sexuality, can most usefully be thought of in terms of gender. Clearly this is nothing more than a pragmatic distinction; to quote Haralson, whose own work explores in depth the political function of the ‘sex/gender regime’, ‘James’s consistent and ever more subtly emphatic writing against what seems to be primarily norms of gender identification and enactment cannot help but assail norms of sexuality as well.’18 My decision to leave open the question of the relations between feminine subject-positions and male homosexual desire may – I hope – enable a productive ambivalence in the reader at the same time as it honours James’s own fertile equivocations. This book is, among other things, an intervention in the increasingly sophisticated discussion of the gender politics of James’s writing and the work of gender in the construction of Jamesian subjectivity (there is a useful ambiguity here – to which I turn later – which puts into question the boundaries between James ‘himself’, and his characters, and his texts). James has encountered some famously hostile readings in the past two decades by critics who have condemned various aspects of his on- and offpage dealings with women; the most influential of the inaugural attacks was Alfred Habegger’s vilification in Henry James and the ‘Woman Business’ (1989). Habegger describes ‘Henry James’s appropriation, masterly and distorting, of American women’s fiction’, and while he may suggest that the focus of his attention will be ‘the interaction between [James] and a whole insurgent culture of female writers’, this quickly degrades to ‘chronicl[ing] the long war that was fought . . . between him and the women’, and builds to the assertion that ‘James’s fiction embodies a covert act of force directed against women’.19 Habegger’s sustained anger about the simultaneous exploitation and marginalisation of


7

women’s art and cultural experience stands as an honourable refutation of the proposition that men cannot be feminists. But the target of Habegger’s critique is profoundly misjudged, and can be justified only through a critical deformation that leads to such tone-deaf claims as that The Portrait of a Lady (1881; 1908) engineers Goodwood’s kiss to compel Isabel’s return to Osmond, or that The Bostonians (1886) devotes itself to the recapture of Verena and her rendition to the heroic Ransom. Such readings repudiate the complexity and ambivalence of James’s fictions, erasing the anguish and the solidarity that are persistently tangible at these scenes of feminine struggle and which make it possible to apprehend Verena’s marital extinction as an implicit tragedy and Isabel’s ostensible capitulation as almost her first act of strategic resistance after a lifetime of unconscious collaboration with the agents of her defeat.20 In marked contrast, some of the most attractive recent work on James has sought to emphasise the emotional and political possibilities of his writing. In her Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure (2002), Tessa Hadley argues that it is James’s ‘erotically polymorphic’ imagination that makes possible his ‘deep and sympathetic treatment of women’, while ‘[his] freedom from ‘‘definitional frames’’ of hetero- and homosexuality gives him [a] special purchase on the whole urgent business of gender definition and gender identity in his society’.21 In a similarly optimistic vein, Jonathan Freedman suggests that James’s fiction perceives the ‘tragic . . . entanglements of human intimacy’ as open to transformation by virtue of their frailty: ‘And that remaking, for James, is the utopian point of the exercise – one that projects the making of social value through and well beyond the nineteenthcentury nuclear family . . . and hence foreshadows new possibilities of relation whose lineaments we are only now beginning to discover.’22 Yet as they honour the pleasures of the Jamesian text, construing a vision of James ‘liberat[ing] himself to step over the boundaries . . . into the open space outside’ and of the ‘utopian potential’ of his fictional project,23 these critics occlude the anxiety and violence in James’s fictional world; they look away from the ‘gleam of [the] bare blade’ that ‘passe[s] across [Maggie’s] vision ten times a day’ (GB 305), and close their ears to Charlotte’s silent scream as she is led into exile by Adam, a cord looped around her beautiful neck. For James, and for his closest

8


female friends, ‘the elation of liberty and the pain of exclusion [are] indistinguishably mingled’ (PL 24): inner marginality offers pleasure at a high price, and the political potential of their experience is both generated and constrained by their intimacy with the punitive effects of power. This book proposes that James can best be understood as both subject to, and the compelling artist of, a potent ambivalence about the social authority of conservative gender patterns. Neither condemnation of James’s ‘elusive male authoritarianism’,24 which fails to engage with the resistant potential of cross-sex affiliations and imaginative community, nor overly utopian readings that wishfully underestimate the overbearing authority of culture, offer a sufficiently nuanced perspective on James from which to apprehend the psychological and aesthetic complexity of his work. ‘[I]t wouldn’t be thinkable except as free and wouldn’t be amusing except as controlled’:25 this is the bind in which ambivalent realism finds its generative force, its constrained and unquenchable energy. This book explores the imbrication of cultural boundaries and resistant subjectivity, reading the lives of Henry and Alice James, Constance Fenimore Woolson and Edith Wharton, as the subtle and restless testing of limits – as the creative process of negotiating with the cage. For these late nineteenth-century figures drew together not only in their shared uneasiness towards dominant patterns of gender identity – and, on James’s part, a long imaginative affiliation with women – but also in their affinity for a certain form of textual representation, which I term ‘ambivalent realism’. ‘Ambivalent realism’ is a mode of representation characterised by the productive equivocation of its semiotic structures; it is, therefore, especially hospitable to the expression and negotiation of ambivalence towards authority. The book examines these writers’ idiosyncratic textual practices in relation to their social modes of being, to map out the structural kinship between contemporaneous forms of femininity and of realist representation. All four writers found in ambivalent realism a way of negotiating their muffled restiveness and self-division; their uncertain sense of failure and reprieve; their conflicting impulses towards complying with, and resisting, authority. Ambivalent realism is generated by, and covertly explores, the failures of ideology: the flaws and gaps in the texture of social consensus, the disjunctions between conscious conservatism and the lived experience of marginality.26


9

The ambivalent realists thus constitute a social, emotional and aesthetic community of interest, whose kinship stems from much more than mere geographic or social proximity. As academic perspectives change, it has become at once more thinkable to align James’s work with that of others, and very much less acceptable to explore the work of Woolson or Wharton in relation to James’s. Chapter 3 discusses in detail the traditional construction – within James studies – of Constance Fenimore Woolson as thwarted spinster admirer of the cavalier Henry: in reaction, Woolson specialists are understandably reluctant to cede James any more of the limelight, particularly if this means implying significant relationships between Woolson’s literary work and his.27 The notable exception is Lyndall Gordon’s A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art (1998), with which my work shares a foundational perception of the importance of women’s experience to James’s writing. Gordon reads James’s life and work in the light of his relationships with Minny Temple and Constance Fenimore Woolson, to argue that James exploited his special capacity for intimacy with brilliant, marginal women in order to recreate real people as fictional characters. Having transmuted these vulnerable pioneers into icons of the Jamesian imaginaire, James turned his back on their real-life avatars, eluding their expectations of continuing emotional involvement. Gordon’s book forms a major contribution to the biographical study of James, Temple and Woolson (indeed, it is the first extended account of Woolson’s life); it is a tour de force of empathetic lifewriting – imaginative, scrupulous and compelling. But Gordon’s conviction of James’s culpability leads her to a misreading of his relationship with Woolson, whom she perceives far too simply as a victim. While apprehending the creative importance of the Woolson-James relationship to each of its participants, A Private Life of Henry James does not recognise the psychological complexity of their intersubjective collaboration. From a periodising perspective, the more unexpected inclusion here may be Edith Wharton, who is considered by much recent criticism to belong to the post-James generation of the early modernists – a perspective often aligned with the rescuing of Wharton from her traditional role as a semi-amateur sub-Jamesian whose work at its best offers an unsubtle reprise of the Master’s. Millicent Bell deprecates the tradition of criticism in which Wharton’s ‘literary

10


sophistication was often confused with a supposed resemblance of her art to that of the most sophisticated of American writers, Henry James’, and argues instead that ‘resemblances [are] less significant than the differences’.28 There is a valuably corrective force in the view of Wharton as a writer working in the era of modernism whose later fictions engage thoughtfully with some of the characteristic preoccupations of the radical experimentalists of the 1920s and 1930s; but we lose an important sense of Wharton’s distinctive cultural ambivalence if we elide either the traditionalism of her overt political commitments or the resilient circumspection of her textual dissent. Further, my decision to include Wharton with writers born twenty years before her is grounded in my sense of the powerful transitionality of the late nineteenth century, a period in which Victorian textual practices – as much as social forms – were uneasily breeding their own critiques. This book shares with Haralson’s Henry James and Queer Modernity an animating perception of the significant links and connections between the most complex, questioning writers of the 1870s and 1880s, and the literature of the subsequent halfcentury; as Haralson writes of his chosen group (Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, James, and Gertrude Stein), ‘[w]hat differentiates the work of these American authors from most of their predecessors is their alert receptivity to [the] queerness . . . that modern life casts up: a receptivity – sometimes despite powerful internal resistance – . . . to modernity itself’.29 With Haralson and with other recent revisionists,30 I want to resist what Ann Ardis calls ‘classic modernist ‘‘narratives of rupture’’’31 which imagine a violent birth for modernism from the repudiated body of nineteenth-century literary forms. This book implies rather that modernism has its roots, its auguries, its restless beginnings in the expatriate lives of the ambivalent realists and in their work, with its disavowable estrangement from the status quo; its anxious, alert apprehension of change; and its discovery of feminine experience as a synonym for the resisting self which would eventually issue in the liberation of the unconscious by modernism. But while Haralson views James as an ambivalent prophet whose work could best begin to speak to a later generation of selfconsciously ‘modern’ writers and subjects, I want to show that the textually mediated relationships between Alice and Henry James,


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Woolson and Wharton suggest the tangible contours of conservative resistance active within their own culture. ‘Ambivalent realism’ is a usefully double term which articulates both the distinctiveness of this textual practice – not all nineteenth-century realisms are ambivalent; or at least, not all are as fundamentally equivocal as is this mode – and, at the same time, its aesthetic and cultural centrality: this is a very significant ‘dialect’ within the broader linguistic range of nineteenth-century narrative representation, and it adumbrates an uneasy apprehension of the semiotic revolutions to come. And there is a corresponding value in naming these writers as ‘ambivalent realists’: the Jameses, Woolson and Wharton constitute a substantial, coherent and richly creative community, yet this small group combines distinctiveness with a wider typicality, their full significance coming into focus only in relation to the broader cultural context in which they occupied a paradoxical position of marginality and expertise.32 Mikhail Bakhtin called the novel ‘the genre of becoming’.33 When we engage with this small group of inner marginals whose work draws its strength and originality from its authors’ unresting ambivalence, we are encountering lives played out on the internal edges of a culture, where subjectivity and representation alike participate in the difficult, alluring process of change. the realist sign He got up as he spoke and walked to the chimney, where he stood a moment bending his eye, as if he had seen them for the first time, on the delicate specimens of rare porcelain with which it was covered. He took up a small cup and held it in his hand; then, still holding it and leaning his arm on the mantel, he pursued: ‘You always see too much in everything.’ . . . Madame Merle kept her eye on her cup . . . ‘I’ve seen better what you have been to your wife than I ever saw what you were for me. Please be very careful of that precious object.’ ‘It already has a wee bit of a tiny crack,’ said Osmond dryly as he put it down . . . After he had left her she went, the first thing, and lifted from the mantelshelf the attenuated coffee-cup in which he had mentioned the existence of a crack; but she looked at it rather abstractedly. ‘Have I been so vile all for nothing?’ she vaguely wailed. (Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881; 1908), 524–5)

When we read realism, we become used to encountering objects which have a physical, commonsense reality within the world of the text, and which at the same time bear a great weight of semiotic

12


importance. Madame Merle’s cracked coffee cup is one of many ‘real’ objects which adorn her Roman apartment, yet we have no difficulty in accepting it as a sign, not merely of Serena Merle’s fashionable collection of bibelots, but of a whole sphere of flawed happiness and disappointment and betrayal. To read realism, we learn to negotiate a world in which objects glow or loom with the promise, or the threat, of a meaning beyond their mere material substance. This dual structure of significance is one of the most characteristic features of realist narrative, which plays on the signifying relation between the (fictional) object-world (which we may think of as the world of the signifier) and the sphere of novelistic meanings (the realm of the signified). At the theoretical heart of this book is the structuralist conception of the linguistic sign as a functional union of a signifier and a signified. For Ferdinand de Saussure, who first used these terms, the signifier is a sound pattern and it is linked by the linguistic sign to the signified, which is a concept.34 Central to Saussure’s scheme is the idea that the relation between the signifier and the signified has no inherent or essential value: ‘The link between [signifier] and [signified] is arbitrary. Since we are treating a sign as the combination in which a [signifier] is associated with a [signified], we can express this more simply as: the linguistic sign is arbitrary.’35 ‘Arbitrary’ here means ‘conventional’ – ‘the [signifier] is unmotivated: that is to say arbitrary in relation to its [signified], with which it has no natural connexion’.36 The sign thus functions purely because it participates in a system of culturally understood signs, all of which are composed of arbitrary unions of signifiers and signifieds. There is, in Saussure’s analysis, no functional significance in the signifier/signified relation except that of agreed equivalence.37 I use the terms ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’ throughout this book, but I have modified them in order to shape a new understanding of ambivalent realist representation. Whereas Saussure is analysing the most fundamental structures of language to theorise the signifying relations between sound patterns and abstract concepts, these terms are used here to address a different level of meaning: that at which the signifier/ signified contrast can distinguish between the literal and the metaphorical valences of the linguistic sign – between Madame Merle’s chipped coffee cup and the life that has ‘dried up [her] tears’ (PL 522).


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This book problematises the hostile diagnosis of the political function of realism as elaborated by later structuralists, perhaps most influentially in Roland Barthes’s discussion of ‘the reality effect’: Semiotically, the ‘concrete detail’ is constituted by the direct collusion of a referent and a signifier; the signified is expelled from the sign, and along with it, of course, there is eliminated the possibility of developing a form of the signified, that is, the narrative structure itself . . . This is what might be called the referential illusion. The truth behind this illusion is this: eliminated from the realist utterance as a signified of denotation, the ‘real’ slips back in as a signified of connotation; for at the very moment when these details are supposed to denote reality directly, all that they do, tacitly, is signify it . . . It is the category of the ‘real’, and not its various contents, which is being signified; in other words, the very absence of the signified, to the advantage of the referent, standing alone, becomes the true signifier of realism. An ‘effet de reél ’, (a reality effect) is produced, which is the basis of that unavowed ‘vraisemblance’ which forms the aesthetic of all the standard works of modernity. This new ‘vraisemblance’ . . . arises . . . from an intention to alter the tripartite nature of the sign so as to make the descriptive notation a pure encounter between the object and its expression. The disintegration of the sign – which seems in fact to be the major concern of modernism – is indeed present in the realist enterprise, but in a somewhat regressive manner, since it is accomplished in the name of referential plenitude[.]38

In Saussure’s analysis there is no relation between the signifier and signified except one of arbitrary linguistic union – the sign – which makes sense because a culture agrees to understand it. In Barthes’s analysis of the realist sign, on the other hand, there is something much more complicated going on in the potent relation between the form and the content of the text’s representational structures. ‘Would you mind shutting the window, my dear?’ said Lady Macleod, seating herself stiffly on one of the small ugly green chairs. She had been educated at a time when easy-chairs were considered vicious, and among people who regarded all easy postures as being so; and she could still boast, at seventy-six, that she never leaned back.39

Barthes’s charge against the ‘reality effect’ is that realist discourse claims to eliminate the signified in favour of the referent (that is, extratextual reality), while in fact it exploits the illusion of referentiality to smuggle in a covert signified. That is, realism offers the illusion of a clear window on to the (fictional) world at the very moment that its representational structures are most powerfully

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constructing that ‘reality’. The ugly green chairs in Alice Vavasor’s drawing room do not seem to be standing for anything except themselves: their ugliness does not indicate Alice’s temperament, their colour does not represent the emotional ambience of the scene, and Lady Macleod’s straight-backed posture claims only the most modest symbolic function, testifying to nothing more than her cultural vintage and her conventional ‘uprightness’. Yet Barthes would argue that it is precisely this apparent literalism, this seeming solidity and absence of the signifying function, that makes such moments in realist texts so ideologically potent: as we picture the little chairs and settle, to our own satisfaction, the exact shade of green velvet which Alice and her aunt might find displeasing, we are succumbing to the text’s masterful selfeffacement, forgetting the work of culture in the pleasure of the reality effect. For Barthes, realism is a strategy for disguising the extent to which bourgeois ‘reality’ is ideologically produced: realism is the way in which ideology both reproduces and conceals itself, reproduces itself by concealing itself. As we linger on the velvet (which, in the mind’s eye of this reader, is yellowish-green and slightly ridged in texture), we pay tribute through our oblivion to the technical mastery of the text, to the semiotic authority that Anthony Trollope creates by rendering invisible the representational work of the narrative. Because Alice’s chairs do not denote a signified of character or ambience, they can connote a powerfully absorbing image of ‘reality’ whose ideological effect depends on the disavowed relation between signifier and signified, producing the subliminal impression that Alice and her aunt (and Trollope’s mid-Victorian bourgeois readers) inhabit a world which is somehow naturally there. There is thus in realism a perfect coincidence of form and content, message and mode; it could be called ‘performative’ insofar as it enacts itself, reproducing itself in mirrored form between the planes of act and statement, being and saying. Realism, in this view, is in some sense a neurotic mode, condemned to reproduce infinitely its own conditions of production. (We do not know who made the green chairs, nor in what conditions; and the text that supplies them to us is correspondingly invisible in its representational mode of production.) For Barthes, the ‘arbitrariness’ of the sign has become a myth whose ideological power resides in the denial of the insidious semiotic collaboration between signifiers and signifieds, the form


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and content of realism. It is when Alice’s green chairs seem to be most innocent of symbolic function that their signifying effect is most powerful, smuggling into the Trollopian drawing room the signifieds of a whole uncontested culture.40 We encounter more and less sustained versions of the reality effect throughout nineteenth-century narrative. (Indeed, it is difficult to think of a single nineteenth-century fiction that does not make use of this effect to some extent; the most radical prose experiments of modernism may be understood as attempts to imagine a literary form which does not draw on the illusion of reality as a deep source of pleasure and value. Yet even Ulysses (1922) is merely split between estrangement and the pleasures of the illusory real, the fine urine tang of those kidneys lingering despite the bravura demystifications of James Joyce’s novel.) What I want to draw attention to here is the way in which some forms of realism embrace the potential for ideological assertiveness in the disavowed relation between signifier and signified, while other writers – the ambivalent realists of this book – find in the structure of the realist sign a contestable space for the expression of resistance to dominant meanings. The cabin of Uncle Tom was a small log building, close adjoining to ‘the house,’ as the negro par excellence designates his master’s dwelling. In front it had a neat garden-patch, where, every summer, strawberries, raspberries, and a variety of fruits and vegetables, flourished under careful tending. The whole front of it was covered by a large scarlet bignonia and a native multiflora rose, which, entwisting and interlacing, left scarce a vestige of the rough logs to be seen. Here, also, in summer, various brilliant annuals, such as marigolds, petunias, four-o’clocks, found an indulgent corner in which to unfold their splendors, and were the delight and pride of Aunt Chloe’s heart.41

Entering Harriet Beecher Stowe’s flower garden, we encounter a masterly deployment of the reality effect to promote the most explicit political message of this crusading text. Beginning with the simplest gestures of description – Tom’s cabin is fictional, but we are to understand that this is how slaves’ cabins are liable to be when the master is humane; Uncle Tom (‘as the negro par excellence’) and his cabin are modestly representative of an extratextual reality – the passage modulates into a generalised homily on the flourishing of productive life ‘under careful tending’; and then it moves one step further into a much more focused and symbolically charged image

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of the interlaced flowers covering over the ‘rough logs’ of the slaves’ dwelling. These three sentences embody a stealthy progression from a relatively straightforward claim of realistic representativeness – ‘at best, this is how slaves’ cabins are’; via a demonstrative picture of good husbandry – ‘see the fruits and vegetables which result from careful tending’; towards a powerfully covert version of the reality effect, in which we are shown the harmonious entwisting of the ‘scarlet bignonia and [the] native multiflora rose’ without any avowed editorial gloss. Whereas the small log building was placed and determined by the authority of how things are, and the flourishing fruits and vegetables by the benevolent authority of human mastery, the bignonia and the rose seem to exist independently: they appear to have left behind the status of objects, occupying the position of subjects within the description, twining together as if spontaneously and seeming to obscure the unlovely edifice of slavery by inner volition alone. Finally, the passage eases back into a more cautious register, with another rather modest and generalised image of the ‘brilliant annuals’ which suggest the lively aesthetic sense of the excellent Aunt Chloe (and reaffirm the possibility of purely decorative ornamentation). Stowe’s novel wants us to believe and, more importantly, to feel, that slavery is wrong, and that it is wrong by virtue of the natural human capacity for interethnic community and mutual responsibility. Stowe uses the reality effect in order to create the subliminal impression that such community and interdependence are part of the natural order of the world. The passage works by seeming to move from the avowed persuasion of rhetoric to the unadorned persuasiveness of those entwined flowers, reality itself; from a representational technique which encourages the reader to recognise that she is listening to a sermon, to a technique which hopes to be overlooked in the flourishing harmony of the real. At the very moment, then, that the text is working hardest to construct an image of natural community, it is underwriting the power of that image with the implicit claim that such a meaning is essentially natural, a given of the world, beyond argument and beyond interpretation. The bignonia and the rose are to represent the natural order by not appearing to be doing any representing at all. Stowe’s text harnesses the ideological effect of the covert relationship between signifiers and signifieds to support the most overt message of the whole novel in a way that comes close to


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Barthes’s reality effect – even though the political content of Stowe’s novel might seem incompatible with the alleged conservatism of realist form. Barthes, after all, is describing a mode of representation which aims to naturalise the authority of the status quo, while Stowe’s novel is militantly opposed to a central feature of contemporary social organisation. However, the most fundamental attitude here is to do with power itself: the reality effect aims at naturalising both social and semiotic authority, and this is exactly what Stowe’s text is doing at the point at which the flowers of interethnic community entwine as if spontaneously before our eyes. Stowe’s political project opposes one feature of social organisation, but does so by suggesting – covertly – that slavery itself is opposed to the natural order of things. Stowe’s signifiers are loyal footsoldiers striving discreetly to produce a subliminal message of support for Stowe’s abolitionist signifieds. Vanderbank . . . gave a vague but expressive sigh. ‘She’s rather lovely, little Aggie . . . ; there’s the young lady.’ He pointed to an object on one of the tables, a small photograph with a very wide border of something that looked like crimson fur . . . ‘At Naples they develop early. She’s only seventeen or eighteen, I suppose; but I never know how old – or at least how young – girls are, and I’m not sure . . . She gave me the portrait – frame and all. The frame is Neapolitan enough, and little Aggie is charming.’ Then Vanderbank subjoined: ‘But not so charming as little Nanda.’ ‘Little Nanda? – have you got her?’ The old man was all eagerness. ‘She’s over there beside the lamp – also a present from the original.’ [chapter break] Mr Longdon had gone to the place – little Nanda was in glazed white wood. He took her up and held her out [.] (AA 36–7)

It would be a preternaturally acute reader who on first eavesdropping on the vague, coyly oppressive dialogues that constitute most of The Awkward Age found herself able to notice and wonder at this pair of photograph frames – or who managed to remember them in the hysterical denouement of the story’s climactic chapters (when her attention is likely to be consumed by the lurid symbolic implications of that ‘French novel in blue paper’ as it burrows obscenely beneath Aggie’s skirts (275)). James’s photograph frames – like Stowe’s flower garden – exploit the difference between signifiers and signifieds to disguise the presence in the text of symbolic meaning. But whereas Stowe’s signs use the covert signified to promote the explicit message of the text, and thus create a harmonious semiotic assemblage which communicates a

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confident embrace of rhetorical authority, the photograph frames covertly produce and express disharmony, both in the world of the text and in the reader’s relationship with that textual world. There is a demonstrative disjunction between the unexceptionable initial appearance, and the later significance, of James’s ambivalent signs: in readerly retrospect, the metaphorical potency of the photograph frames is shamingly frank. How could we miss them: Aggie’s luxuriant border of crimson fur and the protective frozen virginity of Nanda’s ‘white wood’? At first sight, the red frame is unobjectionable. Aggie is from Naples, so we are given to understand that the crimson fur signifies nothing except the most banal and enjoyably recognisable token of southern European cultural difference; the frame seems to be making only a light pretence of strangeness that is actually well domesticated within accepted social and epistemological boundaries. But as the text nears conclusion with the revelation that Aggie is utterly ‘corrupt’ – that she is sexually unbounded and uncontrollable – the red fur begins to be comprehensible as an urgently sexual symbol whose significance was repressed but present from the reader’s earliest engagement with the world of the text. Whereas Stowe’s signs build subliminal affirmation into the signifying structures of her fiction, James uses the difference between overt and covert meaning to encode conflict within representation, structuring the text as a site of resistance to semiotic authority. Stowe’s signs enact a naturalised relationship between signifiers and signifieds to mirror the notion of a natural harmony between blacks and whites; James, on the other hand, builds temporal difference into the reader’s experience of signs in order to problematise the relations between symptoms and meanings, demystifying the ideological fiction of society as benevolent custodian and femininity as virginal innocence. The example of the photograph frames is a tiny embedded parable, a miniaturised allegorical figure troping the text’s concern with the social and psychological frames that produce and delimit interpretation, in particular the formation and analysis of young women who come to stand in this novel as exemplary victims of hermeneutic attention. It is a parable layered with equivocations: framing is a suggestively ambiguous project, open to interpretation as protection or confinement, as a sealing-off or a boxing-in. Moreover, there is some uncertainty as to the agent of


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the framing: Mitchy and Mr Longdon are able to possess, display and compare the young women as objects within their frames, but these photographs, and these young women, are signs which resist simple subordination to the semiotic projects of those seeking to frame them for consumption. Both pictures and people, signifiers and signifieds, the photographs’ objectness is tempered with subjectivity: Aggie, at least, is supposed to have given Mitchy her frame as well as her photograph, which implies some collaboration between a young woman who has chosen to display herself in crimson fur, and the text which proffers it to the reader, versus the explicit, commonsense level of the plot in which the only people with power to judge are complacent men in a late-night conclave. Thus the text elaborates a troubling but productive conflict between first and second readings; between conscious and unconscious meanings; between the reader’s naturalised respect for the masculine interpreters in the text and her nascent alliance with Aggie’s (admittedly compromised) resistance to their hermeneutic authority: and these dynamic, interdependent struggles find their most fundamental form in the ambivalent relation between signifiers and signifieds. In ambivalent realism meaning comes into being in the contestable space between the literal and the metaphorical valences of signs. This generative distinction surfaces under many names in the course of the book: outer appearance and inner meaning; public and private; ideology and resistance; past and future; parents and children; facts and fiction; obligations and possibilities; experience and desire; origins and exile; home and abroad. public writers, private selves? This book is neither pure literary criticism nor pure biography, which reflects its central interest in the constitutive relationship between subjectivity and representation in ambivalent realism. ‘Henry James’ is not a biographical secret hidden behind his public persona: we cannot find the ‘real’ Henry in his private texts, nor are his public texts mere façades. The realist subject comes into being through his or her negotiation of these contrasting textual zones; what creates realist meaning is the controlled proliferation of relationships between differentiated yet reactive semantic levels.

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Of course, to assert that there is a productive, mutually determining relationship between the private self and the public writer is to meet with vociferous opposition from the ambivalent realists themselves: it is to articulate a paradoxical truth on which realism thrives, but which it cannot acknowledge. Henry, Alice, Constance and Edith are driven by an intense desire to write for a public readership, while at the same time experiencing an unrelenting anxiety about what they feel to be the risk of this public presence – psychological vulnerability. What each fears is that, through their relationship with their published texts, their private being may become public meaning. Yet somehow this anxiety strengthens the writer’s sense of the private self. Realist signs, realist texts and realist subjects are produced through the creative incompatibility of wanting to protect the self from the violation of being known, and at the same time sensing that it is through this risk that the self – the signified of textual or subjective meaning – comes into being. Edith Wharton writes as if the worst possible thing that could happen to her would be the reader’s breaching of her psychological privacy; so she designs her writing to be invulnerable (see Chapter 4). Yet during the early years of her adulthood and marriage she suffered psychosomatic illnesses which ceased once she established her literary career; in her autobiography she claims that she ‘had [ . . . ] no real personality of [her] own’ until the publication of her first book of stories (BG 868).42 Publishing one’s writing voluntarily sets up the possibility, or the idea of the possibility, that private being may become public meaning: for Edith, there is no sense of self in the absence of this risk. An earlier version of this paradox is evident in Constance Fenimore Woolson’s uncharacteristically outspoken disapproval of the public status of women writers. Believing in principle that women should be private, domestic and reticent, she is horrified by the idea of women writers as celebrities. She finds Ouida’s self-publicising behaviour painfully undignified, and she insists that her own private life has nothing to do with her published work. As she says, referring to W. D. Howells’s insistent requests that she should sit for a ‘medallion portrait’, ‘I do not at all think that because a woman happens to write a little, her face, or her personality in any way, becomes the property of the public.’43 But Constance’s whole life, with its difficulties and pleasures, as a woman independent of husband or family, is guaranteed by her


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writing; and moreover, despite her chronic loneliness, she chooses to arrange her life to suit her writing. She could return to her family home in Cleveland, to which she received regular invitations from her nephew; she could collaborate in her travel arrangements with her widowed sister and niece; she could even live alone in a permanent home in Europe. Any of these options would be considerably cheaper – and, for a woman who claimed to yearn for domestic stability, considerably less disconcerting – than the mobile, independent life that she actually chose. It is misleading to imagine, as she often claims, that Woolson has to write and publish in order to support herself; while her writing might have begun as a financial necessity, it became a passion and an uneasily congenial way of life (see Chapter 3). Far from tolerating the discomforts of publishing in order to support her private life, she arranges her private life to enable her to write fiction for a public readership. For her part, Alice James was so acutely ambivalent about the idea of a public textual presence that she wrote nothing more substantial than personal letters, despite her eager interest in intellectual debate, until she began her diary in 1889. Alice’s writing – discussed in Chapter 1 – was crippled by her nearinability to negotiate with the demands of social and semantic authority. Her diary is fuelled by a frustrating and frustrated combination of defeatism and pride; she communicates an implicit faith in her intellectual potential and possibilities, at the same moment as she insists that they are irrevocably wasted and lost. Her father and her two oldest brothers, always her favourites in the family, were figures of overpowering intellectual authority: writing as a public act of self-assertion was almost impossible for Alice, and yet her diary, as it develops, develops ambitions for a public audience. From 31st December 1890, the diary ceased to be private, in that Alice was now dictating her entries to Katharine;44 as she did so, her literary awareness of a wider audience increased. Paradoxically, as she embraces the prospect of her impending death, Alice seeks to live through her diary; she dictated a correction to the final entry on the day before she died. Thus Alice’s diary – that most ostentatiously private literary genre – forms the most pointed example of the conflictual, generative interplay between the ideas of publicity and privacy in the creation of ambivalent realism.

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Ambivalent realism is a structure of meaning that is social, psychological and representational; it is neither possible nor useful to achieve a pristine separation of Woolson the regional story-writer from Constance the traveller, or James the playwright from Henry the son, or Wharton the novelist from Edith the hostess. Yet scholars have tended to do either criticism or biography, while using the other as a subordinate background or supplement without taking seriously the mutually constitutive and imbricated activities of each. An interesting example here is Richard Salmon’s Henry James and the Culture of Publicity (1997), which analyses precisely this ideological function of the public/private distinction in the mystified relationship between (realist) literature and late nineteenth-century capitalist modes of production. Salmon’s work offers a rigorous and sophisticated analysis of James’s ‘acute concern with the cultural space of authorship, and its movement across a shifting boundary between private and public spheres’, highlighting James’s ‘tension or ambivalence’ in relation to ‘the culture of publicity’; ‘it is clear’, Salmon argues, ‘that [James’s] seemingly hostile apprehension of this phenomenon in many ways contradicts the ‘‘fluidity’’ of his own fictional practices’.45 Yet Salmon’s treatment of James exclusively as a professional writer, with no attention to Henry in any ‘private’ relationship, could be seen as reproducing the pristine division that the book itself has analysed as an ideological formation. When we engage with late nineteenth-century subjects, we are negotiating with the citizens of a world in which the relationship between private experience and public performance was increasingly potent, volatile and contested. Rather than accept uncritically the emphatic protestations of the ambivalent realists that what they do in private has nothing to do with their public writings – James’s story ‘The Private Life’ (1892) is a particularly urbane expression of this idea – this book seeks to analyse the rhetorical and emotional power of the idea as deriving as much from fantasy as from ethics: from a fantasy whose ambivalence is a source of more, not less, imaginative force. Only relational, interdependently literary and biographical exploration can begin to engage with the realist mode in which representation and subjectivity are best understood as directly continuous semiotic phenomena. Consequently the book finds both its narrative structure and its hermeneutic focus in the complex interplay of


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writing and living; of meaning and being; of representations and subjectivities. Throughout the book, I refer to the four principals sometimes by their first, and sometimes by their second names. This departure from the literary-critical convention of impersonal formality is both a responsive gesture and a strategic decision, elicited by the public-private problematic at the heart of realist representation, and further challenging the counterproductive policing of the borders between the territories of biography and literary criticism. This is not a defence of programmatic inconsistency, nor of estrangement per se: I use first and second names with some care to evoke more and less ‘private’, more and less ‘public’ versions of the writerly self, within a conceptual framework which understands subjectivity and representation as interdependent. It is when the choice of first or second name is hardest to justify, or when there needs to be the most restless shuttling between private and public identities, that the decision to embrace ambivalence in addressing the book’s principals seems most productive, and – I hope – sympathetic to the equivocal lives of these writers. The book is structured chronologically by James’s life, from his childhood relationship with his sister Alice, through his middleaged ambivalence towards heterosexuality (played out in his relationship with Constance Fenimore Woolson), to his elderly embrace of his imagined readership (an attitude which underlay his vexed friendship with Edith Wharton). James is a figure who provides biographical continuity, but it should be clear that this narrative trajectory comes into being only through the elective affinities which form the central subject of the book. Henry James led me to these women, his social and literary selves both eagerly receptive of, and alertly reaching out towards, the patterns of meaning and being negotiated by his most intimate female friends. Henry met Edith first in Paris around 1887, but they did not begin to develop a friendship until Wharton’s literary career was beginning with her short story collection The Greater Inclination (1899) and her novel The Touchstone (1900). Henry and Constance met in Florence in 1880. Constance and Alice never met Edith – but the preoccupations which drew Edith and Henry into a long and superficially incomprehensible friendship are directly continuous with those that allied Henry with his rebarbative sister and his never-quite-lover. Chapter 2 is alone in its lack of a female

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companion, and it explores the instabilities of Henry’s self and the failures of James’s work in the absence of significant others (whether erotic, companionate or familial). For the ambivalent realists, art is a shared object of communion within a culture whose inner boundaries are shifting. In parallel fashion, by serving as the central figure of this book Henry James comes into focus as a transformative object for the women writers who sensed in his work a profound kinship with their own.

chapter 1


What is living in this deadness called life is the struggle of the creature in the grip of its inheritance and against the consequences of its acts; the mother powerless by her tears to wipe out the wrong brought about by her weakness and folly, the daughter to escape by revolt from the ignominy of her destiny . . . How in emancipating ourselves we forge our chains. (Alice James, The Diary of Alice James, 21st June 1889, AJD 38)

Alice James moved to live in England in 1885, three years after the deaths of her parents. Two of her three surviving brothers were living in the United States, and she had no particular friends waiting for her across the Atlantic – only her brother Henry, who was living the single but abundantly social life of a distinguished literary bachelor in London. As Alice describes it in her diary, ‘I crossed the water and suspended myself like an old woman of the sea round [Henry’s] neck where to all appearances I shall remain for all time’ (25th March 1890, AJD 104). The diary ends two years later, with a note by Katharine Loring briefly detailing the circumstances of Alice’s death – one day after Alice had dictated a correction to what would be her final entry. Alice James was a career invalid who spent her adult life exhibiting classic manifestations of hysteria: fainting, prostration, depression, back pain, stomach pain, paralysis. In the James family correspondence, Alice’s ‘illness’ stabilised as a recognised feature of the familial landscape while Alice was in her early twenties, but there is no extended account of her own experience until she began her diary in 1889. The diary is a fascinating, irritating and perverse text whose author repeatedly asserts her desire to die – and when organic disease was diagnosed, at last, in 1891, Alice responded with triumphant vindication: finally, physical events 25

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were catching up with her chronic sense of living death. The cancer in her breast is translating into corporeal reality her experience of psychological suffering. ‘The fact is,’ she writes on 2nd February 1892, a few weeks before her death – her physical pain must have been acute – ‘I have been dead so long and it has been simply such a grim shoving of the hours behind me as I faced a ceaseless possible horror, since that hideous summer of ’78, when I went down to the deep sea, its dark waters closed over me and I knew neither hope nor peace’ (AJD 230). growing up in the james family The James family was compact, self-sufficient and intensely emotional. At the head of the family was the eccentric intellectual Henry James, Sr, a semi-amateur Swedenborgian whose domineering capriciousness kept the family in a state of perpetual displacement between cities and continents. His overt dominance in the family was reinforced by his demanding emotionalism and fragility: his wife Mary supported his every whim while adopting a reticent, self-effacing manner. For most of their married life, they included in their family Mary’s sister, Aunt Kate, who after a brief and unhappy experiment with marriage left her husband and returned to the Jameses. There were five children. William, born in 1842, would grow up to distinguish himself as a philosopher; Henry, born the following year, would eventually achieve international standing as a novelist. The two younger sons, Garth Wilkinson (‘Wilky’) and Robertson (‘Bob’) were born in 1845 and 1846, and after a gap of some years Alice followed in 1850. In somewhat overdetermined contrast to their older brothers, Wilky and Bob failed to establish themselves both as international celebrities and as valued family members – except insofar as they came to be valued as examples of disappointed family expectations. Lyndall Gordon has emphasised the disparity in Henry James, Sr’s attitudes towards his sons over the question of serving in the Civil War: while William and Henry encountered inexhaustible paternal encouragement to evade combat, Wilky and Bob were left with little doubt that their only proper course was to commit themselves – even after injury – to the fighting.1 Just as Alice found herself recognised in the role of perpetual invalid, so Wilky and Bob came to feature in their family’s eyes as figures of pity,


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disapproval and tempered distaste. Exiled to the West, engaged in business and industry, married to women unapproved by the Cambridge Jameses, Wilky and Bob were sidelined by their parents and siblings, and after the parents’ deaths – when William, Henry and Alice drew more closely together, imaginatively if not always geographically – their brothers dwindled to the status of pitiable, sometimes troublesome outcasts: ‘poor Wilky’ and ‘poor Bob’. Their deaths – in 1883 and 1910 – did not command great emotional responses from the remaining family. Wilky’s drew a little distanced sympathy from his siblings while Bob’s was greeted as if overdue (for some years Henry had been expressing his hope that for the convenience of all concerned, ‘poor Bob’ would not too importunately linger on). Alice also failed to distinguish herself in the elite public world of ideas, but she occupied a very different position from that of her two youngest brothers. A true native of the James family, her most intense and prolonged emotional engagement was with the family of her childhood: her parents – in particular her father – and her older brothers William and Henry.2 As an adult woman, Alice lived for many years with her intimate friend Katharine Loring (1849–1943), whose emotional and practical commitment to Alice were unquestionable, and Alice was content only when she had Katharine’s daily companionship.3 However, the relationship between Alice and Katharine features in Alice’s diary as a devoted and tranquil domestic partnership bearing little or no similarity to Alice’s intense involvement with James family members; this involvement, indeed, is characterised by anxiety and a kind of frantic emotionalism which may strike an outsider as frankly pathological: I must try and pull myself together and record the somewhat devastating episode of July 18th when Harry after a much longer absence than usual presented himself, doubled by William!! We had just finished luncheon and were talking of something or other when H. suddenly said, with a queer look upon his face, ‘I must tell you something!’ ‘You’re not going to be married!’ shrieked I. ‘No, but William is here, he has been lunching upon Warwick Castle and is waiting now in the Holly Walk for the news to be broken to you and if you survive, I’m to tie my handkerch[ief] to the balcony.’ Enter Wm. not a` la Romeo via the balcony; the prose of our century to say nothing of that of our consanguinity making it super[er]ogatory. The beforehand having been so cleverly suppressed by the devoted H. ‘it came out so much easier than could have been expected’

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as they say to infants in the dentist chair . . . Poor Harry, over whom the moment had impended for two m[on]ths, looked as white as a ghost before they went and well he may in his anxiety as to which ‘going off’ in my large repertory would ‘come on’ but with the assistance of 200 grains of Bromides I think I behaved with extreme propriety. (4th August 1889, AJD 50–1)

As young men, Wilky and Bob went West, while Henry remained imaginatively engaged in family affairs but had, by 1877, established himself at a judicious distance in England. In contrast, Alice and William stayed close to home both geographically and psychologically, their charged relationship seeming to reinforce their expectation that adult life would be an intensification, not a dilution, of their childhood family. While Alice was still a child and William, eight years older, a young man away from home, there developed between the two a markedly flirtatious epistolary relationship in which William would address Alice as his pretend childbride, at once teasing and flattering, mocking and flirting.4 By 1878, Henry James, Sr had picked out a wife for William. Authorised by his father’s choice, William could marry this new Alice – Alice Howe Gibbens – without fully leaving his childhood family. To the old Alice, this event seemed a double betrayal, her father and brother in league to circumvent her unique feminine position within the family of brothers: after the announcement of their engagement – in ‘that hideous summer of ’78’ (AJD 230) – Alice James’s distress blossomed into ostentatious ill-health.5 (Her familiarity with the spectre of brotherly defection in favour of a wife is evident in her response in the passage quoted, eleven years later, to Henry’s announcement of news and in her reaction to William, still coloured by sexualised anguish.) When her mother died, Alice saw another opportunity to marry within the family: she set up house with her father, appearing happier and healthier than she had done for many years. When he died within a year of his wife, Alice descended into a state of confirmed invalidism that was to last for the rest of her life. The strangeness of the intensity of Alice’s ties to the family of her childhood is flagged by the recurrence in her diary of the idea that reproductive families are undesirable, even abhorrent. ‘I hear that there is one more to be added to the grandchildren!’ she notes on 30th November 1890. ‘To the virginal bosom ’twould seem as if having entailed human woe upon three hapless souls


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might have satisfied even a mother’s heart, but compassion is, apparently, an impulse unknown to parental bowels’ (159). Alice’s bleak humour does nothing to mitigate her insistent characterisation of parenthood as the deliberate infliction of suffering: life is a burden imposed by parents upon their children. Alice’s prose is often strained, and she has a tendency to resort to aphorisms; her writing becomes most cumbrous when she turns to the subject of parents and children. After carefully listing some large families in London, Alice remarks: ‘The queer part is, that, as compared to our race and the French, they haven’t philoprogenitiveness, but how feeble and diluted, of necessity must the parental instinct be, trickling down thro[ugh] 25. Just as the mind refuses to enjoy or to suffer save within limits, so does the heart refuse to love’ (13th June 1889, AJD 32). Alice’s text semaphores discomfort through its oblique and uneven assays at satire. Seeking refuge in the contrived loftiness of ‘philoprogenitiveness’, the diarist speaks anthropologically of ‘the parental instinct’, and casts parents and children in a faintly pathological (‘queer’, ‘feeble’) and less-thanhuman (‘diluted’, ‘trickling’) light, before reassuring herself with the gloomy stability of the finishing aphorism. Alice returns to this subject compulsively, and each time her unease is palpable in the tense, stilted rhythms of the text: ‘I wonder if it is indelicate in a flaccid virgin to be so preoccupied with the multiplication of the species, but it fairly haunts me’ (18th June 1889, AJD 36). The anxiety aroused by this ‘preoccupation’ suggests itself through the strained, overelaborate vocabulary and the choppy, halting flow of her prose; despite herself – even, to spite herself – she seems compelled to pass and repass this threatening territory of familial (re-)creation, and the result is a text formed and deformed by internal linguistic conflict, her language seeming perversely determined to impede itself, as if driven and obstructed by the same impulse. On a larger scale, the diary is marked by an analogous contradictoriness surrounding the subject of Alice’s parents, in particular her father, Henry James, Sr. Alice always insists upon her parents’ kindness, wisdom and admirableness, yet her filial protestations are enlivened by flashes of startling hostility, of which she seems somehow unaware: ‘I remember how horrified I was to the core of my being when some said to me in that month when Father lay dying, refusing to eat, that I must urge him and tell him that he must eat for my sake!! Imagine my wanting to stay

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the will of God and add a second to the old man’s hours!’ (15th June 1890, AJD 125). realism and the family This chapter focuses on the familial origins of ambivalent realism. Realist writing is Henry’s response to growing up in the James family; a different, but closely related response, is hysteria – Alice’s choice. This chapter argues that realist fiction and hysteria are two ways of negotiating with the authority of the family, and explores their kinship as well as their differences. While ‘realism’ is generally understood as a mode of representation, and ‘hysteria’ as a psychological illness or characteristic emotional structure, for the ambivalent subjects of this book realism is as much a mode of being as it is a form of art; and hysteria is a form of subjectivity distinguished by its spectacular representational potency. For realist texts and realist selves, I want to suggest, there is a creative interdependence of subjectivity and representation, which allows us to understand realism and hysteria as not merely contiguous but coterminous processes of being and meaning. In ambivalent realism both subjectivity and representation are structured and sustained by an uneasy relationship with authority; this chapter focuses on the authority of the fatherdominated family as the paradigmatic origin of this mode of psychic production. Henry’s realist representation and Alice’s hysteria, however, should not be conflated, as they enable significantly different degrees of resistance to familial authority. Hysteria, the choice of a daughter who feels powerless, is by far the weaker response, weighted as it is towards self-destruction;6 Henry’s representational mode, on the other hand, is a creative negotiation with the semantic and psychological authority of the familial past. The relationship between Henry and Alice – and between realism and hysteria – is of central importance to James’s writing. His deep psychological affiliation with women is routed through his sister, and this emotional engagement with the experience of femininity as circumscription and resistance shapes and structures his representational practices. Much of the controlled force of James’s writing derives from Henry’s affiliative awareness of his sister’s self-defeating struggles for power. In turn, Alice’s diary is a


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significantly limited sister text to James’s fictional negotiations with familial authority. Recent theoretical work on autobiography in general, and diaries in particular, has drawn attention to the traditional gendering of forms of self-representation that have seemed especially hospitable to women. T. L. Broughton points out that ‘the coincidence of the story of finding a voice and the act of using it makes autobiography a privileged site of historical agency for women’;7 and this coincidence of textual representation with subjective elaboration is at its most extreme in the diary, a textual form conventionally treated by critics as qualitatively distinct from public, published literature. ‘Is the diary feminine?’ asks Rebecca Hogan,8 highlighting the cultural frame within which representation-as-self-representation stands towards ‘literary’ texts in the relation of the feminine to the masculine: the private, amateur form has been viewed as the excessively personal, excessively quotidian sister to the superior public and professional form of Literature. Yet as this book argues from the first, the notion of the private and the public, echoing separate spheres ideology and reinforcing the radical difference and inequality of the sexes, is itself an ideological formation which needs to be understood within the changing socio-economic conditions of the mid-to-late nineteenth century. As Hogan remarks, ‘The establishment of ‘‘privacy’’ as one of the generic features of the diary form coincided with the increasing consignment of women and their work to the private domestic realm by industrial civilization.’9 Rather than reproducing the phantasmatic separation of ‘public’ and ‘private’ forms of representation, we need to recognise that, in the context of textual production as elsewhere, social forms are shaped through ideological pressures which aim to occlude the intimate and mutually constitutive relationship between these realms of meaning and being. However, we also need to acknowledge the extent to which, as a culturally devalued form, the diary in a sense echoes and reproduces Alice’s marginal status as a woman in a family dominated by publicly acclaimed male intellectuals. Like hysteria, the diary offers a form of expressiveness inextricable from its powerlessness: like hysteria, the diary form is especially available to women because women are hindered from accessing politically efficacious or aesthetically prestigious modes of representation.10 The awkwardness and discomfort that characterise Alice’s writing when

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she addresses the topic of reproductive families are symptomatic of the diary’s crippled existence: while Henry left home to produce fiction of exceptional symbolic fluency and coherence, Alice – who was highly intelligent, opinionated and a passionate reader – began writing only in middle age, as a perverse assertion of her desire for death. Alice’s prose is at its most fluent – and most blithely incoherent – when she describes her memories of childhood. Alice will call her father ‘the benignant pater’ and describe her urge to decapitate him within the same sentence, with no acknowledgement to her presumed reader that there is a striking ambivalence in her attitude towards him (26th October 1890, AJD 149–50). However, ‘incoherence’ is an inadequate description of what happens when Alice chooses to tell stories about her childhood family: her halting, overelaborate, sententious diary entries give way to a very different flow of poised, accomplished prose, in which her restless uncertainty towards familial and paternal authority is expressed and negotiated – is managed – through the rhythms and structures of ambivalent realist representation. Instead of clotting and obstructing her text, her deep, unresolved ambivalence structures and sustains such passages as the following, in which Alice recalls the feˆte-day of the Jameses’ French governess, in 1856: all I can remember of the drive was a never-ending ribbon of dust stretching in front and the anguish greater even than usual of Wilky’s and Bob’s heels grinding into my shins [William was not on the expedition]. Marie told us that her father had a scar upon his face caused by a bad scald in his youth and we must be sure and not look at him as he was very sensitive. How I remember the painful conflict between sympathy and the desire to look and the fear that my baseness should be discovered by the good man as he sat at the head of the table in charge of a big frosted-cake sprinkled o’er with those pink and white worms in which lurk the caraway seed. How easy ’twould be to picture one’s youth as a perpetual escape from that abhorred object! – I wonder if it is a blight upon children still? – But to arrive at the first flowering of me Intellect! We were turned into the garden to play, a sandy or rather dusty expanse with nothing in it, as I remember, but two or three scrubby apple-trees, from one of which hung a swing. As time went on Wilky and Bob disappeared, not to my grief, and the Boningues. Harry was sitting in the swing and I came up and stood near by as the sun began to slant over the desolate expanse, as the dready h[ou]rs, with that endlessness which they have for infancy, passed, when Harry suddenly exclaimed: ‘This might certainly be called pleasure under difficulties!’ The stir of my whole


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being in response to the substance and exquisite, original form of this remark almost makes my heart beat now with the sisterly pride which was then awakened[.] (18th June 1890, AJD 128)

This little story is densely emblematic: its interlocking levels of significance offer a concise analysis and example of the links between family and narrative in ambivalent realism. Alone in the French garden, Alice and Henry instinctively gravitate towards each other. Unlike his brothers, Henry is neither an aggressive nor an absent male figure: he is both present and approachable, amicable, trustworthy. Henry is much older than Alice, and she admires him, but he treats her as an equal: the result for Alice is companionship and the awakening of her intellect. Alice remembers her sense of their shared endurance of childhood: they suffered this lonely feˆte-day together (may we imagine that Henry’s place in the carriage is alongside Alice, and that he, too, suffers from the stray kicks of the two boys sitting opposite?). And it is as outsiders, as children on the edge of the event, that they experience the day: they are American guests at a French family’s celebration, and, notwithstanding the thirteen-year-old Henry’s sophistication, they are children in a world controlled by the implacable authority of adults. Alice evokes childhood itself as an experience of marginality, an uncomfortable exclusion from the place where decisions are made and power is exercised. Alice’s story locates some kind of pollution or contamination at the heart of the father-dominated family. She is acutely ambivalent towards Marie’s father; she notes both her covert desire to scrutinise his weakness and also her guilt at wanting to participate in his wounding in this way. There is a striking incongruence between her dutiful, almost sleepwalking description of the father as ‘the good man’ (unless we sense scare quotes hovering?), and the way in which she arrogates to him full responsibility for the cake ‘sprinkled o’er with those pink and white worms in which lurk the caraway seed’ – the caraway seed of which Alice remarks, ‘How easy ’twould be to picture one’s youth as a perpetual escape from that abhorred object!’ She moves from this example to the whole of her childhood, which by extension becomes an experience of disgust and horror at the core of the ‘happy’ family, and of an intensely felt need for retreat and escape. If the festal board images a family scene of pollution lurking within paternal beneficence, the subsequent retreat is limited to a barren garden which

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figures childhood as a foreclosed aftermath of disappointment, neglect and parental betrayal. When Henry says, ‘This might certainly be called pleasure under difficulties!’, he seems to be speaking for the whole of Alice’s remembered childhood. The garden is not wholly barren, however; there are the ‘two or three scrubby apple-trees’ with their covert relation to the ‘flowering’ of Alice’s intellect. This is a fortunate Fall in a ‘dusty’, ‘desolate’ Eden, the decline from innocence to experience recast as a necessary passage from impotence to (limited) agency, from being the object of other people’s narratives to subject of one’s own. And the prime mover in the satirical recovery of agency is Henry. Henry, we might say, is playing Eve to Alice’s younger Adam: a relationship of cross-sex affiliation that both echoes and subverts the conventional plot of sexual difference enacted by Marie and her father – though the character ‘Henry’ reaches us only through Alice’s text and in the service of her own narrative agency. Indeed, it is particularly interesting to note the echoes and imbrications weaving through this 1890 story of Alice’s and those of her brother’s in what we may thus term a properly Jamesian narrative paradigm.11 The adult principals in the drama are limited to two named parts: the wounded, dominant father, and his dutifully protective daughter Marie (Isabel Archer?), with Marie doubling as the future Governess of Bly, that potently liminal figure tense with social and psychological ambivalence. Marie’s feˆte-day stands as her fate day, a painfully epiphanic image of the daughter’s destiny as a return to the family (we will see this again in the glare of Isabel’s white lightning), no decisive escape being possible from the abhorred celebration of paternal power. Naturally, there is no mother visible (no Mrs Archer, Mrs Vetch or Mrs Croy), though the logic of the scene implies her occluded agency as the material producer of both pink-and-white cake and virginal, put-upon, self-sacrificial daughter (Pansy Osmond? Or is Marie, rather, Mary – Mary James; or even the most exalted Mary of them all, whose selfless redemption makes good the human family corrupted by the fruit of Eve’s ‘flowering . . . Intellect’?). Henry and Alice, playing the children of this phantasmatic scenario, oppressed by paternal dominance and then abandoned to familial neglect, find that their (barren and lonely) freedom turns out to be just another form of enclosure, in which Alice’s ‘flowering’ connects her and her brother to the sequestered Pansy and her


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dead half-brother, and to Flora and Miles, whose governess – to borrow Alice’s horticultural phrase, ‘a blight upon children’ – dreamed of immuring them for ever within a splendid private park. However, Alice’s story is more than just a parable of subject matter, a subversion of the Creation story: it also reflects, with some care, upon its own creation, upon the creation of stories. It is a story about Alice and Henry in the garden of childhood discomfort, but it also demonstrates how the garden of childhood discomfort produces stories. Realism, Alice intuits, comes out of the family. This is one of the most sustained passages anywhere in her diary; it is notable for its narrative fluency and for Alice’s control of the symbolic emergence of her story. We see here the birth of narrative, of realist representation, as a child’s self-protective development of critical distance: marooned in the French garden, Henry comments wryly on the difficulties of childhood, and Alice feels her intellect awakened by his verbal assumption of the authority to reflect critically upon their predicament. Alice describes childhood as ‘a perpetual escape from [an] abhorred object’; if we think of this object as the father-dominated family, we can describe the process of realist narrative as a way of distancing oneself from the family. Alice uses narrative to open up a contested distance between literal reality (her father, her childhood) and the multifold realm of symbolic existence (the Boningues, pe`re et fille; the shared world of Jamesian plots; cultural paradigms of creation, corruption and redemption). Ambivalent realist texts – like Henry and Alice in the garden – are like children straining to negotiate with the parental authority of facts: realist representation works with this contested distance between the ‘abhorred object’ of authority and the ‘escape’ into symbolic possibility. For Henry as much as for his sister, children are most endangered by their own parents. James’s fictional children must escape their parents in order to survive: children are not the beneficiaries but the victims of their parents’ marriages. John Carlos Rowe highlights the significance of children in James as ‘cases of arrested development’, yet adds, inconsequently, ‘to the point that we are inclined to forget them’.12 On the contrary, children in James tend to present lurid tableaux of exemplary victimisation brightly lit by Henry’s affiliative sympathy. In an early short story – ‘My Friend Bingham’ – a widowed mother marries the man who accidentally killed her adored only child; she meets him when he

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pays a visit of contrition after the child’s death. Maisie (What Maisie Knew (1897; 1908)) and Nanda (The Awkward Age (1899; 1908))are more resilient but equally exposed victims of their parents’ neglect and selfishness. Other children are semiotic battlegrounds fought over by adults determined to possess them: Miles dies when his governess clasps him so tightly that his heart stops; the Pupil dies in the competing grasps of his parents and his tutor. The wife of the Author of Beltraffio chooses to allow her child to die: determined to prevent her husband from influencing their child in any way, she will not allow a doctor to save him because only in death can she be sure that her child will remain wholly untouched by any influence but her own. Parents in James’s fictional worlds seem to intuit that they will be unable to preserve their children as copies of themselves: just as the realist sign opens up an effortful and ambivalent distance between the signifier and the signified, so Jamesian children, too, are metaphors waiting to happen: they cannot be kept identical with parental meaning – but equally, they cannot definitively escape the authority of the family past. Children and realist signs strain away from their semantic parentage, into metaphor; but metaphor (the signified) is dependent on some continuing relationship with origins, with literal meanings (the signifier). The defining psychological characteristic of this variety of realism is a potent and irresolvable ambivalence about authority: to comply with it – to stay at home, to accept social injunctions to ‘be’ feminine (or, in Henry’s case, masculine), however that is defined, to model oneself on one’s parents; to stay close to semantic origins, to respect the world of literal meanings, of facts; or to resist authority – to cross the Atlantic, to be a woman with ‘masculine’ aspirations or skills (or a man who affiliates himself with women), to distinguish oneself from one’s parents; to pull away from the world of literal meanings and towards the uncharted possibilities of metaphor. Ambivalent realism shares with other forms of nineteenth-century narrative what at first appears to be a developmental conception of plot. From an origin comes subsequent – and consequent – development, and an implicit teleology, or, at least, a clearly finite range of possible outcomes: all future events must have their roots in, and be intelligible in terms of, what has gone before. This conception of plot is fundamental to such major nineteenthcentury narrative projects as anthropology and biology, in which its expression is the theory of evolution, whether cultural or


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organic. But to term this concept ‘developmental’ obscures the restive conservatism of its semantic loyalty to the authority of the past. At the level of the signifier, realism’s ambivalence towards authority plays itself out in the movement of semantic attraction and repulsion between the literal and the symbolic valences of signs; at the level of plot, it is another way of naming the tension between the semantic priority of the past and the lure of the unwritten future. For narrative authority, ambivalent realism must subtly but insistently recall its origins: the reader must be persuaded of a sufficient, and a significant, connection between the beginning and the end, the origin and the destiny, of the narrative; yet, at the same time, the story has to move far enough from its beginnings to create that effect of difference between past and present that is called plot. It is this productive tension between the urge to comply and the desire to resist authority that characterises ambivalent realism. This chapter focuses on Alice James’s self-destructive use of hysteria to contend with her sense of powerlessness, and on Alice’s symbolic importance to her brother’s realist fiction: in particular, to Henry James’s fictional explorations of the role of paternal tyranny in the destiny of daughters, plots and signs. alice and hysteria A central theme in Alice’s diary is her feeling of powerlessness. Her destiny is fixed; she is doomed to a life of suffering. ‘How amusing it is to see the fixed mosaic of one’s little destiny being filled out by the tiny blocks of events,’ she writes; ‘the enchantment of minute consequences with the illusion of choice weathering it all!’ (22nd March 1891, AJD 181). Choice is an illusion, Alice suggests, because the authority of predetermined ‘destiny’ cannot be overcome by the puny will of the present. In her entry for the following day, Alice reflects on the difference between England and the United States, making characteristic use of the contrast to thematise her intimacy with the notion of an implacable Fate. ‘In arranging and fitting yourself here,’ she says of life in London, ‘you have always to remember and count with the far-backness in which the simplest evolution retroacts, and in the manner of doing, the rigidity imposed by the long burden of Time’ (23rd March 1891, AJD 182). Here, as elsewhere in the diary, Alice’s critique of the crippling

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British loyalty to the past echoes her own sense of bondage to the family of her childhood, her apprehension that her past has suspended her present and disallowed her future. ‘It isn’t in the sorrows and the pains,’ she writes, ‘but in the inexorable inadequacy for happiness that the tragedy lies’ (1st February 1892, AJD 229). Alice feels herself condemned to a life of coerced choices, none of which includes happiness, as if happiness itself may be the freedom to choose. ‘How sick one gets of being ‘‘good’’,’ she remarks (is she aware of the double meaning in her phrase?): how much I should respect myself if I could burst out and make everyone wretched for 24 hours; embody selfishness . . . If it were only voluntary and one made a conscious choice, it might enrich the soul a bit, but when it has become simply automatic thro’ a sense of the expedient – of the grotesque futility of the perverse – it’s degrading! (11th December 1889, AJD 64)

In this context hysteria – and the idea of suicide – are attempts to exercise power. Hysteria – a mode of self-suppression – is a way of exercising power against the self, when there is no external opportunity for control; and suicide would defy the ‘destiny’ that has ordained that life will be an experience of suffering. It seems that Alice experimented with the power that might be wielded through suicide at least once, during the summer of William’s wedding. As her father reports it in a letter to Bob, Alice asked her father ‘whether suicide, to which at times she felt very strongly tempted, was a sin’. Henry James, Sr replied that suicide ‘to escape bitter suffering’ was not sinful, and he ‘told her that so far as [he] was concerned she had [his] full permission to end her life whenever she pleased’.13 Alice made no recorded attempt to commit suicide. There would have been little point for Alice in trying to kill herself once her father had, in this extraordinary double gesture of permissiveness and omnipotence, at once authorised and denatured the act of suicide. As her father reports, ‘she then remarked that . . . when she had felt tempted to it, it was with a view to break bonds, or assert her freedom, but that now [he] had given her freedom to do . . . what she pleased’, ‘she could never do it’. By imposing his unrequested permission, Henry James, Sr expropriated the act of the very agency that his daughter seemed desperate to acquire. His response demonstrates a paralysing authoritarianism disguised as disinterested sympathy; it is aggression claiming to


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be passivity in a way that confuses and conflates these supposedly antithetical positions. When we look for the source of Alice’s sense of powerlessness, her sense that she has been destined to a life of coerced ‘choices’, we need look no further than Henry James, Sr. The ‘long burden of time’, the ‘far-backness’ that Alice seeks to defy with the threat of suicide, is paternal: the authority of the past, with which Alice feels unable to negotiate, is her father. In this thwarted attempt to defy her father’s authority, Alice experiences what would later become a paradigmatic scenario in her brother’s fictions. The authority of the past is embodied in the father; the subject produced by this paternal inheritance is a daughter whose hysteria suggests a desperate desire for agency but who is so deeply and constrictingly influenced by her father’s control that her only way of exercising power rather than simply feeling herself controlled from outside is to suppress herself. ‘I am working away as hard as I can to get dead as soon as possible,’ Alice writes to William’s Alice;14 this is a confusion of passivity and aggression that complements her father’s disguised authoritarianism. Alice’s intense ambivalence towards her father expresses itself in the self-contradictoriness of her experience of hysteria: ‘[It is] a fight’, she remarks wearily, ‘simply between my body and my will’ (26th October 1890, AJD 149).15 The father-dominated family expropriates the daughter’s agency, while presenting itself as disinterestedly benevolent; the daughter responds with hysteria, a corresponding confusion of passivity and aggression that offers an exercise of power only against the self. ‘[T]he only difference between me and the insane,’ Alice remarks, ‘[is] that I had not only all the horrors and suffering of insanity but the duties of doctor, nurse, and straitjacket imposed upon me, too’ (ibid). At once produced and divided by her paternal origins, the hysteric can act only by oppressing herself further: as Alice concludes, ‘in emancipating ourselves[,] we forge our chains’ (21st June 1889, AJD 38).16 three sisters: alice, isabel, fleda Isabel Archer is James’s most ostentatiously independent heroine. She ‘wish[es] to choose [her] fate’ (PL 161) and resists every visible attempt to control or oversee her, rejecting offers of marriage, obvious patronage and even Ralph Touchett’s ‘mere

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spectatorship’ (148), whose disavowed appropriativeness she perceives. The attempts that alarm her most are the repeated proposals of marriage by Lord Warburton and Caspar Goodwood. Even Warburton’s ‘admiration’ ‘represented to her an aggression almost to the degree of an affront’. Warburton, she fears, has a ‘design of drawing her into [his] system’ (102); ‘her general disposition to elude any obligation to take a restricted view’ prompts her to refuse him (108). She prefers to keep the future open; as she says, ‘I don’t like to have everything settled beforehand’ (58). Isabel’s horror of constraint, however, is far from unequivocal. ‘[S]he had a fixed determination to regard the world as a place . . . of free expansion’ (51); this contradiction between fixity and freedom is paralleled by her ‘desire to leave the past behind her’, despite her firm belief that she has had ‘a very happy life and . . . [has] been a very fortunate person’ (32–3). Her recollections of her ‘very happy life’ centre upon her ‘handsome, much-loved father’; she considers it ‘a great felicity to have been his daughter’. Others, however, have disagreed; ‘[a] few very harsh critics went so far as to say that he had not even brought up his daughters’ (33). Isabel, as she believes, was never frightened or ashamed by her father’s carefree behaviour: Even when her father had left his daughters for three months at Neufchaˆtel with a French bonne who had eloped with a Russian nobleman staying at the same hotel – even in this irregular situation (an incident of the girl’s eleventh year) she had . . . thought it a romantic episode in a liberal education. Her father had a large way of looking at life, of which his restlessness and even his occasional incoherency of conduct had been only a proof. (34)

Her father, and his effect upon her, are, as Ralph says of the United States and of his ancestors, ‘antecedent to choice’ (90); Isabel is motivated in ways that she cannot at first imagine. As her financial autonomy increases, Isabel’s desire ‘to choose [her] fate’ seems to decrease: ‘‘‘A large fortune means freedom, and I’m afraid of that,’’’ she says; ‘‘‘I’m not sure it’s not a greater happiness to be powerless’’’ (223). Her desire for self-determination, to act as ‘a free agent’ (405), is deeply contradicted by a disavowed desire for constraint, powerlessness and passivity. James locates the origin of this desire in the negligent paternal family of Isabel’s past; and its effects on the adult Isabel are also cast in


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familial – and sexual – terms. Visiting Gilbert Osmond’s house for the first time, Isabel meets the impeccable and utterly obedient Pansy; Osmond’s daughter is nearly sixteen, but he treats her as a small child or as a doll, and there is a distasteful edge of physical domination in his behaviour: ‘he ended by drawing her out of her chair and making her stand between his knees, leaning against him while he passed his arm round her slimness’ (257). Osmond’s infantilisation of his daughter includes a sexualised submissiveness: ‘impregnated with the idea of submission’, Pansy remarks ingenuously: ‘‘‘Am I not meant for you, Papa?’’’ (235, 234) While Osmond talks, ‘[t]he child fixed her eyes on Isabel with a still, disinterested gaze which seemed void of an intention, yet conscious of an attraction’ (257), an attraction reciprocated by Isabel, who, marked by her father’s ‘large way of looking at life’, desires to become another of Osmond’s daughters and experience the authoritarianism that is the overt counterpart of her father’s aggressive negligence. Much later, Isabel and Pansy are to ‘[hold] each other a moment in a silent embrace, like two sisters’ (557); now, however, Isabel identifies herself only unconsciously with Pansy, and waits, ‘with a certain unuttered contentedness, to have her movements directed’ (260) by Osmond. Isabel is seduced precisely by the prospect of the kind of sexualised passivity and relentless control embodied in Osmond’s daughter. When he tells Isabel that he loves her, she experiences it as ‘the sharpness of [a] pang that suggested to her somehow the slipping of a fine bolt – backward, forward, she couldn’t have said which’ (310): for Isabel, the ominous ambivalence of Osmond’s intentions – release or confinement? – is irresistibly attractive, and is compounded by Osmond’s almost simultaneous request that she should ‘‘‘Go and see my little daughter . . . She’s alone at the villa . . . Tell her she must love her poor father very much’’’ (312). Isabel succumbs, of course, to this treacherous combination of the ‘negative’ and the ‘affirmative’ (265); Jamesian oxymorons have a habit of seeking each other out. ‘‘‘If I like my cage,’’’ she tells Ralph, ‘‘‘that needn’t trouble you’’’ (341). Caspar offers Isabel an alternative to Osmond’s ‘cage’. She experiences his ultimate appeal as a prospect of terrifying formlessness which threatens to dissolve her very sense of self: The world, in truth, had never seemed so large; it seemed to open out, all round her, to take the form of a mighty sea, where she floated in

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fathomless waters . . . she believed just then that to let him take her in his arms would be the next best thing to her dying. This belief . . . was a kind of rapture . . . His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed; and it was extraordinarily as if, while she took it, she felt each thing in his hard manhood that had least pleased her, each aggressive fact of his face, his figure, his presence, justified of its intense identity and made one with this act of possession. So had she heard of those wrecked and under water following a train of images before they sink. (591)

Isabel has to choose between defying her paternal origins – accepting Caspar – or negotiating with them – returning to Osmond. Accepting Caspar would be a kind of death: Isabel’s personality has been structured by the need for constraint, and to dissolve the constraints would dissolve her personality. Returning to Osmond is both the more compliant and the more resistant choice; it is no choice at all, and yet it is. This is the dilemma, or the paradox, of hysteria. The hysteric’s illness only reinforces her dependence on her family, yet it is her sole opportunity to exercise power. Isabel will immure herself again within the paternal walls of the Palazzo Roccanero, but now she will be contending with Osmond – for herself and for Pansy – not simply submitting to him. Fleda Vetch (The Spoils of Poynton (1897))is another ‘hysterical’ daughter whose paternal origins have condemned her to a life of coerced self-control; for her, too, self-imprisonment has become necessary, eroticised and the only opportunity to exercise power. Rejected by her father, who ‘mak[es] her feel by inimitable touches that the presence of his family compelled him to alter all his hours’ (SP 104), Fleda is attracted to precisely the same ‘blessed manly weakness’ (140) in Owen Gereth; there is a sense in which she needs him to fail her. Her ‘little gagged and blinded desire’ (87) is generated by the impossibility of its fulfilment, by the prospect of continuing renunciation; ‘courage would . . . come to her if she could only be . . . sure that what she should be called upon to do for Owen would be to suffer’ (82). When Owen betrays his interest in her, Fleda controls it as mercilessly as she suppresses herself: their ‘protected error . . . was like some dangerous, lovely living thing that she had caught and could keep – keep vivid and helpless in the cage of her own passion and look at and talk to all day long’ (79). Her experience of unconstrained sexual expression is almost as devastating as Isabel’s: ‘He clasped her, and she gave herself . . . ; something prisoned and pent throbbed and


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gushed . . . She had not a shred of a secret left; it was as if a whirlwind had come and gone, laying low the great false front that she had built up stone by stone. The strangest thing of all was the momentary sense of desolation’ (134–5). Isabel and Fleda experience what Alice identifies in her diary as the self-suppression that characterises feminine subjectivity. The acutely circumscribed subject can act, not just to exercise power but also merely to protect her sense of self, only by constraining herself further. This, then, is the ambivalent meaning of Jamesian renunciation: it is the hysterical daughter’s recognition that she is constituted by the paternal past, which is ‘antecedent to choice’ (PL 90); it is a dark epiphany of self-comprehension. When the ‘white lightning’ of Caspar’s kiss has faded, ‘darkness returned [to Isabel, and] she was free’ (591). Isabel’s return to the Palazzo Roccanero is a negotiation with the novel’s prehistory, the time of Isabel’s self-sequestration in her father’s closed-up house; and that itself reverberates back to what we know of Isabel’s childhood, when she was left marooned in uncertainty by her father’s culpable absence. Daughters and plots find themselves compelled to revisit the paternal house of the past in order to contest the authority of their origins. hysteria and realism Salutary, challenging, the spectacular crisis is at once a prison and a liberation: a prison because it reproduces the articulations of a culture in which women are in a miserable position, and a liberation in that it constitutes the only sign that women can articulate even if it is shackled, corporal. (Catherine Cle´ment, ‘Enclave Esclave’)17

Hysteria is ultimately self-defeating – a damaging process of selfsuppression whose effect is to confirm the invalid daughter’s dependence on her childhood family; realist representation, on the other hand, is a way of contesting the authority of the family past. However, hysteria is not antithetical to writing: just as Alice’s diary shares significant representational practices with her brother’s published fiction, there is a sense in which hysteria is an impoverished form of realist representation, a sense in which, as Diane Price Herndl argues, ‘illness and writing exist not as opposing options for women but as different points along a continuum of artistic self-discipline’.18 Alice’s importance to James’s fiction is

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not merely as a transposed protagonist in his stories; she is not simply a figure for the effects of paternal domination, on the level of plot. Through her hysterical illness she gives Henry access to an understanding of feminine subjectivity as itself a form of representation. This understanding of the structural links between realism and femininity underlies, and is enhanced by, James’s imaginative affiliation with women. A strikingly unresolved element of the diary is the peculiar unreadability of Alice’s references to her illness: ‘Nurse . . . repeated something which Mrs. B had said, using one of her expressions, when lo! I toppled over in a faint! How little shall I ever know of life!’ (18th June 1889, AJD 36–7). Here the reader of Alice’s diary confronts directly the communicative paradox of hysteria. Such remarks are bafflingly, indeed irritatingly, opaque, yet they cry out for interpretation. Alice seems to be claiming that she lost consciousness as a direct result of hearing a reported remark made by Mrs Bacheler, the mother of a poor family in the neighbourhood to whom Alice made occasional charitable gifts. Alice claims for Mrs B.’s words a dramatic force: but how can words make a body ‘topple over’? And what is Alice doing with words when she represents this spectacular interfusion of words and flesh? What calls out for attention is the ostentatiousness of the display – Alice toppling over in front of her nurse, Alice toppling over again in front of her diary audience – counterpointed by the lack of any explanation. It is a dramatic sign, but its significance is mysterious; its lexicon is unrevealed. Hysteria is an illness of representation; or rather, it is illness as representation, a dramatic yet opaque form of communication produced by the need to express something that resists articulation in words. Hysteria is a transformation of the field of representation from words to flesh. The body becomes a representational medium: it is invested with significance and articulated into a vocabulary of body parts, gestures and corporeal signs. However, hysteria is not merely a literalisation – a physical embodiment – of meaning; as a semiotic system, it shares with verbal language a distinction between signifier and signified. While the opacity of hysteria does not begin to match the radical arbitrariness of the verbal sign, there is also no simple identity between a hysterical symptom and its significance. In other words, the language of hysteria is not self-evident: it requires interpretation. The hysterical body is not simply a piece of


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physical reality – it is a piece of representation; it is a kind of text. And it is a realist text. Just as the ambivalent realist sign appears mundane, ordinary, real, yet glows or nags with the promise or the threat of symbolic value, so the hysterical body is at once physical and metaphorical. Like the realist sign, the hysterical body has an uncanny quality. james and sargent A beauty of beauties, according to Parisian fame, the lady stands upright . . . with her body almost fronting the spectator, and her face in complete profile. She wears an entirely sleeveless dress of black satin, against which her admirable left arm detaches itself; the line of her harmonious profile has a sharpness that Mr Sargent does not always seek, and the crescent of Diana, an ornament in diamonds, rests on her exquisite head. (Henry James, ‘John S. Sargent’ (1887))19

Virginie Gautreau, the subject of John Singer Sargent’s Madame X (1882), was a celebrated beauty in Paris. Sargent was fascinated by her and eventually persuaded her to sit for him. He hoped that the portrait would establish his reputation at the Salon, but in his fascination he underestimated the conservatism of his audience, who responded to the portrait with self-righteous horror. Rather than confirming Sargent’s professional position with the wealthiest potential clients of Anglo-American society, Madame X became an infamous painting which damaged its creator’s social reputation for several years. The painting became a central feature of Sargent’s studio, and he always considered it his masterpiece; as James’s 1887 description makes clear, it is an extraordinary picture. Madame Gautreau is wrapped in a gown of plain black, her silhouette serpentine. She leans lightly on a side table of finely polished wood, whose attenuated legs end in lion’s-paw feet. The floor and background are brown, as is her fine hair, which is piled high up on her head, her neck bare. Her face is seen in profile, her neck, throat, arms and bosom are gleaming with an almost bluish, almost lavender whiteness, and the brightest, lightest place in the painting is the triangle of skin between her breasts. The highlighted body parts of the image constitute a vocabulary, a system of signs. The woman’s body is composed of sharp contrasts between darkness and light, flesh and fabric, above and below, nakedness and cover. Because her head is turned, her ear

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is in the centre of where her face would be, directly above the bright space between her breasts. Her ear is deep pink, almost red, startling against her white skin; it is an open flushed orifice in the place of her face. Here, in a classic manoeuvre from realist semiotics, the metonymical slides into the metaphorical, and the detail, the innocent notation from reality, begins to pulse with symbolic value. James, the portraitist of Isabel Archer, is drawn to Sargent’s work for its deep affinities with his own. Like James, Sargent (1856–1925) grew up in the privileged exile of affluent Americans in Europe; like the Jameses, the Sargents were an exceptionally close-knit family. Emily Sargent – left deformed by a spinal disease – was one year younger than John, and throughout their lives they depended on each other for company. Like James, Sargent never married, and it appears that he never came close to marrying.20 James’s and Sargent’s portraits of women manifest an acute awareness of feminine self-presentation as coerced spectacle. As E. S. Nadal remarked of James, ‘He seemed to look at women rather as women look at them. Women look at women as persons; men look at them as women.’21 James wrote of Sargent: The most brilliant of all Mr Sargent’s productions is the portrait of a young lady, the magnificent picture which he exhibited in 1881; and if it has mainly been his fortune since to commemorate the fair faces of women, there is no ground for surprise at this sort of success on the part of one who had given so signal a proof of his having the secret of the particular aspect that the contemporary lady (of any period) likes to wear in the eyes of posterity.22

How can it be that both portraitists seem to possess the ‘secret’ of what women want (to look like)? David Lubin links the portrait art of James and Sargent with their ‘deep-seated, deeply hidden sexual ambivalence’. He argues that both men used the portrayal of women to explore their unacknowledgeable self-division in relation to femininity: they are both attracted to feminine (that is, unmanly) subject positions and, at the same time, repelled by the feminine as an obligatory focus of sexual desire. In Lubin’s view, the portraiture of women is ‘a method of externalizing and temporarily reconciling that highly unstable . . . sexual difference that was felt within but not understood’.23 My analysis is rather different; while agreeing that James and Sargent convey a deep involvement with feminine


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subjects in their work, I want to suggest that this is best understood as expressing a kind of sympathetic investment in feminine subjectivity. Their portrait women are not, as Lubin puts it, ‘externalisations’ of (homosexual) masculine ambivalence, but, rather, figures of affinity and affiliation: sisters, not substitutes. It is a question of intense participation, rather than the essentially aggressive stance of identificatory incorporation. There is a significant affinity between Sargent’s portrait women and a class of Jamesian women who might be termed the ‘portrait heroines’, an affinity illuminated, and, I suggest, informed, by the similarities between these male artists’ relationships with their sisters. Both James and Sargent manifest a deep emotional affiliation with their sisters, sisters constrained by physical illness and by the emotional authority of their familial pasts. Alice’s hysterical symptoms and Emily’s spinal deformity have the effect of leaving open the familial, childhood access between these adult women and their brothers (also unmarried). There are no husbands to intervene, no permanent new families to supersede the old – Katharine had to divide her time between Alice and her invalid sister Louisa Loring. Through intense fraternal relationships with their invalid sisters, the novelist and the painter approach the representation of femininity from subject positions of significantly problematised masculinity: to neither artist is the feminine the Other. In their aesthetic engagement with women, both men come to femininity as allies; as insiders. Henry came on the 10th, and spent the day, Henry the patient, I should call him . . . I have given him endless care and anxiety but notwithstanding this and the fantastic nature of my troubles I have never seen an impatient look upon his face or heard an unsympathetic or misunderstanding sound cross his lips. He comes at my slightest sign and hangs on to whatever organ may be in eruption and gives me calm and solace by assuring me that my nerves are his nerves and my stomach his stomach – this last a pitch of brotherly devotion never before approached by the race. (25th March 1890, AJD 104)24

In their emphasis on the bodily significance of their portrait heroines, neither artist is producing a simple objectification of femininity. Both James and Sargent act as artists whose imaginative affiliation with the experience of femininity is facilitated by the physical incapacities of their sisters. Sargent, the painter of women who produce themselves as spectacular physical presences, knew

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through his intimacy with his sister a woman who had been intensely embarrassed by her less-than-perfect appearance since her childhood (her spine was injured when she was four). Emily was interested in painting, but although she was a gifted watercolourist, she rarely showed her pictures outside her circle of family and very close friends.25 James, the writer, finds in his sister a woman who characterises her life from adolescence as a selfdefeating attempt to ‘possess [her] soul in silence’ (21st February 1890, AJD 95); while Henry had words, Alice – until she began her diary – had only the default expressiveness of hysteria, which perpetuates the hysterical woman’s dependence on her family. James’s portrait heroines are his fictional explorations of the links between the semantic and psychological structures of feminine subjectivity and of realist representation. A coerced yet defiant interfusion of body and psyche characterises the hysteric and the portrait heroine. These are feminine bodies understood as fields of representation: that is, these bodies are feminised by their production as signs. What feminises a body, and what constitutes a realist sign, is an embodied ambivalence towards authority.26 Signification starts in the contested, embodied distance between literal and metaphorical meanings, between compliance and resistance. who is the portrait heroine? I will but change My jewel for your jewel . . . Nay, let me see you wear it. vittoria: Here, sir? brachiano: Nay lower, you shall wear my jewel lower. flamineo [aside]: That’s better; she must wear his jewel lower. (John Webster, The White Devil, (1612))27 brachiano:

‘If I [Charlotte] were to accept from you [Amerigo] one of these charming little ornaments as you suggest, what should I do with it?’ . . . ‘Wear it, per Bacco!’ ‘Where then, please? Under my clothes?’ (Henry James, The Golden Bowl (1904), GB 102) ‘Oh you,’ the Countess answered [Madame Merle] as they moved away, ‘you yourself are Machiavelli – you yourself are Vittoria Colonna!’ (Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881; 1908), PL 259)


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The portrait heroine’s physical being is of central importance; she is beautiful, and her beauty fates her to be watched continuously. Amerigo perceives Charlotte as ‘something intently made for exhibition, for a prize’ (GB 59); like Eugenia, the portrait heroine is ‘a woman who [takes] being looked at remarkably well’ (E 77). Kate can never escape the greedy gaze of men and women alike: ‘she was somehow always in the line of the eye – she counted singularly for its pleasure’ (WD 56). The portrait heroine manifests a coerced submission to exposure; she is required to become an expert performer. ‘What was expected of [Kate] by others . . . could . . . present itself as beyond a joke’ (WD 82). Maggie and her father acquire Charlotte ‘to do the ‘‘worldly’’ for them’: ‘the act of representation . . . fell in with Charlotte’s tested facility’ (GB 241, 240). ‘[M]ade for great social uses’ (WD 191), the heroine is the focus of desires and demands. Like Kate, ‘her essence was to be peculiarly what the occasion . . . demanded’ (190). For Milly, Kate is ‘as a figure in a picture stepping by magic out of its frame’: ‘fantasies multiplied and clustered, making fairly, for [Milly], the buoyant medium in which [Kate] talked and moved’ (164, 230–1). The portrait heroine is a fetish, a guarantor of meaning; a focus of faith and desire. And, just as the hysteric exerts what control she can by collaborating in her own suppression, so the portrait heroine perceives that her only hope of power lies in cooperating with her own objectification. Instead of rejecting outright her commodification, the portrait heroine becomes an expert in selfpresentation: it is her only capital. ‘‘‘I will present myself – I will appear before them!’’’ Eugenia announces (E 17). Charlotte performs for Adam, at the piano, every night. ‘She could play anything, she could play everything . . . as if she might, slim, sinuous and strong, and with practised passion, have been playing lawn-tennis or endlessly and rhythmically waltzing’ (GB 164). Kate ‘almost avowedly perform[s] for the pleasure of her hostess’, Milly (WD 231). As a visual performer, the portrait heroine finds in her mirror her source of courage and comfort. Kate contemplates financial ruin and family disgrace in her father’s dingy lodgings: Wasn’t it in fact the partial escape from this ‘worst’ in which she was steeped to be able to make herself out again as agreeable to see? . . . She rose now, . . . in sight of the futility and the weariness of many things, and

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moved back to the poor little glass with which she had communed before. She retouched here again the poise of her hat. (56, 63)

When we first meet Eugenia, she is pacing the hotel room in which she is planning her charm offensive on her rich American cousins; we watch her glance repeatedly into a mirror on the wall. ‘Here she paused a moment, gave a pinch to her waist with her two hands, or raised these members – they were very plump and pretty – to the multifold braids of her hair, with a movement halfcaressing, half-corrective. An attentive observer might have fancied that during these periods of desultory self-inspection her face forgot its melancholy’ (E 5). Much later, when she realises that her manipulations have failed – ‘Was she to have gained nothing – was she to have gained nothing?’ (151) she asks herself, echoing Madame Merle’s ‘vague wail’ of ‘‘‘Have I been so vile all for nothing?’’’ (PL 525) – her instinctive move is towards her reflection: ‘In her little drawing-room she went almost straight to the mirror’ (E 170). This checking of the appearance is characteristic of the portrait heroine; a self-reflexive gesture from her visual habitus, it signals her otherwise concealed defensiveness. Attacked by the Countess Gemini, Madame Merle’s ‘hands busied themselves with adjusting the knots of ribbon on her dress’; later, we watch Isabel gather her composure with a mirror check. ‘Madame Merle observed [Isabel] . . . while she stood a moment before the mantelglass and pushed into its place a wandering tress of hair’ (PL 272, 411). James’s authorial position in relation to his portrait heroines is not straightforward. His readers are encouraged to participate in the visual evaluation of his portrait heroines by ostensibly literalist descriptions reminiscent of a considerably more modest stratum of literary enterprise: ‘Her grey eyes were small but full of light . . . ; she had a liberal, full-rimmed mouth . . . thick, fair hair . . . and large white hands, of a perfect shape, a shape so perfect that their possessor, preferring to leave them unadorned, wore no jewelled rings’(175). This kind of (seemingly) insignificant precision is characteristic of a very different contemporary variety of realism, what Ann Douglas called ‘feminized’ fiction.28 At first sight, James’s descriptions of Kate, Charlotte and Madame Merle – the most pronounced examples – seem to have a surprising vulgarity, offering an invitation to the feminine pleasures


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of (self-)scrutiny: the queasy, narcissistic self-objectification that is the unattractive feminine counterpart of the unembarrassed masculine evaluation of the female commodity. But it becomes apparent that James’s detailed descriptions of his heroines’ physical features are not merely ingenuous metonymical catalogues; on the contrary, almost every detail gestures towards metaphorical content.29 This is the potent semiotic lure of ambivalent realism, and it is the failure to perceive the presence of this technique which leads to the modernist denigration of realist portraiture as an art form. There is no gratuitous ornamentation here: rather, every detail is remorselessly – if covertly – representational; each physical feature, each nose, hat-feather and beautiful hand, points towards some meaning beyond the merely material. In realist portraiture there is a semantic conflation of the subject and the portrait: ‘Madame X’ is the name of the picture and of the woman; and the female portrait subject is herself a conflation of body and of spirit (or of psychology – the point is the same in either vocabulary). ‘Madame X’ is, all at once, the painting, the subject of the painting, and the body of the subject of the painting. The realist portrait is in this sense the ultimate expression of the realist semiotic gesture; as James wrote of Sargent, ‘There is no greater work of art than a great portrait.’30 The bodies, then, of James’s portraits are densely symbolic, and the most sustained example is that of Madame Merle’s hands. Almost every time Madame Merle appears as a player in the plot, her hands are presented to the mind’s eye of the reader; they come to represent her, but they also constitute her, they are her, within the fabric of representation. Early in Isabel’s acquaintance with Madame Merle, the narrative gives voice to Isabel’s awed admiration of her new friend’s many accomplishments: Of painting she was devotedly fond, and made no more of brushing in a sketch than of pulling off her gloves . . . When Madame Merle was neither writing, nor painting, nor touching the piano, she was usually employed upon wonderful tasks of rich embroidery . . . ; an art in which her bold, free invention was as noted as the agility of her needle. (191)

Madame Merle’s hands are never idle and rarely invisible. Considering Edward Rosier’s request that she should intercede with Osmond, she ‘strok[es] her chin with her large white hand’

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(358–9); negotiating with Osmond, she seats herself ‘with her arms folded and her white hands arranged as a support to one of them and an ornament, as it were, to the other’ (521). Examining her daughter, she ‘h[e]ld [Pansy’s] hand, drew it across her own fine palm and looked at it’ (235). Madame Merle, of course, is in no doubt as to the central feature of a painting: ‘she recalled the right-hand corner of the large Perugino and the position of the hands of the Saint Elizabeth in the picture next to it’ (246). When the body becomes a field of representation, it is subject – as Alice knows – to a kind of semantic compression that is paralysing. In the analysis of He´le`ne Cixous and Catherine Cle´ment, the hysteric is afflicted by ‘an exceptional capacity for language and an exclusion correlative to it’:31 while the ambivalent realist writer manipulates signs, the hysteric and the portrait heroine become signs. And as we observe these women contending with the world, and with themselves, through this dangerously self-divided ontology, we may sense James standing beside his protagonist, watching the movement of her hands, watching her reflection in the mirror as she half-caresses, half-corrects her appearance. He has an insider’s eye; he knows that these women are as intensely aware of the power of their appearances as they are crippled by the self-divided ontology of the sign. Alice’s brother understands what it is like to try to wield this constrained power. James is most psychologically intimate with his heroines when they are engaged in the effort to dissimulate their awareness of an audience, an important characteristic of the portrait heroine. Muriel Draper describes a conversation with Henry about the portrait of Madame Gautreau: On one wall of [Sargent’s] big room hung the ‘Portrait of Mlle. X’ [sic] . . . Dear Henry James, sitting beside me one night at Sargent’s house, began telling me the story of the infuriated mother of ‘Mlle. X’ who had . . . expressed her outrage that so great an artist should have made a ‘portrait lubrique de ma fille’. Dear James was explaining that ‘the dress, you see, cut a little perhaps generously, and held by such slender promises of modesty across her shoulders’ . . . was upsetting to the good lady her mother, when he observed that my own frock was held in place by nothing more than two strands of blue pearls, one on each shoulder. In extreme agitation lest I should pursue the analogy he launched into the most elaborate discussion and comparison of clothes then and ‘now’, plunging further and further in his desire to free my mind of any disapproving conclusion. His antics were endearingly


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elaborate, but his entanglement became so complex that I finally extricated him by saying, ‘I think it must have been the face she objected to.’32

What Muriel Draper both comments on and demonstrates here is that the provocative power of the portrait heroine lies not only (indeed, not very much at all) in her dazzling dećollete´, but rather in the subject’s gesture of controlled self-exposure through which she submits herself to the general gaze in order to focus and control her audience’s attention. Draper’s narrative restages the spectacle of Madame X with Muriel as the vulnerable and controlling heroine of the textual portrait, doubling the semiotic technique of the original. Madame X poses herself with her body turned towards the spectator but her head turned away; that she does not seek to hold the spectator’s gaze with her own makes her at once more exposed and less vulnerable, and disallows a simple reading of the portrait heroine as either the victim or the perpetrator of this visual objectification. In a parallel gesture Muriel splits her position in the text between that of controlling third-person narrator (‘On one wall of [Sargent’s] big room hung the ‘‘Portrait of Mlle. X’’’) and suddenly embodied object of the reader’s gaze (‘my own frock was held in place by nothing more than two strands of blue pearls, one on each shoulder’) in a representational strategy which plays off impersonal authority against startling self-display. As we view Madame X and Muriel Draper directing our gaze towards their self-exposure, we cannot but be impressed by the daring of their faux-obliviousness: it is a crucial part of the pose, which influences us even as we knowingly admire their mastery of self-presentation. James’s portrait heroines share a similar skill in managing their vulnerability to the gaze of others. Amerigo notes that Charlotte looks particularly good from behind: ‘he knew her special beauty of movement and line when she turned her back’ (GB 59). Gertrude demonstrates her ripeness for the delights of European corruption when she disagrees with her prim sister’s remark that ‘how one looks behind’ does not matter. ‘‘‘I should say it mattered more,’’’ Gertrude replies; ‘‘‘Then you don’t know who may be observing you. You are not on your guard. You can’t try to look pretty.’’’33 (It is also Gertrude who announces, ‘‘‘I think it would be amusing to sit and be painted.’’’ (E 20, 64)) The best example,

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again, is Madame Merle. We meet her for the first time with Isabel; someone is playing the piano, and Isabel goes to find out who the stranger may be. [I]t was a lady whom Isabel immediately saw to be a stranger to herself, though her back was presented to the door. This back – an ample and well-dressed one – Isabel viewed for some moments with surprise . . . [S]he became aware that the lady at the piano played remarkably well . . . [T]he stranger turned quickly round, as if but just aware of her presence. (PL 171–2; italics mine)

‘As if’: while James’s moral sympathies may be with the innocent Isabel, his feline appreciation of Madame Merle’s performance is that of a fellow-performer, who admires a piece of representational sleight-of-hand with an insider’s knowledge of how it is done. Part of the charm is precisely that Madame Merle appears to have been taken unawares, observed in a moment of privacy; the seduction is complete when she assents graciously to Isabel’s request that she play something more. ‘‘‘If it will give you pleasure – delighted.’’ And this obliging person took her place again and struck a few chords, while Isabel sat down nearer the instrument’ (172). The portrait heroine must give the impression that her function is to gratify her audience; her power lies in concealing her control of her audience, which she does in part by laying claim to the kind of aesthetic literalism of which portraiture is often accused. As long as her audience sees only her hands, she can pursue her manipulations undetected. As the reader of The Portrait of a Lady, and of portrait semiotics, becomes disabused of this hermeneutic naı¨vete´, each new mention of Madame Merle’s hands is more ominous than the last, and we can judge the regrettable progress of Isabel’s movement towards the moral, psychological and visual habitus of the portrait heroine by her piano performance for Pansy. While Isabel is contemplating pleasing her husband by inducing a marriage proposal from Lord Warburton for Pansy, she goes to visit her stepdaughter, who asks her to play for her – and we watch Isabel rehearse the covert seduction to which she herself fell victim at Madame Merle’s hands: ‘Isabel gratified this respectful wish, drew off her gloves and sat down to the piano, while Pansy, standing beside her, watched her white hands move quickly over the keys’ (317). As so often in James’s fiction, the denouement of the plot is also a denouement of the sign: as Madame Merle’s manipulations become clear to Isabel, so the signifying valence of


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her hands is confirmed. ‘‘‘Who are you – what are you?’’’ Isabel murmurs in dawning horror ‘‘‘What have you to do with me?’’’: ‘Madame Merle slowly got up, stroking her muff, but not removing her eyes from Isabel’s face. ‘‘Everything!’’ she answered (517; italics mine). the defeat of the portrait heroine I have been one acquainted with the night. I have walked out in rain – and back in rain. I have outwalked the furthest city light. (Robert Frost, ‘Acquanted with the Night’)34 Milly remembered [Kate] having said that she was at her best late at night (Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (1902; 1909), WD 231)

An intense visual glamour surrounds the portrait heroine. She is, like Charlotte, ‘extraordinarily alone’: she may be burdened with drab siblings but her psychological ‘singleness’ and ‘solitude’ are undiminished. The portrait heroine is isolated on the canvas, central, focal, marked out by the contrast between her own brightness and the darkness of her surroundings. Madame X wears black and stands against brown: the gleaming pallor of her flesh glows out of the darkness. Madame Merle wears a dark blue evening dress in the subdued surroundings of Gardencourt during Mr Touchett’s final illness; her dark dress ‘expose[s] a white bosom that was ineffectually covered by a curious silver necklace’ (PL 177). (This necklace is a slightly less serious version of Virginie Gautreau’s silver chain shoulder straps.) Isabel wears black much of the time; ‘dressed in black velvet’ she ‘look[s] high and splendid’, ‘the picture of a gracious lady’ (367). The portrait heroine is often in mourning, and even in her happiest moments she seems surrounded by darkness. In his 1887 essay James describes as ‘the most brilliant of all Mr Sargent’s productions’ a ‘representation of a young girl in black’. Her face is open and smiling, and James notes that she is ‘engaged in the casual gesture of holding up a flower’: something escapes his conscious analysis, however, for, as he says, he cannot account for the ‘ineffaceable’ impression left by the painting.35 The force of the painting – which James feels but cannot analyse – arises from the enigmatic contrast between subject and background. She smiles and holds out a flower; but, alone,

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clothed in black, against a drab, featureless background that is oddly indefinite – part studio set, part visual no-man’s-land, she seems to be appealing to the spectator to set her free. In the essay James finds for this ‘portrait of a young lady’ an older counterpart: ‘the portrait of a lady of a certain age’. A ‘lady in black, with black hair, a black hat, and a vast feather’, this image ‘remains in [James’s] mind as a masterly rendering of the look of experience’.36 This woman no longer hopes to be rescued; she has experienced the darkness around her. The portrait heroine matures early, and with maturity comes that ‘flexibility’ which is her inveterate mark – ‘pliable’, ‘supple’, ‘sinuous’, she does not break; she learns how to survive. It is sometimes difficult to tell whether the portrait heroine gleams so brightly in an attempt to ward off the darkness around her, or whether the darkness is seeping out of her, an experienced sadness that her beauty cannot efface. The portrait heroine is an icon of homelessness. She is a ‘poor wandering woman’ (GB 508), a guest, a visitor. ‘[I]nevitably battered’, she is also ‘honourably free’ (WD 91), wearing ‘the look of her adventurous situation’: a suggestion, in all her person, in motion and gesture, in free, vivid, yet altogether happy indications of dress from the becoming compactness of her hat to the shade of tan in her shoes, of winds and waves and customhouses, of far countries and long journeys, the knowledge of how and where and the habit, founded on experience, of not being afraid. (GB 57–8)

Like Isabel, the portrait heroines ‘desire to leave the past behind [them]’ (PL 32). Fugitives from their pasts, they figure feminine resistance as a coerced yet defiant bid for mobility: as Madame Merle says, ‘a woman, it seems to me, has no natural place anywhere’ (196). (We are told that her own ‘world-wide smile’ ‘overreached frontiers’ (174).) The novel covets them, because they make things happen. They have a special availability for symbol: they are anxious to leave their origins and make a new life for themselves. Homeless and seeking, they circulate through the world of the text; they are travellers, wanderers, signs trying to free themselves from the authority of the past, of familial and semantic origins. They have a burden of (social) representation imposed upon them, but they crave the distance from their origins that this capacity for symbolism implies.


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Theirs is a dangerous and lonely identity. Like Madame Merle, the portrait heroine is ‘welcome wherever she goes’ (176), but she is also mistrusted: ‘A handsome, clever, odd girl staying with one is always a complication’ (GB 56). They promise disruption and defiance. Milly, the dovelike, finds herself drawn to ‘the not wholly calculable’ side of Kate: ‘the handsome girl was, with twenty other splendid qualities, the least bit brutal too, and didn’t she suggest . . . that there might be a wild beauty in that, and even a strange grace?’ (WD 176, 171). These women have a demonic quality; they tend to be associated with the moon, with Diana, the (Isabel) Archer-goddess. Charlotte has ‘the sylvan head of a huntress’ (GB 59); Eugenia, to Felix’s ‘spiritual vision’, ‘was always like the lunar disk when only a part of it is lighted. The shadow on this bright surface seemed to him to expand and to contract; but whatever its proportions, he always appreciated the moonlight’ (E 132). As James notes, Madame X wears a diamond ‘crescent of Diana’ on her head. Ultimately they have to be controlled. Imaged as wild animals – ‘[t]he splendid shining supple creature’ (GB 460), ‘a creature who paced like a panther’ (WD 235); we recall also the lion’s-paw feet of the table on which Madame X leans – they have to be returned to their cages; they are captives of the text, of their culture, who may briefly escape but are always recaptured. They have to be expelled, banished or locked up: in a ritual purification of the worlds of these texts, Madame Merle exiles herself to her own origins, where she will later be joined by Charlotte in the national purgatory of American City. As Eugenia muses, America is a place where ‘the conditions of action . . . were not favourable to really superior women’ (E 172). The defeat of the portrait heroine by her female rival enacts and personifies the self-defeat of hysteria. Alice describes her experience of hysterical self-suppression as that of being the ‘doctor, nurse, and strait-jacket’ of her own ‘horrors and suffering’. James embodies exactly this form of self-divided feminine agency in the pairs of women who struggle to dominate each other: Charlotte and Maggie, Madame Merle and Isabel, Kate and Milly. In each case we have seen the ‘bad’ heroine of each pair achieve some brief and unstable ascendancy over her more compliant alter ego, who, as Alice says of her own ‘moral power’ in relation to her rebellious body, ‘pauses, as it were for a moment, and refuses to maintain muscular sanity, worn out with the strain of its constabulary

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functions’ (26th October 1890, AJD 149). And in each case ‘victory’ is a reversal of power from the more resistant to the more compliant aspects of the feminine self; ‘[t]he relation to-day had turned itself round . . . The point . . . was that they had changed places’ (GB 499). In these intense, agonising confrontations, the volatility of both women’s relationships with authority produces a strange oscillation of roles: the victor experiences an identificatory suffering with her defeated enemy. As Isabel imposes her authority on Madame Merle, she ‘had been thinking all day of [Madame Merle’s] falsity, her audacity, her ability, her probable suffering’ (PL 550; italics mine): So [Charlotte’s] high voice quavered . . . Maggie meanwhile, at the window, knew the strangest thing to be happening: she had turned suddenly to crying, or was at least on the point of it . . . The high voice went on; its quaver was doubtless for conscious ears only, but there were verily thirty seconds during which it sounded, for our young woman, like the shriek of a soul in pain. (GB 496–7)

The positions of victor and vanquished are not only volatile but double-sided. At the moment of reversal, the victor and the vanquished come together in an experience of self-divided suffering identity: for Alice, this moment is attained in May 1891 with the diagnosis of breast cancer. ‘To him who waits, all things come!’ she rejoices, with her tricky blend of self-mockery and self-congratulation. ‘My aspirations may have been eccentric, but I cannot complain now, that they have not been brilliantly fulfilled’ (31st May 1891, AJD 206). This fulfilment is the logical culmination of the hysterical production of subjectivity and representation as perversely self-destructive forms of agency: at the same moment that Alice’s body is at last able to communicate the extremity of her psychological pain, so, too, is the possibility of life itself foreclosed. In attaining to the capacity to represent her emotional experience, Alice’s body will also kill her. In the ‘fight’ between the ‘body’ and the ‘will’, who is now the victor? And who the vanquished? After the doctor’s death sentence, Alice’s diary moves towards an almost euphoric celebration of its author’s imminent extinction; this paradoxical embrace of the death drive produces an eerie instability that Henry James, too, explores through his pairs of struggling women. The ‘victor’ may experience a strange desire for powerlessness at the hands of her ‘victim’, and even at the agonising moment of defeat, the ‘victim’ may assume a position of


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power which is at once illusory and imaginatively potent: ‘Our young woman [Maggie] . . . not only now saw her companion fairly agree to take her then for the poor little person she was finding it so easy to appear, but fell, in a secret, responsive ecstasy, to wondering if there were not some supreme abjection with which she might be inspired’ (GB 511). These confrontations are the raw, volatile sites of a fierce struggle between femininity and authority; or rather, they image femininity as an ambivalent, selfdivisive struggle with authority. The victor is the woman who is more closely aligned – more compliant – with social authority; but even as she triumphs she recognises in her victim that resistance, that defiance of authority that is a part of her own seeming compliance. Rather than term these women victors and vanquished, they are better described as participants in a feminine ritual of selfassertive and self-defeating contention with authority; for Alice and for Henry James, there can be no feminine subjectivity away from power, but only in relation to it, within the vicissitudes of ambivalent loyalties. ‘How thankful I am,’ Alice remarks, ‘that I never struggled to be of those ‘‘who are not as other ones are,’’ but that I discovered at the earliest moment that my talents lay in being more so’ (11th January 1890, AJD 75). These intrafeminine struggles figure the movement of the realist sign between compliance and resistance; the women contending with each other for dominance are images of the literal and symbolic valences of signs. The sign can never free itself of its semantic origins – Isabel will never be able to leave the past behind her, and Charlotte’s defiance of the social authority of Adam’s money can only be temporary. When the ‘connexion’ between Adam and the defeated Charlotte is ‘figured’ by Adam ‘holding in one of his pocketed hands the end of a long silken halter looped round her beautiful neck’ (GB 493), we have an image of the realist signified’s inescapable but always contestable subjection to the authority of its origins in the masculine and paternal past. The tension that binds and fractures the sign, that holds literal and metaphorical tied together, can be resisted but never dissolved. Semiotically insistent, psychologically constrained, the portrait heroine stands before us, in a coerced, conscious display of the profound ambivalence that structures the feminine body of the realist text.

chapter 2

The actress and the orphan: Henry James’s art of loss, 1882–1895

We know of few similar phenomena . . . few such examples of rupture with a consecrated past. (Henry James, ‘Mr. Tennyson’s Drama’ (1875))1

deaths in the family Mary Walsh James died suddenly in January 1882; Henry James, Sr died after only a few weeks’ illness in December of the same year. Family reactions to these deaths reveal the Jameses in some characteristic attitudes. After Mary James’s death, her devoted husband and daughter adapted themselves to her absence with such apparent equilibrium that Henry Jr was able to report, just five days later, that ‘My father and sister are wonderfully tranquil, and in their intense conviction that even the most exquisite sense of loss has a divine order in it are even almost happy!’2 Indeed, Alice appeared rejuvenated. Henry – always her most sympathetic ally – noted in February that ‘after many years of ill health [Alice] has been better for the last few months than for a long time; she is able to look after my father and take care of his house’.3 Aunt Kate was rather less delicate about causality – not for her the decent predating of Henry’s ‘last few months’: ‘her Mother’s death seems to have brought new life to Alice’, she wrote to Bob’s wife, Mary Holton James.4 While Alice was revivified by Mary’s death, Henry James, Sr seems rapidly to have lost his desire to live. William’s wife, Alice Howe James, told Henry that his father simply decided to stop eating, and Henry accepted, apparently without reservation, that his father in effect chose to die. Alice James’s response to this final act of paternal egoism was swift and unambiguous: she collapsed, to be borne away by Katharine Loring. In his letters to William, Henry Jr 60

The actress and the orphan

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does not comment directly on this effect of his father’s ultimate withdrawal – tactfully, perhaps, given that William was in Europe, having absented himself from his wife (for the second time) following the birth of a baby.5 William did not cut short his sabbatical. He remained in Europe, from where he wrote adamantly to Henry objecting to Henry’s suggestion that the four children bequeathed money in their father’s will should redivide their bequests to include Wilky (who, having received money before his father’s death, had been excluded from the final settlement). Meanwhile, the new Henry James – he had dropped the ‘Jr’ by February 1883 – worried about Alice, took melancholy walks around the graveyard (where he read William’s farewell letter to their father’s grave), acted as executor of the will, and looked forward to returning to England. In letters to Europe at this time, he reiterates his plans to settle in England; his return is delayed by postfuneral decency alone. He seems to feel free of the United States; it is now his past. This parallels his surprisingly sanguine response to the deaths of his parents. Writing to Fanny Kemble (5th April 1882), he says of his mother, ‘As the weeks have gone by they have made us at once miss her more and yet desire less that she should be back here again’; the following year, describing the loss of his father to Helena Gilder (26th January 1883), he does affirm that ‘He pervaded and animated our collective and individual existence to an extraordinary degree’, but adds that ‘[T]here is nothing sad for me however in the death of a man who had so completely done with life and who longed so to die.’6 Henry’s opaque reaction to the deaths of his parents contrasts with the florid legibility of the responses of his closest relatives. On her mother’s death Alice at last found an active domestic role; on the subsequent death of her father (clearly she had failed as Mary’s replacement), Alice lapsed into full-blown invalidism. For his part, and with characteristic passive omnipotence, Henry James, Sr decided to withdraw from his remaining family and follow his wife to the Swedenborgian beyond. William, blithely evading his own family on the far side of the Atlantic, assumed the patriarchal mantle by insisting that the feckless Wilky deserved no money. Wilky and Bob, as usual, barely figured as principals in the drama; psychologically exiled from the family in the netherland of the newly industrialised West, they had both acquired unlovely jobs and unsuitable wives in Milwaukee.

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Henry’s reactions, in contrast, seem both muted and undecidable. How much is his grief balanced by his belief that his father chose to die? How far can he reconcile himself to his parents’ absence, now that he is free to leave the United States permanently? Is this simply a loss, or is it also a kind of psychological liberation? This chapter explores the effects of these parental deaths on Henry and on his major writings of the subsequent decade: specifically, the three novels of this period (The Bostonians (1886), The Princess Casamassima (1886; 1908) and The Tragic Muse (1890; 1908)), and James’s theatrical ventures (from Daisy Miller, which he adapted for the stage while in Cambridge after his mother’s death, to the disastrous Guy Domville experience of 1895).7 This is a strange period in James’s writing: the project of this chapter is to explore the ways in which this sequence of texts offers itself to the critic as an urgent, if somewhat incoherent, display of an increasingly self-blinded preoccupation with the idea of the theatre – an idea which gains its obsessive force from its phantasmatic opposition to the idea of the novel. The three novels that James wrote between 1882 and 1890 manifest a representational instability that seems sometimes anxious, and sometimes euphoric. After his parents’ deaths, Henry’s experience of psychological destabilisation is played out through his shifting alliances with the opposed (yet never fully or clearly separable) figures of the actress and the orphan, the central figures in these texts, and in this chapter. The figure of the ‘actress’, in these texts, provides a way of thinking about both realist representation and realist subjectivity as structures of meaning that negotiate with semantic and psychological authority. In contrast, the Jamesian ‘orphan’ of this period adumbrates a form of representation and of identity free from the need to negotiate with authority: the orphan is liberated from authority – and, as Henry would discover, this can be a dangerously unprotected state. In the fiction before and after this strange decade, James’s fictional women share with ambivalent realist signs a self-divided ontology. As discussed in Chapter 1, the woman and the sign within ambivalent realism can be understood as hysterical, in the sense that hysteria is a structure of identity and of representation in which eloquence and agency are bought at the cost of selfsuppression and self-objectification. The result, for subject and


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sign, is a potent and anguished relationship between inner being and outer meaning, as the resisting signified struggles to assert its difference from the authority of the signifier. In this chapter I discuss a dominant late nineteenth-century conception of the actress as a woman who embodies the interdependence of public meaning and private being that James equates with feminine subjectivity and with realist representation. The actress is akin to James’s favourite female characters (the ‘portrait heroines’ of Chapter 1), and she is a literary version of her extratextual counterparts, the three female protagonists of this book. Like the realist sign, these intra- and extratextual women are intensely ambivalent about the interdependence of their private selves and their public appearances. In contrast, the orphan represents a radically opposed conception of the relationship between private being and public meaning. Shocked and elated by the deaths of his parents, Henry imagines the orphan as an embodiment of psychological liberation. The orphan is free from parental authority: the orphaned signified is released from the semantic authority of the signifier. The conflictual relationship between signifier and signified is dissolved, transforming the realist sign into a simulacrum, flat, two-dimensional and therefore impenetrable. Unlike the actress, the orphan does not fear exposure to the outside world; she has no private self, no inner meaning, so she is inviolable, a content-free embodiment of ontological weightlessness. While the actress is a spectacle of unwilling, even coerced, self-exposure, the orphan exists only as an infinite stream of images. The actress is doomed by her visibility; the orphan, invulnerable, rejoices in it. The orphan’s difference from the actress may be understood as an index of Henry’s profound destabilisation after his parents’ deaths. As his relationship with parental authority is questioned and suspended, his loyalty to the semantic structures of ambivalent realism gives way to an extended affair with a mode of representation that seems almost a bizarre premonition of postmodernism. the 1880s: (sur)realist novels Henry wrote to Isabella Gardner, after his mother’s death, ‘I thank heaven that one can lose a mother but once in one’s life’;8 and to

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William, a year later, after the death of their father, ‘Thank God we haven’t another parent to lose; though all Aunt Kate’s sweetness and devotion makes me feel, in advance, that it will be scarcely less a pang when she goes! Such is the consequence of cherishing our ‘‘natural ties!’’’9 The orphan has to live without origins, without ‘natural ties’, without semantic parentage: but how can meaning persist in a world voided by death? In ambivalent realism the tension between parents and children is analogous to the relationship between the literal and the symbolic valences of linguistic signs: parents and literal meanings are points of origin and departure for children and metaphors. It is a structure of representation generated by the child’s ambivalent negotiation with parental authority. Henry’s new uncertainty about the necessity for this negotiation is apparent in the aesthetic and identificatory instability of the three novels of the decade. In some senses they are James’s most socially focused, even – in parts of The Princess Casamassima – his most naturalistic fictions. The Bostonians takes as its subject the American feminist movement; The Princess focuses on contemporary political radicalism in London; The Tragic Muse explores English political patronage and the life of a rising actress in Paris. But it is precisely the self-consciously realistic subject matter of these novels that both demands a concomitantly sober style and is defied by the unstable representational mode that seems to result from this demand. These are, in their different ways, the weirdest novels James wrote: vacillating between the prosaic and the exotic, they have a hallucinatory quality. The Bostonians explores an acute (masculine) anxiety about orphaned representation. Verena Tarrant’s instinctive ability to communicate is a representational power free of content and purpose: it is a semiotic natural resource – associated with femininity – that can be channelled by her father or by the masculine Olive Chancellor, or repressed by marriage. A performer, an ‘actress’, Verena is also a kind of orphan: her parents are alive but have no special authority to determine her. As Olive discovers, Verena is so content-free that she is very difficult to ‘adopt’, despite her parents’ disconcerting willingness to sell her to the highest bidder; it is impossible to impress permanent ideas or meanings upon her. Verena feels no discomfort in the relationship between private being and public meaning, because she has no private self: her identity is simply her will to communicate.


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While Verena’s fluency is untrustworthy because it is without intrinsic content, the novel’s form – the style indirect libre – reports her lengthy feminist speeches without editorial interference, thus implicitly affirming their self-presentation as coherent and persuasive. The narrative voice, which appears at the start of the novel to support the conservative southerner Basil Ransom, undergoes a covert realignment of sympathies, and begins to betray Ransom in favour of his opponent, Olive. It is a radically unstable text, permeated with masculine self-disgust. Despite its beginning as a sober examination of social reformers, by the end it has become a psychodrama of authorial instability and contrition, figured by the hostile triangle of Verena, Olive and Basil: the content-free child-woman desiring only to communicate, fought over by the compromised femininity of the female impresario and the ruthless aggression of the man who would confine Verena to the private sphere of marriage. In this dysfunctional family romance, the ‘child’s’ ultimate submission to ‘parental’ authority can be brought about only by Ransom’s physical force; and Verena’s coerced identification with heterosexual femininity is fatally compromised by her long cooperation with Olive, her other ‘parent’ and other ‘lover’. There is a logic that goes far beyond mere analogy in the coincidence of Verena’s essential imperviousness to the social and erotic authority of her ‘parents’, and the representational instabilities of the novel. The orphan of The Princess Casamassima, too, is cut off from identification with any of his proliferation of real and surrogate parents. Torn apart by class and ideology, Hyacinth Robinson is a childlike, effeminate figure, whose futile yearnings for the Princess and for Paul Muniment merely make him vulnerable to exploitation by both; here, to be an orphan is to be vulnerable to the lure of impossible identifications. Hyacinth’s incoherent and abortive career as a gentleman and a revolutionary (which ends in his suicide) is a story about the failure of identity, the implosion of subjectivity that results from too many exclusions. As if to compensate for this thematics of disentitlement, the representational mode of the novel manifests a highly coloured encyclopaedism, a frantic determination to represent everything. (Declining Pinnie’s offer of a new quilt – and her brother’s plans for revolution – Rose Muniment ‘flash[es] her gay demented eyes’ and cries, ‘‘‘No, not a change, not a change. How can there be a change when there’s

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already everything? There’s everything here – every colour that was ever seen or invented or dreamed of since the world began’’’ (PC 1, 239–40).) There is an exhausted but indefatigable euphoria in the dizzying shifts between prison and country house; Europe and England; the impressionist Parisian boulevard and the economic realism of the London shopping streets; an aristocratic disdain for commercialism and its products, and a novelistic investment in ‘things’; a desire for fineness – in people, in objects – and an unswerving recognition of the economic determinants of taste and style. There are extraordinary shifts of tone and affiliation in this novel. If Henry frequently feels with Hyacinth, ‘one of the disinherited, one of the expropriated, one of the exceptionally interesting’ (I,102), James also has a colleague’s professional respect for the Princess – the ‘actress’ of the novel – who can possess anything, anyone, through her mastery of representation. The novel’s affiliations are more comprehensive than protean: the text encompasses contradictions with a sympathetic largesse that transforms incoherence into paradox, thematising Henry’s acute uncertainty as he hesitates between loyalty and freedom. This twin hesitation about forms of representation and structures of subjectivity finds its ultimate novelistic form in The Tragic Muse, the text in which James brings to a culmination his journey away from ambivalent realism and towards the theatrical aesthetic which figures to him as the possibility of unbounded liberation. Nick Dormer – whose family has marked him out for a political career though he aspires to be a painter of portraits – spends much of the novel contesting his ordained identity as inheritor of his father, of Mr Carteret (his father’s political ally) and of Mr Dallow, whose death has, in effect, bequeathed to Nick a political wife with a necessary fortune and a parliamentary seat to dispose of as she chooses. The project of this novel is to transcend what it analyses as a conventional view of identity as almost synonymous with inheritance, such that Nick’s very identity is threatened by his refusal of his predecessors’ goods. Nick lists the obstacles to his becoming a painter as ‘everything, every one that belongs to me . . . ; my family, my blood, my heredity, my traditions, my promises, my circumstances, my prejudices; my little past – such as it is; my great future – such as it has been supposed it may be’(TM 121). Repudiating these traditions thus means resisting the weight and drag of ancestry and searching for a new subject position; Nick


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is trying to become his own originator, trying to find a future unmapped by what has been before. ‘‘‘I’m not bad,’’’ he tells Mr Carteret. ‘‘‘But I’m different . . . Different from my father. Different from Mrs Dallow. Different from you’’’ (334). How is this, itself, ‘different’ from earlier James protagonists; from Isabel Archer, for example, who ‘wish[ed] to choose [her] fate’, and ‘d[id]n’t like to have everything settled beforehand’ (PL 161, 58)? What sets Nick’s unexceptional sentiment in a unique context is the anodyne nature of the parental triumvirate against whose wishes he must contend. Lady Agnes Dormer, ‘solemnly attended by the strenuous shade’ of the defunct Sir Nicholas (TM 67), and Mr Carteret, Sir Nicholas’s representative on earth, as well as Mrs Rooth, Miriam’s absurd mamma, are without parallel in James’s full-length fiction in their complete lack of any power to wound. Most Jamesian children discover that the greatest threat to survival is posed by their own parents – James’s bleak view of the family as a mechanism for depriving its children of life calls to mind Samuel Butler’s mordant observation that children subjected to Victorian childrearing techniques have ‘a marvellous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances’10 – yet the worst that Nick’s progenitors can visit on him is the unintentionally humorous notion of a spectral surveillance. ‘He hears you, he watches you, he rejoices in you,’ Lady Agnes assures her son, vouching for her deceased husband’s unfailing paternal supervision; and although ‘[t]his idea was oppressive to Nick – that of the rejoicing almost as much as of the watching’ (158), it hardly bears comparison with the parental depredations that are endemic elsewhere in James’s novels. The world of The Tragic Muse is incomparably safer, less vicious and volatile than the customary Jamesian environment; here parents simply do not have the power to destroy their children, and as if as a result, children do not fantasise about killing their parents. In abandoning politics for portraiture, Nick ‘had been ready to disappoint his mother – he had not been ready to destroy her. Lady Agnes, I hasten to add, was not destroyed’ (343); yet this is a mark not of maternal persistence but rather of the negligible significance of parental authority in this novel. Neither the living Lady Agnes nor her dead husband has much real power to determine their son’s behaviour: as if mirroring the simplicity and clarity of the child’s desire to be sui generis in a way unimaginable

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to the ambivalent Isabel Archers or Fleda Vetches of the Jamesian world, The Tragic Muse effectively drains parents of their authority, freeing Nick from his family’s efforts to control his future. Certainly the death of Nick’s father is not enough to liberate the son, as Mr Carteret survives to further the parental project of keeping the future identical to the past: contemplating a forthcoming visit to Mr Carteret’s house, Nick foresees with deep antipathy the wholly predictable course of the evening, emblematised by the clock whose hands ‘might as well mark 1830’ (187). But Mr Carteret, too, is helplessly mortal, and in this second ‘paternal’ death Nick senses a second chance. Warned of the impending demise, Nick arrives with seemly promptness at Mr Carteret’s house in Beauclere, to be greeted by a reprehensible efflorescence of comedy emanating from the narrative voice that seems elsewhere – especially when handling the artists and aesthetes of the text’s younger generation – incapable of being funny. Nick ‘wandered round the abbey with cigarettes and lightened his tread and felt grave, wishing everything might be over’ (326), but the narrative is enjoying itself too much to arrange a speedy mortal despatch: ‘It was judged best that for the first day Nick should not be introduced into the darkened room. This was the decision of the two decorous nurses, of whom the visitor had had a glimpse and who, with their black uniforms and fresh faces of business, suggested the barmaid emulating the nun’(326). With its visual jokes and impeccable comic timing, the chapter elaborating Mr Carteret’s deathbed is a positive festival of humour amid this novel’s otherwise somewhat arid textual desert. And the easiness with which the chapter makes a deathbed amusing is entirely atypical of James; we seem here to be in a different world from that in which Milly Theale, sublimely, turns her face to the wall, or Isabel’s baby son dies in a chapter-break, challenging the reader to remember her extinguished maternity, or even that in which violent deaths – such as Hyacinth’s suicidal coup de graçe – can invoke a risky melodrama. For Isabel, Catherine Sloper and Hyacinth; for Fleda, Kate, and Charlotte; for Alice James; for very many of the central characters of James’s novels, living is an ambivalent project of anguished separation from parental origins that threaten always to become an inescapable destiny. Birth, Alice felt, was a death sentence. In radical contrast, The Tragic Muse


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presents a world in which parental authority is fatally diminished: monsters no longer, those characters charged with enforcing the power of the past have lost their terrible fascination, their nearerotic mastery of the psychological landscape. Instead, insofar as the dethroned authorities are allowed to step into the limelight, parents become available for laughing at, making this a novel not of persecutors and victims but of comic conservatives and their self-absorbed, future-oriented offspring. Consequently in The Tragic Muse there is an inverse relationship between authorial regard and entertainment value: the most unregenerate social conservatives make themselves welcome to the reader stultified by the unrelieved solemnity of the novel’s official heroes and heroine. Julia Dallow, the whip-wielding mistress of Harsh, is always a delight, as are the brief appearances of Mr Carteret’s horticulturally inclined sister, the extraordinarily named ‘Urania dear’ (325), who is habitually to be found ‘in some out-of-the-way spot behind the shrubbery, where, plumped upon the ground, she [is] mostly doing something ‘‘rum’’ to a flower’ (326). Thus while Mr Carteret’s death frees Nick from his predestined identity as the inheritor of patriarchal tradition, it also represents a significant loss of comic potential for the text, and this deprivation itself frees James’s loyal reader to acknowledge something unexpected, and almost equally sacrilegious: The Tragic Muse – to risk putting it simply – is a surprisingly boring book. This phenomenological aspect of the novel is critically occluded but opaquely detectable in much of the history of the text’s reception. Until very recently, few critics chose to discuss The Tragic Muse, and among those that did there subsisted a broad and uninteresting consensus of approach and conclusion: a reiteration of the most explicit plot events would be capped with a quotation from one of three paragraphs to the effect that Miriam Rooth, the Tragic Muse herself, is a great actress – and a great literary character – because her ‘deep substance’ (306), paradoxically, is nothing other than the will to represent. Succumbing to the counter-reflective state of boredom, readers of this novel have often accepted too readily what James tells them; and what he tells them is that no one is more fascinating, more enchanting, more enigmatic, than his tragic muse, Miriam. The meagre critical history has now been partially superseded by readings of the novel by Joseph Litvak(1992), Sara Blair(1996), John Carlos Rowe(1998),

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and Eric Haralson(2003), and this new work has brought an unprecedented depth and variety to the critical conversation surrounding The Tragic Muse; yet despite the interest and liveliness of each of these new readings and notwithstanding their very different conclusions about the nature of James’s political project in this text, these critics continue in the tradition of affirming the remarkable representational power enacted by Miriam. Blair accuses the novel of seeking to exploit and assimilate Miriam’s ‘power of transformative self-invention’;11 Litvak diagnoses a similarly ambivalent combination of embarrassment and desire in the novel’s apprehension of Miriam’s ‘triumphant overflow’;12 and Rowe celebrates Miriam as ‘a magnificent example of what the New Woman can do once she has freed herself from the delusions of romantic love, nineteenth-century femininity, national character, and family heritage’.13 All imply what Rowe makes explicit: that Miriam’s is an ‘extraordinarily interesting character’.14 In this they concur with Peter Sherringham, a diplomat by day and theatrical amateur by night, to whom we owe much of our view of Miriam, especially in the first half of the novel. The relationship between Miriam and Sherringham, her greatest intratextual admirer, is a central element of the novel, revising, as it does, the relationship between Basil and Verena, and forming an index to Henry’s increasingly confident embrace of orphanhood, and James’s move away from the novel towards theatrical representation. As James’s acute uncertainty about untrammelled representation expressed itself through Verena’s ultimate vulnerability to Basil’s discredited conquest, so Peter functions as a convenient, though ultimately insufficient, agent for his creator’s rapturous celebration of Miriam’s aesthetic and psychological liberation. Peter is fascinated by Miriam, a woman, he perceives, ‘whose identity resided in the continuity of her personations, so that she had no moral privacy . . . but lived in a high wind of exhibition, of figuration – such a woman was a kind of monster in whom of necessity there would be nothing to ‘‘be fond’’ of, because there would be nothing to take hold of ’ (126).15 Like Verena, Miriam lacks intrinsic content; now, however, her principal male observer considers this neither untrustworthy nor evidence of hapless vulnerability, but the source of a dazzling power. We must, of course, ask about the extent to which James’s novel endorses Peter’s perspective. Rowe views Sherringham as ‘repeatedly the object of


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James’s withering critique of an increasingly outmoded British ruling class’, while Blair registers more carefully James’s ambivalence towards Miriam’s chief admirer, noting the author’s intermittent likeness to ‘the protagonist from whom he distances himself most thoroughly, Peter Sherringham’;16 yet despite their dismissal of Sherringham, both critics seem to share with him in the experiential reality of the enchantment that leads, in Sherringham’s case, to the pitiful – and, as Rowe points out, unpleasantly imperialist – desire to confine Miriam to the socially exclusive stage of an ambassadorial drawing room. Certainly Sherringham is never merely a representative for James: he is discredited both early and late by his insuperable territorial ambitions, yet he is also capable of an admittedly inadequate longing for the radical freedom that James, as much as Peter himself, apprehends in the Tragic Muse. Peter’s initial reaction to Miriam, for example, combines unreconstructed condescension – ‘the poor girl . . . constituted a kind of challenge, struck him as a subject for inquiry, a problem, an explorable tract’ (TM 96) – with a much more sympathetic desire that aligns him with Nick and, I would argue, with the vein of orphan utopianism that drives this novel: ‘I imagined she was different’ (102).17 Far from diminishing Sherringham’s suitability for the elaboration of James’s vision, his inadequacy, as much as his enchantment, works to adumbrate the almost supernatural quality of Miriam’s newness, by implying that hers is a modernity that exceeds the terms of her fictional world. The primary fracture in this text, then, seems to me to lie not between the forces of freedom and the forces of control – as elsewhere in James’s fictions – but rather between Henry’s desire, and the reader’s experience of James’s novel. Peter is dazzled by Miriam; so are Henry James, Nick and the (intratextual) mass audiences of her global domination; but for this reader at least there is a mismatch between what we are told to think about the Tragic Muse and how we actually experience her. An eerie weightlessness pervades the descriptions of Miriam in performance (here, as so often, reflected in Peter’s infatuation): He floated in the felicity of it, in the general encouragement of a sense of the perfectly done, in the almost aggressive bravery of still larger claims for an art which could so triumphantly, so exquisitely render life. ‘Render it?’ he said to himself. ‘Create it and reveal it, rather; give us something new and large and of the first order!’ (306)

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Peter ‘floats’ in a ‘general’ sense of artistic achievement – the ‘perfectly done’. It is all so vague; the what disappears in the brilliance of the how. Peter’s ‘vision of how the uplifted stage and the listening house transformed her’ (306) is a vision of transcendent sublimation; Miriam floats free of the ground of representation (the physical stage, the subject matter of the play). An effect that has freed itself of a cause, she enchants Peter into a correspondingly ungrounded passion. ‘Her character was simply to hold you by the particular spell’ (306). What spell? We are told it exists yet it fails to enact itself around the reader. Peter tells Miriam, ‘You’re always at concert pitch or on your horse; there are no intervals. It’s the absence of intervals, of a fond or background, that I don’t comprehend. You’re an embroidery without a canvas’ (138). Peter offers us, here, an image of style liberated from grounding: art with no semantic base. Miriam’s origins are vague without being mysterious – a Jewish art-dealer father and a fauxaristocratic mother, who is merely a token of sexual respectability – making her essentially rootless, her origins significant only in their irrelevance.18 Uniquely among James’s heroines, Miriam lives entirely in the present; in other words, she has no psychological identity. Free of her past, free of her parents, Miriam is also unburdened by interiority. That the reader encounters Miriam almost exclusively through the eyes of other characters indicates not that her ‘moral privacy’ is to remain inviolate, but rather that she has none: the only occasion when the narrative shares with us Miriam’s perspective is on her visit backstage at the Français when, for an unprecedented and not-to-be-repeated couple of pages we look with Miriam’s eyes at the scenes behind the scene – and discover that backstage is just another drawing-room, a grand foyer which ‘resembled . . . a ball-room, cleared for the dance, before the guests or the music had arrived’ (225). The room fills up with visitors from the audience, and with actors: there is no life here except that which is to be seen in the main house, and Miriam’s chief observation of Mademoiselle Voisin is that her social performance is no less faultlessly judged offstage than on. At the very moment that the narrative conducts the reader into Miriam’s ‘backstage’, the reader realises that this mystified locale is merely notional, an arena of only more polished and specialised performances. There can thus be no tension between Miriam’s public


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persona (shown to the audiences within the novel-world and to the readers of the novel) and her putative private self, no frisson of potential self-revelation; she is a perversely unerotic fantasy, blank, untraceable, content-free. Miriam’s consequent capacity for wearying her reader is surpassed only by that of the aesthete Gabriel Nash, a figure of such unrelenting cliche´ that even his fictional compeers sense an ontological weightlessness, Biddy Dormer reflecting that ‘she had never encountered any one who seemed so to know his part and recognize his cues’ (29). Whenever Nash, or Miriam, or even Nick, in his aesthetic mode, takes to the stage of this text, the narrative assumes a terrible solemnity: these figures, it is clear, are not to be laughed at; yet the earnestness with which the novel treats the representatives of Art claims for them a special validity that is not effectually substantiated for James’s reader. As Nash’s compliment to Miriam suggests – ‘‘‘You’ve stopped acting, you’ve reduced it to the least that will do, you simply are – you’re just the visible image, the picture on the wall’’’ (269) – the attempt to invoke a newly potent, because radically free, form of artistic representation results only in an oddly two-dimensional quality. After sitting once to Nick, Nash disappears from the world of the text, and – as Nick fancies – his image fades from the canvas on which Nick had begun his portrait, as if the novel can sustain Nash’s insubstantiality no longer, its energies monopolised by the equally unsupported but psychologically dominant figure of Miriam. Both Rowe and Haralson have made much of Nash, proposing that he be read as a proto-queer figure who challenges the rigid patriarchal values of the ruling class; his disappearance, Haralson argues, enacts James’s apprehension of the need for dissident masculinities to elude the ramifying mechanisms of social surveillance. Interpreting Nash’s phantasmatic existence as a form of nascent or evacuated subjectivity that is politically legible, these readings bring a new animation to one of James’s most tiresome characters; yet, again, they sidestep the significance of the reader’s experience of this aspect of James’s text. This is the same problem that attends Rowe’s celebration of Miriam as ‘James’s most successful and emancipated feminine character’:19 the attractiveness of these readings is inextricable from an element of wishfulness that does not seem faithful to the phenomenological process of reading James’s novel. If Nash is to figure a long-lived but ultimately

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elusive form of resistance to the socio-sexual status quo, there is something to be explained in the novel’s failure to prepare the reader for disappointment, rather than relief, at Nash’s disappearance. Lacking content and interiority, Nash – like Miriam – offers his audience little more than a simulacrum. beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.20

Peter, who keeps his evening affair with the stage – ‘not the region of responsibility’ (202) – strictly separate from his daily life as a diplomat, muses, ‘I’m fond of representation – the representation of life: I like it better, I think, than the real thing’ (62). The aesthetic problem afflicting The Tragic Muse is analogous to Peter’s misconceived distinction between art and ‘reality’: in this text the generative link between ground and effect, signifiers and signifieds, is severed. This fatal split between form and content is embodied by Miriam and her mother in their irreconcilable reading techniques: ‘one’ – Mrs Rooth – ‘took everything for the sense’, ‘the other’ – Miriam – ‘was alive but to the manner and the art of it’ (143–4); and this misconceived distinction is celebrated by the radically monadic Nash, who, siding with Miriam, claims that ‘[w]hat we contribute is our treatment of the material, our rendering of the text, our style’ (117). Miriam, all euphoric effect, inhabits a novel which seems all ground, bare of semantic embroidery, conveying an overwhelming impression of endless conversations in the absence of events. All the talk about representation, theatre and art, takes place, as it were, in quotation. How can actors and politicians figure ‘representation’ when that is what they actually ‘do’ on the most constative level of plot? With its relentless literalisation of metaphor, this novel seems to lack a crucial symbolic dimension.21 Madame Carre´’s drawing room is crowded with souvenirs of her theatrical career: The profusion of this testimony was hardly more striking than the confession of something missed, something hushed, which seemed to rise from it all and make it melancholy, like a reference to clappings which, in the nature of things, could now only be present as a silence: so that if the place was full of history it was the form without the fact . . . – the history of a mask, of a squeak, of a series of vain gestures. (83; italics mine)


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This is the closest the novel comes to reflecting on what I see as its impaired capacity for representation. To borrow Julia Kristeva’s idea, melancholy is the problem in this text, which offers so many words, so much talk, but so little attraction, so little event. Kristeva suggests that the language of people suffering from melancholia is impoverished by incomplete mourning. The denial of loss results in an inability to symbolise: if nothing is recognised as missing, what need can there be for substitutes, replacements – symbols?22 The uninvested language of The Tragic Muse suggests a traumatic, yet strangely painless loss manifest at the level of representational structure; as if combining euphoria and affectlessness in unexpectedly postmodern fashion, this novel conveys a sense not of depression, but of free-floating possibility, a liberation from ties and origins. Uncharacteristically – for the connoisseur of the donneé’s fastidiously tended development – James writes in the New York edition’s Preface that he ‘profess[es] a certain vagueness of remembrance in respect to the origin and growth of The Tragic Muse’; he ‘can but look on the present fiction as a poor fatherless and motherless, a sort of unregistered and unacknowledged birth’ (1), as if his novel were itself an orphan, or an illegitimate child. Detached from her origins, floating free of semantic accountability, Miriam’s orphan independence is too absolute, while – evacuated of the symbolic charge monopolised by Miriam – James’s novel manifests an emptiness of its own: it is composed of signifiers offering no access to an inner meaning. Abandoned and liberated by the deaths of his parents, Henry’s experience of orphanhood is legible in the euphoric, exhausted instability of these three novels, resulting in The Tragic Muse in a textual malaise that threatens to dissolve the deep structures on which ambivalent realism is founded. When the signified is liberated from the signifier, the realist sign is dissolved. The signifier is emptied, and the signified becomes at once infinite and weightless: the sign gives way to the simulacrum. In ambivalent realism, meaning is generated by the conflictual interdependence of signifiers and signifieds: in creating Miriam, however, James liberates the signified from the signifier; and we can understand his choice of an actress to embody his new sense of liberty as a response to a dominant cultural conception of the actress as an embodiment of the ambivalent relationship between (public) signifier and (private) signified.

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Henry James, Women and Realism masks or faces?: 2 3 femininity and theatrical art

Public perceptions of the relationship between an actor’s performances and his or her private identity can be argued to have shifted significantly from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Richard Salmon draws on Richard Sennett’s research in The Fall of Public Man (1977) to suggest that ‘[w]hereas, in the eighteenth century, theatrical performance was understood as a code of public representation that bore no intrinsic relationship to the performer’s private self, in the nineteenth century . . . a fascination with the ‘‘private life’’ of the public performer became prevalent’.24 Enthusiastic controversy arose concerning the nature of the actor’s profession, which we may understand as a debate about referentiality: what kind of sign is the actor? How does he, or she, signify? The question of the relationship between public meaning and private being gained particular intensity in the context of femininity on stage and, especially in the context of ‘[t]he new drama of the late Victorian theater, which stages private bourgeois life for public mimesis, [and thus] remakes the actress as a middle-class lady whose private identity becomes a matter of public discourse’,25 the actress became a rich cultural focus for late nineteenth-century questions about the links between femininity and representation. Clearly this problematic has direct continuities with James’s characteristic perception of the realist sign as a vulnerable, feminine structure of meaning. Is the actress really ‘acting’, that is, using her embodied presence as a medium of representation? Or is she ‘being herself’ or ‘revealing herself’ on stage? James’s own attitude towards actresses is variable and unstable. Henry considered his friend Fanny Kemble (whom he had first seen perform in his childhood) ‘the first woman in London, and . . . moreover one of the consolations of my life’:26 his admiration is for a magnificent person, whose acting success was essentially an effect of her forcefulness rather than the result of theatrical expertise. ‘The great thing’, he writes in his essay ‘Frances Anne Kemble’ (Essays in London (1893)), ‘was that from the first she had abundantly lived and, in more than one meaning of the word, acted – felt, observed, imagined, reflected, reasoned, gathered in her passage the abiding impression, the sense and suggestion of things.’27 This rich experience of life animates her


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performances, James explains; ‘in relation to the efficacity of what may be called the natural method, the operation of pure sincerity, [she was] a witness no less interesting than unconscious. An equally active and fruitful love of beauty was probably never accompanied with so little technical curiosity’ (108). In Henry’s view, Fanny Kemble essentially plays herself. Her acting is ‘sincerity’ rather than technique. James’s attitude towards Elizabeth Robins offers an interesting counterexample. Like Kemble, Robins had a successful stage career while still young; exasperated by the constraints and limitations of theatrical representation, she later turned to writing as a preferable artistic mode. Robins became a passionate feminist advocate, supporting the suffragette movement in fiction, plays, tracts and personal appearances. Having made her theatrical name in Henrik Ibsen’s newly translated dramas, she later claimed Ibsen as an important influence on her feminist ideas.28 However, most of her writing – plays, short stories and a dozen novels – has no feminist agenda and is characterised rather by an impressive generic diversity. Her fiction explores contemporary social controversies (euthanasia, the treatment of ‘nervous’ female patients by the male medical establishment, the ‘white slave trade’), and includes both popular romance and adventure stories set in the Klondyke. Her work is highly competent and unusually various, the work of a consummate performer whose writing, both that which engages directly with politics and that which does not, cannot be classified as merely ‘personal’ or confessional. In her essay Woman’s Secret (1908), Robins attacks the idea that women in general and women artists in particular cannot sustain what Peter Sherringham terms ‘moral privacy’. ‘[Woman’s] supposed inability to keep a secret is with many an unchallenged article of faith’ – this, Robins argues, is why ‘No view is more widely accepted than that every woman’s book is but a naı¨ve attempt to extend her own little personality.’ Women writers receive no credit for their power to produce a convincing illusion. ‘[C]ritics . . . say: ‘‘This is so like the real thing it must be a piece of verbatim reporting . . . These life-like scenes are autobiography. The heroine is naturally the writer’s self.’’’29 Henry frequently criticised Elizabeth’s performances (usually he objected to her costume or hairstyle), but he never underestimated

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her acting technique; he never mistook her performances for selfexposure. ‘She is slightly uncanny, but distinguished and individual,’30 he wrote to a friend, his recognition of her ‘uncanniness’ marking his intuitive appreciation of her skilful production of herself as an illusion. As a contrast to James’s insight, Leon Edel’s apprehension of Robins is worth quoting at length as a clarification of the links between the actress’s privacy, visibility and sexuality that became standard during the nineteenth century and that Edel accepts without reflection: Elizabeth Robins, with her large liquid eyes and her inner toughness, regarded men as creatures to be manipulated. She could love women; men were to be conquered and ‘used’, and her secret love affair with the critic William Archer was a kind of collaboration in the theater as much as a passion. She remained secretive all her life . . . [W]hen Hilda Wangel knocked on the door and sounded the fate of the Master Builder, Miss Robins was playing the ‘Saint Elizabeth’ [George Bernard Shaw’s phrase] who expected men to serve her as her husband had done, by total abdication of the self . . . From her earliest days she had regarded all her experience as potential ‘copy’. When there were no more Ibsen parts for her to play, she abandoned the stage and . . . wrote a series of sensational best-selling novels . . . Had James known that Miss Robins dreamed of turning all that happened to her into copy, he probably would have kept a greater distance.31

As is frequently the case, Edel’s confusion and hostility are most instructive. On the one hand, Robins cannot act – she is just playing herself, and her novels are not creation but reproduction: ‘copy’. On the other hand, there is something sly and ‘secretive’ about her that seems to be connected, for Edel, to her elusive sexuality: there is something wrong with an attractive woman who cannot be encompassed by the male gaze, and in Edel’s angry intimation her love of women constitutes a treachery to men in general and to Henry (and Leon) in particular. The claim that Elizabeth ‘expected men to serve her as her husband had done, by total abdication of the self’ is Edel’s way of condemning her for her husband’s suicide; this is as unreflective and ill-judged as his symptomatic misreading of Ibsen’s play, which Edel associates with the suicide. (Edel’s interpretation of Elizabeth’s behaviour towards Henry is also wholly unfair: Theatre and Friendship (1932) is a restrained, affectionate portrait of a man with whom Robins never claims a close acquaintance.32) Edel’s response to Elizabeth Robins clarifies


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what Rachel Brownstein calls ‘the psychosocial structures that connect performing women and paying audiences’.33 In his distrust of the actress whose visibility cannot be simply equated with accessibility, Edel may remind us of Basil Ransom, determined to divert Verena’s attention away from Olive; Elizabeth’s romantic involvements appear as a series of infractions of the rules of sexual respectability that Edel seems to share with Ransom. Edel speculates that Elizabeth’s insufficiently submissive behaviour provoked her husband’s suicide; he disapproves of her affair with Archer, because that, too, involved no renunciation of her theatrical career; and he is deeply offended by her lesbian relationship (with Octavia Peabody in the 1920s), interpreting it as the ultimate rejection of masculine and social authority. Behind his reaction to Elizabeth is an angry sense that she has broken the rules of respectable feminine conduct that became codified in late nineteenth-century expectations of the actress’s socio-sexual etiquette. The contours of the actress’s social contract are elaborated in Mrs Humphry Ward’s 1884 novel Miss Bretherton. Superficial plot similarities between this novel and The Tragic Muse abound, though the narrative tones, perspectives and outcomes are profoundly dissimilar.34 A circle of male friends – artists and amateurs – happen upon a beautiful young aspiring actress who seems promising despite her aesthetic crudeness and lack of training. The men educate, criticise and bestow their patronage upon her; through their tutelage she eventually blossoms into a thrilling performer. The central male protagonist falls in love with her and proposes marriage, and the novel ends with her acceptance of his proposal; though she is not in love, she submits to her patron’s desire. In this painfully distasteful novel, Miss Bretherton’s male patrons see her as such a wholly legitimate object of scrutiny, analysis and critique that they regard themselves as favouring her with their attention, for which she should be blushingly grateful. From the initial performance that establishes her untutored ignorance (‘Miss Bretherton’s inadequacy, indeed, became more and more visible as the play was gradually and finely worked up to its climax’35) to her eventual theatrical triumph and emergence as suitable marriage material (‘‘‘I never saw a woman at a more critical or interesting point of development’’’, 186), the frame of the text collaborates with the series of theatre sets and domestic

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scenes which stage the spectacle of Miss Bretherton, energetically facilitating the reader’s participation in the enjoyable activity of connoisseurship. ‘‘‘She looks superbly sound and healthy,’’’ one of the men comments judiciously; ‘‘‘she is tall and fully developed, and her colour, for all its delicacy, is pure and glowing’’’ (68). Particularly queasy to a contemporary reader is the unchallenged stability of the relationship between the complacent male critics and the female object of their scrutiny, who is simultaneously ‘candid’, undefended and relentlessly sexualised. Her very ignorance and her vulnerability make her attractive to these men. ‘‘‘I find myself’’’, one remarks smugly, ‘‘‘taking often a very physical and medical view of Miss Bretherton’’’ (82–3): ‘‘‘She has a beautiful hand, fine and delicate, not specially small, but full of character; it was pleasant to watch it playing with her orange, or smoothing back every now and then the rebellious locks which will stray, do what she will, beyond the boundaries assigned to them’’’(77). This relentless tutelary scrutiny is simultaneously infantilising and sexualising: she plays with the orange, she is in imperfect control of her rebellious locks. ‘Do what she will’, her attractive vulnerability – her accessibility despite herself – is clearly displayed for the male audience. Miss Bretherton highlights the occult kinship that connects the actress with the debutante in this period: both are states of public, expectant virginity, and this association is nowhere more pressing than in James’s two posttheatrical novels, What Maisie Knew (1897; 1908) and The Awkward Age (1899; 1908). ‘‘‘Nanda has stepped on the stage,’’’ Mrs Brook announces, ‘‘‘and I give her up the house’’’ (AA 133). The debutante’s spectacular virginity, like that of the actress, is advertised by the titillating name of ‘innocence’, and although only one man will secure marital permission to take possession of her prepared violability, she is offered to the general gaze as a focus of surveillance and desire. Given that the actress’s career is conceived as a public process of sexual ‘development’, it is no surprise that marriage is enjoined upon her as a social requirement. ‘‘‘Mercy, how you chatter about ‘marrying’!’’’ Miriam exclaims to Peter. ‘‘‘C’est la maladie anglaise – you’ve all got it on the brain’’’ (TM 384). Marriage and the stage figure reactive poles of privacy and publicity: the actress’s charisma is intensified by the idea of her potential, perhaps imminent, withdrawal into the privacy of marriage. (It is assumed that after marriage, the actress retires from the stage; if she remains, she is


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no longer an irresistible opportunity for gossip, no longer an urgently sexual figure.) Success on the stage is both guaranteed by, and inevitably precedes, the actress’s desirability as a wife; her dramatic career functions as preparation for her submission to matrimony. Miss Bretherton accepts the marriage proposal immediately. Verena puts up more of a fight, but Basil knows that she will eventually succumb: ‘she was meant for something divinely different – for privacy, for him, for love’ (B 1049). This is why Peter is baffled by Miriam’s refusal to marry him; by choosing to marry her manager, Miriam uses marriage as a way of supporting, rather than ending, her dramatic career, refusing to submit to what Brownstein terms ‘the biographical imperative that a tragic actress must be a grande amoureuse in the standard sense, a woman consumed by amorous passion and dedicated to love alone’.36 Both Fanny Kemble and Elizabeth Robins were scandalous in their reversal of respectable sequence: both women experienced highly publicised marital failures as young women, and then, disembarrassed of their former husbands, pursued successful theatrical careers. The suicide of Elizabeth’s husband featured prominently in the American press; she came to England in the wake of the scandal. Fanny – who claimed that she was prompted to leave her husband by the disgust she felt for his ownership of slaves – published in support of the Abolitionist movement the journals in which she described her experience of visiting his plantation; the scandal intensified when her ex-husband addressed an open letter to the national press, attacking Fanny and disputing her account of their marriage. Decades after Fanny’s divorce, James cited Kemble’s failed marriage as one of the two significant disappointments that shaped her life (the other being the limitations of the stage). Failed marriages transform the actress from delectable to scandalous spectacle. It should be clear that the figure of the late nineteenth-century actress as constructed by the plays, novels and critics discussed here works to flatter and confirm the cognitive and social power of the (implicitly male) audience over the female spectacle on stage. This view diverges significantly from much contemporary scholarship that tends to valorise the Victorian actress as a woman enacting professional control over her public appearance. As Gail Marshall points out in her book on the ‘Galatea Myth’ (the Victorian view of the actress as a woman brought to life by the

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power of the male gaze), most real-life actresses could not control the spectacle of their desirability in the hierarchised, public world of the English commercial theatre.37 In contrast ‘to the prevalent current view of the Victorian actress as a woman of positively transgressive and liberating sexual energies’, Marshall argues that by the 1880s the ‘actress’s sexual desirability’ served conservative social goals, ‘confirm[ing] her as an ally of commentators . . . who wished to deflect the anxieties generated by gender-inversion’.38 Moreover, the theatrical framing of the actress on stage, rather than emphasising the artifice of her role, instead legitimises her as an object of scrutiny; it ritualises the spectacle of femininity as (self)-exposure.39 To be successful as an actress, then, a woman on stage must be either very bad or very good. She needs to be either inept enough to be seen to be unable to sustain the illusion of ‘character’; or good enough to produce the illusion of selfexposure: what the male critic requires is to feel that he has the power to penetrate her attempted dissimulation.40 Any notion of the actress’s ‘role’ tends to be elided to the point of disappearance: James equates Kemble’s theatrical power with her personal experience, Edel perceives Robins as Hilda Wangel, Miss Bretherton’s audience takes her ‘development’ as the theatrical spectacle. When William Archer asked Masks or Faces? in 1888, the answer, of course, was that this undecided question is the source of the audience’s enthralled attentiveness. An overly rapid definitive answer would close down the spectators’ pleasurable search for feminine self-exposure. The relationship between the actress and the audience thus involves a latent cruelty, from which James frees Miriam.41 Henry wants to believe in the possibility of an art that does not depend on the audience’s violation of the symbol; an art, that is, without (violable) content. In Miriam, James creates a heroine free from interiority; an actress with no backstage existence; an artist who is not obliged to negotiate with preartistic content; a child unburdened by narrative or familial origins. In his liberation of Miriam from these embodiments of authority, James adumbrates a new kind of representation in which signs are orphans rather than actresses; he severs the signified from the signifier and dissolves the reactive polarity of public meaning and private being – in short, he releases his art from the generative matrix of ambivalent realism.


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feminine texts, masculine readers Thought of as a writing practice, ambivalent realism manifests the writer’s uncertain attitude towards the authority of semantic constraints. The writer makes use of the contestable distance between signifier and signified to enact some degree of negotiation, splitting compliance and resistance between the literal and the metaphorical valences of the sign. This is the source of realism’s uncanny quality, its seductive intimation of internal difference. Considered from an interpretative perspective, however, it is the relationship between the beleaguered text and the importunate reader that becomes central, and in this transaction the sign becomes vulnerable to a kind of hermeneutic aggression which makes James deeply uneasy. He figures this textual encounter as a certain form of heterosexual exchange: a masculine reader is entranced and seduced by his vision of the vulnerable feminine text. This gendered model of reading emerges before the death of James’s parents and his subsequent decade of artistic instability, most notably in Washington Square (1880) and The Portrait of a Lady (1881). Catherine, Isabel and Pansy are constant objects of scrutiny and interpretation; Isabel’s incandescence attracts relentless readerly concentration, from which James tries to protect Catherine by making her unexceptional, even dull (though he cannot protect her from the hermeneutic attentions of her father and aunt). But after the spectacular failure of Henry’s dramatic ambitions – the failure of his tragic muse – the pattern reestablishes itself and becomes insistent. This unequal exchange, in which sexual difference and epistemology figure each other as acute imbalances of power, begins with the male protagonist’s perception of feminine concealment. Something is hidden. Lambert Strether (The Ambassadors (1903;1909)) recognises this in his climactic interview with Marie de Vionnet: ‘He felt what he had felt before with her, that there was always more behind what she showed, and more and more again behind that’ (A II, 283); in this cognitive act Strether forfeits all claim to disinterestedness. Brissenden tells the narrator of The Sacred Fount (1901) that May Server ‘terrifies’ him: ‘‘‘She has something to hide.’’’ ‘‘‘But, my dear man,’’ I asked with a gaiety singularly out of relation to the small secret thrill produced in me by these words – ‘‘my dear man, what woman who’s worth anything

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hasn’t?’’’ (SF 72). The perception of the existence of the woman’s secret is exciting, attractive, emboldening, and causes a ‘small secret thrill’ of interpretative pique. Women try to retain power by keeping their secret hidden, but they cannot: there is inevitably a collapse of self-control, an unrecoverable failure of self-concealment, which gratifies the male observer. It is an appealing, even erotic, spectacle: Once more, as a man conscious of having known many women, [Amerigo] could assist, as he would have called it, at the recurrent, the predestined phenomenon, . . . the doing by the woman of the thing that gave her away. She did it, ever, inevitably, infallibly – she couldn’t possibly not do it. It was her nature, it was her life . . . This was his, the man’s, any man’s, position and strength – that he had necessarily the advantage . . . Just so the punctuality of performance on the part of the other creature was her weakness and her deep misfortune – not less, no doubt, than her beauty. It produced for the man that extraordinary mixture of pity and profit in which his relation with her . . . mainly consisted. (GB 61)

Strether, initially less smug, becomes no less complacent as he grasps the completeness of the revelation: A spasm came into her face, the tears she had already been unable to hide overflowed at first in silence, and then, as the sound suddenly comes from a child, quickened to gasps, to sobs . . . He had to listen to her in a silence that he made no immediate effort to attenuate, feeling her doubly woeful amid all her dim diffused elegance. (A II, 285)

May Server is also more beautiful in her helplessness: ‘She gave herself, in that minute, more than she doubtless knew – gave herself, I mean, to my intenser apprehension . . . Beautiful, abysmal, involuntary, her exquisite weakness simply opened up the depths it would have closed. It was in short a supremely unsuccessful attempt to say nothing’ (SF 79–81). The secret vulnerability of these women is passion. Strether sees ‘passion, mature, abysmal, pitiful’ (A II, 286) in Marie de Vionnet; May Server’s interpreter ‘saw as [he] had never seen before what consuming passion can make of the marked mortal on whom, with fixed beak and claws, it has settled as on a prey’ (SF 81). Passion possesses and dispossesses its victim, invading and consuming her, and opening her to spectators: her secret is of vulnerability, and it is a vulnerable secret. She is doubly possessed, doubly violated – by passion, and by observers’ perception of its power over her.42 Amerigo notes Charlotte’s ‘abjection’; the narrator of The Sacred


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Fount observes a similar public humiliation – ‘So it was brought home to me that the victim could be abased’ (SF 81). The male interpreter is pityingly entranced by his dizzying vision of dominance – it is, after all, ‘his, the man’s, any man’s, position and strength’ (GB 61). Now the woman ceases to register as an individual and comes to represent a general truth. She becomes merely typical: she becomes a sign. It was actually moreover 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. (A II, 286) I for a while fairly forgot Mrs Server, I fear, in the intimacy of this vision of the possibilities of our common nature. She became such a wasted and dishonoured symbol of them as might have put tears in one’s eyes. (SF 81)

It is this inevitable movement from individuated, self-protective concealment to symbolically expansive, involuntary revelation, that James perceives as the fate of the feminine text: ‘She always dressed her act up, of course, she muffled and disguised and arranged it, showing in fact in these dissimulations a cleverness equal to but one thing in the world, equal to her abjection . . . She was the twentieth woman, she was possessed by her doom, but her doom was also to arrange appearances’ (GB 61). The realist text is an actress whose dissimulations cannot protect her private identity from the masculine reader/spectator. Miriam Rooth stands in radical opposition to this vulnerable feminine figure: untouched by other-directed passion, ‘almost perversely non-carnal’,43 she inhabits a text that is itself so uninvested, so unburdened by affect, that it, too, is safe from hermeneutic violation. james’s theatrical experiment [T]his extraordinary defeasance by the poet of his familiar identity. (Henry James, ‘Mr Tennyson’s Drama (1875))44 [T]he intensity, the ecstasy, the insanity as some people would say, of curiosity and enthusiasm provoked by Mlle. Bernhardt . . . It has been the success of a celebrity, pure and simple, and Mlle. Sarah Bernhardt is not, to my sense, a celebrity because she is an artist. She is a celebrity because, apparently, she desires with an intensity that has rarely been equalled to be one . . . [She is] a sort of fantastically impertinent victrix poised upon a perfect pyramid of ruins – the ruins of a hundred British prejudices and

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proprieties . . . She is a child of her age – of her moment – and she has known how to profit by the idiosyncrasies of the time. . . . She has in a supreme degree what the French call the geńie de la rećlame – the advertising genius . . . [She has] a figure so admirably adapted for conspicuity . . . She is far from belonging to the race of Rachel and Descleé, she has something sceptical and cynical which was wholly foreign to the manner of those concentrated and serious artists. (Henry James, ‘The Come´die Française in London’ (1879))45

Despite Miriam’s vague and insignificant origins, she is not wholly unprecedented in James’s writing, as James’s passionate engagement with the theatre certainly preexisted his parents’ deaths. It is evident from James’s article ‘The Come´die Française in London’ that Henry was fascinated but deeply nettled by Sarah Bernhardt’s ‘advertising genius’; in 1879 his disapproval of her ‘fantastically impertinent’ success is emphatic. The ‘arts and graces of publicity’ must not be mistaken for dramatic art, and her public acclaim arises from her talent for ‘conspicuity’ alone. Bernhardt speaks to some central preoccupation of Henry’s; she is an incitement to which in 1879 James could respond only with disapproval. But in the decade following his parents’ deaths, his attitude towards the ostentatious success represented by Bernhardt altered very significantly. In 1876 James had written of Bernhardt in terms that we may read as a defensive encoding of his disavowed fascination under cover of a disdainful stooping to analyse a contemporary phenomenon in mass culture: ‘It would be hard to imagine a more brilliant embodiment of feminine success’;46 fourteen years later, he created Miriam as if to challenge Bernhardt’s supremacy. Miriam’s sponsor and admirer, Peter, embodies Henry’s changed attitude towards the kind of art represented by Bernhardt. Where the creator of Isabel and Catherine had resisted and disapproved, Peter gazes and adores. James’s Bernhardt is an icon of the imagination, an envious projection of Henry’s disavowed appetite for public acclaim, and a forerunner of Miriam Rooth: both figure a kind of theatrical identity that Henry hoped to achieve for himself in the 1880s. James’s relationship with these textual women is, however, very different from the affiliative, imaginatively intimate relationships connecting Henry and, say, the portrait heroines (Chapter 1), the tea-makers and confidantes (Chapter 3) or the interior designers (Chapter 4); James’s Bernhardt and Miriam Rooth alike have


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a kind of glassy two-dimensionality, a weightless illumination, which we may perhaps understand in terms of James’s essentially identificatory stance. Where affiliation implies sympathy, comradeship and imaginative communion, identification is both more hostile and more abject, implying the extinction of one subject by another. Miriam, I suggest, is a wishful replacement for Bernhardt, and – in his theatrical adventures of the 1880s – James seems to position himself as the next in line to substitute for Miriam a greater blaze of public acclaim for himself. Of Bernhardt, James had commented, ‘She is a celebrity because, apparently, she desires with an intensity that has rarely been equalled to be one.’ We can see the same intensity in James’s desire to achieve theatrical success, a desire emblematised by Miriam, James’s tragic muse and wishful projection of himself. During the 1880s, James’s novels became increasingly destabilised as he became possessed by a ballooning sensation of liberation. By the early 1890s, Henry had come to see the theatre as his triumphant future: he has put novels – the past – behind him. He writes to William, of his first play to go into production, ‘I feel as if I had found my real form, which I am capable of carrying far, and for which the pale little art of fiction, as I have practised it, has been, for me, but a limited and restricted substitute.’47 Fiction is a poor second to the real form, drama, because fiction is constrained by limits and restrictions from which the stage, James imagines, is free; and he makes the complementary assumption that the greater exposure of dramatic form should result in greater acclaim for the dramatist. In a major break with the assumptions that underlie the distinctive representational practices of ambivalent realism, James now imagines the degree of mediation in an aesthetic form to be inversely proportionate to its potency. However, while it was only in the wake of his parents’ deaths that James’s interest in the stage became obsessive, it should be noted that his attitude towards the theatre had always involved a pervasive element of professional and personal fantasy. In drama criticism of the 1870s and 1880s, he had repeatedly voiced the misconception that dramatic content need not negotiate with the semantic authority of form. Form, which James frequently identifies with elements of visual realism, is a threat to content, ‘the interpretation of meanings, the representation of human feelings’.48 Objects on stage – mere elements of form – are usurping

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dramatic content. ‘There is evidently a corrosive principle in the large command of machinery and decorations – a germ of perversion and corruption. It gets the upper hand – it becomes the master.’49 The theatre, he predicts, will eventually wither into pure appearance, ‘a landscape without figures. There will be little illustrations of costume stuck about – dressed manikins; but they’ll have nothing to say.’50 James makes the complementary assumption that it is possible to generate dramatic content without reference to the material from which this effect will be drawn. ‘[O]ne goes to see Madame Ristori’, he writes appreciatively, ‘with a serene certainty of observing a dramatic temperament of unsurpassable power, seconded by a language which gives to speech a lovely dignity, independent of its meaning.’51 His praise implies a wishful belief that the dramatic signified, a nonspecific yet ‘unsurpassable power’, can be created without reference to theatrical signifiers, the literal meaning of the spoken words. He writes of Tommaso Salvini, ‘It has often been said that the great actors who flourished in the times preceding our own gave a more striking proof of genius than their successors are called upon to give. They produced their famous effects without aids to illusion . . . they alone were the scene.’52 Henry believes that the dramatist – in direct contrast to the novelist – can create substance (‘effects’) without having to mediate it through form (‘aids to illusion’). In James’s construction of the theatre as his longed-for ‘other’, a space of liberation and unconstrained possibility, we can see both a professional fantasy – the novelist imagining that the dramatist has greater artistic freedom – and a personal fantasy – the Jamesian subject imagining a mode of being free from the authority of limits.53 But whereas in 1876 he analyses this mode as an illusion produced for the theatregoer through the experience of dramatic art – ‘He is in an ideal and exemplary world – a world that has managed to attain all the felicities that the world we live in misses. The people do all the things that we should like to do; they are gifted as we should like to be; they have mastered the accomplishments that we have had to give up’54 – in the wake of his parents’ deaths Henry comes to imagine the theatre as a place of personal transformation. Perhaps Henry, too, can ‘do all the things [he] should like to do’ – be a dramatist rather than a novelist; a public figure rather than a relatively obscure writer; an


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unafraid extrovert rather than a person who carefully guards himself from the world. ‘We live in a day’, James would remark in 1901, ‘in which the term ‘‘success’’ represents, for the composition that has carried off the crown, possibilities of recognition, of circulation, undreamt of by our fathers and unknown to simpler societies.’55 In his attempted conquest of the stage, James tried to achieve for himself Bernhardt’s rejection of tradition and reverence for the past. He had perceived her as a ‘fantastically impertinent victrix poised upon a perfect pyramid of ruins’: the ruins on which James wanted to stand were those of his familial and psychological ‘prejudices and proprieties’. His fantasy links the structure of the psyche with the semiotic structures of representation: we note, in James’s remarks here on ‘success’, the way in which he associates dramatic art with distinguishing oneself from the paternal way. The dream of dramatic success owes nothing – and concedes nothing – to ‘our fathers’. In the liberating euphoria of orphanhood, he feels as invulnerable as Miriam; having questioned and abandoned his commitment to the novel form, James is eager to translate and enhance his sense of power and freedom by experiencing what he imagines will be the exhilarating exposure of the stage. henry’s retreat from the stage [T]hat wholesome old fashion of hissing (Henry James, ‘Notes on the Theatres: New York’ (1875))56

Guy Domville (1895) was the undoing of James’s theatrical aspirations. The first night was a disaster: members of the audience became restive and increasingly vocal; when Henry (who, overwhelmed with anxiety and desire, had spent the evening at another play) stepped out on to the stage to receive the audience’s applause, he found that he was being jeered. Imagined triumph mutated into sickening failure. As he stood on the stage facing his audience, the heady daydream dissolved before the comfortless world of waking reality: ‘I no sooner found myself in the presence of those yelling barbarians . . . and learned what could be the savagery of their disappointment . . . than the dream and the delusion of my having made a successful appeal to the cosy, childlike, naı¨f, domestic British imagination . . . dropped from me in the twinkling of an eye.’57 ‘The thing fills me with horror,’ he

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wrote to William, ‘for the abysmal vulgarity and brutality of the theatre and its regular public . . . I feel as if the simple freedom of mind thus begotten to return to one’s legitimate form would be simply by itself a divine solace for everything.’58 Horrified by the reality of the theatrical experience, Henry opposes the ‘abysmal vulgarity’ of the stage to the ‘legitimate form’ of the novel. Promiscuity, Henry realises, is dangerous rather than exhilarating; legitimacy is safe. A return to authority brings ‘freedom’ of mind. Compliance secures protection.59 gina: hedvig: gina: hedvig: gina:

(thoughtfully, her sewing in her lap). Wasn’t that a funny thing, saying he’d like to be a dog? You know, mother – I think when he said that he meant something else. What could he mean? I don’t know. But I felt as though he meant something different from what he was saying all the time. You think so? Yes, it certainly was strange.60

After the unmediated humiliation of Guy Domville, Henry retreated into fiction with a heightened respect for the interdependence of public form and private content in the construction of realist art. He continued to write plays, but he never again tried to persuade others that they were his ‘real form’; while never fully relinquishing the fantasy of theatrical success, he ceased to confuse it with consensual – we might say, economic – reality. What he took back to his fiction was not, however, limited to an enhanced sense of shame and vulnerability, but included his developing engagement with the dramatic work of Ibsen. When he had first encountered Ibsen, James had reacted with confusion and irritation. He recognised that Ibsen’s plays were compelling, but he resented their resolutely petit-bourgeois appearance (we should note James’s choice, in Guy Domville, of an eighteenthcentury aristocratic costume drama); he was baffled, quite unable to explain their undeniable dramatic effectiveness. ‘Ibsen is much deeper and more various [than Dumas fils],’ he wrote to William Archer in 1891; ‘the Wild Duck is altogether beyond the contemporary neat everlastingly and exclusively adulterous Frenchmen, who are never strange.’61 Ibsen seems to James a tantalising intimation of what his own vision of drama failed to encompass. While James’s plays offered gracious scenery but failed to engage


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their audience, Ibsen’s drama looked suburban but mobilised an irresistible hermeneutic lure. ‘[T]here are moments when . . . the total seems a contradiction of each of the parts,’ James wrote of Hedda Gabler (1890) in 1891,62 recognising a symbolic plenitude that seems greater than can be accounted for by the visible ingredients of the play. Eventually, he came to realise that it is the mysterious contrast between apparent banality and the haunting presence of some meaning beyond the merely literal that makes up ‘the small Ibsen spell’ by which, in ‘his confined but completely constituted world’, ‘the tissue of relations between the parts and the whole is of a closeness so fascinating’.63 James at last comes to cherish the ugly interior . . . which, to be honest, I like for the queer associations it has taught us to respect: the hideous carpet and wall-paper and curtains (one may answer for them), the conspicuous stove, the lonely centre-table, the ‘lamps with green shades’, as in the sumptuous first act of The Wild Duck, the pervasive air of small interests and standards, the sign of limited local life . . . But the oddest thing happens in connection with this effect – the oddest extension of sympathy or relaxation of prejudice . . . What occurs is very analogous to what occurs in our appreciation of the dramatist’s remarkable art, his admirable talent for producing an intensity of interest by means incorruptibly quiet, by that almost demure preservation of the appearance of the usual in which we see him juggle with difficulty and danger and which constitutes, as it were, his only coquetry.64

James’s post-theatrical fiction is charged with a sense of the danger that lies concealed within the ‘demure . . . appearance of the usual’, as symbolic content becomes a terrible secret, a threat rather than a promise. In What Maisie Knew and The Awkward Age James negotiates with his humiliation while examining the semantic and psychological structures of the realist representation to which he has now returned. In the New York edition Preface to The Awkward Age, James compares writing stories to having children. Neither mother nor writer can ‘arrest’ the ‘develop[ment]’ of the ‘vague slip’ into a ‘thick book’. The daughter and the story, ‘projected as small things’, will develop into ‘comparative monsters’, in spite of the efforts of the ‘ideé-me`re’ to limit their growth and independence (AA 7–9). Ambivalent realism is founded on these mutually inextricable ideas: that children are at risk from their parents, and

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survive by contesting the originary authority of their familial past; and that representation is a parallel struggle between the semantic authority of origins and the lure of metaphorical possibility. Following his comparison of daughters and stories, James makes it clear that a text is generated and sustained by the conflictual relationship between form (signifiers) and content (signifieds). The Awkward Age, he remarks, ‘helps us ever so happily to see the grave distinction between substance and form in a really wrought work of art signally break down. I hold it impossible to say, before The Awkward Age, where one of these elements ends and the other begins’ (22). James may or may not be aware of the submerged pun, but it is most apt. It is a grave distinction, a distinction that became unprecedentedly absolute as a result of his parents’ deaths, and which leads back to the grave: Henry described the failure of Guy Domville as the loss of a child.65 In contrast, Nanda Brookenham and The Awkward Age survive because they cannot achieve this fatal freedom; they can dispute the authority of their origins but they cannot escape it, and the paradox of realist representation is that this generative conflict keeps them alive. Both What Maisie Knew and The Awkward Age insistently associate women and signs, suggesting that both (feminine) subjectivity and realist representation are generated by a kind of inevitable contamination. Mitchy refers explicitly to the trope of the girl as virginal writing surface, in order to reject the idea of femininity as inviolate innocence: ‘the young thing who is . . . positively and helplessly modern, and the pious fraud of whose classic identity with a sheet of white paper has been – oh tacitly of course, but none the less practically – dropped’ (AA 229); later, Nanda will draw his attention to what she calls ‘my situation, my exposure’ and to ‘all the results of them that I show. Doesn’t one become a sort of little drain-pipe with everything flowing through?’ (AA 260). These two novels examine the process of violation through which ambivalent realist meaning is created. James wrote of John Gabriel Borkman (1896), in 1897, ‘[Ibsen’s] violent substance imposes, as it were, his insidious form; it is not . . . the form that imposes the substance.’66 In What Maisie Knew the sign – the daughter – develops concealment as a protection against violation. Like Nanda, Maisie is a violable vessel which becomes filled with destructive parental meaning: she is ‘a ready vessel for bitterness, a deep little porcelain cup in which biting acids


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could be mixed’ (WMK 5). Responding to this violation, Maisie protects herself by forming an inner privacy; ‘[s]he had a new feeling, the feeling of danger; on which a new remedy rose to meet it, the idea of an inner self or, in other words, of concealment’ (WMK 15). In this ‘insidious’ form (to borrow James’s term for Ibsen), violation – the imposition of ‘violent substance’ – provokes concealment, so that while the signified is instituted by an initial intrusion, it reactively transforms itself into an inner secret, a private self set up against the hostile outside world. The result is a charismatic and volatile structure whose risks for subject and reader alike are suggested by James’s double-edged term ‘insidious’: Maisie and Nanda (and the novels that stand in relation to these feminine subjects as both creators and analogues) are exemplary victims of the reader’s remorseless interpretative scrutiny, yet they will also effect their unconscious revenge. The reactive, self-protective form of the realist sign is ‘insidious’ in the sense that ultimately it will betray itself, its attempts at concealment only advertising the presence of a violable secret; at the same time, however, the text’s helplessness to withstand the hermeneutic assault results in the unmitigated transmission of the ‘violent substance’ to the reader. Traumatic signifieds lurk within bland signifiers, waiting to bite. What Maisie Knew is a dark comic allegory of the process by which a realist text is read: the novel reflects – with some ambivalence – on its own ontology by making its plot legible only through the reader’s reiterative intrusion into Maisie’s experience and perceptions. Despite our recognition of the damage done to her by her parents’ instrumental attentions, we cannot orient ourselves within the world of James’s novel without bringing our own adult demands to bear on Maisie: we have to read her as if she were a realist text, in order to make out the relationships between signifiers (Maisie’s perceptions) and signifieds (the ugly events of the adult world). The reader becomes involved in a distasteful pursuit of knowledge that is imaged in The Awkward Age as a sexual game of hide and seek: [T]heir hostess . . . was describing the play, as she had called it, of the absentees [Aggie and Petherton]. ‘She has hidden a book, and he’s trying to find it.’ ‘Hide and seek? Why, isn’t it innocent, Mitch!’ Mrs Brook exclaimed. Mitchy, speaking for the first time, faced her with extravagant gloom. ‘Do you really think so?’(AA 303)

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The reader’s determination to possess the secret – to ‘find’ the ‘hidden’ story – works to violate the supposedly innocent girl, the superficially innocent text. As we probe the text of Maisie’s consciousness, there is an awful thrill in making out the narrative’s secret signifieds; and these signifieds are definitively sexual, and thereby definitively contaminatory, in a text in which sexuality is understood as both the cause and the result of adult, and particularly parental, damage. There is no knowing in this novel that is not sexual knowing: to be possessed of knowledge is to be dispossessed by sexuality. Correspondingly, there is no plot outside or beyond the sexual: it is evident that the couplings and decouplings of Maisie’s assorted parents constitute the central epistemological lure for the reader, but the social and semiotic margins of the novel are equally vulnerable, and hospitable, to sexual reading. The underhousemaid, Susan Ash, for example, who is occasionally detailed to take Maisie out for walks, seems to be haunted by the experience, or the prospect, or the fantasy, of being taken for a prostitute.67 This interpretation of the housemaid’s anxiety in the street is, as yet, unavailable to Maisie, who seems merely baffled, but access to the rather sour joke is possible for the reader only through our knowing interrogation of Maisie’s precarious incomprehension. For both What Maisie Knew and The Awkward Age, sexuality is a trauma that always already exists, and that reproduces itself through the epistemological relations of adults and children: Maisie may not yet understand that the streets of London are saturated with sexual fantasy and fear, but she has no other paths to tread, and nobody to accompany her but the adult victims of this victimising world. In this context no act of reading can entirely separate itself from a traumatising sexual hermeneutics. Book Eight of The Awkward Age may be described as the revenge of the realist text. It is the ‘awful night’ (312) of Tishy Grendon’s dinner party, at which it becomes clear that little Aggie – now Mitchy’s wife – is beginning an affair with Petherton. The party is marked, as Mrs Brookenham says, with an ‘uncanny chill’ (302): the horror, after so much innuendo and implication, of so many women revealing themselves, like realist signs making good their threat of symbolic content. When Nanda’s mother challenges Mr Longdon for possession of her daughter, the whole company feels ‘the flicker of fear of what Mrs Brook . . . was at last so strangely


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and differently to show herself’ (292). Nanda, consecrated by James’s fierce affiliation, is good despite her contamination, not because of any preserved innocence; she has, she confirms to her mother, read the ‘French novel in blue paper’ that everyone else is describing as ‘revolting’ and pretending to pretend not to have read. (The content of the novel is a secret so exciting that nobody in this circle wants to be thought ignorant of it.) The purity of women and of signs is revealed as a half-hearted sham, as suddenly the sexual realities that underlie the ‘good talk’ of Mrs Brook’s circle and of this text (the novel is almost entirely dialogue) become unmistakable. At the start of the novel, Mr Longdon had examined two framed photographs in Van’s flat. Little Aggie’s picture is framed ‘with a very wide border of something that looked like crimson fur’; Nanda, in contrast, is surrounded by ‘glazed white wood’ (36–7), yet in apparent contradiction to these omens, Aggie seemed to have been kept ostentatiously pure by her aunt, while Nanda has been neglected and exposed to unsuitable influences. At Tishy’s party, however, it becomes apparent that Aggie’s ‘innocence’ has always been a pose. It is not that Aggie has been corrupted by marriage: she has simply ‘come out’, as Mrs Brookenham puts it, revealed herself. The wide border of crimson fur was not prescient so much as conscious. In What Maisie Knew and The Awkward Age, James redeems his theatrical ambitions, creating dialogue that vibrates with suppressed significance and a sense of impending disaster. The reader bored by Miriam can only be disconcerted by the horrible fascination of these daughters who did not have the good fortune to be orphaned.

chapter 3

Teacups and love letters: Constance Fenimore Woolson and Henry James

‘The other day,’ said Doctor Kirby, ‘happening to turn over the pages of one of these modern novels, I came upon a scene in which the hero and heroine are supposed to be shaken, tortured by the violence of their emotions, stirred to their utmost depths; and yet the author takes that opportunity to leave them there, leave them in the midst of their agonies – and the reader’s as well – to remark that a butterfly flew in through the open window and hovered for a moment over their heads; . . . Why should the whole action of the tale pause, and at such a critical moment, in order that the flight and movement of an insignificant insect should be minutely chronicled?’ ‘But, Doctor, you are attacking there one of our most cherished modern novelties,’ said Winthrop . . . , ‘namely, the new copartnership between Nature and Literature. Nature is now a very literary personage and a butterfly can mean a great deal.’ (Constance Fenimore Woolson, East Angels (1886), EA 150–1)

Henry James wrote to W. D. Howells that he bothered to read only two contemporary English language writers: Howells himself, and Constance Fenimore Woolson.1 This chapter explores the work of Constance Fenimore Woolson and examines the relationships between her writing and James’s, and between Constance and Henry. Woolson is an exceptional writer – sophisticated, reflective and compelling – whose work participates eloquently in the characteristic practices and preoccupations of ambivalent realism. Despite Constance’s unusual importance in Henry’s life, and despite the independent value of her writing, James scholars have paid but the most cursory attention to Woolson’s work; it is now being rediscovered by feminist revisionism.2 The chapter has two complementary aims. The first is to offer a reading of Woolson’s fiction, showing how her realist representational form is structured and sustained by her unresting 96

Teacups and love letters

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ambivalence towards the authority of limits: the semantic limits that constrain the realist sign, and the social and psychological limits that create and constrain femininity. Woolson’s engagement with these limits generates her fiction. A particular concern is with the realist symbol; I compare the related but not identical uses of metaphor in Woolson’s writing and in James’s. Secondly, the chapter traces the textually mediated relationship between Constance and Henry, as adumbrated by her letters to him and by his fictional versions of her. Both protagonists used the covert signifying structures of ambivalent realism as a way of negotiating their emotionally complex relationship. Their relationship was the heterosexual involvement of both participants’ lives. This is an assertion which requires much qualification: another way of putting it would be to say that this relationship expressed and negotiated its participants’ fundamental resistance to the social and psychological authority of heterosexual gender definition. As social conservatives, Constance and Henry wish to avoid acknowledging their ambivalence towards the authority of heterosexual gender identities. Their reluctances are not symmetrical: Henry cannot reconcile himself to heterosexual sexuality; Constance, on the other hand, despite her erotic attraction to men, cannot embrace the social and psychological subordination to masculine authority that marriage would entail. In this system of heterosexual gender definition, gender and sexuality seem to the ambivalent realists to be inextricable: the heterosexual social order seems a merciless binary, dividing women from men at the same time as it forces each sex to address itself to the other for validity. Constance and Henry play a very serious game: tacitly they negotiate an interdependent relationship which guarantees an intelligible heterosexual identity for each. On the surface Constance appears to be the spinster victim of Henry’s bachelor egotism, but their apparent conflict masks an underlying affiliation in a disavowed project of conservative resistance. They play out their mutually intelligible roles of victim and cad – heterosexual identities defined by failure – in order to conceal from themselves their reluctance to embrace either heterosexual success or an overt rejection of heterosexual authority. Their collaborative ‘failures’ function as ideological screens for their refusals. This chapter emphasises ambivalence towards (heterosexual) social authority as the keynote of the relationship between

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Constance and Henry, and as the creative matrix of their characteristic versions of realism. the great lakes and the literary explorer Woolson’s realist representation articulates a potently ambivalent engagement with the authority of form. Form is both a limit and a refuge for Woolson, both a prison and a home. The idea of home, of the domestic, of the domesticated, is a recurrent theme and controlling metaphor in her characteristic representational practices. Woolson is described, dismissively, by Leon Edel as ‘a writer of regional stories’:3 her stories certainly inhabit carefully delineated locations, but far from being limited by this to an aesthetic parochialism, Woolson transforms regional specificity into flexible metaphors, making use of the contrasting landscapes of her fiction to mediate her uncertain loyalty to the domesticating authority of representational form. Constance was born in New Hampshire in 1840; in the wake of the deaths of three of her elder sisters the Woolson family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, within the year. Constance would live in Cleveland until her early thirties. Her father died in 1869, after which she spent a decade with her mother travelling in Florida and other parts of the South. When she was left alone by her mother’s death in 1879, she travelled to Europe with her widowed younger sister, Clara. The sense of inhabiting a landscape – of place as emotional geography – and the contrasts between North and South, are crucial to her work at a stylistic as well as a thematic level. Her work maps out the relationships between home and abroad; domesticity and writing; and, ultimately, the conflicting forces of compliance and resistance that generate ambivalent realism. The domesticated sign complies with the semantic authority of the signifier – with the social authority of form – while smuggling in a covert signified – the resistant inner life of the sign. Woolson’s first collection of stories was Castle Nowhere: Lake-Country Sketches (1875); of particular interest here are ‘Castle Nowhere’, ‘The Lady of Little Fishing’, ‘Misery Landing’ and ‘St Clair Flats’. The male protagonists of these stories are vacationing white romantics who fancy that they are exploring the wilderness. ‘The late summer of 1850, and I was coasting along the south shore of the great lake, hunting, fishing, and camping on the beach, under


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the delusion that in that way I was living ‘‘close to the great heart of nature’’ – whatever that may mean’ (‘Little Fishing’, CN 351). This man – narrator of ‘The Lady’ – is credited with enough irony to laugh at himself; other ‘explorers’ are rather less endearing. The temporary inhabitant of Misery Landing, for example, is not joking when he notes in his diary, ‘Settled at last in my cabin at Misery Landing. Now, indeed, I feel myself free from the frivolity, the hypocrisy, the evil, the cowardice, and the falsity of the world. Now I can live close to nature’ (‘Misery Landing’, 210). These protagonists see themselves as ‘outcasts’. John Jay, the diarist, likes to compare himself to Bret Harte’s heroes: ‘He [Harte] shows us the good in the heart of the outcast. I wonder if I am an outcast’ (212). Relishing their voluntary exile, they delight in the uncharted quality of this northern ‘wilderness unexplored’: it is an ‘unknown region’ which has remained untouched, having ‘always . . . been off the route to anywhere; and mortals, even Indians, prefer as a general rule, when once started, to go somewhere’ (‘Castle Nowhere’, 7). Ordinary people and Indians travel towards a destination; Woolson’s intrepid protagonists shun such teleological purposiveness, and she leaves us in little doubt of her attitude towards them: ‘[T]he white man’s foot, well booted, was on the way, and one fine afternoon came tramping through. ‘‘I wish I was a tree,’’ said to himself this white man, one Jarvis Waring by name’ (9). These men are not merely sanguine about the pathlessness of the wilderness: they positively desire to be lost in it. ‘[F]or days, for weeks, our white man wandered through the forest and wandered at random, for, being an exception, he preferred to go nowhere; he had his compass, but never used it’; ‘‘‘[W]here I am now,’’’ Waring remarks, ‘‘‘I neither know nor want to know’’’ (9, 15). Luxuriating in the idea of being lost, the ‘explorer’s’ ultimate aim is that ‘his determined entangling of himself in the webs of the wilderness’ (10) should lead to a loss of his identity. ‘Once I supposed I was Jarvis Waring, but the wilderness has routed that prejudice’ (14). This wallowing in uncertainty, Woolson makes clear, is a supremely self-indulgent form of egotism. Far from losing his sense of self, Waring ‘glorif[ies] himself in his ignorance’: this is a civilised perversity, a fantasy of dangerous exploration which embraces a blithe unexamined destructiveness: ‘I then selected the best half of the meeting-house for my camp, knocked

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down one of the homes for fuel, and kindled a glorious bonfire in the park. ‘‘‘Now . . . you are illuminated with joy, O Ruin,’’ I remarked . . . ‘‘I promise you to stay until your last residence is well burned’’’ (352). Furthermore, the idea of the wilderness as a natural space outside the bounds of civilisation is called into question by the literary self-consciousness of the explorer. The apostrophising of the landscape is an unfortunately habitual behaviour of the ‘explorer’, who seems to feel that he has an audience: happening upon a deserted camp, ‘‘‘Hail, homes of the past!’’ I said. (I cultivated the habit of thinking aloud when I was living close to the great heart of nature)’ (‘Little Fishing’, 352–3). Frequent allusions to Bret Harte increase our sense that these men are conscious actors on a welltrodden stage. ‘‘‘Strange that it should be so,’’’ John Jay observes, ‘‘‘but everywhere it is the cultivated people only who are taken with Bret’’’ (‘Misery Landing’, 219). Unlike Harte, Woolson surrounds her wildernesses with narrative and temporal frames that distance them from the reader: her stories ironise the creation and recreation of masculine myth, to suggest that the wilderness is a civilised myth; a literary topos; a masculine fantasy. A central feature of this fantasy is the desire to be lost, a desire that is cast in ‘St Clair Flats’ as a kind of reading behaviour: the two male protagonists are figured as mystified readers. Roxana, the long-suffering wife of a religious visionary who has brought her away from her home to live in the wet wilderness, equips her two male visitors with a ‘clew of twine’ to help them find their way back after a day’s fishing; as she remarks, ‘‘‘I can read the Flats like a book, but they’re very blinding to most people; and you might keep going round in a circle’’’ (‘St Clair Flats’, 329). Roxana’s husband has developed a mystical doctrine that has marooned the couple in the wilderness; the male travellers are unable to ‘read’ the flats, and would be lost without Roxana’s ‘clew’; and, as the narrator comments, ‘[t]he whole race of philosophers . . . are all the time going round in a circle’ (338). Male pleasure in being lost expresses itself in philosophy, literature and theology, texts which deliberately bewilder and mystify, and whose readers depend on Roxana’s competent domestic support – which includes the ability to read pragmatically. But the mystified readers look condescendingly on her competence; after the narrator has rhapsodised over Roxana’s cooking, he and his friend sit


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with her by her fire: ‘‘‘I am out of pork,’’ remarked Roxana, casually; . . . Yes; there was no doubt about it. Roxana’s mind was sadly commonplace’ (340). Woolson’s comedy highlights the disavowed dependence of ‘the mystical words of the shadowy Samuel’ (319) and his self-indulgent male compeers on the prosaic hermeneutics of the ‘commonplace’ Roxana. But what is the appeal to these men of a hermeneutics of bewilderment? The explorer-reader experiences helplessness as something pleasurable because he exercises an underlying control over the scenario: as these stories develop, the Great Heart of Nature – at first so enigmatic – is revealed to be at the mercy of its explorers. The St Clair Flats exemplify this. Wet, vast and confusing, ‘a beautiful winding waste of green’, an ‘everlasting marsh’, it ‘captivates’ its male visitors, who arrange to be ‘left on the watery waste without a guide’ (310, 315). But there is some confusion over whether this marsh is a boundary, a border space, an uncharted periphery – or a bounded place, fenced in or protected from the outside. As Roxana’s husband remarks, ‘‘‘America is the great escaping-place; here will the change begin’’’ (he is prophesying an apocalypse). ‘‘‘As it is written, ‘Those who escape to my utmost borders’’’’ (337). Raymond, the narrator’s travelling companion, also sees it as essentially peripheral: ‘‘‘How boundless it looks!’’’ But it is also described in terms that suggest enclosure, and this is an essential part of its appeal: ‘we . . . were captivated . . . , and eager to penetrate far within its green fastnesses’ (310). Once conceptualised as enclosed, the captivating marsh becomes a penetrable secret for its explorers, figuring the vulnerability of the (feminine) realist sign in relation to its (masculine) readers. At the end of the story, when the travellers are surveying the wilderness in retrospect, it seems that the Flats were indeed both bounded and violable: ‘Already commerce has invaded its borders; a few more years and its loveliness will be but a legend of the past . . . Waiting Samuel was the prophet of the waste; he has gone, and the barriers are broken down’ (350). Very far from its original construction as a space outside borders, the Flats now appear as a way of thinking about demarcation and violation; at the heart of the literary wilderness, Woolson is identifying a twin fantasy of penetration and enclosure. Beyond the wallowing in uncertainty, the seeking out of confusion, the self-indulgent pleasurable fears of the loss of identity, lies a desire to write around and into the

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virgin space; to join Harte in the heroic literary endeavour. The most explicit image of this is offered by the narrator of ‘St Clair Flats’, who describes Roxana’s shabby appearance: ‘[T]here was no collar around her yellow throat. O magic rim of white, great is thy power! With thee, man is civilized; without thee, he becomes at once a savage’ (340). Civilisation itself is defined as the setting of boundaries – white boundaries – around a (female) nature, a nature which exists in the same relation of subordination to the explorer (despite his disingenuous claims of helplessness) as is Roxana to her egocentric husband: although Roxana’s domestic support makes life possible in the otherwise bleak cottage, she has to follow her husband whenever he announces a further migration away from her own family and friends. Thus the Great Lakes stories ironise the process of boundarysetting. The wilderness is revealed as a literary topos, a textually sustained place of masculine fantasy, in which the explorer-reader can indulge himself in the experience of being ‘lost’, while the unexplored land exists like a reservation, a ‘nature’ protected and enclosed for the pleasure of the male explorer. In these stories the initial threat of the wilderness modulates into the touching appeal of a violable protectorate. Woolson emphatically locates gender in the structures of representation: demarcation constructs, exploits and threatens the feminine subject. Woolson’s sympathies lie with the subjects of demarcation – feminine victims of the authority of form. the reconstruction south and the obliteration of order Woolson’s second collection of stories, Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches (1880), is set in the South, in the Reconstruction period, and with this geographical shift comes a striking change of perspective. The land of the North is circumscribed and invaded by powerful literary myths of the wilderness, to such an extent that the very existence of the land independently of text and fantasy is called into question: this subordination to masculine literary demarcation is the source of the northern land’s pathos – a pathos which is itself ironised for the reader by its very attractiveness to the explorer. But the links between writing – demarcation – and the South are very different.


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‘In the Cotton Country’ describes the narrator’s walk across the southern countryside, a walk which culminates in a meeting with an impoverished white woman whose life has been devastated by the war. ‘A solitary woman of the waste’, she lives in a crumbling antebellum mansion, a house that is no longer clearly marked out as an enclosure of civilisation – ‘Take away the fence from a house, and you take away its respectability; it becomes at once an outlaw’ (RK 181–2). The Cotton Country is a landscape that has lost its respectability, its demarcations; ‘at last the fences ceased, and only old half-filled ditches marked the boundary-lines . . . I could trace the old line of the cart-road and cross-tracks; but the soil was spongy and disintegrated’ (179–80). The war’s effect on this land has been to erase its order, its civilised and civilising fences; the pathos of the Reconstruction South, in sharp distinction to that of the unexplored North, lies in the disintegration of boundaries. Woolson’s concern with the freed slaves of the South is a part of her protest against the obliteration of distinctions. Her freedmen are pathetic, bewildered victims of abolition, cowed features of a landscape that has been robbed of its legitimacy: ‘the freedmen hardly ever live up on the even ground in the broad sunshine as though they had a right there, but down in the hollows or out in the fringes of wood’ (RK 181). The ‘Negroes’ who work for the protagonists of Woolson’s 1886 novel East Angels are like children orphaned by the new dispensation, though they refuse to acknowledge that they no longer ‘belong’ to ‘their’ household. And the ‘Negro’ community of ‘King David’ is so unqualified to act on its new freedom that it rejects the old order, the northern Presbyterian priest, in favour of a black Baptist preacher. The articulation of social order is the duty of white authority. In ‘Rodman the Keeper’ the keeper of a national cemetery of Republican soldiers in the South – a northern veteran – nurses a dying southerner, to the discomfort of the man’s sister. After her brother’s death, she brings herself to visit the Republican cemetery, and Rodman invites her to sign the visitors’ register: ‘‘‘The Government had it prepared for the throngs who would visit these graves; but with the exception of the blacks, who can not write, no one has come, and the register is empty’’’ (RK 39). The sister refuses: ‘‘‘Shall I, Bettina Ward, set my name down in black and white?’’’ (40). To confer the legitimation of writing – an ordering of black and white – upon the Republican cemetery

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would be treacherous for a southern woman whose family has been obliterated by the war. A recurrent figure within Woolson’s fiction is the northerner who, like the Presbyterian priest of ‘King David’, attempts with saintly but futile patience to educate the illiterate nonwhites: ‘Negroes’, ‘Majorcans’ (Hispanics) and ‘Indians’. ‘Miss Elisabetha’ is the story of a heroic New England spinster whose attempts to confer a northern education on a Hispanic boy are thwarted by his marriage to an indolent Hispanic girl; a related character is Miss Lois in Anne (1882), who feels a responsibility to employ only ‘Indians’: The element of real heroism, however, came into Miss Lois’s life in her persistent effort to employ Indian servants . . . A succession of Chippewa squaws broke, stole, and skirmished their way through her kitchen with various degrees of success . . . She always began to teach them the alphabet within three days after their arrival, and the spectacle of a tearful, freshly caught Indian girl . . . standing confronted by a large alphabet on the well-scoured table, and Miss Lois by her side with a pointer, was frequent . . . Not one of them had ever gone through the letters.4

The northern widow of the orange groves of East Angels has to supervise her Hispanic and black workforce continually, because they repeatedly forget her instructions for improvements. ‘Indians’, ‘Majorians’ and ‘Negroes’ are taught in vain; and the land equated with them is somehow resistant or indifferent to boundaries, too ‘spongy and disintegrated’ to be reliably imprinted with civilising demarcations: ‘I knew the long trestles over the swamps and dark canebrakes that stretched out for miles on each side of the actual stream – trestles over which the trains passed cautiously every day, the Northern passengers looking nervously down at the quaking, spongy surface below’ (RK 180). This passage from ‘In the Cotton Country’ codifies Woolson’s series of oppositions based on the contrast between the victorious North and the conquered South. The northern passengers travel on the trestles above the southern swamps, looking down at the ‘quaking, spongy surface below’, a landscape lacking boundaries between water and solid ground, the ‘swamps and dark canebrakes’ muddying the distinction between the ‘actual stream’ and the land. The relationship of the North to the South is that of solidity to sponginess, order to disintegration, above to below, boundaries to the unbounded – writing to obliteration. The South is the swampy


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substratum of the North, an unreliable foundation that cannot be conclusively subdued. In Woolson’s South women are as likely as men to be proponents of civilisation as a process of boundary-setting. The relationship between Woolson’s northern and southern stories expresses an acute uncertainty in Woolson’s attitude towards social form: do women have more to lose from order or from its breakdown? In her northern fictions she mocks the masculine colonisation of the feminine wilderness; in the southern stories she laments the feminine victims of a wrecked social order. Woolson’s psycho-geography of the United States maps a generative ambivalence towards women’s best interests in relation to social order and the authority of form. ‘i have a vision of blooming swamps’ 5 The imaginative heart of Woolson’s South is the swamp. The most dangerous swamp in her fiction gives its name to ‘The South Devil’, the story of two northern brothers – Carl and his stepbrother Mark – who have travelled to the South for Carl’s health. Mark sets to work on the land, while his brother contemplates the swamp, the ‘South Devil’: ‘‘‘The swamp haunts me,’’’ he explains. One day Carl is lured deep into the swamp and cannot find his way out; Mark sets out to rescue him, but it is difficult because the swamp has erased his tracks: ‘He was now obliged to search closely for the footprints . . . The soil did not hold the impressions well; it was not mud or mire, but wet, spongy, fibrous, black earth’ (RK 147). Mark finds his brother, but the light is failing and they have to spend the night in the swamp. While Carl sleeps, Mark stands guard over the square of light marked out by his torches; he saves the few bullets in his revolver for the snakes that cross into the light, and the brothers find their way home unscathed the following day. Carl does not realise the danger from which his brother protected him, and he is still seduced by the South Devil; he speaks longingly of ‘the Spirit of the Swamp – a beautiful woman, falsely called a devil by cowards, dark, languorous, mystical, sleeping among the vines I saw up there, with the great red blossoms dropping around her.’

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‘And the great mottled snakes coiling over her?’ ‘I didn’t see any snakes.’ (RK 154).

The swamp is a place of danger, of sensuality, of feminine allure. The South Devil is a horrifying place – but other swamps in Woolson’s texts have a rather more ambivalent significance. A key episode in East Angels, for example, takes place in another vivid swamp. East Angels tells the story of a group of friends and families who live in and around the Spanish mansion in the Florida town of the book’s title. At the centre of the group are two women: Garda Thorne, who has inherited none of her northern mother’s characteristics and is a ‘true daughter of the Dueros’, the aristocratic Spaniards of her father’s family; and Margaret Harold, a northerner whose exalted conscience and self-discipline prevent her from divorcing her adulterous husband, which would free her to marry the man whom she loves, her husband’s honourable cousin, Evert Winthrop. The tension between Margaret and Winthrop (each believes that they are despised by the beloved other) climaxes one night when the brutish husband seems to have lost his way on a trip through the swamp. Margaret and Winthrop set off together in a canoe to find him, a fortuitous combination of circumstances making this unavoidable. As Margaret navigates and Winthrop paddles through the vast swamp, which is filled with strange flowers and trees so thick that the sky is not visible from inside, Winthrop declares his love for her, and she, though too scrupulous to reciprocate, is overwhelmed by the scent of flowers, and faints. On her husband’s instructions, Margaret has taken to wearing fine clothes and jewels, and during the journey through the swamp Winthrop compliments her on them: ‘They bring you out, you know, in spite of yourself . . . [T]hey show what you might be, if you would ever – let yourself go.’ ‘Let myself go? You use strange expressions.’ ‘A man isn’t responsible for what he says in here.’ (EA, 469–70)

The swamp is a place where self-control is overwhelmed, where passion can be avowed, where civilised people ‘let themselves go’ (in that charged phrase of many of James’s characters). In the swamp Winthrop is no longer responsible for maintaining the


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boundary between friendship and desire; his words can express meaning openly, they need not conceal and dissemble. That this episode is crucial to the narrative highlights the extent to which Woolson depends on the contrast between self-control, and self-expression or self-indulgence, in the plots of her fictions. Her heroines frequently find themselves paired in this way. Margaret – fair, slim, self-disciplined, martyred – and Garda – dark, rosy, voluptuous, sensual – are only one example of this feminine antithesis. Miss Elisabetha competes with a glamorous opera singer and a pretty Hispanic girl for her ward’s loyalty (‘Miss Elisabetha’); the fair, conscientious Anne is contrasted with her French/‘Indian’ half-sister, the selfish Tita (Anne); Dorothy’s effortless unreflective charm captivates the man desired in vain by other, shyer, women (‘Dorothy’); and the dignified wife finds herself in competition for her husband’s attention with a beautiful younger woman (‘In Venice’). This aspect of Woolson’s fiction resonates with much of James’s imagination of female characters, and there are some close family resemblances, too, between the two writers’ renunciatory heroines. Fleda Vetch in The Spoils of Poynton (1897), for example, refuses to allow herself to take the sexual happiness that is offered her by the man she desires because of a perverse ‘moral’ scrupulousness very similar to that which prevents Margaret from accepting Winthrop. As Winthrop says: ‘Women are better than men; in some things they are stronger. But that’s because they are sustained – the ones of your nature at least – by their terrible love of self-sacrifice; I absolutely believe there are women who like to be tortured!’ ‘Yes – sometimes we like it,’ answered the woman he spoke to, a beautiful, mysterious, exalted expression showing itself for a moment in her eyes. (EA 588)

This is what James is thinking of when he writes in his Partial Portraits essay ‘Miss Woolson’: She is fond of irretrievable personal failures, of people who have had to give up even the memory of happiness, who love and suffer in silence, and minister in secret to the happiness of those who look over their heads. She is interested in general in secret histories, in the ‘inner life’ of the weak, the superfluous, the disappointed, the bereaved, the unmarried. She believes in personal renunciation, in its frequency as well as its beauty.6

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However, while Woolson’s sympathy is often with the selfcontrolled or disappointed woman, this figure can become more grotesque than heroic, and Woolson sometimes chooses to ennoble the beautiful rival or counterpart. ‘Dorothy’ (Woolson’s most popular short story, which was read to Alice James on her deathbed) features an apparently frivolous girl who easily captures the eligible bachelor, and seems unmoved by his premature death. She spends a season flirting with other men, but then falls ill and wastes away: her flirting, it is revealed, was a desperate attempt to escape from her inconsolable grief. Thus redeemed, she dies. Again, the moral identities of martyr and flirt are disturbed in ‘In Venice’. Mrs Lenox is devoted to her young nephew, which leads to her staying with him in Venice while her husband indulges the beautiful Claudia’s desire for an expedition into the mountains. While the party is away, the nephew unexpectedly dies, and Mrs Lenox cannot contact her husband in time for him to attend the funeral. When the party returns, Mrs Lenox gently explains to Claudia the sanctity of marriage, and Claudia, presumably guiltstricken at what appears to be her own symbolic infanticide, immediately withdraws, and the Lenox marriage is released from the threat of her presence. But the story seems unconvinced by its own moral: before the nephew’s death, Mrs Lenox’s devotion and self-abnegation seem almost to be perverse invitations to Claudia’s interest in Mr Lenox; and the child’s death is distastefully close to a triumph for the vindicated wife. In a plot outline in her notebooks, Woolson locates the source of this queasy moral vindication in jealousy. Imagining the social opprobrium that might be experienced by a divorceé, Woolson confronts a disapproving married man with the divorceé’s loyal sister, who asks him, ‘What does a woman like your wife know of the temptations, the excitements and pleasures of the existence of a beautiful being like my sister? . . . It is always the plain-faced, the unsought, who are so fiercely virtuous. A beautiful woman is never [so] censorious . . . ; she knows the situation’ (CFW 134–5). The story which focuses most sharply on the hostility that is generated between sexually successful and unsuccessful women is ‘Felipa’. Catherine, the spinster narrator, an artist, tells the story of a summer spent with her beautiful languorous friend Christine, and Edward, who is courting Christine. They are on holiday in the South, and a poor uneducated Hispanic girl, Felipa, attaches


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herself to the household. Felipa ignores Catherine but adores Christine and Edward, and is heartbroken when the holiday ends and Christine and Edward, now engaged, are to return north. Felipa first tries to poison herself with Catherine’s paints, and then stabs Edward with Catherine’s ornamental dagger. The tension between feminine sensuality and self-control here becomes murderous, with Felipa acting as unconscious agent of Catherine’s jealousy. That this is jealousy points to something very important in the hostility between women that drives the plots of these stories: Catherine’s agent, Felipa, adored both Christine and Edward as a couple – she repeatedly refuses to recognise a distinction between the two individuals – but when her access to them is threatened by their engagement (and consequent return to life in the North), it is not the beautiful woman whom she attacks, but the eligible suitor: ‘It was two loves, and the stronger thrust the knife’ (RK 220). Although this is an enigmatic analysis, it seems to suggest that Felipa’s strongest need is to retain Christine; that Catherine’s repressed hostility towards the ‘haters’ – as she calls the lovers – is motivated most deeply by a desire not for Edward but for Christine. This is to do with relationships between women – or, rather, between different aspects of women’s selves: intra- not interpsychic. The eligible man is frequently only a cover for the conflict between different forms of femininity that split off into desiring identification, disavowal and jealousy. Woolson produces dozens of variants on this theme because she cannot decide where her loyalties lie; each new elaboration of the same basic plot is a new judgement on the female protagonists who come to represent seemingly incompatible modes of female behaviour. It is not that ‘Felipa’ is a story (primarily) concerned with repressed lesbian desire: rather, it is a story about feminine self-splitting, selfdisavowal; once sexual success has been disowned, it becomes an object of both desire and jealousy for the spinster. Woolson’s position in relation to this conflict seems to be that of unresting – because deeply implicated – arbitrator. At bottom, this is not so much a conflict between self-control and sensuality as between the competing social and psychological claims of sexual success and ‘failure’, women’s resistance to the authority of heterosexual gender norms. Woolson’s authorial vacillations express and negotiate Constance’s restless ambivalence towards the attractive, mocking and threatening ideal of

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feminine sexual success. The spinsters and other self-denying women in Woolson’s work represent the choice that the independent, unmarried Constance makes, from day to day; but it is not a choice that she embraces, it is difficult and never definitive. The spinsters embody Constance’s sense that feminine social validity depends on sexuality; Woolson’s attitude towards their sexual ‘failure’ registers Constance’s ambivalent experience of spinsterhood as at once a handicap and an escape, a failure and a choice. Thus at times Woolson suggests that self-denial, disappointment and failure are in part chosen – as Constance chooses to sabotage her own possibilities of sexual success. ‘Renunciation’ is a slippery idea in Woolson’s work; without warning it can modulate from righteousness to self-righteousness. Armies of noble women (often heroic mothers) prostrate themselves in silent self-sacrifice across her pages, but their creator is only erratically loyal to their northern rectitude; in a moment of engaging cynicism, she writes: Do not be so sure that you are self-sacrificing and unselfish because you give all your spare money to your church and to missionary societies. And do not be so sure that Mrs. – is utterly selfish and unprincipled (in comparison with yourself) because she spends more of hers than perhaps she ought in books and pictures for her house, or in music. She is simply spending money to gratify her strongest taste, and you are doing exactly the same . . . Self-denial is giving up what one really likes. Search for the secret taste of each person, and see if that is indulged! . . . When self-denial is the question, let each look within. (CFW 109–10)

The contrast between demarcation and a resistance to boundaries, civilisation and its swampy substratum, feminine self-denial and self-assertion, is thus an area of intense ambivalence, of productive tension and instability in Woolson’s texts. This is not only a question of thematics: it is also central to her writing practice. The tension between North and South expresses Constance’s ambivalence towards the authority of form – and it is this ambivalence that generates realist representation. For Constance, this is always a question of gender expectations, as we can see in her relationship with her sister Clara. This is a relationship that makes clear the parallel imaginative and psychological links between North and South, sexual success and ‘failure’, and the conception of writing as a form of resistance to social order.


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constance and clara: sisterhood and conflict Clara Woolson was born in 1841, eighteen months after her sister Constance. She married George Benedict in 1868. By the time that Constance found herself alone after her mother’s death in 1879, Clara had been widowed. With Clara’s daughter Clare (born 1872), the two sisters travelled together to Europe; at first they made their temporary homes together, before separating in the early 1880s. From this time until Constance’s death in 1894, the sisters shared occasional holidays but they never again lived together. The sisters’ letters adumbrate a relationship of controlled sisterly irritation expressed in conflicting imaginative geographies. Clara, it seems, was not reluctant to assert her primacy as the widow and the mother of the little party; she expected her wishes to take precedence over those of her unmarried, older sister. Her preference was for northern Europe: extended stays were duly made in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Clara liked to take rooms in a smart street in Vienna or Berlin, establish social relations with desirable Americans, appoint music and language tutors for Clare, and spend every evening at the opera. Constance longed for Italy; she wanted to install her desk in a crumbling palazzo and avoid all but literary acquaintances, freeing her days for reading, writing, long walks through the countryside and longer sessions of sunwarmed reverie, with a teapot in the foreground and the Valley of the Arno beyond. These were not compatible visions of Europe, and Clara’s tended to prevail, until Constance began to travel and live alone. ‘I am enraged’, she wrote to her literary correspondent John Hay from Florence, ‘to think of the summers I have wasted in that dreary Switzerland, with the ice-mountains above, & Germans & cuckoo clocks below.’7 In 1887, when Clara and Clare came to Bellosguardo, in the hills above Florence, to visit the Villa Brichieri, Constance felt that her guests were not content with their southern holiday: they liked the villa and approved of the cook, but Constance ‘fear[ed] the rest passes unseen; they dream of Vienna & the opera; & the blue mountains and soft blue skies here cannot compensate them for the absence of Wagner’.8 The sisters’ muted opposition is most expressively tangible in their differing responses to Egypt, to which they travelled – with great intrepidity – in 1889–90. ‘[G]reatly fascinated with things

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oriental’,9 and determined to protect the warm enchanting land from her sister’s querulous criticisms, Constance writes to her nephew: I don’t know what Clara has been writing to Cleveland on the subject of ‘Cairo’. But I, at least, am fascinated & charmed. Clara has not been well here . . . The truth is that she is never really well in a Southern climate, & I think this last experience will cause her to give up trying it again. She was never well in Florida; & it has been the same here in Italy; & now Egypt. This acts upon her spirits, & she finds Cairo perfectly detestable, & has but one wish: namely – to get away. So she is going to hurry it a little, and get back to Vienna earlier than she had intended when we first came . . . I am very well, & the weather is much warmer, & I am fascinated with Cairo. As this is the case, and as southern climates agree with me, I wish much to stay on here through March . . . When I suggested this to Clara, she was dumb with surprise that I should wish to stay. ‘If you & Clare should go north & leave me alone here,’ she said, ‘I should become a howling dervish in a day!’10

More is at play here than a simple difference over the weather. As a tension between North and South, the sisters’ geographical disagreement revisits the ambivalence of Woolson’s attitude towards the authority of social order; now the North and the South of Europe, rather than of the United States, figure oppositional psychological climates. Clara’s preference for northern Europe is based on her enjoyment of order, typified by the regimented world of the spa – ‘you know how I love the German bath life, of rules, early hours, and all the rest of it,’ she wrote to her niece from Vienna in 1892. In 1905 Clara would be delighted to find the authority of the Kaiser manifest in the streets of Berlin. ‘I like the order of the city,’ she would write; ‘I like all the Kaiser’s nice rules.’11 As the sisters embody for each other conflicting attitudes towards social authority, their mutual vexation naturally takes shape around Constance’s writing. She remarks to Henry, ‘As you may imagine, my sister has not enjoyed my being shut up in my own rooms, invisible until evening . . . She greatly detests all my MSS, and has already presented me with a new dress and roundhat, so that I shall not look too ‘‘literary’’.’12 Constance’s writing disputes the social order of her Dresden environment, distancing her from the demands of feminine society.13 In this light Clara’s rejection of Cairo suggests a covert protest against the psychological climate that enables her sister’s unconventional commitment


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to literature; certainly Constance experienced Egypt as a provocation to her best writing. She told her correspondent William Baldwin, ‘No, I don’t think my Cairo articles were half so good as they should have been. I had not space enough to put in anything but facts. And in the East, facts are only half.’14 In contrast to the rule-governed world of the North, the Orient disputes the semantic authority of facts, enticing and deserving the most potently resistant realist art. In ambivalent realism the sign plays out its internal tension between facts and fiction, literal meaning and metaphor, authority and resistance. James and Woolson codify this generative ambivalence towards social and semantic authority with a small object that demurely inhabits both writers’ houses of fiction: the teacup. henry james and tea Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea. There are circumstances in which, whether you partake of the tea or not – some people of course never do – the situation is in itself delightful. Those that I have in mind in beginning to unfold this simple history offered an admirable setting to an innocent pastime. (Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881), PL 5)

This is how James begins The Portrait of a Lady, the earlier of his two great tea-drinking novels (the other is The Awkward Age (1899; 1908)). Those readers who chide James for amiable prevarication might assume that this leisurely opening constitutes an expansive self-indulgent piece of set decoration, bathed in a sunlit inconsequentiality. But with these initiating sentences, James introduces one of the novel’s major symbols and one of its central themes: the ‘ceremony’ of tea. Is it really ‘an innocent pastime’, and what does it matter ‘whether you partake of the tea or not’? That this is a ritualised social occasion becomes clear as we are alerted to the unusual variants on the normal pattern. The participants ‘were not of the sex which is supposed to furnish the regular votaries of the ceremony’, and one of them – the ‘old man’ – holds ‘an unusually large cup, of a different pattern from the rest of the set and painted in brilliant colours’ (5). The anomaly of the allmale tea ceremony survives only until Isabel Archer arrives on the

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lawn to meet her uncle. ‘‘‘You must sit down – you must have some tea,’’’ he says to her; but Isabel refuses. At a later and equally momentous arrival, she is again offered tea – by Gilbert Osmond (‘‘‘Won’t you have some tea? – you must be very tired’’’ (255)) – and again she refuses both the tea and the implicit sympathy. Why should Isabel be so wary of the tea ceremony if it is indeed ‘agreeable’, ‘delightful’ and ‘innocent’? Certainly her docile alter ego has nothing but enthusiasm for the ceremony. Pansy begs Madame Merle to allow her to make the tea on Isabel’s first visit to Osmond’s house; Madame Merle approves. ‘‘‘It seems to me it would please your father to see a careful little daughter making his tea. It’s the proper duty of the daughter of the house – when she grows up’’’ (270). Three years later, ‘as fond as ever of making tea’ (368), Pansy is pursued by two men who hope to transfer her tea-making skills to their own drawing rooms. Lord Warburton sees her for the first time as she is stationed by the tea table at her new stepmother’s reception; charmed, he begins to refer to her as ‘the little maid’ (385). His more serious rival is an established collector of ‘Spanish lace and . . . Dresden teacups’; he ‘had devoted [his time] to finding a flaw in Pansy Osmond’s composition. She was admirably finished; she had had the last touch; she was really a consummate piece’ (357). Ned Rosier therefore approaches Osmond to find out whether he has ‘a piece’ that he wants ‘to match’; Osmond disdains this offer because Rosier is not a millionaire – he characterises him by ‘his eternal majolica’ – and Pansy’s mother is also sure that Rosier’s income would provide an inadequate setting for her daughter. When Rosier tells Madame Merle that they would manage ‘famously’, she replies, ‘It wouldn’t be famous; you’d have to make use of the teacups, and they’d get broken’ (361). Pansy herself would be happy to marry Rosier, making explicit what is usually only suggested by the female offer of tea: ‘She raised the lid of the teapot, gazing into this vessel for a moment; then she dropped six words into its aromatic depths. ‘‘I love you just as much’’’ (387). The tea ceremony has to do with feminine service: a daughter advertises herself as available for domestic appropriation. The problem, though, is that through this act of subtle self-advertisement, the Jamesian tea-maker risks being taken for an object in the


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ceremony – as with the Dresden Pansy, she becomes a container, a vessel: a teacup. The integrity of the feminine subject is jeopardised by her implication in the manipulable object-world: as Madame Merle remarks, teacups that are ‘used’ ‘get broken’. There are a lot of used and broken teacups in this novel. Madame Merle herself, for example. Ralph Touhett ‘tasted her in sips, he let her stand’ (252); she has been sampled and used, particularly by Osmond – whom she accuses of having ‘dried up [her] tears’ – and she has become ‘flawed’. ‘[I]f I must tell you the truth,’ she remarks disingenuously to Isabel, ‘I’ve been shockingly chipped and cracked. I do very well for service yet, because I’ve been cleverly mended; and I try to remain in the cupboard . . . But when I’ve to come out and into a strong light – then, my dear, I’m a horror!’ (192–3) As Isabel will, at last, discover, Serena Merle will not survive close scrutiny. This is something of which Osmond, that pitiless connoisseur, is quite aware, and the image finds its most explicit articulation in the famous passage (quoted in my Introduction) in which Osmond brushes off Madame Merle’s warnings about his behaviour towards Isabel: He got up as he spoke and walked to the chimney, where he stood a moment bending his eye, as if he had seen them for the first time, on the delicate specimens of rare porcelain with which it was covered. He took up a small cup and held it in his hand; then, still holding it and leaning his arm on the mantel, he pursued: ‘You always see too much in everything.’ . . . Madame Merle kept her eye on her cup . . . ‘I’ve seen better what you have been to your wife than I ever saw what you were for me. Please be very careful of that precious object.’ ‘It already has a wee bit of a tiny crack,’ said Osmond dryly as he put it down . . . After he had left her she went, the first thing, and lifted from the mantelshelf the attenuated coffee-cup in which he had mentioned the existence of a crack; but she looked at it rather abstractedly. ‘Have I been so vile all for nothing?’ she vaguely wailed. (524–5)

George Eliot described women as ‘delicate vessels’; in his symptomatic misquotation, James renames them ‘frail vessels’ (xii), fragile containers of significance whose vulnerability heightens their meaningfulness. In this novel the crack never finally shatters the teacup, and the frail vessels remain women on the verge of breakdown. The Countess Gemini is one of these compellingly flawed female signs; when she has told Isabel the identity of Pansy’s mother, Isabel judges that ‘the very frailty of the vessel in

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which [this revelation] had been offered her only gave [it] an intrinsic price’ (552). And Isabel herself, despite her wariness of the tea ceremony, consents to marry a man whose familiarity with Goethe will be no comfort to the wife who finds herself expected to be a vessel empty of personal meaning: ‘His egotism had never taken the crude form of desiring a dull wife; this lady’s intelligence was to be a silver plate, not an earthen one – a plate that he might heap up with ripe fruits, to which it would give a decorative value, so that talk might become for him a sort of served dessert’ (350). What James does with the teacup and the tea ceremony is to introduce them at the beginning of the novel as domestic phenomena which, he playfully suggests, could be seen as symbolic – this is the source of gentle humour in the opening paragraph – and then he slowly piles more and more significance into these fragile vessels until, like their human counterparts, they begin to crack and chip beneath the authorial pressure. During the course of the narrative, the teacups metamorphose from familiar objects humorously cast as symbols, to symbols so overflowing with significance that it is now their materiality, the idea of them as domestic objects, that has become fanciful. James reorients the signifier. At first the signifier points to the referent, its extratextual twin; this is a way of insisting on the semantic authority of the literal, the actual, the status quo. Gradually he redirects the signifier, so that it comes to point to the signified, leaving behind its claims of referentiality, which are superseded by the symbolic force of the signified. It is a kind of ontological sublimation within the world of the text, a dissolution of notional physical substance – of referent – in favour of the superior sphere of metaphor, of idea – of signified. The referent can never be wholly expelled or sublimated, however; there is a kind of uncanny return in the Jamesian sign, a momentary but frequent recurrence of referentiality. In James’s later writing the metaphorisation of the object becomes more sustained, so that, for example, the Golden Bowl very rarely insists on its material reality. As the idealisation of the symbol intensifies, so the increasingly rare return of referentiality becomes more unnerving. The loudest noise in The Golden Bowl (1904) is the moment when Fanny drops the Bowl onto the floor and it reasserts its materiality by shattering.


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constance’s tea ceremony Semiotically, the ‘concrete detail’ is constituted by the direct collusion of a referent and a signifier; the signified is expelled from the sign . . . This is what might be called the referential illusion. The truth behind this illusion is this: eliminated from the realist utterance as a signified of denotation, the ‘real’ slips back in as a signified of connotation; for at the very moment when these details are supposed to denote reality directly, all that they do, tacitly, is signify it. (Roland Barthes, ‘The Reality Effect’)15

James’s use of symbols is different from Woolson’s. James’s great symbolic novels share a bold embrace of the relationship between signifier and signified as the representational matrix of realism. Woolson’s engagement with the psychology and the aesthetics of the realist sign is no less foundational; as we have seen, her restless, productive ambivalence towards the authority of forms is the sustaining impulse of her writing. But Woolson’s approach to the generative problematic of ambivalent realism is characterised by a circumspection as cautious as it is potent. Woolson’s teacups are, individually, definitively banal; it is only when they recur that their significance – that they have any significance – begins to appear. Only after reading dozens of Woolson’s letters, to James and to other friends, does one begin to notice the prominence of the tea ceremony so modestly laid out for her correspondents: I took a small ‘apartment’ high up in an old Roman house, and set up my ‘household gods’ . . . I must not forget a little kettle for five o’clock tea, of which (both tea & kettle), I have become very fond. (CFW to E. C. Stedman, Columbia) Such a joy as I take in my own table & chairs, tea-cups & cushions, I do’nt [sic] believe you can imagine. (Ibid.) Tell Flora I am still drinking tea, though the spinstery little teakettle of Sorrento has departed this life . . . If only I had a ‘Samovar’. I might really live, at tea-hour, in a Tourguenieff atmosphere; & nothing could be more ‘remote’ than that. (CFW to Samuel Mather, WRHS) I am now called at 4.30 every morning, and then, after a cup of tea, I sit (in a dressing gown) and write until 9.30. (CFW to Kate Mather, WRHS.) Here comes the tea tray, now I shall make tea, and drink a big cupful of it. (Ibid.)

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I am always prowling about, and then concluding the afternoon by a cup of tea at some old-fashioned country inn. (CFW to Flora Mather, CFW 367) I begin a letter in the interval after tea and before dinner – which I have set apart for letter-writing. (CFW to Clare Benedict, CFW 383) Then I came home in the fog [from Oxford], and found my kettle boiling on the trivet attached to the grate in the sitting room, and the little low tea-table all ready with the jap teapot that has a cup inside, so that there shall be only an infusion of tea, and no tannin. I therefore instantly made a cheerful cup. And now I am writing to you by my blazing fire. (CFW to Flora Mather, CFW 374)

While James’s teacups gradually and irrevocably effect the metaphorisation of Isabel’s textual environment and the thematisation of the signifying practice that constructs it, Woolson’s cups of tea tacitly symbolise the familiar, the domestic, working to create the reality effect. Ostensibly just details from the fireside scene, they evoke the entire domestic sphere; Woolson offers her correspondents a signified of connotation – ‘domestic reality’ – that disguises itself as a mere denotation of a referent – a teacup. The teacups from which the textualised Constance so frequently drinks connote a domestic reality precisely through their meek claim to contain only tea (and no tannin). This, in fact, is the domesticated signifier – an object within a textual world which bears a naturalised signifying relationship to a (domestic) ‘reality’: but it is important to grasp the very different ideological orientations of this covert signification for Roland Barthes and for Woolson. Whereas the Barthesian signified is the content of ideology, cloaked in the deceptive form of the signifier (a key part of the functioning of bourgeois ideology being precisely its selfpresentation as ‘natural’, its effacing of itself as a system and a product of representation), Woolson’s signified is the act of resistance, infiltrated into discourse by its ambivalent compliance with the authority of the signifier. Constance drinking tea, then, is a textual spectacle repeatedly evoked. Her version of the tea ceremony is usually cast as an independent, pleasurably self-serving ritual – unlike for Pansy, who understands that women make tea for men to drink. Pansy’s version of the ceremony typifies for James the particular female social pose adopted by docile or self-controlled women (daughters


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and confidantes, for example): at once private and welcoming, seated and encouraging, restrained and inviting; a liminal social encounter in which the male guest is tacitly enabled to sample the hostess’s domestic sphere. Poor Pansy is essentially immobile, forbidden even to step beyond the shadow of the house in Osmond’s absence; in contrast, Constance’s letters frequently stress the comfortable stationary independence of the tea ceremony after a day spent ‘prowling about’, but Woolson is also ready to call upon its other meaning, that of the feminine invitation. In her short story ‘Dorothy’, Nora and Felicia compete to perform the tea ceremony for Alan, the eligible bachelor. The setting is a reception, and no woman can monopolise the hostess’s role: there ensues a muted struggle between the women for control of the samovar. In her letters, however, Woolson’s teˆte-a`-teˆte is assured; Constance is, as it were, ‘at home’ to her correspondents, entertaining them within and through the textual tea-party, and linking the proximity of tea-making and letter-writing (‘I therefore instantly made a cheerful cup. And now I am writing to you by my blazing fire’). It is in this context that we read this, from one of the letters to Henry: If you could come in now, and rest a while (till time to go to the next dinner-party), I would make you some of the water-bewitched you consider ‘tea’. And you would find at least the atmosphere of a very perfect kindness. You say you ‘fall back’ upon my ‘charity’, feeling that it is ‘infinite’. You can safely fall back; for infinite it is.16

This kind of invitation appears throughout James’s fiction, often from a confidante. Twenty years after Constance’s letter, for example, he stages this appeal in The Ambassadors (1903; 1909); it is the keynote of Maria Gostrey’s relationship with Strether. ‘‘‘I wish with all my heart,’’ [she tells him,] ‘‘I could make you treat [my home] as a haven of rest.’’ On which they fronted each other, across the table, as if things unuttered were in the air’ (A II, 320). Strether does not want what Maria is offering, and he exploits the decorousness of the appeal – the unutteredness of her meaning – to his advantage: he rejects the offer without having to acknowledge it. The tea ceremony works like this: the tea-maker protects herself by pretending that her attempts to distribute tea are manifestations of a disinterested generosity, or ‘charity’, as Constance calls it, which spares her the vulnerability of an explicit

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appeal. But she puts herself at the mercy of the male guest’s right to refuse the tea, since, as all agree, it is solely for his own benefit. This pattern is reflected in the contrasting mobility of tea-makers and guests: the hostess is capable only of an immobile appeal from her position at the tea table, but her guest controls his arrivals and disappearances. When women are trapped in this immobility – unable to leave the drawing room, the centre of the domestic stage – they cannot visit, they can only wait to be visited. Nanda Brookenham, in James’s other tea-drinking novel The Awkward Age, visits Van only in her earliest, most ingenuous confusion; she has, as she says, been taught by her mother just that morning how to make tea, and she proceeds to do this in Van’s house, in a painfully gauche version of the feminine domestic enticement. When Van definitively rejects her appeal at the end of the novel, it is he who is visiting her: he can leave her emotionally because he can leave her physically. Again, the offer and rejection are couched in terms that disguise both the seriousness of, and the allocation of power within, the transaction: ‘‘‘They don’t bring tea till five, and you must surely stay till that,’’’ Nanda says. ‘‘‘My tea doesn’t matter . . . I’m sorry to say I must be off before five,’’’ Van replies (AA 352). The hostess’s problem is that the very feature of the tea ceremony that makes it possible for her to make an appeal also allows the guest to refuse to take responsibility for rejecting it: the symbolism of the ceremony has become so domesticated that the guest can feign innocent obliviousness to the existence of symbolic meaning when he chooses to refuse the proffered tea. The tea ceremonies of Woolson’s fictions do not always enact this mute heterosexual exchange – Woolson’s teatime cast list is rather more various than James’s; but offering, accepting or refusing tea in Woolson’s stories rarely fails to involve that covert expression of power of which Isabel is so wary. Even when the tea ceremony is a same-sex transaction, some kind of social patronage is being consolidated or resisted. Rodman – the keeper of a Union cemetery – brings tea as well as food to a dying Confederate soldier; his tending of his old enemy confirms the South’s subordination to the North (‘Rodman the Keeper’). Similarly, Genevieve urges Mrs Franklin to accept tea from her after the funeral of Jared Franklin, Genevieve’s husband and Mrs Franklin’s son. Mrs Franklin has always disliked her daughter-in-law, and,


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blaming her for Jared’s decline, refuses to grant Jared’s widow equality, much less primacy, in mourning: she refuses Genevieve’s offers of tea (Horace Chase (1894)). The ceremony is precisely this: a prototypical example of domesticated symbolism. It represents and misrepresents both the appeal and the form of the appeal; it is a mode of representation that is complicit in its own disavowal, in its own dissimulation. The tea ceremony and the realist narrative are signifying practices that cloak themselves in banality, that trade on their own domestication. As so often, it is the Princess Casamassima who crystallises James’s understanding of a potent aspect of representational practice. Here is her virtuoso performance of the tea ceremony; she has recently ‘renounced’ her vast wealth and moved from her country house, Medley, into a dreary London villa, to which she invites Hyacinth for tea. She filled the teapot from a shiny tin canister locked up in a cupboard, of which the key worked with difficulty, and made the tea with her own superb hands . . . Hyacinth lost himself in worship of the Princess’s housewifely ways and of the exquisite figure she made as a small bourgeoise . . . He recognized [the tea] by the aroma as a mixture not inferior to that of which he had partaken at Medley. (PC II, 185–6)

The advantages and disadvantages of this kind of realist discourse are clear. It is an exceptionally decorous mode of communication: it protects the tea-maker or letter-writer or novelist from the exposure consequent on making one’s meaning explicit. (In a notebook entry Woolson sketches out a conversation between a character who admires expressive faces, and another, who does not: ‘Who wants all he thinks and feels to appear in his face for the whole world to read? It is like living in the street! Give me a calm, composed, inexpressive face to the public; a quiet mask. That is like the necessary clothes for the body; we do not go about the streets naked, do we?’ (CFW 129)). It is a form of representation distinguished by its paradoxical disavowal of symbolic meaning; that is, it is a system of substitutive representation (this itself is a tautology) that pretends to disbelieve in the existence of that for which it is substituting. This kind of textual practice inspires an intense faith and investment in symbolism, in tropes and figures and significant objects, precisely because this faith need never be avowed.

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Henry James, Women and Realism realist texts and love letters: ‘she had so very much not to say’ 1 7

A symptom is the sign of a wish to make something known, but by disguising it – at once a demand and an invitation. Or rather two demands: a demand to be accurately translated, or recognized – the wish that the object of one’s desire gets the joke, realizes, say, that you keep blinking because you want to look at her; and a demand for satisfaction. Because desire is always, in part, constituted by the forbidden, every wish is ambivalent, its own best enemy. (Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts (1995))18

Woolson’s notebooks show that the merits of saying and not saying occupied a lot of her thought. Sometimes she ridicules obsessive secrecy: A woman with whom reticence has become such a mania that she spends all the latter part of her life in the careful employment of not telling things. She derives endless satisfaction from keeping secret the fact that she is going to Philadelphia . . . Finally she dies, chuckling on her deathbed grimly because the doctor doesn’t know that she has ever had rheumatism! (CFW 125)

And she considers whether what is not said may not sometimes be pleasant and have no need of dissimulation: ‘Many people think that politeness is always a lie. That honesty and frankness are always, and must always be, rudeness’ (CFW 120). But there is also a recognition that she herself will always find it hard to keep nothing back: ‘There is no use in our advising other people; for we do not know all the circumstances of their lives; there are always some which they do not (perhaps cannot) tell. Each heart knows its own griefs, or aches, or disappointments, & my own heart knows mine.’19 It is an area of intense ambivalence for Woolson’s female characters, many of whom find themselves torn – and, more fundamentally, sustained – by the irreconcilable claims of honesty and honour, of self-expression and integrity. Eve in Jupiter Lights (1889) and Anne in Anne (1882) each wrestle with the problem of a love which, for different reasons, cannot be allowed to speak its name; Eve ‘tak[es], woman-like, the comfort of a confession which no one could understand’, while Anne, perhaps, remembers the shameless but strangely consoling words of her enemy Helen: ‘Are we to go out with trumpets and tell everything we know, just because it is true? Is there not such a thing as egotistical truthfulness?’20


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Constance’s letters to Henry orchestrate her uncertain loyalties towards the authority of formal constraints in order to negotiate her ambivalent desire for sexual self-expression and response. The letters exemplify Woolson’s realist writing practice at its most charged, poised and expressive; they demonstrate her mastery of the balance between surface and symbolic meaning, object and affect. And affect, I suggest, is the whole point: this kind of utterance is perfect for the composition of covert love letters – for this is what they are. In a letter to Henry, Constance refers to ‘One of Cherbuliez’s cleverest divinations . . . : ‘‘Quand les femmes aiment quelque chose, cherchez bien, vous trouverez que sous la chose qu’elles aiment, il y a quelqu’un.’’’21 James criticises Woolson’s fiction for this reason, describing her texts as examples of ‘the love-story’; this he defines as an essentially feminine genre, in which ‘the famous ‘‘tender sentiment’’ usurps . . . a place even greater perhaps than that which it holds in life’. ‘In men’s [stories about love], even of the simplest strain, there are still other references and other explanations; in women’s, . . . there are none but that one.’22 As a characterisation of Woolson’s fiction, this is both unfair (from the writer who was obsessed with ‘the great relation’) and, as I hope has become clear, narrowly reductive. But as a definition of the four surviving letters it is most apt. In a tacit love letter, the signified disavowed – and protected – by every dissimulating sign is the writer’s love for the recipient. Woolson does not want the readers of her fiction to accede unquestioningly to the naturalisation of the signifier, but whereas James gradually and irrevocably defamiliarises realist symbolism during the course of each story – draining the signifier of semantic authority in favour of the signified, the pulsing inner life of the sign – Woolson tends to forward the progress of her plot with one hand while running a synchronised commentary on the construction of realist texts with the other. She induces in her reader an (often comic) awareness of the mechanism of her narrative, of every object that makes its modest appearance as the character, or the plot, reaches for it, without ever repudiating the continuing narrative project. This is a primary source of the subtle self-irony in Woolson’s realist fiction. What happens to this irony when she moves from fiction to love letters is that it becomes a kind of textual flirting: a lingering on the border between covert and explicit meaning, concealment and revelation. As Barthes would agree, it is neither passion nor

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its concealment that is erotic, but the seam between the two, the continuous silent shuttling between mute objects and eloquent symbols. constance and henry: the debate There is another story to be read between the lines of these letters. It is that of his friendship with Constance Fenimore Woolson, the grandniece of Fenimore Cooper . . . [W]e may perceive in the letters – in those brief and peripheral allusions to the middle-aged authoress – an attachment or symbiosis, a game of gallantry and misplaced social charm, for which he paid a painful price. Miss Woolson had come to Europe half in love with James from her close reading of his works. She was a somewhat deaf spinster, trim, compulsive, and meticulous, who wrote popular fiction for the women’s magazines . . . A ‘virtuous’ attachment grew up between them, filled with reticences and avoidances and with certain falsities on James’s part – that is, a failure to recognize the effect he was having on a woman for whom he had the loyalty and affection of friendship but not a shred of romantic love . . . James had no motives beyond the gratifications of male gallantry. Miss Woolson was intelligent, and often sarcastic and aggressive; she placed herself in a bitter situation which is documented for us in the four long letters [ . . . ] It would be too much to say that James’s aloof discretions led to her ultimate suicide. She had a history of depression. She had led a lonely self-contained life. (Leon Edel on Woolson and James, Henry James Letters (1974–84))23 You hear what he says of her. But you do not hear what he says to her! He speaks of her to you rather disparagingly, or pityingly, or with indifference. But how do you know that he does not, when alone with her, speak to her in a very different way? This would explain her manner, which to you seems so foolish and mistaken. (From the outline for a story in Woolson’s notebooks, Constance Fenimore Woolson (1932))24

Edel’s comments – which preface his transcription of the four surviving letters from Constance to Henry; none of his letters to her remains – demonstrate the biographical provocation to the feminist scholar. Edel has constructed a confident narrative in which the aloof and sexually unattached Henry mellows into homoerotic (but chaste) middle age: there is no room in this story for an important friendship with a woman, and Edel wants to keep his story neat. Furthermore, the zeal with which Edel goes about the job of establishing Constance’s physical undesirability, intellectual mediocrity and emotional immaturity speaks of a personal


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hostility that goes beyond his determination to impose narrative clarity; Edel, it seems, is jealous of the woman who shared a somewhat mysterious fourteen-year friendship with Henry, a woman whose relationship with James cannot be incorporated and domesticated by Edel’s narrative because so many of the textual traces have been destroyed. Edel compares the friendship between Henry and Constance to that between the male protagonist of The Aspern Papers (1888) and the niece of Aspern’s lover; a rather more apposite comparison would be between Edel himself and the obsessive, unscrupulous scholar who is tormented by his epistemological exclusion from Aspern’s affair.25 In the past fifteen years, three scholars have published booklength appraisals of Woolson’s life and work. Cheryl Torsney (1989) and Sharon Dean (1995) are determined to release Woolson from her pathetic existence on the margins of Jamesian biography; this admirable impulse results in an overeager downplaying of Henry’s significance in Constance’s life. As champions of Woolson’s independent literary and biographical worth, they do not concern themselves with Constance’s importance to Henry, except to note that there is a self-evident good to be gained from a witty, intelligent and empathetic friend. In contrast, Lyndall Gordon (1998) takes the mutual importance of the relationship between Constance and Henry as the keystone of her work. She emphasises Constance’s rich imaginative value for Henry, and characterises Henry’s significance for Constance in terms of unconventional friendship and the possibility of intellectual equality and exchange. The former perspective wishfully ignores the passionate intensity of Constance’s eloquently ambivalent letters to Henry (as well as the whole question of Henry’s long, enigmatic attachment to Constance); Gordon’s vision, on the other hand, apprehends the creative importance of the relationship to each of its participants, but stops short of a full recognition of their mutual involvement in an emotionally fraught intersubjective project. In Gordon’s eyes Henry is simply culpable: ‘He drew women out as no other man, exposing needs that lurk unexpressed on the evolutionary frontier; and then swerved from responsibility.’26 While Dean and Torsney (and, to a much lesser extent, Gordon) underestimate Constance’s emotional investment in Henry, Gordon overstates Henry’s responsibility for Constance’s demoralisation.

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My reading of these entwined and complex lives suggests a more elusive pattern of conflict and collaboration; an ambivalent and inexplicit negotiation between social conservatives who tacitly colluded to resist the authority of heterosexual gender norms. Yes, Constance was ‘in love’ with Henry; and yes, he took advantage of her self-protective reticence – to disguise from himself his disinclination for heterosexual intimacy. But Constance would never have chosen Henry had she not sensed his basic unavailability, and she took advantage of his sexual ambivalence to play out her irreconcilable longings for heterosexual validation and intellectual equality. Constance and Henry are always more authentically conventional than one might wish them to be, yet they are always less compliant than they at first appear. When we look at their relationship – as it flickers and retreats between the lines of Constance’s letters and Henry’s fictions – we see a disappointed victim and a self-involved cad. Dean and Torsney refuse to engage with this (hetero)sexist frame of reference; Gordon disputes the terms of Constance’s disappointment, but passionately insists on Henry’s culpability. The provoking and paradoxical truth is that we see a spinster victim and a bachelor cad because we are looking at the ambivalent self-representations that protected Henry and Constance from a self-apprehension more painful than that of intelligible heterosexual failure. A good way to approach this deep, disavowed complicity is through James’s stories about confidantes and their male friends. the confidante: martyr or missionary? ‘You would help me more than anyone. I feel it,’ he continued with his eyes on her face, ‘really not as a mistake. Essentially – well, you’re one of them.’ ‘One of whom?’ ‘The women. The women. Good-bye,’ he said again and offering his hand as if their queer chasm had been bridged by this intensity of the personal question. (Henry James, The Sense of the Past (1917), STP 35)

Ralph Pendrel is referring here to a distinctive relationship, of which versions appear throughout James’s fiction. This relationship takes place between a rather ineffectual man and his more perceptive, more experienced female confidante. The men are, without exception, self-centred to the point of self-obsession; the


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women conceal self-interest beneath inexhaustible sympathy and limitless willingness to enter into the question continuously at hand: that of the man’s quest for knowledge – knowledge that is always closely linked with his intimate sense of self, and that is usually the very question of what that self is. The subject matter of these endless teˆte-a`-teˆtes is the man’s uncertain desires and apprehensions; the form – the intimate, protracted, repeated and repetitive conversation a` deux, which typically takes place by the confidante’s fireside – is similarly asymmetrical. Superficially heterosexual, these frustrating relationships tend to founder on the male protagonist’s refusal to engage with his hostess’s interests: his focus is elsewhere, and he is unwilling or unable to recognise his confidante’s desire. He cannot recognise her, because he recognises himself in her, using her as an idealising mirror – and indeed, this is how she has presented herself to him: as a medium of representation in which to find a flatteringly coherent image of himself. Condemned to reflection by her male friend’s self-obsession, the confidante can only play Echo to his Narcissus. Christopher Newman in The American (1877; 1907) is an early beneficiary of a confidante’s emotional hospitality. Rejecting Mr Tristram’s vulgarity, Newman instead finds in Mrs Tristram a suitably refined mirror: ‘He enjoyed her talking about him; it seemed a part of her beautiful culture.’ Setting the pattern for her successors, Mrs Tristram’s attentions are self-defeating. Asking ‘‘‘Should you like me, as they say here, to marry you?’’’, she deflects Newman’s gaze to Madame de Cintre´, by whom she is eclipsed (TA 40, 49). A later American in Paris, Strether, too, seeks self-knowledge in the smooth surface of Maria Gostrey. ‘To sit [in her apartment] was, as he had told his hostess before, to see life reflected for the time in ideally kept pewter’; Strether ‘get[s] back from her in some mirrored form her impressions and conclusions’ (A II, 319; I, 130). He avails himself of her ‘exquisite service’ until she ceases to be merely reflective, at which he moves promptly to extricate himself from her appeal: ‘He was affected in advance by what he believed might come from her, and he would have liked to forestall it and deal with it tenderly; yet in the presence of it he wished still more to be – though as smoothly as possible – deterrent and conclusive’ (A II, 324). Maria finds herself supplanted by Madame

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de Vionnet, who, like Claire de Cintre´, is a woman under a prohibition that cannot be ignored. Marie is Chad’s woman; Claire belongs to the Bellegardes. (We might note also that both Marie and Claire offer their supposed lovers a convenient alibi for cultivating a beguiling male companion.) Maria and Mrs Tristram, in contrast, are possible: too possible. In James’s confidante stories the covert plot concerns the male guest’s ongoing project of keeping his female friend at a safe distance; while never acknowledging to himself that this is his aim, he is careful to ‘forestall’, ‘deter’, and ‘conclude’ the approach of (heterosexual) intimacy. And he is also unwilling to admit his dependence on his confidante’s distanced presence. She must be available to him, yet unavailable; her presence both signals and masks an inarticulate ambivalence in her male friend. As we have seen before, the Princess Casamassima may expertly codify for us the psychological and aesthetic features of a particular act of (social) representation. The Princess Casamassima (1886; 1908) examines Hyacinth’s abortive career as a struggle between the conflicting parental forces of aristocratic aestheticism and social realism. Hyacinth is condemned to a sexually uncertain immaturity by the impossibility of reconciling an identification with one parent with respect for the other. The ‘authors of his being’ are generically and ideologically incompatible, and thus the world of the text in which Hyacinth seeks his reflection cannot provide him with a coherent image of himself. Miss Pynsent tries in vain: ‘He was not what he seemed, but even with Pinnie’s valuable assistance he had not succeeded in representing to himself very definitely what he was’ (PC I, 157). When he meets the Princess, she easily manoeuvres herself into the role of confidante, in order to betray him into that anxious self-revelation that gives the confidante her opportunity: [S]he broke into an exclamation which touched him almost more than anything she had ever done, giving him the highest opinion of her delicacy and sympathy, putting him before himself as vividly as if the words were a little portrait. ‘Fancy the strange, the bitter fate: to be constituted as you’re constituted, to be conscious of the capacity you must feel, and yet to look at the good things of life only through the glass of the pastry-cook’s window!’ . . . [B]efore they separated that evening he told her the things that had never yet passed his lips . . . He told her in short what he was. (II, 60–1)


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The Princess establishes her power over him with this flatteringly meaningful representation of himself. When she loses interest in him, transferring her attention to Paul Muniment, the contradictions of Hyacinth’s identity become intolerable, and he kills himself. The Princess Casamassima’s conscious impersonation of a confidante points up two important features of the exchange. The first is the absence of erotic engagement. These relationships persist through a fundamental absence of mutuality that brings to mind Jacques Lacan’s gloomy verdict on heterosexuality: ‘There is no sexual relation.’ Aurora Coyne does actually receive a proposal of marriage from Ralph Pendrel, but she refuses it, her ‘greater knowledge of life’ telling her that she would be supplanted by ‘[h]is ‘‘other’’ passion’ (the European past). ‘‘‘I know what you most want,’’’ Aurora informs him: it is not her (STP 4, 43, 16). Alice Staverton is the only confidante whose representational career culminates in marriage; she defeats Brydon’s alter ego by seeing him in a dream, evoking the spectre of her rival in order to quell him. ‘‘‘I saw him as I see you now,’’’ she tells Brydon, who begs to know, ‘‘‘What’s the wretch like?’’’ Alice relates her dream to Brydon, as she tells him, ‘‘‘to show you, you see, how I’ve thought of you’’’. ‘‘‘Ah I’ve come to myself now,’’’ he replies, ‘‘‘thanks to you, dearest.’’’27 The other feature that is thrown into relief by the Princess’s conscious power play is the muted ugliness of the confidante’s aim. We can sense it, too, in the queasy juxtaposition of psychological violence and self-serving triumph that characterises Alice’s defeat of Brydon’s ghostly double. The confidante’s arrival heralds both danger and reassurance: she provokes and embodies a submerged ambivalence in her male friend. He needs her, and he resents her; she devotes herself to him, yet she is intent on her own aims. May Bartram is the most stubbornly persistent of the confidantes.28 ‘Her face and her voice [are] all at [Marcher’s] service’,29 and again this ‘service’ is taken by her male friend as a manifestation of generosity rather than personal need. ‘[S]he had in fact,’ Marcher muses, ‘a wonderful way of making [his preoccupation] seem, as such, the secret of her own life too’ (‘Beast’ 81). It does not occur to him that what he perceives as disinterested service may really be May’s desire. Marcher

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inhabits a world of self-reflections which May cannot enter: ‘‘‘[W]e answer so completely to so usual an appearance,’’’ Marcher tells her obliviously, ‘‘‘that of the man and woman whose friendship has become . . . indispensable’’’ (83). To May – he fails to realise – it really has become indispensable, as, indeed, it is for him, too; but while his dependence keeps his confidante at bay, held off by the mirror between them, her need is for a dissolution of the reflective barrier that separates them. Finally, she tries to make him look at her: ‘they continued for some minutes silent, her face shining at him, her contact imponderably pressing, and his stare all kind but all expectant’ (106). Marcher deserves credit for remaining kind under the ‘imponderable pressure’ of her appeal – his is a much gentler response than is Strether’s to such intimate ‘contact’ – but he is unable to recognise what he is looking at. He can see her only as a mirror of himself: ‘he must see just how he had figured to her’; ‘she knew how he looked’ (71, 81). His precarious sense of his own identity depends on her ability to represent him to himself, and he does at least recognise that ‘[h]e had lived by her aid’, finding himself recorded in May’s house – ‘the place was the written history of his whole middle life’ (109, 86). May is for Marcher a medium of ideological self-(mis) recognition; she endeavours to persuade him to recognise himself as her lover, but despite her efforts, and his own disinclination for rebellion, he can never make himself out as she wants. His image in the glass remains opaque and uncertain; he is equally unable to recognise himself either as a lover of women or as a conscious refuser of women. As an embodiment of heterosexual ideology, May can be seen as a failure: Marcher cannot commit himself to what she wants. On the other hand, May also functions to conceal Marcher’s refusal from himself; as long as she is there as the only medium of representation in which he can look for himself, she blocks his view of other possibilities, possibilities that would require him to avow his resistance to what May represents. That is, May, like ideology, blocks Marcher from realising the extent and the implications of his ‘failure’: it remains mysterious, enigmatic, inarticulate. Marcher cannot bring himself to embrace heterosexuality, but he complies with its terms in order to keep his resistance unintelligible. As the years pass, his returns to May’s fireside figure a loyalty to the authority of form that both muffles and protects his mute, obstinate resistance to the heterosexual


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gender conventions that she promotes. He has ‘lived by her aid’ in the sense that to have rejected her outright would have necessitated a radically other self-recognition, from which he has been blocked and protected by the screen of ideology. Alone among the confidantes, Aurora Coyne distinguishes herself by encouraging her male friend to confront his selfmisrecognition; the image with which she presents him is not flattering. ‘[H]er seeing him gracelessly astray [was what] she made him most feel.’ Where Marcher had taken comfort in May’s normative misrepresentations, Ralph is discomfited by Aurora’s pragmatic acceptance of his ‘other’ passion. She ‘glares at him, . . . dazzles and almost . . . blinds him’. Ralph invites her to act as his ideological screen – ‘You would help me more than anyone’ – but she declines the role, backing away from ‘their queer chasm’ (STP 29, 4, 35). Marcher, Pendrel, Brydon and Hyacinth are seriously threatened by the absence or withdrawal of their idealising female mirrors. Marcher and Brydon are assaulted by their unreconciled other selves; Pendrel loses himself in the past, merging vertiginously with a distant, dead, but facially identical ancestor; and Hyacinth commits suicide, the most extreme failure of identity in James’s fiction. Confidantes do not simply flatter their male friends: by offering her guest an idealised image of himself, the confidante protects him from himself. The ‘identity’ which she holds up to screen him from fragmentation or revolt is an ideological image, a ‘reflection’ without an original. Julia Kristeva theorises language as a ‘defensive construction’: [L]anguage, constituted as symbolic through narcissistic, specular, imaginary investment, protects the body from the attack of drives by making it a place – the place of the signifier – in which the body can signify itself through positions; . . . therefore, language, in the service of the death drive, is a pocket of narcissism towards which this drive may be directed.30

I am interested here in the ideological function of the symbolic order; James’s confidantes figure the role of ideology as a kind of ‘defensive construction’. Language, Kristeva writes, protects the body from the attack of drives; ideology may be seen as reiterating this function, protecting the subject from assault by unacknowledgeable desires, discomforts and refusals. As language divides the body from itself, articulating a paradoxical circuit of narcissistic estrangement, so ideology distances the subject from his

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discontents, protecting his experience of cultural coherence by muffling his anxious sense of marginality. accomplices in resistance If I were clever, I should always bear in mind the fact, that when I have written to you many sheets, I have received a short note in reply, beginning with some such sentence as this: ‘Dear Miss Woolson. One doesn’t answer your letters; one can’t. One only reads them and is grateful’; and this followed up by three very small pages (in a very big hand) in which no allusion is made to anything I have said, the ‘faithfully’ of the signature occupying the room of several of my sentences. Then, when I have written you a short note myself, I have received from you a charming letter in reply, eight pages long, and not such a very big hand either, and the ‘faithfully’ even put across the top or side of the first page instead of being relied upon to fill the half of the last! But I am not clever. And then I am always thinking that perhaps you will improve. I hope right in the face of facts. (Constance Fenimore Woolson to Henry James, 30th August [1882])31

James’s confidante stories analyse Henry’s ambivalence towards Constance, articulating the novelist’s recognition of the male friend’s tactical deployment of his confidante’s ministrations. But before we hurry to condemn Henry for bad faith, we should consider the extent to which Woolson’s fiction problematises the feminine self-representation of ‘martyr’, as well as the ways in which Constance uses the performance of disappointment to conceal tacit prompts. Beneath an apparent complaint about the perversely contrary nature of Henry’s epistolary reciprocations lies a disavowed request that he should continue to evade her affection and reward her distance. ‘I am always thinking that perhaps you will improve,’ she writes, reassuring her correspondent and herself that an offer of (sexual) intimacy is ever on the horizon of the possible; but she concludes her performance with an instruction that he should continue as before – ‘I hope right in the face of facts.’ Throughout her writing career, Constance established and maintained relationships, conducted largely by correspondence, with influential married men as well as with James: these included Colonel John Hay (an American writer, historian and diplomat), Edmund Clarence Stedman (an American editor and critic), and Dr William Wilberforce Baldwin (a young American doctor in


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London and Florence whose sympathetic intelligence attracted such patients as Edith Wharton and Alice James). Lonely, Constance longs for exclusive intimacy and companionship; marginalised, she recognises marriage as the remedy for her second-class social status. But Woolson longs also for literary respect from her male friends, and marriage, she knows, could be achieved only at the cost of her writing life: her autonomy, her independence, her absorbing intellectual passion. Marriage – what Alice, another stubborn spinster, called a ‘sweet and seductive bondage’32 – would entail wholehearted subordination to the gendering of authority as masculine, and Constance is as profoundly reluctant to submit herself to marital authority as she is to articulate her resistance. Better, just, to suffer the social and psychological marginality of spinsterhood, than secure (hetero)sexual validation as the intellectual subordinate of a husband. So she wants Henry to respond to her, to love her and to respect her: she wants marriage and fears it, cherishes her loneliness and suffers from it, longs for sexual intimacy and protects herself from it. She chooses men who embody the essential unattainability of intellectual authority, because this is the difficulty – the law of her life as a literary woman – with which she must constantly contend. Colonel Hay, E. C. Stedman and Dr Baldwin are safely unavailable by virtue of their wives. James is different, in that he is technically possible but indefinably reluctant. There is a special intensity in Constance’s appeals to Henry, an intensity provoked by her intuitive awareness of his sexual ambivalence towards women. ‘[W]hy not give us a woman for whom we can feel a real love?’ she writes, in a letter devoted almost exclusively to the question of James’s authorial attitude towards his female characters’ desirability. ‘There are such surely in the world. I am certain you have known some, for you bear the traces – among thicker traces of another sort.’33 It is important that it is ambivalence, rather than certainty, that Constance senses: she needs to be able to appeal to Henry without knowing consciously that he will always refuse her. So Henry fails her, but by failing he protects her: Constance feels that she can play out her longings for social and sexual validation with Henry without having to worry that he will ever take her up on them. ‘A question of any sort you never answer!’34 she remarks, again disguising mutual reassurance beneath the appearance of a complaint.

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Looking for accomplices in resistance, Henry and Constance tacitly agree to pose as mutually intelligible failures. They play ‘cad’ and ‘disappointed lady’, as negative versions of ‘proposer’ and ‘accepter’, ‘man’ and ‘woman’, a collaborative game that disguises – from themselves – their resistance to the authority of heterosexual gender definitions. They assume these parts in order to experience themselves as sexually intelligible: their underlying purpose is to protect both participants from having to commit either to an embrace of heterosexuality or to its rejection. Thus Henry and Constance use heterosexual failure as a screen for their asymmetrical but mutually compatible resistance to the sexual and the social requirements of heterosexual identity. Constance is enabled to experience the socio-sexual identity of the disappointed spinster (Henry will never actually ask her to marry him, so she will not have to accept either marriage or the responsibility of refusing it); Henry is enabled to experience the socio-sexual identity of the caddish flirt (Constance will allow him to go on not proposing, so he will not have to propose to her or take responsibility for not wanting to propose to her). As a system of compulsory gender definition, heterosexuality is a joint collaboration. It takes two to tango, and this is as true for resistance as for compliance. Covert resistance mimics and repeats the form of compliance: Constance and Henry show that it takes two to resist, too. Resistance is two-faced, originating within the walls, contesting its origins without rejecting them outright. It is a complex ambivalent dance, at once collaborative and conflictual, affiliative and estranging. Even as Henry moves closer to Constance through his own shamed experience of refusing and failing heterosexuality, so he is estranged from her as the apparent agent of her own ‘failure’. As in the cases of Strether and Newman, the relationship mutely leads Henry away from heterosexuality; but, for Henry, the experience of mutual resistance consolidates his imaginative and emotional affiliation with women, in part – paradoxically – through his empathetic sense of guilty responsibility. This apparent paradox of ‘empathetic guilt’ should not be mistaken for an objective recognition of moral responsibility: it is the same kind of hallucinatory identification that is experienced between the portrait heroine and her triumphant rival. Chapter 1 describes this encounter as a collaborative rite within femininity in which women experience a split sense of being both victim and


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oppressor, both subject to, and agent of, authority. Alice James described the feminine experience of subjectivity as self-suppression in terms of physical and psychological self-imprisonment: ‘The only difference between me and the insane,’ she notes, ‘[is] that I had not only all the horrors and sufferings of insanity but the duties of doctor, nurse, and strait-jacket imposed upon me, too’ (AJD 149). Watching his sister reproduce her own suppression, Henry felt guiltless; now, cast as the agent of authority to Constance’s victim, he seems implicated, a participant in the rites of feminine self-suppression. Paradoxically, by playing the part of oppressor – agent of the social authority that exacts a sense of ‘failure’ as punishment for resistance – Henry participated in the definitive experience of ambivalent realist femininity: the anguish of self-splitting and self-suppression. a realist relationship The relationship between Henry and Constance takes as its form the precarious realist balance between a loyalty to the semantic authority of the signifier and the psychological authority of sociosexual gender norms, and a desire for the independence and selfassertion of metaphor and gender resistance; and this hesitation often takes shape in metaphors of the domestic. Constance is perpetually ambivalent about ‘home’. On the one hand, she longs for it: it is a state of social belonging, a place of acceptance and rest from her wandering marginality. On the other hand, it is a trap: a state of subordination to social authority, where a woman cannot expect the freedom to write and assert her literary equality. And, as Constance recognises, it is thus a place from which she is always exiled. She cannot return now to that kind of simple compliant femininity, much as she longs for the social respectability that it confers. Thus she vacillates between travel and attempts at domestic stability: ‘[T]here never was a woman so ill fitted to do without a home as I am. I am constantly trying to make temporary homes out of the impossible rooms at hotels and pensions.’35 Her homes are always temporary, because she chooses to try to establish them in ‘the impossible rooms’ of ‘hotels and pensions’; when she does try something with long-term potential – a villa or a Venetian palazzo – she always uproots herself after a month or a year. The temporary home is like a realist sign: it embodies

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ambivalence, the tension between stability and wandering, social belonging and marginality, self-suppression and self-assertion. The home is both a refuge and a prison, as is the sign for the signified. The signified is trapped by its compliance with the signifier; but it is also hidden and therefore protected by its collaboration with the signifier. The relationship between Constance and Henry is based on an understanding that this delicate and uncertain equilibrium between confinement and assertion (reticence and expression, home and houselessness) will continue. The tacit understanding is that Constance will not openly reject the etiquette of the signifier, by asking for a marriage proposal; and that Henry will not definitively reject the existence of the signified, by confirming his lack of love. Instead, they will both inhabit the ambivalent space of a temporary home: they will take refuge in the shelter of a rented house without having to buy it outright; they will flirt with heterosexuality without committing themselves to it (or to its rejection). Constance depends on Henry never to renounce signifieds; Henry depends on Constance never to renounce signifiers. When their relationship is working, each keeps their side of the contract, as we can see in the way in which they both use the idea of a home – the ambivalent combination of prison and protection – to mediate and reflect upon their relationship. To my top floor, a very winding stone stairway leads – like a stairway in a lighthouse – though it isn’t by any means a light stairway. And, when at last you reach the top floor, you find the entrance-door guarded by a little loophole, with a grating over it; and through this aperture the handsome Italian maid, Pietra, will inspect you, before she lets you in. And when at last you are in, you can’t imagine where to go, so involuted is the hall, with all sorts of inscrutable doors, and curtains, and even steps (though you know you are at the very top of the house) leading out of it.36

Woolson transforms a dark top-floor hall into a tiny textual drama of architectural enticement and rebuff, feminine defensiveness and invitation. Her correspondent is conducted into a domestic space which is a point of both entry and centrality, of independence yet expectancy; a space which is somehow liminal and involuted; where the gratings and loopholes and apertures are double signs, ambivalent signals of enclosure and permeability. With this ‘inscrutable’ domestic image, Woolson balances expressiveness and reticence, simultaneously welcoming Henry and


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assuring him of her self-sufficiency. It is an excellent example of Woolson’s idiosyncratic version of the uncanny: always delicate, always discreet, its strangeness unmitigated by gothic escalations of affect. The presence of meaning beyond the literal can always be overlooked; it flickers and retreats, it never insists. ‘[Y]ou know you are at the very top of the house’, so how can the steps lead anywhere? Woolson’s ambivalent realism is a haunted house too polite ever to be frightening; yet there are the stairs, gesturing impossibly up to another level of significance. It is an almost absurd trope which captures perfectly the quietly intriguing quality of Woolson’s writing, that sense of intangible urgency, of suppressed emergence. As Constance senses, Henry’s fear is that she will abandon signifiers; covertly, he requests her to continue to accept the authority of form in his Partial Portraits (1888) essay, ‘Miss Woolson’. Woolson’s fiction, James writes, is ‘an excellent example of the way the door stands open between the personal life of American women and the immeasurable world of print, and what makes it so is the particular quality that this work happens to possess. It breathes a spirit singularly and essentially conservative.’37 Here Henry reassures himself that Constance will remain inside the domesticated enclosure of the realist sign, and not throw herself out into the ‘immeasurable world’ of naked signifieds and outright appeals. She will remain, by choice, ‘distinctly on the private side’, loyal to the decorum of signifiers and the etiquette of disavowal. ‘She sees [her sex] in preference surrounded certainly by plenty of doors and windows (she has not, I take it, a love of bolts and Oriental shutters), but distinctly on the private side’:38 it is important to Henry to feel that Constance chooses not to take advantage of the ‘plenty of doors and windows’. Correspondingly, Constance’s fear is that Henry will break their implicit contract by abandoning signifieds in favour of the bland realm of the signifier: I speak of going home . . . It is all very well to hold out the prospect of ‘talking it over’ (the going home) ‘against an Italian church-wall’. Your letters are better than you are. You are never in Italy, but always in America; just going; or there; or just returned. And as to a ‘church-wall’, there has never been but that one short time (three years ago – in Florence) when you seemed disposed for that sort of thing. How many times have I seen you, in the long months that make up three long years?

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I don’t complain, for there is no reason in the world why I should expect to see you; only, don’t put in these decorative sentences about ‘Italian church-walls’.39

Woolson’s literary fear of the merely ‘decorative’ is echoed by the psychoanalytic idea of ‘aphanisis’, Ernest Jones’s term for the fear of an extinction of sexual desire.40 The world of ambivalent realist representation is a reassuringly meaningful place, in which all surface appearances shyly promise the presence of inner meaning. The covert, ambivalent relationship between the literal and the symbolic valences of signs guarantees the significance of the realist universe, protecting against that nightmare of realism – randomness. Similarly, the symbolic plenitude of the psychoanalytic world is generated and guaranteed by desire. The ambivalent realist trusts that every signifier conceals a signified; the psychoanalytic interpreter trusts that every symptom conceals a desire. Thus for psychoanalysis, the fear of the fading of desire is analogous to what Constance fears from Henry: the draining of representation’s animating principle. Constance spent the winter of 1893–4 at the Casa Semitecolo, on Venice’s Grand Canal. The rooms were sparsely furnished and afforded their new occupant a great deal of privacy; Constance’s reaction to her new temporary home was characteristically ambivalent. On the one hand, she enjoyed her sense of taking possession, installing her books and pictures, coming and going without attracting attention. ‘I seem to have come to the end of being able to live in other peoples’s [sic] rooms,’ she wrote to her nephew in November.41 But her enjoyment is always bitter-sweet, her happiness always edged and backed by loneliness. She bought a black Pomeranian Spitz from some Dalmatian sailors; he compensated for her increasing deafness, acting in part as watchdog, but her delight in him arises, she admitted, from his affection and company. Constance died in January 1894, during a period of poor health. At the insistence of the doctor (not Baldwin, whom she did not contact), a nurse sat with her day and night. Just after midnight, in the morning of January 24th, she sent the nurse away from her bedroom on an errand; when the nurse returned, the room was empty. Constance had jumped or fallen out of the window into the street, and she died within the hour, without regaining consciousness. Gordon has written at length about the circumstances


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of Constance’s death, arguing persuasively that her illness was slight and that she planned her death with fully conscious deliberation.42 Henry was deeply affected. In a series of anguished and repetitive letters in the following months, he writes about what he characterises as her despair, his prior awareness of which he somewhat contradictorily disavows. He states that she persistently failed to express herself; as he writes to her doctor, ‘she kept us both ignorant – with a perversity that was diseased’.43 Writing to his brother William, however, he approaches more closely the social meaning of her reticence. Before I quote Henry, here is Constance again (in the letter in which she accuses Henry of ‘decorative sentences’): ‘I get up very early; . . . see to the flowers (for of course I have ever so many, all in pots, all in bloom).’44 And Henry, eleven years later: ‘This [her solitude] combined with her admirable constitution – her tragically conscientious politeness – to give her, for the hour, the air of a cheerfulness which was really intensely mechanical and which left her whole general feeling about life, her intimate melancholy, utterly unexpressed – any more than the flowerpots in the window of a room express the figure lying on the bed.’45 Henry’s anguished sense of her ‘intimate melancholy’ registers the eloquence of the flowerpot-signifiers that Constance has decorously displayed to him. ‘I did not fully express myself,’ Constance had written to him in 1882, ‘but cut off my thread – as I have done before – for fear you would think it ‘‘unimportant’’ – that terrible word of yours!’46 This is not reticence, but a collaborative performance of reticence: in remarks such as this, Constance draws attention to her trustworthy keeping of her side of their bargain. When she killed herself – ‘cutting off her thread’ in earnest – by throwing herself out of the house into the immeasurable expressiveness of suicide, Henry is horrified because the way in which she breaks her side of the contract suggests that it has become intolerable. This is why, in his intense sense of participatory guilt, he accuses her of being too polite, too reticent, too selfcontrolled: because that is what he needed from her. Now, he disavows his own part in requiring her reticence, as well as his submerged awareness of her meaning. Henry is not to blame for Constance’s loneliness, her depression, her ultimately intolerable ambivalence about what she called ‘the riddle of my existence’.47 Rather, his sense of guilt marks his recognition of the terms of

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their dance: terms that made their lives both more and less difficult, as a temporary home counterpoints stability with uncertainty. The ambivalent inhabitant buys shelter at the risk of entrapment, and the freedom to leave at the price of never truly belonging. In conclusion – and resisting finality – here is a passage from one of the letters to Henry which displays Woolson’s elegant and compelling version of realism at its most expressive. [I]n summer Cooperstown is very pretty, and when I have made my fortune, and built that cottage on the little lake there, you must come and stay with me, bringing with you that sweet young American wife I want you to have – whom you must have – even if only (as you horribly write) as ‘a last resort’. And then you must come down to Florida, and I will show you a beautiful swamp.48

Cooperstown – a civilised enclosure, or vessel of meaning, made strong by the binding that holds together a barrel – with its little lake and Constance’s cottage (built specially to house her), is held in structural antithesis with Florida, the last resort that challenges the conclusiveness of Henry’s marriage; Florida, to which he will come down, in a descent or a fall, where Cooperstown’s distinct little lake will be challenged by the beautiful swamp. And at the crux of this antithesis – the point from which northern order and southern sensuality radiate in productive incompatibility – is the sweet young American wife who is both Constance’s triumphant rival and her own disavowed self.

chapter 4

Realism and interior design: Edith Wharton and Henry James

[W]ith no worlds left to conquer . . . and no impression worth getting thereby remaining to you, doubtless, you must have recoiled and rebounded, charged with booty . . . [T]hese great globe-rushes and vast gyrations of yours lift you so, for me, far above mortal, or Lamb House, ken, and give me such a sense of the rate at which you are living, learning, plundering and pillaging, that the whole adventure makes me crouch in terror or at least in humility, as by its mere side-wind. (Henry James to Edith Wharton, 6th September 1913, HJ/EW 263)

In his correspondence with Edith Wharton, Henry James represents himself as lacking in resources, flagging and failing, breathless in her triumphal wake. ‘Ah I’m conscious enough, I assure you, of going without, and of all the rich arrears that will never – for me – be made up – !’1 It is his misfortune that he cannot keep up with her, his ‘ideal of the dashing Woman’;2 he can only ‘hang about [her] by the power of participation supersensual and devotional’.3 From the melancholy tranquillity of his bachelor quarters, Henry contemplates the splendours of Edith’s Paris apartment, ‘hover[ing], like a too participant larbin, behind your Louis XIV chair (if it isn’t, your chair, Louis Quatorze, at least your larbin takes it so)’;4 he cannot visit the rue de Varenne, ‘But, ah, how from the shelf I shall watch you on the Aubusson carpet!’5 Henry was immensely fond of his ‘dearest Edith’, and with good reason: she was a loyal friend for fifteen years. His letters to her leave no doubt that she was respected as a colleague and trusted as a friend. But coexisting with his affection is a surprisingly emphatic envy of her ‘power to go and to consume and to enjoy’,6 an envy mixed with alarm, even hostility. The ‘Firebird’, he writes to Howard Sturgis, ‘uses up everything and every one’: ‘All I want . . . is to be let alone, and not to feel myself far aloft in irresistible talons 141

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and under the flap of mighty wings.’7 Henry is disturbed by the spectacle of Edith’s life: ‘such incoherence, such a nightmare of perpetually renewable choice and decision, such a luxury of bloated alternatives’.8 Henry James was nearly sixty when he became friends with Edith Wharton, and for much of the last fifteen years of his life he was oppressed by a sense of bodily vulnerability and looming psychological disaster. Wharton was nineteen years younger than James; after several years of psychosomatic illness in the 1890s, Edith became boundlessly energetic, displaying impressive physical and emotional stamina. But Henry’s inability to match her pace, as he makes clear when invited to meet Edith in Milan, is not primarily physical: ‘[S]uch a feat and flight was not possible . . . to any of my powers – perhaps least of all my pecuniary.’9 The rhetoric of impoverishment elicited by Edith from Henry has clear economic referents. Wharton’s fiction attracted serious critical attention – James himself compared her to George Eliot and to Racine – while achieving enormous popular success; occasionally a new novel received a disappointing reception, but generally she could rely on her writing to provide a large steady income, while for his part Henry became increasingly depressed by both critical and financial responses to his work. He hoped that the New York edition would bring both literary and financial rewards, but it sold poorly, exacerbating his sense of impoverishment. Edith Wharton made several attempts to channel money towards him. In 1912 she successfully arranged for Scribners to divert some of her royalties to James, disguised as an advance for The Ivory Tower, but when she organised American contributions to a seventieth birthday fund, Henry found out and quashed the plan. Throughout James’s letters to Wharton, this theme surfaces repeatedly: Edith can earn money, Henry cannot, and in his financial impotence he finds her at once enviable and alarming. style guides: edith and elsie Edith Wharton’s first full-length book (written in collaboration with the young architect Ogden Codman, Jr), was The Decoration of Houses; it was published in 1897, the same year as The Spoils of Poynton. It is a critical commonplace that Wharton’s writing is saturated with images of domestic design: James’s attention to

Realism and interior design

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the decoration of houses is less often noted.10 Through Fleda and Mrs Gereth, James reveals that he shares with Wharton an authentically obsessive eye for decorative detail: ‘The room was practically a shallow box, with the junction of the walls and ceiling guiltless of curve or cornice and marked merely by the little band of crimson paper glued round the top of the other paper, a turbid grey sprigged with silver flowers’ (SP 40). The activity of interior design appears in James’s and Wharton’s fictions as a theme, but it is also a kind of representational structure – a relationship between designer and environment – that is central to Wharton’s work. There is a direct continuity between interior design, the art of hospitality, and the writing of realist fiction, as these representational forms are practised by Edith Wharton. This chapter is about the psychological specificities of the relationship between the realist writer and his or her imaginatively invoked reader: Wharton and James use text to establish very different relationships with their evoked audiences. The chapter focuses on Wharton’s fiction and autobiographical writings, and on James’s late style, to illuminate the chronic and suggestive conflicts that generated their friendship and their texts. Their friendship developed during a period of social and technological change which was both symptomatised, and incited, by a proliferation of print communications. At the same time, the nineteenth-century fascination with biography modulated into the creation of the celebrity through mediatisation. Like many writers of the period, Wharton and James felt intense ambivalence towards their own public status: on the one hand, they craved an audience for their work; on the other, they felt that through publication they risked exposure. For both writers, subjectivity is always implicated in the idea of other selves, and each writer understands the text as a zone of imaginary intersubjective contact. The modern concept of interior design was elaborated and codified for the first time by The Decoration of Houses. During the nineteenth century, the person considered qualified to advise on domestic decoration was the upholsterer, the cabinet-maker or the antique dealer. The decoration of houses meant purchasing a self-evidently suitable object and installing it in the self-evidently suitable place; this exercise in normative and unreflective consumption was overseen by the masculine eye of the furniture retailer.11 Wharton’s book set out to redefine the decoration of

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houses as an exercise in ‘architectural proportion – in contradistinction to the modern view of house-decoration as superficial application of ornament’. Previously an unexciting repository of ugly, inconvenient traditions, the house was reconceptualised as space, to be ordered and arranged to suit the comfort and the convenience of the inhabitants. Long chapters on ‘Doors’, ‘Windows’, ‘Fireplaces’ and ‘Hall and Stairs’ precede those on the individual rooms of the house. Wharton’s redefinition of ‘house-decoration as a branch of architecture’ (xx) conceives a new dimensionality in the house – which becomes the interior – and a new expressive power in decoration – which becomes design.12 Edith Wharton’s closest rival in the new field of interior design was the American Elsie de Wolfe (1865–1950). When her book The House in Good Taste was published in 1913, de Wolfe had been working for ten years as the first professional interior designer, an occupation that she created for herself after thirteen years on the stage. De Wolfe and Elisabeth Marbury (1856–1933), her partner of thirty-five years, had numerous points of contact, social and professional, with Edith Wharton. Elisabeth’s social background was impeccable; as she notes in her autobiography, My Crystal Ball (1924), she regularly attended Sunday luncheons at the West Eleventh Street house of Mrs Cadwallader Jones (Edith’s sister-inlaw) in New York City. Her professional life – she was one of the first literary agents – brought her into contact with the literary, artistic and theatrical spheres in which Edith also moved, and in addition de Wolfe and Marbury had various professional negotiations with Wharton. In 1901, for example, Wharton’s adaptation of Manon (from Manon Lescaut, the Abbe´ Pre´vost novel) was to be produced by Charles Frohman; Marbury was the theatrical agent for the production. When the actress Julia Marlowe left the production, de Wolfe was chosen for the lead role. The final drowning scene required the actress to jump into a tub of water: de Wolfe objected, insisting that Wharton should rewrite this part of the script. Wharton refused and withdrew the script, and the production folded.13 It is clear from such encounters that there was no love lost between Edith and ‘the Bachelors’, as Elsie and Elisabeth were known, and although a detailed examination of the relationship between the pioneering interior design exponents is beyond the scope of this book, it is interesting to note the extent to which Edith was irked by Elsie and her partner. Like Edith, Elsie is


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commandingly feminine, perfectly dressed, ambitious, a flawless hostess and a passionate designer of interior space. Like Edith, Elisabeth has impressive social credentials and a literary-affiliated career. But Elsie’s social origins bordered on the questionable, and Elisabeth’s gender affiliations were clearly in doubt. ‘Those two women are really not fit to traffic with,’ Edith wrote to Minnie Cadwallader Jones in 1916, ‘and I always feel degraded when I go against my prejudices and treat them as if they were.’14 The Bachelors irritated Edith because they used the power of their social status (Elisabeth) and their femininity (Elsie) to defy criticism of their socio-sexual nonconformism in a way that Edith never felt possible for herself.15 Elsie and Elisabeth met in 1887; in 1892 they set up house together in Irving Place, New York City. In 1897 – as Edith was publishing The Decoration of Houses – Elsie redecorated the house, transforming it into an elegant example of the nascent design aesthetic. For Wharton and de Wolfe, the earliest, most elite exponents, the style was characterised by what Elsie called ‘FFF’: fine French furniture, eighteenth-century or earlier; light wooden panelling; many mirrors and lamps; and restraint in the use of frills and padding. In comparison with the drawing rooms of the wealthy with which both women were familiar, the new style was distinguished by its rejection of overcrowded, overstuffed bourgeois gloom. Elsie and Elisabeth established a glittering artistic and social salon; writers, actors and artists mixed with New York’s social elite in Elsie’s exquisite interior. The leading New York Beaux-Arts architect, Stanford White, was so impressed by the Irving Place house that he secured for Elsie the commission to design the Colony Club, the first American club for women. Elsie’s 1905 design was a triumph; each bedroom received her individual attention, much use was made of the English country house chintzes that Elsie remembered from her London social debut, and the tea salon was decorated with green trellis-work and delicate wicker furniture. The Colony Club established de Wolfe’s professional reputation. She went on to complete many other prestigious assignments, such as the family quarters of Henry Clay Frick’s Renaissance palace on Fifth Avenue, built to house Frick’s collection of French art. De Wolfe worked for a 10 per cent commission of costs: these totalled more than one million dollars.16 For Elsie, interior design was fully

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professionalised; for Edith, it was an expensive pastime that gave rise to a successful publishing opportunity with The Decoration of Houses. But despite the different degrees of professionalisation, interior design was a passion for both women, and each woman’s life was similarly directed and structured by the desires and preoccupations that underlie an obsession with interior design. Their parallel lives are shaped in the most obvious, as well as the most private, ways by their fascination with design. Of the many points of agreement between these two grande dames of interior design, not the least was their insistence that the new challenge presented by the primed interior was a compulsory opportunity. No longer a mere accumulation of wealth and tradition, the house is transformed into a spatial arrangement of semiotic fields, in which the decorator must prove herself mistress of the new lexicon of taste: ‘We take it for granted that every woman is interested in houses . . . It is the personality of the mistress that the home expresses. Men are forever guests in our homes, no matter how much happiness they may find there. You will express yourself in your house, whether you want to or not.’17 By transforming the house into an explicitly representational medium, these books have a double effect. They proffer the house as an arena of choice and control; it is an extravagant promise of the possibility of self-fulfilment, which becomes almost synonymous with self-expression. Interior design – understood as the reflection and management of one’s sense of self through the arrangement of one’s domestic environment – far outweighs the daily activities for which the house might be supposed to be intended. Describing the Villa Trianon (an elegant house adjoining the estate of Versailles outside Paris that Elisabeth bought for Elsie and herself in 1903), Elsie notes that ‘Throughout the house, wherever they could be set to advantage, were mirrors, which may always be found when I am in authority.’18 The designer does not decorate her home in preparation for daily use; rather, she acquires a house in preparation for the absorbing and more or less infinite activity of interior design. At the same time, these books are firmly prescriptive. Elsie warns, ‘We are sure to judge a woman in whose house we find ourselves for the first time, by her surroundings . . . We may talk of the weather, but we are looking at the furniture.’19 Both books enjoin the reader to test her interior against the visiting eye


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of the designer, perhaps by comparing her house with the many photographs provided. Edith offers a standard that seems designed to be unattainable: she illustrates her advice to middleclass American women with photographs of Versailles and of Italian Renaissance palazzi. On this reader at least, both books have a rather dispiriting effect; Elsie may characterise the most common design pitfalls as ‘the errors of meaningless magnificence’,20 but the insuperable obstacle, the reader suspects, is likely to be rather different. Shadowing the spectacle of interior design, at once insistent and ignored, is the necessity of wealth. Edith, for example, includes a chapter on ‘Ball-Room, Salon, Music-Room, Gallery’, in which she advises that, for the ballroom, ‘seventeenthand eighteenth-century tapestries are the most suitable, as the scale of color is brighter and the compositions are gayer than in the earlier hangings’.21 While both women concede that good copies are acceptable, it is clear that the designer would much prefer the real thing, which has to be found in France and shipped back to New York. style guides: the princess casamassima Hyacinth had time to count over the innumerable bibelots (most of which he had never dreamed of) involved in the character of a woman of high fashion and to feel that their beauty and oddity revealed not only whole provinces of art, but refinements of choice on the part of their owner, complications of mind and – almost – terrible depths of temperament. (Henry James, The Princess Casamassima (1886; 1908), PC I, 285)

Hyacinth Robinson and Lily Bart (The House of Mirth (1905)) both commit suicide in the cheap rented rooms that are all they can afford to inhabit, having despaired of gaining admission to the succession of desirable properties in which they have been merely weekend guests. Hyacinth and Lily come to realise that the invitation to the envious eye of the reader does not confer a permanent welcome on the financially disqualified. Both novels punctuate their episodic narratives with minutely calibrated descriptions of houses whose social and economic significance is as legible as anything prescribed by the interior design handbooks. The narrative principle that shapes both novels is in perfect conformity with the message of the interior designer: ‘the history of individuals [is] to be traced by the houses in which they have lived’.22

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Anticipating the preoccupations of the interior designers, The Princess Casamassima is obsessed with the semiotics of the interior. Rose Muniment craves descriptions of Lady Aurora’s family houses as much as she covets a sofa for her own room. Hyacinth, though equally fascinated by the wealthy interiors that he visits, finds Rose’s pitifully predatory acquisitiveness distasteful; his own enchantment with Medley (an exquisite evocation of country house style) conceals itself as a love of beauty and art. When the Princess, Christina, visits the Muniments’ garret, Rose demands details of the fabulous interiors already described by Hyacinth, but to the surprise of her audience, it emerges that the Princess has adopted a new domestic aesthetic: politically correct minimalism. ‘There are no things in my house now,’ the Princess went on; and there was a touch of pure high resignation in the words. ‘Laws, I shouldn’t like that!’ Rose Muniment declared, glancing with complacency over her own decorated walls. ‘Everything here belongs to me.’ . . . ‘Do you think it’s not right to have a lot of things about?’ Lady Aurora, with sudden courage, enquired . . . ‘I suppose one must always settle that for one’s self. I don’t like to be surrounded with objects I don’t care for, and I can care only for one thing – that is for one class of things – at a time. Dear lady,’ the Princess pursued, ‘I fear I must confess to you that my heart’s not in bibelots. When thousands and tens of thousands haven’t bread to put in their mouths I can dispense with tapestry and old china.’ And her fair face, bent charmingly, conciliatingly, on Lady Aurora, appeared to argue that if she was narrow at least she was honest. (PC II, 168–9)

Bewildered by ‘this singular picture of her denuded personality’, Hyacinth protests: ‘I think there can’t be too many pictures and statues and works of art . . . In the way of ameliorating influences are not those the most definite?’ ‘A piece of bread and butter’s more to the purpose if your stomach’s empty,’ the Princess declared. (II, 170)

Magnificently fraudulent, Christina’s populist ‘renunciation’ demonstrates an absolute power, a mastery of representation that is underwritten by enormous wealth. Only the infinitely rich can afford to feign poverty; as Muniment remarks ingenuously in the Princess’s faux-bourgeois villa, ‘You’ve a great deal left, for a person who has given everything away’ (II, 231).


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The foregrounded obsession with representation in general, and the hermeneutics of interior design in particular, contribute a great deal to the camp atmosphere of this novel – which is appropriately named after its presiding genius, James’s high priestess of representation, the diva of interior design. ‘[N]o one had such a feeling for the mise-en-sce`ne of life, such a talent for arranging a room. She had always, wherever she was, the most charming room in Europe’ (I, 268–9). That this is an essentially, indeed exaggeratedly, feminine activity is established by the correspondingly butch Paul Muniment (‘I work for a firm of wholesale chemists at Lambeth’ (I, 118)), who makes it clear that real men do not even understand the concept of the ‘interior’. Paul says of the dilettante Captain Sholto, ‘He told me he’d give the world to see a really superior working-man’s ‘‘interior’’. I didn’t know at first just where he proposed to cut me open’ (I, 257). The Princess Casamassima is a Jamesian style guide, a handbook of representational tropes and techniques; in this novel theory and practice come together to produce an effect of high camp – a self-conscious adherence to aesthetic practices whose efficacy and artificiality are strangely complementary. James has a colleague’s professional respect for the Princess, whose command of the image dooms Hyacinth from the beginning. ‘In this beautiful woman’s face there was to his bewildered perception something at once inspiring, tempting and mocking’ (I, 224); and even the discovery that she has dropped him in favour of Muniment cannot destroy her appeal. ‘It was just as she was, superficial or profound, that she held him’ (II, 260). Inviting him into her houses, seducing him with her interiors, and thereby compounding and reinforcing his sense of deprivation, the Princess behaves as do the style guides: ‘inspiring, tempting and mocking’. It is essential that there should be perfect harmony between the natural attitude of the figure and the space it lives in.23

The Decoration of Houses, The House in Good Taste and the Princess’s modus operandi elaborate a fantasy of interior design as the total control of the designer’s environment. Armed with fabulous wealth, the decorator demarcates space, summons the best Louis Quatorze, sets the stage for the visitors who will come to admire: to repeat, she subordinates her environment into a reflection of

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her will. ‘Interior design’ involves a kind of force-field existing between the designer and her surroundings, a force-field generated by, and sustaining, the creation of the domestic interior as a representational medium. It is a medium that demands attention: neither the designer, nor the visitor to the house, will be able to ignore either the authority reflected by an impressive interior, or the semiotic treachery of an interior that resists subordination to its mistress. An interior cannot be mute: it must speak of wealth or poverty, power or abjection. If the mistress of the house cannot imprint it with her mastery, she will find herself (and her guest) assailed by an insistent semiotic clamour proclaiming her failure. Refusing Hyacinth’s gift of beautifully bound books, Christina claims that ‘such things have ceased to speak to me’ (PC II, 259). Given the flawless accessorisation of the Madeira Crescent villa, this claim is disingenuous, but not wholly so: the rich designer can buy the appearance of total control. What counts is the visibility of her self-assurance, whether this is signalled by Edith’s austere asperities and aloof instructions, or by Elsie’s gay prescriptions and imperious egotism. frustrated designers: ‘the anguish of exasperated taste’ Not all would-be decorators can achieve this visible control over the domestic environment. To experience the world as the designer does, while lacking the resources to respond, is, as Hyacinth ironically describes Christina’s simulated poverty, ‘to suffer the anguish of exasperated taste’ (PC II, 182). Kate Croy, for example, is acutely sensitive to the solicitations of her surroundings: ‘She saw as she had never seen before how material things spoke to her . . . She had a dire accessibility to pleasure from such sources. She liked the charming quarters her aunt had assigned her – liked them literally more than she had in all her other days liked anything’ (WD 72). The problem for the impoverished designer is that her ‘dire accessibility’ to the ‘language of the house’ (105) becomes a torment when the objects around her are not subject to her control. Fleda returns to her father’s house from Poynton to find that ‘now that she was really among the penwipers and ashtrays she was swept, at the thought of all the beauty she had forsworn, by short wild gusts of despair’ (SP 105).


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For the woman afflicted by Christina’s temperament without Christina’s wealth, the domestic interior, rather than affirming and expressing her will, is experienced as an agonistic medium, in which her sense of self is defined by incessant contention with a hostile environment. With ‘a small salutary sense at least of neither shirking nor lying’ (WD 55), Kate confronts her father’s lodgings: ‘What showed was the ugliness – so positive and palpable that it was somehow sustaining. It was a medium, a setting, and to that extent, after all, a dreadful sign of life’ (61). Fleda is most frightened for Mrs Gereth when she seems to have lost all sense of engagement with her surroundings; to cease to recognise ‘the principle of property’ is to lose the painfully sustaining sense of impoverishment and descend into an absolute poverty. ‘Something to hate, and to hate ‘‘comfortably,’’ was at least not the utter destitution to which . . . she had helplessly seemed to see Mrs Gereth go forth’ (SP 177). As Madame Merle says of her ‘things’, ‘‘‘[I]t’s good to have something to hate’’’ (PL 358). Kate, Fleda and Mrs Gereth experience themselves most vividly as thwarted and starved. The anguish of exasperated taste develops into a ruthless struggle between self and environment in which the frustrated designer comes to experience the domestic interior as an agent of deprivation. When Mrs Gereth visits Fleda in her sister’s house, to announce Owen’s return to Mona, the little suburban drawing room can only consolidate the disaster: ‘He has done it,’ said Mrs Gereth, turning her eyes avoidingly but not unperceivingly about her and in spite of herself dropping an opinion upon the few objects in the room . . . [Mrs Gereth] selected, with hesitation, a seat less distasteful than the one that happened to be nearest . . . She looked helpless as she sat there, her eyes, unseeingly enough, on a tall Dutch clock, old but rather poor, that Maggie had had as a wedding-gift and that eked out the bareness of the room. (SP 171–2)

Her own powers waning, Kate withdraws to her sister’s drawing room, where Densher finds her: ‘Mrs Condrip’s interior . . . showed itself as a setting almost grotesquely inapt. Pale, grave and charming, [Kate] affected him at once as a distinguished stranger – stranger to the little Chelsea street – who was making the best of a queer episode and a place of exile’ (WD 482). Elsie de Wolfe boasted that ‘when another woman would be dreaming of love affairs, I dream of the delightful houses I have lived in’.24 For an impoverished designer, the house is no less erotically charged, but it

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generates an experience of frustration rather than of satisfaction. Ever alert to the interplay between designer and environment, Edith Wharton says that she has always thought ‘the kiss on the stairs in The Spoils of Poynton’ to be ‘one of the most moving love-scenes in fiction’ (BG 949): Fleda had stood clutching the knob of Maggie’s little painted stair-rail; she took, on the stairs, a step backward . . . Facing him, waving him away, she had taken another upward step; but he sprang to the side of the stairs, and brought his hand, above the banister, down hard on her wrist. ‘Do you mean to tell me that I must marry a woman I hate?’ From her step she looked down into his raised face . . . ‘I wouldn’t give you up!’ she said again. He still had hold of her arm; she took in his blank alarm. With a quick dip of her face she reached his hand with her lips, pressing them to the back of it with a force of her words. ‘Never, never, never!’ she cried; and before he could succeed in seizing her she had turned and, scrambling up the stairs, got away from him even faster than she had got away from him at Ricks. (SP 140–1)

the abject: ‘committed as sisters to a fellowship in abjection’ 2 5 If the object, however, through its opposition, settles me within the fragile texture of a desire for meaning, which . . . makes me ceaselessly and infinitely homologous to it, what is abject, on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses. (Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror (1982))26 Often he woke from his brief snatches of sleep with the feeling that something material was clinging to him, was on his hands and face, and in his throat – and as his brain cleared he understood that it was the sense of his own personality that stuck to him like some thick viscous substance. (Edith Wharton, ‘The Bolted Door’ (1908))27

Julia Kristeva’s ‘abjection’ is a state that challenges the separation of subjectivity and objectivity; it is a kind of limbo that blurs the dichotomy of self and thing. A clear distinction between self and world sustains the subject’s sense of autonomous identity. The abject, Kristeva argues, is what threatens this subject/object divide; it is everything that resists this dichotomy and insists on the original identity of subject and object. The subject tries to cast off all reminders of this, but they cannot be fully obliterated or objectified; the abject taunts the subject with the impossibility of sealing the self against abjection, because the abject comes from within the


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self. It is in and through the constant process of abjection that the subject experiences itself: the subject comes into being through a sense of contamination. The grammatical structure of subject – verb – object expresses the ideal that is continually threatened by the abject. The interior designer hopes to impose this grammatical structure on the world; it is an active, transitive mode that wishfully assumes both the malleability of the environment and the impermeability of the self. The Decoration of Houses and The House in Good Taste – despite paying lip service to the possibility of successful design on a limited budget – leave no doubt that the tool with which the designer pursues her psychological project is money. With money, you can be Edith Wharton or the Princess Casamassima; without ‘enough’ money – for Jamesian poverty is always as much a state of mind as an economic fact – you have no choice but to be Fleda Vetch, Kate Croy or Henry James. While The Decoration of Houses is a wholehearted elaboration of the interior design fantasy, Wharton was at the same time writing fiction that displays an acute imaginative sensitivity to the material and psychological conditions that the interior design fantasy constitutes as its own abject. ‘Mrs Manstey’s View’ (1890; Wharton’s first published story) and Bunner Sisters (a novella written in 1892) are unflinching analyses of female poverty and the consequent impossibility of controlling the material conditions of life. Mrs Manstey, a widow, has nothing left except the view from the window of her boarding-house bedroom. The next-door landlady decides to build an extension at the back of her house: the view will be entirely obstructed. With desperate dignity Mrs Manstey begs her to change her mind; the landlady pretends to agree, and Mrs Manstey goes home, but next day the building work begins. That night Mrs Manstey sets fire to the new foundations, and the following day the work cannot continue. But Mrs Manstey has caught cold from creeping around at night, contracts pneumonia and dies. The day after her death, the building work resumes. Bunner Sisters is an even bleaker analysis of poverty as powerlessness. Two spinster sisters live together behind their little shop; Wharton pays a lot of attention to the inconveniences and discomforts of living in just one room. She carefully records the perpetual fidgety housekeeping required by having to eat, read, sew and entertain at the same table. A modestly eligible suitor

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appears: everyone assumes that he is interested in the younger, pretty sister, but he proposes to the elder. In her small way a heroine, Ann Eliza declines, suggesting that her sister Evelina would make a better wife. After the marriage, the couple disappear; Ann Eliza has given them her savings, and she becomes malnourished and ill. Eventually, Evelina returns. Her husband, an opium addict, has neglected her, and after the death of her baby she has become destitute. She dies of consumption, leaving Ann Eliza alone and impoverished. Wharton has an entirely unsentimental attitude towards poverty. Being poor does not make her characters either good or wise: Ann Eliza is a generous person despite her poverty, not because of it, and her sister is made selfish by her limited life. Even when Evelina’s husband has abandoned her, she slights her sister, a spinster who cannot be expected to understand the sorrows of a wife. Ann Eliza’s heroism achieves nothing: she is forced to recognise the ‘awful problem of the inutility of self-sacrifice’.28 Directed outwards or inwards – as destruction of a building or sacrifice of the self – mere will is nothing without the power of money; the impoverished designer can only slip further into abjection, helplessly vulnerable to the ‘bad food, ugly furniture, [and] complaints and recriminations’ that express the material and psychological condition of poverty.29 Mrs Manstey and Ann Eliza cannot control the object-worlds in which they experience subjectivity as frustration and futility: The Decoration of Houses must be read in conjunction with these stories. These texts invade a reading of the style guide, hovering in the margins, refusing to be left out. They are the grotesque signs of poverty and powerlessness that the interior designer seeks to obliterate from her home. James is particularly interested in the physical distaste experienced by the impoverished designer who cannot mount an impressive defence against these intrusions. There is something monstrous about an insubordinate house, ‘[t]he curtains that overdraped the windows, the sofas and tables that stayed circulation, the chimney-ornaments that reached to the ceiling and the florid chandelier that almost dropped to the floor’ (WD 482): ‘ugly almost to the point of the sinister’, it is the uncontrolled physical substance of this furniture, its aggressive bulk, that makes it so threatening. (Edith reports to Henry with a shudder that she


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has visited the ‘Minnie Pauls’ in ‘a sinister little mouldy villa’.30) The fear that underlies the interior design ideal is that of an environment that ‘fail[s]’, like Mrs Condrip’s furniture, ‘to accommodate or to compromise’ (WD 482). This antipathetic environment is oppressive, is sinister, in its uncompromising physicality: it is unsubdued matter that besieges the anguished designer, arousing an intensely physical repulsion. Kate’s sensitivity to domestic interiors is not confined to sight; she ‘feel[s] the street’, she ‘feel[s] the room’, she ‘feel[s] the table-cloth and the centre-piece and the lamp’, she ‘taste[s] the faint flat emanation of things’ (55). The interior designer is intensely fastidious about the body, and about the ways in which the relationship between the mistress and her house is mediated by the body. The body is the border between self and object; or rather, it is the interface between them, a zone in which the mistress of the house interacts with her surroundings through the physical substance that is common to object and embodied subject alike. The body is the physical person of the designer, but it is also, in its materiality, unavoidably akin to the object-world with which the designer contends unceasingly. The designer’s fear is that her body may be more a membrane than a boundary: a permeable border that cannot be trusted to sustain the separation of self and world. The designer does not trust the body; she must supervise and control it, diminish its natural alliance with the object-world. The designer’s mistrustful fastidiousness about the body results in a proliferation of rooms each designated for a particular aspect of physical behaviour. Rooms become highly specialised to the point at which, for example, the bedroom is ‘subdivided’ into ‘a suite composed of two or more rooms’, ideally four rooms ‘preceded by an antechamber separating the suite from the main corridor of the house. The small sitting room or boudoir opens into this antechamber; and next comes the bedroom, beyond which are the dressing and bath rooms.’31 By distinguishing and separating different aspects of physical behaviour, the designer aims both to impose upon the body the kind of order with which she subdues her environment, and to sequester the body at its most naked, its most irreducibly material. Edith devotes just half a page to the bathroom, and names only the bath and the washstand. Elsie is much less prudish. On taking

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possession of the Villa Trianon in 1903, she and Elisabeth Marbury scandalised their French neighbours by insisting that six bathrooms be installed. Elsie’s most celebrated interior was the bathroom of her Paris apartment in the Avenue d’Ieńa; it featured a fireplace, mirrored friezes, taps in the shape of swans’ heads, and a divan upholstered in zebra skin. ‘Moonshine and glamour, white orchids and rock crystal, silver tissue and white furs, reflected in many mirrors – that is my bathroom, believe it or not!’32 The ultimate effect of this bravado is to obscure the basic purpose of the room; Elsie renamed it the ‘bath-salon’, and her dinner guests would often finish the evening on the zebra divan in rapt contemplation of her aesthetic e´lan, the ‘ugly necessities’ concealed behind a screen. The designer may choose to make her bathroom deeply private or ostentatiously public: whether suppressed or fetishised, the bathroom’s significance as a place in which the body is at its most abject is a source of expressive unease to the mistress of the house. Mrs Condrip’s house in ‘comfortless Chelsea’ offers no such discretions and subdivisions. After the children’s lunch, Kate and Marian appear to have nowhere to talk but the dining room, ‘in the presence of the crumbled table-cloth, the dispersed pinafores, the scraped dishes, [and] the lingering odour of boiled food’ (7733). In houses which fail to ‘accommodate’, which refuse to separate eating from talking, the body and the interior threaten to merge; the house becomes physically distasteful, almost like a body itself, and the designer becomes increasingly unwilling to bring herself into closer contact with it. In her father’s lodgings Kate is reluctant to sit down. She ‘chang[es] her place, moving from the shabby sofa to the armchair upholstered in a glazed cloth that gave at once – she had tried it – the sense of the slippery and of the sticky’ (55). This armchair – at once slippery and sticky – emblematises the world as experienced by the frustrated designer. Kate cannot subdue her surroundings; the chair resists her control, it gives her no purchase, no grip. Yet at the same time it imposes itself on her as a physical touch, a touch that she cannot ignore or wipe away. Slippery and sticky: the suppressed fear of even the most successful interior designer is losing control of the boundaries that separate identity from formlessness, people and things from unsubdued matter.


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henry and edith: self, text, world Edith liked to think of herself as a person adept at controlling, adapting and manipulating the world; this is a central theme of her autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934). A good example is her long and satisfactory relationship with the motor car that began in Italy in 1903, with a visit to the Villa Caprarola. The fiftymile journey in the American ambassador’s car took just one hour each way; but there was no windscreen: It was great fun . . . but when I reached the dinner my voice was entirely gone, and I spent the next days in bed, fighting an acute laryngitis. In spite of this I swore then and there that as soon as I could make money enough I would buy a motor; and so I did – and having a delicate throat, scoured the country in the hottest weather swaddled in a stifling hood with a mica window, till some benefactor of the race invented the windscreen and made motoring an unmixed joy. (BG 887–8)

Motor cars are expensive and induce acute laryngitis; however, they also make it possible to visit places that are not accessible by train. So Edith decides that she must make enough money to buy one for herself – she is always happier to offer than to receive hospitality – and, having acquired a motor, invents a way of protecting herself from the dust. Edith’s happy authority in the domain of the ‘motor-flight’ illustrates her attitude towards the world which both conflicts with, and subtly reinforces, Henry’s sense of self. Theirs was a smiling, mutually vexatious relationship, in which a disconcerting hostility makes itself manifest alongside even the fondest protestations of affection. However, their friendship should not be thought of as continuing despite their intractable differences, but as somehow structured and sustained by their differences. Neither seems to feel guilty about expressing their criticisms of the other, nor does either seem wounded by the other’s manifest hostility. It is as if each has some underlying recognition that it is a shared psychological problematic that brings them together in disagreement. This is not to say that their relationship lacks sparkle; on the contrary, some of Wharton’s liveliest autobiographical writing is fuelled by the mutual irritations between the pair. As represented by Wharton, Henry’s hospitality is both a major opportunity for friction in the friendship and a rich source of energy in the ‘Henry James’ chapter of A Backward Glance. According to Edith, a Lamb

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House luncheon would be consumed ‘amid unnecessary apologies for its meagreness, and sarcastic allusions to [her] own supposed culinary extravagances’ (969). The tetchy mealtime atmosphere is not sustained by Henry alone – Edith’s characterisation of Henry’s housekeeping style cannot be called innocent of judgement: ‘At Lamb House an anxious frugality was combined with the wish that the usually solitary guest . . . should not suffer too greatly from the contrast between his or her supposed habits of luxury, and the privations imposed by the host’s conviction that he was on the brink of ruin’ (966). Edith protests that his apologies are unnecessary, but this has a hollow ring given her continuing sarcasm: ‘in his daily life he was haunted by the spectre of impoverishment, and the dreary pudding or pie of which a quarter or half had been consumed at dinner reappeared on the table the next day with its ravages unrepaired’ (966–7). And her acerbic tone extends to her comments on his attitude towards her motor car: ‘He denied himself (I believe quite needlessly) the pleasure and relaxation which a car of his own might have given him, but took advantage, to the last drop of petrol, of the travelling capacity of any visitor’s car’(969). The crux of their mutual provocation is the question of vulnerability: the sense of insecurity and weakness that Henry does not conceal seems to Edith an ignoble admission of defeat. Edith’s response to her trip in the American ambassador’s car was to decide that she must buy one for herself; Henry’s attitude – that he cannot afford one of his own but will ‘take advantage’, as Edith sees it, of her car – is distasteful to her (though it allows her to experience herself in contrast as generous and magnanimous). If Edith were reduced to penury, she would never confess to it; she would never allow herself to make any sign of her need, of her abjection. For abjection is always a sign. Despite her poverty, Ann Eliza is never abject: she constantly works to conceal the evidence, the symptoms, of her economic and emotional deprivation. The dreary puddings that reappear on Henry’s table are – as signs of abjection – abject signs, signs that betray Henry. To Edith, social self-representation should be a form of semantic self-protection, not an open avowal of need. Henry is critical of Edith with a rhetorical extravagance that implies that she cannot be wounded; his theatrical complaints about his harassment at the talons of the Firebird function as an


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almost aggressive defiance of her implicit claim of invulnerability. Edith, in turn, claims that much as she would have valued James’s professional respect, she knew from experience that his probable response to her work would be hostile. In Henry’s company, she claims, she always avoided the topic of her writing, but she recalls a social occasion at which her husband made the mistake of soliciting Henry’s opinion of a recently published story of hers: he instantly replied: ‘Oh, yes, my dear Edward, I’ve read the little work – of course I’ve read it.’ A gentle pause, which I knew boded no good; then he softly continued: ‘Admirable, admirable; a masterly little achievement.’ He turned to me, full of a terrifying benevolence. ‘Of course so accomplished a mistress of the art would not, without deliberate intention, have given the tale so curiously conventional a treatment. Though indeed, in the given case, no treatment but the conventional was possible; which might conceivably, my dear lady, on further consideration, have led you to reject your subject as – er – in itself a totally unsuitable one.’ (919)

Other friends write of Henry’s kindness, his solicitousness, his elaborate courtesies and courtliness; only Wharton records this strain of untrammelled malice. Henry’s reported display of hostility is nothing if not profoundly undignified – it shows the eminent novelist caught off-guard in a childish moment of revenge; it is the behaviour of someone who feels powerless in the face of another’s implacable composure. This representation of Henry may reflect Wharton’s unusual lack of sentimentality; but it also, I think, indicates Edith’s unusual effect on Henry, as well as Edith’s characteristic use of Henry’s aggression to demonstrate her own imperturbability. James’s story ‘The Velvet Glove’ (1909) appears to be a fictional attempt to puncture Edith’s impenetrable serenity, again by rejecting, in the most absolute terms, Wharton’s claims to literary authority.34 Its protagonist, Berridge, a distinguished novelist, finds himself swept away from a party for a motor-drive through Paris with a beautiful and wealthy young woman, during which she asks him if he will provide a preface for her latest book. A ‘Princess’ in private life, she is Amy Evans, popular American novelist, author of The Top of the Tree, and, now, her new work, The Velvet Glove. The titles are suggestive. Wharton had published The Fruit of the Tree in 1907; and the smooth opulence of the ‘velvet glove’ gestures silently towards its socially unacceptable motive force, the iron fist.

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It is difficult to imagine for James a more satisfyingly hostile image of luxury with which to punish Berridge’s Princess-author: indeed, the story can be read as a piece of unadulterated hostility – or as a story about unadulterated hostility – fuelled by financial and sexual jealousy. Crushingly disappointed to realise that the Princess’s interest in him is purely a matter of literary economics, Berridge’s revenge takes the form of a refusal not only to write the preface but, more satisfyingly, to recognise the Princess as anything more than a privileged Society lady. Such is the extent of his desire to annihilate the sublimely self-assured Amy Evans that he really worries that she may be as stupid as he wishes her to understand that he thinks her to be: ‘No, Princess, I won’t do your Preface. Nothing would induce me to say a word in print about you. I’m in fact not sure I shall ever mention you in any manner at all as long as ever I live.’ He had felt for an instant as if he were speaking to some miraculously humanized idol, all sacred, all jewelled, all votively hung about, but made mysterious, in the recess of its shrine, by the very thickness of the accumulated lustre. And ‘Then you don’t like me – ?’ was the marvellous sound from the image. ‘Princess,’ was in response the sound of the worshipper, ‘Princess, I adore you. But I’m ashamed for you.’ ‘Ashamed – ?’ ‘You are Romance – as everything, and by what I make out, every one, about you is; so what more do you want? Your Preface – the only one worth speaking of – was written long ages ago by the most beautiful imagination of man.’ . . . Their faces . . . were nearer together than ever, but with the effect of only adding to the vividness of that dire non-intelligence from which, all perversely and incalculably, her very beauty appeared to gain relief. This made for him a pang and almost an anguish; the fear of her saying something yet again that would wretchedly prove how little he moved her perception.35

Berridge experiences an almost murderous hostility towards Amy Evans, who fails to comprehend it.36 Edith wrote a letter to Henry in which she praised the story, and Henry responded with characteristically effusive gratitude,37 so it would seem that it did not occur, consciously, to either Henry or Edith that James’s story thematised a wounded craving for revenge which might be interpreted as rather close to home. Perhaps what we see here is a kind of dare: a challenge from grateful Henry to gracious Edith to acknowledge the


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powerful undercurrents of their relationship – but if so, it is the kind of conservative dare that merely feigns rebellion. There is as much in the story that is unlike, as is like, the two presumptive extratextual models: ‘The Velvet Glove’ is designed to protect itself from the necessity of being exposed as an iron fist. It is not a challenge that obliges Edith to recognise it as such, and thus it offers her another opportunity to exercise magnanimity in the face of Henry’s hostility, by behaving as if his hostility does not count. This is at once what Henry seems to be trying to penetrate – like Berridge, wishing fervently that the Princess will understand the extent of his insult – and what he is relying on. Beneath his frustration, Henry uses Edith to confirm his impotence; and Edith uses Henry to confirm her inviolability. Very unlike Berridge and Amy Evans, Henry and Edith collaborate as perverse allies in their struggles with abjection. In Edith’s view, Henry does not share her talent for arranging the world to suit oneself. Edith calls this talent ‘adaptability’, a complete misnomer, as what she means is the ability to adapt the environment, not oneself: ‘During a heat-wave [Henry’s] curious inadaptability to conditions or situations became positively tragic. His bodily surface, already broad, seemed to expand to meet it, and his imagination to become a part of his body, so that the one dripped words of distress as the other did moisture’ (BG 924). For the self to be able to control its environment, it must be clearly distinct from its environment; but Henry’s ‘bodily surface’, rather than separating him from his surroundings, ‘expands’ outwards to meet and merge with the heatwave. In Edith’s eyes, Henry’s body is more a vulnerable membrane than a barrier; through the medium of his physical person, his sense of self – his ‘imagination’, his creative mind – is contaminated by the environment from which his ‘bodily surface’ should have protected him. There is an important association, for Edith, between bodies and texts, an association that she makes explicit in her uncomfortable responses to James’s late fiction. In 1904, writing to W. C. Brownell, she mentions ‘Mr James (whose books of the last ten years I can’t read . . . )’.38 Given her admiration of his earlier writing, this seems strange. Writing to Sally Norton in 1901, her distaste for The Sacred Fount, published that year (‘I wish so fine a title had not been attached to so ignoble a book’) is emphatic. ‘I could cry over the ruins of such a talent. It reminds me, somehow, of the description

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of M. Valdemar’s liquefaction in Poe’s story. (I mean the break up of Mr James’s talent, not, of course, the donneé of his book.)’39 Poe’s M. Valdemar, the victim of an unfortunate experiment in mesmerism, continues to live despite the death and decay of his body. The narrator describes the effect of the voice of the living corpse as similar to the way in which ‘gelatinous or glutinous matters impress the sense of touch’. When the mesmeric state is removed, ‘his whole frame . . . shrunk – crumbled – absolutely rotted away beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before that whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome – of detestable putridity.’40 In Edith’s view, James’s late writing is like a spirit betrayed by the corporeality of the body; it is a distasteful spectacle of vulnerability. James’s open, undefended texts betray him in exactly the way that his perspiring body does. His texts and his body are similarly abject: as interfaces with the world, they are too permeable, too open, blurring the boundaries between subject and object, self and world. James’s late fiction is sometimes accused of aloof impenetrability: the complex texture of generalisation, qualification, vague specificity and intense dilation is experienced by some readers as self-involved and hopelessly pedantic. The next step is often to characterise such texts as inscrutable to the point of futility. This reading of the late fiction is fuelled by the defensiveness induced by near-incomprehension. It is certainly true that the style does not make for a confident grasp of a narrative thread; but it is mistaken to interpret this as a deliberate hostility or disdain towards the reader. James’s late writing is a kind of language in which the clarity of the distinction between subject and object can no longer be sustained: a kind of textuality in which words and world are very close together, and are not clearly separable. Objects lose their definition: the notorious Jamesian ‘it’ signals a wariness towards nouns, a sense that language cannot claim to objectify its material so neatly. Moreover, it opens the text to the contingencies of reading: the Jamesian ‘it’ is a shared object that comes into being through the encounter between text and reader. Meaning, in James’s late texts, is always relational, intersubjective; a contingent, transformative object resulting from a process of hermeneutic negotiation. Strether asks Little Bilham in reference to Mamie Pocock: ‘‘‘For what do you suggest that I suppose her to take you?’’’ (A II, 170) There appears, from a formal grammatical


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perspective, to be a proposed object of discussion – the ‘what’object of Strether’s view of Mamie’s presumed perception of Bilham – but, as we can see when we try to identify this object, it is defined entirely by its enmeshed production within a ring of semantic and psychological relations. James’s protagonists, and readers, act as a matrix within which meanings are made and debated, assumed, guessed, perceived, proposed and translated. As we try to ‘make it out’ (a key form of cognitive activity in late James), the ‘what’-object wavers and transmutes into a series of overlapping, interdependent screens of perception and attribution. At the same time, subjects and the language they use acquire a new permeability, an openness; conversations become verbally tactile, as words and touch converge. There is a stickiness in the experience of reading James’s late texts; the commas between clauses that to some readers seem like the sealant in a mosaic in fact function in quite the opposite way, as gaps and fissures through which the text opens itself, makes itself permeable to the reader. Edith was most uneasy in the face of James’s eager embrace of the intersubjective contingencies of writing and reading. Describing Henry as a correspondent, Wharton emphasises ‘the completeness of his self-abandonment’ in a way that recognises generosity while withholding judgement: ‘His one effort is to identify himself with the person addressed, to commune, in an almost mystic sense, with the friend whom his passionate imagination brings so near.’41 Henry’s passionate imagination is never more clearly discernible than in this letter to William Morton Fullerton: My dear Fullerton. I should have thanked you on the spot and at the hour for your admirable and beautiful, your more than touching, your penetrating, letter of a few days since . . . I have told you before that the imposition of hands in a certain tender way ‘finishes’ me, simply – and behold me accordingly more finished than the most paracheve´ of my own productions. I can only gasp – gently, and thank you. You do with me what you will . . . You are dazzling, my dear Fullerton; you are beautiful; you are more than tactful, you are tenderly, magically tactile.42

Such writing works as an intimate encounter. Henry compares his own state – his response to Fullerton’s tender, tactile prose – to that of ‘the most paracheve´ of [his] own productions’. Just as

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Fullerton – through the mediation of his text – leaves Henry ‘gasping’, undefended and grateful, so Henry suggests that he leaves his own texts open, permeable, unprotected. ‘Finished’, here, does not mean ‘polished’: it means unmanned, overcome – blissfully abject. The state of perfection for the writer is reached when the boundaries are broken down between self and other, and reader and writer converge and merge through the medium of the text. edith: authorial origins Wharton describes in A Backward Glance her first attempt, at the age of eleven, to write fiction. [It] was a novel, which began: ‘‘‘Oh, how do you do, Mrs Brown?’’ said Mrs Tompkins. ‘‘If only I had known you were going to call I should have tidied up the drawing-room.’’’ Timorously I submitted this to my mother, and never shall I forget the sudden drop of my creative frenzy when she returned it with the icy comment: ‘Drawing-rooms are always tidy.’ (BG 839)

‘Submitting’ her first fiction to her mother, Edith receives not praise for her art but criticism of her fictional housekeeping. She learns two things: first, that artistic pretensions are no excuse for an untidy drawing room; second, that it is unwise to allow one’s fiction to make oneself vulnerable. Untidy, unpolished texts make their author vulnerable to the reader, so that the writer of such texts is as undefended as the hostess whose guest sees her drawing room in disarray. Critics have written about Edith’s emotionally distant relationship with her mother, and have persuasively suggested that Edith, as a child, experienced some degree of sexual abuse by her father.43 I am not concerned here with establishing the extratextual accuracy of this hypothesis, or of reiterating assertions that Edith’s relationship with her mother was marked by chilly formality. What I am interested in are the ways in which Wharton’s characteristic representational practices are imprinted and inflected by an irresoluble ambivalence in her attitude towards relations with the outside world. Wharton’s interior design, her art of hospitality, and her writing of realism are expressive of Edith’s most characteristic experience of herself in the world: as contending with the twin threats of deprivation (too little attention from others) and


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violation (too much). The ambivalent realist self is constituted and experienced through a sense of ceaseless contention with the hostile external world. Elsie de Wolfe recorded little affection for her childhood family. She told her prote´ge´ Ludwig Bemelmans: ‘I was born in an ugly house, in an ugly street, the last of five children. I was told that I was ugly by my parents, by both of them, and the furniture in that house was ugly too, and I always got the dark meat of the chicken.’44 The autobiographies of Edith and Elsie share an implicit association of emotional maltreatment with the development of the designer’s eye. After All, Elsie’s autobiography, sketches a picture of her family background without expressing any emotional affiliation or even antipathy towards her parents or siblings. This curious lack of affect is supplemented by a parallel narrative that relates the growth of Elsie’s relationship with the domestic environment of objects; this was always a passionate engagement: As a child I had always been sensitive to my surroundings. This grew on me until it became an obsession. I can never remember entering a room without being definitely conscious of it. My reactions were instinctive, of course, as I knew nothing about interiors. But there was something inside which told me whether they were right or wrong.45

Edith describes a similar sensitivity to domestic environments whose intensity suggests a displacement from more animate sources: her ‘photographic memory of rooms and houses . . . was from [her] earliest years a source of inarticulate misery, for [she] was always vaguely frightened by ugliness’ (BG 805). Elsie feels ‘something inside’ her that tells her whether the environment is ‘right or wrong’ (these childlike moral terms are telling); Edith finds visual images imprinted on her memory as if she were a camera, a machine designed to record its surroundings passively, without selection or arrangement. Just as emotional deprivation seems to be linked to the development of the designer’s eye, so the child’s intense awareness of her marginal significance in her parents’ lives seems to be transformed into a woman’s need for social centrality. For the single activity for which the interior designer fits her house is the art of hospitality. Elsie’s chic, lavish and eccentric social events in the 1920s and 1930s kept her at the heart of the international party

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set; Edith’s style as a hostess was more restrained but no less luxurious or unflagging. Interior design and the art of hospitality are closely connected social activities, each enhancing and complementing the other. The designer’s satisfying sense of mastery over her domestic environment is augmented by the presence of witnesses – her guests; and the hostess must have a suitably impressive interior in which – and with which – to awe her guests. However, the ravishing interior is not merely a backdrop. On the contrary, domestic design is an art that requires perpetual (re)enactment: the designer can never rest because she is tormented by the sense that she can never conclusively master her environment. Like the hostess, the designer must return to the theatre of her performance night after night – or, rather, day after day. Interior design is not a project carried out upon a passive canvas, but a process, an ongoing struggle to subordinate the looming material world. For the designer, the physical world is subdued through the exemplary barrier of the body; for the hostess, the outside world (made up of other people) is managed through the etiquette of hospitality. Both social forms are representational practices that mediate a certain relationship between the ‘artist’ and her importunate environment. hospitality and writing Edith was a tireless hostess. She filled her houses with dinner guests, weekend guests, guests down from London or up from New York or visiting from Paris; close friends, Society figures, acquaintances, artists, younger men, literary colleagues. Her hospitality was gracious, lavish and indefatigable. As Percy Lubbock remarks, ‘she dressed, she furnished her house, she fed her guests, she laid out her garden, all better than anyone else. I never heard of such an apprenticeship for a writer, but it served in this case.’46 Lubbock is always better at describing his perception of Edith’s behaviour than at trying to understand it. He is mystified by Edith’s literary ‘apprenticeship’ as a hostess, failing to grasp the link between Edith’s hospitality and Wharton’s writing: he does not recognise that these are both social and representational practices. Just as hospitality is a form of representation – a way of appearing on the social stage – so writing is a form of social activity – a way of engaging with the writer’s environment. The representational practices of


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ambivalent realism are always social practices: ways of establishing a relationship between writer and reader, self and world, that are structured by realism’s central preoccupation with the relationship between private being and public meaning. Edith emphasises that writing was always closely connected to her social existence. In A Backward Glance and Life and I she describes her childhood passion for what she calls ‘making up’: pacing up and down, alone, carrying a book – frequently upside down – as a prop, she would narrate to herself long stories of her own invention. ‘Making up’ was in some ways a profoundly antisocial activity, self-absorbing and self-sufficient, and clearly it met some important need for the young Edith: The call came regularly and imperiously; and though, when it caught me at inconvenient moments, I would struggle against it conscientiously – for I was beginning to be a very conscientious little girl – the struggle was always a losing one. I had to obey the furious Muse; and there are deplorable tales of my abandoning the ‘nice’ playmates who had been invited to ‘spend the day’, and rushing to my mother with the desperate cry: ‘Mamma, you must go and entertain that little girl for me. I’ve got to make up.’ (BG 810)

As an adult woman, Edith’s characteristic scene of writing was very similar: she would write in the mornings, Lubbock recounts, shut away from her house guests in her bedroom upstairs. All the rest of the day she was abundantly present, the gracious hostess dispensing expert hospitality: but in the mornings it was made clear to visitors that their hostess was unavailable and uninterruptable. Edith wrote sitting up in bed, resting the pages on her knees beneath the pink satin sheets; or sometimes sitting at her desk between the windows, with a partial view of her garden below. Lubbock says that occasionally a guest would be brought a note from Edith, written in her room and conveyed by a servant to its addressee – a note suggesting an activity for the afternoon, or in some other way concerned with the guest’s comfort and wellbeing. But Edith never appeared in person until her morning’s writing was done, when she would descend again to her guests and her impressive exercise of hospitality. These little notes, sent downstairs from Wharton’s inviolable authorial chamber, are the key to the relationship between ambivalent realism and hospitality; and to the analogous psychological dynamics that structure both these representational forms. Edith needs to be alone as she writes; yet

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equally indispensable is her sense of her guests awaiting her on the other side of the closed door.

the house of mirth : surveillance and the subject Wharton’s early novel The House of Mirth employs its heroine Lily Bart to explore the potent and ambivalent relationship between privacy and exposure that is also enacted by Edith’s characteristic scene of writing. As has been noted by many of Wharton’s readers, Lily is emblematic of her society’s construction of the feminine subject as the focus of community surveillance. Our first view of her – and she is a character whose textual existence approaches the status of a visual presence; she is an iconic representation of her culture’s creation of the woman-as-icon – comes to us through Selden’s prototypically connoisseurial gaze: set off to piquant advantage by the drab commuter crowds surrounding her in Grand Central Station, Lily is positioned by Wharton’s text to demonstrate Selden’s contention that ‘it was characteristic of her that she always roused speculation’ (HM 225). In direct opposition to this habitual way of registering in the world, Lily affects to long for privacy, for the freedom to act outside the gaze of the community: her impulsive agreement to visit Selden’s bachelor flat seems an act of defiance of the narrow behavioural norms that are policed through the mechanisms of social scrutiny. Leaving the flat, Lily is punished for her illicit, though very brief, withdrawal from the public gaze by her encounter with an impertinent charwoman and then by her recognition by Simon Rosedale, the owner of the bachelor building in question. At such moments – which alternate with crowd scenes to regulate the characteristic back-and-forth rhythm of this novel – Lily’s sense of fear takes refuge in a wearied rhetoric of sophisticated disappointment: ‘Could one never do the simplest, the most harmless thing, without subjecting one’s self to some odious conjecture?’ (233) It might seem that this is the key to Lily’s downfall: exactly because she inhabits a world in which women are required to be looked at, Lily – who is exceptionally beautiful – cannot escape the envious scrutiny of other women and the desirous gaze of men. Yet Lily’s worst moments are those at which she finds herself most alone. As she strolls through the Bellomont woods and seats


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herself on a rustic bench, staging herself as a tableau of lovely solitude, she succumbs to anxiety when it seems that Selden is not on her trail: as soon as it is at once substantiated and denatured by the absence of an observer, the tableau of solitude dissolves into a demoralising experience of blankness: [S]he was not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in company . . . [A]fter a half hour of fruitless waiting she rose and wandered on. She felt a stealing sense of fatigue as she walked; the sparkle had died out of her, and the taste of life was stale on her lips . . . [S]he was only aware of a vague sense of failure, of an inner isolation deeper than the loneliness about her. (271)

Thus, like other women of her class, Lily cannot tolerate aloneness: her sense of self fades in the absence of stimulating scrutiny. We could compare Judy Trenor, who ‘seem[s] to exist only as a hostess, not so much from any exaggerated instinct of hospitality as because she could not sustain life except in a crowd’ (HM 254); or even the old-fashioned Mrs Peniston, whose boundaries between the inner life and the outer world are more ostentatiously drawn than in Lily’s set – ‘her mind resembled one of those little mirrors which her Dutch ancestors were accustomed to affix to their upper windows, so that from the depths of an impenetrable domesticity they might see what was happening in the street’ (252) – yet who participates, and invests, in exactly the same economy of visually constituted subjectivity. She offers Lily a home for two reasons: firstly, Lily is lovely to look at, and secondly, because the act of familial generosity makes Mrs Peniston appear well in the eyes of the community – ‘It would have been impossible for Mrs Peniston to be heroic on a desert island, but with the eyes of her little world upon her she took a certain pleasure in her act’ (251). Lily is only the most extreme example of the paradox of feminine identity within her culture: the female subject may suffer under the punitive or demanding gaze of the community, but she cannot survive outside it. In her descent into the invisibility of working-class existence, Lily’s end is both guaranteed and foretold by her final encounter with a member of her old set, Selden, who fails to perceive her as at that moment she would need to be perceived in order to sustain her essentially visual modus vivendi. As Selden himself has understood, Lily is ‘so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her’

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(228): she is trapped by her formative imbrication in the social structures of surveillance – she has no other mode of being. In company with the other subjects of the ambivalent realist world, Lily is at once produced and constrained by the same forces; she, too, is a victim of a culture whose impossible demands on the feminine subject can be neither fulfilled nor rejected. There is consequently an ambivalence in Lily’s attitude towards the importunities of the outside that cannot be resolved, and this takes socially legible shape in her paradoxical attitude towards the sexual demands of men. On the one hand, she experiences herself as terribly vulnerable to the undifferentiated gaze of the male community around her. In this mood she imagines that she has a ‘longing for shelter, for escape from . . . humiliating contingencies. Any definite situation would be more tolerable than this buffeting of chances, which kept her in an attitude of uneasy alertness toward every possibility of life’ (300). On the other hand, Lily rejects every offer of a definite situation that she has worked so hard to precipitate. She cannot accept a marriage proposal, in part because this would entail an alarmingly absolute surrender to the (sexual) demands of her husband, but also because she cannot bear to lose her place as the cynosure of every man’s attention. Indeed, ‘It is less mortifying to believe one’s self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness’ (320). The worst thing for Lily is to lose her sense of herself as besieged, either by giving herself up to penetration or by hiding herself from it too effectively. This is how, within the logic of Lily’s experience, the option of marriage comes to seem oddly parallel to the option of spinsterhood as exemplified by Gerty Farish: both marriage and the definitive heterosexual failure of spinsterhood would implicitly rule out any future attention from men. Lily’s life can only be sustained – uncomfortably – between the binary oppositions of surveillance and withdrawal, between the two prospects of surrendering to the outside and turning her back on it.47 Lily’s purchase, long possession and eventual destruction of Bertha Dorset’s extramarital love letters have generally been interpreted in ethical terms as evidence of her disinterested love for Selden (the letters’ recipient) or of her temptation by, and ultimate transcendence of, the ruthless exchange economy of her culture. Were Lily to deploy the letters effectively, she could


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blackmail Bertha into restoring Lily’s social position, and this would in turn secure Rosedale’s clear-sighted offer of a marital alliance. The reading of Lily’s behaviour as a series of ethical acts culminating in ‘moral triumph’48 is encouraged by the final scene, in which Selden explores Lily’s conscience through the circumstances of her death-chamber and achieves at the last a sense of reconciliation and mutual ethical recognition. Yet, as I will suggest later, the final scene of the novel cannot be accepted as a definitive key to the preceding text; the ethical interpretation of Lily’s reluctance to make use of the letters in her possession is more of a blind than an insight. As Rosedale urges her to act against Bertha, and Lily repeatedly claims ignorance of the letters, the rhetoric of the barrier, which arises so frequently around Lily in the presence of opportunity, makes its appearance again: she is ‘striving by sheer force of reiteration, to build a barrier between herself and her peril’ (421). The ‘peril’, for Lily, would be to achieve a definitive act, secure a fixed position: she needs to be on the edge of getting and the edge of not getting, suspended between fulfilment and failure (as Claire Preston observes, ‘liminal settings and occasions . . . are Lily’s hallmark’49), because neither getting nor not getting is enough; like the other structures of Lily’s world, and of her self, such alternatives exist only interdependently as aspects of the same dialectic. Keeping the letters preserves their double identity as both a barrier and a potential opportunity: as long as she neither uses the letters nor throws them away, Lily holds herself suspended between two possibilities. ‘[S]he saw that the essential baseness of the act [of blackmailing Bertha] lay in its freedom from risk’ (430): exactly because it would work, she cannot bring herself to do it, because then she would have to be a person who had chosen, which would mean having eliminated one binary in favour of the other, and Lily seems to sense that her own identity is as powerfully underwritten as it is constrained by ambivalence. The letters, we might say, are analogous to the ‘pale draperies’ with which Lily, as Reynolds’s ‘Mrs Lloyd’, is veiled in her tableau vivant (330). This scene, which encapsulates the novel’s analysis of the dialectical relationship between identity and exposure, is Lily’s masterstroke, the high point of her hesitation between the mutually constitutive binaries of privacy and publicity that jointly sustain her world and her self. The tableau makes Lily more naked

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than the other women, and therefore more looked at, more admired, and thus both more vulnerable and more powerful than the other women in their careful costumes. Like the letters, the veil is both a barrier and a possibility: it obscures Lily’s nakedness, yet it highlights her silhouette; it protects her body from direct visual penetration while paradoxically inciting visual attention. Veiling is the ultimate demonstration of the interdependence of concealment and revelation, of the inner life and the outer world. Wharton’s text is supremely ambivalent about its own investment in the systems of mutually constitutive binary oppositions that produce, sustain and constrict Lily as an emblematic feminine subject. On the one hand, The House of Mirth works hard, though always with great subtlety, to unveil those ideologically potent structures of interdependent meaning and being which both create and condemn their subjects to a life of liminality and ambivalence; such a perspective cannot help but explore the text’s own implication in the representational systems that it presents. At the same time, however, Wharton’s novel draws back from the kind of sustained readerly interrogation that such a self-critique promotes. Like Lily Bart, Wharton’s text is pulled between the reactive polarities of self-exposure and self-protection. The expressive hesitations of Wharton’s project in this novel can be approached via the example of her intermittent deconstruction of the notion of the ‘natural’. Through her subtle problematisation of the term ‘sylvan’, Wharton delegitimates the notion that Lily – and other seeming manifestations of nature – existed prior to their annexation by the culture that appears as their destructive coloniser. One of Selden’s earliest descriptions of Lily, as he watches her adjusting her veil before departing, casts her as a wild creature caught in the toils of a ruthless civilisation: ‘The attitude revealed the long slope of her slender sides, which gave a kind of wild-wood grace to her outline – as though she were a captured dryad subdued to the conventions of the drawing-room; and Selden reflected that it was the same streak of sylvan freedom in her nature that lent such savour to her artificiality’ (232–3). Here Wharton’s text uses Selden simultaneously to voice the notion that Lily’s identity includes an original freedom and to cast doubt on the proposition through the terms of its articulation. Merely employing the term ‘sylvan’ – with its companions ‘wild-wood’


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and ‘dryad’ – poses the reader a problem through the uneasy disjuncture between the ostensible effort to denote the natural, and the markedly ‘poetic’ vocabulary. Wharton’s critique of the notion of the ‘sylvan’ develops a satirical edge at the expense of the disingenuously rural nuptials of the leisure class: The Van Osburgh marriage was celebrated in the village church near the paternal estate on the Hudson. It was the ‘simple country wedding’ to which guests are conveyed in special trains, and from which the hordes of the uninvited have to be fended off by the intervention of the police. While these sylvan rites were taking place, in a church packed with fashion and festooned with orchids, the representatives of the press were threading their way, note-book in hand, through the labyrinth of wedding presents, and the agent of a cinematograph syndicate was setting up his apparatus at the church door. (292)

Here Wharton comprehensively deauthenticates the notion that the ‘sylvan’ exists independently of the sophisticated, that the country exists without constitutive reference to the town, that the natural has any reality without the artificial: the ‘sylvan’ is unveiled as a fantasy predicated on the simultaneous exclusion and cultivation of the urban. Such passages reflect searchingly on the politics of representational practices in a way that might well encourage the reader to engage critically with the textual behaviour of Wharton’s novel itself; yet these elements of (at least nascent) self-critique coexist within Wharton’s novel with a contrasting commitment to the values and practices that can be configured through an evocation of the natural. Wharton’s novel may elegantly debunk the Van Osburgh marriage, but Wharton, too, manifests an intermittent authorial investment in the sylvan scenes of her own literary construction. Early on in the novel, Wharton conjures some notably lovely scenes of the countryside around Bellomont. This ‘natural’ loveliness offers the pretext for Lily’s failure to secure Percy Gryce’s proposal: she diverts herself from the morning trip to church and from her afternoon stroll with Percy by following the conjoined solicitations of the countryside and of Selden. ‘[T]he day was the accomplice of her mood: it was a day for impulse and truancy. The light air seemed full of powdered gold; below the dewy bloom of the lawns the woodlands blushed and smouldered, and the hills across the river swam in molten blue’ (268). Wharton’s text flirts with iambic pentameter, as if succumbing in spite of itself to its

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own capacity for aesthetic seduction, veiling itself in its own capacity for enchantment. Like the term ‘sylvan’, which paradoxically denotes a quality the exact opposite of that which it connotes, Wharton’s text here evokes the image of a seductively natural landscape in cadences of such poetic fluency that the rural fades ineluctably into the pastoral. Later that day, as Lily and Selden wander through the countryside and flirt with the idea of falling in love, the text positions them smoothly before a backdrop of a perfect evening which reflects their mood of enchantment with another image of veiling, another intimation of the interdependence of concealment and revelation that nevertheless relies on aesthetic seduction to disable an analytic response: ‘The actual world at their feet was veiling itself in dimness, and across the valley a clear moon rose in the denser blue’ (281). As the ‘actual world’ is veiled, the realm of mutual enchantment is revealed, in another of the paradoxical formulations – whose apotheosis will be Lily’s appearance as Mrs Lloyd – by which Wharton’s text reflects and manages its own ambivalence in relation to the critical observation of its audience.

the house of mirth : writing, intimacy and abjection Beyond the realm of plot events, then, in which we see Lily hesitate between scrutiny and oblivion, what we could think of as the textual behaviour of Wharton’s novel manifests an analogous ambivalence in relation to its audience. While supplying the ingredients of a self-critique, the text also invests a great deal of energy in baffling the reader’s analytic approach. If James induces in anxious readers a misleading apprehension of his textual complexity as a form of aloofness, Wharton much more effectively wards off hermeneutic analysis through a performance of elegant simplicity. Wharton’s readers have only rarely made any sustained attempt to look beyond the plot events of her fictions to analyse the semiotic structures of her representational practice, because these structures are rendered virtually invisible by their masterful appearance of naturalness. Just as Edith would write having shut herself away from the guests whom she had invited to her house, so Wharton’s characteristic representational practices seek to establish a relationship of cordial yet authoritative separation between


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writer and reader: the text, we might say, acts like the firmly closed door. Here is Elsie describing an encounter with Edith: Edith Wharton, as I remember her . . . was handsome, small and slight and with a wealth of blond hair. There was something sharp about her and she had a forbidding coldness of manner. Calling upon her in her home in upper Park Avenue, when Mr Wharton was living, I noticed but eight chairs in her dining-room. I remarked about this to her, as it was then the custom to give large and formal dinners. ‘Yes, Miss de Wolfe,’ she replied, ‘there are but eight people in the whole of New York whom I care to have dine with me.’50

Wharton’s dining chairs are at once defensive and intimidating, admitting only selected diners and impressing on all others their exclusion. Adam Phillips asks, ‘[W]hat is the project of the symptom, what kind of world does it make?’51 The project of Edith’s chairs is comparable to a powerful, though always contested, element in the behaviour of Wharton’s fictions: to establish a relationship of distance and formality between the writer and the reader, in which the impersonality of the encounter is never in doubt. The differing tolerances of abjection that underlie the relationship between Edith and Henry motivate the most characteristic contrasts between their work. Wharton’s work, and James’s work, particularly his later writing, agree on the psychological problematic that structures them but diverge sharply in their responses. Edith’s most extreme discomfort was provoked by The Sacred Fount, James’s most abject text – or, rather, the text in which James negotiates most openly with semantic and psychological abjection. This text seeks to implicate its reader in an epistemologically and ethically unstable morass. Like its close relative The Turn of the Screw (1898), The Sacred Fount toys with its readers, threatening to entrap them between the twin snares of identification and disavowal. The image ‘found’, and accepted or rejected, by the reader, may be that of the author or of the reader: either way, these texts are constructed to act as permeable membranes rather than as barriers between author and reader. This is a high-risk textual strategy: because these texts constitute themselves as challenges to the reader not to confuse herself or James with the text, so they lay themselves open to the possibility that the reader will fail the test and fall into the text. These texts flirt brazenly with the prospect of abjection. Jamesian gothic (I am thinking also of ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ (1903), ‘The Jolly

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Corner’ (1908), and The Sense of the Past (1917)) always harnesses the volatile energy of such risk-taking, boldly – rashly? – entertaining the idea of psychological disintegration. This, of course, is a Whartonian reading of James’s late fiction; drawing back from Edith’s perspective, we might characterise such texts as eagerly embracing the intersubjective contingencies of reading. ‘Really, universally, relations stop nowhere,’ James remarked in the New York edition Preface to Roderick Hudson (1875; 1907).52 James’s late fictions always begin in the semi-circumspect, semi-luxurious surrender to the idea that this could be the start of a beautiful friendship. Wharton’s fictions, on the other hand, tend to express their author’s brisk determination that, really, relations should never be started. Just as she uses dining chairs to keep an impregnable barrier between herself and Elsie de Wolfe, Wharton uses text to keep her reader at arm’s length. Perhaps the most important technique in her novels for avoiding intimacy with her audience is Wharton’s almost ubiquitous defence against transferential readings. In contrast to James, who flirts brazenly with the risk of transferential, and therefore abject, encounters with his readers through his fictions, Wharton consistently works to keep herself, and her reader, out of the text. Her fictions are not to be taken as permeable membranes; there is to be no confusion of self and other, author and text and reader, in a Wharton story. In The House of Mirth, for example, Lily’s behaviour within the world of the novel tends to mirror and literalise the characteristic behaviours of Wharton’s text. Lily repeatedly fends off the threat of epistemological, psychological or sexual penetration by a performance of inviolability. As Gus Trenor bears down on her with a burgeoning threat of rape, Lily manages to ‘regai[n] her presence of mind, and st[ands] composedly in the middle of the room, while her slight smile seem[s] to put an ever increasing distance between herself and Trenor’ (336). The paradoxical idea of a smile as a form of defence crystallises Wharton’s sense of the protective distances that can be achieved through cordiality. In one of the last encounters between Lily and Selden, in which, as usual, each is fully occupied in manufacturing pretexts for eluding the other, ‘The smile with which she summed up her case was like a clear barrier raised against farther confidences: its brightness held him at such a distance that he had a sense of being almost out of hearing’ (447).


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Wharton’s writing is deeply committed to the semiotic and psychological values of clarity and integrity. Where James’s writing, especially in his late work, luxuriates in the sticky imbrication of text and reader, courting transferential and identificatory responses from the readers which it seeks to enmesh within its abject representational matrices, Wharton’s writing, on the other hand, prizes neat edges, clear views and dispassionate authorial and readerly positions that aspire to an ideal of abstract justice. Yet Wharton’s text, like Lily herself, is sustained through the hesitation between competing binaries. It is a mistake to read the calmness – what we might think of as the ‘sylvan’ quality of Wharton’s own prose – as a ‘natural’ feature of the novel. Just as the ‘simple country wedding’ takes shape in relation to the flattering threat of crowd violence, so Wharton’s deep-rooted preference for clear, established boundaries separating reader from text takes shape in relation to a strongly repudiated but never wholly suppressed longing for the intimacy and merger of dyadic relationships which recur as enticing and disturbing intimations throughout The House of Mirth. Wharton’s text, and Lily, occasionally fantasise about a kind of radical closeness and identification that for Lily is adumbrated by the image of the mother and child and that for the text implies and invites a powerful transferential response from the reader. The first of these qualified and partially blocked intimations is the sequence of events in which Lily flees the Trenor house – having faced down the threat of rape with her most cordial performance of untouchability – and then, in her subsequent reaction of horror and fear, begs for sanctuary in Gerty’s unglamorous flat. Gerty takes Lily into her bed, and Lily asks her to hold her: Gerty silently slipped an arm under her, pillowing her head in its hollow as a mother makes a nest for a tossing child. In the warm hollow Lily lay still and her breathing grew low and regular. Her hand still clung to Gerty’s as if to ward off evil dreams, but the hold of her fingers relaxed, her head sank deeper into its shelter, and Gerty felt that she slept. (356)

This scene of a maternal dyad is carefully ironised, however, by its presence within a sequence of events which split the two women from each other. Gerty had begun to hope that Selden might be coming to love her, and has realised this very evening that Selden, enchanted by Lily, is incapable of perceiving his

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earnest charity-working cousin as a sexually eligible woman. At the moment of Lily’s ring at the door, Gerty is lying in bed ‘shivering, and hat[ing] her friend’ (353). Gerty’s care of Lily is a habitual response to the spectacle of need: ‘all personal feeling was merged in the sense of ministry’; her acts of ‘disciplined sympathy’ thus paradoxically register, even as they override, her distance from Lily at this moment. For her part, Lily is oblivious to the reality of Gerty’s emotional life: ‘But you don’t know – there is nothing to make the dark dreadful to you –’ The words, flashing back on Gerty’s last hours, struck from her a faint derisive murmur; but Lily, in the blaze of her own misery, was blinded to everything outside it. (353)

This nocturnal tableau is only a very qualified image of togetherness; there is no real communion, each is blocked from the other, withholding even as they hold. Gerty and Lily thus enact a scene of mother and child without ever becoming identified with these roles, and this internal alienation from the enacted intimacy of the encounter works to ensure that the reader will feel no encouragement to merge with the scene, instead remaining mindful of the boundaries between herself and the characters within the text. The next of these hints or glimpses takes place in Carry Fisher’s rented house, to which she has invited Lily and Rosedale. The ‘firelit quiet of the small silent house descend[s] on [Lily’s] spirit with a sense of peace and familiarity’ (421); ‘Carry, in her rare moments of prosperity, became so expansively maternal that Miss Bart sometimes wondered whether, if she could ever get time and money enough, she could not end by devoting them both to her daughter’ (422). In this explicitly maternal place, Lily opens a door to find Mr Rosedale kneeling domestically on the drawing-room hearth before his hostess’s little girl. Rosedale in the paternal role was hardly a figure to soften Lily; yet she could not but notice a quality of homely goodness in his advances to the child. They were not, at any rate, the premeditated and perfunctory endearments of the guest under his hostess’s eye, for he and the little girl had the room to themselves; and something in his attitude made him seem a simple and kindly being compared to the small critical creature who endured his homage. Yes, he would be kind – Lily, from the threshold, had time to feel – kind in his gross, unscrupulous, rapacious way, the way of the predatory creature with his mate. She had but a moment in which to consider whether this glimpse of


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the fireside man mitigated her repugnance, or gave it, rather, a more concrete and intimate form; for at sight of her he was immediately on his feet again, the florid and dominant Rosedale of Mattie Gormer’s drawing-room. (422)

Lily’s view of Rosedale here is complex and mutable, as if destabilised by her new recognition that as well as figuring yet another masculine threat of intrusion into her physical and emotional privacy, he seems to promise elements of a nurturing relationship which are coded within Wharton’s text, and within Lily’s imaginary, as feminine and maternal.53 Carry’s absence, and Rosedale’s singularity as the one adult in the room, make Rosedale as much the ‘mother’ as the ‘father’ here; and Lily may well recognise herself in the place of the ‘small critical creature who endure[s] [Rosedale’s] homage’, homage which conflates his masculine desire for Lily – he is kneeling, in an archetypal posture of heterosexual entreaty – with his maternal affectionateness and physical gentleness. As long as it seems that ‘he and the little girl had the room to themselves’, Rosedale’s gender is in flux or under erasure by his one-to-one relationship with the child, and he seems ‘a simple and kindly being’; and Lily experiences a corresponding ambivalence in her response to this vision: does ‘this glimpse of the fireside man mitigat[e] her repugnance, or g[i]ve it, rather, a more concrete and intimate form’? There is something powerfully tempting within this vision of Rosedale which Wharton’s text, acting for Lily, fends off firstly by using Lily to interrupt the dyad – she triangulates the scene from her characteristic position on the threshold, at which point, ‘at sight of her he was immediately on his feet again, the florid and dominant’ man of the social world; and secondly, by its ongoing exploitation of Jewish stereotypes to render the ‘rapacious’ and ‘florid’ Rosedale an unthinkable suitor. Wharton is attentive to the use of stereotyping as a way of blocking cognitive intimacy: there is a direct relationship between the efficacy of Rosedale’s attempts to penetrate the upper classes – and his increasing emotional proximity to Lily – and the urgency of the anti-Semitism that seeks to baffle his approaches. The third of these intimations of a disavowed longing for intimacy takes place in Nettie Struthers’s kitchen. Nettie is a former beneficiary of Lily’s few charitable activities; she has now recovered her health, married a kind man, had a baby and managed to build a frail but tenacious life for her new family in the lower

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echelons of the respectable working classes. Seeing Lily in the street, she invites her home, warms her, offers her coffee – ‘There’s some of baby’s fresh milk left over’ (474) – and talks about her admiration for Lily and her hope that her baby will grow up to resemble Lily. Nettie recognises that Lily is in ill-health but does not fully realise that she is herself now a working woman. The scene is a compelling final attempt to negotiate the constitutive imbrication of public and private, distance and intimacy, in Lily’s constitution, and in Wharton’s prose. On the one hand, this scene engages the iconic image of the mother and child to evoke intimacy, warmth and reparation. Nettie explains to Lily that her baby has restored her will to live: it is clear that Nettie’s maternal love is also a form of self-care, and within the scene Lily identifies herself with the roles both of the mother – she has previously cared for Nettie – and of the baby daughter, as she receives Nettie’s care. On the other hand, even as Wharton’s text invokes this nexus of intimacies and proximities, it works hard to control the risk of such closenesses. The room, like the overall scene for which it provides the stage set, insists on being recognised as a cliche´: in the voice of a middle-class social worker praising the deserving poor, the text characterises Nettie’s kitchen as ‘almost miraculously clean’, while Nettie’s housekeeping attitude manifests a ‘pardonable pride’ (473). Moreover, the scene of simple maternal nurture is constructed in an ostentatiously elaborate, even arch idiom that almost obscures what it seeks to describe. ‘[H]aving passionately celebrated her reunion with her offspring, and excused herself in cryptic language for the lateness of her return’, Nettie prepares ‘infantile food, which she tenderly applied to the baby’s impatient lips’ for the ‘ensuing degustation’ (473). That is to say, Nettie kisses, coos at and feeds her baby: Wharton’s language holds off what it simultaneously seems to strive to bring near. This paradox has often been effaced in critics’ interpretations of this much-debated scene: as if enacting the doubleness of Wharton’s project, readings of Nettie tend to promote Wharton’s irony at the expense of ignoring her simultaneous sincerity, or vice versa. Carol J. Singley states that ‘Wharton presents this sentimental vignette ironically; such domestic renovation is impossible in Lily’s uncaring world’, whereas Elaine Showalter, in significantly polar opposition, claims that the ‘encounter [between Lily and Nettie] is the strongest


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moment of female kinship in the novel’. Wai Chee Dimock agrees that Nettie is ‘an ideal’ in relation to whom Wharton ‘suspend[s] her ironic incisiveness’, but criticises Wharton’s ‘romanticiz[ation]’ of this working-class woman.54 Rather than arbitrating in a conflict between irony and a more or less persuasive solidarity, we need to allow that Wharton’s project in this novel as a whole, and in Nettie Struthers’s kitchen in particular, is to articulate and explore precisely the imbrication of closeness and distance that constitutes both Lily’s self and the representational structures through which Wharton creates Lily’s textual world. Whereas Gerty’s maternal embrace was ironised by the two women’s emotional distance, and intimacy with Rosedale was disallowed by his recurrently masculine identity and the antiSemitic taboo, here the text deploys class difference to explore, and problematise, the possibility of loving identification. Nettie is unable to grasp that Lily is no longer an upper-class celebrity, so the new fact that they are economically akin to each other functions not to reinforce nearness but paradoxically as another form of distancing. In an imaginary identification of her own, Nettie has named her baby after a character in a play because the actress reminded her of Lily; Nettie expresses her hope that the baby ‘could grow up to be just like’ Lily.55 Lily’s response to this opportunity to identify herself as the object of maternal desire registers both her longing for this experience, and her resilient comprehension of its deep risks. She chooses to hold the baby, but replies to Nettie’s wish with the remark that the baby ‘must not’ be like her: she, Lily, ‘should be afraid to come and see her too often!’ (475). Wharton’s text represents the baby’s name within Nettie’s speech as ‘Marry Anto’nette’. This is another complex textual act of imagined intimacy and ironic distancing: the text endeavours to get close to Nettie’s pronunciation, to merge itself with the sound of Nettie’s voice, yet this act of transcription draws attention to the difference between Wharton’s language, and Lily’s, and the working-class Nettie’s. Wharton’s novel, like its heroine, experiences a double ending. The first ending is Lily’s death: she takes too much chloral and loses consciousness while imagining that Nettie’s baby is lying in her arms; the second is the scene next morning when Selden arrives at Lily’s boarding house to tell her that he loves her. Lily’s death, too, is double: it is both an accident and a suicide. The

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double death and the double ending temporalise and articulate the text’s radical ambivalence about the risks and promises of both intimacy and separation; and in so doing they construct and manage a changing sequence of psychological responses from the reader. Lily’s double death, and Wharton’s double ending, pull the reader into a dyadic relationship of identification and merger before reinstalling separation and psychological integrity at the last. Lily’s death is an accident: She had long since raised the dose to its highest limit, but tonight she felt she must increase it. She knew she took a slight risk in doing so . . . But after all that was but one chance in a hundred: the action of the drug was incalculable, and the addition of a few drops to the regular dose would probably do no more than procure for her the rest she so desperately needed. (480)

This carelessness of herself is the personal corollary of her social invisibility: with nobody watching her – with no external scrutiny, whether desirous or hostile – Lily’s sense of self is depleted and she cannot compensate for the loss of her sustaining relationship with the outside world. This death inculpates Selden, the last representative of her class to see her – or, rather, to fail to see her adequately – before she dies. But Lily’s death is also a suicide. ‘[D]arkness, darkness was what she must have at any cost . . . She lay very still, waiting with a sensuous pleasure for the first effects of the soporific . . . She had been unhappy, and now she was happy – she had felt herself alone, and now the sense of loneliness had vanished’ (480–1). As Judith Fryer comments, ‘In this final, distinctly sensual embrace of self and another, Lily breaks through at last the separating and isolating structures of her life.’56 After a lifetime of uneasy hesitation between intimacy and its repudiation, this death is Lily’s final choice in favour of a radical dyadic merger with the other, the mother.57 Selden is irrelevant here: the important final contact in this death is that with Nettie and her baby, whom Lily now imagines to be lying in her arms: ‘She did not know how [the baby] had come there, but she felt no great surprise at the fact, only a gentle penetrating thrill of warmth and pleasure’ (481).58 The two deaths are different kinds of tragedies. The accidental overdose indicts Lily’s culture for its failure to sustain the fragile


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feminine subjects of its own fickle creation. It constructs its readers as sorrowful observers who yet remain sufficiently composed to do justice to the socio-political contours of Wharton’s novel. The suicide, on the other hand, works to evoke in its readers a powerfully transferential response: the textual barriers between fictional character and extratextual reading subject are overwhelmed by imaginative intimacy and interchange. As Lily cradles the imaginary baby, cradling herself and cradled by death, she figures and facilitates the reader’s own longing for merger and cessation; as Wharton’s text confesses, ‘it was delicious to lean over and look down into the dim abysses of unconsciousness’ (480). For Wharton, this kind of abjection is as seductive as it is intolerable. The work of the final chapter is to reinstall the lost barriers – to revalorise the reading of Lily’s death as an accident, thereby assuring its recognition within the social realm, and to reposition Selden in a relation to Lily that will extricate both Lily, and the reader, from the ‘dim abysses of unconsciousness’ approached through the radical subjective identification, and disintegration, of the suicide. Selden’s arrival at the boarding house revives the reassuring theme of crowd intrusions, against which Gerty Farish is detached in proper recognition of her inexpugnable class superiority; ‘behind her, in an agitated blur, several other figures ominously loomed’ (482). Gerty reassures Selden that the doctor has ‘promised that there shall be no trouble’: he, too, is reaffirming social boundaries – Lily’s class difference – by offering to attest that her death was not suicide. Now Lily’s social equals have the opportunity to search her room for a suicide note in order to ensure the smooth social recognition of the accidental death. Gerty and Selden climb the stairs, alone, leaving the mob below, and then Gerty, having shown Selden into Lily’s room, herself descends again, so that Selden and the dead Lily are left together in perverse consummation of their unachieved romance.59 The vision of the working-class mother and her baby are banished – and with them, the text’s evocation of a dyadic merger between Lily and the reader. Many readers have characterised the strained, rhetorically effortful final four paragraphs of the novel as a transcription of Selden’s bad faith or false consciousness. Dimock argues that Selden’s ‘abysma[l] ignoran[ce] of what [Lily] has done for his sake’ functions as Wharton’s ‘bitter commentary on the loneliness and futility’ of Lily’s moral repudiation of the exchange economy.60

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Linda Wagner-Martin misdescribes these paragraphs as Selden’s ‘statement’, which virtually erases the complex authorial investments of the style indirect libre, and Shari Benstock similarly dismisses the difficulty of the concluding section as Selden’s ‘last ‘‘word’’’ which merely demonstrates his ‘self-serving egotism’. Lori Merish recognises that the novel’s concluding paragraphs are ‘Wharton’s depiction’ of what Selden believes to be his reconcilation with Lily, but comes to the same conclusion – that the section ‘both foregrounds and ironizes his will-to-possession’.61 These readers are responding to the sense that the final paragraphs of the novel are working overtime to avert some unspeakable but tangible emergency; but to scapegoat Selden makes it impossible to attend to what can more productively be understood as Wharton’s urgent need to reconfigure and redeem Lily’s death from the spectre of a rapturous abjection. If Selden can be demonstrated to have understood Lily, and if their mutual love can be held to have ‘been saved whole out of the ruin of their lives’ (486), her death is no longer so existentially engulfing, and certainly no longer implicates the reader, the heroine and the text itself in a disavowed project of psychological disintegration. If Lily is no longer alone, we can no longer be alone with her, and we can therefore no longer be her. The imaginary merger between Lily and the reader is banished in favour of a full understanding between two characters within the text, who through the achievement of ethical and cognitive recognition from which the reader is partially excluded – ‘in the silence there passed between them the word which made all clear’ (486) – disallow the reader’s identificatory merger with Lily. The dyad is triangulated by Selden’s privileged role, and the reader moves backwards to the threshold of the scene, the child in relation to – and excluded from – its parents, as Wharton’s text, itself ‘the word which made all clear’, reestablishes itself as a medium of individuation, of both semiotic and psychological clarity. realism: privacy, invasion and the new biography ‘I’m going for the inside view, the choice bits, the chronique intime, as they say here; what the people want’s just what ain’t told, and I’m going to tell it. Oh they’re bound to have the plums! That’s about played out, anyway, the idea of sticking up a sign of ‘‘private’’ . . . and thinking you can keep


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the place to yourself . . . [I]t ain’t going to continue to be possible to keep out anywhere the light of the Press. Now what I’m going to do is to set up the biggest lamp yet made and to make it shine all over the place. We’ll see who’s private then.’ (Henry James, The Reverberator (1888; 1908))62

Edith Wharton’s generative ambivalence in relation to the reactive poles of intimacy and individuation, of self-exposure and selfprotection, can be traced also in the structure of her literary career. Born into a wealthy family, Edith had no need to earn money. Her literary ambitions received little encouragement; indeed, she describes herself as having ‘to fight [her] way to expression through a thick fog of indifference, if not of tacit disapproval’ (BG 875). Yet she wrote prolifically, insatiably, with a fervour that shows that this was not merely a pastime but a profoundly important part of her life. Wharton described James as ‘a solitary who could not live alone’.63 By inverting this paradox we have an apt characterisation of Edith: a hostess who could not tolerate intimacy, but whose craving for privacy could only be satisfied through the strict management of guests. Just as the interior designer is motivated by her essential sense of her connection, her accessibility, to her surroundings, so the writer, too, needs her audience, depends upon their attentive presence, as much as she works to control the encounter and keep them at a distance. The hostess and the writer need guests and readers against and through whom to establish a sense of privacy. This is the other side to Wharton’s scene of writing: secluded in her bedroom with her guests forbidden to approach, she is not simply escaping or rejecting society, but deliberately setting herself in a dialectical relationship with it. She writes and she entertains because the boundaries that separate her from the outside have not only to be established, but policed and reasserted continuously. The insistence on the separateness and subordination of the object is directly linked to the subject’s sense of autonomy and control. Thus the subject needs the object: it may at first appear to be a nuisance, but in truth it is a necessity, for if the object can be sufficiently controlled, the subject can keep at bay her fear of abjection. The object is a source of constant irritation: like the lapdogs who accompanied Edith and Elsie everywhere, the object querulously demands attention – its needs are never definitively met, only quelled briefly. But, in return for this constant attention, the object remains tame: domesticated, a pet, a dependant.64

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The writer, like the hostess and the designer, can never turn her back on her audience: retreat is not what she seeks. Elsie left her early life on the stage because she could not impress her audience as absolutely as she wanted; the move to interior design was not a rejection of life in the public eye – on the contrary, it was intended to give Elsie yet more power over her audience. Edith’s life as a fashionable Young Married was not satisfactory either, despite her impressive wardrobe: subject to rumours about her mariage blanc, she focused instead on the writing of realism as a more effective way of negotiating an invulnerable yet creative relationship with the world. The realist writer negotiates continually with her or his ambivalence about privacy: the urge to solicit and sustain an audience is in constant productive tension with the sense that the presence of an audience constitutes a kind of hermeneutic siege. The realist writer uses text as a way of negotiating her paradoxical experience of herself through contamination: this sustaining ambivalence finds expression in her repeated attempts to attract and hold the audience from which she recoils. Freud implies . . . that the inevitable and necessary wild-goose chase of culture – of which psychoanalysis is a part – can be both depleting and radically dismaying for the individual; and yet the individual has nowhere else to go. He can only know his most private or recondite preoccupations in the public language of culture. His privacy, at best, is a public life in secret.65

An insoluble, productive ambivalence about the relationship between public form and private content shapes many facets of the realist world. Wharton’s ambivalence about the risks and benefits of publishing fiction is an expression of the anxiety that is more widely manifested in relation to nineteenth-century – that is, realist – biography. The nineteenth century was a boom period for biography, the popularity of which was signalled and intensified by a series of biographic scandals that arose from an endemic realist preoccupation with the reactive polarity of the public and the private spheres. Henry’s biographical anxieties were intense. More than once he destroyed huge collections of his correspondence; it seems likely, for example, that after Constance’s death in 1894, while assisting Clara in emptying Woolson’s apartment, Henry took the opportunity to destroy the letters that she had received from him over the previous fourteen years. When Katharine Loring had


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Alice’s diary privately published (a nice realist paradox), and sent copies to Alice’s surviving brothers, Henry was adamant that the diary must not be allowed out of the family. Throughout James’s fiction, there is a tremendous frisson attached to the suppression of private papers; far from protecting private information, the burning of personal documents is a gesture of such self-conscious drama that it works rather to heighten the volatile relationship between privacy and publicity. In other words, the destruction of papers consolidates the existence of scandal: the contents of the letters become less important than the very existence of the letters themselves, which take over the function of signifieds at the moment of their ostentatious destruction.66 James wrote about this effect in The Aspern Papers (1888), and offered other examples in The American (1877) and The Wings of the Dove (1902). For this ingenuous son of his age all distinction between the person and the artist had ceased to exist; the writer was personal, the person was food for newsboys, and everything and every one were every one’s business.67

At the same time, Henry was shamelessly entranced by the biographical spectacle of others – as was Edith Wharton. Indeed, their friendship made much use of George Sand’s scandalous biographical existence. The publication of yet another volume of her revelatory correspondence was always an occasion of prurient delectation and gleeful epistolary consultation between the two friends, and Edith motored Henry through France in order to visit the scenes of Sand’s erotic spectaculars. Their shared fascination with Sand is not merely a convenient topic of gossip; rather, it signals the deep preoccupations that underlie their superficial incongruities. ‘I know of no such link of true interchange as a community of interest in dear old George,’ Henry remarked to Edith;68 it is only to a first glance that they seem an ill-assorted pair. Henry’s insatiable appetite for biographical scandal is just the other side of his personal horror of the public gaze; by expressing this profound ambivalence towards selfexposure in the context of biography, James frees himself to explore and engage with the idea of abjection in his late texts. In contrast, Wharton’s public works are predominantly committed to establishing a relationship of formality with their reader; her

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ambivalence towards the presence of an audience is encoded in the form of her published fictions, in the productive hesitations between privacy and publicity, intimacy and individuation, that generate the semiotic structures of her writing. Edith wrote that as a young woman ‘[she] had as yet no real personality of [her] own, and was not to acquire one till [her] first volume of short stories was published’ (BG 868). The realist subject comes into being through struggling with the experience of contamination; the realist writer creates texts through an imaginative engagement with the idea of self-exposure – which, in this context, is what ‘publication’ is. This is why, in the world of ambivalent realism, all social activities are semantic practices: realist representation is always, to some extent, self-representational. It is how the realist text or realist self negotiates with the outside – readers, guests, furniture – that produces meaning; there is always a dialectical relationship between content (the private self) and form (public appearance). The private self comes into being through public forms of self-representation: the realist tension between concealment and revelation is thus always a reactive polarity that produces meaning through an escalating dialectic of publicity and privacy. The realist preoccupation with public and private arises from an underlying suspicion that the differentiation of these semantic zones is the source of the semantic ‘objects’ that are mistakenly supposed to exist independently of their hermeneutic pursuers. Thus the realist writer struggles ambivalently to defend herself against the reader’s hermeneutic intrusion because there is a sense in which, by the psychodramatic logic of realist ontology, the writer is created and recreated through her or his imaginary relationship with a phantasmatic reader. James expresses this realist ambivalence in another of his images of dead letters. In ‘The Jolly Corner’ a man who is characterised by his wilful self-blindness is described as having decided, on past occasions, to burn, unread, letters addressed to him. By refusing to read, he avoids the provocative intrusions of his would-be correspondents; but, by ‘protecting’ himself in this way, he starves himself of subjective and intersubjective life. It is through the creative intrusions of the outside that the ambivalent realist self – and the ambivalent realist signified – comes into being. Reading, writing and being in the world of ambivalent realism are essentially countertransferential; realism is a process, a productive discovery


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(another realist paradox) of intersubjective meaning. The realist self, like the realist text, has a contingency that is in tension with its proclaimed autonomy: its semantic self-confidence is always counterbalanced by a fearful and curious accessibility to outside interpretation.

Epilogue: 1892

The novel comes into contact with the spontaneity of the inconclusive present . . . The novelist is drawn toward everything that is not yet completed. (Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Epic and Novel’)1

The last three years of the 1880s formed a difficult period for Alice James. She lived alone in Leamington Spa: although Katharine Loring made extended visits, Alice had to do without the comfort of her uninterrupted presence. In August 1890 Alice’s physical and emotional health deteriorated dramatically, and Katharine returned to her from the United States; Katharine now committed herself to her friend for the indefinite future. Henry wrote to William that Katharine had undertaken not to leave Alice while she remained in her ‘present condition’;2 no one expected Alice’s condition to improve. Katharine arranged for the couple to move into a small house in Kensington, where they established themselves in serene domestic contentment. Alice’s happiness was only consolidated by the diagnosis, in May 1891, of cancer in her breast and liver. At last, Alice had secure possession of the two enduring desires of her adult life: Katharine’s undivided devotion, and the guarantee of imminent death. Alice died on 6th March 1892; she was unconscious during this last day of her life. The day before, however, she had been lucidly awake; in a note at the end of her friend’s diary, Katharine reported that Alice had dictated a correction to the entry for the previous day, the 4th, after which Katharine finished reading ‘Miss Woolson’s story of ‘‘Dorothy’’’ to her (AJD 233). Alice was a passionate and exacting reader: it seems that Woolson’s ‘Dorothy’ was the last fiction of her life. Alice’s desire for death expressed her twin sense of despair and defiance in the face of what she experienced as the impossible 190

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demands of life. Being Alice James was so difficult that it seemed like a punishment – a life sentence – inflicted by a bafflingly malevolent authority. Only by dying could she defy the parental, social and medical authorities who insisted that she live. She took death as her project, her aspiration, her object of desire, pitting her self-destructive animus against the living world which had created her to suffer. ‘[G]et[ting] myself dead’, she commented, with her characteristically distorted ambition, is ‘the hardest job of all.’3 In death – in dying – she would live as never before. After the cancer diagnosis, Alice told William that her ‘impending demise’ makes this ‘the most supremely interesting moment in life, the only one in fact, when living seems life’.4 What kind of fiction, then, did Alice choose at this supreme moment of living, this embrace of death as triumphant self-assertion? Woolson’s story is set in Florence, at the ‘Villa Dorio’, a huge grey house in Bellosguardo with a garden high above the Valley of the Arno. There live two widowed American ladies, Mrs North and Mrs Tracy, with Mrs North’s stepdaughter Dorothy. Dorothy is young, beautiful and charming: the villa is besieged by her hopeful suitors. The most desirable man of the international community is Alan Mackenzie: all the unmarried women – including a disappointed spinster, Felicia Philipps – compete for his attention, but he is intent on Dorothy, who seems uninterested in him. However, Alan and Dorothy marry, crushing the hopes of their numerous admirers. Shortly afterwards, Alan dies. Dorothy spends a season flirting with her former beaux, before lapsing into a decline, a medically mysterious combination of physical prostration and emotional despair. She explains to her mother that she had been flirting in the hope of numbing her inconsolable grief. Doctors insist that she will recover, but Dorothy dies. This seems a strange fiction to unite Alice, Katharine and Constance in imaginative communion around Alice’s deathbed. Katharine’s devotion to her invalid companion appears to have been her most straightforwardly ‘feminine’ aspect; Alice’s descriptions stress her calmness, strength and competence in a way that communicates a rather androgynous woman whose ‘femininity’ was at least muted, if not negligible.5 In contrast, Alice and Constance were ‘feminine’ women, but each woman’s allegiance to the authority of gender norms was very significantly problematised by a painful sense of failure and an unquenchable impulse to resist.

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Dorothy – until her husband’s death – is everything that her spinster sisters have failed and refused to be: girlishly pretty, happy, sexually successful. Constance had been struggling with the temptations and the reproaches of such blithe, untroubled women throughout her life; what is she doing when she chooses to ennoble an unreflective flirt, redeeming her protagonist in death? And how did the story speak to Alice and Katharine, as they awaited the death for which Alice had longed as the solution to the problem of her wrought, distorted life? Despite its heterosocial appearance, this is a story about women. The male characters are uniformly stupid: they never apprehend the complex emotional lives of the women – whether attractive or ineligible – around them. Implicitly, the story addresses a female or female-affiliated reader, because within the narrative women’s inner lives go unseen by the men who confer social and psychological approval on the feminine objects of their sexual patronage. The spinster of the story – Felicia – snipes at a witless handsome young man, trying to avenge herself for her sexual marginality: ‘‘‘The comfort of Waddy is that you can make mince-meat of him to his face, when you feel savage, and he never knows it.’’’6 But his obliviousness to Felicia’s sarcasm only marks his general discounting of her existence: ‘he never paid sufficient heed to Miss Felicia Philipps to comprehend what she might be saying, good or bad; to his mind, Felicia was only ‘‘that old maid’’’ (11). Mackenzie, the universally admired bachelor, is equally dim; witnessing a covert struggle between Felicia and Nora for his attention, the object of their competition ‘thought that the two ladies had been very kind to each other’ (15). When Mackenzie falls in love with Dorothy, his lack of perception is not at all diminished: he gazes adoringly at her, failing to register her initial lack of a corresponding passion. Yet the women of the story are helplessly oriented towards these unintelligent men. Even Felicia, the classic embittered spinster, is desperate for Mackenzie’s attention. The relentless feminine reliance on men as objects of desire and guarantors of social status and self-esteem results in an incessant conflict between women. First Felicia and Nora, then Rose and Felicia, compete ruthlessly for Mackenzie’s attention. And there is a muffled mistrust between Mrs North and Mrs Tracy, arising from the former’s suspicion that her husband and her friend may have been intimate before she

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became Mr North’s second wife. Women must be aligned in some relation to men; this alignment divides them from each other, sowing jealousy. Woolson’s story dramatises the splits and hostilities – ultimately, the self-splitting – generated within femininity by the demands and punishments of heterosexual authority. It is in this light that we can ask about the imaginative affiliations of the story’s author and its intent little audience in Kensington. On the one hand, Constance, and Alice, are clearly present in Felicia, the lonely spinster whose ‘smile always had a slightly hungry look’ (15). We watch Felicia leave the Villa Dorio and trudge down through the countryside to Florence, where, ‘high up in an old palace, [Felicia] had a small apartment crowded with artistic trumpery’ (27). Like Constance and Maria Gostrey in The Ambassadors (1903), Felicia comforts herself in her exile from domesticity with a ‘heterogeneous glimmer’ of portable possessions: ‘the plates and the plaques and the pots, the bits of silk and tapestry and embroidery, the old sketches and old busts and old shrines’ (28) that cushion and proclaim the clever woman’s unattached wanderings. On the other hand, it is Dorothy who inhabits Constance’s Villa Castellani,7 and it is Dorothy who – like Alice and Constance – dies an irreducibly expressive death. At the start of the story, the narrator imagines the female characters falling from the wall of the villa’s high garden: Felicia, we are told, would fall like a needle, but Dorothy would float down unharmed. Despite her bitter disappointment, however, Felicia endures, while the previously blithe Dorothy finds her desolation intolerable and escapes into death. Felicia tries to express her love for Mackenzie by singing to him a song called ‘Through the long years’. This song is an intrusion into the fictional world by an extratextual art object: the song existed independently of Woolson’s fiction. Francis Boott – friend of Henry and Constance, and established Florentine – wrote the music; the lyricist was Constance’s literary correspondent, Colonel John Hay. As Felicia sings to Mackenzie, he is enchanted by the music but prompted by it towards Dorothy; then, on her deathbed, Dorothy sings the song in despairing memory of her dead husband. First in Felicia, and then in Dorothy, the song expresses the ‘last courage’: ‘that acceptance of grief as the daily portion of one’s life, which is the highest pathos’ (21). Through this song Felicia and Dorothy are united in an expression of inconsolable

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loss; their conflict is suspended and superseded by their communion through art. And through the extratextual existence of their song, and its personal associations, Constance, too, is brought into affiliative communion with both the spinster, who tramps on, thwarted, weary, blighted; and the grief-stricken young widow, whose superficiality and easy success are redeemed and reinterpreted by her embrace of death. And Alice, listening to Woolson’s story through Katharine’s voice, is brought into imaginative confrontation with the two opposing versions of femininity that have structured her life also. Through ‘Dorothy’, Alice, Katharine and Constance come together in creative meditation on the ‘riddle’ of their lives. Woolson writes of Dorothy, ‘It was her last song. Three days later she died’ (59). Woolson’s story was Alice’s last fiction; she died the next day. Constance chose death two years later. Just after midnight on 24th January 1894, she jumped out of the first-floor window of the Casa Semitecolo and fell to the street below.8 She had imagined Dorothy floating weightlessly down from Bellosguardo; now she, too, sought death as a release from the painful difficulties of life. For Constance, Alice and Dorothy, dying is a kind of defiant self-expression: it cheats Fate and disputes social authority. After Dorothy’s death, her stepmother, ‘white and stern, said, with rigid lips, ‘‘The doctors did not tell us.’’’ Woolson adds a final, one-line paragraph: ‘But the doctors did not know’ (59). Woolson is writing about a feminine despair that eludes the masculine authority of medicine; her fiction charts the emotional costs of a life structured by insoluble ambivalence. In Alice’s death and in Constance’s, there is a sense of great weariness; they are simply too tired to go on contending with the limits and constraints of social authority. Alice wrote of her ‘delicious consciousness . . . of wide spaces close at hand’;9 Constance leaped into the ‘immeasurable world’ – Henry’s phrase10 – from which she had felt bound to exclude herself in life. While Constance was ending the riddle of her life in Venice, Edith Wharton was struggling with psychosomatic illness. Edith was thirty-two in 1894; she had been married for nine years. Her marriage was proving to be a painful disappointment and her lack of sustained intellectual occupation was crippling. Throughout the 1890s, Edith suffered recurrent physical ailments and periods

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of emotional exhaustion; in 1898 she underwent a hotel-based rest cure in Philadelphia, under the medical supervision of a faculty colleague of the now infamous Dr S. Weir Mitchell.11 Dr Mitchell had ‘treated’ the writer and feminist activist Charlotte Perkins Stetson (later Gilman) in 1886, when she had become deeply depressed after marriage; as Perkins Gilman reports in her autobiography, the doctor’s instructions were as follows: ‘‘‘Lie down an hour after each meal. Have but two hours’ intellectual life a day. And never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live.’’ I went home,’ Charlotte remembers, ‘followed those directions rigidly for months, and came perilously near to losing my mind.’12 Wharton’s biographers dispute the nature of Edith’s illness and treatment.13 What does seem clear is that no variety of medical authority could do much to ‘cure’ Edith’s ill-health; help came rather from her developing literary career. In her comments on her work and her psychological wellbeing, Edith is very clear about the role of writing in her recovery, telling Barrett Wendell in 1899, for example, that ‘[t]he poor little stories [The Greater Inclination] have been reclaimed, as it were, inch by inch, from almost continuous ill-health and mental lassitude, and my chief effort has naturally been to preserve, amid such limiting conditions, the same broad outlook on life’.14 Edith, like Alice and Constance, struggled to contend with the ‘limiting conditions’ of her invalid femininity; this was a struggle in which each woman resisted the masculine authority of doctors despite her loyalty to the social order that the doctors represented. ‘The doctors did not know,’ Woolson wrote in 1892; a decade later, Edith was commiserating with a friend’s depression in a similar spirit. ‘Don’t I know that feeling you describe,’ Edith wrote to Sara Norton in 1902, ‘when one longs to go to a hospital and have something cut out, and come out minus an organ, but alive and active and like other people, instead of dragging on with this bloodless existence!! Only I fear you and I will never find a surgeon who will do us that service.’15 Ultimately, the medical representatives of the social status quo have no answers for these women, though they look to them obediently; even Alice James did not think to refuse to consult the doctors, despite her inveterate hostility towards them. Looking to the social authority of gender conventions for help, Constance, Alice and Edith find only reproach and impossible demands; they must find some other way

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to help themselves, some way of negotiating their ambivalence towards the ideological authority that has failed them. What they found was ambivalent realist fiction. They wrote out of their ‘limiting conditions’; they wrote as a way of negotiating with their limiting conditions. Edith – as much as Constance and Alice – belonged to the last generation of highly educated women for whom intellectual ambition entailed an unavoidable yet unacknowledgeable conflict with the social authority of respectable gender conventions. Born in a cultural period in which, despite widespread agitation by political activists, the heterosexual imperative remained dominant, and embodying in their personal experiences of unsought marginality the resistance that was beginning to contest the socio-sexual status quo, the ambivalent realists are enticed and disturbed by their unwilling apprehension of the flaws, gaps and contradictions in the structures of social authority. Confronting death, Alice wrote of the ‘whisperings of release in the air’.16 Constrained by their loyalty to the dominant social order, the ambivalent realists can never confess to themselves that they are alertly listening for these whisperings of release; but listening they are. In 1883 Constance wrote to Henry: I wonder if you will understand me if I should tell you that this is the deepest charm of your writings to me – ; they voice for me – as nothing else ever has – my own feelings; those that are so deep – so a part of me, that I cannot express them, and do not try to; never think of trying to . . . Well – that is my feeling with regard to your writings; they are my true country, my real home. And nothing else ever is fully – try as I may to think so. Do you think this is quite an assumption, – or presumption? . . . If you will only bear all this in mind, it will – or should – excuse me to you; for your writings have been to me like a new, & beautiful, & unexpected land.17

Ambivalent realist art is a home for these restless conservatives. It is a place of imaginative inclusion and self-confrontation, where ambivalence is negotiated and managed through the structures of representation; where self-contradictions and insoluble dilemmas can be figured and explored, and ideology gives way to the complexity of lived experience. Ambivalent realism is neither simply reflective nor simply escapist. Listening to Katharine reading Woolson’s story, Alice did not have to choose between Felicia and Dorothy as the focus of a

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self-punishing or a compensatory identification. As the fiction gently suggests, this is an obligatory ‘choice’ imposed by the social and emotional authority of heterosexual gender definition. Woolson’s story, in contrast, suspends any such identification, inviting the reader to an imaginative inclusiveness and intersubjective affiliation that constitutes art as a bridge between women. Ambivalent realism is a shared object of cultural negotiation within a community whose lived experience outreaches the grasp of ideology. Where heterosexual gender ideology generates femininity as an experience of self-splitting and self-suppression, the art of the resistant realists creates a place of imaginative negotiation, an affiliative communion by which the restless ambivalence of these exiled lives can be encompassed, if not stilled.

Notes

The following abbreviations are used throughout the notes in references to correspondence: AJ HJ EW CFW

Alice James Henry James Edith Wharton Constance Fenimore Woolson

introduction: ambivalent realism 1. CFW to Edmund Clarence Stedman, 23rd July [1876?]. Special Collections, Spec. MS Coll. Stedman [Edmund Clarence]; Rare Books and Manuscripts Room, Butler Library, Columbia University. 2. M. M. Bakhtin, ‘Epic and Novel’, in Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), p. 7. 3. Martha Vicinus (ed.), A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1977), p. ix, and Susan Kingsley Kent, Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 14. 4. Michael S. Kimmel, ‘The Contemporary ‘‘Crisis’’ of Masculinity in Historical Perspective’, in Harry Brod (ed.), The Making of Masculinities: The New Men’s Studies (Winchester, MA: Allen and Unwin, 1987), p. 141. 5. Vicinus, A Widening Sphere, p. x. 6. Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Sie`cle (London: Bloomsbury, 1991), p. 7. 7. Kent, Sex and Suffrage, p. 24, and Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte¨ to Lessing (expanded edn; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 4. 8. Kimmel, ‘The Contemporary ‘‘Crisis’’’, p. 142, and Carroll SmithRosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Knopf, 1985), p. 176. 198

Notes to pages 2–7

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9. Ann L. Ardis, New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1990), p. 4. 10. Ibid., p. 26. 11. Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, p. 11. 12. Rita Felski, ‘Afterword’, in Ann L. Ardis and Leslie W. Lewis (eds.), Women’s Experience of Modernity, 1875–1945 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), p. 293. 13. Kate Millett, ‘The Debate Over Women: Ruskin v. Mill’, in Martha Vicinus (ed.), Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age (London: Methuen, 1980), p. 122. 14. Diane Price Herndl, Invalid Women: Figuring Feminine Illness in American Fiction and Culture, 1840–1940 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), pp. 114–15. 15. Vicinus, A Widening Sphere, p. ix. 16. Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 (London: Virago, 1987), pp. 121–2. 17. CFW to HJ, 30th August [1882], HJL III, 545. 18. Eric Haralson, Henry James and Queer Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 110, 102. 19. Alfred Habegger, Henry James and the ‘Woman Business’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 4, 15 (italics mine), 230. 20. A characteristic donneé of more or less hostile readings of James as inflexibly gender- or class-bound is the assertion that James can have nothing to say to (or within) feminism. Habegger is implacable in his criticism of work such as Judith Fetterley’s which is ‘compromised by a need to rehabilitate James for feminism’ (Habegger, ‘Woman Business’, p. 5); while Martha Banta’s recent edicts in The Cambridge Companion to Henry James aim to deter a generation of undergraduates from such careless talk: ‘It will not do to think of James as a protofeminist. One should know better than to go to his writings for brilliant insights into the lives of working-class women, of women of color, or of the female members of the ‘‘new alien’’ hordes.’ (‘Men, Women, and the American Way’, in Jonathan Freedman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Henry James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 23.) From the proliferation of images which could be counterposed to this view, we might choose the Governess in The Turn of the Screw, class-enchanted daughter of an impoverished country vicarage, taking illusory possession of her grand new room at Bly in which she sees herself for the first time in a full-length mirror; or the correspondingly nameless heroine of ‘In the Cage’, simultaneously tormented and enticed by her avid absorption in the oblivious lives of her social superiors; or even Charlotte Stant, who bears the solution to her homelessness in her beautiful body, with its ‘likeness . . . to some long, loose silk purse, well filled with gold pieces’ (GB 59). John Carlos Rowe has recently

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21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

Notes to pages 7–8 made a similar argument: ‘If we are to look for a ‘‘class consciousness’’ in Henry James . . . perhaps we should look first to women, lesbian and straight, children, and gays as contributors to such a class consciousness . . . [O]nce the victimization of these groups is understood as an essential part of James’s social critique of bourgeois values, an accompanying recognition of the ‘‘working class’’ also becomes visible in James’s fiction’ (Rowe, The Other Henry James (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1988), p. 19). Taking a slightly different tack but to similar effect, Hugh Stevens argues that in light of authoritative sexological and Darwinian accounts of society as ‘a delicately structured pyramid of hierarchical life forms’ we can see the Jamesian drawing-room as ‘a highly politicized forum, just as the relation of James’s characters to marital and sexual life is always resonant with larger social implications’ (Hugh Stevens, Henry James and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 9). Tessa Hadley, Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 13, 1, 1–2. Hadley is quoting the phrase ‘definitional frames’ from Stevens’s Henry James and Sexuality. Freedman, ‘Introduction’, The Cambridge Companion, pp. 6–7. Hadley, Imagination of Pleasure, p. 4, and Freedman, ‘Introduction’, The Cambridge Companion, p. 12. Habegger, ‘Woman Business’, p. 26. Preface to The Turn of the Screw, in Henry James, The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw, The Liar, The Two Faces (New York: Scribners, 1908), p. xvii. The question of the effects of James’s ‘thoroughgoing marginality’, as Freedman puts it (‘Introduction’, The Cambridge Companion, p. 5), is a perennial topic, undergoing its most explicit examination in Kelly Cannon’s Henry James and Masculinity: The Man at the Margins (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), which suggests a relation between James’s own ‘agonies and satisfactions of marginality’ (p. 5) and the ‘consciousness [in his fiction] of alternative masculinity’ (p. 1). Michael Davitt Bell describes ‘the marginal or sexually ambiguous implications’ of being an author ‘in mid-century America’ (Davitt Bell, The Problem of American Realism: Studies in the Cultural History of a Literary Idea (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 27) which drove W. D. Howells to a defensive doctrine of ‘masculine realism’ (p. 37); but notes that James ‘celebrates his alienation from ‘‘normal’’ activities, and even associates this alienation with a superior . . . ‘‘reality’’’(p. 74). Hadley refines the trope of the marginal, writing of James’s ‘perch between’ (p. 12): ‘James’s . . . ambiguously gendered position places him in distinction from but attraction to both differentiated genders in their heterosexual circlings’ (Imagination of Pleasure, p. 13). Habegger


27.

28.

29. 30.

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suggests that James’s covert aggression towards women is related to ‘his own masculinity [being] problematic in the extreme’ (‘Woman Business’, p. 6), a view seeming to bear some faint traces of an unexamined homophobia. And, in one of the more original contributions to the debate, Nancy Bentley argues that we need to understand James’s narrative practice, with its hesitations between marginality and authority, in a more precisely ‘historical context that includes the rise of professional ethnography and a new scientific interest in customs and manners’. The resulting ‘ambiguity’ of narrative stance ‘makes James a figure of a particular liberal authority’ (Bentley, The Ethnography of Manners: Hawthorne, James, Wharton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 9). See Sharon L. Dean’s Constance Fenimore Woolson: Homeward Bound (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995) and Cheryl B. Torsney’s Constance Fenimore Woolson: The Grief of Artistry (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989). Millicent Bell, ‘Introduction’, in Bell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 4–5. In contrast, Adeline R. Tintner focuses on Edith Wharton’s ‘give-and-take with authors whom she knew well, especially Henry James’, but she too insists on their ‘deep-seated differences’ (Tintner, Edith Wharton in Context: Essays on Intertextuality (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 1999), pp. 1–2). Miranda Seymour’s biographical study of the ‘ring of conspirators’ – Stephen Crane, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, H. G. Wells, Henry James, and Wharton – explicitly asserts the aesthetic independence of its members, characterising James as a ‘solitary worker and thinker’ (Seymour, A Ring of Conspirators: Henry James and His Literary Circle, 1895–1915 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1988), p. 16). Wharton has been linked with Woolson by Sharon L. Dean’s recent Constance Fenimore Woolson and Edith Wharton: Perspectives on Landscape and Art (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002), but here also ‘[t]he aim [is] to analyze how Woolson and Wharton saw differently’ (p. xi): ‘Wharton and Woolson wrote in different styles and from different generations and different social classes’ (p. 13). Haralson, Queer Modernity, p. 2. Ann L. Ardis and Leslie W. Lewis (eds.), Women’s Experience of Modernity, 1875–1945 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). See also Jane Eldridge Miller, Rebel Women: Feminism, Modernism and the Edwardian Novel (1994); Lynn Pykett, Engendering Fictions: The English Novel in the Early 20th Century (1995); Maria diBattista and Lucy MacDiarmid (eds.), High and Low Moderns (1996); Lynne Hapgood and Nancy L. Paxton (eds.), Outside Modernism (2000); Tamar Katz, Impressionist Subjects (2000); Talia Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes (2000).

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31. Ardis in Ardis and Lewis (eds.), Women’s Experience of Modernity, p. 4. 32. Susan Goodman’s Edith Wharton’s Inner Circle (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994) – which discusses the friendships of Walter Berry, Henry James, Gaillard Lapsley, Percy Lubbock, Robert Norton, John Hugh Smith, Howard Sturgis, and Wharton – makes a similar claim: ‘Statistically insignificant as it was, the group . . . suggests larger patterns of social and cultural life . . . Providing a model of literary expatriation, it also represents a period of literature.’ Goodman’s (almost entirely) male ‘coterie’, however, is rather different from the ambivalent realists, finding its identity in ‘a sense of [cultural] election’ and exclusivity (pp. ix–x). 33. Bakhtin, ‘Epic and Novel’, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 22. 34. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye with the collaboration of Albert Riedlinger, trans. and annotated Roy Harris (London: Duckworth, 1983), p. 66. Harris translates Saussure’s ‘significant’ and ‘signifie´ ’ as ‘signal’ and ‘signification’: I have chosen to use the terms ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’ to conform with common theoretical usage. 35. Ibid, p. 67. 36. Ibid, p. 69. 37. Roland Barthes uses the term ‘equivalence’ to emphasise that the link between Saussurean signifier and signified is one of relation, not of identity: ‘This relation concerns objects which belong to different categories, and this is why it is not one of equality but of equivalence . . . For what we grasp is not at all one term after the other but the correlation which unites them: there are, therefore, the signifier, the signified, and the sign, which is the associative total of the first two terms’ (Barthes, ‘Myth Today’ (1957) in Susan Sontag (ed. and intro.) A Barthes Reader (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1982), p. 97. 38. Roland Barthes, ‘The Reality Effect’ in Tzvetan Todorov (ed.), French Literary Theory Today (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982) p. 16. 39. Anthony Trollope, Can You Forgive Her? (1865) (London: Oxford University Press World’s Classics, 1968), pp. 13–14. 40. Barthes represents the more explicitly theoretical tradition which understands realism as an essentially quietist, conservative mode; there exists also a generally less theoretically informed critical tradition which similarly holds that realism – to use Elizabeth Deeds Ermath’s formulation – ‘is an aesthetic form of consensus’ (Deeds Ermath, Realism and Consensus in the English Novel: Time, Space and Narrative (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), p. xi) but which tends to valorise realist representation for this very reason. Amy Kaplan, for example, analyses nineteenth-century American realist fiction as a recuperative response to the growing instability of the


41.

42.

43. 44. 45.

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social world. The realist novelist is ‘capturing, wrestling, and controlling a process of change which seems to defy representation’ (Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 10). Whether in approval or dispraise, critics from these different perspectives tend to agree that realism is characterised by aspirations towards consensus and conservatism. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), ed. with an intro. and notes by Jean Fagan Yellin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 25. Wharton had been writing since the age of fourteen: however, it was the disappointments and dissatisfaction of the early years of her marriage which gave new impetus to her literary ambitions. CFW to HJ, 30th August [1882], HJL III, 545. The diary’s first entry is dated 31st May 1889; its final entry is 4th March 1892. Richard Salmon, Henry James and the Culture of Publicity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 2, 13, 11.

1

alice james and the portrait heroine

1. Lyndall Gordon, A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998), Chapter 3, ‘A Fighting Man’. 2. We may perhaps sense the echoes of her childhood relationships with Wilky and Bob in the ‘flaccid set’ (1st February 1890, AJD 80) of ineffectual clerics – the ‘absurd clericule[s]’ (10th June 1889, AJD 28) and ‘parsonic worm[s]’ (2nd December 1889, AJD 62) – discounted men who function in Alice’s diary and letters as a minor opportunity for dismissive humour. 3. Ruth Bernard Yeazell quotes a letter from Katharine to Alice’s close friend Fanny Morse, after Alice’s death: Katharine says that she and Alice met on 17th December 1873, at a lunch given by Fanny, and that ‘from the moment of that festivity is dated the great happiness of my life’. The Death and Letters of Alice James, ed. and intro. Ruth Bernard Yeazell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), p. 70. 4. This has been widely noted, for example by Jean Strouse in Alice James: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1980); R. W. B. Lewis in The Jameses: A Family Narrative (London: Andre Deutsch, 1991); and Gordon in A Private Life. 5. My reading of Alice’s illness, and of her diary, differs markedly from that of Kristin Boudreau. Boudreau views Alice’s illness as an entirely external imposition, an ‘inescapable’ piece of biological bad luck to which Alice could only resign herself (‘‘‘A Barnum Monstrosity’’: Alice James and the Spectacle of Sympathy’, American Literature 65

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Notes to page 30

(March 1993), p. 53). Consequently Boudreau understands Alice’s rebarbative relations with visitors and with William as motivated by Alice’s perception of the ‘problem of escaping the theft of her subjectivity by illness and by the spectators whom illness brings to her sick-chamber’ (p. 56). In Boudreau’s analysis Alice’s strategy of self-protection involves ‘resist[ing] sentimental relations between subjects’, ‘arresting the flow of sympathy and depriving her spectator of the choice to grant or withhold sympathy’ (pp. 54–5). Boudreau’s key example is Alice’s refusal to accede to William’s pity on hearing the news of her cancer diagnosis, and I think Boudreau is right to stress Alice’s characteristic concern to assert herself against William’s complacent authoritativeness; but, overall, Boudreau’s reading is limited by the assumption that subjects exist prior to their articulation in social forms. This is to miss both the radical imbrication of subjectivity and representation, and the subject’s paradoxical awareness of the inadequacy of existing social forms, which are highlighted by Alice’s semi-voluntary entrapment within the culturally legible validity of invalidism. Yes, Alice disputes the terms that William – a successful theorist of psychology – tries to impose on her; but this does nothing to diminish the extent to which Alice is always already an invalid. 6. There is a rich history of feminist debate over the political and representational agency afforded women though the social identity and practices of hysteria. Elaine Showalter acknowledges that ‘within the specific historical framework of the 19th century’, hysteria may be understood ‘as an unconscious form of feminist protest, the counterpart of the attack on patriarchal values carried out by the women’s movement of the time’ (Female Malady, p. 5). The spectacular and distressing quality of hysterical symptoms placed the woman’s anguish centre stage, at the same time as it relieved her of domestic and familial responsibilities. It ensured her access to the prestigious male attention of medical experts, while excusing her from a husband’s sexual demands. It licensed forms of selfabsorption and physical privacy discouraged for normal women. The hysteric may well appear as an authentic female – if not exactly feminist – heroine of the fin de sie`cle. On the other hand, Showalter warns against ‘romanticizing and endorsing madness as a desirable form of rebellion rather than seeing it as the desperate communication of the powerless’ (Female Malady, p. 5), and most recent feminist critics agree that, as Gail Finney puts it, ‘Where feminism is rebellious, emancipatory, and – in its potential to change the world outside – constructive, hysteria is compliant, imprisoning, and selfdestructive’ (Finney, Women in Modern Drama: Freud, Feminism, and European Theater at the Turn of the Century (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 8). Yet this formulation goes too


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far towards erasing the complexity and ambivalence of hysteria: as Linda Anderson says, in her discussion of Alice’s life and writing, ‘Hysteria becomes a place where submission and resistance to female socialisation exist together and where deviant and normative identifications of woman can be seen to traverse each other’ (Anderson, Women and Autobiography in the Twentieth Century: Remembered Futures [Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1997], p. 25). 7. T. L. Broughton, ‘Women’s Autobiography: The Self at Stake?’ Prose Studies 14 (1991), p. 79. 8. Rebecca Hogan, ‘Engendered Autobiographies: The Diary as a Feminine Form’, Prose Studies 14 (1991), p. 95. 9. Ibid., p. 99. 10. The debate about the cultural and aesthetic authority of representational forms available to women echoes the question of whether hysteria effects a challenge to the status quo, or works only to reinforce a woman’s dependence on her family. Much recent work on women’s textual self-representations celebrates the potential power leveraged through the writer’s sexual marginality – Sidonie Smith, for example, speculates that ‘it may be that the making and remaking of the female self in autobiography emerges from the dialogic engagement with the ideology of sexual difference promoted in the discourse of her time, that her making and remaking is at once imitative and disruptive’ (Smith, A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 14); the reader of Alice’s diary, however, is unlikely to take such a sanguine view. 11. Alice identifies a sense of shared ownership of linguistic property within the James family – or at least between Henry and herself – in an entry of 17th June 1891: ‘H., by the way, has embedded in his pages many pearls fallen from my lips, which he steals in the most unblushing way, saying, simply, that he knew they had been said by the family, so it did not matter’ (AJD 212). 12. Rowe, The Other Henry James, p. 22. 13. Henry James, Sr to Robertson James, 14th September [1878?], Death and Letters, pp. 15–16. 14. AJ to Alice Howe James, 26th November 1890, Death and Letters, p. 185. 15. Linda Anderson draws attention to this feature of Alice’s hysteria, comparing it to Henry’s aesthetic control: ‘What Henry accomplished by his absorption in the process of art . . . Alice achieved through a complex act of splitting whereby she could be both body and mind to herself, subject or object, artist or text’ (Anderson, Women and Autobiography, p. 18).

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16. Alice’s experience of hysteria as coerced self-control was echoed a generation later in the depression suffered by William’s daughter Peggy. She wrote despairing letters to her father from school; he responded with exhortations to self-control and emotional selfdiscipline. See Lewis, The Jameses, pp. 612–13. 17. Catherine Cle´ment, ‘Enclave Esclave,’ trans. Marilyn R. Schuster, in Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (eds.), New French Feminisms: An Anthology (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1981), p. 133. 18. Herndl, Invalid Women, p. 127. 19. Henry James, ‘John S. Sargent’, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 75: 449 (October 1887), p. 690. 20. Stanley Olson writes, ‘[Emily’s] life was oddly parallel to [John’s . . . ] She, too, was the product of a highly irregular education, greatly reduced to accommodate her health and gender. She, too, had terrific energy, but it was forced to operate within a very confined space. Her growth was little more than a chronological advance on the total atmosphere of childhood . . . She restrained any ambition she might have had by sinking deeper and deeper into the ground marked out by her parents, sister and brother. She knew she would never stray beyond that boundary. She knew she would never marry . . . As John managed to inch out of the tight sphere of family influence, Emily was left behind . . . Emily needed John. She looked to him for any light in her shuttered existence, and such dependence was entirely consistent with the Sargent propensity to lean on each other . . . And John needed Emily, because he, too, was incapable of leaving home’ (Olson, John Singer Sargent: His Portrait (London: Macmillan, 1986), p. 44). 21. Quoted in Simon Nowell-Smith (comp.),The Legend of the Master (London: Constable, 1947), p. 86. Rpt. from E. S. Nadal, ‘Personal Recollections of Henry James’, Scribner’s Magazine (July 1920). 22. James, ‘John S. Sargent’, p. 684. 23. David M. Lubin, Act of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargent, James (New Haven, CT.; London: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 20. 24. Boudreau highlights Alice’s refusal of William’s pity, but does not mention this example of Alice’s embrace of Henry’s sympathy (nor her sustained efforts to secure Katharine’s undivided attention). Alice’s rejection of sympathy from inferior female visitors or her patronising oldest brother encourages redoubled efforts of patience and devotion from those whose affiliation she prizes. 25. Olson, John Singer Sargent, p. 231. 26. Claire Kahane makes a comparable argument in her discussion of The Bostonians: ‘many late 19th century texts can profitably be called premodernist and hysterical . . . ; as symptomatic narratives, they articulate the problematics of sexual difference’ (Kahane,


27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34. 35.

36.

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‘Hysteria, Feminism, and the Case of The Bostonians’, in Richard Feldstein and Judith Roof (eds.), Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 286). John Webster, The White Devil, ed. and intro. Rene´ Weis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), I:2, 211–17, p. 13. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977). See also my discussion in ‘Sticky Realism: Armchair Hermeneutics in Late James’, The Henry James Review 25 (2004). James, ‘John S. Sargent’, p. 691. He´le`ne Cixous and Catherine Cle´ment, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing, intro. Sandra M. Gilbert (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986); orig. pub. as La Jeune neé (Paris: Union Geńe´rale d’Editions, 1975), p. 155. Muriel Draper, Music at Midnight (New York: Harper, 1929), p. 34. There is an interesting counter-example in The Awkward Age’s Nanda, whom Henry fiercely adores although she explicitly repudiates this kind of calculating visual control. Mrs Brookenham asks her daughter to turn around so that she can assess the aesthetic success of her outfit, and complains that the back of the dress has not been made as agreed with the dressmaker – to which Nanda replies, ‘‘‘I don’t want my back to be best – I don’t walk backward.’’ ‘‘Yes,’’ Mrs Brook resignedly mused; ‘‘you dress for yourself.’’ ‘‘Oh how can you say that,’’ the girl asked, ‘‘when I never stick in a pin but what I think of you?’’’ (AA 232). There is a great deal to say about the ambiguous violence of that pin-sticking; but even if Mrs Brook is entertaining the idea of turning Nanda into an early version of Kate Croy, it is clear that Nanda herself has no psychological investment in the prospect. Robert Frost, ‘Acquainted with the Night’, Complete Poems of Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1949), p. 324. James, ‘John S. Sargent’, pp. 684, 686. See James’s description of The Daughters of Edward D. Boit for a similar combination of imaginative attention and critical blindness. James, ‘John S. Sargent’, p. 689.

2

the actress and the orphan

1. Henry James, ‘Mr. Tennyson’s Drama’ (1875), in James, Henry James: Essays on Art and Drama, ed. Peter Rawlings (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), p. 89. 2. HJ to Edwin Godkin, 3rd February 1882, HJL II, 376. 3. HJ to Mrs Francis Mathews, 13th February 1882, HJL II, 379. 4. Aunt Kate to Mary Holton James: 26th February 1882, in Strouse, Alice James, p. 202. There seems to have been some muted antagonism

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between Aunt Kate and Alice; having failed to achieve a successful marriage, each woman found herself a female dependant in the James household. This resulted in resentment rather than solidarity: in her will Kate bequeathed to Alice money and personal possessions – including an old shawl – but these drab offerings were to revert on Alice’s death to her male relatives. Alice was furious about this ‘extraordinary and ludicrous’ bequest (AJ to William James, 7th April 1889, in Yeazell, Death and Letters, p. 167). In a letter to her nephew, Constance Fenimore Woolson discusses Alice’s dislike of aunts: ‘recently in reading ‘‘The Principles of Psychology’’, by Prof. Wm James (of Harvard) I came upon a sentence something like this; ‘‘under these circumstances, it is best to express an emotion of benevolence, if it rises within us; it is best to do something that one would not otherwise do, as for instance to give a penny to the crossingsweeper; or to yield up one’s seat in a horse-car to an old man; or to speak genially to one’s aunt.’’!! I sat down and scratched off a note to Alice James, the Prof.’s sister (who is in London), demanding to know what that meant! We have been writing back and forth about it ever since (she is very witty), yet I have been astonished to find that she considered her brother’s illustration a perfectly good one! Heavens – is that the usual idea of aunts?’ (CFW to Samuel Mather, 8th February [1892?], Samuel Mather Family Papers, MSS # 3735, containers 23–4; Western Reserve Historical Association, Cleveland, OH). 5. Edith Wharton told her lover William Morton Fullerton that all of William James’s family had been the ‘victims’ of his ‘neurotic, unreliable’ behaviour, the ‘chronic flares and twitches of . . . William o’ the wisp James’ (24th March 1910, The Letters of Edith Wharton, R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis (eds.), (London: Simon & Schuster, 1988), p. 205). 6. HJL II, 381, 403. 7. It is interesting to note that, in parallel with the stage adaptation of Daisy Miller – which belongs to the period after his mother’s death – James’s impassioned review of the actor Salvini (in Boston, 1883) dates from the months following his father’s death. This review is one of the longest, most detailed that James wrote, and bears witness to his preoccupation with the dramatic at this time. 8. [13th February, 1882], HJL II, 377. 9. 1st January, 1883, HJL II, 398. 10. Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 26. 11. Sara Blair, Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 129. 12. Joseph Litvak, Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford: University of California Press, 1992), p. 257.


209

13. Rowe, The Other Henry James, p. 76. 14. Ibid., p. 77. 15. This passage is the most frequently quoted in readings of this novel; until the very recent emergence of a lively critical conversation about The Tragic Muse, noting that Miriam was ‘a kind of monster’ was the extent of most analysis of the text. 16. Rowe, The Other Henry James, pp. 75–6, and Blair, Writing of Race, p. 137. 17. When Madame Carre´ tells the unformed Miriam that given her knowledge of languages she ‘oughtn’t to be an actress – [she] ought to be a governess’, to which Mrs Rooth pleadingly responds, ‘Oh don’t tell us that: it’s to escape from that!’, Peter is ‘moved to interpose’ that he’s ‘very sure’ Miriam will escape that fate (TM 87). This is the vein of optimism that Rowe chooses to emphasise in his reading of Miriam, and of course – from the point of view of the characters’ welfare, though not, I am arguing, from that of the reader’s enjoyment – he and Sherringham are quite right. If Miriam were ever to visit Bly, she would come as a celebrity guest to whom all would pay court; she would be unlikely even to notice the presence of children, much less be troubled by dead servants; and when she departed – refreshed by the bucolic retirement but eager to return to the arena of her global triumphs – she would be quite untouched by any desire for the master of the house (who might, on the other hand, feel her departure as the moment to revise his ‘no correspondence’ rule – though Miriam would not bother to reply). 18. For a persuasive elaboration of an opposing view, see Blair’s Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation. In Blair’s view, James invokes powerful contemporary stereotypes of the Jew to create Miriam as a figure of aesthetic transformation, a source of both anxiety and desire to the newly cosmopolitan author; the project of James’s novel, Blair argues, is to exploit and assimilate Miriam’s culture-building potential while purging her of her worrying ethnic difference and equally disturbing affinity with the vulgarity of mass culture. In similar terms, Michael Robinson argues that Miriam’s Jewishness means that she is ‘perceived as racially marginal, equivocal, and naturally histrionic’: her putative ethnic identity thus collaborates with her femininity to support her representation as a paradoxically ‘natural’ performer (Robinson, ‘Acting Women: The Performing Self and the Late Nineteenth Century’, Comparative Criticism 14 (1992), p. 6). 19. Rowe, The Other Henry James, p. 76. 20. Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1997). 21. Litvak argues in similar terms, though to very different effect. His observation that Miriam’s ‘triumphant overflow look[s] like a perversion of metaphor into metonymy’ is linked to his view that

210

22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

Notes to pages 75–82 metaphor offers a ‘hierarchical and idealizing’ perspective and ‘establishes a stable relationship between the fictive and the real’: thus Miriam’s ‘displacement’ of metaphor looks to Litvak like a liberatory move which ‘allows for [a] fluidity of relations’ (Caught in the Act, p. 257). In my analysis, on the other hand, metaphor is not an agent of oppression but a contestation of it, a way of negotiating with authority, of mediating between the fictive and the real, not a way of imposing hierarchy. Thus the wishful banishment of metaphor in favour of metonymy in The Tragic Muse makes not for a liberating fictional world but rather for a text impoverished by its disconnection from its psychosocial origins. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). The title of William Archer’s Masks or Faces? A Study in the Psychology of Acting (London: Longmans, 1888). Salmon, Culture of Publicity, p. 23. Mary Jean Corbett, Representing Femininity: Middle-Class Subjectivity in Victorian and Edwardian Women’s Autobiographies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 14. HJ to Grace Norton, 8th June [1879], HJL II, 241. Henry James, Essays in London and Elsewhere (London: J. R. Osgood, 1893), p. 90. Robins was a close friend of Elisabeth Marbury (see Chapter 4). ‘In the world of literature and the stage, one of my earliest and best friends was Elizabeth Robins, who introduced Ibsen to England and who helped secure the franchise for women in Great Britain’ (Marbury, My Crystal Ball: Reminiscences (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1924), p. 215). Elizabeth Robins, Woman’s Secret (Letchworth: Garden City Press, 1908), pp. 4, 10, 11. HJ to Isabella Gardner, 7th June [1891], HJL III, 342. Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life (London: Collins, 1985), pp. 406–8. Henry James, Theatre and Friendship: Some Henry James Letters, ed., intro. and commentary Elizabeth Robins (London: Jonathan Cape, 1932). Rachel M. Brownstein, Tragic Muse: Rachel of the Come´die-Française (Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 108–9. In addition, Michael Robinson proposes that The Tragic Muse be read in the context of several theatre novels of the period, including Edmond de Goncourt’s La Faustin (1887), Arse`ne Houssaye’s La Come`dienne (1884) and Emile Zola’s Nana (1880). Mrs Humphry Ward, Miss Bretherton (London: Macmillan, 1884), p. 59. Further references will be given parenthetically in the text. Brownstein, Tragic Muse, p. 151. Gail Marshall, Actresses on the Victorian Stage: Feminine Performance and the Galatea Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).


38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

211

Tracy C. Davis makes a similar point through her analysis of the actress’s prevalence in Victorian pornography: ‘because of the existence of this large body of literature documenting, justifying, and enacting the erotic fictions associated with actresses it is impossible to claim that actresses were in control of all the signs they gave off’ (Davis, Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 108). Marshall, Actresses on the Victorian Stage, p. 97. The opposing view may be seen, for example, in Christopher Kent’s analysis of the ‘symbolic importance’ of the actress’s profession as an occupation for women: ‘It offered striking opportunities for independence, fame, and fortune, and even for those outside it the stage incarnated fantasies, providing vicarious release in the notion that here was an area of special dispensation from the normal categories, moral and social, that defined woman’s place’ (Kent, ‘Image and Reality: The Actress and Society’, in Vicinus (ed.), A Widening Sphere, p. 94.) As Judith Butler remarks in her discussion of heterosexual gender performativity, ‘there is no guarantee that exposing the naturalized status of heterosexuality will lead to its subversion. Heterosexuality can augment its hegemony through its denaturalization’ (Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), p. 231). Tracy C. Davis and Michael Robinson take the opposite view: quoting Davis, Robinson argues that ‘[l]ike the whore, the actress was an object of desire, whose company was purchased through commercial exchange by customers who ‘‘tacitly agreed to suspend disbelief while a particular desire was gratified’’’ (Robinson, Acting Women, p. 10). This analysis does not work for texts such as those discussed above, in which the desire gratified by such actresses as Miss Bretherton is precisely the male viewer’s power to criticise, to judge and ultimately to penetrate the theatrical feint to the vulnerable truth of the woman within. The basic function of Miss Bretherton and her hapless thespian sisters is to provide an object for a kind of hermeneutic rape. In contrast, Robinson argues that Miriam is a ‘representative figure’ among the crowd of actresses thronging the literary stage of the 1880s and 1890s; this reading is based on Robinson’s characterisation of ‘the prevailing view of the actress as someone who is essentially devoid of personality . . . whose very variety is symptomatic of her lack of substance’ (Acting Women, p. 6). In the texts discussed above, I can find no support for the claim that this is a dominant conception of the actress. In contrast, we might note the ostentatious absence of otherdirected sexual desire among the aesthetic characters of The Tragic

212

43.

44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53.

Notes to pages 85–88 Muse. Miriam, Nash, and Nick seem to desire nobody, and wish to be free of the demands exacted by others’ desire. Nick signally fails to desire Julia, and, later, Miriam herself: when Julia surprises them as they contemplate Miriam’s portrait, the sense of betrayal is as much to do with Julia’s apprehension of Nick’s lack of desire for Miriam – another, albeit very different, female prize – as it is to do with his seeming preference for Miriam over Julia herself. Alloerotic desire is an embarrassment in this novel; it makes its victims ridiculous, because it subjects them to a need that can only be satisfied by application to another. In contrast, the figures who represent James’s vision of liberation are free of such otherdirected desires; Miriam wants the whole world to watch her but she has no need of any particular person, Nash seems to thrive on absence and disconnection, and the most embarrassing element – for Julia – in her discovery of Nick painting the Tragic Muse is its undertone of autoerotic independence. Brownstein’s description of Rachel: ‘‘‘On n’a pas de sexe en la voyant,’’ wrote the correspondent of the Journal de Rheims in 1839’ (Brownstein, Tragic Muse, p. 125). James, ‘Mr. Tennyson’s Drama’, p. 89. Henry James, ‘The Come´die Française in London’ (1879), Essays on Art, pp. 307–8. Henry James, ‘The Theáˆtre Français’ (1876), in James, The Scenic Art: Notes on Acting and the Drama, 1872–1901, ed. and intro. Allan Wade, foreword Leon Edel (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1949), pp. 90–1. 9th February [1891], HJL III, 329. Henry James, ‘London Pictures and London Plays’ (1882), Essays on Art, p. 353. Henry James, ‘After the Play’ (1889), Scenic Art, p. 230. Ibid., p. 233. Michael R. Booth’s description of the demand in the Victorian theatre for pictorialism provides historical context for James’s perception; in line with the intensifying culture of consumption and its focus on material objects, ‘[t]he environment of the actor solidified around him’ as the stage was overwhelmed with reproductions ‘of all the paraphernalia of corporeal existence’ (Booth, Victorian Spectacular Theatre 1850–1910 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 15). Henry James, ‘Madame Ristori’ (1875), Scenic Art, p. 32. Henry James, ‘Tommaso Salvini’ (1883/4), Scenic Art, p. 168. Richard Salmon’s work on James’s theatrical misadventure stresses the need to understand his ‘anxieties of exposure and fantasies of acclaim’ (Culture of Publicity, p. 47) in the context of a culture increasingly preoccupied with ideas about publicity and mass audiences. While heeding Salmon’s warning that the intensity of


54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59.

60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67.

213

James’s response to the theatre ‘cannot simply be ascribed to personal psychology’ (p. 47), I think it important not to lose sight of the peculiar symptomatic appeal of the theatre (shaped by widespread discursive formations) to Henry at this particular time in his life, and share Litvak’s view that ‘[a]lthough the embarrassments of James’s excursion into the actual theater in the 1890s may appear as so many misfortunes befalling him as it were from outside, we will see that that painful episode in his life merely literalizes the inherence of embarrassment in the Jamesian ‘‘theater’’’ (Caught in the Act, p. 200). James, ‘The Theáˆtre Français’, p. 72. Henry James, ‘Edmond Rostand’ (1901), Scenic Art, p. 303. Henry James, ‘Notes on the Theatres: New York’ (1875), Essays on Art, p. 59. HJ to Alice Howe James and William James, 2nd February 1895, HJL III, 516. James might have spared himself this unhappy experience had he listened to Elisabeth Marbury’s ‘blunt announcement that [his plays] were much too ‘‘talky’’ ever to succeed on stage’ (Jane S. Smith, Elsie de Wolfe: A Life in the High Style (New York: Atheneum, 1982), p. 117). 9th January 1895, HJL III, 508–9. Salmon’s analysis of the Guy Domville fiasco highlights the conservative, even reactionary, implications of James’s response: ‘what is evoked in James’s account of this episode amounts to a scene of crowd violence’ (Culture of Publicity, p. 64). Henrik Ibsen, The Wild Duck (1884), Act 2, in Henrik Ibsen – Plays: One, trans. and intro. Michael Meyer (London: Methuen, 1983), pp. 153–4. 5th June [July?] [1891], HJL III, 344. Henry James, ‘On the Occasion of Hedda Gabler’ (1891), Essays on Art, p. 457. Henry James, ‘London’ (1897), Essays on Art, p. 492. James, ‘On the occasion of Hedda Gabler’ (1891), Essays on Art, p. 460. Mary Anderson de Navarro on the death of her baby son (A Few More Memories (1936)): ‘Henry James’s sympathy was unfailing during that time of illness and death . . . His only mention of our little boy was: ‘‘We have both lost our first-born. I was very fond of Guy Domville too.’’’ (James, Henry James: A Life in Letters, ed. Phillip Horne (Harmondsworth: Lane-Penguin, 1999), p. 273). James, Scenic Art, p. 291. ‘[Susan Ash, the underhousemaid,] was a guide to peregrinations that had little in common with those intensely definite airings that had left with the child a vivid memory of the regulated mind of Moddle. There had been under Moddle’s system no dawdles at shop-windows and no nudges, in Oxford Street, of ‘‘I say, look at ’er!’’ There had been an inexorable treatment of crossings and a

214

Notes to pages 96–112 serene exemption from the fear that – especially at corners, of which she was yet weakly fond – haunted the housemaid, the fear of being, as she ominously said, ‘‘spoken to’’’ (WMK 56).

teacups and love letters 1. HJ to W. D. Howells, 1st February 1884, HJL III, 29. 2. Lyndall Gordon’s A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art includes the first fully extended biographical account of Woolson (it focuses also on Minny Temple, James’s cousin, as well as on James). Cheryl B. Torsney’s Constance Fenimore Woolson: The Grief of Artistry, and Sharon L. Dean’s Constance Fenimore Woolson: Homeward Bound combine some biographical background with the first modern extended readings of Woolson’s literary works, while Dean develops her interpretation of Woolson’s travel writing in Constance Fenimore Woolson and Edith Wharton: Perspectives on Landscape and Art. Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Nineteenth Century: Essays (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001) is a collection of recent critical essays on Woolson edited by Victoria Brehm. Constance Fenimore Woolson: Women Artists, Women Exiles: ‘‘‘Miss Grief’’’ and Other Stories, ed. and intro. Joan Myers Weimer (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988) is a selection of Woolson’s short fiction with an interesting introductory essay. 3. Edel’s introduction to Woolson’s letters to HJ: HJL III, 523. 4. Constance Fenimore Woolson, Anne (1882) (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1883), pp. 56–7. 5. CFW to her publisher, Mr Warner, 11th March [1890], Western Reserve Historical Society. 6. Henry James, ‘Miss Woolson’, in Partial Portraits (London: Macmillan, 1888; rpt. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1970), p. 181. 7. CFW to John Hay, 26th December [1885]. In Alice Hall Petry, ‘‘‘Always, Your Attached Friend’’: The Unpublished Letters of Constance Fenimore Woolson to John and Clara Hay’, Books at Brown, 29–30 (1982–3), p. 81. 8. CFW to Samuel Mather, 27th February [1887?], Western Reserve Historical Society. 9. CFW to Samuel Mather, 17th April [1890], Western Reserve Historical Society. 10. CFW to Samuel Mather, 31st January 1890, Western Reserve Historical Society. 11. Clara Woolson Benedict to Kate Mather, 14th October 1892; 3rd June 1905; 17th May 1905, Western Reserve Historical Society. 12. CFW to HJ, 30th August [1882], HJL III, 539. 13. Even after Constance’s death, Clara felt her own enjoyment of German authority threatened by her sister, in the form of


14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

215

Constance’s Pomeranian Spitz, Tello. From her sister’s Venetian apartment, she wrote to her nephew, ‘[A]nd then has come up the question of the dog – which has been another great perplexity and sorrow. Connie talked much of providing for him by will, and as he is a most difficult dog to manage, and made me very nervous and as we have no house, I see plainly that all hope of any benefit of our quick[ish?] cure in Franzensbad was ended, if he should be taken with us – besides it was her wish to have him cared for here – Mr James has arranged that Tito the gondolier (who always had charge of the dog and whom the dog knows,) should take him to board while we are in Germany – and he has gone to him – but, we were really heart-broken over it – indeed we are both in such a poor state that every little thing knocks us up –’ (Clara Woolson Benedict to Samuel Mather, 2nd May [1894], Western Reserve Historical Society) To do Clara justice, it should be noted that Tello became a cherished companion of the Benedicts in their subsequent European travels. CFW to William Wilberforce Baldwin, 6th February 1892, Pierpont Morgan Library. Barthes, ‘The Reality Effect’, p. 140. CFW to HJ, 7th May 1883, HJL III, 557. Woolson, Anne, p. 239. Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), pp. 33–4. CFW to William Wilberforce Baldwin, 16 June [1892], Pierpont Morgan Library. Constance Fenimore Woolson, Jupiter Lights (New York: Harper, 1889), p. 254; Anne, p. 181. CFW to HJ, 12th February [1882], HJL III, 527. James, ‘Miss Woolson’, Partial Portraits, pp. 188–9. HJL III, xvi–xvii. CFW 117. For another example of Edel’s hostility towards James’s female friends, see my discussion of Elizabeth Robins in Chapter 2. Gordon, A Private Life, p. 327. Henry James, ‘The Jolly Corner’ (1908), in James, The Altar of the Dead, The Beast in the Jungle, The Birthplace, and Other Tales (New York: Scribners, 1909), pp. 452, 483. It seems that James may have found the donneé for ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ in Woolson’s notebooks, in which she wrote, ‘To imagine a man spending his life looking for and waiting for his ‘‘splendid moment’’. ‘‘Is this my moment?’’ ‘‘Will this state of things bring it to me?’’ But the moment never comes. When he is old and infirm it comes to a neighbour who has never thought of it or cared for it. The comment of the first upon this’ (CFW 144–5).

216


29. Henry James, ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ (1903), in James, The Altar of the Dead, The Beast in the Jungle, The Birthplace, and Other Tales, p. 64. Further quotations will be given parenthetically in the text. 30. Julia Kristeva, La Re´volution du langage poe´tique in Toril Moi (ed.), The Kristeva Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 103. 31. HJL III, 542. 32. AJ to Alice Howe James, 8th December 1886, Death and Letters, p. 122. 33. CFW to HJ, 29th May [1883], HJL III, 559. 34. CFW to HJ, 30th August [1882], HJL III, 541. 35. CFW to HJ, 30th August [1882], HJL III, 540. 36. CFW to HJ, 7th May [1883], HJL III, 548. 37. James, ‘Miss Woolson’, Partial Portraits, p. 178. 38. Ibid., p. 179. 39. CFW to HJ, 7th May [1883], HJL III, 557. 40. For Jones’s discussions of aphanisis, see ‘Fear, Guilt and Hate’ and ‘The Early Development of Female Sexuality’ in Ernest Jones, Papers on Psychoanalysis (London: Maresfield Reprints/Karnac, 1977). 41. CFW to Samuel Mather, 20th November 1893, Western Reserve Historical Society. 42. Gordon, A Private Life, Chapter 10, ‘The Death-House’. 43. HJ to William Wilberforce Baldwin, 2nd February 1894, HJL III, 464. 44. CFW to HJ, 7th May [1883], HJL III, 549. 45. HJ to William James, 24th March 1894, HJL III, 470. 46. CFW to HJ, 12th February [1882], HJL III, 527. 47. CFW to HJ, 7th May [1883], HJL III, 550. 48. CFW to HJ, 30th August [1882], HJL III, 545.

realism and interior design 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

2nd January 1908, HJ/EW 85. 13th December 1909, HJ/EW 129. 7th September 1911, HJ/EW 187. 9th February 1911, HJ/EW 175. 4th October 1907, HJ/EW 75. HJ to Mary Cadwallader Jones, 17th October 1911, in Millicent Bell, Edith Wharton and Henry James: The Story of Their Friendship (Peter Owen: London, 1966), p. 176. HJ to Howard Sturgis, 9th August 1912, HJL IV, 622–3. HJ to Mary Cadwallader Jones, 18th June 1906, in Bell, Edith Wharton and Henry James, p. 116. HJ to Mary Cadwallader Jones, 17th October 1911, in ibid., p. 176. See Coulson, ‘Sticky Realism’, pp. 115–26. A significant exception to this pattern was the Aestheticist movement of the late 1880s to the 1890s. See Jonathan Freedman, Professions of


12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

217

Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). However, the Aestheticist movement described by Freedman – while marking a self-conscious departure from the normative consumption to which I refer here – has little specific bearing on the development of the elite interior design sensibility of Wharton and her followers, which was always aristocratic rather than bohemian, and took its lead from powerfully feminine women rather than subversively effeminate men. Edith Wharton, The Decoration of Houses (1897) (New York: Scribners, 1917), pp. xxi, xx. Shari Benstock, No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton (New York: Scribners, 1994), p. 117. EW to Mary Cadwallader Jones, 15th April 1916, in Alan Price, The End of the Age of Innocence (London: Robert Hale, 1996), p. 81. Elsie’s and Edith’s lives overlap in ways which highlight the proximity and the contestability of the borderlines between inherited and acquired social status, and between irreproachable and risque´ sexual reputations. In 1880 Edith was briefly engaged to Harry Stevens, the son of a Mrs Paran Stevens, a greengrocer’s daughter who had become rich through her marriage to a Boston businessman. Mrs Paran Stevens was an ambitious socialite, accorded only the most grudging recognition by families of Edith’s social standing (Benstock, No Gifts, 42–3). In 1884 Elsie – a fast friend of Mrs Paran Stevens – made her London social debut; there she became friends with Cora Urquhart (Mrs James Brown Potter): ‘Cora had come abroad as a guest of Mrs Paran Stevens and was having a most brilliant and successful season. Her great attraction, aside from her beauty, was her drawing-room recitations . . . Later I went to Hamburg when the Prince [of Wales] was staying there and Cora had a cottage in the vicinity’ (Elsie de Wolfe, After All (London: Heinemann, 1935), pp. 16–17). A close friend of Constance’s in Florence was Mrs Launt Thompson, who was Cora’s aunt and who, according to Constance, disapproved of her flighty niece; and in the late 1880s[?] Constance received a note from Cora: ‘May I include your ‘‘Kentucky Belle’’ in a collection which I am thinking of publishing? I recited ‘‘Kentucky Belle’’ last summer on the Royal yacht ‘‘Osborne’’ for the Empress Eugenie, at the especial request of the Prince and Princess of Wales, who admire the piece more than anything I had the honor of reciting for them’ (Cora Urquhart Potter to CFW, 15th October, marked ‘copy’ in CFW’s handwriting, Western Reserve Historical Society). Smith, Elsie de Wolfe. Elsie de Wolfe, The House in Good Taste (1913) (London: Sir Isaac Pitman, 1914), p. 5. De Wolfe, After All, p. 151.

218 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

36.

37.

Notes to pages 146–160 De Wolfe, The House in Good Taste, pp. 18, 21. Ibid., p. 318. Wharton, Decoration of Houses, p. 140. De Wolfe, After All, p. 74. Wharton, French Ways and Their Meaning (London: Macmillan, 1919), p. 42. De Wolfe, The House in Good Taste, p. 27. ‘Committed . . . as sisters to an almost equal fellowship in abjection’: Kate and Marian (WD 77). Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 1–2. Wharton, ‘The Bolted Door’, in The Stories of Edith Wharton, sel. and intro. Anita Brookner, 2 vols. (London: Simon & Schuster, 1988– 9), II, p. 188. Edith Wharton, Bunner Sisters (1892), in Madame de Treymes and Others: Four Novelettes (New York: Scribners, 1970) p. 303. Edith Wharton, ‘A Cup of Cold Water’, in The Greater Inclination (London: The Bodley Head, 1899), p. 188. EW to HJ, 3rd September [1912], HJ/EW 231. The ‘Minnie Pauls’ are Paul Bourget and his wife. Wharton, Decoration of Houses, pp. 169–70. De Wolfe, After All, p. 210. ‘Crumbled’ in this edition is probably a mistake for ‘crumpled’ as in other editions. Adeline R. Tintner first drew attention to the ways in which this story of James’s reflects on aspects of his relationship with Wharton in ‘James’s Mock Epic, ‘‘The Velvet Glove’’: Edith Wharton and Other Late Tales’, Modern Fiction Studies 17:4 (Winter 1971–72), pp. 483–501, reprinted as ‘The Give-and-Take between Edith Wharton and Henry James: ‘‘The Velvet Glove’’ and Edith Wharton’ in Tintner’s Edith Wharton in Context (1999). My quotations are from the 1999 volume. Henry James, ‘The Velvet Glove’ (1909), in The Complete Tales of Henry James (1903–10), ed. and intro. Leon Edel, 12 vols. (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1964), XII, pp. 262–4. Tintner does not grasp the full force of Berridge’s hatred of the Princess at this moment: she remarks that ‘[t]he Princess does not understand and thinks that John does not like her’ (‘Give-andTake’, p. 24). On the contrary, it is because the Princess is not intelligent enough to understand the depth of Berridge’s fury and repudiation that Berridge finds himself paradoxically wishing that she were in fact less stupid, so that his rejection of her might cause her more pain. Benstock quotes James’s letter: ‘your exquisite hand of reassurance and comfort scatters celestial balm’ (9th May 1909, in Benstock, No Gifts, p. 204).


219

38. EW to W. C. Brownell, 25th June 1904, in Bell, Edith Wharton and Henry James, p. 221. 39. EW to Sara Norton, 12th March [1901?], The Letters of Edith Wharton, p. 45. 40. Edgar Allen Poe, ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’, in Edgar Allen Poe: Poetry and Tales (New York: Library of America, 1984), pp. 839, 842. 41. Edith Wharton, ‘Henry James in his Letters’, review of Lubbock’s Letters of Henry James (1920), in Edith Wharton: The Uncollected Critical Writings, ed. Frederick Wegener (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 139. 42. HJ to William Morton Fullerton, 26th September 1900, in Henry James: Selected Letters, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, MA: BelknapHarvard, 1987), pp. 324–5. 43. For example, Gloria C. Erlich, The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 44. Ludwig Bemelmans, To The One I Love The Best (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1955), p. 17. Edith and Elsie were both attended by young aspiring artists who later wrote about their friendships with these formidable figures. Elsie’s prote´ge´ was Ludwig Bemelmans, whom she invited to live with her in her Beverly Hills mansion, ‘After All’, during her Second World War-exile from France; Bemelmans’s book (whose title quotes the inscription on the gravestones of Elsie’s two poodles) bears distinct family resemblances to Lubbock’s A Portrait of Edith Wharton. However, Bemelmans’s book communicates a real affection for its generous and flamboyant subject, while Lubbock’s memoir is marked by moments of untrammelled spite; he slights Wharton’s literary achievements and seems to enjoy citing only the most negative remarks by Edith’s acquaintances. 45. De Wolfe, After All, p. 42–3. 46. Percy Lubbock, Portrait of Edith Wharton (Oxford: The Alden Press, 1947), p. 33. 47. The view of Lily’s predicament as a distinctively feminine experience within the culture of the leisure class complements Amy Kaplan’s analysis of this structure of identity as characteristic of the leisure class in relation to the poor: ‘To legitimate their privilege, the upper class cannot afford to seclude itself in a private sphere but depends upon displaying itself before the gaping mob. Such publicity must simultaneously appeal to the crowd by arousing its desire to belong and control that crowd by maintaining an inviolate boundary between actors and audience’ (‘Crowded Spaces in The House of Mirth’, in Carol J. Singley (ed.), Edith Wharton’s ‘The House of Mirth’: A Casebook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 87–8).

220


48. Wai Chee Dimock, ‘Debasing Exchange: Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth’, in ibid. p. 78. 49. Claire Preston, Edith Wharton’s Social Register (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. 70. 50. De Wolfe, After All, p. 95. 51. Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), p. 36. 52. Henry James, Roderick Hudson (1875) (New York: Scribners, 1907), p. vii. 53. Gloria Erlich is very interested in the possibilities adumbrated for Lily by Rosedale. ‘Although the book may seem to be a failed pas de deux between Lily and Selden, . . . the synchronised movements between Lily and Rosedale . . . shadow and finally control the stagefront actions. The fateful dance and the most significant one is the subtle ballet between the Lily and the Rose.’ Erlich also notes that an early title for the then-unfinished novel was The Year of the Rose, which highlights the occult affinity connecting Rosedale to the heroine of Wharton’s story. Yet despite the suggestively feminine implications foregrounded by Erlich’s image of ‘the Lily and the Rose’, Erlich identifies Rosedale as ‘the incestuous . . . provider or father surrogate’ who ‘haunts Wharton’s imagination’ (Sexual Education, pp. 73–4). Questions about the relations between paternal and maternal objects and the formations of sexuality in this period of fraught gender politics go beyond the scope of the present book, but I do not want to pass by this topic without noting that for Lily Bart, and, it could be argued, for her creator, the most compelling intimations of intersubjective possibility always carry within them the idea of the feminine and the maternal. 54. Singley, ‘Introduction’, Edith Wharton’s ‘The House of Mirth’ p. 12; Elaine Showalter, ‘The Death of the Lady (Novelist): Wharton’s House of Mirth’ in ibid., p. 54; Dimock, ‘Debasing Exchage’, p. 80. 55. Kaplan points out that Nettie’s life risks ‘becom[ing] a parody of its own imitation of upper-class life, as she becomes a domesticated version of the gaping mob’ (‘Crowded Spaces’, in ibid., p. 102). 56. Judith Fryer, Felicitous Space: The Imaginative Structures of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), p. 94. 57. Here I am in agreement with Gloria Erlich’s reading of this scene: ‘Having found her way back to the peace and satisfaction of infancy through identification with the infant that she herself has nurtured, Lily is ready to return to death, the great mother’ (Erlich, Sexual Education, p. 66). 58. For an unusual, psychoanalytic reading of the novel, from which my analysis differs in important ways, see Joan Lidoff, ‘Another Sleeping Beauty: Narcissism in The House of Mirth,’ in Singley (ed.),


59.

60. 61.

62.

63. 64.

221

Edith Wharton’s ‘The House of Mirth’. Lidoff’s reading of this text is an explicitly hostile diagnosis of what she sees as evidence of Wharton’s own frustrations and repressions, which ‘dam[n] [Lily] to destruction’ within the ‘constrictive walls of the inhibited psychic world from which Wharton has constructed her novel’ (p. 184). While I share Lidoff’s sense that this novel is engaged in a conflict between a ‘fantasy of ecstatic oneness’ and a ‘world in which communion is impossible’ (p. 184), I think that Lidoff’s unexamined commitment to the ideal of ‘completed intercourse’ (194), of ‘emotional climax or resolution’ (p. 184) as the proper telos of a narrative, obscures from her Wharton’s more complex and less normative investment in, and analysis of, a mode of being constituted by doubleness, hesitation and paradox. For example, in her determination to discount the novel as fatally immature, Lidoff claims – in relation to the end of the novel – that Wharton ‘never integrates needs or angers in personality or plot’ (p. 202): yet surely Lily’s double death, and the novel’s double ending, can be understood very persuasively as Wharton’s articulation of conflicting needs through the structures of plot. Noting that Nettie is the last person to see Lily alive and that Gerty is the first to see her dead, Showalter argues that Wharton’s novel ‘ends not only with a death but with a vision of a new world of female solidarity’ (Showalter, ‘The Death of the Lady (Novelist)’ p. 56). This reading has to overlook the final tableau of the novel, in which Selden and the dead Lily are enshrined in silent reconciliation. Dimock, ‘Debasing Exchange’, p. 78. Linda Wagner-Martin, ‘The House of Mirth: A Novel of Admonition’, in Singley (ed.), Edith Wharton’s ‘The House of Mirth’, p. 124; Shari Benstock, ‘‘‘The Word Which Made All Clear’’: The Silent Close of The House of Mirth’, in ibid., p. 139; and Lori Merish, ‘Engendering Naturalism: Narrative Form and Commodity Spectacle in U.S. Naturalist Fiction’ in ibid., p. 260. George Flack describes his journalism in Henry James, The Reverberator, in The Reverberator, Madame de Mauves, and Other Tales (New York: Scribners, 1908), p. 63. Wharton, ‘Henry James in his Letters’, p. 143. Edith’s lapdogs were Pekingese; photographs of Elsie show her accompanied by various diminutive fluffy dogs. Henry had a succession of small, short-lived dogs. While Edith – so expert at managing the object – is remembered by Leon Edel as accompanied by two ‘elderly’ Pekes (Edel, Some Memories of Edith Wharton (New York: G. Horowitz, 1993, p. 13)), Henry, so much less good at controlling his environment, could not keep his dogs alive. There is a pathetic row of canine graves in the garden of Lamb House to testify to this.

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65. Adam Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), p. 29. 66. Richard Salmon has discussed James’s ‘deep-seated ambivalence’ in relation to the ‘practices of biographical investigation’ (p. 97) in depth in Henry James and the Culture of Publicity. 67. James’s description of Matthias Pardon (B 915). 68. HJ to EW, 13th March 1912, HJ/EW 216.

epilogue: 1892 1. Bakhtin, ‘Epic and Novel’, p. 27. 2. HJ to William James, 7th November 1890, in Strouse, Alice James, p. 297. 3. 16th June 1891, AJD 211. 4. AJ to William James, 30th July 1891, Death and Letters, p. 186. 5. ‘I wish you could know Katharine Loring, she is a most wonderful being. She has all the mere brute superiority which distinguishes man from woman combined with all the distinctively feminine virtues. There is nothing she cannot do from hewing wood and drawing water to driving run-away horses and educating all the women in North America’ (AJ to Sara Sedgwick Darwin, 9th August 1879, Death and Letters, p. 82). 6. Constance Fenimore Woolson, ‘Dorothy’, and Other Italian Stories (New York: Harper, 1896), p. 11. Further quotations will be given parenthetically in the text. 7. CFW lived at the Castellani in 1886–7. 8. As noted in Chapter 3, Lyndall Gordon has argued persuasively that Constance planned and carried out her suicide with deliberation. 9. AJ to William James, 30th July 1891, Death and Letters, p. 186. 10. Henry James, ‘Miss Woolson’, Partial Portraits, p. 178. 11. Benstock, No Gifts, pp. 93–7. 12. The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935), ed. and intro. Ann J. Lane (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), p. 96. 13. R. W. B. Lewis writes that Edith experienced a psychological breakdown and was treated for nervous exhaustion; Shari Benstock dismisses this as myth, insists that Edith’s illness was largely physiological, and argues that her treatment was medical in its focus. 14. EW to Barrett Wendell, 15th May [1899], Letters of Edith Wharton, p. 39. 15. EW to Sara Norton, 24th January [1902], Letters of Edith Wharton, p. 55. This interesting turn-of-the-century metaphor (which evokes castration, sterilisation and menstruation in a rich if somewhat incoherent nexus) conflates a distinctively medicalised perspective on women’s illness with an older, presurgical notion of feminine suffering as essentially inoperable. At the symbolic core of the image

Notes to page 196

223

is the mysterious and blood-sucking ‘organ’ whose excision could leave Edith and Sara ‘alive and active and like other people’ – active and powerful, like doctors, perhaps; or – the suggestion is there – healthily ungendered, like the ‘other people’. Their suffering femininity could be transformed by removing the organ that prevents them from being like their only potential saviours, men; yet the men will not, or cannot, alleviate their gendered distress by performing a symbolic hysterectomy. 16. AJ to William James, 30th July 1891, Death and Letters, p. 186. 17. CFW to HJ, 7th May [1883], HJL III, 550–1.

Bibliography

(i) works by alice james, henry james, edith wharton and constance fenimore woolson Alice James The Death and Letters of Alice James, ed. and intro. Ruth Bernard Yeazell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981) The Diary of Alice James, ed. Leon Edel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982)

Henry James The Ambassadors (1903), 2 vols. (New York: Scribners, 1909) The American (1877) (New York: Scribners, 1907) The Aspern Papers (1888), in The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw, The Liar, The Two Faces (New York: Scribners, 1908) ‘The Author of Beltraffio’ (1884), in The Author of Beltraffio, The Middle Years, Greville Fane, and Other Tales (New York: Scribners, 1909) The Awkward Age (1899) (New York 1908) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966) ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ (1903), in The Altar of the Dead, The Beast in the Jungle, The Birthplace, and Other Tales (New York: Scribners, 1909) The Bostonians (1886), in Henry James: Novels 1881–1886 (New York: Library of America, 1985) The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, ed. and intro. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) The Complete Plays of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel (London: Rupert HartDavis, 1949) Essays in London and Elsewhere (London: J. R. Osgood, 1893) The Europeans (1878) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964) The Golden Bowl (1904) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981) Henry James: A Life in Letters, ed. Philip Horne (Harmondsworth: LanePenguin, 1999)

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Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters 1900–1915, ed. Lyall H. Powers, (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1990) Henry James: Essays on Art and Drama, ed. Peter Rawlings (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996) Henry James Letters, ed. Leon Edel, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974–84) Henry James: Selected Letters, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, MA: BelknapHarvard, 1987) ‘In the Cage’ (1898), intro. Libby Purves (London: Hesperus, 2002) ‘The Ivory Tower’ (n.d.) (London and Glasgow: Collins) ‘John S. Sargent’, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 75:449 (October 1887), pp. 683–91 ‘The Jolly Corner’ (1908), in The Altar of the Dead, The Beast in the Jungle, The Birthplace, and Other Tales (New York: Scribners, 1909) ‘My Friend Bingham’ (1867), in Eight Uncollected Tales of Henry James, ed. and intro. Edna Kenton (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1950) Partial Portraits (London: Macmillan, 1888; rpt. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1970) The Portrait of a Lady (1881) (New York 1908) (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1967) The Princess Casamassima (1886), 2 vols. (New York: Scribners, 1908) ‘The Private Life’ (1892), in The Altar of the Dead, The Beast in the Jungle, The Birthplace, and Other Tales (New York: Scribners, 1909) ‘The Pupil’ (1891), in What Maisie Knew, In the Cage, The Pupil (New York: Scribners, 1908) The Reverberator (1888), in The Reverberator, Madame de Mauves, and Other Tales (New York: Scribners, 1908) Roderick Hudson (1875) (New York: Scribners, 1907) The Sacred Fount (1901) (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1994) The Scenic Art: Notes on Acting and the Drama, 1872–1901, ed. and intro. Allan Wade, foreword Leon Edel (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1949) The Sense of the Past (New York: Scribners, 1917) The Spoils of Poynton (1897) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971) Theatre and Friendship: Some Henry James Letters, ed., intro. and commentary Elizabeth Robins (London: Jonathan Cape, 1932) The Tragic Muse (1890), (New York 1908), intro. Philip Horne (London: Penguin, 1995) The Turn of the Screw (1898), in The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw, The Liar, The Two Faces (New York: Scribners, 1908) ‘The Velvet Glove’ (1909), in The Complete Tales of Henry James, ed. and intro. Leon Edel, 12 vols., XII (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1964) Washington Square (1880) (New York: Harper, 1881) What Maisie Knew (1897), in What Maisie Knew, In the Cage, The Pupil (New York: Scribners, 1908)

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Edith Wharton A Backward Glance (1934), in Edith Wharton: Novellas and Other Writings, ed. Cynthia Griffin Wolff (New York: Library of America, 1990) Bunner Sisters (1892), in Madame de Treymes and Others: Four Novelettes (New York: Scribners, 1970) The Decoration of Houses (1897) (New York: Scribners, 1917) Edith Wharton: The Uncollected Critical Writings, ed. Frederick Wegener (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) French Ways and Their Meaning (London: Macmillan, 1919) The Fruit of the Tree, intro. Marilyn French (London: Virago, 1984) ‘The Fulness of Life’, Scribner’s Magazine 14 (July–December 1893), pp. 699–704 The Greater Inclination (London: The Bodley Head, 1899) Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters 1900–1915, ed. Lyall H. Powers (London: Wiedenfeld & Nicolson, 1990) The House of Mirth (1905), in Edith Wharton: The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome (London: Chancellor, 1994) The Letters of Edith Wharton, ed. R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis (London: Simon & Schuster, 1988) Life and I [n.d.], in Edith Wharton: Novellas and Other Writings, ed. Cynthia Griffin Wolff (New York: Library of America, 1990) The Stories of Edith Wharton, sel. and intro. Anita Brookner, 2 vols. (London: Simon & Schuster, 1988–9)

Constance Fenimore Woolson Anne (1882) (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1883) Castle Nowhere: Lake-Country Sketches (Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1875) CFW to William Wilberforce Baldwin: Baldwin Collection, MA 3564; Pierpont Morgan Library, New York CFW to John Hay and Clara Hay: Alice Hall Petry, ‘ ‘‘Always, Your Attached Friend’’: The Unpublished Letters of Constance Fenimore Woolson to John and Clara Hay’, Books at Brown 29–30 (1982–3), pp. 11–107 CFW to HJ, Henry James Letters, ed. Leon Edel, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974–84), III (1980) CFW to Samuel Mather and others; CWB to SM and others: Samuel Mather Family Papers, MSS # 3735, containers 23–4; Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, OH

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CFW to E. C. Stedman: Special Collections, Spec. MS Coll. Stedman [Edmund Clarence]; Rare Books and Manuscripts Room, Butler Library, Columbia University Constance Fenimore Woolson, arr. and ed. Clare Benedict (London: Ellis, 1932) Constance Fenimore Woolson: Women Artists, Women Exiles: ‘‘‘Miss Grief’’’ and Other Stories, ed. and intro. Joan Myers Weimer (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1988) ‘Dorothy’, and Other Italian Stories (New York: Harper, 1896) East Angels (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1886) Horace Chase (New York: Harper, 1894) Jupiter Lights (New York: Harper, 1889) Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches (New York: Appleton, 1880)

(ii) other primary sources Archer, William, Masks or Faces? A Study in the Psychology of Acting (London: Longmans, 1888) [Bell, Florence, and Elizabeth Robins], Alan’s Wife: A Dramatic Study in Three Scenes, intro. William Archer (London: Henry, 1893) Bemelmans, Ludwig, To the One I Love the Best (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1955) Butler, Samuel, The Way of All Flesh (London: Oxford University Press, 1961) Draper, Muriel, Music at Midnight (New York: Harper, 1929) Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935), ed. and intro. Ann J. Lane (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990) Harte, Bret, Poems and Prose (London: War, Lock & Tyler, 1872) Ibsen, Henrik, Henrik Ibsen – Plays: One, trans. and intro. Michael Meyer (London: Methuen, 1983) Kemble, Fanny [Frances Anne], Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839, ed. and intro. John A. Scott (Athens, G A: University of Georgia Press, 1984; orig. pub. New York: Knopf, 1961) Journal of a Young Actress, ed. Monica Gough, foreword Elizabeth FoxGenovese (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990) The Terrific Kemble: A Victorian Self-Portrait from the Writings of Fanny Kemble, ed. and intro. Eleanor Ransome (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978) Lubbock, Percy, Portrait of Edith Wharton (Oxford: The Alden Press, 1947) Marbury, Elisabeth, My Crystal Ball: Reminiscences (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1924)

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Poe, Edgar Allen, Edgar Allen Poe: Poetry and Tales (New York: Library of America, 1984) Robins, Elizabeth, The Convert (New York: Macmillan, 1907) ‘The Fatal Gift of Beauty’ and Other Stories [by C. E. Raimond, pseud.] (Chicago: H. S. Stone, 1986) George Mandeville’s Husband [by C. E. Raimond, pseud.] (New York: Appleton, 1894) Woman’s Secret (Letchworth: Garden City Press, 1908) Sargent, John Singer, Complete Paintings, ed. Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray, Volume. I: The Early Portraits (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1988) Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), ed. with an intro. and notes by Jean Fagan Yellin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) Trollope, Anthony, Can You Forgive Her? (1865) (London: Oxford University Press World’s Classics, 1968) Ward, Mrs Humphry, Miss Bretherton (London: Macmillan, 1884) de Wolfe, Elsie, After All (London: Heinemann, 1935) The House in Good Taste (1913) (London: Sir Isaac Pitman, 1914)

(iii) secondary sources Agnew, Jean-Christophe, ‘The Consuming Vision of Henry James’, in Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears (eds.), The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980 (New York: Pantheon, 1983) Anderson, Charles R., Person, Place, and Thing in Henry James’s Novels (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1977) Anderson, Linda, Women and Autobiography in the Twentieth Century: Remembered Futures (Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1997) Ardis, Ann L., New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1990) and Leslie W. Lewis (eds.), Women’s Experience of Modernity, 1875–1945 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003) Bakhtin, M. M., The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992) Banta, Martha, Imaging American Women: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987) ‘Men, Women, and the American Way’, in Jonathan Freedman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Henry James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) Barthes, Roland, ‘Myth Today’ (1957) in Susan Sontag (ed. and intro.), A Barthes Reader (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1982)

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Index

actresses 62--75, 76--7, 144, 209, 210--11 ambivalent realism 1, 4, 8--11, 12, 15, 19--20, 22--4, 30, 32, 33, 35, 36--7, 51, 52, 62, 63, 64, 66, 75, 82, 83, 87, 91, 92, 97--8, 113, 117, 135, 137, 138, 165, 170, 188, 196--7 Anderson, Linda 205 Archer, William 79, 82, 90, 210 Ardis, Ann 10, 199, 201, 202 autobiography 20, 31, 143, 144, 157, 165, 205 Bakhtin, Mikhail 1, 11, 190, 198, 202, 222 Baldwin, William Wilberforce 113, 132, 133 Banta, Martha 199 Barthes, Roland 13--14, 17, 118, 123, 202, 215 Bell, Michael Davitt 9, 200 Bell, Millicent 201, 216 Bemelmans, Ludwig 219 Benstock, Shari 184, 217, 218, 221, 222 Bentley, Nancy 201 Bernhardt, Sarah 85--7, 89 biography 19, 23, 81, 143, 184, 186--9, 222 Blair, Sara 69--70, 71, 209 Booth, Michael R. 212 Boott, Francis 193 Boudreau, Kristin 203--4, 206 Bradley, John R. 5 Brehm, Victoria 214 Broughton, T. L. 31 Brownell, W. C. 161, 219 Brownstein, Rachel M. 79, 81, 210, 212 Butler, Samuel 67, 208, 211 Cannon, Kelly 200 Cixous, He´le`ne 52, 207 Cle´ment, Catherine 52, 206, 207 Codman, Jr., Ogden 142 confidantes 126--32 Corbett, Mary Jean 210

Davis, Tracy C. 210, 211 Dean, Sharon L. 125, 126, 201, 214 DiBattista, Maria 201 Dimock, Wai Chee 181, 186, 220, 221 Douglas, Ann 50, 207 Draper, Muriel 52--3, 207 Edel, Leon 78, 82, 98, 124--5, 210, 214, 215, 218, 219, 221 Eliot, George 115, 142 Erlich, Gloria C. 219, 220 Ermath, Elizabeth Deeds 202 Felski, Rita 3, 199 feminism 2, 4, 65, 77, 96, 199--200, 204--5 Fetterley, Judith 199 fin de sie`cle, the 2, 3, 4, 204 Finney, Gail 204 Freedman, Jonathan 7, 199, 200, 216--17 Freud, Sigmund 186 Frost, Robert 55, 207 ‘Acquainted with the Night’ 55, 207 Fryer, Judith 182, 220 Fullerton, William Morton 4, 163--4, 208, 219 Furst, Lilian R. 202 Gardner, Isabella Stewart 63, 210 gender 1--4, 6, 7, 8, 145--50, 195--7 Gilbert, Sandra M. 207 Gilder, Helena 61 Gissing, George 2 Goodman, Susan 202 Gordon, Lyndall 9, 26, 125--6, 138, 203, 214, 215, 216, 222 Guardianship of Infants Act, 1886 2 Habegger, Alfred 6--7, 199, 200 Hadley, Tessa 1, 200 Haralson, Eric 6, 10, 70, 73, 199, 201 Hay, John 111, 132, 133

236

Index Herndl, Diane Price 3, 43, 199, 206 Hogan, Rebecca 31 Howells, W. D. 20, 96, 200, 214 hysteria 1, 25--6, 30--2, 37--45, 42--3, 52, 57, 62, 204--5, 206 Ibsen, Henrik 77, 90--1, 210, 213 Hedda Gabler 91, 213 John Gabriel Borkman 92 The Master Builder 78 The Wild Duck 90--1 ideology 14--15, 18, 19, 22, 31, 118, 130--1, 197 interior design 141, 143--56, 164--8, 185--6 James, Alice 4, 8, 10, 11, 20, 21, 25--207, 190--, 208 childhood 25--30, 32--3, 203 death 4, 25--6, 32, 108, 190--4 diary 1, 21, 25--39, 43--5, 58--9, 135, 187, 190, 203 illness and hysteria 1, 25--6, 30--2, 37--45, 47, 48, 52, 57--8, 58--9, 61, 190, 203--4, 205, 206 marriage and spinsterhood 4, 5, 28--30 relationships with family members 5, 21, 26--30, 28--30, 60--1, 205 James (neé Gibbens), Alice Howe 5, 28, 60 James, Garth Wilkinson (‘Wilky’) 26--7, 28, 32, 61, 203 James, Henry death 5 heterosexuality 5, 6, 7, 97--8, 134, 200 homosexuality 5--6, 7, 47, 124, 200 imaginative kinship with women 5, 24, 39--75, 62--75, 83, 92--5, 154--6 privacy and publicity 63--75, 82, 143, 188--9 relationships with: Alice 1, 23, 30--7, 43, 47--8, 60--1, 205 Aunt Kate 60--1, 64, 207 Minnie Temple 9, 214 Edith Wharton 1, 23, 141--3, 152--64, 175--7, 186--7, 187--8, 216 Constance Fenimore Woolson 1, 23, 96--8, 107, 119, 123--6, 132--40, 196, 199, 203, 223 theatre 62, 76--95, 212--13 The Ambassadors 83, 84, 85, 119, 127, 162 Little Bilham 162 Maria Gostrey 119, 127--8, 193 Chad Newsome 128 Mamie Pocock 162 Lewis Lambert Strether 83, 84, 119, 127, 130, 134, 162

237 Marie de Vionnet 83, 84, 127, 128 The American 127, 187, 215 Claire de Cintre´ 127, 128 Christopher Newman 127, 134 Mr Tristram 127 Mrs Tristram 127, 128 The Aspern Papers 125, 187 ‘The Author of Beltraffio’ 198 The Awkward Age 17--19, 80, 91--2, 93, 94--, 113, 120, 207 Aggie 17--19, 93, 94--5 Mrs Brookenham 80, 93, 94--5, 207 Nanda Brookenham 36, 80, 92--4, 120, 207 Tishy Grendon 94--5 Mr Longdon 17, 19, 94--5 Mitchy 19, 92, 93, 94 Petherton 93, 94 Vanderbank 17, 95, 120 ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ 129--31, 175, 216 May Bartram 129--31 John Marcher 129--31 The Bostonians 7, 62, 64--5, 206, 210, 222 Olive Chancellor 64--5, 79 Matthias Pardon 222 Basil Ransom 7, 65, 70, 79, 81 Verena Tarrant 7, 64--5, 70, 79, 81 ‘The Come´die Française in London’ 86 Daisy Miller 62, 208 The Europeans 49--50, 53, 57 Eugenia 49, 57 Gertrude Wentworth 53 Felix Young 57 The Golden Bowl 48, 53, 56--9, 84, 85, 116, 199 Adam 7, 49, 59 Amerigo 48--50, 53, 84 Fanny Assingham 116 Charlotte 7, 48, 53, 55, 57--8, 59, 68, 84, 199 Maggie 7, 49, 57--8, 59 Guy Domville 62, 89, 90, 92, 213 ‘In the Cage’ 199 The Ivory Tower 142 ‘The Jolly Corner’ 129, 175, 188, 215 Brydon 129, 131 Alice Staverton 129 ‘My Friend Bingham’ 35 Partial Portraits 107, 137, 214, 215, 216, 222 ‘Miss Woolson’ 137, 214, 215, 222 The Portrait of a Lady 7, 11, 39--42, 48, 50--, 54, 67, 83, 113--16, 151

238

Index

James, Henry (cont.) Isabel Archer 7, 34, 39--43, 46, 50, 51, 54--, 59, 67, 68, 83, 86, 113--16, 118, 120 Mrs Archer 34 Countess Gemini 50, 115 Caspar Goodwood 7, 40--2, 43 Madame Merle 12, 48, 50--2, 54--8, 114--, 151 Gilbert Osmond 7, 41--2, 51, 114--15, 119 Pansy Osmond 34, 41, 54, 83, 114--15, 118--19 Edward Rosier 51, 114 Mr Touchett 55 Ralph Touchett 39--40, 115 Lord Warburton 40, 54, 114 The Princess Casamassima 62, 64, 65--6, 121, 128--9, 147 Lady Aurora 148 Paul Muniment 65--6, 129, 149 Rose Muniment 148 The Princess 65--6, 121, 128--9, 148--9, 153 Miss Pynsent 62, 128 Hyacinth Robinson 65--6, 68, 121, 128--, 131, 147--50 ‘The Pupil’ 198 The Reverberator 221 George Flack 221 Roderick Hudson, 176, 220 The Sacred Fount 83, 84--5, 161, 175 Brissenden 83--4 May Server 83, 84--5 The Sense of the Past 126, 141--222 Aurora Coyne 129, 131 Ralph Pendrel 126, 129, 131, 214 The Spoils of Poynton 34, 42--3, 107, 142--3, 150, 151--2 Mrs Gereth 143, 151 Maggie 151, 152 Fleda Vetch 42--3, 68, 107, 143, 150--2, 153 Mrs Vetch 34 The Tragic Muse 62, 64, 66--75, 79, 80, 208, 209, 210, 211 Madame Carre´ 74, 209 Mr Carteret 66--9 Urania Carteret 69 Julia Dallow 67, 69, 212 Lady Agnes Dormer 67 Biddy Dormer 73 Sir Nicholas Dormer 67 Nick Dormer 66--9, 71, 73, 212 Harsh 69

Gabriel Nash 73--4, 212 Miriam Rooth 67, 69--75, 80, 81, 82, 85, 86--7, 89, 95, 209--10, 211, 212 Mrs Rooth 67, 74, 209 Peter Sherringham 70--4, 77, 80, 81, 86, 209 Mademoiselle Voisin 72 The Turn of the Screw 34, 175, 199 Flora 35 The Governess 34, 199 Miles 35 ‘The Velvet Glove’ 159--61, 218 Berridge 159--61, 218 Amy Evans 159--61, 218 Washington Square 83 Catherine Sloper 5, 83, 86 What Maisie Knew 36, 80, 91, 92--5, 214 Susan Ash 94, 213 Maisie 36, 92--5 Moddle 213 Wings of the Dove, The 49--50, 55, 56, 57, 150--, 156, 187 Marian Condrip 151, 155, 156, 218 Kate Croy 49--50, 55, 57, 68, 150--1, 153--, 155, 156, 207, 218 Mrs Croy 34 Merton Densher 9 Milly Theale 49, 55, 57, 68 James, Sr, Henry 26--8, 28--30, 32, 33, 35, 38--3, 60--3, 75, 83, 86, 87, 205, 208 James, Mary 26--8, 33, 60--3, 75, 83, 86, 87, 208 James, Robertson (‘Bob’) 26--7, 28, 32, 61, 203, 205 James, William 5, 26--8, 204, 206, 208 Jones, Ernest 138, 216 Jones, Mrs Minnie Cadwallader 144, 145, 216, 217, Joyce, James 17--19 Ulysses 15 Kahane, Claire 206 Kaplan, Amy 202, 219, 220 Kemble, Fanny 61, 76--7, 81--2 Kent, Christopher 211 Kent, Susan Kingsley 198 Kimmel, Michael S. 198 Kristeva, Julia 75, 131, 152--3, 210, 216, 218 Lacan, Jacques 129 lesbianism 79, 109, 200 Lewis, Leslie W. 199, 201, 202 Lidoff, Joan 220--1

Index Litvak, Joseph 69--70, 209--10, 213 Loring, Katharine 5, 21, 25, 27, 47, 60, 186, 190--4, 196, 203, 206, 222 love letters 96, 123--6 Lubbock, Percy 166, 167, 219 Lubin, David 46--7, 206 male homosexuality 5--6, 7, 47, 124, 200 Marbury, Elisabeth 144--5, 146, 210 My Crystal Ball 144 marginality 8, 9, 11, 31, 33, 132, 133, 135, 136, 196, 200--1, 205 Married Women’s Property Act, 1882 2 Marshall, Gail 81--2, 210, 211 Merish, Lori 184, 221 Miller, Jane Eldridge 201 Millett, Kate 3, 199 modernism 10, 13 Morse, Fanny 203 Nadal, E. S. 46 Navarro, Mary Anderson de 213 ‘New Woman’, the 2, 3, 70 Norton, Sara 161, 195, 219, 222 Novick, Sheldon M. 5 Olson, Stanley 206 orphans 62--75, 82, 89, 95 Ouida (Maria Louise Rame´) 20 Peabody, Octavia 79 pets 185, 215, 221 Phillips, Adam 175, 215, 222 Poe, Edgar Allen 162, 219 ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ 162, 219 ‘portrait heroine’, the 47--59, 63, 86, 134 Preston, Claire 171 Pre´vost, Abbe´ 144 Manon Lescaut 144 Pykett, Lynn 201 Racine 142 Rawlings, Peter 60, 207 ‘reality effect’, the 13--19, 118, 215 Reform Bill Amendment, 1884 2 Robins, Elizabeth 77--9, 81--2, 210, 215 Robinson, Michael 209, 210, 211 Rowe, John Carlos 35, 69--70, 70--1, 73, 199, 205, 209 Salmon, Richard 22, 76, 210, 212, 213, 222 Salvini, Tommaso 88, 212 Sand, George 187

239

Sargent, John Singer 45--8, 51, 52--3, 206, 207 Madame X 45--8, 51, 52--3, 55, 57 Saussure, Ferdinand de 12--13, 202 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 5 Sennett, Richard 76 Seymour, Miranda 201 Showalter, Elaine 2, 3, 180, 198, 199, 204, 220, 221 Singley, Carol J. 180, 219, 220 Smith, Jane S. 217 Smith, Sidonie 205 Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll 198 Stedman, Edmund Clarence 1, 132, 133, 198 Stevens, Harry 217 Stevens, Hugh 200 Stevens, Mrs Paran 217 Stevens, Wallace 74 ‘The Snow Man’ 74 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 15--18, 203 Uncle Tom’s Cabin 15--18, 203 Strouse, Jean 203, 222 structuralism 12 teacups 96, 113--21 Tintner, Adeline R. 201, 218 Torsney, Cheryl B. 125, 126, 201, 214 Trollope, Anthony 13--15, 202 Can You Forgive Her? 13--15, 202 Vicinus, Martha 2, 198, 199 Wagner-Martin, Linda 184, 221 Ward, Mrs Humphry 79, 210 Miss Bretherton 79--80, 210 Miss Bretherton 79--80, 81, 82, 211 Webster, John 207 The White Devil 207 Weimer, Joan Myers 214 Wharton, Edith 4, 8, 9--10, 11, 20, 133, 141--197, 194--7 childhood 164--5 gender 195--7 hospitality 22, 166--8, 185--6 marriage 4--5, 186 privacy and publicity 143, 167, 184--9 psychosomatic illness 20, 142, 194--6, 222 A Backward Glance 152--64, 157--65, 167, 185, 188 ‘The Bolted Door’ 218 Bunner Sisters 153--4, 218 Ann Eliza 154, 158 Evelina 154

240

Index

Wharton, Edith (cont.) ‘A Cup of Cold Water’ 218 The Decoration of Houses 142, 145, 146, 149, 153, 154, 217, 218 French Ways and Their Meaning 218 The Fruit of the Tree 159 The Greater Inclination 195 The House of Mirth 147, 168--84, 219, 220, 221 Lily Bart 147, 168--74, 176--84, 219, 220, 221 Bertha Dorset 170--1 Gerty Farish 170, 177--83, 221 Carry Fisher 178--9 Mattie Gormer 179 Percy Gryce 173 Mrs Peniston 169 Simon Rosedale 168, 171, 178--9, 220 Selden 168--74, 176, 220, 221 Nettie Struthers 179--81, 220, 221 Gus Trenor 176 Judy Trenor 169 Life and I 167 Manon 144 ‘Mrs Manstey’s View’ 153 Mrs Manstey 153, 154--5 White, Stanford 145 Wolfe, Elsie de 144--7, 151, 155--6, 165, 175, 176, 185--6, 217--18, 219, 221 After All 165, 217, 218 The House in Good Taste 144, 149, 153, 217 ‘Woman Question’, the 1, 4 Woolson, Constance Fenimore 1, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 20, 22, 96--216, 190--7 Clara Woolson Benedict 5, 110--12, 214--15 Clare Benedict 118 death 124, 138--40, 186, 194, 222 friendships with men 132--40 friendships with women 217 gender 97--8, 102, 109--10, 133, 134, 135, 195--7 marriage and spinsterhood 4, 97, 126, 133--8 privacy and publicity 20--1 relationships with family members 5, 98 social conservatism 97, 126, 196 travel 98, 111--12, 135, 138, 214 Anne 104, 214, 215 Anne 107 Miss Lois 104

Tita 107 ‘Castle Nowhere’ 99--100 Castle Nowhere: Lake-Country Sketches 98--102 ‘Dorothy’ 108, 119, 190, 191--4, 222 Dorothy 191--4, 196 Felicia 119, 191--3, 196 Alan Mackenzie 119, 191--3 Nora 119, 192 Mr North 193 Mrs North 191--2 Rose 192 Mrs Tracy 191--2 East Angels 103, 104, 106--7, 214 Margaret Harold 106--7 Garda Thorne 106--7 Evert Winthrop 106--7 ‘Felipa’ 108--9 Catherine 108--9 Christine 108--9 Edward 108--9 Felipa 108--9 Horace Chase 121 Jared Franklin 120--1 Mrs Franklin 120 Genevieve 120--1 ‘In the Cotton Country’ 103, 104 ‘In Venice’ 108 Claudia 108 Mr Lenox 108 Mrs Lenox 108 Jupiter Lights 122, 215 Anne 122 Eve 122 Helen 122 ‘The Lady of Little Fishing’ 98--100 Jarvis Waring 99--100 ‘Misery Landing’ 98 John Jay 99--100 ‘Miss Elisabetha’ 104, 107 ‘Rodman the Keeper’ 103--4, 120 Rodman 103, 120 Bettina Ward 103 Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches 102--9 ‘The South Devil’ 105--6 Carl 105--6 Mark 105--6 ‘St. Clair Flats’ 98, 100--2 Raymond 101 Roxana 100--2 Samuel 101 Yeazell, Ruth Bernard 203

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Henry James and Queer Modernity

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A Companion to Henry James

Henry James and the Language of Experience

Henry James and the Philosophical Novel

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The Rhetorical Logic of Henry James

Henry James, This One's for You

The Martian Invasion Journals of Henry James

Henry James, This One's for You

Henry James, This One's for You

A Henry James Chronology (Author Chronologies)

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