American Literature’s Aesthetic Dimensions

The troubled, even catastrophic, history of Constance Fenimore Woolson’s and Henry James’s literary and personal friendship has led a notable critical afterlife, epitomizing male homosexual panic in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s account and emblematizing James’s egregious professional misogyny in numerous feminist accounts. Despite the odds, I want to propose that another history lies between James and Woolson in the less charted terrain of their fiction, and in so doing I wish to suggest the ways that the aesthetic domain opens onto and sometimes extends the terrain for social relations. While Woolson’s first and best-known artist story, “Miss Grief,” has become the touchstone for assessing her bitter sense of gendered exclusion from the literary field and the attentions of its strikingly James-like guardians, “Miss Grief” also inaugurates a dialogue with James that he reciprocates in his own portraits of artists, especially in his 1896 tale, “The Figure in the Carpet,” a title he adapts from “Miss Grief.” “The Figure in the Carpet” and “Miss Grief” are about literary relations, and they forge a literary relation. That is, in both theme and form the stories mediate and recast registers of literary relation—between authors, between readers and the text, and between the social and aesthetic domains. Furthermore, “The Figure in the Carpet” gives us both an alternative record of James’s recognition of Woolson and the opportunity to come to Woolson’s curious story on new terms, terms that James helps us to recognize.

Recognition is a term that resonates, within and between these stories, with sexual, social, and formal implications. Both tales feature the quest of an unnamed first-person narrator, a bachelor writer, who seeks to unlock a text of genius—Miss Grief’s in Woolson and the great novelist Vereker’s in James. But various ambitious strategies or narrow formalist presumptions on the part of the narrators are the object of derisive irony and propel the frequently overlooked comedy of the stories. Within the farce, however, lies a less lofty but more urgent desire that reading and interpretation be forms of generative mutual relation.

Woolson’s historical legacy for much of the twentieth century has been to be remembered as the woman writer who pined for validation from Henry James, despite the acknowledged centrality of the friendship to both authors’ lives. More recently, she figures importantly in Sedgwick’s seminal essay “The Beast in the Closet” as the figure behind James’s May Bartram who waited patiently for some acknowledgment of love or erotic intimacy from James but may have fathomed more than he about her victimization by homosexual panic.¹ Sedgwick corrects Leon Edel’s profile of Woolson as merely a love-sick minor author for whom James couldn’t have harbored serious regard, and burgeoning studies of Woolson reveal that she was as much of a critical success as James when she introduced herself to him in 1880, at the start of the “middle years” of his career.² Whatever feelings James may have harbored for or withheld from Woolson may never be known, as he burned his entire correspondence with her after her 1894 suicide. Certainly, the four letters from Woolson that escaped that fate reveal her frustration with James as an interlocutor, one who often failed to engage her critical responses to his writing (there is “no allusion to anything I have said,” she exclaims after sending a detailed response to The Portrait of a Lady).³ And though James included her as the only American author besides Emerson in his Partial Portraits (1888) of authors, the compliment was mixed, for he used the occasion to minoritize her writing as “feminine,” “essentially conservative,” and “private.”⁴ When he proposes that Woolson’s writing speaks only for, to, or about women, James risks not recognizing the affinities I argue he does ultimately acknowledge, affinities formed across and through shifting, not static, differentials of gender and sexuality.⁵

“Miss Grief,” which has by now been widely anthologized, often sets the tone for studies of Woolson’s relation to James.⁶ The story diverges from Woolson’s customary regionalist mode to offer instead an artist study set in Rome, where, in the same year, Woolson introduced herself to James. “Miss Grief” involves an odd, unpublished middle-aged woman seeking the critical opinion of a bachelor who is the darling of the literary establishment. While the story is often taken as a representation of Woolson’s initial encounters with James, careful critics have warned that it was almost certainly written and submitted to Harper’s before the authors’ first meeting. As Anne E. Boyd rephrases the relation of story to event, “In ‘Miss Grief’ Woolson essentially sends Miss Crief [the character’s actual pen name], a partial representative of herself, ahead to encounter the derision she anticipated she herself might also face for being forward and unconventional.”⁷

The literary politics of recognition have had currency for our own recent recovery of women authors and the kind of critical attention we give them, and it has not gone unnoticed that such politics are the very theme of “Miss Grief.” Briefly, the bachelor writer, an American, narrates the story of how the woman, also an American, repeatedly calls on him at his apartments in Rome to introduce herself. The narrator mishears the butler’s pronunciation of her name, Miss Crief, as Miss Grief. Eventually he is home and out of boredom admits the woman. She has read every word of his writing and has chosen him to read and evaluate her own creative work. When she recites his best work in a way that illuminates the core of his meaning, he is compelled to agree to her request. He finds to his surprise that he is passionately enthusiastic about the “genius” of “Armor,” a drama; at the same time, it seems riddled with error that he hopes to correct. One of the amusing surprises of the story comes as Miss Crief, whom he continues to call Miss Grief and who has seemed an utterly unresisting soul, flatly refuses to change her writing in any way. In vain, he tries to correct the work himself, but it is “like taking out one especial figure in a carpet”: the work loses the elusive texture of her genius and becomes his.⁸ He half-heartedly seeks a publisher for her work in its original form, but the publishers confirm his sense that the work is “unavailable for publication” (118). At the conclusion he learns that Miss Crief is dying, from actual starvation and a malaise that seems related to his long silence about the possible publication of her work. By the wasting woman’s bed, he tells her, falsely, that he has procured a publisher for her drama and she dies contented. He never shows “Armor” to another person, instead planning to go to the grave with it himself.

“Miss Grief” like “The Figure in the Carpet” is a riddle and a wry ruse that fingers the knitting of the aesthetic and social domains. James’ parodic treatment of textual approaches that reify and decontextualize the aesthetic, its form or content, highlight retroactively what may be an unexpected corresponding parody in Woolson. Feminist critics have offered important insight into the story, but, ultimately taking the story at face value as an earnest expression of female victimization by the literary market, they have failed to come to terms with Woolson’s figure in the carpet. Linda Grasso claims that Woolson (and her contemporary, Mary Freeman) “decry the waste of the sacrificed female self; they underscore the deadly effects man-made institutions and aesthetic standards have had on the writing woman’s sense of self and literary productivity.”⁹ These authors want the “revenge” gained by “telling the woman’s story,” she asserts.¹⁰ However, “Miss Grief” does not really tell the woman’s story; the bachelor writer does, and the reader must grapple with this filter. In an intriguing reading, Paul Crumbley suggests that Woolson connects “failed female health to the inadequate circulation of a print record that embodies the experiences of real women.”¹¹ As Crumbley himself points out, however, we do not know enough about Miss Grief’s texts (just as we know even less about James’s Vereker’s texts) to assess their content or manner: we don’t know and can’t assume that her print record, if published, would “embody the experiences of real women.” Woolson is up to something far more complicated than a complaint about the injuries or the self-division the literary field inflicts on women writers. Though, as this story is indeed eager to point out, “print conventions constrain literary representation,” it would be a mistake not to extend to Woolson’s story some recent poststructuralist insights, which understand, to borrow Judith Butler’s phrasing, that the scene of constraint is also the scene of improvisation.¹² Indeed, we might well ask, with the wondering narrator, what is the nature of Grief’s “little pantomime. Comedy? Or was it tragedy?” (105).

Boyd seems right about Miss Crief’s surrogacy as a character who will reconnoiter the territory James may have represented for Woolson and psychically test the waters or take the heat prior to Woolson’s own arrival on the scene, but a critical sense of the nature of this relation remains to be articulated. Miss Crief is not exactly a representative of Woolson’s self, but an impersonation of a type, the social persona that Woolson understands to be imposed on the woman artist. This is where the story gets, not earnest, but funny. Woolson, I believe, is camping up her woman artist. Her bachelor narrator fears the mysterious caller will be trying to sell him something: an intaglio because she knows his “fancy for oddities” (104) or, when he sees the flat box she carries, old lace. When she finally tells him it is a manuscript she wishes him to read, he exclaims to himself, “An authoress! This is worse than old lace” (107). It is a display of misogyny, to be sure, but we should not mistake Woolson’s comedic tone here. In short, Woolson’s intriguing story takes a form that seems a bit at odds with its apparent social thematics.

Indeed, there is something ludicrously hyperbolized about many of Woolson’s portraits of women artists. Ettie of “The Street of the Hyacinth,” for example, arrives in Rome as a young woman from the Midwest intent on becoming a visual artist; she has already subjected herself to the privation and sacrifice of which she learned by reading “the lives of all—almost all—artists”; she has removed to Rome and now is keen to take the next step in her self-fashioned artist’s life.¹³ So utterly literal and single-minded is she in her quest for artistic achievement that she fails to notice the subtleties of either social or artistic conventions. Her hair is severely styled in the last generation’s do; she takes no hints from the narrator about her outrageous demands on his time. She is the tactless American innocent abroad, made garish by her unbounded artistic, rather than social, ambition. Similarly, Miss Grief—for really it is “Miss Grief,” and not Miss Crief, we come to know through the narrator’s perspective—is utterly in earnest, so earnest that she is unable to assume any kind of persona or surface effect. Her dress is always the same, nondescript and black, sometimes abjectly damp. She attempted to practice cigar smoking, she tells the narrator blankly, but was unsuccessful (suppressed sniggering from the narrator). She is thus not clearly legible as a gender invert, as has been argued by some who attempt to locate an identifiably lesbian subtext.¹⁴ The shabbily clad foot that is exposed to the narrator’s vision when she falls asleep while he reads her manuscripts seems to indicate that her character partakes more of a feminine grotesque—a vulnerable, graphic, unaestheticized female body.

In the passage that seems the grain of James’s own interest in a “figure in the carpet,” the narrator describes the form Miss Grief’s aesthetic appreciation takes, which seems a significant component of the persona Woolson develops. Admiring her choice of scenes from his work, he “had always felt a wondering annoyance” that the public “had never noticed the higher purpose of this little shaft, aimed not at the balconies and lighted windows of society, but straight up toward the distant stars” (106). (James’s celebrated author, Vereker, will disclose the existence of his own “little point,” long unnoticed, to the eager critic-narrator.)¹⁵ But the “riddle” here will not concern the little shaft, as in James’s story, but the mystery of the form Miss Grief’s genius as a reader and a writer takes. When Miss Grief arrives at the key passage,

her very voice changed, and took, although always sweetly, the different tones required, while no point of meaning, however small, no breath of delicate emphasis which I had meant, but which the dull types could not give, escaped appreciative and full, almost overfull, recognition which startled me. For she had understood me—understood me almost better than I had understood myself. It seemed to me that while I had labored to interpret partially a psychological riddle, she, coming after, had comprehended its bearings better than I had, although confining herself strictly to my own words and emphasis.

(106)

The figure of Grief’s reading, rather than a figure of her text, is the focus.

While James’ story maintains an eroticized (and facetious) emphasis on the reader’s and critic’s reading as “penetration,” the term he repeats in his preface to the New York Edition, it would not be accurate to say that Miss Grief penetrates the narrator’s meaning here. Rather, she inhabits and embodies his text—breathing his very emphases, inhabiting his words and their luminescent sense. Moreover, she is not reading from the text; she has internalized and is reciting it. It is perhaps because she so thoroughly embodies the text that she cannot also intellectualize or find words outside of it to describe it. She also recites her own work, refusing to “read” it to the narrator, who wishes to use reading to gain the distance and distinction necessary for critique. “I worked hard,” the narrator exclaims: “the perspiration stood in beads upon my forehead as I struggled with her—what shall I call it—obstinacy? But it was not exactly obstinacy. She simply could not see the faults of her own work,” he says (113). Sure enough, when he allows her to recite the story, the strong passages are stronger and the “faults, which seemed nothing to her, were made by her earnestness to seem nothing to me, at least for that moment” (113). Again we see that Woolson’s women artists are inveterately “earnest”: they are utterly devoid of a critical sense of themselves or their art.

The earnestness of the artists should not be confused with Woolson’s own tone, which is as ironic as James’s; however, critics have taken the story straight and labored to assign some inherent or natural expression of gender or sexuality to the form of Grief’s genius. Grief’s transcendence of textuality, the way she conveys an intelligence in the tones of her voice or in the appearance of her handwriting, tempts critics to identify her portrayal as an articulation of feminine difference, as, for instance, “an unrecorded, nonhierarchical, and thus feminine language.”¹⁶ Others have sought to attribute her excesses to “a lesbian imagination.”¹⁷ And yet it seems to me that Woolson’s story does not buy the dichotomy—“the tensions,” as Elaine Showalter assesses the story, “between male and female literary culture” or between a feminine and masculine imagination—it seems to pose.¹⁸ Woolson is mocking, sometimes savagely, suppositions about the woman writer as naive, natural, and unselfconscious. If there is a personal retort to James, it may be to his assessment in the Nation in 1878 of a fellow regionalist, Julia Constance Fletcher, like Woolson known for her “scenery fiction” (as James calls it). Though he praised Fletcher’s writing, James also found it “irremediably feminine.”¹⁹ When the narrator finds Grief’s errors to be an essential quality of her work, the figure he cannot remove, Woolson sardonically takes irremediableness as the very essence of femininity. The mystification and excess of Grief’s genius are parodic, and, as in “The Figure in the Carpet,” mock certain textual approaches. Neither story accepts that an inherent textual essence is to be divined and isolated by critics within or outside of the stories. Woolson’s hyperbole in drawing the earnestness and “originality” of Miss Grief actually works to denaturalize those concepts because parody, as a form of copying, is the process of exposing the natural and the original as imitable and transferable, not inherent.

The story is thus not a self-expression of Woolson’s own professional experience, and it is not a plausible tableau of her anticipated encounter with James. Instead, the role Grief plays is one that allows Woolson to allegorize and expose the gendered relations of power she experiences. But “Miss Grief” suggests that the ways by which Woolson understood her gender are mediated by her professional role, her status as a woman author. Thus we cannot simply extrapolate from taxonomies of femininity in the sociohistorical field. In Woolson’s text the woman writer is not just a theme; she takes a form in dynamic relation to the content Woolson is working out, a form that troubles literary and social convention and opens up the whole parodic dimension of the text. We cannot understand Woolson’s treatment of gender and literature without also recognizing and attending to the comedic tone, the parodic treatment, and the narrative voice to understand how the content is being shaped and how we are to interact with it. Using the insights of theories of camp and drag, we might see that, through the figure of Miss Grief, Woolson explores a sense of the unreality and illegibility of a woman who writes, and it is through this figure, I argue, that she deterritorializes sexual and social norms.²⁰ She uses this figure to wedge open a site of nonheteronormative gender complexity.

To recognize Woolson’s parody is to open one’s self to its implications. Frank Kermode suggests that one step toward the greater analytic appreciation James seems to call for in “The Figure in the Carpet” is to understand that Vereker’s secret, “the thing for the critic to find,” is “not the subject, but the treatment,” and indeed attention to the interplay of form and content in Woolson’s story is essential to its interpretation.²¹ But both stories’ internal emphases on readers rather than texts help us to see that the figure in the carpet is not an autonomous formal entity and “a thing to find” but a function of reading, an interdependence of text and reader. Woolson in particular helps us to see the importance of reading as an encounter by her story’s focus on the dynamic of interaction between reader and writer, but such a dynamic is ultimately the basis for James’s figure in the carpet as well.

Woolson does give us an unexpectedly concrete suggestion about a more identifiable figure in the carpet, though commentators have overlooked it. Woolson has the narrator descend from his impressionistic evaluations of Miss Grief’s work to furnish us with a strikingly detailed account of the plot of her prose story: “but here was the trouble: through the whole narrative moved another character, a physician of tender heart and exquisite mercy, who practiced murder as a fine art, and was regarded (by the author) as a second Messiah! This was monstrous.” Will Miss Grief “cut him out”? “Certainly not,” she replies (116). After the story is rejected because the publisher also cannot stand the doctor, the narrator secretly tries to “improve” the story himself, but “that apparently gentle ‘doctor’ would not out: he was so closely interwoven with every part of the tale that to take him out was like taking out one especial figure in a carpet that is impossible unless you unravel the whole” (118–19).

As the story concludes, a strange overlap between the egregious doctor and the narrator emerges to complicate the identified figure in the carpet. The narrator acts the heroic doctor to Grief’s text: he “amended, altered, left out, put in, pieced, condensed, lengthened” (118). He labors to “‘improve’ Miss Grief”; he attempts to “cut” out the errors, but his surgery fails (119, 116). He avoids Grief until Aunt Martha more or less accuses him of murder as a fine art: “And as to who has racked and stabbed her, I say you, you—YOU literary men!” (119–20). He returns to Grief’s apartment to buy her wine and “tell her—a romance invented for the occasion,” and she dies contented that the drama will be published, according to his fabricated account (121). She has asked him to be her executor and to bury her other unpublished works with her. Like the doctor, then, he assists her death—both literally and literarily. And Woolson overlays the scene with suggestions that the wine-wielding narrator is a false messiah, as Miss Grief plays the worshipful, intellectual Mary to her aunt’s housekeeping, world-weary Martha. Woolson seems to raise the possibility that the figure in the carpet has to do with the narrator himself. Take him out and the fabric of Miss Grief’s text is lost.

On this view, it is not that the narrator “ruins Miss Crief’s chance of public recognition and literary success.”²² Something is built into the system of literary production that determines the dialectical position these two characters occupy. The story seems to posit familiar dichotomies (with gender wittily reversed) between genius and conventionality, poles embodied by the main characters. The distance Woolson creates between Miss Grief and convention is, again, not borne out of her earnest or essential sense of women’s greater genius but out of her perception of the position women occupy in the literary field. To be a genius is to be set apart, to escape definition, but Woolson exaggerates this distance and correlates it to a segregation of women writers that is both literary and social. Woolson overlaps Grief’s ingenious lack of conventionality with her gendered lack of entry into the inner circle of literary enterprise and access to “recognition.”

Certainly the bachelor is an essential figure in the text we read. It is in the dissonance between the debonair bachelor narrators and the unwitting gall of the woman artist that much of Woolson’s humor resides. Her women artists assume that they can enter the literary market and the lives of its guardians without fanfare, on the basis of the work in the case of Miss Grief, and simply by following the plan in the case of Ettie. They assume the right simply to “be” artists. Their guilelessness is made particularly vivid through the perspective of the polished narrators who themselves are startled out of convention and sometimes out of their patronizing attitudes by the encounter. We understand something the narrators do not about the hilarity of the women’s earnestness and what it exposes not just about the narrators’ contrasting insincerity but also about the mutual constitution of their roles.

One striking structural similarity James’s “The Figure in the Carpet” bears to “Miss Grief” is that the narrator never understands he too is already part of the figure in the carpet he seeks. Evoking one of Vereker’s analogues for the figure in the carpet, Jonathan Auerbach has argued, “Like a string of pearls linked together by an invisible thread,” the narrator, “together with his fellow detectives, make up the very configuration they would solve. The riddle involves social relations.”²³ The narrator reductively seeks a single key, an element of composition, without realizing, as Auerbach argues, that “James’ riddle is to be lived, not solved, its clues experienced, not communicated.”²⁴ Rather than suggesting that “experience” is something to be brought to the text, I would qualify Auerbach’s emphasis to suggest that, read together, the stories emphasize the “social relations” and the “experience” of a specific activity: reading. Both narrators misrecognize their role as readers. Woolson’s narrator wishes not so much to find the figure in the carpet as to “fix” and overcome it, but it is only a version of the same kind of criticism or reading that James’s narrator vainly strives to perform. James’s narrator seeks to penetrate the text and access the secret of its essence. But form is not autonomous, intrinsic, and organic, a thing apart waiting for James’s narrator to discover it, and it is not a container into which Woolson’s narrator might pour Miss Grief or her texts. Rather, to use an insight of feminist critic Ellen Rooney, to which I will return, form is both the enabling condition and the product of reading.²⁵ The text has a form, but it is only viable, it only takes shape, via a reader’s apprehension and involvement with it. The narrators, however, misrecognize their roles and cannot see themselves. They can see in the text neither their projections onto it nor their unwitting involvement in its reading. As in James, the farce in “Miss Grief” happens at the expense of the reader who cannot discriminate between the narrator’s approach to a text and a more viable one. Such near misses lead to much of the sexual comedy both stories proffer when the narrators fail to gauge the extent of their involvement.

Ultimately, the narrator takes Miss Grief’s earnestness earnestly and to his great exasperation. It is worth tracking backward to one of the story’s antecedents to understand the features of the narrator’s encounter with Grief, especially her blank obtuseness and failure to yield despite all of his ostensibly charitable perseverance, for the encounter can be productively compared to that in Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” As in “Bartleby” the bachelor narrator tells the story of the arrival and ultimately the betrayal of a mysterious being, vaguely Christ-like.²⁶ As with “Bartleby,” the reader is treated to a story about the advent of something new and puzzling in the mundane, conventional world of business-as-usual. The narrator, meanwhile, must figure out how to relate to the unfamiliar and nonnormative. In “Bartleby” the narrator functions as a kind of straight man who keeps coming back, asking the irrational Bartleby to be rational. This is the case with “Miss Grief” as well; the narrator keeps returning to the utterly earnest writer, asking her to be, in effect, self-critical, canny, and conventional—to pitch and alter her writing for the literary market. The comedy turns on the narrators’ misrecognition of a process of encounter that calls preconceived “norms” into question.

We might say that the “straight man” cannot see what is happening, but the queerness of the figure brings him out, as it were, to keep repeating the encounter. This dynamic is observable in “The Figure in the Carpet” as well: Eric Savoy has argued much the same of a “circuit of refusal and renewed perseveration” undergone by James’s narrator in his pursuit of the enigmatic textual figure and explicitly places the “embarrassments” of these encounters under the sign of homosexual panic and the closet.²⁷ As my discussion already suggests, in both “Miss Grief” and “The Figure in the Carpet” a system of sometimes oblique double entendre charges the terms of intimacy and personal relation in ways that task and complexify these as metaphors for reading and interpretation.

As many commentators on James have observed, marriage provides a kind of veiled allegory for the critical act of reading or interpretation. But when the narrator thinks he can get at the secret he seeks by marrying Gwendolyn, his strategy highlights what Frank Kermode humorously identifies as a mistaken kind of penetration the narrator presumes to bring to the text. On the other hand, Gwendolyn’s and rival critic Corvick’s apparent possession of the secret is made to seem enigmatically related to the event of their engagement and marriage. Gwendolyn asserts that the secret is not something to be told, it is her “life,” and Kermode finds a more viable basis for critical perspective here—it is “a quality pervading the life of the subject, like marriage.”²⁸

It cannot be said, however, that the bachelor narrator’s own “engagement” with the figure in the carpet is devoid of “life” or human dimension, for it takes shape in his encounters with the author Vereker. These encounters, registered in “unnarrated dialogue, dramatic moments when significance is construed jointly,” can be read in terms of “James’ concept of union.”²⁹ In what Auerbach dubs the “groping process of give-and-take,” the exchange of “metaphors for the artist’s life and passion” (the “little point” [364], “a complex figure in a Persian carpet” [374], “the very string … that my pearls are strung on” [374]), the secret that precipitates the quest “assumes life” in the dialogue between Vereker and the narrator.³⁰ As Savoy points out in the only essay to explicitly address the homoerotic basis of the narrator’s “engagement” with Vereker, these metaphors verge on the campy as they dance around the homoerotic relation the narrator cannot acknowledge. It is not that the narrator overlooks the figure in the carpet, it is that he has failed to recognize his constitutive involvement with it, which may be a function not only of his critical blindness but of the social regime that stigmatizes such recognition.

James’ story allows us to discern Woolson’s own network of pun and innuendo, which curiously interweaves sexual with literary interaction. Woolson’s story has been included in Susan Koppelman’s excellent collection of “lesbian stories,” but I would argue that the basis for a queer reading lies in Woolson’s queering of categories rather than in a categorizable “lesbian” subtext. Woolson works to queer the typical intercourse between woman writer and male critic and gatekeeper. In fact it is the confusion between literary and sexual relations in the treatment of women authors that Woolson seems particularly interested in critiquing. In her own string of puns, running through the text, Woolson probes the confusion the author-as-woman creates in the codes and mores of the literary profession, a confusion that ultimately exposes and troubles its normative heterosexism. The narrator, for example, does not know whether to woo her, filiate himself to her, or critique her; he is perpetually confused in his address to her. Woolson plays on the literary standards the narrator represents to show how Miss Grief’s purported lack of “convention” is both a literary characteristic and a social effect her presence generates.

When he first meets Grief again after reading her work, the narrator considers that he “ought to go do down on [his] knees before her and entreat her to take her proper place of supremacy” as a towering genius (111). But he recoils as he suddenly associates such an act of deference to a woman with a marriage proposal (“one does not go down on one’s knees, combustively, as it were, before a woman over fifty” [111]), and here her sexual maturity makes her no more an appropriate object of such attention than her femininity makes her a proper object of professional deference. Woolson thus plays on contexts of “reception” for Miss Grief, revealing indeed how social relations, rather than literary qualities, determine them. To some extent, Grief’s presence unmans the narrator: “I did not quite know what to do, but, putting myself in her place, I decided to praise the drama; and praise it I did. I do not know when I have used so many adjectives,” he reflects (111). “Putting [him]self in her place” unleashes what he calls a “verbal Niagara” that would seem more associated with feminine fluidity and talk (111). He claims to assert himself here as “an anti-hysteric” (111) against her tears, but his own floods seem more to reveal his inability to relocate himself in a social identity that was so smugly secure prior to Grief’s presence in his bachelor-parlor. The fluidity of a space that is both dining room and library, in which the bachelor enjoys an ease of movement between domestic and professional occupation, is queered by Grief, who has already, so the narrator avers, “sacrificed her womanly claims by her persistent attacks upon my door” (104). Miss Grief’s presence, the woman in the bachelor’s digs, uncomfortably exposes the sexual indeterminacies in the bachelor’s status and the performativity of his own masculine and heterosexual presumptions.

The narrator’s confused overtures continue to determine the character of his intercourse with Grief, and, as James also must have appreciated, Woolson significantly overlaps sexual and readerly relations. The “romance” (as he calls his tale about the publication of her drama), wine, and flowers he shares with her at her sickbed suggest that he continues to confuse the nature of his obligation to her. (One wonders, in a story where near misses provide salient confusions [Crief/Grief, Aaronna/Erroneous] whether the title of her drama, “Armor,” might also provide a little fun when, upon perusing the title page, the narrator muses, “Grief certainly needs armor” (109). Is the near-homonym amour hovering, to feed the chain of suggestions about the narrator’s attitude toward her?) But Grief, as the narrator repeats, remains “unavailable”: by emphasizing both this term and the term unaccepted and attaching them to Grief’s person rather than her texts in the closing epithet, “my poor, dead, ‘unavailable,’ unaccepted ‘Miss Grief,’” the narrator unwittingly elaborates the conceit (123). The narrator’s misrecognition of his relation to Grief, his continued adherence to the chivalric rituals of courtship in an overrecognition of her sex and an underrecognition of her vocation, is foiled by her intractable lack of fit into his codes and mores—her irremediableness. When he admits that he cannot “‘improve’ Miss Grief” (119), it completes this chain of double entendre: the nature of their literary intercourse, despite the narrator’s heterosexist presuppositions, has indeed been queered by its failure to be fruitful and multiply Miss Grief’s texts through publication. Nor has their relation succeeded in attaching her to a social or literary convention.

And yet perhaps the strange bond they achieve, farcical as it is, embodies some kind of qualified redemption—or rather the mutual recognition so elusive in the world the text delineates. To return briefly to the analogy with “Bartleby,” some kind of bond is already in place, it is what the narrator saw but didn’t see in the figure in the carpet. Aunt Martha suggests that “literary men” like the narrator are “vampires”—that they “take [Grief’s] ideas and fatten on them,” but the obverse relation obtains when he fills her with the publishing “romance” he invents and the wine of his praise (120). She claims to finally know what it is “to be fully happy. … Yes, I am happy” (121). She says to him, “You had success—but I had the greater power. Tell me: did I not have it?” “Yes, Aaronna,” he responds, and she states with contentment, “It is all in the past now. But I am satisfied” (122). The narrator recognizes her work or shares his own, the romance invented for the occasion, and the gesture sustains and satisfies her. She is “full” and “satisfied,” not drained. It is perhaps a return on “the appreciative and full, almost overfull, recognition” of his work she had given him in their first meeting (106). Recognition, attention, notice: these terms subtly lace their encounters and trigger moments of communion and reciprocity. Grief may even be aware of or unconcerned with the falsity of his final “romance,” for she herself inaugurates it: “Tell me,” she prompts for the first of three times in the final scene, “I know you have good news [of the drama]” (120). The “romance” is not coauthored exactly, but mutually generated here, shaped by the needs of the listener who inaugurates its telling. A figure for reading that is echoed in James’s account of the exchange of metaphors between novelist and critic, the “romance” does not clearly distinguish what is the author’s and what is the reader’s share, and their mutual involvement generates new versions of intimacy. And this “romance” occurs outside the heteronormative frame in which the narrator continues to cast their relation. Comically, they fill and suffuse each other—the narrator with the wine of his praise or his romance and Miss Grief with the suffusing intelligence of her recitation—in a relation that seems nonnormative because physiologically interchangeable and mutual.

What James’s story responds to and allows us to fathom in Woolson’s is the irony of a confusion of the sexual and the textual that is both risible and generative. Both stories call for literary reading and interpretation to be more capacious and dynamic, but maintain that such engagement has a significant social dimension, making sexual and textual desires ineluctably entwined. While the narrators’ confusion between the two types of intercourse remains both ludicrous and tragic, within the textual frisson taking place in the narrators’ blind spots, the discursive confusions exfoliate more capacious forms of social and sexual intercourse and more capacious forms of reading. Our full recognition of one is connected to the other, just as the narrators’ misrecognition of the terms of both their sexual and literary engagement are also linked.

A connection unrecognized, disavowed, or undernourished has been the refrain of studies of James and Woolson. Either James fails to recognize, at least until after her death, that his homosexual panic stunts their intimacy and diminishes both lives, in Sedgwick’s reading, or James fails to acknowledge Woolson’s literary achievement or even entertain her critical responses in his writing about and to her. My aim is not to refute either of these perspectives. Woolson’s story, and James’s too, has already delineated for us the deeply vexed terrain of gender, sexuality, and literary endeavor on which their relationship would have proceeded. But I wish to suggest that through “The Figure in the Carpet,” James does allude to something Woolson has said after all. In doing so, he acknowledges Woolson’s work—her literary value, her formal performance, and the social terrain her story traverses and alters. He recognizes, and allows us to recognize, her parody and her poses and the demands they make on the reader; indeed, he allows us to see how her treatment of the subject, the form her story takes, makes a challenging appeal to the reader that is in fact the point. James’s recognition of Woolson is neither closeted nor panicked. Nor does he play the master; instead, in “The Figure in the Carpet,” he has allowed Woolson’s story to recognize him, and his response meets her on the terrain of the gender and sexual complexities she has opened up.

If, through gender parody like Woolson’s, we “grasp one of the mechanisms by which reality is reproduced and altered in the course of that reproduction,” James allows us to see how “reading” is a form of recognizing that performance, where recognition brings one into relation with the possibilities that unfold.³¹ By recognition, I mean something more provisional and less totalizing than identification with or of another, or the imposition of normative categorical legibility, though these are risks. Judith Butler’s Undoing Gender asserts that the act of recognition is a way of doing justice, a gesture of inclusion that extends “reality” and the norm. It is a form of acknowledgment and openness to the other that enables a “life,” a life open to gender complexity and unprescribed intimacies. For James and Woolson, the aesthetic medium allows for a play of recognition, recognition of sexualities and between gendered positions that were undoubtedly more intractable in person.

Given the dreary chronicles of his reception of women writers, it is perhaps embarrassing to lean on James for his insights, and it is always a possibility that James didn’t see the figure in the carpet, the form of his engagement with Woolson, in his own “The Figure in the Carpet.” We do well, then, to consider the parables of reading these stories offer and ask how we might better prepare ourselves to recognize the kind of challenges Woolson’s story represents to our own ways of reading and mechanisms for literary inclusion and political critique. In a recent essay that calls on political criticism to examine its reliance on social themes or theoretical motifs and to reinvest in form, Ellen Rooney describes her interest in form in a way that resonates with “the figure in the carpet” in the stories by James and Woolson. Rooney insists that form is not the thing that is the purported delight of conservative defenders of literary value and the canon who exclude attention to social content or historical context. Form is, for Rooney, as I believe the figure in the carpet is for James and Woolson, a figure not for an isolatable textual feature but for reading itself; it is both the enabling condition and the product of reading. In the “most fundamental sense,” then, form “is not ‘given.’” It “emerges under pressure of a reading.”³² In “Miss Grief” Woolson does not simply articulate the experiences of the woman writer, she subjects that category to an analytic and a parodic form that troubles rather than reflects other “given” forms of gender and literary convention. Woolson’s figure of the woman writer involves us in a dynamic that reinvents the grounds for our recognition of her, as it did for James.

Notes

1. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic,” in Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008 [1990]), 213–52.

2. Leon Edel, Henry James: The Middle Years: 1882–1895 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1962). Studies treating the Woolson-James relationship include Sharon Dean, “Constance Fenimore Woolson and Henry James: The Literary Relationship,” Massachusetts Studies in English 7, no. 3 (1980): 1–9; Cheryl B. Torsney, “The Traditions of Gender: Constance Fenimore Woolson and Henry James,” in Shirley Marchalonis, ed., Patrons and Protégées: Gender, Friendship, and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 161–83; Victoria Coulson, “Teacups and Love Letters: Constance Fenimore Woolson and Henry James,” Henry James Review 26, no. 1 (2005): 82–98; Lyndall Gordon, A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art (New York: Norton, 1998); Anne E. Boyd, “Anticipating James, Anticipating Grief: Constance Fenimore Woolson’s ‘Miss Grief,’” in Victoria Brehm, ed., Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Nineteenth Century: Essays (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 191–206.

3. Letter from Woolson to James, August 30, 1882, in The Letters of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge: Belknap, 1974–80), 3:542. Boyd, “Anticipating James,” Coulson, “Teacups,” and Gordon, A Private Life, usefully analyze Woolson’s correspondence.

4. Henry James, “Miss Woolson,” in Partial Portraits (New York: Haskell House, 1968 [1888]), 178–79. Lyndall Gordon calls the portrait “a calculated betrayal; it carried an armoury of stings in its velvet glove” (A Private Life, 213). Coulson, in “Teacups,” concurs and argues that in “turning the discretion of Woolson’s prose against itself” and feminizing it, James disingenuously associates a literary style he himself employed with a perceived inherent femininity (93).

5. I use the term minoritize as cognate with Sedgwick’s, in Epistemology of the Closet, where she refers to the “minoritizing view” of those who understand homosexuality as relevant to only a small segment of the population (1). She reveals how minoritizing views paradoxically coexist with “universalizing views” to create our contemporary inchoate understanding of homosexuality as simultaneously an issue for a few and an issue of “determinative importance in the lives of people across the spectrum of sexualities” (1). We might say James risks “feminine panic” when he proposes that Woolson’s subjects and techniques have nothing to do with his own artistic expression, with masculine identities, or with his own treatment of gender and sexuality. My essay implicitly maintains that such a limited view of homosexuality, as constitutive of the lives and work of only a distinct community, would diminish both James’s and Woolson’s stories. Of course, it also draws on a strategically minoritizing view by focusing on Woolson’s negotiations with the category of the woman writer and both writers’ engagement with queer sexualities.

6. Notably, in Victoria Brehm and Sharon L. Dean, eds., Constance Fenimore Woolson: Selected Stories and Travel Narratives (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004); Susan Koppelman, ed., Two Friends and Other Nineteenth-Century Lesbian Stories by American Women Writers (New York: Meridian, 1994); Joan Myers Weimar, ed., Women Artists, Women Exiles: “Miss Grief” and Other Stories (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988). The Heath Anthology of American Literature and The Norton Anthology of American Literature include “Miss Grief.”

7. Boyd, “Anticipating James,” 200.

8. Constance Fenimore Woolson, “Miss Grief,” in Koppelman, Two Friends, 118–19. All further page references are to this edition and will be given parenthetically within the text.

9. Linda Grasso, “‘Thwarted Life, Mighty Hunger, Unfinished Work’: The Legacy of Nineteenth-Century Women Writing in America,” ATQ 8, no. 2 (June 1994): 97–118, quot. 99.

10. Ibid., 99.

11. Paul Crumbley, “Haunting the House of Print: The Circulation of Disembodied Texts in ‘Collected by a Valetudinarian’ and ‘Miss Grief’” in Robert McClure Smith and Ellen Weinauer, eds., American Culture, Canons, and the Case of Elizabeth Stoddard (Tuscaloosa: University Press of Alabama, 2003), 83–104, quot. 83.

12. Ibid., 84. I refer to Judith Butler’s work in Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004) as well as to her earlier Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).

13. Constance Fenimore Woolson, “The Street of the Hyacinth,” in Weimer, ed., Women Artists, Women Exiles, 174.

14. See Kristin M. Comment, “Lesbian ‘Impossibilities’ of Miss Grief’s ‘Armor’,” in Brehm, Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Nineteenth Century, 207–24.

15. Henry James, “The Figure in the Carpet,” in The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories (New York: Penguin, 1986), 355–400, quot. 364.

16. Cheryl B. Torsney, Constance Fenimore Woolson: The Grief of Artistry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 113.

17. Koppelman, Two Friends, 102.

18. Elaine Showalter, “Introduction,” in Elaine Showalter, ed., Scribbling Women: Short Stories by Nineteenth-Century American Women (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), xxxvi.

19. Woolson seems interested in irremediableness as a suggested quality of the feminine, rather than in its specific content. The review is generally positive but regrets the “slightness of subject” and “an unbusiness-like way of telling the story.” Henry James, review of Fletcher’s Mirage, in Leon Edel, ed., Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers (New York: Library of America, 1984), 275. For a discussion of Woolson’s “scenery fiction,” see Katherine Swett, “Corrine Silenced: Improper Places in the Narrative Form of Constance Fenimore Woolson’s East Angels” in Brehm, Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Nineteenth Century, 161–71.

20. See especially David Bergman, ed., Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993); Esther Newton, Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), and Butler, Gender Trouble, 163ff.

21. James, “The Figure in the Carpet,” 366. Frank Kermode, “Introduction,” in James, The Figure in the Carpet, 28.

22. Grasso, “‘Thwarted Life,’” 97.

23. Jonathan Auerbach, The Romance of Failure: First Person Fictions of Poe, Hawthorne, and James (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 150.

24. Ibid.

25. Ellen Rooney, “Form and Contentment,” MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 61, no. 1 (2000): 17–40.

26. Herman Melville, “Bartleby, The Scrivener,” in The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860, ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1987), 13–45. See Grasso, “‘Thwarted Life,’” and Torsney, Constance Fenimore Woolson, for readings of the Christological reference in “Miss Grief.”

27. Eric Savoy, “Embarrassments: Figure in the Closet,” Henry James Review 20, no. 3 (1999): 227-36 quot. 230.

28. Kermode, “Introduction,” 28.

29. Auerbach, The Romance of Failure, 157.

30. Ibid.; James, “The Figure in the Carpet,” 364, 374.

31. Butler, Undoing Gender, 218.

32. Rooney, “Form and Contentment,” 37.