John Carlos Rowe
Born in New York City, educated in Newport, Rhode Island, Boston, and Geneva, Switzerland, Henry James, Jr. (1843–1916) was raised in a cosmopolitan family. His father, Henry James, Sr., was a philosopher recognized as a member of the American Transcendentalists and, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, was influenced by religions and ideas from around the world. Thanks to the fortune made by his own father from real estate investments in upstate New York, Henry James, Sr. had the financial means to travel the world with his family, even establishing residence in Paris and Geneva. Henry James, Jr. recalls his family’s three‐year residence in Europe from 1855 to 1858 as their quest for a more “sensuous” and aesthetic education than was available in the United States (James 1913: 278). After returning in the summer of 1858, when they briefly settled in Newport, Rhode Island, the Jameses moved back to Europe in 1858–1860, enrolling Henry and his older brother William in schools in Geneva.
It is not surprising, then, that after a brief year at Harvard Law School (1862–1863), Henry James, Jr. would travel on his own to Europe, first in 1869–1870, meeting such Victorian celebrities as Charles Darwin, William Morris, Edward Burne‐Jones, John Ruskin, and George Eliot, and then in 1872–1874 as a journalist for the Nation, reporting on cultural events in Paris and Rome. On his third trip to Europe (1875–1876), he moved to London where he lived for the next decade (Rowe and Haralson 2012: 224–225). Both his family’s and his own cosmopolitanism were typical of the nineteenth‐century US upper class, who often shared the British criticism of America’s lack of historical tradition and cultural sophistication. Anthony Trollope’s mother, Frances Trollope, had made famous this British paternalism toward America with her bestselling Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), in which she emphasized how US democracy had destroyed all prospect of culture and manners (Trollope 1984: 89). In his 1879 study Nathaniel Hawthorne, James echoes this British view, noting how Hawthorne had to struggle to produce original literature in a society notable for those “items of high civilization […] absent from the texture of American life.” Virtually all of the missing items James enumerates in his infamous list are British or French: “no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools – no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class – no Epsom nor Ascot!” (James 1879: 42, 42–43).
Henry James begins his literary career imitating Nathaniel Hawthorne, especially Hawthorne’s use of romance to express the distortions and fantasies of individual psychology. Hawthorne’s unique combination of the formal characteristics of the romance and literary realism has often been noted as a distinctive quality of American literature, as Richard Chase influentially argued in The American Novel and Its Tradition (Chase 1957: 21–28). In fact, Chase relies centrally on James’s conceptions of the forms of the novel and the romance in chapter 1 (“James on the Novel vs. Romance,” 21–28) and in chapter 6, on James’s The Portrait of a Lady (117–138). But rather than tracing Chase’s continuity of the “American” novel, James observes in Hawthorne how his most important influence suffers from his “innocence,” a term James often uses to express provincialism or ignorance (Rowe 1984: 30–57). What James’s Hawthorne lacks, especially early in his career before his later residence in Europe, is a rich historical sense and experience with the diversity of social life: “If Hawthorne had been a young Englishman, or a young Frenchman of the same degree of genius, the same cast of mind, […] his consciousness of the world around him would have been a very different affair; […] his sense of the life of his fellow‐mortals would have been almost infinitely more various” (James 1879: 42).
When he published Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1879, James had been writing journalism, travel writing, and fiction for 15 years, since the publication of his first short story, “A Tragedy of Error,” in 1864. Only recently, however, had James published Roderick Hudson (1875), The American (1877), The Europeans (1878), and Daisy Miller (1878), works that had established him as a major author. All of these novels are indebted to Hawthorne, but each articulates a less innocent and more sophisticated sense of life as “infinitely more various.” They are the key works in the critical formulation of “the international theme,” a critical standard for describing James’s fiction that shaped his modern critical reputation. Of course, Hawthorne’s works are hardly as “provincial” and culturally “innocent” as James contends. Hawthorne’s short fiction deals centrally with the problems confronting early settlers, largely British, in colonial New England. The Scarlet Letter (1850) hinges on the marriage of Hester Prynne and Roger Chillingworth in Europe and his delayed arrival in Salem, as well as on the charisma of Hester’s lover, Arthur Dimmesdale, whose emulation of the “new learning” derives from European sources, such as Peter Ramus. Pearl’s marriage into a European aristocratic family, whose coat of arms is “unknown to English heraldry,” has often drawn comment. And when later works, like The Marble Faun (1862), are taken into account, Hawthorne is a thoroughly “international” writer.
Nevertheless, James worked successfully in Hawthorne to create a predecessor strong enough to deserve the younger James’s imitation and yet sufficiently “provincial” for James to supersede him as a more worldly and modern writer. Just as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein would draw on Henry James as an influential predecessor, so James treated Hawthorne as a worthy “American” influence whose provincial settings and characters had to be overcome with more sophisticated, cultivated characters and situations. It is just this complex influence and novelty readers have traditionally identified in James’s first major novels. The eponymous protagonist of Roderick Hudson is an obvious version of Hawthorne’s troubled artists, like Owen Warland in “The Artist of the Beautiful” (1844); and Hudson’s social and aesthetic circle in Rome includes many of the same American expatriate sculptors and artists Hawthorne had depicted in The Marble Faun. The American revolves around a protagonist whose very name, Christopher Newman, seems to underscore the “innocence” and historical newness James criticized in Hawthorne. Generations of scholars have treated Newman as the “New World” victim of “Old World” malevolence and conspiracy, even if a close reading of the novel reveals Newman himself as the greatest manipulator of the social circumstances he encounters in France. What is even more evident on close reading is Newman’s consistent ignorance of the social and personal circumstances in which he finds himself in Europe. Repeatedly told by the Bellegardes that they are French Catholics and supporters of the Bourbon pretender to the French monarchy, Newman ignores such crucial facts as if they are irrelevant details in his romantic pursuit of their daughter, Claire de Cintré (Rowe 1997: 193–199).
Hawthorne’s “innocence” of the “infinitely various” social lives of Europeans turns out to be the fatal ignorance of James’s American characters in his early fiction. James’s portrait of the “American Girl” in Europe, Daisy Miller, made his early reputation as a novelist, and it appears that it is Daisy’s fatal stupidity regarding the unwritten rules of high society in Geneva and Rome that dooms her to an early death from malaria, or “Roman Fever.” Full of romantic allusions, Daisy Miller hints at a young woman who just misses identification with Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, and a host of other famous European intellectuals she has almost certainly never read. But the same can be said of the Americans living in Europe who so strictly judge Daisy for her violations of their social code. Both Mrs. Costello and Mrs. Walker are represented by James as obedient to a social order that is distinctly un‐American, and Daisy’s admirer, Winterbourne, seems deeply conflicted between his desire for her and his interest in protecting her “honor” from such presumed Italian adventurers as Eugenio and Giovanelli. It is hard to understand what distinguishes Winterbourne’s desire and those of his competitors, and James goes to great lengths to show how expatriate Americans living in Europe have adopted class‐specific standards at odds with their own democratic origins.
In The Europeans (1878), James also criticizes the corrupting influence of European values, especially when they are adopted by Americans. Eugenia, the Baroness of Münster, and her brother, Felix, are expatriate Americans, visiting relatives in Boston in hopes of making wealthy marriages. The Baroness knows her husband, a German prince, is about to repudiate their morganatic marriage in favor of a state‐sanctioned match. Eugenia and Felix are both in need of financial support and hope they might find wealthy partners among the “innocent” Bostonians. As it turns out, the Americans are only temporarily impressed with the Europeans’ manners, acting out a moral common in James’s international theme. Americans must remember their democratic origins and reject the aristocratic pretensions against which Americans rebelled. In this regard, James is responding to the widespread nineteenth‐century American enthusiasm for European royalty and aristocracy, especially evident in the public’s fascination with Queen Victoria (Tamarkin 2008: 1–10). James shared Mark Twain’s contempt for the hypocritical American obsession with royalty, which Twain would satire brilliantly in his two con men, the Duke and Dauphin, in Huckleberry Finn (1884/5).
James established himself as a writer during the 1870s, which Twain and Charles Henry Dudley had named in their satire, The Gilded Age (1876), a period of expansion that produced great wealth, new class differences, and heralded the United States as a global economy and political power. James’s warnings to his readers were thus prescient regarding a modernization process that would lead to World War I. Pound, Stein, and T.S. Eliot were right to identify James as an important precursor to avant‐garde modernism, with its powerful criticism of second‐stage industrialism, imperial expansion, and new class distinctions. Yet like these successors, James was also deeply implicated in the ruling‐class values he so often criticizes. His readers were primarily members of the upper‐middle and upper classes, interested in the social psychology of membership in their exclusive communities and the mobility from mere wealth to social prestige. Conventional interpretations of James’s “international theme” view the class differentials in James’s work as primarily that of a rising US middle class competing with a declining European aristocracy, clinging to its heritage while losing its economic privilege. But the transnational situation in the second half of the nineteenth century was considerably more complicated. Just as wealthy Americans like Christopher Newman and Daisy Miller traveled to Europe in search of cultivation and marriage, so European capital flowed into US expansion projects, especially in the period of Manifest Destiny.
Macroeconomic and political changes on a global scale also produced social consequences James was by no means unique in addressing. Since the first national Women’s Rights Conference at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, women’s rights had become a central issue in the United States. Although women there would not be granted the legal right to vote until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, and full suffrage for women was not granted in Great Britain until 1928, women’s rights’ activism led to numerous changes in the laws regarding divorce and women’s rights to property, inheritance, and work. In his so‐called middle period (1880–1900), James would address centrally women’s rights through a series of novels and feminine protagonists whose bids for independence have been interpreted quite variously by scholars. Washington Square (1880) and The Portrait of a Lady (1881) represent feminine protagonists who rebel against marriage and family as the proper roles for respectable women. In both novels, marriage is presented as a trap, a means of subordinating women to the power of men. Courted by the penniless Morris Townsend for her expected inheritance, the heroine of Washington Square, Catherine Sloper, is at first deluded by romantic love; then struggles with her father, Dr. Sloper, over her right to choose her own future; and finally rejects both her father’s authority and Townsend’s proposal to remain unmarried, growing old in the company of her Aunt Penniman.
In The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer’s destiny is more complicated, rejecting as she does two proposals of marriage, one from a British aristocrat, Lord Warburton, and the other from a wealthy American industrialist, Casper Goodwood, only to marry an expatriate American, Gilbert Osmond, who uses her for both her wealth and to cover the illegitimacy of his daughter, Pansy. The deception of women by the patriarchal system of marriage and the family appears so deeply ingrained in the novel as to allow little agency for women, like Isabel, who wish to pursue the sort of self‐reliance and independence James identifies with US democracy and Emersonian liberalism. Often contrasted with Washington Square, which is set primarily in the United States, the setting of Portrait swiftly shifts from Albany, New York, to Europe, as Isabel Archer journeys to London, Paris, Florence, and Rome. But both novels deal primarily with American problems. What options are available to an independent American woman who chooses not to follow her father’s or husband’s authority? Catherine Sloper is left in the typical nineteenth‐century limbo of the “spinster” or “maiden aunt”; Isabel Archer is left in ambiguous suspension at the end of Portrait, poised among the equally unappealing choices of her marriage to Osmond, Casper Goodwood’s overwhelming passion, and Lord Warburton’s social service.
In his other major works published in the 1880s, James explores the dilemma of and considers various options open to the American woman who seeks to make her own choices and escape the systemic trap of patriarchal society. The Bostonians (1886) deals centrally with women’s rights in the United States, appearing to satirize the excesses of the movement. Based on the social activist Elizabeth Peabody, Miss Birdseye is as good as her name in seeing only the larger historical picture and missing the particulars of individual lives. Olive Chancellor manipulates the young Verena Tarrant, exploiting the young woman’s talent as a charismatic speaker to promote the political agenda of women’s rights. Scholars have long speculated whether or not James intended their relationship to be sexual, although most agree James used the contemporary idea of a “Boston friendship” – a close but asexual relationship between women – as the basis of their association. The novel’s conclusion in which the southern gentleman, Basil Ransome, literally sweeps Verena off the stage and takes her away to his plantation suggests that James judges all gender relations in terms of power.
As if simply considering other options, James turns his protagonist‐victim in The Princess Casamassima (1886), Hyacinth Robinson, into an impressionable working‐class man manipulated by the Princess, the American expatriate, Cristina Light, whom James created as the romantic attraction for Roderick Hudson in his 1875 novel. Committed to political revolution, rather than merely women’s rights, the Princess shares responsibility with the Anarchists who lure Hyacinth into the plot to assassinate a Duke. Although set in London and Paris, The Princess Casamassima seems to repeat James’s argument in The Bostonians that progressive politics merely repeats the dynamics of older aristocratic and newer plutocratic powers. When Hyacinth commits suicide rather than carry out his deadly assignment, James seems to be warning activists of their potential hypocrisy and the inherent problems of radical social change. Published in the same year, the two novels suggest how the “international theme” had changed in the decade since James had first considered the conflict between US and European values. American “innocence” is no longer a central issue for James, although he continues to identify the United States with the future and Europe, especially Great Britain, with the past. But the destinies of his economically and socially privileged characters are now so deeply entangled as to make sharp distinctions between “good” Americans and “evil” Europeans much harder to make.
Beginning with The Aspern Papers (1888) and The Tragic Muse (1890), James relies less on American and European stereotypes and more on characters representing modern and traditional values. Still somewhat baffled as to how to judge the “new woman,” James continues to represent women as victimized by patriarchy and begins to offer some agency for such women. In The Aspern Papers, the narrator takes up residence in the crumbling Venetian palazzo of Julianna Bordereau and her niece, Tina. Keeping from them his real purpose of finding some unpublished writings of Juliana’s lover, the great American expatriate poet, Jeffrey Aspern, the narrator showers them with gifts and exploits their economic need to gain access to their inner lives. When she discovers his plot, the niece, Tina, bargains with him to marry her in exchange for the poet’s papers, imitating the very marital contracts central to Victorian patriarchy. When he refuses, she burns the poet’s papers, taunting the narrator: “‘I burnt them last night, one by one, in the kitchen. […] It took a long time – there were so many’” (James 1888: 137). Throughout the entire narrative, the narrator remains blithely unaware that the “niece” is likely the illegitimate daughter of Jeffrey Aspern and Julianna Bordereau (Rowe 1984: 105–118). In this way, James suggests that even when confronted by the living legacy of a great author, the narrator is too self‐absorbed to recognize the truth.
Tina Aspern’s dramatic act of burning Aspern’s papers is destructive, but it differs from Catherine Sloper’s abstinence by defying the existing power structure. James was on the verge of developing certain aesthetic alternatives for his feminine protagonists, rather than using them simply to declare the futility of social change. In The Tragic Muse (1890), he develops a beautiful, charismatic character, Miriam Rooth, who approximates the aesthetic and cosmopolitan values he himself would advocate in the remainder of his career. Miriam Rooth’s family background combines her mother’s English aristocratic lineage with her father’s German‐Jewish background, hinting at the “cosmopolitanism” that in the late nineteenth century was often used as a pejorative term for stateless Jews, Gypsies, and other displaced people (Rowe 1998: 81–83). Although James’s anti‐Semitism in works like What Maisie Knew (1897) and The American Scene (1907) is indisputable, James appears to use Miriam Rooth’s transnational background as a potential ideal for the modern individual. Pursued by numerous men with marriage proposals and refusing them all, Miriam Rooth finds her career in acting as her true love. Familiar with stereotypes of women in theater as immoral and licentious, James identifies Miriam with two celebrity actresses of the period, Rachel (Élisa Félix) and Ellen Terry, suggesting a more modern view of women on the stage (Rowe 1998: 78, 82).
Between 1890 and 1895, James wrote several plays, including a successful dramatic adaptation of The American, and such original plays as Tenants (1890), Disengaged (1892), The Album (1891), The Reprobate (1891), Guy Domville (1893), and Summersoft (1895). He had written or adapted previous work in four plays between 1869 and 1882, and he would write five more plays between 1907 and 1913. Despite his career‐long commitment to drama, James is still best remembered for his theatrical failures in the 1890s, even though The American enjoyed a very long run in London. It was the production of the eighteenth‐century period piece, Guy Domville, competing against Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband down the road in Haymarket, that is the basis for this legend (James 1990: 468). When James took the stage at the end of the first night of Guy Domville, he was met with jeers and rotten tomatoes. But the anecdotes from that opening night and the inevitable contrast of James’s flop with Wilde’s dramatic triumph are far from accurate. James enjoyed several dramatic successes in his career, including the adaptations of The American and Daisy Miller, and there is little question that his literary style until his avant‐garde experiments in the twentieth century were well suited to dramatization.
Thus Miriam Rooth, the successful actress on the British stage, can be considered a sort of alter ego for James, and the aesthetic solution to the problem of modern agency for either men or women can be considered James’s own response to the problem of social and political progressivism in his middle and major periods as a writer. In the later 1890s, as he returned to major narrative works, James would once again consider the possibilities for women as independent agents and full members of society. At the same time, he would take up more directly his own same‐sex desire and the social status of homosexuals and lesbians in the aftermath of the Anti‐Sodomy laws adopted in Great Britain (1885), which had condemned Oscar Wilde to Reading Gaol. The Spoils of Poynton (1897) features two women protagonists, Mrs. Gereth and Fleda Vetch, who develop a strong friendship through their love of the art in Mrs. Gereth’s country house, Poynton, which her son and his superficial wife cannot appreciate. Just as Tina burns Jeffrey Aspern’s papers, so Poynton burns in a climactic scene. Unlike the unflattering relationship between Olive Chancellor and Verena Tarrant in The Bostonians a little more than a decade earlier, however, the friendship of Mrs. Gereth and Fleda Vetch is sympathetically portrayed by James.
Yet it is in the three novels of the late 1890s, What Maisie Knew (1897), In the Cage (1898), and The Turn of the Screw (1898), that James makes a critical turn in his representation of feminine protagonists. The adolescent Maisie, tossed between her recently divorced parents and their new lovers, learns gradually to navigate a fantastic world that best represents the phantasmagoria of the modern world with its overt insistence on scientific “facts” and its secret reliance on perverse psychologies. In a similar fashion, the young telegraphist in In the Cage is at once romantically deluded by her aristocratic clients and dimly aware of the power she might wield as the mediator of those messages. James’s Governess in The Turn of the Screw is a mere servant, but when left alone with her charges, little Flora and Miles, she imagines every possible horror, including their sexual violation by the previous servants, Peter Quint and Miss Jessel. None of these protagonists succeeds in overcoming patriarchal and aristocratic authority, but each experiences the fantastic elements of modern life and suggests the capability of surviving its distortions. Like James, each protagonist is a decoder of messages, an interpreter of texts, more or less capable of understanding other human beings through their style and tone. In short, each feminine protagonist is measured against Henry James himself as a master of textual understanding.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Henry James had lived more than a quarter of a century in Europe, primarily in London, so it should not surprise us that his increasingly liberated feminine protagonists are no longer “American Girls,” like Daisy Miller, or even her more sophisticated alter ego, Isabel Archer. Maisie, the telegraphist, and the Governess are all British women, but they share many of the qualities of his earlier American women: independent and yet innocent, susceptible to romance, but protective of their own individuality. The problem for his feminine protagonists becomes less that of determining what it means to be an “American” as opposed to a “European,” much more what it means to be an individual capable of making intelligent choices. Such independence still depends in part on economic self‐sufficiency, but marriage is no longer the only answer.
In The Awkward Age (1899), James makes clear that marriage has long been a commercial enterprise in England and can only restrict an intelligent young woman, like Nanda Brookenham. Increasingly, James stresses the perversity of human relations based on the socioeconomic conventions of upper‐class marriages, legally arranged to transfer wealth and guarantee security to dependent women. Nanda is in love with her mother’s lover, Vanderbank, who is reluctantly in love with her as well, should “Van” be truly capable of such a passion. The complex negotiations between the mother and her lover to cover up what they well know is the perversity of this ménage à trois in order for Nanda to benefit economically from old Mr. Longdon’s fortune emphasize the incorrigible state of heteronormative relations. Although Mr. Longdon is often interpreted by critics as a British gentleman from an older, more refined age, he is as intent on exploiting the young Nanda as any of the other characters. The commodification of women, especially in marriage and the family, has a very long history for James and is not exclusively the work of the modern commercial forces.
Behind such conventional social and marital relations lurks the “beast in the jungle,” the possibility of other sexual and personal relations James had entertained in his fiction since his early story “A Light Man” (1869) and continued to address in works like “The Author of ‘Beltraffio’” (1884) and “The Middle Years” (1893), and then more directly in “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903) itself. Well aware of the legal jeopardy in which public homosexuality placed many of his contemporaries, notably Oscar Wilde, James was careful to allegorize his own same‐sex stories in ways that could be interpreted in various ways. But following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s interpretation of James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” in “The Beast in the Closet,” it is no longer possible to read James as a conventional heteronormative writer (Sedgwick 1990: 182–212). Marriage is most often a nightmare for his characters, and the most passionate relations are either same‐sex relations or between characters who do not endorse solely heterosexual values.
A great deal of biographical attention has been paid to James’s own personal sexual identity, but it seems unquestionable that his fiction in the late 1890s represents same‐sex relations not only in positive terms but as a viable alternative to heteronormativity, especially marriage. James is cautious in entertaining same‐sex relations in the fin de siècle, well aware of how public advocates of “Greek love” such as John Addington Symonds had been persecuted. James uses Symonds as the model for homosexual characters in “The Author of ‘Beltraffio,’” “The Middle Years,” and “The Death of the Lion” (1894), in each case warning the reader of the risks of publicizing one’s same‐sex identity (Bristow 1995: 128). Instead, James would develop distinctive aestheticist qualities for many of his gay characters, like Dencombe and Dr. Hugh in “The Middle Years” (Rowe 1998: 101–113). In this regard, James recalls other “passionate friendships” in his earlier fiction, which may or may not have been intended to be secretly erotic: Olive Chancellor and Verena Tarrant, Mrs. Gereth and Fleda Vetch, Isabel Archer and the consumptive Ralph Touchett. All of these friends are closely connected by way of art – oratory, home furnishings, and music, respectively – and thus may sublimate their passions for each other through their common love of the arts.
It is also worth noting that James’s queer aesthetics have a distinctly transnational character, anticipating much later queer theories as challenges to the heteronormative values of many modern nation‐states. José Esteban Muñoz has argued that queer sexual politics anticipates future social organizations that go beyond nationalism, in part because queer relations so often rely on political and personal bonds that exceed conventional geopolitical boundaries (Muñoz 2009: 1–5). Throughout his career, James would write stories in which queer sexual and transnational politics are entangled, as he does in “Collaboration” (1892), in which the German composer, Herman Heidenmauer, and the French poet, Félix Vendemer, mutually compose an opera that will be judged “immoral and horrible,” as well as unpatriotic, by their respective national audiences (James 1963: 422–423). Heidenmauer is a thinly fictionalized version of Richard Wagner, well known in his day for his bisexual relations and not particularly liked by Henry James, but nonetheless a musical genius and vocal advocate of “free love.” Just as Miriam Rooth in The Tragic Muse transcends her national backgrounds by playing great dramatic heroines, albeit most successfully on the English stage, so many of James’s homosexual characters find a utopian, transnational community in artistic works. For James, such queer aesthetics are certainly media for disguising otherwise dangerous relations, but it is worth noting that art is an alternative to the state for most of his enlightened characters.
Although James would entertain alternative sexual identities from his earliest to his last fiction, usually in coded ways, the works of his so‐called major phase are oddly conservative in their return both to the marriage plot and the international theme. From The Tragic Muse to “The Beast in the Jungle,” nationality hardly seems to matter, even though most of the principal characters and settings in the majority of the works in this period are British. But the three novels of the major phase all revolve around Americans in Europe and marital problems we recognize from mainstream Victorian novels. Although generally considered direct influences on avant‐garde modernist fiction, The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904) are manifestly quite conservative in their marriage plots and stereotypes of Americans and Europeans. The modernist elements in these novels are usually considered to be James’s adaptation of symbolist methods of literary representation, well exemplified in the three provocative titles. Whereas so many of James’s earlier titles were primarily descriptive, these titles focus on a central literary or religious symbol whose interpretation helps determine the reader’s understanding of the work’s moral lesson. Both the Christian dove and the golden bowl from the Bible have denotative religious meanings, but it is their connotative meanings James teases out in the two novels to provoke the reader’s active interpretation. In a similar fashion, just who the true and false “ambassadors” might be and for whom they serve determines how readers judge the ethical problems posed by the characters in The Ambassadors. James was relying on the French symbolistes, such as Baudelaire, as well as their Anglo‐Irish imitators, including Wilde, George Moore, and Charles Algernon Swinburne. In these formal respects, the three novels of the major phase share not only international settings but the influences of this modernist avant‐garde.
Yet James’s oddly conventional marriage plots, his avoidance of same‐sex alternatives, and his apparent reversion to the conflict between Americans and Europeans deserve special attention. In The Wings of the Dove, the penniless but socially ambitious characters Kate Croy and Merton Densher try to lure their dying American friend, Milly Theale, into a marriage with Densher that will allow him to inherit her wealth and fund Kate and Merton’s relationship. In The Ambassadors, Lambert Strether is sent by his wealthy New England patron, Mrs. Newsome, to Paris to retrieve her son from European temptations, which turn out to be his relationship with an older, aristocratic Frenchwoman, the Countess de Vionnet. In The Golden Bowl, the American Maggie Verver marries her fabulously wealthy, widowed father to her best friend, the expatriate American Charlotte Stant, who has had a long‐lasting love affair with Maggie’s fiancé and eventual husband, the dashing Italian Prince Amerigo.
Complexly plotted, full of conspiracies and secrets, these three modern novels depart little from the twists and turns of the standard Victorian marriage story. To be sure, marriage is viewed generally as a commercially motivated, psychologically perverse institution, creating fantastic situations that seem to mock conservative claims to the social stability offered by the patriarchal family and its Victorian gender hierarchies. When the Prince and Charlotte have a passionate tryst in a hotel in Gloucester, he is legally her “son‐in‐law” and she is his “stepmother‐in‐law.” Not quite a case of incest, of course, but the perversity of their legal relations is stressed by James, especially when Maggie, having discovered their infidelity to her and her father, attempts to patch up the broken marriages for the sake of respectable appearances.
All three novels display some flexibility in the gender identities of the characters. In The Wings of the Dove, Kate Croy is the strong, masculine character, whereas Merton Densher seems pliable and effeminate by Victorian standards. In The Ambassadors, Lambert Strether is dominated by his wealthy patron, Mrs. Newsome, and he seems incapable of heterosexual passion when it is offered by his friend and confidante, Maria Gostrey. Similarly, in The Golden Bowl, Maggie Verver micro‐manages everyone from her father to her husband, the Prince, and her best friend (and stepmother), Charlotte. But with the exception of some rare hints of undeveloped homoerotic relations, as between Lambert Strether and Little Bilham in The Ambassadors and the initial friendships of Kate and Milly in The Wings of the Dove and Charlotte and Maggie as school friends in The Golden Bowl, James offers the reader no queer utopia in these novels.
In addition, they all seem to return to the older stereotypes of the “Old World” and “New World,” Europe and America, that James had employed in his earliest fiction. American “innocence” is no longer quite as naive as it was in those earlier narratives. The American heiress Milly Theale figures out early in the novel how her friends want to use her for the sake of her money; she is far cannier than Isabel Archer. Milly does not marry Merton, and she speaks from beyond the grave by way of her bequest to him, presumably leaving him the majority of her fortune. Although neither he nor Kate Croy can bear to look at the contents of the “long envelope” that arrives in London from Milly’s New York lawyers after her death, they both know what she has given them (James 1902, vol. 2: 431). Her “gift” is, of course, a psychological poison, reminding them both of how they have betrayed her love of them both. Repudiating the money, Merton and Kate also abandon their love affair, ashamed that Milly knew of their conspiracy. Lambert Strether is hardly the naive Daisy Miller or the uncultivated Christopher Newman. Strether is conventional, but not inexperienced, and he knows European culture and history. He is not so much scandalized by Chad’s relationship with a French countess as he is baffled by the new authority of strong women, like Mrs. Newsome, now so central in the US public sphere, and the French countess, who pursues Chad as much for his money as for his youthful sexuality. In a similar and even more central way, Maggie Verver represents the new American woman, who knows how to arrange social and economic relations to serve her purposes. Hardly a victim of her circumstances, Maggie turns the conspiracies of her closest friends against them and ends up writing her own story, however tragic its consequences for everyone concerned.
James’s central focus on US cultural and social concerns in the novels of the major phase, despite their settings in London, Venice, and Paris, seems intriguingly prophetic of his long visit to the United States in 1904–1905. With the exception of brief returns to his home country, James had lived abroad for three decades. Although all three novels were completed before his return visit, they indicate more than just the nostalgia of an aging writer for his place of birth and citizenship. Throughout his long career, he had always considered the future of the country in relation to the changing geopolitical and social circumstances in Europe. He records his impressions of the twentieth‐century United States in The American Scene (1907), the most important of his seven travel books and a scathing indictment of modernity’s impact on his native land. Criticizing the superficiality of what he terms “hotel‐culture” and the disregard for history in the skyscrapers of New York, he also recognizes the extent to which the negative characteristics of US modernity follow the directions of the nation’s brief history. He criticizes how southern provincialism derives from an antebellum culture that censored outside influences for the sake of preserving the unnatural system of slavery, with the fractured postbellum southern society as a visible reminder of these self‐destructive consequences (James 1907: 402). He notes the shabby dispossession of Native Americans by a political system committed to equality, condemning the assimilationist policies of the Dawes Act governing federal–Indian law in this period (James 1907: 350). More troublingly, he observes in the Bowery immigrants’ failures to learn English and the threat he considers them to pose to a national culture, a point he stresses in the graduation address he gave at Bryn Mawr College during his visit (James 1907: 197; James 1905: 3–52).
By the first decade of the twentieth century, James had shifted his “international theme” from a consideration of how the United States needed to avoid the political problems of Europe while emulating its rich cultural traditions to criticism of those domestic forces – slavery, capitalism, immigration – that had contributed to modern American problems. Perhaps he was also aware that the country had become in the intervening years the geopolitical power of the future, shaping rather than following the foreign, economic, and even cultural policies of an increasingly global world. In his lifetime, James witnessed the rise of popular literature – often termed “railway literature” – and the decline in readership of the Victorian three‐volume novels, often serialized, he had imitated in his own career (Stougaard‐Nielsen 2010: 258). On the other hand, his own work had been pirated frequently by such international publishers as the German Tauchnitz, whose cheap editions were made possible because the authors received no royalties. Along with other activists, James fought for the International Copyright Act of 1891, which protected American authors’ and publishers’ works from such literary piracy (Stougaard‐Nielsen 2010: 258).
These somewhat divided sentiments on modernity are typical of James’s views in the last years of his life. Notorious for his complex, convoluted literary style, especially in the novels of the major phase, he was often caricatured in his own time as a throwback to an older generation of ornate prose and complex sentiments. By the same token, James had a profound influence on the modernist avant‐garde, evident not only in the long critical assessments written by Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, but also in the early prose experiments of Gertrude Stein and the stream‐of‐consciousness styles of James Joyce and William Faulkner. Just as his views of women’s rights and same‐sex identities ranged from criticism to advocacy, so his responses to modernity remained divided. Although his popularity with readers waned in his later years, he may well have sustained interest in his work and bolstered his reputation as “the Master” by his ability to represent effectively middle‐class attitudes toward a modernization process that increased bourgeois economic power and prestige while also posing serious risks to that class.
In The Portrait of a Lady, he gently mocks Isabel’s friend, the professional journalist Henrietta Stackpole, tacitly criticizing both women in the workplace and journalism as a genre considerably beneath literature and its enduring value. Yet in his long career, James wrote a great deal of journalism, occasional essays, book reviews, and literary criticism that ought to be understood as foundational to modern professional writing. Richard Salmon has shown that James’s contempt for the modern culture of publicity did not prevent him from employing it to his own professional advantage (Salmon 1997: 1–14). James’s last major political act was also a literary one, when he surrendered his US citizenship in 1915 to become a British citizen. Supporting the war efforts by Great Britain in World War I and urging the United States to join the fight, James used his own status to call attention to the European crisis. James virtually wrote the unattributed story, “Mr. James a British Citizen,” which appeared in the New York Times on 29 July 1915, effectively managing his own anxiety regarding the modern culture of publicity and at the same time making political capital from his personal decision (Rowe 2008: 390).
Between 1907 and 1909, Charles Scribner’s Sons published an edition of Henry James’s creative work, which James himself labored to choose, revise, and introduce. The New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James in the original 24 volumes – two unfinished novels, The Ivory Tower and The Sense of the Past, were added after James’s death to bring the set to 26 volumes – is a complex work in its own right, including the photographs by Alvin Langdon Coburn that James commissioned the young photographer to take as impressionistic illustrations for each volume (McWhirter 1995: 102‐103). The Prefaces James wrote to each volume not only articulated his own aesthetic values and theory of the novel in the early twentieth century, they influenced how the novel would be studied and understood for at least the next 50 years. Used centrally as sources in Percy Lubbock’s influential critical study of the novel, The Craft of Fiction (1929), and published separately by Richard Blackmur as The Art of the Novel in 1934, James’s Prefaces shaped formalist approaches to literature by stressing such matters as consistent point of view, scenic development, dramatization over narration, and character development.
The formalist interpretation of Henry James and his status for many of the Anglo‐American New Critics from approximately 1920 to 1970 is another aspect of James’s “international” status. Disengaged from the specific historical and political issues James so often addresses, his novels and stories were often used to illustrate proper aesthetic technique and style. As a consequence, James’s highly self‐conscious method of narrating his works, including his many allusions to other writers and artists, helped dehistoricize and denationalize his works. The fact that he was an early example of the American expatriate who ended up changing his citizenship at the end of his life only reinforced this legend. Anglo‐American modernism was once imagined to be a transnational field that escaped the social and geopolitical details of the United States and Great Britain. When understood as a literary formalist and a transnational cosmopolitan, James fitted perfectly the interests of this field and many of its aesthetic assumptions.
But the Henry James who should interest us today is a different sort of cosmopolitan, interested in the social and political consequences of cultural work, divided in his attitudes toward the great changes of his era: women’s rights, lesbian and gay rights, ethnic diversity, immigration, and class mobility and affiliation. The legend of the Master, to borrow one of James’s titles, is a misleading and finally narrow way to understand his international views and reputation. The conflicted, anxious, curious, interested, and passionate Henry James who experimented with different modes of fiction and non‐fiction to represent the rapidly changing political situations and psychological circumstances facing individuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries impresses me as a far more appealing person and author, worthier of our study and history’s regard.
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 2 (TRAVEL WRITING); CHAPTER 22 (REALISM FROM WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS TO EDITH WHARTON).